Titbits

A few titbits arising out of breakfast this Sunday morning.

First, I was prompted to wonder about the ways in which charismatic people with a message for the world control the message, this prompted, as it happens, by looking something up in the Quran. On the one hand, you do want your message to reach the world, to touch millions of people. On the other, you also want it to be your message, uncorrupted by transmission, time or anything else. There is a tension here, a tension to which there is no easy solution: you cannot have it both ways.

One way to approach this is to write a great deal, to set out your message at great length. This will not stop people writing commentaries, but it does make it harder for commentators to stray from the True Path. I have not done the sums, but Freud's collected works are many times longer than the Quran, the whole of which can, I believe, be recited as part of an edifying evening's entertainment for one's guests. But that has not stopped the production of an even larger amount of commentary - in which there is a fair amount of material disputing who in on the True Path and who is not.

I might add that I do slightly covet the new edition of Freud's collected works, snapped above, but I am not going to pay £1,000 - or anything like that - for it. I might also add that Amazon, on this occasion, is significantly cheaper than either Abebooks or eBay - although eBay did offer rather more choice - with some much cheaper copies of the first edition. I shall continue to rely on my large pdf, free or near free, from one Ivan Smith, about whom I have managed to find nothing at all, despite trying on various occasions. So not much provenance- not that that really matters for my modest needs.

The Bible is another important book which attracts a lot of commentary. And I imagine that in the eastern bloc of old, the collected works of Marx, Engels and Stalin attracted plenty of discussion, although I don't know to what extent commentary was allowed. And I don't think that Stalin was actually much of a writer, much of a theorist, at all - but he did like to be included in the canon.

Moving on, there was the matter of our Smart television from Samsung, so smart that it had lost its connection to terrestrial TV, a significant nuisance in some parts of the family. I had asked Gemini to sort me out and he delivered some neat and tidy instruction on how to get out of this fix, including the time-honoured device of taking the power plug out of the wall, and then counting to a hundred before putting it back again. A sovereign remedy for all kinds of computer complaints when I was in the world of work.

But the more cunning part of his story was to go into settings and fiddle with the broadcast section thereof. Sadly, I could find no such section in the settings and there the matter rested. Then yesterday, a much younger person was put on the case and he explained that the settings you got directly from the television and those you got by pressing 'settings' on your remote were not the same. He went to the latter settings and the problem was solved. Terrestrial TV now present and correct.

Perhaps if I had persisted with Gemini, he would have got there too, but he did not mention this distinction in round one.

Last up, I was amused to read at reference 1 about the mystery that is big companies' basic lack of good manners in the matter of dealing with rejected job applications. Rather glad that I was never really part of that scene!

References

Reference 1: Why do employers think it’s OK to ghost job applicants: Businesses that complain it is hard to recruit the right staff should look at themselves too - Robert Shrimsley, Financial Times - 2026.