2014 — 26 April: Saturday
Cool, moist, but at least the sun is actually putting in an appearance1 and it's not actually raining. Now, where's that cuppa?
Call a doctor, somebody!
Post-modern Medicine is (f)(l)ailing:
Here is a sentence from a recent article in the journal Medical Humanities entitled "Medical Humanities as Expressive of Western Culture": "The act of asserting disciplinarity, even interdisciplinarity, derives momentum from a certain teleological impetus to self-narrate, producing a coherent or centralizing version of self-hood in relation to one's envisaged audience". This passage is reminiscent of the infamous 1996 Sokal hoax, when the eminent physicist Alan Sokal submitted a paper to the American journal Social Text entitled "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity". The paper, a parody of postmodernist gobbledygook, was accepted and published.
You hafta smile when you read "I remember one meeting where an artist explained to me that the problems of gravitational-wave physics would be solved if only the research teams were expanded to include the arts" too, surely?
I retain...
... a soft spot for Pelicans (books, and birds, both):
But the imprint itself thrived, and published other books that were to become cultural studies classics: Michael Young's The Rise of the Meritocracy (No 485, September 1961), later misunderstood by Tony Blair, who didn't grasp that it was an argument against meritocracy — "education has put its seal of approval on a minority".
They helped paper over some (of the many) cracks in my education :-)
I live a life...
... of digital uncertainty. I've just re-instated the earlier DVD-ROM drive in BlackBeast when yesterday's fancy new BD drive failed to load a DVD. It started behaving itself (of course) perfectly just as soon as I'd struggled to fit back in its older cousin.2 I then switched back on my Humax Freesat PVR (to see if its digital radio reception had fewer dropouts than the current Freeview reception) and off went the mammoth Rotel power amp. Heck, that's not even a digital device, nor is it digitally connected.
I've just (14:43) brought BlackBeast back online, having undertaken a massive simplification of my rats' nest of linked external hard drives. Funny that NPR is right now talking about "link rot" on the Interweb thingy. It seems 50% of Supreme Court links and 70% of Harvard Law reviews are currently rotten :-)
It was moderately interesting to hear a repeat of an "In the psychiatrist's chair" radio programme in which (the now late) Professor Anthony Clare 'chatted' to Stephen Fry (back in 1997). It was rather more interesting to muse that neither party was then aware of Fry's later diagnosis of his own bipolar disorder. Clare's ham-fisted attempts to analyse Fry's reasons for certain behaviour struck me as therefore necessarily flawed. Though that could be my own long-time disenchantment with psychiatry affecting my opinion, of course.
I could well be...
... the last person to have heard about the Sachal Studios Orchestra of Pakistan. There was a snippet about them on NPR's 'Morning Edition' today and I'm consequently now in proud possession of one of the only variations I've so far heard of Dave Brubeck's "Take Five". What's more, before he died, Brubeck himself had also heard it and expressed himself delighted by it.
Useful tip: don't buy it from Amazon in the US.
In about 18 months...
... from now, which is approximately when I next expect to open the kitchen cabinet door below the sink, in preparation for cleaning out the accumulated gunk that, erm, accumulates in the U-bend, making the draining process slower than I like, I will smile and congratulate myself on my wisdom about 18 months earlier (that is, today) in sticking to the underside of the sink a note that says:
U-bend: clockwise loosens
Of course, had I had the gumption to do this, say, six years ago I could have been congratulating myself that much earlier, couldn't I?