2015 — 26 May: Tuesday
Until today I thought I knew only one thing about a chap called Edmund Crispin1 — that I owned and very much enjoyed six of the seven fine SF anthologies he edited in a series called, simply, "Best SF" from the 1950s until 1970. (I'm still missing "Best SF 5" if anyone cares to oblige.) Turns out he also scored the music for several of the "Carry On..." films and wrote at least one "Concertino for String Orchestra"... I've just heard the third movement of it.
Tea, breakfast, and a fresh batch of supplies are next on today's never-ending little list. Tick tock.
I have...
... just two albums by Kanye West ("College Dropout" and "Late Registration"). His recent award of an honorary doctorate has provoked a well-written and rather damning indictment of the state of higher education (and its disgraceful funding) across the Pond. For example, a student loan isn't cancelled on death! (Link.)
Big, bad Jobs
Priceless. Source and snippet:
Since Steve Jobs was published in 2011, "I think I've had 10 conversations where CEOs have looked at me and said, 'Don't you think I should be more of an asshole?'" says
Robert Sutton, a professor of management at Stanford, whose book, The No Asshole Rule, nonetheless includes a chapter titled "The Virtues of Assholes."
What separates the asshole from the psychopath is that he engages in moral reasoning (he understands that people have rights; his entitlement simply leads him to believe his rights should take precedence). That
this reasoning is systematically, and not just occasionally, flawed is what separates him from merely being an ass. (Linguistics backs up the distinction: ass comes from the Latin assinus, for "donkey," while the
hole is in the arras, the Hittite word for "buttocks.")
"Alimentary, dear Watson" as Holmes would never have said. [Pause] I recall a little anecdote by Peter Medawar on the high value he put on possession of a working anal sphincter but I cannot safely recommend Mrs Google's help in tracking it down. Trust me on this.
I had to wait until the latest visual zig-zags had made their unhurried way across my visual cortex before regarding it as optically 'safe' to nip out to the shops. They did; I've now safely nipped. And tucked away the booty. Time to set off for lunch already, though that's clearly impossible.
Toot, toot, tout de suite.
Considerable time...
... and 30-plus miles later, let's catch up as I listen to Rachel Podger, live, from the Hay festival.
Mr Postie dropped this off for me before I set off for lunch:
- Best SF 5? Now on order (secondhand) from an AbeBooks seller called "Bygone Books" a few miles up the motorway in Fleet, Hampshire.
- Lunch? Lunched.
- Status of the troubled 5TB external USB3 hard drive? Misbehaviour pleasingly confirmed by Len under both Windows 7 and Linux Mint 17.1 on completely different hardware a couple of miles away from any baleful influences in Technology Towers.
He then kindly zapped its data contents for me before I returned home to do the best I could to repack it. For once I'd kept the receipt, too. In fact, I'm finally relaxing with a fresh cuppa having got back from part of an afternoon spent negotiating an untroubled full refund from the Currys / PC World superstore in Hedge End. And proving — literally in passing — that driving past the Countess Mountbatten hospice in West End no longer triggers much by way of flashbacks to Christa's last 10 days there at the end of her ghastly cancer "journey" in November 2007.
Time takes its own sweet time but it does heal wounds eventually. For which I'm grateful.
When I was describing...
... the audio minidiscs and cassette tapes that still malinger here and there in the darker / dustier corners of Technology Towers I made passing slightly satirical reference (here) to the "huge hill to climb in terms of properly documenting the wealth of spoken material I've captured over the last forty years or more". As I set about one of my periodic attempts to diminish the state of disorder existing in the digital audio domain of my life I find myself wondering whether it wouldn't be easier just to "burn the implements of my craft and begin life anew as a trainer of performing elephants" as Kai Lung once put it...
A case could be advanced for the proposition that I have too much stuff.
20 years ago...
... I was still regularly supplying dear Mama with her reading material. Case in point:
Glad you're finding Mr Nikiforuk's book interesting, though I suspect you're not exactly "enjoying" it. As he himself is the first to admit, William McNeil's Plagues and Peoples (1976) is the Bible in this somewhat esoteric field. My only reason for picking Mr N's thin tome was to gain an up-to-date view. I've put on the back of this letter a recent piece reprinted by the Guardian from the Washington Post. As bugs have had nearly 250,000 generations (that is, 50 years or so) in which to learn how to defeat our drugs, and as they're capable (it now turns out) of transferring their drug-resistance to other species of bugs by mere physical contact, it seems our antibiotic period of freedom from fear is just about over...
Not wishing to scare the ol' gal I held back my copy of the venerable Ziegler. (Its approach is [much] more historical than medical.)