2015 — 1 January: Thursday — rabbits!

Happy New Year, etc. etc. Or, as that long-suffering earwig supposedly said1 "Earwiggo again." (The old ones are the best.)

I gave up on...

... several potential lumps of entertainment last night with which to see the new year in, but finally settled on — and greatly enjoyed — rather a sweet little fantasy that I'd remembered watching with Christa back in 2005:

Just Like Heaven

It was all a bit silly I admit, and is clearly a descendant of material like David Lean's film of Noël Coward's stage comedy "Blithe Spirit". But Reese Witherspoon's quickfire dialogue delivery recalls the fastest of the 'screwball' comedy cross-talkers of the 1930s and 1940s. Not that many people can be bothered with those in these modern and almost fully-unenlightened times, of course.

I could have...

... managed perfectly well without the last batch of fireworks — the ones that woke me at 02:05. That's just unnecessary. I wonder how my neighbours would feel if I set off a string of the damnable things this morning?

Who wouldn't want...

... to be a fly on the wall at this meeting?

Pulps

Confession: I've read no Spillane! One glance at the covers on those wonderful rotating wire racks...

My sister and I would go to the shop to buy packets of sour cherry boiled sweets, and on a rotating wire rack were flimsy, pulpish American publications with paintings on the front covers of scantily clad women tied up in ropes, looking in horror at leering, bald SS officers with monocles and riding crops, or buck-toothed Japanese wearing thick-lensed spectacles, thus neatly reducing the whole of the Second World War merely to provide the context for some cheap and rather sordid titillation.

Martin Rowson, describing part of his childhood in "Stuff" (2007)

... in the newsagents of my youth was enough to see that dear Mama would have had a series of conniptions. And, back then, I wasn't even sure I knew what a "conniption" was...

There's an interesting piece in "Aeon" on science retractions — a topic I noted last Sunday — here.

Push me pull you?

Gotta love that ubiquitous "self-undermining human irrationality"...

It would stretch matters only slightly to say that Why Nudge? could serve as a book of common prayer for this new political religion. A government both libertarian in Sunstein's understanding (because it shies away, for the most part, from direct coercion) and paternalistic (because informed by the ubiquity of self-undermining human irrationality) is one that will be simultaneously nowhere and everywhere. Sunstein's vision is not absurd, but there are costs to a liberalism more focused on nudging a bit everywhere instead of shoving society in a more circumscribed but definitive way.

Steven Teles, reviewing Cass R Sunstein's book in American Interest


It seems a while since we heard from our glorious guvmint's very own "Nudge Unit". And who knew the "will to power" is a "psychological flaw"? How could our — one might hope, benevolent — Intelligent Designer possibly permit such things?

Early Doonesbury

:-)

'Twas brillig...

... and 93% of the slithy toves in the UK now have mobile phones. That's a lot of chatter. [Pause] Or a wo(c)k full of Jabber, perhaps? [Pause] Right, I'm off to blag a biccie and a cuppa. TTFN.

Time blurs...

... in the leisured land of the lazy pensioner. I bought (a while ago) what turned out (sadly) to be a "one-off" alternate reality / alternate history TV series called "Kings". An ambitious re-telling of 'David and Goliath' in a digitally-anonymised modern day New York. Having very much enjoyed it, I lent it to a chum or two. Perhaps inevitably, I forgot who had it last — it might even have been Junior, though he's denied the charge. So, having decided that I wanted to watch it again, I bought another copy. And this evening I've been very much enjoying it again...

If you want to see it, buy your own copy!

  

Footnote

1  As he fell off a cliff.