Home: Blog: 2006-05-01 What's hot!Home: Blog: 2006-05-01 What's hot!It's time to make sure you have the right opinions.
Logical Positivism: Freddy Ayer's still the bad boy of British empiricism. Though we can't think of an experiment which would demonstrate that it ain't so, we still assert that nothing is getting bigger than reductivism.
The Spleen: You don't know what it does, but you still had to have one!
Algebra: The fun fun business of finding out what 'x' is. Gotta love those Arabian mathematicians!
Death: Now it's cool to be cool.
Feudalism: A social blast from the past coming to a fledgling democracy near you. You give up a little power, you gain a clearly defined role in an unchanging, backwards, God-given hierarchy. A cure for existential angst if ever there was one - and good for the environment! The ideal gift for the Green or Political Islamicist in your life.
Paradoxes: Very intriguing, very cool...
Paradoxes: ...and yet somehow still crap.
Mountains: Yeah, very nice, and all that, but after a while simply being "very tall" doesn't seem enough somehow. One trick pony.
Gravity: The ultimate downer. Is it a physical force transmitted by gravitons, or merely a metaphor for the curvature of space-time? Who cares?
Ireland: Has finally become insufferable: we always knew it would. Stuff your Bodhran lessons.
Deja vu: Been there. Done that.
Episcopaleans: Noone's quite sure who they are. Well worth not finding out.
Prime numbers: Factorless snowflakes. Identity politics for integers.
Opposing thumbs: Overrated.
Cinzano could be the shock of the season. That staple of 1980's teenage bring-a-bottle parties, and once England's top dipsofavourite - with that high high alcohol per pound spent ratio, wrapped in a rakish brown paper bag - is now being bought in nostalgic self-parody by forty-somethings, a consumer force now known as the ironic pound.
...I'll be asking if lifestyle magazine journalism is fiesty self-expression or merely brain-rotting nonsense, and what attitude you should adopt towards it if you want be considered cool and have lots of sex.
Manny