2015 — 14 October: Wednesday
Happy birthday to me yet a-bloody-gain. Perhaps it's time for me to burn the implements of my craft and begin life anew1 as a trainer of performing elephants? Not before another cuppa to warm the cockles. It's 19.4C in the living room. I trust it will warm up a bit in time for my planned afternoon perambulation.
I mentioned...
... some shopping yesterday. It began with a book — "Promised you a miracle; UK 80 - 82" — by Andy Beckett and a CD — "Kremerland" featuring the Kremerata Baltica — to try out a bit of that Georgs Pelecis chap's music (among other Baltic composers equally unknown to me) from Amazon. That was even before I set foot out the door, and will take a few days to get here. Meanwhile, being a chap who sees no merit whatsoever in deferred gratification, there was another book that I actually succumbed to in a moment of weakness in WH Smug after paying in a VAT-refund cheque for Big Bro's stamps fund.
As I'm clearly in the twilight of my years, I decided this...
... would make a good, pre-birthday treat. (It did, though I very much doubt many "TwiHards" will like it.) It's a moderately interesting twist, but personally I would still much prefer Ms Meyer to just get on and finish her "Midnight Sun" variant :-)
My admiration...
... for the classy way William Giraldi expresses his opinions is steadily growing. Though I am still not yet inspired to tackle Milton's "Paradise Lost". And still have only the one title by Stanley Fish. Bite me.
To read Fish in Surprised by Sin and How Milton Works (2001) is to commune with a scholar in supreme control of the literature and his own attitudes toward it, a scholar thrillingly authoritative, wholly convinced, giddy with aptitude. This is heaven-sent talent, regardless of whether or not you're partial to his assessments: You can't hit the ball like Serena, and you can't read Milton like Fish...
How sweet is this?
I've just accepted an Adobe flash plugin-in update even though I keep said plug-in strictly in "ask to activate" mode. Then I see that the El Reg piece on today's patch of smelly updates to a rather more widely-used desktop OS signs off with:
PS: Don't forget to check to see if your Microsoft Windows patches include KB3035583, KB3083710 and possibly others, which will try to get you to install Windows 10 by stealth.
Windows 10. So good, we're now going to sneak it on to your system whether you like it or not. Jumping off that particular train wreck was a Good Thing, methinks.
The checklist...
... I mentioned a few days ago has finally turned up:
It may not be quite as beautifully typeset, printed, and bound as an earlier example of this fairly rare genre on my shelves...
... but that particular outfit set the bar very high :-)
I re-applied myself...
... to a box-file full of yellowing clippings from the "New Statesman" magazine. Colin Ward's excellent "Fringe Benefits" column dealt, one week, with "Moving on". It rang particularly true:
The man who remarked reflectively to Arthur Koestler, "Maybe I've been licking the wrong boots all these years" touched an important difference between our parents' or grandparents' generations and the contemporary world. They
stayed put. We moved on. It certainly applied to male jobs. The boy who was apprenticed at 14, or became an office boy in the bank or the town hall, retired 50 years later with a gold watch or a chiming clock.
One in a thousand
of them ever became managing director, branch manager or town clerk, something inconceivable nowadays, as a wholly different set of people enter as graduates and escalate through jobs. And if there are any long-term survivors in
the lower ranks, we regard them not with admiration for their long and faithful service, but as examples of the Peter Principle...
I recall speculating, in the job application I made to IBM in 1981, that there were probably more Mounce-shaped niches within IBM than within ICL.2 Certainly, the ones I managed to find kept me busy and largely unbored for just over 25 years.