I never really thought Tony Blair was a good or even an interesting speaker though apparently most of the country did. I am however interested in the ongoing debate for paying for university education on the basis that what is paid is a small percentage of the increase in salary a university graduate may expect…
Category: Quotidial
The Human Censor
I was very interested to learn that Hollywood had a pre-censor era of film making going up to about 1933, after which a host of rules came into force about what was and was not allowed to be shown in films. What interested me was not the actual rules but the fact that it was…
Resonance
Many years ago I had a teacher who loved driving vintage buses and there was a warehouse filled with them in Devon he would visit all the time. He used to have pictures of the buses fully restored and recordings of the sounds. Being a musician and organist for his church I thought he must…
Meme
This is a word coined by Richard Dworkins to describe “the idea of a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation.” I used to call these things fads and sometimes ‘in vogue’ but I think he is aiming at an idea that may not be as transitory. As a child I had no…
Fighting Tyranny
In Hans Fallada’s almost pedestrian and normal look at Nazism and ordinary people, Alone in Berlin, he relates the true story of a working class couple who take to distributing anonymous post cards carefully inscribed with anti Nazi sentiments around the city. An act that went on for three years every week and finally cost…
The Art Of The Apology
It seems to me impossible to live through a week in today’s world without someone apologising for something. From the big ones, like nations apologising to nations, and races to races, to the minor ones run in newspapers of partners apologising to each other and now we see newspapers having to apologise to people. And…
A World Without Money
Since money is a system human beings created, and since we are all inculcated, one may even say brainwashed, into the reasoning that flows from that system, I have often wondered what a world without money may look like. Since the world of money is all pervasive and there is actually nowhere on earth one…
What Are We Frightened Of?
There is almost no story I can think of which is the founding saga of a nation (from King Arthur to the Mahabharata taking in all the myths of the ancient world and those in bibles) that does not envisage some wickedness, some malevolence against which the hero or group has to fight. And not…
Face Masks
There are hundreds of cultures across the world and down the millennia which have designed and used face masks for various reasons. Mostly ritualistic which appeals to facial features that are fixed, but sometimes, and these are my favourite, for costume and partying. The Venetian face mask balls have something of a sinister reputation mostly…
As I Sit Here
in front on my screen typing away surrounded by pretty graphics and an intelligence that wants to know why I am spelling everything the Un-American Way, I realise the computer age is well and truly off the ground and that one day we will be talking to them and they will be talking back. This…