2014 — 22 February: Saturday
Much as I enjoy listening, each week, to Brian Matthew and his "Sounds of the Sixties" with its seemingly effortless flow of anecdotes and 'trivia' it remains a very sobering thought that by definition he plays nothing that doesn't shore up the horrible proposition that I've been knocking around for a lot longer than I like to think (or feel, for that matter). Furthermore1 there was some truly dreadful dross put out in the (dis)guise of pop music.
Tea still helps :-)
Academic politics...
... is a vicious game, precisely because the stakes are so small. "Postmodern insurrectionists and nonsensical self-help gurus"? Love it! (Link.)
Even Garry Trudeau...
... has been won over by Jeff Bezos. The one time I received anything purportedly direct from him (Bezos, I mean) it was a free DVD of the then-new Mel Gibson film "Braveheart" that I was happy to pass straight along, still shrink-wrapped, to a much more appreciative recipient. This New Yorker piece is a long, fascinating, read but is packed with goodies:
Brad Stone describes one campaign to pressure the most vulnerable publishers for better terms: internally, it was known as the Gazelle Project, after Bezos suggested "that Amazon should approach these small publishers the way a cheetah would pursue a sickly gazelle." (Company lawyers later changed the name to the Small Publisher Negotiation Program.)
Spies 'R Us
Oh my goodness, is that how it works?
How [David] Hare approached MI5 agents more recently for research he will not say, but he wasn't surprised that they talked. "People are always keen to talk to playwrights because whatever they tell you becomes embedded in a way that is untraceable — nobody will ever know who I talked to, and they trust playwrights for that reason. So most groups you talk to are always extremely pleased to see you. They say, 'Ooh we were hoping you'd get round to us.' I keep getting emails from people saying: 'Can't you come and do us?' Particularly health and education."
Reading this...
... annoying story of UK banks and bonuses I can't help but recall what Matt Taibbi of "Rolling Stone" heard by way of a cogent suggestion to "stop the rot" once and for all:
To understand the significance of this, one has to think carefully about the efficacy of fines as a punishment for a defendant pool that includes the richest people on earth — people who simply get their companies to pay their fines for them. Conversely, one has to consider the powerful deterrent to further wrongdoing that the state is missing by not introducing this particular class of people to the experience of incarceration. "You put Lloyd Blankfein in pound-me-in-the-ass prison for one six-month term, and all this bullshit would stop, all over Wall Street," says a former congressional aide. "That's all it would take. Just once."
Still true, I suspect. Still waiting for it to happen, too. Bankers' heads on spikes, that's what I'd like to see. "Game of Thrones" sets the example :-)
I wandered...
... lonely as a cloud, first, down to the Post Box to send off my second entry in the biannual guvmint-sponsored game of Poo Sticks (my name for their bowel cancer screening programme), and then into what had been my newsagent2 for quarter of a century to pick up some milk and a copy of "Micro Mart" magazine. I last read this when I was (for reasons probably better left unexplored) still trying to make my XP system look like the then-new and cool-looking Vista 'Aero' desktop.
I'd recently been reading about cache SSDs and had reluctantly concluded that, although BlackBeast now sports both two SSDs and Intel's "Rapid Storage Technology" (which recognises both of them), setup all looked too much like hard work for too little payback. However, a letter at the back of "Micro Mart" introduced both me and "Ask Jason" to an SSD-agnostic German product called VeloSSD. If I can figure out how to register, I may just try the seven-day free trial which sets aside a 32GB cache on one of the SSDs and leaves the remaining space available for normal access.
Red Bull Music Academy
I've just downloaded their 90-minute film about making music, with some names I know, and many I do not, but it all looked pretty interesting. Even if Brian Eno says he's only happy for about 30 minutes after finishing a project before he once again starts worrying about the next one.
Meanwhile, I have a problem: having now finished, and tremendously enjoyed, the first three seasons of "Game of Thrones", what on earth should I follow it by? Tricky decision.