Oh god oh god oh god. Today is going to be a hard working day. I'm only half Protestant so my work ethic is pretty damn capricious - it whines if I try to employ it on something I only do for the money, as it's listening to my Catholic half saying fatalistically that God'll provide if we just fucked off to the south of France now.
Not helped by the fact that Brussels is one filthy city. The air quality here is fucking rank and even on the clearest days there's a visible miasma of diesel and dust and fuck knows what else in the air. It was illegal levels of mercury the other week. I know one doesn't choose to live in any city for the air quality, but Brussels is not a large place and I don't understand why much larger cities in Germany, the next country over, don't make me feel like I'm being throttled when I go out for a little constitutional. But I am dangerously close to breaking my Lenten resolution to not rib on Belgians so I will now change the subject.
I've moved on to the next evolution-y book I'm reading for review, Full House: The Spread of Excellence from Plato to Darwin, a reprint of a Stephen Jay Gould book from 1997. Only thirty pages in and I must say that those thirty pages were fucking excellent. I can't wait to read the rest. He had a lovely clean writing style, and it doesn't hurt that thus far his attack on the idea of evolution-as-progress is ringing all my ideological bells. But really, such a great style. So far none of the confusingly avuncular messiness of Wilson and none of the 'we're so clever, aren't we' wankery of Dawkins. Can't wait to keep going and considering putting my tongue in the mouth of the next ailing person I see so that I can take a couple of sick days this week to polish it off.
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