2014 — 28 March: Friday
If it were possible1 for the morning cloud cover to be "eleven/tenths" then that's how I would currently describe it. But there's hope yet. It's only 06:45 or so.
Those were...
... the days, heh?
Sunglasses don't confer as great a degree of anonymity as masks, but there's a larger body of evidence showing masks' detrimental impact on moral behavior. Throughout history, governments have regulated masks in the interest of maintaining public order. In the 12th century, Pope Innocent III banned masks as part of a crackdown on immorality among the clergy. In 1845, New York State made it illegal for for three or more people to wear masks in public, after farmers in the Hudson Valley dressed up as Native Americans and attacked and killed their landlords.
So why do our friendly, incorruptible police so often dress up as paramilitary thugs and goons? There's a horribly prescient Ron Cobb cartoon from 1968...
The security camera is labelled "For your protection". Good to know.
I shall leave the car out now that I'm back from a supplies run. Who knows? The rain may clean it, a little. And I have a lunch date. The Waitrose aisles are even less packed two minutes after that Temple of Commerce opens its (sliding) doors. I commented to a chap (of about my age, who was muttering to himself as he restocked the shelves) that I found it reassuring to find I wasn't the only self-mutterer. "First sign of madness" quoth he. "What's the second?" ask I. "Working here."
Should have seen that one coming.
It's funny...
... but I never seem to get any atheists, agnostics, or humanists banging on my front door proselytising on behalf of their (lack of) belief systems. No, I only get the people who seem to want to introduce me to their invisible, imaginary friends. Mind you, they do seem to be getting fewer youngsters caught up in their shared delusions. Time to up the dosage, Nurse Ratched.
Who knew...
... that the holder of a registered Power of Attorney was automatically "screened" for money-laundering? Triggered by the (I'd hoped, simple) process of trying to get dear Mama's snailmail address altered to mine. After all, I sold her house in the Midlands three years ago to help fund her stay in the care-home she's now "lived" in, completely unaware, since August 2010.
Even worse, all parties concerned who've bothered to reply so far all want Big Bro's details and status confirmed too. (He has yet to 'activate' his own PoA and [I suspect] was hoping to be able to avoid any need to do so.) Indeed, it was precisely to avoid all this duplicate hassle that we'd carefully selected "Jointly and severally" — with Big Bro being resident in NZ (and an NZ citizen rather than a UK subject) it made more sense to let the poor chap off the hook as I'm the son on the (local) spot.
It amuses me...
... when I stop to think about it that — considering the four-plus years of my aeronautical engineering apprenticeship from September 1969 to January 1974 with Hawker Siddeley in Hatfield — I'm rather less interested in aircraft (and photos of same) than many of my chums who (generally) did not spend the period of their tertiary education thus engaged.
This splendid lady (for example) is apparently...
... something called a Sopwith Triplane RNAS 10Sq-C (replica ZK-SOP) Hood or N533 Black Maria (depending how well you know her). I will naturally take Big Bro's word for that. All I know is that the original .jpg file my splendid sibling jammed into my email Inbox is (at 5184 x 3456 pixels) too damn' big for my ancient Fireworks program to open. That has a 5,000 pixel width limit. I assume back in 1998 or so nobody was fool enough to be working on web graphics of anything like that size.
Nowadays, it seems, people don't stop to think "wouldn't an attachment of that size be better handled in, say, Dropbox?" Poor show, Bro, poor show. Or perhaps that's just the vestiges of the IBM webmaster in me. No wonder the planet is running out of Internet backbone.