Book #13 of 2005: The Four Chambered Heart, by Anais Nin
A frustrating story about a woman who is in a relationship with a selfish, unreliable man, and his manipulative, malingering wife. She continues to devote herself to him and define it as love, even though she knows that everything she ever loved about him was an illusion. Not the most hopeful venture into french literature.
or How much more tat does the world need?
Personally, I’m making it a policy decision from now on not to purchase a product, if there is an alternative that does not come with a supplementary bit of tat. Take for example the free bags that are plastic-wrapped with women’s magazines. They are rubbish. How can any thinking woman allow such a piece of junk to influence her choice of magazine? [and frankly, why is she even buying Cosmo when she could read a nice book instead?]
Wandering around Woolies yesterday while Pete purchased videotapes, I was profoundly disturbed by the sheer quantity of utter shite that the world just doesn’t need. Fortunately The Observer kindly offers a weekly solution to the consumer guilt that affects me twice as much as it used to.
I liked their advice to refuse your next mobile phone upgrade, as mobile phone handsets have a ridiculously short lifespan, and get replaced long before they stop functioning. We also re-use supermarket carrier bags, instead of getting new ones with each shopping trip. What do you do?
If you set yourself up a non-pro flickr account, then don’t upload your images at 2048×1536 or whatever resolution your camera uses. There’s an upload quota, which you’ll reach very very quickly this way.
Since non-pro accounts can only display images at up to 1024×768 or thereabouts, you should take copies of the images you want to upload and shrink them before you upload.
I found this out the hard way.
Book #11 of 2005
I do enjoy this wistful, ethereal european literature from the middle of the last century.
With merciless dark humour, Nabokov makes detailed character studies of a group of russian ex-pats, back in the days when they still had enough seedy glamour to be referred to as emigrées.
The central character chances to recall his first love, when he finds out that she is married to his neighbour. He dumps his girlfriend and plans to meet Mary at the station and steal away with her. But fate is cruel to his room-mates, and he manages to take control of his own.
4/5
Every day on the train, I spot at least one person reading The Da Vinci Code. The only thing that stops me from admonishing them is the fact that I have read it myself. But at least I didn’t read it in public.
This afternoon I stumbled across our company internet usage reports. I was fascinated to note that Chaotique is classed as a Real Estate website.
Has anyone else seen Doomed and Unrequited? It’s car-crash blogrolling.
It’s kind of Amazon to remind us that Mothers Day is March 6th. But if I remember it this year, I will make myself look bad for all the years I forgot it.
We taped Footloose before christmas, and this evening, we finally got round to watching it. It’s not actually that we had better things to do than watch Footloose, but that we have a rolling collection of 18 films that we have built up over the last few months, and tonight it seemed like the right one to watch.
Actually, we needed the tape for The Breakfast Club; but we enjoyed it so much, despite ourselves, that we declared it a keeper, and gave it a label of its own.
I was 13 when Footloose first came out; a time of school discos and suede ankle boots, and chicken races with tractors were things we could only aspire to, in the arable wastelands around Armpit. Like Ren McCormack, I was the new kid in town, and oh boy, did I want to dance.
Actually, I didn’t want to dance; I just wanted to go back where we came from, but that’s another story that I’ve already bored you with. Not that where we came from was any better for me, socially. In fact, at least the kids at the new school didn’t know that I had once asked who Simon Le Bon was.
The lesson we can all take away from this is that the bible can be used to prove god wrong.
I have come upon a major hurdle in my migration to Linux. My second hard drive (the one that I use for photographs and music) is formatted as NTFS, which means that I can only mount it as read-only under Linux. This is highly offputting.
One possibility would be to reformat with a more Linux-friendly filesystem (I have everything backed up), but that seems like a very big operation when I am already having doubts about whether Linux is right for me (I can’t get my printer/scanner unit to work at all at the moment, and am not having much success with it).
I’m coming to the conclusion that Linux isn’t right for my needs at this time. Having two separate computers isn’t really an option – I want one computer that can do everything that I need from it. And at this stage, it is looking like the Microsoft way (shudder) provides me with the platform that best allows me to do what I want to do. I’ve currently got a fantastic system for maintaining and utilising my music collection on Windows, and Linux doesn’t seem to work in that context.
This is a sad day, and I’m having great difficulty deciding. I don’t want to dual boot forever, as my bookmarks etc will get gradually out of sync, and I want to be settled in one place. Any thoughts?
Books #7-10 of 2005
Blackberry Wine by Joanne Harris: not as intriguing or mystical as Chocolat or Coastliners, and not particularly original. It seems that when the central character is a blocked author, there’s really only one way for the plot to go.
The Haunted Hotel by Wilkie Collins: not as intriguing or mystical as The Moonstone or The Woman In White. Used exactly the same device, to less dramatic effect, as TWIW, and was nowhere near as beautifully written. The Venetian setting compensated somewhat.
Venice: Tales of the City edited by Michelle Lovric: a collection of extracts, letters and poems about Venice. The food section was particularly good.
3/5 each
Fear of De Sade by Bernardo Carvalho: pointless drivel in the wannabe-Kafka-esque vein.
2/5