2014 — 23 February: Sunday
Yesterday evening, I finished reading the nicely-illustrated "companion"1 to the HBO series "Game of Thrones" that was my only purchase during my pleasant two hours or so drifting through the bookshops (not many left, alas) down in Soton on Friday morning. Now I've just spent the first hour or so this morning reading up on the tangled history of George Martin's "projected seven novel" sequence.
It seems (inevitably?) that I was being over-naïve in assuming that the seven paperbacks I've ordered map neatly on to the seven (or will it be eight?) novels. (Two of them, so far, have each been so fat [bloated? I hope not!] as to require splitting, somewhat like IBM shares used to be.)
The first time I ...
... embarked on such a saga was 45 years ago when I bought the six main novels of EE "Doc" Smith's Lensman series, about which perhaps the less said the better. And that was almost immediately followed first by "Lord of the Rings" and then (at Dad's suggestion) the "Horatio Hornblower" Napoleonic maritime saga. I wonder what he would have said about David Weber's futuristic, sex-changed protagonist Honor Harrington? Let alone the 20 novels of Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey / Maturin partnership?
Dear Mama always seemed to take a much dimmer, rather disapproving, view of my mild bibliophilic streak. I could never understand why. Christa and I encouraged Peter to read all he liked, and he turned out OK :-)
As I've mentioned we were both shocked in 1976, when first inspecting the house we bought in Old Windsor, to find it contained not a single book. How weird is that?
I've been...
... fully aware of the concept of the 'Singularity' since reading Vernor Vinge on the topic. However, I remain deeply dubious about the inflated claims of AI that I've also been following, on and off, since first reading of W Grey Walter's "tortoises" (though my copy of "The Living Brain" fled my shelves before I last printed a copy of my books catalogue, and that was in February 1994).
AI seems to be forever on the point of being with us (usually about 15 years from now, whenever 'now' is) without ever quite arriving. Ray Kurzweil (whom I last mentioned when he was making a ridiculous claim about reverse engineering human neural functioning into about one million lines of code) is currently predicting 2029 as the date for joking robots. Sadly, he has a track record of predictions that is far from flawless. Colin McGinn didn't much care for his book on "How to Create a Mind" and I somehow failed to buy a copy. (Link.)
Corporate Rap Sheets
For once, my heading says it all. (Link.)
Later: the kinder ...
... dropped in on a bit of a flying visit this afternoon. Just long enough, in fact, to dump a few surplus storage cartons back here, treat me to lunch down in Soton, and also relieve me of a few choice items — Panasonic Blu-ray player, WD HD TV Live media streamer, hdmi switchbox — that were now all just gathering dust since the arrival of my fancy new Oppo wonder box last month. Then it was time for them to head off back into the dusk. (All they need now is a TV, of course.)
They also provided me with just the right amount of encouragement I needed to finally clear out all the canned and other goods from my two main kitchen storage cupboards. Nothing in either cupboard had been bought by me, which made all of it over six years old. It was all thus now more or less guaranteed to be safely past its chucking-out date. So out it all went. A curiously liberating sensation, I have to admit.
I shall gently start refilling the cupboards, but this time only with stuff there's a less (or do I mean more?) than six sigma chance of my eating in a timely fashion. Though I mostly favour fresh or frozen food, to be honest. My diet has been fairly restricted in scope since Christa died, but certainly seems to be perfectly nutritious so far!
The idea of...
... pulp SF writer L Ron Hubbard's ridiculous invented cult slowly being allowed to metamorphose into a religion with tax breaks is more than usually cretinous, so will probably not take very much longer to occur here in the increasingly-Benighted Kingdom. Apparently no less than five of our Supreme Court justices have ruled that religion should not be confined to faiths involving a "supreme deity".
Meanwhile, men are to be banned from becoming Queen or Princess of Wales — just two unintended consequences of gay marriage if some of our dustier old statutes and regulations don't get updated smartish. Probably by the same Supreme Court justices who — it seems to me — can't tell the difference between a cult based on bizarre revelations and a bet between a pair of SF authors on the quickest way to make a million bucks.
Madness!