2015 — 14 April: Tuesday
An odd juxtaposition, this morning.1 News of the anniversary vigils marking the abduction of Nigerian schoolchildren followed immediately by a line from Verlaine. Meanwhile, I await the sunshine that will be burning off the morning mists.
I can't believe...
... I've just read an entire article about the tie. But then, it kept me smiling.
In a feudal order, Foucault suggested, power existed in order to be seen. It was enshrined in the very bodies of the king and nobles, which were on continual display in portraits, pageants, and court ceremonial. Common folk were faceless spectators. The modern bureaucratic state reversed all this: suddenly, it was the powerful who were faceless, depersonalized abstractions, as it was they who did the inspecting, examining, and monitoring of everybody else.
Inevitably prompting recall of the Dilbert strip wherein Wally exerted real power by unjobbing Dilbert with just a few keystrokes while on 'assignment' to his unreal job in HR.
At least I have a real job. (clickety click) Not any more, you don't.
Bean counters and HR. All hail the new Kings. And then along came this delicious line from Auden, in a review of one of Moretti's recent books:
In a number of recent essays, lectures, and books, he's made it clear that he wants to be that guy: the disruptor who upsets the applecart of the Usual to vend the finer fruit of the Counter-intuitive; the boy who points out that the emperor has no clothes and then morphs into the Grand Vizier who re-clothes him. Moretti has been the leading polemicist for bringing quantitative methods into a field that, until recently, faithfully observed W.H. Auden's instructions: "Thou shalt not sit with statisticians/ Nor commit a social science." Moretti does both...
I can't say I "enjoyed" Distant Reading overmuch.
Oops
I've once again managed to overlook the monthly glass re-cycling. Mind you, they've fooled several neighbours this morning by showing up at 07:45. I've yet to cover the bottom of the crate with my impressive set of marmalade jars.
Back from...
... my supplies run, to contemplate the (solved?) mystery of perytons:
While microwaves (sic) are supposed to be sealed against escaping radiation, the research also suggests human impatience lets enough noise escape to be detected: people open the doors as soon as the timer hits zero, but while the power source — the magnetron — is still in its shut-down phase.
15 researchers to pinpoint this? Crikey.
The prospective...
... LibDem MP (after characterising the 2008 global financial meltdown as "Labour's disastrous economic crash") tells me she has three top priorities just for little ol' me:
So she has trouble counting, too. Said "Conservative", by the way, voted against gay marriage. (Can't have married gays in Winchester, dammit!) And the Labour chap is going to build genuinely affordable homes for ordinary people. Barrister turned brickie, heh?
My next dollop...
... of mindless CGI has just shown up:
Hard to disagree...
... though I don't doubt no sensible Tory would dream of doing so in any case.
The right to security, to tenancies that last, to rents that don't suddenly zoom up, the right to live somewhere warm and free of damp, who will address that?
Not, I imagine, this party of landlords and property dealers, this protectionist club. This revamped and nonsensical extension of the right to buy is actually desperate gibbering. That it is the pillow talk of the hollowed-out zombie Thatcherism of today's Tories shows
how little Cameron actually has to offer.
It's now both sunny and...
... warm out in my back jungle. Say hello to some old friends:
Or click the pic for a closer look.