2014 — 7 December: Sunday

This morning's lack of frost can easily¹ be explained. It's (briefly, as it turned out) started raining.

Last night's...

... pre-sleep entertainment, partly because it marked how far (3715/4278, whatever that works out to as a percentage) through my video 'stock checking' task² I've got, was "Tadpole":

A great little movie with some subtle character observations, some lovely text quotations from Voltaire as a modern variant of a Greek chorus, and, I only now realise, the doomed young lady (Kate Mara) from the excellent US remake of "House of Cards" in an early minor rôle.

Sadly, there comes...

... a time in the life of any lunchtime salad when, frankly, it's eased just a little too far past its optimum "eat by" date while I've been busily overlooking it. For quite a long time. <Sigh>

I'll make you something nicer for the evening, tum, I promise :-)

A decent interval...

... has now elapsed since I last rummaged into my Churchillian goodies bag. On that occasion I found a couple of new (to me) stories buried deeply within Lord Hailsham's diaries. So, what's new? Well, I've just been idly browsing a text file (while looking for something entirely different, of course) whose timestamp carbon-dates it to late in 1994. I retrieved it from an internal IBM text forum called "JEWELS" before such things (and all too many of the IBMers who seemed to have time to append items to them) went the way of the Dodo in the Gerstner and post-Gerstner era...

When the situation was manageable it was neglected, and now that it is thoroughly out of hand, we apply too late the remedies which then might have effected a cure. There is nothing new in the story. It is as old as the Sibylline books. It falls into that long dismal catalogue of the fruitlessness of experience and the confirmed unteachability of mankind. Want of foresight, unwillingness to act when action would be simple and effective, lack of clear thinking, confusion of counsel until the emergency comes, until self-preservation strikes its jarring gong — these are the features which constitute the endless repetition of history.

Date: 2 May 1935 in a speech to the House of Commons

This evening's...

... just-concluded pre-sleep entertainment has been the gloriously politically-incorrect³ "Thank you for smoking" which Christa and I had first enjoyed when it showed up at Harbour Lights:

I bought my DVD just a month before I retired. Eight years on, I decided it was time to treat myself to all the "extras". These included a 2006 segment from the "Charlie Rose" show — an interesting round table TV studio discussion with the author (a twitchy-eyed Christopher Buckley), the director (Jason Reitman, looking remarkably similar to his father), the producer (David Sacks, who made a mint when he sold his Internet start-up PayPal to eBay), and square-jawed Aaron Eckhart.

Despite having seen him several times, I failed to recognise Eckhart's film "son" as the chap who went on to appear in three of the 'Twiglet' films as Jane's twin Alec, the Volturi vampire who could numb your senses...

Footnotes

¹  I wonder — half a century later — what happened to my Triang-Lionel weather station? I remember not being allowed to drill holes anywhere on which to mount its wind-speed data capture device (the exact noun escapes me until I've finished my first cuppa). That rendered one of its functions a great deal less interesting. I don't think dear Mama quite trusted me with a drill. And, now that I think about it, I don't think we even had a power drill back then. Dad was not a natural DIY-er. (Which is odd, given how much they seemed to enjoy watching Barry Bucknell hammering away on the TV with his DIY show in the late 1950s.)
²  Of course, according to a variant of Zeno's paradox, some might argue that I will never actually get to the end of this diabological task unless I stop adding new titles as I go along (as it were). Extra points to anyone who gets the 'diabologic' reference.
³  It took a little over a decade to get the film made; I'm not surprised.