2014 — 26 August: Tuesday
The post-Bank Holiday continuing rain and rather gloomy weather is considerably brightened1 by the pleasing news that Bob Fosse's 1979 film "All that Jazz" has finally (finally!) come out on Blu-ray. My order for it was winging across the wires mere minutes ago. Slowly but surely the gaps continue to be filled...
I shall celebrate...
... with another cuppa and a breakfast calorie or two while wondering whether or not I actually need to do any fresh supplies shopping yet. I suspect I can procrastinate a little longer. I usually can — it's one of my few remaining core skills.
Reading...
... the "news" here that...
Samsung sells a hard drive loaded with five 4K movies and three documentaries, but this costs $300.
... takes me straight back to early 1983. I had just obtained my first LaserDisc player...
... on a one-year rental contract (just in the unlikely case that this technology failed to catch on) and the deal included three 'popular' titles. Which is why Peter had, by the time he was five, watched "Star Wars" (by his own estimation) perhaps 40 times. The second title was "M*A*S*H" and the third (which I never bothered to watch) was "Raise the Titanic", about which Lew Grade remarked in later years "It would have been cheaper to lower the Atlantic".
The New Yorker has...
... another of its reliably well-written essays. This one is on Mary (the troll slayer) Beard, and could easily make one despair of being a chap. (Link.)
And this rings...
... very true, too. I was unaware of the term "metalepsis", but then, who isn't?
[David] Mitchell began writing his first novel the day after he finished reading Ursula K. Le Guin's A Wizard of Earthsea. He was 10 years old, or maybe 11. "I remember writing one of these swooping camera shots coming in over the water," he says, "past the sails and the merchant ships, to a very Game of Thrones-y-looking castle keep by the sea." Mostly, though, what he remembers is the map he drew — because, as nerdy 10-year-olds can tell you, every fantasy novel worth its amulet must begin with a map.
As Leonard Marcus points out, in one of his annotations to that "Phantom Tollbooth", gifts with protective or talismanic virtues occur throughout myth, lore, and legend. Though I never put one in an IBM manual.
I've finally cracked...
... and have been reading just a tiny little bit about young Mr Snowden and an analysis of what NSA surveillance could mean to me. (Well, were I hooked into any social media.) The NSA's defence (as ever, of course) is that people with nothing to hide have nothing to fear. Well, they would say that, wouldn't they? Apparently, they allow themselves to data hop three times from, say, me.
I've been plugging a few figures into an interactive calculator that tots up one's Facebook friends, and friends of friends. With just my one, imaginary (!), friend, the second hop away from that person gathers up 100 extra, and the third hop gathers up a further 26,634 extra, "targets". On average. As Mr Average Facebook user has 190 friends, the numbers are geometrically larger, of course. (31,046 and 5,072,916 respectively.)
Me and my one, imaginary, friend will be continuing our tiny boycott of social media. And quietly hoping for great things from the film described here. (I watched its trailer yesterday.)
The appalling news...
... contained in the latest (the third!) report about child sex abuse in Rotherham — the Council and the police knew about the level of exploitation — is now also a feature of NPR's news reports. Good grief. (BBC link.)