2015 — 30 January: Friday
Please, Miss! I know I'm late, but I have an excuse! I was just tidying up my desktop1 and now I need to make some breakfast... Back in a tick.
Much as I love...
... toothache, I love even more the idea of there existing a "literary reader" who is (I can only assume) morally and/or intellectually superior to an "infrequent" reader. Source and (annoying) snippet:
It's a book that boys and young men of a certain temperament — intelligent, introverted, angry — often obsess over. Dune is a potent wish-fulfilment fantasy, allowing its readers to play out the status and power they lack in the real world.
By the way, chum, it's probably smarter not to judge a book by any film adaptation made from it. Ever! Just sayin'. Though I concede the existence of the concept "Lynchian weirdness", what the hell do you expect when going to see a film by Lynch? Mary bad-word-here Poppins?
I've yet to...
... finish absorbing all of "Bitter Lake" which is still dangling off iPlayer for the next 25 days but, in its creator's own words:
I'm not just talking about news, but about all factual reporting on television. The way they tell stories about the world feels increasingly thin — and more and more detached from the way all of us think and feel. Journalism used to open up reality to
tell us new stuff. But now it is helping to keep us all inside the bubble by playing back stuff we already know in slightly altered forms.
So I've taken all that unedited material from Afghanistan and tried to use it in a new way. My aim is both to show the complex reality that we didn't see in Afghanistan, but also to try and do it in a way that's more emotional and involving. Some of it is
quite radical, but I think you have to try and do that if you want to puncture the bubble
Is reality for people who can't handle drugs, or did I get that the wrong way round?
My desktop epiphany
Like a child with a new toy (or its cardboard box, perhaps) I was quite enchanted by the way I could pin the Windows programs I regularly run to the Task Bar for invoking conveniently. Perhaps you could always do this, but I only got into the habit in Win8, partly to keep away from the obnoxious "Start" screen. I soon found how to clear that of its ghastly Fisher-Price style Modern Apps tiles. But, by then, I'd also half-filled my Task Bar with stuff I actually use. Modus operandi varies even among my like-minded chums, but I've decided to try a new approach, and see how I get on.
My Task Bar is now empty, and there's a neat row of program and folder shortcuts sitting vertically down the left hand side of my screen adjacent to said Bar. I can thus see at a glance if a given program is running. Example:
Just remember, on a 40" screen this is all perfectly readable!
But doesn't...
... everyone feel this way?! Particularly when wearing silk...
Fascinating article though, alas, my incipient synaesthesia has stayed firmly in the closet. Which meant the final paragraph left me with a nasty taste, if that's not too synaesthetic a way of putting it.
My 'catch of the day' ...
... a while ago was Bryan Talbot's "Alice in Sunderland", so I enjoyed this interview covering his recent work. I won't, however, be opening the second of my two packs of sardine with piri piri dressing any time soon. Definitely not a catch.
Meanwhile, I thought the two DVDs that arrived today...
... would probably offer an interesting contrast of interviewing styles between Parky and John Freeman.
Having supplied...
... my latest gas and electricity meter readings earlier today, I was delighted to receive this news a few hours later:
Tell me again...
... the part played by intuition in an economics exam?
Incredibubble.