2014 — 1 September: Monday — rabbits!
Two-thirds of the year has now evaporated. Next stop, Xmas :-)
NPR's "On the Media"...
... is gently lifting the rock1 to examine the pond life that swirls around the annual White House Correspondents' Dinner. No danger of any political journalism breaking out; no-one stepped away from the red carpet to show up to their session on Press ethics.
I finished reading...
... the Winston Graham memoir last night. He dealt briefly, but touchingly, with the death of his wife. This tiny extract2 is from the first page of Chapter 10:
She died in December 1992, to the last issuing strict instructions as to how her Christmas pudding was to be cooked.
After the loss of a woman with whom one has lived in the greatest amity for much the larger part of one's life, one is not a little bereft. When towards the end she would once or twice become a mite depressed, I would say to her: "Don't
be so selfish. You can't go and die on me. Think of me. I can't go on without you." And, although light-heartedly expressed, I meant it — and totally believed it. But I have.
Sometimes if you wear a cheerful face to deceive, the deception begins to stick, and you end up by deceiving yourself.
Nicely put, by a nice chap.
Tomorrow's car service...
... will leave me stranded here for the day, so (ahead of my lunch date today) I shall be nipping out to fix the ominous echo in Mother Hubbard's cupboard. There's also a possibility of a Wednesday catch-up with my friend Pauline. Haven't seen her since we met at Nick's retirement lunch, held in the restaurant at the base of that cylindrical tower in the vicinity of the Spinnaker Tower. (Site of my first Segway sighting during my precautionary reconnoitre — and first solo trip down there, in fact.) Too long ago, it occurs to me.
Echo silenced in the wake of a trip out in the pre-rush drizzle that did a good job of washing the car. Now for a cuppa while I catch up with Harry Shearer's "Le Show". Pop quiz: who was it who did this robust lambasting that I was reading before I nipped out?
He named, in the best tradition of truth-telling scholarship, the public officials pursuing the aggression, all of them men and many of them past and future academics — Robert McNamara, McGeorge Bundy, Arthur Schlesinger, Henry Kissinger — for lying, for heedless cruelty, for sheer damnable incompetence.
(Answer.)
Nick Hornby has been...
... describing his decade-long gig reviewing books each month for The Believer, the only rule being that he isn't allowed to be rude about anything. Source and snippet:
The magazine's philosophy posed a question, however, one I had, bizarrely, never properly thought about ever since I had learnt to read: how does one choose books that one knows one is going to enjoy? The obvious answer is that you can't. You would think that every time you pick up something that you haven't read before, especially if it is written by an author whose work is unfamiliar to you, then it's a crapshoot.
Could explain why so much of my leisure time flashed by in bookshops.
Kindling...
... under Win8.1Pro. A reader regards my "ongoing obsession with screen capture ==> OCR" as a source of fascination and amusement, asking if I realise I can cut and paste text out of a Kindle reader? Well, "Up to a point, Lord Copper". The Kindle Reader for Win8 was recently improved. So, when I highlight text in the reader I just get a Modern App-ish pair of sub-tiles — "Highlight" and "Note" — popping up near the highlighted text. But no copy option.
Mind you, my 'ModernMix' App that constrains Modern Apps to appear 'inside' a standard window (with the benefit of edges and 'normal' controls rather than going instantly full screen and becoming rather intractable about playing nicely with anything else) is clearly not quite sure where the boundaries of a Kindle Reader "screen" start. Or stop. My fault for running such a marvellously modern OS, of course.
Good job I still get a childish thrill by seeing software speedily turn a captured bunch of pixels into editable ASCII text.
[Longish Pause]
There's also a childish thrill to be gained by my post-prandial indoor entertainment: seeing a ridiculously tiny, radio-controlled, quadcopter, puzzle (and mildly disconcert) a pair of not-so-tiny Siberian forest cats. Less thrilling was the emptying out of the car's 'detritus' ahead of its collection tomorrow morning (lest my dealer concludes I'm a total slob).
Well, the Kindle for Android App went on to the new toy easily enough, but crashed and burned two pages into an old favourite. Oops. What is it about me and software?
I'm delighted...
... to learn, from the latest Ansible, of the award of a 'Hugo' to Randall Munroe, aka XKCD. And TH White was awarded a 'retro' Hugo for his 1938 novel "The Sword in the Stone" (or, I assume, "The Once and Future King"). How cool is that? I bought this second-hand copy a mere 40 years ago for 10p after my original mid-1960s paperback fell apart:
I must admit, I enjoyed Disney's cartoon version of the first 'book' much more than the musical variant. And it wasn't until 1975 that this little item from 1941...
... was discovered in the archives of the University of Texas, and published a couple of years later. I bought my copy from a 'damaged in transit / bargain price' heap in July 1979. It contains a fascinating prologue, by Sylvia Townsend Warner, outlining the tortuous genesis of this "true last chapter".