Me
Couple of podcast episodes I was on
The sentimental trash that is Borat Subsequent Movie Film.
The “Start as a loser who wins matches and end as a winner who loses them” paradox that is Rocky.
Not yet for public consumption yet but had a fun chat with Jay, and further to that, here’s an interesting article on Free Kriegspiel, and also one on Arnold Rimmer’s swimming certificates. If you can join the dots between them, you are swimming in the same waters we are!
Quotes
‘(God)…. is indeed good, but certainly not white’ (Quomodo Substantia)
‘who can say there is any person of whiteness or blackness or size’. – both Boethius (from @jmilbank3)
“To have any opinion, one must overlook something.” Charles Fort. Similarly, “to select is to distort” Marshall Mcluhan (lots of juicy stuff at that link!)
Other
The Memory War. This is a long but really important article. I covered an angle on this back in 2016 and spoke to Chris Brewin, who is interviewed in the present article, about it. It’s frustrating, the key figure Elizabeth Loftus is such a prominent/eminent figure in psychology – one of the key figures in my area of memory research when I was doing my work. And the idea that it’s easy to implant false memories has spread so fully, and -as this article details – has had a massive impact on society. One of many bits that stuck out:
Coan, Loftus’s former student and now a neuroscientist and psychology professor at the University of Virginia, has decidedly mixed feelings about the experiment he inadvertently spearheaded. “I’m slow enough on the uptake that it took me a while to realize that the study I was doing was making people who had been sexually abused feel like I was their enemy,” he tells me. “That was completely devastating to me.” Although he has been asked to testify about false memory in countless court cases, Coan has always refused. He just doesn’t think the mall study is sufficiently relevant. In her excitement, he thinks, Loftus may have “mischaracterized” what started out as an undergraduate assignment for extra credit.
“I got five points,” Coan says. “Five points and decades of grief.”
This should happen, not just in Wales but all over: Growing food: Call to give vegetable growers public cash
As much for the criticism as for the song itself, this:
Summer Nights (1986): For the first 15 seconds, Eddie (performing alone) sounds like a precocious adolescent trying to figure out an unfamiliar song for the very first time, maybe even reading the sheet music and glancing at his finger placement. He’s then rudely interrupted by Hagar, who grunts the word “Uh.” By magic, Eddie can now rip all the riffs into ribbons, which he proceeds to do. Two minutes later, the astoundingly dumb lyrics are airlifted by the vibe and taken to a hospital in Malibu.
“Summer Nights” – taken from Best Van Halen songs
