May. Almost mid-May. This is the best part of the year, right? Is there anything better than the pre-black-fly world? It’s like mosquitoes (is there an “e”?) don’t exist, let alone wasps and hornets. It’s still all about the plants but not quite yet the mowing. May is a time of imagination.
- You know what may is? May is the time for thinking about the things you will never do this summer. Like going to that bluegrass festival with mass banjo instruction. My inner novice banjo star would do so well at that sort of thing. But there might be bugs.
- Good to see the powers of the surveillance crime controllers are entirely misplaced:
In becoming the world’s most-watched nation, Britain was promised a commensurate drop in crime. But the estimated 4.2 million closed-circuit television cameras in the U.K. have made barely a blip on the graph of public safety, a senior London detective in charge of the program admitted yesterday. Calling Britain’s multibillion-dollar surveillance network “an utter fiasco,” Detective Chief Inspector Mick Neville said video footage has solved only 3 per cent of crime.
Multibillion. That is the beauty of a new technology. Boosts the economy without any real idea whether it works or not.
- There is one thing that I don’t understand about the post-9/11 anti-faithers like Martin Amis:
As the Ayatollah Khomeini used to say — in scandalized terms — affiliates of other religions think that they can go to church once a week, or even pray once a day, and that’s that. He said, Islam isn’t like that. The whole wave of Islamism is the revival of the idea that Islamism is the total guide to existence, that it’s not on the edges but right in the centre. If you adhere to this literalist way, [Islam] does follow you into every room in the house. It’s without its grandeur and beauty if you deny this central severity.
What kind of person has faith that doesn’t get into every room in the house? It is like you have a relationship with the creator of all things and say: “feh – you can stay around but only in the rec room”? What kind of faith is that?
- Dark matter is really out there. It’s apparently baryonic – unlike me.
Gotta run. School bus trip.