A thought provoking article here.
Can it be right though? that two hundred billion hours are spent watching TV in the US every year? That sounds quite frightening frankly. That equates roughly to 658 hours spent watching TV per person per year, which is 1.8 hours a day, 365 days a year. Actually that sounds pretty much how much TV I’d watch some nights.
To make a stand I’m not going to watch any more TV, apart from Have I Got News for You, of course, and anything else that takes my fancy.
An excellent review of “The Poems of Marianne Moore” conducted by Kay Ryan.
I hate Bank Holidays. The thought that the majority of people have a day off work depresses me for some reason; much better when I’m off work and nobody else is, I think. The insane rush to extract the most “fun” from a day of freedom from wage slavism results in the self fulfilling prophecy of massive traffic jams and full to capacity car parks at shopping centres and amusement parks. Much better to treat every day as a holiday I think, just don’t tell the bosses.
At least for once the weather forecasters predictions of shitty weather have been refuted by what has been, so far, a lovely sunny day in the North East of England. Yet I opt to sit inside my house, typing away at the computer, just as I do at work. This is too mundane to pass off as irony.
I’m not sure what this bank holiday is actually for to be honest, is it something to do with Blackberry Week as we old time northerners used to call it? I think it might be “Labor Day” in America, whatever that means.
Why does it seem to be that the people who propound philosophies of elitism, such as Nietzsche’s ubermensh or variations and corruptions such as racism, social and intellectually snobbery etc, always appear to be such physically and socially unimpressive specimens? Is it merely an attempt to compensate for their deficiencies?
Oddly, very few women loudly express such theories, at least these days. Is this relevant? Do they have more important things to occupy their minds, or is it because they still are to some extent an “oppressed” group, even if they are a majority?
I occasionally watch the BBC2 teatime quiz show “Eggheads” and I partially enjoy it. It gives a good overview of a certain section of society: quiz buffs in the UK.
It rewards useless and obscure information, which I applaud; there’s nothing wrong with someone showing off their knowledge of 19th Century railways in my book. The problem for me with this program is primarily to do with the smugness factor of some of the Eggheads themselves.
Daphne comes across as a sweet, elderly lady but this hides a razor sharp mind, or at least a capacious memory, as well as a determination never to be beaten. I like her, she’s a proper English type you don’t see very often these days….a Miss Marple archetype.
Chris, the ex train driver (as he and the host often remind us) is another English type, the slightly boorish trainspotter/know all. He’s never satisfied with just giving an answer, he also has to give some related but unnecessary extra tit bit of information. I don’t particularly like him but he’s okay. When he’s beaten by a punter I take great pleasure.
Kevin is probably a bank worker or administrator somewhere. He’s very stiff on telly and always seems to me like he’s being interviewed by Jeremy Paxman about sodomy, such is his look of discomfort.
The posh woman I neither like nor dislike, I think her name is Judith.
Now, CJ, where do I begin? I really don’t like him. He rolls his eyes and feigns disbelief when one of his team mates gets a question wrong, even though he is far and away the least knowledgeable of the Eggheads and more often than not gets beaten by a member of the opposing team. He’s good on popular culture and that is about as far as his talents stretch. He’s a modern English type, arrogant, under informed and convinced of his right to a place in the higher echelon of society, in this case, the titans that call themselves “The Eggheads”
It was 30 odd years ago that a rent in the membrane between this reality and the primordial chaos spat me out.
What happened after that? Well that’s another story….
