2015 — 9 January: Friday
There's some beautiful choral music playing. Sub olea pacis et palma virtutis ZWV.175 by Jan Dismas Zelenka1 performed by Collegium Vocale 1704 from the 2013 Herne Early Music Days Festival. I don't normally find myself staying up long enough to hear more than the first minute or so of "Through the Night" — and then only if I've been listening to the whole of that evening's preceding "Late Junction". But this time, I'd settled down, already quite late yesterday evening, with the firm intention of re-watching the recent Spike Jonze film "her"...
... to see whether it still struck as being as good as I remembered it from the middle of last year. And a "re-watch" is what I got, interrupted only by one of my usual infrequent attempts to trim what's left of the once-flowing locks, tidy up the beardy bits, and then wash and dry whatever was still attached. Try doing that in a cinema.
Is it as good? No; it's actually even better than I recall. But that doesn't stop it now being well after 01:30 and very much time (on what sounds like a wet, and potentially windy, night out there) for some more of that sleep stuff we non-OSes still seem to need from time to time. G'nite.
The "big hand" is...
... embarrassingly near the value that tells me it's 10:00 but at least the sun is shining. [Slight pause] I could wish I knew more precisely what this means, or is really trying to tell me:
I've yet to solve this particular part of the ineffable Mystery that is Windows and its occasionally fraught relationship with the Universal Serial Bus interface. Clearly the work / tool of Loki. Either that, or it simply means I've yet to switch on my scanner. Which I'm fully aware of, thanks all the same. (I can tell by the single bright blue LED [of seven, potentially] currently lit on my powered 7-port USB3 hub. That's my printer, which I never bother to switch off.)
Though I know...
... she's labouring under a terminal diagnosis2 Jenni Diski has written yet another marvellous chunk of her memoir. Source and snippet:
But as far as I was concerned the death of Sylvia was before my time, if only by weeks, in the same way that the end of the Second World War was before my time at my birth in 1947. The two events marked seminal moments in my life, but, for all that I was surrounded by people intimately involved in both affairs, Sylvia's suicide and the Second World War felt less real to me than historical events that had taken place centuries earlier. I think it's a way of avoiding the intolerable fact that the world and the people in it got on, well or otherwise, in the years and days without my presence, as indeed it and they will in my next and final absence.
I remember the bitter cold of that winter, though at that tender age had no clue who Sylvia Plath was. Nor Doris Lessing.
It's safer...
... to read the 'small print'. In the case of a fake travel poster to Kepler-16b, for example, NASA cautions:
Depicted here as a terrestrial planet, Kepler-16b might also be a gas giant like Saturn. Prospects for life on this unusual world aren't good, as it has a temperature similar to that of dry ice.
My banter...
... with a friendly sales assistant in M&S half an hour or so ago over at the End of the Hedge as I dumped four identical white polo shirts on her counter:
Me: One advantage of being a widower — it makes shopping for clothes very simple.She: You mean there's no-one to ask 'Do you really want four of the same thing?'
Me: :-)
I have, with any luck, solved the problem of the old friends that are all now falling quite literally apart at the seams at the same time in that
unkind modus operandi preferred by this particular specimen of the Multiverse.
But would Christa approve? :-)
M&S being right next door to Sainsbury's, I had a quick mooch around there, too. Christa always seemed to find lots of stuff to buy there (until Lidl opened up in Eastleigh) though I only ever really liked their "well-fired" loaves, and even those tended to be only sporadically available. However, my tastebuds are now in thrall to the Pane Pugliese — that should make niece #1 smile — I first tried as an experiment last February. It's, wait for it, the best thing since, erm, sliced bread.
Can it really...
... be that simple?
I've always enjoyed...
... discussions, films, plays and stories featuring time travel. (Link.)
Tonight's viewing?
An eminently re-watchable slightly twisted rom-com from 1999 with an elegant sufficiency of laugh-aloud moments:
Not least from Simon Callow and Tom Hollander.