Joy

Remember the band 'Three Dog Night'? Yeah you do, 'Jeremiah was a bullfrog...' ('Joy to the World'). They're still around you know, they all look like bloody bullfrogs now, but hey, why not, if people are still paying to see you and you're not dead yet, go for it.

Anyway, they've been around for 35 years, but they're not in the news, not even sure why I thought of them, total opposite of my kind of music.
However, another old bullfrog, Fidel Castro, who has been around for roughly half a century, although no albums to his name, is ailing. I don't really feel one way or t'other about him either, but you know, you notice when the world changes, names disappear, life's rich tapestry changes all its colours. I mean, whatever happened to Moshe Dyan? Rhetoric question, obviously I know what actually happened to Moshe and Kruchev and all the people that used to be. Castro's one of those. Then the spectacle of all the Cuban exiles in Florida all readying themselves to dance on his grave. What a disgrace, they should be ashamed of themselves.

Equally depressing is that scientists have realised that the great apes are smarter than the lesser ones. I mean really, you have to screw your eyes up, wrinkle your brow and say 'What?' Didn't we know that from like...I dunno, before Castro's time? Is this the Rip van Winkle team that are just publishing? The only thing they say which makes it sound even vaguely de nos jours is that they acknowledge that
".....one species may outperform another in a problem-solving test not because it's smarter, but because one species is poorly suited to that particular testing situation."
Yes indeedy, we've been there, we've seen the KKK method of deciding that blacks are less intelligent than whites because they asked them totally loaded questions. Intelligence can't be discovered through testing spurious knowledge, but through problem solving tests, and again, this study does make that quite clear.

Spiralling even further down into the depths of the crashingly obvious, ok, no actual research money was spent on this, but Doctors are having to take time out from the company's time - the company being the NHS - to warn ladettes that wearing high heels and then getting drunk, is causing more and more accidents, or, autrement dit, using up more of the taxpayers' money.
This article reminded me with a horrible, vivid jolt, of a day when Austen and I had been called into Accident and Emergency because my father had had a stroke and spending the day watching him and worrying about him, and then when he was finally admitted to a ward and we were told to go home, meeting one of the girls from my own tutor group as we left the hospital.

'Hello Miss,' she greeted me cheerily, 'why are you here?'
'My father's had a stroke, why are you here Elaine?'
'Oh, my foot's gone sceptic Miss,' she said, showing me her porky little hoof, shoved into a shoe that was too small and too high and which I had told her daily not to wear to school. In spite of that, I liked Elaine, but she really didn't get it.

That's a gratuitous picture of Jaime Pressly, Joy from 'My Name is Earl', a show I love. My friend explained to me a little while ago that Joy is a honey, but not someone you lust after because she isn't smart. Made sense, I totally understood that.

PS. It's August, the French are on holiday, no I mean seriously France has shut up shop and gone away. Does no-one see the opportunities here?