2015 — 18 January: Sunday
My little watch has fallen behind the times1 which means, unless I miss my guess, another trip into Eastleigh to my little man for a new battery. On my last such visit (not that you can see the year, but it was 2011) I bought the 'atomic' clock...
... so the current watch battery has kept things ticking for nearly four years. Not too shabby for £3. But just tell me where the Time goes.
Having downloaded...
... quite a variety of film trailers of differing degrees of temptation (or, sometimes, astonishing inanity) over the last six months or more2 I've been keeping a gentle eye out for a handful of titles to appear, or to reduce in price, before lurching into affirmative acquisitive action. Hence the email that arrived at 00:20 this morning confirming this quartet:
- "Lucy" — I've been quite loyal to Luc Besson over the years, and who can possibly dislike Scarlett Johansson?
- "Automata" — not based on the weird and unsettling drawings in my 1976 book of that title by cartoonist Michael Heath
- "I'll follow you down" — looks no loopier than the average Hollywood treatment of "reality" and "causality" in our quantum world
- "Touchy Feely" — seems likely to make me laugh at the human condition
I left another sextet "saved for later" as they were all still only on pre-order:
- "Hector and the search for happiness" — I enjoyed the book on which this is based
- "Maps to the stars" — Julianne Moore generally floats my boat
- "My old lady" — Maggie Smith and Kristin Scott Thomas v Kevin Kline
- "What we did on our holiday" — also seems likely to make me laugh at the human condition
- "Serena" — has been mysteriously held back from release
- "What if" — the Harry Potter chap in a different world — the real one
Better grab a bite of breakfast I suppose. Soon be time for Cerys.
It's nice...
... to think that the world (still?) has experts on "divided attention" somehow. (How do they find the time?) This from the chap who wrote so interestingly about music and the brain.
My nascent...
... credibility as any kind of completeist is not helped by listening to the conversation with Bonnie Dobson and then discovering I have precisely one track by her in my little collection. And that's not "Morning Dew" either. Though I do have three versions of that song (by Ralph McTell, Jeff Beck, and Episode Six). Plus a Steeleye Span medley that includes it.
I can't speak too lowly of the ever more cluttered user interface of the latest variant of Amazon's digital music downloader...
... but at least I not only now have the excellent Salena Jones version of "Morning Dew" that Cerys played, but there's a version of "Here comes the sun" by Nina Simone and another 22 goodies to be explored in due course (or should that be "dew" course?)
My current reading...
... is only doing my head in slightly:
I fear it got overlooked at the time by the even greater distractions on offer from Michel Choquette's mighty comix-oriented tome. Not to mention all those "Laundry Files" of Charles Stross. Of course, reading this bit of Shubin on the water molecule:
With one oxygen and two hydrogen atoms, it looks something like a Mickey Mouse head: small hydrogen atoms form the ears atop a head made by a large oxygen atom.
... immediately brought to mind3 this:
I suspect it's time to grab some lunch. [Pause] Anton Corbijn has just chosen "She was naked" from Superstarshine by Supersister — good grief! Must be time to listen to Pudding En Gisteren again. I first heard that on Andy Finney's "Fresh Garbage" BBC Radio London show in 1972 or thereabouts. And then had to wait about 30 years for it to appear on CD.
I very much enjoyed...
... Mike Walker's "Alpha" — a Sony radio drama prize winner in 2001 — a while back. Which is why I've just snaffled his more recent "2025" in hopes of it being similarly skilful4 entertainment.
I decided — after watching the first chapter and a bit (50 minutes or so) of "Empire Falls" — that I'd probably derive more pleasure from the original Russo novel. (Even though he also wrote the screenplay.) I was finding the constant voice-over narration / "tell, don't show" style very irritating. I'm sure I can find something else...
Listening...
... to (what I could make out of) the lyrics to "Never get burn" by the Twinkle Brothers and then exasperatedly typing "wikipedia Shadrach" into Mrs Google's search field has finally helped clear up a very long-standing mystery with respect to occasional references by PG Wodehouse to the hapless but non-flammable trio. Of course, had I stayed more alert instead of daydreaming during all those tedious 'Religious knowledge' lessons in Junior school back in the early 1960s, who knows? I might not have been so ignorant for more than half a century!