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Pancakes are generally rolled up!
This weekend was full of bobcat. I managed to salvage that portion of Sunday which involved seeing Jack Clayton's Something Wicked This Way Comes (1983) and The Bespoke Overcoat (1956) at the Harvard Film Archive with ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
gaudior and rushthatspeaks, and today made a huge leap forward at the point where derspatchel took me to dinner at The Friendly Toast and then to a late showing of Moonrise Kingdom (2012)—which I loved, better, I think, than any other Wes Anderson I've seen so far—but in general the last four days have not been among the best. I have, at least, as of this writing, a working computer with a hard drive I didn't have to pay for and all the data I backed up with extreme paranoia on Friday. There are some internet-related problems I will have to address, but not until the morning. Ditto the oh, God number of e-mails I have to answer. Kalliope, muse of epics, pray for me.
strange_selkie sent me this for whenever I came back online: the seven highly productive habits of Alan Turing. Don't forget about chaining your tea mug to the radiator.
Hello. I'm going to bed.
gaudior and rushthatspeaks, and today made a huge leap forward at the point where derspatchel took me to dinner at The Friendly Toast and then to a late showing of Moonrise Kingdom (2012)—which I loved, better, I think, than any other Wes Anderson I've seen so far—but in general the last four days have not been among the best. I have, at least, as of this writing, a working computer with a hard drive I didn't have to pay for and all the data I backed up with extreme paranoia on Friday. There are some internet-related problems I will have to address, but not until the morning. Ditto the oh, God number of e-mails I have to answer. Kalliope, muse of epics, pray for me.strange_selkie sent me this for whenever I came back online: the seven highly productive habits of Alan Turing. Don't forget about chaining your tea mug to the radiator.Hello. I'm going to bed.
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Glad you're back to being more or less connected--more later; I've got to go mail a bobcat.
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From Andrew Hodges' Alan Turing: The Enigma (1983), the first modern biography and still the best:
In Alan's case, there was a suggestion in the nickname ["Prof"] of his role at school, as the tolerated 'Maths Brain' with his star globe and pendulum, who had performed the feat of cycling from Southampton. As at school, trivial examples of 'eccentricity' circulated in Bletchley circles. Near the beginning of June he would suffer from hay fever, which blinded him as he cycled to work, so he would use a gas mask to keep the pollen out, regardless of how he looked. The bicycle itself was unique, since it required the counting of revolutions until a certain bent spoke touched a certain link (rather like a cipher machine), when action would have to be taken to prevent the chain coming off. Alan had been delighted at having, as it were, deciphered the fault in the mechanism, which meant that he saved himself weeks of waiting for repairs, at a time when the bicycle had again become what it was when invented—the means of freedom. It also meant that no one else could ride it. He made a more explicit defence of his tea-mug (again irreplaceable, in war-time conditions) by attaching it with a combination lock to a Hut 8 radiator pipe. But it was picked, to tease him.
Trousers held up by string, pyjama jacket under his sports coat—the stories, whether true or not, went the rounds. And now that he was in a position of authority, the nervousness of his manner was more open to comment. There was his voice, liable to stall in mid-sentence with a tense, high-pitched 'Ah-ah-ah-ah-ah' while he fished, his brain almost visibly labouring away, for the right expression, meanwhile preventing interruption. The word, when it came, might be an unexpected one, a homely analogy, slang expression, pun or wild scheme or rude suggestion accompanied with his machine-like laugh . . . He cared little for appearances, least of all for his own, generally looking as though he had just got up. He disliked shaving with a razor and used an old electric shaver instead—probably because cuts could make him pass out with the sight of blood. He had a permanent five o'clock shadow, which emphasised a dark and rough complexion which needed more than the cursory attention it received. His teeth were noticeably yellow, although he did not smoke. But what people noticed most were his hands, which were strange anyway, with odd ridges on his fingernails. These were never clean or cut, and well before the war, he had made them much worse by a nervous habit of picking at the side, raising an unpleasant peeling scar.
To some extent, his lack of concern for appearances, like his low-budget mode of life, was an intensification of what people meant by 'donnish', and as such was far more striking to those outside university circles, than to those long familiar with bicycling dons eking out their stipends. It departed from the 'don' typology' in its peculiar youthfulness of manner, but Alan Turing still presented the world outside Oxford and Cambridge with a crash course in King's College values, and the reaction to his oddness was mostly a concentrated form of the mixture of baffled respect and head-shaking suspicion with which English intellectuals were traditionally regarded . . . It was demeaning, but the repetition of superficial anecdotes about his usually quite sensible solutions to life's small problems served the useful purpose of deflecting attention away from the more dangerous and difficult questions about what an Alan Turing might think about the world in which he lived. English 'eccentricity' served as a safety valve for those who doubted the general rules of society. More sensitive people at Bletchley were aware of layers of introspection and subtlety of manner that lay beneath the occasional funny story. But perhaps he himself welcomed the chortling over his habits, which created a line of defence for himself, without a loss of integrity. He, this unsophisticated outsider at the centre, could be left alone at the point where it mattered.
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That's a very astute observation; I find it intuitively correct.
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It does affect the nails; I hadn't thought of that. I knew someone with heavily ridged nails on two or three of his fingers, but that was because they'd come off from exposure to industrial cleaner when he was in his teens or early twenties and grown back unevenly. If Hodges knew any kind of story like that about Turing, he'd have told it. Interesting.
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Glad you're back to being more or less connected--more later; I've got to go mail a bobcat.
And the world spins on . . .