pumpkinstrokemarrow

It was certainly the case with this morning's scrambled egg. I don't usually add milk at all and get a rich yellow product. Today I added maybe two tablespoons of green top (slightly better than coloured water) to two eggs and got a rather thin, palid product, despite the knob of butter it was cooked with. Eatable but you don't get that mainlining cholesterol feeling.

Over breakfast reviewed the review, that is to say this week's edition of the TLS where I came across various matters worth a mention.

First, there was a very solid article about preserving our heritage in a digital age, which included a lot of stuff which would do very well in Private Eye's Pseuds' Corner, assuming that said corner has not yet been redeveloped. Lots of turgid sentences with lots of impressive sounding words which I could not make head nor tail of at all. But he observes in passing that Mr G. in his digitising book project may cut the odd corner in the interests of economy. I had not realised - it is obvious enough after the event - that digitisation mainly takes the form of scanning followed by optical character recognition, a proceeding which is error prone, with not all the errors detectable, let alone correctable, by computer. You might actually need a person to do that. I guess what Mr G. is not going to do is proof read the product, in the way that a book used to be in the (g)olden days of type. Maybe proof reading hardly goes on at all these days with most manuscripts being submitted in digital form in the first place? Except in so far as the author has the discipline to do it himself. And I dare say quite a lot of authors do not; you need to be able to focus on a tedious task for hours at a time. I drift off into musing about the content and lose focus on minor infelicities altogether. But the author of the article goes on to make the more interesting point that once a book has been properly produced it is reliable. You cannot easily tamper with the printed word. You can chuck it around the world without much regard at all without damaging that reliability. If you hold a book saying published by Penguin you can trust it. OK so someone could forge such a thing, but who is going to bother? But this is not true of the digital word, especially the digital word which is online. That can be fiddled with the whole time and you would not be any the wiser. Will we ever tolerate the management regime online which would be needed to lock down an online text in the same way as a printed book is locked down?

The Mormons have faced up to this problem by inscribing their all important family records in plain text on small wafers of silica. These are even more durable than books, it even being suggested that they had been tested in biblical vats of boiling oil, can be read with a domestic microscope or by a computer.

This article is followed by a lighter and short review of a book about deletion. Which makes the interesting point, quite the converse of the drift of the heavier and long article, that being able to forget is a good thing. We now have the ability to store huge amounts of information - the life time sensory input of a human bean is well within reach - and we do not need to forget anything. But not forgetting anything is a dreadful burden. One is unable to move on. I wonder how often film stars come to loathe the productions of their youth?

Then we have the review of a couple of books about the doings in Afghanistan. From which I learn that 57% of the teaching material at Sandhurst is derives from war films. An oddly precise figure, but assuming it is even vaguely right, puts a different take on the claim that war films are nothing like the real thing. Our warriors learn how to be warriors from the antics of the Governor of California in his youth. Not so differant, I suppose, from the Saxons mentioned recently who learned what to do in battle from the stories sung over their cups in the pub.

A propos of Afghanistan, I learned during the week that lots of countries are participating in the task force to sort the place out. Out of the 60,000 troops or so so engaged, about half are from the US. A sixth are from the UK. And so on down the list until at the bottom you get the odd hundred contributed by places like Outer Mongolia. Maybe as many as forty contributors altogether. Must be as much of a swine to command and control as the Roman army was when it started taking in allies and confederates big time. At least now, as then, there is a top language to command and control in.

Lastly I mention a piece from this same TLS about the 'Wild Things', a confection for children from the sixties of the last century. The piece is headed by an engaging picture (about to be posted) of a child riding on a cuddly monster. My point being that it is odd how monsters who are clearly equipped with hard-core teeth and claws for ripping other animals apart should be successfully portrayed in such a cuddly way. Do we not have any instincts about not meddling with such animals? Or does the image revive happy (or happily) infantile fantasies of being such an animal?