Google and Fugue

Various ineptitudes have made me angry today. I can't really mention any of them but if you knew, you would be as angry as me, I am sure. Well that has put you in the picture as to how I feel today. Maybe I can impress on you the range of strange faces that I have been pulling, much like the cartoons of Jim Dixon on the front of my library copy of Luck Jim. There are twelve of them, passport-sized and arranged in three rows of four. Each ones seems to capture one of the described imitations (face-pullings really) from the book. (Daughter took time to point to each and say "That's Jim. That's Jim and that's Jim".) Anyway, I am listening to a collection of Bach Harpsichord pieces to calm myself down. I really used to like harpsichord music a lot but I seem to have gone off it recently. Maybe I will change it in a minute. No! This piece is quite wonderful. (Many more schoolgirl-style enthusings omitted)

I did have something that I thought really important to write about here but as usual, without any hand-written note about it I have forgotten it. The smell of spring in the air has made me feel slightly better about myself and everything that usually gets me down. That and the thought of the nice clean pages of the Pepys book when I get home. N1S is currently starting solids and is half way (at least) to the first weight for boxing (which as you all know is Strawweight).

Totally blocked for the last five minutes! I cannot think of anything but this to write. I did have a few ideas but they all sounded pretentious. That hasn't stopped me writing before has it? I listened to Another Green World which made me think of Arena, the programme for which the title track of AGW was the theme for. I thought of the connection between this and the fact that the BBC appear to have made a commitment to have more arts programmes on TV during prime time. Now I am not going to complain if they do put more stuff out of this nature but I think that there is quite a lot already - maybe I would like at least one programme a night but some decent drama would be nice as well. I hesitate to praise TV now because it sounds like I do nothing else and I have thought for a long time that I should be turning the TV off and reading more instead. The problem is that after a hard slog at the hot screen here, it is just so easy to glaze and vegetate in the armchair. I read somewhere that it takes less effort to watch TV than to just sit still and think. Nice to see that the BBC article illustrates the archetypal makeover show with the vacuous Lowri Turner. She may be one of those people who I dislike by default for some strange reason. Does that happen to you. I am friendly with most people, if only in the generally guarded British way, but sometimes I can start almost hating some random person I see walking down the street. I can of course hate the people who give me reason to - the bad drivers (the drivers who drive slightly more badly than me I should say) and unemotional staff, but sometimes this unreasoned dislike worries me a lot.

Now all that has reminded me of the target of a rant I planned from yesterday. I will give the excuse for watching the programme I am about to berate as being that I was channel hopping which suggests my desire to read more is something which I should action as soon as possible. The programme was I think called "Sixth Sense" with a guy called Colin Fry (I was going to use a noun not in decent use to describe him but I have withdrawn that for the sake of decency). This programme is one of those Clairvoyance-in-front-of-a-TV-audience things - ClairAudience as the credits put it - more of which later. This sort of thing makes me so angry. The cold-reading technique of this man is as transparent as a vacuum and yet the people who go there, do not see it. This inability of people to see themselves as emotionally manipulated makes me so angry - it is deception pure and simple. I know that in a free society people can spend their money on whatever they like but this ranks with paying money to someone to provide a service and then them NOT DELIVERING IT. The programme makes even cover themselves over the chance that someone might take them to task about the accuracy of some of the readings by putting up a caption saying that the show is purely for entertainment valuse and that opinions on Clairvoyance and Clairaudience differ. Well they could go further and say that the whole thing is a load of tosh but that they are very thankful for all the money that they get for doing it. Angry stuff has gone now. I am slightly calmer than I was but not enough.