Maybe my mind is just wandering to places that are less muggy, especially around this time of year. New Zealand is deep into autumn at this point.
And the South Island has penguins, which is cool in a couple pf senses. The catch, of course, is that if you have a dog you definitely need to keep it leashed. There are always tradeoffs.
From what I understand, the infinite monkey theorem―that a monkey given infinite time at a typewriter will produce the entire works of Shakespeare―is not mean to discount the Bard's specialness and importance. In fact, if Borges was correct, some form of the theorem existed for more than a millennium before Shakespeare was born. It's intended to prove that given an infinite amount of time, seemingly impossible or at least improbable events will occur. Of course monkeys tend to have a short attention span. In the real world, there's always a limiter.
Don't want to sign off without noting that the Mekons made a pretty funny visual joke about it.
Writing about characters with amnesia is tricky. Full-on, "who am I" amnesia especially. You spin characters out from what they do, say, and think. The absence of knowledge about who they are is toubh to build on. Tougher than it looks.
Then too, there's the danger that the mystery about their identity will be too absorbing. If the main thing about them is that they're a big question mark, might not the answers be a letdown?
Patrick Quentin's Puzzle for Fiends takes an interesting approach to the subject. In a brief prologue, he introduces his hero Peter Duluth in his own life with his own wife before a smash cut to him being bedridden with three women telling him he's someone else. And Duluth had appeared in several books before this. So there's really no mystery about his identity, at least not for the reader. Unlike Duluth, we know that. Like him, we don't know how he got from there to here.
I haven't finished the book yet, so I couldn't say how it turns out even if I wanted to. The setup is pretty engaging, though.
Some tentative good news. If they were trying to make hantavirus the new COVID, it doesn't look to be working. It is a nasty disease to those who get it, but it's not a credible pandemic. And I think for much of the population there's a feeling of "fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me." Maybe I'm wrong, but I hope not.
There's some irony in me writing this post while sick. It's just some kind of cold, though. I'm hoping to send it packing within a couple of days.
Is this the ideal place to be? Not necessarily in a physical sense. The recording was made in Leipzig, and not everyone can travel to Germany. But there's a nice balance here. Church bells and some kind of motor. Birds chirping. Human voices, and with them, a dog. This is where nature meets culture. Maybe this time they can be friends.
The aloha shirt, also known as the Hawaiian shirt. Where, I wondered, did it come from?
There's an answer. Apparently a certain mania for Hawaiian things had already hit the mainland by World War I, decades before Hawaii became a state. Ukuleles were a popular instrument through to the end of the 1920s, at least. And the shirt became a craze over the next decade, during the Great Depression.
Fads are fads, though, and usually burn themselves out pretty quickly. The ubiquitous 20s image of college men wearing raccoon coats to the football game had become a period piece by the start of the 40s. But I have a few aloha shirts, or at least light button-down short sleeved shirts with printed designs that evoke the tropics. So do a number of people with a considerably more credible claim to being cool. So how did this particular fad last? Well, there's the comfort factor, but the truth is you just never know.
