2015 — 8 November: Sunday
I live in hope that BBC Radio 3's early morning music, and/or the first cup, will quickly dispel the remnants of one of the odder dreams of a mixed bunch. While it's nice to dismiss the things as merely meaningless random garbage collection and memory consolidation processes, they still sometimes beg the question: "But how did that get in there?"
What would Freud say? :-)
Back to the great...
... HTML table clearances. Good job it's merely a short-term hobby. And the end is in sight, though there will be little or no visible evidence if I don't cock it up.
Meanwhile...
... here we (entirely predictably) go again, it seems. Good ol' security — the gift that goes on giving...
Not that budget increases, staff increases, or technology "improvements" won't be thrown at the "problem" and hailed as breakthroughs that will solve everything. Little or nothing is actually very much use against a sufficiently-determined (brain-washed?) fanatic of any political or religious stripe. Let alone any idiot with a grievance, real or imagined. I suppose the only thing to do (shades of gun control across the pond) is buy a bomb1 to carry concealed with me everywhere.
One good reason...
... for my keeping 'molehole' as a ¬blog, I suppose, is my laziness. (Server logs show repeated attempts to find my [non-existent] "Make a comment" facility. Simple email works fine, by the way.) Another reason is the "blog-troll":
As for the supposed irony that Germaine's feminist writings helped to create her current persecutors, it's tosh. They created themselves, like blog-trolls. Indestructible microbial organisms, blog-trolls copulate with themselves constantly, producing offspring in the form of lethally insolent verbal tics.
It's good to be a Luddite. Though I'd better not say "methinks" or "Just saying!"
Sweet mystery of Life
Look what I've been missing...
Rhetoricality... manifests the groundless, infinitely ramifying character of discourse in the modern world. For this reason, it allows for no explanatory metadiscourse that is not already itself rhetorical. Rhetoric is no longer the title of a doctrine and a practice, nor a form of cultural memory; it becomes instead something like the condition of our existence.
It's quoted, and described as "bosh", by Sam Leith in his "You Talkin' to me?" which has bubbled to the top of one of my ebook piles.
Sweet mystery of (Second) Life
Look what I've (not) been missing...
It makes the old Gnostic version of the Creation, which has a junior deity creating our universe to practise on, look compellingly plausible. The senior gods have surely long since produced a much nicer immaterial universe in which we, half-arsed underling attempt at a world that we are, cannot participate. And being what we are, and techno-whizzes to boot, we can and do perpetually reproduce our own conditions in increasingly sophisticated formats. A very different kind of multiple world theory, where the same sad little world is made over and over again. I really hope that our alternative selves, in at least some of those infinite parallel worlds the quantum physicists tell of, are doing better.
Bother!
I was playing the random set of 230 or so music tracks I have of performances by artists whose names begin with the letter "F". A set of playback glitches on both my immediately-accessible NAS copies of the 9-minute track "Hope" by Fat Freddy's Drop has just sent me scurrying across the floor of the dining room to winkle out the actual CD from its CaseLogic folder. (It's the second CD of the "World 2004" compilation assembled by the late Charlie Gillett.) [Pause] Dagnabbit, the CD also glitches, but at a different point in its playback.
This is DoublePlusUngood. For the first time since parking all my CDs in the dining room and, indeed for the first time since converting Technology Towers into an all-Linux world, I now actually need to rip an MP3. This may take a while!
Sadly, my newly-installed "Asunder" tool stalled at the 29% point, which roughly corresponds to the first of the glitches. Grrr. [Pause] Well, 99p and one Amazon download later, the cat is skinned. No audible glitches. Just nice music.
I am utterly shocked...
... naturally, and shaken to the core, to learn that the Daily Mail, no less, is only now2 claiming to be shocked to discover that Tony Blair told porkie pies. More than once, too. Golly. What will that fine "newspaper" make of the Chilcot Report (if that actually ever sees the light of day)? I think I'd better go and lie down.
Many moons ago...
... I lusted (to an extent) over the Evesham (that dates it!) mini-PC I mentioned here. Evesham evaporated years ago, but mini-PCs march on, getting both smaller and a helluva lot more powerful.
And silent.