Quote of the day

It helps sometimes, before you get seized by the clamour of things and the frenzies of the moment, to pause and consider if the matter at hand deserves your emotional energy. Most things don’t. On any given day, news is a vacuum into which significance must be poured and if whatever’s around isn’t truly significant, then whatever’s available must be made to seem significant.

The trick for us poor stumblebums on the receiving end of a torrent of hyperbole is to sort the wheat from the dross. In an angst-happy world, there’s no point getting all het up and hot and bothered and ringing talkback to say we’ve had a gutsful until we’ve applied a simple test to see if whatever it is we’re having a gutsful about actually deserves the abdominal distendation. . .  Jim Hopkins