ITEM: I really do need to get some better glasses for reading. Earlier this week I was somewhat flabbergasted while cruising the net to discover the news headline ‘Kylie fights testicular cancer’.
On subsequent perusal it turned out to be Kyle (as in Jeremy), not Kylie, but for a moment there I thought I’d crossed over into Bizarro World.
ITEM: Chicken curry pizza – great in theory, but disappointing in reality. Discuss.
ITEM: On Monday I entered a competition to win ‘a cultural break in Manchester’, but as the prize includes a visit to the National Football Museum I think I may have somewhat different ideas to the organisers regarding what’s meant by ‘cultural’.
ITEM: I haven’t seen Les Miserables as yet, and scheduling problems make it seem increasingly possible that I won’t get to see it.
I can still watch this rather wonderful spoof video though:-
ITEM: As Valentine’s Day approaches once again the ugly problem rears its head of finding an appropriate card to send The Imaginary Girlfriend.
A quick trundle round the shops has revealed that they don’t as yet do 50 Shades of Grey themed cards, which seems like a real missed opportunity, as surely nothing says I love you like handcuffs.
ITEM: I’ve been thinking a lot lately about politics, and what attracts people to left and right wing ideologies.
There was a time when I believed in logic, and thought that people were attracted to right wing parties simply because the issues weren’t properly explained to them, but in the days of the ConDemned I’m afraid I can’t hang on to that belief.
I don’t recall the exact quote, but Nietzsche said something to the effect that people pick their moral codes on the basis that they make a virtue out of doing the things they want to do anyway. For example (and a very bad example it is too, but I’m ‘on the clock’ here), if you don’t want to jump the bones of every other attractive member of the opposite sex you see, then chastity is the virtue for you. And I wonder if something similar applies in politics.
So if you’re basically a shitty excuse for a human being, you’re attracted to whatever party line tells you shit smells sweet. When I look at the people who comprise the GOP in America and the government in this country, the theory makes perfect sense.
Another example of what you’re saying about virtue: it’s not unusual to see publishing people fulminate against the evils of book piracy – which on its own is fair enough – but mention elsewhere how they’ve “acquired” expensive desktop publishing software (upgrading my Quark cost me £350 last year), or downloaded TV shows they wanted to watch.
I remember one writer blogged about it a couple of years ago. After years of downloading, he’d suddenly realised how bad piracy was. And the source of this revelation: Lost had finished, so he didn’t need to do it any more.
I can’t claim my own ethics are consistent. I was showing Ranjna an iffy book cover the other day, and she shook her head in shared dismay, then pointed to the Supergirl wallpaper that had popped up on my desktop and called me a hypocrite.
Oh, I think Supergirl wallpaper just shows you’re a geek. Nothing sexist about it at all