Funfare for the Common Man

This is part 5 (of 10) of my August 2020 Challenge. We’re at the halfway point. I am trying to fit all of my posts into the context of a broader narrative. In other words, that is an unnecessarily pretentious way of saying I hope they all link together, in a way.  Yesterday was Part 1: Embracing the wilderness. For some context, you may to read that post if you haven’t already. There is a very tenuous link to this post. Very . Part 2: Tolerance in a post-truth society: where do we draw the line? Natalia said that she ‘wanted to ask [me] to write smth on the issue of tolerance in the context of post-truth society (where do we draw the line and stuff)’ and I thought this was a great opportunity to make a tenuous link between this and being out in the wild. (why not?) This is a fascinating yet troubling area to grapple with, one that is often on my mind. In fact, it was on my mind a lot last week. When you’re out in nature wandering (and wondering), your mind also tends to wander (an...

‘We are all familiar with the after-the-fact tone – weary, self-justificatory, aggrieved, apologetic – shared by ship’s captains appearing before boards of inquiry to explain how they came to run their vessels aground and by authors composing Forewords.’ ( John Lanchester, The Debt to Pleasure) A Foreword First, I should probably add a [sic] to the quote above, just after ‘authors’. Second, what I am posting below is a very lightly edited little ditty that I wrote specifically for my teenage students a couple of weeks ago. Though it didn’t take me long to write, I’m pretty hard-pressed to find much free time to write these days and so I didn’t want it to go completely to waste. I think (or hope) some of them appreciated it or at least found it mildly interesting, and I even turned into a sort of reading ‘test’. It fit in with the topic of the unit we were studying, the media, and I figured they might have been fed up or bored with my endless crapping on about the ‘good...