2016 — 11 April: Monday
Alas! Into every life a little dentistry must intrude, from time to time. In my case, starting at 09:00 on the dot.
Rain from a grey sky is therefore...
... more appropriate this morning.1 I was glancing at a piece suggesting British Banking naughtiness has amounted to well over £50,000,000,000 in the last 15 years. Doesn't that make you proud to be British? Top of this smelly chart (over £37,000,000,000) was the good ol' Payment Protection Insurance scam that raked in up to 87% of the premiums paid as commission and seemed awfully unwilling ever to pay out. Nice work if you can get it.
Coming up fast is the packaging of simple bank accounts to "offer" all sorts of stuff I personally don't want, all in return for a dribble of interest and a monthly fee. Can you imagine? Bank staff get higher bonuses for pushing these, and don't always bother to get customer consent. Golly.
Who exactly keeps track of all this, I wonder? And when it says "has cost" who has actually footed the bill? I'd still like to see some bankers' heads on sharp spikes arrayed across a London bridge, but I doubt that will happen. More's the pity.
Still, I can relax. Banking bonuses remain nice and high. You can dig more dirt here.
I sat in the car...
... on my drive, ignoring the rain, and enjoying the final part of "Swan Lake" with the LSO and Pierre Monteux. A chap has to do such things after a dental session now that Jonathan's Arcade Books — and thus the post-dental habitual therapeutic treat of former times — has vanished into the Mists of Whatever. Mind you, I nearly didn't make it as far as Dr Fang in the first place. A young lady wandered over into my lane on a head-on collision course that she only noticed really rather late in the day. I may be unable to carry a map in my head for more than a few seconds, but I now have an astonishing sense of what other drivers are about to do. In this case, I was already slowing right down in good time.
From the angle she was leaning at, I suspect she was either retrieving lipstick from the passenger well or fiddling with her GPS. I may have muttered a two-word phrase encapsulating her level of mental development. And animal ancestry. I was provoked, dagnabbit.
And still it rains. Oh EBuyer, lead me not into temptation.
Environments
Just seeing the album cover brought back more than a few memories. I had four of these titles on vinyl "back in the day" — the day, in my case, being during my time as a record reviewer in the mid-1970s. I remember them being quite expensive imports, too. Not so sure about a "Decongestant for the Mind" but they certainly gave a vinyl replay system a jolly good workout. I was taken there by this "Atlas Obscura" piece.
After the mess...
... that was the frankly-weird "Bish Bosch" I'm dipping a toe gently back into the water of Scott Walker with "Soused", having just caught up with a track from it on a rather venerable Max Reinhardt "Late Junction" programme. We shall hear! Somehow, my "Library" of albums on Amazon's cloud has recently topped 500 titles, from Loudon Wainwright's "10 Songs for the New Depression" to Steve Tilston's "Ziggurat".
A fascinating insight...
... into some of the hoops involved in dodging the BBC's current (but continuing) anti-Linux stupidity. (Link.)
To my (mild) horror...
... it turns out that, if I'm to enjoy today's planned lunch, I shall actually have to fire up my main oven. This is a first for me. I think I shall dispense with 75% of the recommended "pre-heating" for a start. Christa didn't generally bother, and I survived 33 years! Closer inspection of the pack, however, reveals it to contain 78% of my "guideline daily amount" of sugar, 40% of my "Sat fats" and 20% of my salt. On that reckoning this will be both my first, and my last, venture into "Gressingham duck legs marinated in a Cantonese style plum sauce".
It was an impulse buy. [Pause] "Lord, love a duck!" as my favourite mad aunt used to say. It was actually very tasty.
44 minutes and 26 seconds...
... of audio bliss. I'm listening — precisely 101 months after Christa's death — to one of her favourite albums. She actually brought it over to England, in fact. The digital version I'm listening to is spraying its bits across the living room carpet from the NAS to the NUC and then through to the Rotels and onwards to my ears.
Not even the memory of that flawed failure "Apocalypse Now" can spoil my enjoyment of "The End". Just let's not dwell on how old the album is!
I'd not once thought...
... of trying to light a fire by concentrating moonlight. (Link.) Though I suppose moonshine could work. With a match.
"Soused" is pretty weird, by the way.