2014 — 7 January: Tuesday
It only occurred to me this morning1 that yesterday's odd (for me) bank letter was polite because the bank (sort of) owed me money, rather than the other way round. That certainly makes a change.
The clouds...
... currently scudding past are holding on to their rain. That's a nice touch, too. It could be Mother Nature being nice to dear Mama on her 97th birthday, I suppose (but I somehow doubt it). Wonder how long it will last... My lunch companion and I both got well-soaked yesterday afternoon just on the short dash from the pub to the car following the morning's little road trip.
It has been said...
... that the only thing we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history — a sentiment that I most recently heard espoused by one of the characters that Halle Berry was portraying in the film version of "Cloud Atlas". (The 1970s radical journalist, should you not recall.) That said, I find myself wondering if the history of my A/V system supports the proposition.
Here was the state of that system in April 2001.
Click the pic to see the 2014 variant (as of today).
I managed to deduce that it was...
... J Craig Venter that I managed to catch taking part in an NPR phone-in about his book "Life at the speed of light" and the prospects and possibilities of synthetic life. Parts of it have been very reminiscent of that scary 1950 story "The Little Black Bag" by Cyril Kornbluth.
I wonder if...
... Big Bro was aware of this? Source and snippet:
Legend has it that in late November 1916, while piloting a Curtiss Flying Boat C-2 some 500 feet above the coast of Long Island, [Sperry] used his instrument (sic) to administer a novel kind of flying lesson to one Cynthia Polk (whose husband was driving an ambulance in war-torn France). During their airborne antics, however, the two unwittingly managed to bump and disengage the autopilot, sending their plane into Great South Bay, where they were rescued, both stark naked, by duck hunters. A gallant Sperry explained that the force of the crash had stripped both fliers of all their clothing, but that didn't stop a skeptical New York tabloid from running the famous headline "Aerial Petting Ends in Wetting."
And to think that, last night, I was skimming through nearly six hours of John Downer's hi-def Earth flight without spotting any hint of such airborne antics. (I was skimming because, after a while, the ravishing landscapes started to trump the attractions of yet more of our feathered friends.)
I was browsing "The Atlantic" in the first place because its editor Scott Stossel is the chap prone to just about every anxiety and phobia known to humanity, and I had recently sent his Observer story to my chum Ian for his interest. Earlier this morning, I heard Scott talking to Terry Gross on NPR. And, yes, he has a fear of flying, though only because his "baseline" fear is one of vomiting. He even recalls the exact time he actually last vomited, which was in 1976...
People are strange.
Declaration of...
... personal disinterest: I have read little or nothing by Aristotle, Plato, Hayek, Rand, or Herman (for that matter). But I do still like a nice, vicious put-down. Source and snippet:
"Today's affluent, globalized material world," Herman writes, "was largely made by Aristotle's offspring." But while he not only greatly prefers Aristotle, but also taxes Plato's intellectual
and spiritual heirs with virtually every political tendency and historical development in European and global history that he deplores, Herman nevertheless insists that "our world still
needs its Plato."
In Hayek's terms, and — to careen vertiginously down the intellectual and moral food chain — in Rand's as well, such a view is anathema. Late in The Cave and
the Light, Herman approvingly quotes Rand's assertion that "everything that makes us civilized beings, every rational value that we possess — including the birth of science, the
industrial revolution, the creation of America, even the [logical] structure of our language, is the result of Aristotle's influence." Hayek's view was far more nuanced (but then,
compared with Rand's, whose wasn't?)...
Time for "lemonses" I think.
Recall that highbrow tachyon joke?
The barman says: "We don't serve faster-than-light particles here." A tachyon enters a bar.
This struck me as somewhat similar:
Myself...
... as others currently see me:
Sorry about this. Definitely time for lunch. [Pause] I can (just about) grasp the concept of an "over-heating" UK economy. But now they're talking about it reaching "escape velocity". I assume this is a matter of some gravity. Or is it to do with a Black Hole, perhaps?
I blame Iris!
She it was who pointed me to this afternoon's very well-observed radio drama, and I snaffled it as soon as it became available. Christopher Reid knew exactly of what he wrote, and I fear I all too easily recognised some (actually, many) of the situations he faced and the reactions they invoked since (had I the skill) I could have described them myself.