We get into the nurse's room, and I get what I can only described as harangued about why she should have had it earlier in her life, why it was so important, why people who didn't have it were stupid etc. Continue reading
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I remembered this story today.
Simon was Mozart in the original production of Amadeus at the National Theatre. When Milos Forman was making the film, he met with Simon and said he 'obviously' couldn't cast him in the part (too uncommercial or something) but surely I can find you a part…?
Ah yes, Emanuel Schikaneder, who wrote the words for The Magic Flute as well as producing the first production – of course, who else?
Anyway, come the days of filming and Milos tells Simon he wants no acting! "Be natural!" he says, dozens of times when shooting the tiny section he's in the film. "H" says Simon under his breath each time, knowing that is what most of Europe call the note we call B (their B is our Bb).
Why remember this today?
Because the sodding Windows installer decided that the compact flash reader would be drive C. Clearly the two DVD drives would be D and E. Naturally, the other memory card readers are F and G.
So that leaves the drive the Windows system is on as H.
H?!?
Memory is telling me the only way to change this is to go through the installation process again (possibly disconnecting the memory card reader first!) but is there a way to ensure it assigns letters how I want them, rather than semi-randomly?
Amazon.co.uk used to have a promise that if you bought something from them and the price dropped within the next 30 days, they'd refund the difference.
If you asked them.
And they didn't make a big fuss about pointing this out to you – the details were buried quite deep in the help pages.
But it is an excellent idea and it was a reason for me to use them.
As I've just seen something I bought a few days ago drop by £9.90, I looked for the details on the site. Couldn't find them. I remembered that they weren't exactly prominent, so I sent off an email.
Apparently, this promise was dropped on the 1st September this year.
Now, they're going to give me the refund (thank you Amazon) but can anyone find anything about this promise going? Their terms and conditions reckon they were last changed in 2007, for example.
I can't find anything about this on the main Amazon.com site either…
There's a mailing list which I think only one of you is on, where someone has asked – in all seriousness – "Does poverty really limit choices?"
My response:
"Let them eat cake" you mean?
.. but in the past week I've seen what will surely end up as 'silliest' and 'best musical'.
Spyski is Peepolykus being very, very silly as usual, this time with a spy story interfering with a production of The Importance of Being Ernest. The Times' review is spot on – not all of it works, but what does is fab. Two throw-away highlights for me are what they do with the gun after an accident and the train sound effects.
Eurobeat is a better Eurovision Song Contest than the original will ever be. Amazingly, I can't spot a reference to seeing it in any of the LJs of people I know love Eurovision. If that's you, or you just like pop spoofs, you need to see this. Sit down about ten minutes early to see the 'instructions'. If you have seen it – who won? My favourite (the 'Polish' entry with men singing about coming together and miming fisting) was narrowly beaten by the Russians. Voting tip: listen to the cheers for the various countries at the start, then – unless you want to vote for it – pick the one with fewest other people 'from' there to maximise the effect of your vote.
Both close on the 1st November. Spyski is available for £12.50 via lastminute.com, while Eurobeat is always available at the half-price booth in Leicester Square. In fact, given that there was no-one in the upper two levels for Eurobeat last night, I suspect anyone with a ticket there gets moved to the stalls, so if the theatre is selling those tickets, that may be even cheaper.
I don't know if Amazon will publish it, so…
One Hundred Strokes of the Brush Before Bed, by Melissa P.
Not hot enough for one-handed reading, not intelligent enough to need a brain
"A girl who loves herself doesn't let her body be violated by any man whatsoever without a specific reason and without any pleasure."
Quite: casual sex can be delightful, but if it contains no delights for you, don't do it! This is the big difference between this and, say, Catherine M's memoir that others have compared it to.
The problem is that it takes about two years into the diary for the protagonist to write that. Unfortunately, by that point I'd lost any interest in the characters. She's looking for love via casual sex, they're inevitably looking for a compliant set of holes.
Eventually someone decides they love her, but – even in such a short book – I had to skim backwards to work out which one it was, and didn't care enough to bother.
This picture: 
What do you think the BBC News title is for it this morning?
This won't mean anything to people under, oooh, their early thirties, but Valerie Singleton shagged Peter Purves!
I never did believe the 'Val's a lesbian' stories, but I knew someone who swore that Peter brought his boyfriends into the pub they worked at…
The power went off just after nine this morning. A big plume of smoke could be seen towards Crystal Palace and we had a call from someone coming over that the trains weren't going along one of the two lines near us.
A call from someone closer revealed that it was an electricity sub-station going bang, and could he come over to do some washing because it looked like taking four or five hours before the fire was extinguished and – apparently – might be days before power would be restored.
Gosh that was frightening… Never mind having to do all clothes and dish washing by hand, with cold water (gas heating/hot water, but electric pumps), never mind quite probably no school for JA next week, never mind losing a recently refilled freezer's worth of food… no internet!
Fortunately, it came back a few minutes ago, so the power cut was about three hours long.
How long is civilization meant to be away from breaking down? As someone who grew up quite happily with power cuts in the early 70s (miners strikes leading to coal shortages at power stations) it feels like it got shorter.