Sparks in the Unremitting Gloom

Another in an occasional series. I got a reputation at college as a bit "Hello Clouds, Hello Sky" because of my liking for "From Gardens Where we Feel Secure" by the wispy, wandering waif that is Virgina Astley. I have possibly raved about FGWWFS on here before because I have every version of the album available. However, until the recent liberation of the above album - Hope in a Darkened Heart, that has been it for Ms. Astley. The reviews complain of its delicateness and occasional descent into cutsey melody and lyrics. Having just listened to it several times, I'm a bit concerned that it's actually one of the darkest collections of music I have. Although some of the tracks are either re-recordings or simple previously-released versions, the whole thing hangs together in a strange and unsettling way - suggesting someone in a deep depression, someone trying to give off an air of happy nonchalance but instead revealing everything in simple block-chords of emotion. The words are not clever, just honest, forced into the melodies in awkward ways that add to the threatening atmosphere. But who is being threatened? Virginia herself is about as threatening as the scent of an orange. It's all just a mystery.

Six tracks are produced by Ryuichi Sakamoto while there are three previously released or re-recorded songs. David Sylvian sings with Virginia on Some Small Hope.

It is indeed some small hope, hope in a darkened heart, glory in the reality of nature and all that cliched stuff we secretly like and long for but cannot mention because it is not cool. Another thing what got me into poetry - I'm thinking of Yeats though Virginia herself was more into the War Poets I think. Right - I'm off to scour ebay now.

Good Widdance

Is that better?

Oh - and apologies for the crude and shallow title today, not that anyone in the news would influence me in that direction.

Still no sign of the snow melting but a few more people have made it in today. And after my rant about boring politics we have an attempted SMS coup. Who'da thought it? Maybe things are getting exciting again. (Pause for a yawn).

I've finally managed to understand (sort of) how to take input from the PC microphone and use it to create truly random numbers. I may have mentioned what I think was PHD thesis I found about using sound files as the source for real random numbers (I can't find it now) and it spurred me to try and take the input from the mic to use as a real time stream. I use DirectX which it seems actually creates something like the internal format of a wav file. Anyway, the stream of data can be used to create random numbers. I have written a small program to produce a Gamelan-like sound which depends on the mic input for it's melody and rhythm. I'm trying to work out how to make it available but it needs references to DirectX of course.

Watch this space

I Have Been Jeremy Bentham. Goodnight!

Has it really been that long? Back to work now, but that's just me as the office is running on about an eighth of normal strength. It looks like a fairy tale out of the window with bright sunlight on pristine stretches of snow and all the trees lined with it as well. Unfortunately it's more like a nightmare underfoot. An early dart is required this afternoon I think.

Anyway, what have we got coming up in the next year? We go to the polls at some point but I cannot enthuse about it much. I suppose the actual result promises to be interesting and might even prompt me to stay awake to see the line crossed (or not) but what with all the scandal and sleaze, for the first time in my life I can't quite decide on where to put my cross. Suggestions to the usual email address and boiled sweet to the most imaginative.

Aha! Book list for Christmas :

The Prostrate Years by Sue Townsend (finished on Boxing Day)
The Greatest Show on Earth by Richard Dawkins
Schott's Almanac 2010 by Ben Schott
QI G Annual (2010) by John Lloyd and the QI Elves.

All this and I ... I mean the kids ... got a Wii.

Rapid Transit

It was late that day when idle travel took us,
Wearily through the crowds which scattered,
Silently before us, all seeming deaf and blind,
Visible as if existing just a second later.

And the train pulled out, a tired drag ahead,
Through the mess of fussy yards and waste ground,
The city's dust and mire swept away and seen,
By only travellers, high on that scrubby bank.

Then the suburbs fell away and that second,
Caught us; instantly in countryside, we stirred,
And raised ourselves against the grimy window,
Rain-marked with the dunes wind-blown from Africa.

In my head, I idly plugged our speed into Lorentz,
And came up presently, with tiny shifts in time,
That made real and clear our imminent arrival,
Ahead of other copies of ourselves in space.

Non-stop, through the ethered land, our magic train,
Shrank distances, obeyed the laws of physics,
And set us down, to weave dreamily across the rails,
Up the steps, our tickets uncollected at the barrier,

Rage Against Cubase/Pro-Tools/Voice Correction etc.

I am sick at admitting this but I quite like The Climb, the new X-Factor single but only the version by Mylie Cyrus. Joe's version is little more than Karaoke and all this means that I have a leaning towards buying Killing in the Name by Rage Against the Machine, from off that album with the self-immolating monk on the cover. For some reason RATM passed me by, probably because despite liking a lot of left-field stuff, they were just too heavy and WASPY for me. There is not much meat to the song either - it is just Rage and lots of it, rage which I like to think I still possess in a sort of moderated way, with control rods and intelligent targeting. I would give anything to see Simon Cowell's grip on pop in this country lessened together with its resultant blandification of modern music. As Cowell himself says, having a Christmas Number One is not going to make much difference to his life. However, for him to call the campaign for RATM to be Number One "cynical" is just quite funny. In the words of Liberace .... ho hum.

Anything Outright Barbarous in this?

Word of Mouth yesterday was dedicated entirely to a discussion of Orwell's rules for the use of English with the apparent agreement of the panellists that the rules were really useful except when they weren't.

Now following just one of the rules the above sentence would have been "Word of Mouth was dedicated to Orwell's rules of English usage with the panellists agreeing that the rules were good excpet when they weren't." Now is this better? This decision to both agree and disagree with the six simple rules was clearly the only possible outcome. It of course all depends on what you are writing. As David Aaronovitch said some of the rules are "unpoetical" in that they remove everything but the utilitarian components of language. While this was ideal for Nineteen-Eighty-Four and Orwell's analysis of everything from widespread political systems to the intensely-observed minutiae of nature notes, it almost forbids any magic realism and much other writing. However, this does not forbid one from holding up Orwell as amongst the finest writers who have ever existed. The rules force clarity upon the text - they imbue any piece of writing with authority. Now could the rules be programmed easily? I suspect that the grammar checker on MS word already has some of this built in. In the days when I had it turned on, it did seem to have an obsession with active/passive voicing.

Elvis Has Some New Dancing Shoes

Well the attic has been rifled for various decs and the tree is up. No tinsel this year and it still looks wonderful. Have I ever told you I hate tinsel? Well I don't hate the look of it - it's a bit like cobwebs - they look alright from a distance but the thought of touching them makes me shiver. If you want to get me to leave you alone - should I be mugging you say - then just wave some tinsel on a stick at me and I will be away to a corner gibbering waiting for the nice boys in blue to take me away to a place of safety.

As usual, Christmas has arrived suddenly, without warning. Last week it was boiling hot and now all the office boys are warning us of snow. Bring it on - I love snow as much as I hate tinsel. It wipes out all the darkness - levels us all even. So there we are - really important things going on in the world and I am talking about tinsel and snow. I did want to rant about something today but I have taken the deep breath and counted to 10 and now it's all gone away.

Aren't You a Little Short for a Radio Play?

I am currently obsessed with defragmentation. The disk on this machine is as clean as a whistle, a sea of blue and white and no red. Well, the paging file won't go to less than two fragments but you can't have everything and I suppose it does help that there is more than 52% free - that pesky version of Visual Studio!

At the moment I have a strange sense of what I think is pre-millennial tension which is odd bearing in mind the long way we have to go until the next one. Is it perhaps just the normal paranoia that everyone gets? That is all. Message ends.

In the Very Last Month of Two Thousand and Nine

... which will probably be remembered for not a long time.

To important things. Well maybe not actually. carol Ann Duffy has written a complex poem called The Twelve Days of Christmas 2009 which I am afraid has too much variation to really work. It would have been better in a regular form but then again her reply should be "Who's Poet Laureate?" A good opening regarding war in the same spirit as her WW1 poem for Harry Patch and Henry Allingham but then it just becomes a list of Duffy's own frustrations with the world and while I agree with more of them than not, it seems scrappy and undirected. It would have been better to decide on one for each month of the year to come with maybe a "Judas Poem" for this month by way of introduction. In fact maybe that's an idea for me. See if I can do something with the same themes.

There has of course been comment from the usual suspects regarding the apparent hero-worship of Barack Obama -

I BOUGHT A MAGIC GOOSE FROM A JOLLY FARMER.
This goose laid Barack Obama.

I'm not sure that this line is entirely laudatory and may actually be a warning against such idolatry. Whatever it is, it is definitely Nursery Rhyme material.

And now the really exciting bit - for the first time in my life I have beaten a computer at Chess. I'm not sure how it happened and it was with my last non-pawn piece but whatever the scatter gun strategy I am happy. On to level 2.

Faffing About in Hyperspace

It's all got a bit fragmented around here recently - lots of high-definition things, none of which take any length of time.

I've just noticed that the last circle in the image above appears to extend out of the plane of the screen by about a millimetre. Now I know that this is simply an illusion created by the interference of pixels and the frequency of the AC flashes of the lights but for a second I was wondering if the two-dimensional representation of multi-dimensional objects had somehow left an impression of those dimensions. Rudy Rucker's book talked about Flatland having a minuscule third dimension to facilitate the existence and movements of the inhabitants. Unfortunately this picture resembles The Millennium Dome.

Who Ate the Postman?

I had to retune seven Freeview TVs last night - one of which was so recalcitrant that it asked you to select the channel numbers for all 90 stations. At least three of them had the same chip inside so despite having widely-differing outer casings and makes, they all showed exactly the same menus. The problem here (and I am sure I explained this last time we had to re tune all those weeks ago) is that the new Welsh Multiplexers for Freeview are as strong as the English ones and because they have lower channel numbers, get in first on the list of stations, so we get BBC one and two from Wales with BBC one and two from the Granada region up in the 800s. It is useful that the manual tune allows you to enter the individual channel numbers for each multiplexer, thus avoiding the multiple channel issues. Pity the digital text does not work as well as it used to do. Still, everyone is sort-of happy. Kids had no problems with the 70s channels which is obviously the most important thing.