2013 — 21 December: Saturday
Crikey, I've already missed over half of the "Sounds of the Sixties".1 Who knew the massive "Letters of Ted Hughes" would be so initially soporific? Yawn.
It seems I've neither...
... consciously avoided, nor (evidently) actively sought out, the music of The Smiths. Proof? Copernic has managed to roust out just two tracks (from the subset of 46,566 MP3s I've ripped from my non-classical CDs) by Morrissey himself — "Spring-heeled Jim" on Q magazine's "World of Noise" sampler and "First of the Gang to Die" from an album called "Live at Earls Court". And nothing at all by the Smiths. This does not seem to constitute much of a representative sample, does it?
And now, having read the interesting review of his Autobiography (published expensively — I assume at his insistence — as a 'Penguin Modern Classic' in the teeth of Taleb's wry observations about the failure of Penguin to learn from experience) I don't feel any compelling need to catch up.
Biercing wit?
A fine essay. Source and amusingly-unrepresentative snippet:
His best aphorisms in The Devil's Dictionary are easily a match for La Rochefoucauld, maybe even Voltaire. His most reprinted book review consists of a single sentence: "The covers of this book are too far apart." When a young mother pestered him for advice on bringing up children, he finally replied: "Study Herod, madam. Study Herod." Democracy he defined as "four wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch." At the death of a local politician, Bierce volunteered the epitaph: "Here lies Frank Pixley, as usual." Disdainful of philosophical pretension, he rewrote Descartes's axiom as "Cogito cogito ergo cogito sum": "I think I think, therefore I think I am."
I wonder (randomly) if...
... this is actually the software understatement of the year?
Isn't it Xmas?
Just askin'...
Idle thoughts...
... of a (nearly) year's end nature:
I've been giving some thought — not too much; one doesn't wish to overdo things — to a vague summary of the past year. Of course, one drawback is that the people with whom I have some form of regular contact, where "regular" might just as well be defined as "more than once a year around the winter solstice" will already be more or less aware of what little I've got up to, or embarked upon, or signally failed to achieve, and those who aren't aware (or, face it, David, whose level of interest is possibly less than burning) will have glazed over before the end of this sentence. Who can blame them?
It's strange to think that I've now been a retiree for over seven years. Even stranger to have been a widower for over six. But the merry little dance that is Life seems to go on going on. The world also gets steadily stranger — generally not in a pleasing way — and often a little more alien as its various Seldon crises come, and sometimes fail to go. I thought increasing Age was supposed to impart ever-greater Wisdom, but I'm still waiting...
Meanwhile, I love driving, and relish the independence it gives me. Though I hate drivers; I especially hate drivers who pootle along in the middle lane, or who don't use their headlights in heavy rain, or who examine my exhaust pipe at length and in close-up. I love the (relative) peace and quiet of retirement. I find I can manage perfectly well without broadcast TV. Music, books, and videos still keep me vastly well-entertained, as do walks and chats and meals and laughs with chums, tinkering with tech toys, and all manner of email exchanges.
I hate seeing the brainless abyss that my Mother has descended into as it's a very depressing reminder of a quite likely future. I hate the cult of the celebrity, the bigotry displayed by the UK's tabloid press and its self-serving politicians, and the general dumbing-down I see most places I look. I hate seeing chums getting older, or frailer, or ill. What sort of a well-designed system is that?
Though I love my little nest, I hate Christa's absence from it. And I'm truly delighted to watch Peter's life away from it. In short, Life goes on.
Well after the...
... shades of night have finished doing their falling thing I'm happy to opine that, on the evidence of the first four episodes of "Episodes" Season #1, it's very (very) funny indeed. And — even better — a blissful total absence of audience laughter, live or canned. My kind of show.