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 →
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 →
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 →
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 →
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 →
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 →
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 →
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 →
From a documentary broadcast on BBC2 on November 25 1992. PILGER: And yet you’re often described as an extremist CHOMSKY: Sure. I am an extremist. Because a ‘moderate’ is anyone who supports western power, and an extremist is anyone who objects to themPILGER: Now you’ve had some quite spectacular rows | Arthur Schlesinger accused you of betraying the... Continue Reading →
Everyone gets fat and old, says someone fat and old, if they're lucky. I just saw a juvenile moorhen do proper flying - like a proper bird. (I was feeding its mum or dad, and it wanted in on the action). Distance, style, the works. Won't be able to do that this time next year,... Continue Reading →
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