Shall I tell you a story?

Laying the Foundation

11/8/2018

If this site every goes dark - Friday comes and there's no new post; years pass and it's still this sentence at the top - you might want to - well, you might want to breathe a sigh of relief, but if you came here on purpose (thanks), you might want to try william essex dot online.

There's nothing there at the moment (except that I pressed "publish" on the template so you get to look at that, plus ads temporarily), so I'm not linking the address (and I'd hate you to watch how slowly I get my act together over there), but I had a glitch on my other (new) laptop the other day, and that got me daydreaming about paper back-ups, hard drives, thumb drives, redundant systems, cloud-based computing, server farms, solar flares knocking out electronics generally, sea levels rising, zombie apocalypses, black holes ... and then I had a thought.

If I actually sign up for a second website, maybe I'll be able to watch YouTube clips without those earnest young entrepreneurs telling me how easily they set up their websites. I've found that if I keep doing online banking, the bank stops sending me those pictures of the young woman in exercise gear, at the gym, who's chosen just that moment to check her balance on her smartphone. So I transact like crazy. Perhaps the same principle applies here. Perhaps if I just set up a website and tinker with it occasionally, the young bloke in the specs who's just set up his website and now leans forward, one elbow on the desk, and starts being very frank with me about how easy it all is - will go away.

I signed up for the minimum package over there, hence the ads, but I'll upgrade as and when I get my act together. The thing with the new laptop was, it decided as of Thursday evening last, to block my access to this page. Not the dashboard, but the "edit site" page. My chromebook (Chromebook?) did the same. The man behind the counter at the computer store just down from the cinema did what he always does when I come through the door - carefully, slowly, he explained a few possible solutions that I could try at home, and then he sent me away without charge. Usually, that works.

But this time, when I got home, his possible fixes didn't work, so I think I might have an excuse actually to get in there and pay him something. It's about time. He'll probably fix the thing, but if it turns out that my new laptop's awkward little moment is the first sign of an impending global meltdown in all my current IT dispositions - yeah, I can work with the template I've chosen. And anyway, there are precedents. I dimly remember, from years ago reading under the sheets with a torch, that the conclusion of Isaac Asimov's Foundation trilogy (spoiler) somehow involves the discovery that there's a second Foundation hidden behind the first.

I've been told not to mention any movies for a while, so let's put it this way. If you're breeding dinosaurs from blood preserved in mosquitoes preserved in prehistoric amber, you will know the importance of maintaining a second island. If your first Death Star was shot up by pesky rebels, you will know how much it matters to build a second Death Star - secretly - with absolutely the minimum possible number of fatal vulnerabilities.

There is now a Second Website. This one's built on Weebly. I like Weebly. I have no plans to leave Weebly. If there was a "Like" button I would press it. Weebly! Weebly! Don't misunderstand me. But - yeah. Just in case. Dot online kind of covers all the bases, I think.

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In a desk diary scavenged from a house of the dead, a man records his own experiences of the end times: what he has to do to survive; how he came to be marooned where he is; how he reacts to the discovery that he is not alone.

Over coffee, a young journalist gets The Message.

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What happens here

This site is updated weekly, usually on a Friday although I might change that (again). I write it because (1) I like writing it and (2) I like having a deadline. More often than not, it works out as a commentary on the week just passed*.
There are no ads, no pop-ups and no tricky business with cookies. I don't take money for my own opinions. [Except when they come out in book form.] I write this for myself, without a set agenda, on any subject that catches my attention. If you're interested enough, it's not hard to work out my interests. Not impossible, anyway.
*Although I seem to have gone away from that recently. Normal service may or may not be resumed.

No data is kept on this website overnight. Blog posts are usually shared to my Facebook page. We can discuss them there if you feel so inclined.

There's a page for this, but maybe you'd like to see the cover here?

Where are we now? We're hurtling round the sun, held to the ground by a weak force that we don’t begin to understand, arguing about trade deals between the land masses on a planet mostly covered by water.
The dolphins must think us ridiculous. No wonder they only come to the shallow water to play with us, not to signal their most complex philosophies. More.

Riddle. It takes two to make me, but when I'm made, I'm only a memory. What am I? Scroll down to find out.

Is that a catastrophe I see before me? Could be. There was a clear sky earlier, but now clouds are encroaching from the North. We could be in for a storm. More.

You found me!
Welcome. Thank you for coming. But am I the right
William Essex? Click here
to meet some more.

Read My Shorts?

Here is yet another page of old blog posts and other writings. Sorry, but I need my metaphorical sock drawer for metaphorical socks. The link to the page is right at the end of the paragraph here.

A very green picture. I can't remember where I took this.

Roads without end

Here is a passage from a review of the book The Road to Somewhere by David Goodhart. I haven't read the book (yet), but the collected reviews would make a worthwhile set of political arguments in their own right. More.

Also available in English. Look further down.

State of the Union

Several commentators today saying that they've lost confidence in the US. Making their point by talking up the glories of the past. After two weeks of this administration, they're not going back.
Were they wrong, and they've seen the light? Or has the US changed? I guess the latter is the intended meaning. But we should at least acknowledge the possibility... More.

Categories
(Started 4th November 2017; forgotten shortly after that.)

Kitchen parenting

I have teenage children. When they're home, sooner or later one of them will come to me and say: "Dad! We're going to make a mess in the kitchen!
   "Great!" I will reply, picking up on the tone of voice. "What are you going to do?"
    "We thought we'd slice up some peppers and onion and bits of chicken and leave them glued to the bottom of the frying pan. Burn something in one of the saucepans and leave it floating in the sink."
    "Anything else?" More.

Variously available online, in a range of formats.

No pinpricks

Okay, so a certain President recently made a speech to his people, in which he told them that their country's military "don't do pinpricks". His intention was to get across that when those soldiers do a "limited" or even "targeted" strike, it hurts. But those of us in the cynical wing of the listening public took it the other way. More.

Ceased to exist. Sorry.

Making mistakes

We all make mistakes in our relationships. Some are mistakes that can be corrected with an apology. Sometimes - "if only I'd said that, and not that." Sometimes, they're mistakes that are incomprehensible even to ourselves, and sometimes, we do things that show us up as not quite the likeable hero of our own story that we want to think we are. More.

Man down?

There's a report by the Samaritans about men and suicide. It's titled Men, Suicide and Society, and it finds that men are more likely to take their own lives than women (in the UK and ROI). More.

Offending the status quo

Looking at both the US election and the revived Brexit debate in the UK, the question is not: who wins? but: how did we get here? More.

Thinks: populism

Bright, sunny morning. Breeze. Weather forecast said fog, but it's a blue sky overlaid with vapour trails. Windy season, drifts of Autumn-coloured leaves. Thinking, on this morning's walk, about populism. More.

Early morning, Church Street, Falmouth

9th May 2014

On the day that I wrote this, the early news told us of a parade in Moscow to celebrate Russia’s defeat of Nazi Germany in the Second World War. Crimea remained annexed, and the Russia/Ukraine crisis was not resolved. At around half eight, the BBC’s reporter in Moscow was cut off in mid-sentence summarising the military display; the Today programme on Radio 4 cut to the sports news. More.

Riddle. What are you? You're a conversation!