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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.