Perishable Beauty

As he sat on the side of his bed he felt the room, the house, and the night as empty. In the next room Nicole muttered something desolate and he felt sorry for whatever loneliness she was feeling in her sleep. For him time stood still and then accelerated in a rush, like the quick rewind of a film, but for Nicole the years slipped away by clock and calendar and birthday, with the added poignance of her perishable beauty...

So delicately balanced was she between an old foothold that had always guaranteed her security, and the imminence of a leap from which she must alight changed in the very chemistry of blood and muscle, that she did not dare bring the matter into the true forefront of her consciousness.

Tender is the night
F. Scott Fitzgerald

There's a new link to Foghorn Records on the right.

Listening to:

Roy Ayers: Virgin Ubiquity
Resonance FM: New Adventures in Modern Music
Gilles Peterson: last night's show

A great article from Hitch. (courtesy Norm)

I've been meaning to quote from Francis Wheen's book and Nick Cohen's article, in yesterday's Observer (which also quotes the book), seems like the perfect reason to do so now. So here it is:

The alluring adjectives 'complementary' and 'alternative' are essentially euphemisms for 'dud': there is only medicine that works and medicine that doesn't. Professor Richard Dawkins pointed out that if a healing technique is shown to have curative properties in properly controlled double-blind trials, it ceases to be an alternative: it simply becomes medicine. 'Conversely, if a technique devised by the President of the Royal College of Physicians consistently fails in double-blind trials, it will cease to be part of "othordox" medicine. Whether it will then become "alternative" will depend upon whether it is adopted by a sufficiently ambitious quack (there are always sufficiently gullible patients).'