2014 — 11 July: Friday
I wonder if the football has finished yet?1
This is the...
... second time I've read of Barbara Ehrenreich's memoir "Living with a Wild God". The first being in "Harper's" back in March. At that time, I even went so far as to enjoy a brief dalliance with it in that little online bookshop run by Mr Bezos, too. Today, I've found a "proper" review of it written by a "proper" reviewer. Professor AC Grayling, no less, whose own, calm, book "The God Argument" briefly caught my eye yesterday in WH Smith between my misleading ('Ooh, Linux Mint 17 is so easy') magazine and the new Mark Haddon.
I think I'll wait until I'm dead before bothering to read any further arguments pro- or anti-religion. That will be quite soon enough. Nor do I feel any great urge to proselytise, though I understand simple changes to my brain chemistry could fix that. Either way.
Actually, I've...
... just been emailed my next reading assignment:
- The Shadow Over Innsmouth
- The Call of Cthulhu
- The Dunwich Horror
- At The Mountains of Madness
- The Strange Case of Charles Dexter Ward
- The Whisperer In Darkness
- The Shadow Out Of Time
- The Music of Erich Zann
If I get as far as that last one, I will (I'm told) see the inspiration for the mysterious killing fiddle deployed by Mo in a couple of the Charles Stross "Laundry Files" tales. Meanwhile, I have (again) forgotten to top up my supply of fresh plums during the morning's hunter-gathering. Breakfast now awaits.
Having had...
... such initial optimism for our fragrant coalition guvmint (which, at least, has yet to take us into a very dubious war — unlike the last lot) I now find them emetic.
Nick Clegg, Ed Miliband and David Cameron are going to railroad surveillance laws through parliament in just three days. Apparently it doesn't have time to discuss this properly. Yet parliament went into recess a week early
in May because we were told there was no need to debate further legislation. Something isn't right about representatives of the people being told by their party leaders to pass laws that they've barely read, let alone
properly considered.
The bill was published in draft form a few hours ago. It's pointless attempting to scrutinise it because, thanks to the secret deal, we know it will be law by the end of next week.
Meanwhile, our cousins across the water have different invasions of privacy to contend with:
A 17-year-old boy in the US could be forced to have an erection to enable prosecutors bringing a "sexting" case against him to compare his penis with one in a sexually explicit video, his lawyers reportedly claim.
Me, I can just about cope with "texting" :-)
It's just as well...
... Technology Towers is no longer sullied with Apple kit, too. Perish the thought I should ever wish to try getting anything remotely spicy engraved on the back of my iThing. (Which I 'ave not got.) Among other comments on this absurd story was the one I noted about the "apple" (of Original Sin and Eden-expulsion fame) actually being a pomegranate. It's enough to give you the pip. (Link.)
The latest boss of Microsoft name drops both Nietzsche and Rilke at the end of his memo. Not something I recall his illustrious predecessor doing. Nor any boss of IBM. Just sayin'. (Link.)
Aside to Christa...
This chap...
... smells much nicer than the dustbin he currently has as a neighbour. [Pause] There's nothing quite like freshly-squeezed grapefruit juice. Guess who's just unearthed a Spanish-made Braun electric juicer from the depths of a largely-unexplored kitchen cupboard? Yes, I wiped the Dust of Ages from it first. I also found not one, but two, coffee bean grinders, too. The traces of ancient beans in them were completely free of any suggestion of coffee-ness. Could I possibly have broken through into the Tomb of the mythical Kenwood Chef, I wonder?
The kitchen was no more my domain than the garden, of course. Recall Simon Armitage on the topic?
I continue to...
... admire the kind of 'graphic brain' that can take a venerable visual illusion of ambiguity and update it like this. Click the pic:
I don't really...
... regard myself as a book collector.2 And I certainly have no wish to be a bookseller. I was delighted, however, to stumble across an essay on a rather esoteric subculture of bookselling, written by Ivan Stormgart and Mary Cook (of "Stormgart Books" in San Francisco). It appears (under the letter "B" for "Bookselling in the field of sexology") in my 20-year-old edition of Vern L Bullough's "Human Sexuality: an encyclopedia".3 Here's a snippet (pun unintentional):
Some collectors specialize in books that are of a curious shape, have unusual bindings, or are in some other way uncommon. Pop-up editions of the Kama Sutra are an example of such books but there are others published in more limited editions. Among the rarer examples is a book on circumcision printed in fewer than 100 copies, each of which is tall and narrow in shape and cannot be opened without the removal of a prepuce-shaped paper cap.
Some books are given special value by their collector. One collector of gay books tried to put bindings on them to match the content, theme, or title. Included in his collection was Casimir Dukahz's The Asbestos Diary, bound in nontoxic asbestos with the title blocked in silver on the front cover. To be successful in selling such unique books, the bookseller has to have a customer in mind when he or she purchases them.
The music on this evening's minidisc...
... shown here at nearly twice life-size...
... was originally recorded on my friend Hugh's NEAL cassette tape deck right at the end of 1979 (indeed, quite possibly while we were seeing in the New Year during a mammoth, three-couple, game of Trivial Pursuit lubricated by a bottle or two of wine). Since we were over at Hugh and Yvonne's house, I'd simply asked him to dump the BBC Radio London "Breakthrough" rock show (curated by Andy Finney and Mike Sparrow) on to some blank tapes I'd brought over for the purpose. I would have transcribed the tapes over to minidisc in the mid-1990s.