Meg and I must have been more tired than we realised yesterday as we practically both overslept this morning and it was a bit of a rush around to get ourselves ready before the carers arrived. This morning our trusty domestic help turned up switching her days this week as she has a very busy week in her normal place of work and was trying to ease the pressure a little. The day started off gloomy and raining but after breakfast we make a trip down the hill to pick up our newspaper and give ourselves some lungfuls of fresh air. As it was quite a fine day, we made a venture down our local High Street, purchasing a soft toy for Meg in our Local Salvation Army charity shop. Nothing else really took our fancy so we made our way home to coincide with the lunchtime call of the carers. Both they and myself have rather horrendous problems just getting into and out of our access road because a new gas main is being installed on the distributor road which we have to utilise to get onto the main Kidderminster Road. The contractors are just at the point where they are digging a trench immediately opposite our drive and basically all traffic on the road is closed in both directions.So to take the car out of the road, and even to get past the vehicles that block the road, we have to look pitifully at the contractors.
We are still experimenting with 'Alexa' and have tried giving it a variety of commands. If you try to ask Alexa about Donald Trump however, you do not get any real answers. As a joke, I asked Alexa 'Tell me about Donald Trump's sexual peccadillos' followed by 'Tell me about Donald Trump's convictions' to which you only get the bland answer that Alexa cannot help with that particular query or does not understand the question. But since the 1970s, at least 26 women have publicly accused Donald Trump, of rape, kissing, and groping without consent; looking under women's skirts; and walking in on naked teenage pageant contestants but Trump has denied all of the allegations.He has a history of insulting and belittling women when speaking to the media and on social media and has made lewd comments, disparaged women's physical appearance, and referred to them using derogatory epithets.But only a cursory scan of the web reveals an article (courtesy of 'The Daily Beast') which is entitled 'A Handy Guide to (Nearly?) (Maybe?) All the Sex Scandals in Trump’s New Cabinet' so there is a wealth of information out there. Intrigue I did a little bit of digging and discovered that Alexa uses the 'Bing' search engine which, if you question it directly, spills all of the dirt on Donald Trump without hesitation. But there are nuances to this question that do not pull in one direction. Some users have tried to ask Alexa why they should have voted for Donald Trump only to be informed that Alexa does not engage in political debate or endorse a particular candidate. But when asked a similar question of Kamala Harris, Alexa will reply that she is a 'woman of colour fighting for racial justice' When challenged about all of this, Amazon replied that it was an 'error' that is being quickly fixed but clearly there are algorithms at work that give very inconsistent answers to these questions.
For lunch, I was conscious that I needed to eat up some bits and pieces before my shopping day on a Thursday. I had some prepared cauliflower cheese which I had purchased from Aldi and was apparently some days out of date but I opened and microwaved it and it was fine. To give us a bit more protein, I had some fragments of beef left over from the weekend joint so I fried an onion to which added the meat fragments and then I made this a bit more exciting with some fruity sauce and a spoonful of Bovril. The end result was pretty taste so I may feel inclined to repeat this little bit of experimental cooking. After lunch, I FaceTimed our son to check on his progress after his recent spell in hospital and it appears that he is making some reasonable progress which is a source of great relief to me. Then I thought I would have a quick look at the films available on Amazon Prime and selected the first which was a sort of biopic of the famous dancer, Isadora Duncan. I was not really concentrating on the film which was playing in the background as I was intent to do a quick sort of the newspapers before the bulk of them could be binned ready for the bin collection in the morning. But the film was one of those disappointing ones where you have invested a certain amount of time in it thinking that it might improve before you realise that you would have been better off watching something else. By an Amazon delivery in the late afternoon, I received a copy of the Chris van Tulleken's book 'Ultra-Processed People' which I now see is a No 1 Sunday Times bestseller and was first published last year by Penguin in 2024. It seems to be my kind of book because at first glance, it appears to be incredibly well researched with some 53 pages of references and nearly 400 pages long. Watching the documentary by van Tulleken was enough to stimulate me to buy the book but now I will have to find the time to actually read it, probably in small chunks every night after Meg has been put to bed.
When the two young carers arrived for Meg's teatime call, we had some fascinating conversations about their belief systems. Perhaps as a result of having to meet with a variety of both clients and co-workers they were both of the opinion that they could tell almost within seconds whether they going to feel attuned or not with the people with whom they needed to interact. In the 1960's, they used to talk a lot of 'vibes'. When I put this term into Google, I learnt that people who give off good vibes are often described as having a positive energy that makes others feel safe, happy, and relaxed. Some signs that someone has good vibes include a smiling demeanour, open body language, an optimistic outlook, a supportive nature, expressions of gratitude and kindness and empathy. The same source indicated that a person's energy is a combination of their past, mindset, dominant thoughts, and perception of the world. This energy can be easily felt, or it can manifest subtly and subconsciously. People can sense good or bad vibes through their nervous systems, which can pick up on chemical signals left in a physical space. These signals are based on the emotional state of the person who left them. Now these young people really believed in these principles whereas I must say that I am agnostic about this kind of material at the moment.
© Mike Hart [2024]