April is the cruellest month

See?  Here.

Yet another game

The LikeBetter game shows you two photographs, and then you vote on the one you like better. Then the brain guesses something about you.

I have no idea how it works, but it’s a good timewaster.

Oh yes.

This post by HowardM2 on PFFA was particularly fun.

I imagine people will disagree violently.  No problem.  They aren’t Auden.

I’m on his side.

Here’s a bit from the article to whet your appetites or (in local parlance) to yuck up your vexation.

It is surely astonishing how many young people of both sexes, when asked what they want to be in life, give neither a sensible answer like “a lawyer, a farmer, an innkeeper”, nor a romantic answer like “an explorer, a racing motorist, a missionary, President of the United States”. No, an astonishing number reply “a writer”, and by writing they mean — dreadful word — “creative” writing. Even if they say: “I want to go into journalism”, this is only because they are under the illusion that in that profession they will be able to create. Even if their most genuine desire is really to make money, they will still make for some highly paid sub-literary pursuit like Advertising.

Among this host of would-be writers, the majority have no literary gift. This is not surprising in itself. A marked gift for anything is not very common.

What is surprising is that such a high percentage of those without a marked talent for any particular profession should think of writing as the solution. One would expect that a certain percentage would imagine they had a talent for medicine, a certain percentage for engineering, and so on. But this is not the case. In our age, if a boy or a girl is untalented, the odds are in favour of their thinking they want to write.

…

Happy the lot of the pure mathematician. He is judged solely by his peers and the standard is so high that no colleague can ever win a reputation he does not deserve. No cashier writes articles in the Sunday [New York] Times complaining about the incomprehensibility of modern mathematics and comparing it unfavourably with the good old days when mathematicians were content to paper irregularly shaped rooms or fill bathtubs with the waste-pipe open.

It is a sobering experience for any poet to read the last page of the Books section of the Sunday Times where correspondents seek to identify poems which have meant much to them. He is forced to realise that it is not his work, not even the work of Dante or Shake-speare, that most people treasure as magic talismans in time of trouble, but grotesquely bad verses written by maiden ladies in local newspapers; that millions in their bereavements, heartbreaks, agonies, depressions, have been comforted and perhaps saved from despair by appalling trash while poetry stood helplessly and incompetently by.