2014 — 27 October: Monday
Waking an hour "earlier" this morning I made myself the necessary cuppa (of course) and then toddled back upstairs to enjoy it in the company of Hilbert, Gödel, and 'Bourbaki' as presented to me by Professor Barrow... Shortly after the logical flight of fancy that was a proof of the existence of God I decided I might well spend my remaining time on Earth more usefully by getting up and getting dressed :-)
Highlights of the coming week include1 a trip to Dr Fang for him to show me how to fit whatever it is that he's cooked up to stop me grinding my teeth at night, a walk, and a lunch or two somewhere or other.
I somehow...
... neglected to mention that I snaffled some more music yesterday, after listening to Chrissy Hynde. She has a solo album out called "Stockholm" on which Neil Young is one of the immediately-recognisable guests. And I'd also missed an earlier album of hers called "Fidelity". Not that I'm any flavour of completeist, you understand. And I'm just in the process of downloading the other 58 Pretenders tracks that I stumbled across. (I bought one of those nifty "Five original albums in one pack" bargain-price compilations as it contained three albums I didn't already have.)
While doing so, I noticed the Amazon elves finally found time to add Siouxsie's "Through the Looking Glass" to my 'cloud' now that the physical CD has been delivered. (And ripped by me, of course.) However, by way of apology the elves kindly included the four extra tracks of this "Remastered and Expanded" album that weren't on the original CD, so I won't be complaining.
Rather irritatingly, Amazon's MP3 meta-tagging doesn't bother to identify the five separate Pretenders albums but instead has tagged every track identically as coming from "Original Album Series" so it's over I go to Wikipedia for a spot of pre-breakfast research.
Oh, good grief!
I'm not quite sure whether this is depressing or not:
It's also a bit depressing that a five-minute scouring of bookshelves has failed to turn up my copy of the first edition hardback I bought on 22 August 1991 — the same day I bought Heathcote Williams' anti-car polemic "Autogeddon" as it happens — casting some doubt on the accuracy of that Grauniad sentence. [Pause] Found it...
... buried under a couple of rather fatter Stephen Jay Gould hardbacks. It's definitely © 1991, by the way.
This pair of ...
... documentaries, delivered by Mr Anonymous Blue Van Man as I was prepping my lunch a while ago, struck me as potentially interesting viewing:
"Waltz with Bashir" is by Ari Folman, who went on to make "The Congress" (which I'm still keen to see). I note he also used Max Richter for his music on this earlier (and vastly different) title.
The penny...
... may just have drop-boxed. Amazon recently told me there had been an attempt to access my account using credentials obtained "away from our website". I wondered what had leaked, and I think I may have the answer. I have, but rarely use, a Dropbox2 account. Its password was quite like my old Amazon one. And I seem to recall Dropbox being one of the sites that had suffered a "leakage", though I may be maligning them.
Henry Marsh...
... didn't disappoint. His contribution to the BBC's Museum of Curiosity was a juvenile seasquirt, about which I host a quotation here.
I've just re-watched...
... the excellent film Alan Pakula made in 1990 from Scott Turow's first novel. As I had said in an email to my friend Carol (who shares my taste for well-written thrillers) a couple of years earlier:
Just finished Presumed innocent by Scott Turow — it's only just appearing in paperback over in our green and peasant gland — and, although murder trials aren't exactly a turn-on, the book is truly gripping. (Like the court martial in the 'Caine' Mutiny, but stronger.)
And I cracked it a few pages before the end! (But only a very few.)
I suspect it was Carol who brought over my original NTSC LaserDisc of the film, too. A mere $29-99 in late April 1991. I 'upgraded' it to my current PAL DVD about a decade later.