White Poppy.

This Earth of ours contains innumerable examples of bad design. Take this poppy, for example: the original work was carried out using a tool called “evolution,” admittedly not the perfect tool but, on the whole, not to bad. The poppy, as a species, has survived for an aeon, a simple red flower, no fancy bits – but functional. Along came Homo sapiens (aka wise man) and decided that it would look nice in white. Now who, in their right mind, would take a flower that sheds copious amounts of black pollen and dress it in a white frock. It is much akin to a man with bad dandruff wearing a black jacket.

To take another example, my Windows 10 computer has been working tolerably well for several years, but has recently been bombarded by Microsoft with attempts at upgrading its operating system. After about a month of these attacks being successfully repelled, one of them finally broke through the defences yesterday. Now, the Microsoft operating system is suddenly incompatible with that company's flagship suite, Microsoft Office. Now the computer will open any Word or Excel file very quickly and efficiently but, 10 seconds later, without any of the usual common courtesies, closes it back down again leaving not a shred of evidence that it has done anything at all. Windows does, conveniently, provide a facility whereby the user can reset a computer to previous settings; unfortunately, I have never managed to get this incredibly useful function to work. There is also the ability to uninstal some of the upgrades; again, unfortunately, those that have caused the damage are inaccessible.

I wonder if I'll ever manage to get my journal up to date.