2015 — 10 September: Thursday

Big Bro's email confirms we share our opinion of the tendency of many lawyers1 to act in ways that maximise their income stream. That's an issue I shall leave until next week's appointment. I have more pleasant matters to attend to first, including today's lunch date, and a weekend visit (though the weekend has yet to be fixed) by niece #1. She should have landed in London yesterday. I'm hoping she can be persuaded to save me a spot of postage by taking back with her the (excellent) biography of Geoffrey de Havilland that the old sibling requested as an Xmas present. Now that the promised replacement bush hat has arrived I need to keep my side of the bargain...

It's a lovely...

... sunny morning, but feels distinctly autumnal with my patio's sliding door as wide open as it will, erm, slide. I've tweaked the thermostat down to 17C while I enjoy the welcome influx of fresh air. BBC Radio 3 has just suggested I take up beer and tobacco to lure a particular kind of moth for the next three nights for census-taking purposes. Yesterday I actually brought downstairs a recently-rediscovered pair of Minolta binoculars as I wanted to take a closer look at a white-winged butterfly attending to the late blooms on one of the back jungle budleias. The chap had one dark black spot on the upper surface of each wing, and his wings were quite sharply outlined in the style of a Hergé cartoon with a dark line.

I'm just a wide-eyed innocent

Somewhere in Technology Towers (update: I've just found them) is an expensive pair of Canon binoculars with electronic image stabilisation. However, the eyepieces don't actually adjust as far apart as the spacing of my eyes2 so they are, to use a technical term, bugger all use to me. Binoculars that stop me using both eyes at once? Gimme a break! The physically smaller Minolta — a compact 10x25 — doesn't have the fancy electronic stabiliser, but crucially does adjust wide enough, which is ideal for my built-in ocular apparatus and the elderly visual cortex that seems able to process the incoming photons into some form of reality.

Video cull

The total stands at 361 titles leaving the building (freeing up nearly two complete CaseLogic folders of physical disks). [Pause for lunch and a chat.] Right. What's next?

Well, here's a question: do I ever wish to watch all eight seasons of "House M.D." again? I'm currently thinking: "Probably not." That would be another 40 disks.

Christa loved the show...

... even when she was desperately ill. But my opinion of it went down as her health steadily deteriorated! Though I see I made an accurate prediction:

With Christa's pending surgery I find myself unconvinced that the Hugh Laurie vehicle "House" is fully appropriate viewing, let alone something that will help me sleep any better. There was a time when I used to devour medical books (not to mention all those fascinating Reader's Digest articles [usually] by JD Ratcliff with titles like "I am John's knee" — or worse) but, just lately, I've been made too well aware of the things that can go wrong with what her surgeon described (perfectly seriously) as "the dustbin with a hosepipe casually tangled up in it".
Perhaps I'll change my mind if the sun ever re-appears.

Date: 11 May 2007


She only ever saw the first two seasons. Since her death I've been buying — and mostly very much enjoying — all the others, as the sun did, indeed, slowly start to shine again. I liked the theme tune by Massive Attack, too.

  

Footnotes

1  Not including my cousin, I'm happy to confirm. He suggests "In their final year they all do a short course on "gold mining". Parasites."
2  I had exactly the same problem with a Pentax 3D stereo adapter I bought for my ME Super SLR in the 1980s. The viewer supplied with this adapter for splitting the image from slides into left/right pairs had a fixed separation. I insisted the camera shop let me try the adapter before buying it. The demonstrable fact that I couldn't look through both eyepieces at the same time — and thus had no chance of enjoying any 3D images — got me out of paying for the device they had ordered in for me (but clearly had no understanding of). I seem to get that a lot for some reason.