he mutters darkly as we pad into his kitchen for an espresso.
August 23rd;
Tuesday. It must be about a year since the supermarket installed glass doors on the dairy cabinets, cannot remember. I let that milestone slip past. It's also been a year or so I think since they changed receipt paper so as to have a big red logo on the back, making the till receipts less useful as handily-sized scraps of note paper. Then about 2 weeks ago (or 3?) the old friendly ones with faint blue writing only on the back returned! Also a better paper for scrap lists, with a more matt surface taking ink better. Now I see they're using cash-register rolls of both types intermittently, sometimes the nice blue-print semi-blank matt ones and sometimes the ones less suited for scrap paper (or papier mache) use due to red logo & shinier finish.
August 22nd;
Monday. My latest article at The Salisbury Review weblog is up: in favour of hereditary peers returning to the House of Lords. Wonderful dinner in the evening: Robin & I go to Goran's and meet delightful company.
August 21st;
Sunday. Japanese art-school animation on vimeo involving bits of cut-out paper with some wonderfully splodgy colours. Strenuously low-fi.
August 20th;
Saturday. Hungary has its national day, with the usual firework display in the evening. On my quiet street, the night sky in that direction is blocked out, so I can only hear the bangs and the excited squeals of two girls a few balconies away who seem, judging by the timing of their wheeee noises, to be able to see the coloured lights. They might be foreign or Gypsy or under-5s because the general reaction of Hungarian adults watching firework displays is a grave uncanny silence without even an ooh or an aah. Apart from the two girls the street is as silent as if no-one lives here.
August 19th;
Friday. British mind-control cult (2003) that influenced Cherie Blair.
August 18th;
Thursday. In the Olden Days Department, a description of a heatwave in 1911 which had some people in New England committing suicide the weather was so hot; a curious decline in men's arm-and-hand grip strength which suggests testosterone levels really are falling; and an obituary of an impressive woman researcher into British espionage before the 20th century.
August 17th;
Wednesday. Radio interview with Peter Levenda, an articulate & balanced-sounding conspiracy theorist. Ticks all the far-out boxes for those curious about secret Nazis, spacecraft, ceremonial magic, the usual.
August 16th;
Tuesday. Ringing the street doorbell of a student I'd already for an hour sensed wouldn't be in for this morning's lesson, I look up at the slot of deep blue sky between the 19th-century building fronts in bright sun, with a mass of wispy white clouds scudding across that slot, and feel a surge of good cheer, how things are turning out well after all, and how kind people are. Lunch later with Heikki and then briefly meet Zoe on the steps of the cathedral. Here's a slightly eccentric top-100 French-film list. 99 looks fun.
August 15th;
Monday. Lovely impromptu dinner with Zoe & Mark in town for a very short visit. By chance we sit at an outdoor cafe table under a TV screen relaying an Olympic event: women's waterpolo between Hungary & Australia. We touch on whether some people's love of the EU reflects middle-manager/ambitious-clerk resentment of traditional class structures built round national loyalties.
August 14th;
Sunday. My landlady's fridge's stiff plastic ice-cube mould is cracking a bit more each time I twist it to pop out cubes of ice during the hot weather. I should make my own, designed to mould ice chunks in jolly shapes. Means creating a .stl file for a 3D printer, printing it somewhere, and then finding the right tool-and-die bod on an industrial estate to redo that in some kind of soft synthetic rubber. Not impossible.
August 13th;
Saturday. The oft-repeated (and rather odd) claim that almost no-one in Classical civilisation read text without moving their lips.
August 12th;
Friday. Worthwhile piece on newly-discovered links between the brain and the lymphatic system. Mind you, anyone who's known a few doctors shouldn't be too surprised that physical evidence of lymph nodes connecting to the brain could, during centuries of exhaustive anatomy classes, careful dissections, and intensive lab research, simply go unnoticed.
August 11th;
Thursday. Nice introduction to cellular automata.
August 10th;
Wednesday. An interesting article on Rousseau very very weakly pegged on the Honey Monster's campaign for president. Tragic this is the only way people can find to talk about someone as important as Rousseau. And again, here is Trump tenuously imagined as Norse trickster god.
August 9th;
Tuesday. After lesson with Simon, Jessica from San Fran suddenly appears in his kitchen, and kindly invites me for lunch at the Kadar eatery. In the evening, I finish 'Turkey: A Short History' by Norman Stone, lent me by Robin. Brisk, entertaining prose leads us through the centuries of the Ottoman empire, into the post-WW1 Kemalist state, right up to the rise of Erdogan in 2010. Stone is at pains to decouple the Ottomans from militant Islam, suggesting (slightly implausibly) that the 1453 conquest of Constantinople was in some sense a preservation of the Eastern Roman Empire, not an end to it. Conflict between rulers and the army seems a constant theme through the centuries, right up to 3 weeks ago.
August 8th;
Monday. Vaguely depressing six-minute cartoon from 1946: a Salvador Dali & Walt Disney collaboration.
August 7th;
Sunday. As we chat into the evening, Robin mutters with firm resolve that "Tonight I've really got to be disciplined and get to bed before 5." Finally, a realistic plan. I suggest I might make some Platonic solids to go on his balcony. Meanwhile, a man in London claims the city's leylines have been altered by newer office blocks.
August 6th;
Saturday. Photographer turns movies into long-exposure stills.
August 5th;
Friday. Handy little chart being regularly updated with each new fresh poll for those following the current US presidential contest: Mrs Hillary Clinton versus Honey Monster.
August 4th;
Thursday. Important history update on magical death ray device.
August 3rd;
Wednesday. Another article of mine up at Salisbury Review: my song of the dying swan for Budapest's dwindling all-night shops.
August 2nd;
Tuesday. I'm sure now: the Sankt Peterburg devushka chooses a better mix of records when her radio show is live {#389} than when she pre-records one. Not so surprising, I suppose. We all try a bit harder when we're live.
August 1st;
Monday. Worthwhile 2014 Atlantic profile of Russian PR shapeshifter linked to Putin. A Belfast writer now in Paris working for Charlie Hebdo half-echoes Stewart Lee's famous 'gentleman bombers' monologue: what's tricky about talking to Al Qaeda, Da'esh et al. Meanwhile, a ghost writer describes his job doing world-ends-in-2012 books.
Mark Griffith, site administrator /
markgriffith at yahoo.com
