2015
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December 31st; New Year's Eve. Robin a bit ill with food poisoning, so Gio from Rio & I try to cheer him up. Dull muffled sounds of fireworks going off in nearby streets penetrate into his grand city-centre apartment throughout the evening. A 2-month-old interview with Freeman Dyson. The Register doing fine work re-establishing the word 'boffin'. Earlier in day, a friend describes over coffee what taking the hallucinogenic San Pedro cactus in Peru was like.
December 30th; Wednesday. Mild weather in town. A quite detailed attack on the campaign to move concert-tuned A from 440 Hertz back to 432 cycles per second.

December 29th; Tuesday. English lesson with Boardgame Orsolya in Obuda. We read more of Graham & Dodd's 1930s book on securities analysis that Warren Buffett admires so much.
December 28th; Monday. The strange empty week we get each year between Christmas and New Year. An interesting article about how the 2003 Iraq War united Britain's Leninist left, plus a piece (behind paywall) explaining Mr Corbyn to Americans.

December 27th; Sunday. We all drive back into Budapest to meet Sara at the airport where she has just landed from Italy. Parallels between France's Algerian war and Iraq today: a 2007 write-up on Alistair Horne praised by our man in Bucharest, currently in Algiers.
December 26th; Boxing Day. We all open our presents under the indoor tree, like good Victorians. Over the last few days, fog on Hungary's Great Plain has been thick enough to make the front gate and wall vanish several times. Whereas, back in Britain it seems that the local pub one minute's walk from my still-unsold house in The Yorkshire Valley currently looks like this. I expect Calderdale Council are blaming the six-month-old national government for the floods that have occurred every 9 or 10 years in their valley for centuries.

December 25th; Christmas Day. Restful time in the countryside. Lovely lunch centres around The Retrieved Salmon. Suddenly returning to tradition, Letty's absence today means we will open presents tomorrow, Boxing Day, for the first time. A few days ago it came to me where I'd seen Donald Trump before, in his innocent younger days before he became a property developer. The Special Relationship made clear.
December 24th; Christmas Eve. Robin, Zsuzsi, Letty, Bela, & Gio from Rio pick me up in the early afternoon for the drive down to the Great Plain. As we travel out, the roads get mistier. Once in Tiszainoka, it emerges that someone forgot to pack the fresh salmon, which is therefore back in the flat in Budapest, going off. After dark, Robin & I drive back to Budapest through rapidly thickening fog to pick it up, returning to the countryside a second time, quite a long round trip. As we stop off to refill during the second trip out to the Great Plain, I chat briefly with the strikingly pretty & cheerful brunette at the till of a petrol station. As it becomes clear we are now leaving her, she suddenly gives us a jaunty mock salute, switching into English to say "So--- have a nice life!". I think this means "I suppose you have no intention of even trying to meet me again - or you're just too slow-witted to seize the moment?" although one never knows for sure, of course.

December 23rd; Wednesday. Some firms now stop folk they sue from countersuing.
December 22nd; Tuesday. Creepy new level of social manipulation: very disturbing online game in China.

December 21st; Monday. Feeling of turning a corner: let's see if it's real. 'Turn on the Smoke Machine', by Ursula 1000 remixed (always so complicated) by Fort Knox Five. Taken from a radio show by the St. Petersburg girl, though not this recent one #357, best in a couple of months.
December 20th; Sunday. Darker winter days since the corner office block and shopping centre cut down the sunshine angle. Here's a .pdf explaining in detail some fairly intractable problems with renewable energy. A rather depressing interview with a spry old German/British modernist painter. A curious article about a forgotten interwar British scout-like movement. Via the ever-alert Zoe, a bullet-pointy list of 52 facts some Silicon Valley bod who knows Bruce Sterling thinks are quirkily enlightening: 3 or 4 have value.

December 19th; Saturday. Dear oh dear. Calderdale Council really deserve to have their bottoms spanked. An interesting article which tackles free will, as I've been advocating for many years, from the animal direction, shorn of its theological and anti-theological baggage.
December 18th; Friday. And the big question: are books becoming longer?

December 17th; Thursday. French cheeses are under threat, it seems.
December 16th; Wednesday. Fax machines & printers use secret yellow dots; Russian propaganda channel claims the US can now legally create propaganda for US citizens; + a new encryption method a lot like the one I outlined to Sir John et al a year ago for phones with no metadata.

December 15th; Tuesday. The Geography Teacher and his krypto-party?
December 14th; Monday. Getting chilly in more ways than one. Nicely-written article about the dark mistake of interwar antisnobbery.

December 13th; Sunday. Chat with Mohammad about the stranger things in life. Is Jersey in trouble?
December 12th; Saturday. Interesting interview with a Republican moderate in Northern Ireland. Mallon is senior in the SDLP movement that (perhaps naively) gave Sinn Fein their current political respectability without ever having used violence themselves. He emerges as dignified and humane.

December 11th; Friday. Getting dark early, though I suppose December 21st isn't far away. Stephen Wolfram, who can't quite resist mentioning himself a lot, nonetheless writes a careful, well-researched essay about two important Victorians. Feels like he gets close to pinning down the real relationship between mechanical-computer-builder Charles Babbage and Lord Byron's daughter Ada Lovelace (recently rediscovered as possibly the world's first ever computer programmer).
December 10th; Thursday. Dull weather here in Budapest. A couple of people are urging me to write an in-depth book on gold-digger femme-fatale types. Two others are saying no, don't.

December 9th; Wednesday. Amusing global-strategist profile: Edward Luttwak.
December 8th; Tuesday. Woman stabbed at art fair: onlookers think it's an art work.

December 7th; Monday. A relative oldie from a decade ago, a song which (still) raises the obvious question: what is it actually about? Camille Jones 'Creeps' versions one, two, & three certainly have in common bits of a visually striking video, a fidgety insistent sound, and the sense it's about something compelling & important ---but what? Insomnia? Nightmares? Ghosts? Being a single woman in New York? Urban angst in general? Feeling addicted to, yet trapped within, The Horror of The Dance Club? // Answers on a postcard, please.
December 6th; Sunday. Britain's Labour party perhaps losing touch with public opinion in opposition (in chart, DK = Don't Know). Meanwhile here, 3 or 4 days ago kittenish blonde from recently-closed cafe popped up again on far side of town.

December 5th; Saturday. Interesting map of drone-operating bases within Africa.
December 4th; Friday. Last night a couple of months of boxed covering came off a large-looking store inside Corvin Plaza, with giant backlit photo of stern-looking mannequin in outdoor clothing from floor to ceiling. Around midnight a girl with a luminous chartreuse jacket was photographing the workmen taking the casing off the big picture. Being dressed for the moment creates moments of its own.

December 3rd; Thursday. Quite intelligent talk-with-whiteboard: how women can acquire magnetic sexual power over men, narrated by a bubbly Slav girl (Bulgarian?) with curves & spectacles. One friend used to call this the Porn Librarian look. A woman talking frankly about the importance of presents: always funny to hear the advice they give each other about us.
December 2nd; Wednesday. Excellently odd film about multi-dimensional time. Like many, I've wondered this: why just one dimension? Cue stolid Russian researchers with touching faith in the maths, who - to tourist-ministry music - are soon deep in the Slav forest dropping metal weights down a tower to measure peturbations in other time dimensions with their instruments. Unmissable.

December 1st; Tuesday. Coffee & tea with Publisher John.

Mark Griffith, site administrator / markgriffith at yahoo.com