I'm not sure if this is actually true - some of the things going around have a touch of the urban legendary about them - but people policing other people's shopping baskets for 'non-essential' items?
I don't think this is so much going back to muttering about 'having dealings with spivs for black market goods' as 'entering into somewhat dodgy ( Read more... )

Was thinking that when I was a young 'un (and in spite of things like polio, and the so-called 'Asian' flu, and the general prevalence of diseases that anti-vaxxers have forgotten were still a peril within living memory) the Big Threatening Horror was The Bomb -
Four Minutes Warning and then Oblivion, or maybe a radioactive wasteland inhabited by ( Read more... )

Saw something the other day - FaceBook? Twitter? - about having wanted to be part of some Momentous Thing in History: No, not This Momentous Thing...
But the thing is with history is that we are always in the middle of it, and we very seldom see at the time what is momentous.
This is brought to you by somebody who in 1967 was massively preoccupied ( Read more... )

Over the past few years, I have had occasion to mention a chapter I was asked to write, under extremely stringent conditions of length, for an edited volume project, which goes extremely quiet for long periods of time and then I suddenly hear from the editors asking me to Do Something with an extremely short turn-around time, in fact, could I just ( Read more... )

Article about the value of boredom for children during school holidays
Am of the opinion that, if not actual boredom, a certain amount of days that are quiet and routine and even monotonous can be a very good thing for the grown person, as well.
And on the matter of over-scheduling stuff, I was pretty much aaaaargh at this:
Want to Be Happier? ( Read more... )

Have had a link open in tabs for a few days on the grounds that, that is interesting but weird, maybe there's a DW post in that, and then there was another one I saw this morning, and I realised that there is a sort of synergy between the two of them.
Let’s Cure the Disease of Sleeping, which I suspect is written by someone who deals with the ( Read more... )

Goodness, that was rather a dull week, not helped by the weather being very iffy particularly towards the end of it, and rather militating against anything in the way of extended walks.
There was a slight moment of drama one night over aged P's alarm, but it subsequently turned out that the intermittent bleating sounds were actually the battery of ( Read more... )

Dr rdrz may have noticed that, yes, there was no cooking post yesterday, because there was pretty much no cooking except for a sardegnera for Friday night supper, because am on father-sitting duty in ye old family mansion for the next week. Have I whinged about mentioned my dislike of trying to cook in a strange kitchen? so I do not think there ( Read more... )

Further to the recent post on the over-scheduled life and never being off the clock, and my further thoughts about those women who had everything perfectly slotted in, home and work and exercise-to-keep-them-fit and having a space for relationship, and so on, which were along the lines of 'and one small thing goes wrong and there is a huge ( Read more... )

I am surely these 75% white, 100% male (I haven't calculated the average age - data isn't there - but suspect it would be above 40) group who form the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk, are well-intentioned. But. We feel that their ponderings may be just a leeeetle skewed, hmmmmm?
These people are surely only boring if they insist on ( Read more... )