2015 — 20 September: Sunday
Inspired by my recent success — he declaimed loftily — in culling 12% or so (a mere 691 physical disks) from my video collection I turned a jaundiced eye last night on a bookshelf or two. The result is currently scowling at me on my dining table:
It's a (very minor league) start! After all, with Windows now completely expunged from my world, who needs books about it? I also struck from the record almost the entirety of my Kindle set of Austen fan fic. I refuse to ask "What was I thinking?" as I enjoyed1 some of them at the time. But they're not "keepers", no matter how little physical room they take up.
I'm pretty sure...
... these are all rhetorical questions. Though it can be hard to tell sometimes:
Anyway, how much of what Corbyn argues do most voters disagree with, if they stop to think?
Do people approve of bewildering, high tariffs set by the cartel of energy companies, while thousands of elderly people die each winter of cold-related diseases?
Do students and parents from middle- and low-income families want tuition fees?
Do people like paying ludicrous fares for signal-failure, delays and overcrowding on inept railways?
Do people urge tax evasion by multinationals and billionaires, which they then subsidise with cuts to the NHS?
Post-cold war, who exactly are we supposed to kill en masse with these expensive nuclear missiles?
What's so good about the things Corbyn wants to drastically change?
As Sir Humphrey once had to explain to Jim Hacker (in the context of polling for opinions) it's how you pose the question that ultimately determines the answer you get.
Gambling on the probability...
... that "they" had only closed my nearest branch of "Homebase" out of sheer cussedness, I took myself off to Hedge End and successfully equipped myself with another 10kg sack of salt for my water softener. The branch of Currys / PCWorld down there has also finished refurbishing itself, so I'm now using a Sandstrøm Bluetooth / 2.4GHz wireless (dual mode) mouse2 which "simply worked" when I plugged in its little USB dongle and switched the mousy bit "on". I think Bluetooth is the non-default setting, but it seems content with its wireless state.
I also got a chance to feel the 'heft' of one of the Bodum Bistro glass mugs because Currys sell them with cheap'n'nasty plastic tea infusers for only double what I paid for just the mug. Nice.
It is, of course...
... quite impossible to cull Christa's copy of "Harvey" (aka Sir Paul Harvey's "The Oxford Companion to English Literature") which she bought in Würzburg in October 1969 and refused to be parted from thereafter. Nor my 1972 book "What everyone knew about sex" (by William M Dwyer) — a truly horrendous forensic examination of "advice" from a variety of pig-ignorant Victorian moralists — despite the fact that my copy has its contents bound upside down3 with respect to the printed cover. Typical example:
How frequently should a husband and wife exercise their marital rights?
My answer is that it depends on the health and desires of the partners, once a month being sufficient for some, once a week or more being required by others. The celebrated Dr. Acton of London agrees, at least in
part. He declares that for a hardworked intellectual married man living in London, sexual congress had better not take place more frequently than once in seven or ten days.
In order to save...
... the book, it was necessary to destroy the book. I moved a piano stool — and the row of eight CaseLogic folders, each stuffed to the brim with CDs, that live underneath it — out of the way to remind myself of the range of larger-format books I have largely forgotten about because they're tucked away, at carpet level, against the living room wall but behind the stool and the folders. I found (oh, the horror!) that an arachnid, or worse, has been nibbling away at the tasty slipcase of one of the books, doing the same sort of damage you can see here on another, earlier, victim of this unwelcome rapacity:
Paolo Roversi's 1999 book of photos ("Nudi") has been nibbled. So I got out my trusty scalpel, loaded a fresh blade into it, and spent two hours carefully slicing out the pages (none was damaged) to pop them in a spider-proof plastic folder. I've done the same thing with Robert Crumb artwork, so I know it works well. Of course, I've ruined the book's secondhand4 value — but then I'm still not yet a secondhand book-dealer, am I?
Tonight's "Drama on 3" is shaping up nicely. I assume this is the same Mike Walker who wrote "Alpha" a few years ago. And the new mouse behaves itself rather better now that I've plugged its wireless dongle into an extension USB lead that means it can now sit on my desk in easy line of sight of the moving rodent.