2014 — 12 November: Wednesday
More rain? Deep unjoy.
Regardless1 my grocer will be getting a visit at some point today — preferably before lunch. But not before breakfast, that's for damn' sure.
Is there no Hope?
Adam Gopnik has written an excellent essay on Bob Hope for the New Yorker. So that's where Larry Gelbart got his ideas for M*A*S*H? And there was me thinking they came from Richard Hooker's book and Robert Altman's film. Silly me. (Link.)
The outer fringes of London and then industrial Cleveland were not places designed to bring out the beaming aesthete in any man.
Indeed not. Though Robert Crumb spent four years in Cleveland drawing cards for American Greetings.
It's taken a...
... Treasury minister a long time to admit that foreign exchange market rigging was "particularly bad" at a time when taxpayers were bailing out the banks. And the "failings" in this $5.3 trillion a day "business" occurred between 1 January 2008 and 15 October 2013. (Link.)
Get me outa here! (Link.) And George Monbiot has some good stuff to say, too.
Only connect
Come on. Who nowadays needs fifteen fully-wired SCART leads? Not to mention eight SCART dongles (two of which break out RGB/sync, three break out S-Video, stereo audio and sync, and one intercepts that lot and passes through the SCART signals). Then there are nine SCART leads that trail an interestingly-varied array of audio and video plugs and sockets at the other end. Ten S-Video to S-Video leads, and one S-Video socket to S-Video socket. The less said about the BNC co-ax leads and extra sockets, the better — recall how much better we once thought composite video was over an RF connection!
That's one 6.8Kg plastic sack ready for its next stage in life. Probably up in the loft.
Four DVI-D to DVI-D leads? Eight HDMI to HDMI, one mini-HDMI to HDMI, and one HDMI to DVI-D? One Displayport to Displayport? Nine VGA to VGA leads? Nine SP/DIF optical fibre leads? That's a crate full.
More than twenty mains leads. A brand new Cat6 network cable I could have done with finding several months ago before giving up and buying one. A fist-full of audio phono leads. That's it. I'm done.
A White House political journalist on the Diane Rehm show says if all social media commentators would try to keep in mind that their mothers could be reading every word they write the quality of political discourse might just improve a little. [Pause] And back comes the rain. I thought it was getting a bit dark suspiciously early. Time for a cuppa, methinks, and a change of 'occupation' for a while. I mooched along the discount shelves of Asda without finding anything worth opening my wallet for this morning. Certainly not the growing mountains of Xmas crap.
Work / Life balance
A lovely throwaway line from that correspondent:
Nobody's obituary ever reads: 'He is survived by his co-workers.'
I was surprised...
... when insider trading was made into a criminal offence... but only because I'd naively assumed it had never been legal in the first place. There's a 2011 book by Peter Schweizer called "Throw them all out" that I haven't yet been able to bring myself to read. (Did you realise members of Congress were then, and probably still are now, exempt from insider trading laws?) Now I learn that rigging foreign exchange currency markets is also to be made a criminal offence.
And "Composer of the Week" has just retold the tale of La Thatcher objecting to the foul language in "Amadeus", asserting there was no way Mozart could possibly have used such language. The director (Peter Hall, if I heard correctly) sent a copy of Mozart's more-than-somewhat scatological letters to Number 10, but the wondrous piece of political poison person in residence there remained unchanged in her mistaken opinion.
Having enjoyed...
... Thomas McCarthy's film — and, particularly, Richard Jenkins' performance in — "The Visitor" very much a while back, I decided to re-watch his earlier "The Station Agent" tonight — it's a delight.
Christa and I first saw it about 10 years ago down at the Harbour Lights cinema. I preceded it by the pilot episode of Aaron Sorkin's "Sports Night", having heard him chatting earlier on BBC Radio 4.