2016 — 4 September: Sunday
On occasion, I puzzle myself.1 This morning's (mildly) furrowed brow is being caused by my pseudo-random selection of listening. It's a 2012 David Sylvian album — an engagingly-strange collaboration with Sidsel Endresen and Arve Hendriksen — called "Uncommon Deities" ...
... that I'm beginning to think may be receiving its first playing here in Technology Towers. But how (and/or when) did it manage to slip, as it were, past me unheard? I've tracked it down as far as the Amazon Cloud Library, and find I bought it as an MP3 set of downloads on 27th July 2013. Mildly alarming to see that library is now showing "8,291 songs"... The Sylvian is oddly suited to a nice, calm start to the day. Good choice.
Control freakery?
In the UK guvmint? At the highest level? Really?
Mrs May has a thing about discipline. As home secretary, she was not famous for being either a delegator or a sharer of information with colleagues...
Number 10 has issued an edict around Whitehall that all media bids for interviews with ministers, and on whatever topic, however significant or inconsequential, must now be cleared through Downing Street...
Mrs May and the new team at Number 10 sit atop a government with a slender majority, a cabinet with some extremely combustible egos and a party with deep divisions that cannot be long disguised by the meaningless mantra of "Brexit means Brexit".
Yes, but what does Brexit mean? :-)
Reading some of...
... the latest pile of "Spectator" articles that Iris has kindly passed along to me is continuing to challenge my mildly left-wing view of political reality. The articles all seek to assure me all is, and will continue to be, well. Perhaps I should try Nick Clegg's forthcoming memoirs to restore my sanity?
One leitmotif is the lack of credit the Lib Dems, and Clegg in particular, got for the coalition's successes, from putting a brake on austerity to taxing plastic bags. If the Tories liked a policy, he says, they simply claimed it as their own...
The problem is, Clegg says, he didn't understand the importance of the political symbols, from the Rose Garden press conference with Cameron (which came across as more bromance than business) to his acceptance of a nothingy office with no front entrance (Cameron refused
to allow him to use Downing Street as a backdrop for media interviews).
Remind me who Cameron was again.
Witty...
... in my eyes:
Given earlier battles...
... with my kitchen Nemesis (the U-bend under the sink) I was pleasantly surprised by how little gunk had accumulated in the year since my new one was fitted. And it only took me a few minutes to discover where Peter's g/f had relocated my bottle brush, too.
Round and round it goes...
On this day five years ago I finished entering my video titles into DVD Profiler (3,432 titles at the time) and noted the following 16 Lost Sheep ("lost", only in the sense that nobody had yet profiled any of them):
Since then, two of these titles have been culled, 13 are now accounted for, and "S.F. Sorrow" by The Pretty Things continues to elude me. Though I've not yet tried the Music Videos DB scraper. And (in passing) 3,661 titles now live on as a Zombie collection in the DVD Profiler set that I haven't touched since the inglorious collapse of my last working Windows system in February 2015.
I must say, Python helps speed up the process of updating my external web pages in these here parts! (Link.)
Kitchen sink drama, round #2
Last Thursday's clean-up session (of the sink itself, rather than its hidden U-bend) was about 95% successful. This afternoon's two-pronged chemical assault — on the remnants of limescale stained by tannin in the immediate vicinity of the plughole — has finished the task to perfection. Prong #1 being another laundry enzyme tablet and hot water for a few more minutes of gentle scrubbing. Prong #2 being a follow-up with judicious application of limescale remover, carefully confined to just the rim of the plughole. Remembering to wear protective gloves this time also helped.
Can't resist dipping back...
... into Clegg's upcoming memoir:
