Short items (#5)
I went to the Leonard Cohen concert in Madrid last weekend. It had to be in Madrid because when he played in Dublin, I was still in Spain. The performance was amazing, and let it be noted that it was a three and a half hour concert. That, per-se, is already remarkable. When it comes from a 75-year-old man... well, just another reason to take one’s hat off (perhaps that’s that’s why so many attendants wore one that night).
The days before going to the concert, I was sick in bed with some pharyngitis, tonsilitis, or the like. I went to the doctor on Wednesday, and I had to pay 55 € for the visit, plus 16 more in antibiotics. Of these, I’ll get a refund of 40 € by my private insurance. This saddens me a lot.
I think I’m definitely back on track on my reading again, after so many years. Since June, when I picked up The Time Traveler’s Wife, I’ve read 8 books in total, not that bad. As a side note, at the end it seems I’ve dropped Goodreads and gone for LibraryThing; my catalog there is publicly available. They don’t provide a feed of books as one starts reading them; there’s however a feed of additions to one’s library, which comes close.
Back in June, some of my posts had a PS giving status updates on how I was doing with my exams. I never got a chance to say that I passed the third of them, which was a big relief. This means that now I’m one course away from getting my degree, yay! Hopefully I’ll be done by next June.
I guess that as a gesture, it can’t hurt that the UK Government publicly apologizes to Alan Turing. However, we’d be all better served if everybody, governments and population alike, would just spend some spare cycles today on saving us from futher embarrassing apologies 50 years from now. For example, the day we may apologize to all those people who we’ve let die of hunger every day for decades, will you have done something within your reach to improve the situation? (Apparently back in the 50s it was difficult for people to believe that a Prime Minister would publicly apologize to a homosexual, let alone that there was something that needed apologizing for.)