2016 — 10 June: Friday
First order of business? Correct! Snaffle this week's dollop of three BBC Radio 3 "Late Junction" music programmes1 before the rest of the world starts soaking up all my downloading bandwidth with their celebrity tat and messages pertaining to same. After my initial cuppa with Helga Thoene's arrangement of Bach's "Chaconne" from the Partita in D minor (BWV 1004), of course. Utterly sublime.
With that, and one ginger biccie2 plus a half-square of Lindt dark chilli choc, my present happiness is rendered complete. Can Donald Trump make such a claim, I wonder?
After yesterday's...
... session with the Linux Mint 18 Beta I was also very pleased indeed to learn that it will be possible to upgrade from the Beta to the "real" thing directly. The upgrade route from my present Mint 17.3 is still being worked on, I gather. And the Release Notes for the Beta still tell a tale of nVidia graphics cards causing boot freezes, and the continued need for the perfidious NOMODESET. Fore-warned is fore-armed. Mutter, mutter.
I only know...
... the name "Katha Pollitt" from having seen it alongside a handful of reviews by the late Jenni Diski in the London Review of Books. Turns out she wrote the New Yorker story in 2002 that has re-surfaced in the form of the film "Learning to Drive" that I heard "Sir Ben" discussing on the steam radio earlier this week. Given the circumstances, I expect to be able to identify with some portions of the film... But my attempts to buy the US DVD were consistently thwarted by Amazonian policies in North America. I shall try their Canadian3 offshoot next. It worked for Richie Mehta's "Amal" a few months back.
The stunning satellite images here could be much improved by some informative text, dagnabbit.
Another...
... "oh, good grief!" moment coming up, alas. Source and snippet:
In essence, Pizarro was saying that the man's behaviour was weird, concerning and distressing, but he wasn't willing to condemn it. If that doesn't sit well with you, you're probably sickened by the very image of someone having sex with a dog. But was the man acting immorally? At least by the man's own account, the dog wasn't being harmed.
But did anyone ask the dog? I have to wonder what Wittgenstein would have had to say. Morally dumbfounded? Me? Yep, all the time. Just look around the web!
It's now been eight years...
... since the guvmint said it intended "to halve child poverty by the end of the decade". Wonder how that's been working out for them?
Deciding...
... it was time to fire up my NUC, and then deciding to take all the offered Ubuntu updates, "something" broke "something" and an error report has gone shooting off. The Kernel seems to have bumped up a little, too, to 4.4.0.24 (whatever that means). I am continuing to regard the NUC as just a bit of a Linux playpen for now. A wise decision, I suspect.
[Pause]
The two chaps finishing off the rest of the roof tile work have also gone shooting off, for the second time this morning. I looked, but it doesn't seem to be much beyond time for early "lemonses" so far. They arrived just after 08:00 however. The work seems to be progressing very nicely.
I've just had a chat with them on their return. They are understandably reluctant to tread too much on any of the tiles under which fresh cement is busily setting, which constrains what else they can now do before resuming on Monday. Fair enough. The new concrete edge all down the left hand side of the roof is a Thing of Beauty.
Bitte Geht Nicht!
Christa would have been tickled pink to see the upcoming "Brexit" issue of her favourite weekly news source, Der Spiegel. The decision to stay in ought to be a no-brainer; you only have to look at the idiots trying to make the case for leaving to see that.
Junior's taking me out to lunch tomorrow. Or, at least, that's today's plan.