2015 — 6 February: Friday
My choice of evening entertainment last night was a three-hour nostalgia1 binge — that recently-acquired DVD of "Parky's Picks". (Who cares if nostalgia isn't what it used to be?) I thoroughly enjoyed my binge, and it reminded me that, on our final wedding anniversary, Christa and I had watched a somewhat similar DVD I'd made from BBC4 — an interesting one-hour compilation of snippets from a range of UK TV chat shows2 all originally transmitted in 1973. I had seen few of these at the time because I neither had, nor wanted, access to television. Radio, films, and books were then, and remain, much more my thing.
Is it time I got a life, do you suppose? :-)
What happened...
... to the idea of turning the other cheek? Though only after the first one has been spanked into submission, of course.
I'd quite like...
... to read this paper — who doesn't love a good laugh? — but I'm not willing to pay $5 to do so:
Surprise, surprise
It's taken a committee of our MPs a very long time indeed to realise that one, at least, of the planet's largest accountancy firms has been getting ever richer by cooking up and selling tax-avoidance schemes to its multinational corporate clients "on an industrial scale". Another instance of the seemingly unstoppable Invasion of the Bean Counters. What a sorry waste of brainpower. Mind you, if our leaders finally start going after our planet's plentiful supply of corporate "crooks" rather than chasing the benefit and welfare "cheats" originally defined as somehow responsible for causing the financial upheavals of the last six years, they just might reap greater rewards. They might even get my vote, too. (Link.)
Time for breakfast, on this rather chilly, but sunny, morning.
As part of...
... my morning 'lemonses' ritual, I decided to treat myself to a new desktop background. I'd been poking around in the murky depths of one of my 3TB backup drives and had found not only what I was looking for — a copy of my marriage certificate, needed for my new will — but also a promising little snapshot...
... I'd taken on 4th June 2010 but not examined particularly closely at the time. My excuse? Well, I was in the middle of packing and transporting 178 cartons of books over to the storage place ahead of the Great Central Heating Upheavals, and also pondering the various issues involved in relocating dear Mama from her home in the Midlands down to a care-home in Winchester. While it's no Bad Thing to be busy, one shouldn't overlook the need, as pointed out by WH Davies, "to stand and stare" on occasion.
Anyway, if you click the next pic you, too, can take a moment to stare at the wee winged beastie I'd captured right here in River City:
It's a wry thought...
... but the light from that Hubble space telescope YouTube animation of the Andromeda galaxy I linked to yesterday set off about 2,500,000 years ago. In other words, quite a while before there were any human beings on this planet to build such telescopes, let alone place them in orbit. However, the fossil record for dragonflies and damselflies dates back to the Jurassic and the Cretaceous well over 65,000,000 years ago. And the largest of the earliest "Giant dragonflies" was flitting around Gondwana back in Upper Carboniferous and Permian times over 200,000,000 years ago. What would Bishop James Ussher have said to that, I wonder? (I don't actually, but it's an amusing thought experiment.)
There's a gorgeous spiral representation of Geological time on (where else?) Wikipedia. (Link.)
Back, following...
... tea and a biccie over with Roger & Eileen. Blimey, it's jolly f-f-f-cold out there. Barely +2C and with an unwelcome breeze. Since I now find I have a visitor lined up for the morning, I shall ensure that he, too, is well-brewed (as it were). Suppose I could dig out the cute little sucker, too, and give its new(ish) battery a bit of exercise. Grrr.