Fed swans, ducks and, obvs, moorhens, including juvies. Listened to three podcasts. Notes on a Native Son (different writers on a Baldwin passage - excellent series). This one was Hisham Matar, choosing not a bit from a novel or essay but Baldwin on a talk show in May 1969. A must must listen. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mq_jufwQBSM The... Continue Reading →
Memory holes and popular culture; middle-brow geography and what is ignored
When we try to educate ourselves about The World, we can easily be misled by popular accounts, either because the author is trying to pull a fast one, or just because well things get 'forgotten. I don't know what the solution is, besides reading loads and remembering most of it? And who has the time?... Continue Reading →
Unhelpful Hippy Bollocks (words like “holistic” or “systems” or whatever
We need a new TLA (Three Letter Acronym) to describe mush and gibberish that sounds profound (at least to the speaker) but is either circular or banal or both. I propose... UHB. It doesn't seem to be "taken" (see here), and the one that does is undersea and hyperbaric medicine, so I could probably play... Continue Reading →
Officially terrified about AI now; it is spitballing
I may be late to the party, but this: I have become used to google searches generating an AI summary from stuff that it has scraped. I even got used to it generating summaries (passably accurate in most cases) of stuff that I myself have written (various neologisms like the smugosphere, and emotacycle). It was... Continue Reading →
Standing on the Outside – the failures of climate movement organisers to put themselves in the shoes of ‘newbies’
Yesterday I put up a post on Blue Sky that was a quote (generated by Google Translate and then tidied) from a recent article, in German, about why the "climate movement" is on its arse. The quote did "well". It's this "I am convinced that the decline and numerical implosion of the climate movement is... Continue Reading →
The most eco Doctor Who story ever? Take a bow…. Logopolis; IAM, CVE, it’s all the same
Doctor Who, the looooong-running TV show I used to be obsessed with, was ecologically-minded from the start. In the second story [broadcast from December 21, 1963] the Doctor (a Time Lord, from the planet Gallifrey, though we didn't know that at the time) and his companions land on a planet that has had a nuclear... Continue Reading →
Of “open letters” about #climate -cry me a river
Short post - supposed to be decluttering my pigsty of a study [Take This(1) Seriously, dammit, Marc]. Yesterday some "elders" put out a letter about how the COP process was no longer (sic) fit for purpose and had lost its way blah blah blah. Shoot me now. I had a reaction that I suspect is... Continue Reading →
“The Future Used to be Better” by TV Smith (aka “Noam Chomsky with a guitar”)
Absolutely adore the work of English punk TV Smith. And he's a nice guy to boot. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BsDilQ9Tm0s The sights I've seen, the things I've heardWhile sliding down the learning curveTheir contract promised me the earthThrough toothy grins and weasel words With normal jobs and normal livesThey force us to this compromiseWhere labour lives and leisure... Continue Reading →
Book review Testimony by Anita Shreve or “let’s go to the video tape…”
There's an American sports journalist (? commentator?) called Warner Wolf, and one of his catchphrases was "let's go to the video tape." It came to mind while I was reading this rather good novel by the late Anita Shreve. The novel is told in mosaic format - chapters told by characters (central and peripheral) before,... Continue Reading →
marchudson.net 