The Loss Of Limbs Came As A Shock.

Listening to Replicas by Gary Numan …

… the black-haired old rascal.

I am not sure what to write about at all. Everything seems to have escaped the box this morning. I can only look forward to finding a scrap of hope left at the bottom, underneath all the scrapings that Channel 4 and ITV have done to get the ideas for their latest shows.

It may not surprise you to learn that I am still in the middle of The Ancestor’s Tale. I have just noticed that the illustrations are often headed with just a fragment of a sentence from the main text in the style of a lot of old kids’ books. A Child’s History Of the World had this sort of caption. It's sort of related to the way Frasier had those obscure titles before each act (Conceit for bit of the programme divided up by commercial breaks – didn’t The Streets Of San Fransisco have ‘acts’?). They made no sense before hand and the meaning was only revealed after watching the section. Seem to have seen that idea before somewhere. Can’t think where though. Aha! More information on this subject has just popped into my brain. Glen Baxter used to draw cartoons with ludicrous captions very much as if they had been lifted from stories.

I want to use the Passive voice so please leave me alone.

I have been able to accept all the concestors in Richard Dawkins reverse tale so far. They all have four legs but we are now mired in the murk of primordial seas where the line of descent joins the fish and this has made me uncomfortable. I know we link back all the way to single-celled ancestors but the loss of limbs came as a shock. I was reading the book trying to imagine some internal and primal body image that links me back over the years to all those reptiles and fish. What did strike me while trying to imagine this was the ‘rightness’ of these creatures. Think of a shark swimming gently in the blue sea and it just seems correct – the only possible outcome of a long process of fitting the animal to its environment. I see so much which is ‘designed’ by us humans and often it just fails. Successful human design is often more of an acceptance of a long line of failures and lessons learned. Try and design something from scratch and it will often be full of faults. This may be some subconscious stealing from Papanek who was passionate about designing for the real world, for real people. There is so often a headlong rush to computerize something already working with the result that all the years of evolution which have brought a system to a peak of efficiency are ignored at the expense of a few gee-whizzes and a slick front-end. There is also the slotting-in of staff to run these systems with the result that so much just becomes a fix-it-up-and-ship-it-out process without allowing for anyone to think about how ludicrous things have become. It reminds me of the dangerous joke sketch from Monty Python where the translation of a fatal joke from English to German was carried out in small chunks to avoid exposing the translators to the full power of the whole joke. One man saw two words and spent two weeks in hospital. Maybe one day we will get the whole joke. Maybe that’s all it is.