March 31st;
Wednesday. Neck still hurts. Wake out of a strange short nightmare, hooting like a steam-train
whistle, where part of the wall seems to loom at me in the early morning. End-of-March news round-up from Lockdownsceptics-dot-org.
March 30th;
Tuesday. Another topic
of conversation last week.
March 29th;
Monday. Sink of water I wash the dishes in at 11am mysteriously is still warm
four hours later at 3pm when I get back to Victoria's.
Fall asleep in late afternoon as a golden dusk falls over Orczy ut. A strange sense of
beauty and safety seems to glow in the gently darkening open skies that Victoria's flat on the
top floor of her building look out on.
Totalitarian tendencies noted in the bogus
covid-19 emergency by a Flemish psychologist.
March 28th;
Sunday. Various quite reasonable constraints force me to spend six hours in a parked car. Warm sunshine moves round
the square, and I'm able to get out a couple of times, lock the car up, and go for a short walk. Next to an open grass
area where remains of a Roman amphitheatre still stand in a curve with people sitting on chunks of wall enjoying their
packed lunches. Knowing from the outset I'll be stuck there all day not so bad. Quite soothing.
Visit Victoria again. In a conversation with Mike last week I learned about irrigation pivot
wheels, and approaches to the soil-rutting
problem.
March 27th;
Saturday. The attempt to build up a danger story from a
"British variant" of covid-19 begins falling apart like the other stories.
March 26th;
Friday. Seems mortality in Israel is quite a bit higher
among the vaccinated. As the man on the Balkan train said,
"How can this be??"
March 25th;
Thursday. Another article argues that the covid-19 "crisis"
(using that word very loosely)
is over.
March 24th;
Wednesday. Again discussed Wollstonecraft's legacy with a friend. Look at her portrait, particularly.
March 23rd;
Tuesday. One from Memory Lane: Jean Luc Cornec's
Rotary Phone Sheep. From a chat with Irish Michael.
March 22nd;
Monday. Neck still uncomfortable - some taste & scent have returned.
Take Victoria's 2 chairs over to her place in the Orczy square area, just a few doors along from Harry.
Ask her about Quinton water.
March 21st;
Sunday. Why the French hate the English.
March 20th;
Saturday. Why the English hate the French.
March 19th;
Friday. Review of Rousseau-esque book on original innocence.
March 18th;
Thursday. Interesting article about free debate &
identity cultism.
March 17th; Wednesday.
Three journals:
New Criterion,
The Critic,
Perspective.
March 16th; Tuesday.
Article from the younger Robert Kennedy showing advance plans for
social-media censorship came just weeks
before covid-19 itself. Another article alleging the Kennedy politician is not to be trusted or
listened to is here.
March 15th; Monday.
Everything closes for public holiday in a country where it's all been quasi-closed for a year already and even in a normal year only lets customers through the door with bitter reluctance.
March 14th; Sunday.
Successful small-scale quantum teleportation? Sounds legit.
March 13th; Saturday. Not only is there German leader Angela Merkel, and not only has the affair around the supposed victim wife of Harry of Sussex been enjoyably dubbed "the Markle debarkle/(debacle)" but it seems there is a thing in cryptography called a "Merkle tree". Truly our cup runneth over.
March 12th; Friday. Neck still hurts. Slightly better, with the pain-killing drug-infused bandages still attached, but really should be gone by now.
Zero Hedge predicts silver could break its record from 1980 of 50 USD/oz.
March 11th; Thursday. The head cold, that came along with my neck crick, continues. No scent or taste for six or seven days now.
CDC study now shows that face masks to slow covid-19 have had no benefit.
March 10th; Wednesday. Article in Nature: covid-19 curfews have had no benefit.
March 9th; Tuesday. A slightly odd article claiming that the witch stereotype (cauldron, pointy hat) was concocted to discredit women brewers.
March 8th; Monday. Almost exactly a month ago was struggling to remember this word: Mithridatism. Am proud to recall I got almost all the syllables in place.
March 7th; Sunday. 'The Son Also Rises' by Gregory Clark. A carefully researched book about surname frequency which finds that social reform, revolution, egalitarianism, all have close-to-zero effect on social mobility. Whether it's communist China or mediaeval England, the modern United States, caste-ridden India, or social-democratic Sweden, successful families rises and decline at roughly the same rate everywhere and everywhen. By tracing the persistence of rare surnames in national registers of doctors, scientists, members of Parliament, Clark obtains a broad and powerful result which should have a chilling effect on social reformers of all types. Quite simply, you can't keep a good clan down - until its natural time is up, and it starts returning to the mean like everything else.
March 6th; Saturday. 'Michael Powell' by James Howard. A good overview of the career of one of the 20th-century's most unusual film-makers, an English director roughly contemporary with Hitchcock. Powell worked closely for most of his life with a Hungarian emigre screenwriter, Emeric Pressburger, and the "Powell & Pressburger" duo ('Archer Films') accounted for almost all the best films of both men. Some extraordinary films like 'A Matter of Life and Death' and 'Black Narcissus' emerged from the partnership. As one reviewer on Goodreads-dot-com succinctly says, the book doesn't go too deeply into specific films. I particularly missed a deeper account of Powell's very controversial 1960s film 'Peeping Tom', the film which had such a hostile reaction from critics and audiences it effectively finished Powell's career (although he did go on to make one or two more films). A horror story about a man who murders women with a gun concealed in his camera, it made a tremendous impact on cinemagoers, losing Powell the good will he had from his bigger-hearted films of the 1940s. Much of the dreamlike atmosphere of his films is lost, and the later re-evaluation of 'Peeping Tom' as a masterpiece is touched on, but this book could have given it (and each other film) perhaps three more sentences to explain the plot and the mood for anyone who hasn't seen it.
March 5th; Friday. I think it was today I woke up out with an acute pain in my neck. Clearly I twisted it in my sleep. Have never had a crick in the neck this bad.
March 4th; Thursday. Long rewarding piece on putting viruses on the tree of life.
March 3rd; Wednesday. An interesting time to look back at a British TV drama from 2013 about a politicised pandemic: 'Utopia'.
March 2nd; Tuesday. Toyota CEO (confusingly called Mr Toyoda with a D) says there is not enough electricity for all the electric cars.
March 1st; Monday. Among discoveries of the last few days, "Sheilaism".
Mark Griffith, site administrator /
markgriffith at yahoo.com
