2016 — 1 October: Saturday — rabbits!
The rain this morning is giving my refurbished roof tiles and guttering a chance to strut their waterproof stuff. That leaves me free to worry about:
- the outrageous assertion that, having identified a piece of ITC NewText, I failed to identify an adjacent piece of custom corporate type!1
- the rumbles of nearby thunder (of less concern now that Technology Towers no longer has a large FM antenna poking up into the clouds)
- the odd way that, on creating a new folder to contain my next month of ¬blog jottings, the UTF-8 HTML file copied in as a template is once again initially reset to ISO 8859 despite my best efforts to force it to UTF-8 everywhere I can.
It's clearly already time for my next soothing cuppa.
Radical chic?
One of those phrases (coined by Tom Wolfe in his 1970 essay in "New York") that long sticks in the memory without necessarily ever having had a clear definition:
God, what a flood of taboo thoughts runs through one's head at these Radical Chic events... But it's delicious. It's as if one's nerve-endings were on red alert to the most intimate nuances of status. Deny it if you want to! ... For example, one's own servants, although white, are generally no problem. A discreet, euphemistic word about what sort of party it is going to be, and they will generally be models of correctness. The euphemisms are not always an easy matter, however...
My merry random walk to that revealing little snippet started innocently enough in a book review:
In the opening chapters of "Grand Hotel Abyss" — the title derives from philosopher Gyorgi Lukacs's derogatory description of what he regarded as the Frankfurt School's radical chic — Jeffries examines the Oedipal rebellion of these often mollycoddled sons against uncomprehending merchant-fathers, who had assimilated German secular culture and frankly disdained working-class East European Jews with their long beards and kaftans... Naturally, Adorno, Benjamin and their intellectual comrades refused to actually work for a living and instead blithely and incongruously relied on Daddy's business profits to pay their allowances and fund their anti-capitalist projects.
That, in turn, has prompted me to order Gary Lachman's book about Colin Wilson, but I am still teetering on the edge of the rabbit hole represented by some of Lachman's other work, including "A secret history of consciousness" from the foreword of which I couldn't resist the temptation of lifting this (typical) snippet by Wilson himself:
A small number of human beings differ from their fellows in feeling basically dissatisfied with what living in this world has to offer them... such people do not necessarily regard themselves as religious. Perhaps, like myself, they spent too much of their childhood
bored to tears in church or Sunday school, and automatically react with hostility to the kind of bleating that clergymen indulge in... They are revolted and enraged by the hymn that declares:
The trivial round, the common task
Should furnish all we ought to ask.
I think I can risk the (less than a) fiver being asked for the Kindle edition :-)
Well, I never...
... knew that!
Even when paper mills were established in England, however, demand for the rags they depended on outstripped domestic supply, leading papermakers to shop abroad for their materials. This prompted trade controls such as the Burying in Woollen Acts of 1666–80, which forbade the use of linen for burial shrouds, with the intention of "lessening the Importation of Linnen from beyond the Seas and the Encouragement of the Wollen and Paper Manufactures of this Kingdome".
Having just tinkered...
... with the location where I stash these 'molehole' HTML files I'm just about to find out if I can still publish to the AWS bucket. Fingers crossed! [Pause] We have Stage #1 lift-off. So now all the web files are living on a RAID 1 pair on a NAS and can thus be edited from, and published from, any of my little Black Gang of PCs. Stage #2 consists of modifying a symbolic link or two so I can still serve the files from a 'localhost' server for use as a staging post. Of course, I also have the Pi2 for that. Cautious Cuthbert, that's me.
Stage #2 lift-off? [Pause] Yep! All hail the power of the mighty Linux symbolic link.
Stage #3 (low Earth orbit) is an edit performed on Skylark... Yep!
As for the UTF-8 business, it seems that UltraEdit may be the culprit. But, by popping a single non-ASCII character into an HTML comment on every web page, I may just be able to force the editor to recognise the file as UTF-8 rather than the ISO 8859 that it seems to want to default to. (It's not my default!)