May 31st;
Monday. Well-argued allegation that on covid-19,
"Not a shred of doubt, Sweden was right".
May 30th;
Sunday. A suit announced on May 25th in India, against the Indian woman who is chief
scientist at the World Health Organisation (WHO), signals the start of a legal
process to examine claims that
ivermectin
was wrongly dismissed as a treatment for
covid-19 (to bolster the case for rushing unneeded vaccines into production?) This cost
tens of thousands of lives.
May 29th;
Saturday. More prompts to read Rebecca West (especially if Doris Lessing disliked her).
May 28th;
Friday. Not-very-helpful
grid of Hungarian polling agencies: those showing the Fidesz
government in the lead seem to be all Fidesz-funded, while those showing the opposition
alliance in the lead seem to be all opposition-funded.
May 27th;
Thursday. We stay up late, talking about the Bauhaus, and in particular
one of their teachers with a rather
distinctive
style
of
his
own.
May 26th;
Wednesday. In an April interview, data scientists discuss how they were censored
for trying to show that
lockdowns didn't slow the covid-19 pandemic.
May 25th;
Tuesday. Spot Weininger book on Edina's shelves.
Meanwhile finish reading the novel
'The Fear Index'
that Harry kindly lent me, since he's acting in the film version being made right now. An eccentric
former physicist builds an artificial intelligence that can make buy/sell decisions each day to
run a hedge fund. Action takes place in Geneva over around 24 hours in 2010. The wife is not quite
right, and the motivations of the three other major characters never completely make sense,
but the kind of page-turning yarn Hitchcock said was good for making into a film.
After all, the author once thought Neil Kinnock merited a biography (which he wrote) so he's clearly
not hugely imaginative, but this tale probably matches the way most non-financiers think finance
works. He tries not to drool with envy over the frequently-mentioned large sums of money.
May 24th;
Monday. Chatting with Edina, recall I must read
Connolly
and Muggeridge.
May 23rd;
Sunday. Mystery friend Austin refers me to a letter to Science. Extraordinary as this might sound,
the leak-from-Wuhan-lab explanation is still just a "theory" for how covid-19 started. Meanwhile, a short study
reported in French finds the policy of curfews (as if this wasn't obvious from the start) on balance
did substantially more harm than good.
May 22nd;
Saturday. Another episode of Masha and the Bear. In this one our young Russian heroine
gets kidnapped by the two dodgy wolves with the
rusty ambulance.
May 21st;
Friday. So here I am, waking up again in the Big Pogacsa. Andras some months ago made me listen to
Paul Desmond's Take Ten, a
play on Take Five
(also by Desmond). I ought to be able to remember how. Beats in the time signature?
May 20th;
Thursday. After a complicated start to the day, I find myself eating chocolate at Kecskemet
railway station under grey cloudy skies. I can see nothing, but the roar of fighter jets
passes over the station, two perhaps three military aeroplanes gadding about somewhere up in the
sky. Crosses my mind that each of those pilots in the air get their hearts checked every month by Akos.
A short Maceo Plex video with a curious
Leonardo quote at the front. Excuse me asking, but how could he have known? Oh -
hang on.
May 19th;
Wednesday. Duke's 'So In Love With You' :
Pizzaman Vocal House Remix /
Sil Mix Radio Edit /
Remastered original.
May 18th;
Tuesday. CDC admits that
covid-19 cases were overcounted. Here's the
rebuttal, saying that conceding just
6% of covid-19 deaths being due to only covid-19 doesn't amount to admitting deaths were overcounted.
An article criticising SAGE.
Someone called Judex writes tweets
undercutting the official covid-19 narrative.
May 17th;
Monday. A Texas Senate hearing is told by a senator that covid-19 vaccines
did have animal trials but the animals kept dying.
This website alleges the senator's claim is false.
May 16th;
Sunday. One of Solomun's Scientist Of Groove DJ performances. Keep an eye on the
tall brunette in the white shirt right behind him.
May 15th;
Saturday. Each night Edina's two chained dogs Kara & Harci howl into the darkness, it seems to me,
calling out across the Great Plain to their unchained third dog friend Roka
(who looks a bit like a fox). Roka vanished a couple of weeks ago. Mind you,
as Edina points out, the three of them used to howl together for half an hour
every evening before the third hound went missing.
May 14th;
Friday. A piece of graphical desperation from some new-world-of-work guru
consultant guff-sellers. Shoeless tree-head = "more specialised and flexible"?
May 13th;
Thursday. Senior military officer claims
civil war in France is inevitable.
May 12th;
Wednesday. Researchers claim ivermectin was an effective drug all along, just as some doctors were saying
14 months ago. Some Spanish & Latin American medics call for covid-19 vaccinations to be halted. Several US states have passed laws actively banning use of covid-19 vaccination papers as
de facto passports: at least ten states so far.
May 11th;
Tuesday. This belated
crypto-based attempt to price internet use
might be worthwhile.
This would have been an obvious use of 1970s design time on
TCP-IP, had computing back then not been run by obsessive quasi-socialists
with no grasp of how resources get allocated.
May 10th;
Monday. Innovator creates dummy laptop you can plug a
smartphone into.
May 9th;
Sunday. Edina recommends an adorable Russian animation character: Masha. Look out for the wolf dentists
in their sinister battered van.
May 8th;
Saturday. In conversation with Edina, I mention Mr Benatar's
nihilism and we agree on an improved title: 'Better Never To Have Written'.
May 7th;
Friday. The disinfo campaign built to
launch covid-19 hysteria.
I bid farewell to Anne and catch a train to Szolnok, where Edina has just finished her
visit to the dentist. We drive together back to Szeleveny.
May 6th;
Thursday. Do some early-afternoon sleeping in preparation for this evening's night shoot
at the film set. A New Yorker article Jessica
recommended.
May 5th;
Wednesday. Get to the end of another book of Anne's, a collection of short detective stories,
'The Department of Queer Complaints'.
These are by Carter Dickson, a writer I vaguely
recall mother strongly disliking. Very much at the crossword-puzzle end of the
detective-mystery spectrum, the tales feature invisible weapons, non-existent
rooms, footprints on top of hedges, invisible murderers and the like. Finding out
how each impossible crime was in fact done is strangely satisfying. Published
by Pan in the 1940s, the cover shows a revolver, a long slim dagger, a string of
pearls, and a stack of one-pound notes from the day when the monarch made no
appearance on our money.
Meet Jessica, back from Dixieland, for a lovely late lunch. We catch up on her
extensive adventures of the last couple of years.
May 4th;
Tuesday. A morning's work at the film set. All very smoothly organised and
quite jolly. I get put into a coffin so I can emerge from it saying how
comfortable it is. Nice piece via Robin about
blockchain-authenticated artworks.
May 3rd;
Monday. I finish a lovely book from Anne's shelves:
'J. M. Barrie's Peter Pan in Kensington
Gardens', written by May Byron ("with the permission of
the author"), illustrated by Arthur Rackham. It seems Anne danced, acted, and sang
in a wide range of shows (she simply cannot believe I have never seen
'Cabaret'),
but toured the US several years with Peter Pan. Having never read
or seen the original play I thought I should experience some
of his hospital-funding hero's adventures in make-believe. Very touching,
cheering, adorable, and poignant by turns, with exquisite drawings and the
occasional colour plate of Rackham's distinctive washed-out autumnal
hues. The adventure of defying 'Nurse' and hiding overnight in the park
after the gates close in the evening is conveyed perfectly with the seriousness
a five-year-old or six-year-old some time between 1900 and 1930 would view it.
Listening to Anne talking about her years on the stage, I get the sudden
feeling that the boy who never grows up is somehow a crucial figure in
20th-century myth, and I should look into this more.
May 2nd;
Sunday. Anne's stylish flat is about 200 yards from a night shop I wrote
about in this article. The same lads
still staff it. They greet me like old friends.
May 1st;
Saturday. Walking distance from Anne's, I get
my second covid-19 test. Another
slightly rushed affair where I again get the impression the goal is to be able
to say to lawyers that all the cast were tested, while making sure to not
actually confirm any of us have it. Not that it would matter if we had, of
course. On a bus a couple of days ago heard this tune ('Red is the Apple')
with a folkishly jaunty summer-hit tune, vaguely undercut by
whining lyrics.
Mark Griffith, site administrator /
markgriffith at yahoo.com
