2015 — 17 January: Saturday
Despite the local evidence1 suggesting that it's -3C out there, this morning's severe weather warning map from the splendid chaps in the Met Office insists I'm not even in their yellow "Be aware" region:
Still, if the web site can be trusted, at least I now know how to spell "wintry" [sic] correctly. All these years I've been getting that wrong. Amazing. Brrr.
Mummy, what's a liberal?
Steady but flexible; that's me.
The only directly political cliché that occurs in It's Been Said Before is "staunch conservative/Republican." If Orin Hargraves has a politics, he has kept his book free of them. Regarding this cliché, he notes that "instances of staunch conservative/Republican outnumber staunch liberals/Democrats by nearly four to one, suggesting that the users of these phrases are speaking or writing formulaically — or alternatively and not very persuasively, that liberals and Democrats are less steadfast in their principles and so do not merit the staunch label." Another possibility — one I favor — is that the word "staunch" here really stands for unbending, if not fanatic. In this reading, conservatives and Republicans are staunch, while liberals and Democrats, more reasonably, are merely steady but flexible.
As a long-time fan...
... of nominative determinism, it strikes me as particularly appropriate that someone called Francine Prose should be writing about reading. (Link.)
I will have to await...
... the delivery of my second copy of this "gift copy"...
... from a different supplier before I will know whether the colour mis-alignment on its cover is a deliberate effect. Meanwhile, I never knew that the screenwriter of this 1971 Otto Preminger comedy adapted from Lois Gould's novel...
... was Elaine May, writing under the pseudonym of "Esther Dale".
One of the...
... duties of being a canny2 pensioner is to get £35-98 knocked off my annual buildings and house contents insurance premium by flatly refusing to pay for a "pedal cycle" I do not own and "garden cover" I do not want. (Having removed all Christa's larger [but visibly ailing] trees I'm not greatly bothered by anything else left out in the jungle.) Paying with the organisation's own credit card also brings me "points", and we all know what "points" mean, don't we?
Keeping a sense...
... of proportion. With my current two-screen system, I'm exactly half-way to having a 5K screen's worth of real estate:
For all that it's a 60" diagonal screen, my little Kuro plasma Full HD display at the other end of the living room is somehow starting to look under-nourished.
I've just been...
... proving to my satisfaction that said Kuro still3 does a very good job. For my evening dose of pixels I chose that lovely little film "Twilight" — no, not the sparkly vampires — a rather more 'grown-up' gently-paced modern noirish tale turning over some of the stones in Hollywood to examine what lowlife-forms are wriggling around concealed under them.
Christa and I first caught this relaxed gem down at the Harbour Lights cinema quite late in the previous millennium. Robert Benton and Richard Russo make a good team regardless of what Roger Ebert said at the time. In fact, I think I shall make "Empire Falls" my next viewing. Not this evening, however. I have some reading and some fine jazz "up with which I wish to catch" (should you remember your Churchill). Plus a cup of tea with my name on it.