Your Lossless Adjectivisation Is Showing

Listening to Machine Gun by Porus'ead

I think this may be called Machine Gun after a track of the same name by Peter Brotzmann which sounds remarkably similar, but then again who knows the differences between various machine guns anyway? Just for interest here is a list of the other music which gets displayed with Peter Brotzmann on Amazon.com - Nipples by PB - For Alto by Anthony Braxton - Pakistani Pomade by Alexander Von Slippenbach and AMMMusic by AMM. Realtime notes - I just started Dummy playing and a mobile phone went off with the theme from the Southbank Show - the younger Lloyd Webber's cello thingy - got a might confused - didn't fit in with Dummy at all. Anyway - Portishead's Machine Gun - Heavy rhythm track and very little else save for singing - a few bits of wailing analogue stuff at the end and a gradual increase in what I think is flanging. This would be very much at home on a Wiretapper CD. Would not have bothered any more than 8 tracks - probly. Not like Dummy but then again was anyone expecting it to be? Wife does not like it - she won't say but I can tell. Anyway - downloading this one track required that it was put to a CD along with a collection of similar sounding stuff so I trawled the outer reaches of "My Music" and came up with a gratifyingly consistent collection of stuff. Trouble is that I did not bother to record what they were and some of them have been played so little that sometimes I can't remember the artist let alone the album/single. Lush are on there and a remix of one of Kristin Hersh's recent releases. And there are a few Wiretapper things - mostly stuff with a strangely-treated beat which was my subconscious criterion for selection. "Stuff" is of course the proper way for people to describe their music.

Rambling again. I must be dizzy with hunger and oxygen. Speedbath by Kristin Hersh is very good and you can actually get it for free though if you like it a one-off payment might be an idea. Might be me in there somewhere - not sure where I am at the moment - the desk seems to be in a little world of its own. Dreamed I was on board a plane destined to crash yesterday - waiting for the horrible moment of impact that never came - trying to imagine the thump of metal into me, the crush of collapsing airframe slicing me up. Strangely not that worried when I woke up - usually I lie awake trying to get a handle on how lucky I am not to be really involved in what I dreamed of but this time the resolution was easy and quick. I went straight off to sleep again. The dream world is kind at the moment - the discrepancy between good and bad is wide and is easy to come to terms with.

Hail To The Chief Coffee Spiller



We all seem to be drawing imaginary islands this weekend. I'm not sure where the idea came from but the note book already has three complete islands and youngest is trying his own versions out on separate pieces of paper. I'm thinking of calling my Gill Sans for obvious reasons. Youngest desperately needs a nickname though the reason for the fleeting thought that I might call him "Bomber Command" is lost on me - he's not that destructive. Might have been a dream of some sort. I have been having loads of dreams recently which is odd because it is usually the change in the clocks which makes me have to get up in the middle of REM sleep. I was the stage manager for The Rolling Stones the other night - trying to get them to start playing on time and generally being ace at everything - which is quite weird isn't it? But aren't all dreams weird? If dreams are supposed to be something to do with daytime worries why do we seem to dream of magical things - flying and being famous?

Lots of good things to look forward to at work this week though how sad am I for that? Though one of them is retrospective support for something that should have been retired about the time of the second Stone Roses album. Remix, Remake, Remodel - ever onwards.

On Losing An Hour

Through pouring rain in South Liverpool today - faced with a long and low police car looming out of the murk - dreamlike in the extreme, like a peripheral witness to some major North American crime scene now swamped with inquisitive cops, driving slowly, partly to be safe and partly to snoop on everyone they see. The feeling passes quickly but the rain continues, meaning it as they say here, wipers on fast making not nearly enough space in the streams that speed like rapids down the windscreen. It is a long half-light, the enduring twilight of the temperate zones, leaving us dark at the start and just as dark at the end.

Earlier, son and I are in the Palm House - reaching it between showers but we are inside as the heaviest rain fills the park and overflows the lakes into the garbage-filled gutters. It smashes on the glass above us, threatening to bring it down on us. Of course over-engineering saves us again and we leave in a lull but are drenched before we reach the car. We go to friends to wait for the other half of the family - fun is had - train tracks are laid - carpets are concealed. The world is good and distant. Rain always makes me feel like this - it is a shield between me and the rest of space and time; it takes me back to my first day away from home, when it rained and Bristol did its best to break me up and spit me out but failed. Happier than ever am I when it rains. Let it rain forever and fill all the gullies. Let the sky never be blue again. I am hidden in the gap between the curtains and the window; there is no real view from here, just the rain and grey sky and lines of semis, with all the murky attempts at brightening these little boxes failing because it rains and rains. There is no point on bright paint over adobe walls because the rain spits up grit and soot and earth and all the walls turn to concrete. When it's raining it's too wet to fix them and when it's dry they're as good as any man's house.

The Major-General And The Leviathan

Poor Charlotte Green - but she does have form. Anyway I challenge anyone not to laugh when they have to sit across the room from Jim Naughtie. Ahh! Would that it were! I remember Brian Redhead. I may have dreamed this but I think he did some promotional work for one of the ex-incarnations of a company I once worked for and was actually in our office .. but that might have been Geoffrey Wheeler.

A very fine ending to Mitchell and Webb there was last night - to be all Yoda-ish about it. Especially liked the Numberwang night - Bertrand Russell was notably fine. Have I ever told you that my aunt has had tea with him? I have? Oh well.

Notebook randomness for today includes - Mr. UNC - Speed and Sleep - Frat Boys and Heroes - Solardip - Hard work on the recall front - Redo DDE for Smarterm - Today for Drones. I do know what it all means but it makes for some sort of loose poem when seen together. I don't seem to have any real poetry at the moment - there may be a chemical reason for this but I'm not sure. I just don't seem to have the attention to take any of the many ideas further than just being a simple thought. I have been thinking about the technicals of poetry and have been considering getting Stephen Fry's The Ode Less Travelled out of the library again but it just makes me feel a bit constrained. However, to write proper free-verse one has to know the basics in exactly the same way that the best abstract artists can actually draw. It is obvious when someone has the basics of how to assemble form even if that form is impressionistic, surreal or just plain strange. Making art for the sake of a statement is pointless unless you can also make art for the sake of art. Of course sometimes it just happens without any attempt at either. I have failed to be able draw properly for many years though I like to think I can hang a few components together to make a pleasing and inviting piece of software so some sort of artistic sensibility exists somewhere around.

Beware The Folk Police - For Knitted Meat Is Wrong.



To The Philharmonic Hall last night for a rattling good show by the impossibly-sweet-voiced Kate Rusby, a woman so confident that you'd think she was talking to her mates down the pub instead of the jumper-wearing folkies of Liverpool and environs. Intra-song conversation ranged from the lack of sandwiches in M&S on Bank Holidays, via the ace idea of having swans on stage, to a gentle argument with Ian Carr, one of her guitarists/multi-instrumentalists over how many nipples her dog Doris had (either eight or ten). But of course in between the in-betweens, were beautiful songs that filled the stage in a way that surpassed both Evelyn Glennie and Jah Wobble, who have also walked this stage. A voice beyond beautiful - Beatrice gets her second mention of the week here - raised up to some sort of cross-time folk goddess. Ms Rusby brings a little bit of every past era to show us how happy we could be if only we tried - she is the kids playing knock-down-ginger in the background of Norman Wisdom films- she is the clog-dances of the shabby poor of Orwell's Wigan Pier - the songs of the soldiers off to war in 1914 - the parlour songs of Mr Darcy put to new tunes of her own devising. Each time a leap back in time but without any perceived distance - "We know it is fiction." she says "but not when we sing - then we truly believe it." Think of how you cry at the end of The Railway Children - and multiply by it by all her songs and you might get there some day. The whole world is blown to the perimeter by this - nothing matters - just this room - this sound. And there were recipes and a knitted, green Gary Numan that I wish I had bought.

While amusing herself by taking random photos from the car on the way home, daughter asked who the folk-police ("who reside in London") are. She seemed to believe that they were a proper organisation with a big building - possibly fronted by a giant set of slowly-turning bagpipes. Had to try and explain and did not manage it very well. Kate Rusby does not worry about them. They seem so real to me now that they must have a logo of some sort - a Big-Brother in Chunky jumper and beard - someone do me a Marvel-style drawing. Of course folk music is music of the people and people change over time - by all means celebrate the past but recognize that you cannot stick at one point in time - we all think life was better back then but of course the truth is the save for major catastrophe life gets better and quite a lot better at that. A good week and still not over.

Unknown Catastrophes

My daughter is in the middle of a huge poem about the characters from What Katy Did. I remember writing really long poems though I was far older than my daughter is. Mine were rubbish in the style of The Wasteland but without any academic background to make them mean anything. She recited Death by Emily Dickinson for me last night from her Daring Book For Girls. I have to say that I think that this is better than The Dangerous Book For Boys - more measured and intellectual but with a few breathtakingly alarming sections - daughter is currently trying to equip a toolkit which includes power tools - I won't buy a replacement for my lost Swiss Army Knife in case it is seen as an offensive weapon. And is Fahrenheit 451 really a book to be recommending to teenage girls?

I'm still on the Pilate book at the moment, lost in the details of how Judea was Governed. It is nice to see that Michael Palin is mentioned in the summing up of various depictions of Pilate over the years, having a serious point when we all thought it was just funny. I think that most depictions of both the Temple in Jerusalem and the Governor's palace, have shown them as rough, dark places, almost unfinished when they were probably light, airy stretches of shining and polished marble. It just seems wrong to us that architecture 2000 years ago could be as clean and smooth as our own edifices.

Lookalike in Mouse's Trousers



Actually it was probably a thumb spica but what are a few medical quibbles?

Just describing a face is as difficult as drawing it. How do some people walk out of casualty with deadpan faces - is it shock? Nothing other than physical woosiness and a strange feeling of being part of a book for me thank you. Everyone here is either a film star or not. Some are stars but I cannot work out who belongs to who. The relationships seem strange and beautiful, like Beatrice is here among us - someone unaware of how attractive they are, cut out of a book and detached from the normal hum of the everyday - the little conversations that are necessary to get by in this place of small crises, the minutiae of the medical - she is calm and walks and talks as if just visiting from somewhere much more worthy of her. And yet she has the normal things we all carry - the bag, the coat, the mobile that receives texts and calls which make her smile in some unalarmed way. The pain must have gone or not hit her yet or is that the reason, a mess of painkillers and muscle relaxants taking the top and bottom of her world? And in all these people, these triggers for stories in my head, tales to make sense of the random input, this woman is the most mysterious for looking like someone famous and yet not being. It is all down to drugs I think - absence of mine and presence of hers. Here are the playing children, calm again in crises, running happily and not pinned down while parents with minor injuries seem content to leave them be, as am I. There is a steady stream of casualties and staff and the strange in-between people who could be either, some confident in their destinations some haltingly inquisitive, reading the many notices - attend triage before reception (because the four-hour target clock starts at reception and triage can work out if you are likely to collapse and drop blood on the clipboards) - this reception, that reception - pre-op and none of those coloured lines that take you other parts of the world that is this hospital. No major stuff comes in today, no sirens in the distance. And it is only after an hour or two that I realise that the grey ceiling is actually clear glass onto a greyer sky when a wheeling gull sweeps across the view-screen and suddenly the room becomes the universe, the instantaneous increase in space hitting me almost physically. And now we are out, the small procedure completed without fuss or consultation, the X-rays transmitted instantaneously from machine to desk in what must be the peak of free medicine. And all we do is complain at the wait.

The Hissing Of Mystery Lectures

Somehow I have swung myself another day off. A lot of today was taken up with burning disks for some reason though we did swing a walk to the cinema to see The Spiderwick Chronicles. I was all ready to gear up Mr Grumpy and complain about how all the good books are Americanised these days but after looking at our copy of the book of the same name I was able to avoid any mistaken offence 'cos of course as any fule know (a fule wot has red it anyway) it is actually an American book. The film was quite good though I am well beyond being impressed by CGI which these days seems to swamp every film even in the bits that normally would simply be people on sets. It all got a bit too hectic at the end though the final few minutes prior to the quiet come-down bit at the end were quite breathtaking. I have to say they cleaned the house up very quickly - tomato and salt does stain so.

I don't seem to be able to get as excited about all the things which used to make me angry. I used to to promise myself that I would not compromise in my ageing and would keep the same outlook on life but now I find myself able to come to internal agreements to accept quite a lot of the things which used to have me painting placards - well shouting into space anyway. Looking at it, maybe there are new things which start me off now - old persons' concerns about the world, but these seem to be worries about myself and my family rather than wider interests. Is the inevitable slide from angry young man towards reactionary old git? Answers on a postcard to the usual address. Isn't the cost of postage a bloody disgrace these days? And another thing - I bought four magazines last week and the only one of them which was not at mid-height for easy retrieval from the Magazine Library that is WH Smith was The Oldie. I'm not bothered for myself of course - I just worry for all the old people.

No More Than Three Sheep Abreast



Mindful of a mind full, I am in a strange state of expanded moods. I may shout - I may cry - I may cheer at inappropriate moments. But not as much as some. I hear the shaking of wings as they go by and there seems to be nothing there and yet I absolutely reject the supernatural. It is the a natural extension of the huge amount of extrapolation that the brain does with the limited amount of real input it actually gets. See many, random collections of shapes and you will try and pick out faces - hear any sounds and you will hear what you want. The rough shake of the wind in between the houses becomes a swooping spectre, threatening and voicing those threats, the black ghosts that worm their way through the gaps between doors and frames, scraping into sound the movements of any one imagined hells.

And the low moods are worse.

Drop Which Pilate?

Listening to Heroes Symphony by Philip Glass

A funny old day Easter Saturday. I have an extra day off this Tuesday but still this strange day between Bank Holidays seems to be more of day for doing nothing than the most recent candidate for non-day of the year which was Leap Day. It never occurred to me that my company was getting an extra day out of me for no pay - I just assumed that, like the astronomical reasons for the existence of January 29th, my salary was apportioned across the four years to cover that extra day. What about the two times out of seven that the day falls at the weekend? I can't be bothered to spend time thinking for arguments either way.

I am lost in the weird world of alternative Pilates at the moment. He was either a member of small tribe from outside Rome, a Spaniard who was effectively banished to Judea by the Emperor Tiberius for marrying above his station (and this just prior to his first night with his bride after Tiberius was a guest at the wedding - handing Pilate the order to depart for Judea on the waiting Bireme from inside his toga leaving Pilate to wait six years before consummating his marriage) or a German who grew up in red trousers and whose first pair are still on display in some Teutonic town. All this ignores the real story that he actually comes from Tyneside, which is my favourite truth. And of course there is no way we will ever really know. All of this is the first chapter, which leaves me wondering how much the rest of the book can actually reveal. I suppose I'd better read the relevant bits of The Gospels to make sure I understand the only other historical context because obviously I cannot rely on the BBC Passion being entirely accurate (it probably sparked howls of clunky derision from certain people for not including Jesus' replacement of a severed ear and it certainly wound up this secular humanist by having an announcer directing viewers over to an episode of Steptoe and Son on BBC4 directly after the crucifixion scene, albeit in sombre-ish tones).

Last night I dreamed of the moment when Pilate made his decision, trying to imagine the two worlds splitting off from each other - one where Christ carries on towards our own world, crucified, risen, becoming the head of Christianity - and the other where he is released to two possible futures - a leader of a revolution maybe more political than religious - or a return to obscurity in Galilee, just about recorded as a minor distraction in the mess of Middle-Eastern history. And I could not get beyond either - it was just too much to imagine the world any different from the accepted path. And there is no point - this timeline is this timeline - those timelines (which may exist in some theories of the Universe) are only possible in our minds.

Get over it!

Frank Skinner's Let Himself Go



I nearly forgot that I was going for a whole month so this is probably just filler - isn't it all? So of course I haven't even been thinking about anything to write. And now I am so tired I just can't get anything together to again in the style of Odelay, this is just place-marking. Old man calls down alleys to the back, where the drunks and the tramps have never found the knack of filling in the blanks and the stories of the true in the night of the knives and the tales of shining blue. The trees in the night haven't seen a way through to the dreams of the days and the skies of dripping glue.

The Return Of The Orreryery



There is a part-work out at the moment which each week supplies you with a small component of an orrery for you to make at a total cost of something like £300. Not sure if you could get a fully assembled version for less than that and after thinking it was made of plastic I have found out here that it is actually made of brass. With all the PC stuff to simulate the Universe in great detail, this can only be something for the 'drawing room (you can just see into ours if you go by on the top deck of the 'bus). I am much more impressed with this Lego version which reminds me of the Lego record player I made at primary school. It had gearing to turn the record and an arm which supported a pin stuck through some paper as a resonator. The only uncool thing about it was the fact that I only had one record - a single that went along with a book of the film The Aristocats. That was remedied with the purchase of two soundtrack records - Big Horror Themes and TV Themes which gave us both the Theme To Colditz and The music for Three Days Of The Condor.

This months Wiretapper CD is probably the best yet. There are often some very difficult tracks on these CDs but this month's seems to be tending slightly towards less demanding music. Not that it is in any way a compromise or a sell-out - it has a long way to go to rival even the most left-leaning of other music magazines - unless there is a John Cage Monthly out there.

I have luckily noticed that I spelled Aristocats wrongly up there and that is a completely different story. Don't Google it at work whatever you do.

The Pop And Push Of Coffee Cups

There are many strange things which only seem strange when they result in something that is out of the ordinary. There must be a specific flag in my mind which remembers exactly how full the last coffee cup is. I always seem to know exactly how much coffee is in that last cup and bubbles along as an interrupt letting me know that it is available. So it always quite a surprise when that interrupt tells me that the cup is empty and I go to stack it on the other for transport to the bin (Clean desk policy etc) and it has a third of the liquid left. The strange feeling this produces is even worse when I realise that it is still warm. It seems to me like some sort of mini version of the loss of time reported by supposed UFO abductees. It must just be down to extreme busyness which fills the memory stack as it were and removes the interrupt. This must be filed under things that could only possibly interest me mustn't it though it all ties back with my Random-ish Sunday assertion about memory being filled with small thoughts that come and go like the creation/destruction of matter/anti-matter particles in empty space, only remaining in existence when something big sucks one of the pair away leaving the other on its own and detectable. I think this is Hawking Radiation but some scary equations stop me from reading the article beyond the first few paragraphs.

I Have Left Out The Capital Letters On Purpose.

Had a brainstorm yesterday and decided on the back of my back being up because of the assertion by a certain favourite newspaper of middle england that the BBC were attempting to bring Pilate and Judas in from the cold with their new version of The Passion, that I really should get around to reading that biography of Pilate. Luckily, there it was on the web version of the library catalogue and now here it is in my hot little hands. Now it opens with a joke about a Russian obsessed with Pilate - well a sort of a joke - and goes on to openly admit that there is not actually much you can write about Pilate as little is known for sure outside his time as Governor of Judea apart from the fact that he was born in Newcastle as the result of a union between a Roman official and a local girl - it's all in the book - though it doesn't actually say that it is true. However I do know that long before the BBC started their own attempt at rehabilitation, there have been all sorts of various suggestions about how he behaved. I came out with a long and tortuous analysis but was pipped to the denouement by a colleague breaking a third of the no Politics/Money/Religion-at-work rule with this little gem of succinctness :-

You're at the front of a baying crown of hundreds if not
thousands. The small, beaten, disheveled bloke to your right looks nothing more
than a helpless tramp. The crowd are screaming for you to have him killed
telling you if you don't your bosses will probably do the same to you. But you
say "No ! he's done nothing wrong. Piss off and leave him alone !" Yes Right !
Me too !

And then to finish off, the same colleague pointed out that had Jesus not died, he would probably have returned to Nazareth as just another minor teacher and preacher and there would have been a long wait for the next one. Here we have a strange loop - one's entire religion is based around the death and the image of the death of one man and yet you rile against the various people who brought it about. Can't have it both ways. That Pilate should have let him off - that would-a showed 'em. Judas is of course another matter though Christianity was apparently neutral on suicide for some years until the priests with too much time on their hands found a spot in their busy schedules to break off from all those dancing angels and turn their eye on human misery. As some analysis says, the death of Jesus himself could be seen as self-inflicted anyway.

And finally the same newspaper seems to have a problem with the writers attempt at historical accuracy which shows Jesus crucified in a foetal position rather than the "Cherished" Image of generations. As my friend of moderate religiosity says - the idea is to get across the misery, the pain of the death, not to read something into the standard arms outstreched image - one which sails dangerously close to being a Graven Image anyway.

Got the John Humphreys' book - Confessions Of A Failed Atheist as well. Not quite a rabid as Dawkins - much more homely in style. Now is he right in his assertion that the Urine of teetotal Methodists was worth double that of a drinker when used as a Mordant for dyeing? I seem to remember that the urine of certain drinkers was actually worth more or is that the urine used to make gunpowder? Not sure I really should be seraching on Google for this.

The Raven Demands A Garibaldi

Which might make you think that today will be very biscuity around deWeyden place. You will have to read on and find out. My step mother makes a wonderful fruit slice of pastry- mincemeat - pastry and icing instead of mince pies at Christmas. I have now discovered that in the mode of calling Garibaldis Squashed Fly Biscuits, these Christmassy goodies are known as Flys' Graveyards. None of which puts me off either Garibaldis or my step mother's fruit slices. This from Alexei Sayle:-

'It's quite interesting, y'know, the number of biscuits that are named after revolutionaries...You've got your Garibaldi of course, you've got your Bourbons then of course you've got your Peak Freens' Trotsky Assortment. Revolutionary biscuits of Italy Rise up out of your box!You have nothing to lose but your wafers Yum yum yum yum yum!'

Remember that? Is your name Toxteth O'Grady? Are you hanging from a lamppost?

Sorry! Where was I? Oh yes! Running a Windows console application as a service under XP. That's much more interesting isn't it?

No Sleep 'Til Aristotle

It's not the normal milestones of existence that make up memory - neither the standard markers that define the insanity of Christmas round robins or the daily routine events that seem to frame our craving for regularity. It is the obscure thoughts which flash across our minds and escape without ever being held in memory. See those silver letters up there - The Paradox Club or maybe just Paradox - the tower has fallen apart - broken down by elements and vandalism - but up there the collection of silver letters - the word Paradox - stays forever polished by the wind and rain. The tallest thing around here, it has decayed over the years I have known it until now and it seems forever on the edge of collapse, a broken reminder of the days before the ghost town and rebuilding made everything shiny and empty. Maybe we queued there once or twice - the blur of nights out has not left any memory of locations - just still pictures of bars and dance floors and memories of thumping music which was always far too loud to talk over - there was no call for chill out rooms in this place. All people wanted here was oblivion through alcohol or Drum and Bass. Now everyone is (or thinks they are) a bit more sophisticated, wanting something other than this rapidly fading chaos of social adhesion - maybe that should be cohesion. The lights change here and I am back in Sunday-Morning mode - all thoughts of those silver letters gone for good - except that now there is a scibbled reminder of the 30 seconds of thought that the sight of them sparked before it was forgotten again. And the weekend has gone with several things achieved but nothing actually fulfilled. It all moves too fast for real comfort or belief. And now brought back from where it was saved in my head without any chance of being recalled simply for its own sake, or even at all - just remaining as empty, unuseable space in my brain, this short memory, this single element amongst all the others has taken on importance far above all the rest. I am minded to attempt a day of full recall, to remain undisturbed by normal concerns, and to write short key reminders for a full day of remembering.

It frightens me.

Wigs And Wiggage



Nor sure of what to write about at all. The notebook is no help apart from this drawing :-



Will that do? I can't get the laugh right Bob.

The Marvellous, Mechanical Panopticon

This title is a place marker because last night after reading the chapter in 42 that mentioned the Panopticon, I thought of the most amusing and wonderful title for today's entry and then failed completely to record it anywhere, including, it seems, my brain. It is a place marker in the style of the weird phrases used by Beck on Odelay which we now discover were just nonsense to fit the music to. Of course Oasis did this first.

The notebook has an entry which just says "A Pitta Bread Clip!" followed by one which says "She ain't no Tom Waits." Forgetting brilliant blog titles seems to not be the only problem with memory I am having as both of these phrases are completely meaningless.

Advanced warning of the next book - Proust And The Squid by Maryanne Wolf - A book about how the brain operates when reading. The Author was on Open Book yesterday afternoon and seemed to be smiling all the time - don't ask me how you can work this out on radio - you just can. It nearly put me off but the actual content was enough to make me interested. trouble is, all I can see now is Proust feeding little bits of sweet biscuit to a ... er .... squid which is surely not the image the author wants to promote for a serious book about the science of reading. I will never read Proust. No single life can encompass both Ulysses and Proust - it's like the ultimate answer and the ultimate question. They cannot exist in the same universe.

It's true. It really is.

Chicken Soup For The Hungry

Another sketch by my Great-Grandmother - it is of someone called "Louie" I think from 1895. I have no idea who Louie is I am afraid. Some digging will be required though it might not be a relative of ours at all.

I do need to try and consolidate all the various bits of family trees that we have. We have one vertical one going back to prior to 1400, various horizontal fragments going back about 150 years and one traced one which seems to be Victorian and takes the form of an actual tree with trunk, branches and leaves. The trouble is that it takes so long to enter all this data into a family tree program. Yet another project on the stack/List/Queue/Your listing structure of choice.

Watch out for the Irony Signifier.

I am developing an application that runs on a server. I would like to know when it fails - not that it ever will fail because of anything I have done of course - but all I can do is get it to email a time stamp. However, I then do not know whether the absence of an email time stamp means that the program has failed or that somewhere down the line the email has failed. I could also write a program which would check that the first program is still running and then notify if it fails. What if the notifying program fails? It is less likely to because it is far simpler than the main program which uses API calls and threads (any word on strange behaviour there would be welcome). I am therefore stuck in a strange loop where I cannot think of a foolproof way of ensuring that any failure gets to me when I am not on the network. I just have to trust not only my own programming but the OS/Network/Apps that lie between my app and me wherever I may be. It's all sometimes just too much.

Interesting (But very old) article about API and other whizzy stuff.

Final bit of whoop-de-doo about technology. I got a firmware upgrade for The Toppy yesterday, meaning that there is now a series link and accurate recording (the Freeview equivalent of PDC) all under the umbrella of Freeview Playback, which seems to be working fine (after a few traumatic issues with the download). The whole concept of simply recording what you want with little fuss and then watching it when you want with pauses to get Marmite sandwiches and other refreshments is a fine one. It seems to mean that we watch better television. Having said this, I should really replace some of the watching with some good-quality reading. Maybe a rule - no blank-eyed goggling - only defined programmes with a reminder or a recording set. No more "Cops chasing bailiffs who have relocated to the country in order to train their dogs to eat better".

White Dot anyone?

You've Got Bionic What?

My daughter and I are going to see Kate Rusby of the impossibly delightful voice after Easter but we were having trouble seeing if the seats were suitable. However, having spotted that the Philharmonic Hall have a virtual tour created in Second Life we were able to stake out the seats for ourselves which was wonderful.

I rarely venture into Second Life because, while I am aware of the infinite possibilities of what I might find there, the virtual reality of the places just seems samey. Let me know of some Jaw Dropping locations and I might change my mind but even being chased by an Alligator while trespassing in someone's swimming pool did not seem that exciting and even flying becomes tiresome after a while. I do hope that I might find other places which give the place some real use. Daughter is pestering me to create a version of our house which will probably sit on the project pile for ages before being discarded.

Bionic Woman (why no definite article?) was trash - stilted dialogue - a plot which whistled by as if all the important stuff had been cut out in a race to the first sight of technology, over-simplification of complex issues, and a lack of the charm which allows Torchwood to get away with all of the above. Zoe Slater was alright I suppose - she has a much better American accent than Hugh Laurie - but that is just not enough. And to think that I got all this in the 20 minutes of the first episode that I watched before changing the channel. I seem to be thinking of the word Midi-chlorians here. Wonder why?

Gulity Pleasures in defiance of The Word. Only Five I am afraid but all is flux (not of Pink Indians either)

Nightbirds - Shakatak (they held the record for the longest silent gap in the middle of a song - still going)
Gold - Abba
Islands - Kajagoogoo
Chess - Half of Abba and Time Rice.
Tell Me On A Sunday - Marti Webb

My sister played Tell Me On A Sunday over and over and I loved it. Why is there no CD release of this? My sister also played "You're Moving Out Today" by Carol Bayer Sager which is weird in the extreme - like some art-house movie compressed into three minutes. I seem to think it might actually have been about Benny from Cross Roads - he certainly did the voice over. I first heard Nightbirds while in a car coming back to Bristol from London and it fitted with the late-night, rain-on-window ambience of the day - more Jazzy than Jazz funk I thought. One of their later songs has bits of dialogue in it which I think are from The Dambusters.

Wiseman - du Sautoy - Singh

There is a hole in my notebook where the desk shows through. Actually there is a drawing of a hole in my notebook enclosing a drawing of the desk, so it only ever works when the book is on the desk. Not sure why I am mentioning this at all though I have been trying to find something worthy of putting up here and not finding anything remotely interesting.

I am trying to develop a personal framework for my new-found enlightened ignorance. I would hope that this does not stop me learning new things but that it will make me realise that knowing these things is not that important. Learning for its own sake is not good - it should be that the more you learn the more you know about what you don't know. This resonates with my childhood delirium which was induced by thinking about everything and nothing - contemplating the entire universe in one thought and then the infinitesimal in the next, switching back and forth between the two like an infinite loop requiring a wetware reboot. I don't think it was quite petit mal though as we now have to call this an Absence Seizure then maybe it was. The description doesn't sound far off being a simple period of complex concentration. No - too far - what I had was just anxiety at not being able to understand what I was thinking about. Now I know that this does not matter at all and should be cultivated as proof of the size of the universe. My head feels quite full but this may just be the weather rather than any laser-like alignment of neural impulses.

Black And White Week

Stick with it - Friday's picture may be more interesting.

More on the search for happiness.

The next chapter of 42 etc etc etc starts off describing an episode of The Simpsons where Homer is delivered of a crayon which has been clogging his brain since he was a child. This freedom raises his intelligence above that of everybody else save for Lisa and after several episodes where he starts questioning the wit of situations he finds himself in, he asks for the crayon to be re-inserted so that he may live his live in blissful ignorance of the lack of intelligence around him. This is then linked beautifully to Socrates' attempt to disprove the Delphic Oracle's assertion that he is the wisest man in Greece. After speaking to all the wise people around, Socrates decides that the oracle is right because only he realises how much he does not know. A big chime went off in my head at that point. Therefore there are two types of ignorance - Pig Ignorance and wise ignorance which of course is the knowledge that you do not know everything and the acceptance of that fact. A lot of my unhappiness comes from not being able to complete anything - things may work and perform perfectly in terms of what is required of them but they just don't seem 100%. We should concentrate on what we know we can sort out completely and avoid getting frustrated at being unable to complete everything. At this point my head is full of half-remembered aphorisms which all seem to be variations on Socrates' Delphic issues which shows how prevalent the attitude is throughout history. Unless of course, the story has been widely reported in order for the teller to sound intelligent without actually understanding the meaning. I also keep thinking of the word inscrutable as well. Even my brother has spouted something along these lines at me. Wisdom comes in a flash of understanding not with a lifetime of study or something like that.

Looking back now, the picture is actually apt - the ladder to understanding perhaps though maybe it being a fire escape suggests a descent rather than an ascent.

Technology still amazes me. My wife has decided that she really ought to get back into The Archers and asked me to set the PVR to record it last night. Within a minute I was able to download all the week's episodes as mp3s and transfer them to the PVR ready for listening. And now with 2gig of USB stick memory, I am beginning to get into that state which people who make their living in technology should never really go to. It all seems so fascinating and of course goes against my ideas from above because so much effort has gone into making all these things perfect and easy to use. We don't need them. My wife could quite happily live her life in comfort and safety without having The Archers on demand. I have listened to The Archers on and off for years. I remember it being on at any lunchtime I happened to be at home in the week and without actually listening to it, it gave out a feeling of comfort, especially when I realised that the view out of the windows in our house was the same as the characters would see. I seem to remember Shula from when I was very little but she can't be that old can she?

I Didn't Know Harry Secombe Was A Virgo



Zero has been replaced by Forty-Two - specifically this book. I've only got to chapter two out of 121 but it is far superior by a ration of 0 to 42. Which implies that it is infinity times better doesn't it - which is just plain silly but maybe the first book was just that bad.

I seem to be in a weird state of flipping between depression and ecstasy in a matter of seconds at the moment. Maybe depression is a bit too strong - slightly to the left of indifference is probably more accurate but the changes are notable. It is probably the result of a few late nights or all the Bombay mix I ate in one go the other day. Nothing I cannot cope with by talking it out. The first chapter of the book above is about the idea of happiness and how trying to achieve that state often just results in the opposite feeling. Popular philosophy seems to be all about happiness these days - is there nothing ethical to talk about regarding modern thought? It is of course all self-referential - anything discussing happiness always seem to refer to how looking for it makes it recede and then you are into meta-reference - talking about talking about being happy and that squares the unhappiness. By even mentioning this, am I risking a black-hole-like descent into complete melancholy - an Escher-based pit of black infinity - or am I just trying to seem 42 times cleverer than I actually am?

A top-ten puff (or more likely filler but I was actually thinking about this while in the car the other day).

Top Ten Albums

Dummy - Portishead
Stories From The City - Stories From The Sea - PJ Harvey
Kind Of Blue - Miles Davis
Katydids - Katydids
Autobahn - Kraftwerk
From Gardens Where We Feel Secure - Virginia Astley
Music For Eighteen Musicians - Steve Reich
Gala - Lush
Treasure - Cocteau Twins
Aion - Dead Can Dance

Which as you can see, makes the favourite label 4AD.

All the above is as fluid as a plasma ball let loose in the heart of a dark sun. Guilty pleasures list next week sometime. Possibly.

I Bet You Can't Find Marcus Island



Oh! You have.

The youngest has just tried to find out where the pictures actually are on a DVD which if you ask me is a very good question. You might apply it to finding out where the internet actually is. The "contents" of your computer spread out all over the disk in what would seem a completely illogical order. Even straight after a defrag, it is probably not easy to tie a list of files in explorer to areas on the disk. I wonder if there are utilities which show an actual physical representation of the files on disk - maybe having a link on the right-click menu of the file explorer. Expand this to the entire collection of data on the internet and see where that gets you. Of course all the stuff at the BBC website probably resides in only a few locations around the world but even then, redudancy and backup machines probably mean that something a click away on the page will not be anywhere close in physical location. So we have the logical map of all the stuff out there and the physical map of where the actual bits sit on disk. Is there an equivalent of the degree of fragmentation of the intenet? The people who wrote the web-crawler to answer the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon question must surely be half-way there.

Fighting A Bobcat For Liquorice

Oh Douglas - you should sue!





Listening to Electric Guitar Phase by Steve Reich - played by Dominic Frasca

I have to admit to jettisoning the book about zero - I have to agree with most of the reviewers that it was a random load of trash which said in 100 words what most of us could say in 10. I still stand by my pivoting about zero thing but of course "of course" is my irony signifier of the moment. The book may be full of mysterious stories, but none come up to wonderfully surreal standards of others I have read recently.

Apart from this I have nothing else to say today. I should try a random Friday but I don't even have any triggers. I have Electric Guitar Phase turned up, way beyond 10 - may even be near 11, like the reverb on A Cocteau Twins record. How random is this? I saw some of a programme about call centres yesterday though it made me angry - especially the blatant Newspeak of the "Above the line language" which is designed to promote "Above the line thoughts". However if you are in that line then I suppose making people feel good makes them more likely to buy your product.

Canning Town Blues

I am going to call this latest piece of software after one of the Muses - see if you can guess which one.

Listening to Four Organs by Steve Reich

You may not wish to listen to this as apparently caused one woman at the premier rose from her seat and approached the stage saying "I confess! I confess!". I love it. It is basically one chord which gets longer and longer throughout the piece though there is some dissection of the basic notes in that they are not all played all the time (Thank you Eric Morecambe). Its beauty to me is the choice of chord which is found in lots of music - just usually in a much more conventional setting. Steve Reich is not a difficult composer; his works are far more melodic than the atonal pieces that you can sometimes hear on Radio 3 and I have often argued (not than many people can be bothered arguing with me about this) that there is far more variation over the length of the pieces than you will find in a standard pop song. I listened to some samples of Metal Machine Music the other day and found that reasonably interesting as well.

Currently reading The Nothing That Is: A Natural History of Zero by Robert Kaplan. I was immediately struck by how flowery the introduction to this was and although this poetic approach has returned throughout the book it seems to work even with the diversions into various Zen-like interludes. I suppose that anything to do with zero really does actually fall naturally into a reference to Zen. My aunt told me about how her first few lectures for her maths degree just involved discussion of the succession of 1 and 2. I now have a whole book about zero which if you think about it hard enough is far more than either just the absence of anything to number or the number between -1 and 1. It is the pin on which all numbers circle, wheeling about this central point without which the galaxy of mathematics would spin off into the universe with no real definition.

All this is leading to some weird dreams about maths. Last night I dreamed that I had found a geometric solution to the sequencing of prime numbers, where the angles between the sides of polygons with various numbers of sides has a direct relationship with whether that number was prime or not. I'll let you know when I crack RSA. Begging letters to the address above.

Big Films Made Small

What film is this? This is the scene in the kitchen of my daughter's dolls' house. As well as having proper wallpaper and floorboards, it is a schoolroom for Doctor Who characters, so Martha Jones and Rose sit around the sitting room being instructed on how to deal with various monsters while the Doctor in his space suit sits alone at the kitchen table. This is as well as having all the normal occupants of the house including the maid - things are getting a little crowded now though it does look calm and comfortable at night. No telly I think. Of course Rose and Martha can never meet can they!


Notes:

Banking sleep over a whole lifetime. Am I catching up now?
"Leave my child to me - do not make my child a political point."
Angels fly at the speed of light.
Do I like the music of Steve Reich because it is unresolved like real-life - not like a structured book.

We were watching Lewis the other night and while contemplating the possibility of one of the peripheral characters being the culprit, I began to wonder if some of these people could keep cropping up as regulars like in the soaps. For instance the chief librarian at The Bodleian Library would be the same every time she has cause to appear. You could extend this to other dramas should they use the same location but I suppose Lewis is the only drama likely to work in this location.

Isn't this just rubbish. My most excellent stream of consciousness. I might even be able to spell consciousness one day.

Faith-Based Belligerence Initiatives

I was driving home on the M57 the other day when I overtook a beat-up old 50's style bus with nearly all the paint flaked away. As it receded in the rear-view mirror I was just able to make out the words in the destination window at the front. It read 'CEMETERY'. Which rationally is a wonderful bit of black-humour and irrationally WAS A GHOST BUS GOING TO THE SCENE OF A HORRIFIC ACCIDENT! Sorry! Calmed down now.

I am sorry to say I have removed a particular blog from my list of favourites over its vile attitude. It is a real pity because the blogger was intelligent though not particularly in line with my attitudes but the last straw was a post that was partisan in the extreme and betrayed some brick-wall within their personality that showed them to be not quite as clever as they liked to think. I would think is was a case of high IQ but low EQ if you believe in such things. Anyway, I have already replaced the blog with someone much more worthy (warning - might be a bit sweary). Having said this there are loads of blogs which are purely there to wind up their readers ... pause... just read one - nicely fired up by non-resident of the UK spouting off about UK policies about which he really knows nothing. Getting your views on this country from the Daily Mail just makes you think we live in nothing short of Albania circa 1975. I will expect the food parcels any day now (please send just one Norman Wisdom video as we only have a single VCR and that is Beta). I will have to wean myself off this garbage for the sake of my systolic.

Hitting The Personality Button

Out of zombie mode I think - the world seems to have a range again, ups and downs rather that a great featureless plain which I could be falling towards or racing away from. I have to put up with some of this in order to be real but sometimes I wonder if it would be nice to live like that for ever just to avoid the over-powering ecstasy and the crushing depths. Actually maybe that is the state I have craved for years.

Today smells clean and fresh like being back in the country, walking across the hills between the farms near our house. My eyes seem to want to slip into distant focus - I have been sitting here at the screen f0r a few minutes as if there was a whole world a thousand metres behind it - like another universe in the perfectly reflecting globe. I can see and hear and smell it all, feel the scratches of the brambles and the gentle warmth of spring sun.

Abrogation is a waste of effort - like those irrelevant terpsichorean angels it is an excuse to justify anything you might do or say. The world seems to be run by those annoying people who think the height of sophisticated comedy is to hold a finger out and make your own eye into it - the same people who when questioned about something they say can justify the whole thing as being just a joke up to the point where they advocate murder and pillage. Political spin seems to be this type of ducking and diving dressed up in long words. I hate myself for complaining - I hate myself for being unable to complain enough at the right time and I hate myself for wanting everything to be simple.

Hot Road - Jumping Toad - Upton Snodsbury



Some of today's entry is brought to you by the youngest.

Shrek is good - look he burps but that button on this book sounds very like the X-Files theme. Aren't trains brilliant? - it's TR for train not nothing. Can I take just one more picture? The best train is the one with arrow that points that way and that way and that way and that way but we don't go on it - it's not a 'm' one and it's not yellow. Press [RETURN] now! We have to. Twenty five! Forty five dad. Press [RETURN] please! It's not fair. Yay - Yay - Yay - it's Horrid Henry. Ha Ha Ha. Zero won't go on. It keeps staying forty five. All done. All Done.

Figments and Fractions
(Pretentious Filler For A Saturday)



Actually Listening to Seventh Tree by Goldfrapp

We were out and about today though the high winds seemed to be keeping most people indoors which made me wonder about being inside the minds of the few people we did pass. The only person I can truly know everything about how they feel is me and everyone else dwells in varying circles of experience - obviously most of them outside any possibility of me knowing them at all. The man passing the new building work on the corner, hands in his pockets and jacket held tight against the wind was in my sight for less than a second and in my memory, though I know he was moving, is just a snapshot of a man with one leg off the ground. I was thinking about how all this must have been thought about before and by many and better equipped minds than mind but I still want to write about the empirical evidence of this as it crossed the canyons of my own mind rather than being filtered through other peoples. These thoughts are like random X-Wings, sparking along the grey trenches of my brain, waiting for some tiny exhaust port to open up and let them bomb me with some really important concept - something that will be "right" like that piece of music that came to the composer in Amsterdam and then will just float away leaving some messy impostor that seems the same but to everyone else is just a thought. The external world is continually hitting us with stuff that goes in through senses and mostly ends up flying right out again.

Yesterday I wrote a paragraph in the notebook about how hearing a great piece of music can feel like winning the lottery, the music seeming to provide a level of happiness well beyond that which you might feel you deserve. How can something so simple as a few notes backed with a peachy chord actually give you feelings that are only ever matched by complex things like love and long-term fulfilment? It is a wonderful free-gift. I suppose I have to tell you which piece of music sparked this don't I? It was As the Bell Rings the Maypole Spins by Dead Can Dance.