2015 — 12 January: Monday

A sprightly blast of Vivaldi is clearing away (some of) the mental cobwebs.1 Drafting a reply to my cheeky Big Bro's overnight email regarding the non-granularity (and, I freely admit, the illegibility) of some of my video 'genre' classifications will deal with the rest soon enough. It's almost as if he's joined forces with my chum Len, dagnabbit.

Helped by my cuppa, I shall prevail.

Perhaps...

... he'll prefer this bar chart? It at least gives a better idea of the hill I have yet to climb (as it were).

Video genres in bar chart form

Breakfast first, methinks. One shouldn't go climbing on an empty tum.

Besides, I do still have a meagre handful of other interests to attend to, not to mention a sadly-echoing cupboard belonging to Mother Hubbard to deal with. It's not (quite) all retirement fun and games here in Technology Towers.

I've not given...

... too much thought over the years to the inverse relationship between the pressure (P) and the volume (V) of an ideal gas so neatly encapsulated (as eny fule kno) by Mr Boyle. I can't help thinking, however, that there should also be an elegant relationship to be derived between the volume (V) of a book I know damn' well is lurking on my shelves somewhere and the probability (P) of my finding it before I lose the will to live.

This morning's search would have been greatly helped had I thought to look for Cyril Connolly under the letter "P" for Palinurus — the name under which my 31-year-old copy of his "The Unquiet Grave" was published:

Unquiet Grave

Quite perturbing to find this is now being described as a masterpiece, too. Source and snippet:

The grand ruse of civilization, wrote Connolly, is the idea of progress. Only human beings are obsessed with the desire to evolve. To the writer, the idea of the masterpiece is everything. But what does Nature care? Nature cares only that we live. "If there were no parents to make us try to be good, no schoolmasters to persuade us to learn, no one who wished to be proud of us, would not we be happier?"
"What monster," asked Connolly, "first slipped in the idea of progress? Who destroyed our conception of happiness with these growing-pains?"

Stefany Anne Golberg in Smart Set


Good question :-)

I thought I may as well browse anew having just found the Lost Sheep:

How privileged are Mahommedans! Small wonder there are more of them than of any other religion and that they are still making converts; for their creed is extroverted, — the more fanatical they become, the faster they relieve themselves by killing other people. They observe a dignified ritual, a congenial marriage code and appear to be without the sense of guilt.

Date: Revised, in 1945


My gast...

... is suitably flabbered by the exquisite images here.

Thanks, Mr (new) Postie

I'll add these to my watch list:

DVDs and BD

Thinks: does Oliver Stone's idiosyncratic view of recent history constitute one of my "fictional" genres, do you suppose?

Gulp!

My 53-week-old Oppo BD player again had enormous trouble with a Blu-ray. Cured (I very muchly hope) first by completely power-cycling it, and then explicitly erasing its "persistent storage" — the first time I've done this, I admit, in, erm, 53 weeks of quite heavy use. I'm guessing not even 1GB lasts, as it were, forever in the face of floods of undesirable BD-Java data. [Pause] I find, also, that I've misunderstood the premise of "Blue Jasmine", having casually assumed it would be somewhat comedic. It looks most promising, but just happens not to suit my mood this evening. I'm a fickle sort of chap.

  

Footnote

1  We've also been promised a "hymn by Ippolitov-Ivanov" before what some refer to as "the top of the hour". The hour being currently 08:35 or so.