Stingโs song โAll This Timeโ plays a pretty significant role in my mental world. It came out a few months after my first trip to England, a trip centered on London and Oxford, and it alerted me to the wholly different texture of a Northern city, a Northern upbringing. And it made me imaginatively aware of what it might be like to grow up in a country with a Roman history โ for instance, in โan edge-of-the-Empire garrison town.โ It set me on a path of inquiry that made me highly receptive to what would become one of my favorite books, Susanna Clarkeโs Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell. Also, itโs one of Stingโs best songs. ๐ต
A record that has received a lot of love but never enough love is DโAngeloโs Black Messiah. Eleven years after its release it sounds as fresh as tomorrow. ๐ต
Interviewer: โYou look tanned and rested.โ Ange Postecoglu: โIf a manager looks tanned and rested, that means heโs out of a job, mate.โ Dudeโs kinda crazy but Iโm really glad heโs back in the PL. โฝ๏ธ
Leszek Koลakowski wrote about the
unpleasant and insoluble dilemmas that loom up every time we try to be perfectly consistent when we try to think about our culture, our politics, and our religious life. More often than not we want to have the best from incompatible worlds and, as a result, we get nothing; when we instead pawn our mental resources on one side, we cannot buy them out again and we are trapped in a kind of dogmatic immobility.
Thus Koลakowski appeals for what he winningly calls “moderation in consistency.”
A post I wrote a while back on diseases of the intellect seems relevant to this moment.
I successfully adjusted the truss rod in my guitar, ama
BBC:
In 2024, Windows was at the centre of a controversy across the German internet. It started with a job listing for Deutsche Bahn, the countryโs railway service. The role being recruited was an IT systems administrator who would maintain the driver’s cab display system on high-speed and regional trains. The problem was the necessary qualifications: applicants were expected to have expertise with Windows 3.11 and MS-DOS โ systems released 32 and 44 years ago, respectively. In certain parts of Germany, commuting depends on operating systems that are older than many passengers. …
The trains in San Francisco’s Muni Metro light railway … won’t start up in the morning until someone sticks a floppy disk into the computer that loads DOS software on the railway’s Automatic Train Control System (ATCS).
The Detection Club will be a BBC series in which G. K. Chesterton, Agatha Christie, and Dorothy L. Sayers solve crimes. Time to start dreaming about ideal casting … but with Richard Griffiths no longer around, the ideal for GKC is not possible, alas. A younger Dawn French would’ve made an excellent DLS … Olivia Coleman for Christie … Must keep thinking about this.