2014 — 11 August: Monday
Bright, sunny, fresh, dry1 and I've had the wit to leave NPR on in time to catch Harry Shearer. (An audio equivalent, if you will, of "Private Eye" magazine.)
Time...
... for my next cuppa, already. Meanwhile, an email from that nice Mr Bezos tells me that finally the DVD of "The Unknown Known" (the Errol Morris 'portrait' of the ineffable Donald Rumsfeld) is in the mail. I won't say I'd forgotten about this, but I've certainly been kept waiting long enough for that to have become a possibility. I ordered it in March, and note that its price has dropped by 10p (so that's OK then).
Masters of the Universe
I'm beginning to suspect that the elite tertiary education available — incredibly expensively — across the Pond isn't necessarily all it's cracked up to be. But was it ever?
For evidence, re-watch the 1978 documentary by John Landis :-)
I won't bother...
... to list the chain (just joking) I followed this morning to end up at "Semen, green rice and the rate of Internet decay" since, well, by now, I guess link rot may well have started to set in.
Pictures on the radio
The wonderful Gerald Scarfe (and a great deal of "recycled radio") has been proving very entertaining listening. A sound bite from the godawful Tony Blair disagreeing that exercise of great power erodes the soul, for example — no doubt absolutely correctly in his case as I've never known him to lie. Ever.2 This after I've first discarded all the duplicate junk mail insisting I need cheap loans (5.9% APR) and all manner of "Government Scheme" household insulation that I already have, and have had, for the last three decades.
I've just OCRed...
... an interview that appeared in the New York Times in July 2000 to coincide with the release of the definitive (well, almost!) CD compilation on the Rhino record label. Subject? Tom Lehrer. Best quote? "Political satire died the day Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize." Quite so.
There's an enormously...
... clever idea in my latest snail-mailed issue of Toyota's "this way" magazine:
I had to resort to my scanner, however, as the online version of the magazine (for some reason) is all about cars; usually Toyotas, now that I look more closely.
Speaking of WMDs...
... I was surprised to learn as I listened to Eric Schlosser on NPR's "Fresh Air" programme talking about his latest book3 "Command and Control" that we have the paperback here in the UK ahead of the US, which has only so far seen the hardback. It's a pretty damning indictment of the US Department of Defense, which had over several decades consistently and desperately tried to wrap news of any and all accidents involving nuclear weapons in their opaque security blankets. Until forced to contend with Freedom of Information Requests they admitted to 32 accidents when there had actually been well over 1,000.
I wasn't really surprised. After all, I did manage to finish this earlier (very, very scary) book that I bought in 1989:
