2016 — 22 February: Monday
Grey, and rather drizzly out there.1 It has quickly become apparent that the only thing more unedifying than a General Election campaign is likely to be a Referendum campaign. I switched away from the "talk" channel in less than 10 seconds.
Reading...
... casual scare-mongering from the "right" (conservative, closed-minded) politicos2 obviates any need for more detailed MRI observations so, with what little trace of illusory free will I like to think I think I can perhaps kid myself I can muster, I shall move on to breakfast, and (of course) another cuppa!
Pausing...
... only long enough, first, to read this beautifully-written "Good for Nothing" book review. Source and snippet:
Explaining altruism and cooperation naturalistically, without reference to religion, is a flourishing field of evolutionary biology these days.
But will evolutionary explanations, even combined with political ones (religion as the opium of the people), be enough? Perhaps, in addition to their faulty worldviews and dubious practices, religions also transmit some useful, even indispensable, ideas. Perhaps, for
example, they model goodness.
Now there's a thought. Though I confess I don't see a great deal of evidence to support it :-)
I find myself dithering...
... (not for the first time) over far deeper and weightier pre-breakfast issues: window focus.
Do I want "raise on click"?
Do I want "focus follows mouse"?
Can I even capture the Xfce route through the thicket of system settings I must now re-learn to follow on my stumbling path to Nirvana without getting lost?
Tweaking the windows behaviour
Of course I can (having first set a 10-second delay to give myself time to open the impressive cascade of "flyout" boxes before the virtual camera shutter3 clicks). All these choices Linux brings to a desktop near me... And that's before you even get to the selection of the behaviour you seek to change — or, in my case, just investigate — of course. It's (almost) enough to drive a chap to the nearest chapel.
Christa liked...
... Alain Delon. I still prefer Jane Birkin. So we would both have enjoyed going to see today's delivery of this 1969 outing, I suspect:
Ozon remade it in 2003 with Charlotte Rampling. And it's just been remade again as "A Bigger Splash" (best not confused with the film about Hockney) with Tilda Swinton, by the chap who made the wonderful "I am Love". That's gone straight on to my little "keep an eye out for it" list. "Emotional Rescue" (by St. Vincent) is on its soundtrack. I shan't let it put me off.
One of these...
... will make me laugh (unless its trailer was a complete fraud), one should make me smile with certain amounts of wry recognition of shared web and bookish experiences, and one will probably do my blood pressure little if any good at all:
The book was actually printed by Amazon; 223 footnotes by page 89... not bad going!