2014 — 20 March: Thursday

Having woken from a surreally-pleasant dream in which I was chatting to Richard Schiff and Alison Janney (in their Toby and CJ personae from the "West Wing") while I was taking part in some ridiculous e-book readability font tests hosted at IBM Hursley — see what I mean about "surreal"? — I have been supping my first cup while listening to the chattering twits¹ as they frantically talk up the implications of the pensions reforms announced in yesterday's Budget while being unable to agree on even the reason for the current miniscule interest rates for savers.

The plunge in share price of "Legal and General" suggests some degree of panic has been engendered in at least one segment of the so-called financial industry. "The economy has turned, but to many people it doesn't feel like that." You think?

I fear our guvmint believes (as they all do, it seems to me, sooner or later — management in the upper echelons of IBM seemed to share that particular delusion) that if you can only manage to manage the perception, the reality will somehow fall neatly into line behind it. Perhaps they should all be forced to sit down and watch the "Hunger Games"?

Meanwhile, the chap who...

... told me (in the context of the news he'd been listening to that purportedly downgraded the health risk of saturated fats, rather like Woody Allen's strange film "Sleeper")...

The single most dangerous aspect of any foodstuff or diet is
worrying about whether it is doing you harm. Everyone eats and
everyone dies. But if you stop eating you die sooner. The same
goes for breathing.

... now assures me just as confidently (in the context of my bemoaning the latest facilities that I mentioned had been added to my Synology NAS box in yesterday's firmware upgrade):

You are clearly too old and set in your ways to be the target
for this sort of facility. It is aimed at that segment of the
population which is permanently plugged into their mobile device.
You know, the ones who wander down the street with earbuds glued
into their ears and a permanent stoop/squint as they peer at the
angry birds on the little screen in front of them.

Is that what they're all doing? I admit, I had wondered. It would certainly explain why they can veer alarmingly near the wheels of my car.

There have been...

... whole books written (and, in one glorious case — that I have just spent a few minutes failing to find — illustrated, by Shary Flenniken) on the topic of mis-heard lyrics. I enjoyed this Chronicle essay. Source and snippet:

But also, and much more commonly, rock lyrics are misunderstood on the purely psychoacoustic level — not for what they mean, but for what they literally say. Creedence Clearwater Revival never advised, "There's a bathroom on the right" (though, arguably, "There's a bad moon on the rise" makes little more sense), and in "Bullet the Blue Sky," Bono sang "I can see those fighter planes," not "spider veins." And let's pause to read into the record here pretty much the entire first decade of the Stones and R.E.M. catalogs.

Kevin JH Dettmar in Chronicle

Not much changes?

I was ruminating thus a not-so-little while ago:

For some reason, I find myself unmoved by the plight of our banks and other financial institutions. I know I should be and, in all probability, I will (like many others) suffer at some point down the road. But the idea of these people queuing up to borrow money (my tax money, by the way) from the central bank so they can more confidently and (no doubt) profitably carry on lending it to one another would just boggle my mind. It's as insane in its way as watching laden lorries thundering up and down the motorway carrying near identical loads (I'm sure) from A to B and from B to A. I'm reminded, not for the first time, of that wonderful quotation from Anne Fadiman.

Date: 20 March 2008

Having just browsed...

... on Brian's advice the following three links:

I can see that my choice clearly reduces to either a clean re-install or changing my sources to point to the new release and then using the apt-get dist-upgrade route. Discretion being the better part of Valerie, I've decided to stick with the Linux Mint 15 that I know works well on my wireless laptop PC. I may yet have a crack at the variant that I occasionally let loose to run around in a VirtualBox on BlackBeast as I use that even less often.

Time for some slicing and dicing if I wish to eat tonight. (And, I find, I generally do.)

It's nice, on...

... walking back into my house, to be "greeted" by an enticing aroma coming from the crockpot. It's rather cool, and a bit drizzly, out there. Quite windy, too.

Over a year after...

... leaving Santander I know, from a specific malformation in the format of my snailmail address, that it could well be they who may have sold on my snailmail details to "Audley Inglewood", which is a "luxury retirement village" — or, more unkindly, an apartment in same — that looks for all the world like my personal idea of Hell on Earth. What would I want with a pool, beauty treatment rooms, restaurant, bar and library?

Footnote

¹ On the BBC Radio 4 news, in this case, before I give up and revert to the classical music channel next door to it.