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.

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?

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.

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.