Combien des Chambres Dans La Maison de Votre Pere?

Such a great photograph, it deserves to be uploaded twice.

I’m thinking of changing my name to Rose.

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Boy Wonder has begun talking about politics again. This is kinda like Punxsutawney Phil coming out to look at his shadow.

For those of you who are sad about the playing out of the Ford-Kavanaugh complex, consider my proposition: the Blue Church is dead. It might not seem dead - it has a lot of inertia and meaningful power. But I would like to strongly suggest that it is "already dead". In the rapidly changing world that we find ourselves in, it is no longer adaptive and growing more so daily.

If this is true then attaching your energy (in sensemaking, choicemaking or actuation) to the Blue Church is a self-extinguishing strategy. It might not feel that way, but this only makes it more seductively dangerous. Like the folks who thought they were safe by finding high-ground on the Titanic.

From my perspective and from everything I can see, the sooner you fully disconnect your sovereignty from the Blue Church, the sooner you can begin the challenge of constructing some new form of collective intelligence that is at least plausibly adaptive to the contemporary environment.

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I am thinking that I’m never going to vote in another election ever again.

I am completely uninterested in “collective intelligence.”

From my perspective, “collective intelligences” are either mobs or top-down exercises in totalitarianism swinging the bully-stick in the direction of anyone who dares harbor a digressive thought.

The pendulum is swinging toward groupthink and repression; it’s some kind of cosmic trend. There is absolutely nothing I can do to change the course of history, and I’m sick of trying. There’s no kind of collectivism that I like, but collectivism is the trend—both on the Right and on the Left, proving once again (as though I needed further proof) that there’s no substantiative difference between the Right and the Left.

I am hoping that incredibly awful video of those crazed women clawing at the doors behind which Kavanaugh was being confirmed doesn’t lose the Democrats the House in November.

Or maybe I’m hoping it does.

I find myself hating on Democrats a lot more than I’m hating on Republicans these days.

The hatred of a disillusioned lover, I suppose.

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Transcription turns out to be Kate Atkinson at her most meh. It’s dull. Of course, that is the point: Ya think spying is all shaken not stirred martinis? Well, it’s not! But that point has been a cliché since at least The Spy Who Came in From the Cold.

Atkinson intends her heroine Juliet to be arch, but that archness never translates. Juliet’s archness, in fact, kind of gets in the way of necessary scene-setting. Historical fiction needs to have a strong sense of place and time, but Atkinson seems to have been more interested in establishing Juliet as a mouthpiece for an insipid parade of tepid ironies than she is in helping the reader realize that the world as seen through Juliet’s eyes is a very different place than the world the reader lives in.

The novel reads like a second draft that needed a fourth draft.

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Nevertheless, since I’d just finished reading Transcription and since Harriet the Spy, c’est moi! I spent the hour and a half I had to wait in Grand Central for the next train back to the quaint and scenic Hudson Valley following people around and eavesdropping on their conversations.

This was my favorite spy assignment:



They were speaking together in rapid French. Since neither of them was talking about directions to the toilet or the Louvre, or how many rooms are in the house of my father, I had trouble following their conversation. I could follow the body language, though: She was pouring out a stream of grievances, and he was wondering how he was gonna get his hands around those triple-D boobs of hers.

He came close!

The big mystery in Grand Central Station, though, is what the hell are those vending machines with all those plants?