2015 — 6 August: Thursday

Good morning, IBM pension.1 Lovely to meet you! I'm sure you'll come in handy.

R.I.P. Robert Conquest

This splendid chap made it to the same great age as dear Mama, but did a great deal more (with the five wonderful "Spectrum" anthologies, co-edited with Kingsley Amis) along the way to inculcate my lifelong addiction to SF than she ever did! Given that this is the anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing I had to, sort of, smile at the Conquest limerick chosen for use in the NYT obituary:

There was a great Marxist called Lenin
Who did two or three million men in.
That's a lot to have done in,
But where he did one in
That grand Marxist Stalin did ten in.

Though, being the NYT, they choose to describe it as a "short poem". Typical. As a consequence of my addiction I know, by the way, that Asimov actually formulated a total of four Laws of Robotics. Nobody ever believes me, but I refer Doubting Thomasinas to the 1956 story "First Law" which you can find in my now 52-year-old copy of The Fantastic Universe omnibus (click the pic):

My 20th SF paperback!

The back cover warns — correctly, it seems — of the dangers of said addiction.

I'd not heard of...

... Avies Platt, but this extraordinary essay of hers "recently discovered by Peter Scupham in a carrier bag of diary entries and other bits and bobs" of her meeting with WB Yeats is both amazing and moving. And beautifully written.

Lesen Sie mehr!

I gather LibreOffice has nudged up to Version 5 as of yesterday.2 I first used it back in the (paid-for) days of "Star Office". Of course, I've been using LibreOffice far more than 'normal' in the last few months during the flurry of Probate-related letters, though that's now thankfully, erm, died down. But generally I can easily go a year without writing a single snailmail. I like it that way.

What is it...

... about last century's crop of white British male artists called "Eric"? I've mentioned Eric Gill on numerous occasions. (Example here.) And whenever I leaf through "The Art of Radio Times" I'm always struck by Eric Fraser's work. His distinctive art is in my Folio Society edition of Tolkien. Today I've added a sumptuous set of Eric Ravilious art to my little collection. If I can figure out how to stitch together a cover scan it will probably appear here in due course. But, before that, I'm off out again for tea and biccies.

If you know the "radio ballads" of Charles Parker...

Ballad of John Axon, 1958

... this was the superb illustration Fraser drew for the "Radio Times" to accompany the first of them — the Ballad of John Axon — first broadcast in 1958. Of course, the fact that the magazine chose to print on a form of blotting paper, and tended to reduce the size of the artwork, did nobody any favours (except, I guess, the accountants).

Since today's promised "lunch and a chat" turned (through no fault of my hosts) into more of a "let's have a quick brunch upstairs in the West Quay food hall and then straight off back home" and I had taken the precaution of buying a 3-hour parking ticket in case our planned rendezvous went awry, I had time on my hands. I thus spent the early part of the afternoon strolling around parts of Soton I haven't visited (in the main) since before Christa died. I was taken aback at the deterioration of some of these old haunts. Still, it is a truth universally acknowledged that such few (pitifully few) bookshops as remain are there to be browsed in, surely?

Today's crop of books

The "Drawn and Quarterly" anthology is over 770 pages. Blimey. Their stuff can be a bit "hit or miss" as, like everything else, it tends to obey Sturgeon's Law. Though I'm hoping Vonnegut's vaguely autobiographical books don't. Still, if all else fails, WH Smug is still in business. I picked up this £7-99 magazine there. It throws in a DVD with Knoppix 7.4.2 on it. That's way more recent than the DVD stuffed in the back of my 2007 O'Reilly edition of Kyle Rankin's "Knoppix Hacks"!

Today's Linux lessons

I hadn't realised it's 20:12 but the ol' tum is reminding me.

An unconsidered life

... part 3. As promised, three years since I last attempted the exercise, I've been glancing back at my diary entries for this day...

Watch this space in 2018 :-)

  

Footnotes

1  I'm being treated to lunch today. You can relax for a bit :-)
2  Having been totally spoiled (ruined for life?) by the "TechWriter Pro" WP and "Impression" DTP programs I used for 13 years on my RISC OS PCs, I've always had a relatively hard time with WP on more "industry compatible" platforms. And, although I also bought an OEM copy of the ubiquitous (iniquitous?) "MS Word" for Christa's PC, I always shuddered at the prospect of having to use that horrid software myself. I still prefer markup languages to WYSIWYG systems, too.