2016 — 10 March: Thursday

Apparently1 the work of the late Guido Crepax (in a planned "coffee table" edition) "will be a revelation to American readers". No comment. I've been collecting his (amazing) work, on and off, for quite a while. (Click the pic):

Collecting Crepax

Although I love...

... his recurring "Valentina" character (and her Louise Brooks hair) I'm not sure I wish to fork out a total of $750 plus shipping! Assuming the per-volume price remains at its pre-order $75. Nor am I certain of it receiving unfettered passage through the hands of those splendid chaps who beaver away on behalf of Her Majesty in their Customs and Excise — or whatever they're called these days — halls, forming their own incisive artistic opinions of such material.

Besides, I don't have a coffee table.

I have to wonder...

... what (if anything) Christa would have made of Backpfeifengesicht.

A tangled tale...

... of Picasso's legacy, very well put together in "Vanity Fair". The nearest I've ever got to owning a Picasso is on a book2 cover:

A fake Picasso

However, there's really not much comparison with the 1932 original :-)

The mighty...

... hunter-gatherer is (yet again) home from the hills, in neat time for a cuppa before my lunch date. I see the pot-holes are growing in both size and number hereabouts. Pehaps I should get out less?

My ISP...

... drew this to my attention today:

Private searching

Are they trying to tell me something?

The mighty...

... hunter-gatherer forgot to pick up some spuds for his next crockpot creation. That was a silly thing to do. I have, however, just re-read "The Marching Morons" to remind myself of some details my post-lunch chat revealed I'd clearly forgotten since the last time I picked up the Amis and Conquest "Spectrum IV" anthology I'd spent five shillings of saved-up pocket money on back in 1967.

"Today's simple truth: Half of all children are below average in intelligence. We do not live in Lake Wobegon." So says Charles Murray in the first of three consecutive articles in the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal. Golly. Let me see if I can recall the simple definition of "average" — nope; it's gone... By the time I'd struggled to the end of the third article all I could think of was The Marching Morons, the story Cyril Kornbluth wrote the year I was born.

Date: 18 January 2007


I also forgot...

... what the "K" suffix means on an Intel processor chip. Since I have no intention of over-clocking BlackBeast Mk IV I suspect this could mean I may possibly have over-specced its performance by a slightly bigger margin than I intended. On balance, however, Len agrees it's a sound set of bits to assemble. He also approved the tentative choice I'd made of a GTX 950 graphics card should the i7 6700K's on-chip graphics be unable to cope with the 34" Dell. After all, the i5 Skylake NUC can't cope with it either.

  

Footnotes

1  According to the blurb accompanying this sumptuous first volume (of a series of ten that are planned).
2  Nor does there seem to be any acknowledgement in the book of the original inspiration for the image. That is just plain wrong.