2015 — 4 June: Thursday
This is a little unusual1 but I could get used to it. I inspected the DVD and BD shelves of my local hypermarket yesterday, but found nothing even remotely tempting. And much rubbish that was frankly depressing. I did, however, also get a couple of deliveries from Amazon:
While I'm pleased to supplement my DVD of "In Bruges" with a Blu-ray, I'm irritated to see that there's a 20-minute documentary on the DVD that they haven't bothered to include on the BD. Where's the sense in that? I don't know "Perrier's Bounty" but the cast is promising. I also got a book, not that that's unusual, though its subject is (as it were) a bit off the standard, erm, deviation. Should be fascinating:
Michael Bloch did a good job editing the recent diaries of James Lees-Milne so I thought I'd give this examination of "some 20th century politicians" a whirl. It's the lives of those who were "either homosexual or not straightforwardly heterosexual" that he's chosen for his subject matter. Now I couldn't care less about a chap's sexuality. (Besides, it's not as if we're any different from a great many of our cousins...
... as very well-documented by Bruce Bagemihl's amazing observations.) But when that chap was a politician, in a position of considerable power and influence, at a time in our recent history when his sexual preferences had to be kept concealed because they were not only illegal but generally regarded — by our infinite supply of hypocritical bigots and largely self-appointed moral guardians — as unacceptable, it made for some interesting (and, occasionally, funny) conflicts between the public and the private.
At some point...
... I shall fire up get_iplayer version 2.94 (yes, it's now been updated twice in less than 24 hours, most recently to fix a bug in live streaming of some streams). I want to see if it can still retrieve the handful of BBC radio programmes I like to listen to at my leisure, not that that seems to be abundant. I'm also wondering exactly when Brenda's tax goons intend to get in touch either to demand money with menaces or (as it were) let me (as dear Mama's executor, that is) finally off the hook now that all that remains of her mortal coil is a puff of cemetery smoke, a few binary digits in financial cyberspace, and some personal memories of very assorted flavour.
Good to know?
Or, maybe, not:
Meanwhile, citizens who went to Whitehouse.gov to read the text of the president's Cybersecurity Summit speech could not do so on a secure page because the White House website did not offer even the option of secure browsing.
Bring back Huxley's "Soma"!
What is it about UK Home Secretaries that makes them pursue such stupid policies? Just askin'.
But really I am too old now for anyone, least of all the government, to tell me what I may or may not ingest. What is this nannying? Where are the conservative concerns about liberty? What is this coalition of puritans? None of this is actually about helping addicts or saving lives. The arbitrary distinction between legal and illegal highs is historical and has nothing to do with reducing harm. If it were, booze would be a class A. This bill embodies a panic attack induced by councils complaining about those little canisters of laughing gas left in the street and some pictures of girls in the Daily Mail.
Nurse! Bring me my meds!
A year ago...
... I was musing about Maurice Girodias. Well, on Tuesday's celebratory2 drive to our lunch date a book title I hadn't thought of for many years came up, in passing. Namely, The Undergrowth of Literature by Gillian Freeman, with a foreword by David Stafford-Clark. I couldn't recall the author's surname, though two of the trio chatting agreed it was "Gillian something" ... so (as one eventually does) I've just resorted to Wikipedia, where I found the opinions apparently expressed at the time (1967 or thereabouts) and in "The Times" by one Stephen Vizinczey — another author long unthought of.
Well, until my fairly recent DVD acquisition, at least, of the first film variant of one of his books. (Good film, by the way.)
The hollow feeling suggests I'd better do something about making a bite to eat. [Pause] That's better. Now, to today's arrivals:
Many years ago, I took out a subscription to the then relatively new London Review of Books. It wasn't cheap, and its sometimes lengthy and often thoughtful essays and reviews frankly demanded more free time than I had at the time (not that I'm ever in a different situation even now, in retirement). As for Stafford Beer — it's been over five years since I enjoyed his too-thin "Personal Memoir". Here's a snippet from a Foreword he wrote to a book about making decisions about decision making itself:
Here is the next sample problem that is urgent today. The big nation states exert enormous economic 'clout' and highly threatening military power over small nation states... what can the small nation state do?... The name of this answer is terrorism. It is another wholly predictable problem. It is manifestly impossible for a surveillance system to generate protective requisite variety in face of the assassin and the aircraft hijacker. Therefore it is necessary to handle the issue at the metalevel, whereby the initial super-power stance is shown to be generating the succession of actual problems that result in so much havoc.