2014 — 1 April: Tuesday — rabbits!
An indistinctly misty morning1 — for which my hot cuppa is prepping me before I have to nip out to make a supplies run. The newest piece of oral hardware is giving me no trouble as I sip, I'm happy to report... If I'm no longer supposed to bite into green apples I suppose Dr Fang would also take a dim view of raw carrots. No hardship to dodge those. (There was possibly an April Fool news item on upping one's daily dosage of fresh fruit and veg from five to between seven and ten pieces a day.)
Itchy feet...
... or, more accurately, itchy wheels have prompted me to leave the car out this morning in case I am seized (though definitely not before breakfast) by a spirit of exploratory adventure.
I would be...
... mildly curious to know if my casual reader is aware of what these two books in my little library have in common:
Christa...
... would have laughed uproariously had she lived to read this:
You became a professor at Cornell without ever having received a Ph.D. You seem almost proud of that fact.
Oh, yes. I'm very proud of not having a Ph.D. I think the Ph.D. system is an abomination. It was invented as a system for educating German professors in the 19th century, and it works
well under those conditions. It's good for a very small number of people who are going to spend their lives being professors. But it has become now a kind of union card that you have to
have in order to have a job, whether it's being a professor or other things, and it's quite inappropriate for that. It forces people to waste years and years of their lives sort of
pretending to do research for which they're not at all well-suited. In the end, they have this piece of paper which says they're qualified, but it really doesn't mean anything. The Ph.D.
takes far too long and discourages women from becoming scientists, which I consider a great tragedy. So I have opposed it all my life without any success at all.
That exploratory...
... adventure took me first down to Hedge End, to pick up three adapters to fit three of BlackBeast's four SSDs into. I would have bought four, but PC World failed me. So I (over) compensated on the way home by browsing the new and newish release shelves in Asda, picking up three films:
I would have bought four, but the DVD Profiler App on my smartphone assured me I had already got another title I had been considering.
A spot of downtime (polishing off my 12th Sookie Stackhouse novel2) followed by a spot of lunch (polishing off a piece of chicken and a salad) followed by a spot of surgery inside BlackBeast (polishing up my twiddly screwing skills) and, here I am again. Nice sunny day, too. Time for my next cuppa. While I listen to a segment from a 1922 jazz ballet version (by John Alden Carpenter) of George Herriman's Krazy Kat! (I've long been a fan of the printed version.)
I've only just learned...
... of the (relatively) recent death (18 January 2013) of Jim Horning. There's a bunch of his anecdotes still online here.
Robert Reich's film...
... "Inequality for All" is very well worth seeing. 'Nuff said. And here's what I found printed on the Amazon.com bookmark that I'd left in the only book I have by him:
One must, after all, keep one's priorities well-ordered. And it was while skimming Wikipedia's entry on Erasmus (of Rotterdam) that I not only learned that he single-handedly accounted for 10 to 20% of European book sales in the 1530s (it was a smaller market!) but that he was also credited with having coined "In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king." Smart cookie.
Those two books of mine?
On 3rd October 1998, a mere nine days after I'd already grabbed my first-edition hardback off the 'new releases' trolley in one of my bookshops (better not say which one), I clipped the following (im)pertinent item:
A second clipping, in January 1999, revealed that George Harrison had won a public apology as well as undisclosed "substantial" damages. The book was withdrawn. Roger McGough, by contrast, simply seems quietly to have withdrawn his early book of verse. He certainly omitted some of the poems it contained from his 2003 edition of "Collected Poems".
I don't usually regard myself as a completeist (opinions diverge on that point) but I was faintly shocked to discover that I actually have over 30 books of his verse (and, of course, his autobiography). Christa and I went to hear him at least twice at "The Point", too.