2015 — 30 May: Saturday
Back to bright sunshine this morning1 and (initially, at least) another crack at the usual stuff played by Brian Matthew. He still manages to find and play music I've never heard before (but then I led a very sheltered "pop" life until the end of the 1960s musically).
I conclude...
... it was the beeps from my regenerating water softener very early this morning that disturbed my sleep as the salt level was much reduced when I checked, and topped it up, a few minutes ago. The curse of the light sleeper.
Time to rewatch the excellent 1991 Paul Schrader film of nearly that title, perhaps?
I very much enjoyed...
... the fairly recent book "A Jane Austen education" by William Deresiewicz — written before he went on to stir the hornets' nest of higher education across the Pond with his book on "Excellent Sheep". So, not only was I rather tickled by this "Jane Austen Manifesto" for improving writing "on the Internet"... I was pleased to discover an automated Jane Austen thesaurus.
The latter years of my "career" in IBM weren't made more pleasant by the endless rounds of downsizing, and I got heartily sick of hearing the word "empowerment" so often trotted out by witless managers as more work was regularly expected of fewer peons. What word would Jane have chosen, I wondered? Answer(s) here. It's a nice touch to add a series of other related ghastly words that the divine Jane never used.
I noted...
... the new film coming out based on Truffaut's long interview with Hitchcock fifty years ago. Now, I'm not the greatest fan of Hitchcock's films but — not for the first time — an essay in the LRB makes a compelling case. And simultaneously reminds me of a long-forgotten anecdote about a scene that never made it into my favourite of his films, "North by North-West":
I wanted to have a long dialogue scene between Cary Grant and one of the factory workers as they walk along the assembly line. They might, for instance, be talking about one of the foremen. Behind them a car is being assembled, piece by piece. Finally, the car they've seen being put together from a simple nut and bolt is complete, with gas and oil, and all ready to drive off the line. The two men look at it and say, "Isn't it wonderful!" Then they open the door to the car and out drops a corpse!
Talk about red herring!
The 'reductio ad absurdum' conclusion...
... of the piece here on legal highs made me smile:
Using the same "everything is banned unless we say otherwise" approach of the new regulations on legal highs, it would be best to ban all neurotransmitters just in case they're used to induce psychoactive effects. And they
would be, because that's technically what they're for. So we'd end up with a population unable to use their brains.
Seems like an ideal arrangement for the government, if we're honest.
It reminded me of pretty much the whole of chapter 9 of Jerome K Jerome's glorious "Three Men on the Bummel" describing Teutonic approaches to the concept of the law-abiding citizen.
I'm delighted...
... to discover that "The News Quiz" also exists in an 'extended' format. I shall miss Sandi Toksvig. [Pause] I had to stop listening to the arguments about house building that featured on "Any Questions". I first read such tales of broken guvmint promises in the diaries of Richard Crossman (one-time Housing Minister) and nothing much seems to have improved. In half a century.
I'm undelighted...
... to discover that I can't immediately see any major errors in Norman Spinrad's reasoning here. And that's a tad worrying.