Thursday, January 25, 2007
Musings
Cold, damp day so no allotment. Apart from baker and one or two other matters, keeping the warm.
Another version of yesterday's soup today; identical except that rather more of it today and we did not quite finish it for lunch. Maybe for breakfast - although it is very odd how very odd some people find eating real food for breakfast. Some even go pale at the thought of anything more challenging than Frosties before 1100!
Been mugging up for the gardening section of the next pub quiz (which might be a while, the craze for such things never having quite recovered from the demise of the excellent (medical flavoured) sessions at The Mitre. Which is, sadly, another of the many establishments to have fallen by the camra wayside, having once done a cheap and cheerful real ale but is now down to lager. Hopefully flat warm beer will see me out but it certainly seems to be on the wane). Returning to mugging, have acquired two factlets worthy of note. First, that when lawnmowers were invented in 1850 or so, proper gardeners were quite sniffy about them. And the compiler of the book has been a little lazy in that the illustration appears to be of the (very good) Flexa push lawnmower which I inherited from my parents and would probably have figured in woodcut illustrations in catalogues in the 1950s (from where I presume he has scanned it into his text) rather than the 1850s. Second, that three quarters of the world's aubergines are grown in New Jersey. This stikes me as a bit odd so I will endeavour to raise the Aubergine Growers Association on Google and see if they know better.
Prompted by the adoption squall, been musing about the criteria for discrimination. It seems that it is not OK to discriminate on things like colour, creed or sexual orientation. But that it is OK to discriminate on things like criminality (which includes some sorts of orientation), substance use and abuse and hunting. I started off by thinking that the separator was that what you are is OK but what you do is not OK - the fallacious rationale being that you cannot control what you are but that you can control what you do. Catches with this neat formulation being that 1) there are lots of things at the boundary where the rule doesn't help; and, 2) it doesn't capture at all the need to discriminate against anti-social behaviour. Like being a Nazi. Maybe I feel the need for four pint wisdom coming on.
Another version of yesterday's soup today; identical except that rather more of it today and we did not quite finish it for lunch. Maybe for breakfast - although it is very odd how very odd some people find eating real food for breakfast. Some even go pale at the thought of anything more challenging than Frosties before 1100!
Been mugging up for the gardening section of the next pub quiz (which might be a while, the craze for such things never having quite recovered from the demise of the excellent (medical flavoured) sessions at The Mitre. Which is, sadly, another of the many establishments to have fallen by the camra wayside, having once done a cheap and cheerful real ale but is now down to lager. Hopefully flat warm beer will see me out but it certainly seems to be on the wane). Returning to mugging, have acquired two factlets worthy of note. First, that when lawnmowers were invented in 1850 or so, proper gardeners were quite sniffy about them. And the compiler of the book has been a little lazy in that the illustration appears to be of the (very good) Flexa push lawnmower which I inherited from my parents and would probably have figured in woodcut illustrations in catalogues in the 1950s (from where I presume he has scanned it into his text) rather than the 1850s. Second, that three quarters of the world's aubergines are grown in New Jersey. This stikes me as a bit odd so I will endeavour to raise the Aubergine Growers Association on Google and see if they know better.
Prompted by the adoption squall, been musing about the criteria for discrimination. It seems that it is not OK to discriminate on things like colour, creed or sexual orientation. But that it is OK to discriminate on things like criminality (which includes some sorts of orientation), substance use and abuse and hunting. I started off by thinking that the separator was that what you are is OK but what you do is not OK - the fallacious rationale being that you cannot control what you are but that you can control what you do. Catches with this neat formulation being that 1) there are lots of things at the boundary where the rule doesn't help; and, 2) it doesn't capture at all the need to discriminate against anti-social behaviour. Like being a Nazi. Maybe I feel the need for four pint wisdom coming on.
# posted by Jim @ 7:00 AM 
