ironically, science

whoever could have guessed?

people are happier on weekends.

when it’s cold, people wear more clothes.

teenagers with TVs in their room watch more TV.

let me introduce myself…

what did we tell them?

“Any life forms at Epsilon Eridani and Tau Ceti [...] will receive”… some interesting recordings.

capital

“In the past few weeks circumstances had made me discover what an ignoramus I was. [...] I became aware that I knew nothing; I was empty, an intellectual void. I didn’t even know who Cromwell was, for God’s sake. I knew nothing about zoology, geology, astronomy, languages, mathematics, physics.

Most of the kids I grew up with left school at sixteen, and they’d be in insurance now, or working as car-mechanics, or managers (radio and TV dept) in department stores. And I’d walked out of college without thinking twice about it [...]. In the suburbs education wasn’t considered as a particular advantage, and certainly couldn’t be seen as worthwhile in itself. Getting into business young was more important. But now I was among people who wrote books as naturally as we played football. What infuriated me – what made me loathe both them and myself – was their confidence and knowledge. The easy talk of art, theatre, architecture, travel; the languages, the vocabulary, knowing the way round a whole culture – it was invaluable and irreplaceable capital.

At my school they taught you a bit of French, but anyone who attempted to pronounce a word correctly was laughed down. [...] By this ignorance we knew ourselves to be superior to the public-school kids, with their puky uniforms and leather briefcases [...]. We were rougher; we disrupted all lessons; we were fighters; we never carried no effeminate briefcases since we never did no homework. We were proud of never learning anything except the names of footballers, the personnel of rock groups and the lyrics of ‘I am the walrus’. What idiots we were! How misinformed! Why didn’t we understand that we were happily condemning ourselves to being nothing better than motor-mechanics? Why couldn’t we see that? For Eleanor’s crowd hard words and sophisticated ideas were in the air they breathed from birth, and this language was the currency that bought you the best of what the world could offer. But for us it could only ever be a second language, consciously aquired.”

Hanif Kureishi - The Buddha of Suburbia

that village

o dolphins here I come

mirror lake. inevitable.

brain plug-in

…coming soon, says Intel: FMRI-based sensing chip implanted into the skull.

for some obscure reasons, I don’t buy this.

the pull

crazy little things