Last week we were contacted by a long-forgotten (but quickly remembered) ex-student. We met for coffee yesterday and, for no reason we could discern, the student presented us with a bottle of wine:
We are aware that a number of our ex-students read this blog. So, it is important that they not think of this post as somehow a hint or a request to act in kind. They should think of it as more of a demand.
And good riddance. Please take Gladys and her companion “She’ll be right” dumbfucks with you.
LESSON 1
We received the book below a while back, shipped in the pictured wrapping:
Yeah, a reasonable sized and reasonably valuable book. But, wrapped in paper, inside bubble wrap, inside a box, surrounded by air pillows, inside a second box?
On the other hand, …
LESSON 2
The following books arrive yesterday, shipped by Target:
Yep: no paper, no bubble wrap, no air pillows, no nothing except way, way too big a box. And of course one of the books was damaged. Sheesh.
Update (15/12/20)
At Glen’s request, here’s a page from the old arithmetic book.
Yes, of course we’ve read on this nonsense, as have probably most readers of this blog; it’s either that or reruns of Bachelor Chef Island. For those divorced from virtual reality, however, here is:
There are plenty of left-wing thugs pretending that “cancel culture” is a fraud, and there are plenty of right-wing thugs pretending that they and their thuggish cronies don’t play the same nasty sport. For us, the smartest takes are:
But, really, “cancel culture” is what we gotta solve right now? One would think that being inundated with plague, and having the World heating to the point of no return, and with the three superpowers being led by homicidal maniacs, that would be plenty enough on our to-do list. But, if taking hair-trigger offense and being a Blockleiter is your thing then, sure, go ahead and have fun.
UPDATE (21/07)
A new article:
Read it. Yeah, you’re busy but, trust me, read it.
That’s it. Just wanted to say that out loud.
After signing a deal to publish Woody Allen’s memoirs, The Hachette Book Group has pulled out. That comes after Ronan Farrow whined about the deal and HBG employees walked out in protest. HBG spokeswoman Claire Cottrell stated that “The decision to cancel Mr. Allen’s book was a difficult one”, but of course Claire is lying. What was difficult, and what proved to be too difficult, was for HBG to stand up to a lynch mob. Meaning, we suppose, that we’ll have to stick to actresses for models of integrity, rather than self-righteous publishers.
UPDATE (22/03/20)
Lionel Shriver has written a very good article on the Hachette job.
There are two types of climate denialism. The first type, practised by Liberals and Republicans and Murdoch hacks, is to deny the science, to deny that humans have been and are continuing to heat the planet in an unsustainable manner. The second type, practised by pretty much everyone else, is to deny the politics and the psychology, to deny that human society appears incapable of altering its behaviour sufficiently to deal with scientific reality.
The New Yorker has just published an essay by Jonathan Franzen on this second type of denialism, on the refusal to confront our current and impending death. Franzen’s essay is gentle, heartfelt, pleading and depressing. The essay, along with its author, has also been condemned far and wide.
Franzen’s essay has not convinced me that we are doomed. Much more convincing has been the vicious and fundamentally empty response, which does nothing so much as to prove Franzen’s point.
It is difficult to know what Scarlett Johannson was thinking when she came out in support of Woody Allen. Of course it didn’t take long for the #MeToo gang to fire back. And true, the social (?) media mob might have wanted to have first read this, or this, or this, or this, or this, or this. But why let information slow down a good, old-fashioned lynching?
July 20th was the 50th anniversary of Neil Armstrong’s walking on the moon. Well, maybe.
I still have vivid-grainy memories of watching Armstrong’s first steps. A random few students from each class in Macleod State School were selected to go to the library to watch the event on the school’s one TV. I was not one of the lucky few. But Mr. Macrae, our wonderful Grade 4 teacher, just declared “Bugger it!”, determined which student in our class lived closest to the school, and sent out a posse to haul back the kid’s 2-ton TV. We then all watched the moon landing, enthralled and eternally grateful to Mr. Macrae.
But did it really happen?
There have been plenty of questions and questioners, suggesting that the moon landings were faked. How, for example, is the flag in the above photo flapping, given there is no atmosphere to flap it? Then, there is the fake photo of astronauts playing golf on the moon. And the lack of stars in moon photos. And the killer radiation that didn’t kill. And the strange links to Stanley Kubrick. And on and on.
Can all this evidence of doctoring be discounted? Did Man really walk on the moon?
The answers, of course, are Yes and Yes.
The idea that the moon landing was faked is completely ridiculous, and it takes a wilful stupidity to believe it. Which includes about 5% of Americans, and 10% of millenials. (The funniest take is that Kubrick did indeed stage the moon landings, but he was such a perfectionist that he went to the moon to do it.)
There is more to this story, however, than a bunch of conspiracy clowns and gullible slobs. As the brilliant Matt Taibbi writes, there is, indeed, plenty of sleight of hand going on.
The important question is why so many people are willing to believe something so patently false? The answer must be some combination of an inability to discern truth with a lack of concern for truth. And why might that be? Well, just perhaps one factor is an extended history of media and government authorities willing to misdirect and to obfuscate and to flat out lie about everything else. Just perhaps people don’t trust authorities because authorities have abused people’s trust for too long. As Taibbi writes:
“… the flowering of conspiracy theories has an obvious correlation, to a collapse of trust in institutions like the news media and the presidency. … It’s simple math. You can only ask the public to swallow so many fictions before they start to invent their own. The moon story is a great illustration.”
Which is a huge problem. It doesn’t matter a damn if people believe moon landing conspiracy crap. But if they believe that crap then they’ll also believe, more easily, climate change conspiracy crap. And then, an authority that has lost authority is powerless to convince them otherwise. And then, we’re doomed.
But at least we can laugh at the dumb slobs while the Earth goes down in flames.