Thought for the day. It’s from Meera Nanda’s Prophets Facing Backward again. I may even have quoted this particular passage before – but if I don’t remember, you won’t either, and nobody ever reads old N&Cs, so it doesn’t matter. And anyway this is worth quoting often. It’s from the Preface, page xii.

Having grown up in a provincial town in Northern India, I considered my education in science a source of personal enlightenment. Natural science, especially molecular biology, had given me a whole different perspective on the underlying cosmology of the religious and cultural traditions I was raised in. Science gave me good reasons to say a principled ‘No!’ to many of my inherited beliefs about God, nature, women,

I’m laughing maniacally again – and it’s Norm who’s made me laugh again. With his entry for the name the pseuds contest. Prof Ursula LeTofu Thinberry and Dr Doug D. Void. Yep, I like those very much.

There is also José’s entry: ‘Judith Lucelia Etchegaray’ and ‘Jacques Alain Babha-De Ritta’. I like those very much too. The competition for that copy of Of Grammatology is going to be fierce. Except from my colleague, of course; his silly suggestion I just pass over in silence.

Norm also made me laugh with his deeply profound ruminations on the meaning of the ‘cartoon’ and what its referent really really is.

I was wondering whether one might deconstruct the notion that the cartoon represents

This story is interesting in more than one way.

Prof Southall accused Stephen Clark, a solicitor, of smothering his two babies on the basis of a 50-minute Channel 4 Dispatches documentary on the case…The paediatrician said Mr Clark was a double murderer “beyond reasonable doubt”, although he had not read any of the papers in the case, spoken to the parents or seen post mortem reports.

Beyond reasonable doubt – because he watched Clark on TV. Hmm.

Prof Southall refused to apologise and repeated the allegation during the disciplinary hearing. Denis McDevitt, the chairman of the GMC panel, said he was “extremely concerned” by Prof Southall’s actions. “Your view was a theory, which was, however, not presented as a theory

Well I just thought I would link to this, simply because it made me laugh a lot. Yes it is, that’s a perfectly good reason.

The situation Norm complains of – having to buy three kinds of cat food, two of which his cat doesn’t like and won’t eat, because the kind she does like suddenly comes in a variety pack with two others instead of on its own – is a classic, a pure, a definitional example of what Kingsley Amis so rightly called sod the public. There’s a lot of it in the UK. I’ve always noticed that. There’s too much obsequiousness and groveling for the customer over here, perhaps (except of course when there isn’t), but … Read the rest