2014 — 10 March: Monday
I don't often remember my dreams1 when I wake up. What were my (long-dead) favourite aunt and uncle doing running some kind of vast, low-rent "Pound Store" kind of place on the shore of a clearly-rising ocean? Is it a reminder I need to do some supplies shopping? I already know that. Or maybe it was a consequence of my whimsical decision yesterday evening to revisit Alan Ball's truly mad "True Blood" (first watched, and enjoyed, in June 2009) after first trying, and quickly rejecting, a series of about six rather dreary unwatched (and, in my case it now seems, unwatchable) films.
Perhaps my collection could stand a little culling?
Meanwhile, chilling...
... news of winds from the north east is only OK if there's no accompanying rain. But at the moment the sun is currently shining and the tea is hot. It's 07:40 give or take.
Equally chilling...
... reading of anti-intellectualism:
Thanks to intellectually lazy parents, shortsighted and simpleminded college administrators, politicians who excuse ignorance by calling it "off the cuff", and an increasingly brain dead pop culture, America's future voters, parents, teachers, entrepreneurs, and political leaders are people entirely clueless and oblivious to their own country's history, the standards of philosophical argument, the recent events of politics, and the beauty of the arts.
Recall Cyril Kornbluth's "The Marching Morons"? Ho-hum. I met my first true adult anti-intellectual when forced to share a room overnight with him in hospital during a visit to remove my three remaining impacted wisdom teeth. I still shudder to recall him.
I'm prepared to give this a go.
Whenever I've been forced...
... to relegate a database item2 into the Zone of Shame that is a remnant catch-all "Misc" or "Other" category my occasionally annoying "Extreme S" brain3 has felt an obscure sense of failure. (Sad, isn't it?) Mind you, with a score of 56 I'm not as extreme as Christa was, with her 59 — though we were both uncomfortably distant from Junior's score of 30. (And, by the way, what kind of lousy parents test their own child?!)
Where was I going with this? [Pause] Oh, yes.
A couple of years ago, after a minor brainstorm — although I prefer to think of it more kindly as an epiphany — I laboriously dispersed all the MP3s I'd ripped from my hundreds of "compilation" CDs across the main set of 26 sub-folders in which I was already holding all the 50,000 or so MP3s from CDs by specific performers. Since I ended up creating another 26 sub-folders, each labelled "Misc", for what was an essentially random set of performers, I initially regarded this as another failure.
Not so! Playing the contents of each of these "Misc" sub-folders invariably yields a far higher percentage of musical gems than the average to be found within almost any individual album. And serendipity has a habit of placing, say, the Nakibembe Village Musicians with their "Waire Nzira Nte" (from World Routes: On the road, disc #2) in close proximity to Nancy Sinatra's "Bang Bang (My baby shot me down)" from the soundtrack album to Tarantino's Kill Bill, volume #1. Show me the radio station where that ever happens.
I'm looking forward...
... to watching Mr Postie's latest little bundle of watchables:
The "Kosminsky" stuff (actually three separate political dramas) has been on Channel 4, but I honestly cannot recall the last time I watched anything on that channel. Though Richard Eyre's "Ploughman's Lunch" was on it, back in 1983. I remember watching it at the time, too. (Though I don't recall the significance of the German keyboard layout.)
My inane...
... smartphone service provider (O2) has just sent me a text message suggesting that, if I'm hiding any undeclared income off-shore, it would be a good idea to tell Brenda's thugs before they batter down my door in the middle of the night. Who on Earth do they think I am, I wonder?