tired fools

We’ve been cleaning up our new office in central London (built 1891). Whilst the scaffolding was up I took the opportunity to snap some of the details in the stone work. They don’t make things like this any more etc.

each year i try to better the halloween pumpkin from the previous year. this year i even impressed myself

i love reddit. i’m not much into “community”, i contribute little, am unsociable, cantankerous, and dismissive; but Reddit is just great. anything of any import finds it’s way there, and i like the sense of humour.

there are many facets to reddit. people post, and vote up or down, all kids of stuff. then there are the sub-reddits, areas of special interest etc. one good example is “AMA”, someone states what they are, or what they’ve done, and says “ask me anything”. in fact general questions posted often lead to the most interesting things.

here’s nice example of reddit from today.

Q: Soldiers who have been in battle: Do you like playing games like Call of Duty or is it difficult for you to put yourself back in that position?

I was in the Infantry, and was in Kirkuk when COD4 came out. I ordered a bunch of switches, and there was an abundance of cat5 lying around. Strippers, RJ-45 jacks, and crimpers magically appeared. I networked up our entire platoon, everyone got COD4 (They sell video games like crazy at the PXs overseas), and we would play all the time. They also sell gaming laptops (Toshiba only when I was there) too, along with XBOX 360s and PS3s. If you’re an unmarried soldier making a minimum of 2k a month, tax-free, with nothing to spend it on, convincing someone to drop 2k on a gaming laptop is like convincing someone back here to go to the movies. We also played Dawn of War, and organized DoW tournaments. There were about 12-16 of us who played ALL the time.

It’s funny because we would be playing COD4 for a few hours, and then we would have to go out on a real mission, and if it was a good round of games we’d be bummed out because we’d have to put down our game to go fight the real war on terror.

i read recently that ayn rand’s “atlas shrugged” was the favourite book of a bunch of VCs. I’d read “the fountainhead”, which I quite liked (at least most of it), so i thought i’d give atlas shrugged a chance. life is simple in ayn rand world (i now understand where jeffrey archer got his style from), a small number of ubermensch work hard and get along, whilst a greater number of leechers bring them down using red tape, politics and the media. it’s just not fair. oh, and real men just take sex, no consent should be sought. after all, if you want it badly enough, they must want it too. this is a recurring theme in this book and in “the fountainhead”. so the movers and shakers move to a nietzschean disneyland in the desert to kick their heels while the world suffers without them. does the world suffer? i don’t know, that’s as far as i’ve got (p700 of this enormous tome), and i don’t know if i can go on.

last (probably) from Orwell’s road to Wigan pier:

We live, admittedly, amid the wreck of a civilization, but it has been a great civilization in its day, and in patches it still flourishes almost undisturbed.

more orwell (road to wigan pier”

Of course the post-war development of cheap luxuries has been a very
fortunate thing for our rulers. It is quite likely that fish-and-chips,
art-silk stockings, tinned salmon, cut-price chocolate (five two-ounce bars
for sixpence), the movies, the radio, strong tea, and the Football Pools
have between them averted revolution. Therefore we are some-times told that
the whole thing is an astute manoeuvre by the governing class–a sort of
‘bread and circuses’ business–to hold the unemployed down. What I have
seen of our governing class does not convince me that they have that much
intelligence. The thing has happened, but by an un-conscious process–the
quite natural interaction between the manufacturer’s need for a market and
the need of half-starved people for cheap palliatives

orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier:

You cannot disregard them if you accept the civilization that produced them. For this is part at least of what industrialism has done for us. Columbus sailed the Atlantic, the first steam engines tottered into motion, the British squares stood firm under the French guns at Waterloo, the one-eyed scoundrels of the nineteenth century praised God and filled their pockets; and this is where it all led —to labyrinthine slums and dark back kitchens with sickly, ageing people creeping round and round them like blackbeetles. It is a kind of duty to see and smell such places now and again, especially smell them, lest you should forget that they exist; though perhaps it is better not to stay there too long.

i signed up to goodreads after some initial reluctance. these are the books on my just read pile (i.e. i’ve nowhere left to shelve them.)

the swimming world is rocked by new swim suits. a two-time gold medalist refuses to indulge in “technological doping”. middle-ranking swimmers have started breaking world records with the new attire. i guess we understand now why the original olympics were conducted nude (gymnos in greek). so let’s hear it for nude swimming. something that’s bound to increase audiences.

what’s the effect on mortality of a recession. not much, apparently, but there is a significant change in how people die.

A 3 per cent increase in unemployment led to rises of about 4 per cent in suicide and 6 per cent in murders but a 4 per cent fall in traffic fatalities. The biggest impact was on deaths from alcohol abuse, which rose 28 per cent.