ruskin and reality... Just Shoot Me!

I wasn't going to be here today but last night I was skimming through a book of short essays by John Ruskin. It was a prize my grandmother won in 1911 from the Canterbury University School.
anyway Ruskin opined that too much was made of Venice's origin as a fishing village and a salt works and that the art was more important.
Well that may be but Venice's wealth always came from the sea in one way or another and to downplay this is arrant nonsense.
that sort of belief is alive in well in our little town.
the arrivistas believe that they can create an era, aura, whatever of creativity that supersedes the fact that the wealth of Carterton is built on cows.
They think it is possible to change the fortunes of the whole district by bringing in some guru who is going to look at their watches and tell them the time.
mainly it is a total distraction and just a night out at the centre of innovation and creativity that the citizens will be paying for long after most of the current crop are dead.
The German city of Heidelberg tried to create a mathematics centre for the whole world last century but they could not conceive that creativity is more or less aleatory and comes when it wants to and not when it is demanded.
and as an aside to the artists around the place. They don't realise that the colonial artists, chevalier, gully, bierstadt etc were in demand not only for their command of the medium but because they had presented a reasonable verisimilitude of the topography.
howzat. They weren't that ARTY that they presumed to make it up!
PJ Proby.
very naughty man. He kept splitting his trou on stage till "THEY" got him and effectively ended his career.
He was a good singer.
I was looking through a box of Cd's and found one I had put aside just in case he didn't sound as good as he did way back then.
I always like his version of The Masquerade Is Over" but that is the one they always leave off the compilations. why is that.
gotta rush because the provider will close soon but I am slightly put off by a full page article on the Vatican and their response to satanism and black magic.
Well the Vatican should take note of what happened to Galileo and the eventual outcome and realise that much of what they call satanism is psychological and needs to be separated from religious belief.
Maybe it is time for the Vatican to sponsor a renewal of Freudian Psychiatry and find a writer who can boil all his writings down into a readily understandable body of work instead of the huge amounts of sometimes not easily glossed books spread over a  very large production.
If The Vatican persists in pretending that satanism is a mystical event then it will lose all authority as a spiritual guide that people need to lead them through this valley of tears.

congrats to Chanel 4
"Just Shoot Me is the hippest, slickest, funniest show on TV at the moment.
yes indeedy.