2008 — 23 Feb: Saturday
Placeholder only, as it's 00:18 and I'm drooping very rapidly. More later.
Five tracks to go...
And Brian Matthew will be playing "Soul bossa nova" by Quincy Jones — the bounciest music of the evening yesterday during the Trivia quiz. What an amazing web! I can remember when you had to write to the BBC and wait several weeks to be told what a particular item had been, by which time you'd forgotten it, or bought it. Now you can know in advance... Nor had I realised that Shirley Abicair was "the famous Australian zither player" but then there are lots of things I neither realise nor know. Time (08:42) for brekkie.
The editor of that Bookslut site I mentioned a few days back does a nice line in intelligent ranting:
[Hadley Freeman's] new book The Meaning of Sunglasses: And a Guide to Almost All Things Fashionable will not make you feel worse about the state of your thighs, nor your brain. Freeman namedrops Andrea Dworkin and poet Joseph Parisi as often as she does Anna Wintour. She's the one you want on the other side of the changing room, not Redstone. If you came out looking cheap, she would grab you by the shoulders, turn you around, and demand you change immediately. As she writes in the section labeled "Cleavage, and the plumbing of depths," Show me a woman with a good three inches of cleavage on display, and I'll show you a woman who, rightly or wrongly, has little faith in her powers of conversation.
A good question
Tom Hayden was back in Vietnam last Christmas while I was cowering, shell-shocked, after my first solo drive up to my cousins in the Midlands. As I was walking in Sutton Park
with a couple of Westies, it seems Mr Hayden was wandering through throngs of Christmas shoppers, asking himself: "Why kill, maim and uproot millions of Vietnamese if the outcome was a consumer
wonderland approved by the country's still-undefeated Communist Party? The whole wretched American rationale for the war, that Vietnam was a dangerous domino, a pawn in the cold war,
seemed so painfully wrong. Was there any connection between destroying so much life and causing the Vietnamese to go Christmas shopping?"
More here.
An anti-war theory?
Which takes me, of course, to the theory that make-up might serve a pacifist cause. Paula Marantz Cohen, also writing in The Smart Set magazine: "By the same token, checking makeup is a useful rite. It allows for a respite from the hurly burly of life. It says, quite literally, hold on while I straighten up the mask that I'm showing the world. I suspect that men are more violent than women because they don't have these 'time-outs' in which to take stock and put their masks in place. If they wore makeup, they might think twice about going to war where, moreover, the opportunities to put on lip gloss are decidedly curtailed."
It's a wry thought to contemplate Churchill's response to this line of reasoning. Still, as I mentioned here, make-up has (forgive the pun) wide application! Ironic that "Lipstick traces" by Benny Spellman is playing as I type these words.
In the real world(?) the Guardian reports that "Passengers travelling between EU countries or taking domestic flights would have to hand over a mass of personal information, including their mobile phone numbers and credit card details, as part of a new package of security measures being demanded by the British government. The data would be stored for 13 years and used to 'profile' suspects." I predict a profitable future for forgers and ID thieves. These are, it seems, EU proposals but (of course) our benevolent and caring leaders in Whitehall want to extend this (stupid, expensive, useless — I could go on) system to sea and rail travel. We are (of course) the only EU member state to want to erode our citizens' freedoms still further. And we want to be able to share this information with third parties outside the EU. (Guess who?)
The society of Isaac Asimov's Caves of Steel comes ever closer. There are days when New Zealand sounds very attractive, he added sheepishly.
Eyes watering... dept.
Family web site be blowed:
But in such unsettling times, when most things we thought we knew were wrong, there is a certain nostalgic, reassuring quality to the discovery that there are still white-coated Italian chaps generating female orgasms under laboratory conditions. I do hope they go to work on silver Vespas, accompanied by retro-futuristic soundtracks.
Perhaps I should construct a new MP3 playlist? As for "retro-futuristic", where else would it take you but here?
This, on the other hand, will take you into a very wacky world:
Emo has a wry way with words... Example: "I go from stool to stool in singles bars hoping to get lucky, but there's never any gum under any of them." He is a master of the paraprosdokian — but then, you probably already knew that.
So much to do, so little 'umph'... dept.
There is much that I can do, and a subset of that consists (of course) of things that I should do. But, right now (having just put the phone down after accepting a very kindly invitation to an evening of food and entertainment) I am dipping into "Still spitting at sixty" as I was curious to read Roger Law's memories of his involvement with the National Lampoon folk back in the 1970s. I struck gold, of a sort: "At our first meeting Hendra1 asked me if I would consider doing a model of Mel Brooks in chopped chicken liver. I knew then that we were on the same wavelength."