2014 — 26 September: Friday
BlackBeast has just been swept for viruses and malware and declared healthy.1 Big Bro has put in a request for my Cayman Islands stamp within 24 hours of its arrival here (though I've suggested it should not be separated from its "Hell" postmark, surely)? The way energy companies handle customer complaints is "frankly awful" (says the energy regulator). And the guvmint is expected to win "overwhelming support" today for its latest proposed military adventure. Which could take "two to three years". What a wonderful world.
Just lie back and think of the arms contracts.
Meanwhile...
... I shall be girding my loins for my early morning session in Dr Fang's chair, trying not to grip his drill bit between my teeth, and then (I hope) relaxing afterwards with a Free Lunch in fair exchange for lending a recently reformatted 3TB drive to Len for temporary data recovery purposes. Reformatting it had not been part of my original game plan. Then "quick format" failed, twice. A low-level format took about eight hours to progress about 30% before my patience was exhausted. And popping the drive out of my temporary USB2 caddy and into a proper Icebox USB3 carrier and then repeating "quick format" worked perfectly2 in about 25 seconds flat. Go figure.
A packed day so far, heh? :-)
It's official, I...
... grind my teeth (I assume, while asleep, and probably since the time I first became aware of what lousy guvmints we have). Dr Fang spent most of this morning's 45-minute session in my non-happy place building up the missing back surfaces of my two upper canines, or incisors, or whatever the technical name for the pointy ones is. And he wants me back next month to take an impression of my upper teeth from which to mould a plastic guard for me to wear each night. Hope it tastes nicer than the ghastly stuff they use for the impressions.
Time for a cuppa, if I can just avoid dribbling too much.
The downside...
... to all that quantitative easing since the (still unadmitted to this day) unfixable breakage of the global financial "system" must surely be...
... a profits warning from the chaps who print 'actual' money? Oh, the rich irony.
Threats from employees?
Ridiculous! Who ever heard of a disgruntled employee?
I recall being told off in IBM for pinning a newspaper clipping (about a disgruntled IBMer with a shotgun) to my little patch of display space...
Off I head for lunch, and a post-lunch ice-cream adventure and chatter.
I believe the last...
... US TV series that I bought after it had been pulled prematurely off the air was the wonderfully funny, foul-mouthed Hollywood satire "Action" with Jay Mohr. It was shown in the UK, though its American network chickened out after a mere six episodes. Anyhowsoever, stuffed cunningly into my normally empty milk bottle container — which still has its uses seven years after I stopped the deliveries — on my front door-step when I returned a few minutes ago was my next example, from 2007:
I only heard about it two weeks ago. It was written by Paul ("Crash") Haggis, so I'm hopeful.
Should I be...
... surprised to learn that rigging foreign exchange markets is still not yet a criminal offence? Wait! Is the pope Catholic? I used to have accounts with three of the six major banks named. (Link.)
The problem with...
... having a "trick" memory, and an occasional eye for detail, is that I can find mistooks even on this very ¬blog. Compare the (just uploaded to Dropbox and then filched from there) DVD Profiler entry for "2001: a Space Odyssey" on my smartphone:
... with the subtly different variant I revealed a year ago. I can relax now :-)
There's a line...
... in the opening track ("Une nuit à Paris") of 10cc's "The Original Soundtrack" album that goes "One night in Paris is like a year in any other place". I feel much the same way about 45 minutes spent in Dr Fang's chair. Come the early evening, and I'm now drooping more than somewhat. And my jaw is complaining a little.
[Pause]
Having heard the excellent live transmission of Beethoven's Fourth and Ninth symphonies, making me feel almost like Alex from A Clockwork Orange, I decided (on a whim — I get those a lot) to re-watch Jerome Bixby's "Man from Earth". What an excellent film.