2011 — 28 June: Tuesday
With any luck, and a following wind, it will be a bit cooler today.1 Meanwhile, on a sunny day a few years ago, and just a few feet from where I'm currently sitting:
Those were the days.
It's 07:33 and a mere 23.9C, so there's hope yet...
Just (09:20) back from a supplies run. The bits of breeze are quite pleasant, unlike the roof of my mouth. It occurs to me as I cautiously munch through my cereal breakfast that I may have stumbled on one of the secrets to weight loss. It's certainly been a discouragement to nibbling. This too shall pass.
I see the idiocy is spreading
I had never heard of "Offa":
One highly-ranked university, which did not want to be named, was told by Offa it was not enough to measure itself against its rivals. "Our aim is to improve the performance of the sector as a whole and we therefore need you to improve your absolute performance ... as well as measure how you are doing compared to others," the watchdog wrote. "Please consider this issue as soon as possible and make any amendments you think appropriate ..."
Erm, I don't think we can all be above average, like, sort of, by, erm, definition.
Sticking in the needle
Regardless of the propensity of our current heir to the throne to champion ideas that are, shall we say, adrift from the (sometimes) more rational mainstream, I wonder what he'd make of this?
I had a handful of disagreeable clashes with a sociology lecturer during my engineering studies at the Hatfield Polytechnic. Quite why we were even exposed to this chap in the first place both boggled my mind and now reminds me of Tom Sharpe's "Wilt" character — it's fair to say that the majority of my fellow students failed to draw any benefit from his sometimes dubious assertions. The one that stuck in my craw was his unyielding belief2 that humans have no instincts.
I was reminded of this (for reasons I couldn't begin to explain) while reading a fascinating piece bearing on volition, and the way brain damage or illness can affect it. Source and snippet:
Along with the shock of the murders lay another, more hidden, surprise: the juxtaposition of his aberrant actions with his unremarkable personal life. Whitman was an
Eagle Scout and a former marine, studied architectural engineering at the University of Texas, and briefly worked as a bank teller and volunteered as a scoutmaster
for Austin's Boy Scout Troop 5. As a child, he'd scored 138 on the Stanford-Binet IQ test, placing in the 99th percentile. So after his shooting spree from the
University of Texas Tower, everyone wanted answers.
For that matter, so did Whitman. He requested in his suicide note that an autopsy be performed to determine if something had changed in his brain — because he
suspected it had.
The Whitman murder spree was used as the basis for Peter Bogdanovich's unsettling 1968 film "Targets" — well-documented in Roger Corman's amusing memoir:
And I suspect I will now be buying Eagleman's book...
It's gone dark, and I've just (13:06) heard a distant rumble of thunder.
Although, as a lad, I...
... was often told by dear Mama that I "would try the patience of a saint", the blisters in my mouth are currently offering me a similar trial. Still, since my last jotting (it's now 20:14) I've read one of today's deliveries and just finished watching another:
And — lest I be thought a heartless brute — I've also whizzed over to the care home on my next chocolate-flavoured mission of mercy, though today I politely refused the slice of cake on offer, while letting the tea become tepid (not the way I prefer my tea, of course). Turns out the ol' dear has been on at least two minibus outings and attended a musical 'event' in the last month. None of which is either remembered by her, or recounted to me, of course.
The book by NZ author Margaret Mahy was a delight; it won the Carnegie Medal in 1984. (I'd been browsing a "Guardian" piece on medal winners on the eve of the announcement of this year's winner and the title had looked interesting.) "Petropolis" is a largely wordless helicopter survey of about 3% of the devastation so far caused by the extraction of bitumen from the Alberta Tar Sands. We don't deserve this planet.