2016 — 25 October: Tuesday
It's becoming apparent — even to me, in the last 48 hours or so — that one can now grow old waiting for an outbound SMTP connection to Gmail to complete...
... when it's arriving from my Thunderbird email client. I have checked my settings. They are all on (or claim to be on) the default settings.
So, if you read this page before you next check your email1 (Big Bro) "Yes. It is entirely sensible to destroy the papers associated with the Office of the Public Guardian." And you could make me another cuppa while you're at it as I shall be having another "go" at Stanley Gibbons on your behalf regarding your catalogue...
It amuses me...
... to recall that I actually host a delicious quote about the Planck length (and indeed have done so for a decade or more since my original struggle to typeset the relevant formula...
... for a little textual accompaniment to a Ron Cobb cartoon for my own amusement).
The chap (Carlo Rovelli) who recently brought us his "Seven brief lessons on physics" — a wonderful little book, by the way — has a new one out, which is now traversing the review circuit. Source and snippet:
Rovelli tries to convey just how small this is. Imagine, he says, a walnut magnified until it is the size of the universe. If we were to magnify the Planck length by that much, we still couldn't see it. "Even after having been enormously magnified thus, it would still be a million
times smaller than the actual walnut shell was before magnification," he tells us.
We simply cannot probe the universe at these scales using current methods, because it would require a particle accelerator the size of a small galaxy.
That would make the daily commute a little tricky, even at Warp 10.
I've not read...
... nearly as much of Eliot's poetry as I perhaps should.2 And I've only recently realised he also managed to produce an epistolary flood that cannot be entirely comfortably contemplated. There's a fabulous essay here (though at this late remove his sexuality seems to be of greater interest than his verse — why is that?). Source, and snippet:
As for the uncollected verse, there are surprises in abundance for the reader who cares to puzzle his way through these poems... in 1909 [he] stares at a reproduction of Manet's La Dame au Perroquet in a book and remarks:
But evanescent, as if one should meet
A pensive lamia in some wood-retreat,
Needless to say, few twenty-year-old men are moved to conjure this much gloom from the image of a fully covered woman standing next to her pet bird. Lest the reader pass over the lamia reference here, Ricks helpfully submits: "OED: a fabulous monster supposed to have the body of a
woman, and to prey upon human beings and suck the blood of children." It is quite remarkable that young Eliot is already turning innocuous women into fabulous monsters in the pages of the Harvard Advocate...
Not quite my understanding... There's a Greek myth of the laminae — lustful she-demons born (I gather) from the Libyan snake goddess Lamia. Laminae meant either "lecherous vaginas" or "gluttonous gullets". Lamia was also the Greek name for the Indian Kundalini, the sexual/life force energy sometimes envisioned as a snake goddess.
My mid-afternoon...
... entertainment, following:
- catalogue-ordering and overseas-shipping success with a 'real person' at Stanley Gibbons,
- some unwelcome (but needed) laundry and household cleanup,3
- some ditto foodstuff shopping,
- the posting of a card to a Midlands cousin,
- lunch, and
- a "put your feet up, ol' chap, you must be exhausted" cuppa...
... is to browse my new Linux Format, Linux User, Songlines, Prog, and Home Cinema magazines while listening to a bunch of unfamiliar new music on the three cover CDs stickily attached to two of these magazines. It's a hard life, this retirement skylark.
Thoughtful pause...
... plus the making and consuming of a light supper when I realised how late it had suddenly become. (I largely keep to the "breakfast, heartily, alone... share lunch with a friend... give your evening meal to your enemy" school of thought.)
It's curiously heartening to learn that my late-model Pioneer Kuro 60" Full HD plasma screen4 ...
... is still regarded, by some people at least, as "the one to beat". This is what they had to say about a tasty new 65" 4K (and HDR) OLED screen from LG:
Costs the same as my Kuro did, too. (My earlier Pioneer 50" plasma — nowhere near as good a black level, and an odd 1280x768 resolution — cost £8,500 in 2002.)
One of my...
... unlikelier musical heroes is Ron Geesin — primarily for the rescue work he did on Pink Floyd's "Atom Heart Mother"...
Pink Floyd eventually decided that the missing 'something' was an orchestra and a choir. But first they needed someone to write a score. Enter Ron Geesin, an Ayrshire-born banjo player, pianist, poet and writer... [He] wasn't familiar with Floyd's music. And when he did hear some,
he wasn't impressed. "I called it 'astral wanderings'," he said.
Geesin also preferred opera to most rock'n'roll, and he took Mason, Gilmour, and Wright to hear Wagner's Parsifal at Covent Garden. "I think it's significant that they all fell asleep," he grumbled.