Day 594

Aka Sunday 16^th September

It was a bit of lazy Sunday, I’d submitted two job applications, so figured I could take a breather for a day, so I:

…listened to the first episode (The Inheritance) of Rob Newman's Total Eclipse of Descartes, in which he discussed the philosophy/ideology of the UKs selective education (grammars, comps., etc.) policy, which is based on studies of the intelligence of social classes (upper, middle and working) by Sir Cyril Burt. The only problem is that Burt falsified his data, he liked to use the figure 0.771 a lot, which is what helped to ‘trip’ him up, the revelation of which surprisingly (but not completely surprisingly) hasn’t changed our approach to education. I say ours, but I really mean the Tory party/ Theresa May. Newman goes into great depth, showing how disturbing and bigoted this approach was/is.

…listened to the last few episodes of the ‘The Thing Minute’ podcast. This has been a really enjoyable podcast and has highlighted new sources of information about ‘The Thing’, like Cohen’s blog, and new ideas about what happens in the film, for example, that MacReady is cool, collected and in control when things are going his way, but when they don’t he lashes out, as shown by the chess game in the first few minutes of the film.

…and read Goro #6 and #7, by Sarah Horrocks, Goro is a weird comic that I find hard to adequately describe, but here I go! It’s a melodramatic crime thriller, its Dynasty meets Carlito’s Way, with dysfunctional (and functional) family relationships at the forefront #6 and #7 finds things building to a head, people miraculously wake up from comas, brothers piss off sisters and long-lost family connections are made. Goro is a great read and doesn’t look like any other comic on the shelves (including virtual shelves). 8/10.