May 2014
Marley was all right as far as I could tell, but I sure wasn’t. The entire side of my head was numb, I had a splitting headache, and my vision (he had hit me close to my good eye) was blurred for the next few days.
Gus, world's smartest cat.
And that, children, is why Daddy wears a football helmet at his desk. In our next episode, you’ll meet Gus, the inventor of Cat Chow Hockey and food-snatcher extraordinaire. Gus can also actually fly.
Onward. I mentioned a few years ago that a kind reader had sent me a reconditioned IBM/Lenovo ThinkPad T60 laptop, which I love (especially because I nuked Windows and installed Linux on it). One part I hadn’t loved was its rather dim screen, which was probably due to the fact that the computer was made sometime around 2007. I replaced the screen after a few months, but it didn’t make that much difference. Well I replaced it again last week with a higher-resolution glossy screen ($49) and, more importantly, installed a new inverter ($10), and boy howdy, it’s a bright, crisp, thing of beauty. Since it already had the best keyboard ever made, I’m thrilled. I’ve never understood, by the way, why everyone is in love with MacBooks. Those keyboards are truly awful. T-series ThinkPad keyboards are solid and quietly clicky and just plain awesome.
I was surprised, when I first tackled the task, how easy it is to replace a screen on one of these things. (Apple, no doubt, probably makes it harder on their stuff. They love non-standard bits.) The only tricky part is the ten or so tiny screws you have to deal with. When I installed a new screen the first time that was just a minor annoyance. This time I got halfway through the job and realized I that had a major problem. The intervening years of multiple sclerosis have made my hands shake constantly and I can’t use my left hand at all for this sort of thing, so what should have taken 30 minutes took me more than two hours. Marley must have sensed a disturbance in the fabric of the universe near me (or maybe it was the constant swearing), so he spent the time over on the nice soft couch.
OK, what else? Philip Roth called John le Carre’s novel A Perfect Spy “the best English novel since the war,” and it is a truly fine book. While it is “about” spies, there is very little spying in it, no gunplay, car chases or cliffhangers. It’s about friendship, family, and maybe fate. Le Carre, whose father was a famous con-man and an associate of the Kray Twins, has said that it’s in large part autobiographical. It’s a haunting and beautifully written book, and you should read it. The BBC made a series from it, as they did with Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, but I haven’t seen it.
We have seen most of the first season of Orphan Black, which is a bit dizzying but riveting. Parts of it strain plausibility (even aside from the central premise), but the characters are engaging and it certainly beats The Americans on FX, which may be the most witless, annoying spy drama ever made. Quick, Boris, put on wig! Moose and Squirrel are comink!
We watched Orphan Black, by the way, with a free trial of Amazon Prime and a Roku 3 I bought for $70 or so on sale after Christmas. We have the world’s slowest joke-DSL net connection, and had tried a basic Roku a couple of years ago, but took it back because the picture on our aging large-but-not-huge LCD TV was so awful. So we were genuinely shocked when the Roku 3 produced a full-screen tack-sharp 1080p picture. Netflix Instant looks great.
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