Those Dell laptops that smell like cat urine? Don't worry.

"The smell is not related to cat urine or any other type of biological contaminant, nor is it a health hazard."

Link goes to a BBC news item that ends "News of the issue spread after a link to the thread was posted to discussion site Reddit," which links to a Reddit thread where the top-rated comment refers to the BBC link to the comments thread and comments like "Clearly BBC journalists like to keep their fingers on the pulse of what's happening. Commendable attitude" and "Or they're desperately scrabbling for a source that isn't 'Marge from St. Ives said so' and don't think people will look too carefully..."

"But since my cancer diagnosis, I’m beginning to empathize with Jesus at Gethsemane..."

"... Just as he’d gotten his life’s work going, just as he was planting the seeds of a new society, just as he was gaining followers willing to give up everything for justice and love, he found out he was probably going to die, at the age of 33...."

When has your life experience caused you to change which character you identify with in an old story?

Or is this a big sermon cliché? First, we identify with the sleeping disciples because blah blah blah but then etc. etc....

Eh. Maybe it's a big but great cliché. Let's have your examples.

I can't offhand think of any of my own, but I think of that mother in the BBC documentary we were watching last night who described her son as always identifying with the villain in the story and who gives — as her one example — Cruella De Vil. It's a power fantasy, and he doesn't seem to mind — mom says — that the character loses in the end. She probably thinks the BBC documentary viewer identifies with her, the devoted mother of a difficult child. Why would she have invited the documentarians into her home otherwise?

It's a cliché of documentaries to lure us into identifying with one character and then tempting, then forcing us to switch to another character. How else are you going to build narrative energy? And yet you invite these devils into your home. They seem so empathetic as you open up not just your house but your soul.

I said I couldn't  offhand think of any examples of my own, shifting from empathizing with one character to another. But now, in the context of that BBC documentary, I realize I do it all the time in blog posts. I get interested in one person, and I start writing, and I find — make?! — a narrative thread that ends up turning my empathy around. I'll bet there are over 1,000 examples of my doing that in this archive.

Perhaps you should turn against me. Perhaps I am the devil you've let into your house.

"America's Medicated Kids."

A 1-hour BBC documentary by Louis Theroux. I share Theroux's skepticism about medicating children, but I don't think he ends up explaining much about the problem in general. Instead of "America's Medicated Kids," a more accurate title would be "3 Medicated Kids in Pittsburgh." I do recommend this. Worth discussing.



ADDED: Next morning thoughts at the end of this post.

"Kim Kardashian: How do Armenians feel about her fame?"

BBC homes in on the question everyone is asking.

"Kim is an Armenian and famous in the world, so this is enough for every Armenian to be proud of Kim. But because of cultural and traditional issues, they do not want to accept that she is an Armenian," [says BBC monitoring journalist Armen Shahbazian].

Stories about Kardashian are frequently a topic for comedy programmes, he says.

"They always compare the Armenian French singer Charles Aznavour, who they are proud of, with Kim Kardashian, who is seen in a more negative light. They don't want her to present their country," he says.

Deep into this article we get to some comparative material about what the people of Gibraltar think about fashion designer John Galliano and what the people of the Isle of Man think of Dan Quayle, who — "was internationally ridiculed when it appeared he could not spell the word 'potato.'"