Musings of Nobody Important

FURRY

No need to guess very hard which furry is going to be here this week. Unfortunately I only have photos I had to scan and they are not brilliant. My favourite furry, sadly no longer with us but the best dog I ever had. May I present the charming Miss Cleo, otherwise known as my avatar.

The avatar photo is cropped from this one which is cropped from another larger photo taken with my daughter on her wedding day, twelve years ago.

I bought her when she was 5 months old, from someone who had come down with a serious illness and could not look after her. She was a gawky adolescent, not yet grown into her ears and not housetrained, would you believe?

When my granddaughter visited and was still in a high chair for meals, Cleo sat underneath waiting for the manna to fall from heaven. Of course she was often rewarded for her patience.

Cleo, sadly, no longer with us, for three or four years. Gone but never forgotten.

HAVE A GREAT WEEKEND EVERYONE

It looks to me like the government of Pakistan is not capable of administering the part of Pakistan in the north west, that boarders Afghanistan. The Swat region. I guess the locals must feel that way.

This is not something the locals seemed to want, they were sending their daughters to school. They are having this imposed on them. So surely it can’t be genuine Islamic teaching, can it?

Yes the degree of suppression of their basic human rights varies greatly. This I know full well, both from my reading and from the many Muslim friends I have. But the fact that a basic fundamental right such as education is denied to anyone on the basis of their gender is anathema to me. Knowledge is power, and as such must be denied to women in Afghanistan, to keep them in their rightful “place”, according to the Taliban.

For some reason I seem compelled to read many books which highlight the reality of Muslim women, one of which was the Bookseller of Kabul, which I reviewed in the link. This book had me ranting for months and made me quite depressed. Will this treatment ever change, will the rights of all Muslim women ever evolve into basic human rights?

Nobel Peace Prize winner, Shirin Ebadi, an Iranian human rights lawyer, says over and over again in her book, Iran Awakening, that so many of these rights are denied women, not based on the Koran or even Sharia Law, but merely on the interpretation of certain individuals, unfortunately often those in power. But that gives me a slight glimmer of hope. Things can be changed. But how long will it take? Sadly not likely in my lifetime.

The Underground is ancient. The oldest in the world. All others are (often improved in different ways) more modern copies. I would bet it is the most complicated too. There is something.. Magnificent about it for all its faults.

One thing the Underground used to do is make the odd announcement over the pa systems.

You always listened up to these because they mostly told you something useful, important. Like the line you hoped to switch to at the next station was suspended, or there was a fire alert or something. You knew it would be important and therefore worth listening to.

Not now though, and it is my personal suspicion that this has led to the rise of the iPod. Sounds like something from a bad “B” movie. THE RISE OF THE IPOD!!! Doesn’t it? Yes, mea culpa, I have one now, sobs, breaks down confessing… “I have joined the pod people!”

Well anyway, that was then and this is now. Now the poor users of the Underground system are constantly pestered, bombarded, by pointless recorded, or computerised, messages that the important stuff gets lost in. Messages telling you not to smoke, or to stand behind the yellow line, or not to abandon your luggage, or really annoyingly (and this is my personal favourite grr) that there is a good service, especially when you have just had a diabolical journey, being turned off trains, delayed and the like.

They have an opposite one also, when they tell you about delays on the line… and the service seems perfectly normal too. I guess you just can’t trust them…

So now instead of listening I figure we all just mentally tune them out, or go mad, or block them out with an iPod and those noise suppressing in ear buds you get for plane journeys.

I wonder if anyone else gets this? I don’t remember it being that bad on any other Subway systems, and I have used a few.

One thing they do get right on the Underground though, there are usually lots of staff about, at least in central London. That makes you feel nice and safe.

They are not so obvious in some of the lonely outer stations later on at night though. Maybe they could fix that?

So Metro Gnomes, if you are listening… Way less announcements please. None about so-called good service, they just make you look like you are trying to con us. And more visible staff late at night in small stations pleeease.

For some weird reason I quite like the odd random “Mind the gap” announcement, they somehow seem friendly.

Am I being cranky with this post, or do I have a point?

CHIPPED

HAVE A GREAT WEEKEND EVERYONE

Supposedly it was taken this morning from Cypress Mountain, a local ski area. Click on it to see it in its full glory.

Early on I had the awful experience of a CD not being read by the drive and also not ejecting as requested. Out came the big fat book, Switching to the Mac and my hair just about stood on end as I read the solutions, the increasing order of desperate measures for the one trying to extract an unwilling CD from the DVD drive, including the use of a paper clip. Since there is a section included in the big fat book, I assume this is not such a rare occurrence. Luckily, using the Disk Utility program, I was able to get it out, although I never did load Paul Simon into iTunes.

By last week I had loaded more than 60 CDs with no problem until once again I had one which refused to load, although it did on a retry. But this weekend came the very serious problem, for when I loaded an instructional DVD from the library it made the most awful grinding noises while trying to read the disc, which it sometimes succeeded in doing, sometimes not. Now this was not some old beat-up DVD but a new one, just acquired by the library and I was the first borrower. I wondered if it was the taped barcode on the upper surface causing it to be off kilter, so I took both it and the computer back to the store where I bought it. They found the same thing but when they loaded the disc into their other Macs it read it without a problem and no unusual noise whatsoever.

So today, when I went to the Apple Store for a one-to-one lesson I also made an appointment with the Genius Bar to have them check out the DVD drive. Same thing. Sounds like the Wheel of Fortune on mine but smooth as glass on the others in the store. Consequently after checking if the part was in stock they have taken the computer to replace the drive and I should have it within a few days, with any luck. So here I am on my old faithful Dell computer, telling a tale of woe about my brand new Apple computer.

Old Faithful

By the way, my old faithful Dell has a newly installed keyboard and after its memory upgrade in July is in very good shape. Finally, after months, Dell had stock of the replacement keyboards and I ordered one for a very hefty price in comparison to the US price for the same thing, The Old Scientist installed it with no problem at all, thanks to a YouTube video, some detailed posts by technical people, along with judicious reading of the manual. The internet is an amazing thing and the fact that people go to all that trouble to share their knowledge never ceases to astound me. There must be a teacher buried in all of us somewhere.

Now my new MacBook Pro features a one-piece, rigid, machined aluminum frame or unibody, a huge plus feature, according to Apple. But how do you actually get into it to replace the DVD drive? How do you get this unibody off to get inside? Will they return it to me all scratched up and not yet a month old? I have been so careful with it, treated it ever so gently. I never eat near it nor drink near it, as opposed to the Dell from which I am always vacuuming crumbs, etc. I handed it over to them very reluctantly and can only hope that it will be returned in perfect condition and with a fully functional DVD drive which does not sound like the Wheel of Fortune. All I can say is luckily I purchased the three year extended warranty, even though the cost certainly made me gulp for this does not bode well, as I said. What will be next? I am very happy to have my faithful Dell to keep me company as I wait on tenterhooks. Yes, I know. It will be fine, fine, fine.

It quotes him as saying, ”Maybe I am sick of following rules and regulations!”

HATS

I’m not quite sure when I began wearing hats again. I certainly cast them off in the sixties like every other woman, glad to be free of “hat hair”. But somewhere in the last ten to fifteen years I have begun to wear them again. Of course it is not easy to find a good hat shop in this part of the world. In fact I can only think of a couple here now and they do not have great hats, more funky ones, which do not suit my advanced years. I have lots of casual straw ones to keep off the summer sun, as befits a very freckled one and but a few dressy ones too.

I just counted my hats and I currently have 26 and yes storage is a problem. A few are in hat boxes but most are not and consequently, usually stored nestled within each other, they are sometimes become malformed and I have to take some drastic measures like steaming (not the straw ones) them to return them to shape.

But may I present a selection of some of the hats in my closet and worn quite often on my head.

My red Akubra, seen here before for Photo Hunt — Red

A slightly formal Italian straw hat, bought for an outdoor wedding
in San Jose, five or six years ago

Another favourite Akubra, fern green and worn often
during winter

The very casual raffia hat which sits in my car all summer
and is usually grabbed as I exit

A jaunty little female styled fedora

I saved the best for last: a beautiful fine straw bought
in the early fifties for a wedding. Yes this hat is
more than fifty years old and I still wear it occasionally

Do I own one of those ubiquitous baseball caps which everyone, male and female, seem to consider a suitable head covering? And which men do not remove when they go inside? That would be a resounding no! Nor do I own a Tilley hat, although all the other members of my family do.

I think you can see that wearing a hat has not disappeared with one person at least and I look forward to seeing the other photos of this week’s theme.

HAPPY WEEKEND TO EVERYONE

For many years, while my mother was still alive, I kept my passport ready and a bag half packed, so that I could dash off to Australia in the event of an emergency. But when it came, her stroke, followed a day or so later by her death, there was no point in going for she was in a coma and everyone knew it was but a matter of time and my brother took care of it all, but when my brother died several years later it came as a complete shock and I was on the plane within 24 hours, even though I was still working, for then it was my turn to take care of things. Perhaps I had a premonition for that year I still had two weeks holiday banked and did not even have to take a leave of absence.

It is fifty years since I took out my first passport. How things have changed. Look, it is handwritten. It reads British Passport, Commonwealth of Australia. Inside it declares Australian citizen and a British subject. Now there is no mention of Britain on either passport, although this is my first expired Canadian passport so I cannot say how that may have changed. That one is, of course, in French and English. I am both a Canadian and une Canadienne.

Another change is the paucity of stamps in the current passports. My first one is filled with all kinds of exotic stamps from places I travelled to in those first five years and even personal history as it records my marriage and change of name, my immigration acceptance into Canada, along with the birth of my son, born here but registered as an Australian citizen. My daughter’s birth must appear in my next passport, since this one expired in 1964 and she was born in 1966. Nowadays, hardly anyone stamps the passport as you come and go. Except the USA. Immigration is very vigilant there and they never omit to stamp your passport on entry.

Now, as you can see above, the Australian one is carefully cut on all four corners to be unusable while the Canadian one is punched through on every page as well as the covers with the words null void. It is rather funny that they both expired within a few days of each other since the Australian one is a ten year passport while the Canadian one lasts only for five years.

In the past two days we have spent $524 dollars on two new passports each and $56 for passport photographs, all for the privilege of being identified as Canadian and Australian citizens. The cost for the photos should have been only $40 which we paid earlier in the week for two sets for each passport but today mine were rejected at the Australian office because it did not “conform to the regulations”, by a few millimetres or so it seemed to me. For some reason the old scientist’s were fine. Go figure. So I was forced to rush out and have new photos taken and return to the office before they closed for lunch, all in about 30 minutes. Only the Australians would close their office for lunch!

So here I am, hoping nothing will happen that will cause me to wish I could travel the USA or to Australia in the event of an emergency. I am sure all will be fine, fine, fine. But I do feel uneasy for some reason.

Name a book you have read more than once.

Has a book ever fundamentally changed the way you see life?

How do you choose a book, eg. by cover design and summary, recommendations or reviews?

Do you prefer fiction or non-fiction?

Depends on my mood, but more often fiction.

What’s more important in a novel – beautiful writing or, a gripping plot?

Most loved / memorable character

Which book, or books, can be found on your night stand at the moment?
None. I don’t read in bed unless I am ill.

What was the last book you read and when was it?

Legacy – The Sharing Knife, by Lois McMaster Bujold, Fantasy, last week.

Have you ever given up on a book half way through?