Meant to keep drear readers up to date with my university "progress".
Not great so far -- cept that Sociology seems much easier second time around.
This Foundation thing, though, is proving a bit of a worry.
We have this weird tutor and, the other day, he was trying to show us that all the propositions in Freud are unfalsifiable.
That is, they're not formulated in such a way that there could ever be any disconfirmatory evidence.
All you can do is agree with them or deny them.
In short: they're bullshit.
To show this, he set up a parallel theory: that all human endeavour and its failures can be explained by our deeply ingrained but ambiguous relation to chickens!
Your chicken being one of the first animals to be domesticated for food and so one of the first we, qua species, got to know in any detail.
Chickens can be scary the way they scratch around -- try picking one up in a hurry.
But there's nothing funnier than a man in a chicken suit.
An object, then, of both fear and ridicule.
More evidence:
• We say that those who are afraid are chicken (why not goose or duck?)
• Something worthless is chicken feed.
• Potential partners are called "chicks" -- I've even heard "chicky-wick" applied to both sexes as objects of affection (aka possible shagging).
• As it's bloody Easter again (of which, no doubt, more in another post): chickens and their eggs are classic instances of fertility symbols.
• The well-known -- almost seminal, archetypal -- jokes about chickens: crossing the road and such.
• The equally archetypal conundrum of existence: which came first ... usw.
• Combining the joke and the conundrum: a chicken and an egg are in bed -- the chicken is smoking a cigarette -- the egg says "That solves that problem".
• Look at the variety of meat in the supermarket (ignore obscure forms): most of them have fancy Froggy names that disguise their origin (beef, mutton, pork, veal, etc.) but chicken is just chicken.
• The cuts of meat have disguised names too (surloin, hock, shank, etc.) but chicken has down-to-earth names like "breast", "leg", "thigh".... There's an obvious identification going on here.
• The funky chicken dance is almost completely confined to weddings. Go figure.
• Even Freud knew these things but repressed them. Cf his book Yokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious; and his famous case study of "Little Hens". Only the names were changed to hide what he really wanted to say.
• I could go on with this load of cock but shall spare you all.
So you can see what sorts of madness and corruption are being inflicted on the youth of the society through our universities these days.
Where can you get hemlock when you need it?
