2015 — 11 December: Friday
Reading around the topic of optimal digital audio bitstream transmission1 — just one of my little tricks for dispersing the visual zig-zags — suggests I should simply trust the evidence of my ears and not worry. Not that there isn't a similar morass of psycho-acoustic theory wrappered around what we think we know about the human auditory signal processing system. "Perception is reality"? Yeah, right!
I'm back on...
... my BBC Radio 3 morning music2 for the duration, at least, of my initial morning cuppa. It's already 09:30 and the patio door will be closed now that the air in here has been suitably refreshed, and chilled :-)
The next crockpot...
... has just been prepped to the story of the Via Egnatia. Slicing and dicing all that healthy fresh veg keeps me constrained within range of the little portable on the kitchen windowsill for the duration of a typical piece of Radio 4 infotainment. And, of course, it's much easier to concentrate on the words while mindlessly chopping. In fact, it occurs to me that this was exactly the same modus operandi that Christa used. She kept the kitchen door closed as she didn't like the house "smelling of food", so I was less aware of her audible kitchen companions. I rarely close any of the internal doors in Technology Towers — I like to think it helps the radon dissipate.
I've been browsing through and enjoying the excellent and wide-ranging series of pieces by Andrew O'Hagan in the London Review of Books. He certainly has a way with words. Sample snippet:
It was a time of Player's cigarettes and gin after hours at the pubs on Great Portland Street. Broadcasting House was a maze of stairwells, long corridors and unknown powers, a world within worlds that couldn't quite decide whether it was a branch of the civil service or a theatrical den. Many of the men who worked there were getting their own way in the national interest, and the best (or worst) of them combined the secrecy of Whitehall with the languor of Fitzrovia. It was Patrick Hamilton in conversation with George Smiley down a blind alley off Rathbone Place, with froth sliding down the insides of pint tumblers and lipsticked fags in every ashtray. Men such as Gamlin practically lived in Langham Place: their outer bounds were Soho, Bloomsbury, Marylebone, and everything else was the World Service.
Subfolder "E" is...
... now being enjoyably shuffle-played on another voyage of musical re-discovery. (Helped when I realised after the initial seconds of worrying silence that the digital audio now pipes into the "DVD" input on the Audiolab pre-amp, not the "DTV" one.)
And, already, it's not only time to switch a light or two on, but time to snaffle the week's accumulated trio of BBC Radio 3 "Late Junction" programmes. [Pause] Yesterday's re-discovered book on Gödel and Einstein has been making me smile as it explains, more clearly than I have ever read before, Cantor's transfinite Gardens of Paradise. Steven ("Who touched base in my thought shower?") Poole's New Statesman piece barely scratches around in the same fertile arena by comparison.
This is one...
... very clever piece of cover artwork:
My original copy of this excellent yarn fell apart many years ago. I decided it was time to re-read the tale.