2015 — 24 December: Thursday
I also really need to stop listening to the weather forecasts.1 There's definitely a pinkish warning tinge to this morning's sunrise. Or is that just a sign of the post-solstice slo-mo lurch back towards longer periods of daylight? The outlook for noon hereabouts:
Where's my cuppa? What? Drunk it already? Typical.
Harry Frankfurt's new book...
... "On Inequality" has a less pithy title than the tiny little one I bought a decade ago, but mentioned only in the context of the Aaron James book. Still, at least it can thus be quoted with less chance of offence. Source and review snippet here, though I note that the reviewer quotes Tony Bliar and New Labour whereas Professor Frankfurt does not:
"It's not a burning ambition for me to make sure that David Beckham earns less money."
Note how cleverly Blair chooses a sports celebrity, who got rich quasi-magically, rather than a businessman or banker, whose fortunes were made with other people's labor and by virtue of the deregulation and privatization of the British economy. When detached from a theory of how
wealth and poverty connect, charity, even public charity, aspires to communal improvement rather than distributive justice. The goal of alleviating poverty had entirely replaced a vision of an equal society.
I also liked the line:
A Manhattan-based opera-lover, for instance, requires far more income than a small-town film buff.
I can attest to that :-)
Yet another...
... thoughtful and well-written piece from Tim Parks, published on the other coast. Though I'll not be buying the book. (Link.)
I was browsing...
... my Amazon (US) orders history of around a decade ago (for reasons related to Prof. Frankfurt as it happens) and while "there" decided to glance at their current recommendations for me. Bingo! I was delighted to discover a hefty SF story collection called "An Ornament to his Profession" by Charles L Harness. It's now sitting on the Android SHIELD Tablet PC. Harness...? Who he? Many people don't know, it seems. My first encounter with Harness was in 1970:
The third of these has left not the slightest neuronal trace. But I learned today, from introductory notes in the new collection by Harness himself, how "The Rose" (which I read twice, two months apart) was about his older brother who'd been killed by a pair of inoperable brain tumours at just 26. Every SF market in the US rejected the story (more fools them). Nor had I, until just a few minutes ago, bothered to seek out and read the Oscar Wilde story "The Rose and the Nightingale" (more fool me).
This incoming pair...
... of imported DVDs are the final crumbs due to fall off the Amazon conveyor belt for 2015, I rather think. I very much enjoyed "Angels & Insects" a while back, and Christa and I had both earlier enjoyed "Up at the Villa", both being fans of W Somerset Maugham. It's fair to say, however, that critics have been a mite rude about this Philip and Belinda Haas film: "The Blood Oranges":
As for "Copenhagen", it first caught my eye with its trailer just before the ignominious collapse of my Windows system; this German DVD seems to have won the release race. There's another, vastly-different, "Copenhagen" due out at the end of next February, too — the 2002 TV version of Michael Frayn's play. I captured that off-air when the BBC showed it, but clearly managed to miss the original NTSC release in 2003. (There's a good review here.)
A phone call from Peter...
... assures me of the young people's continued health and happiness. Nice Xmas present. [Pause] Can you imagine? They drove my poor little ol' Yaris all the way up to Edinburgh and back a couple of weeks ago — I remember doing Meldreth to Oban, in the summer of 1971, but pausing overnight at Scotch Corner in God's Own County before leaving the A1 behind there for the A66. And I was being chauffeured in a nice, comfy Jaguar 420 saloon...
A score of 92%...
... on Google's PageSpeed Insights assessment still doesn't strike me as too shabby:
