2015 — 4 May: Monday
Having switched away1 from poetry on Radio 3, politics on Radio 4, and mindlessness masquerading as humour on 6Music, I'm once again reminded that maybe it's time to get my NPR satellite radio act back on the road. The last two satellite boxes have both been cheap and cheerful ones from Maplin, but neither managed to last more than a year. Maybe cheap just isn't the right way to go in pursuit of those few missing microvolts. (It's all Arthur C Clarke's voltfault.)
Meanwhile...
... my friendly plumber has an email from me regarding the impending demise of my under-the-kitchen-sink nemesis. Yesterday's foaming cleanser did a fine job, but now I can no longer tighten the jointed pipework sufficiently to stop a few drops leaking every time water flows through the plughole. A drip tray is in place but it's time, I think, to call it a day.
The boy Dave...
... has made what seems to me the schoolboy mistake of comparing himself to a firefighter, let alone referring to his opposition as the arsonist:
My dad, who retired last year after more than 25 years in the Essex County Fire and Rescue Service, didn't appreciate the comparison. "We get less than £28,000 a year to work 15-hour shifts, and five weekends out of seven," he said. "We pay a sixth of our pay into a pension with less than a 20% chance of getting out what we put in due to premature deaths. We manoeuvre around pitch black buildings in temperatures that make our skin boil. Recovering dead kids, dead adults, attending coroners courts. Compare that to £142,500 a year, free accommodation, free transport, a full pension and a £1m book deal when you leave. Cameron, a firefighter? Don't make me laugh."
Personally, I think her Dad makes a fair point. Oops.
I don't have...
... an overabundance of affection for my sex. Or for literary studies. Or for force-fitting evolutionary explanations:
He warms to the metaphor. "I wanted to use the experience not only to write a memoir but to get at the important question: Why are men this way? Why do we fight?" He believes this might be the most important question in the world. "There's no denying that male, competitive, violent tendencies are extremely disruptive
in the history of the world, and may even end the world before it's all over and done."
The Professor in the Cage pays disconcertingly close attention to "the great semen glut" (the biological reality that men produce many more sex cells than women do, which, the author says, explains "why men are the way they are")...
If only all difficult problems had such simple solutions. Desmond Morris has a lot to answer for :-)
Wow! Talk about...
... pandering precisely to my personal prejudices:
Nicely played, sir. Here's an interesting review, by Vicky Pryce. By the way, are you actually allowed to be rude about users of Twitter? I always assumed that if you were they would come down on you like a ton of bricks. (Not that I'd know, I guess, as I'm not signed up to that, or any other, social medium.)
Having become alarmed...
... by reading that Firefox intends to punish me for not using https connections, I browsed a little further. I became more depressed to discover that Google's "rating" of my 'molehole' web page speed for a "mobile" user is a 63% or so. (I managed a score of over 90% for a "desktop" user.) I was on the point of shooting myself when it occurred to me to check the BBC's main page in the same way by the same criteria. I am now euphoric. I shall stop reading.
I have...
... less than absolutely no idea how my email address ever got itself signed up to a religious supplies outfit. I just hope I'm not being counted as one of their flock. I would, I fear, prove a sad disappointment to them.
If this...
... truly reflects the level of political discourse in the UK a couple of days before the General Election...
... then we deserve whatever guvmint we get thrown at us.