2015 — 22 November: Sunday
So, where were you 52 years ago today?1 I had been parked with neighbours for the month or so needed to see out my Autumn term at Cheadle Hulme school before moving into the new house down in Harpenden and starting school afresh at a new grammar that had then just opened for business in St. Albans. Not the long-established, chaps-only, fee-paying one (thank goodness). I remained "under age", as it were, and even got to resume Latin, which was only offered to a small subset of the pupils. By then, I'd already had it for four terms, which gave me some advantage over my peers.
Can't say I regarded school days as the happiest of my life. They weren't. But now consider the tale of largely self-inflicted woe here. Source and snippet:
Their respective careers — in management consultancy and personal injury law — give them a joint income of £190,000. The couple also own two properties with a combined value of more than £1m, putting them2 in
the wealthiest 1pc of households in Britain.
But the pair are worried about becoming "financially broken" as the sheer cost of middle-class life in London means they are stretched to the brink. They spend everything they earn — and more.
I've long thought the rich are different from me. But the idea of finding £600,000 in education fees for two kids is so far beyond ludicrous as to be, well, silly.
For reasons...
... that remain unclear, Tony Richardson's last film — a tangled tale of nuclear testing cover-ups in Nevada — was only released three years after he'd died. I had no sooner read the email telling me that it was "out for delivery" than there was a knock on my door:
I suspect...
... this is truth posing as satire:
Databases...
... are all very well, and certainly have their uses. But I bet the salesman never goes into much detail about the tedious business of getting clean, normalised, data into the things in the first place. Or the second.
I am therefore finding lots of other things to do in between my intermittent bouts — I hesitate to call them "bursts" — of data entry.
The task is rendered less tedious at times when you realise (for random example) that rather than simply plugging "I do" into the title field and wading through rather too many returned "hits", it's much quicker to go whizzing off to IMDB, search for Charlotte Gainsbourg (who looks amazingly like her Mum these days) scan down the list of her films back to the 2006 "Prête-moi ta main" (the original title) and try entering that into the latest variant of Brian's magic program instead.
Et Voila! as they say across the Channel. Just one hit, and it's the right one, too. Ever onward.
I like watching...
... films and TV shows on my 60" Kuro plasma. What I really don't like is sitting down at a fixed time, watching stuff "live". Len says there are now over 20 minutes of ads per "hour" on commercial channels. Shades of "The Jagged Orbit". Still, I admit I sat through last night's double dose of "The Bridge" Season #3, watching it "live" in 1080i via BBC Four's hi-def channel. Bite me.
Those two episodes are trapped3 on the Humax, so I downloaded them in 720p versions with get_iplayer to get two files I can play easily on the PC (or the Kuro). Tonight's BBC 4 programme about 40 years of "Arena" programmes sounds OK, though it can scarcely do more than whet the appetite at that sort of "time compression". I may yet download it tomorrow to see if it merits watching more than once. It probably won't — I have a DVD I burned from a VHS recording of a BBC programme skimming through 21 years of Arts TV programmes.
Although I managed...
... to note this arrival at the time...
... it somehow eluded my infallible full artwork-scanning system until about five minutes ago. At the (conservative) rate of one opportunity per day, I've therefore missed 1,194 chances of putting that right. Perhaps there's a bug in my system?