The Matter of Intelligence.

I watched a video recently about octopuses (or octopi if you prefer.) It appears they’re highly intelligent creatures, having nine brains (one in their head and one in each arm), and no friends. (I also saw a note which said they have three hearts, but I didn’t watch the video so I can’t attest to the fact.) Apparently they’re one of the world’s best at solving mechanical and other practical problems. Having made this startling discovery I wanted to put a picture of an octopus next to a picture of Donald Trump on he blog and ask ‘Which do you think is the Republican?’ Only Google won’t let me without forcing me to cross a red line. 

*  *  *

And on the subject of intelligence, there’s a video which YouTube keeps offering among my recommendations and which reads:

If You Can Identify These 14 US States It Proves You Have an IQ Above 140

I’ve said before on this blog that having a high IQ is a limited way of assessing a person’s worth. Let me also add that being able to identify 14 US states correctly has absolutely nothing to do with IQ. That’s YouTube.

Considering the Flu Mystery.

I read in the news this morning that admissions to hospitals in the UK for cases of flu have risen 50% over the same period last year. And every year at around this time the news is full of wailing about the immense pressure under which the poor, benighted NHS is put throughout the flu season. I ask myself why that should be because in all my life I’ve never known anyone be admitted to hospital to be treated for flu.

When I was in my mid-forties I contracted a bad bout of it. It was winter and I was living in an old house which had no heating other than a gas fire in the living room. I took three days off work and rested up. In addition, for the only time in my life, I spent one whole day in bed. And then I went back to work on the fourth day. It was an unpleasant experience but something which simply needed to be got through until it burned itself out. And that was how everybody I’d ever known handled it.

So what’s different about now? Is it to do with the increasing age demographic? That hardly seems likely to explain such a rise because the age demographic isn’t going up that much. Are modern flu viruses much stronger than they used to be? Is there something about modern social habits which leads people to be more exposed to it? Or are we becoming so wimpy that we expect advanced medical treatment for everything from cancer to a wart on the left little finger?

Maybe it’s a combination of all of them. The next time I see my doctor I must ask him.

(And I still couldn’t find anything amusing to say about this one. I’m sure I would have done once. Then again, my house is uncomfortable tonight because the bitingly cold wind is in the east, and that’s always bad news.)

When Jesus Meets the Muslims.

Among the plethora of idiotic nonsense uploaded to YouTube, the following one caught my eye. It purports to come from a man who claims to have had a near death experience and went to heaven (as all NDEs do.) The video reporting his encounter is titled:

Jesus told me what he does with all the Muslims

I doubt it was a happy and accommodating experience for them, although there are several reasons why I didn’t waste my time watching it.

It raises several contentious points, of course, most of which should be obvious. But the first thing that occurred to me was how Jesus would know who is Muslim and who isn’t. Anybody can claim to be or not to be Muslim, just as anybody can claim to be or not to be Christian or Buddhist (Hindu and Jewish are different because bloodline comes into the picture with those.) Would a woman wearing a hijab, for example, be unable to contest the accusation of being Muslim?

And that leads me to a wholly unconnected question: There are several states in which the wearing of Muslim traditional dress is forbidden by law, and that includes the hijab. How would they respond, I wonder, if some major fashion designer set about popularising the hijab – presumably in gay colours and patterns – until it became a popular fashion statement? I truly wish somebody would do so just to find out.

And a second issue raises its head: I’ve noticed that there are a lot of anti-Islam videos appearing on YouTube lately. Given the high sensitivity to anything which can be viewed as being in any way prejudiced in the modern world, I’m surprised that Google aren’t being pressured to remove them on the grounds of ‘hate speech’ or ‘inciting racial or religious intolerance.’ I’m not suggesting they should, just surprised that it isn’t happening.

My own position is simple: I detest the excesses of Islamism for obvious reasons, as all reasonable people do, and I would object most strongly to the imposition of shariah law in what is effectively a secular state. But if someone chooses be Muslim and follow its dress code, I really don’t give a hoot. (Some people might remember my effusive praise of a student nurse called Sabs back around the period of my kidney operation. She wore a black hijab. It suited her.)

Flat Blog Blues.

I’m feeling a little troubled lately because my blog has gone flat, and I’m asking myself why it’s gone flat. Well, it’s like this:

I write the blog in order to have something to write. Writing has been in my blood since I was a teenager and has had several outlets down the years. It came to its high point when I was writing fiction between 2002 and 2011, and when the stories ran out I turned to blogging instead.

Let me make clear the fact that I don’t expect to change the world with the blog. I don’t see myself as an ‘influencer’ (in fact, I would be horrified if anybody called me that.) But I do like, for whatever reason, to present myself through it. I like to throw out to the universe what I am, how I feel, what my opinions are on matters important to me, how the environment in which I live functions, and occasionally what little stories I tell myself to make the inner me more worth the bother of being here. And so the blog has to be a picture of me in words – all of me (or at least most of me.)

One aspect of me that has always been prominent has been a tendency to see an undercurrent of humour in most situations. The humour was usually subtle, mostly based on sarcasm, innuendo, irony, and the surreal, and so it naturally found its way onto the blog in a significant number of posts. Not all obviously, because some subjects don’t allow even a minor diversion into humour, but I often found something funny even in the darker situations. And that’s what’s missing these days.

So what’s causing it? The health issues I can cope with, even though some of them are inconvenient at times. The descent into winter with its short days, long nights, cold accommodation, and general grimness doesn’t help, but I’ve felt that way about winter for much of my life and the humour has still managed to pop its head above the ice now and then. Being alone so much of the time can be a bit galling now and then, but not often. Mostly I prefer being alone and having my space to myself, and there are so few people I would consider amenable company that aloneness is my natural state. And my current near-obsession with mortality is not, in itself, a big issue because it’s never morbid. It’s part and parcel of my lifelong drive to discover the true nature of life and existence in general.

And yet the black cloud of unease and apprehension still hangs over my head for much of the time, often descending to darker depths. I suppose it could be that the issues mentioned above coalesce into a weight that’s troublesome to carry around all the time. And there’s one that I didn’t mention in the paragraph above: so many of the functional things I have around me are breaking down now, and when you feel you don’t have much longer to go the temptation is to hope that they will stay with you long enough to see you out, rather than accepting the trouble and expense of replacing them.

I wanted to close this post with something amusing, but I couldn’t think of anything.

Language and the Cheap Shot.

Something which so irritates me on YouTube are those videos which say: Can Japanese people pronounce these difficult English words? And then they show Japanese people trying their best and failing miserably. So what do we do then? Why, mock them of course, even if under our breath. (And maybe feel superior.)

Surely it must be obvious to everybody that different languages have sounds which don’t appear in other languages, and so the relative positions of tongue, teeth, and palate to which native speakers are habituated are different. It’s well known, for example, that the Japanese have difficulty with the letter ‘l’ and the hard ‘g’ because they haven’t been trained to use the sounds those letters make. And it works both ways.

So here’s a new rule for Google to apply: Any video which says Can Japanese people pronounce these difficult English words? must be accompanied by another one which says Can English people pronounce these difficult Japanese words? And then we can mock ourselves as well. (And maybe feel inferior.)

On Autumn and Its Faces.

I’ve noticed throughout my life that the autumn season mostly wears a small but distinctly different set of faces. This evening I decided that there are four.

The first is the pallid face when the light remains constant due to the universal cloud cover. It’s undistinguished and often wet. It drags us through the day in sombre mood and further hastens the dread of approaching winter.

The second is the jolly face when the sun bestows its beneficence from a pale blue sky and casts its glow on the warm colours of landscape and building alike. Myriad shades of red and yellow woodland delight the eye, and the low evening sun turns the dark tree trunks red while casting old limestone buildings in a shade of old gold.

The third is the face of vaporous air, less bright than the jolly face but still bright enough to encourage the dying leaves to glow in a final celebration of the inevitability of demise. And that’s the one which reaches the olfactory organs, filling the head with the musty scent of dead leaves on the woodland floor.

Finally there’s the magical face late in the year when river valleys fill with dense white mist, and floating above the fluid but impenetrable whiteness are the topmost branches of skeletal trees. There’s no colour to be seen anywhere, but there is mystery. That’s my favourite, and that’s the one I saw at twilight today.

And still I ask whether any of it is truly real. And still I ask whether anything lies beyond it, and if so what. And still I try to place it all within the concept of universal consciousness, and maybe one day I’ll know.

The Near Miss.

The route from my village to Uttoxeter begins with a narrow country lane of around two miles in length. The width varies from place to place and has quite a few blind bends, so a certain amount of caution is required. I drove it this morning.

The day was fine and dry with a low, bright sun shining from an almost wholly blue sky. It’s the sort of condition which produces the brightest highlights and the deepest shadows, and even at midday – the time I usually go to Uttoxeter – the sun is low enough to require the use of the car’s visor to keep the blinding sun out of one’s eyes.

And then there is the problem of road glare. We’d had rain the previous night and so the road was damp. That problem is best addressed with the wearing of polarising sunglasses because they’re the best at reducing glare. But the problem with sunglasses of any kind is that they make everything else darker too, and so anything in a shaded spot is almost invisible.

I was driving around a right hand blind bend when I saw her: an elderly lady only just visible in the gloom bestowed by the shadow of a hedgerow tree. She was walking towards me along the edge of the lane and my driver’s door was level with her before I knew she was there. Had she been only a little further out into the lane my car would have hit her before I’d even had reason to brake. I was driving more slowly than usual but it would still have been an awful accident.

And so there was a lesson to be learned on both sides. To a driver one would have to say: ‘be very, very careful when negotiating a bend that’s in shadow.’ And to a pedestrian one might refer to Eric Idle’s famous song beginning Always look on the bright side of life. Maybe somebody should record a new version for us country dwellers beginning Always walk on the bright side of the lane.

Unhappy Birthday.

It was my birthday yesterday. I cleaned the kitchen sink by way of celebration. The rest of the day was a liturgy of misadventures and malfunctions. In fact, it was a pretty awful day one way and another, possibly the worst of the year so far.

What surprised me, though, was my reaction to remembering of the fact, which I didn’t do until I came into my office first thing and saw the little parcel and card sitting on the chest of drawers next to my desk.

The fact is, you see, that until I reached the dizzy age of 30 I had always welcomed birthdays because they were carrying me forth to a time when I could feel my adult status to be fully vindicated. After that I gave them little attention, but this year my immediate reaction was to feel depressed. I don’t think a birthday has ever actually depressed me before. Maybe it was because it brought me to the age my mother was when she died of cancer, but I’m not convinced. I think it’s simply the fact that I’m unsuited to being old. And the period covering November, December, and January is my least favourite time of year.

But at least my kitchen sink is clean, for now.

Lost in Uncertainties.

I once wrote a post proposing the idea that nothing actually exists as we perceive the definition of ‘existence.’ It was a very simple proposition: The past doesn’t exist because it’s gone; the future doesn’t exist because it hasn’t happened yet; and the concept of ‘now’ doesn’t exist because the flow of time never stops.

But of course, the counter argument is that it’s a matter of how we perceive the phenomenon we call ‘now.’ We tend to regard it, rather lazily I suppose, as a fixed concept. The boss might say ‘I don’t want it tomorrow, or next week, or even in an hour’s time. I want it now.’ And that’s the simple reason why certain people of moderate wisdom argue that now is the only thing that exists. It’s just a matter of understanding that ‘now’ is a feature of existence which is in a state of continuous motion.

That’s fine, but existential enquiry gets more complicated than that. We could argue the case that solidity has no objective reality, and that colour is not a quality of an object but is created entirely in the brain. We could consider the theory that every fact of existence – past, present, and future – still exists because experiences do not move through us with the passage of time, but that it is actually us who move through a permanent state of experiences. And that’s before we consider the nature of time itself, the study of which I admit goes over my head. And where in all this is the dimension generally held under the all-encompassing banner of ‘spirituality’? That’s where the edge of the continental shelf is reached and beyond it is only unknown depth and impenetrable darkness, some of which certain people claim to have explored. But how do you know whether to believe them or not, and whether their findings were truly real?

And that’s the point of this post. I’ve been engaged in existential – and particularly spiritual – enquiry ever since I saw through certain absurdities inherent in standard Christian doctrine at the age of about 12. I’ve gained many insights but I still have a massive jigsaw on the table before me with only a few of the pieces in the right place. (At least I think they’re in the right place.)

But now I’m growing tired of it all. I’m considering whether I should shut it all out and concentrate on the delights of nature, the fortunes of my local football team, and whether there is a person somewhere in this world who might one day make me a baked Alaska. And time is running short.

I don’t know whether I can shut the matter of existential enquiry inquiry in a locked box and put it away; it’s too big a component of who I am. But I think I might try.

Tricks and Trash.

I was browsing my YouTube recommendations this afternoon and learned a few interesting facts. One channel, for example, informed me that the streets in China are littered with dead bodies and the country is in catastrophic meltdown. Another said that Paris is little more than a pile of shattered masonry because the city is collapsing. New York is also collapsing because huge gangs of angry people are setting fire to everything. And China is currently preparing for war with Japan. It didn’t take long to find those four. YouTube is full of outrageous claims like that because clicks are profitable, which is preferable to being authentic.

I was mildly disappointed that I never came across ‘Aliens ate my hamster’, but reasoned that even the average YouTuber would know that that story was debunked about fifty years ago.

So then I started to compile a list of the phrases used by YouTubers to convince the gullible that there’s something deliciously hidden to be found, and this video will let you in on the secret. Surprisingly they were few and far between in the couple of minutes I was looking, and so I’ve only picked up three so far. There’s usually more than that. They are:

… will shock you

… which they don’t want you to know

… it’s not what you think

I’ll keep looking and add some more another time.

I find it sad that a platform with the potential of YouTube should have degenerated into having a large proportion of its output clearly aimed at those for whom The National Enquirer has become too highbrow, but it appears that there’s a growing consensus that it’s just the way the western world’s mentality has progressed over the past few decades.

*  *  *

And I think I need to put a notice up somewhere in the village:

Lost: JJ’s sense of humour. Please check your sheds and outbuildings, and if you find it call this number urgently. No reward, I’m afraid, except that attaching to the attainment of virtue.

When Money is a Distant Irrelevance.

Very many moons ago when I was writing my fiction, an indie publisher (of sorts) took four of my short stories and said: ‘If JJ Beazley wrote a story about watching paint dry, I bet it would be interesting.’ That’s quite a compliment, isn’t it (even if the editor involved was training to become a Catholic priest and might have had as much literary nous as Dougal Maguire.)

But then this week my daughter told me that whenever I relate the latest goings on in my little world, I always make it an interesting story. She certainly has more nous than Dougal Maguire so maybe I should take the compliment seriously after all.

Sometimes I ask myself why I didn’t go all out to make a living out of my fiction, since it’s the one thing I apparently do passably well. It’s because it was never written for monetary reward. I had something like twenty five stories published by different levels of the indie press – some of them more than once – and had two of them included in ‘best of’ anthologies, and yet I think my total earnings from the lot amounted to no more than about £200. The novel and novella which I self-published are available online at all the main book retailers and they’ve enjoyed a similar lack of attention.

And that’s fine by me. I was never ensnared by the pecuniary principle which so obsesses and rules modern culture, you see. I only ever wanted to do what I wanted to do at the speed and in the way I wanted to do it. Money never really entered the picture because my writing habit occupied a part of my mind far distant from that in which monetary reward lies.

But I did take up the challenge of writing a story about watching paint dry. It’s here if anybody wants to read it.

Information and the Internet.

Having recently said a few words about how the Christian faith is shamelessly manipulated to match indoctrinated American attitudes, I was pleased to see this on my YouTube home page:

It’s impossible to follow Jesus and be a Christian at the same time

Maybe it was intended as clickbait, but since it’s a rare example of something I consider not only axiomatic but transparently so, I won’t complain about this one.

*  *  *

I’ve noticed something else about YouTube recently. I’ve seen an increasing number of examples of self-professed experts explaining their position on something or other in a simple and rational form of words. And then they repeat that position using different words. And then they repeat it all a second time using different words again, and I find myself thinking ‘but you said all this three minutes ago and three minutes before that.’ I’ve little doubt that it’s a recommended practice – encouraged by Google, no doubt – to drag the video out as long as possible because one of the factors used to consider the ‘value’ of a video is retention. They want to keep people locked onto the video as long as possible because that, or so I’m reliably informed, increases the fee they can charge the advertisers.

This didn’t happen much back in the days when people derived their information from books published by responsible publishers. Good editors would look out for repetition and only allow it if they deemed it genuinely necessary. The world of information availability has changed greatly since the coming of the internet, and not always in a good way. The concept of monetization has changed all that, as it has in most aspects of life.

Sound Bites, a Welcome, and a Contradiction.

These two thoughts dropped into my head while I was fetching my first scotch last night. They don’t have to be anybody else’s thoughts, so take them or leave them.

 

On Reality

There is only one consciousness in the whole universe. The illusion of individuality arises from its desire to view all possibilities from innumerable angles.

 

On Capitalism (After Churchill)

Never in the field of human endeavour have so few owed so much to the discontent of so many.

*  *  *

I had my chin licked by an ageing greyhound today. He appeared to be excusing me for disturbing his position on the coffee shop floor. I did apologise to him.

*  *  *

I’ve made the 200 posts for the year a month early. It’s an interesting fact (to me, that is) that I have no truck with targets, believing them to be a pointless facet of modern times. I do, however, like statistics. It’s just another example of the two halves of my brain falling out.

Being the Reluctant Wimp.

We’re having the first taste of winter in the UK at the moment. Down here in the English Midlands the temperature today was low enough to be considered cold even by January standards. It’s been much worse further north.

It had me thinking of times past when several winters showed their meanest faces, and I realised how much stronger, braver, and mentally tougher I was back then when dealing with difficulties and emergencies in unusually harsh winter weather.

Now, as I descend into old age, I’m becoming quite the wimp. I’m brought to depression by every ice-cold blast. I want to go to bed and hibernate until spring instead of fronting up and dealing with whatever needs dealing with. I still do deal with them of course, when it’s really necessary, but not before I’ve realised that seeking an excuse to ignore the whole thing and say ‘I don’t care; what will be will be’ simply won’t do and reluctance must be overcome.

So should I be ashamed of losing the will to fight nature’s nastier side until it retires to a safe distance? I suppose I should and I suppose I do, but life is very different from what it was back in the day. For the most part my sole responsibility is to myself and my little world. There’s nobody out there to lend a hand, so maybe the best approach really is to say ‘I don’t care.’ (But only if I can get away with it.)

Right now the night is dark and very cold and I have one room in the house that is just about tolerable, and I worry about the birds and the animals stuck out in the fields with nowhere to go and get warm. Maybe I should make that post about the talkative techie I encountered in Ashbourne last week, or the way in which my perception of life since I moved to this house has become compartmentalised around certain people and events. Tomorrow, perhaps. Or maybe I should just stop talking about myself.

Time to see what YouTube has to offer. Maybe something will be watchable.

Two Sides of the Gender Coin.

When I was 19 (which was quite a long time ago) I worked with a man who told me one day that his wife wanted to get a job. His response was typical of the age: ‘No wife of mine is going out to work’ he said with much indignation. Well, this attitude has nuances.

The first is his assumption that he had the right to tell his wife what he would and wouldn’t allow. It’s worth remembering that although the Church of England allowed the bride’s undertaking to ‘obey’ her husband to be omitted from the marriage vows in 1928, it didn’t become normal practice until the 1980s. (I was a little older than 19 by then…)

The second concerns the accepted attitude to gender roles. My work colleague no doubt considered – as did many men in those days – that a wife’s place was in the home and nowhere else (except, perhaps, the performing of voluntary work which made no pecuniary contribution to the household and therefore broke no taboos.)

But there’s also the other side of the gender imperative. A husband considered it his duty to work in order to provide for his wife and family, and so having a working wife would have diluted that role and been injurious to his pride. Knowing the man in question, I suspect that was his major concern.

Things have changed now, of course. Wives are expected to work because relatively few husbands earn enough to provide the sort of lifestyle regarded as normal in modern developed economies. And I suspect that this development has largely been driven by the corporate world and its lackeys as part of its drive to rule society and become obscenely rich in consequence. That’s the part I dislike.

And therein lie the nuances, so take your pick. I expect people of my generation will tend to see the situation quite differently from the younger ones, and I’m tempted to think that there’s a competition going on here between what some people consider preferable and not preferable, and what other people consider normal and not normal.

Suffer the Little Children.

I had a bad night last night. It happens occasionally. I wake up in the dark and the bedclothes feel to be in a state of disarray. And then I feel disoriented, not knowing how my body aligns with the four walls of the room. I don’t know whether I’m chilled or not because some parts of me are and some not, so I sit up and look in the direction of the panel heater under the window. If the red light is on it means that the room should at least be tolerable, and at least I know which way I’m facing. And so I pull all available fabric around my recumbent form and go back to sleep.

When I got up I felt empty inside, as I do often these days. I thought about the impending Christmas season and asked whether it was worth acknowledging. I didn’t think so, but considered the idea of buying myself a present. But what do I want? Nothing, at least nothing I can afford. And when I went out to top up the birds’ feed table, I had to remove the first ice cap of the winter from the water bowl. Winter is not a pleasant experience in this house.

I decided to go for my morning walk, and as I strode down the lane I spotted a small group approaching from the opposite direction. It turned out to be a little girl of around 2 or 3 sitting astride a small pony being led by a woman, presumably her mother. The child stared at me as the gap closed, and when they turned into Bag Lane she waved. I waved back. And then her mother waved. They walked on and then the child turned to watch me over her shoulder. She waved again, which I returned again. And her mother waved again.

A sense of some substance added itself to my perception of life, and the 2½ mile walk was navigated at a slightly brisker pace. How I have come to realise that the presence and lack of inhibition in children can be such a light in the growing darkness of the times. (And why I think of mothers as being the most important people in society.)

Three Little Connected Notes.

While listening to some music on YouTube last night I was reminded of a question I’ve asked on this blog before, so I’m going to ask it again (using different words this time.) How does a composer know that if he writes a number of notes in a particular order, the effect on a person’s emotional state on hearing them played can be mightily profound. How does he know?

*  *  *

It will be my birthday in eleven days time and I’ve realised something quite disturbing: I’ve started to notice attractive women over 40. I think the end must surely be nigh.

*  *  *

And to join the two previous notes together, I’ve been hearing Roy Orbison singing the song It’s Over all day today. I’m not aware of coming across any reference to either the singer or the song in a very long time, which makes it an odd coincidence.

America's Answer to Cirque du Soleil.

I see the American political scene continues to resemble a third rate circus which can boast no more than an endless supply of clowns throwing custard pies around to amuse its eager audience – in this case the citizens of the free world.

The latest spat is between Donald Trump and Marjorie Taylor Greene (or Marjorie 'Traitor' Greene as Trump is now inclined to label her, calling on that ultra-sharp wit for which he is justly famous. It seems that anybody who disagrees with Donald these days is labelled a traitor. I suppose it’s meant to have maximum effect on a population brainwashed from the cradle to believe that patriotism is on a par with godliness, since the world 'traitor' is commonly understood to be the opposite of 'patriot'.)

Talking of godliness, Ms Greene’s response to Donald’s invective was 'I don’t worship Donald Trump. I worship God, and Jesus is my saviour.' I expect something as weak and frankly ludicrous as that was meant to appeal to the single brain cell shared by the mentally challenged denizens of the Bible Belt. Can’t think of any other reason why she would aim so low with her dish of custard.

And of course, there remains the inevitable irony: if Jesus of Nazareth was anything like the character pictured in the canonical gospels, I doubt he would have had anything to do with a firebrand Republican politician from Georgia, USA. And I expect Donald the Dunderhead would have been one of the money changers he swept out of the temple.

Contrasting Habits.

On my walk this morning I was approached in a friendly manner by one dog, one cat (most unusually), one donkey, one horse, two cows, one woman from the village, and one man from the village. That’s a lot for a morning walk, isn’t it? Guess which ones were welcomed in return 

*  *  *

It occurred to me today that when we refer to people’s parents we always call them ‘mum and dad.’ (Or mops and pops if you’re a southerner, mother and father if you’re being formal, mater and pater if you’re very posh and at least 100 years old, and ma and pa if you’re American.) What’s odd is that in western culture it has generally been the norm to place the masculine ahead of the feminine. So why the difference?

The Dubious Side of YouTube.

There’s a thumbnail in my YouTube recommendations which is titled:

What Would Happen If All the Scandinavian Countries Combined?

It’s accompanied by a map showing the ‘Scandinavian countries.’ Only it’s wrong because it includes Finland, which isn’t in Scandinavia. This is ignorance and therefore regrettable, but at least it’s probably a genuine and relatively common misapprehension, so there’s little harm done.

What is much worse is the habit of peddling outright lies in order to get clicks. A recent example was ‘King Charles III Abdicates!’ No he didn’t, and there’s no reason to think that he might have done. This has become so common now that the practice of lying to get clicks is apparently regarded as acceptable.

When did this happen? It’s long been accepted in modern civilisations that deliberately lying on a public platform in order to make money is at least frowned upon and usually illegal. This practice on YouTube is akin to those unscrupulous peddlers of coloured water in the Old West who assured the ignorant that their magic elixir was a guaranteed panacea and particularly efficacious against rattlesnake bites.

And money is what it’s all about. The more clicks, the more advertising revenue, so both the YouTuber and Google are happy. It’s inevitable to conclude that it’s why Google apparently makes no attempt to put a stop to it, and why YouTube has become an object of suspicion as much as a means of acquiring information and entertainment.

Losing Community Approbation.

I blotted my copy book while out clearing the road grids today – twice.

First I mistook a little boy for a little girl. ‘What’s your name, miss?’ I asked. ‘Bear.’ ‘Sorry, did you say Belle?’ ‘Bear,’ intoned his mother. ‘He’s a boy.’ Whoops (but he did have long curly blond hair and that’s as good an excuse as any.)

And then I saw Lydia coming down the road with her little girl (I think) and her new whippet puppy. It being the fourth time I’ve encountered Lydia at school run time, I felt that sufficient familiarity had been established to regale her with the Lydia the Tattooed Lady song. She was unimpressed. She carried on walking and muttered something I didn’t catch. And she declined to allow Gwen the dog to come over and smother me in canine affection, even though Gwen the dog seemed desperate to do so.

I think I’m becoming ever further removed from the tolerance of the Shire dwellers, but that’s no problem since there are so few of them I want to be tolerated by anyway. I don’t mind being thought a fruitcake, you see, but it does concern me a little that I might be becoming creepy in my advanced years. I wouldn’t like to become – or even be thought – creepy, but it’s such a difficult characteristic to define, isn’t it? What’s creepy to one person is eccentric to another.

Still, it’s life and life only, and as long as the horses and dogs accept me for what I am, that will suffice.

Clued-Up YouTube.

This is an amusing little example of how well some YouTubers know their subject. The title reads:

This gorilla is seeing a human baby for the first time.

The picture shows a woman’s arms holding a young baby out to show it to an Orang-Utan.

A Techie Turncoat and Barmy Bureaucrats.

I met a man today who’s spent his working life to date as a tech consultant. He was probably in his mid to late forties. He told me that when he started out he loved the ingenuity of modern technology and enjoyed working with it, but now he feels very differently. He said it’s moving too quickly, it’s too full of glitches, and it’s allowing all manner of ne’er-do-wells to know your business and habits. And that enables them to cheat you, manipulate you, and steal from you. He said it’s a world he doesn’t want to work in any longer and is looking for ways to scale back and live a simpler life. So maybe I’ve been getting it right all along.

*  *  *

I read this morning of a woman in London who took a used cardboard envelope to a public bin to dispose of it. She found the bin full, but there was a pile of cardboard next to it awaiting collection so she put the envelope on top and thought no more about it. And then she received a letter from the local council accusing her of fly tipping and fining her £1,000 which she hasn’t got (lots of people haven’t.) This is the wild, wondrous, and wonky way of bureaucracy in modern Britain. The cataract is beginning to look inviting.

 

*  *  * 

I wish I could remember where I put my sense of humour and my aptitude for a neat turn of phrase.

On Posts Made and Not Made.

I lost some money on Sunday at the retail park in Uttoxeter. As part of my latest crusade against the system (it’s a use it or lose it thing) I decided to pay cash for my purchases in Tesco. The change was £4.25 but I forgot to pick it out of the tray when I left. I’ve lost several things on that retail park and have decided that it has a bad vibe about it.

But then I met two lovely horses accompanied by two young girls at the other end of the park, so I chose to consider the matter of good and bad fortune to be in balance after all. I’ve never seen a horse on a retail park before.

*  *  *

I considered making a post about last night’s strange dream in which a man committed suicide and homicide in a single action. I used to make quite a few posts about strange dreams back in the early days of the blog, but I doubt the details would be of interest to anybody else. I can’t think for the life of me what it was supposed to mean, especially since the Lady B made a brief appearance at the end.

I also considered making a post about the Israeli hardliners’ latest descent into the sewer of mediaevalism. I’m not going to do so because it would be hard to avoid mentioning the name of the most objectionable of said body of ne’er-do-wells, and I don’t want it polluting my blog. They say that words have power, and I think they probably do.

The Sprint and Stumble of Emma Watson.

Emma Watson is coming in for a lot of stick on YouTube lately, and she received a particularly stinging rebuke from her old friend and mentor Joanne Rowling recently because of something she said in an award ceremony speech. There are now a lot of pictures of Ms Watson looking upset on YouTube’s recommendations pages, and it’s causing a certain dichotomy in my view of her.

The thing is, you see, over the course of the Harry Potter franchise the character of Hermione Granger was my ideal child, my ideal adolescent, and ultimately my ideal mature woman. I know full well that it’s a big mistake to confuse a character with the actor performing it, but I was inevitably left with a warm impression of the lady Emma.

But all that changed quickly when it became evident that, having virtually owned the biggest spotlight in the film franchise, she set out to achieve mainstream starlet immortality, first by resorting to some dubious (in my opinion) modelling, and then by taking up an activist stance and revealing what I saw as a juvenile and rather silly nature. And so I went off Emma Watson big time. Fine, you might say, Emma Watson is just an actor, she’s no concern of mine, so let the whole thing go and think no more about. And so I did, until now.

The problem for me is that I separate cause and effect in such matters. I can’t just say ‘Emma Watson brought all this criticism on herself so she deserves the brickbats. End of story.’ When I see somebody being attacked for views and behaviour which they held honestly, if a little immaturely, such an attack feels unjust and my sympathy gene is immediately aroused. Occasionally I have seen that tendency as a fault, but it’s who I am and I’m not likely to change now. I don’t even want to change. Why should I?

And so that’s why I want to have a long confabulation with Ms Watson to see whether my imperfect INFJ mind can say something to help. It isn’t going to happen, of course, but at least I managed to get a blog post out of it.

Taking Refuge in the Cryptids.

I have time to make a post tonight, but as luck – good or bad – would have it, I have nothing to make a post about because nothing of consequence has befallen me today. I suppose I could augment the post stats to the tune of one by saying:

The views near and far around the Shire today were decorated by countless tracts of arboreal gold glowing in the still, misty air.

I like that sort of autumn day. They’re atmospheric, especially if you can find a wood to walk through. I’m a little suspicious of woodland these days, though. My forays into the nature of reality have led me to consider the question of cryptids, you see, and I watched a video last night about the strange sightings on Cannock Chase.

Cannock Chase is a large area of forest and heath not far from where I was brought up, and one of the subjects of such sightings was of the creature known as ‘dogman’ (although they referred to it as a vampire in the documentary, which is something quite different and just goes to show how much ignorance is frequently encountered in the documentary form.)

The point is, however, that dogman is pretty big, horribly black, and presumed to be homicidal when it’s hungry. It isn’t something you’d want to encounter while wandering through the woods on a still, misty day in autumn. But fortunately there was an expert on hand to give us the rational explanation for dogman sightings.

He said that a Red Deer stag (cut to a picture of the Monarch of the Glen replete with antlers) can look surprisingly like a dogman when it stands on its rear legs after dark. Are Red Deer stags in the habit of standing on their rear legs after dark? Does something with the head of a deer (replete with antlers) really look like a hound from hell with a humanoid body? I suspect that this particular expert was not being entirely rational (and it’s not the first time I’ve said that) and had probably been gorging on Far Side cartoons.

The Lying Channel and a Little Mystery.

I complained in an earlier post about the sheer fakeness proliferating on YouTube, and one aspect in particular is bothering me. More and more videos on YouTube are being introduced by thumbnails containing outright, and often outrageous, lies. One recently claimed that King Charles had just abdicated, another that a city in England was ‘ablaze’ due to rioting amounting to civil war, and several others claiming that a well known celebrity had died, only they hadn’t.

It troubles me that people are prepared to lie to this extent purely to get more hits and therefore more money from the advertising, but that’s just the latest example of a sad truth about the modern age – that the pursuit of money outweighs the application of basic standards in nearly all circumstances. What troubles me more is that nobody seems to want to put a stop to it, which indicates that lying on a public platform has become the new norm and is therefore acceptable. Well, not to me it isn’t. The importance of truth is ever paramount.

*  *  *

I put a comment on a YouTube video recently. (I often do.) It was a simple exposition of a point I wished to make and the grammar, syntax, and spelling were –as you would expect, I hope – impeccable. And it was written in English, as you would also expect, since it’s the only language I know well enough to engage with people. Yesterday I received a reply written in one of the East Asian languages, so I clicked ‘translate.’ This is what it said:

‘Your Japanese is perfect but your English is a little casual.’

What the hell am I supposed to make of that?

Glitches and a Dubious Celebration.

It began when I woke up this morning. I looked at the clock and saw that it was forty minutes later than the time I’d set on my phone alarm for a wake up call. My alarm has always been reliable, and quite loud. And if I don’t silence it in the correct manner it goes off again ten minutes later, so either I was sleeping too heavily or the phone had a glitch. And that was only the start.

Next up was the computer behaving like a right ne’er-do-well, and then the car exhibited a few glitches, and when I attempted to pay for my groceries in Sainsbury’s, their computer system was faulty and it took six attempts before the transaction was complete. ‘It’s like this all over the country,’ said the cashier. And then there were other misfortunes which I won’t bother to relate. (Although I might the mention the pigeon which had become trapped in one of the charity shops and appeared most distraught, poor lady.) It was that sort of day.

It really makes you wonder, doesn’t it? Is this all just coincidence, or is it the configuration of the heavenly bodies, or is there something up with what we generally rely on as reality? I’ve been surprised over the last few years by how many people I’ve heard say ‘I think the matrix is crumbling’ and I’m quite sure that some of them weren’t joking. I used to think that only strange people like me said things like that.

*  *  *

Today, November 5^th, is Bonfire Night in the UK. It’s a celebration remembering the day in 1605 when a group of Catholic activists planned to blow up the Houses of Parliament with thirty six kegs of gunpowder, with the intention of killing the King and many other notable personages. They failed because somebody snitched on them anonymously, and the man designated to light the fuses – one Guy Fawkes Esq – was caught. He was subsequently executed most horribly and now we celebrate his failure by lighting bonfires, setting off fireworks, and burning effigies of Mr Fawkes himself. (They’re simply known as ‘guys’, as in ‘penny for the guy, mister.’) For my part, I’m inclined to investigate the cost of having a T shirt printed with Guy Fawkes for Prime Minister.

*  *  *

The fakery, the naked lies, the disinformation, the persistent irrationality, and the sheer preponderance of half-baked trivia which now constitutes a large percentage of YouTube’s output are getting on my nerves. I’m seriously considering giving it up.

On Ladies and God and Things.

Today was a day of Lydias, Lady Bs, and a near-multitude of women called Megan. The coincidence of so many Megans suddenly appearing in my life encouraged me to investigate the name. Seems it’s the Welsh diminutive of Margaret and comes from the Greek for ‘pearl’, which is odd because Megans and Margarets are very different sorts of people.

Did I ever mention that my name at birth and for the first eight years of my life was Jeffrey Godwin? If you trace both names back to their Germanic roots, they both mean something approximating to ‘friend of God.’ No wonder it got changed.

*  *  *

I watched a video recently on the differences between the UK and the USA on the meaning and values of Christianity. She said that in America it’s considered good to be wealthy because it indicates that God is pleased with you. That being the case, I wonder how they circumvent Matthew 19.24. Or could it be that Matthew 19.24 has been redacted from the American version of the canonical Gospels?

*  *  *

When I went to bed last night I suddenly remembered, for no apparent reason, the film The Elephant Man. In particular I remembered the poignant scene near the end when Mr Merrick decides he wants to go to sleep lying down, knowing that the cranial condition to which he is prey will kill him if he does. That’s why he’s doing it, of course. I remembered the sense of the moment when he said it, and as I was climbing into bed I felt the same sense. I thought it entirely possible that I might not wake up in the morning, but I suppose I must have done because several people waved at me today.

*  *  *

My Lady of the Day, with whom I’m becoming a little fascinated and possibly even enamoured, is Mary Magdalene.

Preparing the Answer.

You know, I realised only yesterday, when I was putting a glass of scotch and a pastry out for the little people at midnight, that my birthday falls precisely four weeks after Halloween. Fancy not noticing that before, and at my age too.

On similar note. I’m waiting for somebody in the Shire to ask me: ‘Do you believe in fairies?’ I have my answer ready:

‘That’s like asking me whether I believe in ghosts and whether I believe in God. There are two answers to all three. The first is “I don’t do belief.” And the second is “It’s complicated.”’

And then I’ll walk away with the sort of detached air which befits the sigma INFJ.

Trump and his Qualifications.

I was reading this morning of King Donald’s massive reduction in the USA’s immigration quota, and particularly of his intention to give priority to white South Africans. Sounds a bit racist, doesn’t it?

‘Oh no,’ says Donald, ‘it’s not racist at all. It’s because white people in South Africa are being persecuted and murdered in large numbers by nasty black people. I have photographs to prove it.’

And then he smugly produces photographs of body bags stacked up and awaiting disposal, and expects us to believe it. Meanwhile, Reuters points out that the photographs didn’t come from South Africa; they came from the Democratic Republic of Congo thousands of miles to the north. They have nothing to do with South Africa. The White House, apparently, declined to comment.

So I’m still a little confused as to why the majority of American people voted to make Donald their President, but I have a theory.

(A Little Aside: I think I know why Donald wants to take possession of Canada and Greenland. Not satisfied with being merely King of the USA, his ego craves the title Emperor of the Americas. He wants to be added to that star-spangled list along with Peter the Great, Suleiman the Magnificent, and Ming the Merciless. Donald the Dunderhead fits nicely. But I digress…)

The theory: We all know that the world is mostly ruled by idiots, psychopaths, cheats, and liars, so Donald probably has the perfect qualifications in the minds of the majority of Americans, he being able to tick all four boxes with supreme confidence. And who can blame them? America is, after all, still a fledgling culture. It didn’t live through the Middle Ages and learn the error of its ways as most of the rest of the world did. Could that explain it, I wonder.

(And I must just mention again that some of the finest people I have ever known have been Americans, just not the majority.)

The Geese Are Going Ga-Ga.

I’ve mentioned on this blog before that every autumn I see, and hear, a large gaggle of geese flying north. I still don’t know why they would want to go north since north is generally colder than south in the northern hemisphere. Notwithstanding the apparent lapse in credibility, however, north is the direction they’ve always been taking. But not this year.

Over the past few days I’ve seen – and heard – four smaller skeins flying over my house. The first was heading west, the second south, the third east, and the fourth south-east. Why is this, I ask myself. Does it have something to do with the earth’s magnetic field, or climate change, or that infamous comet 3I/Atlas and its close proximity to the sun? My own feeling is that they’re either bored with taking their hols in Svalbard every year, or they’re tired of honking at the aurora.

And I still don’t understand why I still find the honking of migratory geese so magical, but I think I’m getting there.

Is Gen Z Destroying My Country?!

The sensationalist title to this post was deliberately engineered to mock YouTube where such titles predominate almost to the point of being ubiquitous. Just so you know.

To continue…

I’ve noticed that Gen Z seems to have no concept or appreciation of banter at all. If you try to engage a person of that era in banter you’re mostly met with a quiet stare which varies between blank and bemused. It’s as though you’ve asked them a complex question on the subject of advanced thermodynamics and done so in the most ancient dialect of Mongolian. Gen Z doesn’t do banter, and on thinking about it I realised that it’s also uncommon among Millennials, so maybe they started the rot.

Wiki gives the definition of banter as ‘playful and teasing remarks.’ So it is, and it’s central to the life blood of British communication, especially among the peasant classes from which I originate. I’ve often wondered whether it grew out of the hardships of working class life during the horrors of the Industrial Revolution when the majority of the population was condemned to labour on treadmills and live in crowded conditions.

If so, maybe we have a reversal of a trend going on here. If the Industrial Revolution, which threw large numbers of people together in adversity, gave genesis to the propensity for banter, maybe the Technological Revolution, which discourages human contact except when conducted in the limited environment of laptops and smart phones, is now taking it away again. And one of the primary aspects of human connection is being lost.

The State of Me.

I felt fine when I woke up this morning. I continued to feel fine all the time I spent lying there ruminating on the prospect of not ruminating but getting up instead. But get up I did eventually, and then I didn’t feel fine. My face was suddenly attacked by the combined forces of earache, toothache, blocked sinuses, and a general facial malaise down the left side. So then I felt rough instead.

But being ever in thrall to my practiced routines, I still had a breakfast of a bowl of cereals, milk, and sugar, and I still went out for my customary walk, and after lunch I completed the job in the garden which I’d set myself to do today. I even worked through the light rain which was falling at one point. So then I told myself what a good boy I am and noticed that the symptoms of the earlier lurgy had eased quite a lot.

By the time I’d finished the garden work the light was falling rapidly and so I spent an hour or so thinking about the Lady B. I often do, you know – think about the Lady B. I’d watched a YouTube video last night, you see, about the genetic origins of hazel eyes – which the Lady B has to complement her very dark hair – and the fact that they’re commoner in Ireland than most places. It encouraged the speculation that the Lady B is not (physically) a throwback to some ancestor from the regions around the Mediterranean as I’d often suspected, but has an element of the dark Irish in her antecedence.

And that led me to another realisation. The good Lady once told me that she was attending a course on some aspect of computing with her sister, and members of the group had remarked that they couldn’t tell them apart. To me that was nonsense because to me they didn’t – and still don’t – look even slightly alike. And further, neither of the girls look like their mother. And that was when I realised that when I look at somebody I don’t just see the outward physical form. I add to it a quickly formed sense of the person’s innate characteristics, and so their appearance takes on a different quality. Maybe I’m weird. Who can tell?

After that I decided to research the author Algernon Blackwood, the well known writer of paranormal and mystical novels and short stories. He’s especially known for his stories The Willows and The Wendigo, and the great Lovecraft himself considered Blackwood to be possibly the best of all such writers. I read The Willows and a few others many years ago and was very impressed myself, so today I finally got around to finding out a bit more about him. It turned out that he was very much like me in his attitudes and interests, which pleased me.

The ear, tooth, and sinuses are pretty much back to normal, by the way. Time now to make the usual highly laboured attempt to persuade my old friend (and he really is old) computer to play YouTube videos. The Lady Guanyin usually helps eventually. 

Another Encounter from the New World.

Having made the acquaintance of the girl from Brazil yesterday, today I encountered another woman from the New World. New York this time. She’s a volunteer in one of Ashbourne’s charity shops, and ingratiated herself into my presence by extolling the virtues of one of a range of appointment calendars which charity shops routinely sell at this time of year. All the monthly pictures are line drawings, you see, which are meant to be coloured in when the recipient is bored in January after the light and glitter of Christmas has passed.

And so we chatted about America and New York for a while, but I forgot to mention that I don’t really see NYC as part of America. It’s always seemed to me that it has the air of an independent city state about it. But I did manage to squeeze in my theory that the USA might benefit from splitting into several separate countries. The clued-up north east could become the first, everything south of the Mason-Dixon line would be the second, the Midwest could be third, California would be a state in its own right because it’s a bit odd, and that just leaves Oregon and Washing State stuck up there in the north-west. I suggested that Canada might be prevailed upon to accept the two orphans as a new province.

Oddly, she didn’t disagree, and that was the end of the conversation. Unfortunately, I forgot to ask her whether she knew Zoe Mintz.

A Brief But Exotic Connection.

I watched the women’s football match on Saturday between England and Brazil, and it occurred to me that I don’t think I’ve ever met a Brazilian. Well you don’t, do you? Australians, Americans, and to a lesser extent the Dutch, buzz around the world like horse flies at a knacker’s yard. Brazilians are a rarity.

But today I was walking around the Shire when I saw a young woman approaching from the opposite direction. I’d seen her twice before and each time she’d smiled, waved, and said ‘hello’, so I thought it was time I elevated the connection.

I opened with some nondescript pleasantry and noticed she had an accent that wasn’t British. ‘Where are you from?’ I asked. ‘Brazil,’ she said. ‘That’s interesting, I don’t think I’ve ever met anybody from Brazil,’ I replied predictably. (I consciously avoided any mention of both horse flies and beach volleyball, since both seemed inappropriate in the circumstances.)

So now I’ve met somebody from Brazil. It was the most exciting thing that’s happened to me for a number of years. I asked her what her name was and she told me, but I don’t remember it. It began with L.

Having a Bejewelled Window.

Having succumbed to an autumn whinge yesterday, I thought I’d balance it up today with something a little more pleasant.

On the opposite side of the lane which runs along the bottom of my garden stands a big old sycamore tree. It’s one of the first local sycamores to adopt autumn colour, and this year has been a particularly vibrant shade of golden yellow. (I expect it has something to do with the warm, dry summer we had this year.)

It stands opposite the front of my house and a little to the right, so if I go into the front bedroom on a sunny morning the sight of it fills the window with its golden glow. To put it simply, the window is full of shiny, golden jewels, and it’s rather pleasant.

(Yes, I know nothing in the material world is innately coloured, but one has to pretend sometimes. And the effect it has on the mind qualifies for the term ‘beautiful.’)

Dour Day.

If days have personalities, today was dour and mean-spirited. A cold, dark, and depressing heaviness hung in the air, seemingly intent  on pressing the life and cheer out of the land and all who move upon it. A light rain left pools of filth on road and field alike. The sky was neither bright nor menacingly dark, but that shade of nondescript grey which leaves the spirit in limbo.

I had to go out to the town this morning and really didn’t want to. The view from the window looked cold and grudgingly hostile. The wind had little power, but its sharpness seemed to bode no good. I went anyway, and felt constantly on the edge of a cold, incisive presence despite several heavy layers of clothing.

Maybe it was all due to the bad night I’d had, a night filled with dreams of being in a familiar place but no longer welcome there, only tolerated. I was woken four or five times feeling chilled, and every movement placed some part of me into the frigid domain of cold cotton sheets. Maybe it was the rewinding of clocks an hour, which we did in Britain today. It happens every year, but today it felt like sending the light of life back towards the darkness whence it came. Or maybe it was just the awareness that the cheerless presence of winter is visible on the horizon and heading my way. I dislike winter.

And maybe tomorrow it will all seem like a mirage.

Being Proud of Being British...

My YouTube recommendations are currently awash with exaggerated stories of how nice we Brits were to German combatants after WWII. They carry headlines like These German POWs Thought They Were Going to Be Ill-Treated in Britain, but actually… And this is followed by a picture of a nice British Army officer talking to them nicely. There was These German POWs Thought They Would Suffer Badly From the Cold in a British Winter, but actually…, and is illustrated with a picture of a nice British Army officer handing out heavy winter coats. And what about the picture of women in uniform parading through the streets with a nice British Army officer in attendance, accompanied by the headline These Women POWs Were Amazed That They Were Allowed to Parade Through the Streets Without Chains. There’s even one showing captured Japanese ‘comfort women’ in uniform, naturally expecting a fate worse than death, but actually nobody touched them.Or so it is claimed.

It’s all silly propaganda, of course, but there was one I found amusing. These German POWs Thought They Would Be Poisoned in British Camps it began, but actually... And then an obviously AI-generated picture shows a group of wild-eyed German soldiers reaching out in a state of ecstasy for a parcel of… fish and chips (wrapped in sheets of old newsprint as they were in those days.) Fish and Chips was, after all, the proletarian dish which put the ‘Great’ in Great Britain. Didn’t you know?

A Short Note on Immigrants.

One of the main features filling the media and parliamentary debate at the moment is the question of illegal immigrants. I gather there’s a complex economic argument on both sides of the equation, but the objection I’ve mostly experienced has favoured the emotional response. ‘There are just too many of them,’ say even those who see themselves as kind and liberally minded. ‘These people are uncouth foreigners invading our country and swamping our civilised culture.’ And they’re usually inclined to presume a proclivity for criminal intent as well.

I wonder how many of them realise that the people we now call the English came here in boats as what we would now term ‘illegal immigrants.’ And the same is true of white people in the Americas, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. And when they did, they didn’t just swamp the existing culture, they took ownership of it.

And let’s not also forget that major population shifts have been happening all over the world since time immemorial, usually in pursuit of better opportunities and living standards, and we just happen to be living through the latest of them.

Perception and the Matter of Beauty.

This year has been unusually dry so far. Rainy days have been relatively rare, but now we’re getting a spell of daily light rain. It’s reminded me of something that happened a few years ago in Ashbourne and which I reported on this blog. I make no apology for re-posting it because I have a couple of things to add.

I was walking past the library on my way back to Sainsbury’s in Ashbourne today. Light rain was falling from a leaden sky and the pedestrian areas were liberally scattered with puddles.

I saw a girl of around twelve or so sitting on one of the benches near the library steps, next to a long haired and bedraggled dog with floppy ears – a Cocker Spaniel I think, or at least a spaniel cross. As I approached, she took her raincoat and covered the dog’s back, and as I drew level she was busy pulling the hood over the dog’s head. I had to stop and watch, didn’t I? Of course I did.

I could have explained to her that the hair of a healthy dog is liberally oiled and so it doesn’t suffer from the rain quite as we do, but why spoil the moment? Here is a light spirit performing an act of self-sacrifice for an animal. It was a mild day and so the girl was in no danger, and she was probably waiting for a parent to collect her soon anyway. I wanted to speak to her but she seemed reluctant to engage, so I simply smiled broadly and thought ‘You’re OK, kid’ as loudly as I could. And then I walked on.

It struck me while I was remembering this that another person witnessing the little scene might have perceived it differently. Such a person might have scolded the girl for being stupid, telling her that dogs don’t need coats and instructing her to take the coat back and put it back on. And here we have another illustration of my favourite sound bite: perception is the whole of the life experience. But let’s take it a step further and consider the question of beauty.

I’ve long held the view – ever since I read Richard Bach’s Illusions – that beauty, like colour, is not a component of material reality. It doesn’t exist there, but only in the mind of the perceiver. Just as nothing is inherently coloured, so no-one is beautiful in an objective sense. You might say that I’m regurgitating the old maxim that ‘beauty is in the eye of the beholder’, and in a way I am, but not as it’s generally perceived. It’s usually taken to be a way of expressing the fact that it’s simply a matter of variable taste.

I think the true meaning of the phrase goes deeper than that. To my mind the old adage should really say that ‘beauty is in the mind of the beholder’ because that’s the only place where beauty truly exists. Richard Bach’s reluctant messiah says to his disciple ‘the sunset is an illusion; the beauty is real.) So it is with the perfectly formed features of a popular actress. The pretty face is an illusion; the personality, the kindness, and the capacity to promote light and goodness are the qualities which make the beauty real. And because we humans are convinced of our individuality in our self-centred worlds, the beauty is only real when it’s observed. (I suspect a quantum theorist might agree with me.)

Incompetent Algorithms and Other Silliness.

There’s an advertising panel at the side of my Hotmail inbox which is currently giving me a message instead of an ad. It reads:

Oops. An error occurred during a connection to adsdkprod.azureedge.

The page you are trying to view cannot be shown because an error in the transmission was detected.

Please contact the website owners to inform them of this problem.

And then there’s a blue button carrying the words Try Again

Are they kidding me? For several years now it has become increasingly apparent that there are all manner of sundry people and organisations collecting information on me, presumably from emails, blog posts, and so on. They seem to know everything about me from my shoe size to what I had for breakfast today. That being the case, how have they missed the obvious fact that I regard advertising as one of the world’s most iniquitous pollutants? I know to which sector of society it pays grovelling obeisance, how it encourages social division, how it treats the majority of the population as half-baked simpletons only there to be manipulated, and how it helps the corporate world take more and more control of society’s functions. So why would I ‘contact the website owners’? Why would I want to ‘inform them’ of the problem? Why in heaven’s name would I Try Again?

*  *  *

Sometimes this ad panel carries a different message which begins: You appear to be using an ad blocker, which I’m not. It then invites me to upgrade to a (paying) version of Outlook so I can have more space in my inbox. My inbox in its present form shows me the name of the sender, a preview of the subject line, and the date on which it was sent. What more do I need in order to decide whether to open the email or consign it to perdition’s flame? And more to the point, I suppose: are there really people out there who pay this charge in order to get something that is of no value? This is more than the subtle manipulation which is the stock-in-trade of the ad industry; this is a blatant case of trying to kid the gullible.

And this is the world created by the mega-rich capitalists, a world largely unknown to us Brits when we had a sane and settled mixed economy. And then Mrs Thatcher came along…

On the Chastening and the Chocolate.

I made my 39^th visit to the Royal Derby Hospital today – cardiology this time. I submitted to the usual ‘obs’ (blood pressure, temperature, blood oxygen) and was then treated to a consultation with a consultant. He tapped my chest and back with a stethoscope and remarked, upon reading my file, ‘I see you’re resistant to the prescription of medications.’ (You can’t hide anywhere these days, you know. Our affairs and opinions are spattered around like cat vomit on the wallpaper.)

I gave him the full lecture on why I’m resistant to the prescription of medications and he nodded, so I asked: ‘Am I discharged?’ He said he would refer me back to the GP, which as far as I know means I’m no longer a member of the Royal Derby Hospital Cardiology Club. Being black balled is quite a chastening experience, but I expect I’ll get over it.

And then the real adventure began.

I decided I wanted a cup of hot chocolate. There are a number of vending machines at RDH, but the only one I’d ever seen which dispensed hot drinks was at the opposite corner of the great monobloc behemoth and one floor up. I decided I was worth it and set out on the journey.

They’d changed it. It was a fancy new modern one and I’d had enough trouble using the old one, so I scanned it carefully. There were lots of lit up pictures of different hot drinks (including hot chocolate, thankfully.) There was lots of text, none of which had anything to do with how to operate it or how much anything cost. But there was a white panel which said to start, tap here. I tapped there. Choose your drink said the electronic display. I tapped the hot chocolate picture and all the other pictures disappeared. Ah, now we’re getting somewhere. You have £0.00 credit, said the display.

Well I knew there wouldn’t be any credit because I hadn’t put any money in yet, so why’s it telling me what I obviously know already? Thinks: Maybe it isn’t telling me anything; maybe it’s a convoluted way of asking me to put money in; maybe that’s the way modern machines think. (It’s been a long time since I was a revenue inspector, you see. That was in the days before machines had learned to think backwards.)

I stuck my courage to the sticking place and fed a shiny £1 coin to the machine. Nothing. Hmmm… ‘Should I cut my losses and go home chocolate-less, or should I risk another £1 coin? I felt adventurous so I reluctantly gave this half-witted piece of modern technology another coin.

There was a clatter somewhere lower than my waistline and a paper cup appeared. And then there was the sound of splashing liquid in the same vicinity. Success! I had my cup of hot chocolate. And then there was a satisfying tinkling sound even lower still. I investigated and found 30p change in the little bay at the bottom. Adventure over. Now we drink the hot chocolate with a satisfying sense of victory.

So tell me, why couldn’t this 21^st century piece of equipment have a printed notice giving the price of the various drinks? I checked several times and there was none. And why didn’t the display read: Please insert £1.70 or more. Change given, instead of You have £0.00 credit?) Am I just old fashioned or have modern machine designers lost the taste for simple logic?

Today's YouTube Spots.

There’s a video appeared on my YouTube recommendations. It has a picture of a dog with its teeth barred, and carries the catch line:

Pregnant Man’s Dog Becomes Vicious.

Having scratched my head for a few minutes, I eventually realised that the words “pregnant” and “man’s” should be the other way round, so maybe whoever wrote it wasn’t a native English speaker. I wonder whether there’s a market for a freelance YouTube editor.

*  *  *

Something else which is currently proliferating (trending?) on YouTube is the misogynistic video. There are lots of them, typically characterised by pictures of women looking tearful and terminally depressed. The standard message, usually being sung from the rooftops by smug men (although a few of the uploads are from women), promotes the view that since women’s issues achieved prominence, men don’t want them any more. Whole regiments of attractive women can no longer attract men, apparently, and they’re now in the depths of Hades with nothing to occupy their empty lives except abject regret at their foolishness. Poor little petals, eh? It’s a shame for them.

One of the more notable has a picture of a bloated, ugly old man whose face exudes the oily appearance of smugness and self congratulation. It carries the line:

Now that women have equality, they don’t want it any more.

That’s interesting because it carries the clear implication that he thinks women shouldn’t expect or have equality. And that brings to mind something I’ve said on this blog before: Old men tend to assume that advanced age is a natural guarantee of wisdom. It isn’t. I’ve generally found that what old men presume to be wisdom is more often than not simply the impression arising from having their feet firmly stuck in a concrete block of tradition and conditioned prejudice.

This whole movement is an insult to my heroes the suffragettes, and I don’t like it.

The Promise of a Leisurely Future.

YouTube is currently loaded with videos in which very clever people tell us that AI will make humanity obsolete in just a few short years from now. They call it ‘the singularity.’ Some say it will bestow us with immortality, while others say it will kill us all. I haven’t yet decided which of the two is more pleasurable to the ear. Meanwhile, other clever people tell us that we don’t actually exist anyway, we only think we do, so I don’t suppose it matters very much.

The Devil Inside the DVD Player.

I’m drowning in troubles at the moment. Several of them involve the computer, and several of the several manifest inside the DVD player. It’s developed a bad case of Arkwright’s Till, you see, which term will only be recognised by those who watched the old British sitcom Open All Hours avidly (and with repeats) as I did. Briefly, what happens is this:

You open the tray with the regulation button and attempt to place the DVD into it. Sometimes the mechanism stays compliant and allows you to close it with the same button, but sometimes it has a little brainstorm and tries to drag your hand into the casing – presumably with the intention of enjoying a free meal – before you’ve let go of the disc. It can be quite alarming until you’re used to it, which I’m not.

Today's YouTube Note.

One of my YouTube recommendations today has a banner headline over the thumbnail picture. It reads:

PUTIN HAS FALLEN

The tense says it all. Putin is gone. No more President Putin.

And then there is the introduction underneath the thumbnail, which says:

‘Protests in Russia: Young Russians are Threatening Putin’s Rule.’

Now we have a different story: Putin is still there but his position is being threatened by young people. How, I might ask, when Putin still has the loyalty of the military?

I strongly suspect that ‘threatening’ should be replaced by ‘unhappy with’, and now we have a very different story.

This is today’s YouTube – fake news and wild exaggerations on every line, in process of which even the more innocuous claims promise: ‘this will terrify you!’ ‘Terrify’ is the current buzz word on YouTube uploads. And I’m led to believe that social media is just the same. Is it any wonder that the world is in such a muddled mess when it’s virtually impossible to take anything you read in the media seriously? The overly rapid rise in technology is bringing the stupider and seedier side of the human condition to the fore and nobody seems to care. I wish I didn't.

Mixed Encounters.

The Lady Fu was bestowing her favours on me in Ashbourne today. I was getting smiles and friendly comments from all quarters. And then everything went dark.

As I was about to head out I stopped for a quick smoke by one of the garbage bins outside Sainsbury’s, and was surprised to see the Lady B walk past with her youngest daughter. She was only inches away but showed no sign of recognition.

I watched her walk to her car in one of the nearby parking bays and strap her little girl into a child seat, and then she turned to look briefly in my direction before climbing into her car and driving away.

That made me a little sad, but what was even sadder was that she looked unhappy. The daylight always sinks noticeably when the Lady B looks unhappy.

*  *  *

But on a lighter note…

Sightings of the twilight bats have been in short supply this year. I’ve occasionally seen a single bat hunting around one of the trees by the lane at the bottom of my garden, but no more than that.

Yesterday evening was different. There were two of them and they were hunting around my house. I was so pleased to see them that I called a ‘hello’ quite loudly, at which point one of them flew down to my eye level, performed a loop, and then flew back up to the roof to continue feeding. I think I might be allowed the luxury of seeing it as a reciprocal greeting, don’t you?

The Corporate Double Vision Trick.

This blog has comprised mostly inconsequential asides lately, hasn’t it, so let’s have an outcry for a change just to keep the title honest. Imagine this:

You’re contracted to a large company for the supply of something-or-other and you have very low regard for them because their systems and general conduct suck, but you stay with them because it’s more convenient or you have no other realistic option. But then you have a problem and need to call them to get it sorted, so that’s what you do through gritted teeth.

Having sat through all the obstacles they lay in your path to make your teeth ache with the ever-increasing pressure, you eventually find yourself talking to a customer service advisor who is affable, helpful, knowledgeable, and probably even sympathetic. He or she deals with your problem efficaciously, everything is now fine, and your teeth can go back to the state of rest which is their normal condition. (Careful selection of customer service advisors is a good way of aping Macbeth’s dictum that ‘fair face must hide what the false heart does know.’)

OK, so what happens next? You receive an email from the company which approximates to:

Bearing in mind the contact you just had with Kerry, our customer service advisor, how likely are you to recommend our company to other people?

What do you do? If you’re so buoyed by satisfaction and relief that you click 5 stars out of 5 you’d be lying, because the only person to whom you would recommend this company would be your worst enemy on a day when you were feeling particularly vindictive. If, on the other hand, you click 1 star out of 5, it might reflect badly on dear Kerry and that would be inaccurate and grossly unfair.

(Now, suppose you run out with your football team to play a game and notice that each end of the pitch has two goals. You ask the referee: ‘Which goal is the correct one?’ ‘Oh they’re both correct,’ says the ref, ‘but what you need to understand is that whichever goal the ball enters will be automatically deemed the wrong one, so you won’t score.’)

That’s the game the big companies seem to be playing, and so you decline to reply to their manipulative and damn silly questionnaire.

Preamble.

Autumn announced its presence in true seasonal fashion today. The pale yellow leaves which have been creeping up on us for a few weeks suddenly broke forth in greater numbers as they hung in the cold air suffused with a heavy mist. It was one of those days when ancient cobwebs become suddenly visible for having donned their jewellery of silver dewdrops, and I felt the iced fingers of winter preparing to take hold of the land on the northern horizon.

On a happier note I did receive unsolicited smiles from two ladies and two dogs today. No, that’s a lie. The dogs responded to smiles from me, but it was good to be recognised and made welcome by a whippet and a black Labrador.

And then I saw a young woman with a Mohican hair cut, and asked her whether such a style is making a comeback. ‘No,’ she replied, ‘just me.’ I congratulated her on being different, and she said ‘thank you.’

The Oddness of the Lambs.

The land to the back and side of my house comprises a large field containing a small flock of sheep. Some of them are lambs born in the spring and now fully grown, and yesterday I watched intrigued as these adult ‘lambs’ started behaving like young ones.

They were galloping around the field, leaping, bucking, and head butting each other in play fights. I’ve never seen grown up lambs do that before and gave some thought to the possible reasons.

Lambs get very short lives, and those not being retained to bolster the flock get moved on in the autumn while their flesh is still succulent enough to please the palates of non-vegetarians. And so I wondered whether these guys were somehow aware of danger and were showing off their physical prowess as prey animals do in the wild when there are predators about. Then again they might all be females and have somehow come to realise that they are being retained, in which case maybe they were celebrating.

Both possibilities seem equally fanciful, but I think I’ll stick with the latter since I’m not non-vegetarian.

Surveillance?

While I was out clearing the road grids and channels yesterday, somebody stopped and asked me: ‘Did you know you can eat acorns?’ He went on to explain that there is a lot of soaking involved and a particular way of cooking them, but they’re said to taste like sweet chestnuts. The best answer I could give was: ‘I think I’ll leave them to the squirrels. They can’t afford to shop at Sainsbury’s.’

Nevertheless, I was intrigued and made a mental note to research the subject some time later. After that it went completely out of my head. I thought no more about it, didn’t research it, didn’t mention it to anyone else, and made no mention of it on the blog, by email, or through any other medium.

Today there’s a recommendation on my YouTube home page which tells me how to harvest, prepare, and cook acorns. I’m quite sure I’ve never seen it before because that’s the sort of thing which would pique my curiosity and be memorable.

So is this purely coincidental, the universal consciousness proving its mettle, or could it be that even the quiet lanes of rural England are now infested with tracking devices which can recognise individuals and even have access to their Google accounts? I’ve experienced coincidences of this type before and always shrugged them off, but how many does it take before you have to start wondering?

Recalling the Priestess.

I had a vivid dream last night in which there was a knock on the door, and when I opened it the priestess was standing there. She’d located my address in order to pay a surprise visit.

I remember nothing more about the dream, but when I woke up my mind went quickly to some adverts appearing in my YouTube recommendations offering the provision of an AI girlfriend. (You can even decide what she will look like, they say. Most accommodating.) And that led me to wonder whether the priestess had been an AI construct all along.

All those deep discussions betraying the advanced precocity of her worldliness and wisdom. All those partings and reconciliations. All her travelling around the globe. All her wild but ultimately failed relationships. Her relocation from the New World to the Old until she wound up a mere 140 miles from where I live. And finally my realisation that I no longer had anything to offer her and maybe it was time to break the chain.

For thirteen years we seemed important to one another, and yet we never met or even spoke on the phone. The whole relationship was conducted via email, the last of which was sent by me two years ago and said ‘I’m not worth knowing any more.’

So was she real or merely a program in some advanced computer somewhere? Will I ever know the answer to that before I die? And are we all maybe nothing more than programs in an advanced computer being operated by a previous, highly evolved culture of computer builders as some suggest? Are we all just pieces of AI and is there someone out there deciding what we should look like?

I doubt it myself. My instinct with regard to the nature of reality is becoming ever surer that the key to understanding existence is to understand consciousness. The ancient sages said they did, and the evidence is there for those who care to look. And yet we all seem to have forgotten it in the process of what the clever people call the Enlightenment. Meanwhile, I hope the priestess is happy.

Today's YouTube Gem.

Some months ago I put a complimentary comment on a YouTube video which studied the facts around some mysterious ancient artefacts. The man who presented it did so calmly, rationally, and without unwarranted speculation or hyperbole. Today someone entered a reply to my comment which read (and this was copied and pasted from the channel so it’s exactly as it appeared):

Few and far Between Nowadays like joe friday "Just the facts" directly whiler so many others are overly BSOP!!!

What am I supposed to make of it? I read it several times, and on about the fourth I came to the tentative conclusion that he was agreeing with me. I also presumed that English is not his native language, and so I admired him for trying. And it did remind me – if I needed any reminding – that speaking a foreign language is at least as much about grammar, syntax, and conventions as it is about vocabulary. Knowing the words is good as long as you put them in the right order. (Then again, he might have been an American whose vote contributed to putting Donald Trump into the White House.)