Roller Skates?

With a week full of teaching, woodworking, French study and general worry ahead, this would probably be a good time to kick back and relax. Yes, we could amble on, chattering about butterflies, arithmetic, the virtues of the colour green, and the greatest aspects of 'Star Trek' for a whole page, couldn't we? Couldn't we? Or would a chuckling appreciation of 'The Six Million Dollar Man' be in order? In the current episode, great tension is being presumed from a scene involving a roller skate jump from a one foot ramp. Yes, it's really that tense! Does it help if I add that the roller skaters are wearing Halloween costumes? No? Oh, such jaded cynicism. It's very interesting to see just how goofy 'The Six Million Dollar Man' could be at times. It's almost as far as out there as Douglas Adams in some cases. Oh, Douglas Adams... Expect some writing on 'Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency' sometime soon. A classic novel, and a formative one, featuring... Oh, never mind. That can be for its own post.

We're halfway through August, one quarter of the way through the lunatic woodwork project, and only a few weeks away from the commencement of a second year of Open University study. There's a lot going on. A dear friend has possibly had her second child in the last few days, a potential conflict is brewing between the madmen running North Korea and the United States, and everyone's getting just a little nervous as xenophobes and bigots raise their slimy but un-numerous heads above their slimy parapets all over the developed world. Who knows where it will all end? Doubtlessly, there will be much confusion about how it all came to pass, and lots of mislabelling of people on all sides of every decision. (Of course, mislabelling can take many forms, ranging from sheer opposites to missing out the 'creepy' in 'creepy weirdo'.)

If we don't all go up in a nuclear armageddon, then what will happen? It seems that we're in the pull of a tidal change in what is bizarrely called 'The West'. Will it result in greater democracy or the corporations grabbing ever more power and forcing an even more entrenched plutocracy? The key will be the influence of what we euphemistically call 'social media'. How possible is it to pull the wool over the eyes of a populace when people can talk to each other instantly and with great fidelity (we presume)? That's a question for another day, along with the accompanying concern of just why do governments always want to crack down on the Internet anyway? Who gets to benefit? Make your own opinions, people of the world, while the Quirky Muffin spins mad conspiracy theories like a fruitcake with an axe to grind about the size of the chip on its shoulder. Are those enough metaphors for now? No? Let's not slip on a banana peel of linguistic ambition.

Every fruitcake needs to rest from time to time, so let's wrap up another edition of the Quirky Muffin for now. 'What happened to  Colonel Steve Austin and his rollerskates?', you might be asking. The answer to that must remain unrevealed for now. Check out the episode 'Rollback' from the fifth and final season of 'The Six Million Dollar Man', if you're truly interested. Robert Loggia is certainly confused in it.

O.