2015 — 3 May: Sunday
I'm never at my best1 in the wake of illness, no matter how helpful my plight is to paper tissue manufacturers. Music always helps. Last night, it was some very loud blasts from some old rock favourites. This morning? Someone I'd never even heard of (Elisabetta Olga Laura Brusa) — let alone her symphonic poem "Merlin" — but somehow the three CDs of her orchestral works are now mysteriously in Amazon's output hopper. Since their elves also auto-rip these things for me, I shall download the tracks at some point today and see whether the Naxos record label has indeed correctly championed what seems to be an almost totally-overlooked talent of, erm, considerable talent.
Meanwhile...
... my second throat-clearing cuppa is working wonders. I always recall Yossarian's views on phlegm (and its assumed inventor: God) at some point in these nasty little viral conflicts. When I've done so in the past, I've been in the habit of simply quoting the lovely exchange between he and Doc Daneeka, but that's getting 'old'. This time, on a whim, I decided to dig out the earliest reference I could find in my "digital" life to my agreement with Yossarian and his views. Here's what I came up with from part of an email I wrote to my friend Carol on Guy Fawke's night in 1984:
As you can deduce from the URL, this particular web page (like all too many of its companions) lives on a server that's behind my 'private' firewall. Sorry! The "Terrible Two" were over in Germany (a year after Christa's initial cancer surgery) doing what they could to help my mother-in-law while Christa's then 81-year-old father was hospitalised2 fifty miles or so distant from his village for some brutally aggressive radiation therapy.
Sooner...
... or, (more likely) later, somebody will explain why I sometimes have to reboot Linux just to restore digital audio output. It seems to become necessary if I switch on the HP All-in-One printer/scanner (though, as that's on a USB port, I fail to see any plausible excuse it can offer as to why it should feel it has my blessing to knock out the output from my Creative X-Fi soundcard sitting on a PCIe bus).
Still, at least I managed to download the next batch of MP3s from Mr Bezos' cloud (which exceeds in 'value', I gather from some news reading this morning, the IBM cloud that claims the same crown). Amazonian elves have been very busy: my "personal" musical cloud now contains over 7,000 tracks as the elves work their steady auto-ripping way through the backlog of my previous CD acquisitions.
I've just begun...
... a simple chemistry experiment designed to deal with that kitchen sink nemesis of mine. I'm giving it a 60-minute blast of a two-component drain foamer cleanser from "Mr Muscle". The magic potion seems to consist of equal parts sodium hydroxide and sodium hypochlorite. Interestingly3 I'm advised to avoid gold-plated fittings, and to spend 20 minutes swilling off any splashes on my skin (assuming any skin remains for me to swill after accidental splashes).
It wasn't...
... until I retired that I had both the "leisure" (joke!) and an audio system of sufficient clarity to be able to hear the stunning banality of the lyrics of Steely Dan's "Pretzel Logic" album (I'm thinking of the track Rikki don't lose that number that Guy Garvey played a few minutes ago before admitting that one of his producers hates the group's music). I suppose I must have heard the track at least a dozen times since it came out in 1974... but why did I ever think it was any good? I am officially now my own father!