2016 — 16 April: Saturday
April showers — despite helping along the crop of surviving flowers out there in my back jungle — can get beyond a joke, but seem to have slackened off for a bit this morning...
Last night's CD ripping...
... proceeded apace, for a value of "apace" = 63 so far, equating to almost exactly one-third of my latest CaseLogic storage folder. I even found the sticky labels I use. There were several classical music CDs in the pile — these still get treated differently and housed elsewhere until I finally bite the bullet and rip them. Junior has been pestering me to do this for several years but I find one cannot rush these things. "CD" #63 actually turned out to be a 'bonus' DVD cunningly packaged1 to look just like a CD.
It turned out — on delving into my simple-minded ASCII "database" — that some of these CDs had already been auto-ripped for me perfectly acceptably by the Amazon elves. That's a Good Thing2 as it's a mind-numbing task at the best of times. This time I simply got on with Kage Baker's "Company" saga in between loading the things.
So, where does that leave me? Well, ignoring the three Max Richter CDs I ordered 15 hours ago, I'd say "In some need of breakfast", for starters. But out in the hallway my drawer is now clear of the things (to the detriment of the local entropy of a bit of the living room carpet). What shall I put there next?
Really?
What genius came up with that last one, I wonder. Wouldn't work for me:
Paradoxically, much of the hand-wringing over digital-era distraction as a mortal enemy to thinking has given rise to apps: Scrivener, or WriteRoom, or Write or Die, the last an online editor that promotes concentration by erasing your text if you pause too long between keystrokes.
There's a high-spirited Churchillian "Doctor's note" if you scroll to the bottom of this link. 250cc? Isn't that quite a lot?
Yet another variant...
... that had somehow passed me by:
It was a French TV mini-series in 2003.
Oh, good grief!
I'd been idly following a trail of "research" into the hedonic treadmill. Buried in a University of Milan paper on "Income aspiration, TV and Happiness" one can find this data (Footnote #19, if you go looking) from an earlier study:
Television has a number of features that contribute to its impact as an agent of consumer socialization.
1: it is ubiquitous: the average American family watches more than seven hours of television per day, the average individual more than four hours per day.
2: the effects of television are often invisible. Watching television is so common that its effects can be obscured.
3: television supplies its viewers with images, accounts and stories of life that often far removed from the viewer's daily experience and social milieu.
4: television's message is homogeneous.
5: television's representations of social reality are often discrepant from objective reality.
You think?
I'm now prepared...
... to declare Jocelyn Pook just about my most pleasing musical discovery of recent months, if not of several years. Ululation,3 and all!