2014 — 19 April: Saturday
It always amazes me1 how I can get lost inside music for hours at a time. Yesterday evening (yawn!) was largely such a voyage of musical re-discovery, browsing randomly among the folders of CDs and including (at one point) the whole of the amazingly good (and rarely mentioned) second CD from the Buggles. I do appreciate the audio freedom of living in a detached house. I also find stereo has an uncluttered elegant sufficiency2 of channels for me. Following the Buggles link (if you do) will also reveal the first Blu-ray audio I actually bought.
Quite a while ago now.
Breakfast is starting to seem like a good idea. Another sunny morning, I note. I wonder what mischief awaits. [Pause] Well, here's some, from one third of a century ago.
For some reason...
... I've deemed this almost humourless graphic (from The Economist) worth keeping3 for (now) 10 days less than a quarter of a century. Perhaps for the snide footnote (a speciality of that magazine) about the uncertain size of the Italian "hidden economy":
This was, by the way, at a time when Italians were talking about Il sorpasso which was their term for the moment (in 1987, as it happens) when the Italian economy exceeded the size of ours. Did the Treasury really know the size of the UK's own black economy, back then? Give me leave to doubt that.
Call me "old-fashioned"...
... but surely something listed in the (very, very far from wondrously well-stocked) Windows modern "App" store ought not to say it's free if it contains "an in-app purchase option to remove the adverts"? Nor can I claim to be the least bit impressed by a calculator App that "has permission to use some features of your PC that might affect your privacy". In this case, I assume at a minimum it steals some of my Internet connection bandwidth to fetch all those adverts (in fact, "advertising banners") I have less than zero interest in.