Friday 31 July 2015

Just One Left

The end was so close. Just one story stood between me and the completion of 'The Most of SJ Perelman', but sheer fatigue has defeated me, and the ruminations on the legendary humourist will have to wait for another day. What a marathon it was!

Away from reading, there is also maths in the air. Doing Maths again is odd, as is waiting two days for a calculation to finish. Two days! If only there were a faster computer for casual experimentation. If only. You can't farm off a thousand calculations to a friend, as you experiment with parameter sizes and other such things, after all. It becomes too fiddly. The final intense calculation, on the other hand, can be farmed out with not a worry in the world once the bugs are gone.

It was nice to write the first part of 'Diary of a Laundry Robot'. It's nice to think of ideas for stories. For example, what about a person with a talking native balloon, who rides with it, exploring the new world of Borgia IX? Or the life and times of an apple treesman in a world that loves only oranges? Okay, that second one was a bit of a stretch. There are always the time travelling space gringos, or the pelicans from the zone of unreality. Oh, creativity does not seem to be on my mental menu right now, possibly because of the Potato Curse, the needing the haircut, an overdose of computation, not enough sleep or too much sleep, or even the rapture of an upcoming holiday. Did I just say 'holiday'? It must be a clerical error. Take two amnesia pills and pretend it never happened, before saying "Oh, Max...". Ah, Agent 99, you tolerant lady.

I have students again. It's nice. In Spanish, a private tutor calls his students 'alumnos', which is a cute term. One of the nice things about some foreign languages is the specialist terms you can find in all the nooks and crannies (never mind the crooks and nannies) of the lexicon, and the different emphases strewn about like confetti. It's nice to teach something and see it learnt, instead of just hoping it didn't bounce off all the skulls sitting in front of you. Now, if I could only instruct the population at large in the vital life lessons to be learnt from 'Dharma and Greg'...

Blast it all! Will they never release the remaining years of 'Dharma and Greg' on DVD?? I blame Putin. It's always his fault.

O.

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