Hometown Sceptics
The immediate news is that my Covid test came back negative. Hooray! I thought it would thanks to the double-vax thing, but it’s a relief nonetheless. The more complex news is that we’re still isolating out of an abundance of caution and have a bunch of lateral flow test kits here. The result is that I’m keeping the daily posts going for another week to see that process through. Sorry about that.
In the meantime, the news today is worrying: Covid in Scotland: Number of new cases highest since February (BBC)
A total of 992 people tested positive for the virus on Thursday, the highest daily figure since 17 February. First Minister Nicola Sturgeon said the number of new cases had more than tripled in the past month.
To some extent this is to be expected if you open up the country while lots of people remain unvaccinated. The key thing remains the whole flattening the curve thing and avoiding hospitals overflowing with desperately ill people. The concomitant pressure is to get people who are desperately ill for other reasons back into hospitals where appropriate.
But, although I understand the economic pressures and the need to come out of the stasis of the last year and a half, it looks fragile to me.
On the other hand, in a spirit of optimism, I booked tickets for Lindsay and I to go and see Public Service Broadcasting at Barrowland in Glasgow, 7 November 2021.
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Mwah-hah-hah-haaaah
A few days ago I mentioned here that
I’m toying with making some short videos of those dark and twisted fairy stories I mentioned a week or so ago ( At The Indianapolis Of Your Heart). This would involve sitting in lamplight with a glass of malt and a pipe in hand, attempting a Vincent Price voice. Part of that would be to find a suitable old pipe on eBay, then to clean it up properly to use as a prop. Ideally I’d want a book-lined room, or a crypt, or an atmospheric old pub.
The eBay bit of that has now been completed.
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I had a series of messages last night suggesting that I ought to do some sort of analysis on these daily posts–word frequency, sentiment tracking, correlation of the mood of posts to whether the music chosen is in a major or minor key, etc. I like the idea, but it’s a huge amount of work. There is software that will do some of it, I think, but I’d really need some students to exploit. Even creating an index would be a big job. I’m thinking about it, but it might be beyond me.
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Music : Taylor Swift is an artist I’m ambivalent about: her songs tend to be tonally similar and I get bored easily. But. Her last couple of albums have been lyrically interesting. The focus of criticism of this song seems to be that it’s about a ‘difficult girlfriend’, but it’s a more subtle lyric than that. It’s about the consequences of having the strength to say no in the face of peer pressure (such as being called a difficult girlfriend…) The woman is blamed for saying no to a man she doesn’t want. Oddly, it reminds me of Neil Young, though I’d be hard pressed to specify why.
This is the radio-friendly version (stuck in her head rather than fucked in the head)
Champagne Problems
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