2015 — 1 June: Monday — rabbits!
What do you mean: "Everything but the kitchen sink"? I mean I should be getting my new sink installed tomorrow.1
Today's dismay...
... therefore (naturally) arises from contemplation of the degree of clutter to be moved, temporarily, on to the dining table out of the way of my plumber.
Oh, it all makes works for the (non)working man to do. Meanwhile, a choice of bizarre stories (Eva Braun's underwear and a senior Catholic's "almost sociopathic" dismissal of abuse claims) fail to tempt me to bother to link to them. Humans make for a very strange planet. I prefer breakfast.
For which, because someone around here keeps eating it, I first need to stew my next batch of fruit topping.
I'm not...
... entirely convinced by Arvo Pärt's "Cantus in memoriam Benjamin Britten". It's more an audio version of descending an endless Penrose triangle staircase of the sort so ably depicted by Escher. Could be a mood thing, I suppose. Besides, it's just started to rain. But Rob Cowan is now chatting to 50% of Goldfrapp...
This week's...
... subject of the excellent and informative "Composer of the Week" (Zoltán Kodály) is hardly over-represented among my ancient set of "classical" tape cassettes as his music crops up on precisely one side of one cassette:
I typeset the label for this one recording I made, of the Hary Janos suite, in June 1985. Three decades ago! <Sigh> Yet people call me a completeist. It's a bit like that line from a song in "Evita" where she complains about still being called a whore and the cruel rebuttal about retired admirals2 still being called admirals...
[Pause]
More worryingly, though I've just confirmed the physical whereabouts of my double CD of the original 1976 concept album of "Evita", and my laughably-misnamed music "database" confidently asserts the existence of a set of MP3 files I ripped several years ago when this CD version finally came to my notice ... I cannot currently find the files as (a) I have yet to point the excellent Linux equivalent ("Recoll") of my Windows-era ("Copernic") desktop search tool at all my music sitting out on my NAS drives and (more stupid still) (b) having filed away the CD artwork somewhere terribly safe, I cannot immediately deduce which folder / subfolder conceals the things.
[Pause]
Of course, had I looked first under letter "J" and thus found "Julie Covington"...
As I wait...
... for a couple of eggs to warm up a bit before I boil them for my lunch, I'm now losing my appetite as I listen to the radio news of the row bubbling up about "defence" spending, the NATO 2% of GDP commitment, and the US Secretary of State weighing in (I hesitate to say "on the side of the angels") by casting doubt and spelling out his opinion of our nuclear or conventional future options for killing lots of people all over the place.
I have persuaded...
... the "Recoll" search program to take a good snoop around one of the MP3 storage areas on one of the NAS drives and will be interested to see how it gets on. I noticed it has a "media" filter so I'm hoping this will mean I can in due course search for MP3 files based on their metadata tags. That would be handy. But this could take a while. I cannot deduce by watching the indexing status line data flashing quite what indexes it's building but, if it ever finishes, I shall perform the same "Infirmary" test that I tried out on Copernic a while back.
Meanwhile...
... I'm delighted to find this essay from the neurosurgeon, Henry Marsh, whose recent book "Do no harm" so impressed me. Source and snippet:
The brain has the consistency of jelly — it seems something of a cruel miracle that thought and feeling, an understanding of quantum mechanics, love, hatred, the obscure and lengthy utterances of
NHS management, Beethoven's late quartets and First Division football all derive from this stuff...
You cannot see people whose very personality and moral being has been altered for the worse by damage to the frontal lobes and maintain belief in some kind of mind or human soul separate from the
brain — at least, if you do, you must exercise extreme cognitive dissonance.
Searching my media files...
... for "Infirmary" turned up these "documents":
- St James Infirmary by Allen Toussaint
- St. James Infirmary by Bobby Bland
- St. James Infirmary by Dr John
- Ain't necessarily the Saint James Infirmary by Frank Zappa
- St James Infirmary by Robert Crumb
- St. James Infirmary by Josh White
It missed the Bob Dylan track. And, before I could play any of them (with actual audible audio, that is) I first had to restart Linux. I'm sort-of used to that. If I want sound, I have to sneak up on it sometimes!
There exist...
... people who seem (to me) to be a lot more obsessive than I am. My Blu-ray of "Ex Machina" is finally now on its way, but I will content myself with this Reddit tale of code flashed briefly on the screen during it.
Say what?!
Good ol' Ansible strikes again:
