Current dissatisfactions

A list of things I am currently dissatisfied about:

1.  My shoulder.  It still hurts from a simply executed backwards wrench in the surf on New Year's Day.   Maybe worth a post of its own...

2.   The new X Files - last week's episode ("Home Again") was unnecessarily violent, overly dramatic with Scully, and had a stupid, utterly unrealistic monster with no proper explanation.

3.  Scully's centre hair part in the X Files.   Sure, she's supposed to be smart, but seeing what looks like 15 cm of forehead is just too much.   Bangs, Scully:  bangs.

4.  How long it is taking for Malcolm Turnbull to get his act together.   Feels like we're watching a drifting ship of state, with a slowly increasing rate of escapees on life boats.  (Except for Abbott, who actually deserves to be tossed overboard, perhaps with a life jacket if I'm feeling generous.)

5.  My inability to read books due to:

     a.  the "I'm sure I'll find something interesting soon" stream of new information on the internet;
     b.  getting sleepy pretty quickly when I try to read.

I used to deal with the latter adequately by doing things like reading books in a park during lunch times at university, or on the beach during school holidays.   Now that I mainly try to read while in the house, it's harder.

6.  Aging men who chant "the war on drugs has failed", and  shrug their shoulders about the dance party drug culture scene.  Last night's Four Corners was as po-faced as it comes with ex federal police, Nicholas Cowdery, and (of course) party doctor Alex Wodak all saying its hopeless to try to stop it.   All instead of doing what older men and women are supposed to do:  decry a culture of self indulgent, hedonistic, extended adolescence that mature people in past times would have said is bad for society and individuals and should be stopped.    Just ban dance parties:  with the lock out laws we're already half way there to crushing this degeneracy, aren't we?    And seriously - it is degeneracy.  Can't convince me otherwise.  

7.   Channel Ten doing its utmost to ruin the viewing experience of The X Files.   It's appalling, the ads that take up at least a quarter of the bottom of the screen while Scully is mourning (with unconvincing acting) the death of her mother.

8.   That my list of dissatisfactions is full of X Files related complaints.

9.   The lack of good, intriguing new UFO cases.   The last one I can recall was the really weird incident at O'Hare airport in 2006.   Ten years is a long time between good UFO sightings.

10.  Reading newspapers on the net.  Last Saturday, I found myself the only person in a South Brisbane bar, enjoying a craft beer and reading a Sydney Morning Herald that had been left there.   I subscribe to the SMH digitally, but I had forgotten how much more satisfying, and better informed I feel, after spending 45 to 60 minutes reading a physical paper, compared to the digital experience.   Firstly, with digital subscription it still feels like you're only getting half the articles that appear in the hard version.  Maybe I'm wrong - but there seems to be a lot more in the hard paper.   Secondly, digital reading is all about the eye scanning mere snippets of information and moving on in a way that reading a hard copy discourages.   You just feel smarter for the experience of spending time with an actual newspaper.   I really wish we had something such that we saw on Minority Report:   a flexible plastic large format reader which could download any paper and present it in tabloid format sized pages.   Perhaps such a reader does exist, but is considered too specialised a use to ever market.  (And certainly, it could be a pain to carry around all day just to be able to read it on the train on the way to work.   Maybe it needs foldability?)  But yeah, I think we're losing something valuable by going purely digital with newspapers, even with tablets.