The Lair

Been a while since I had this much free time to myself. And by free time, I really mean time that I should be spending putting the finishing touches to some work – but I’m choosing to do other things. First, books – and there is truly nothing nicer than being able to catch up on some of the titles that I hadn’t read over the last year. Then, in orderly fashion – new book announcements, of which there are a few.

First, to no one’s surprise (certainly not mine, at any rate) – the final Robert Jordan WoT book is now three volumes. Why do I sense another potential money spinning venture here; with volume following volume? Perhaps I’m being overly cynical about this. Next, new Discworld. Note the timing of both releases – November and October this year, respectively.

And apropos of nothing – more than one person has already asked me how I manage to keep some (most) of the character names in the WoT series sorted out in my head. And the answer is; well – at least I think the answer is – I have read the books a few times now over the last decade or so. I do re-read books. These things get remembered. As an explanation, I always thought this sounded sort of weak – until I read about the woman who has perfect recall.

Except that the article takes the sheen off a pretty remarkable achievement by setting it in a slightly creepy context -

When it comes to the 2004 election, she opts out entirely. I soon find that except for her own personal history and certain categories like television and airplane crashes, Price’s memory isn’t much better than anyone else’s

and later …

The difference is that she scans her past relentlessly. Every time we think about something, and especially how it connects to something else, we get better at remembering it—a phenomenon that psychologists call elaborative encoding

And now? you find a picture of someone who seems to spend most of her time relentlessly scanning her past. Ooerr.

And on that note, I’m off to forget most of what I still remember about characters in the WoT series.

So I have a new gadget. Have had it for a week or two now (has it just been a fortnight? It seems much longer, somehow) and I am getting used to the interface.

Or at least trying to. My distaste for the Mac OSX interface is well known. Just works isn’t good enough if I can’t shape the experience to fit my own quirks – and that’s a complaint I have with both OSX and the Gnome DE.

But no – my most recent complaint is a lot more trivial.

You know that thing about mouse gestures? I hate it. Always have, because I don’t think I have the motor control or the patience to draw swirly patterns on a monitor with a mouse. The iPod Touch takes this one step further. The new gadget seems to rely on finger painting swirly patterns on the touch screen in lieu of you know, an actual interface for such actions.

So far, I have been unable to zoom into a page without much swearing, haven’t been able to move back and forth on a page without cussing out Steve J and his ilk…

As they’d say on a certain social website – (angry)

The Freakonomics blog dissects arcana and tells us, among other things, that this whole economic thing is deceptively easy. Since everyone is a self-described economics expert these days, let me offer my anecdotal nugget of not-really-economic-wisdom.

Based on approximately the same time last year, London is doing anything between 66% and 80% worse, in an economic sense at least.

You totally didn’t see that one coming, I can tell. But here’s why …

Walking along a deserted Hounslow high street on a Saturday night (not all that late, either!), I was offered drugs by far fewer people (literally, a “pssst, mah brother. You want some [insert colloquial phrase here]“) than at the same time last year. It’s hard times when even drug dealing seems to have been affected by the credit crunch. Or maybe the druggies have moved elsewhere, I don’t know.

In other news, the number of people offering entertainment of other varieties (the so-called recreational category of pills and so on) went down from 2 to 0. Clearly, this means I have now crossed into the old-fart-probably-doesnt-have-use-for-party-drugs threshold in the last year. I sob silently for these visible signals of my advancing years.

But no – the high street is deserted early, shops are shuttered, plenty of stores are announcing gigantic clearout sales. It all looks like doom and gloom from here.