2016 — 17 May: Tuesday
With the exception of dental X-rays,1 yesterday's ultrasound scan of my aorta was the first time I'd had a glimpse of any of my "inner workings" in the 30 years since I painfully dislocated a toe. And, prior to that, I can think only of those High Street shoe shop X-ray machines of the 1950s that were quietly withdrawn when it was belatedly realised just how high a dosage they delivered. As Allan Sherman's song has it: "...skin's the thing that, if you got it outside, it helps keep your insides in..." And that's exactly where I want my insides to remain!
The sun is...
... shining from a rather cloudier sky than yesterday, the tea has been enjoyed, the NUC is delivering Anne Hilde Neset's brand of delicious "Late Junction" musical bliss perfectly satisfactorily via the "2.2.2 Weatherwax" build of VLC — and only the type and timing of fruit topping, erm, atop my breakfast cereal remains on my current short-term list of decisions-to-be-made.
Sad, but...
... probably true:
Which was the most disappointing revelation about the books world: even an intellectual is susceptible to clickbait. They might carry a New York Review of Books to read on the subway, but tweet a link to a slideshow of 37 regrettable Ernest Hemingway-inspired tattoos and they are all over it.
I discovered "Bookslut" a few years ago, though I only seem to have mentioned her a couple of times on my ¬blog — example here. And I continue to avoid Twitter like the horrid plague it is. I assume "clickbait" is all the crap splattered everywhere on web pages unless you run AdBlock and NoScript. Or just mentally tune it out. Crispin does a lovely line in intelligent ranting. Her example here still rings true; indeed it was a feature of that memorable first meeting between Zoe Barnes and Francis Underwood!
As [Hadley Freeman] writes in the section labeled "Cleavage, and the plumbing of depths," Show me a woman with a good three inches of cleavage on display, and I'll show you a woman who, rightly or wrongly, has little faith in her powers of conversation.
Little did I know...
... back when I was casually poking fun at this chap's offensive (to me, if no-one else) opinions about dignity (and ice cream licking in public) that Leon Kass had been the...
prime architect of the ban on federal funding for stem-cell research in the US under the George W Bush administration. Kass advocates what he calls the "wisdom of repugnance", which is a fancy way of saying that we should be guided by gut instinct. Greely sets aside his otherwise cordial and considered demeanour to excoriate this position, and rightly so.
(Link.)
"Vantablack"...
... is a new one on me. Could I be more out of touch, I wonder? (Link.)
Many things can be learned...
... by reading the User Manual for my 2TB Western Digital "My Cloud" box:
- I am the unintended audience
- It runs an embedded Debian of some flavour
- It supports CIFS/SMB, NFS, FTP, AFP
- It supports FAT32, NTFS, HFS+J, Ext2, Ext3/Ext4, XFS
- It uses TwonkyMedia as its DNLA media server, and the Public share defaults to DLNA on
- There's a dual-core processor inside it, fighting the good data fight on my behalf
- I have no access to firmware updating, resetting, backing up, changing network addresses, and so on, under Linux as its controlling GUI is only available when it's on a network with Windows and/or Mac systems. (I have no "ON" to click! [The same goes for FTP.])
So it's a Good Thing it "just works", I guess. I may yet invite Dr Frankenstein to help me break it out of its current jail at some point.
I suspect...
... this afternoon's DVD delivery of yet another dollop of Armando Iannucci's satire...
... will help dislodge some of the lingering aftertaste of "House of Cards". And, if it doesn't, I can always try this trio of CDs by Ute Lemper:
I realised it had been too long since I last heard her when I caught a fleeting glimpse of her recording session for the album "Punishing Kiss" that cropped up on the Scott Walker DVD I watched a few days ago. He contributed two of what he regards as his "best songs" to that album, though the second of them only appears as a bonus track on the Japanese CD of it, dagnabbit...
Meanwhile, I'm keeping up my tradition. I just did something that caused the Caja file manager to crash on the NUC, though the music played on. Well, I say "crash". The window contents went blank, and the network drive disappeared from the desktop. One "Force Quit" later, and the drive reappeared. But the music stopped, not surprisingly. As Doonesbury put it in one of his earliest Yale cartoons:
