Limited Toolkit

"When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail." This quotation is normally used by liberals to decry a conservative tendency towards monolinear thinking.

However, political and social liberals like myself tend to have an equivalent (or perhaps hypervalent) tendency that may be worse: "When all you have is a toolbox, everything looks like a tool."

Which is to say, we tend to see every effort by an authority-holding entity to be one aimed at curtailing liberties. In that, we make ourselves libertarians, not liberals. True liberals should be in most (if not all) cases prepared to critique and criticise everything - including their own assumptions about power, the state, truth, expression, and other such constructs.

Sometimes, the majority of people do want simple things - not to be bombarded with advertisements, not to have faux news inflicted on them. Is that censorship? If the state speaks for the people who created it or who elected the governing moiety of that state, do they have a right to rein in special interests on behalf of those people? Is this tyranny by majority (an oxymoron for those who know their history)?

Ah, questions, questions. But remember: the toolbox must have tools in it, and the more, the better. I'd rather not have only a set of really big power tools at the expense of my jewellers' screwdrivers and other diverse and mismatched tools.

A Close Brush with Death

I finally swapped my Frankenbrush back for a Pulsar.

The idea of an electrical toothbrush is an old one. It is a little more recent that the source of the electricity has become a battery in the handle. It is even more recent that light-weight synthetics and computer-aided design have minimised the number of moving parts and maximised the brushiness (oh, what a wolfberry word!) of the brush.

The Pulsar is a nice colour. It is mostly blue with golden-yellow vibrating bristles. It has clean and swelling lines that seem to say, "Brush with me, and I will make you clean."

All toothbrushes should say things like that.

My old Frankenbrush was a bad one; it used to say, "Brush with me, and I will make you pay for it in agonising ways; hold hard, or you might be found lying on the ground dead from acute entanglement with a geometry that man was not meant to see."

As you can see, I am beginning to develop an acute appreciation for the quotidian and mundane, for the things I see and use everyday.

Pencils

It's been a long time since I looked at a pencil. Do you remember the days when a good sharpener would peel of a curling swathe of fresh and aromatic wood, exposing sharp and shiny black pencil lead? It seems such a long time ago now.

I'm sure that I've sharpened many pencils and used many pencils since then, but my strongest memories of pencils come from primary school days. I remember what I thought of as 'pencil-sharpening parties', when kids would gather around the big waste bin in the corner of the classroom to sharpen pencils, gossip, and engage in discussions about whether long pencils were nicer than pencil stubs.

There was this guy who loved short pencils. He would either sharpen them repeatedly just to whittle them down to size, or he'd actually break his pencils in half when new and sharpen them into two half-size pencils. I asked him why he did this. He replied that he found long pencils to be a waste of length. Hrrrrm.

I remember my grandfather sharpening his 6B pencils with a knife. It was fascinating to watch him shape the tip with a few well-placed strokes. He never used a sharpener; he hated having pencils with tips that were too sharp and might break. He shuddered at the idea of a 0.5 mm mechanical pencil, although he didn't mind the older kind which could hold a thicker lead.

There is a kind of romance with pencils. They are like the last vestige of a time before efficiency drives and the hard, manic insanity of a certain kind of working life. Pencils seem to say that there is still a sort of space in the unfolding of time, that you can watch the world and record it through the imprecision of a pencil better than through the digital accuracy of a modern camera. To this day, I've not forgotten how to sketch with a pencil.