From birth to puberty, a hamster doubles its weight each week. If it didn’t stop when mature, as animals do, and continued to double on its first birthday, we would be staring at a nine billion ton hamster. This hamster could eat all of the corn produced annually worldwide in a single day – and still be hungry.
There is a reason why, in nature, things grow in size only to a certain point. So why do most economists and politicians think that the economy can grow forever, and ever… and ever?
The current crop of politicians and economists – who have held sway for far too long – have a mantra, and they won’t let it go of it. That mantra is “Growth is Good.”
They also won’t let go of GDP, either, although it makes no distinction whatsoever between good and bad economic activity. It’s used as a blanket measure of ‘how well the economy is doing’, even though disasters increase it. Massive floods and megafires, for instance, that devastate entire neighbourhoods are a terrific boost to GDP – because everything has to be rebuilt.
If you feel that you owe me something (you don’t), could I ask you please for a review on amazon and/or goodreads?
Reviews of ‘The Eclectic’
If your sense of humour is like mine, you will roar with laughter at some of these gems. The Eclectic is a collection of poems and short stories that take a gentle but firm poke at reality. For example, the trickle-down effect is examined in a goblet-shaped poem, which correctly identifies the main reason our world is in trouble. One hilarious story tells you exactly what had happened to the Titanic, and why. Or you might be interested in the REAL story of King Arthur. I can recommend the productions of a delightfully twisted mind.
After you read this wonderful collection of stories, poems and dreams, you will be asking this incredibly original deep thinker to put pen to paper (or finger to keyboard) without delay! Fantastic stuff!
My nonagenarian Mum passed away last month. She did so on my birthday, guaranteeing that I’ll never, ever be able to forget her (not that I ever could, nor want to, anyway). I figure her choice of departure date into The Great Adventure was her revenge for all the arguments she lost.
Dr McCoy (after Kirk tells him that Spock has embedded his Katra within him): “That green-blooded son of a bitch. It’s his revenge for all the arguments he lost.”
For the last few weeks I’ve been pretty much cobbling together posts to maintain the illusion that all is well Chez Wibble. The truth, however, is rather different. As those of you who have been kind enough to comment on my recent wiblettes may have noticed, I’ve not been responding as I would normally. And I have not read any of your recent posts, nor have I responded to the several reports submitted by fellow ?Random Raiders!. I’m sorry for all of that, but I hope you’ll understand, as I’ve had rather a lot on my plate. And the meal’s not over yet.
In retrospect, it would perhaps have been better to have taken a leaf out of Esme’s book and set each post in advance to moderate all comments until I had time to attend to them. Doing so, however, would have required a degree of forethought and preparation that has been evading me of late; my thoughts have been scattering like leaves in a gale.
I’m finding ‘post-mum life’ really, really strange. For years, I’ve been convinced that I would, in her stubbornness to deny her own God’s allotment of ‘three score years and ten’, be trapped here looking after her until I was driven totally, completely and utterly insane (and then, in all likelihood, be carted off to the funny farm). At times, I even thought she might outlive me. Now that she has shuffled off the mortal coil, gone to join the bleeding choir invisibule and is pushing up the daisies, I am, at last, finally free. And pondering what to do without having to constantly consider Mum is not something I’ve spent any time doing. At all. It’s an intensely odd feeling. I feel a little like Howard Wolowitz from the Big Bang Theory, as he prepares himself mentally for his trip to the International Space Station…
The Big Bang Theory – Howard goes to space
I hope to be able to resume normality soon. Perhaps I may have managed that by then, although it currently seems unlikely as that will entail determining what my ‘new normal’ actually looks like, and I’m still wrestling that into focus.
So, I thank you for your recent visits, likes and comments. I hope you’re well. Stay safe, and speak soon.
Readers of my wibblettes over the years may have got the impression that I’m not exactly a fan of advertising (and that would be right). Even when such ‘communications’ give an honest portrayal of the product or service on offer, all advertisers share one feature upon which they all rely: repetition, repetition, repetition. They insert jingles in our heads to promote their brands, pervert memes such as ‘sustainability’ and ‘green’, and, utterly cynically, employ psychology and their thorough understanding of human nature to persuade us to buy their stuff.
It’s said that “there’s no such thing as bad publicity.” And I can believe it: on my litter-picking walks I’ve collected a great many cans, bottles, coffee cups and assorted packaging, all of which bear proud logos of their respective hawkers. How is it that the vendors aren’t ashamed that their litter is everwhere? It seems to me that the answer to that is simply that whenever a passer-by sees yet another logo, even on dirty trash in the streets, it reinforces that same repetition, repetition, repetition.
Perhaps we need to fight fire with fire. To turn the climate crisis ship around, those of us who care could take a leaf from the advertisers’ book and use the same ideas to inject green memes into the minds of the, let’s face it, mostly unthinking masses.
There are many things we can do. For the last couple of months, I’ve taken to doing a daily word puzzle, ‘A Greener Worldle‘. I figure that it kills two birds with one stone: I get a bit of brain exercise, and by posting my result on Twitter I’m doing my tiny bit to promote the drip-drip-drip of the green meme.
Other examples are the annual Earth Day (22 April) and Earth Hour (26 March) events. It’s true that turning off the lights all over the world (or at least in as many places as possible) for just one hour a year doesn’t save much energy; it’s a drop in the ocean. But that’s not the point; it’s about constantly reminding ourselves of the need to tread more lightly on our wonderful planet.
I’ve just added annually recurring entries into my dumbphone calendar for both Earth Day and Earth Hour. Can I persuade you to do the same?
Just yesterday (as I write this, on 04Mar2022) a ginormous bumblebee buzzed past me, and said, “Spring is coming!” Well, not literally, but the message was clear. It reminded me of the fact that ‘our’ planet’s bee population is in serious decline (which is almost certainly our fault), and that if bees disappear then we will all starve to death ourselves just a handful of years later.
I’ve been thinking about turning my lawn into a meadow. I’ve long thought that the very idea of a lawn is a relic of a bygone age; one of the many traditions we’ve inherited from our ancestors that deserve to be consigned to the history books. If we were all to convert our lawns to meadows, that would certainly help the bees – and I for one wouldn’t miss the regular mowing chore!
And then, today, I got an email from 38 Degrees, urging me to sign up for Seeds for Bees. So I did.
Our bees are under threat. Over the last few decades, we’ve lost 97% of our wildflower meadows. [1] Our bees’ food supply is starting to run out. And if they’ve got less food, there’ll be fewer bees to pollinate our crops – which means we’ll all have less food too. [2] To make matters worse, the UK government just authorised emergency use of bee-harming pesticides. [3]
But there’s something we can do today to help improve the situation – by giving our bees the food they need to thrive. If thousands of us plant bee-friendly flowers in our gardens, window boxes or private green spaces, we’ll be doing our bit to save our bees! [4] And we’ve got 60,000 packets to send out to people up and down the country so they can do just that!
So, can you sign up now to get your very own packet of seeds to plant this spring – and chip in for others to get a packet too, if you can? Seeds will be limited to one packet per person, to make sure that as many people as possible can take part!
There’s a lot going on in the world right now. It can leave us feeling powerless and worried for the future. But there are still small things we can do to make our corner of the planet a little better place – including planting wildflowers to support our declining bee population.
It doesn’t matter whether you’ve got a large garden or a plant pot on a windowsill – anyone can plant some seeds to help our bees.
Last year an incredible 60,000 of us planted seeds to help protect our bees. So let’s do it again this year, and make sure that we fill our gardens, window boxes or private green spaces with flower food to help our buzzy friends.
The seeds will need to be planted in the next few weeks, so the more of us who sign up now, the more flowers there’ll be for our bees!
(If you have any questions about the bee-friendly seeds, check out the FAQ page.)
I saw this on Twitter today, and thought it was a fabulous ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ photograph.
As I didn’t want to risk it getting buried and forgotten on my hard drive, I asked the artist (@lacharpenta) if I could post it here, and so, permission granted, here ’tis. :)
I thought it might make a good subject for a post prompt… though I’m somewhat distracted right now and, to be honest, nothing’s coming to my mind at the moment. There’s always tomorrow (until, of course, there isn’t)…
In 1957, Leon Festinger wrote a book about cognitive dissonance, in which he suggested that human beings strive for internal psychological consistency, and that when presented with conflicting information, the struggle to reconcile the differences causes mental stress.
I’ve been suffering from this problem myself for years. I’ve long recognised that our society is badly broken, and that, since most folk think it’s normal (or simply refuse to acknowledge the problems), the changes we need can’t materialise. Dr Jason Bradford might well have been describing me when he said:
[…] you’re constantly looking at your own culture and saying “OMG man that’s crazy” — and yet your culture will look back at you, and say you are crazy.
Dr Jason Bradford (in the documentary ‘Blind Spot‘, 2008)
You only need to look at my blog posts to see this in practice: on the one hand, I’ve been screaming ‘FIRE!’ about the climate crisis (for years, now); and yet at the same time, particularly recently, I’ve been trying to figure out how to ensure the survival of my blog after I’m gone. As it becomes more and more evident that we may be on the cusp of the end of everything, these two modes are utterly irreconcilable, and totally ludicrous. (Hence my phocus on phlyarology.) Of course I recognise this, but one has to take a break from the doom and gloom now and then so as to avoid going insane.
Alien Gloria Gaynor sings “I will survive!”
And so, I present a phlyarological diversion; a magic trick:
The Mystery Calculator
It’s a set of six cards with numbers on them. What you do is you show all six cards to a friend, ask them to choose a number from any card and then hand you all of the cards on which that number appears. You glance at the cards and can immediately say which number was picked.‡
Here are the ‘cards’:
1
3
5
7
9
11
13
15
17
19
21
23
25
27
29
31
33
35
37
39
41
43
45
47
49
51
53
55
57
59
61
63
Card #1
2
3
6
7
10
11
14
15
18
19
22
23
26
27
30
31
34
35
38
39
42
43
46
47
50
51
54
55
58
59
62
63
Card #2
4
5
6
7
12
13
14
15
20
21
22
23
28
29
30
31
36
37
38
39
44
45
46
47
52
53
54
55
60
61
62
63
Card #3
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
Card #4
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
Card 5
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
Card 6
‡ The number your friend selected is the sum of the numbers on the top left of the cards they handed to you.
Afterwards, feel free to resume your ‘normal’ daily life; or, if you’re like me, go back to trying to figure out how on Earth we’re going to dig ourselves out of this hole…
My post last week, ‘How to ensure that your blog lives forever, revisited‘, needs a follow-up, as an unanticipated situation arose. (I would probably have spotted it myself in time, but then again, perhaps not, and I am indebted to Goldie for pointing it out.)
Specifically: in ‘case study 4‘ I made reference to my custom domain gratwise.com, which was scheduled to expire the day after that post was published. In that post, I suggested taking a look at the microsite I’d set up, which discusses some other issues, and would allow some things to be tested before and after the transition from the custom domain (gratwise.com) to the ‘free’ domain (gratwise.wordpress.com).
However, as it turns out, that microsite was, at the time, inaccessible. It was being blocked by the WordPress.com system, which showed visitors the following instead:
Some might suggest this is blackmail (but I won’t)
I saw something similar; but, as the owner of the account, the message was different:
Looks even more like blackmail (but I won’t use the term)
This situation is reminiscent of case study #2 (connectedness.net). The difference is that gratwise.com is registered through WordPress.com, whereas the registrar of contentedness.net is Tucows. So, it’s entirely possible to continue to pay one crowd for the registration of a domain name, but if you don’t pay the other crowd (the ones hosting your website) to apply the redirection, your site can be in limbo. Possibly for years.
The essential point here is that there is a difference between the ‘expiry’ of a domain, and its removal from the domain name system (DNS). Registrars charge a fee to provide domain name services, allowing a website to be accessed via ‘custom’ domain names, but part of that fee (a small fraction – trust me, it’s tiny, I used to be a registrar myself) is passed on to the organisations who actually control the national DNS systems (such as Network Solutions for .com, and Nominet for .uk). And, naturally, there is a lag involved here; it’s important that domain names aren’t terminated prematurely. There’s a grace period to allow sufficient time for registrars to receive the renewal fees and co-ordinate with the national registration systems to ensure that there’s no break in service.
And, naturally, the registrars are bound to to take full advantage of that grace period, to try to persuade owners of domain names to continue paying for the service. In the example here, gratwise.com, the domain name is still active. But my contract with WordPress.com requires that I pay the renewal fee to continue service. And that’s fair enough. Quite naturally, WordPress.com is taking advantage of this lag between the ‘expiry’ (of my contract with them) and the actual ‘lapse’ of the domain name (when the organisation, in this case Network Solutions, decides to remove the domain from the DNS) by trying to persuade me to renew the registration.
So, this is what happens… in my notifications tab the other day, one of the entries was:
… and in the run-up to the expiry date, I’ve had several emails reminding me to renew. The latest one said this:
That part about ‘available for someone else to register’ is, in my book, the biggest reason not to opt for a ‘custom’ domain name at all, because eventually someone else can take it over (see danhoger.com in ‘case study #1‘).
And so, as I’m ‘pretending to be dead’ so as to discover what actually happens in that situation, I haven’t responded. I am still alive (honest!), so I could hit the ‘renew’ or ‘cancel’ buttons… but after I’m dead, that won’t be an option.
So here we are: I don’t know how long the ‘grace’ period is between ‘expiry’ and ‘lapse’. As it happens, as I’m preparing this post, I checked again. it has now been just five days since gratwise.com ‘expired’. The registration of that name is still active, although attempts to access it are met with the message, “This domain expired”. But the good news is that the WordPress.com system is no longer blocking access to the site; it is, once again, accessible, although only via its ‘free’ name, gratwise.wordpress.com. So, now, you can visit it, if you wish. (Don’t forget that you’ll need the password, ‘letmein’.)
This latest experience has led me to believe that my original post on this topic was, in essence, correct. Assuming that you don’t mind effectively advertising wordpress.com by using the ‘free’ domain they provide, the one that contains the reference to them, and assuming also that you don’t intend to at some point in the future transfer your site to another hosting service, then you are far better off using the ‘free’ domain name they provide. The benefits of going down this road are:
It costs you less (no recurring annual fee purely to retain the domain name; reduced administrative hassle).
Access to your site remains completely uninterrupted (gratwise.com is a good example: the site was inaccessible for several days, despite assurances from various WordPress.com Happiness Engineers that “there’s no need to worry”).
You don’t have to worry about internal links within the site becoming inaccessible if they are hard-coded to a custom domain that may, in the future, not be available (see case study #2) or, worse, have been hijacked by someone else acquiring the domain name (see case study #1). Yes, there is a way around this using relative links, but that just adds to the administrative overhead when building your site; an unnecessary complication.
The only advantage to having a custom domain name is the egotistical (and ephemeral) one that all website hawkers advocate because it improves their bottom line: “You want your own name, don’t you? Of course you do. Why wouldn’t you?”
This is a reblog of a post on Blind Wilderness – it’s not at all clear, though: the WordPress ‘reblog’ function has been playing up of late (it could be something to do with Wibble’s theme, ‘Twenty Ten’, being ‘retired’).
[…] her mother would certainly not rest in peace now, and there would be no way out of it.
Oh, I dunno, you know… plastic bottles don’t last forever.
I should know, I’ve collected many roadside presents lately that have clearly lain there for years. I’m no materials expert, but it’s my understanding that plastic exposed to the Sun gradually deteriorates over time (emitting methane in the process… how lovely is that?). I’ve seen the evidence of it: the bottles become rigid, inflexible, and slowly break up into tiny shards (more loveliness).
The ramification here is that if Sammy truly wanted to imprison her mother for good, perhaps she should have chosen something more durable. Glass, maybe. Or steel?
Sammy looked at the green plastic bottle that she was holding in her hands. Her sister, Libby, watched her. The last time she had seen her mother was when she was taken out of the house on a trolley by the undertaker. On that day she was covered by a black cloth. Now, she was in a green plastic bottle.
Libby contemplated the RAMIFICATION of this. Sammy had always been controlled by her mother, and now, she had to get her mother under control. What she couldn’t do when she was alive she now had to do when she was dead.
Their mother had not wanted a funeral, but just to be cremated by the crematorium staff and then scattered in the grounds of the crematorium with no memver of the family present. Now, however, she was captive in a plastic bottle. Sammy never stopped talking, and her mother…
Wibble 