2015 — 29 January: Thursday
Today's little treat?1 A lunch date (preceded, alas, by more mundane [but necessary] shopping including — for a change — a trip to the Post Office [in response to Big Bro's simple "Go4it" email reply overnight]). But followed by a giant 4K 40" "Show and Tell". Should be fun. I see I still need to pick a name for the new toy.
Having lasted barely...
... one hour into "Automata" before pausing this disappointing2 piece of low-rent "Blade Runner" meets "Mad Max" meets "I Robot" mish-mash (or do I mean "mess"?) I decided to elevate my mood by revisiting a heart-warming saga of smartly-dressed New York corporate lawyers and their back-stabbing power games. "Suits" Season #1, in other words.
I wanted to see if any of the long-buried chickens that were coming nicely home to roost in Season #3 had, indeed, been properly foreshadowed. Several of them had been, going as far back as the slightly longer than average pilot episode, in fact. Although I could have done with subtitles at a couple of points to be sure of catching character name references, it was all done very smoothly.
Tosh? Of course it is. But highly entertaining tosh, and a lot more grown-up, and life-affirming, than the drearily predictable SF preceding it.
I hate p.c. in...
... all its guises. Consider this:
Political correctness is a style of politics in which the more radical members of the left attempt to regulate political discourse by defining opposing views as bigoted and illegitimate. Two decades ago, the only communities where the left could exert such
hegemonic control lay within academia, which gave it an influence on intellectual life far out of proportion to its numeric size. Today's political correctness flourishes most consequentially on social media, where it enjoys a frisson of cool and vast new
cultural reach. And since social media is also now the milieu that hosts most political debate, the new p.c. has attained an influence over mainstream journalism and commentary beyond that of the old.
It also makes money.
I've yet to ask...
... Mrs Google what she can tell me about piri piri, but I'm assuming John West wouldn't make it into a dressing and add it to their new packs of mashed sardines if it was inedible. We shall see (or should that be "sea"?) And, if my plunging barometer and the dark clouds are any evidence, I might not even mind if piri piri turns out to be mildly 'hot'. Hot is one thing that it's not in the Great Outdoors at the moment. Need a cuppa.
This...
... is but one more reason for me to adore the period. Source and snippet:
Seneca ended up spending the better part of a decade in exile, and he would have spent even longer were it not for one of those episodic mate swaps which make the imperial family tree such a thicket. In 48 A.D., Claudius had his third wife killed and took as his
fourth bride Agrippina — Caligula and Julia Livilla's sister, and Claudius' niece. It was she who persuaded Claudius to bring Seneca home.
The scheming wife is a fixture of Roman history. As bad as the men are, the women are worse — ruthless, cunning, and often sex-crazed. Many of the stories that come down to us are difficult to credit; for example, before Claudius had his third wife,
Messalina, whacked, she was reported to have held a twenty-four-hour sex competition with a hooker. (According to Pliny, she won.)
Is it any wonder our classics-soaked public-schooled ruling elites are, erm, just a bit "off"? I also can't help wondering if Colin Kolbert (translator of my copy of Justinian's "Digest of Roman Law: theft, rapine, damage and insult") is any relation to Elizabeth Kolbert. A classy writer, in my opinion, as I noticed here...
Somewhere along the line, thanks to some twist in that 0.3 percent of uniquely human DNA, we became the sort of creatures who could level cliffs and turn stone to steel; "the sort of creature," Kolbert writes, "who could wipe out its nearest relative, then dig up its bones and reassemble its genome."
... for example. Some questions are too delicious and best left unanswered.
Deep unjoy!
Not only did I get home to find an unwelcome email from the care-home regarding yet another fall on dear Mama's part, but now (17:32) I notice it's windy, cold, and snowing. Yuk.
Whether I will try to cheer myself up with the day's delivery remains to be seen:
As I've said before, I'm a sucker for time travel tales. Though I can't help wondering why the MPAA didn't rate this title.