2015 — 13 April: Monday
It seems1 that my decorative Japanese cherry tree blossom...
... is just slightly ahead of my pear tree...
... does that mean2 that it's now safe to "cast a clout"?
Oh, good grief
Helping the rich get richer — it's a key Tory value:
If the Conservatives win the general election, then from April 2017 parents would each be offered a further £175,000 "family home allowance" to enable them to pass property on to children tax-free after their death. This could be added to the existing £325,000 inheritance tax threshold, bringing the total transferable tax-free allowance from both parents in a married couple or civil partnership to £1m. The full amount would be transferable even if one spouse had died before the policy came into effect, the Conservatives say, and so would benefit existing widows and widowers.
Smacks of desperation to me. There can't be many reasons to vote Tory, and this3 certainly isn't one of them for me. Now, if they were to cut the tax on tea...
Tee-hee
Nicely put:
Should we vote for the party that says it'll definitely renew our nuclear deterrent, or the party that says it'll absolutely and positively definitely renew our nuclear deterrent? And why are they both so certain that retaining an astronomically expensive facility for killing millions of people at the touch of a button is crucial to our national wellbeing? I'm not convinced they're wrong but I find it sinister that they're agreed on it.
Speaking astronomically, here's an amusing tale of things on a grander scale than the average Tory politician could ever hope to grasp: failure to recognise, and thus differentiate, between two differing classes of supernovae leads to a tentative conclusion that the more slowly-expanding Universe is even less well understood that previously thought. (Link.)
Closer to home, if I can't stop Sublime Edit from autocompleting HTML tags for me (and me not always noticing in time) in a short while I shall be expunging it rather than paying $70 for it. There are certain classes of witless machine assistance that are more bother than the "problem" they seek to solve. Doonesbury had a nice riff on this back in the early days of text auto-completion and spell-checkers.
It's gone.
Following...
... hard on the heels of my discovery that "Skippers" are essentially equivalent to sardines — my salad lunch of them went down OK — comes the realisation that I can easily tolerate minor damage to a dust-jacket...
... when it reduces the price to 50% for David Lodge's memoir. And nor, it turns out, do I want either a Surface Pro 3 or a 15" MacBook Pro having given both a reasonable inspection this morning. Tea though. That's another matter altogether.
On the "memoirs" front...
... it strikes me the emails to and from my ex-IBM friend Carol (since 1983) constitute a memoir of "Life in IBM". A brief taste:
We had a Corporate bod here this week who managed to upset various groups of people by shedding a great deal more heat than light. He was outlining, not very credibly (nor with any apparent conviction, or ability to depart from his script and [enormous] foils package) our "Beat Microsoft" strategy. The audience gave very polarised assessments afterwards.
Of course, whether the audience was appropriate (all 2nd line and above plus Klingons) is germane. Half seemed to think we'd exposed Hursley's (traditional) intellectual arrogance and bad manners by asking questions designed to reveal the intelligence of the asker. Half, of course, maintained that various excellent and searching questions had lain there unanswered for all the world to see, in a pitch that reeked of "Old IBM". And the (third) half didn't bother to fill in feedback forms (probably because they were by that time covered in doodles of varying degrees of obscenity and/or psychological self-revelation...)
At one point, the hapless bod (and I'm not sure hapless bods still rise to such Corporate positions if they're as clueless as some people here seemed to think — though I reserve the right to be wrong!) said more or less that we should make faster progress through the foils if we didn't keep sticking barbs in the presenter, but he said it so nicely that the English in the audience probably lost the irony!
"Third half" was a favourite formulation of the Car Talk hosts on NPR's long-running phone-in. I knew she'd get the reference.