(no subject)

Happy birthday, shewhostaples and mrissa!

The big picture is usually made up of lots of small ones

Forgot to add this into my post yesterday. Found it irritating.

Bostrom expressed dismay at how little research has been done on serious threats to humanity, writing: "There is more scholarly work on the life-habits of the dung fly than on existential risks."

There are lots of reasons for that, one of which is surely the disaster equivalent of being prepared for the previous war rather than the one that actually happens.

But also:

Not just because there may be ongoing, non-catastrophic, ills to humanity the prevention of which is served by studying dung-flies;

And not just out of envisaging a 1950s B-movie scenario of huge mutated dung-flies menacing humanity;

It strikes me as altogether likely that the clue to dealing with a major disaster will be something as unglamorous as the lifecycle of the dung-fly that some negelected scientist has been plugging away in obscurity, enlivened by occasional mockery about the pointlessness of what they are doing.

('Stop mucking around with that mould, Fleming, and get on with something useful.')

Miserable white man, active women

Mi privileged white-boy existential anomie litfic, let him show u it:

"Well, pain's interesting," he drawls languidly. "Depravity's interesting. All of my books come from pain. I mean," and he slowly starts to smile, "what's ever been interesting about joy?"

I think I want something rather spiker than a codfish for Mr Easton Ellis.

Have a couple of interesting women to take the taste out of your mouths:
Barnham [née Bradbridge], Alice (1523–1604), silkwoman and benefactor:

As a merchant Francis Barnham was prohibited from keeping a shop, and the retail branch of the family's business was evidently headed by his wife. Alice Barnham sold fancy fringes and points to the Drapers' Company in the early 1560s, and seems to have had the status of a professional silkwoman. Silkwork was a popular career for the wives of leading citizens who, like all freemen's wives, were authorized to operate as femmes soles, in which capacity Alice was able to bind her own apprentices, keep her own shop, and was responsible for her own debts. Her stock probably serviced Francis's attempts to disguise large loans as sales of merchandise; she was, for example, directly implicated in the usury charge of 1574. After her husband's death two years later two of his apprentices worked out their terms with her. By not remarrying she protected her freedom of the city and bound at least three more apprentices in her own name, freeing the last when she was in her late seventies.
....
In her own will Alice left an assortment of charitable bequests, including £5 each to the poorest prisoners at several London gaols, £10 to children at Christ's Hospital, £4 to purchase food for inmates of Bedlam, £20 to impoverished students of divinity at Oxford and Cambridge universities, £120 for young merchants in Chichester, and sums of between £5 and £10 to poor persons in London, Hampshire, and Sussex. Barnham Street in Southwark is named for Francis's bequest to Christ's Hospital, but in his edition of the Survay of London of 1617 Anthony Munday singled out Alice instead, praising her as one of forty-three ‘citizens' wives deserving memory for example to posterity’.

Please 2 refer to Alice Barnham anyone who is explaining the paucity of roles for women in their fantasy on account of it is Tudor-style world.

And Betty Jerman, journalist, author and campaigner, and can I refer all those people who sigh for the 50s and their pretty clothes and lovely domestic life to the reasons for founding the National Housewives Register, following a column by Jerman on women's suburban isolation and anomie?

Nuns on the run (because I couldn't resist).