the 'Hippopotamus Effect'

Something in Minority Report reminded me of something I had read a long time ago. Eventually I worked it out. In 'A Year with Swollen Appendices' by Brian Eno, he talks in one of the said swellings about adverts tailored exactly to their intended target. He writes a short story about Daniel Xavier Shelton (which you can read. I am 38 too.) This exactly describes the situation in Minority Report where the billboards tailor themselves to the people who get close enough to have their eye prints scanned by the readers. Now I have to find out if this was in the short story on which the film was based or if it was an idea of the film-makers. I suspect that Brian Eno may well read Philip K. Dick.

"The small frogs The small frogs Are amusing to see No ears, no ears No tails do they have"

An interesting link - Samantha Morton who played Agatha, one of the Pre-Cogs, in Minority Report has apparently just been filming where I live. See if you can see her here.

I need an Oblique Strategy and that Strategy is ... Destroy -nothing -the most important thing. Which means that I will not now undelete or remove any of the information from this page. I will remove spelling mistakes unless they are revealing or interesting in some way. All of which does not tell me what to write about but if you want more Self Reference then I suppose I should talk about (I meant write about but I am not removing anything) Oblique Strategies. They seem to lean towards being for help with a stalled musical performance or recording process but even those which are obviously related to that, seem to fit with many other situations. I wrote a program once to throw up a Random OS whenh I logged in and I added a few of my own. It is suprisingly easy to invent new ones - have a look at the existing ones and try it.

Imagine you are wrong when you imagine you are wrong.
Split a split-second and then recombine all the split-seconds you have created.
Record a recording of you recording a recording.

These took me as long as it took to type them to invent. The last one has been done in a very pure form. I think it is a very early Steve Reich piece which involves recording a recording over and over again until it becomes unrecognisable, an effect which is now easily replicated with digital delays though I suspect the quality of a digital implementation of this will be very different from the analogue ... er analogue (Maybe not the write word but an interesting result). There is so much interesting stuff out there. I am trying not to write anything which I will want to delete later because as I said, I am not going to divert anything. I meant delete anything. It is like that cure for hiccoughs, run up and down stairs seven times without thinking of a hippopotamus (Hippamus Potamus to my daughter). You can't do it (unless of course the active element in the cure is to think of a Hippopotamus). Remember the end of 'Village of the Damned' (It should have been called 'The Midwich Cuckoos') when Zellaby had to think of a brick wall so that the telepathic children didn't see that he was carrying a bomb to kill them all. Of course all he imagined was the wall falling down, though we don't know if that was the children affecting his mind or just the 'Hippopotamus Effect'. Anyway, the bomb went off and they all died so a happy ending was had by all. Does John Wyndham always have someone who's given name begins with 'Z' (Zed please)?. There was someone in 'Trouble with Lichen' as well.

Time passes. Only you can see. (To be read in a mellifluous Welsh voice).