2014 — 18 November: Tuesday
The first movement of Haydn's 6th Symphony has just been doing its best to disperse the current earworm1 as my initial cuppa cools towards drinkability. And the sun is shining, too. Though it's a mite chilly out there.
It's been a while...
... since I spotted anything by one of my regular gadflies, but I enjoyed today's example "Eternal Youth, Eternal Kitsch". It's his commentary on a book containing a collection of inscriptions found in second-hand books though, alas, he misquotes the initials of the author if Amazon's front cover image can be trusted...
Source and snippet:
Declarations of love found in books are particularly poignant, especially when they were written comparatively recently. Here is one written less than five years before the book was published:
To my darling Husband — We have now been married for 6 very special months. Enjoy memories of our wonderful honeymoon as you read this.
The book in which this was inscribed was Death on the Nile, by Agatha Christie, not perhaps the most auspicious of choices of book for such an inscription, since the story is of murder on honeymoon.
I find Dalrymple's perspective beautifully skewed in directions2 that usually suit my taste. I'm a strange chap, it occurs to me.
I know...
... it's shockingly hard to believe, but it's just possible that Brenda's gang of thugs has been fibbing to our MPs. For three years. Good job we're all in this together.
I realise that £1,900,000,000 is petty cash to some people, but it takes me ages to put aside that sort of money. I clearly need a better accountant. Except that I can't afford the one I don't have already.
A neat quote from the Mayor of Bogota in the comments to a piece making the case for a 20mph speed limit in all built-up areas:
A developed country is not a place where the poor have cars. It's where the rich use public transport.
Wonder how the sainted Thatch would have reacted to that sentiment as she got off one of the many buses she famously never travelled on? (But was only too happy to privatise.)
Listening to a BBC phone-in on the damage inflicted by that lovely grammar school / secondary modern split at the time of the "11-plus" is further evidence of the mess that the Benighted Kingdom continues to make of its educashun policy. (Link.)
Post-lunch, my...
... SHIELD Tablet PC has just decided to upgrade its Androidiness to Lollipop. (Android 5.) Cool! Or it will be, I hope, after it's stopped playing with itself and upgrading 127 items (a bit sparse on details). If each of those is an App, the Tablet has more software on it than BlackBeast. And there was me thinking all I was doing was getting an Over The Air upgrade to the Tegra ROM. [Pause] All done, and looking pretty good, so far.
As the twilight deepens I've just nipped out to put the black bin on the other side of my garden gate for tomorrow's collection. And been struck, quite forcefully, by just how much noise now comes from the motorway. It's rather chilly out there, too. Brrr.
Not long ago...
... I watched, and very much enjoyed, the slow burn that was "The Good Shepherd". Since then, I've been looking (on and off) for my copy of a fat tome that I'd remembered treating myself to back in January 2001 (by which time it had dropped from £25 to a far more affordable £9-99). I bought it as a consolation prize for simply never having had time to watch the 24-part TV series it accompanied in 1998:
I found it on a remote shelf that runs around the upper reaches of the dining room — which is often rather cool, and nowadays always too cluttered, for use as a dining room. It was sitting alongside two collections of Sherlock Holmes stories. Of course, it was Holmes who remarks "when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth". Or, in my case, the location of the mislaid book.
It generally suits me...
... to leave my smartphone at the other end of the living room. By the time I've worked out that it's actually ringing (by separating the subtle sound that Peter's g/f set up for me from whatever music is playing) and strolled over to it the caller has almost invariably given up. Today I actually asked Mrs Google about the number that had just called me — the numbers are not usually displayed. It seems 27,300 or so people have moaned about this particular outfit, which is a premium rate service just dying to tell me all about the accident for which I can claim. Or the missed flight. Or the debt. Or any other scam they think I might fall for.