Brexit

It’s said that Britain has spoken, and the will of the nation must be respected. It’s a convincing argument, but nobody in Australia has the right to make it.  When we have a referendum it has to win both a majority of votes and a majority of states. If the Oz rules applied over there, Scotland and Northern Ireland would have had a veto. If the Pommy rules applied here 5 additional referenda would have passed, and the government would have powers over aviation (1937), marketing (1946), and industrial employment (1946), and senate terms would always be in step with the house ((simultaneous elections, 77; terms of senate, 1984).  Reluctantly, I have to think better of the Australian constitution. We may have peculiar Senate terms, but we're not going to Brex all over the living-room carpet.

A classic

"The other night, eating a bowl of pasta and sauce, I felt a familiar gravelly crunch. Sure enough I spat out a tooth. A whole tooth, or so it seemed - quite a nice new porcelain looking one - I thought I'd lost a crown. But I ran my tongue round my mouth and couldn't feel any sharp edges, or holes or gaps. So I said it was funny but I didn't seem to be missing any. And Alexandra said that Tina had lost a tooth about a week or so ago, that is she'd given the tooth  to Alexandra for the tooth fairy pay-out, but Alexandra had lost it (Tina got the money anyway). So I asked Tina where she gave the tooth to Alexandra and she said "The kitchen". So, still not quite sure how it got there, but I found a tooth in my mouth that wasn't mine..."

And

Further down,

Never had I more 
Excited, passionate, fantasticalImagination, nor an ear and eyeThat more expected the impossible—No, not in boyhood when with rod and flyOr the humbler worm I climbed Ben Bufcen’s back 
And had the livelong summer day to spend.

Tsk Tsk.  And

The mountain throws a shadow,
Thin is the moon’s horn; 
Wha did we remember
Under the ragged thorn?
Dread has followed longing
And our hearts are torn.

This is not rocket science: it isn't even really lit crit. It's called reading.

At least he died before seeing it.

At least they didn't, as far as I can see, fuck up

“O cruel death give three things back,” 
Sang a bone upon the shore;
“A child found all a child can lack 
Whether of pleasure or of rest
Upon the abundance of my breast”;A bone wave-whitened and dried in the wind.

“Three dear things that women know” 
Sang a bone upon the shore
“A man if I but held him so
When my body was alive
Found all the pleasure that life gave”;A bone wave-whitened and dried in the wind.

“The third thing that I think of yet” 
Sang a bone upon the shore,
“Is that morning when I met
Face to face my rightful man
And did after stretch and yawn”;A bone wave-whitened and dried in the wind.

Yo, Yeats

The New Republic tries to make use of its backlist; it scans in and posts online among  its other articles its old triumphs from old Nobelists, as so:

Seven Poems

BY W.B. YEATS

October 23, 1930

Girl’s Song

I went out alone
To sing a song or two,
My fancy on a man
And you know who.

Another came in sight
That on a stick relied
To hold himself upright,
I sat and cried.

And that was all my song—
When everything is told
Saw I an old man yo’ing
Or young man old?

The problem being, as here, that either they don't read them once scanned or that they don't have anyone in the building who's ever read Yeats or, indeed, anybody else. The death of the editor.

What rough beast

We can say, surely, that Trump is the most uncomplicated candidate that there has ever been, nationally - without, and without any particular interest in, intellect, knowledge, ideology, morals, religion, or anything else other than ego and resentment - and you can therefore say that anybody who votes for him does for out of, and only out of, ego and resentment. He may not win, but he's already punched an enormous hole in the fundamental concepts of democracy.
He's won over about 60% of white males. He can't gain much support from the other groups, because he'a already promised to support whites against them.  Imagine, though, if everybody - white and unwhite - was wearing virtual reality headgear through which they heard Trump's resentment directed against the people they  disliked. Blacks, hispanics, gays, women, would be offered different targets.  Is there any reason, then, to believe that they are actually more virtuous than whites - that if offered that faustian pact, they would not take it? If 60% of any group is capable of operating only through hate and fear, 60%  of any group is, and 60% of people are; and our polity has survived till now only because we have such a complicated web of different interests that it is very difficult to assemble a majority whose resentments all point in the same direction and are not undercut by competing differences.
When I say interests, of course, I mean psychic interests, or what in material terms one would call false consciousness.

Metric madness

Lenovo and Acer are both now advertising computer size in litres.  Acer's range runs from 1 litre to 30 litres.
Lenovo's one-litre PC weighs 1.3 kg, which means that it's heavier than a litre of water. It's 179 x 182.9 x 34.5 mm, which means it's 

1129498.95

cubic millimetres, or 1.12 litres. Which means that a litre of computer is 1.15 times heavier than a litre of water, which considering the amount of extra space is slightly counterintuitive.

The Acer 30-litre measures 30.68 litres, so close enough for government work; but doesn't give a weight.

Still, the litre measurement does rather suggest that it it won't fit in a particular spot you can pour it into a different-shaped container and get it in that way: which isn't, surely, the situation.  Not a terribly helpful measure, I would have thought.