2014 — 21 October: Tuesday
Big Bro's overnight email had an over-sized attachment of his "newest family members" all enjoying sunshine (though I have no idea where Clark's Beach is). My first thought was that he was making some sort of photographic riposte to my shots of Boris the Spider. Not so; just cows and a kid. To be more precise, six new cows and a not-quite-so-new grandson. Personally, I think the cows could have been more than adequately depicted1 thus:
It would have saved just over 5MB. But that's just my opinion. I suppose I should be grateful that he didn't attach the RAW images from his latest wondrous pixellating apparatus. (A Canon EOS 20D by the look of the EXIF data.) Bro and his beefburgers...
Meanwhile, the weather prospect more locally is for rain, thunder, and high winds (and we're not even in Jamaica).
Today's adventure?
Inspecting the orbs2 and once again teasing my optician about laser eye-surgery. (Every couple of years I ask him how the technique is coming along. Each time he says it's improving. I ask: would you have it yourself yet? He replies: not a chance.) Besides, I quite like wearing glasses. They keep a whole lot of airborne sh1t out of my eyes judging by what I clean off them every couple of days.
[Pause]
Well, pressure inside my eyes remains "low". There are no signs of cataracts. Corrected distance vision remains unchanged, and still delivers 30/20 (one line of smaller print further down the chart from 20/20). A quick tweak to the frames of the pair in which I pushed my Varifocus lenses a couple of years ago, and I'm good to go, wallet unopened. At last: a benefit to being Of A Certain Age. And I swung by the foody shop on the way home. Two birds with one stone, and all that. It's more than a bit blustery out there at the moment, yet the sky is currently cloudless.
Me, to a "T"
Tee-hee.
During the era Thorstein Veblen so vividly described in The Theory of the Leisure Class, social status was measured by how little a person worked; today it is often measured by how much a person works. If you are not constantly connected, you are unimportant; if you willingly unplug to recuperate, play, or even do nothing, you become an expendable slacker.
There are more serious points further into the essay.
Six days...
... from now, I shall be able to increment my total of "Strange Fruit" variants. (From nine to ten.) NPR just aired an interview with Annie Lennox, chatting about her new album "Nostalgia". It's one of the songs she's just recorded.
I've cheated. There's a version (by Katey Segal and the Forest Rangers) on the excellent soundtrack album to the first four seasons of a TV Show called "Sons of Anarchy"... and I'm enjoying that right now. Though what I really should be doing right now, of course, is making myself some lunch before I collapse in an untidy heap on the floor. 'Twas ever thus.
To my mild surprise (or should that be 'horror'?) the Amazon Music Library now holds 6,878 purchased items, spread across 444 albums (not counting the one I inadvertently "one-clicked" on, that still needs about 15 minutes to decide I haven't changed my mind about it). I don't play these from the Cloud Player (though I could, of course) — I simply download them if I haven't already ripped the CD they 'match' for myself. The Auto Rip elves have been very busy, it seems, making good on their long-term promise to go back and rip many of my earlier CD purchases.
Now, about that lunch...
Stardust
Yesterday I mentioned my original (late December 2007) DVD of "Stardust" and my intention to replace it by a Blu-ray. That arrived today (accompanied by a nice mixture of other titles)...
... and I've just re-watched it. Thoroughly enjoyable it was, too. There was also a BBC Blu-ray of Prof Iain Stewart's "How Earth made us". I began watching that with my lunch, but am not yet ready to deliver a verdict. Certainly, its information density was pretty low, and there was a mite too much music, jump-cutting, repetition and recapitulation-as-we-went-along for my taste. But some of the landscapes were pretty, and pretty stunning, too.