Malevolent voices that despise our freedoms

A few posts back I linked to an article at The Time online which purported to be by Philip Pullman and was written as a literary sneer at the very things which Jack Straw said in the other article I linked to. Pullman's piece has been pulled (er... man?) which does seem slightly suspicious given the content. You may read a copy of the article here. I have headed my piece with the same title as the original. Many people have gone further and added the whole article to their own blogs and hence if there is any less-than-innocent reason for its disappearance, the full force of The Streisand Effect can be felt.

I am loathe to suggest a malevolent reason for the original article being pulled and we do need to analyse the possible reasons. The facts are that the original link gives a 404 error arising within the timesonline site.

Firstly I suppose we have to look at it being the result of someone in control of the site not being comfortable with it and deliberately pulling it.

Secondly it may just be purely a technical error.

These first two issues are linked in that putting up a message to suggest that the article had been deliberately pulled, even if it did not give a reason, would smack on censorship and hence the simple deletion of the source file.

Thirdly there is a chance that the article was published without the permission of the author though you would think that Philip Pullman would have thought about how it would look should it be pulled without information being displayed as to why. As the piece was to coincide with the Convention on Modern Liberty there is also the possibility that it was due to be a keynote speech and hence it was taken down to ensure that people attended the session. Again some sort of information about that being the case would have been helpful.

Finally and most upsetting for me is the possibility that the whole piece was a hoax rather like the beautiful piece of writing that was sent around the Internet after 9/11 purporting to be from The Dalai Lama but was disappointingly not by him at all. Google has now come up with this article in today's Guardian which claims to be Pullman's address to the Convention on Modern Liberty and I have no reason to doubt that it is. ..... pause ..... just read it and while it is less flowery than the Times piece, it makes a more consistent point and says it in a proper way that even our government can understand. His conclusion is stinging.

We are a better people than our government believes we are; we are a better nation.

I have no reason to believe that the original piece was not by Philip Pullman and I am enough of an optimist to think that the reason for its disappearance is innocent. If it is not then so begins the work of Winston Smith.

Twenty Years After

It was easier these days thought Winston. His workstation still had all the old equipment - the Speakwrite, the pneumatic delivery tube and most importantly the memory hole - the one thing that he thought stood out and screamed that the whole purpose of his work was wrong and yet was never mentioned. Its function, to take any scrap of no-longer-true information left in solid form and convey it to the furnaces deep below this floor, was just not documented for it betrayed the wrongness of everything about this building. There was no manual lettered in gold on the shelves that circled the lifts at the centre of the building. Any maintenance was carried out by unseen proles who scurried about this building in the gaps between shifts, men and women who carried the knowledge of the machine in their heads.

In fact Winston thought, his own, entire existence was glaring evidence of the whole, mad organisation and yet no one dared even acknowledge its existence. The thought of having to deny his function within this building was so ludicrous simply because no acquaintance of his would have dared question it for fear of following all those bits of paper into the furnaces.

Winston could not remember when he has last used the memory hole - few things came out on paper these days because paper meant evidence of the past and now it was far easier to just edit the billions and trillions of electrons which constituted almost every piece of news, information and entertainment that existed in the state. The whole mass of this data was continuously changing, a great tide of words and pictures pulsing through various amplitudes depending on how the state wanted to play things at any particular moment. Most of this change was carried out automatically in huge scripts generated by trusted and well-rewarded "Quants" who lived in privileged townships - "working from home" so as not to be contaminated by the low-ranking party members who did the dirtier work. However even the quants, needed to be kept somewhat in the dark. Their job was to define conditions for change - to determine the prevailing ideology for the day or hour or even minute and to use that to crawl through the information in all the machines in all the world to alter them to fit the desired opinion of the man or committee who ran things at any one time.

It was not just words that were changed; whole videos could be re-edited in seconds by these routines. Undesirable plot-lines or even just single characters were expunged and replaced. The resulting work was not perfect - the scripts could not create logical and meaningful entertainment and eventually even the truth-is-lies justification for the edits became strained and the scripts would bail-out to their masters who would invariably just wipe the entire piece, replacing it with some new film of the same title which put across the required idea. And so like so-many individuals working on small bits of some top-secret weapon without understanding the function or even purpose of the complete construction, the quants defined the world for all but the highest party members. They alone knew the truth or at least a good proportion of it.

Winston was lucky. He was skilled at full-scale rewriting where logicality and consistency were still required to keep the few-remaining intellectuals from guessing the truth. Not that they would have questioned the truth anyway. Winston sometimes wondered what the actual point of all this re-writing actually was; the threat of a night-stick in the face was enough to suppress anything. But having survived his aberration of twenty years before and therefore being more aware of the bigger picture (even if he did not actually believe all his memories all the time) he did have some idea of what really was going on. He seemed to me more trusted these days, maybe because of whatever those mysterious electronic machines did to him - was he actually being controlled by the automatic routines? The thought sometimes ran away with him and he began to worry that he was just actually a thought in the humming boxes all those floors below, venting their excess heat into the atmosphere. And so Winston knew where all the bodies were buried - literally in some cases - knew the general stream of how the state had leant over at least forty years. He was a veteran, a survivor, a remnant of the millions who were born before the war and could remember that all that history was just faulty memory. What spark kept him from believing that every thought he had that was at odds with the state was just a false memory? Because no matter what method they used on him - the myriad carrots or just-as-numerous sticks, all too real in his jagged consciousness, somewhere deep in the human mind is a core of reality that enters through the senses, the eyes the ears and seeps into deep places, unreachable by technology, by chemicals, by any kind of outside interference. We are free, Winston thought - in here - he imagined pointing to his temple knowing that not even Big Brother could see that thought, nestled and protected by all the rigorous and repetitive training that his masters, now so much younger than him, put him through.

He was the senior officer in his section, ostensibly respected by all the younger staff. They would come to him for advice and, after the tortuous and extended sentences which had to be used to ask a question without admitting the purpose of the query, he would respond in what they saw to be a dignified way, directing them in the correct use of language, the most elegant way to erase an entire personality, basically how to kill someone with prose. Winston was one of a dwindling band of masters of the art. And it was beginning to be clear that the state could not do without him. He was powerful, more powerful that his masters and obviously this troubled him. At what stage did the men (or more likely machines) who monitored such things become aware of this fact? It might be that they did not yet know and some automatic routine built by the quants but designed to act on real people rather than simple data, would kick in and send him to the furnaces with that day's quota of miscreants, to be vapourised and then to be written out of history.

But how would they do it? He had been party by degrees to so many key points of history that he would himself be in every part of the history, if only as a peripheral figure, a leader writer here, a comment there, a false letter from disgusted of wherever. His own presence in history was so structurally-important to the whole shaky edifice, that the only person able to expunge his existence in any way that left no doubt as to the veracity of ... well everything ... was Winston himself. He imagined at first that he would be forced to write himself out before he had been physically disposed of but what had he to lose by refusing and no gun-toting thought policeman would ever know that his work was correct. In fact Winston realised, he could, under the noses of his tormentors, effectively booby-trap the past, littering history with enough trip-wires, bombs, paradoxes and simple lies so that his own de-existence would immediately render all media false and indefensible.

As he thought more of this, he refined the idea until in his view it could overcome even the physical threats of the all-so-real and consistently-violent thought police. He could stimulate the population, low-ranking party-member and prole alike into just not buying it any more. So passionate was Winston about this, that he became worried that the shivers of excitement the thought of it produced would become visible but he comforted himself that this would only hasten the end and start the collapse he so longed for.

Winston had convinced himself that he was the most powerful person in the entire world, a hidden fulcrum about which everything that had happened, was happening now and would happen, span like a continuously-updated and entirely-accurate narrative, describing the world, not as it was but as he alone wanted it to be. What, he wondered would happen should he simply die of old age or in an accident? The order would unravel but with no structure. Things would fail and some new order would rise from the mess, maybe something far worse. That hidden portion of his brain which contained the last belief in his own memories, jumped into action at the idea that his power would be wasted. He could not just wait for the moment when the state identified him as a weak spot which he now was certain had not yet happened. He needed to act now, make himself known. Raise his expression above the blank one he had carried for years in order not to betray the remaining spark of memory. They should have ended it all those years ago, rather than letting him back into the game. This was their incompetence at its worst. They had missed him as he faded back into the grubby masses and he was now the engineer of the end of the state that he had so wished to be when O'Brien had given him the book.

O'Brien was long gone. There was no indication of his existence anywhere in the apparatus. His removal from history had been the most complex undertaken and Winston had carried it out almost single-handedly and with a skill that in any fair society would have brought rewards unimagined in this state. Indeed, Winston's involvement with O'Brien was one of the pillars on which his grand scheme rested. Remove Winston and great, murky shadows of O'Brien would rise from the electronics like mist above a swamp, seeping into the consciousness of the party and making so many things impossible to either deny or confirm. Perversely, O'Brien would be the right-hand man of the engineer of the end of all this, an unbidden worker for truth. The rats had almost been worth it thought Winston, smiling in a way that betrayed no emotion to the outside of his face. Only he, Winston, could remove himself without resurrecting a-great-many enemies of the state who had been expunged unemotionally and without any apparent malice. He had solved everything. Even if he was vapourised this instant, he would at least leave this state ended. It was up to him to ensure that his end brought about the structured end he so longed for.

What other way could they remove him and yet leave the state intact? Winston thought for many days of this. He foresaw all sorts of artifice to allow him to continue to have existed and slowly and surely he drew his plans to insure himself against any of it. This was another plank of the grand scheme. He alone knew how to do many of the most complex tasks that the department carried out and by adding no more than five percent to his workload, he could set those traps, light those fuses and generally create a sort of structured demolition to the whole thing with himself as the fuse and O'Brien as the detonator, an analogy that he loved.

He had loved Julia and even after his betrayal of her, he seemed still to love her. He knew everything about her for he knew almost everything about almost everyone. That knowledge of her entire life wrapped itself up in that last-remaining kernel of his mind, her physical existence in his head unmatched by her history in the logs and records from her birth, through her school, her work and her death. The core of truth is that she sold him as he sold her and yet who would not? We could not make it simpler than that. The last bastion of truth is oneself and given extreme circumstances one will do anything to live that little bit longer. He apologised in his head every day of his life and yet it was not enough to settle him. This plan would be his apology. He would do it FOR Julia.

Today he would press the button. The plan was set-up like a line of dominoes, the first one toppling the second and so on until the carefully-balanced supports of the state came crashing down. Winston saw the faces of the men and women he had created and those he had destroyed, poised to come back like spectres to haunt those in charge. His net spread wider - he had created quants in the past and now he had created logical impossibilities in the scripts that they produced. The whole media circus of the novel-writing machines and the pulsing illogicality of the automatic editing would bring the proles round, waken them like the sleeping giant he remembered but could not quite place. He stood poised to implement the last piece of the plan, and with the final piece of physical evidence, an ancient newspaper, screwed up in his hand ready to send it to oblivion. He was sure he had no need to destroy this for he was certain that in the chaos he would produce, no person would be bothered to check but he was logical and needed what had come to be called "closure". He would destroy the paper and press the button.

He reached out and opened the grill. Nothing happened. The memory hole was broken. He told himself to be calm; he did not need to destroy the paper, he could eat it, tear it up, make it unreadable and unrecoverable in any number of different ways but none of these ways seemed right. He must send it to the furnaces or his plan was not complete. It had to be that memory hole. He could so-easily have walked casually to another workstation and used that one - things broke all the time - it was common - no one thought anything of it. It would be gone. He tried to get up but the state still had him - had his mind ordered and correct. Without this act he could not finish it all. He might as well stand up and declare himself an enemy of the state. The state would still fall around him but what would be the replacement - might he make things worse? He leant forward and in his normal way tried to cover up the emotion inside but he had come so far that his disappointment spilled out and he shook, sobbing with despair.

He put his head in his hands. Out of the corner of his eye he saw the maintenance panel under the memory hole. It was bashed in, bent in the middle and two of the four screws which held it in place had come away. Probably some apprentice to the engineers had kicked it while replacing a light  bulb. Winston thought about fixing it himself. This was almost as much against his programming as his original dilemma but he could just about justify it - sometimes they were allowed to carry out simple repairs if it fell outside the maintenance manuals, not that he'd ever seen them. He leant forward and with outward confidence, he lifted the panel. It came away easily and underneath he could see a wire pulled free from its terminal. It would be a simple job to fix. He hesitated for a tiny moment, though enough for the whole ludicrousness of his plan to march across his mind. Towards the end of that micro second, he braced himself against not fixing it and remembered the only things he could be certain of were his own memories. He fixed his face with the empty confidence that showed on all other faces in the building, indeed every face in the whole city.

Winston pushed the wire back into its terminal. Behind the flap on the memory hole, he heard a hum which he had not previously been aware of but he took it to be the noise of correct operation. Deftly he dropped the piece of paper into his palm, pressed the activate button and the cover of the memory hole slid back with a rush of warm air. In another second, the paper was opened flat and he pushed it into the hole. The cover slid back and he heard another new sound - a gentle and distant puff - normal operation being restored, the nugget of truth in his head had control again.

He typed in the string of commands that he had memorised - a seemingly-innocuous detail about figures, something that would arouse no suspicion. But Winston knew of the next thing in the chain. What was he expecting to happen now? He knew the logical model of the flow he had just started but he suddenly realised that he had no idea how long it would all take. There was no apparent change in anything. Had it all failed he wondered?

Someone moved in his eye line, a figure standing up and visible above the level of their cubicle. This was nothing out of the ordinary -people stood up to ask questions or to get a drink. What should he do now? He actually had work to do and he decided to carry on with it. But now there was another person standing up. Now everyone was on their feet, looking at each other suspiciously and then out of the windows. Winston turned to look as well. What was different? Something had changed but he could not tell what. There seemed to be a hum in the air, different from the normal hum of city traffic. A black helicopter streaked across the view. Someone had gone to the window and was looking down into the street far below. More people took courage from this and joined him. Winston did too. Down in the street, anyone outside was standing or walking in a way that did not chime with the normal, head-down movement of the masses at this time. Winston looked up. Overhead the stars were going out.

On Real Images

This is the new cover.

Walking on the Cracks on the pavement

To be honest I think I'd much rather have HAL watching me than some of the operators of the equipment that are out there these days. At least HAL had no malice - he was literally, and without ethical distractions, following orders. Anyway compare and contrast this piece in The Times by Philip Pullman with this from Jack Straw in the Guardian. I make no comment on which one I agree with as I am sure you can work that out for yourself. All this as we find out that taking pictures of policemen and members of the armed forces is now an issue. I have to add that in the best tradition of misquoting the US Constitution to justify carrying arms, this law does have a rider about the photos being useful in the preparation or commission of a terrorist offence but the point of contact between the boys in blue and the snapper himself has no formal definition and could well include "looking at me funny - having a bad attitude - wearing a loud shirt etc".

As I am sure has been pointed out and you might well have worked out for yourself, anyone wanting to carry out surveillance of this sort will probably do it covertly - I think our own security forces have some experience of this - and therefore me with my ruddy-great SLR is likely to be less of a risk but of course more of an easy target for someone relishing the idea of ripping the film from the camera with a cool flourish - sorry delicately removing the SD card and jumping up and down on it. Obviously I might be risking someone finishing reading at this point and be thinking that I am accusing people of this behaviour - I suspect in reality that my clean-cut, well-spoken image will let me take cheeky pictures of Policemen enjoying themselves at carnivals or covering up the wobbly bits of streakers - but that is not the point. I am loath to mention that taking pictures of the police was illegal in certain Eastern European countries - it may still be illegal - but it is true and that is the perceived idea of all this. Jack Straw may well believe that talk of a police state is scaremongering but the drip-drip of new regulations does not show us any benefit.

The regular mantra of the adolescent-minded supporters of such measures is that if you are not doing anything wrong then you have nothing to fear. Maybe at some point that is true but that only works if you agree that what someone is doing is actually wrong on a societal level - what happens when it catches you? Which of these is wrong - dropping a pasty wrapper and getting caught on CCTV and fined for doing it or being photographed driving at 42 in a 30 zone? Which one of these misdemeanours is more likely to kill someone? Where do you stand on that argument? I cannot say but I know that one will be used to justify the other in the name of the government knowing better than the proles.

I used to think that incompetence would be the reason that such massive surveillance programmes would fail - unfortunately it now seems that they will not fail and the incompetence will just lead to a heavy level of injustice. Don't care about the guy who looks like a terrorist today? What happens when they start taking away the wrong people by mistake tomorrow because I can guarantee that there will be mistakes.

I also add in Jack Straw's vetoing of the release of the Cabinet Minutes relating to the decision to go to war in Iraq. He said "It is a necessary decision to protect the public interest in effective cabinet government ..". Most people haven't got a clue what "effective cabinet government" is. I don't see any evidence of it around. Do you? Sounds dangerously like "there was a slanging match - we don't want you see how much like a sixth-form common room the cabinet meetings actually are so we are covering it up - yah boo sucks to you."

Six Horse Pills and a Teddy Bear

When I had just started work full time, I was often skitted by my immediate bosses for what they called "my italic handwriting". In those days (I feel old) typing documents was done by secretaries and I took comfort in the fact that they said that my writing was actually the easiest to understand. It will be sad if handwriting does cease to exist as this article suggests but it has only been in the last 150 years that more than a small percentage of people could actually write and only say half a millennium since writing (and reading) was only done by very few people. Handwriting is, I suppose, the rigorous framework which gives structure to our thoughts and lets us speak in a clear way so it will be useful for everyone to learn to write. I am slightly worried by the idea in Went the Day Well? that the undercover Germans were discovered because they put lines across the written number 7 in that strange "continental way"; I've always done that - I had to look back in the notebook to check.

Second story is how The Daily telegraph chose to prefix the story regarding the fossils which prove that fish started having sex longer ago than first thought.

Philip Larkin was nearly 380 million years out when he wrote that sexual intercourse began in 1963, it appears, after scientists found an ancient fossil of a pregnant fish.

Brilliant!

And finally, I spotted some Lorem Ipsum in the pages backing a BBC4 ident about their motoring season. The pages were in the style of a Haynes Manual but all the text was Lorem Ipsum - shortcuts at the BBC? never! Anyway maybe they could have used the text from this one.

A Better, Fitter, Twitter Fritter

(Not the new album but a great picture isn't it?)

I was going to enthuse about it only being a month until the new PJ Harvey/John Parrish album is released but those days are long gone. I used to dash into town after work on a Monday evening to shell out much money on limited edition formats of 4AD stuff quite often. Several times I bought beautiful vinyl editions as well as the CDs so that the black and groovy stuff could remain untouched in its cellophane. They still remain unplayed and unseen somewhere in the garage in boxes hopefully high enough to keep them out of reach of the also-unseen mouse that lives there, though the little bugger has been able to climb up to the bird table so I dread finding some shredded cardboard and plastic when I eventually get to the uncharted reaches of the dark beyond. Should I admit that I'll probably get the new U2 album as well? Well you know now.

And now for the really important debate of the day - does poetry need a Poet Laureate? Obviously I like the idea of one of the poets I like getting the nod for this position but my joy would be tempered by the almost-certain tragedy that the new laureate would suddenly start writing drivel. Oh no! I've just realised it might be Stephen Fry - he'd twitter epic dirges in gobbets of 140 characters trying desperately to create sonnets with the relevance of 18th century courtiers on laudanum. I'm beginning to wonder if Fry's delight in this inane burbling is his attempt to undo his reputation? Maybe it's a punishment for being smug, like telepathy was for the Belcerebon people.

The BBC have destroyed one of my favourite jokes. There is a wonderful-yet-gentle insult in a Simpsons episode where they received a letter from Australia. The stamp commemorated "50 years of electricity". Driving home yesterday I listened to an episode of America - Empire of Liberty which described FDR's first term as president including a wonderful new scheme to spread electricity to the 9-out-of-ten farms that did not yet have mains connections in the mid 30s. So not much ahead of Australia then. I wonder what we can expect from this New deal?

Which reminds me that "Obama" is the reverse Amabo - the future active of the Latin Verb - to love. And guess what - Gail Trimble - she of the hair-flick and fast-finger on University Challenge, did not get that when asked on Monday and she a Latin scholar - must have been sweat on the buzzer button. Corpus Christi won which was sort of what I was wanting at the start because of all the irrational hatred of Trimble, but Manchester seemed so honest and self-deprecating, that I was quite disappointed when they lost. I'm just jealous I suppose. Daughter still has time to make it and she does have form having got a starter and three bonuses right once when she was 4. They were ballet positions but that's not the point is it?

War Child

There are some morons about aren't there? God help us if we don't look like Victoria and David - they seem to be the standard against which everything is measured these days. Wait until they start getting old and looking a bit wrinkly - that'll really frighten the children - "Muuuuuummm - there's a wrinkled old woman on the telly - she's not got any hips - it's gross! And there's this old man with her - he's got writing all over his arms but it's all gone funny and I can't read it! I may have nightmares!" It is necessary that this sort of behaviour is countered by what follows.

Currently listening to this :



and it is excellent, brilliant and many other superlatives to be found in a thesaurus near you. Especially good is Hot Chip's cover of Transmission, Elbow's Running to Stand Still and Heroes by TV on the Radio. On top of that it's all in a good cause - one of the best in fact. Despite credit crunch, snow, ice and general incompetence of people who really should know better, we do have an easy life in this country in that we do at least stop people becoming soldiers until they are seventeen (because of course anyone of that age is completely aware of what they want to do in life). We should be thankful that we do not have motley-attired infantry standing outside elementary schools offering cool weapons and smart uniforms to kids who should really be doing something else. I bet having one arm doesn't frighten any of those kids.

Raskolnikov Did It! Or Did He?

A bizarre new theory aims to unite the worlds of Literary Criticism, Criminology and High-Energy Particle Physics. Doctor Martin Martin reports from outside the text.

The number of cases of what appear to be false confessions to non-existent crimes has reached double figures with the recent case of Rodion Raskolnikov who turned up at a police station in an unnamed Russian city claiming to have murdered two women but also raving that “Dostoevsky made me do it!” As with previous, similar cases across the world, no evidence of any actual crime has ever come to light: the victims appearing to be fictitious creations along with the obviously-ridiculous and made-up names of the supposed criminal masterminds behind the acts.

The phenomenon started a couple of years ago with the sudden arrival in a small West-Country police station of a woman – variously reported as being Tess or Hetty Durbeyfield – who, after complaining that the station should be manned at all times and that she was freezing after sitting on the doorstep all night, raved about having stabbed a local man while under the influence of a shadowy, local architect-cum-author that she knows only as “Tom”. No investigations have uncovered any man of such standing and no body or proof of the crime was found.

Tess/Hetty was committed to hospital where she might have remained in obscurity had the case not caught the eye of a literary academic – Professor Arthur McTrellis of Bangor University, who read a short account of the incident in The Daily Mail (claiming that he only saw it because it was wrapped around his fish-and-chips). Professor McTrellis says that the case and all the others which have followed it have echoes of some common folk-tales, found in ancient communities the world-over. In these tales, the teller is often manifested in the story itself, becoming a character in his own creation, encouraging and directing the action with skillful and subtle instructions using only slight suggestions of the path that a particular character should take. The professor had Ms. Durbeyfield transferred to a home for the Literary Insane, near his laboratory in the shadow of the Snowdonia National Park, where he has been carrying out a number of what he describes as “not-dubious ethically in any way … er… at all” experiments. The result of this has been a new theory of literary criticism which has been dubbed as “totally useless” both by ignorant hacks and anyone with the slightest amount of common sense.

This thesis was reinforced, when a number of women claiming to be sisters, arrived at council offices in Liverpool asking to be housed after they were thrown out by their father. Five of the women purported to be sisters of the surname Bennet while a sixth woman who would only give her first name of Jane, accompanied them, rarely speaking, instead preferring to write in a small notebook which she always carried. Jane also appeared to have a sinister sway over the Bennets and seemed in some way able to control their actions at a whim. Council officials were suspicious of this behaviour and the police were called though no charges were brought. The sisters and their mysterious director are thought to be living in two flats in a Bootle tower block with reports that they are visited regularly by soldiers and various moneyed, idle layabouts from the Home Counties.

Two women of similar standing were arrested after an altercation on a street corner in Hebden Bridge when one of the women a nervous, well-spoken, sombrely dressed lady, attacked the other woman, described by onlookers as “harridanous” (Google does not recognise this word – Ed.) for “looking at her funny”. The more passionate of the two, variously called “Kate” or “Kathy” or “Katherine” was heard to rave in return about the other, who she called “Janet” or “Jane” as having not been satisfied with one man and accusing her of catching the affections of her intended, an unnamed man of Gypsy extraction. Both women were taken into custody where they were allowed to cool off over night before being released into the care of the local book group, who claimed that the women were local and known to them. Before leaving the station, a further incident occurred when there was competition for the affections of the desk officer, Sergeant Rochester-Heathcliff, who himself began raving as if directed by some outside agency. Katherine was heard to shout “those bloody Bronté women should leave us alone!” but the incident was brought to conclusion by the intervention of the Superintendent, who grabbed both women and forcibly ejected them into the street and the care of a Mrs Gaskell. There was a further brief scuffle as Katherine tried to escape onto the moors but Mrs. Gaskell (a big woman it has to be said) rugby tackled her charges, telling Kathy to “shut her North and South”, and marched them away in the direction of the library.

Professor McTrellis has recently, completed a six-year study of these various occurrences and come up with a deep and complicated theory worthy, in this writer’s opinion, of the worst French Post-Modernist claptrap. These incidents are, in his terms, a situationist strange loop, the result of excessive deconstruction of the novel, something which he claims began with what many people consider to be the first true modern novel, - that one about the old guy and his noble, but uneducated sidekick – you know the one, the bloke who sees windmills and tries to knock them down by charging them with a big stick – (look it up in Wiki later . Ed.) In conjunction with poor-dead Jacques Derrida, Professor McTrellis has been able to create some of his own characters in physical space by treating various ancient parchments with beams he captured in an empty coca-cola bottle while in the car-park of the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland. He has managed to capture blurry images of these characters but the experiment has often had to be abandoned before full corporeal presence is achieved because of the overwhelming smell of chocolate, a side-affect, the professor claims, of a bizarre accident with the coke bottle and a cuckoo clock while returning from the continent. Hopes are high that the next stage of the experiment, for which, it is envisaged, that CERN and the Tevatron accelerator in Illinois will join forces to provide a more-reliable source of deconstruction beams (and a full two-litre coca-cola bottle), will actually result in some permanent physical presence. However, McTrellis is aware of his own literary short-comings and has been canvassing several well-known authors to provide the raw, un-analysed text necessary for success. To-date, only Martin Amis has replied but has been rejected on the grounds that he has already appeared in one of his own novels – Money – 1984, and as a result might well, in the professor’s words –“disappear up his own fundament should he be exposed to the beams – if indeed he hasn’t already.”

There is a shadow on the horizon of this wonderful, new theory in that McTrellis broke with Derrida shortly before his death. He was interviewed for a French news programme during which he described Derrida as a “crazy French pansy.” He said “Derrida is a useless, ignorant philosopher who sprinkles his work with extraneous equations using pi and square roots, that sort of thing, all of which are useless in the description of text. Everyone with an ounce (or should I say gram being in Europe) of common sense knows that pi and square roots are only to be used for round and ... er… square things respectively. As most novels, poems and other literature are built around triangles, the only branch of mathematics at home in the world of literature is trigonometry.” A member of the audience then stood up and claimed that complex numbers had been very useful in his understanding of the Paris Metro timetables and that he was leaving France to work for London Transport. At this point McTrellis seemed to take on a glazed look which he later explained was the result of the memory of a girl he once met on the tube but who had ignored him completely until he took out his trusty copy of “the Third Policeman” whereupon she fell on him. It was only later that he discovered that she had stolen his membership card to The British Library and the lock of hair purportedly shaved from James Joyce’s head before his eye operation. The interview thus ended in farce and was written up in the Paris Journal of Philosophy with the help of seventeen mathematicians and a plasterer from the Sorbonne.

However, the professor is desperate to retrieve some crucial notes that he believes Derrida took back with him after the falling out and is certain that these notes reside amongst Derrida’s papers which are stored along with various bits of other famous Frenchmen in disparate locations around Paris. To this end he has canvassed for the support of the French First lady who he thinks is much more likely to “have read books and stuff” than her husband who “looks like he probably struggles to complete the back of a cornflakes packet”. We are all waiting for the outcome of this petition with … well we are all waiting for it anyway.

The professor’s current field of study is by far the strangest case of literary cross-over so far. In Basingstoke, a man known only as Proust turned up at a police station, claiming to have lost his characters and raving about Swans. This case differs from the rest in that it appears that the only manifestation of the work in question appears to be the writer himself, there being no characters in existence, or none that anyone can remember anyway. Proust was offered a biscuit at the start of his interview but on his first taste (It was apparently a hob-nob - the most comedic of biscuits.) began to spout, at length, the details of his entire life in relation not only to biscuits, but in fact to all confectionery. He was eventually silenced by an injection of Nembutal given by the police surgeon, but only after a discourse on Florentines during which it became obvious that both the First and Second World Wars could have been avoided by increasing the butter-to-flour ratio of these most luxurious of delicacies. McTrellis was brought in to give assistance to local writers hoping to avoid future wars but told them he was a structuralist (or post-structuralist – at least something with structuralist in it) and “not a bloody historian!” Eventually Constables Chapman, Palin and Idle were brought in on overtime to precé the text, going on to win first prize at the local Fete for their searing translation.

The Proust episode might well be the most interesting of the incidents reported so-far, but the most poignant is undoubtedly that of the so-called Joyce Brothers, who were found very much the worst for wear, spread across at least five Dublin drinking dens, a feat of utmost cleverness being that there are only two of them. After being reassembled at the Central Police station, they were transferred to the Department of Supreme Cleverness at Trinity College where they were put inside an anechoic chamber and studied intently by at least six Flann-O’Brienn disciples using both modern technology – lasers and stuff like that – and more traditional methods like pen and paper. It eventually became clear that although the police had assumed that they were brothers with the surname Joyce, they were in fact unrelated, one being called Bloom and one being Finnegan. Gradually a difference in style was noted, in that Bloom spoke incoherently and Finnegan spoke more incoherently. Such was the extent of the garbled utterances from both the “brothers” that their mode of speech was ascribed the highest technical definition available to such texts, i.e. absolute and utter tosh. Occasionally, a few words would be recorded that did seem to make some sort of sense. Finnegan was heard to remark that Bloom spoke gibberish to which Bloom replied that he wondered whether Finnegan was actually dead yet. Finnegan’s sentences where eventually discovered to be circular but of a long period – one novel’s worth in fact, a discovery which nearly took the life of one young undergraduate who stayed awake for three days before he caught Finnegan repeating himself. It was also clear that both men were lovesick and with help from the constabulary and the Taoiseach herself, Molly Bloom, Bloom’s wife was located. On arrival at the Department of Supreme Cleverness, she was given the standard non-mad person’s test of grammar and other stuff to do with writing, which she failed miserably, apparently having no knowledge of commas, full stops or indeed any punctuation at all. She was reunited with Bloom but was under the impression that she would be allowed to take him home for a shave. When told that he was still technically in custody, she asked what sort of sentence he might receive. The head of the department said that he wasn’t sure exactly but that it would probably be a long one. Mrs Bloom replied that she didn’t have a problem with long sentences and left mumbling “mmmmmmmmm yes”. McTrellis is convinced that the Joyce Brothers hold the key to the whole mystery and is currently working on further tests to determine how solid their existence actually is.

The last case before Raskolnikov’s is indeed interesting, in as much as all of the known cases are completely outside the ragged line that defines literature these days. Everyone has a novel in them, the trouble is that for most people it is a turgid, sprawling mess of thinly-disguised autobiography, riddled with mistakes and a certain suspension of self-belief that manages to keep us all at it until we realise that we are too old to be writing about that nice girl we met in our twenties or how we once went snow-boarding with the drummer from Ride – it’s always the drummer from ride – he must have met so many people. This last case defined the worst indulgences of literary ambitions, coming from the pen of an apparent genius of epic vision and pristine literary ability. Unfortunately, it appears that the manifestation of this writer’s work in our world has somehow failed; the process has mixed up all of his characters and spat them out to us as a mess of corseted posh people, the men as well, who sit around in drawing rooms and take the offer of an Umbrella as some sort of obscene suggestion. They take interminable teas and say nothing of note because the thread of the story has been mixed up like a fault in a matter transporter. This single work, apparently the conglomeration of four or five novels, is intriguing and ultimately disappointing because we cannot identify the story; it is lost and we cannot tease out the meaning. This is not helped by the fact that the materialisation of characters has occurred at random locations around the world without any consistency of authorship. Professor McTrellis has attempted to document all of the characters of which he has become aware but his Excel spreadsheet is now full. I note a short expression of tiredness on his face as I ask again what he thinks the meaning of it all actually is. He slumps in his luxurious desk chair and then with resigned despair, he leans across and punches me in the face.

I was escorted from the building by security but as I was thrown out of the college gates, the porter beckoned me back. “He’s like that with everyone” he said and then he winked. Was this a suggestion that McTrellis was actually a character in one of his own investigations? I pressed the porter for more information from the safety of the other side of the gates, but got no more than another wink. A whole new area of investigation is opened up.

This week Martin attended Casualty in Bangor but found out that McTrellis, the git, has had me banned from what turns out to be his show.

Disappeared in the Sight of Bear in Mind

I once bought a mug from a shop selling Japanese stuff, as a present for a friend. It was only when I got it home that I realised that there was a Panel of one set of Japanese characters covering up some intimate contact between other Japanese characters like those above. It was no use as a present and because it had no handle, I used it for washing brushes until I dropped it. Not being too hot on the detailed etiquette of Japanese high society, I am hoping that there are no such shenanigans displayed in this picture. Reminds me of the recent story about the Max Planck Forschung magazine which asked for some attractive Chinese writing for its cover and actually got something similar to posters for a strip joint in Hong Kong.



I once had to typeset some Mandarin for a Powerpoint presentation. We had the text translated by the University, sent back at reasonable size and then scanned in and converted to vectors so we could move it around the slides. I am pretty sure that it was hilarious to the final audience but I shall never know for certain. With Google Language Tools it is very easy to produce absolute gibberish.

For instance a certain English phrase becomes this :

我知道你所有，並將一段時間堅持無限幽默的無所事事。

but returns to this when translated back :

I know you all, and will insist on an unlimited period of time doing nothing funny.

Melochord Seventy-Five

I'm not sure that we can actually claim that anyone is actually at fault for two submarines colliding in the middle of the Atlantic. It seems like this was just a freak coincidence and what do you expect when they are both designed to be as undetectable as possible? We should simply say it was an accident and be thankful that no one was injured and no nasties escaped. Unless of course they were on exercise together. The big question is, why have we found out about it?

Right - sit up straight! A lot of reading but interesting and maddening at the same time. All right - it's about creationists - I point and laugh at creationists. The denial of obvious truths, the introduction of random suppositions in order to make the observed evidence fit (The speed of light used to be 300 times faster than it is now apparently), the general fingers-in-ears-nyah-nyah-not-listening attitude, it all seems so silly. Why would God go to all the trouble to create the circa 10^80 particles that float around us in the wonderful configuration we see and then not advertise the fact? It's all supposed to be faith isn't it? Is it not perverse to go burying fossils that indicate their age physically and scientifically simply as a test of faith? Isn't "the way, the truth and the light" supposed to be part of it all? Why lie to your own creations about your existence simply to make them stronger? What makes me stronger is working to an indicator of what causes misery and trying to avoid doing that - my moral compass is quite a simple piece of apparatus. And if God is able to create everything and control the way it acts then why does He make some people act badly just so he can damn them? That sounds like a cat playing with a mouse to me. Anyway, I have lost sight of the fact that there are plenty of religious people who do actually believe in 99% of the scientific truth. Those who believe in Bishop Ussher's (extremely arbitrary) calculation of the date of creation as just before supper on the 22nd October 4004 BC are just plain deluded. Is there a chance that he might have been trying to prove otherwise much in the way Canute was proving his inability to control the waves? Maybe not in which case even then he was pushing it a bit wasn't he?

Anyway maybe I should not be so bothered by such obviously-ludicrous ideas. Argue with a position of this nature and the people who hold that view see the debate as somehow justifying the point - they argue with me therefore there must be something worth arguing about. I can't help thinking it's fun though. Dawkins as usual has done his animagus act and turned into the Rottweiler again. He was skimming through some lavishly produced Creationist dismissal of evolution which seems to consist of thousands of glossy photos comparing fossils with modern living organisms - as if that proves that things do not change over time. The comparison of a fossil eel with a modern sea-snake was bad enough - wrong class anybody ? However the modern picture for comparison with a fossil caddis fly was a fishing lure complete with hook which suggests that the pictures were trawled off the Internet by an interior designer without a clue about taxonomy. Oh look - there's another one!

Half-Life

We were in Liverpool this weekend. A woman dragged her partner to the other side of a sign post and exclaimed "Ooooh - The Cavern - Where the Beatles Live" - which is pretty-much an accurate description of the zoological attraction which is the Cavern Quarter these days. Of course there are only two of them left now, occasionally popping their heads out of their burrows to exclaim "Peace and Love" or to scan the horizon for the remains of the majestic herds of Unidexters that used to wander across the plains of downtown Scouseland. It's sad to see them now, bedraggled and grey when we all remember them in their heyday, scurrying over Europe and even America, with that wonderful courting behaviour of the shaking head. Happy days. Long gone now of course. We looked for them on Saturday but the weather seems to be keeping them indoors at the moment.

It's The Chas 'n Abe Show!

It is time to come out of the closet and admit what many of you may have been suspecting for some years now. It is always painful when the time comes that it is no longer possible to cover up such deviant characteristics but I feel that everything is set for such a revelation. My name is Rogier and I am an .... errr.... evolutionist. There! Said it. No "I think" about it Chaz! It's all true and no amount of argument can convince me otherwise. I am in good company I know. With your help I may get over the trauma of this announcement. I thank you for your support at this difficult time .... blah blah monkeys ... blah blah volvox etc.

And what do we say about the other famous bicentenarian and exact contemporary of Mr. Darwin? How about "Well apart from that - how did you enjoy the play?" Will that do? No - maybe something else? Did you know he used to keep important papers under his hat which explains why it was so tall? There probably wasn't room for a marmalade sandwich - maybe a wrap of some sort instead.

Paula Nancy Millstone Jennings and the Wolf

In the spirit of bad poetry I bring you :

Lines Written to a Friend on the Death of His Brother,
Caused by a Railway Train Running Over Him
Whilst He Was In a State of Inebriation

How oft alas my brother have I warned thee to beware
The horrid spells of guilt which led the drunkards' life to care;
But no! you heeded not the warning words I spoke with pain,
Your wretched soul that once was pure was bound as in a chain;
At length, one cold October, when the night was late and dark,
The awful doom came on which sank thy life's unsteady barque;
Thy mangled corpse upon the rails in frightful shape was found,
The ponderous train had killed thee as its heavy wheels went round.
And thus in dreadful form thou met'st a drunkard's awful death
And I, thy brother, mourn thy fate, and breathe a purer breath.

James Henry Powell

Take that McGonagall! Mine is better than that at least. All this has been sparked by reading Wish You Were Here: The Official Biography of Douglas Adams which is good but not that good - bit dry if you ask me. There is enough of interest to keep me going and maybe my disappointment is really because nothing can compare when Smokie Sings .... er .... to DNA's own writing. the bit in question is the fact that the name of the world's worst poet had to be changed from Paul Neil Milne Johnstone to the lovely Paula of the wonderful swans dirge viz.

The dead swans lay in the stagnant pool.
They lay. They rotted.
They turned
Around occasionally.
Bits of flesh dropped off them from
Time to time.
And sank into the pool's mire.
They also smelt a great deal.

Actually some of mine have been like that and quite of lot of modern poetry still is - Stephen Fry rants against it but then again he is channeling Keats and the whole emotional gang of his mates. None of mine for today - I am taking stock.

And so I return to the whole sorry mess that is the MMR debate. Jeni Barnett is no longer wibbling about MMR because she has taken down her blog post about the subject along with all the comments about it - though she may have had some help from Winston to manage this dangerously technological process. Comment number 6 on that link to Ms. Barnett is rather beautiful. Ben Goldacre over at Bad Science has had to take technical advice (though not from Winston I hope) because of the increase in bandwidth to his site. As part of that bandwidth I learn that an early day motion regarding the recent debate has been made. All seems to be below the radar of actual broadcast but what can you expect when the increased chatter is due to the apparent censorship of a radio show by the broadcaster of the show?

All of this is of course, an example of The Streisand Effect. Oh look! There's a chimmney!

I would put up the Free Speech Flag but I's a coward.

Drafty In Here

After my rants of yesterday, I find myself on the cusp of catastrophe over this article about how the triple jab is compulsory in some parts of The US. It seems that if you can't be bothered to make a simple and compelling case for the jab, then you have to resort to threats and punishments to beat the idea into the ignorant chavs.

I can't be bothered with it anymore - so ....

Listening to Electric Guitar Phase which will either drive you potty or send you to some sort of rock/classical/alternative Nirvana. Listen on LOUD.

I also have to rethink the poetry don't I? I am told that it has been sitting in a groove for ages and though it seems to flow quite easily, it's all about the same thing - apparently - I wasn't actually aware of that but I suppose it may be true. Maybe this is the Oblique Strategy I need to make the needle jump. In defence, the last one was at least an attempt to be less opaque. Did it work? Subject was still the same hey? Oh well! Watch this space. Of course the question of talent is a completely different bread-maker of brilliance isn't it?

Letter to The Observer - 1798

Some more modern links :

Jeni Barnett (and this is definitely editorial) - wibbling.

And on the other side :-

Ben Goldacre (who I have only just realised is a doctor).

There is also Doctor Crippen, who by virtue of not being directly involved can put his case a little more strongly.

I do not wish to make any further comment as I am an anonymous coward of the highest order - however, those of you with me will know you are right and therefore have no need for expansion of the subject. Those of you on the other side of the the argument will of course believe in all sorts of gibbering psycho-super-extra-sensory wibble and therefore will be able to tap into my brain via the wonderful modern technology of telepathy that science has provided for us to use in these situations.

Are we done? I suspect not.

Geneva Convention

She dreams, like us all, of many things each night,
Of how we fail to fix the leaks around the house,
The high-speed career through empty life,
And how she was once a fighting man; dead soldier,

Who before his end by air bombs, lived a fetid life,
Of boredom, hunger, dull ailments in mud and dust,
Which make a war long-ended still regarded “modern”,
When compared with those that went before,

Red-coated glories, the rush through fields agreed,
Beforehand with the enemy who nod to cousins,
And order patriotic hordes, ablaze with fevers,
Born of loyalty to men who know to lift a finger,

When they take tea with mother in the nursery,
And down to this we’ve come, deprived of honour,
All that filters through the years to us, to sign,
To agree that one way of killing is one way too far,

And leave all the others legal, approved and stamped,
With marks of blocs, alliances and nations,
And every one considered civilized and stable,
Compassionate, concerned. It is OK to kill this way.

Then comes the banal list of prohibited atrocities,
The fire, the bugs, the bullets which explode on entry,
As if damage after that is not quite cricket.
The mines, which as a side-effect take children,

More than any soldier, the yellow bombs like toys,
Prizes found on bomb-sites to take as souvenirs,
In the fire-stormed, sun-blinded, shattered towns,
In the paddy fields, concealed and lasting years.

And here men argue, dark-suited diplomats at trade,
To swap cluster bombs for chemicals and bugs,
Tossing military-corporate management trash around,
Tick “strategic”, tick “advantage” in your buzzword bingo.

By the sea in the dappling of seventy-two degrees,
Fine set for a week of work and after-hours tennis,
She dreams of family men, designers making weapons,
And cannot see how that neural pathway works,

How coming home to that cliché survives the rounds
Of news reports that are the distant testing grounds,
The market research launched from sunny Glendale,
Is a clipboard shining light on paradox.

The Moon of Nowhere

The moon of nowhere, silent and slow across the sky,
has caught you begging riches for your sweet song,
and as punishment gives you voice to question liberty,
a cut and swipe of logic targeted with ire.

Some philosophy was made that day you called for death,
Imagining yourself a soldier, gumshoe, scientist or hack,
Mad at madness, the stupidity that shows its head,
And draws the fire of those who suffer it.

The sun and moon are one, a unit shield to enmity,
A centurion's formation in battle with the Goth
And Visigoth of failing factory owners, history men,
Let loose like beetles, fading through to nothing.

She calls us up at night, under the moon that made her,
The ringing spilling from the empty house to us,
To wake the children and lead us all into distress,
Her compassion seeping through the wire and air.

She melts hearts, makes hands wring when she goes,
Has arbitration over truth delegated to her easily,
For she knows us all, and what will make us free,
What it takes to make young girls gather arms and kill,

To dream of arcs of bloody self-extermination,
And yet still condemn it, still defining liberty,
In that spray of bone and hope and life and love,
The keystones of decades under threat, in poverty.

The universal, cosmological extent of what you know,
Is rock and steel to us, your calls still seeping through,
Under the handset, up the stairs, to wake us gently,
With nagging thoughts of how to make things better.

Demi Cuit

Announcing the deWeyden Biscuit/Cake Complexity Test.

Inspired by the wibbling idiocy of this table relating to VAT on biscuits and cakes I have again been annoyed at the complexity of the British Tax system. Do the boundaries of certain categories of snack items require such a level of definition as to whether a gingerbread man has more chocolate than is necessary to define its eyes? If there are such stupid things in this simple area, what unread paragraphs lie in wait somewhere in the multi-volume manuals that document our owings to the Government? Can such narrow categories really benefit us in any meaningful way?

Anyway, I have decided to use this obviously-contrived category of taxation as a bench mark for my own systems. From now on my mantra will be "What would Mr Kipling do?".

Plenty of lovely and juicy documentary stuff about evolution on the BBC at the moment including a rerun of Mark Steel's lecture on Charles Darwin - though I think Fitzroy's issues were glossed over slightly - but then again The Mark Steel Lectures are more about comedy than documentary. And I have to say if you were looking for bias on the BBC (never - ed.) this is where you might find it more openly than anywhere else.

End stuff:

- Will Young has a Desmond in Politics.

- It should possibly be moitié cuit but I am channeling Miles Kington.

The Cosmos Spins Fueled by Irony and Observation

Standing in the car park, the snow frozen to the ground in treacherous lumps, he suddenly saw again, the meaning of everything. He could not describe it in any clear way, just like he could not describe it the first time it happened. The realisation of that long-ago day hit him almost physically, mixed up as it was, with all sorts of mystical beliefs and strange spiritual ideas that lived in all of us in that place. These days, being in a city and working with solid, dependable machines, this sudden revelation was a strange surprise, an aberration in an ordered world. He was disturbed this time for he thought he was over such childish things

Not sure how to deal with this almost-messianic idea and struck with a fast pulse and spinning head, he sat down on a curb that held in the soil of the flowerbeds and thought about it. The unreality of it all and the fact that it struck totally out of the blue, made him wonder if something had failed in his head; he imagined a gradual leak from an artery, filling the spaces in his cortex, gradually building up pressure until everything collapsed in a gory mess of blood and brains. But this worry subsided; something had taken hold of his mind and like a friend in times of stress, was calming him down, holding him deep within a warmth that seemed to be coming from outside. I am linked to somewhere else he thought. This is a dream, it must be. But everything around him was as normal. The car park was the same as every other day, empty at this early time, sound tracked by birds, the gentle swishing of trees and the distant conglomeration of city sounds, a low hum that suggested a cold day in the park from his childhood.

He thought back to the first time this had happened and how disappointed he was when the feeling faded and evaded description. Though no less a surprise to him, that day was much more suited to what could only be described (embarrassingly for him) as a religious experience. It was rural and sunny, the sounds of crickets and of birds more suited to the moorland that surrounded him. For a few minutes he was as happy as it is possible to be - shown the workings of the world, knowing the deep science that usually was only understood by eccentrics and adepts. He had to struggle against the gravity that kept him place, for he was strangely aware that he was stuck perilously to the side of a spinning planet in a universe that dwarfed him. He could imagine being sucked out into space because for now the world was not solid matter any more - just a shadow of something, like a sub-atomic particle with no influence on big things. The clouds above were islands, drifting in their oceans, for creation had succumbed to the strangeness of the moment and the endless eons of time that lay between him and the first confluence of chemicals that started life had shrunk to tiny seconds. If this lasted he would see the fate of the world in the next few minutes, the gradual colour change of the sun and then its final explosion and contraction. He would be left on a cinder of metal, turning forever around an eternally-fading star until all light burned out and the whole universe was just other cinders unilluminated and dead. And despite this, he knew he was safe and immortal

This was no help in the industrial present. He should be encouraged by this happy feeling but he was both ecstatic and deranged with the strangeness all at once. He stepped outside these two extremes, as he had done with other conditions of mind, to examine and analyse the situation, independent of it being a problem of his. He thought for a moment of a doctor self-prescribing and almost always getting the diagnosis wrong despite never having failed in any similar task on a patient. How rational do you have to be to understand your own mind? He was distracted now, not feeling the ecstasy so intensely. The rational world will always defeat the irrational he thought but then he wondered why he thought this feeling could be irrational. The idea that we are all mad and this is sanity occupied him for a while before he dismissed it as cliche. He was scrambling for answers and an end to the state. What do I look like to other people he thought, stepping to the idea from a worry about the imminent arrival of colleagues. But he was early as usual and no one else would be here for almost an hour. Strangely he was relieved, firstly because he would be embarrassed at being found in what he imagined was dangerously close to some sort of fugue state, and secondly because he was actually enjoying the analysis

They found him 50 minutes later, catatonic and shivering but they were able to gently encourage him to his feet and into the warmth of the foyer where he sat calmly and quietly until the ambulance came. Inside his mind, he was back on the hillside again, a master of science in a world of charlatans, able to destroy any argument of faith with a single sentence. He felt part of the grid of communications that links us all, plugged in and spaced out. He was in two worlds now, a body, breathing, being fed with tubes, uncommunicative and compliant - lost to his family and to any physical human being. However, inside he was lying on the grass of that summer day forever, ringed with electromagnetic signals, a hub of mysterious things that happened in the networks

People began to receive strange emails, weirder messages amongst the weirdness that humans create for themselves in cyberspace. The messages were short, to the point, always scientifically accurate and often devastating in their criticism. The writer had no belief in anything supernatural. Evolution was definitely correct and all the possible levels of equivocation that served to placate all but the extreme proponents of this controversial subject were thrown out in language almost-religious in its fervour and vicious decrying of faith-only existence. The writer claimed all sorts of things and went some way to provide proof for many of them. Some believed he was a time-traveller, with knowledge of research not-yet-done. However, to the writer, time did not exist; it was simply a way of keeping events apart. In the sender's world, everything had happened already and it was his job to communicate all the knowledge of the universe to anyone who would listen ... and especially to those who would not listen for religious reasons. This was a new God to some, but that suggestion, when returned to the sender, was debunked as well, in a stream of polite but fervent language. It would have been nice to hear the person speak but attempts to locate his machine, his email, his IP address, failed in a mess of mechanical and electrical snafus - the messages sent to trace him, dispersing into feeble rays at the back of network hubs - becoming nothing detectable. This made him more like God, the ultimate conspiracy theory.

May Contain Groundhogs

I didn't realise that yesterday was Groundhog Day so any mention of Groundhogs was purely coinceidental, rather than down to any sensitivity to bizarre North-Eastern-North-American holiday customs. Chances 1 in 365 - not particularly difficult to achieve.

Windows Media Player has just jumped from the end of The Four Seasons to Acrid Avid Jam Shred by The Aphex Twin. This was quite disconcerting but also exciting in an oblique-strategy-type way. I have just managed at last to write an add-in for Windows Live Messenger which can respond automatically to messages sent to me. At the moment is doesn't actually reply in any intelligent way - it just sends back a random Oblique Strategy but at least it's a start. Full Turing-passing app coming soon.

I'm not sure if you noticed the link to an mp3 file a few posts back. It is an attempt at simulating a peal of eight bells using vb. As there is no proper Church Bell sound in the VB list and no sample that would work across the range, I ended up working with detuning 5 channels of other instruments playing against themselves. After a bit of playing it turned out that the standard Piano sound sufficed. I need some objective response about how close to the real thing this sounds. Everyone who has heard it so far is a philistine and a wet and a weed with no real appreciation for the nuances of resonance and timing.

Of All The Lockers In All The World

Look what I found in Google Earth.

Astronomy Gallery

Blood and Guts has left the pioneering days of the pillars of surgery and is now in the cutting edge zone (ho ho) of cardiac procedures. It is seemingly a procession of clunking, wheezing, whirring heart-lung machines which explode regularly and still occasionally a patient survives. Before this any number of weird solutions to keeping a patient alive while cutting into the heart were employed. Sometimes a donor would provide heart and lung function for the patient. Blood was oxygenated by sterilised monkey or dog lungs - and some of these patients also made it through.

Then there is the hilarious tale of the scientists who endeavoured to extract a chemical from hibernating groundhogs in the hope that they could lower the temperature of patients thereby reducing their oxygen requirements and giving longer to operate on the heart. They actually found something which they called hibernin and used it on live patients apparently with success, only to discover from the patent office that the substance was already registered as a plasticiser; they had extracted this from the tubes used in the experiment rather than from the groundhogs. It worked because it contained alcohol which explained why the nurses reported the patients drunk in the recovery room. Doh! And yet it works!