2014 — 8 November: Saturday

Well, I don't know what I've done to deserve it1 but I gather from El Reg that next Tuesday's crop of Microsoft updates (mustn't call them patches any more) is going to be a bumper one.

No change there, then. And it's raining again (or perhaps that should be "still"). I await my visitors.

Until two days ago...

... I was blissfully unaware of the contents of this little tome:

1001 albums

Alas. Not any more. There's even a Wikipedia entry devoted (probably the right word) to it. But its compilers and I must agree to differ, however, on the meaning of "outstanding music". Furthermore, I have numerous other things I'd quite like to do before I skid off Life's Little Highway. The idea that there are also 1001 video games I must play before I die isn't going to fly, either.

I suppose some...

... of the books I've read may have changed my mind (such as it is). The 12 books and miniature essays listed here include only three I have read,2 but they have all remained on my shelves, and are all three crackers. (In a good way.)

The exhilaration of meeting ideas and thoughts you had not known
existed piggybacked on the hard truth that you knew diddly.

It occurs to me I've known diddly very well over the years :-)

Including the fact that Joseph Heller wrote a musical comedy.

The youngsters...

... arrived in jolly good time to whisk me out in the middle of a monsoon for a bite to eat down in Soton. They'd threatened to take me to a specialist pub that offers guaranteed scorching hot sauces in abundance, but luckily they'd also failed to factor in the presence of large numbers of hungry pre-match footie fans, so we ended up at a more conventional restaurant. When you don't pay and you don't prepare it yourself it all tastes that much better.

Late afternoon entertainment — before letting them scramble around up in the loft to remove the breadmaker I'd spotted on my last exploration — was the film "A New York Winter's Tale", which seemed to go down very well. (I certainly enjoyed it.) [Pause] And mid- to late-evening entertainment was "Edge of Tomorrow" as only two of us had seen it before.

  

Footnotes

1  Wickedness in a previous life, perhaps?
2  The ones by Julian Jaynes, Stephen Jay Gould, and Timothy Ferris. (Probably predictably.)