2014 — 1 November: Saturday — rabbits!
My grocery shop has quite plausibly concluded1 that I live in an uncleaned hovel. So they've just sent me a £3 off Household cleaning junk coupon, exclusively for Mr Mounce (and given me a reason to print only my second-ever sheet of A4 on that fancy colour network printer into the 'bargain'). Mind you the ink consumed in the waking-up and head/nozzle cleaning must have eaten into the value of this "discount", and I have to spend £10 or more on such products before the voucher even kicks in. Plus I have to use it before 14 November.
Generally...
... the only such two for one type offers I regularly use are either for that vital food group, chocolate one-sided digestive biscuits, or their sachets of tuna. Not that I eat those together, you understand. Well, not usually.
At the risk...
... of putting myself off my breakfast, I've been reading a review of the (latest) definitive annotated anthology of HP Lovecraft stories. The reviewer likes it, kicking off with the opening paragraph from "The Call of Cthulhu" of which he says:
[Lovecraft] set out a view of things that animates pretty well everything he wrote thereafter: the human mind is an accident in the universe, which is indifferent to the welfare of the species. We can have no view of the scheme of things or our place in it, because there may be no such scheme. The final result of scientific inquiry could well be that the universe is a lawless chaos. Sometimes called "weird realism", it is a disturbing vision with which Lovecraft would struggle throughout his life.
That view certainly aligns tidily with Feynman's...
"The theory that it's all arranged as a stage for God to watch man's struggle for good and evil seems inadequate."
Particularly when you (or, at least, I) gaze in awe at some of those Deep Field stellar images. Turtles all the way down...
Speaking of stellar images...
... my friends Gill and Chris recently attended one of these "WOOBS" events after which Chris — having discovered that I couldn't access the pictures he'd put on his Book of the Face system — used Dropbox to get some of them to me. Of course, I only remembered to fire up Dropbox this morning, rather than when he first told me. It occurs to me that I am very far from the bleeding edge technologies by which the great majority of people share the material of their daily lives these days. However, that could be just as well...
Also in "Staggers" is this eye-watering story by Margaret Corvid about the trouble that can ensue when a chum sends an image to you and that image falls afoul of the ridiculous "extreme" pornography legislation that mysteriously found its way (I don't make this stuff up) into Clause 64 of Part 6 of the Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill when our Lords and Masters took it upon themselves to define (rather badly, as it predictably turned out) this new offence I recall having a mini-rant about at the time.
I don't think the pictures Chris sent me are likely to arouse PC Plod. But who can tell? :-)
NPR's "On the Media"...
... is discussing an outfit called MindGeek. I'd never heard of it, but it consumes more Web bandwidth than Twitter, Amazon, or Facebook. (David Auerbach's Slate article prompted NPR's discussion.)
Unfortunate choice of words?
With shrinking competition, de facto sanctioned piracy, and falling pay rates, industry blogger Lux Alptraum told Mademan's Grant Stoddard that if MindGeek goes down, "it could take most of the porn industry with it."
Thanks, Mr Postie
This little lot should improve some aspects of my currently-deficient understanding of the ways of the world:
(Un)funnily enough, the first title ("Gasland") deals with fracking. It's been only a week since I watched an episode of Season #6 of "The Mentalist" — tackling the same topic fictionally. I didn't realise until I watched it that it can be possible to ignite the water flowing into your kitchen sink.
I've just fielded...
... phone calls from three chaps, all giving English first names non-aligned with their Indian accents, all calling from what sounded like the "UK Survey Office", all seeking confirmation from me (pronunciations of my name and address varying wildly) that I, or someone living at my address, reported an accident (initially a week ago, and eventually mutating — as I perhaps foolishly explored this hypothesis — into "some time within the last three years") in which my car was hit by another.
Every time I go up...
... into the loft, I find lots of things I wasn't looking for. I rarely find what I was looking for, of course, but the searches are invariably interesting, often moving, and occasionally downright heart-rending. Christa was a squirrel par excellence and kept a great many more things than I do. I was looking for the original cases of my "Lord of the Rings" extended edition DVDs as I've belatedly realised (as I work towards the end of titles beginning with "L") I didn't scan them.