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The voices blend and fuse in clouded silence
Happy Bloomsday! I have no computer.
There are a couple of reasons that yesterday was outright awful until the evening, when![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
rushthatspeaks and I went to see Jack Clayton's The Innocents (1961) at the Harvard Film Archive (it is one of the best black-and-white films I have ever seen, meaning that it could not have been made in color; and the ghosts are uncanny, but Deborah Kerr is terrifying), but one of them was the way my laptop failed to boot for over an hour in the morning and only came back, slowly and waveringly, sometime after dark. This morning, it wouldn't come back at all.
I do not really feel like recounting the details of a day spent at the Apple Store, except that at one point I textedderspatchel, "I am the only person with a book in this entire store. Everyone else around me waits staring into their phones or the air. I'm reading ethnography from 1912, but I feel like I'm conducting it a hundred years later." I had thought the problem might be that one of the fans in the computer had died, leading to overheating, but when the utilikilt-wearing employee at the Genius Bar (whose logo is a sort of stylized Bohr model of the atom; I am amused that the universally recognized sign for genius is still something to do with nuclear physics) popped the back off, it transpired that my machine only has one fan, which was not in the specs. I may have to name it either George VI or Owen Pugh. In any case, there were tests run, the hard drive appeared to be fine, it was decided that the problem was software corruption and the machine was taken off into the back room to have its operating system razed and reinstalled.
The operation was a success and the patient died: the hard drive failed during reinstallation. The good news is, a replacement is actually covered by the insurance I bought three years ago August. (For once, paranoia rewards. I cannot, cannot afford to buy a new computer. I am not sure I could have afforded a new hard drive.) The bad news is, I am unlikely to get the machine back before Monday, and until such time I have really no access to my e-mail and no ability to do my job. I guess this month is my exercise in unplugged weekends. But at least I could write about the last one without resorting to pencil and paper. I just don't write that fast by hand.
There are a couple of reasons that yesterday was outright awful until the evening, when
rushthatspeaks and I went to see Jack Clayton's The Innocents (1961) at the Harvard Film Archive (it is one of the best black-and-white films I have ever seen, meaning that it could not have been made in color; and the ghosts are uncanny, but Deborah Kerr is terrifying), but one of them was the way my laptop failed to boot for over an hour in the morning and only came back, slowly and waveringly, sometime after dark. This morning, it wouldn't come back at all.I do not really feel like recounting the details of a day spent at the Apple Store, except that at one point I texted
derspatchel, "I am the only person with a book in this entire store. Everyone else around me waits staring into their phones or the air. I'm reading ethnography from 1912, but I feel like I'm conducting it a hundred years later." I had thought the problem might be that one of the fans in the computer had died, leading to overheating, but when the utilikilt-wearing employee at the Genius Bar (whose logo is a sort of stylized Bohr model of the atom; I am amused that the universally recognized sign for genius is still something to do with nuclear physics) popped the back off, it transpired that my machine only has one fan, which was not in the specs. I may have to name it either George VI or Owen Pugh. In any case, there were tests run, the hard drive appeared to be fine, it was decided that the problem was software corruption and the machine was taken off into the back room to have its operating system razed and reinstalled.The operation was a success and the patient died: the hard drive failed during reinstallation. The good news is, a replacement is actually covered by the insurance I bought three years ago August. (For once, paranoia rewards. I cannot, cannot afford to buy a new computer. I am not sure I could have afforded a new hard drive.) The bad news is, I am unlikely to get the machine back before Monday, and until such time I have really no access to my e-mail and no ability to do my job. I guess this month is my exercise in unplugged weekends. But at least I could write about the last one without resorting to pencil and paper. I just don't write that fast by hand.
no subject
Ok, I have dug out from under this week enough for serious thought again.
An interesting point. I will argue from background; my homeland reveres (to the point of having him on the $100 note) the physicist Ernest Rutherford. His great knack was to know what to built to be able to test ideas. These days in-field he'd be called an instrumentation expert, or experimentalist. But that reverence is partly because his skill fits perfectly with another aspect of nation-myth, the fix-anything-with-nearly-nothing "No. 8 Wire mentality", where a scrap of standard-gauge fencing wire can fix anything; including the secrets of the universe. So it may well depend if there's an allied niche into which one's hero-concept can helpfully slot and round-out, since these are culture-heroes being archetyped here after all.
(That he was a grand supervisor, with I think four of his students going on to win Nobels of their own, is kinda overlooked. Again with the selective-aspects).
no subject
Agreed. The British boffin archetype flourishes during and after the war: a little funny, a little fussy, but the boys in the back room still pull through with the rest of the national eccentrics.
(That he was a grand supervisor, with I think four of his students going on to win Nobels of their own, is kinda overlooked. Again with the selective-aspects).
That's still pretty awesome, though.
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You were saying:
He is the great exemplar of a kind of native genius – detached yet driven, unselfconscious yet fully aware of his intelligence, quirkily unpredictable yet steadfast. In other words: he is a very British kind of hero.
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