2015 — 21 May: Thursday

I think today's just possibly the day for exercising the theory I learned — though I had, by the time I read it, more-or-less formulated my own opinions (low) on share ownership — from the back cover of PJ O'Rourke's book "Eat the Rich".

Greater Fool Theory

I shall toddle along to my branch of Nationwide1 clutching a sheaf of papers. I would have gone to dear Mama's preferred bank, Barclays, but after their humongous fine yesterday for rate rigging (and other little foibles that some might suggest are indicative of inherent dishonesty) I imagine they might now be wanting to charge higher fees to recover what they probably perceive as their "losses".

Hard to argue...

... with this succinct summary:

The former type is characterized by much magic, questing, battles of good versus evil, Joseph Campbellian heroes, conclusive triumphalism, and a quasi-medievalism. Such novels always travel in herds of three books or more. The second category features strange, mind-bending venues, odd, idiosyncratic characters, problematical morality, enigmatical actions, open-endedness, interstitial hybridization, and a more elaborate and elegant prose style. Such books — nowadays sometimes subsumed under the banner of "New Weird" — are generally standalone novels.

Paul Di Filippo in B&N review


One man's "weird", of course, is another etc etc...

I just heard "Hammersmith" (Holst) for the first time and it's now already in my input hopper. Thank you, BBC Radio 3.

Unmasking umask

The discrepancy in behaviour between copying the album tracks (including "Hammersmith") from my Downloads folder to an appropriate new folder2 on each of the two NAS drives has just necessitated an extended 'repair' session to fix the umask setting globally on my Linux system. That doesn't, in and of itself, explain the source of the discrepancy, but at least it now enables me to copy files on to both NAS drives successfully. And a quick burst of MIME type editing also fixed another long-standing niggle.

Tip of the hat to Len for pushing these particular boulders out of my way and on to the side of my Linux path.

Fast forward...

... a couple of hours and, as my telephone cools down and I grab a hasty late lunch, I'm left awaiting the forms from the BP share registrar that will set in motion the production of a Letter Of Indemnity3 regarding the two sets of (physically missing) share certificates from among dear Mama's jumbled stash of paperwork. Needless to say, I only discovered they were missing as I ploughed my way through to the end of a mind-numbing set of alphanumeric codes while a lady at the other end of the telephonic string checked them against her records. Without the physical certificates (representing a grand total of 35 shares, or less than 2% of the total) her shareholding would actually have to remain "open" until the End of Eternity or the next Seldon Crisis — whichever Asimovian event occurs first.

I did suggest simply ignoring the absent bits of paper, but it seems — as with Frank Muir and Denis Norden, who were unable to refund an advance to the BBC "because they had no mechanism4 for refunding advances" — there's no process for doing that and, besides, the entire future of the Western Capitalist System utterly depends on shareholders not making silly suggestions like that (or so I gather). When enough people wake up to the essential worthlessness of enough bits of paper there could be a small-scale problem.

Taschen...

... delivered a small Crumb of Consolation this afternoon, after all my hard work as a would-be stockbroker. Wait long enough (in this case, since 10th October 2009, when I placed my initial order — long since cancelled — for this 'mass-market' edition...

Crumb book

... that was advertised, but never actually released) and the price eventually drops from an unfeasible £999 (one of Benedikt's "special" editions) to a much more affordable £13-99 plus whatever DeutschePost charged. I spotted it in an email from the US arm of Taschen just this week, but it actually arrived from Christa's country. (As in earlier years did five editions of his sketchbooks, come to think of it. Two of those were bought for me by one of Christa's chums over there. I wonder whatever became of Monika? She was somewhat scary; her boyfriend kept a pistol in his bedside drawer... I didn't like to ask why.)

That Holst brass band music is mighty fine. And all new to me. Shamefully "Planets" is almost the only Holst I knew for many years.

A quick spin...

... up and down a local motorway yielded some useful extra (data) storage space. A nice, quiet 5TB USB3 drive for less than £120? Remarkable! Now, thinks I, it's way past time for my next infusion of tannic acid. And a splash of cow juice.

Speaking of motorways, I'm...

... now seven years further along the road (as it were) and have still to find a description of a web site's sitemap that's even half as good as this one:

It's beyond me to remember everything that's on the site, let alone where to find it all, so for the lost visitor I have put together this map that shows the way to everything you could need to find. Please bear in mind that the Sitemap does not always get updated as frequently as the site itself does. Sometimes it takes a couple of weeks (or, you know, months) for additions and changes to make their way here.

Date: May 2008


I fear Molehole's sitemap can be similarly invariant "as time goes by".

  

Footnotes

1  Playing the befuddled pensioner / executor sympathy card (as appropriate) in hopes of persuading them to help me without first having to sign up for their thick-with-terms-and-conditions online and telephone share trading service. My need for that is strictly a one-off, after all.
2  I'd somehow backed myself into a corner where, despite being able to create new folders on either NAS drive, identically, I couldn't put files into the folders on one of the drives. Most unhandy. There's a hint of a suspicion that Samba may lie at the heart of the problem. Of course, I need Samba so my Oppo Blu-ray / network player can stream A/V files over to the amplifier and Kuro plasma screen.
3  Who was indemnifying whom, and against what, somehow went unclarified. Nor at that stage of a long conversation did I feel the need to ask.
4  A reason that struck the BBC bureaucracy as entirely reasonable :-)