2014 — 3 March: Monday
By the traditional process of pains-taking elimination1 I appear to have found a cure for — though not the cause of — the irritating interaction between the lump of bits that I use to talk to my web servers and the lump of bits I use to edit files I fetch from them. "Cure" of course is IT talk for work-around.
The trick seems to be...
... not to have anything to do with my email client (Thunderbird) until I've first established a good working relationship (that is, opened the first new file of the day) with the servers and the editor. Curious, but not too onerous. (No worse, for example, than remembering to keep a disc at all times in the previous Oppo Blu-ray player to be reasonably sure of being able to open the tray without having to give it a clunk.)
Not sure what the work-around is for the rain, let alone the apparently pending conflict in the not-so-far East.
And now an email...
... from Amazon.de has tipped me off to the existence of a Blu-ray of "Wenn der Postmann zweimal klingelt" — the 1981 remake of that James M Cain pot-boiler. (I first saw it in the cinema in Winchester near the hotel that IBM paid for me to live in for three weeks in June 1981 while this house was completed by its builders.) Of course, the German BD has neither an English soundtrack nor English subtitles but the import I've just ordered via a seller on the US sibling organisation certainly does.
It's jolly clever of Amazon to know that I'd be also interested in the forthcoming "Camera Obscura" collection of five films and 14 shorts by Walerian Borowczyk sumptuously restored "in 2K" (whatever that means). But at £107-36 I think I can afford to give it a miss. I already have "La Bête" (who doesn't?) and can still clearly remember "Blanche" even after 42 years or so. Of the former, Derek Malcolm had this to say when writing in The Guardian of the most erotic cinematic moment(s):
Most critics claim that the most erotic moment... is where sex is suggested rather than shown... Not me. The last four minutes of Borowczyk's The Beast get my vote..., cut by the censors after a London Festival screening which had its packed audience enthralled enough not to walk out during it but also to complain bitterly of 'filth' afterwards in an extraordinary display of hypocritical unctuousness. Curiously, it was the men who objected.
Isn't it always? I think I must stop saving old newspaper clippings... or, at least, remembering them!
Now that the hail has stopped perhaps it's time for breakfast.
Now here's a chap...
... I suspect I could have shared a giggle with. Source and snippet:
One essential tool for successful living is humor, whether haughty existential scorn or that oddly comforting sense that the world is fundamentally absurd. "Why attack God?" said the composer Erik Satie. "He is as unhappy as we are. Since his son's death he has no appetite for anything and barely nibbles at his food."
And this RSA conference...
... sounds like it could have been a blast, too:
As for the NSA, he said that the agency showed that if you gave an organization unlimited budgets and no oversight the results were always fantastic. The NSA had built up an incredibly
powerful and sophisticated organization that could be completely pwned by a 29-year old with a thumb drive.
"He took top secret intelligence to China and then to Russia — was Mordor not accepting asylum requests?" Colbert noted. "I see the Norwegians gave Snowden 30 Nobel Prize
nominations. The guy's practically a war criminal — I don't understand how they could put him up for the same prize they once gave to Henry Kissinger."
Ooh, snarky :-)
The nasty moment...
... I felt when I saw this on the back cover artwork of one of today's little batch of "incoming" — Dutch not being my linguistic strong suit...
... faded when I loaded the DVD. Subtitles can be switched off, and the default soundtrack is, indeed, English. It's a nice little film I originally borrowed from Mike a while ago and just fancied having in my little library.
I felt very sorry for the bedraggled young Mr Postie as he handed over this trio and tried to ignore the second batch of hail:
The weather is getting beyond a joke. One of my local spies has just told me:
The road through the Peter Green industrial estate is completely flooded near the Knightswood roundabout end. You can't turn into it from Knightwood but coming from the Peter Green end you are presented with a half road barrier labelled "Road closed" just upstream of a major lake.
In other news...
... the latest Ansible delivers its monthly quota of fine chortles. I would draw Len's attention to the Lovecraft Reference Resource did I not fear for his blood pressure. Langford wisely gives no clue as to its location. And I'm awfully glad I gave up on Stephen R Donaldson long before he gave a bemused world "The Gap into Power". He left me behind about 100 pages into "Lord Foul's Bane" though, oddly, I still recall the leprosy-oriented acronym VSE. I have no idea why my memory chooses to file some things rather than others.
Friends with Money...
... is an absolute gem of a film. It opened the 2006 Sundance film festival. Witty script, lovely performances, almost shockingly funny. What's not to like?