2016 — 6 June: Monday
Good morning, pension! Say "hello" to my bank account on your way through.1 There's a large van parked outside claiming to be "the cylinder specialist". That's a new one on me. Not, however, anything to do with the team of roof repairers that I hope will show up and start work today. (Hence the transience of the pension.)
It's an "oh, good grief!" morning, so far:
NO ONE HAS KNOWN what to do about lesbians for a very long time...
...if people are instructed to nod their heads while listening to a tape (in order, they are told, to test the headphones), they express more agreement with what they hear than if they are asked to shake their heads...
He was an unkempt Harvard dropout who would flap his arms and squawk like a sea gull, or consume a meal consisting entirely of ketchup, or recite impromptu poetry designed to mock the very members of the intelligentsia who made up his audience, or drop his pants and jump on a table and swing his ... but where was I?
Scaffolding...
... is going up as I type. It's only 08:59, too. Excellent.
I'd not heard...
... of a "gentleman scholar" called Larry Alex Taunton. He's got a book out claiming the late Christopher Hitchens (a writer and thinker I greatly admired) "teetered on the edge of (religious) belief" while busy dying from cancer. Turns out, indeed, there's a cottage industry of people over many years who have regularly been making such claims about other peoples' deathbed conversions in these direst of personal circumstances. Amazing what people will do. I will never quite understand why it's so important to some people that others share their beliefs.
Yesterday's set of "Outrageous Tales" from the Old Testament includes "The prophet who came to dinner" (a retelling of 1 Kings 13, 1 to 32) and ends with either a moral, or perhaps just a spot of sound advice:
Never listen to anyone who says God told him what you ought to be doing. Not even a prophet. Or you'll get eaten by a lion on your way home, or something.
Damn. No, that can't be right...
A typical piece of Gaiman prose!
Does any planet...
... really have a destiny? An odd thought. Source and snippet:
How remarkable it is that biology arising on a planet could consciously change the nature of the planet itself, and ultimately its destiny. Think about it: millions of biological organisms actively filling their planetary atmosphere with a gas that is going to destroy them. The act works against the process of evolution itself, where natural selection ordinarily directs organisms not only to reproduce, but also to protect.2
On the other end...
... of the temperature scale I recall Arthur C Clarke's lovely little 1949 meteorological horror story "The Forgotten Enemy". I've never forgotten — who could? — its literally chilling final sentence:
Out of the North, their ancient home, returning in triumph to the lands they had once possessed, the glaciers had come again.
I have at least four books with this story in. And if you think that sounds imprecise, well, the most recent has failed for nearly 15 years to make it into my SF short stories database. Now there's a shock. Here's the quartet, in order of publication and (alas) corresponding degree of decrepitude. I disclaim all responsibility for the poor handling of any of my books before they land in Technology Towers. Once here, however, I do my best to look after them (or, if they're bad enough, fling them violently across the room!)
I picked up the earliest (and by some margin the most battered) — a 1954 US anthology published here in 1955 by the splendidly-named Eyre & Spottiswoode (original price, 18 shillings) — for 55p in January 1980. In the 1956 Preface to his earlier Ballantine collection (which set me back one shilling and sixpence in 1969) Clarke adds: I apologise in advance to any experts who may be offended by the slight liberties I have taken with time-scales. But what is a factor of 103 among friends?
I splashed out the full 3/6 on my 1963 Penguin collection some time in 1964, and a massive £9-99 on the "Collected Stories" two days before Xmas in 2001.
Roof scrubbing...
... has stopped for lunch. I don't blame them, it's probably rather hot up there in all the sunshine that appears to be proving the feather warcast slightly wrong.
The Internet...
... was invented, as eny fule kno, purely for the purpose of disseminating news of the inexorable progress of our Feline Overlords in wresting control of the planet from what Emperor Ming the Merciless described as "Pathetic Earthlings". This Young Princeling can be found in the vicinity of my second shed:
Work on the roof...
... resumes tomorrow, so I took the opportunity to nip out on a late afternoon food supplies run. There will be a thorough assessment of my soffits, fascias, brickwork pointing, gutters, and the state of the lining up in the loft. That will give me a better idea of the 'bottom line'. Good job it's only money. Still, given the essentially-zero I've spent on maintenance for nearly a decade, I can't really grumble.
I've dodged bullets in the past, too: more than one of my neighbours handed over dosh to a posh gentleman cold-caller a few years back — Christa and I both took a deep dislike to him — whose team of youngsters then moved in and nailed badly-cut unvented plastic stuff on top of wood that then started rotting, with inevitable results.
[Pause]
Just finished yesterday's Gaiman book of non-fiction pieces. Mostly good to very good, and consistently interesting.
[Pause]
I think it's safe to assume the Pope won't be putting the film "Spotlight" on his Xmas list.