I stopped the car
we grabbed a beer
and then eased down the road


Kate MacDonnell, Marvin (here), 2006

* From Diamond Geezer:

"There's probably a wall where you live stacked high with the media you consume. Bookshelves, CDs racks, rows of DVDs, all lined up ready for use when fancy strikes. They may not be there much longer. Music is vanishing as a physical format, with most new purchases downloaded rather than catalogued. E-books are coming, and they don't need shelves. And why buy DVDs when you can watch films on satellite, or last night's TV on iPlayer, or a cat falling off a skateboard on YouTube. You might keep your old stuff on show for now, but your new media acquisitions are increasingly available only invisibly. Photographs have already vanished inside the machine, and soon all your other entertainment clutter will follow suit. Let's measure storage capability in megabytes, not cubic metres, thereby enabling access to your entire collection anywhere, anytime, anyhow. Why wait until you're in the High Street to buy stuff, when it's far easier to download your heart's desire right now? But digital formats can be lost as easily as they're obtained. Upgrade your software, mislay your smartphone or pour coffee into your laptop and they can all vanish. You never physically owned these files, they were never meant to last. And whereas you probably still possess a book or CD you bought in 2000, by 2020 you'll probably have lost almost everything you download this year. The future may be in countless ones and zeroes, but it's only temporary."

* "A painting in a museum hears more ridiculous opinions than anything else in the world." -- Edmond de Goncourt