2014 — 13 April: Sunday
No TV to report — reading and radio were more than adequate; they often are — and a reasonably early night, as well. Now, what on earth does a chap have to do1 just to get a morning cuppa round here...?
There are few annual treats...
... I enjoy more than my peek up the skirts of the American Library Association as they reveal the sort of things that have been upsetting some of their readers, or (since I doubt the literacy of some of these weird people) their borrowers. Mustn't encourage all those kiddiewinks to do any thinking for themselves, must we?
I've long believed that the most fervent and vituperative attackers of "a thing" may well tend to have a deeply-suppressed and unadmitted longing or attraction for that "thing". I further believe that Philip Larkin was correct about the effect of parents on their children. And let me throw in another word for Gershon Legman2 while I'm about it.
I'm with Diderot
"Benevolent monarch" is an oxymoron, is it not?
But for me, the best way of summing up the division between rich and poor, and high and low, is a contract stating that "hours of work will be advised by the visitor manager and will be
dependent upon the requirements for retail assistants"...
The contract says so much because the employer in question was not some crook but the Queen — whom everyone in authority assures us is a benign sovereign who cares for every one of
her subjects.
My book-selling friend Tony Martin was unable to keep his Ringwood shop open after relocating it there from Soton. But Waterstones has just invited me along for a free coffee on Good Friday to meet Kipper the Dog (?) at what they describe as my new local Waterstones. Not really my sort of thing, these days. Still, it's not as far as Bournemouth...
Now that I've been...
... up close and personal with my first batch of sweet potatoes, I'm a bit dubious about this evening's intended crockpot. I shall just have to suck cook it and see, won't I? I note I also managed to forget a Bramley and had polished off the last of the cooking wine without getting a new bottle. Call yourself a chef, David? Tut, tut.
The weather is currently nice enough, and currently looking likely to continue that way, that we've lined up another walk for tomorrow. I also have a lunch date and/or PC acquisition discussion with Iris on Tuesday. She's been eyeing an HP Envy Rove All-in-One.
With it being "Palm Sunday"...
... I thought it appropriate to remind myself that there has long been clear Biblical evidence "proving" that Heaven is at least 80C hotter than Hell. It's a piece I first saw in RL Weber's 1973 selection of physics goodies, A Random Walk in Science, but you can find the same elegant reasoning in my September 1974 copy of An Index of Possibilities. The original author was apparently Paul Darwin Foote who, in about 1920, published it in the Taylor Instrument Company internal magazine. His original manuscript was found among his personal papers after his death in 1971.
Thaumaturgical has a neat graphic. This saves me from having to nick3 the text.
Naturally, there's also been at least one published rebuttal, in the Journal of Irreproducible Results — where else? Although Dr Tim Healey accepts the calculated temperature of Heaven, he questions the assumption that Hell is at normal atmospheric pressure. Donald Simanek has the full story here.
Listening to...
... a fascinating examination of Handel's finances as he manoeuvred his way successfully (more so than Isaac Newton, for one) through the bursting of the South Sea Bubble, it occurs to me that I was also listening to the same BBC business correspondent (Peter Day) chattering amiably to Mike Hammer, the business process re-engineering guru, back when that was all the rage in the early 1990s.
My crockpot was actually pretty tasty. Mind you, I forgot to top it up with any spinach. No matter; I had some, raw, on my tuna sandwich for lunch. Yum. This healthy eating will be the death of me, sooner or later. Life is, after all, a terminal disease.