Now I have settled into a routine of sorts, I'm confronted with scarce little chance for comment. It isn't the most interesting lifestyle to relate, you see, when it's much the same as yours. So I will have to collect titbits and snippets of more interesting existences, such as that of the Boeing 747 airliner, one of the most recognisable and well-known aircraft in the world, which looks the way it does because Boeing actually designed it as a commercial failure.

It came about at a time (1965 to 1970-ish, these things take a while to knock together y'know) when Boeing and most sensible contemporaries believed regular passenger jet aircraft were about to be usurped by supersonic commercial flights, a la Concorde, and thusly thought any new planes travelling at normal old speeds of just five or six hundred miles per hour were never going to cut it carting impatient bloody humans around the planet and so had to be able to take freight to pay their way.
So the most famous passenger plane in the skies today has a damn great lump on its head and a vastly extended upper cabin because the nose was designed, with as little modification as possible, to hinge right off to enable to loading of heavy freight straight into the fuselage. So now you know.

Now I'm not sure whether you know (or care) but there is also the story of that unavoidable and rather overated song from the movie The Bodyguard, which Whitney Houston sang from the number 1 spot for fourteen weeks whether we liked it or not; you know, that three-minute warble that simply says `I will always love you` but required a few million dollars of movie and/or stage baubles to get the sentence across.
The thing is that Whitney, even in the midst of her most creative crack sessions, did not write this song, for it was created by none other than Dolly Parton a good few years before (1974 in fact). But at least I have worked out one thing that is true - none of you actually did care ;)

More poignant and a lot more seriously, I recently read an article by a scholar of sociology and various other humane sciences, that highlighted something purely plausible, highly likely and extremely important for millions, if not indeed the whole world. The thing is that in the United States of America, which is of course the only country of any importance to anyone whatsoever ;) , black people consistently perform very badly in school, college and the world of work, very badly indeed in fact, and you can put your white hood and robes back in the drawer right now because first off, this sociology scholar happens to himself be black, and he's one (one of the dwindling few) of that number with a serious amount of skills and education; and they happen to be exactly in that area under discussion.

The problem with black people underperforming in the United States has a lot to do with hip-hip music, the author asserts, and not in that cliched vein where hip-hop is a violent form of music that causes gang problems, but rather that both the music and the appalingly low levels of performance across US black culture as a whole are in fact symptoms of the same problem: namely, that African Americans are unique among all cultures in developed nations in that they largely take their social cues and structure from street culture rather than from high-acheiving scientific and academic culture, the political sphere, from spiritualistic or moral ideals or any other admirable focus of human acheivement.

Essentially the problem is what has been called `cool-pose culture` where the influence for social behaviour is directly or closely based on street gangs and young and powerful, and usually criminal, black men who go against the grain of society purposefully to establish themsevles as unique, and more often than not uniquely bad. That only a tiny proportion of black Americans come close to that definition, yet millions upon millions are addicted to its imagery and narrow-minded, self-destructive ideals is the most saddening and tragic thing of all.

Just as maddening and unfortunate is that the idea of "keeping it real" and staying close to black American street roots - basically glorifying the poverty of inner city ghettoes and the infamous housing projects - is something noble to uphold. This is most heartbreakingly manifested when intelligent and high acheiving black kids are socially demonised, cast out, even physically attacked for doing well in school, for no other reason than that they are `acting white`.
To be seen to be in any way smart, focused or gifted is, for black kids in millions of streets across the US, something that must be hidden through a very real fear for their safety, and even their lives. I can't think about that without feeling a sense of rage and frustration.

It is such a huge problem that a black kid from anything but the most affluent slice of society in the States, who works hard and wants to have a college degree and a decent career, will more than likely be beaten up by fellow black students because those aggressors feel, fundamentally, that behaving as the white kids do and doing well, in order to acheive good things and attain and happy life, is betraying their underacheiving and downtrodden roots. That this has bizarrely become the thing to model your life upon if you are young, black and American.

Why this should be so when the civil rights movement was led, and rightly so, on the basis that white and black people are capable of equal greatness and all people should strive as hard as they could to acheive the best of all things. Sadly something, somewhere in the works seems to have gone terribly wrong.

And you will have noted, I hope, that no-one ever complains about hip-hop lyrics advising the listener to do badly in school, to perform poorly in the world of work or to have an unsucessful life, and rather that the music has become poster boy for the apparent glory of street culture and has in fact been used by, rather than informing, this senseless and bitterly cruel ideology.

Anyway, that's what I read the other day.