{"id":4166,"date":"2012-01-20T08:10:43","date_gmt":"2012-01-20T13:10:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/hawkdog.net\/wordpress\/?p=4166"},"modified":"2012-01-20T08:31:19","modified_gmt":"2012-01-20T13:31:19","slug":"the-circus-the-laundry-and-apophenia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/hawkdog.net\/wordpress\/archives\/4166","title":{"rendered":"The Circus, The Laundry and Apophenia"},"content":{"rendered":"

A month or so ago I re-watched the classic 1979 BBC\u00a0adaptation<\/a>\u00a0of LeCarr\u00e9’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy – partly to get ready for the new Gary Oldman movie, but mainly because it is so damn good. I was happily viewing when one shot caused my jaw to drop:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

George Smiley is on his way to the Lamplighter’s HQ to interview Toby Esterhase. I saw the ‘Starlight Laundry’ sign and immediately thought of Mr. Stross<\/a>. His wickedly entertaining Laundry<\/a> series is a Secret Service\/Lovecraft\/bureaucracy horrorthrillercomedy amalgam that I can recommend unreservedly. “Aha”, says I, “I’ll bet this scene is The Laundry’s birthplace!”<\/p>\n

Alas. A little while later I tweeted – wondering if there was any back story to the choice of a laundry in the BBC shot. \u00a0[technical note – I will work out the ’embedding Storify<\/a> w\/in a WordPress post’ kinks in the fullness of time – for now, a screen scrape]<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

“Apophenia is the experience of seeing meaningful patterns or connections in random or meaningless data.” *<\/a><\/p>\n

And lest anyone think I’m particularly observant\/pattern recognizing\/perceptive, I think this one belongs in the “even a blind pig can believe he’s found an acorn once in a while” bucket.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A month or so ago I re-watched the classic 1979 BBC\u00a0adaptation\u00a0of LeCarr\u00e9’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy – partly to get ready for the new Gary Oldman movie, but mainly because it is so damn good. I was happily viewing when … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[21,22],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4166","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-random-stuff","category-scifi"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pdqxx-15c","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/hawkdog.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4166","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/hawkdog.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/hawkdog.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/hawkdog.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/hawkdog.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4166"}],"version-history":[{"count":17,"href":"http:\/\/hawkdog.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4166\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4184,"href":"http:\/\/hawkdog.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4166\/revisions\/4184"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/hawkdog.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4166"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/hawkdog.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4166"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/hawkdog.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4166"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}