Saturday, August 07, 2010
Even more basic dreaming
I read once that if one goes to a Jungian shrink, one has dreams of a sort that will interest a Jungian while if one goes to a Freudian shrink, one has dreams of a sort that will interest a Freudian. And I seem to recall that Freudians are quite keen on dreams drawn from the earliest layers of personality, laid down in infancy, with an onion being the appropriate analogy. So my scheme is that the dreams one remembers when waking up are usually from the outer layers of personality, these outer layers by then having booted up. But if one wakes suddenly, one may catch a dream from the inner layers, unblocked by the outer layers which have not booted up at that point. Which is what I think happened to me this morning, with the dream consisting no more than a state of being dominated by an image of what appeared to be thick gray custard, very cracked and crazed.
Next stop of the day was http://yourfreedom.hmg.gov.uk/, a site I had been prompted to look at by the dignity in dying people. An interesting venture, presumably the work of the Lib Dems. Of rather dull appearance but a place where you can twitter about laws you would like to see changed or repealed, although, oddly, twittering about new laws is not encouraged, although it is easy enough to piggy back new laws on relevant old laws. Some of the stuff that has been submitted is quite sophisticated. I don't suppose that there will much that is new to the central policy wonks, but it does strike me as a reasonable to thing to give a whirl. A crude way of taking the nation's pulse. I wonder why they have opted for such a low key design? Very dull next to commercial sites.
Which prompts the wonder, why do booze companies have such flashy looking web sites? For example, http://www.mountgayrum.com/. Lots of fancy art work and pictures, if fairly low on content. Who looks at these things? And why do they bother with the nonsense of asking your age before you go in?
Over the cup that cheers, moved to try and work out why the Independent of yesterday was all in a dither about Google trying to make some deal with Verizon, who appear to be an internet service provider. As I understand things, a huge amount of internet bandwidth is burned up by people moving films and such like about - rather than watching the stuff provided for them on the regular channels - this last being much less greedy on bandwidth. It seems to me to be quite reasonable to ration this kind of thing - by price or whatever. The Independent completely failed to explain to me either what exactly Google are up to or what is meant by net neutrality but it does not strike me as the end of the Internet as we know it if there were to be a bit more management of its use. Shouting on the front page not supported by the story on the inside pages. Bit of a sunjob really.
So gave up on that and moved onto plant identification, the objective being to try to name a climbing plant that I was watching yesterday evening. With a view to finding out whether it was picky about where it flowered - that is to say on new growth or old growth - my understanding being that some plants will only develop flower buds on a shoot in the second year. At least you only get the flowers in the second year. Had to give this up as a bad job too. Unable to find on online version of one of those binary choice trees which botanists devise as an aid to plant identification by others. Question 1: does it have bark? If yes, go to question 2, else go to question 47..... Question 47: does it grow independently or does it need support. If yes, go to question 48, else go to question 113. Sounds easy enough but the questions are apt to include a fair amount of botanist speak about the finer points of leaves and flowers. But I thought I could manage. But sadly Mr G. failed to find me such a thing. Mostly just more or less elaborate sites from nurseries which wanted to sell me plants.
So gave up on that one too and moved off to the baker.
# posted by Jim @ 8:35 AM 
