November 30th;
Sunday. Zsuzsi returns from the big city, and we all celebrate Joli's birthday again with more cocoa liqueur & tasty food. During a mid-meal discussion we check, through the wonders of the internet, if the French really do say "My little cabbage" as a term of endearment. Perhaps not.
November 29th;
Saturday. Damp grey misty weather on the Great Plain. Robin & I have a lovely lunch in the Transylvanians' kitchen of free-range chicken and tiramisu. Lacko shows us some paper-folding tricks, and I get squiffy on a very tasty liqueur Joli made from cocoa & alcohol. Here's a sweet film of some clever Swiss engineers making small objects hover in mid-air, sitting on sound waves.
November 28th;
Friday. More news from the we-knew-it-all-along department. So renewable energy isn't that good after all. Artificial intelligence still looks completely misconceived. And when men & women disagree over whether women were really flirting, a study finds the men aren't in fact deceiving themselves with wishful thinking: the women are lying. Late evening towards midnight Robin & I speed out of town through almost-fog.
November 27th;
Thursday. Yesterday at Lorinc's I find he has a round fluffy Angry Bird in his room. Takes me five attempts to throw it on top of some tall cupboards he cannot reach so we can get the lesson started. Much hilarity.
November 26th;
Wednesday. Last Thursday, so six days ago, had a good idea - even by my high standard of nifty wheezes - on the tram coming back from teaching Jake & Viktoria. More recently, I think the night of Sunday into this Monday, another different moment of insight. Can this really be down to watching that Youtube video recommended by Oz Priestess Vanese? The video of a rather sweet Canadian girl talking to camera for 12 minutes about how to decalcify my pineal gland and open my third eye? Certainly very restful to watch.
November 25th;
Tuesday. Although my translucent green plastic wristwatch persists in running late, I was optimistic about the blue-strapped, orange-dialled plastic wristwatch kindly lent to me by Lorinc, my youngest student. The dial has, above the small slot where the digital time appears, a rather alert, cheerful-looking plasticine snail about his business. Noting that the green watch always lagged it, I assumed this one was on time. However, now realise Lorinc's watch runs fast, about 2 minutes ahead a day. More than usually perky in his picture, the snail turns out to be speedy.
November 24th;
Monday. Girl in pink metallic wig has one of those days.
November 23rd;
Sunday. Topsy-turvy art thing.
November 22nd;
Saturday. Now this sounds like a book worth reading: "a groundbreaking study that challenges our understanding of what it means to be alive." 'Quantum biology'.
November 21st;
Friday. Surprisingly thoughtful article about a Star Trek episode where some aliens have an odd made-up language. Meanwhile, the story that grammar shapes thinking drifts back into fashion. Esoteric Veronica is back from her course, talking about getting the Dali Tarot pack. We look up the star alignments of the Swiss Confederation constitution of 1848.
November 20th;
Thursday. Real journalism. Magneto Boy!
November 19th;
Wednesday. Carefully-written article suggests some people, even police officers, fear that wheelchair-bound physicist Stephen Hawking is being abused & beaten inside his home.
Read a short book borrowed from a student's parents:
'Paper' (Building Great Designs With Paper) by Lesa Sawahata. Have long found it odd that people in the paper business refer to weights, not thicknesses, as a way to classify paper and card. This book gives lots of examples of graphics work (business cards, restaurant menus, branded stationery, company prospectuses) which make use of paper colours and textures as well as typography, imagery, embossing etc. This is a nice idea, but one sad flaw in the book is that almost every single piece of graphic work it contains is ugly or tasteless. There are lots of yellows, oranges, creams and browns, along with cluttered designs, bad lettertype choices, and fussy, banal visual ideas. Close-ups of the paper types, enlarged images of other weights and thicknesses visible in the photographs, would have been nice. But best of all would have been crisp, smart graphic work that wasn't nasty.
November 18th;
Tuesday. Interesting suggestion that living at high altitude both depletes seratonin and raises dopamine levels. So happy alert people get happier in the mountains. Sad anxious people feel worse.
November 17th;
Monday. In the late morning Mr X tells me a woman who has found a good man understands that "I am where he wants me because that's what I want." Explaining his point, he continues "A woman is meaningless and boring until a man sprinkles magic dust on her. Then he has to yoke her." This might be a moment to mention research showing women who are on contraceptive pills when they meet and marry a man seem to often fall out of love with him once they come off the pill. Sounds as if the magic dust might be pregnancy-induced oestrogen.
November 16th;
How can small nations attract high-net-worth individuals? Suggestions welcomed.
November 15th;
Am now on
the Tsu network.
November 14th;
Friday. Late-eve speed down slightly misty motorways with Robin.
November 13th;
Thursday. Last week's radio show & the current magazine article about #biometric identity linked to here.
November 12th;
Wednesday. Persian vampire movie!
November 11th;
Tuesday. The dangers of simulated worlds & intriguing piece by Robert Bauval about Egyptian archeology's curious "hall of records".
November 10th;
Monday. On his nifty little laptop Robin & I watch both two films,
'In Bruges' and
'Young Adult',
fairly much back to back, as we media moguls phrase it.
November 9th;
Sunday. Catch the stupid germ & be
thick at work.
November 8th;
Saturday. I like coffee, you like tea.
November 7th;
Friday. Last night's radio show here. I was wonderful, citizens.
November 6th;
Thursday. Weather slightly sunnier & warmer. In their incredibly temperature-responsive way, sharply-dressed Hungarian girls appear on public transport
as if from
nowhere.
November 5th;
Wednesday. Sex with over 20 women reduces a man's likelihood of getting prostate cancer. The less said here the better, probably.
November 4th;
Tuesday. Geneticists proposing to release modified organisms into the wild very politely want to ask the rest of us first; Nassim Taleb, he of Black Swan fame, says bioengineering is dangerously risky.
November 3rd;
Monday. Find Solero the stallion at the gate again, wistfully watching a horse and cart out beyond the next field. Only his snuffles into my glass of cold coffee interrupt yearning gazes at distant fellow beast clopping along main road.
Turkish man builds weird new musical instrument.
November 2nd;
Sunday. Interesting maps show Germany is still divided.
November 1st;
Saturday. I take the train to Kecskemet at lunchtime. In the station cafe the rock chick is serving again, wearing this time a salmon-coloured high-necked sports hoodie and preppy black-framed glasses. Once again I'm not allowed to read her shoulder/upper-back tattoo. I relax there a while with coffee & drinks, Robin and Zeno having been mysteriously delayed in a small country town somewhere south of Bugac. Zsuzsi, Letty, and Bela pick me up from the station cafe in the mid-afternoon. Two questions I get asked while we drive are 1. what do theologians do? and 2. why are some films called spaghetti Westerns?
Here's a wonderful article by Theodore Dalrymple / Anthony Daniels about Marx & Turgenev. He uses the fact that both were born in 1818 and both died in 1883 to make the comparison - how two different yet in some ways similar men both felt about the plight of poor or oppressed people. Everyone should read this.
Mark Griffith, site administrator /
markgriffith at yahoo.com
