Sacred shibboleths.

Sat, 1 Oct 2011
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Shibboleth by Doris Salcedo

Elyot: (seriously) You mustn’t be serious, my dear one; it’s just what they want.

Amanda: Who’s they?

Elyot: All the futile moralists who try to make life unbearable. Laugh at them. Be flippant. Laugh at everything, all their sacred shibboleths. Flippancy brings out the acid in their damned sweetness and light.

Amanda: If I laugh at everything, I must laugh at us too.

Elyot: Certainly you must. We’re figures of fun all right.

— Noel Coward, Private Lives.

Also relevant:

…we have to…be able to laugh at ourselves – because if we can’t laugh at ourselves when you (sic) are standing on a pedestal (sic), somebody is going to knock you (sic) down.

But I went to school yesterday.

Mon, 19 Sep 2011
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From a book I got at a book swap I went to over the weekend:

There was a story which my father and mother used to tell people about me when I was a child. They had said to me one day, “Today we are going to take you to school.” At the end of the day they asked me, “Did you like school?” I said, “I loved it.” The next morning they got me up early. When I asked why they were doing that they said, “You have to go to school.” And I said, crying, “But I went to school yesterday.”

— V. S. Naipaul, Half a Life, p. 22 (my emphasis).

Google+ and speaking in hushed tones.

Thu, 30 Jun 2011
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g+

My Facebook-verse and Twitter-verse were abuzz with people asking for invites to Google+ today.

I didn’t ask for one because I know from my own usage patterns that I’m not an early adopter of technology; I wait and see what happens and whether a certain product is useful to me before I start using it.

So I did the next best thing – going to read up on what Google+ is all about and what people have been saying about it.

What I found out startled me somewhat: the concept of Circles is very akin to something I mentioned some time back in a post.

BTW please don’t get me wrong – I’m not saying that Circles is my brainchild or that the team plagiarised my idea, etc.

The only pleasure I’m getting out of this is knowing that I don’t need to do the work, but I can forecast trends as good as any Lee can.

I’m being tongue-in-cheek, in case you didn’t get it.

In other news, not everyone thinks Google+ is bananas, B-A-N-A-N-A-S.