2013 — 5 October: Saturday
For a change, and because I can, I've been listening1 to NPR's "Fresh Air" with reviews of Alfonso Cuaron's "Gravity", (best seen, I gather, in 3D on the biggest screen you can find) and an interview by Terry Gross with Thomas Maier, the author of a 2009 book about Masters and Johnson that a new Showtime TV series has been based on. I ask you: Twiglit's vampire Aro now pretending to be William Masters? Gimme a break! (I found the book, which I bought when it was first published, to have rather a florid style, and ducked out of it about 25% through. Bite me.)
I also found a new film — "Don Jon" — with Scarlett Johansson and Julianne Moore directed by the young chap (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) whom I last saw playing a younger (or perhaps I should say "earlier in time"?) version of the Bruce Willis character in the excellent "Looper".
There's also been an appalling story from "This American Life" with Ira Glass describing the Adrian Schoolcraft case about NYPD crime stats manipulation and cover-ups, proving (if nothing else) that Lord Acton's dictum about the tendency of power to corrupt is right on the money.
Neatly put, I think. Oh well, time for breakfast.
Elsewhere...
... in New York, researchers suggest an increased diet of literary fiction can be helpful for developing one's social skills. Source and snippet:
There is much the study does not address: How long could such effects last? Would three months of reading Charles Dickens and Jane Austen produce larger or smaller effects, or have no impact? Are the differences in scores all attributable to the type of material read? Would the results hold if the same person read all of the types? And would it matter if the literary fiction was particularly difficult? (Nobody was asked to read James Joyce or Thomas Pynchon.)
Nobody should ever be asked to read James Joyce or Thomas Pynchon.
I'm grateful to Verity Stob's piece here, ...
So we put our heads down and kept to our code page - our set of 8-bit characters - which was laid out according to the English Imperialism algorithm first identified by the renowned 1960s songster Michael Flanders.
... which took me to this wonderful reminder.
Somebody...
... had better try to explain how it can possibly be nearly time for an evening meal already.
Looking back...
... at my not very enthusiastic — and, thankfully, very brief — career as a chemical mass-murderer just two years ago, I would have been even unhappier if contending with one (or more) of these not-so-little blighters!
The photo (by Scott Camazine) shows a hapless honeybee being snacked on by its distant relative, an Asian hornet. The horrid things have been clocked at 25mph. We're doomed, I tell you :-)