2012 — 21 December: Friday

It struck me as probably a good idea¹ to postpone breakfast while I get in a few more crumbs of fresh food before the festive spasm kicks into gear. Even though this meant it would be too early to pay in Uncle ERNIE's two minor-league Xmas presents at my bank. (Dear Mama picked up three this month, once again beating my 'score'.)

I shall now turn my attention to another cuppa and some fuel, methinks. It's stopped raining though the cheery radio weather forecasters suggest it's not going to be long before we get re-doused. Where will it all go, I wonder?

I'm not a huge fan...

... of this chap — having regularly read his stuff in "New Statesman" in former times — but he may just be on to something here:

The arrival of fake thought and fake scholarship in our universities ... has come about through the complicit opening of territory to the propagation of nonsense. Nonsense of this kind is a bid to be accepted. It asks for the response: by God, you are right, it is like that. And if you have earned your academic career by learning to push around the nonsensical mantras of the impostors, combining them in the impenetrable syntax that hoodwinks the person who composes it as much as the person who reads it, no doubt you will react indignantly to everything I have said so far and cease to read further...

Roger Scruton in Aeon

Some of the comments are pretty indignant and/or dismissive. I do like that story about the Emperor's new clothes :-)

The comments attached to this piece by Tim Parks were fascinating, but probably only to a writer. Some of the issues regularly cropped up while writing IBM manuals in English (of course) for an international audience.

I've never had...

... the slightest urge to pursue power in the fascinating way some loathsome people are driven to. It's evidently a lot more addictive than so-called hard drugs. Perhaps we should make a pair of 1969 SF novels compulsory school reading? I have in mind Norman Spinrad's "Bug Jack Barron" and John Brunner's "The Jagged Orbit". They both predicted current events, and helped me form my jaundiced view of media and political power. (Link.)

Apparently, this technology is going to enable Mozilla's Firefox to cut itself loose from Adobe Flash. Some time next April. Good (I hope).

Courtesy of Mr Postie...

... and, just barely visible between the incoming² Blu-rays, is the remastered (and expanded into a double CD) "Tusk", the 1979 album from Fleetwood Mac. With 21 unreleased tracks, it claims, though this includes demos, roughs, and outtakes.

No time to hear it yet, though, as I'm now heading over to Roger & Eileen to blag a pre-Xmas cuppa and a choccie biscuit.

Footnotes

¹ It was, judging by the rate at which the car park was filling up.
² The almost continuous mayhem in Nolan's final episode of "Batman" is categorised by our film censors ("classifiers", yeah, right) as "moderate violence". This includes a nuclear explosion clearly visible from Gotham City. Though I have my doubts about the accuracy of the "mushroom" cloud. (I don't think this constitutes a spoiler, by the way. As eny fule kno, if you show a weapon early in a film, you should assume it will be used before the end of the film. Unless, of course, the director is a crappy one. Nolan is not.)