2015 — 7 November: Saturday
An energetic version of Witold Lutoslawski's "Variations on a theme of Paganini for two pianos" has just kept me happily glued1 to BBC Radio 3 for a couple of rainy morning minutes while I sup the first cup.
I've survived...
... my first North African (Moroccan) lamb Tagine. It was amazingly tasty, actually, if a little more highly-spiced than is my normal preference setting. I have an estimated two further doses chilling out in my fridge :-)
In between bursts of further reminiscence — the faintly disagreeable tale of my first IBM book and its perceived problem with "readability" — I also polished off and enjoyed (very much) yesterday's excellent biography of Dornford Yates (aka Cecil Mercer). I had somehow managed to go for well over 35 years2 without even realising that he and "Saki" (another fantastic writer) were first cousins.
And still it rains.
Since my move...
... to Linux, I really seem to be missing out on so much Good Stuff :-)
You (well, I) have to smile while listening to some of the soundtrack music from Sylvain Chomet's "Belleville Rendez-vous"...
The week off (which was delightful) left me with the clear impression that retirement can barely come soon enough to suit us both, life being far more usefully employed to some purpose other than employment. Yes, we got to the Tate Modern (though it was largely bereft of anything worth seeing, beyond one large Epstein piece, as they were upheaving most of their galleries) and yes, we managed to rendezvous with Belleville, though we did rather wonder on the way home why, at times, we'd been the only members of the audience laughing out loud at several points.
... chosen by Jocelyn Pook, who sounds a very interesting woman indeed.
On a whim...
... as I was walking past what had been my newsagent for 25 years or so (on my way back from posting an order for two more copies of the Geoffrey de Havilland biography for Big Bro to give away) I decided to treat myself to a copy of "Radio Times". It's faintly shocking to see it now costs £2-20 which, were I to buy a copy there every week for a year, is a substantial fraction of the BBC's annual TV licence fee. I've been assured I will find a discount voucher in it for a trial subscription. My informant had better be right.
He was, but I'll not be using it.
I got so fed up...
... with being unable to lay my hands on the copy of "Best of Pogo" that I know damn' well Carol sent me in February 1990...
... let alone seeing (oops) so much as a trace of it in my Books DB, dagnabbit, that I've just caved in and ordered a secondhand replacement copy. It's all Brian Matthew's fault, of course.
BofAML? Really?
Creative Disruption. Oh well, here's something to look forward to with great eagerness:
Oncologist and bioethicist Ezekiel Emanuel argues that life after 75 becomes a slow and arduous decline, where creativity is stunted, productivity collapses and one is an increasing burden on one's progeny. "The age-creativity curve (Chart 19), especially the decline, endures across cultures and throughout history, suggesting some deep underlying biological determinism probably related to brain plasticity."
You think? Or, maybe, eventually you don't think?! (See page 16.)
Purrfect
Still hungry?
I've been spending some time tidying (or do I mean fixing glitches in?) a venerable bunch of my HTML tables. Somehow, it's become 23:12. I hate HTML tables. Mine, or anyone else's. (Dating back, I think, to the Dark Times in IBM when my external Java web pages were all "formatted" in deeply-nested table structures instead of using CSS.)