This morning I woke up and approached my smartphone in the same manner that people open cellar doors in horror films. In actual fact, I couldn’t bring myself to open the phone and my youngest daughter was the first to wave a visual map of America stained red under my nose.

I am neither religious or American, but I was, and still am praying for a victory for Biden/Harris (whether my religious convictions last beyond that, they certainly won’t under any Trump administration). …

Disgust is one of those universally experienced emotions which, over time seems to have evolved in line with us as an advanced species. In its most basic form, it’s that rising sense of nausea and skin crawl you get when you for example, bite into an apple to reveal half a worm’s corruption. The sensation of disgust is so palpable that it acts like a pre-warning immune system. Before antibiotics and refrigeration, it might have been your best bet against food poisoning, and in many ways it still is.

Then there is sexual disgust which is apparently a two component…

The weight of guilt

Guilt is powerful thing. It carries much weight — the baggage of revenant regrets, the heavy load of things that have been done and cannot be undone.

According to psychologists, humans develop the capacity for it already by age two and over a lifetime of deeds and misdeeds, it accrues, like money in the bank for everyone to pore over and mull in their own privately created misery pools. Except, of course, for psychopaths.

In the absence of any kind of moral compass, they leave in their wake, a path of destruction, broken relations, abandoned children…

In marketing land, they break down users into bands on a curve based on the adoption rates of goods or services. It starts out with the innovators — the smug select band of people who get a cool product or have been selected by their influencer profile by marketeers to play and promote. That gets followed up by the early adopters, the early and late majorities (the ‘me too’ gang playing catch up) and keeping up the unfashionable rear, the late adopters otherwise known as the laggards (aka schmucks).

I’m a self-declared laggard. It’s not any kind of shame to…

Faced with information overload, we have no alternative but pattern-recognition.
Marshall McLuhan

If you are reading this post, you will probably have noticed there is a typo in the title (if you didn’t, there’s an ‘r’ missing in the last word). If you work with words, I bet you probably spotted it right away, and if you didn’t, well, you didn’t…

In actual fact, this idea for the post has been floating around in my head for an age — it’s a little bit of the small world big world dialectic thing — those persistent imperfections that capture our attention…

I’m sure this is a title that many a great writer has put at the top of the page but in all instances, anybody who writes for a living (even the worst of us) should examine their motives and come up with some kind of sensible answer — if only to themselves. If anything, for me at least, it should have been titled ‘Why I don’t write’ but that would be a subject for another blog (talk to my wife).

And while we are talking about great artists, the ones who inevitably attract critics like shaggy dogs attract fleas, here’s…

I’ve always been a big fan of the boiling frog analogy since it fits so neatly to the concept of global warming. We all know that the world is heating up but for most of us looking out of the window, it’s just another day, so we keep on about our business until that day we are all boiled alive.

The only problem with the analogy is that frogs don’t happily swim around waiting to be cooked (and who is the pyscho chef who put the frog there in the first place anyway?). …

Rights and wrongs

I recently got into a short-lived but illustrative disagreement with a friend of a friend on Facebook (take note this does not confer friendship status with the aforementioned gentleman — at least based on our exchange).

The disagreement followed a post about Donald Trump’s alleged advancing ill health noted by my proper American friend to which I added the comment ‘Let’s hope he dies soon’ — a little bit harsh, I know, but given his advanced age and well-known closeness to God, statistically likely (without the death wish attached, of course).

For this, I was accused of…