2015 — 9 November: Monday
As I was munching my inelegantly-prepared and messily-served, but tasty, evening treat1 yesterday — shredded duck with pancakes and Hoisin sauce — it suddenly struck me that it was now a decade or so too late to ask my favourite aunt why she so often exclaimed: "Lord, love a duck!"
Again, what would Freud say? :-)
My HTML tables...
... are in much better shape, with only the most minor perturbation of my CSS file,2 so I'm now returning my beady eye to the vexatious (some might say "parlous") state of some of the simple-minded data I wish to import into Kodi before I declare victory (or get bored) and move on. Again, the end is in sight. Again, there will be little or no visible evidence to show for it.
I've yet to reach...
... any decision about yesterday evening's equally tasty little PC as (for one thing) it isn't cheap, and (for another) BlackBeast Mk III is already silent, nearly as fast, and behaving itself. Give it time.
I can't say...
... that the "Grauniad" pieces I've read, so far, including radon levels in UK houses hereabouts, care-home costs, palliative care, euthanasia, smart meters, have done much for my appetite for breakfast. So, having first gently ushered a whopping great basking bumblebee back out into the garden I've closed the patio door, popped the kettle on, and kicked back with a piece about the last book due from the now-late Robert Hughes. Much more to my liking. Source and snippet:
And then, like the heavy judgment of God on the sinner, the bill came. It was a double blow, firstly because the sum was immense — somewhere near the G.N.P. of a small central European republic — and secondly because Laurent turned out not to accept the only kind of credit card I had. With Lourdes's exploratory fingers by now on my thigh, I shut my eyes, directed my inner gaze across the room, opened them again — and was suddenly flooded with relief. There, on the other side of the restaurant, was the hen-shaped form of my mentor and friend, the man who had taken me out of Europe in the first place, the managing editor of Time, Henry Anatole Grunwald. And although I very much liked his wife, Beverly, I was even more relieved to see that he was not dining with her. He was sitting with a woman less than half his age, another and equally gorgeous Lourdes or Mercedes (or possibly Heidi or Marie-Josée), who was clearly engrossed in their conversation, as indeed any girl might be. Dear Henry, sheepish to find me across the restaurant, paid for the feast and never mentioned a word.
Those were clearly the days.
As was 1984...
... judging by the El Reg story here. I actually took a peek at the original legislation, too. Joseph Heller's Catch-22 comes to mind: "Where are the Snowdens of yesteryear?"
If I knew...
... more history, or had even stayed awake in the tedious lessons, I might now know whether this is, erm, an over-simplification:
But before we reached Shakespeare, we had to get through the Dark Ages — when, no doubt, people communicated well enough in grunts, snarls, and the clanging of axes,3 but nobody was paying too much attention to Aristotle's theories of metaphor. Fortunately, the Islamic world had its eye on the ball, and most of the classical texts we have now were preserved in Arabic translation. The early-medieval Renaissance saw them translated back out of Arabic and returned to the West.
Let's hope there weren't too many instances of phrases such as "Out of sight, out of mind" turning into "Invisible idiot" with this two-way linguistic manoeuvering. After all...
The from the German into the English language translation by no means a so easy a task as it appears to be is. It is ever important for the translator on the one hand to preserve as far as possible the delicate shades of meaning of the author's thought, the height-depth and light-darkness of his not only never-decreasing but also ever-increasing ego-personality, and on the other hand to render him into recognisable English while at the same time retaining the characteristic rhythm of the wonderfully variable if perhaps rather sometimes often somewhat over-flexible Germanic idiom.
(From "Translation. 'Le Style c'est l'homme'".) I once typeset this for Christa, who had worked on rather more patent translations than I've had hot dinners. A point I can ponder over the re-heated remnants of my tasty Tagine.
Lost Sheep(ish)
One human gestation period ago I ordered (from Italy via Switzerland, if I recall) this promising DVD. Today is its début appearance on a 'molehole' web page. Why's that, do you reckon?
Well, it eventually showed up when my PC was busy wrapping its positronic brain around a new Linux-shaped bag of bits. I'd temporarily lost all scanning capability. And dear Mama had just catapulted me into the Probate Process Phantom Zone. I wonder what else managed to fall through the cracks?
A billion here...
... a billion there. Pretty soon, you're talking real money. The rich continue to be very different from me!
The lady atop IBM has just authorised another $4 billion for share re-purchases, too. Amazing. I waited over a decade for my few IBM shares to recoup their "lost value". And this was after being given a discount of 20% and one matching share for each one I bought. When they crawled back up to "parity" in mid-1998, I unloaded them, swore off ever being a shareholder again, refreshed my entire hi-fi system with Christa's blessing, and enjoyed that a great deal more every day thereafter. Bite me.