If you have not read G.Bradshaw's book Elephants on the Edge do so. Symposia has always known homo sapiens are a menace to the earth. Anyway, this book is far more important than any of the goofy, innane Gladwell books on the NYTimes best seller list.

Over one-third of births in the USA are dangerous Caesareans, especially in the poorest southern states. Charges for these deliveries are double the cost of normal births. Oh the eloquence of facts! En tout cas -- this assumption people are sick to begin with and not healthy galls us Darwinians.

Sir Nicholas Winterton on the common man, "They are a totally different type of people." Noisy children (nothing worse), an unacceptable level of commotion and racket. Why are class differences so profound, still, here as well as in GB? Your school still determines your future.

Movies are cartoons for a pre-literate society though Symposia watches them regularly. We rented Lawrence of Arabia from 1962 - how ridiculous the script, how Classic Comics the characters, and all that ghastly background music. On the other hand we always love the Ralph Lauren mood of the chick-flic Out of Africa, made 20 years later and with the travelogue a bit more subdued.

We love arcana--the more arcane the better. Thus Truffle Hunt by Sacheverell Sitwell is sublimely foolish and wonderful; the long dead Sunday Times columnist does a bit of sleuthing and discovers that the Trappists, though a silent order, had no fewer than three numbers in the London telephone directory. How is that to make you forget the D.C. Goons!

Louis Auchincloss died at 92. He led the life every social climber from Oklahoma or Iowa wanted to live as well as every gay man in the universe -- a delusion, a fairy tale. There were never any good old days for 99% of souls. There is only inherited wealth and unconscionable advantages for the 1%.

Symposia's old muse Bertrand Russell wrote a wonderful essay on the subject more taboo than death, i.e. boredom. This is omnipresent in advanced industrial society and explains aberrant behavior such as obesity.

He also wrote a resonant article called The Superior Virtue of the Oppressed. Dinesen's kikuyu became the Mau Mau though this was the logical result of tribal culture and colonialism.

Today we learn Paxil, Prozac and all those other drugs are pretty much worthless for non-psychotic people who suffer from normal vagaries of life. If the drug companies were culturally literate one would think they were deliberately trying to manufacture soma (Brave New World).

Speaking of words I tried again to read Cyril Connolly's Unquiet Grave and was defeated by the affected blowhard. Of course Hemingway pretended to like and understand that piece of utter madness.