2014 — 1 May: Thursday — rabbits!
I seem to get very little spam email these days1 but the one trapped this morning made me smile. It's not the first time I have been "reached out to, yet again" purportedly to get me to submit a bio profile for some spurious edition of a directory such as "Who's Who". But it's the first time when, hovering over the three separate email links, they all come from a domain quite honestly calling itself "walletlighttend".
I would probably lose less money, I suspect, than I tend to do when following the similarly unsolicited — and much higher volume — emails I get from, say, Jeff Bezos.
Raising a son...
... was hard enough. Apparently, dogs in the upper Amazonian forest are even trickier:
The relationship of the Runa with their dogs mixes a hands-off quality with a certain intimacy: the dogs aren't often fed, but "just as they advise a child on how to live correctly, people counsel their dogs". Dogs should not be lazy, violent or devote too much energy to sex. These principles are "communicated" to the dogs — who are also understood as ensouled creatures — by giving them hallucinogenic substances in special rituals.
Sounds slightly barking mad, but that could just be me.
"Newspeak", in other words
Before I nip out, ahead of the impending rain (by the look of it) in search of the next crockpot, I was tickled by the chain of logic on display here:
When Müller's first book was published in Romania, the censors removed, among other things, the word "suitcase" whenever it occurred. "Suitcase" hardly seems a politically charged word. Yet at the time, the early 1980s, the German minority was leaving Romania en masse and the regime wanted to keep quiet about it. In the censors' minds, if you said "suitcase," you meant "packing," which meant "leaving," which meant "leaving for good," which meant that the country was not a socialist paradise that nobody would leave of his own accord. The irrational assumption was that if suitcases were not mentioned, people would not think of emigration. As in magical thinking, that which is not named does not exist.
Again, it sounds barking mad, but that could just be me.
We're all gonna die!
Not for the first time, I'm reading about bacterial resistance to antibiotics. My life was saved by antibiotics in the early 1990s when Christa and I simultaneously (and very quickly) succumbed to nasty double pneumonia, but that's another story. One human generation ago, I wrote to Carol:
Have been enjoying my sore throat for 29 days now, but it's finally starting to fade. Don't know what this new generation of viruses is coming to, but I don't approve. Once worked out, while idly standing at a bus stop, that — allowing, say, 45 years, since bacteria were first exposed to penicillin — germs which reproduce (am I allowed to say that over VNET?!) even only twice in one hour have had getting on for
quick drop into CMS SUBSET for my calculator, here!
788,400 generations to evolve ways of dealing with our primary antibiotic. That's the equivalent of over 14,000,000 years of human evolution (14,191,200 allowing 18 years per generation...). Since we've only been around for perhaps 3,000,000 years max (and I, personally, feel as if I have!) is it any wonder the little devils have got the drop on us?
We're returning inexorably to the pre-antibiotic world of my grandparents, but with the added bonus that there are now hellishly high concentrations of human population for said little devils to make whoopee among. Or perhaps they're just fiendishly intelligently designed by that all-loving fantasy figure to keep us on our toes? Actually, if this Dutch paper is accurate, "the early modern human morphology emerged in East Africa possibly as early as 195,000 year (sic) ago". That gives bacterial evolution a far greater 'advantage'. We're doomed, I tell you. Doomed.
Don't panic. Make a cup of tea.
My post-prandial...
... browsing has seen me wandering around this little wonderland. (After first starting here while Len fossicks around for a BBC documentary he's [almost] "sure" he has salted away somewhere.) I started reading Charles Fort in June 1971, for reasons probably better left unexplored. Eric Frank Russell was a great fan, I recall.
Here's hoping...
... my seemingly tenuous link to the outside world stays active long enough to report the latest batch of Decca's Blu-ray Pure Audio bits to land on my doormat:
It's fair to describe this as a venerable performance, as it dates back to 1966. But, from what I've heard of it so far, it was a good, clean recording. The late Colin Davis had not yet been knighted, that's for sure.
Having just listened...
... to the 2011 remastered version of "Animals" I've now moved on to the even more under-rated "Atom Heart Mother". You probably have to be of a certain age and 'bent' to agree with me about the quality of this fine music. De gustibus non est disputandum, even if dear Mama characterised it as a "dreadful dirge" when I played it for the third time in a row in the bungalow in Meldreth one Saturday afternoon in 1971. And I was listening on headphones, dagnabbit.