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Front Page News
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Rants
- Hits: 2574
There was so much they could have done with this....
Front page news in the Calgary Herald. The headline something like "Gorilla with knife scares visitors to Calgary Zoo", or the like.
What it should have been was "Proof of Evolution" or "The Missing Link Discovered" or "Gorilla takes hostage, threatens euthenasia if demands not met...", "Gorilla prepares for Calgary Stampede" or a hundred other far more entertaining possibilities.
A shame the photographer sold the rights to the Herald.
The real story was much more mundane, a zookeeper had forgotten his knife in the enclosure, curious gorilla picks it up, aghast visitor snaps photo. What was remarkable was the comments posted on the site, hundreds of irate Calgarians demanding that the zoo be closed, cleverly observing the obvious fact that the zoo is inhumane, ignoring the obvious contradiction that our bloated lifestyles have stolen from the Gorillas the last of their habitat, if not for the zoo then they soon may well not exist at all....
Funny how people look at things.
And then the case of poor the woman crushed by the falling cement slab in Montreal, initial headline "Woman crushed by cement slab in Montreal", then, as the story updates (Woman was sitting on outdoor patio at cafe celebrating birthday with her husband, slab falls from builing and crushes her) the headline is changed to "Woman asked to sit there...", a morality tale for demanding customers, implicit is the fact that by requesting this seat she was somehow responsible for her misfortune, the classic case of a demanding customer somehow getting her just desserts...
George Orwell - 1984
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Books
- Hits: 1933
Somehow I picked it up and began rereading it. I had read it once, long ago, some 20 years past when I read everything by Orwell, or almost everything, and so I picked up believing that I would just skim it, refresh my memory, revisit the central themes and characters.
It wasn't as I remembered it. I remembered it, true, most of it, but the details, the nuances, raw brutality, the intimacies of violence were all forgotten.
Possibly I read it during high school, some dumbed-down bowlderized version, which would account for it.
It's a great book. Prescient, insightful, and bleak as all out.
He got it wrong in the details, of course, or some of the details. That the population would by and large be poor and live in squalor, subjegated by a lack of education, a failure to percieve options, wrong, they would be instead fattened like pigs on soda pop and fast food, they would be dumbed by the news and doublespeak, true, but there is no once telescreen channel with a monopoly rather there are thousands of channels, each with its own view, the dumbing down would come about as a result of the constant assault of conflicting or complimentary points of view. But we have undoubtedly been dumbed down, not from lack of choice (there are abundant choices), but from laziness on our own part, our readiness to accept the situation, any situation, without revolt so long as we are kept plump and lightly distracted....
The telescreens nowadays don't watch us, they don't have to. We have the internet, credit cards, banks, traffic and street cameras, we bare all willingly before the corporations, our validition a function of our credit rating and institutional approval. Some bare more intimate, personal details, but these are not (yet) what the corporations want, they are the perverse misunderstandings who have taken this absence of privacy to the next level.....
The news has become entertainment. AN inane parody without self recognition of all things that might somehow be important. 15 or 30 minute breaks amuse us and feed the smug feelings that we are well informed.
The tortures he describes, that are visited upon Winston, the insistence upon conformity, they are still happening, slowly in the works, there are none (here, in Canada) so dire as he describes (and how accurately he portrays it!), rather people are hung in the vacuum of shopping malls and lifestyles, a torture of the spirit as opposed to the flesh. Far less painful, but no less damaging.
It's a great book. Revisit it if you have the chance...
The Missing Neighbors
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Miscellany
- Hits: 2317
And I returned from Banff last week, the family vacation, to discover that the neighbors had gone away. There were clues, the piles of mail in their inbox, the strange but welcome quiet, and a mewing at the cellar door.
They had left their cat with a small dish of food and cup of water in downstairs hallway, the laundry room...they wouldn't be gone long.
Which is good, as I have to collect on July and Junes utility bills, read the water meter to correct an error on the last billing.....
But they didn't return, the cat has moved upstairs, the stack of mail has grown, the litterbox overflows, the food is refilled by me every other day, there was no note to look after the cat, perhaps they counted on me to return and find it, or perhaps the thought of returning to a mummified cat wasn't so disturbing for them, I send them an email, but there's no response, the landlord isn't aware they've left, I've a phone number I can call, will call later this morning, but somehow I suspect that they've just disappeared, leaving behind unpaid bills of over $500.00....
AN empty inbox
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Miscellany
- Hits: 2517
I work through the emails, but still they come in. It's always been this way, ever since the internet and hotmail, your inbox a storage place for unanswered, unaddressed items, things to do, follow ups. It's never been empty.
But yesterday it was close. By the end of the day only 2 emails left, one from google analytics, another from an old friend that had sat there for several months. I have great excuses, I work on the computer, it's a poor tool for pleasure (for me), I'm a luddite, I've phobia about email.....
SO I answered, I had been postponing, waiting for some great news or the right time to respond, but the longer you leave certain things the harder they are to address, finally, though, the thought that I was only 1 email away from an empty inbox, it was a sign, and so I responded, apologized, and now I have an empty inbox.
There's a sort of Zen Tranquility to this, knowing that there are no unaddressed items on this list, that in some small way, in one small aspect of my life, I'm caught up....
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