2007 — 29 June: TGIF (once again)
Not much point waiting in for Mr Postie today, it seems. Nor much to detain me in today's Guardian, it (also) seems.
Saved by Amazon... department
Good mornin' young feller-me-lad, what'cha got there for me?
- A Prairie Home Companion the final film by Maestro Robert Altman (and one of my preferred NPR broadcasts in "real" life, too — if such a term is valid)
- Stuff by Martin Rowson
This — excellent — political cartoonist turns out to be a sickeningly good writer too - The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
A Black Swan is "a highly improbable event with three principal characteristics: its unpredictability, its massive impact; and, after it has happened, our desire to make it appear less random and more predictable than it was."
Excellent! They can neatly displace the finished Dawkins on the bedside. (I browsed both books in the UK's over-priced High Street at some length earlier in the week; the Altman DVD was [of course] a no-brainer.)
Here's a tiny bit of Rowson describing summer holiday camps that, with two small changes of detail1 could have been a precise extract from my own childhood memories:
My sister and I would go to the shop to buy packets of sour cherry boiled sweets, and on a rotating wire rack were flimsy, pulpish American publications with paintings on the front covers of scantily clad women tied up in ropes, looking in horror at leering, bald SS officers with monocles and riding crops, or buck-toothed Japanese wearing thick-lensed spectacles, thus neatly reducing the whole of the Second World War merely to provide the context for some cheap and rather sordid titillation.
Come to think of it, I host a quotation about Adam Parfrey's study of this sub-genre of literature along similar lines...
Big Bidness... department
NPR has just told me that Walmart sales last year were up 8% to a staggering $348,000,000,000.
RSI... department (1)
Bailing out the pond, stein by stein, into a bucket and thence back to the water butt. The pond half of the bog garden, that is. While the rain does its best to defeat me, of course. Such stuff as dreams are made of, or drenched words to that general effect.
RSI... department (2)
Opening the door, and signing for another Amazon delivery:
- The Last Oil Shock by David Strahan
How can one resist "A survival guide to the imminent extinction of petroleum man"? Mind you, the last such guide I read about impending doom and gloom (during the UK's brief flirtation with the idea of right-wing military coups in the mid-1970s) was, in hindsight, so wide of the mark as to have deserved filing in the "fiction" section. Though the author's name escapes me, I remember he had been a regular speaker on one of the London radio stations, and advised everyone to do as he did, sell their houses and stay liquid, presumably to float clear of the house price meltdown he was confidently predicting as one of the consequences of the collapse of law and order in the UK. - Way off the road by Bill Geist (I mentioned this amiable chap here.)
Equally irresistible: "discovering the peculiar charms of small-town America."
On that last point, I gather next year marks a turning point whereby 50% of the population will be urbanised, rather than rural. For anyone ahead of that particular demographic curve, let me point out that the creature at bottom left is called a "cow". Check out Pink Floyd's album Atom Heart Mother for a close-up!