2015 — 12 July: Sunday
Back to a more civilised hour for a resumption of consciousness this morning.1 I've made the ol' chap a cuppa and palmed off one of my delicious cinnamon hot cross buns on him. Even got him to try some of the reduced-sugar orange marmalade I like to slather on to them. He approved, though only after demonstrating precisely the same initial reluctance that I'm all too often accused of. For me, there are plums to be stewed to go atop some healthy high-fibre cereal in due course.
Last night's entertainment...
... was just the one film: also by the chap who made "The Guard" — namely "Calvary". Further proof that a good script and decent actors totally obviate any need for Hollywood's preferred style of high-budget overblown CGI comicbook antics and adolescent crap. Just my opinion, of course, but that doesn't stop me from being right.
Another of yesterday's...
... even noisier heavier-than-air devices2 was this old Cold War-era death-dealing warrior:
I gather it's destined for taxi-only (non-flying) duties after this final UK "tour". Nothing lasts forever. Certainly not the summer sunshine needed to rescue this from the gloomy ten-tenths cloud cover that helped persuade Big Bro to call a halt yesterday afternoon.
I never got the feeling...
... that, when Christa used the word unheimlich, she meant "uncanny", though that was Freud's choice, it seems. Source and (rather creepy) snippet:
Following Freud, Kotsko groups media characters into three main types: psychotics ("they totally reject reality and construct 'their own little world' in accordance with their desires"), perverts ("acknowledging the rules while still maintaining some small, unrepressed outlet for the prohibited desire"), and neurotics (who historically came in two gendered flavors: obsessives and hysterics). But many of his own arguments can fit under these categories, too.
Is it obsessive, I wonder, to correct the nesting of parentheses in my first footnote? Probably :-)
Need more tea, clearly. Or, perhaps, mate? (Link.)
The vast crowds played guitar, shook maracas and sipped gourds of mate — the herbal drink beloved by many in the region.
Speaking of "death-dealing" — the self-planted "Buddleja" that was growing immediately outside my living room window has been brutally truncated. The way it kept catching my attention by moving, as it were, in the corner of my eye, doomed it. Now that I have my long-handled garden "scissors" back, I'm a gardening force to be reckoned with once more.
There's a certain irony...
... at play as I read Harari's chapter in "Sapiens" on "History's Biggest Fraud" (the agricultural revolution) while Big Bro is watching "Delivery Man". The former concerns itself with how humans have been domesticated by plant species such as wheat, thus enabling much larger human (and wheat) populations. The latter with a chap who managed to father several hundred children as a sperm donor.
And now he's happily watching some form of tennis match. What divergent tastes, heh?
Back from NW2...
... though there were irritating SNAFUs both going and returning with regard to excessive motorway queues, accidents, and road works. It's just gone midnight...