2016 — 16 May: Monday
Not content with examining my poop every two years, the guvmint now wants to give me an ultrasound scan to see what state my aorta is in. So that's today's minor-league excitement.1 Meanwhile, I'm left to wonder why UltraEdit has suddenly forgotten that I want these ¬blog HTML files to be treated as UTF-8 although it barely matters as long as I stay within the confines of a simple character set.
The sun is...
... shining, the initial tea has been drunk, the NUC is feeding me my morning music — breakfast next, methinks. I shall also top-up my supply of strawberries while they remain in season.
When is a door not a door?
When it's ajar, of course. Everyone knows that. I've never really given much thought to the meeting of burglary and architecture. Source and snippet:
For most people, the door isn't merely the best way to move room to room but the only way. It's why we lock our doors when we leave our room, lending ourselves the illusion of security. But as Manaugh points out: What if someone simply carves a new door in a wall with a saw or blunt force instrument? Most of us — the door people, if you will — are to him, "spatial captives in a world someone else has designed for them [...] too scared to think past the tyranny of architecture's long-held behavioral expectations."
Silly me! Worrying about leaving the house without my door keys.
Mr Postie...
... just handed over the missing jigsaw piece for my "Nurse Jackie" collection:
I've just driven home to the beautifully-relaxing tinkling of Satie's "Gymnopedie #1" after "Nurse Joy" told me my aorta was so normal as to be boring. It's not bulging anywhere that she could "see" and is a mere 1.5 cm across. I will admit I was quite relieved to hear that. KBO
History repeats?
A young couple, he carrying a baby of about one year, are — I suspect — now inspecting the house that's for sale next door. Peter was the same age when we inspected this house in March 1981.
I'm mildly...
... irritated at the relative clumsiness of Ubuntu's current "Add new s/w" process relative to Mint. There's little point having stuff in the index if, when you try to install it, all knowledge of its existence is denied. Having been thwarted over "decibel" in this way, I downloaded the 1.08 build as a 'deb' file, installed it with the package manager, ran it, and was only then told some bits of Python were missing. As long as Linux desktop systems stay rough-edged like this I suspect that fabled "Year of Linux on the Desktop" will remain a mirage.
It's pleasant enough out there this afternoon to make even supplies shopping just that little bit more enjoyable. Can I tempt myself with a cherry, I wonder?
Explaining Trump?
Here's an interesting attempt, by George Lakoff,2 from his blog:
There are at least tens of millions of conservatives in America who share strict father morality and its moral hierarchy. Many of them are poor or middle class and many are white men who see themselves as superior to immigrants, nonwhites, women, nonChristians, gays — and people who rely on public assistance. In other words, they are what liberals would call "bigots." [...] Donald Trump expresses out loud everything they feel — with force, aggression, anger, and no shame. All they have to do is support and vote for Trump and they don't even have to express their 'politically incorrect' views, since he does it for them and his victories make those views respectable.
Does this remind you of anyone closer to home, I wonder? I arrived at Lakoff's interesting blog by quite a circuitous path; having finished "God's Debris" I'd been poking around on the webby thing to see other people's reactions to it.