2014 — 2 December: Tuesday
The first inkling I had that my Texan ISP was about to switch1 'molehole' back on the air was the way my webserver access was terminated. Brutally.
"Aha", thought I. "That has the look and feel of a re-boot. About time too." Still, as Junior kindly pointed out, that should teach me not to reproduce so precisely the text of a Korean tax phishing scam on a 'molehole' page, even for satirical purposes. I have redacted the material from the troublesome page. This is only the third time I've ever chosen to go back and alter history, as it were.
Reminds me of the time I used the phrase "such as IBM Confidential" in what I had hoped was a helpfully didactic manner on the internal IBM Java web site and a simple-minded goon whom I shall not name, running a simple-minded text scanning job, most unhelpfully took down the server on the grounds that it must therefore be serving "IBM Confidential" material when — as eny fule kno — the highest classification permitted on internal IBM web sites (without the pain in the sit-upon that was password protection and controlled access lists) was IBM internal use only. Context is everything.
Late to bed...
... but, alas, early to rise — if I want any fresh food, that is. G'nite.
"Plangent" is not...
... a word I find too many excuses to use in my quotidian round :-)
And so the plangent litany of loss and disappointment begins...
Occasionally, too, [Rose] relieves these chronicles of disaster by lingering over the raffishness of a J.D. 'Jack' Ffrench or the luxurious early life of Elise La Rue, who "wrote in longhand, naked, voluptuously, lying on her divan, usually
covered by the fur of a snow leopard which she claimed she had herself skinned from the back of the animal (this story, improbable as it may seem, may be true: records that have recently come to light show she assisted the young Stalin
on a hunting trip through the central Asian wilds.)."
I'm grateful to Dirda for pointing me to a Donald E Westlake book I've now ordered: "The Getaway Car". Its title is explained by his wife, Abby Adams Westlake: "no matter where he was headed, [he] always drove like he was behind the wheel of the getaway car." Contrast what the Richard Jenkins character says to his daughter Jennifer Aniston in Sunday's film "Rumour has it..." — "Honey, I only drove slowly because you were in the car with me."
If I were...
... a regular blogger with, erm, a regular blog I might be able to host something as interesting as Adam Gee's "take" on the new Jason Reitman film. (I must say, he makes it sound pretty interesting.) Furthermore, I might not disappear offline into a Black Hole for several days. Now, there's a thought.
I suspect...
... I may have solved the mystery of the null "Pre out" on the new toy. Perhaps it simply doesn't transcode a digital audio input (in this case from the Sony Freeview TV/radio box) across to the analogue audio output. Though that would be remarkably cheapskate of it.
"Of cabbages and kings"
The story here is fascinating, not least for the scientific euphemism: "a false-paternity event". The currently-living relatives are between 24 and 26 generations removed from the chap of main interest. "Drift and infidelity" indeed. Is that what they're calling it these days?
Listening...
... to Sean Lock's obvious enthusiasm for Jim Thompson's 1958 novel "The Getaway" prompted me to re-read it for the first time in 30 years. Unlike the radio pundits, I don't regard the ending as in any way weird. Nor had I realised that it had been filmed again, in 1994. Both film versions have the happy ending that is obligatory for Hollywood, but conspicuously absent from the book.
Since December 1983 I have acquired 25 of his books (plus [of course] the excellent 1995 biography "Savage Art" by Robert Polito):
"The Killer Inside Me" — possibly the best look inside the mind of a psychopath I have ever read — has also been filmed again, very effectively.