Expect trivia

I do like this song off of La Roux's album:

Also, I know they're all pretty much business as usual, but I've been listening a lot to the Sophie Ellis Bextor heartbreak song, David Guetta's "When love takes over", and Cascada's summer swine flu hit "Evacuate the dance floor (I'm infected with the beat".

I quite like this watch which reminds you that you're going to die. There's something supremely triumphant about constantly remembering your own mortality, I suppose because if you can cope with that you can cope with anything. I've been writing a paper partly on the Corpus manuscript of the Ancrene Wisse, a Middle English guide for women who had themselves walled into small rooms on the sides of churches. They would dig a little more of their own grave every day, and then kneel in it to say their prayers. But if you can own that, what can own you? Not much. (And as a way of life it certainly worked for Julian of Norwich.) I've never been 100% convinced that having a slave whisper "Don't forget you're going to die" into your ear during a Roman triumph was entirely a deflating act; it's pretty much saying "but nothing else can touch you". Although I do dislike the Corpus clock a lot, which I suppose is a bit hypocritical of me; maybe it all comes down to aesthetics really. I think it's partly because the Corpus clock is rather hysterical and seems to be about panicking in the face of death rather than just getting on with things, and because although it claims to be mechanical it couldn't keep time without a software intervention which corrects it every five minutes. That's not insouciant; that's not "Death be not proud".

Also this watch with a blank face is quite good.

Furthermore here are some disconcerting vintage adverts; here is a map which shows something very true about Wales; and a website which will sell you an authentic rug about war. Actually that last one isn't trivia, but rather upsetting in some way I can't quite put my finger on. The clash of the domestic and the horrific? I don't know. Maybe it's something about these rugs being sold in the far-off land which provided a lot of the weaponry depicted. *Ponders*