2016 — 31 October: Monday
Hearing1 that "the public" have been urged to seek out and report occurrences of "witches' marks" leaves me wondering whether I have, in fact, quite woken up yet...
I never liked...
... open-plan offices — not that I much enjoyed any offices, to be honest — so this made me smile:
...but suppressing men's natural instinct for violence is part of the problem for the author of Who Stole My Spear?, Tim Samuels. He complains that open-plan offices are "an unnatural source of emasculation" for men, because it "sends our flight/fight hormones haywire". (It is not clear whether a natural source of emasculation, such as a testicle-nibbling tiger, would be any better.)
I thought the trick to tiger deterrence was to keep throwing orange peel out of the window. Or does that only work when travelling by train?
What is the secret of Trump deterrence, I wonder?
Now what could...
... possibly go wrong with this, I wonder?
Has no-one read John Brunner's "Shockwave Rider" lately?
It's a nice, sunny day...
... so I decided to make my first-ever trip as an OAP to Bournemouth. Since the last time2 I was there, Dorset County Council has recycled 77,000 tonnes of "material" and nicely resurfaced a £22,000,000 stretch of the A338 just for me. Once again, I circled the town, but in a newer car, unaccompanied by a packed lunch, and unaided by Madame Navigator-in-a-box. The parking fee is up by 50% since my first-ever solo trip (a couple of weeks after my driving test). Back then I had gone there both on 'our' traditional New Year outing and to scatter some of Christa's ashes.
Once again, I set off past the B.I.C. (a nice class of "Gents" still in there, should you need it) and on down and right out to the end of the pier — now in its winter season "free admission" state. The sun was bright, it was surprisingly warm, but though I could make out the "Old Harry" rocks at the far end of Studland Bay there was no sign of the "Needles". The entire Isle of Wight was hidden behind haze. Since I didn't really feel like trotting through the Gardens just for one bookshop, here I am, back in Technology Towers, and contemplating a spot of something in the DIY late-lunch line.
Who to believe?
I was burrowing along a data trail to see if the WHO did indeed rank "hormonal contraceptives as a class one carcinogen alongside tobacco and asbestos" as asserted in "The Spectator" of 8th October 2016. WHO web pages were a little coy. I turned, next, to some of the Podesta / Clinton emails. Fell tumbling down a rabbit hole when a comment made there led me first here, and thence here, then here (interesting Putin video) and finally here (hard-to-refute piece by John Pilger).
Now I need some of Huxley's soma!