Thursday, September 04, 2008
Boredom, Noonan, Gapper, London Library and Google Chrome
Forgive my silence, I have been feeling bored with myself this morning. Boredom with oneself, rather than with the world, is, of course, the killer argument against immortality. But, anyway, it's worth checking out what happens when, through no fault of their own, hacks tell the truth. Here's Peggy Noonan's not entirely persuasive explanation. Meanwhile, Gapper tells us all we need to know about the Google Chrome browser. Well, not quite all. What I need to know is why the hell these things are called browsers. A browser is one of those peculiarly dressed people with an affected stoop, large shoes and a morbid fear of human contact that I come across in the stacks of the London Library. They always look panic-stricken as I attempt to squeeze past and probably have sandwiches and a tangerine in a Tupperware container waiting for them in the lobby cloakroom. I assume they live alone - if you can call it living - in Dollis Hill which, as Nige so memorably observed, probably inaccurately, is the bad end of Neasden. An internet thingy would, one assumes, be called something groovier, a surfer perhaps, a web window or a.... well, anything but a browser, which also suggests, now I come to think of it, one of those water tanks they bring out when... Ah no, bowser ... or somebody with a forked stick ... no, dowser. Still bored.
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A blog about, among other things, imaginary ideas - What ifs? and Imagine thats. What if photographs looked nothing like what we see with our eyes? Imagine that the Berlin Wall had never come down. What if we were the punchline of an interminable joke? All contributions welcome.
re London Library users: it's less likely fear of human contact when you squeeze past; more likely, we fear static-electric shocks from the stacks!
ReplyDeleteHave you tried becoming someone else? i suspect the cowboy boots & radical diet thing are an attempt to change your identity bit by bit, you need to be more radical, suddenly announce your name is Dwayne or Jerome or Bartholomew, adopt strange accents that be Welsh, take to wearing an eyepatch if possible, give your colleagues cause for grave concern. Sooner or later you'll end up with your own chatshow, i guarantee it.
ReplyDeleteYou must forgive the sainted Peggy. Bubblehead is a great phrase. I shall use it every time I watch Newsnight or listen to James Naughtie - whenever they say something tendentious I will shout 'Bubblehead!' at them.
ReplyDeletecheer up, nothing lasts forever.
ReplyDelete'browser' is good enough, isn't it - didn't you mention google made us stupid?
I don't know anything about how journalism works, but is this what happens when there is No Story? You just go into your cupboard, hang yourself up on a coat hook and enter No Existence until a story comes along, at which point you bounce back out and all is well again?
ReplyDeleteMicrosoft like to talk about a "rich user experience" rather than browsers or code. Beyond boring. Google's Chrome is quite a good idea, I think, but it is really designed for a few years down the line. It's there for running applications from the internet - word processors, spreadsheets, msessaging, etc - rather than for just or only looking at web pages. It probably has given the Beast of Redmond a nasty bout of indigestion.
An energized journalist can make a story out of anything, or nothing. Bryan can now write about the stacks in London Library; its books, its users, its storied history. He can compare it to other libraries people use or -- here's a radical thought -- the Internet, which most people use now *instead* of libraries. He can suggest new uses for now moribund libraries (how about cafes with books, a la Barnes & Noble?)....
ReplyDeleteOh, there are a lot of options. What I want to know is why Bryan is in the library at all. Hoping to see Sarah Palin dance out of the stacks, fling off her glasses and hair bands and.... Oh, wait. That's Nige's fantasy. Never mind....
When my computer screen instructs "Please turn off your browser", I envision a rampant, sex-crazed sheep that requires restraint.
ReplyDelete