2015 — 26 November: Thursday

A sunny, if somewhat moist, start to my Next Day on Earth. Lunch out somewhere nice, too. (Though not before breakfast.)

Yesterday's...

... film running time discrepancy is, I suspect, down to the disconnect that is all too common (and obvious) between those who supply marketing artwork for cover sleeves and those who have more than a faint idea of how the technology works. Either way, the film was an excellent full HD 1080p/24 transfer across to Blu-ray. Now they just need to work on the mismatch between onscreen dialogue and subtitles.1 Anne Bancroft's main reason for accepting her rôle was largely excised, but lives on among the "deleted scenes" extras as Norton struggled to cut 50 minutes out of the initial running time, too.

Trivia note: for the last 15 years I've mis-identified "Stiller" as "Affleck" in my video DB notes. Oh, the shame. For some reason I confuse the two.

I pay little heed...

... to religion, of any stripe, so am unqualified to do more than smile in bafflement at this piece and some of the comments it's attracted:

...schools are now under orders "to take action against staff who demonstrate unacceptable views ... and to target non-violent extremism as well as violent extremism". Meanwhile, next door, little Christians are singing, "Onward Christian soldiers, marching as to war ... like a mighty army ... where the saints have trod". This may now be more metaphorical than when composed, but in the face of behaviour allegedly motivated by Qur'anic myth, the temptation for fear-fuelled Christians is to slide in religious responses rather than socio-criminal ones.

Simon Jenkins in Grauniad


Apparently...

... (and I'm no expert, to be clear!) this is the one home truth that cooks really need to hear:

You don't say?

It was (I was informed a while back) Kissinger who said "academic politics is so vicious precisely because the stakes are so small". Now Joseph Epstein is expanding that thesis a little:

the reason writers are so disputatious with other 
writers is that they cannot abide rivals

He quotes Evelyn Waugh as justification, too. (Link.)

Having reached...

... the "69% read" point of a Kindle Daily Deal I actually bought in August 2013 — but neglected to identify at the time — let's put that right after a delicious snippet from it:

But since we find it hard to recall the past, are fuzzy on the present and know nothing of the future, "on most subjects most men take opinion as counsellor to their soul, but since opinion is slippery and insecure it casts those employing it into slippery and insecure successes".

Date: long, long ago!


It's a translation from a piece by Gorgias on epideictic rhetoric ("the third branch of oratory"). And appears in:

Sam Leith on Rhetoric

Which currently nestles inside my Android SHIELD Tablet PC as I've made no attempt to install the Kindle reader software on BlackBeast Mk III (what with it being a Linux beast).

[Pause for lunch, chat, and errands.]

It's becoming...

... ever clearer to me that there's a lot more to Kodi. For example, it potentially offers exactly what I need to bring some very-long-overdue order to at least some portions of the chaos that is my sprawling digital music collection. All by first pointing Kodi at said collection (done) and then working out some questions for its SQLite DB. With luck, spinning off the answers into an automagically generated 'molehole' web page.

I was last experimenting with this in the bad old days of my Windows systems, running the godawful Windows variant of iTunes and WinAmp, each of which could be persuaded to disgorge XML files representing the music content. I tried (largely in vain) to wrestle with these to produce some simple lists of my MP3s. I even put LibreOffice spreadsheets to work on my behalf. Not an elegant solution.

Since listening to my music is a great deal more than pleasant than trying to list it, my simple-minded modus operandi is to meta-tag all my music (done) and just keep it in alphabetised folders with a subfolder for each Artist, and sub-subfolders for each Album. Finding stuff to play then becomes a matter of (trying to) remember the Artist, and (ditto) the Album.

Banshee works perfectly well for this, but I've not poked at it hard enough yet to understand whether it's happy to disgorge its data. However, the more I learn about Kodi, the more I suspect it can do all this. For example, it actually runs its own little webserver from which you can browse all your audio and video content...

Stoned again

... to help your selection process. Of course, at this point it would be a Good Thing were I to have finished scanning all the CD artwork...

I mentioned the...

... wondrous insanity of Big Pharma price gouging and Turing Pharmaceuticals two months ago. Why am I not surprised to learn today that the recent 5000% price hike of Daraprim has yet to be reduced? (Link.)

  

Footnote

1  I often select subtitles, though more out of habit than need. And no longer the German ones!