2012 — 5 December: Wednesday
This morning's word? "Brrr!"1 I'll see if any more come to mind after a cuppa has completed the rebooting processing between the ears.
How cool is this?
Not very, if her blood is indeed coursing at 212 degrees :-)
Given their short supply, let me also show the text accompanying this fine product before it disappears into that strange bourne whence returns no web page...
You walk around like everybody else, weaving in and out of the flow of humanity, searching fellow travelers' eyes for the briefest flash of recognition -- of coal-smoke leaking delicately from a too-loose collar, perhaps, or the deep churn of a furnace not baffled quite well enough, or of sparks leaping up in the hot space vacated by a man stepping off the curb and into the crosswalk. But now you can put an end to that timidity! Say it loud: Your lungs are boilers; your blood courses at two hundred twelve degrees. Your heart runs on steam power.
Having given up...
... any pretence of making plans (more or less) since early July 2007, I tend to run my Life on JIT lines. For example, yesterday evening's entertainment only became manifest early yesterday evening, following a gentle tap on my front door — it was my new next-door neighbour bearing what Mr Postie had failed2 to shovel through my letterbox.
I've been following Soderbergh since "sex, lies and videotape" though I drew the line at the "Ocean's Eleven" nonsense. (His most recent film "Magic Mike" was entertaining.) "GFE" (a TLA new to me) is a slow-burning piece of improv, but quite interesting. "Ted" was a must-have after I'd watched it with Mike last Friday. The first Verhoeven film Christa and I saw together was "Turkish Delight" (in 1974). The last we saw together was the amazing "Black Book". As for "Showgirls", I'd first bought it (a massively under-rated and sneered-at film, by the way) on LaserDisc3 in Florida in 1992; this 'sinsational' anniversary edition is a Dutch Blu-ray, as hinted at by the "12" certificate. But it boasts "Engels Gesproken" so I should be OK. (Dutch sounds very like German to me, but tantalisingly incomprehensible.)
I'm predicting another little supplies run before too long. The crockpot stands empty and waiting. [Pause] Well, notwithstanding this link to the (free) OED online dictionary that Brian tells me chaps like me with valid UK library cards can use, courtesy of Hampshire's subscription (to save what's left of their eyesight being strained by my rather heavy, nine-pages-per-page photo-reduced one-volume edition I was incented to obtain for a mere £32-55 in September 1993 by a long-since-forgotten bookclub) I stand firmly by my initial word of the morning. I don't think a sunny +1.5C merits any change from "Brrr!".
Blimey. I've just looked up "bourne" and find that not only may I have used it incorrectly based — assert the omniscient folk at the OED — on a misunderstanding of the passage in Hamlet that I had in what passes these days for my mind, but also that "this entry has not yet been fully updated (first published 1887)". Well, it only shows to go, or words to that general effect. I think that merits a fresh cuppa, don't you? Indeed, I may even have to lie down with a wet cloth on my forehead and some smelling salts to hand.
Wot a swizz!
I'd hoped that the clever folk at MIT were cleverer. But it turns out all things are relative. I was very taken by the pretty little equation I found here...
... and had hoped, by inspecting the source code of its web page, to uncover the mystical secret behind such elegant web typography. No such luck. A mere 764 lines into the file's source code and there's the equation, as a simple PNG image file, buried among some incredibly messy page mark-up. Almost as nasty a shock as the rather too venerable tomato lurking amidst my lunchtime salmon and watercress quiche and salad.
R.I.P. Nefertiti
Good grief!
It is with sadness that the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History announces the death of Nefertiti, the "Spidernaut." "Neffi" was introduced to the public Thursday, Nov. 29, after traveling in
space on a 100-day, 42-million-mile expedition en route to and aboard the International Space Station. She was there to take part in a student-initiated experiment on microgravity.
This morning, before museum hours, a member of the Insect Zoo staff discovered Neffi had died of natural causes. Neffi lived for 10 months. The lifespan of the species, Phidippus johnsoni, can typically
reach up to 1 year.
Calling Quatermass!
Mr Postie delivered...
... yet another impassioned plea to Christa to equip herself with BT's Infiniti fibre optic broadband. I do wonder, from time to time, whether the massive databases operated and maintained by "big business" merely reflect the same weaknesses as my own slightly more modestly-scaled efforts, but simply writ very much larger. More interesting is this Blu-ray...
... bringing to two (if either my memory or my database can be trusted) the number of Blu-rays I have that manage to extract Full HD 1080p from a Super 16mm starting point. The BBC's wonderful and painstakingly remastered 1995 production of "Pride and Prejudice" being the other one.