Sausage Pie

• From the department of "Hello darkness, my old friend," some musings on the meaning of silence and removal... How the brain manages silence (well, maybe, because this study concerns how the brain handles the sensory data called silence... not how it handles the intellectual concept). Sometimes even the LAT gets something right, like decrying NBC's Olympic egotism in not letting the athletic performances speak for themselves, but then in the same issue refuses to extol silence as an alternative to this (my objection is to the particular works covered, combined with the fanboyish overenthusiasm for Ms Fleming's declining skills — not to the concept of opera singers recording/performing indie music).
• Finally! Someone has explained the Heffalump Party in clear, unambiguous terms!

  

  Note carefully that I am distinguishing among the Party (whether Inner Party or Outer Party is, for the purpose, irrelevant; they're equally indefensible), movement conservatism (ditto), and conservative political thought (although usually and objectively wrong — like just about any other ideology; I'm a liberal because liberalism is less wrong and less often — it's a necessary part of political thought).

• As a corollary to the currently ongoing musings on packaging, here's a great big raspberry to CBS. I wanted to point to the successful experiment Craig Ferguson engaged in on Tuesday night: An hour of conversation with Stephen Fry. No audience. No sidekicks. Just conversation between two of the more intellectually inquisitive and erudite entertainers around today (yes, Craig, it's ok to be an intellectual even if you did drop out of high school to make fulltime drinking more convenient). However, I can't. When searching for the material, one doesn't get to an authorized repository until about fifteen entries down the list — those above it on the list are almost all pirates. Going to CBS's own site is doubly frustrating. For one thing, it's apparently "too soon" to have the whole episode available on the site, even though it was an out-of-the-norm episode. For another, I can't see it... because CBS's site uses not one, but three untrustworthy ad vendors that are blocked by my routine use of a simple, popular, privacy-oriented ad-on for Firefox.

  So thanks, CBS executives. You've just demonstrated that you're just as stupid and shortsighted as anyone in publishing. Like that's a surprise...