2012 — 1 March: Thursday — Rabbits!
It's a wry thought1 that it's now precisely 50 years since my guvmint-sponsored IQ test2 though, since I was already in the first year of grammar school, it also struck me as a bit pointless. Come to think of it, quite a few further things have struck me as pointless in the half century since then. I wonder what my namesake today was the patron saint of — just Wales, perhaps?
It's a bit misty out there at the moment.
There's some depressing modern support here, for my grandfather's thesis that I mentioned here.
I'm reminded...
... of a delightful anecdote in Nathaniel Mayer Victor Rothschild's somewhat-autobiographical chunk of family history, the 1984 "Random Variables". It describes how he became permanently sceptical as to the value of intelligence tests:
I long ago chucked out both my Eysenck Pelican books of IQ tests and one by Bernard and Leopold called "Test yourself". I was a curious child...
Shaken?
Or merely stirred? Quadrocopters, heh? What would John Barry have said? (Link.)
During an afternoon...
... jam-packed almost to overflowing with free tea and biscuits — I somehow managed to get my afternoon entertainment and chatting options double-booked, as it were — I had cause to mention Thog's Masterclass and, this evening, the latest Ansible has just provided a neat new example:
Stan and Olivia ate noodles together and then proceeded by taxi to Sembawang Wharves, where Olivia boarded an American destroyer in a long raincoat with the hood up while carrying a large umbrella.
An attention to nautical detail worthy of the late Patrick O'Brian. It occurs to me: I read my first O'Brian novel in 1984, and I've read the entire Aubrey-Maturin saga twice, but I wonder if I'll ever read the books again? (I similarly read the entire "Hornblower" saga two or three times, but not for nearly 40 years.) There are some things I simply don't now seem to wish to return to, which begs the question: why do I keep them?
Answer comes there none.