2012 — 23 October: Tuesday
I may have been born to potter but there comes a time1 to put away childish things, saddle up, and go get some more food. If, that is, a chap wants more fresh stuff to eat. But let's see if the weather picks up a bit first, shall we? (It probably won't.)
I gave up...
... studying history nearly 50 years ago. As taught in a new, mid-1960s grammar school by a bored descendant of Thomas Gradgrind it was far too tedious. Besides, history is generally written by the victorious conquerors, is it not? Not nowadays:
In recent years, space history has been armed with data and detail and an urge to explain everything. Like the "naked ape" anthropology of the nineteen-seventies, sure in its belief that the
missionary position in sex explains all of human bonding, the new space history has imperial ambitions. Russians always want a warm-weather port and will always have a huddled, suspicious culture,
whether Tsarist, Soviet, or Putinish. Ideology is mere summer clouds above an unchanging terrain...
The new space history has one great virtue. It forces upon historians, the amateurs we all are as well as the pros we read, a little more humility. American prosperity looks like a function of
virtue and energy, but the geographic turn tells us that it's mostly a function of white people with guns owning a giant chunk of well-irrigated, very well-harbored real estate off the edge of
the World Island, bordering a hot land on one side and a cold one on the other. Really, you can't miss.
A beautifully-written piece.
Meanwhile, over in the Grauniad, we can find Polly Toynbee banging on about politicians, who — based on their ambivalent relationship to the 'truth' about crime2 and punishment — are always convinced that the guaranteed route to more votes lies in banging up more criminals. Personally, I would hate to be imprisoned, but that's just me. And I would really hate to share a cell with a politician, for that matter. Or a banker. Or a journalist. Or an estate agent. Or an insurance salesman. Or...
Having spotted...
... my local book-selling friend Jonathan pushing a trolley in the Rose that Waits a few minutes ago I was pleased to be able to offer him my good wishes for a happy and healthy retirement. He's confirmed what I already heard from his wife about not finding anyone willing to take over his Arcade books enterprise. This will zeroise the number of such outlets within easy walking distance. I regard this as a shame as I have a life-long tendency to calibrate the desirability of places to live by the proximity of independent book shops. Still, he kept it going for a quarter of a century.
Come to think of it, so did I! :-)
Brrr
The cheery chap on the BBC has just outlined impending Arctic chills later this week displacing the current uniform grey. Meanwhile, my combination therapy continues to help displace the pesky critters currently running riot in my nasal tract. Time for a healthy lunchtime snack, methinks. I hope my sense of taste has come back online. I certainly tasted the last of my previous batch of Kiwi fruit.
I was no fan of that rather strange chap Jimmy Savile, but is there anything quite so unedifying as a committee of MPs in hot pursuit of the in-all-probability blameless current Director General of that dreadful lefty organisation they have such an entertaining love/hate relationship with — the BBC — as they avidly take the moral higher ground?
You can never quite...
... be sure you've extirpated that "final" bug from your software, can you? My current colour scanner is a CanoScan 5600F. Most of the time, the application software suite is no problem. Then, on the odd occasion, it will lock up at that inconvenient point after scanning, and before saving, an image — with the only option left being to kill off the process. I have a hint of an inkling of a faint suspicion that the problem could actually be one of interaction with something else running at the same time, which (if true) of the applications would tend to point suspicion at either my web browser or my SCP client.3
Not for the first time, therefore, I've just checked for, and downloaded, a scanner driver update that was only four days old. Of course, if the interaction is with system software, I'm screwed. What are the odds? :-(
BBC bias
I hope it wasn't my comment above that resulted in my being sent this high-energy Mitch Benn YouTube link. (Thanks, Tom.) BBC Radio alone is worth more than the costs of the licence fee. Not so sure about the TV side, but nobody forces me to watch that.
Trumped?
I've been watching Anthony Baxter's film "You've Been Trumped" — a documentary guaranteed to raise the hackles higher even than Donald Trump's arrogance. And I've no great liking for golf in the first place. Bill Forsyth (maker of one of my many Top Ten films of all time — the 1983 Local Hero — from which some clips have been incorporated) watched the film at the Shetland Film Festival, giving his full support to Baxter. Fascinating.