2014 — 4 April: Friday
Plans are again afoot1 for a little local ramble on what the forecast suggested ought to be a largely dry day. I also need a few more foody bits and pieces, so I shall be swimming against the tidal wave of Friday morning shoppers as best I can in half an hour or so.
I've been reading...
... an excellent trio of pieces by Mark Danner, starting here. When you get to the end, the sensation is rather like how good it feels to stop banging your head against a brick wall. Although I've got the new Errol Morris film on pre-order I may end up having to view it in small doses. Too much (un?)reality can be bad.
I've been munching...
... my light snack lunch and contemplating the half a dozen (or so) tulips that are, as it were, springing into action in my little back jungle. The day is less than sunny, but the walk up St Catherine's Hill and looping back along the river was very pleasant — the air a great deal clearer than yesterday.
I've been trying...
... quite hard not to think how long ago I first watched this neat little Robert Towne thriller that has finally trickled out on a US Blu-ray.
Now if only they would release "Into the Night"...
There is, of course, a...
... first time for everything. Today's example? I've been characterised as "a snailmail back-channel". Probably best not to ask :-)
The news that...
... a Scottish cardinal's sexual conduct had "fallen beneath the standards" expected of him is pretty boggling. Is the Standards Manual online somewhere, I wonder? Besides, I thought all these fine, upstandingly moral chaps with the amazing headgear and full-length frocks were supposed to be celibate? Kinsey, of course, regarded celibacy as the only perversion, but let's not go there. (Link.)
Easter, a mere 16 years ago...
... I was regaling dear Mama with tales from Technology Towers:
... it was sufficiently sunny earlier this morning to persuade the two nominally more adult members to set bravely off for the New Forest Owl Sanctuary, which lives in a converted World War II aircraft hangar (and more recently pig farm) bought off the Yanks for a nominal £1, while the brains of the business slept in a little rather than get straight back down to further 'A'-level preparations. Saw our first-ever white squirrels, and a pair of reds, plus (among many others) some amazing things called secretary birds. There was a half-hour lecture, some time to walk around, then another half-hour flying display. Very nice, in fact, apart from the continuing cold. But you can forget the legends about wise old owls — they are particularly bird-brained, it seems, and regarded everywhere but in Britain as little short of feathered idiots. What you might call the Tories of the avian world, in fact, for all that they're clearly what the dinosaurs have now turned into.
I'm confronting...
... the depressing fact that I've been buying and reading books by JG Ballard for over 40 years. (Link.)