2014 — 18 February: Tuesday
Further sleep has been made unlikely1 so I shall now focus on my kettle. I do like my cuppa in the morning, even though — these days — I seem to have to make the thing myself :-)
In fact...
... the list of things I like can now be (slightly) further expanded to include both that fancy bread I mentioned and (on the evidence of three and a half hours, so far) the vastly expensive and quite entertaining (if rather silly) tosh that is "Game of Thrones". But an IMDB score of 9.5. Really?
Despite the...
... heavy rain earlier (while I was out trying to fix the echo in Mother Hubbard's cupboard, of course) there are currently bits of bright sunshine trying to break through. This will only further encourage the foolhardy daffodils. At this rate there may even be another little country ramble on the cards for tomorrow.
It's been...
... over a quarter of a century since I took a crack at Elaine Scarry's fascinating (and somewhat horrific) book...
... and — pushing aside any crass attempt to comment on nominative determinism — I note with interest the publication of her latest 640-page tome: "Thermonuclear Monarchy: Choosing between democracy and doom". Her heart is definitely in the right place, however, as she makes a Second Amendment argument for nuclear disarmament. Even if her professorship at Harvard is in aesthetics and general theory of value. (Link.)
I still somehow feel I learned all I really ever need to know about thermonuclear weapons-based politics from a weird combination of the following:
- Reading Nevil Shute's "On the Beach" in 1962 or thereabouts
- My time in Civil Defence (while still at school in leafy Hertfordshire) in the mid-1960s
- Watching the Henry Fonda film "Fail-Safe" at about the same time, having read the novel it had been based on
- Reading (in 1971) George MacBeth's story "Crab Apple Crisis" (a wonderfully funny riff on Herman Kahn's 44-step ladder of thermonuclear escalation charting the seemingly inexorable path leading to a full-blown thermonuclear spasm) in the anthology I mentioned by James Sallis here
- Reading Raymond Briggs' "When the Wind Blows" in 1982
And, of course, spending far too much time in the few left-wing bookshops I've managed to find over the years. I long ago concluded that I would only ever want to be at Ground Zero "when they drop the Big One".
While waiting...
... for the horribly dark sky's latest load of rain, making my next cuppa, and admiring yet another rainbow, my post-prandial little treat2 has been the snaffling of four "Classic albums" (each in 320Kbps format MP3, and costing £1-99) from the February offer in the Google Play store. Makes a change from Amazon...
- "Want One" (Rufus Wainwright)
- "Kaleidoscope" (Siouxsie and the Banshees)
- "The Lexicon of Love" (ABC)
- "Synchronicity" (The Police)
Cue the phrase: I can't believe I didn't already have [insert album title to suit].
One of these titles...
... has been almost endlessly recommended — the other, not so much:
We shall see! [Pause] Meanwhile, I found Season #1 of "Game of Thrones" very entertaining.