On News
This second entry requires more introduction before I quote another half chapter of text.
I rarely ever read news. I find it, for the most part, useless information. I never realized that Princess Diana -- or whatever her name was -- died until a month after it happened. I am sure that she was missed by those who loved her, but why should it matter to me? I think it should concern me more that a poor homeless man died around the corner. (I hope that none of my readers are related to the royal family.)
Crime -- Is there any benefit to reading about bad news?
Sports -- I hardly consider that news. If it has an aesthetic beauty, I hardly see how reading about it would capture that.
Fashion -- please....
Politics -- you've already heard my thoughts on that.
Besides this, the news is hopelessly biased. The few times I have been "in the news" the reporters always mixed up the true information.
About the only news I bother reading is science and technology news, because to me that is "new" information. "Cool! They sequenced another genome." "Cool! Titan has liquid methanol after all."
Anyhow, I used to get scolded for my lack of knowledge of current events and for my dislike of news. So I was excited to see that -- once again (It is getting suspicious.) -- the author of a book I am reading seemed to agree with me. Granted, this does not make me any more right or wrong. But I don't feel so alone in my weirdness anymore....
Another wise man once wrote......I can hardly regret having escaped the appalling waste of time and spirit which would have been involved in reading the war news or taking more than an artificial and formal part in conversations about the war. To read without military knowledge or good maps accounts of fighting which were distorted before they reached the Divisional general and further distorted before they left him and then "written up" out of all recognition by journalists, to strive to master what will be contradicted the next day, to fear and hope intensely on shaky evidence, is surely an ill use of the mind. Even in peacetime I think those are very wrong who say that schoolboys should be encouraged to read the newspapers. Nearly all that a boy reads there in his teens will be known before he is twenty to have been false in emphasis and interpretation, if not in fact as well, and most of it will have lost all importance. Most of what he remembers he will therefore have to unlearn; and he will probably have acquired an incurable taste for vulgarity and sensationalism and the fatal habit of fluttering from paragraph to paragraph to learn how an actress has been divorced in California, a train derailed in France, and quadruplets born in New Zealand.
Once again, I have little else to add to that....
I rarely ever read news. I find it, for the most part, useless information. I never realized that Princess Diana -- or whatever her name was -- died until a month after it happened. I am sure that she was missed by those who loved her, but why should it matter to me? I think it should concern me more that a poor homeless man died around the corner. (I hope that none of my readers are related to the royal family.)
Crime -- Is there any benefit to reading about bad news?
Sports -- I hardly consider that news. If it has an aesthetic beauty, I hardly see how reading about it would capture that.
Fashion -- please....
Politics -- you've already heard my thoughts on that.
Besides this, the news is hopelessly biased. The few times I have been "in the news" the reporters always mixed up the true information.
About the only news I bother reading is science and technology news, because to me that is "new" information. "Cool! They sequenced another genome." "Cool! Titan has liquid methanol after all."
Anyhow, I used to get scolded for my lack of knowledge of current events and for my dislike of news. So I was excited to see that -- once again (It is getting suspicious.) -- the author of a book I am reading seemed to agree with me. Granted, this does not make me any more right or wrong. But I don't feel so alone in my weirdness anymore....
Another wise man once wrote......I can hardly regret having escaped the appalling waste of time and spirit which would have been involved in reading the war news or taking more than an artificial and formal part in conversations about the war. To read without military knowledge or good maps accounts of fighting which were distorted before they reached the Divisional general and further distorted before they left him and then "written up" out of all recognition by journalists, to strive to master what will be contradicted the next day, to fear and hope intensely on shaky evidence, is surely an ill use of the mind. Even in peacetime I think those are very wrong who say that schoolboys should be encouraged to read the newspapers. Nearly all that a boy reads there in his teens will be known before he is twenty to have been false in emphasis and interpretation, if not in fact as well, and most of it will have lost all importance. Most of what he remembers he will therefore have to unlearn; and he will probably have acquired an incurable taste for vulgarity and sensationalism and the fatal habit of fluttering from paragraph to paragraph to learn how an actress has been divorced in California, a train derailed in France, and quadruplets born in New Zealand.
Once again, I have little else to add to that....