2016 — 10 September: Saturday
Since I failed to shop in yesterday's sunshine I'm now faced with today's rain.1 I shall finish my cuppa and be on my way. Or just go hungry.
I was pondering...
... as one does, on my drive back from the grocer, the differences and similarities in the working principles of the Voltaic and Zamboni piles. I first investigated those, as one does, as a sparetime project in the mid-1960s having been by then defeated in my attempt to build a Ruhmkorff induction coil out of such spare bits as I could cobble together on my limited budget. And the limited resources of a Meccano Electrikit. And a car ignition coil from a breakers' yard.
All I wanted, as one does, was an affordable source of somewhere around 4 to 5KV DC to light up the image intensifier tube I had winkled out of an Army Surplus Night Vision monocular. Its three Voltaic cells had (in the decades since WWII) lost all but a tiny fraction of their "oomph". But I'd proved — by hooking the tube up briefly to an induction coil I was tinkering with in the school physics lab — that it was perfectly functional if fed enough volts. It was all Ian Fleming's fault. The night scope featured in the film of "From Russia with love" had intrigued me.
Who would have thought...
... that one could lose nearly an hour browsing through this little gem?
Trust me! It's very easy. As it is when you go on to find stuff like this:
This amazing tale will have to wait until after breakfast! Where does the time go?
Imminent financial ruin...
... is staring me in the face. The letter today from the IBM Pensions folk warns me that "under the scheme rules, your C Plan Supplementary Pension will cease at age 65". Just as well this only amounts to £0.29/month gross, I guess.
I've seen various...
... descriptions of the Internet. This one takes the biscuit for sheer silliness:
Clive James has been...
... reliably entertaining and informing me (most recent example) for several decades. Quite who in the BBC's "Newsnight" office thought it would be a Good Thing to send a "grinning dolt" to interview him is a mystery. The BBC seems oddly clueless. Their hi-tech gateway invites you to click "Yes, I have a TV licence" before playing the programme.
Those copies of...
... the "Spectator" that Iris now kindly passes along to me are starting to cost me money, as well as time. Their deplorable political stance is offset by their arts coverage. Following a recent review of a Spencer exhibition I was intrigued to see at greater length what biographer Fiona MacCarthy made of him as she'd told an amusing anecdote in a piece for the Grauniad in 1997. Hence today's delivery from the delightfully-named "Electric Chicken" in Goring By Sea:
I saw his triptych — The Resurrection with the raising of Jairus's daughter — in the Soton City art gallery years ago. I wonder if it's still there in these times of austerity? [Pause] The book is a delight. It even includes a photo of the Port Glasgow shipyard during the filming of "Out of Chaos" in 1944 by Jill Craigie. (Though MacCarthy draws a disceet veil over the anecdote, alas.)
I liked this comment...
... in the wake of Facebook's capitulation over their, erm, stupid classification of an iconic Vietnam-era photo as "child porn":
"What's interesting in this case is the multiple escalations finally to a correct answer took so long. Evidence of a company run by a Control Freak." ---- JeffyPoooh
I'm voting this insight of the week: the number of escalations required to reverse a stupid decision is inversely proportional to the intelligence of a corporation.
I'm laughing at...
... some of the delicious rhymes in "Just Another Rhumba" as Ella Fitzgerald sings from "the George and Ira Gershwin Songbook". "Slumber" and Dumb-ber", for example. I have become my father. 1959 was an excellent year for music!