2014 — 15 August: Friday
I was appalled to discover that the BBC videotape wipers have been at it again.1 I had been following a chain of suggestions after examining details of an upcoming Blu-ray release of an old favourite "The Night of the Comet" (starring an incredibly attractive young lady yclept Catherine Mary Stewart). The BFI (not the FBI) have an "Out of the Unknown" compilation of all surviving episodes — sadly, that turns out to mean one episode of an Asimov story (Little Lost Robot) and a couple of scripts in PDF format. Not terribly impressive, Mr BBC!
If I'm to feed my weekend niece (who may coincide, as it were, with Peter and his g/f) and squeeze in today's planned walk I have places to be and foodstuff to buy. TTFN.
When I read...
... a book review of this ilk, I no longer wonder why I gave up 'Eng Lit' just as soon as I was able to, 47 years ago. Source and snippet:
In his compelling new work, Metaphor, Denis Donoghue suggests that the very act of reading itself is "an enchanted interpretation that sometimes involves foraging among the available senses of a word or a phrase to settle upon the one that seems most justly telling in its place," so that metaphor becomes the act of saying that "something is something else."
And there was me, wondering what a metaphor was. [Pause] To amend a mildly scabrous couplet from Ken Tynan's largely-forgotten "Oh, Calcutta!"...
Obfuscation can be fun
Kama Sutra, everyone.
TSX, anyone?
Buried on page 49, if you're wondering. Who says hardware never has bugs?
The state of...
... the North-bound motorway this morning2, the surprising visual difficulty of threading the black laces into my new black boots, and the dangerously-late discovery that they were absolutely not at all suitable for wearing while driving all did their little bit to contribute to my late arrival, and hence a sensible last-minute change of planned walking route. Humid, with the merest hint of rain. I'm back now, and recuperating for a while before heading over to say a long-delayed "Hi. Put t'kettle on" to Roger and Eileen. They have just hauled down the plague flag that had been flying over their house.
Meanwhile, I've been reading gloomy news about the increasing risk of serious fungal infections in the wake of climate change. I think I shall have to give up reading and take up something more cheerful like alcohol for a change. It seems to do the trick for many of my neighbours.
My evening...
... meal of chicken kebab and salad was accompanied, for as long as I could stomach it, by a 1995 HBO TV movie-of-a-true-story called "Citizen X" — designed, one might suspect, to make you glad you never lived under Soviet communism in the 1970s and 1980s. My limit turned out to be about 20 minutes. This Dutch DVD will be on its way back to Roger almost before you can say "The Ripper of Rostov".
Seeing a trailer for "Mortdecai", I now understand why these 1970s tales of this charming rogue (written — after he'd given up editing the SF magazine "Impulse" in the 1960s — by the equally charming rogue, Kyril Bonfiglioli) have just been republished. And were being pushed quite hard in Waterstone's a couple of months ago. To accompany this new Johnny Depp film, of course. Silly me; I should have made the connection much sooner. The fourth novel, unfinished at the time of his death, was completed by Craig Brown. I recommend the 2001 'memoir' Mortdecai ABC by his widow Margaret Bonfiglioli, too.
I've just cast off...
... the final graphical trace of my recent six-year dalliance with the (now defunct) Cisco Network Magic3 program. I could, and did, also use this to generate a map of my local PC network. The network map generated by my router is not, by any stretch, a thing of artistic beauty. Xara software to the (far more flexible) rescue, therefore, as you can now see here.
[Pause] And there was me thinking it was "totes amazeballs". Shoot me now. (Link.)