2014 — 11 June: Wednesday
Today's ramble is1 to a mystery destination. I expect Moriarty will make known his plan at some point; he's a cunning devil. Meanwhile, I note that other cunning devil (Microsoft) is once again offering me an option to downgrade my graphics card driver by updating it. Thanks, but no thanks. This, after I'd already told the update to "go hide" and stop pestering me.
In the wake...
... of Taverner's "Protecting Veil" yesterday evening, I went a-browsin' and snaffled a 99p download of a couple of further pieces I don't know: "Total Eclipse" and "Agraphon". But I was too tired to give them a fair hearing at the time. This hot weather has that effect. I have enough trouble grappling with the idea that it's damn' nearly midsummer already.
In a fit...
... of something or other, I made a decision2 yesterday. I fetched all my minidiscs down from a corner of the reading room (it's far too warm to sit up there for any extended period) and popped the tottering tower of cases into an (almost) unused corner of the living room (almost) exactly where it used to be for a decade or so until the Great Plumbing Upheavals four years ago — and the putting-up of (yet another) floor-to-ceiling set of bookshelves behind the door at the front of the living room.
Did I really just hear of yet another Toyota recall, or was that the BBC Radio 3 news being not quite up to the minute? Grrr. Close reading of the information on their recall checker (which was what I was reduced to when their first three attempts to display a pair of words for me to enter actually displayed portions of an image uncontaminated by any trace of wordage) suggest the 3-door Yaris and a 2nd-generation Yaris are the ones affected this time.
Is it just me...
... or does anyone else find the thought of our magnificent guvmint's Passport Office staff being forced to hold meetings in a stationery cupboard hilarious?
Gotta love...
... sociologists:
Adults without the economic means to enter the market never face the same range of possibilities, yet their (and their children's) failure to flourish is routinely ascribed to their not having "taken responsibility" and made the "right choices," whether in school, on the street or around the dinner table. This diagnosis airbrushes structural inequality out of the picture. What's more, Salecl notes in the most thoroughgoing of these social critiques, our collective obsession with individual choice distracts us from pursuing collective solutions to these dilemmas. It seems we are always on the way home to ponder (and worry about) all the incredible possibilities before us on Match.com or the 700-channel desert of cable TV.
Less amusing to contemplate the three water cannon that good ol' Boy BoJo has allowed his Metropolitan Plods to buy in anticipation of "disorder" in the Capital. And in anticipation, let me add, of permission to use them. I expect a few of his chums in castles could re-purpose them as lawn sprinklers in due course if Home Office permission is withheld. (Link.)
There's no telling...
... what manner of things may decide, from time to time, to take root in my back garden. Or, in this case, sprawl at completely-relaxed ease on the steps out of my patio door:
Just purrfect.
When the Met Office...
... "improved" their maps and services a day or so ago, they neglected to point out that the pollen forecast that they, erm, forecast has now disappeared from their system. Their last update to the info about said system is also 13 months behind the times, dagnabbit. Back to the Beeb, I suspect. Mind you, I can tell by my itchy eyes that levels are high right now.
Yep: "Pollen: Very High"
Unintended consequences!
Oh, good grief:
The deeper angst in San Francisco appears to be over the way each new tech initial public offering creates another few thousand millionaires who want to buy apartments, jacking up the real estate prices for everyone else... Now that these little garage businesses are some of the biggest companies in the world, it's a whole lot harder for them to exhibit the qualities that once made them the darlings of the culture and counterculture alike.