The hills are alive, with the sound of Stray Thoughts

1. Beware the person who claims to be sensitive, for they may well be sensitive only to their own suffering, and not too worried about yours.

2. You can buy a cheap watch for 99p, but when the battery runs out, it's usually something like £5 just to replace that. Huh?

3. Season One of 'Lost' didn't exactly have the best ending of all time, did it ? Oh, they've opened the hatch, but you're not going to see inside it. And Michael and Walt have sailed into the plot of Deliverance, apparently. Really unsure as to whether I'll bother tuning in when it returns, as it was all pretty much downhill after the excellent Locke-based episode early on (was it episode 3?) - written, if memory serves, by one of the writers of Buffy. Overall: hmph.

4. And on which theme, saw King Kong last week - that's three hours of my life I'm not going to get back. Not recommended at all, and some bits of it were frankly embarrassing (monkey on ice, Ann Darrow doing slapstick for Kong's benefit - ugh, it's like 'is it still raining?' in Four Weddings all over again).

5. Had a minor brush with being unwell recently, and as far as curatives go, I really do recommend the combination of a sofa, a stack of books/DVDs, and plentiful intake of tea. Daytime television, however, will weaken both your mental acuity and your ability to repel infection. Avoid it at all costs.

6. In its way, isn't ethical relativism a positive stance ?

7. After seeing Kill Bill part (NOT chapter) 2 and the episodes of CSI he wrote, I'm beginning to think Quentin Tarantino has a bit of a fear of premature burial.

8. I've often thought that Descartes' alleged 'Cogito ergo sum' is flawed both logically (it presupposes the existence of the thinker) and similarly on a linguistic level, as the conjugation of the verb to think there is in line with the first person singular, again presupposing the thinker. So whilst I'm intrigued to find out that his original Discourse on method didn't actually contain the phrase, I'm reassured to see that the original French phrase he used - "Je pense, donc je suis" contains pretty much the same seeds of its own undoing...