flemmings | The comforts of a rainy evening

1. Rainy autumn nights are cozy. This has to do with an obscure memory from childhood, something to do with the warm lights of Bedford and the shiny black streets outside, and dinner, and homework at the dining room table, and the grandfather clock ticking in the hallway, sounding the quarter hours and playing a tune at the half ones: which always broke the sleep of school friends sleeping over. Maybe it's that particular night when Patricia came for a sleep-over and (my mind insists) my parents were out at Camelot (though I'm almost certainly conflating two evenings) and the rain drummed on the flat roof over my bedroom and we were warm under the blankets.

2. Dreamed of 'Tokyo'- very vaguely, a sunnyish afternoon near the Ginza Maruzen or Yaesu bookstore where I did my research for A Garden in Paris back in '94- and my friend Grainne who in this settei had either produced Fullmetal Alchemist or written the manga; and we were saying in wonder 'That was so long ago! Twenty years already- no, closer to thirty!'

3. From Sabina's tumblr, reblogged (if that's the word) from Ian Mathers, a passage which explains much:

Donald Trump says many, many things that are not true. He makes assertions that brazenly contradict established facts, or that impossibly ask us to forget what he’d just said moments before. He’ll say “X” one moment and then, days or minutes later, he’ll say “Not X, never X, and I never said X.”

And the weird thing is that I think he means it. This is what Donald Trump — and many of his supporters — imagine constitutes truthfulness and honesty. It’s not about saying something that is true or accurate or factual, but about saying what you truly, sincerely feel. Dishonesty, in this view, entails not a denial of truth or of reality, but a denial of your own emotions. Courtesy, tact, and nuance are all, from this perspective,dishonest because they may not fully reveal the emotions, opinions, fantasies and preferences of the speaker.

This is why Secretary of State Clinton is perceived and portrayed as inherently dishonest. *All* diplomats are dishonest. They don’t speak from the heart and from the gut but, instead, speak diplomatically. They speak cautiously, weighing the impact of their words instead of just letting it rip.

Scientists are also inherently dishonest in this view. Their words are always hemmed in by the facts and the data, restrained from the satisfying sweeping generalizations and superlatives available to "honest" speakers who "speak from the heart."