Saturday, December 31, 2011

HDR Swag

Again - No Wooden Table - Meh of the Day
Back in the days when we lived in a cardboard box in the middle of the road and thought ourselves lucky not to wake up to ice in our boots, Christmas was a meagre, seventies affair. If we were lucky, the Turkey would just about stretch to covering the saucers which were all we had as dinner plates and the highlight of the presents was the latest leaflet in the rack at the library checkout. Not that it bothered me at all - I was just glad to have days away from the various Wackford Squeers wannabes at school, sitting between the curtains and the windows with some scientific tome, every so often glancing through the snow and fog at the distant road leading to the bright lights of Hanley Castle. We were happy and we were grateful to be alive.

Now we've returned to something similar to those late seventies times of austerity, it seems that I've swung so far the other way. And so we have this embarrassingly extravagant pile of stuff. Should keep me going until a major currency failure or the end of a calendar - whichever comes first.

PS. Please Mr Fry and Mr Schott - let's get back to normal next year hey!

Thursday, December 22, 2011

Phalangeletic Calculus


Well it certainly feels like Christmas round here, despite various tribulations and rigidly-defined areas of doubt and uncertainty. Of course at this age the festive season is more about extended lie-ins and time away from the desk-of-woe that is the result of going to and leaving work in the dark. Anyway we don't want to talk about that. We want to talk about higher things like Quantum Physics and how the brain works so it is nice to see Brian Cox and his Night with the Stars and the Royal Institution Christmas Lectures back where they belong - well on BBC4 anyway. Youngest watched BC avidly despite it being way beyond his bedtime. Current reading for him is split between Antique Giles Annuals and his science book which is currently giving him a head-start on science programmes. Daughter seems to be gravitating away (can you gravitate away from something?) from scientific things and is currently churning out short stories by the (two) shed loads - none of which is allowed to be read by us. If only she would use a single notebook at a time - her room is stuffed with various collections of random thoughts and ideas and I hate to think what her laptop is like.

Wednesday, December 21, 2011

Charisma and Chameleon


He Blends - That's What He Does.
Listening to Let England Shake - Number One Album of 2011 here and most everywhere.
I rejected the idea of some classic fiction in favour of some palate-cleansing dip-in which is Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman, a blunt and wide-ranging discourse from probably the greatest genius of the last century. What is more amazing is that despite his mind operating at a gear several hundred times above that of us plebs, he was able to communicate these complex ideas into the real-world. The book itself is light in tone and yet still contains musings on the higher things that made up his day job, and above all shows how to learn by understanding rather than by remembering. Doing is better than being told how to do something for forcing obscure concepts into the grey jelly. Laughing and learning in one easily-digestible volume.

PS. Book Dedications Blog by Wayne Gooderham

Tuesday, December 20, 2011

Web Mix

A Horse - Definitely Not yesterday
... though of course Magritte would have it that it is definitely not a horse either.

Listening to Nerve Net by Brian Eno

Well along with 11 holes in one during his first attempt at Golf and all the other Godlike properties of The Dear Leader, we hear that he didn't need to urinate which I suspect might give some of his useless doctors a clue as to what went wrong with this obviously-destined-to-be-immortal man. Is North Korea the ultimate real-world example of the world described in nineteen-eighty-four? All that wailing at the death of a brutal leader (not that he looked as if brutality was ever a strong point) is obviously orchestrated by shadowy groups of thought-police. Which reminds me that after the classic of The Bell Jar I really should read NEF again soon.

Monday, December 19, 2011

Like Chalk on a Blackboard


Two-Dozen Avocados Not Pictured
(SP top of picture)
 After Bonjour Tristesse, I've just whistled through The Bell Jar for the fourth time. I started reading SP poems some years ago and this being noted by someone at work I was pointed at The Bell Jar as being a very funny book and despite the clipped literary tones and serious events it is indeed hilarious in parts. I'm not sure I'd read it for a laugh as for the more melancholy reader it might cut close to the darker synapses of the brain with which the book has an almost-physical link because of the ECT. You might want to dismiss the whole thing as a middle-class girl's experience of mental illness - nice asylum paid for by rich benefactress - but as Esther herself states early on she does not have the experience to write a novel and so this book is basically autobiographical and I can only imagine it pretty-much describes exactly what happened.

I'd read a couple of the SP biographies before The Bell Jar and to me it seemed like a distillation of the fragments I'd already picked up. It seemed that all that was missing were the footnotes pointing the pseudonyms at the real people. So ignore the Bourgeois backdrop and concentrate on the description of Ether/Sylvia's predicament and the brilliantly-succinct way that a complex state of mind is described in a way that keeps you reading despite the over-whelming sense of ennui about the whole thing. If you are expecting obscure poetic references you will be disappointed - this is basic description born maybe of the detailed descriptions of peeling hotel rooms from the journals, a brilliant mind sharply dissecting both itself and the hypocrisy of others, all the while pointing out without judgement,  the hypocrisy of the narrator herself. There is a lot of what she ought to have said but didn't, times where she just shrugged and accepted the terrible behaviour of those around her. You can find a parallel here between the bright and breezy style of the Letters Home and the dark mazes of The Journals. You might not come away from this understanding any more of Plath's mind but you will feel that you have read a great book masquerading as Airport Fiction - A potboiler as Plath herself described it.

I know that there is a second film version of this in development at the moment. I am not hopeful that this will be any better than the 1979 version which resulted in legal actions and apparently managed to filter out any literary merit leaving the pulpiest of pulp-fiction on the screen.

Monday, December 05, 2011

Edsger W. Dijkstra Was Wrong

Goto Considered a Very Nice Man
Well that was a very short book! I bought Bonjour Tristesse years ago and I've only just got around to reading it. There isn't much to it in terms of plot until near the end but it all sort of makes sense in an inconsequential way. It reads a bit like The Stranger in style - the same dream-like desultory narrative - but a Bourgeois version (for all its outward profession of being Bohemian and anti-normal). The only really likeable person doesn't actually make it to the end and in not doing so returns Cecile and her father to their strange hedonistic lifestyle. It remind me of a less-manic version of Wuthering Heights - strange family happy in their own way have this contentment disturbed by misfit outsiders - violence and dislike ensues - someone dies and everything returns to normal. I think. It is brilliantly written - structured nicely but ultimately none of the potential directions that spatter the story would give any sense of feeling for the characters. Cecile may have been played by Jean Seberg in the film but not even that image can keep from thinking of her as much more than a spoiled brat. Read for the language rather than the story is all I say.

Saturday, December 03, 2011

On Completion

The Leaky Cauldron Yesterday
Well we had to do this twice because the thing glitched and left us unable to get the last character with 0.1% to go to completion. Well take that Mr. Lego - 100%. This is the first time I've ever completed a full video game - I am not sure whether the campaign where I was a German Fighter Pilot actually counted as although I got to the end, history does indicate that the ultimate outcome was not good for The Luftwaffe. Anyway - I've hung up the wand now.

Tuesday, November 22, 2011

Admiral Ackbar, General Bomgar and Field Marshal Tantawi ....

.... walked into a bar.


Of Course it Was a Trap

Where today? Well Semi Finals of Only Connect have ramped up the obscurity to a level that University Challenge can only dream of - lightweights. Vanessa Bell apparently looks nothing like Virginia Woolf. Youngest is still desperate to get one right in OC - it is only a matter of time.

Work involves cross-domain authentication and is not working meaning a re-examination of the options - not many of them to be honest but let's at least fail on the side of not letting anyone in rather than everyone. Our apps would be much better off without having to let people actually use them anyway.

Leisure time consists of approaching the end of Peripheral Vision with an ever-increasing pulse determined not to be surprised by anything which comes out of this Chick-Lit with emphasis on the Lit. Anything can happen in the next half hour and going on what already has probably will.

Och A Vay

Monday, November 21, 2011

On The MetaVentriloqal

The Garden of Arthur "Two Hens" Jackson Yesterday
My mind is full of V. Poor jokes after watching Tim Vine's DVD The Punslinger yesterday, a disk with a very cool picture of the man himself on the front. As usual for TV's stuff - 2 minutes in and you wonder whether you'll be able to take such an awful parade of punning. 10 minutes in and it's drawn you down like a whirlpool with its never-ending stream of jokerage. And then you get hit by the genius of the Ventriloqusim section. I will not explain - just suffer a bit of google-tubing and find it for yourself - you will not be disappointed. One complaint from certain sections of the family is that the extras on this DVD are not as wonderful as such things as "Parade of Sport" or "Video Diary" but said Ventriloquism will more than make up for this.

Friday, November 18, 2011

Kindling

Doorplate at Snowshill Manor
Back off dead-tree books and on the Kindle for Peripheral Vision by Patricia Ferguson. This was one of the choices in A Good Read a few weeks back and I think I've already mentioned it as being in the queue/Stack/Floating-point Register before but now I've actually started it. It is strangely without dialogue which seems to match with its other worldliness quite well. It has many reasons to read on as well as being generally well-written with the promise of plenty of revelations to come. I remember that the reviewers on AGR did agree that it did not need the resolution that actually came along which may reflect the general post-structuralist desire to get away from neat and satisfying parcels of literature but does sometime make for an annoying lack of closure. Head says go with the flow of real life - heart says let them all live happily ever after but let's wait for the end of this one to decide.

PS. Later - Wouldn't you know it - The Graun has a piece on unresolved fiction this very day.

It looks like Christmas Day may well be marred in the deWeyden Household in that it seems that there will be no Schott's Almanac for 2012 and worse, no QI Annual either. I think I read something from Mr Schott himself about the lack of Almanac but there is nothing about the QI Annual and I am worried that they have gone for the Board Game instead which just seems a cop-out. Maybe they are just saving it up to go for concentrated sales.

What is coming out and what will not wait for Yule unwrapping is this - oh and also this, so a certain amount of pre-Christmas happiness will be had. I'll just have to hope that there is plenty of Lego to keep me occupied on the day itself.

Thursday, November 17, 2011

My God it's Full of Xs!


A Fiendish Thingy Yesterday
Daughter had a friend for tea yesterday and during the standard "What did you do at school yesterday?" interrogation around the table she replied that she learnt something that she must "add to her algebra poster" which had us all boggling. I wouldn't be surprised if our youngest starts on the same thing as maths is his favourite subject and he has already come out with some instant replies to his sisters homework, which is slightly worrying. I wish I'd got that excited by maths when I was at school. Algebra has only recently become cool and only then amongst a certain group of kids who delight in the name and the business of geeks (they are not nerds - they ARE geeks as I keep getting told). It is only a pity that there isn't some sort of work they could be doing for national security between the manga obsessions and the music lessons.

Friday, November 11, 2011

Voldemort is the ... shhhh .... Bishop of London

Not You Know Who
Nice to see the rehabilitation of Harry Potter's Nemesis in Rev last night though daughter had trouble getting used to his new nose. And what with all the activity around St Paul's it is somewhat apt though could he have been more wet? Not like the real one I'm sure. So with two Episodes of The Big Bang Theory and then Rev we have  both Science and Religion covered in one evening. What no Politics?

Tuesday, November 08, 2011

Growth! What is it Good For?


I'm not really sure that anyone is qualified to pronounce on the current apparent crisis. I certainly am not and what I suspect about this is that as usual eventually for all of us will settle down to the standard situation - us in the west relatively well off and the rest of the world either mired in a swamp of fear and loathing or scrabbling to drag themselves up to the crowded pinnacle of Liberal Capitalism. For however much the admirers of Mrs T. and Mr R. say that the woolly hippies of the broadcast media and the statist minions have destroyed what made this country great, the gradual drift to a more caring and tolerant society cannot be reversed. I hear mutters of "believe that you'll believe anything".

I have a problem with growth which I suppose is the way that uber-capitalists - the receivers of bonuses beyond the dreams of any Biblical characters - justify their existence and their nasty ways and means. Of course here in this Shangri-la, on the whole we should be thankful that we don't have to walk miles for water or go hungry for more days than we don't. What follows is only a feeling and you would catch me out if you asked for evidence but I do wonder whether we would better off without struggling for growth for a bit. Some will say that human advances are the result of growth which provides cash and facilities for investigation and forward-thinking but in times of crisis maybe we should stop the mad paddling for a while and look at picking up those who fall in the wake of such messes. And then ensure that we remember what brought us so low in the first place.

I;m also not sure whether Steven Pinker's book The Better Angels of Our Nature has any of this in it and I'm reluctant to buy it at the moment after failing to get through the drier bits of a previous book by the man but a discussion between Pinker and a strange, woolly philosopher - Anthony O'Hear - on Thinking Allowed last week was intriguing and did suggest some of the above.

Anyway I have to end here after starting a long and tedious rant about advertising and the X-Factor which shows me up as the shallow, wannabe elitist that I really am.

Monday, November 07, 2011

... and I Feel Fine

Beekeeping Paraphenalia at the Natural History Museum - Oxford
Listening to Drumming by Steve Reich.

Some books finished and on the go - selection follows.

Second Volume of Michael Palin's Diaries completed at second attempt - much is interesting though I always get the feeling that they have been edited far away from what they look like on the raw, white page of the original notebooks. Just started Tickling the English by Dara O Briain which is such an easy read that I'm tempted to jettison it as too easy even for a palette-cleanser. To read in future is the Kindle Edition of Peripheral Vision by Patricia Ferguson which was one of the books on A Good Read last week and was made to sound intriguing - at 288 Earth Pennies what is to be lost?


Musical Instruments at Snowshill Manor
 I was pleasantly surprised to discover that flashless photography is now allowed at Snowshill Manor where previously it was by appointment only. The house is somewhat dark and meant that only certain pictures came out as I'd not brought a tripod - must remember for next time. The boy seems to have lost his clock obsession which has heavily indulged when he was carried around last time we visited. He seemed more interested in the fact that you could see the lower storeys through the holes in the floors of the upper ones.

Tuesday, November 01, 2011

Dad Rocks

A Rock Yesterday
Please give a big welcome to the Information Superhighway to my dad who finally got connected last week and with any luck will be reading this in between various birding websites - stop sniggering you lot at the back. As you can see last week was spent in the deep south just down the road from that Nice Alex James' Cheese Farm in the sunny Cotswolds. We did indeed try some Blue Monday which being a cross between a great Stilton and a super-soft Brie was heaven to this reviewer though I do of course have to avoid any dairy products for a month to get back to a safe level of lipid intake.  Other places visited include Oxford (Bikes everywhere) for the Pitt Rivers Museum, Avebury for the hippy vibes and lots of pictures of stones and the Cotswold Wildlife Park for the cute and fluffy stuff like this - all together now - awwwwwww ...
Dotty - or maybe not

.. which is an opportunity to relate the Lemur story from Bristol Zoo ... oh - you've heard it.

Sunday, October 09, 2011

Dali or Private Eye

Professor Gadsby Yesterday
Professor Gadsby was a one-legged diver who use to entertain the peanut crunchers by hurling himself off Southport Pier into a sea of flames (something tells me he wasn't a real Professor but boiled sweet to anyone who can say otherwise). It took me some time to realise that the statue of him (above) wasn't actually broken and that he really did have one leg. Anyway the reason for this post is that we seem to have some sort of Jungian Synchronicity in that his spirit has lodged itself in a bottle or air-freshener in our bathroom.

Friday, September 23, 2011

Sixteen Million Litres of Dry-Cleaning Fluid Can't be Wrong

Some Neutrinos Yesterday
Well that was a surprise wasn't it? Really - faster than light hey. Not convinced myself but then again from the tone of the scientists reporting, neither are they. I was amused by the response of Subir Sarkar, head of particle theory at Oxford University who said "Cause cannot come after effect and that is absolutely fundamental to our construction of the physical universe. If we do not have causality, we are buggered. As a card-carrying cynic I might put forward the theory that some concrete-carting contractor who built the tunnel has signed off some measurement wrongly but as theare probably made relative to each other rather than to the track on which they travel I think we can dismiss my ill-informed ramblings on the subject.I actually thought that seeing neutrinos was something rather difficult and now I discover that you can measure how long they take to travel somewhere. I should really pay attention to modern physics.

Tuesday, September 20, 2011

The Magnum Agency

It made us high and blue, the stills of skylines decimated,
Or perhaps it was the dust that covered us in grey,
Breathed in and out in the fatigue of that strange commute,
That made this a bleak and fractured dream of unreality,

While the vertical order of man collapsed to empty chaos,
The ragged, fractal edge of a planet built from nothing,
Returning to nothing, a leaden void made through madness,
In the dark sections of a brain cauterised with the rhetoric

Of blank-eyed preachers, sympathetic to no child, to no one
But the dead as tally, crosses painted on the nosecones,
Of holy-bombers fuelled by distant, mountain commanders,
The delusions of religious wars hiding thoughts of influence,

To replace a tolerated hegemony with the untested thoughts,
Of a colour-blind, adolescent mind set hard on everything,
They retro-fitted the planes with sirens, a wail of terror,
Foreshadowing a-thousand counterfeit assaults on collateral,

The blasted concrete is the memory of those hundred minutes,
The falling white material, from flesh to foam to fabric,
An undocumented weather, a million secrets in the wind,
A day’s work for three thousand people given up and lost,

And untouched, we magnify each real loss from its quiet end,
To the squared and cubed sum of so many gone at once,
Hiding the famines and droughts that take so many more,
Behind the skull of piracy and concentrated madness,

Bringing down belief while trying to prove it dominates.

Not That Dreyfus! Or that one!

A Trolling Troll Trolling
I hate extremists! Well no I don't I suppose. I am of course a Namby-Pamby, Wishy-Washy Fence-Sitter of the highest order and I try not to imagine the painful death of anyone I don't agree with but I do sometimes get to a point where certain opinions splashed out all over the screens of the Interwebs have me almost in tears at the plain injustice of the writer's opinions. I have managed to refrain from jumping in on comment threads through what I hope is enlightened ignorance but what is probably just plain fear of being torn to shreds by some dribbling fanatic and all this shows that unlike my soft and cushy working environment of mild-mannered janitors IT-type-people, the civilization that I am part of is actually populated by the most self-centered, un-self-aware, selfish, any-other-phrases-beginning-with-self-you-can-think-of, with an ability at insulting which would have Genghis Khan looking at the Human-Rights legislation for a get-out clause. I am grateful everyday that no one I know is like that or at least is able to keep those manic ideas deep within their brains. I suppose that somewhere my opinions are extreme - rationalism is a problem for some people who believe in blind faith - but I like to think that I lie somewhere near the centre of the spectrum. Does he mean us? He surely does!

Now, is there an inverse-exponential scale at the centre of opinion? Is there an ever-zooming region where human enlightenment homes in on an ideal acceptance? This would be the realm of the ultimate party of the centre. And what a non-descript place that would be, the political limbo a peaceful-yet-sad place of those not involved in politics, the point where all ideas about good and evil ping out of existence leaving the good people to lounge about with their quiet hobbies, like the Eloi in The Time Machine, ripe for being picked off by the slavering mobs of left and right, of dictators and libertarians. I'll have to develop some proper opinions won't I or I'll be thrown to the Moorlocks of extremism. Who can he be thinking about?

Comments are welcome but play nice or else.

Monday, September 19, 2011

Stephen Fry's Moustache ...

... or a darn-sight more than the average number of legs.

A Blatant Attempt to Bump Up the Hits
 There has been a distinct lack of cod philosophy here in the sparse postings that I've been making over the last year. I'm wondering if this is any indication of some cerebral deterioration that comes with age - after all I have the reading glasses and the wisps of grey at the temples so perhaps this is the start of the ever-accelerating descent on the other side of the hill of age. Oh well - lets carry out some mind-muscle exercises to try and apply what remains of the brainy brake pads to this headlong rush.

But how to start? Perhaps a song about a popular if cultish quiz show - oh dear - been done already.

What about poetry - all poetryd out at the moment myself though I did find a second-hand copy of this at the weekend which I haven't actually opened yet as on purchase it immediately hid itself in the bottom of the general Saturday Shopping bags and then mysteriously re-appeared by the bed - how does that happen? Pixies? Elves? Super-cooperative spiders? I'm afraid that this rationalist has an irrational dislike of spiders. I'm not phobic as I can put my nose right up against a web outside but a nasty black and wiry specimen stationary in the bedroom or scuttling like a relay team all running the same leg at once will have me on a chair like a woman in a sixties sitcom. Put this up against my daughter who also hates spiders inside and yet insists on them being ejected without harm, and the result is chaos. Anyway we all know that unless you carry them away some distance they will be back inside before you've got your slippers back on. And all that guff about conkers keeping them out is nonsense apparently so the only chemical solution is industrial-strength beasty-beating stuff and that's just not The Green Way is it? Never mind - good bit of frog and fost and they'll be rolling over in their thousands - little black husks everywhere - Arachnid Armageddon - Eight-Legged carnage.

Well that wasn't quite as philosophical as I was hoping. I've just changed my Army-and-Navy sweet supplier so it maybe something to do with that I suppose, though I don't think they've actually had Chloroform in them since our experiment in the prep room at school. Which reminds me that I have just discovered that school children are no longer allowed to dissect anything more complex than a chicken leg. Living in the country we had all sorts of roadkill and farming detritus supplied to our biology teacher who liked to boil the flesh off the mutilated remains and wire up the skeletons. His joy at discovering a massive tapeworm in a fresh rabbit was disconcerting but I'm sure said tapeworm still sits in a small jar of Formaldehyde on a shelf in the Portakabin which was our biology room along with the crouching remains of its unknowing host. What fun remains in biology if there is no longer the chance of more-sensitive scholars fainting? Maybe we should start some home dissection clubs. They can't touch you for it you know.

Monday, September 12, 2011

On Not Cancelling My Subscription ...


... because to my shame, I don't actually have one. I'm not sure there is much that Hislop, Wheen et al could actually do that would make me want to cancel a subscription anyway. Private Eye is the definition of free-speech and has managed to be outrageous in a way that offends many people (me included) and yet still makes you think in the background of such ear-steaming, that they might have a point. I don't think I've ever missed an issue since I started buying it some time in the mid-eighties. And the physical thing itself is an excellent fly-swatter.

I'm still kicking myself for not sending in my own look-alike from the cover of some celebratory issue of the esteemed organ which had one of those ensemble cartoons with various characters from public life including The Duke of Edinburgh with a gull on his shoulder, which reminded me of this :


Ennu by Walter Sickert
Whether that is actually a gull on Queen Victoria's shoulder is debatable but who cares it makes for a great bit of scandal. Pity I can't find the PE cover.

Wednesday, September 07, 2011

Like a Kid Again - or How the Blues Makes You Happy

Not felt so unconditionally happy for ages. She deserved this without question and there is no more I can say on it. So I wont.

Friday, September 02, 2011

One Last Gasp

Bodnant Garden - A Selection of Views
Well the last trip of the hols has been tripped - a smooth and unhindered drive to the Rivendell Lookalike that is Bodnant Garden and relaxing it was. See you next year for more random nines.

Friday, August 26, 2011

The Road to Wigan Pier Leads to Runcorn

Pipes and Stuff
Well Wigan is off the destination list - if they can't keep their websites up-to-date and their signage logical then why bother going at all. No wonder Orwell was late getting there. Anyway we turned around and made our way cross country to Catalyst Museum in Runcorn which as well as having the standard interactivity and quizzes has a brilliant glass lift and a panoramic view of the Mersey Estuary - so majestic it just about gets away with not having any Wildebeest sweeping across it.

Sunday, August 21, 2011

Mad Men and Women

Be Like the Trees - Become One With the Trees
  More Jane Eyre, more Wuthering Heights. While I did wonder about yet more versions of both of these, neither of which are likely to be exactly as the author intended (though for WH, that's probably a good thing) I am still looking forward to seeing them. The journalist here could probably have looked at the sales of both books and saved himself a bit of puff for something with a little more point but you have to fill up The Sundays with something don't you?

Plants and Rags

Some Flowers and a Bee Yesterday
Is it obvious that I've just discovered aperture priority? Anyway, what goes on around here? Well after years of dismissing Twitter as the ultimate curse like Telepathy, for some reason I decided to start Tweeting to the account I set up some time ago. Of course, I am like most Twitterers in that I have nothing to say at all and so it remains a high-tech method of shining a torch at the stars. However, it was worth it for Little/Big Howard's Fun Fringe Facts especially the assertion that The Monkey House at Edinburgh Zoo wrote the Complete Works of Shakespeare. And if you are one of my three followers so far then you will know that this week I have been delving into such wonderful geek-stuff as BIOS and Registry settings. All of this was topped off with interrogating the pins on a parallel port attached to the back of a server in another country. All very ZX81 I thought. Isn't life exciting?

Tuesday, August 16, 2011

Literally - not Figuratively

"Pick up the Phone - Pick up the Phone"

We've been very taken by The Hour and have dismissed all the various clamour about it not capturing the times exactly. People who worry that the phones are anachronistic should get a life - this is a drama and I'm sure that some pompous lord somewhere had a go at Pride and Prejudice when it first came out. Prompted by a comment from one of the family I turned down the colour on the TV on a replay of a small segment on iPlayer on the Wii and with the slight blurring it looked very atmospheric so the triumph of Style over Content is complete.

I think I would take issue with the idea that the women in The Hour are too forthright. I'm pretty certain that the 1950's was not the earliest decade which gave rise to strong, independent women and the fact that many commentators feel the need to discuss it is quite disappointing as personally I feel it's not really worth comment this days. And if you argue that I have just commented on it I would reply that it was a meta-comment - comment on comment.

That is all.

Sunday, August 14, 2011

Gloom, Gloomy, Gloomier, Gloomiest

I've never really though of Alain de Botton as a pessimist - after all as some sort of Swiss Trustafarian he does not have to work and seemingly doesn't giving him the freedom to be like a medieval polymath - simply thinking about thinking - oh - that's philosophy isn't it? Anyway after reading this characteristically-deep piece by him I am wondering whether it could be labelled "pessimism - the new optimism. As a supposed card-carrying depressive I now find that my view of the future lumps me in with the secular optimists who foresee a paradise on earth brought about by growth, science and benevolent dictatorships. And yet all my worrying about the complexity of things in the west being just too much for the human hive mind to contemplate seems to be the other side of the cusp of catastrophe in this Cognitive Dissonance. Anyway I don't have the intellectual equipment to process many things by AdB so you will have to make your mind up for yourself.

However, another thinker also brought to mind by a BBC article is the supremely-readable and also very clever Atul Gawande, an American Doctor and the author of the book Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance, which I picked up randomly from the library. Hence I was stopped from my normal breeze through the BBC news site by this article about Gawande's last book - The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right which was of course dutifully reserved and retrieved from the library to be pushed onto the top of the reading stack (above Conference at Cold-Comfort Farm). I leave you to puzzle out examples of Simple, Complicated and Complex systems. Clue; some of this might well be Rocket Science.


Friday, July 01, 2011

On Getting Something For Nothing (Again).

I'm struggling to identify the economics of all the free VST stuff I've downloaded over the last week or so. From an innocuous advert on a local paper website, I have managed to get a VST Host and  myriad instrument and effect VSTs which give me as much functionality as I used to have with a room full of kit and cables. On top of that some of the specialised instruments have sounds approaching the real thing - saxophones with the sound of spit through the reed, cellos with a mis-hit scrape of bow on wood. As an added bonus the single, twenty-year-old keyboard which I kept is still able to keep up and control this studio-in-a-box. .All I need to find now is some actual musical talent to put them all together. And some time I suppose.

Another frightening thing is that even with 10 instruments all with their own independent effects channel, the render is still able to turn this into a single sound file at many times the speed of the actual live music. It seems quite possible to produce a whole album to a high standard using kit that would fit in a briefcase. As none of this has cost any money I can at least spend something on important things like food, and the car, and comics.

Wednesday, June 29, 2011

Gompertz Hurts Hertz


Loading Gantry for PLUTO - Keith Henderson
That there Eighth Doctor was on TV the other day doing a short programme about hidden art. This is part of a BBC initiative called Your Paintings which aims to digitise much of the hidden public art that is either in storage or on display only in private areas of public buildings. The above picture caught my eye because my mother worked on PLUTO towards the end of the war. The following picture was also interesting because I've walked through the hangar in the scene and it was still full of aircraft. Sad to say they were Nimrods, all of which are now just piles of grey scrap.


Avro Lancaster Bombers at Woodford - Charles Cundall
However, the main focus of the programme was an almost forgotten war artist called Albert Richards who was killed in 1945 at the age of 25 when his jeep ran over a mine as he was trying to find a position to paint a picture of the retreating German Army. Although many of pictures show military subjects, quite a few show the routine side of life in the forces as the one below shows.

 Building a Hutted Camp - Essex - 1941 - Albert Richards
Richards' death, (the manner of which reminds me of Robert Capa's demise) is as poignant as that of any of the superstar poets from other conflicts and obviously left the Art World without a great talent. All of this comes about because a surreal self-portrait of Richards has been put on display in the recent refresh of the increasingly-inaccurately-named Permanent Gallery at The Walker in Liverpool. What with that and the new Magritte exhibition at The Tate (20 quid to you mate), we are really being spoiled for culture in this town at the moment. It's not all Shell Suits you know. Anyway one more picture from the war to finish with.


Multi-spindle Drilling Machines on Aero-Engine Work - A.S.Finlayson


Monday, June 13, 2011

First Try at a Julian Opie Style Picture

PJ Harvey in the style of Julian Opie
Not original I know and I'm not sure why I've suddenly decided to have a go at this but I'm quite proud of it. I was expecting to see loads of examples out there - maybe there aren't many people in the Venn Diagram of Peej/Blur/Pop Art fans.

Sunday, June 12, 2011

Checking the Level at the Reservoir

Little Moreton Hall

Main Hall Windows

Marton Church

Wedding Car

Friday, June 10, 2011

Gamine Ultra

Adventures in Numberland has been pushed to the stack as this has arrived hot off the library man's van and despite the whinging over the supposed inaccuracy about the derivation of the phrase "Sleep Tight", it is a moreish and informative book stuffed with much more than the already-generous content of the BBC 4 programme which it accompanies. It appears that the BBC is far more prudish than Lucy Worsley in that she not only seems to delight in the juicier delights of home life but devotes whole chapters to them, though of course Pepys and friends have already alerted us to the historical predilections for rumpy-pumpy. The book manages to cover all classes though for obvious reasons, royalty and celebrity elbow their way in by virtue of being more recorded. From the show, it is obvious that the author enjoys joining in reconstructions but manages to avoid seeming like just another extension of the heritage industry.


And what else goes on? Well I still have a hole in my head .. which is nice, though it's doing it's best to become an ex-hole and I don't need to go back to see Mr Consultant for a couple of months. However along with the hole I have a dinge as well though I was warned.

Saturday, June 04, 2011

No Flies on the Roman


This pair need their own series. I'd watch it. Then again, nearly all the characters in this episode need their own series. There were maybe a few too many threads in A Good Man Goes to War but that is no matter - it kept us interested and laughing. All back to mine in a couple of months for Let's Kill Hitler. Yes - lets - despite what happened in the book by that nice Mr Fry. Oh well I know technically they didn't kill him did they.

Anyway as you may have guessed from previous posts I have had a lot of time on my hands and of course none of this has been filled with me actually creating anything but I have managed to read quite a lot. I'm currently just about to finish Paradoxical Undressing by Kristin Hersh - the eloquent diary of a year in her life at the age of around nineteen. Next up is Alex's Adventures in Numberland by Alex Bellos.

Monday, May 30, 2011

Oi - Lansley - No!

Well things didn't exactly go quite to plan over the last few weeks. The thing that had to come out did come out nicely and those nice people in the path lab confirmed that it was completely cuddly and nice and was all in one piece. Unfortunately, one of the things on the long list of possible outcomes happened and now I have an extra hole in my head which I need like ... er ... a hole in my head. This sort of stops me doing much - me being self-conscious and other people going "yuck - that's disgusting". Trouble is it doesn't hurt so I'm pretty much just sitting here twiddling my thumbs. There was one positive outcome in that as I lay on the bed in hospital with only The Telegraph for reading matter, for the first time ever I managed to complete the Cryptic Crossword without dictionaries, anagram solvers or son's rinky-dinky little electronic gizmo though this did put my blood pressure up momentarily until the ennui kicked back in. Anyway - solution may be just time or it could be more knife and needle work.



Monday, May 09, 2011

Sound and Fury (II)

I saw a woman forcibly drowned on Saturday night. What made it worse was that it was that nice Gillian Kearney from Brookside and more importantly many other thespian outings in this fair city. It was of course Macbeth - I seem to have blown the shock with the banner up there haven't I. Kearney was playing, amongst several other roles, Lady Macduff who is put to death with "All my pretty ones" on the orders of the old tyrant himself. In this case we were treated to neck-breaking, drowning and beheading all within the cat-swinging range of the audience afforded by the "in-the-square" stage of The Everyman. There is minimal actual scenery in that square but the periphery is dressed in best post-industrial rust and decay that eminently suits this play. What scenery there is either comes down from the space-ship pipes in the roof or is placed by black-clad stage hands on tiny luminous spots that I only noticed towards the end. There are fetid pools in the broken floor and firey grids that surely connect the damned man of the title and his wife with hell itself.

I was expecting modern dress but this was modern dress of an alternative reality with rusty ceremonial fittings to distinguish the real warriors from the effete royalty, non-functional chain mail glued roughly to faded army surplus contrasting with the Post-WWII functionality and cleanliness of what I think were Luftwaffe uniforms. Of course everyone starts on the same side until Macbeth and wife fight only for themselves, driven mad with ambition that exceeds their capabilities and states-of-mind. There is no "side" to any of this - the monologues are intense and wordy as in all Shakespeare but nothing is outside the text. Maybe you can find analogies that point to Will sucking up to James Six/One but this is an action movie with some added self-psycho analysis thrown in for the quiet bits and dramatic they are. The whole stage for Macbeth to strut his ambition on and how does he celebrate the murder of a king with she who encourages him? He stands shocked and bloody skulking in an alcove at the back, like a thug in an alleyway after stabbing someone.

And the witches appear again, to give him comfort with their seemingly cast-iron guarantees of success that boost his self-confidence above his doubts, the hubris reacting with the madness created by earlier doubts to create an insomniac monster who deserves his fate entirely. We are left with the powerful Macduff panting at his success like some animal, yet bending his knee to the Wet and a Weed king Malcolm, while Banquo's son begins the video-pointed-at-itself rise to royalty.

This is a fitting last play to stage before The Everyman is knocked down and rebuilt. It is powerful and tight.

Friday, May 06, 2011

Summertime Blues

The aircraft make a sound that hurts, a deep roar that cracks the top end of the hiss on my head. From left to right it flows, from the distant land of rigorous R&R to the North down across the deserts where we live and on over the strange apparatus that makes up the towns of the south. Just as the sound fades to nothing we see the black bombs drop from the wings to the ground where they explode in a flash of fire and black smoke, using the precious oil as fuel for month-long fires. The sound reverses, fading in from south to north as the computers return the planes to their bases resting tranquilly in the foothills of the greener European mountains. What style, pilot less, without windows - if only the targets could be the same. Let's agree on a planet out there and send out all our machines to fight for whoever wishes to and leave the rest of us to get on with things like living.

The history we used to be taught was about Kings and Queens, Politics and envy, wars, the big things. We forget that wars just facilitate a short life of thuggish dictatorship, which fades to a vacuum that is filled by the creeping historians who write it all up as they want. Real history is how we laid fires, what we did for food and shelter, things that seep into the fabric of existence, that gives us mannerisms and ways of doing things that we can trace back for thousands of years. There is behaviour that is a combination of evolution and instinct, of folk memories and day-to-day existence. Stuff Starkey and his pompous, snobbish attitude to living history. I imagine he has to shake the dust off himself after a heavy day of analysing the long dead we used to have in command. Centrism has won and real history is much more interesting.

Monday, May 02, 2011

Bank Holiday Photos

Magnetic Poem at Tate Liverpool





















Duck Tour













Narrow Boats - Albert Dock










RFA Fort George - Canada Dock Liverpool














RFA Fort George - Canada Dock Liverpool











Scrapbook 02/05/2011a
















Scrapbook 02/05/2011b