2014 — 15 October: Wednesday
Being now an ancient gentleman1 I thought I'd treat myself to a film that somehow slipped through my viewing net several years back (I bought it in February 2009). It's Robert De Niro's "The Good Shepherd". Good choice. Of course, the fact that it's nearly three hours long, and I didn't have the wit to start watching it until quite late, hasn't helped. So I shall simply hope the Oppo remembers where I'd got to while I now toddle gently up the stairs to Bedfordshire.
To be (as they say) resumed... :-)
Something to tease...
... Dr Fang about when we next meet (tomorrow morning, as it happens). Source and snippet:
The UK food historian Bee Wilson pointed me to the work of the US anthropologist C Loring Brace, who has been obsessed with the "various manifestations of human dentition" since the 1960s.
By examining European skulls, Brace found that the typical way in which human teeth fail to meet, with the upper set overlapping the lower set in an overbite, is a phenomenon that is actually only 250 years old in the West. That shift
that [sic] correlates almost exactly with the widespread adoption of the table knife and fork. Before cutlery, Europeans would clamp their teeth together on large chunks of meat, in order to hack off pieces with a dagger — a style of
eating Brace christened the "stuff-and-cut".
Ironic that my visit to Dr Fang is to prepare a plastic shield to prevent my teeth grinding one another away while I slumber peacefully (dreaming, perhaps, of large chunks of meat — an item now very largely absent from my diet).
The guvmint...
... continues to DABble in murky radio waters, it seems. And El Reg continues to be unimpressed:
The only bit I really don't understand is why anyone would want to listen to a smartphone for one second longer than necessary.
Having resisted...
... the full spectrum of physical, chemical, and thermal assaults I brought to bear on the corroded cell that was molecularly bonded inside the illuminated magnifying glass that Christa had bought for me nearly a decade ago, I caved in to temptation in Asda a few hours ago, picking up a cheap'n'cheerful replacement for rather less than a fiver. This after first glumly assessing the shelves of dubious video entertainment, much of which consists of people killing people in various nasty ways. But then, the Cruiser's "Edge of Tomorrow" cheerfully showed him dying multiple times, and only picked up a "12" snufftificate from our censors on the grounds of its "moderate violence". Funny old world.
Seven years ago...
... almost to the minute, I was doing my best to stay on the road and not hit anything during my first 25 miles of driving around, while Christa was back in hospital for what was to be the final four weeks of her life. Learning to drive was a very welcome temporary distraction from our state of domestic unbliss. And she was tickled pink by my rapid progress. It's fair to say I threw myself into the task with ferocious concentration.
I don't do that quite so much these days :-)
I have become...
... adept at scanning a diminishing pile of slices of bread for signs of mould. I figure if visible patches are small enough to be pinched off the surface between finger and thumb then I'll still be good to go, toast-wise. This buying-fresh-food-for-one lark is still more of an art than a science. But then, isn't just about everything?
Annoyingly (probably because of the stupid anti-piracy film 'they' force me to watch) "The Good Shepherd" is unable to resume at the point I left off last night. Grrr.