2015 — 25 September: Friday
I am prepared to declare my glass tea cup trial a success. A simple bit of swilling under the cold tap and the lightest of touches from my plastic scouring pad1 and it looks like new. If only that same treatment worked for me. Meanwhile, in another minor-league triumph of mind over matter it seems I have no need to dash out on a supplies run before the hordes this morning. Excellent.
This chap Maisky...
... is new to me. But Prof Green makes his diaries sound potentially fascinating. Source and snippet:
He was appointed Soviet Ambassador to London in 1932, remaining there for 11 years. During that time, he set about systematically courting and manipulating anyone who mattered in Britain to Russian advantage. That involved cultivating around 500 of the most influential men and women of the time, beginning with the Foreign Office, then working his way through Parliament and the press. His method, beautifully set out in a nine-page "lecture" to Fedor Gusev, one of Molotov's moronic yes men, is admirably summarised in this book. It repays the most careful scrutiny...
I noted this chap...
... back in May, being somewhat amused by the idea of a happiness industry. But reading this latest review doesn't suggest the book will increase my own happiness index one iota (if that's even the correct unit). Source and snippet:
Davies is not a polemicist. He is an academic and a polymath par excellence... This explains both the mastery of The Happiness Industry and the author's tendency to fight shy of confronting the horror of his subject head on. Hints at the dystopic run through the book, dished out in parcels of grisly humour and flashes of electric-chair clarity. This is a world where the capitalist imperative to ensure compliant and productive subjects brings our interior life, what makes us human, under an ever-tightening grip. It's a world where friendships are pursued for the chemical kick and "the only escape from a manager who wants to become your friend is to become physically ill".
I admit I had one or two IBM (and ICL) managers like that. I became friends with several of them.
[Pause, for an early "lemonses" banana. Yum.]
When I like...
... a book sufficiently, I've been known to buy an annotated edition of it. Even more than one, in the case of Martin Gardner's2 "Annotated Alice". My most recent example was The Phantom Tollbooth, which caught the eye of niece #1 last Saturday. Mind you, the work involved in producing a half-way decent set of annotations hardly bears thinking about. So this piece, majoring as it does on Gardner, rang a whole series of pleasantly melodic bells for me. Source and snippet:
It is part of the philosophic dullness of our time that there are millions of rational monsters walking about on their hind legs, observing the world through pairs of flexible little lenses, periodically supplying themselves with energy by pushing organic substances through holes in their faces, who see nothing fabulous whatever about themselves. Occasionally the noses of these creatures are shaken by momentary paroxysms.
But I confess I was completely unaware of Genius.com :-)
There's an exchange...
... in the comments attached to this superb cartoon between a programmer ("DieSubversiv") who was criticising the claim in the cartoon (that the software was clever, having [apparently] failed to grasp that the cartoon was satirical) and, erm, his or her detractors. It cracked me up.
Following yesterday afternoon's...
... interesting chat about dark matter I've been reading around the topic. Oh for those simple days when the only meaning I knew for WIMP was windows, icon, mouse and pointer. And who knew I was strictly baryonic?
[Long pause.]
I never realised just how addictive the process of dusting, moving stuff around, and "re-purposing" both a high-level shelf and the neglected space underneath the bench seating in the dining room could be, until I got going. I needed something to occupy me while BlackBeast was also shifting around (from hither to yon) a huge number of bits. I've also refitted the little PCi expansion card that adds two eSATA ports to the motherboard.
Judging by the pangs of hunger I'm guessing it must be approaching "tea time". It's actually 18:31 and counting. The BBC Radio 3 examination "Why music?" has been fascinating, as an accompaniment.