A Common-sense Thumbs-Down

Music is - The Grotto - Kristin Hersh

I remember reading somewhere that Adam Hart-Davis has refused to dress up for any more of his history programmes. Now I wonder if this is the reason why Dan Cruickshank has taken over from AHD on What the Industrial Revolution Did for Us. Mr Cruickshank doesn't dress up either but everyone he talks to does. It is almost as if he has found a time machine and is talking to the actual characters involved which in some way makes the whole thing a bit more interesting. It was all very civilised and gave a slightly weird sense of time to the programme. I have written in my notebook 'What social changes would time-travel bring about?" I had this idea that Dan Cruickshank was not the in vanguard of time-travel and had arrived when it was already becoming commonplace, a matter-of-fact experience. Of course there are all the paradoxes of time travel where you have to allow for alternative universes created if you affect the present by mucking around with the past but it seems commonsense that if you go back in time you always reach the 'seed' universe for the present you depart from. But then again, this also suggests that it is impossible to get back to the present you left either. Maybe you would have a sort of bookmark. All academic in this present I know, but is it any more far-fetched than things which happen in our current world? Implications are massive.

Spelling is Bnuk. I have removed a few commas after reading this article and I don't mean chasing the butterflies off the rosemary in the garden. (My daughter apparently has a pet butterfly called Pepé though she insists Pepé is a girl. )

Dead Cat Bouncing.

A cat at the lights this morning made me change lanes,
a flat-headed corpse of a cat, Schroedinger's detritus,
blown apart in that box, or poisoned but very dead
and left as landfill garbage
And then in another world, a dead cat walks and talks,
and knows its fate in this universe. A coupled particle
has joined this cat to that; sold it tales of LD-50 and
yields of cyanide, shampoo and bullet brains.

There really was a dead cat at the lights this morning. Not sure if it actually has a copy in any alternative universe but this is what it made me think of. Isn't the world exciting? Blocked now so maybe time to go.