January Pieces Of My Mind #1

• My wife and I were congratulating ourselves on how nicely we (unlike others) had cleaned up after our fireworks last night. Then we realised that actually, most of the contents of those fireworks packages we didn’t clean up at all. We used rockets to shoot the stuff into the sky, later to land randomly on roofs, in trees and in people’s yards where we will never even try to retrieve them.
• Gravity is highly recommended! And the coolest thing is that it isn’t a scifi movie. It’s a contemporary disaster movie about NASA astronauts with a strong female lead.
• The Queen should give an MBE to a male porn star.
• Listening to an informed discussion of Plato’s most-read work, The Symposium, I realise that from my physicalist point of view all the main concepts it deals with are either meaningless or of little interest. I would never want to read a meditation on the nature of love or beauty by a modern writer either. It’s all just glands, now let’s move on.
• The straits between Scotland and Ireland are so narrow that you can easily see across them.
• I’m skeptical of all-bran soap. My guess is that it makes no practical difference to the washing results but makes for a higher profit margin.
• Found a bunch of track-suit-wearing teens standing around pointlessly in the copse next to the vacant lot we pass on our way to the train. Dark and cold as hell. I saw a glowing point at face height. I suppose they had convened there to share a bag of weed. I was debating with myself whether to intervene but decided that I don’t much care if other people’s teens smoke weed on the vacant lot.
• I usually use Inkmesh to find the cheapest ebook edition I can find of any book I want. Therefore I now have four pieces of e-book software on my phone, three of them for proprietary file formats and with a built-in store each.
• It’s kind of fun though that it’s 2014, we have probes in interstellar space and rovers on Mars and full-genome sequencing, but our kids still have insects living in their hair.
• Jrette likes to drum her belly absentmindedly. Yesterday a mom in her 40s walked past me at the bath house doing that. Love it!
• For the past 20 years my main source of income has been small research grants paid straight to me by a large number of private foundations without the involvement of any formal employer. I’ve only been on the dole for three months in 1993. I wonder what statistics bucket the government places me in. Am I unemployed to them? Independently wealthy? Leeching off my wife or parents? A mentally retarded man supported by his family?
• The Swedish word for homeless person is a direct cognate of “outlier”.
• I just managed to say “Joe comes to play with his lamp” in Mandarin without being laughed at for my pronunciation. *proud*
• Holy cow, 33 people apart from me have applied for this one assistant/associate lecturer job. I think it’s a record in my 13 years of applying for these things.
• Free tip from your editor: you don’t really mean methodical. You mean methodological.
• Sometimes when I’m reading I wish someone would lock me in a windowless room with only my book, a pen and a notepad. I keep getting distracted.
• I want to be asked to give one of those lectures that incomprehensibly carries somebody’s surname.
• Gruyere really is a damn good cheese. I like them firm, tangy and smelling of the barn, not liquescent or moldy. And the same goes for my taste in cheese.
• If you look African, people will think you’re less smart than you are. If you look European, people will judge your intelligence by your clothes. If you look Chinese, people will think you’re smarter than you are. Maybe Jrette can actually benefit from such positive racism.