2014 — 20 August: Wednesday
One of my music acquisitions yesterday afternoon was the album "Sing to the Moon" by Laura Mvula. I shall also therefore now download yesterday evening's Prom which featured the same singer and the same album, this time re-arranged for a full orchestral performance by Jules Buckley. While I'm at it, I may also snaffle the earlier "In Tune" as it featured a nice interview with the lutenist Jakob Lindberg — I enjoyed an album of his back in September 2012.
This flurry of...
... musical activity will precede1 my rendezvous for coffee, possible PC purchase, and lunch, with young Iris who tells me she has clarified her thoughts on what she requires from her next PC. That should be interesting.
My predictions...
... regarding yesterday evening's entertainment were spot-on, by the way. I enjoyed "The Cabin in the Woods" — a jolly and enjoyably deranged (your smileage may vary) little meta-horror show descending into full-on OTT Grand Guignol nuttiness — sufficiently to have ordered my own Blu-ray of it... (along with, erm, another four titles that I found thrust in front of me after scouring Amazon's wicked "2 Blu-rays for £10" offer:
- "10 things I hate about you" (replacing a 15-year-old NTSC DVD)
- "The Game" (replacing an elderly PAL DVD that came in one of those ludicrous 'super' jewel cases and had the usual non-standard size artwork)
- "Anonymous" a fictional look at an 'alternative' author who could have dashed off Shakespeare plays
- "Promised Land" a look at fracking's effects on a community
And "Calvary"? Well, it was in some ways far more of a horror show than "Cabin" (being far more based in the real world, if that's what Ireland's Catholicism is). But it was a magnificent piece of film-making nonetheless, and it kept me gripped from start to finish, which I have to admit is increasingly rare these days. Highly recommended. I watched all the interviews with great interest, too.
My rendezvous...
... with Iris a few hours ago was delayed by five minutes as I first had to respond to a faintly alarming email from Amazon, who had reset my password temporarily as a precaution:
We believe that an unauthorised party may have attempted to access your Amazon.co.uk account using your sign-in credentials, which that party obtained elsewhere. We do not know how your sign-in credentials were obtained because that happened away from our website.
They sensibly suggested that I should also change my password "on any other website where you use the same or a similar password". So someone, somewhere, has somehow compromised some part of my web life. Charming.
We have a...
... guvmint Major Projects Authority whose job is to look into whatever the National Audit Office regards as problematic. Apparently, they are currently tracking almost 200 schemes with a total value (or should that be cost?) of almost £400,000,000,000. And just 17 of those projects (less than 4%) are assessed as "green" status. Green merely means "the lowest risks to success". (Link.)
I actually bought...
... my first DVD of Alan Bennett's marvellous "The History Boys" a while ago opining when I watched it with Christa several days later that it would probably be the best film I saw that year. Of course, a lot of other things took precedence later that year, but I was blissfully unaware of what was coming down the pipe... thank goodness! I recall watching the film again on Mike's large screen system in August 2008. But when I came to winkle it out of my impeccable / infallible CaseLogic folder filing system for another viewing last week, there it was... gone. "No biggie", thinks I. It's an excuse to get a new copy on Blu-ray.
But it doesn't seem to be available on that format. Hence one of today's two arrivals while I was out helping Iris to choose her next PC:
The other being the final set of (probably-scabrous) misadventures of Hank Moody. I do hope he makes it out alive.