Tuesday, November 18, 2008

Boredom and freak accidents

Today I have been having a lazy day. I decided that today I would do admin. So far today, I have done some washing, completed step 1 of sorting out my CAF, did some washing up and had lunch. Which, seeing as it's nearly 5 o'clock, isn't massively productive. I have spent most of my day doing a lot of nothing on the internet; watching random YouTube videos, reading articles on Wikipedia, going onto BBC News...

It's amazing what you do when you're bored. Today I've found out, someone called C. D. Fisher defined 'boredom' as "an unpleasant, transient affective state in which the individual feels a pervasive lack of interest in and difficulty concentrating on the current activity.” The etymological origins of the word 'bore' (as in the feeling, not a hole) are unkown. People just seemed to use the word around 1760 to denote the feeling of ennui. In fact, the phrase was often 'a French bore'. The first recorded use of the word 'boredom' is in Bleak House, penned by Charles Dickens.

I found the YouTube videos I watched to be incredibly depressing. That's to say, the videos themselves were rarely the problem, but the multitude of highly depressing comments which went with them. On a video created by the EU Commission on Aids, there were so many comments about how HIV (along with Ebola, red tide and bird flu) were created by American new-world-order/zionist government agencies, how HIV doesn't actually cause Aids, it's just the side effects from amyl nitrates or anti-retroviral drugs, and on another EU video on equality, the fascist comments were just tragic. I know that I shouldn't put my hopes in human kind, and I know that the internet, with its anonymity, its lack of consequences and its deindividualisation, fuels extreme, hateful or plain stupid comments, and that often only people with the most... marginal... opinions would see the point in posting comments, but still, I found it rather surprising.

In a rather tragic freak accident, a Brazilian widow was killed by the coffin of her late husband.

I hope this entry hasn't left you all depressed and reaching for the amyl nitrates...

1 comment:

  1. I think the widow being killed by her husband's coffin is tragically ironic and strangely and poingnantly moving, as in the widow did not have to wait long to be reunited with her husband.

    ReplyDelete