2015 — 16 November: Monday

I've been listening to the boy Dave1 interviewed in the wake of Friday night's attacks in Paris. Throwing extra money at the "intelligence community" sounds to me like a Band Aid in the face of a need for more radical surgery. Not that radicalism isn't at the heart of the issue. Although the West's problems are to an extent of their own creation initially, that makes them no less intractable. Perhaps I won't renew my passport after all.

In the more congenial world...

... of a fantasy past, "Votan" has got off to a good start, though after my Linux tinkerings (including updating the application checklist I first threw together in a mad panic [incoherent spluttering rage, more like] last February) I began the book too late last night to get very far before my eyelids slammed together.

:-)

I have my cuppa...

... but there remains the need to agitate a couple of plums thermally for my cereal topping — the rest of yesterday's Bramley having already been sacrificed as part of a delicious icecream and Kahlua late treat. Assuming the UK is not yet on a wartime food rationing kick, I shall also be doing some Motherly Hubbard cupboard re-filling at some point soon.

Prosocial skills

I wonder if anyone has thought of dropping ukuleles instead of bombs? (Link.)

Junior forgot, and...

... has just asked me to post to his work address, the jacket I found hanging in the hall after they left yesterday morning. I already need to buy a postage "box" for Big Bro's pair of books so it's no "biggie". But I did ask them "Are you sure you've got everything?" dagnabbit. Kids. What can I say?

A beginning...

... a muddle, and an end? Source and snippet:

Vonnegut's (rejected) masters thesis in anthropology at the University of Chicago in 1947 theorised that all literary narratives can be represented as a graph of the hero's fortunes against time on a happy-sad axis. So there's the Boy-Meets-Girl arc (up-down-up: Jane Eyre), the From-Bad-To-Worse plot (down and down: Metamorphosis), and so on. This, Vonnegut claimed with characteristic deadpan, reveals the New Testament to have basically the same arc as Cinderella.

Philip Ball in Aeon


Silver linings

Returning to the Post Office with two parcels — £32-38 split between brother and son — took me past Waitrose, so I picked up a variant form of chocolate:

Dark choc with chilli

That's one of my "five-a-day" sorted. And Hoagy Carmichael is 'Composer of the Week'. Cool.

Peter's g/f looked mildly...

... askance when she realised one of the uses — "scrapbooking" — I've put my dining room to. She'd seen the extent to which I'd undone her efforts by recolonising2 the vacated space (Nature abhors a vacuum, remember)...

dining room table

... and asked me what was the story behind the open box-file of clippings on the dining table itself? Hearing they came from "New Statesman" magazines in 1990 or thereabouts, she asked "Surely there's nothing still of any use in them?" Random example:

But Sir Geoffrey [Howe] was not this year's biggest MP-as-televisual-hero. He may have fanned a crisis, but Chris Mullin, immortalised by John Hurt in Who Bombed Birmingham?, took centre stage in a drama made out of a crisis. Whether Mullin's efforts will make him a real-life hero remains to be seen.

Date: 21 and 28 December 1990


Deborah Orr's "remains to be seen" is perhaps best answered by reading the three superb volumes of political diaries Mullin went on to write:

Chris Mullin diaries

Notice how awfully long it took for Granada's "World in Action" TV drama-documentary to get a DVD release.

Zeno's just sent me a link to Vonnegut himself filmed expounding on "the shapes of stories". Well worth five minutes.

Well, I never knew (it did) that!

I often capture screenshots, usually of a single window, or most often of a portion of it. Often to stick into an email. The Mint screenshot dumps these captures onto my Desktop as .PNG files. As an act of kindness, typically, I load them into the GIMP, possibly scale them, and then re-export them as GIFs or JPGs to save space before finally attaching them to my email, and sending it.

Now I like to tidy up my digital life as I go along (as it were) rather more assiduously than I do my Real Life. So, if I've finished with a file, I tend to delete it. On the spot. It's a habit.

So, a few minutes ago, I'm drafting an email with two screen captures to go in it. Having "processed" the first of these and attached it to the email, I delete both the original capture and the GIF I'd created from it (since I naïvely assumed as it was now attached to the email I could do that safely, right?) Wrong. And moved on to process and attach the second capture. Clicked on "Send". FAIL. Turns out, the email sending failed because it could no longer find the 'temporary' file in its 'temporary location' because, guess which idiot had deleted the thing a little too soon? That'll lern me.

  

Footnotes

1  And — behind the customary rhetoric — hearing the distant sound of war drums banging. Though without the sound of a dying trumpet (actually, it's a "sad trombone", says Peter) as an audio alert.
2  Since I don't host dinner parties, and since what was Peter's room is itself colonised by boxes of mostly her books, I feel no remorse.