Nature. We humans are so desperately and collectively arrogant, we think we know nearly everything, and God help us, we know so very little. This morning something made me think of how wonderful nature really is, its overall appreciation, not in little pockets here and there, but globally. How nature reacts.; for example you don’t have to tell it to reduce your pulse rate or increase your pulse rate for various circumstances, it knows that. Magnify this on a global scale and you have the most incredible level of sophistication we humans could never achieve. Yet we tinker repeatedly, not only giving ourselves manufactured drugs that can have a long-term effect, but we feed them to the very animals were going to eat later. When you’re as old as I am, and retired, you have time to think all those thoughts you were too busy to think about for all those years. Nature anticipates, takes precautions against hunger, and, if you think about it, almost every natural eventuality. Sometimes we consider it gets it wrong, but then again we have not got the wider picture. People at the moment are fiercely worried about the future, with some justification, but they’re not giving nature the credit they should, for all its checks and balances. This doesn’t mean that we can hare on in the way we have in the past, on the contrary, but it could mean that things are not quite as bad as David Attenborough says.
Opera singers. Sophie told me this morning that she had heard that the people who seem to know are saying that the opera singers of today are not of the quality of the past and I think this is highly likely. I knew one of our great Covent Garden opera singers, he was enticed away from his butcher’s shop to sing all over the world. How many of those in the past, were sons and daughters of farming stock, labourers and other people who led a strong healthy outdoor life, which built up their muscles, their tissues, and their stamina. Practically all of us lead lives which are much more governed by time, by rules, and have more leisure content, with a result we are becoming a different race. We are going against nature’s basic rules.
Fred the Computer. No, I’m not going gaga, or am I? I do not call my computer Fred, but from time to time I catch myself on, nearly apologising to it when I do something stupid and it actually corrects me. Subconsciously I can’t believe that the machines can do what they seem to without somebody inside it working levers. This reaction is most prevalent when I am performing repetitive operations, lose concentration and do two or three of the operation, wrongly. What an idiot?
Advertising. In October, 06, I wrote about James who bought a small news agency, sweets and tobacco shop as a hedge against the insecurity of the shipyard. It was there, while helping out, I discovered the strength of advertising. We had been warned by the traveller that the advert would be on television and consequently stocked up by 300%. However when the advert appeared, not only could we not keep up with demand, neither could the wholesalers. Since those days, I find the changing form of advertising presentation to be most curious, with the ridiculous lengths to which the advertising industry goes to draw attention to a simple product,. For example, not so long ago, the Nat West had an advertisement in which, presumably the manager, smashed his way through a brick wall, and, followed by some of the staff, went out onto a flat roof and started to dance in a most ineffective way. I bank with the Nat West, and this gave me pause for thought, that those in charge of advertising could be so asinine. Have you noticed, more and more inanimate objects such as telephones, stuffed toys, in fact almost anything, is telling us how to spend our money on important matters like insurance, health, and finance. Clearly it is cheaper to employ an illustrator than a whole body of actors. It must be working or they would have given up years ago, so it says something about us the viewers, rather than about the advertisers.
TV Programming, Years ago, out of interest I calculated the number of programs that were being put out on TV in one week, and then on only four channels. I was dumbfounded by the amount of work that was required to entertain us, and that was before Sky and all the other proliferations of sources which are now available. I have been running this website for nine+ months now from a standing start, and have found that items I thought would go down well have fallen like a lead balloon while others unsuspectingly have been popular. This exercise has made me realise the problems the TV planners have, year in year out, even with repeats. I now moan less than I did, but still am not really satisfied.