2015 — 9 September: Wednesday
It turns out my policy of humanely exterminating the shelf-filling video dross1 can quite happily carry on even while I'm "defragmenting" my CaseLogic folders to close up the gaps. Each time I assess a candidate for removal I consider my memories (if any!) of it, whether or not it was one of the many titles primarily bought for Christa's enjoyment, what (in the main) critics such as Roger Ebert had to say about it at the time, and how I feel about the chance of ever wishing to watch it again.
If, after all that, I decide it's for the chop, I dig out the cover artwork from one of my rainbow folders upstairs, amend my database to reflect the removal, add the disk and the artwork to the neat pile on the living room floor, and move on to the next title.
In other long-running tasks...
... I gather Brenda today at some not quite certain point reaches (or maybe even passes) the length of her great-great-grandmother's reign, seeing off seven Popes, and 12 prime ministers. Her supposed successor is himself already a pensioner, of course. I have read in the past no doubt scurrilous suggestions that the minor indeterminacy as to timing is a function of quite when her father's medicine man administered the dose that ensured the news of his death could still make that morning's edition of "The Times". What a very strange social system.
Acidic thoughts
There's a neat encapsulation here of the effect of LSD ("Acid removes the filters that the brain normally applies to reality and users often describe a perception of interconnectedness, a slowing down of time and sensations of synaesthesia"). Source and further, more amusing, snippet in this book review:
The BBC banned "A Day in the Life" but establishment discomfort with LSD was often focused less on drug-taking than — pace Arthur Koestler — on the anxiety that acid allowed any Vera, Chuck or Dave to barge into the presence of God without having to endure all that "living as a hermit in the desert" stuff for 40 days and nights.
I foresee...
... a minor-league skirmish with my latest solicitor when we meet up next week supposedly to sign the new Will I've resumed drafting. I've just read through it more carefully, and there's a problem. I've twice had to "perform" duties as an executor, obtaining Probate, gathering in, and distributing, an Estate's assets. The task is essentially trivial, if tedious, when:
- the Will is simple,
- the beneficiaries are unambiguously identified, and
- the assets of the Estate are uncomplicated
I therefore see no need for the solicitor to have added her firm as my executor alongside my son, although I can easily guess the motive. I did not request this to be done. Unamusingly, Big Bro's corresponding gang of vultures in NZ tried to do exactly the same last year when he and Lis updated their Wills. Their solicitors had to be argued out of it for an extra fee. Game on!
Offshore ownership of the UK
A fascinating map. (Link.)
I'd never heard of...
... (or, possibly, I'd forgotten) the Remembrancer. George Monbiot perpetuates a myth about where he sits in the House of Commons! (Link.)
One of the duties...
... of a domestic god such as myself is to keep an eye on the health of his kitchen tools. To that end, I now have a new plastic drainer (avocado-coloured) to sit atop my left hand draining board. It's unlikely to scratch the stainless steel sink, nor to rust. £3 in Matalan. [Pause] Propping it up on six extra-thick fridge magnets gives it a better chance of draining, too.
Here's a nice...
... though, possibly, low-interest list:
1. Switzerland 2. Luxembourg 3. Hong Kong 4. Cayman Islands* 5. Singapore 6. USA 7. Lebanon 8. Germany 9. Jersey* 10. Japan 11. Panama 12. Malaysia (Labuan) 13. Bahrain 14. Bermuda* 15. Guernsey*
* British overseas territory or crown dependency. If Britain's network were assessed together, it would be at the top.
You can see the original here. Makes you proud to be British, doesn't it? We stopped taking holidays in Guernsey long ago, but even then we could see all the plaques on buildings listing the presence within them of a huge array of companies and High Street institutions whose names we recognised.
Art and neuroscience...
... might seem to make strange bedfellows, but the article was fascinating. Source and snippet:
Crucially, this picture — you are your brain; the body is the brain's vessel; the world, including other people, are unknowable stimuli, sources of irradiation of the nervous system — is not one of neuroscience's findings. It is rather something that has been taken for granted by neuroscience from the start: Descartes's conception with a materialist makeover.
One of the comments linked to an interesting video clip of work being done to reconstruct what is being "seen" by analysing neural activity.