Night Mail.

Lots of poems to be listened to here. I went here because last night there was a short programme about the end of the Royal Mail Post trains. before it started I guessed they would start it with Auden's poem, Night Mail and they did. I always thought it was Betcheman with its strong rhythm and rhyme but I have heard it enough now to be certain. It accompanied a 1930s film by the Royal Mail which I don't remember seeing except for short clips.

I have just listened to both Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath's poems on this page and I have noticed a slight twinge of Hughes' Yorkshire accent in Plath's speech. Not a surprise I know but interesting to note nevertheless.

All this poetry has started me on an idea which I am off to realise. Bye

Dangling Action Men out of the Window on bits of String

I never quite worked out what this meant but it was said to be a pastime of Sixth-formers at my school. We had many pastimes in our sixth-form but I don't recall ever doing this. We did measure the mean free path of molecules in a gas using fifth years distributed in the hall and we did weigh fire extinguishers. Never got to hang Action men though. Really weird that. If anyone can explain then drop me a line at the email listed. Maybe its a euphemism for some practice which I never got involved with.

There are at least three people from another planet living on Earth.

Yesterday we watched a programme called My Family and Autism about a single mother with seven children. The four boys all have some form of autism spectrum disorder. The second boy, Luke is thirteen and has Asperger's syndrome. A very articulate child, he has written two books (see Amazon listings) and this programme last night was basically his film. The two younger boys seem to be affected more. However, and this may just be judicious editing, far from seeming like a family devastated by the disorder, they were happy and as my wife said, a great advert for family life. It seems that most problems that children have can be either exacerbated or lessened by the reactions of the parents and other children. The other family members have accepted the boys’ problems. Personally I didn't see that Luke had any problems other than being a boy who liked to read rather than play football and as he said you don't take your kid to a developmental Psychologist if he is obsessed with football so why do so if he is obsessed with, what other children would call, geeky things?

One of the most amazing bits of the programme was when Luke and his younger brother were given coloured glasses, which helped stabilise their vision. Luke got blue glass while his brother got red. This stopped letters dancing on the page and helped Luke walk a straight line along a corridor. Miracle and cheap. Can the NHS take note? If need be, do a cost/benefit analysis of any future care required. Who is normal? Certainly not me if this programme is right.

I have a theory that Autistic Children do not lack the social and emotional apparatus to determine how to interact with other people; they instead have a heightened awareness of the emotional factors in relationships and are just like the rest of us in being unable to decipher them. It is just that 'normal' people do not care about such things. Far from being unemotional, Autistic children are hyper-emotional. Too far? It's just a theory right.

The bottom line is that I feel humbled, having only one pretty balanced child. If Luke's mother can keep her calm with all that going on, then I can be a better father.

Blocks and Blocks of Dead End Lies

I know that mentioning dreams is probably bad practice but then again so is writing down poems so I will carry on. Last night I dreamed of Mandalay. No - sorry!. last night I dreamed something which I noted, while still dreaming, I should blog. As usual, I can't remember what the original thing was but I have remembered that I needed to blog it. Maybe there was nothing and I was just dreaming that I should blog something and this was a fear about forgetting all the things I should write down. I still feel that there was something which required noting.

I want to curl up in some little glade while the rain patters through the leaves. When Governments can set up mechanisms for allowing the free market to bet on Terrorist Attacks, you know that Wonderland was real and this horrible place in which you live is the dream. It is only right that this has been axed. Having said this, we could see the logic behind it but the basic idea that the free-market is a better indicator of such events than the intelligence agencies is an admission of failure on the part of those agencies. I think it's Wednesday - the morning.

From Chicago to New York

Got the Orwell book last night and watched the South Bank show special on Orwell (by the author of this book). Well that is reading log over with for the day. We float.

I dreamed about Bali last night though as usual it was not the real Bali, more some sandy, watery oceanic island with elements of the South of France about it. Rather strange to say the least. In the dream, I found a rough sketch, which was supposed to be Queen Elizabeth I during a visit to the island. Now I don't think Queen Elizabeth I ever left this country (was she at the Field of the Cloth of Gold with her father?) so that was rather interesting. It wasn't a bad dream, apart from the normal worry that I have been on a plane to get there and I have to get on one to go back. It was the flight back from Bali which made me frightened of flying so maybe this is trying to tell me that I will never be able to go back unless I get on a plane.

I can't find anything about Elizabeth I being at the Field of the Cloth of Gold.

Totally blank now. At this point I always remember that there was something really important to write down but that I have forgotten the details. Sometimes I will have an impression of what it is about but will not recall enough detail to set it down.

Aha! I have just remembered something. I worry about the implication of Chaos theory with regard to Genetic engineering. I may have mentioned this in previous entries. I took this to an ultimate end for the human race. This end is not that our species will die out, but that we all end up the same, like the Midwich Cuckoos. Even though we will all have normal intelligence and not be mentally deficient, we will be incapable of adjusting to the fact that everyone is the same. Society will collapse because there will not be enough variation to sustain changes in how humans interact and react to events around them. This will be in the same way that species die out if they do not Physically adapt to events and their environment.

I have not yet worked out how small genetically engineered changes could cause this to happen, but it just seems a logical possibility if you think about how small genetic changes can build up. Even if this does not happen, I suspect that some bomb-shell mutation in whatever species we engineer will cause some form of catastrophe. Fear it and don't buy genetically engineered produce.

Read this and get annoyed. Well I know I should not editorialise and direct juries but the fact that the US cannot deal with its own waste seems rather unacceptable. 200 jobs for 200 lives. Do you think 200 extra people dead because of these ships is possible? I do. I can be as partisan as you want here but I really think that countries responsible for pollution should also be responsible for clearing it up.

Oh for the open road and the haunt of the Seamew.

Jungfrau and Matterhorn

Re: The Movie - Sylvia

Every time I read something by or about Sylvia Plath, I seem to be listening to Steve Reich.

Anyway, have a look at this picture and see if you get the same spooky feeling which I got.

Mixed feelings as always over this matter. I probably will go and see the film but it is one of those case where you would not say "I wish they would make a film of this"; there is already so much feeling about her life already amongst the fans of her work that a film would be unnecessary. One of the correspondents on the Sylvia Plath forum site says "Believe it or not, there's many people out there that have no idea who Plath is.". That is extremely pompous. Plath's poetry is not exactly easy reading and even if she did enthuse about the glossy magazines ("Slicks"), she is never going to be popular like Big Brother or the soaps.

Talking about poetry, the BBC drama biog about Philip Larkin was very good. Now I am sure that this did not raise huge objections. I am not a fan of Larkin; he is the literary equivalent of Victor Meldrew I think, but this was quite absorbing if a little depressing. Only two laughs in the whole thing one being Larkin's take on what Ted Hughes' laureate poems would be like - not too far from the reality actually. When I mentioned it my wife said that she had never seen any of Hughes' laureate poems so I showed her "Rain Charm for the Duchy and other laureate poems". I remember the first poem which was for the Christening of Prince William. I didn't really appreciate it at the time but it is quite evocative of weather (very Hughes). The Daily Express had a real go at it (not known for literary criticism even in those days) and he seemed to be stung by this because the poem for The Duke and Duchess of York's wedding was so sickly sweet as to be almost like one of the verses in a cheap greetings card. This was not nearly as bad as our current Laureate's offering for Prince William's 21st birthday. "Better stand back Here's an age attack"! (Yes Andrew. It is an exclamation mark.) The B Side IS from a cheap greetings card isn't it? I am so glad that the Poet Laureate doesn't get paid. Maybe he does now and is part of some Public/Private Finance Initiative.

I want to write the word 'Fake' here.

No matter! The end of that biography will make you cry. Whatever happened to Holden Caulfield?

Mercator

Nothing - a special report. The complexity of the world seems to fade into the background here. We have nothing worth talking about and still there is so much going on everywhere else. I can close my eyes and see the Neutrinos colliding with my neurones. Who needs all that water and mine shafts? CERN is just another drain on resources. The light over the buildings faded as the devices started up. Round and round went the particles searching for something to crash into. They never found it. If I travel fast enough and my mass increases, does my own personal gravity increase? Is this part of relativity? I have not read about this. Outside, the sky still fades and the rain comes down. We sit in the doorway and watch it keeping just out of the wind, still warm and inside the house but connected to the water by the splashes from the ground outside. How do you tell anyone how wonderful this is? There is nothing like the rain. We are unique in the Universe. No other planet has water that comes from the sky or if they do, then there is no intelligent life form to experience it. They do not see things. Sight is also unique to us. As we do not see anyone else, then as far as we are concerned then we do not see it. Wait and see something only when you measure it. Humans created everything. Nothing existed in any sensory manner before we were here to see and experience it. I dreamed of being faceless with no eyes and not ears. How would I experience the world? My consciousness would not last long for I would be unable to sustain myself, but for the time I existed, what would the Universe feel like? It would be nothing. I would experience my own thoughts, a world within my head. If I had never seen or heard, what would those thoughts be? Maybe when we create the first computer with an intelligence and learning capacity matching that of humans we should not connect up any sensory equipment and just monitor the processes; let it freewheel for a bit. Think of the revelation when it was 'born'. No mind can be so pure. Think of those poor children who were kept from language to see what language they would speak by default. Many hundreds of years ago that was. Then there was Genie. She was the same and she didn't speak Hebrew or Sanskrit did she? She spoke nothing. Her parents stole her speech before she ever had it. Talk to the children and they will talk back. David Crystal knows all. Accent does matter but we all have one. My mind races when I write like this. Self reference and complete automatons must surely be dangerous. Who is controlling the freewheeling mind? We can never know but it is just me. My mind is mine and comes complete with the developed mind of all my ancestors. Think of this. You can trace your lineage right back to a single celled animal. All amoebas can. They are all the same genetically until they mutate somehow. Does my mind have elements of the control processes of such simple creatures? DNA is the beginning of intelligence. All of our computers are based on the simple idea of one or zero and all their complexity is built up from that. All life is based on DNA and DNA on its own is far more complex than one or zero. No wonder we are so clever. Computers should be based on something more complex than binary arithmetic. Think of the speed you could achieve with a living computer using the bases of DNA to form its core processing ability. And you would have a computer that could replicate itself. All out desktops here use the same basic processing now as they did 15 years ago. They are just faster, nothing more. Change the architecture and create something new. What then do we do when the computer is as sentient as we are? The idea of a computer is to have it do the things we do not want to do. What if the machines got bored with their lot? We have to retire them or get them to develop something better. This is ludicrous self-reference. Lets dance. Forget science. Check the grammar little ones. It is so important to not be random like this. We are not happier than when we can find some prose to pull apart. Use a long word when a short one will do. This just confuses the enemy who you can never know. They do not know you and yet they feel they must dislike you and press their buttons to try and get rid of you. 108 he was, a hero and a lion. The world never changes and wars never change. We will send men into battle until the world ends in a mess of comets and tidal waves. We will just be clouds in the galaxy by then; consciousness propelled to the stars. What if I was a beam of light? - my consciousness encoded in those photons. I would travel at lightspeed and reach everywhere instantly. I would have the whole universe in my mind and the universe would be mine. Maybe that is what God is? If God is a beam of light then he is everywhere at the same time. Einstein created God when he imagined being that beam. Man has defined the universe and we just cannot see the complexity.

Deasil and Widdershins
or a scientific attempt to compress the Village People into the smallest possible space

As you know, I am not prone to crackpot ideas about the supernatural. However, as you also know, I am quite happy to talk about such things. Today's topic has me slightly spooked. As I was driving to work this morning, I passed a very large black dog loping along the pavement. At first, I thought it was some sort of Irish Woflhound but its nose was too short. As it had the potential for more than a friendly lick, I reported it to the Police - The station is only 200 yards from where I saw the dog and it was travelling in that direction anyway. Now, even before Harry Potter and Sirius Black, I was aware of the mysterious implications of seeing black dogs; I come from a county with a very high incidence of (belief in) fairies. I can safely say that this black dog paid no attention me and simply carried on in the direction it was travelling without even looking at the car. I couldn't tell whether it was happy or angry (I would have needed first to stop the car and second to buy one of these). Lets face it; I was not trapped inside a rickety old church with the dog running widdershins about it so I think I am safe. I will convince myself of the rational explanation for this sooner or later.

Soundtrack is a various selection of the Volume CDs from the early 90s. I used to get this every time it came out. It consisted of a nice thick book with articles about all the bands on the full-length CD attached. I can't find anything about them on the web but the current one - Volume five - has the Orb, The Grid, L7, Cocteau Twins and various other bands of that ilk. Right now we have Venice Groove by The Sandals which has that ecstatic flute you get in sixties funk records. Having just searched for this record, I have found this site about Volume itself. Life falls into place eventually doesn't it?

Norman Stanley Fletcher and other soundbites

Soundtrack - Well just wait and see.

I have just had one of those weird moments of serendipity which only come along a few times. I accidentally clicked on the My Library list in Real Player and it started playing all the sound files which I have listened to on the web since I got this laptop, some 150 files. It goes from the welcome message on the Suzanne Vega website, via "And now for something completely different" from Monty Python to The Soviet National Anthem. I am currently listening to the spoof phone call sound files which I set up using the Bell Laboratories Voice Synthesizer programme. It is getting difficult to identify all of them. Now it is Philip Glass but I have just had lots of Spanish which I don't understand. Try it on your own real Player and see what you get. David Toop would be proud of me.

Aha! The Horizon Theme. Brilliant! I used to play this on my own kit at home.

I wasn't going to write anything as I am reading Mil Millington's book so this is a bonus for you.

From one mind to another

I got a whiff of a very familiar scent in the lift coming up here just now. It was exactly the same smell as there used to be in the ante-room to our Biology lab at middle school, a hint of floor polish with overtones of formaldehyde. I am not sure that children are allowed to have pickled biological specimens any more but our school, being in a rural area where many of the children would go into some form of agricultural work, was full of such things. When I left the school, there were also too bottles of ginger beer fermenting in that small room. I only remembered them half way through the summer holidays. I hope they didn't explode. We also had a rinky-dinky little circular saw with a diamond edge which could cut stones in half but on which you could place a finger without it being damaged. If only the children were allowed to spend all their time in that room. I would never have gone anywhere else. All those specimens and science books. The whole school has been demolished now, except for a small section of it which I think is the local village hall.

I feel a bit empty afetr talking about a building which no longer exists. Every place I have lived is still intact, but that school is the one building in which I spent any length of time which has gone. I'd never thought about that before. I can see why Rachel Whiteread likes to make casts of empty rooms. I apologise for the pretentious writing on that last link but it does mention the evocation of memory and association which is what I am trying to get at here. She has recently done a cast of the interior of room 101 at the BBC which reminds me, I have just ordered Orwell: The Life (on the back of three Mary Poppins books for my daughter - Mil Millington would be proud of me). Talk to me in a week after we have finished all the books.

Sountrack (late I know) - The Mix - Kraftwerk

No comment about this is necessary, I think you'll agree.

There is a wonderfully threatening sky here. There is a vogue in adverts at the moment to have the 'before' situation lit like a thunderstorm with the 'after' - the result of using the advertised product, having a warm orange glow as if the product changes your house completely, because of course an air freshener can do that can't it. My only problem is that I like the light of a thunderstorm far better than the Ikea catalogue look. I remember a very big thunderstorm when I was still in Nottingham which must have made me about four because we moved to Malvern when I was five. The light was wonderful.

Easy Tears

The heartbreak of simple music and remembrance
makes tears come like rain from nothing
and the life we had has left us empty,
passing days into the paper of our diaries.

Give us magic, blank machines of comfort,
lose loss as trees go round the seasons,
leafless in our middle age to spring long passed
and all the tears and joy of being five again.

(Click on the title for a picture which may or may not go with this poem)

Beware the Pigeon Inspectors

There have been a number of people walking across the roof of the building which we can see out of the office window here. They first look down at something on the roof and then point up at the sky. We can only imagine that they are looking at dead pigeons and wondering where they come from. Reminds me of the episode in 24 Hour Party people where Shaun Ryder and (in the film anyway) his brother poison hundreds of Manchester Pigeons using bread spiked with some controlled substance. It took a few minutes for the stuff to take effect meaning that many pigeons simply expired in mid-air and rained down on the city. Been done before of course, if only in song - Poisoning Pigeons in the Park. Tom Lehrer is of course, the writer of the Elements song but that is probably the least scandalous of all his tunes. Marilyn Manson has nothing on the Masochism Tango. It seems if you dress in a suit and have a Haaaarrrrrrvaaaaarrrrrd accent, you can get away with anything though I do think one or two of his records were banned in this country. It makes you proud to be a soldier.

The phrase "Harvard accent" reminds me that Loyd Grossman is doing a history of sculpture for Channel 5. Just to let you know of course. I am not that keen on sculpture. You don't get the variety that is possible with painting. Of course I can appreciate the beauty of some sculpture but it just does not fire me up like some medieval religious painting does. Indeed I would rank most painting over any sculpture. Even the standard purple Rothko painting has more subtlety than many so-called masterpieces of sculpture. (I have just realised that I have never had to spell the word 'subtlety' before and it was struggle.) I may still watch the Sculpture programme though even if Mr Grossman's accent could sculpt marble on its own.

Repeated Repetition

Soundtrack - Six Pianos - Steve Reich

This is just sublime (I just checked the full meaning of that word to ensure that I am correct). 24 minutes of exactly what it says; six pianos locked in patterns of immense beauty, and yet even at the start I know I will play it again from the start. To sum it up, the music consists of Six Pianos (or in a later version - Marimbas) playing pretty much the same eight note sequence in various combinations and interlocking patterns. The variation in the piece derives from the gradual introduction of each new pattern a single note or chord at a time. It is life condensed to simple mathematics. I made an effort to get to my boxes of CDs yesterday as I am being ribbed over the selection of my wife's CDs which I have been listening to. I will not embarrass her by listing them here though she would probably not be that worried if I did; after all, she bought them in the first place. On an early date, I said loftily that it was not good to criticise someone's choice in music as all music brings happiness to someone. Of course this was before I found out what she liked to listen to. My compilation tapes for her (before I had read High-Fidelity) consisted of - so I thought - reasonably cool stuff like Stereolab and though I think she liked them, I was unprepared for her actual musical heroes ( and I apply the term "heroes" very lightly). I will leave you to make up your own mind by giving you a few clues - Irish, Tea Drinker, Jumper wearer (but no rocking chair - well not from my limited viewing of his videos).

I have to link to this BBC article if only because Joseph Merrick is now known to have suffered from Proteus syndrome. I don't remember seeing the film though of course I know the voice which John Hurt used. All the voices John Hurt uses.

My daughter went to a Wacky Warehouse party yesterday. If you are not familiar with the concept of three story padded cages only slightly different in appearance from the cells at Camp X-Ray, then you have to made aware. These institutions are usually attached to those Beefeater, Carvery type pubs you find on bypasses and at various other strategic locations. The big draw is that you can drop off kids who will then spend two hours running around, over, under, through and up the various objects and pathways within this giant set of cages which are usually filled with thousands of 10 cm plastic coloured balls. The focal point of the entire setup is an enclosed spiral slide. The slide at this particular Wacky Warehouse was a full three (cage) stories high. After a few slides, my daughter decided that prone descent was boring and started running down the entire length. It is parents' duty to either go to the pub and have a meal/few drinks, or as in my case, to sit nervously outside the complex trying to find out which piece of apparatus their child is on. After a while I realised that I had no need to try and locate her as every few minutes there was a loud thump-thump-thump as she perambulated down the slide. Not for her, the plot amongst some of the other children to stuff their shirts with the plastic balls and shuttle them to a pile outside for later collection. (They were rumbled and the balls retrieved). Also not for her, the transportation of as many of the balls as possible up to the top of the slide in preparation for a rerun of a great lost Irwin Allen disaster movie (probably called Avalanche! - and the exclamation mark is very necessary there). I think that plan was foiled by the tendency of the balls to seek their own level well before the ring-leader of what, in another time would have been an escape committee, could give the order - "Now!" No. My daughter simply beat a well-trodden path from the bottom of the slide to the top and down again, at least forty times over the two hours she was there as far as I could tell. It was a general murmur amongst the fathers there, that it was simply not fair that parents are not allowed in. If only someone would set up a chain of adult Wacky Warehouses. Forget all that poncy Gym Equipment and Lycra stuff. Just let the unfit and overweight loose, in baggy shorts and T-Shirts, in one of those for two hours and the Health Service would be relieved of a great deal of the burdens upon it.

Retinal Overload

There is too much going on in my head at the moment. Put music to all of it and I can hardly keep up with my own thoughts. So much of it is negative and so much of it is positive and yet overall it seems to fade back into some giant un-polarised web of images, sounds and emotions. I just read the manifesto at Bansky's website (He did the cover of the last Blur Album - Think Tank) which was the story about the Allied Soldier at Bergen-Belsen who said how sending lipstick as part of the relief effort was a stroke of genius - it gave the inmates a sense of individualism which the incarceration had stolen from them. This started me off on my current internal video show of all the things that are happening in the world. I know reflecting on all these things is pointless. Short of running for Prime Minister or President, there is little any individual can do to make huge differences (and even then, high office seems to remove the altruism which might make some people run for that office in the first place - the only suitable president is someone who does not want to be president). Nothing is difficult. The things we have to do to relieve the largest amount of suffering are the equivalent of binary addition whereas we seem to think that the signs of progress, Rocket Science, Brain Surgery etc are like Calculus, both differential and integral. They are nice to play with but not the solution for saving the world. Nothing ever will be. All that sounds so glib and stupid. There is no solution. There is only transient enjoyment and music and then we all descend into the homogenous mass again. Falling down.

God save strawberry jam

My daughter (who is very nearly five) has found a new form of protest if she does not want to do something. She has watched Mary Poppins four times over the weekend which as you may remember has Glynis Johns in it as the Suffragette mother of the two children. We went swimming on Saturday and when I tried to coax her out of the water, my darling child ran away shouting "votes for women" at the top of her voice which did seem rather surreal. We are raising an activist. I am saving up for the bail now. She also has green fingers as she has grown tomatoes from seed which she is now harvesting. I won't even attempt to grow anything as I know it will die the vegetable equivalent of a painful death.

Sauterne Bottle in B flat

Sountrack (and what a soundtrack this is) - BBC Radiophonic Workshop - first album - 1968

A procession of treated twangs and bleeps made from all sorts of everyday objects. The object of the album is to entertain rather than to inform. It says that in the sleeve notes but then goes on to have quite a few pages of information about the composers and the way in which they made the music. Delia Derbyshire is of course the original artist of the Doctor Who Theme though it was composed by Ron Grainer. This is like hearing history. I know that I was actually alive at the time many of these pieces were constructed but it is still quite like eavesdropping on something ancient. I had a paperback tie-in with Tomorrow's World at the back of which there was a collection of letters from people in which they requested certain inventions and technology. One of them asked for a machine which could reconstruct what famous people had actually said. The writer suggested that as energy was never destroyed; only turned into another form, then ancient sound could be reformed and replayed. The piece was illustrated with a cartoon of Henry V addressing his troops before Agincourt. He sat proudly on his horse and said "Good luck lads. Sorry I won't be coming with you!". If only! Of course the other requests were for Dandruff cures and four-legged chickens (how would you catch them? Boom-Boom) so this was a standout request. I do hope someone is working on it - the historical tape recorder not the chickens, though I can guess which one has most priority at present and a clue to it would be 'cluck'.

I have just been listening to the original Doctor Who theme tune. I never missed Doctor who until around the time of Sylvester McCoy. Maybe that was just my circumstances. The Paul McGann version in 1996 was quite good but having decent effects seemed to lessen the impact of the stories. I liked the John Pertwee ones best though Tom Baker was good as well. Some of them really did make me hide behind the sofa, though I'm not quite sure what protection I thought it would give against the Dalek exterminators or those weird sea-monsters had technology been wonderful enough to transmit them bodily through the TV. I wonder how many people believe that the people at the other end can see them? Tell anyone these days that something is possible and there is a good chance that they will believe you.

Firefly

Finished the Bryson book last night! Now onto the Feynman biog. Harry Potter was finished ages ago by the way but I have not been allowed to talk about it until my wife finished it as well.

The Short History of Everything was just that but in way which gave new insight into almost every area of science. Bill Bryson has no professional reputation in the fields discussed and so can afford to say things which scientists will not normally say, things like "We don't know." or "There is just too much to do." He does not gloss over the many dangers we as humans face on what is in reality a very dangerous place to live. It is only by luck that we have managed to survive long enough to redirect our powers of analysis back on ourselves. It seems that science does not like revealing these truths in case it panics us. The general population has such a low opinion and knowledge of science, that these realities would just be mind-blowing.

My daughter has been asking whether whales are the largest animals that ever lived. She cannot believe that they are bigger than dinosaurs. It is not generally known that Whales are far bigger than dinosaurs. The average Blue Whale is about 25m long and weighs around 100,000 Kg. In contrast, the Brachiosaurus, although longer only weighed about 50,000 Kg. Still big and quite impressive bearing in mind that it lived out of water for at least some of the time. But nothing like a whale.

My mind is like the sky - a complete blank. Off to read some Feynman.

Anthropomorphism

Soundtrack - Transient Random-Noise Bursts With Announcements

The weather seems to have broken though the cloud is now so thick I am beginning to wonder if the Meteorite has struck and this is the Winter which follows. There was nothing on the news so I think we are probably safe.

I sat in our 'break-out' area yesterday (euphemism for room with tables and Vending machines) because it is the only place on the floor with air-conditioning. I suddenly got the impression that the machines were watching me and at any moment would launch themselves through the air to get back the coffee I had stolen from them. The human desire to find faces in everything is unnerving. My daughter does it all the time. We were driving past a long line of regency style houses in town the other day when she pointed out that the doors had faces, the upper long panels being the eyes while the letter boxes were mouths. From simply being doors we now had a row of red faces staring at us. Luckily the lights changed and we moved on before I got really spooked. I really need that digital camera don't I?

The current track from those lovely people at Stereolab is I'm Going Out Of My Way and it fits beautifully with the day. I feel like I am in some 60s movie like Georgy Girl or Alfie. (Oi! Stop messing me about). I was born in the sixties but it seems like ancient history now. Sometimes I get these looping thoughts regarding history. The beginning of the 20th Century is within some living memory and yet take a hundred years off now and you are within living memory of the Napoleonic wars. As Hillyer said in A Child's History Of The World, the (then) 1900 years or so since the birth of Christ is only 19 lives each of one hundred years lived sequentially. Keep that in mind when you think about history. The four hundred years between the Death of Elizabeth I and now are but a blip. We are little different from the Tudors; the basis of our moral outlook was already in place as was our language and culture. Lead on.

Oh! Here is Jenny Ondioline which I mentioned in my second ever Blog entry here. Bliss out on this track if you have it. This is music for musicians. And of course on the same page you get the poem "Proteus" of which I am very proud. Is that against any blog etiquette? Repetition is always viable. For most of the time that there has been music on this earth, it has been repetitive and while I can appreciate complexity in music, it is the repetition which gets the more primeval instincts going. Which maybe why wrinklies (my membership card is probably being printed at this very moment) complain about youngsters' music being thump-thump; they have suppressed the more basic desires within themselves and crave more 'enlightened' (as they see it) cultural activities. (Either that or they do the "This has got a good beat" thing (Copyright Hugh Dennis I think). I find myself complaining about 'modern music' with my normal comparison of the repetitiveness of most pop-songs when compared to the so-called minimalism of messrs Glass and Reich. It does seem that to have a memorable hit record these days you need to do a cover - The Tide is High, Favourite Things (which must annoy the writers because the Big Brovaz version says exactly the opposite of the simple message of the original - Oh! I have missed the joke have I? I must be a wrinkly - pass the Wintergreen).

Ach Avey!

Soil Festivities

Soundtrack Two Pages - Philip Glass

I was listening to Withholding Pattern by John Surman earlier and both this and the Glass piece above fit the oppressive atmosphere we have today. There is some giant hand holding an invisible gauze over this city trying to foment some form of uprising. I can only hope that we get a storm soon. It used to be that it got hot, you had a storm and it got fresher but now the storms seem to miss us and the heat just fades away.

Talking about Glass reminds me that I have just read in the Bill Bryson book that James Watson (of Watson and Crick) distinguished himself on the radio programme The Quiz Kids (he's in one of these pictures) which before I read the next line made me think of the Glass family. Bryson dutifully declared Watson to be an inspiration in part for Salinger's Glass family. Nice bit of loose-end sorting there.

Scintillating Spirogyra

Hi there Peter! Nice to see you have some time to visit.

Did you think you were going to get a Jazz record (well of sorts I suppose)?

Actual soundtrack for today is currently :-

The Guitar and Other Machines - The Durutti Column

and :-

Blue - Terje Rypdal and the Chasers

My wife tells me that my trip to Bletchley Park where I last saw the Battle of Britain Memorial Flight was in June last year which means that I have been blogging for longer than I thought. I have got used to the new format very quickly and my wife says she is happier with this layout because it is easier to read. I just liked the implication of detail which the old template had, simply because the text was smaller. It looked like some sort of technical document but it didn't draw you into actually wanting to read it.

The heat just removes any possibility of thinking of anything important. I have found this article about starless galaxies (made out of gas which failed to coalesce to save you clicking on the link). It has made me think again at how wonderful the BBC actually is. For an MP to compare the BBC to Enron is quite awful but it is only to be expected at the moment with the current spat between BBC news and the Government. Is is not the role of the media to uncover inconsistencies in the behaviour of Governments. For the Government (and you know who I really mean here) to simply stonewall the accusations is just unforgiveable. There seem to be so many u-turns that it is difficult to sort out what today's reason for going to war actually is. First it was about Weapons and when they couldn't find any it was about liberating the Iraqi people (bearing in mind that it seems quite a lot of them still want to be liberated). I suspect that the real reason was to secure a small mine in the mountains of Northern iraq which produces small amounts of a chemcial necessary for some new super invention. Oh no! Sorry! That was the plot of Raise the Titanic.

I loved the line from Donald Rumsfeld regarding how 9/11 affected the US's view of Weapons of Mass Destruction. :-

"The coalition did not act in Iraq because we had discovered dramatic new evidence of Iraq's pursuit of weapons of mass destruction. We acted because we saw the evidence in a dramatic new light - through the prism of our experience on 9/11,"

I leave you to make up your own mind on this. Funny prism though. I bet Newton didn't have one like that. The bottom line being that No Weapon of Mass Destruction (as defined by popular meaning of the phrase) has ever been used in anger in the continental US and talking about them like this can, at best divert attention from the real dangers and at worst give people ideas. The phrase itself is on the Lake Superior State University Banished Words List. I am bored with whole thing. Wake we up when something happens.

zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

Whatever happened to Knoxxy Eugenia?

Hands up all those who said "Nothing" because that is what happened to her. Remember I said that there is nothing outside the text. Well I suppose on the few occasions I thought about possibly writing some more of her life, something did happen to her, or was it just what happened to the fuzzy cloud of thoughts within my head which seem to co-incide slightly with the idea of Knoxxy Eugenia?

Index of things I am thinking about today :-

Brunelleschi
Maxell Tape advert from MTV
Rocks
Very Tall Buildings (The Space Elevator)
Particle pairs for communications

Some of the notes about this state that if you create an entangled pair of particles and force one of them to spin one way, then the other will spin the other way. I am not sure that you can do that. I thought that the situation was that if you observed the spin of one particle, then the spin of the other had to be in the opposite direction. Maybe it is the case that you can force a spin and get the other to spin the other way. In which case, do we not have a instant method of communication? Sounds like a free lunch to me.

As you can see I have changed my Blog template and started putting links down the side. My wife will probably complain and she is the only person who reads this unless you want to write to me and prove otherwise. Actually I have found it rather traumatic to change the template, not difficult, just upsetting that something which is so familiar has now changed. Not many people are very good with change and even those who are would probably not be good if they changed to having no change in their lives.

I bought the first Radiophonic Workshop album at the weekend - This one - Made on a shoestring probably literally - along with a milk bottle and several pieces of paper and a half-empty tin of baked beans. Anyway, this is very much like the advert tunes of Manhattan Research but with a feeling that it was done more for love than money. I haven't seen my copy of Manhattan research for sometime - I hope it is safe somewhere. Don't forget that the Aphex Twin started off in the same way as these guys.

I need to index this blog in a way which will make it more interesting to look at, like the way the Saturday Guardian magazine has an alternative index which always seems more juicy; though when you get to the page you have been attracted to, it it just like any other. This does however give you a different way of reading the magazine. What can I put in the side bar which will appear random each time it is is loaded? Can my image hosting site handle asp? These and other questions will be answered at the end of the Universe or when Paxman is nice to someone, whichever comes first. Actually, he was quite nice to JK Rowling the other night. Which reminds me - AS Byatt - sour grapes or what? Just because her books are top of the list for Insomniacs Anonymous as non-addictive sleeping aids and JK Rowling has got loads of kids actually reading something quite complex. To offer up Terry Pratchett as an alternative seems trite in the least. Maybe, I didn't continue far enough into the Discworld series but after three books, they began to sound the same. And it is almost as if Mr Pratchett is afraid to stop and let the story tell itself without having some comedy magic in it. It is like being beaten up by one of Bob Monkhouse's joke books while watching Paul Daniels. I suppose I will have to read Possession so you cannot accuse me of being biased against a book which I have not read though at least one person I know has tried to read it and had to give up. What is it about anyway? Hold on a second while I take a look. Oh dear! Sounds like something I might actually like. Come back in a few weeks.

I polished off two books at the weekend while still keeping the Bill Bryson on the stack. They were the first of the Lemony Snicket books (which we both have been meaning to read for a long time) and the dead Famous book on Leonardo Da Vinci. The Lemony Snicket was, as he promises in the first few lines, very dark and nasty and told in a very traditional manner which because it is so unfashionable is quite "out there". The Children are a sort of Glass family for younger readers (or maybe what the Royal Tenenbaums who are the Glass family by another name after all). The Leo book was very good but I knew most of it from Alan Yentob's program about him a few weeks ago. I still think I have learnt more history from the dead Famous books than I have from all the school history I was taught though I still remember all about the Corn Laws and Habeas Corpus. And I still can hear my History teacher pronouncing the name "Metternich". It must be said with a real chhhhhhh at the end.

I have to get a digital camera and then I can be a photoblogger. I long to be a photoblogger. It seems just wonderful to be able to take pictures of anything you want and post it. Not only can you dump your mind onto the web, you can illustrate it as well. Sooner or later someone is going to have their whole life posted a la Truman. Well it won't be me but wait and see what you get.

Welcome to the Late Show

Thanks to Tom Watson, the Labout MP who's blog I mentioned (not positively I might add) for this page of poetry by an MP. My view of MPs is being assaulted on all sides. When I did Economics and Public Affairs (at O Level) I knew all the main cabinet ministers and their shadows because plainly they were intellectual giants. Now we have a procession of suits and yes men (not so many women yet despite Blair's babes.) The dismal performance of the MPs team on University Challenge (The Professionals) and the sad attempt at teen cool have finally made me give up all hope that someone in Government or Opposition has an intellect which matches their position. The poems are like mine WHEN I WAS 16. Blank verse like this is like tennis without the net; it is prose with line breaks. Can't fault (all) the sentiments though. My mid-life crisis is probably going to be the realisation that my country is ruled by people with less intellect than me. Remember that quote (seems the wrong word for something so old) from Plato? I do not want to be a politician so anyone who writes and tells me to get up off my backside and do something about it will get no response.

A gull has just flown lazily by the window and I got a sudden impression of being on board ship. It is a pity that the sea breezes for this image are not present. It is like a Sauna in this office at the moment. When I got petrol this morning, the heater above the door to the kiosk was blowing HOT air down on me. Why do American ideas on foreign policy and bad TV, catch on in this country while the useful things from over the other side of the Atlantic, like air-conditioning and cold beer, do not? Just imagine the hairy-jumpered brigade if all beer was sold at 2 Centigrade. They would get so hot and bothered that they might even have to take their fingers out of their ears. Sorry! That is a bit harsh isn't it. I mean warm beer is a tradition and I am all for traditions, like ... well make up some of your own because that is what everyone else seems to do these days. The market stallls in Liverpool City Center are a tradition, despite the fact that the centre has only been pedestrianised for twenty years.

I would have thought that the right to an undisturbed night's sleep was one of the basics of the Human Rights act and yet do you realise that one of the riders to this grubby legislation is "except where a Government can show an economic reason against a decision in someones favour based on the act? So the poor people who live near airports have to put up with night flights because it is econmically necessary. Everything is down to money these days. All parties seem to have this view of the mighty greenback being the first consideration. I wouldn't be surprised if in twenty years time, someone was aquitted of murder after basing their defence on their economic needs coming before and moral aspects. This decision goes this way and yet someone claims that banning foxing hunting breaches human rights. I liked Alice. She was the only sane one in Wonderland.

I must add that having looked through the BBC site many of the mentions of the European Human Rights law were actually positive decisions regarding care homes and many of the rest were ambiguous like a convicted Drug Trafficker claiming that the tapes used to convict him were obtained illegally. It does balk that someone who makes his living out of such an illegal activity has the cheek to claim things like this but it does have implications for all of us if tapes can be made just because of suspicion Maybe there should be riders on such cases which state that no claims can be made on behalf of individuals after conviction but that the case can be investigated on behalf of the convict as part of a wider-ranging human rights investigation for which no payout would be made other than to the organisation carrying out the investigation.

I would like to talk to you about endings. Zombela. I am so happy I could dance.

The Battle of Britain Flight went over our house yesterday. They were there for the Carnival just down the road. We had the Red Arrows over before but it was the distant roar of the Lancaster which got me running into the street. There is just something really wonderful about that deep spitting of the engines. Twice in a year and at different ends of the country.

Papery and Transparent

I thought I would just say that I am having trouble containing my excitement at the work I am having to do at the moment. It is genuinely exciting but without being important for national security.

Just though I would share that.

Bye again

Ampex for the mind

I need to start writing things down as soon as I think of them. So many times over the last few weeks I have thought of something which I really want to talk about here but by the time I am sat down in front of the PC, all of it has become just rapidly disipating energy in the heat death of the Universe. I need a permanently running tape for the mind or some form of continuously updating mind map. That actually gives me a clue to something I may be able to do to sort it out. I will buy some felt tip pens for myself and keep then away from my daughter. She never has to worry about not having any paper or pens to draw with. I remember being anxious about not having something to draw on when I was little; you just didn't always have paper around let alone have all the pens you might want. Sometimes, I actually tore out the blank pages at the front of books to draw on. Silly really because when I asked my dad, I was always given paper even if it was just the back of catalogues. I had one book which was a catalogue for the German firm of Polensky and Zoellner. I actually looked at the pictures as well as drawing on the back of them and so I know all about Gabions and there cannot be many ten year olds who know what they are. Come to think of it there can't be many people outside the "Boring - see civil engineers" world who know either. My father was anything but boring I must add - it is all perception you know. He knows a lot about a lot as I have often said. It is just that campaigning to keep a rather unattractive grandstand from demolition just because it is an early example of reinforced concrete seems to give people completely the wrong idea about him. Think about how much concrete is around you and how beautiful some things made of it can be. I know a lot of it looks just horrid but that is down to maintenance and short-cuts by the owners of buildings. It is all down to what you like and don't like when it comes to architecture along with making things fit it in with what has gone before. So many architects have no respect for the overall environment and just put up some eye-catching stump for the sake of making a name. I can't find a picture of it, but there was a plan to make an extension for what I think was a London Gallery of some sort. The drawing was all anglular steel and on its own looked wonderful but placed in between older more conventional buildings it appeared that someone had dropped a piece of crushed metal in the street. Same with the fourth grace. A Graceless Grace indeed. Someone ask the people of Liverpool what they want. If you go to Will Alsop's page and look for the Fourth Grace pictures you will see that that this thing looks like a large whale trying to sneak its way back to the Mersey. The website is as I though a triumph of pretentious style over actual content. Actually, let us retract a bit of this. The presentation pages look quite interesting and the building will be very impressive. It is just not in the right place and it is not a Grace, more like a Tracy or possibly a Tara. And don't those stilts at the front look worrying as if it can't actually take the weight?

Will Alsop said this :

"Our work as architects, currently poised to be able to give the world extraordinairy objects of desire, is currently under threat by people who see the world as a dull and uncultured place of tedium and boredom. STOP THEM. Write them out of your story."

This sounds a bit messianic to me. I hope you will agree that I do not see the world as dull and uncultured etc but this sounds like a way of making all dissentors seem like Philistines. Better anti than pretentious and publicity seeking. I know I will never make a real thud in this world but if I could, I would not want to do it by having a laugh with society as Mr Alsop seems to want to do.

Mr Alsop puts his fingers to his chin as if stroking an invisible beard (he knows the sign language for "man" of course) and utters a gentle but possibly patronising "hmmmm". The spirit of Freud is alive in Mr Alsop and just to rub it in he resists the temptation to light up a cigar and put on a Viennese accent. He is of course afraid of any Freudian symbolism in his architecture and that is why the Fourth Grace is shaped like an egg on stilits. Somewhere deep within his towering intellect, there is a stirring of a long forgotten dream from his school days. They laughed at him and his big ideas but he has shown them what he can really do. It wasn't like Larkin said. It was the Philistines around him who made him work his way up to this. Of course everyone loved the Peckham Library. It has those stilits again; we are of course in London and what would happen to all those books if the Barrage didn't work properly? Mr Alsop is silent and will not answer questions. He is a nice man and he didn't have anything to do with those nasty tower blocks which so buggered up the 60s and 70s did he? We are City sick. Let us build an architecture park in a big field somewhere, read Papanek and dream of how wonderful the world could be for everyone. Mr Alsop utters no sound other than a second "hmmm". He is happy with the world as it is.

I want to write so much more - I could write all afternoon but sadly for the architects of this world I have to get on with some real work. Think of scale man and you will have your building.

Oh ****, not another phylum

Apologies for the lack of text on the page I am about to link you to but the pictures are worth it I promise. The Strange World of 1984 - from Life magazine. These images give a strange quality which somehow seems to be exactly in keeping with the book. There was a programme on BBC 4 (TV) yesterday about the real room 101 which complemented the Chris Langham Forrest Gumpesque programme about Orwell the other week. It wasn't particularly in depth but as it concentrated on the sources for the room of worst nightmares, it did give a fresh slant on the whole Orwell mania that seems to be about at the moment (to which I am adding of course). It was particularly good to hear John Hurt (Winston Smith in 1984's ... er ... nineteen-eighty-four), talking about the rats which ran straight up to him, looked him in the eye and then turned tail, farting in his face as they did so - never work with children or animals dear boy ... or Michael Winner obviously. As they played the bit from the Black and White TV version with Peter Cushing, where Winston betrays Julia - "Do it to Julia - not me.", my wife said that she couldn't work out why he caved in so easily. Must be a long time since she read it. The depth of the indoctrination is enough for Winston to genuinely believe that two plus two equals five if Big Brother says so; betraying the one person left alive who you love(d) to avoid your worst nightmare would be easy. I spent some time trying to work out what my room 101 experience would be but I couldn't come up with any one thing, just a succession of various middling worries. Of course BB would know what it really was even if I didn't. What if your room 101 fear was the fear of the result of being placed in room 101 - ie being broken by the experience. Would that be a win for BB or for you? I can still do self-reference when I want to. When I was younger it was difficult to work out where Orwell was coming from; but now I know that you don't have to believe that nineteen-eighty has any one message other than isn't BB horrible. You can spend all day looking for parallels between the USSR and Animal farm or for signs of Britain's descent into Totalitarianism in nineteen-eighty-four, but the bottom line is watch out and don't let this happen. As Orwell himself says - "Sometimes the first duty of intelligent men is the restatement of the obvious"

I have just noticed that Winston Smith in the Life magazine cartoons looks like John Hurt which is quite strange but is probably because I am looking for similarities rather than differences. Wonderul painting of John Hurt here. I now have Quentin Crisp's voice bouncing around in my head. Today is not going to go well. My aunt seems to remember meeting him in London during the last war. My aunt is in a photograph on the cover of one of the VE day celebration magazines. I have been trying to find the picture on the web but I suspect I will have to scan it if she lets me. Actually, this picture may just be it. If it is, then she is one of the young ladies on the bonnet of the lorry.

Faith! Not Wanting to know what is true. - Nietzsche
The penalty good people pay for not being interested in politics is to be governed by people WORSE! than themselves. - Plato
I can feel his mind decaying, only inches away from me. - Gary Numan ( Friday Joke)

I am sure every sixth former has noticed this but it has only just occurred to me that almost half of the name Nietzsche is the Russian word for "no". Too many letters, thats his problem.

Why would anyone want to kill Veronica Guerin?

I want to write down music - not the notes - just to be able to type away and evoke whatever the music moves within me. From the following can you guess what I am listening to?

Little high sounds, the distant empty people walk like you and me but miss the point. We are not them and never will be. The sound of souls avoiding exits from the world with blankness and desire for oblivion. We are not paranoid. We never now the sadness because men have stolen all emotion from us with their plans for one whole mind. We celebrate diversity and then must beat it out again with weapons made from what we call the truth. We do not let the people carry guns and yet we must have them for out protection. Victims are all paid by the hour. We are America and is it legal for us to burn the symbols of any country. When does a man who burns the flag of a country become a terrorist? Define terrorist. Write only on one side of the paper. We put the evil men with victims and they all fight. They only burnt a flag. You burnt families. Thinking is dangerous for anyone; someone might actually have a good idea and then where would we be? We can't have everybody thinking of things to make things better because then the people who actually get paid to think of things would have nothing to do. They could invent teapots which don't drip or a safe birth control (instead of getting some ****** to roam the moon). Go and count paper clips and see where that gets us. The Government needs an inventory of paper clips. Because of course they still need paper in the restrooms don't they. The world belongs to Alice in Wonderland. Well Alice was the only sane one so maybe the world belongs to the Duchess - she was the maddest of the lot. Little pigs, little pigs, let me in. Lets send him to the moon. It must have been years. Rock and roll with save the world if it ever saves itself.

Piggies and Piggies.

Falling for the world.

Sole Survivor of Cloud Eight

Soundtrack - Treasure - Cocteau Twins

Find your own link Script Kiddies.

There is some debate on whether this blog by an MP is hip and cool or just plain annoying. He says that all the kids who read it 'get the joke' (See the BBC article). Well I am a Guardian reader (on occasions), over 30 and I think it is a sad attempt to keep up with whatever is supposed to cool. Ali G is pretty sad anyway so trying to sound like him is going to be doubly annoying. Yes I know I overuse the word 'cool' but that particular adjective has survived for many years as opposed to things like 'phat' (huh?) and 'tubular' so I have an excuse to a certain extent. Is 'cool' cool? I don't know but whatever your decision I will not stop using it. I am sure my daughter will find plenty of amusement in my use of it when she gets older but that is her problem, not mine.

Weapons of Mass Destruction and please read the page that results, whatever it looks like.

My colleague has just pointed the above link out to me. That sounds like the old "Why did you bring that book which I didn't want to be read to out of up for?" but of course that is something up with which I will not put. I can find lots more of this sort of thing on the web so I will resist putting any links in. Find your own - like I said before. As Mil Millington said, call me; I'll come round and scroll for you.

Purple Skies and Vapour Trails

Soundtrack Tiny Dynamine/Echoes in a Shallow Bay - Cocteau Twins

The titles on this must be the chapters from a book about Moths and Butterflies.

This is not supposed to be one of their best collections but I like it as much as anything off Treasure. Victorialand is of course the best Cocteau Twins album and could be the music behind Knoxxy Eugenia's journey home from school. I wish I had brought more Cocteau Twins stuff with me today as this one is about to end and leave me empty for the rest of the day.

Without wanting to sound like a certain diminutive and nameless US rock star, the sky is so purple today though at this spot it is quite sunny. The horizon is lines with thick purple clouds which seem to be threatening some sort of storm which we desperately need. Come to think of it, the roil on those clouds looks very much like the cover of a Cocteau Twins album (any one - just take your pick - but this one is probably what I have in mind). I had to look up the word roil there as I was worried I had just created a portmanteau word from Boil and Oil - well sort of portmanteau but it does mean in a state of turbulence or agitation. All this from looking out of the window while listening to The Cocteau Twins.

Fill all those empty spaces and keep banging the rocks together guys.

Sunday Afternoon Guitars

Soundtrack - True Crime Motel - Cath Carroll

Not her best album - that is of course England Made Me but the second track on this one - into day - is a doozy.

Canberras

In the middle of an empty week
away from school and other darker things,
we walked a causeway to the sea
and watched the planes land feet away,
bright yellow diamonds in the sky,
with engines deep enough to hurt;
and make our insides buzz and bleed.
We saw them first at limits, the horizon
beckoning them to earth and home.
And then in instants never realised,
they passed over us like ghosts
with screams and safety markings.
"No Step" "Emergency" "walk here".
So loud they broke the bounds of senses,
overflowing from our ears to eyes,
to make our vision faulty in the mind.

And in the quiet of a sandy afternoon,
we found a dead one, burnt and empty,
a practice for the firemen and foam,
blackened, deconstructed by the wind,
inside the fence, a hundred feet across
the dunes, in grass and watched we thought.
To my blind eyes my brother added terror
as he climbed the wire and ran, a soldier,
a thief of aeroplanes and black insignia.
I saw him silhouetted, shaded by the mountains
as he wrenched metal from this whale
and brought it back to me, the coward,
blind and deaf and gibbering and waiting
for the gunshots from the towers.
His enemies were mine and this plane
crashed and died for us to see this day.

Beware the Dresden Codex


Soundtrack - Geek the Girl - Lisa Germano

Not the album that the blonde skinhead wouldn't sell me in Probe records but one by the same woman. My wife once saw Pete Burns coming out of Probe Records (When they had a proper shop in the centre of Liverpool rather than the industrial unit they have now) dressed in a nappy. I have to admit that I just had to ask for the name (I was going to put Pete Shelley but I knew that must be wrong.)

We have a very strange sky here at the moment. Come to think of it, the sky has been weird since this morning. It looks just like that painting of the Battle of Britain. Hold on while I try to find it. ... Can't find it. I will just have to describe it. Lots of sky and contrails but no actual aircraft. It suggests very intense combat without actually showing any of the hardware you would expect. My mind just wandered off having seen a plane flying very low over the city. You begin to worry about what it is doing there and then start with a whole flood of anxiety about where it might end up. There was an ancient biplane doing aerobatics over Crosby on Saturday. I couldn't tell exactly what type it was though it might have been a Swordfish but I wouldn't think that a Swordfish could actually do an outside loop which this one did albeit with a struggling engine. The microlight which sometime flys over the city was almost swept out of the sky. Even my wife commented about the sound from inside the house and wondered if it might be going to hit us.

The sum of all human activity is me, right now or that is the way it seems. It must be that for everybody.

De Historia Piscium

Soundtrack - Different Trains - Steve Reich

Nice day today. No black mood and no worries. Alertness Index at 8.6. Specified annoyances 0.34. Albedo 0.39.

Sorry. Just had a Bridget Jones moment there. Yes. I have read it though how did anyone think that you could compare it with Pride and Prejudice? I wanted Pride and Prejudice to win and I haven't read it yet. My wife dug a copy out for me but I am working my way through Feynman's collections and Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything. No tea has actually come out of my nose yet but that is because I haven't actually drunk any tea while reading it yet. There is a point only a few pages into this book when the size of the Universe becomes all too apparent but I also found at the same point that I couldn't stop reading. Bill Bryson has a very uncanny knack of writing heavily intellectual material in a light-hearted prose style and so gets across very powerful ideas while seeming to entertain. This must always be the gift of a good teacher. Even the cynicism which he occasionally puts in, seems entirely justified. He is not afraid of pointing out toes of clay. Newton (who you would think was one step down from a god) is shown up for the cantankerous old weirdo he actually was. Exactly my sort of person. Still he does seem to have done Robert Hooke an Injustice. Now the question is would Newton have been able to understand Relativity or even accept it. Would Newton have been to Relativity what Einstein was to Quantum theory?

I thought about something related to an old rant about how much an entity creating a artifically intelligent mind would have to maintain in order to convince that mind that it existed in a Universe of the creator's own invention. I think I said that it would be relatively easy to maintain this Universe as you would only need to maintain a sphere of influence around the mind. It would be difficult to maintain the consistency of this Universe what with international travel and communication. Would all the phone numbers in the International directory actually connect to different people or would it not matter until they were actually called by the artifical intelligence? My thought was deep and meaningful and said something about the whole Universe whether or not we are real or a creation of God and annoyingly I can't remember what it was at all. In fact as I wrote those words, I had another thought and even that has gone fuzzy. That thought actually had something to do with the physical creation of our Universe, whether out of nothing from the Big Bang (sorry Fred) or from the collision of two "Branes", and was that it is still entirely possible that this creation has a cause. There was all that stuff about Starglider in The Fountains of Paradise about the Universe being just there and that Ockham's Razor stated that the most simple solution is always the probable one but intellectually for people untrained in the deep issues of cosmology, the intuitive next step to such answers as "There was nothing, no space, no matter and no time before the Big Bang" is "But what caused the Big Bang?" Even if you now accept that the Branes caused the Big Bang, what is outside this. Mathematics cannot solve the answer to the nothing before the Universe was created because it is entirely possible that the maths we use is peculiar to this Universe just as the angles of a triangle are peculiar to the surface it is formed on. In another Universe the square root of 2 may not be 1.414213... but some other number entirely but then again 2 would then be difficult to define. I don't think you can carry on this argument. It is like trying to imagine four spacial dimensions with a brain that only copes with three in reality. It is possible to imagine it but you can't provide any practical examples because they will not work in our world. Where was I before that digression? A creator of the Universe. Any artifical intelligence which we might create would necessarily have a limited Universe to work in though I have just thought that you could create an infinite randomness. Fractals (and I am thinking of the Mandelbrot set here) have infinite complexity where the limits are infinity. You could use a fractal to define a universal complexity; al you would have to do is feed in numbers and get the patterns out. All this is still digression which is just to help me forget that I thought of something rather wonderful and as usual have forgotton it. I then thought that, if the Universe is a creation of asomeone, then they should really have a filter to ensure that their creations do not think about this and whenever a thought which gets close to defining what is really going on, then it would be filtered out to ensure that the system does not think about itself. Of course in our world, many people think about what created us and everything else, either through religion or science which has just made me realise that at a deep level they are just different manifestations of mankind's desire to know where he comes from. Of course a lot of religion stops reasoned enquiry with the question of faith which is where this enquiry, reasoned or otherwise, must stop because we are, to use the Classical imagery of Dante, required to be back on our heads.

Some interesting stuff here but do monks really play Croquet? I would have though Rugby would have been much more their game.

White Dielectric Material

Finding the radiation that signalled the Big Bang. Now that would be a wonderful. I built a very simple radio at the weekend (using a cheap electric experiment kit) and it worked even though I could understand all the components and how they fitted together. Nothing more than a transistor and a coil in essence. It struck me then how much radio wave energy must be passing through the air all around. The station I could hear was a Spanish one, though not surprisingly, Radio Moscow got in on the act as well. If there is life out there (and I am not exactly convinced 100% that there is) and it is broadcasting, then the very signals are passing just in front of your nose right now, even it is just the odd photon here and there. Think of that; something has just been stopped by this very desk which originated in a star billions of light years away. The Universe is wonderful enough without trying to "mystify" it. Just the thoughts in your head are more complex than any designed mythology of prediction. The memories you store in your mind today will contain more information than any book you might want to read.

PS. Don't actually think about all that Universe and space all around you. I just did and the thought was quite crushing for an instant. It is like my thoughts on the Fish at the bottom of the Ocean on the other side of the planet, just a lot bigger. Don't think about it. You aren't thinking about it are you? Good!

Keep this frequency clear.

Thomas The Rhymer


With Glamour and with Meadowsweet

The Seely Court are out to play tonight;
the Vandals and the Visigoths in violence
are bound to them with love of dancing
and the bloody poetry of moonlight.

In the dark they see by their own lights,
the silver mantles at their pretty edges,
and show the way to human lovers
with glamour and with Meadowsweet.

And in the bowers of the fields and verges,
we hear them in our restless sleep, in mirth.
And like some monster, loved by gliding beauty,
the farm boys see the white sheets shaking.

Out for revolution, on our way to school,
we find them, dead and smiling, bloodless,
drained like sheep upon the hook,
with glamour and with Meadowsweet.

And gleefully we bear them home like furniture
we found, discarded in the forest.
The witches in this village bless them
with their misguided animistic spirit.

We bury them with songs and dancing,
and warn ourselves off night time wandering,
where tall, lighted women tempt us to death
with glamour and with Meadowsweet.

The best use of "da dee da dee da da" in a pop song.

Soundtrack was until a few minutes ago - Dots and Loops by Stereolab and that is lots of "da dee da dee da da"; I kept thinking of Richard Feynman's time in Brasil. He was teaching Physics (I think on a sabbatical from his University) and yet he got involved in the Samba Schools just like Evelyn Glennie did when she was there (in Rio like Feynman). I remember seeing Evelyn Glennie on TV before she has even started at the Royal Academy of Music. I think she was showing her parents round her flat in London and demonstrating how she had to put towels over here drum-kit to keep the noise down for the neighbours. And then, only a few years later there she was with James Blades (a regular on Blue Peter into his eighties) and dressing up with the Samba Schools in Rio. I saw her twice at the Philharmonic Hall in Liverpool and percussion has never been so cool. I have just found out that James Blades recorded the "da da da dum" sound for the broadcasts from the BBC to the resistance during WWII (and yet his deaths never got a mention on the BBC news site) and of course the Gong sound for the Rank Studios ident, not that it was him in the picture. I seem to remember that the gong was actually made of plaster and if you really did hit it, it would shatter. That would have been good for their last film. Rank Stupidity not to I would say. I always say I prefer oriental percussion but the Samba stuff is really infectious. You can see how it would be asy to get swept away by it all. The difference between a good and a bad rhythm can be just one extra beat - or one less. No machine will ever be able to simulate a real samba beat. It may be easy for a rock beat or even Jazz but Samba relies on the little extras and twiddles and plain human feel. I once read an interview with Depeche Mode in one of the Music Technology magazines. It was a special about drum machines and they kept going on about how tight their chosen beat box was. They knew it was spot on the beat because they had put an oscilloscope on it. Even at the time, when I was into techno and such stuff, I though that sounded sad and stupid especially when you consider that Depeche Mode actually do sing songs rather than just making synthesiser music. Gary Numan's music is always thought of as synthesiser based but on the first few albums there is a real organic feel behind all the technology. Now modern music, that is another story ......

O Americano, Outra Vez!

How did OMD go from the synthesiser equivalent of Joy Division and turn into the backing band for Pop Stars? The soundtrack for today is Sugar Tax and while there are a couple of songs on it worthy of note (Neon Lights but that was written by Kraftwerk and their version was much better; and Big Town) the rest are totally forgettable. I don't know why I bought it. The last good OMD single was Tesla Girls but Talking Loud and Clear was the last one I bought. That has Julia's Song on the B Side which is brilliant. The picture sleeve is a wallpaper design by William Morris (the background on this website is a design of his as well and similiar to the OMD sleeve). Compare all those moody black and white photographs of the band in the late 70s with how they looked just ten years later, all black leather jackets and attitude. They looked like some pub covers band. And now - Atomic Kitten! What are they thinking. They wrote songs about a phone box, the plane which dropped the atomic bomb and the pop-song equivalent of a Vaughan-Williams piece. (Red Frame, White Light; Enola Gay and Talking Loud and Clear). How did it come to Pandora's Box?

When we moved to this house a couple of years ago, the first person I saw walk along the pavement outside was a teenage girl with a large book under her arm, a book of William Morris designs. She was dressed as if she should have been carrying a skateboard and I know the book was probably homework but it did make me feel quite happy about our move.

How come Beckham and Chelsea are the top headlines at the moment. It seems that the BBC news teams are all football fans and are letting that colour how they report things. I bet they would have screened the Beckham medical if the Real Madrid had decided to film it. It obviously wasn't going to be shining a light in one ear to make sure it didn't come out the other side (always a worry for quite a few footballers) but it was three hours long and some saddo would watch every minute. "This is Raourie McTavish reporting live from inside David Beckhams Knee. And now we all have heard about that obscure bit of bone; it's called Victoria." Get some real news please. Or is the BBC trying to remove all the bad news so we all feel happy and hence avoid campaigns of Civil Disobedience.

MOR

I had to get the train and bus to work today and just near the site I took a short cut across the four lane highway and had to walk for a few metres down the central reservation (Something I always thought was an American word). It suddenly struck me as to how different everything looked from that point of view. It was quite disconcerting to see somewhere you have walked by or driven by for most of the past 17 years in a completely different way. I don't want to read anything into this, just to draw attention to the phenomena (though that seems to be promoting the experience beyond what it deserves). Try looking at a familiar room in a mirror. Just the act of reflection can really change the way you feel about a place. Try it in the horizontal plane as well and you get a "living on the ceiling" effect. I know! I am back to hanging upside down and imagining the clouds as islands. Still, I can tell you have not tried it yet so off to the park. Maybe not! We don't want any injuries.

It was a lovely atmosphere though even in the middle of the road; trees dripping and the air not too hot and not too cold. Summer in this country can be nice but it can be horrible. That is glib statement number 1 or a series of several hundred - like the lost consonants, they will go on forever. Actually more like ordering a series of books from Time-Life; they never tell you when the last one will come out so you do not know how much it is going to cost.

Martin (yes! he is still here and still misanthropic in the extreme has found a wonderful site by Mil Millington who also writes in the Guardian though never in the Mail on Sunday (what is the Internet sign for crossed fingers?). I now need a long time to read all of it but my colleagues are wondering what all the sniggering is about which I suppose makes a change from the Quasimodo-style dribbling which they normally have to put up with.

On Heads. Now!