The Travelling Pies

There is a bridge across the motorway here, always grubby, never been clean since the day the steam cranes left it balanced on the concrete. It seems to attract every local daredevil wishing to tag it with some witticism to further confuse the drivers already distracted by the radio, or their mobile phones, or some honey trying to interest them in some lurve-on-the-road. I've never been sure exactly what the graffiti means but there is a vast range of different styles. Some are obviously hip-hop monikers, taken to extremes of typography and art by being in all colours and shapes, anything but something readable. There may be teenagers or sadder older folks who know that a vertical squiggle outlined in red and crossed by a blue circle means that it comes from Bazza or Gazza or Shazza - but not me. I am too old for all this these days and while I can appreciate some of the art as art, most of it is bravado dressed up as something mysterious. And still I don't think of myself as old - this morning I was confused and thought that the next president was actually younger than me but he isn't. And what does that mean? Nothing at all.

I remember the year that Martin Luther King was shot. I don't remember him actually being shot but I do remember the B52s pouring High Explosive into the jungle and I also remember wondering what the point was, though not with any particular outrage as what it was doing to the poor people on the ground - horror developed over the years, probably reaching its peak when I discovered that the man-in-a-suit responsible for it had actually got a Nobel Peace Prize, something which removes all credibility from the award and seems to me the worldwide extension of double-speak and plausible denial. It is of course the ultimate expression of complexity which still plagues the world. The general solution to stuff that is difficult to understand these days seems to be to introduce some extra level of complication in order to handle the complexities rather than simplifying the equation and addressing things that way - so instead of cancelling out the square terms you multiply both sides by the square of itself - still valid but makes the whole thing far more complicated, and it is all simply for the sake of it or maybe as obfuscation. At a personal level we all want simple lives - we don't want all those forms to fill out, we don't want to have to answer loads of stupid questions that get recorded somewhere deep in a computer system and then never get used again. Huge percentages of the processes that humans are subject to are simply to justify the existence of the people who develop the systems - some of these people even accept this as a fact and laugh in the faces of those who wish to simplify things. (shh - Occam's Razor - yet again).

This was going to be a Random Friday but it seems to have developed a structure and meaning which I was hoping to leave out. Oh well - you'd better have some links then. This page has some Modern Jazz interpretations of Nude by Radiohead and very good they are too - wouldn't seem out of place on a Wiretapper and best of all you can download them for wire-free enjoyment anywhere.