2015 — 13 January: Tuesday
Not being terribly quick on the uptake — not to mention behind with some of my music listening — I've only just noticed that there's actually one track missing from my "Twilight" soundtrack album. It's by Radiohead, it's called "15 Step", and it's the tune that plays out over the end credits of that excellent film. I was reminded of it when a fragment from it was played on an edition of "The Write Stuff" that I had spotted on BBC Radio 4Extra, though the "show" seemed to be more or less entirely devoted to taking the mickey1 out of Stephenie Meyer.
I bought Radiohead's 2007 album "In Rainbows" last September, and guess what? 15 Step turns out to be the first track on it. Result...
G'nite!
Perhaps this...
... is what made America what it is?
Candy's reputation improved after World War I, when lemon drops, peppermints, and chocolate bars were standard military rations. "By the time the war was over," writes Kawash, "candy was universally embraced as real food, fit for men, women, and children alike." Aviators, boxing champions, and long-distance runners extolled candy's virtues as performance food. Early nutrition science equated calories with "food value," and wrapped candy bars made that value cheap and portable — the perfect lunch for busy people on a budget. By the 1930s, a trade magazine editor recalled in a 1976 interview, "a quarter pound of Baby Ruth and a glass of milk was considered a very substantial, nourishing meal." (A standard Baby Ruth bar today weighs half as much.)
I wonder...
... what Cyril Connolly might have said about this:
My ex-neighbours from Pakistan — perfectly decent people on the face of it, if you put to one side the issue of the two AK-47s owned back in their homeland — both insisted that their religion2 had no room for, (and needed to make) no provision for, the exercise of free will. Literally everything in their world view was pre-ordained. I'm afraid I gently mocked this Newtonian clockwork universe view of things. Now I'm left wondering just how, erm, untutored you have to be to accept a cleric's interpretation of a snowman as promoting lustiness and eroticism. I presume snow angels are also frowned upon?
I shall remain a godless infidel, methinks. Insofar as I think, that is.
Another tool...
... of the devil, of course, is the dynamic link library. Perhaps we could have a fatwa issued against them, too? (Link.)
Odd that I put this Don Marquis quote on the ¬blog exactly five years ago...
Dire prognostications...
... of entirely normal — indeed, predictable — weather for this portion of our planet's solar orbit sent me scurrying back out on an auxiliary Mother-Hubbard's-cupboard filling expedition, from which I returned in neat time to catch Mr Postie...
... the start of the next batch of Lassus, and the Stygian gloom preceding a brief shower. Did you know Sherlock Holmes was at one point supposedly writing a monograph upon the polyphonic motets of Lassus?
Right, that's it, batten down the hatches, hoist storm cones, Mum's here to stay with us for the next couple of weeks or so. Christa and Peter collected her on Saturday while I made the most of my last day of domestic freedom and bought two new Lassus CDs, the complete David Byrne and Twyla Tharp Catherine Wheel, Michelle Shocked, and Tanita Tikaram.
No matter...
... how firmly convinced you are that you're playing an album of MP3s from NAS 1 while updating the firmware on NAS 2... when the music suddenly stops with a popup about an I/O error, and the NAS goes offline while it sorts its inner gubbins out and sticks itself back together, it's a powerful clue that you were wrong. It happens.
I was unaware...
... of Saturn's polar hexagon. Nice video simulation here. And Pale Moon was happy to play it. Though not directly from Lucas Green's blog. I had to watch it courtesy of Slate, here. What is it with Vimeo?
I'm not saying...
... this isn't one of my favourite books, but just look at the price!
"Out of this world"? [Pause] Just re-read it. What a good book it is. Simak died in April 1988; he was a good writer. Right. What's next?