Cries and Whispers of the Herd

Well, I was aurally browsing with my XM satellite radio and settled on the BBC World Service's Culture Shock program (or progamme, if you prefer, mate).

Good show, guv'nor.

I heard an entertaining yet Brave-New-World-ish interview with a fellow from North Carolina expounding on the virtues of scent marketing via his firm ScentAir, as I naughtily mused to myself: "Would the interviewer please be so horrifically naughty as to ask blatantly about the ScentAir availability of the human equivalent of what I saw my dog do a few hours ago while encountering another canine, sniff-sniff?"

Then an engaging and thought-provoking chat with Mark Earls, linked a few words preceding to his own blog, author of Herd: How To Change Mass Behaviour by Harnessing Our True Nature. (Presumably, the American edition will be about mass behavior.) Among other things, the Duke of Earls spoke in the BBC interview of humans as "we creatures," which got me thinking about my sloppy blogging habits (i.e., the poor grades I deserve for my discourteous lack of blog-comment reciprocity), the "we" nature of blogging itself (despite blogging's radically ephemeral nature), and the challenges this concept poses for an avowed solipsist. But, deep down, and across and above, I believe we are indeed "we creatures," we the people. Curiously, Earls and the BBC's Tim Marlow noted how Western and Northern European society drifted from "we" to "I" several hundred years ago (the Enlightenment? the Reformation?), but the rest of the world still believes in "we" (or us, grammatically). I suppose all that -- Excuse me: We (the royal we) suppose all that is a bit of an oversimplification. And that also gives us the chance to voice the subjective view that most people misuse the word simplistic.

So then I browsed the BBC's World Service site and discovered Ingmar Bergman has died.

The BBC reported that:

British film director Ken Russell told the BBC: "He [Bergman] could hardly bear to watch his own movies, apparently they made him so miserable," he said. "To have done 50 films with such a variety of misery is quite an achievement."

Bergman had five marriages and eight children, and his work often explored the tensions between married couples.

But Bergman confessed in 2004 that he could not bear to watch his own films because they made him depressed.

"I become so jittery and ready to cry... and miserable," he said. "I think it's awful," he said in a rare interview on Swedish TV.

See, I'll bet Ingmar Bergman didn't comment on any other blogs either.

Or even read his own, if he had one. It would make him too miserable (to read his own, not yours, or yours, or yours either).

That's my excuse (I mean rationalization) (I mean rationale).

Yeah. Sure.