from Hull to The Hutt
Not too early to start on the cliches. Photo from the train as it travels between the Hutt Valley and Wellington. When the Sun is just coming up and the harbour is calm it is just lovely.
Sadly everyone else on the train is glued to their phone and taking the view for granted.
Our talented friend Holly has baked The Duchess a perfect birthday cake for a crazy dog lady – we might need to shorten the ears but otherwise spot on! (gluten free too)
Our poor Penny has been to the groomers and had the doggy equivalent of a pudding bowl haircut (millennials ask an old person)
She had some matting behind her ears but we hadn’t expected the groomer to completely shave them.
Wor Lass and I have been absolutely gutted all last night (ruining the buzz of her birthday) and all today. It will take months to grow back too. Anyone know of a pet shop selling ear muffs?
Celebrating a big zero birthday with The Duchess today.
Once she’s finished her weekly Citizens Advice shift – dispensing wisdom and tough love to her subjects whether they want it or not – we’re heading out for lunch followed by an Escape Room session. (If I haven’t posted again in 2 weeks send a search party in to Xcape in Lower Hutt.)
Hopefully we’ll have a better day than we had 10 years ago, waiting at the British Embassy in New York for emergency passports to get home after some plonker managed to lose our passports …
I’m still working through the Factfulness book on the commute, and it’s exciting reading. My expectations of how humanity is doing is completely different to what the actual data shows! The great news is that we’re actually doing far better than we think.
The authors publish a website called Gapminder.org, on which they illustrate their points via a collection of lovely interactive graphs.
Take this one for example, showing the spread of global household incomes across a scale, those in extreme poverty on the left through to the wealthiest on the right. I’ve moved it back to 1970, the year of my birth, to give an example of the clear split between the rich and poor and in line with our typical views of “how things are”.
https://www.gapminder.org/tools/#$state$time$value=1970;;&chart-type=mountain
Now drag the slider bar beneath the graph to move the date forward to the present day and notice how it changes :-
Of course this doesn’t mean too many people are living in hellish conditions or dying unnecessarily, that would be naive and foolish. But graphs like this – and many others you can view on the site – do show how dramatically and quickly things have improved for us, not by fluke or accident but by hard work and co-operation between nations around the World.
A Poem by David H. Bodecott
This is the tale of my friend Jack,
Had an affair behind his wife’s back,
He thought that she would never discover,
That he had got a secret lover,
But she did find out and she was vexed,
You’ll never guess what she did next,
When he went to bed and fell asleep,
Into the bedroom she did creep,
She took a knife with a very sharp edge,
And with it cut off his meat and two veg,
But I’m glad to say Jacks much improved,
Since he had his manhood removed,
Although bereft of all desire,
He sings Falsetto in a male voice choir.
Saturday morning in Maidstone Park, sun just starting to melt the frost. One of my favourite times of the week.
This has been my shortlist of favourite tunes picked up in the previous quarter, effectively the soundtrack to the Coronavirus Lockdown. Some of it is new, a lot of it is old (Harry Nilsson’s been dead since 1994). Some of it you’ll hate, but the odd thing might get your foot tapping. Enjoy!
“A lie can travel around the world and back again while the truth is lacing up its boots.”—Mark Twain
The truth has always been up against it, especially from politicians and their “lies, damned lies & statistics”, but in the past 5 years the poor thing has been properly roughed up and left bleeding in a ditch.
Pre-Internet our sources of information were journalists, held by professional pride or at least corporate lawyers to some degree of accountability. Tabloids aside, if you read something in print you had some confidence that it would be true.
Not any more.
The Internet is an unregulated, unchecked morass of bullshit and lies, often not even generated by humans – over half of web traffic is bots (automated software). We pick up the skills to get online and participate in the global community, but not the skills or technology needed to identify truth or lies online.
Add to that Trump’s blatant disregard for truth with “alternative facts” – which astoundingly his gullible followers swallow hook, line and sinker – and the news media’s political bias and sensationalism and it’s difficult to know what you can trust any more.
This leads to some very serious problems :-
Thankfully there is a way to fight back.
Independent online fact checkers are available (though maddeningly there are also fake fact checkers, even previously reliable Snopes.com now being corrupted). If you’re reading an article and you’re not certain if it’s true try
There’s also an online course available called Calling Bullshit to train yourself in spotting and calling out the lies
I’ve just bought Factfulness by Hans Rosling, to help me learn to navigate around the bullshit better.
I just hope The Truth gets its boot laces tied soon and starts playing catch up otherwise we’re all in trouble.
bodecott.blog 