I Wandered Lonely As a Cloud:
There once was a poet named Will
Who tramped his way over a hill
And was speechless for hours
Over some stupid flowers
This was years before TV, but still.
(From here, via this MetaFilter post, the comments are worth a look too.)
Sometimes the reading of a book is inextricably tied to the place and time in which it is read. Sometimes reality insists on throwing up events that will remain in the memory of the reader, permanently associating themselves with the story being read. It takes a special kind of book to override the reader’s feelings towards those events, to allow the reader to engage fully with the story separately from what is happening to and around them in the real world. The Road Home did that for me.
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I recently treated myself to a new MacBook Pro, and one of the first things I did (after fitting a ridiculous amount of RAM) was to install Parallels. This splendid piece of software allows OS X to run other operating systems in a virtual machine, which means I can do boring Windows-based day-job work on my shiny new Apple laptop.
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Wow. Microsoft and Fiat have teamed up to produce a Windows-based Fiat 500. The legendary reliability of a Fiat combined with the rock-solid stability of Windows! What could possibly go wrong? Enjoy the thrilling experience of a BSOD at 90 mph! Marvel at the mere three minutes it takes to start your vehicle every morning! Feel safe and secure as your car asks you if you really want to change gear again, whilst simultaneously allowing random strangers to mess with your brakes via Bluetooth! Grit your teeth manfully whilst being overtaken by little old ladies in mobility scooters as your mode of transport indexes its components and checks that its engine is still there! Pray for salvation when your car suddenly grinds to a halt in order to install two-hundred megabytes of updates right here, right now, in the fast lane of the M25!
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Apparently there is some debate about which Tolkien was responsible for The Silmarillion; whether it is mostly genuine J.R.R. or made up by his son C.J.R. seems a rather boring question to me, a book is a book irrespective of who wrote it, but I suppose such fascinating discussions keep literature students off the streets and out of trouble.
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Pretty much the only sensible reporting I’ve seen on the recent terror attacks
in London and Glasgow has come from The Register: firstly, secondly. That second link is an article by a bomb-disposal technician, who, having pointed out precisely why this last weekend’s attempted car-bombings were hilariously rubbish, goes on to note that the UK survived tons of explosives raining down on it every night for six years
during World War II.
Our parents and grandparents stood that kind of punishment, not to mention four times as many military dead, and got on with life. Sad though it is to confirm the oldsters’ world view, by comparison our generation - our generation’s journalists, anyway - seem a bit lacking in backbone.
Well, quite. Massive press overreaction aside, the only really scary thing about this whole episode is that some of the suspects were working as NHS doctors. If they are the culprits, that means that people who can’t successfully burn out a car full of petrol, a basic skill of the lowliest twoccer, are getting jobs as neurosurgeons. Now that is terrifying.