Homo ex machina

Typically for the day following a bank holiday, the morning dawned bright and clear but still pretty cold. I did the right thing and forsook the bike for the train and carried on reading "Quiet" by Susan Cain. I like her subtitle of "The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking". Like a lot of fellow introverts, I feel that it's talking directly about me. There are many facets of my temperament that I'm now feeling much more positive about. I have a clear explanation of why, despite a deep love of cricket, I never ended up playing at any serious level, nor any team game for that matter. I was predisposed to enjoy long distance running and cycling, the training for which inevitably involves long periods of time on your own. My worst nightmare was always a training partner who wouldn't stop talking. I'm accepting that I'm nothing like as odd as I thought I was. And that's been quite a revelation really.

Quite remarkably, one of the pioneers into research about introversion and extroversion, Jerome Kagan, actually speculated there was a correlation between introversion and certain physical traits such as blue eyes and hay fever. Male introverts are apparently more likely to be thin! I have all these traits. It is, of course, much more complex than this might suggest but it would be fascinating to do a quick straw poll amongst the introverts out there. A little while back, taken from Cain's book, I posted a short list of questions on this blip here to give people a way of broadly ranking themselves on a scale from 0 to 20. So, indulge me again. If you ranked 15 or above on that scale (basically meaning that you're an introvert) would you care to comment on your eye colour and whether you have suffered from allergies. I'd be fascinated if we can corroborate these findings. I'd feel even less strange then!

I never did make it back to the computer last night. I ended up watching Silver Linings Playbook with the boys. We really enjoyed it, and I thought Jennifer Lawrence was amazing, but I was really surprised at how different it was from the book. The screenplay took the characters and the skeleton of the story along with the main plot device, and then pretty much changed everything else! I barely recognised any of the dialogue. It might possibly have been for the better but it's hard to make my mind up. Anyone else got an opinion?