Blag Bluster is monitoring you

Lord but I am sick of the Olympics. I knew I would be but didn’t have the means to escape. & I can imagine all the caves and hiding places being the subjects of disputes.

In a hobbit on the ground there was a hole.

I don’t mind people trying to pick up heavy things with others watching them; or running round and round to see who can do it fastest with others watching them. Let them.

But I am tired of hearing about it. It’s like people thinking you want to hear their opinion on the nature of God and sin and so on. I believe it so it’s true. As someone I know once wrote to someone else: you have made the mistake of thinking your opinions matter.

It is apparently the most important news, more important than a horrible civil war, a Mars landing and a corrupt and incompetent government(s).

I am tired of seeing human beings portrayed in the context of Olympians, striding to work in sportswear to beat the crowds, being waved at by vaguely-familiar sportspersons from utility advertisements.

I dislike religious processions.

I don’t want to stop it; but they might do it in private just as thoughtful people tend to if they want to masturbate. This has been going on since the bronze age at least. The more adept we become the more fearful we become; and what’s going on now seems to be based on compulsive repetition.

And it is continuous with all the other idiocies including a Games management which can't organise its own security or provide enough drinking water and milk for a known number nut extending to the whole world, particularly damn fools who upgrade software without the possibility of reversion if it goes wrong and never trying a fullscale test.

Chatting the other day with a friend I haven’t seen a while, we found we had developed much the same fearfulness. That where once one might hope the next generation might see things out, now we’ll be lucky to see our own lives out. It wasn’t, we felt, just that sense of chaos to come that many get as they grow old – we really have had most of our assets ripped off; and the thieves are here helping us look for them, blatantly, in the hope of getting the pennies remaining. Climate change is not only obviously here but far worse than anyone thought. And one might sum up the general response to these and other problems: oh surely not; oh you are pessimistic. And the population doubles and doubles.

We talked about the breakdown of language both in the apparent inability of many to read anything that’s not been processed till it’s like cheap breakfast cereal and in the inability of the few who are writing to express themselves.

[Earlier today, a highly educated and highly intelligent person took me to task for unclear writing which I had done for him because he had failed repeatedly to get it done himself. One sentence that stumped him had a simple syntactical inversion and the reader said he couldn’t keep it all in his head; the other was just a complex sentence with a subsidiary subject. Again, he couldn't get through it retaining the various aspects of the thought.]

I offered my friend the example of bSkyb whose web pages include the possibility of a message which says “that’s gone with the clouds” and nothing else when the system thinks (wrongly in my case) that cookies are blocked; but it doesn’t say that; it just makes the arrogant joke.

A complaint elicited a denial that making irrelevant facetious jokes could be arrogant or that there is any need to explain the message. They knew what it meant, I said.

Yes, they said. And?

How was I supposed to know?

It comes up when cookies are blocked.

But how do I know that?

Because it comes up when cookies are blocked.

They could not see the other person’s point of view at all. If they knew then surely I must. That puts them below the crows.

“That’s gone with the clouds” does not mean “cookies are blocked”, I said.

They knew that. They aren’t stupid, you know.

Well? I asked.

Well? It comes up when cookies are blocked.

I said to my friend that more and more the only book which engages with the situation we are in is The Hitchhiker’s Guide; but my friend wants 1984 in there, too; and he is right.

And we agreed that the image of our reality might be Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

Blag Bluster is monitoring you