2015 — 5 November: Thursday
Today's adventure? A lunch out somewhere.
Big Bro safely received...
... another 22 fragments of Mounce family photographic history1 from me, mostly scanned from 35mm slides some years ago now. Many have appeared on 'molehole' over the last nine years, though not in quite such high-res form.
Further evidence...
... (not that any is really needed) of humanity's basic unsuitability as steward of Planet Earth. It will be a truly cosmic joke, surely, if we succeed in rendering the only planet we have ready access to incapable of supporting our own species? Let the ants try! (Link.)
Breakfast?
Paul Ford's piece...
... in "New Republic" was indirectly responsible for my taking a little morning excursion off into the wilds of YouTube on my Tablet PC. I must admit it's faintly worrying that Android already seems to know enough about me to feel confident in recommending...
... a three-year-old short film made by Michael Kurcfeld for the "Los Angeles Review of Books"... and featuring Robert Crumb. How well they know me!
Almost as well as Theresa May's gang will, in due course. No matter what political stripe the UK Home Secretary has, the UK citizen subject is always assumed to be up to no good, and to need keeping an eye on. But Quis custodes custodiet?
Lunch...
... was grand, but the weather is uniformly foul, wet and dismally grey. Could it be November?
No sun - no moon! No morn - no noon - No dawn - no dusk - no proper time of day. No warmth, no cheerfulness, no healthful ease, No comfortable feel in any member - No shade, no shine, no butterflies, no bees, No fruits, no flowers, no leaves, no birds! - November!
Thank you, Thomas Hood :-)
Meanwhile, a fresh cuppa may yet help me batter Kodi into some form of submission.
The wonderful "Saga"...
... is returning at the end of November. There's an 8-minute interview with Sofia Helin here. And I now have the latest BBC Media Player App on my Android Tablet PC. It works well.
After listening to...
... an interview with Brian Cox four years ago, I made rather cavalier reference ("As Schrödinger apparently suggested in an essay in 1943 or so") to the science chap with the infamously dead (or was it alive?) pussy cat. Two months ago, of course, I bought the slim (but wonderful) book that contains precisely this 90-page essay ("What is Life?") from his Trinity College lectures in Dublin:
I like to think I get there in the end, as it were.
Perception and Reality
So far, my simple-minded dalliance with Kodi has taught me the difference between my perception (of my Videos database) and the reality of it:
- Perception: a Thing of Finished Beauty likely to trigger attacks of Stendhal Syndrome
- Reality: a Thing of Unfinished and almost Unspeakable Horror, littered with data glitches and the sort of inconsistencies that could well drive a nit-picking pedant quite wild (and not in a good way)
Nor did I get very far with my attempts to knock a couple of errant film entries on the head by accessing the SQLite DB2 buried deep within Kodi. But how Kodi behaves when fed with my occasionally indigestible data is a lot less important to me than its nascent ability to generate a simple 'molehole'-compliant SHTML web page list of all my video titles. The first attempt to do that has gone remarkably well, no thanks to me, all thanks to Brian's Python.
Let's face it: I may just be better-suited to Life as a Trainer of Performing Elephants. I need a hot cuppa and a complete change of activity for a while.