2013 — 30 December: Monday
While it would be silly to pretend — fooling myself has always been trivially easy — I can survive much longer (fresh foodwise) on the dregs and remnants lurking in darker corners of Technology Towers, I find myself feeling curiously unenthusiastic about a food expotition this morning as I contemplate the currently grey, wettish, weather. It was quite windy as I whizzed back on a largely empty motorway last night, too.
We'd chosen...
... to watch "Cloud Atlas" since I noted Mike had given it a score of "10" back in July and I'd never even heard of it as a film, though I was vaguely aware of the book. Crikey, good choice! It's an extraordinarily entertaining, non-linear, romp of a film — I've not read the book — and I was happy to exploit the enforced pause1 at 1 hour 48 minutes to order my own copy for a well-spent tenner. Though it soaks up 172 minutes I shall be watching it again quite soon. It's stuffed full of interesting references (for random example "Soylent Green", anyone?) and I doubt I picked them all up on first viewing. Nor does it spend much time on exposition, which makes a welcome change.
Good fun, which I see has divided (and sometimes appalled) the critics. And when, by the way, did Larry Wachowski turn into Lana? Just askin'.
Working on the assumption...
... that I'm stupid, I've received three identical emails today phishing on behalf of Amazon UK to get me to examine an attachment with "my order details" for non-existent orders placed three weeks ago. First rule of successful phishing: make your email look like the real thing. Second rule: be more timely. That said, picking Amazon UK is potentially more plausible than the usual invitation to supply login credentials to a UK bank I've never used, or to deal with non-delivery to me of a FedEx parcel because of a zip code error.
Which reminds me. On 5th January 1974, the IBM Laboratory news from Kingston had the following urban legend from the Wall Street Journal, 3rd October 1973:
Important notice: If you are one of the hundreds of parachuting enthusiasts who bought our course entitled 'Easy Sky Diving in One Fell Swoop' please make the
following correction:
On page 8, line 7, change "state zip code" to "pull rip cord".
Hah!
He who waits long enough... gets to do his foody top-up shopping in occasional fleeting shafts of sunshine. Excellent. I wonder what I forgot this time? And I'm now starving.
Here's just one...
... of many nice snippets from yesterday's Kindle book bargain:
Once Hawking arrived at the recording studio, the writers waited patiently as every script line was keyed into his computer. The only remaining problem occurred when the voice synthesizer struggled to deliver the line that describes Hawking's disappointment at the way Springfield was being governed: "I wanted to see your utopia, but now I see it is more of a Fruitopia." The computer's dictionary did not contain this American fruit-flavored drink, so Hawking and the team had to figure out how to construct Fruitopia phonetically. Commenting later on the episode, writer Matt Selman recalled: "It's good to know that we were taking the most brilliant man in the world and using his time to record Fruitopia in individual syllables."
Or individual syllabubs, perhaps?
Having just finished...
... watching the first season of "Green Wing" (and thoroughly enjoying the surreal journey all the way to the literal cliffhanger ending) I've been rounding off the evening by doing a tiny spot of the perennial (physical) book-culling needed around here from time to time to reclaim a decent amount of Lebensraum. (Or at least, the visual illusion of same.) A rotten job,2 but someone has to do it. Well, it's either that or put up yet more shelves on the walls, and I can't help feeling I've now got enough shelves in my life (as it were). Besides, I'm running seriously short of unused wall space.
It wasn't until the (second) great waterbed disaster that we finally rid ourselves of the dreadful striped-pattern wallpaper (behind our bed's headboard) that we'd both realised was a horrible mistake about four days after we'd put it up. The one wall in the house we voluntarily chose to put wallpaper on... go figure. The stuff that had looked so good in the samples "book" ended up resembling a migraine-inducing seismic activity trace once on the wall. Still, we leapt into action and removed it after a mere two decades or so.
"You don't get nowhere if you're too hasty."