2016 — 9 September: Friday
Today's sunshine may yet tempt me out on another little adventure.1 One needs something to store as a pleasant memory ahead of the next season lined up in the delivery chute to start racing towards us.
I've resumed...
... "Chrome casting" of my morning dose of BBC Radio 3 but, this time, with the Android SHIELD Tablet PC positioned more suitably with respect to the invisible waves dripping from the wireless router almost vertically above it on the communications technology shelf in Peter's room. When it works, as I admit it did immediately today, it's a very neat and largely trailing-wires-less solution. I noted the BBC's iPlayer Radio app updated itself this morning though I rarely bother to check the detail of changes. I prefer to nurture the naïve hope that they simply go on improving performance and security.
That is, after all, exactly what the UK guvmint assures me it does, too.
Last night's...
... Mapplethorpe documentary proved every bit as interesting as I'd hoped. Although I was aware of the malign existence and appalling behaviour of a US politician called Jesse Helms I don't believe I'd ever had the dubious pleasure of watching him in action before. Ironically, the documentary makers took his ranting mantra "Look at the pictures" as their subtitle. As I said last week, I don't mind what other people believe in, vote for, pray to, have sex with, think about, eat, drink, watch, listen to, or read... providing only that I am free to believe in, etc etc the things I choose without interference from other people. My stance pushes me further along the "Live and let live" axis than Mr Helms would have been comfortable with.
Quite why any set of thinking voters gave a position and platform of such power to such a closed-minded individual baffles me. It's a fascinating problem. (I believe people who seek such power automatically disqualify themselves, but mine is a tiny minority opinion.)
Nor do I believe they invariably occupy the moral higher ground, but that's a whole different quagmire. Time to re-read "Ethical Quotient" perhaps?
Speaking of quagmires...
... it seems moves are afoot to build a "shocking giant new town" north of Eastleigh. (Not the Eastleigh in Kenya.) Careful with that axe flood plain, Eugene!
A quagmire...
... of a different sort. I'm simply too dim to understand stuff like this:
If everyone becomes an amputated transparent eyeball — to adopt Emerson's insane metaphor from Nature — the nation-building of hands would give way to a glut of shoegazing. Of course, we now know that an oligarchic American empire, crafted from military
and market dominance — and the cheap distribution of Emersonian individualism to all corners of the Earth — relied on the elimination of social life both at home and abroad...
If anything, Emerson's transparent eyeball is now a webcam hacked by the NSA. Or maybe it's a TV camera. Either way, it's a technology at the mercy of corporate and government technocrats.
Though I think I 'got' that last bit.
I had no difficulty with this, either!
I read a story...
... about Zuckerberg's censorship of a Vietnam photo on Facebook only after reading a Nature piece in which young Zuck had been identified as one of the "one-percenters" passing through the Johns Hopkins "Center for Talented Youth".
Hearing Otmar Suitner...
... conducting a nice bit of Tchaikovsky a couple of hours ago reminded me — before I later read my own footnote (!) — of the CD that (at the time) "broke" the playing time record for that medium. It was Beethoven's Ninth, with Herr Suitner waggling a stick in front of the Staatskapelle, Berlin in June 1982. I have a cassette of him "doing" the "Pastoral" with the same band in 1983. Getting to that has taken me past Berg's Violin Concerto, which has been gathering dust for about three decades. Having just played it,2 and (still) found it rather depressing, it will go back into its wall-slot shortly for another long slumber.
Roll on, Beethoven.
There's an amusing typo...
... buried in the IBM Pensions Trust material... "Royal Ascent has now been received..." (Grin.) The section in question only affects employees with an annual income of over £150,000 so I shan't worry my little head about it.
The joys of bibliophilia
Imagine today's mild frisson when I discovered that a book I paid £31.50 for in 2008 is currently fetching over £460 if the eight used copies on Amazon are any guide.