2015 — 24 November: Tuesday
Damp, rather than frosty, this morning1 and I've remembered to put out the glass crate in time. Its little cache of marmalade jars is considerably boosted by a single champagne bottle this month! Junior and his g/f are responsible for that. I merely got to wash the flutes.
This Ubuntu...
... PC-on-a-stick looks quite impressive, though they could definitely use an editor and/or poofredder for their web page. But what need have I for a Smart TV? I'm not a Smart viewer. (Link.)
Trump is...
... as Trump does. I don't have much time for psychoanalysis, but this hit the mark. And not just because I've had a block print of Dali's "Metamorphosis of Narcissus" on my wall for the last 43 years:
"The political rise of Donald J. Trump has drawn attention to one personality trait in particular: narcissism. Although narcissism does not lend itself to a precise definition, most psychologists agree that it comprises self-centeredness, boastfulness, feelings of entitlement and a need for admiration."
He's actually quoting from a NY Times story, but I tend not to go there as every visit provokes a salvo of email invitations to take up my "last chance" of a "bargain subscription". Their paywall has become very tiresome. By contrast, the Baffler offers their "entirely unobtrusive newsletter, chock full of cheerful negativity". He goes on to this lovely phrase: "The unending flood of commercial messaging, utterly empty of information or art, resembles the miasma of toxic particulates that infect the air of even the most developed countries..."
I wish someone would drown out Mr Trump... (Link.) It reminds me of the time Tom King managed to open his mouth and put his foot in it. As reported in "New Statesman" in the mid-1990s:
It's no illusion: Tom King really is as stupid as he looks. Remember how the appeal court quashed the convictions of the Winchester Three because King had sounded off about the IRA and the right to silence in the middle
of their trial? On Tuesday morning he was at it again. Asked about his reaction to the capture of four alleged IRA members in the Netherlands, he expressed satisfaction that the perpetrators of the Dortmund bombing had been
brought to justice, just as he had predicted.
Let's take it again slowly: trial first, verdict afterwards.
Personal note: Tom King was, briefly, chairman of my late father's company when it imploded...
Oh my gosh
I was reading a not-that-ancient report on cyber threats and found this telling sentence rather buried on page 73:
The Department would ultimately like to know "who" is in its systems, how they got in, and how long it took [the Department] to get them out and restore the systems to full operation.
The identity of that "Department"? Follow the link! (Link.)
Ouch!
Hafta agree, though:
It has to be said that Trafalgar Square is an odd choice of venue to show solidarity with France; presumably Waterloo was too busy.
An unanticipated benefit...
... of my current efforts in properly preparing data about my videos before feeding Kodi "for real" is that, already, my 'Recoll' program — which is happy to index whatever it sees in my /home folder — has digested all the "media stubs". This makes finding the CaseLogical location of a DVD dead easy. (If, that is, I can recall the title.) Typing "manufacturing consent" fetched this as the first "hit":
Think of all the milliseconds I shall save :-)
Show and Tell
I won't bother to show the socks I bought, but rewarding myself for buying the things (I hate shopping for clothes) I managed to scoop up a particularly interesting quartet of books. And I cheekily wangled a minor-league discount ...
... when I confessed I'd looked long and hard but been unable to find a second book to go with their "Buy one, get one half-price" which, of course, only applied to books with a special sticker defacing them.
Guess the source :-)
And the best thing to do is to relax and enjoy this: the tiny-ness2 of us, and the enormity of the rest of the universe. Of course, if you're feeling depressed by that, you can always look at it the other way and think of how big you are compared to the atoms and the parts of atoms, and then you're an enormous universe to those atoms, and then you can sort of stand in the middle and enjoy everything in both ways.
Which is, of course, exactly the point of that wonderful film and book "Powers of ten".
But what appalling kerning!