Weeknote 33: Innocent as a Cabbage
Last week I noticed that my local fruit shop had fresh blueberries for sale. I’d only eaten frozen ones before so, in the spirit of inquiry, I purchased a very tiny box that cost me an eye-watering ₹300. For some reason, I expected blueberries to taste kind of like jamuns. Instead, they were like a cross between grapes and phalsas. Did I enjoy them? Considerably. Did I ₹300 enjoy them? I don’t think so.
A character in Flannery O’Connor’s A Good Man is Hard to Find is described as having a face that is “as broad and innocent as a cabbage”. This phrase tickled me so much that I feel compelled to share it here. Can we please start using it more often?
If I spend too much time reading text on my Windows laptop, I inevitably develop a terrible headache. On high DPI displays—like the one on my ThinkPad—ClearType forces the fonts to be far too thin and sharp for comfort. Increasing the global font size to 125% breaks several apps, so I’m forced to instead bump up display scaling from my preferred 250% to 300%. Doing this gives me the same screen real estate as a 1080p display, which makes me feel like I’m stuck in an elevator. It’s a shame that neither Windows nor Linux can correctly handle high DPI displays in 2022, whereas macOS has been doing it without fuss for a decade now.
I went on a date!
The review scores for Cloud Atlas on IMDB either sit at a full ten stars or just one, with very few that lie in between. I personally think it’s a perfect adaptation of a perfect book that, despite its deviations from the source material, retains all the beauty, power, and awe the text inspires. For me, Cloud Atlas remains the most ambitious and important story of the times we live in.
It’s Independence Day today, so I feel obliged to write something about it here. I will spare you the thesis and say only this: the overwhelming feeling I have when I think about India is concern. I’m concerned that the current stewards of this country will continue to subvert the ideals it was founded on and lead us ever onward into the darkness. I do have a flea of hope, though. And fleas ain’t easy to get rid of.