Reflections on life at “De Witte Wand”…
Andy Sennitt has a nice article about the fact that media advertisers in The Netherlands seem to think that life ends at 50. I don’t think that it’s just here in the Netherlands; advertisers (it’s those damned marketing people again!) seem to spend a disproportionate amount of their budget chasing the yoof market. While shallow youth may be more easily swayed, they probably don’t have the disposable income that us oldies have…
Paste your head onto a ghoulish body and join the Halloween Fancy dress compo at the Space Café
Bob
I discover that at the moment at least, I share my name with not a single citizen of the US. I’m not sure whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing…
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Congratulations, you’ve bought these CD blanks from a sensible bit of our corporation, when you could, just as easily, have bought something from us that was not sensible. It could have been downright stupid, for example, or actively evil. For example, you could have bought this from this SAMSUNG division and you would have been exposing yourself to invisible sperm-destroying rays. So count yourself bloody lucky that you have purchased merely a sensible CD blank from a sensible SAMSUNG division. Phew, what a relief, eh?
The term “odd sympathy” was coined by the 17th-century Dutch mathematician and physicist Christiaan Huygens to describe the strange phenomenon he observed while laying sick in bed and looking up at two of his newly invented pendulum clocks hanging on the wall beside him. Inexplicably, the two pendulums always swung in opposite directions. Even when he would release them in different positions, they eventually fell back in synch (or antisynch, to be precise). Huygens had discovered the principle of coupled oscillation, but it took a recent study by physicists at Georgia Tech to prove that it was the miniscule force of the pendulums operating on a beam in the wall that caused them to link up.
You get the impression that her tolerance for human imperfection comes from having seen some very dark things, and not just from our own species. After studying chimpanzees for over ten years and coming to see them as peaceful and benevolent animals with a bit of a temper, Goodall witnessed a four-year chimpanzee war of extermination, and discovered a mother-daughter pair who liked to kill and eat babies. To someone who always had higher expectations of chimpanzees than people, the petty hypocrisies of Western consumerism or even Chinese repression must seem like small potatoes in comparison. Her resilience and optimism are remarkable; they reminded me of how many times I have been content to adopt a convenient pessimism in the face of the terrible environmental damage taking place, and made me ashamed of it.
My result from the What Horrible Edward Gorey Death Will You Die? quiz, found via Lost in Books
I adore Edward Gorey – I have ‘The Object lesson’ and ‘The other statue’ and ‘Amphigorey’ which contains the compilation of 15 books now hard to get hold of. The drawings are superb, but I also love his lines – ‘Emily, helping her brother look for his twisby, saw a candlestick mounted on a horse’s hoof thrown from a limousine as it drove away’ and ‘As the party was about to retire for the night Fenks announced that the Lisping Elbow was not in its case’.. I mean, I thought it was only I who had such bizaare thoughts, but this guy puts them down in ink. As to the death – I love ‘X is for Xerxes devoured by mice’ but the picture that goes with Neville (who died of ennui) is tragic! Personally I think I’ll go with Z for Zillah who drank too much gin.
And Lo and behold, when I did the test, Gin is exactly what I got! sheesh.
Gelert, yes, that’s it – it’s not just the wonderful pen and ink etchings (that scratch away at one’s life), but those wonderful lines. Alas, I only have The Dwindling Party – but, in my defence, it is a pop-up book, and of some dusty distinction, I feel…
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