2015 — 10 December: Thursday
Yesterday evening's necessarily-limited quota of conscious attention1 was flung partly in the direction of last month's fat arrival "The Gameplayers of Zan" which, I'd been (correctly) warned, gets off to a slow start. No weird dreams to report!
I'm eschewing...
... my habitual diet of BBC Radio 3's morning music2 by selecting a music folder, highly unscientifically, and once again playing it in "Shuffle" mode. It's a form of serendipity, I guess. I've paid for all the stuff; I may as well hear it. The miscellany from performers with names starting "D" will last — if I let it — for 21 hours and 34 seconds :-)
I don't expect to hear quite this variety coming at me from BBC Radio 3 any time soon — though 6Music would be far more likely to oblige:
I don't want to start any blasphemous rumours but I think that god's got a sick sense of humour and, when I die, I expect to find him laughing.
No argument from me on that score.
I'd driven the Mazda...
... too deep into its nest after yesterday's walk to let me squeeze past it to get at the likeliest cache of co-ax leads (cables suitable for composite video, which makes them equally suitable for digital audio). So I've hauled a dinky little Maplin's "co-ax to optical" converter3 out of retirement to handle the latest soundcard's (co-ax only) SP/DIF output. I'm "bridging the gap" between the card's output and the converter's input with the "green" lead from a component video triplet of high-quality leads that were recently returned by a borrower long after I'd forgotten all about them (having no current [or anticipated] "video" requirement for them). Serendipity again.
One of my personal set...
... of civil servants, clearly having nothing better to do, has very kindly totted up and sent me a colour-printed personal summary showing how Brenda's gang has carved up the 11% they take out of my widower's mite, among themselves, to keep our Untied Kingdom ticking over. Over 75% of it goes into welfare, health, state pension, education, and bombs and bullets.
I searched...
... the garage when I got the Mazda out for a mini-top-up supplies run before heading off to my lunch date. Nary a decent piece of co-ax to be found, though I turned up the flat woven-ribbon loudspeaker cable that last saw use under the carpet in the living room of our Old Windsor house to stop little feet tripping over it (and little fingers tugging at it). Peter was encouraged from a very early age to 'respect' the hi-fi and shown how to use it. At age three he was perfectly competent to load and play a LaserDisc which is one reason he watched "Star Wars" about 50 times...
Benedikt Taschen...
... clearly doesn't get any information from Brenda's tax people about me. His latest carefully-targeted Xmas festive offerings range from £135 for a book on Charlie Chaplin through £1,750 for one on Annie Leibovitz to (a snip, doubtless) £3,500 for one on the Rolling Stones.
In search of Temps Perdu...
... I was oddly pleased to learn that Kurt Gödel's nickname, at age four, was Herr Warum (since I was myself nicknamed "Why?" at about that age). But I admit I was quite shocked to realise that this fascinating book...
... has actually malingered unread4 since April 2005. That was about the time it first became apparent that something (we knew not what) was not quite right with Christa's health. An excuse of sorts, I suppose. But I now wonder what else I will find inside the Event Horizon of that particular chronological Black Hole? I hardly dare look.
Time for a few calories.
Experiments...
... show absolutely nothing wrong with the quality of the co-ax digital audio signal delivered via a decent quality phono audio lead, so that's what I'm now using. Maplin's little converter can rest easy for another decade or so.
Just had to press "Pause" there for about 15 minutes while I sat and let the coloured zig-zags work their way across my field of vision in their own good time. Was it the cheese? The chocolate? The bright screen? The tiredness? I've so far never been able to pinpoint cause and effect though a bright screen or time spent facing a bright window is wending its way slowly to the top of the list of suspects. I amused myself by skimming through my very self-satisfied local MP's very self-satisfied occasional newsletter. He's so sad, he actually thinks being made PPS to Jeremy Hunt is a promotion :-)