Sometimes the post just decides - for better or worse - to go its own sweet way

'Bye now,' says a friend, and I'm reminded that this expression sounds exactly the same as buy now, something that stores and online sites encourage you to do all the time. As if this might be your last opportunity ever to grab the bargain (which is often something you don't want or need).

It may be the last chance you'll have, of course...you might be dead of a heart attack before you get out of the store, or before you've finished closing off the tab on the browser. But that aside, there usually isn't the great imperative to get on and buy the thing now that the store would like you to think.

It's like those ads you see on TV which tell you that there's only ten minutes in which you can purchase a particular item. If you actually do ring up, you find there's a queue, and you hold on for fifteen minutes and find that the supposed ten minutes in which you were to buy the thing have gone, and yet, amazingly, the item is still well and truly available.

None of this has anything to do with percussion instruments. You're going to ask how I made that leap. Well, this is a postmodern blog, after all, and leaps which lack connection are commonplace here, as they should be. I've just been reading Terry Eagleton's How to Read Literature, and he informs us in there that postmodern writing is full of sudden shifts and disconnections. So accept that fact that I've made a sudden shift and disconnected, and you'll be all right again. You might have to go and get yourself a small sedative, but don't worry about that. You'll have noticed that now I've shifted from postmodernism to stream of consciousness anyway, and perhaps it's well and truly time to bring this post to a close.

If such a thing is possible in postmodern writing. Closure isn't what it's all about there. And how can there be an end to a stream of consciousness?

All too much for this time of the day, especially when you've been up since 5.30 am and busy ever since.

Distracted by the Trivial

Once again the Islamic world is up in arms with a matter concerning Salman Rushdie. Some MP in Pakistan is threatening suicide bombers if the knighthood Rushdie has received isn’t taken away from him. The warped thinking that goes on in the Islamic world can scarcely be believed. Firstly, it’s none of their business who the Queen gives a knighthood too – and calling her an ‘old crone’ is hardly diplomatic.
But far more importantly, these same people who condemn a writer for writing something that offends them find no offence in the fact that 75 people were blown up in Baghdad today, and hundreds of others were injured. Do we hear anyone in the Muslim world condemning this act of terrorism? I certainly haven’t. And if we discuss such an omission in the Islamic world the Muslim speakers are likely to say it was all the fault of the Americans. If the Americans hadn’t been in Iraq it wouldn’t have happened. The plain nonsense of such a statement (which has been made before) is self-evident. The hypocrisy of the Islam is so blatant that the Western world can only stand by open-mouthed, wondering what piece of nonsense they’ll come up with next.
They have a great deal in common with Napoleon the Pig from Orwell’s book, Animal Farm. Whatever piece of nonsense he wanted to spout had to be believed, such as: All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others.
The Islamic world seems to say: Everything we say is wise, though much of it is nonsense.