2015 — 3 January: Saturday
I enjoyed Steven Poole's "Treasury of Unbearable Office Jargon" — a smile every couple of definitions is plenty good enough for such a book. I see it has now won a 2014 Plain English Award, which seems entirely yet weirdly appropriate. Today, I discovered Poole's earlier debunking of the current spate of pop (aka pseudoscientific1) neuroscience books and found it equally entertaining. Source and snippet:
You start each chapter with a pat anecdote about an individual's professional or enterpreneurial success, or narrow escape from peril. You then mine the neuroscientific research for an apparently relevant specific result and narrate the experiment, perhaps interviewing the scientist involved and describing his hair. You then climax in a fit of premature extrapolation, inferring from the scientific result a calming bromide about what it is to function optimally as a modern human being. Voilà, a laboratory-sanctioned Big Idea in digestible narrative form.
After premature extrapolation, shouldn't there be a hasty retraction? :-)
Or, in my case, some overdue breakfast and a calming cuppa. Nurse! Where have you put the bromide?
Has anything changed...
... since I wrote this?
Back when I thought these things mattered and guvmints told the truth I used to track inflation and pay rates ... my ICL salary then was half my IBM pension now. Whether I am in any sense better off now ... is an imponderable I refuse to ponder ... but I now stick to the Wilkins Micawber principle of domestic economy :-)
I shall now wrestle a lump of cheese from a mouse-trap and see if I can find a stale crust.
It seems not!
It's one thing...
... recognising — on the front cover artwork of the French DVD delivered this afternoon by a rather bedraggled Mr Postie — the name of the cartoonist (Georges Wolinski) who masterfully encapsulated almost the whole plot of Claude Berri's 1977 film in one, simple image:
But tracking down which page (110, as it happens):
In exactly which book (from over quarter of a century ago, as it happens):
Reproduces the only other example I believe I have of Wolanski's work took (I hafta admit) rather a long time. Good job I'm retired.
Having just...
... been led (by an IMDB 'news' item) to an inane Grauniad piece about using "Seinfeld" episodes as diagnostic aids to psychiatric disorders (where else but in the land of the DSM?) I chortled delightedly on seeing one of the comments attracted by this piece of meta-pseudoscience:
Why don't they just read the guardian comments sections...there are enough head cases here to make a DSM the size of a dozen OEDs.
"You might well think that, Mattie. I couldn't possibly comment." :-)