Rant Corner

In the limited amount I’ve contributed to this blog so far, you may have noticed that there’s a fair degree of Grumpy Old Man whinging at some aspect of life. I don’t mean it to be like this. I just sit down at the keyboard intending to write calmly on one topic and then a sentence or two later I seem to be gripped by a rapidly accelerating Cresta Run career towards a blood vessel-bursting tirade about some aggravation I had been experiencing.

But this time it’s not going to happen.

It’s 11th. February and it’s a beautiful, sunny and warm Spring day. Spring? 11th. February? Warm? Oh! My God! It’s Global Warming! What I thought was a Good Thing™ (Sellar and Yeatman) is actually a Bad Thing© (Prophets of Doom Inc.) These sudden shifts in perception e.g. (1) the advantages of home birth over hospital delivery and back again, (2) red wine is good for you/bad for you, (3) Prozac improves your mood, Oh! No! it doesn’t! seem to be a given of Western culture. Scientifically-proven beliefs held for 20 years plus are suddenly overthrown by “research just published shows that”. What set my mind havering along this knife edge of doubt was a suspicion that, after a lifetime of drinking traditional draught beer, I may be allergic to it. At first I attributed my discomfort to those very rare occasions when I may have imbibed a little freely. Then I started feeling queasy after nights when I had drunk comparatively little but supposed I had “forgotten” some pints. Then I found that even when I knew for a fact ….

Fact (n.) Something you know for certain that you have done, only for someone close to or in authority over you, to prove for certain that you haven’t. Another example of a disproved fact is when you read, say, an academic text for the very first time, you turn the page to find highlighting and annotations in your own handwriting that you would have sworn on an entire print run of bibles (or other religious scriptures of choice) that you had never seen before.

…anyway, when I knew for a fact that I had only drunk two pints, I began to feel nauseous. This is potentially appalling news, capable of destroying my lifetime self-image. No beer? Ever again? A panic trawl through the dodgy information on the web about liver function was, entirely predictably, inconclusive. Never mind! Another 20 years and the received wisdom will be that livers are entirely nugatory organs and should routinely be removed at birth.

And another thing…

What’s really annoying about Word™ spellchecker is when it automatically “corrects” something mistyped to something wholly ludicrous or embarrassing without flagging it up and why, when you fairly invariably make the same mistake with a word you use commonly (mine is “construction”), it inserts a word almost entirely foreign to your habitual lexicon. There are many good things about Word™, but why doesn’t it learn?
And finally…

I’ll leave the relating of my experience in getting our Skype™ phones to work until I actually have got them to work.