Turned on and turned off

We got cable TV today. I know this is not particularly earth-shattering news, the rest of the world and his dog has had giant plasma TVs fed by satellite for a couple of years now, but the slow advance of TV technology into my home put me into a bit of a funk. I had prided myself on being able to tell my students airily, "No, actually we don't have a car or a TV." Now, only the lack of a car remains as our sole other-worldly credential. Yoshie was excited to watch things in English and wanted the kids to see cartoons and the like in English (although, paradoxically we don't want to encourage our kids to watch too much TV). I flipped through the channels and after watching a report on chaos at Heathrow T5, a bit of a movie that I'd seen before and a roundup of Premiership games that I can't watch, I turned it off and returned to the world of words, reading a bit and blogging a bit. My reading didn't cheer me up much, I'm engrossed in a political history of oil and how we don't have much of it left. The Long Emergency, by James Kuntsler, a New York Times columnist, makes for compelling, if depressing reading. His thesis is we are addicted to oil, without it our societies don't work and we have no realistic replacement for it when it runs out - which will happen for folk in this generation very shortly. I'm half way through the book and am getting a bit worried - he effectively debunks the myths that free market economics will sort out the problem (there just ain't enough of the stuff in the ground left) and pooh poohs the notion that some alternative silver bullet high-tech solution will save the day. However, the sub-head to the book is "Surviving the converging catastrophes of the 21st Century," so I'm hoping there will be some ray of hope to cheer me up and save my children's generation. In the meantime, here are two jokes to take your mind off doom and gloom. Where do British detectives live? In Sherlock Homes of course. Ahem, and where do Bobbies on the beat live? In Letsbe Avenue. The old 'uns are the best, eh readers?