the printed word, spider on sunflower

This morning at dawn I turned on the radio and heard that Cyclone Yasi had passed south of Cairns, about midnight. Terrible destruction of houses and farms, tall palm trees snapped in half, many frightening experiences, but amazingly, no deaths or serious injuries. A baby born in one of the evacuation centres. What an orderly, together country I live in! Can’t help thinking how very different it would have been if the cyclone had hit a poor country rather than this fortunate one.  

Managed to overcome my early morning torpor and go for a walk. Getting back into routines is hard. School lunch, drive to the bus stop, work, put on my professional face. It’s too hot for any of it. 

Took this pic in the garden this morning. The sunflower seedlings I planted not long before we went away for Christmas are in full bright yellow summer bloom.

In town for a spare half an hour between appointments I took refuge in the library. Heavenly airconditioning! I picked a book almost randomly off the nearest shelf. 

E.B. WHITE Writings from The New Yorker 1927-1976. He’s the guy who wrote ‘Charlotte’s Web’. In 1948 he made the following observations about  television, then still in it’s early days:

Like radio, television hangs on the questionable theory that whatever happens anywhere should be sensed everywhere. If everyone is going to be able to see everything, in the long run all sights may lose whatever rarity value they once possessed and it may well turn out that people, being able to see and hear practically everything, will be specially interested in almost nothing. Already you can detect the first faint signs of apathy...

...Television, when it gets going, will almost certainly pick up and throw into one’s home scenes it didn’t reckon with when it first set up its camera...

A few years later he wrote:

The printed word...has a natural durability....Whenever we watch television we are impressed by two things: its effectiveness and its evanescence. The printed word sticks around - you can walk into a library thirty years later and there it is. ( Yes, here I am reading these prescient words from a man who died in 1985)

...The most puzzling thing about television is the steady advance of the sponsor  across the line that has always separated news from promotion, entertainment from merchandising. The advertiser has assumed the role of originator, and the performer has gradually been eased into the role of peddler...