2014 — 25 December: Thursday
I've just been reading about Lilith1 in "The Erotic Tongue" by Lawrence Paros, but will now redirect my attention to my nice, fresh, Xmas cuppa. And my apparently overdue breakfast. I'm pleased to note that my last-minute choice of supper — the sausages I'd forgotten all about until I disinterred them from the back of the freezer compartment last night — doesn't seem to have killed me. Yet. They were more than a tad past their "Best By" date.
A bit like Lilith, in fact.
I bet...
... you didn't know that the chairman of the University of Wisconsin's zoology department calls his hard drive "Narnia". (Link.)
Xmas be hanged!
Once again my festive bank has just sent me my festive credit card statement by festive email... "It's important we're able to let you know when your statement is ready". Not to me, it isn't. [Pause] More important to know that, having paid not a bean in interest during the year (by settling in full each month), my "Cash Reward" is a very welcome £36-50 which is rather more than they've paid me for my current account since the "honeymoon" period ended.
My nascent...
... OCD completeist tendencies have been exorcised (for a while) by a final "defragmentation" pass through the set of CaseLogic folders housing my videos. I'm still missing those three titles I noted on Monday, but so what? That constitutes an acceptably low "angel's share". And I still suspect Junior.
Meanwhile, this is surprisingly interesting. Fine-tuning the parameters of a super massive black hole for the cinema?
For my Xmas...
... evening treat, I decided to re-watch the sequel that Peter Hyams made in 1984 to Kubrick's original "2001: a space odyssey". It's actually a considerably more interesting story than the frankly rather pedestrian original. I must have seen it four or five times over the years, since my friend Val brought over a VHS copy of it for us to watch one weekend when she stayed with us. Now, it's not easy photographing a fairly low-level plasma screen image, but the frame I captured here...
... shows the front cover of a "fake" copy of Time magazine — on screen for less than a second — carrying a story of the escalating tension between the US and the Soviets at the time of this new Jupiter mission. What I'd never noticed until tonight, however, is that the two chaps pictured on this fake cover are actually Arthur C Clarke and Stanley Kubrick.
Nero's software Blu-ray player is, of course, far too clever to allow me to capture its screen directly lest I pirate a piece of DRM-protected IP that I've paid for. So (with apologies for the bleed from the Canon SLR's flash) here's an only slightly better image of the dynamic duo:
At least you can see the timestamp should you wish to check it yourself.
And here's a related book...
... that won't be leaving my shelves any time soon:
After all, I've only owned it since 1972. And, if I fossick around in the books warehouse for long enough, I can still lay my hands on the MGM booklet that accompanied the original release of "2001" in the UK.