2014 — 4 July: Friday
Listening to some of the news1 doesn't help me conclude the world is getting any saner. Obama somewhat sarcastically suggesting that Congress should sue him over immigration policy, for example. 11,000,000 separate problems, it seems.
Mesmerised? Moi?
Arguably.
Modern life avails one of plentiful opportunities to be mesmerized, enchanted, visually inebriated now: The condition is not hard to bring on. In a culture that asks us too often to "pay attention," we need rest and release, and we can find both through the mesmerizing powers of current electronic culture. Ideally, paying attention should be rewarded by absorption, but when absorption isn't found, or no one teaches us how to achieve it, then being mesmerized will have to do. Being mesmerized is all about wish fulfillment. It's about becoming the soldier, becoming the knight, becoming the sports star, becoming the princess. It is a turning away from reality. To be absorbed is to intensify one's connection with what is real with the hope of reshaping it for the better, if ever so slightly.
I'm guessing reading doesn't count :-)
I find myself...
... curiously sympathetic to this comment...
The media report is the data. The topic is mainstream media reporting of psychology experiments. Remarkably, the report does not explicitly state that the psychologists were morons. Make of that what you will.
...appended to this "report".
I blame Ben Goldacre for my increased cynicism.
If a paper cut...
... is delivered by the edge of a pack of salad in Waitrose, is it still a paper cut? Not as bad a day, however, as the person ahead of me in the self-checkout queue will be having, after leaving behind a payment card and vanishing into the Friday morning melee2 before I could do anything about it.
An afternoon...
... listening with about half an ear to a series of naughty chaps getting sentenced to various lengths of time in prison. Personally, I regard both phone hacking and kiddie fiddling (to put it kindly) with distaste. As long as tabloids and rubbish TV channels continue to pursue the disgusting cult of celebrity, publish or promulgate celebrity tittle-tattle, and flourish this as infotainment "in the public interest" (which will not be for one microsecond longer than idiot members of the public buy into all this rubbish) I don't expect to see much change.
This after the naming by an old age pensioner of an aircraft carrier for which (I'm told) we can't actually afford a full set of aircraft.
Much nicer...
... listening to Suzy Klein chatting to Bernie Krause (recall his book "The Great Animal Orchestra") at the Cheltenham Festival. (Link.)
For anyone...
... who cares to track this sort of thing, I can now report that I've bought 643 books since Christa's death. How (let's not ask 'why'?) might I know this? Funny you should ask.
Owing to a momentary lapse of reason on the part of the idiot webmaster who works on these things around these parts, and while refreshing a web page on my little Intranet a few minutes ago, I foolishly saved a file that had become zero length while I worked on it. No great harm done — except to my sense of professional pride — as I was able to retrieve the .shtml variant of the same file from the server where I'd just popped it, strip out the few trivial bits of markup, globally change all the occurrences of "&" back to "&" and carry on relatively unscarred.
Having been lent...
... "The Atrocity Archives" (Charles Stross) a couple of days ago, and enjoyed it, I've just loaded the next four titles of the series on to my Kindle and am good to go, regardless of the weather, which has just started drizzling quite heavily. In fact, it now (20:16) looks grey and dreary out there, which will at least help the temperature drop a little nearer my comfort zone.