Shitty day today, as I’ve spend most of it trying and mostly failing to assemble a flat pack bed, having had to stop and restart a couple of times thanks to dumb errors. Oh well, have to sleep on the couch for another night…
Have some Mitch Benn as a consolation.
Like me, Sandra was a ferocious reader, one of the few people I’ve known who actually read more and faster than me. Where we differed was in our attitude towards books, as she was far more ruthless in discarding books than I could ever be. For example, before we moved in together she had gotten rid (unasked) of at least a third of her books, while I, well, had not. She always kept trying to limit the spread of books and bookcases through the house somewhat, even though she was aware it was largely a lost battle. Not that she disapproved of buying more books, just that we should be discerning in which books we’d actually keep.
So she might’ve been just a tiny bit disappointed if she’d seen the pile of books I’ve brought home from Plymouth. Not much, just a bit and only because she’d known our bookcases are full to overflowing already and more books won’t help there. But I can’t help it, there was just too much good stuff. What I’ve always liked about going to Plymouth was browsing the charity shops up in Mannamead, near where Sandra lived, as back then you could be certain to pick up a lot of good books for cheap. These days many of the bigger charity chains have long since discovered that it’s easier to put the good stuff up on Ebay, so there’s less gold amongst the dross, but roughly half that pile still came from charity shops anyway.
The rest all comes from one great bookshop right in the middle of the Barbican/harbour, the tourist area of Plymouth, three floors of bookshelves heaving with secondhand gems. Not all that cheap, but I know that if I lived in Plymouth full time I would’ve spent quite a lot of my disposable income there — I found a lot of books there already on my own shelves, which is always a sign of a good shop. If you’re ever in Plymouth and in need of something good to read, the Book Cupboard is your best bet.
What I found there: a pile of Giles annuals, several Nicholas Freeling van der Valk mysteries, several hard to find sf novels (Vance’s Showboat World, Ian Watson’s The Book of the River, Diane Duane’s The Door into Shadow) as well as two history books, of which The Saxon Shore: a Handbook is the most interesting, something I had to buy as I wasn’t sure I’d ever see it again. In general I would’ve liked to spent a day or so browsing the history shelves, but we had other things to do…
Two prime examples, courtesy of two of the best communities on the web. First, through Unfogged, some wannabe Steve Jobs douchecopter explains how the Ipad means we all need to be excellent at our work or be unemployed forever:
And if you’re good at what you do, then I suggest making a plan to be excellent — or quitting and joining the 99% at Occupy Wall Street.
I think the polarization of wealth is as much about the “age of excellence and the end of good” as it is about the criminal Wall Street gambling d-bags who rape and pillage our economy with every trade they can. Certainly the financial crimes of Wall Street did damage, but what damage does putting out average products do to our economy?
It’s just the usual twaddle on how we all need to adopt to the increasing demands of the modern workplace yadda yadda, dressed up in New Shiney Apple snake oil, written by somebody who hasn’t done a day of honest work in his life.
Then at MeFi, another jerkfacewanting to do away with computer science departments at university because they’re not quite vocational training courses, demonstrating he has no clue about what universities actually do:
One good example is cited in an awesome book on educational reform called Crisis on Campus by Columbia professor Mark Taylor: one of the most pressing problems that humanity has today is obtaining clean drinking water. Yet no university has a Department of Water. Why is this? Because campuses are an endless successions of zero-sum games: the formation of a new department necessarily means that resources must be taken away from existing departments, so existing departments viciously defend the status quo, even when that doesn’t align with reality. Computer science education has not been in alignment with reality in a long, long time.
This is just hopelessly clueless about how universities work and like the earlier example, this guy too is obsessed by being the best, by seeking simplistic, business driven solutions to complicated problems. It’s a handicap in the geek mindset, something these silicon snake oil salesmen make good use off.
Aging Norwegian folkie leads 40,000 people singing the Norwegian version of Pete Seeger’s Rainbow Race, in a giant fuck you against Breivik and all he stands for
The news can seem unending grim day in day out, then something like this comes along and restores some of your faith in humanity. A reminder that despite all the Breiviks out there, there has been progress in the past seven decades since WWII, that the belief in the equality and worth of all people, no matter their race, creed, faith, orientation or gender, is utterly mainstream. The fascists and nazis have lost, they may still be dangerous but they cannot win.
I got some of my pictures up from our visit to Plymouth last weekend. The picture above is the most important of the lot: that’s where my parents and I scattered part of Sandra’s ashes, into the Plymouth Sound, to become part of the ecosystem again — the only sort of reincarnation or life after death she believed in.
Her sons weren’t there, as they didn’t feel up to it yet, quite understandably. We’ve left the urn behind for safekeeping so that at a later date, when they are ready, they can scattered the rest of her ashes somewhere nice. Meanwhile a final part of Sandra’s remains will be laid to rest in our own garden, helping feed the plants she herself planted.