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As asides from travelogue, I'd just like to say the following.
1. McCain really does think women are stupid. "Hey, there are a load of women who voted for Hillary Clinton just because she's a broad, so if I get some no-name dame for VP, the suckers'll vote for us!"
2. Every so often, you encounter a popular intellectual programme about something you happen to have studied intensely, and the experience makes you distrust all popular science/history/art programming. The new series of Visionaries is the BBC's version of American Idol for the world of classical music. OK, cheesy but educational. But then, in their stand-off for the baroque era, the contestants are Bach and Handel. Both of them were great composers, but neither of them were musical visionaries. Bach, in particular, was a musical conservative, so much so that most people ignored his music as hopelessly old-fashioned, preferring the visionary (but crappy) music of his sons. What's more, they have a series about musical visionaries without including Schönberg. This man had vision in spades. His vision was music liberated from tonality; in place of the crippling bourgeois-feudal system of major and minor keys, he proposed a new twelve-tone system where all tones were equal. It was a great vision. It was also totally stupid and helped screw up music for a whole century, but it should have been included in the series.
3. I am experimenting with not smoking. Note that I am not giving up smoking; giving up is for quitters. I am just playing around. But it is very interesting. In the past week, my daily cigarette consumption has ranged between eight and zero (the eight was because of panic after I lost an essential bureaucratic document; the zero is yesterday and this much of today). The problem is that nicotine withdrawal makes me emotional. Not just ordinary-emotional but downright-silly-emotional. Last night I was reduced to tears by the recollection that I had taken Nalan to a cafe in Paris and she wanted to eat chips and they didn't have any. That is how bad nicotine withdrawal gets, and from a Stoic point of view, that means I should not give up smoking, since grief is a vice, but lung cancer is merely a dispreferred indifferent. In case any of my readers are considering giving up smoking, I should mention that two things are very good: alcohol and Buffy DVDs. Buffy makes everything OK.
1. McCain really does think women are stupid. "Hey, there are a load of women who voted for Hillary Clinton just because she's a broad, so if I get some no-name dame for VP, the suckers'll vote for us!"
2. Every so often, you encounter a popular intellectual programme about something you happen to have studied intensely, and the experience makes you distrust all popular science/history/art programming. The new series of Visionaries is the BBC's version of American Idol for the world of classical music. OK, cheesy but educational. But then, in their stand-off for the baroque era, the contestants are Bach and Handel. Both of them were great composers, but neither of them were musical visionaries. Bach, in particular, was a musical conservative, so much so that most people ignored his music as hopelessly old-fashioned, preferring the visionary (but crappy) music of his sons. What's more, they have a series about musical visionaries without including Schönberg. This man had vision in spades. His vision was music liberated from tonality; in place of the crippling bourgeois-feudal system of major and minor keys, he proposed a new twelve-tone system where all tones were equal. It was a great vision. It was also totally stupid and helped screw up music for a whole century, but it should have been included in the series.
3. I am experimenting with not smoking. Note that I am not giving up smoking; giving up is for quitters. I am just playing around. But it is very interesting. In the past week, my daily cigarette consumption has ranged between eight and zero (the eight was because of panic after I lost an essential bureaucratic document; the zero is yesterday and this much of today). The problem is that nicotine withdrawal makes me emotional. Not just ordinary-emotional but downright-silly-emotional. Last night I was reduced to tears by the recollection that I had taken Nalan to a cafe in Paris and she wanted to eat chips and they didn't have any. That is how bad nicotine withdrawal gets, and from a Stoic point of view, that means I should not give up smoking, since grief is a vice, but lung cancer is merely a dispreferred indifferent. In case any of my readers are considering giving up smoking, I should mention that two things are very good: alcohol and Buffy DVDs. Buffy makes everything OK.
