Month: February 2024

Shock horror: billionaire justifies existence

I know there’s any number of arguments that can be made against billionaires existing at all, and I’m not exactly a fan of the obscenely rich myself, but I must tip my hat to this lady:

When the 96-year-old Ruth Gottesman’s husband died in 2022, he left behind something that surprised even his wife: $1 billion in Berkshire Hathaway stock.
“He left me, unbeknownst to me, a whole portfolio of Berkshire Hathaway stock,” Gottesman told The New York Times. Her husband’s only instructions? “Do whatever you think is right with it,” she told the outlet.
At first, Gottesman couldn’t decide what to do with the massive bequest, but after her children advised her not to wait too long, she had a realization, The New York Times reported.
She would donate the money in full to the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx, New York City’s poorest borough, the Times reported.
“I wanted to fund students at Einstein so that they would receive free tuition,” she told the Times.
Her gift is so large that it’s set to cover students’ tuition for the medical school in perpetuity, the college said in a press release.

I actually did a quick bit of maths, and at the current rate ($59k per annum) that works out at nearly seventeen thousand years’ worth of tuition. It’ll be centuries before anyone ever need to cough up for tuition at Einstein College again. Amazing.

Of One Blood

Finally, book #7 for 2024. Struggling a bit with the reading this month, mostly thanks to a time-consuming other project with my classical music collection and re-organising that, but never mind that, here’s this month’s “classic”. Pauline Hopkins’ Of One Blood was serialised in a magazine she edited from 1902 to 1903, and it evidently leans somewhat heavily on H. Rider Haggard; it’s kind of a domestic society drama at first, albeit one with a peculiar mesmerism undercurrent, but then it turns into an African exploration adventure as our hero signs on with an expedition to find the lost treasures of ancient Ethiopia… and the romance of the first part of the book is revealed as being rather more gothically fucked up than we might have expected (I was actually genuinely stunned by it and had to reread the scene to make sure I hadn’t just imagined it; I’m still not sure it even makes sense) and our hero is not who he thinks he is on multiple levels. This is fucking preposterous, and not in a particularly entertaining way either; Hopkins may have the first of her particular kind (though the book is more fantasy than horror) but that doesn’t mean she was any good at it… if this is indicative, she was a shabby stylist with a propensity for hitting you over the head with Christianity in a manner that became increasingly aggravating as the book dragged on (which it does mercilessly despite being under 200 pages). I did rather enjoy the thought that the book’s thesis that THEM DARKIES really invented civilisation 6000 years ago would’ve made a bunch of racists’ heads explode back in 1903 (much as it still would now), but those racists wouldn’t be reading this in the first place… Anyway, not a fan.

RIP Brian Stableford

Just reading about the passing of Brian Stableford. Never read any of his own actual works, but I knew of him as a translator of French literature, especially for Black Coat Press, in which capacity he’s Englished a whole lot of books in the French fantastic tradition… there being a whole lot of SF, fantasy, horror and pulp in French that’s kind of gone unknown by us Anglophones for literal centuries (apart from Jules Verne, whose first English critics woefully misunderstood as a children’s author). And so it is that Stableford introduced me to two of the most singular books I’ve ever read, Petrus Borel’s Champavert and Edgar Quinet’s Ahasuerus; both published in the early/mid-1830s, the former is a sort of late gothic collection of tales possessed of a very peculiar black humour, and the latter is… just something else. I really don’t know what to call it, basically it’s a vision of the history of the world from the creation to the last judgement, with the latter event going very much not according to plan, but what form is it? A novel told entirely in dialogue without descriptions? A play which features the entire universe as a character at one point? I remember while I was reading it that I could actually imagine the text being sung, as if it were an oratorio or something (and an extremely atonal one at that). So, respect to Brian Stableford for making these two books available to me that I would otherwise never have read…

A genius

I’ll admit to having no idea how to set my own PC laptop up without the Microsoft account either, but I’m also not marketing myself and being celebrated by an unthinking cult as the world’s prime technology genius. Surprised to find such a smart man using Windows in the first place (are Mac and Linux too woke for him?)…

“What was 2024 like, grandad?”

I had to take a screenshot of this cos otherwise it would be kind of unbelievable. Still is, of course, but, well, it’s 2024 and things like this really shouldn’t surprise me any more, should they?

That’s a couple of examples I found via Twatter. Alas, the Verge article depicted above is more interested in speculating on why Gemini behaved like this than in asking why these people wanted AI-created pictures of Nazi-era German soldiers, which is what interests me more. (That, and why couldn’t they just use regular Google image search.) However, it does contain this remarkable sentence:

As the Daily Dot chronicles, the controversy has been promoted largely — though not exclusively — by right-wing figures attacking a tech company that’s perceived as liberal.

Google. Liberal. The company that was going to make a special version of its search engine just for China that would refuse to find sites about things like human rights, democracy, etc. That’s engaged in racially based surveillance of BLM protestors for the FBI and of Palestinian people for Israel. That tried to stop its employees from unionising. That owns Youtube and is happy for far-right YT creators and overt white supremacists to make money from their hateful bullshit. That Google. Liberal. The Right really is detached from reality…

Happy 50th, Phaedra

Tangerine Dream’s fifth album entered the world on February 20 1974 (it’s  and still that date in most of the rest of the world, so I’m on time), and we can at least indirectly thank the late Kenneth Anger for that, apparently… cos when he got Mick Jagger to do the score for Invocation of My Demon Brother, Jagger did so on a Moog synthesiser that the Rolling Stones had bought for him to experiment with but which he had no idea how to use (as you can hear from the results); this thing made a couple of other film appearances (in Performance and some Italian film where Keith footles about it with a bit), then eventually it somehow ended up in the hands of Tangerine Dream and revolutionised their sound.

I still remember being in Waterfront Records back around the late 90s, maybe early oughts, and that day Frank was playing a vinyl copy of the album; it struck me then as one of the most extraordinary things I’d ever heard, the way this sound just seemed to move through dimensions of space, and it still is extraordinary after all these decades.. kind of like Oxygène, it must’ve sounded like the absolute future when it came out and in some ways it still does. I have days when I think it might be the best record ever made.