This morning I got the warning that Adobe Flash Player was unsafe. I did a little checking and found:

Mozilla has added all versions of Adobe Flash up to the most recent version 18.0.0.203 to the Firefox blocklist.

Security researchers have discovered vulnerabilities in recent versions of Adobe Flash that have not been patched yet by Adobe but are exploited in the wild. In particular, several exploit kits are already making use of it to serve crypto-ransomware to systems running Adobe Flash.

In an effort to protect Firefox users from harm on the Internet, Mozilla has added the current version of Adobe Flash and all previous versions to the browser’s blocklist.

The blocklist lists browser extensions, plugins and other components that are blocked automatically by Firefox either directly or sometimes in the case of plugins, by setting them to “ask to activate”.

The Flash vulnerability affects all versions of Flash on Windows, Linux and Macintosh systems.

Firefox displays a warning message on its plugins management page that Flash is vulnerable. As you can see on the screenshot below, Shockwave Flash has been set to “ask to activate” and not blocked permanently.

Yet another reason why I continue to stick with Firefox. I expect the problem will be remedied shortly.

Check out Undercurrents News Networks…

I’ve re-read Jon Schwarz’s two-part interview with Rep. John Sarbanes (D-Md.) this morning and I’m growing increasingly dissatisfied with Sarbanes’ Government By The People Act. Perhaps he’s being pragmatic, but I find the assumptions regarding money in politics offensive.

People say, “I already can’t stand these politicians, why would I want to underwrite your campaign?”

I say, “Look, I know you don’t like politicians, but you’re paying our salary. Would you prefer that my salary be paid for by Halliburton or Goldman Sachs?” The answer would be no, because they know that there would be a conflict on doing my job on behalf of the people. But how different is it if the salaries of all my campaign workers are being paid by Halliburton and Goldman Sachs? My campaign’s the way I get to Congress in the first place and how I keep coming back. So how isn’t that a conflict of interest?

It’s your choice. You’ve got to decide whether you want to own this system or not. Somebody’s going to own this government. It ought to be us, not Wall Street, the oil and gas industry and all these big corporations.

Sarbanes’ choices are faulty. He makes a choice to take money from people he would rather not. The solution is not more money from other sources, the solution is for people like Sarbanes to stand up and say no.

Money from lobbyists and corporations is the crack of politics. Sarbanes need to take advice from Nancy Reagan and just say no. If Bernie Sanders can take that stance, then so can any other politicians with an ounce of integrity.

I’m watching Gillian Anderson in The Fall on Netflix at the moment and I’m taken with how Anderson’ character plays with the undercurrent of misogamy that runs through each episode.

If all you knew about police officers in my country was what you saw and heard in the past year or so in our media (including Have Coffee Will Write), you would be convinced that they were a bad lot. Yes, plenty of problems exist, many of them deeply systematic, but most police officers are good people doing a tough job.

Like Roeland Park, Kansas, officer Mark Engravelle:

A mother of six girls was stopped at a Roeland Park Walmart for stealing diapers, baby wipes and clothes.

Officer Mark Engravalle was called to a Walmart store in Kansas to investigate a shoplifting report, he found Sarah Robinson and her six children in the parking lot. Engravalle and his partner noticed that the three youngest of the woman’s five daughters—a 4-year-old and two 2-year-olds—weren’t wearing shoes.

The crying, dirty, barefoot children touched Mark Engravalle’s heart. “I just want to have a place for my girls”.

“They thought I was going to take their mother to jail”, he said.

“I have been taken aback by the profound response and the positive nature that people have for this woman and her children”, he said. Robinson thought she was going to be thrown in jail and be separated from her girls, but what the officer did wasn’t what she expected. Donations are pouring in through the police department, and people who are willing to help are welcome to drop by the station to bring goods for the family.

She said she has since been swamped with requests from the public who have offered to donate food and clothing to the family.

The story gets better.

John, Derf, Backderf writes:

I’m happy to report that Trashed is delivered and in the can. All 240 pages of it. Took a bit longer to put the finishing touches on it, as it always does, and MAN am I sick of looking at these pages, but it’s completed at last. Here’s the wraparound cover (above). I especially like how designer Pam Notorantonio tucked the barcode right into the truck’s hopper.

I’m recently returned from Book Expo New York and the American Library Association convention in Frisco, where I passed out crappy proof copies like candy.

And the first review is in! Damn book isn’t even printed yet, and Kirkus Reviews gave it a “starred review”! That’s not one star, like a movie critic would give to a lousy film, that’s starred as in “we like this book!”

“Indie comics stalwart Backderf returns to the scabrous humor and pointed commentary of his earlier work. A one-time garbageman himself, Backderf has a clear affinity for these hardworking stiffs and their travails. An entertaining ode to the odiferous realities of getting by.”

Heidi MacDonald at Comicsbeat also declares Trashed to be “hilarious and disgusting.”

And these are based on the positively dreadful, mistake-and-typo-ridden proof copy. Abrams was in such a rush to get it out by these two events, they just used my first draft. I hadn’t even spellchecked anything, which is painfully obvious, as I have apparently lost the ability to correctly spell any word longer than two syllables. I’ll be building a bonfire out of any copies remaining once the real book comes out. That’ll be the end of September (I hope).

There are plenty of text novels that don’t run 240 pages, a movie version of Trashed would run four hours. I can’t begin to imagine the hours necessary to draw 240 pages and I have to wonder in the universe of graphic novels, what tiny percentage have reached and passed that number?

My days of attending Comic Con are long past so I’ll have to pre-order from Mac’s Backs and wait for the release with the rest of the mortals, but in my West Coast youth I think I might have gone all dark superhero to grab one of those positively dreadful, mistake-and-typo-ridden proof copies.

Previously…

I’ve never been a late-night television person, I’m a lark not an owl, but I have followed David Letterman’s Top Ten Lists over the years, so I’m happy that, even in retirement, Letterman hasn’t really hung up hat.

On Friday night, sporting a post-retirement beard and appearing with his friends Martin Short and Steve Martin at their live comedy show in San Antonio, Letterman made up for lost time with a list of “Interesting facts about Donald Trump”.

“I am so glad to be out of the house,” he said, before beginning his discussion of someone he called “a high-profile fellow” and “someone who doesn’t shy away from aspects of his life”.

Letterman’s list – in homage to a constant feature of his time on the Late Show – mocked such familiar Trump targets as the billionaire developer’s hair and his famous vanity.

10. That thing on his head was the gopher in Caddyshack.

9. During sex, Donald Trump calls out his own name.

8. Donald Trump looks like the guy in the lifeboat with the women and children.

7. He wants to build a wall? How about building a wall around that thing on his head?

6. Trump walked away from a moderately successful television show for a delusional, bull … Oh, no, wait, that’s me.

5. Donald Trump weighs 240lbs – 250 with cologne.

4. Trump would like all Americans to know that that thing on his head is free-range.

3. (tie) If president, instead of pardoning a turkey on Thanksgiving, he plans to evict a family on Thanksgiving.

3. (tie) That’s not a hairdo – it’s a wind advisory.

2. Donald Trump has pissed off so many Mexicans, he’s starring in a new movie entitled No Amigos (a reference to the 1986 comedy Three Amigos, which starred Short and Martin).

1. Thanks to Donald Trump, the Republican mascot is also an ass.

While I don’t doubt that they laughed too, the rest of the candidates for the Republican Party nomination are not amused.

Our house guest, a cousin from Wales, thinks having John Oliver’s job—telling Americans how fucked up we are—would be his dream job.

Senate Intelligence Committee Report On Torture.

Unions and collective bargaining work because masses of relatively weak and disorganized individuals can come together and build organizations that rival and even surpass those of much smaller, but wealthier and more powerful groups. Our founders understood this principle when they began our most important document with the words We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union.

Today Rep. John Sarbanes (D-Md.) sees the imbalance of power in American politics where the tiniest of minorities holds the vast majority of wealth and leverage that power to lead federal, state and local governments around like the lap dogs they have become. Sarbanes, speaking with Jon Schwarz at The//Intercept, describes his plan.

Most people are sitting there in their kitchens, and they’re watching cable television, and it seems like every day there’s more news about big money, Super PACs, multi-billion dollar presidential campaigns. And the average person is looking at that and saying, “This is crazy, where do I fit into this? How do I possibly have any kind of role to play or any voice that could match what those other players have?”

And that’s where we come along and say: “Well, actually here’s a system that can give you some power, that can make you a player.” And I think if you offer that to people, they’ll say, “Okay, I don’t have to just be a spectator in my own democracy anymore. I can actually go on the field and play the game.” I think this is a very hopeful message.

There’s some great research that’s been done on this in New York City [which instituted a 6 to 1 match for small donations in 2007]. There were whole neighborhoods, before they put their multiple matching system in place at the municipal level, that never gave any money — because no candidate ever showed up asking for a donation. They completely ignored those neighborhoods, because they said, I can’t collect $500 donations there, or $1000 donations, or even $200 donations. So they never set foot over there, they never did the outreach.

Since they put that system in place, it’s completely changed that dynamic. And you’re seeing events and gatherings and outreach on the part of candidates in some of these neighborhoods that were completely ignored before — because it’s worthwhile for those candidates to go find those citizens.

The problem we have now is that if you can give $25 or $50, that may be a heavy lift for you but it’s still not a big enough lift for the candidate to want to come and find you. Right now to make it worth it for a member to attend a fundraising event, they need to come back with $10,000, at least. And on K Street [i.e., at a fundraising event in Washington, D.C. with lobbyists] you know you can walk out of the room with that.

There’s no way a house party with 30 people can compete. They each give $25, and that’s $750. But the cost now is about $1.6 million for a congressional campaign. So you have to go to the thing on K Street to get money.

But let’s say you went to a living room in your district, and they each gave $50 and got their $25 tax credit, so it only cost each of them $25. With the 6 to 1 match, that’s a $350 donation per person. And with 30 people in that living room, that’s over $10,000.

So, I can see at least one major flaw in this plan. Let’s say that I’m the owner of a large corporation with 100,000 employees. I tell my employees that everyone is going to get a $100 bonus and that some will be able to double that bonus. All they have to do to receive a further $100 is to write a check for $50 to a certain candidate and present a copy of the canceled check to the accounting department. The upfront cost to the company is $10 million to $20 million, but the potential windfall to the campaign could be as much as $35 million.

I recognize that my scheme may be fatally flawed and countermanded by existing election law, but if I can arrive at such a simple work-around in just a few seconds, how likely do you think the chance that billionaires with their minions will contrive to find legal solutions to turn Sarbanes’ act into another tool for our oligarchy?

What billionaire won’t jump at all that free tax money to buy a pet politician?

Tweaking the system is just political masturbation.

Still, reading Part II of Schwarz’s piece is important.

Mano Singham has written again and again that members of Congress are perfectly capable of coming together in harmony and bipartisan harmony when the issue at hand rises from the needs of their billionaire corporate masters.

Our own Rob Portman is more than happy to co-sponsor a bill with the dark side when our Oligarchy barks a command.

In today’s bitter, poisonous political environment, there’s still one place where Democratic and Republican leaders find common ground: an abiding devotion to multinational corporations.

Sen. Chuck Schumer, D.-N.Y., and Sen. Rob Portman, R-Ohio, have just proposed a plan that would give those corporations something they’ve always wanted: a so-called “territorial” tax system in the U.S.

A territorial tax system would only tax U.S.-based multinationals on their profits earned within the United States — which sounds like it makes sense, except that it’s incredibly easy for big corporations to use financial trickery to sell to a big market like the U.S. but say their profits were earned in another country. Another country that always happens to have a much lower tax rate than here. For instance, in 2010 U.S.-based multinationals claimed that so much of their profits were earned in Bermuda that these profits were 1578 percent the size of Bermuda’s economy.

According to the current law, though, U.S.-based corporations are taxed on those profits at U.S. rates if they ever bring these profits back home. So they just leave them overseas—right now they have about $2.1 trillion stashed in other countries.

The Schumer-Portman plan would impose a tax on corporate profits purportedly earned in other countries whether they came back to the U.S. or not. But it would do so at a far lower rate than the current standard corporate tax rate of 35 percent — President Obama has proposed 14 percent, and while Schumer and Portman haven’t come up with a specific number, Portman says 14 percent is much too high.

The obvious consequence if the Schumer-Portman scheme becomes law is that businesses based solely within the U.S. would be at a permanent disadvantage. Multinationals could earn profits in the U.S., get their armies of lawyers and accountants to make these profits appear to have been “earned” in the Cayman Islands, and get taxed at the overseas profit rate. Meanwhile, purely domestic companies would either have to pay the higher domestic rate, or turn into multinationals themselves.

I know that a story like this can sound like inside baseball and may even sound as if we’re bringing tax money back to the United States, but make no mistake, this is yet another blood-sucking move by our Oligarchy.

I was horrible at sports when I was young. I played three years of summer league baseball as a left and center fielder where my main skill was to get under fly balls and catch them before they touched the ground. The hard part was getting under the ball. If I did that right, then the ball simply fell into the basket I formed with my glove and left hand. That is how I think of luck: getting under, and capturing, the opportunity before the chance strikes the ground and rolls away.

Scott Adams clearly learned the same lesson.

I pursued a conscious strategy of managing opportunities in a way that would make it easier for luck to find me. p. 1

From How To Fail At Almost Everything And Still Win Big by Scott Adams

Previously…

Found in my electronic chapbook.

Steven Moffatt’s 21st century update of Sherlock Holmes has been one of the most talked-about BBC shows of recent years, pitting Benedict Cumberbatch’s meticulous detective against a host of contemporary foes—while keeping a little of the emotional repression of Conan Doyle’s creation.

Now for an upcoming Christmas special, Moffatt is doubling back on himself, taking Holmes and Watson back to their original Victorian setting, but clearly with a sprinkling of post-modern wit. As you can see from this trailer launched at Comic-Con, there’s plenty of winking self-referentiality, both to Conan Doyle’s stories and the TV series itself.

Yes, I know, all of the news coming out of the Vatican of late might simply be meant to distract the world from past issues like pedophile priests, but I’m willing, for now, to give Pope Francis his chance. Earlier this year he pissed off American petroleum industry hacks politicians by saying that Global Warming was real and an existential threat to humanity. Now, in a speech in Peru, the Pontiff goes for the real source of human misery: unfettered/super capitalism.

The Reuters News Service reports that:

Pope Francis has urged the downtrodden to change the world economic order, denouncing a “new colonialism” by agencies that impose austerity programs and calling for the poor to have the “sacred rights” of labor, lodging and land.

In one of the longest, most passionate and sweeping speeches of his pontificate, the Argentine-born pope used his visit to Bolivia to ask forgiveness for the sins committed by the Roman Catholic church in its treatment of native Americans during what he called the “so-called conquest of America”.

The pontiff also demanded an immediate end to what he called the “genocide” of Christians taking place in the Middle East and beyond, describing it as a third world war.

“Today we are dismayed to see how in the Middle East and elsewhere in the world many of our brothers and sisters are persecuted, tortured and killed for their faith in Jesus,” Pope Francis said.

“In this third world war, waged piecemeal, which we are now experiencing, a form of genocide is taking place, and it must end.”

Quoting a fourth century bishop, he called the unfettered pursuit of money “the dung of the devil”, and said poor countries should not be reduced to being providers of raw material and cheap labour for developed countries.

Heads explode on Fox news in three… two… one…

The Cleveland Plain Dealer—if you still remember it—is down to 79 editorial workers. And it’s going down from there.

I’m told there are about the same number working the digital Cleveland.com side. Or as the management calls it—Northeast Ohio Media Group.

But the bloodletting isn’t over.

As the PD hires cheaper and less experienced young people at NEOMG, it cuts the more experienced Plain Dealer staff. It’s the unionized part. Surprise anyone?

The call is for “fast news” to get on line quickly. Easiest to do: crime and sports. That’s why you see so much of it.

By October, the Newhouse family gang, which likes to be known as Advance Publications, wants five more PD Newspaper Guild members to check out—or it will do the job itself.

The PD—print and web site–keeps slicing out its editorial heart with work force dismissals. It has become a part-time delivered newspaper—four days Continue Reading »

I finished reading Scott Adams’ How To Fail At Almost Everything And Still Win Big recently and, as is my system, I put my notes from the book into my Electronic Chapbook. Normally I start at the beginning and proceed in due course to the end. I’m not doing that this time. Instead I’ve jumped ever so slightly ahead to what I think of as Adams’ Big Idea: that which is consistent across at least two filter axes is true.

When it comes to any big or complicated question, humility is the only sensible point of view. Still, we mortals need to navigate our world as if we understood it. The alternative—acting randomly—would be absurd. To minimize the feeling of absurdity in your life, I recommend using a specific system for sorting truth from fiction. This system will be useful for reading this book, and it could be even more important in your life. The system recognizes that there are at least six common ways to sort truth from fiction, and interestingly, each is a complete train wreck.

Personal experience (human perceptions are iffy).

Experience of people you know (even more unreliable).

Experts (they work for money, not truth).

Scientific studies (correlation is not causation).

Common sense (a good way to be mistaken with complete confidence).

Patter recognition (patterns, coincidence and personal bias look alike).

In our messy, flawed lives, the nearest we can get to truth is consistency. Consistency is the bedrock of the scientific method. Scientists creep up on the truth by performing controlled experiments and attempting to observe consistent results. In your everyday, non-scientist life you do the same thing, but it’s not as impressive, nor as reliable. For example, if every time you eat popcorn, one hour later you fart so hard that it inflates your socks, you can reasonably assume popcorn makes you gassy. It’s not science, but it’s still an entirely useful pattern. Consistency is the best marker of truth that we have, imperfect though it may be. p. 4

From How To Fail At Almost Everything And Still Win Big by Scott Adams

Previously…

Found in my electronic chapbook.

Three years ago I wrote about the inconsiderate dolts who collect their dog poop in plastic bags and then leave the bags for someone else to collect. This summer I’ve noticed another kind of eejit prowling the Metroparks: people who make a habit of sticking their garbage on the branches of trees along the paths.

I have blogged sporadically, at best, since the beginning of summer and generally have allowed too many tasks to plummet down my procrastination rabbit hole. Central among those tasks has been the daily creation of my Action list: a ranking of vital tasks. Oliver Burkeman nails the sodding annoying aspect of all of this in Make The Most Of Your Guilt.

Unless you’re a better person than me—and I reluctantly concede such people may exist—there are probably several things on your to-do list, or on your mind, that you feel guilty about not having got around to yet. This kind of low-level, everyday guilt poses a puzzle. It arises, obviously, because of a gap between what you believe you should have done and what you’ve actually done; were we perfectly rational creatures, feeling that negative emotion would motivate us to close the gap. In the real world, though, the easiest way not to feel the guilt is often just to focus on something else. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you… procrastination! Perhaps you’re already acquainted?

To avoid the unpleasant guilt, you avoid the guilt-triggering task. That triggers more guilt, thus more avoidance, and so on. You’re overdue, for example, to write to a faraway friend, but you put it off, because you want to give the task the attention it deserves. Then the guilt-avoidance cycle kicks in. Before you know it, a month’s gone by, and someone you especially wanted to contact is getting the silent treatment—not despite but because of how important you felt it was to get in touch. In the technical language of psychology, this is really sodding annoying.

Indeed, I am and it is. What to do?

In the Navy we always set aside Friday afternoons for Field Day. No, not an afternoon of sports and jovial camaraderie, but rather the time to break out the buckets, swabs, rags and polish to make the ship shiny bright and Bristol fashion. (We had a saying on my ship: Work it may, shine it must; our greatest enemies are dirt and rust. Beginning tomorrow, at four bells on the forenoon watch (10 a.m. to you landlubbers) I will sit to my first Guilt Hour. What is Guilt Hour? Thank you for asking.

You know that thing you’ve been meaning to do? The reply to the complex email you’ve been putting off, the phone call you’re dreading, or the task you’re cringing at because the last time it didn’t go so well? Unless you’re a whole lot more centered than I am, there’s probably a few items like this that serve mostly to make you feel guilty every time you remember that you haven’t done them yet.

Guilt isn’t a great motivator, so a few months ago my team at The Action Mill added a new item to our work calendar to try to put an end to the avoid it, feel guilty about avoiding it, avoid it some more cycle: the Guilt Hour.

Every Wednesday at 10am, we sit together and look at our task lists (we use Personal Kanbans, but any list of stuff you should do will work). We take 2-3 minutes to identify the one thing that we feel most guilty about not having done yet. Then we go around the table and name our One Guilty Task, and commit to spending the rest of Guilt Hour working on it.

That’s it: declare it, do it, move on. And once we implemented Guilt Hour things started to flow in interesting ways.

No one is allowed to judge you on the task you choose. In fact, you’re expected to do the opposite: if someone names something you could help them accomplish, you volunteer to assist with their Guilty Task right away. Taking on someone else’s task is considered one of the highest achievements in Guilt Hour. Generally, when you pass a Guilty Task to another person, the guilt that has been preventing it from getting done doesn’t get passed along.

Guilt is waste, so if you can make it disappear by passing a task to someone else, everybody wins. You get to move on to do something else, they get to feel good about helping you out, and if someone was waiting for you to do your task, they’re satisfied too.

I agree with the commenter who wrote:

From a psychology standpoint, the out-loud sharing of your Guilty Tasks is sheer brilliance. Leads to a reduction in ambiguity (does everyone think I’m a worthless slacker?) which correlates with anxiety reduction. Can also lead to normalization when you find out that others’ Guilty Tasks are similar to yours.

For me, I can also see a certain amount of self-shaming going on. If I allow myself to put an item on my weekly Guilt Hour list, then I will simultaneously create pressure to accomplish a task before the hour arrives.

This could work.

[This story is cross-posted from my other blog: The Writing On The Wal.]

When I first heard the story of Walmart refusing to make a cake decorated with the Confederate battle flag but then agreeing to create an ISIS battle flag in icing I immediately thought of James O’Keefe and Andrew Breitbart because the timing and pitch-perfect flackiness of the affair were just too clean.

Given votes in the South Carolina legislature over the the last few days, Netzhammer and his cohorts are becoming increasingly marginalized and the lie of heritage-not-hate crowd is exposed. They are not happy.

The discussion in the United States over the Confederate Flag has reached a fever pitch.

Shortly after Dylann Roof shot nine dead in a Charleston church the news was all over the details on how he had used the Confederate flag in his personal life.

So, leftists and politically correct moderates, decided the only thing to do was to create a big fuss out of nothing and get the flag banned wherever it might be.

It was absolutely insane to see how the opposition to the flag reached a fever pitch as well as insane to see how retailers across the country complied with idiotic bans of the flag. Apple computers even went so far as to pull all games containing the flag (even civil war games) off of their online app store.

And Walmart, who caters to conservatives all across of the nation, gave into the whining of liberals as they pulled the flag from stores and off their online shops.

And if you wanted to go to Walmart and make a cake with the Confederate flag on it, well good luck!

Walmart refused to honor such requests based on a pretend policy to not make something that might offend someone else.

However, their hypocrisy was soon exposed.

Vice News reports how one man showed them to be hypocrites of the highest degree. They report:

Chuck Netzhammer went to a Walmart in Slidell, Louisiana last week to get a personalized cake with a Confederate flag on it and the slogan “Heritage Not Hate.” The retailer, however, had just announced it would stop selling Confederate flag merchandise in response to the Charleston church shooting, so the store refused to bake the cake for Netzhammer.

In response to the denial, Netzhammer then placed an order for another sheet cake—this time with the black and white flag brandished by the so-called Islamic State, also known as ISIS.

“I went back yesterday and managed to get an ISIS battle flag printed. ISIS happens to be somebody who we’re fighting against right now, who are killing our men and boys overseas and are beheading Christians,” he told ABC News.

That’s right, the nation’s largest retailer put the ISIS battle flag right on a cake. The same flag that flies over the bloated corpses of the 250,000 some they’ve killed in the past two years. [What about the bloated corpses of the 620,000 who died in our internal war? JH]

Walmart was quick to back pedal and say the associate who made the cake was unaware they were making a cake representing ISIS and proceeded to apologize for the incident.

It’s unclear what’s more problematic, that the confederate flag is being banned from retailers, or that people would be so quick to create ISIS honoring paraphernalia.

Years ago I remember a fictional discussion in a television show produced in The United Kingdom between a young man finding fellowship with fascists and his grandfather. After finding Nazi paraphernalia in his grandson’s bedroom, the grandfather sat the boy down and explained how British men and women had died on battlefields around the world and in the villages and cities of England fighting what the swastika represented and that by owning and displaying his collection he was dishonoring those men and women, including his own great uncle.

That is a problem in Europe that continues as evidenced by the headline Nazi and Confederate flags seen near loyalist bonfire in Northern Ireland and images like these.

I find Walmart’s apology—An associate in a local store did not know what the design meant and made a mistake. The cake should not have been made and we apologize—credible and I feel for the person made the brunt of Netzhammer’s protest.

The great Southern writer William Falkner once put these words in the mouth of Temple Drake, the protagonist in Requiem For A Nun: The past is never dead. It’s not even past. Our history books deliver conflicting messages to our students about our Civil War/War of Northern Aggression and the former confederate states remain occupied (take a look at where our infantry divisions are based), a century and a half after General Robert E. Lee formally surrendered to General Ulysses S. Grant at the Appomattox Court House.

In the ’90s I conducted interviews for a story on the Bosnian War. What I most strongly remember is the vehemence with which the people I interviewed spoke about the atrocities committed by the other side more than a thousand years ago.

We can’t expect to be over our bloodiest war in a mere 150 years.

Falkner didn’t know the half of it.

While I’m certain that my humble library pales before the grandeur of Umberto Eco’s collection, I too have been the interrogated as to how many of my volumes have I actually read. Oliver Burkeman, writing in What unread books can teach us provides, via Eco’s How To Justify A Private Library, a very neat solution to that particular dialogue.

The novelist and scholar Umberto Eco once bemoaned the fact that many visitors to his home, seeing his vast personal library, can’t help but exclaim: “What a lot of books! Have you read them all?” His jaw stiffens: the question implies that his floor-to-ceiling bookshelves are for showing off, when actually they’re a research tool. Unread books are where the action is. The writer Nassim Taleb approvingly calls such a collection an “antilibrary”; one’s shelves, he argues, should contain “as much of what you do not know” as finances allow. And don’t expect the proportion of unread books to fall, either. The more you read, the more the perimeter of your knowledge increases, and the more you’ll realise you don’t know. (Incidentally, Eco’s deadpan response to his visitors’ question is, “No, these are the ones I have to read by the end of the month. I keep the others in my office.”)

I occasionally tell my students that I take great pride in my ignorance because ignorance is simply the absence of knowledge, and, since knowledge is generally easy to obtain, I am afforded a never ending life of discovery. I now, thanks to Burkeman, am able to elaborate further using my anti-library as an example.

Life is grand.