2014 — 12 April: Saturday
I had forgotten1 what an enjoyable riot Barry "Men in Black" Sonnenfeld's "The Addams Family" film is. Last night's Blu-ray was, however, ill-served by its ludicrously ungenerous "Extras" — I hardly class two low-resolution variants of the original theatrical trailer as a generous dollop of extradom. I also watched and very much enjoyed "The Way, Way Back" — a much newer, but equally adroit, ensemble piece. This was actually the title I thought Brian had been referring to when he offered me his copy of "The Way Back" yesterday. An understandable misunderstanding.
Less understandable...
... is where things go in this house when I put them away safely somewhere. I've already spent a couple of hours eliminating quite a few of the easier (less dusty2) candidates for "hiding place in which I could have stashed my marriage certificate for safe-keeping". I know I had this annoyingly absent 40-year-old bit of paper "in my grasp" within the last six years or so as I'd scanned it (it's a little too wide for my A4 scanner) and then stitched together the two halves of the image using Photoshop's 'panorama' facility. Proof:
This would have been when I was scanning the several hundred photos and slides I have of Christa to put on this ¬blog for the first two years or so after she died.
Horrid thought
I may yet be forced to tackle the 19 storage cartons that are neatly lined up across her wardrobes, or (failing that) the six that are sitting up in the reading room that used to be Christa's study (and repository of all household paperwork in days of yore). These cartons (and whatever the hell is inside them) represent the last remnants of the great plumbing system house upheaval of 2010, and I suppose it really is time I did "something" about them. By the same argument, it really is time I did "something" about the untouched chaos up in the loft, but what's the rush? Think of the fun any descendants of mine could have in years to come sifting through whatever the hell is up there.
It feels about time for some breakfast and another cuppa :-)
[Pause]
Having just bought my first-ever large bag of fresh spinach, and first-ever US sweet potatoes, you can see I'm experimenting (a little) with my next crockpot. (The spinach will be cooked separately, of course, now that I've consulted Mr WikiHow.) I remember eating this unfamiliar leaf for the first time well over 30 years ago, accompanied (somewhat messily) by a fried egg, in Germany, at a friend of Christa's. It was a Bavarian treat, I was told proudly. Today's batch may yet end up in a sandwich or two as I can also digest it raw, I gather.
Having just glanced...
... probably for the last time at the still white-hot Microsoft forum gathering yet more complaints from people toasted by the pesky Win8.1 Update 1 "upgrade" I'm reminded of a 1974 essay by Lewis Thomas called "On Meddling":
You cannot meddle with one part of a complex system from the outside without the almost certain risk of setting off disastrous events that you hadn't counted on in other, remote parts. If you want to fix something you are first obliged to understand, in detail, the whole system, and for very large systems you can't do this without a very large computer. Even then, the safest course seems to be to stand by and wring hands, but not to touch. Intervening is a way of causing trouble.
Easier to read, by the way, than the rather more magisterial output from Stephen Jay Gould.
Are you feeling lucky, punk?
This Economist piece has an amusing offline-only interactive item. It's a potential killer. (Link.)
When I was blagging...
... my free mug of tea with Roger and Eileen a couple of days ago, he asked to borrow a book he suspected (correctly) would be on my shelves. I wonder how identifiable this extract makes it?
Clue: I had printed (with that John Bull printing outfit I had as a child — and still have, somewhere) the legend...
D.C.M. SF No. 10
... inside the front cover on the title page, when I paid my 2/6d for it in 1963.
Nick Hanauer...
... was one of the "1%-ers" talking to Robert Reich in the (excellent) film "Inequality for All" I watched recently:
Energetic, blunt and sometimes profane, Hanauer seems to take particular delight in ripping business moguls who resent paying higher taxes.
"This is my world, I know a lot of these folks," Hanauer said in an appearance on MSNBC last week. "These are borderline sociopathic people, and they don't care about other people and
they have no empathy."
You think? (Link to some telling cartoons and opinions.)
I've just interrupted a very satisfying paper-shredding exercise to give Christa's favourite office kit time to cool down, and to download an MP3 version of "The Rite of Spring" by a jazz trio called The Bad Plus. (They were featured just a few minutes ago on Jazz Record Requests.) [Pause] Well, I must say that's about the best jazz treatment I've yet heard of any piece of Stravinsky. As I noted back in January, such 'experiments' really are not usually so good.
Rumble! Time for my evening meal.