2014 — 6 August: Wednesday
Starting the day with a fresh build of TextPad1 always gives me a minor-league thrill. (I'm easily thrilled.) The amount of overnight rain hardly seems to have merited a 'weather warning' for Hampshire, at least hereabouts and so far...
Bright sparks
I'm surprised to hear that plans to make the "rigging" of wholesale gas and electricity prices a crime punishable by a custodial sentence of up to two wholesale years are needed. There's me thinking it would already have been a practice that was at least heavily frowned-upon in that mysterious self-regulating entity, the City. Not so. I wonder if that's why I'm suddenly getting my £310-20 credit repaid? I note, with still further surprise, a curious application of the Law of Conservation2 of Energy: our biggest energy companies are currently allowed to sell energy to themselves3 (at a profit, no doubt) before selling the same energy on to me. (Link.)
What a gloriously well-regulated country. I eagerly await plans for the taxation of air and water.
I was disappointed...
... yesterday evening by two of the four films I mentioned, and thus retreated to the more reliable haven of the written word until my eyes finally gave up. Mind you, I could wish that the George RR Martin fat paperbacks had been split up into more manageable chunks. They are each about 400 pages too long for comfortable single volume format.
I really should give up this Interweb malarkey. At least until after breakfast. It appears "Studies show" that I should be taking a daily dose of aspirin as the increased risks of stomach bleeding and stroke this would cause are felt to be "worth" the decreased risks of stomach and bowel cancer. A charmless choice, if you ask me. Still, since the regimen is best started at age 50 and discontinued after a decade, I appear already to have missed my window of opportunity. The devil and the deep blue sea, heh? (Link.)
The 90s?
Yes, I still vaguely recall some of the stuff mentioned. Source and snippet:
Pathology and polarization were the twin propellers of this newly inaugurated era of perpetual outrage, and the low-flying pilot of this crop duster was Newt Gingrich, who, elected as Speaker of the House after Republicans won big in the 1994 midterm elections under his insurgent leadership, poisoned everything in his wake. His legacy of sliming liberals as "sick," "pathetic," "despicable," and similar sweet nothings, his appetite for the political destruction of his opponents on the pettiest of pretenses, and his jihad against any traitorous sign of bipartisanship or collegiality in the capital are why, today, Republicans in Congress routinely, reflexively kill veterans' benefits and funding for food stamps out of righteous spite and fix their bayonets to the battle cry of "Benghazi!"
I miss Seinfeld, too. And Northern Exposure :-)
From time immemorial...
... or, at least, from the first time I had sufficient coppers scraped together to afford something to read, I've judged the quality of a local town by the quality and number of its bookshops. I was delighted when Bell's bookshop opened in the then-new Swan Centre in Eastleigh, not too worried when it became Ottokar's, and still not too worried when it became Waterstone's. However, it's now become closed. This has removed my last major incentive to visit.
The boot-liner socks in their "outdoor specialist" store only go up in size as far as "7 to 11" (which stretches them far too tightly against my little tootsies). Another major strike against the benighted place. There's still a branch of my bank there, but really that's now about all there is. Eastleigh has reverted to the unsatisfactory and somewhat decrepit state it was in back in 1981 when we moved here.
As I drove back...
... I was gently ruminating on the "Psychopath" test in Jon Ronson's book. (The 20-point checklist that was originally devised by Robert Hare4.) I have no doubt I would be a miserable failure as a psychopath, personally, as only item #3 "Need for stimulation / proneness to boredom" registers with me. Later, I listened to a radio interview with our blessed London mayor BoJo (in the wake of his long-procrastinated [yet somehow inevitable] decision to stand again for parliament). As he dodged questions with his usual jolly-seeming slipperiness flair, I almost found myself feeling sorry for what the boy Dave will find himself up against. BoJo was said to be likely to appeal to the "grass-roots Tory heartland" (whatever and wherever the hell that is).
He holds not the slightest appeal for me. Not even as a cure for boredom.
Given...
... the massive bank bailout in Portugal — "No need to panic" says Deutsche Welle — the reporting (just heard on NPR) that Italy has surprised "everyone" by sliding back into recession, and what seems to me the intrinsic stupidity of BoJo boasting that London is "roaring" out of recession5 (and thus he's free to break his promise and turn from mayoral duties to political hustling) — it's quite hard for me to disagree with Big Bro's assessment that the whole system is (still) fundamentally broken.
I need more tea!