2014 — 3 November: Monday
If BBC Radio 3's reporting of Der Spiegel can be believed1 the lady who thinks she's currently in charge of Germany is quoted as threatening the chap who thinks he's currently in charge of the UK that she may well stop trying to keep the UK in the European union unless said chap changes his current stance on immigration within and from that fine continent. Just imagine how the French must be chortling.
Personally, I didn't think the boy Dave actually liked to take a stance on anything much, preferring to be blown wherever his advisors, erm, blow him with their soundly non-evidence-based, erm, advice. If I sound grumpy, it's possibly because I could have done without the crack of thunder that woke me about one hour into the six I like to spend in the arms of Morpheus.
Being terminally...
... out of touch, I'd never heard of Rebecca Solnit. But I suspect I could warm to her, given her stance (for example) on Google glasses in one of the 29 essays in her 17th book. Source and snippet:
I tried on a pair that a skinny Asian guy was wearing in the line at the post office. (Curious that someone with state-of-the-art technology also needs postal services.) A tiny screen above my field of vision had clear white type on it. I could have asked it to do something, but I didn't need data at that juncture, and I'm not in the habit of talking to my glasses. Also, the glasses make any wearer loom like, yes, a geek. Google may soon be trying to convince you that life without them is impossible.
On the other hand, I've heard of Oblomov... even before Clive James pointed several (million?) NYT readers in the direction of a "very learned blog" bearing that name. Well worth a look; loved her opinion of Holly Golightly ("round the bend") as portrayed by Audrey Hepburn.
I've also heard of Tim Bell — vaguely. He has written (some say had ghost-written) his memoir. Opinions vary as to which of these two dissections of it is the more effective. The one by John Crace in the Grauniad. Or the one by Craig Brown in Mail Online. They could both just be simple satire, of course :-)
I suspect...
... the lady economist who's just been 'educating' Harry Shearer on the way the global financial system "works" is Stephanie Kelton of the "New Economic Perspectives" website. She made rather a lot of sense for an economist, whoever she is. China, by the way, holds a mere one trillion US dollars of the 16 trillion total (US) debt making waves as it sloshes around the globe.
I'm not the...
... only one who's been kept waiting to see "Serena", it seems. Though we're not, initially, to get what director Susanne Bier originally had in mind:
It's far from a disaster, but we're clearly not quite getting the whole picture: in the desperation to get the film off the shelf and paying its way, a possible Heaven's Gate has been whittled into what could easily be dismissed as a Heaven's Cat Flap.
Scouring BlackBeast...
... with my usually foolproof desktop search tool Copernic has so far failed to tell me exactly how I was correct in knowing the Italian composer being featured this week: Alessandro Stradella. That last name has been ringing a memory bell. No matter. Definitely time for a lunch on this rather horribly wet day.
I have a pair...
... of dust-covered credit cards that are managed by the same institution, zzzz, though one started as a card from xxxx, got bored with that, became a card from yyyy, got bored with that, and ended up as a card from zzzz (which is what the other has been all along). I don't use either (and pay any credit card balance in full each month). zzzz wrote, warning me to "use it or lose it". Now I've just received a pair of emails "offering" either or both a 0% balance transfer (plus fee) or a 0% money transfer (plus fee) on each card. So what?
So, try to make logical sense of this 'generous' offer and its accompanying cautionary caveat:
Seems to me that nice, big, bold "0%" only applies if I repay in full within one month of taking any "free" cash, and will cost me a handling fee regardless. What's the point? No wonder zzzz would rather I kept this sh1t confidential.
Missed it!
In 1953 (14th March, to be precise) Raymond Chandler wrote to his Hollywood agent, HN Swanson, dashing off a spoof piece of SF in which he managed to make a reference to somebody called "Google" who had warned him that four seconds wouldn't be long enough "to hot up the disintegrator". Spooky, or what? Ansible has the story, which I cross-checked against the letter on page 188 of my copy of Hiney and MacShane's "The Raymond Chandler Papers" (which was itself a reworked version, in 2000, of MacShane's 1981 edition of the correspondence). I have yet to lay my questing hands on my copy of the earlier work. And the tum is now signalling its urgent need for further food.