2016 — 11 June: Saturday
Brian Matthew has just played the 1966 song "Don't let the rain come down!"
This morning's "Scots Mist" can no longer penetrate my roof, so I "remain calm and carry on". Before my amiable pair of miracle workers left for their weekend break they assured me "things are now watertight" up there. My tiles and the plastic gullies underneath the two potential waterfalls are firmly in place. This is, as they say, "a load off". As Big Bro remarked: "Judging by the weather extremes we now tolerate1 then it is a JIT solution for your roof!"
Both sheds have new felt covers, too, alleviating my neighbour's concern for his loss of visual amenity.
Of course, if...
... the original builders2 had been in less of a hurry to build the place, extract my money, and move on, they might have been less slapdash in the way they glued bits together. Local council building inspection could have been a bit more assiduous, but that was the way of the world in the late 1970s. Probably still is.
Such dreadful...
... cynicism about my former industry! Can you hear the "FUD"? Source and snippet:
Cybersecurity vendors issue propaganda and then sell expensive 'solutions' into it. These solutions have often been developed with poor inherent security. Then they sell expensive fixes to patch the holes. A complex ecosystem has evolved around this merry-go-round.
Having been unable...
... ever to persuade myself of the value of slogging to the end of the turgid "Gravity's Rainbow" — I culled my copy, largely unread, and now wholly unremembered (apart from its attractive rainbow cutout front cover) at some point before 1994 — I've been blissfully unaware of Kurt Mondaugen's exposition therein of a law of human existence:
"Personal density ... is directly proportional to temporal bandwidth."
I'm far too stupid to grok the meaning. I did like this, though, from later in the same set of "Digital Age" book reviews:
Dante, always our contemporary, portrays the circle of the Neutrals, those who used their lives neither for good nor for evil, as a crowd following a banner around the upper circle of Hell, stung by wasps and hornets. Today the Neutrals each follow a screen they hold before them, stung by buzzing notifications. In popular culture, the zombie apocalypse is now the favored fantasy of disaster in horror movies set in the near future because it has already been prefigured in reality: the undead lurch through the streets, each staring blankly at a screen.
Perfect!
Just finished...
... sorting out power leads, screen and requested VGA lead, keyboard, mouse, for Junior to set up (and then attempt to debug) the NAS box he is currently having difficulty in persuading to boot. That's in between my frenzied bursts of "boy clean" house-cleaning ahead of the arrival of his accompanying eagle-eyed White Tornado in human form. And shouting at the idiots on the Home Counties' fascists' political ill-informed opinion-spouters' national radio channel.
A truth...
... though not universally acknowledged! Source and snippet:
I had always scorned Jane Austen ... until I found myself on a train last year with nothing to read but Emma. I realised something I'd never considered as a literature student: that Austen's famous novels of shrubbery romance in stately homes and claustrophobic marriage plotting make a lot more sense once you realise that all her protagonists are profoundly depressed and economically desperate. The reason that her middle-class heroines are so singularly fixated on marriage is that they have no meaningful alternatives: without a suitable mate, they face poverty, shame and social isolation. They are not romances. They are horror stories. I was hooked, and ploughed through the entire collection in three weeks.
My next "oh good grief!"...
... moment comes from the world of, and the apparent existential threat posed by, "sex robots". Source and snippet:
Professor Sharkey, speaking at the Cheltenham Science Festival, explained that he was 'fairly liberal about sex'. But he explained: 'It's not a problem having sex with a machine. But what if it's your first time, your first relationship?...'
I was (mis?)-led there by Deborah Orr's piece in the Grauniad.
Today's arrival...
... is my lowest-priced new Blu-ray, so far. I may yet find out why:
