2014 — 16 November: Sunday
Rain is falling1 and it won't improve until I've drunk my first cuppa. Much as I like fresh air, I've also shut the patio door. What a wonderful time of year. Thomas Hood's "No!" gets things about right.
No fruits, no flowers, no leaves, no birds,
November!
Actually...
... there are still a couple of blackbirds taking the very last of my grapes, but I can't hold that against them.
Always reassuring to know...
... that multinational ethical giants are still (s)trolling in our midst:
I wonder how much global climate change is attributable to 676,000,000,000 little human fires each year? That industry's euphemism for smoking-related deaths (and the consequent need to attract new smokers at the rate of several hundred per day) is... wait for it... "Biological leakage". Nice. Of course, if it was really dangerous, the guvmint would outlaw it, right? :-(
I wonder...
... though probably less than once a year, these days, just how well IBM's off-shoring to places like India really worked out for them when I read stories like this:
It's getting on for a decade since IBMers in Hursley's Java development centre (or whatever it was calling itself by then) were invited to train multiple replacements on the Indian subcontinent to do the work. I was delighted to step forward... and offer them 10 months' notice of my desire to take early retirement instead. The problem when the bean-counters2 take over is, well, all they know how to do is count beans.
Dismal science
Having read both Will Hutton's depressing article on banking corruption and many of the comments it attracted at least I eventually got a new (to me) Galbraith quote out of the exercise:
The process by which banks create money is so simple that the mind is repelled. When something so important is involved, a deeper mystery seems only decent.
(Link.)
Having just...
... reached the title "Nice Work" — based on the third novel in David Lodge's superb "Rummidge University" trilogy — in my video collection I looked yet again for a copy on DVD with which to replace my ancient BBC TV recording. (Who could forget, or not wish to see again, the sparkling interactions between the late Warren Clarke and Haydn Gwynne?) To my utter surprise and delight, it's being released a week from now:
That pre-order was a complete no-brainer.
Fielding a call...
... from a nurse at dear Mama's care-home, I learn she's somehow managed to bang her elbow (covered, as it is, by paper-thin skin) with inevitable damage. But the nurse assures me it's been dressed and "apart from that" I'm told "she's in a great mood". What can one say?
Later
As a bear of but little brain, I fail to understand how a G20 pledge to grow the planet's 20 richest economies by 2.1% by 2018 is going to achieve much of any use to the planet. Though I don't doubt it will be of enormous benefit to what used to be called the 1% but is now probably more accurately the 0.1%. When will people realise you can't have continuous growth in a closed system of finite resources?
The $2 trillion figure batted around isn't even as much as the contracts (of dubious credit derivatives) that Barclays and Royal Bank of Scotland had each bought and sold, in roughly equal measure, before the smelly system did its best to implode. As I mentioned, the Grauniad dropped that little factoid into its story by Simon Bowers six years ago. It's still online.