The IED Registration Department

There will be no demonstrations.
Hand your devices over at the border.
They will be inspected, catalogued,
Tinkered-with to work out provenance,
then packed up neatly, marked as passed.

We'll hand them back to you,
for onwards passage to the battlefield,
where detonation depends on timing,
but neither skill nor training,
other than misguided ideology.

We reserve the right to test them,
prior to use, fired downwards into sand,
remotely from the regulation bunker,
stamp them with our little flags,
to make them authorised.

In political return we'll let you sail,
permit your sea patrols to catch our freight,
unpack the billion-dollar fighter jets,
pose with our missiles in your embargoes,
to boil the blood of your citizens.

We'll hold our hands up to this trade,
you caught us stained as we caught you,
red-handed at the window.
The only difference is our range,
that lets us dodge the shatterings of bone.

You'll analyze the samples from the scene,
picked up in plastic marked "Made in China",
and find a gene for self-destruction,
in all the casualties, post them as proof
of dedication, to classify the dead as heroes,

And were it not for guaranteed oblivion,
we'd end up in the same grey waste,
the eternal boredom of the bureaucrat,
left alone with just ourselves to fight,
vacuous, immortal combat with no end.

Subversion ("More Tea Vicar?" Edition)

Son (7) went into Church Parade singing "The Words That Maketh Murder" yesterday. I have no reports back on any shocked reaction from Purple-permed pillars of local religious society so I think we got away with it. Currently the album from which this song comes is the favourite of four-fifths of the family - my wife likes it a bit having been able to admit that it is actually quite good compared to all the shouting that PJ normally does. I've been trying to write a proper review of Let England Shake for a few weeks now but it needs proper consideration and more than the 20-30 listens I've already given it since it came out. However, review or not, I don't need to wait to say that you must buy it, for it is easily one of the best and most important albums that I can remember hearing since I first started buying music. You will not be disappointed.

The Map Room

Listening to Strange the Things by Smoke Fairies (Shh! Don't tell them).

Many Books - too many to list though the last one is worth mentioning it being The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot which tells the story of the black American whose cervical cancer cells became the first immortal human cell line when they were taken from her in 1951. The cell line called HeLa, has been propagated and used for testing many many medical advances from Salk's polio vaccine to modern anti-AIDS drugs. Henrietta Lacks died without knowing any of this and yet today, the HeLa cell line has become a foundation of huge amounts of medical research and is so hardy that without proper procedures it can and does escape to confound other research. All of this happened without consultation with anyone in Henrietta's family who now are understandably angry that many commercial laboratories made money from selling the line. The scientist who first developed HeLa, made it available to anyone who could find a use for it but further down the line it has become a lucrative product for many less-principled people. None of the family's concerns about the financial remuneration that they might have received has any basis in law both in 1951 and now, though rudimentary legislation is in place to try and address this. The most terrible thing is that when some biologists found out where the relatives lived, under the guise of testing Henrietta's children for cancer, they took blood samples which they thought might help them do further research on the cells.

Although this is science writing, the author has started from the direction of Henrietta being a person and not a cell line. It brings alive both all the people involved and the science that has been carried out on HeLa since it was first cultured. I first read about HeLa in Omni magazine in the late 70s and from what I recall, the framework of the article was the general g-whizz amazingness of the fecundity of the cells themselves rather than the human aspect of the woman from whom they came. I am glad that TILOHL has redressed that. The surviving family are made interesting and real through not ignoring their flaws. It could have been easy to give them a free-pass after what has happened to them both at the hands of scientists and the "system" in general. Henrietta's daughter Deborah, is the focus of the family in the story and is funny and tortured at the same time. It is moving to read about the discovery of the medical records of her sister Elsie who was committed to a Hospital for the Negro Insane diagnosed with Epilepsy, Palsy and "Idiocy". She turned from a happy child to a broken shell after apparently being subjected to Pneumoencephalography, a horrific technique for examining the brain involving replacement of the fluid surrounding the brain with air in order to make X-Rays clearer. This practice was only stopped in the 1980's. And we still call ourselves civilized.

I seem to have got off topic simply because that was one of the most memorable sections of the book. This is a science book that reads like a novel and yet does not skip the technical aspects. The academic rigour is plain to see from the exhaustive notes and the careful list of acknowledgments which indicate the amount of work that Rebecca Skloot put into the book.

It Shakes

It shakes us hard these days, the lack of danger,
Our time defined by blur and tedium,
               directionless and lacking war,
Safe and finely fed,
               we eat ourselves,
Turning snarling on our own quarters,
               As the cause of all that fails,
It kicks the children into fade and fits,
Now that we have our ideals fixed,
Now that we have crushed all these ills
               with logic.


There is no muddy trench to make us men,
No whistles sounded three times
               to pour us over wire,
into the screaming hail of shells
               and other metal,
We’re in a ragged hole now,
               becoming European,
Slowly mixing with the Earth
               of France and England.
Turning to interred flesh not marked
               By ritual,
Save for letters in a grimy pile
               meant for home,
Forgotten on our Captain’s desk.


The rubber has perished
               on the masks they carried,
Decomposed to dust and scraps,
               in every attic,
Lost in the ragged, glassy lagging,
The synthetic wool that scours
               a thousand cuts-per-second,
Over my skin, and not drilled at Sloping Arms,
               I drop my rifle,
Its clattering, a bomb
               dropped in the silence,
A butterfly to start a war,
               As houses fall in sequence,
Dropping like my ancestors,
               into the mud of Asia.

In Vivo Veritas

How does the Galactic Capital City/Planet work? It struck me the other day that Coruscant - the city-planet on which all that boring diplomatic stuff happens in the first three Star Wars films - has no economy. Well, not a monetary-based one anyway. I know of course that there is nothing outside the text but I wondered if this was possibly the future for humanity on this very-real planet, where technology has taken over almost all the work that we at present get paid for. Sooner or later our technology is going to get to a point where no one actually has to do anything other than think - and even that will go out of the window. Will we then live in a paradise of permanent leisure where everyone just gets and does what they want without any need for the money to do so? Of course we won't. Wouldn't it be lovely though? Someone I know - until recently a Maggie fan of the highest order - has started suggesting that a world based on a monetary economy is doomed to failure (something to do with debt apparently - maybe he has a point there) and we should work towards one based on barter and resource. From what I remember, the governments of the world have done their best to monetise any resource-based economy by taxing payment in kind so we can't all just go off and start swapping our abilities without handing over money and expect no not get a visit from Mister Inland Revenue ... which is a pity. Of course if the point at which the technology makes such a world possible coincides with the point at which our consciousness can be absorbed into the machines, such laws would need a radical overhaul anyway.

Sometimes I wonder if it wouldn't be better to set up the robots with a few unimpeachable regulations and let them get on with the boring stuff of keeping the world happy without them having to worry about being actually paid for it. Sorry - not a good thought is it. Bye for now.

To The Gills

Even with the Kindle I'm still left with a huge pile of books by the side of the bed. I know I really need to do something about. And now the logical-yet-ephemeral collection inside the Graphite Slabette is growing at a rate fare higher than the normal acquisition of reading matter. I like the idea of having all sorts of reference matter on hand.

Anyway, this entry is by way of bring up-to-date the reading log.

Polished off on Christmas Day between various gift and food frenzies was the now-traditional QI Annual - this year H for Heroes (and some villains). Next came Bill Bryson's At Home which was not the encyclopedia of Household Gadgets which I had imagined but a book about whatever the author wanted to talk about that he hadn't already covered in other books, triggered by loose association with the rooms in his own house. Interesting and moreish it was. After that comes the also-now-traditional Schott's Almanac 2011, still unfinished but being consumed in an unnaturally linear way for what is really a dip-in volume. Now we are back to Quite Interesting Limited with The Second Book of General Ignorance which of whistled by like one of Douglas Adams' beloved deadlines. It's not all purchased literature - from the library is Carl Sagan's Demon-Haunted World which while interesting leaned into spittle-flecked sophistry at times (I don't believe I just dissed Carl Sagan). Now into The Human Voice by Anne Karpf.

Just found the 1000 Journals website which is packed with superior versions of my own scrapbook.

On Finally Being Led by the Nose

A lovely graphite slab - something so much like a real version of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy that some people have "Don't Panic" Laser-Etched in large, friendly letters on the sensual grey soft-touch back cover - The Kindle 3 - an icon like a limited-edition 4AD CD - a self-contained holder for any amount of information you could want. You can keep your iPad - that glassy show-off is Liberace to The Kindle's Chopin.

Mine is already packed with literary loveliness for which I have not paid a penny - all selected with a single touch on the machine itself without all that tedious mucking about with USBs.

And still it can be improved. The display lends itself to Henri Cartier Bresson coolness by just being only able to display in black and white. Amazon have exploited this possible failure in the face of all the colour than abounds in the world of portable devices by setting the sleep savers to be famous authors and other icons of high-culture such that when switched off, the machine looks like something not electronic at all. Here is Virginia Woolf, Jane Austen, Emily Dickinson, Jules Verne and many others of that ilk. Of course after a while of the children switching it off and on and off just to see who will come up next, I am bored with these and want my own. So with a few downloads and no more than the copying of a single file to the machine, I have hacked it to use my own grey scale, 8-bit, 600x800 portraits - heroes all of them. And not so high-brow any more - more popular culture. And this annoys my wife who thinks the aloof apartness of the machine has been compromised by the masses - I imagine she thinks it is something like displaying a Warhol in Tate Britain. However, I am not to be diverted from this - my eReader - my rules so they will remain until I get bored of them as well and they are replaced with another set of favorites.

Bear With!

There are some people I take an instant dislike to. I know I shouldn't and many times actually verbal discourse with someone about whom I have made such a hasty judgement reveals them to be perfectly normal or indeed actually quite likeable. However, there are some people who build up a catalogue of misdemeanours which over time render them unlikeable. Unfortunately the Internet is rife with both types of people which is why I never really comment on anything. The keyboard, various wires and the amorphous collection of servers that separate your average casual browser of news and blogs seems to give them courage to troll and flame without any of the consideration that even the most ribald of conversationalists would give for someone they met face-to-face yet who they disagreed with. A sensitive soul like me would be reduced to jelly by just one of the milder ripostes that punctuate cyberspace discourse.

Ad hominem attacks just to destroy the character of an online commenter are rife - it seems a badge of honour to use the most horrible slander (I suppose technically it is libel) giving the impression that that the author is some sort of shaven-headed football goon or a slathering red militant with a badge saying "This Keyboard Kills Fascists!". (As you can tell I live in a small hut perched a-top Vince Cable's fence). However, thinking about it and matching up some of these tools with videos, I have determined that in reality the worst of them are actually the quiet kids from school who have grown up seething with years of abuse about their haircuts, their funny voices, their obsessions and everything else that makes us different from one another, until they have found the safe medium with its remote bunkers from where they can lob stones and mud at the bullies without fear of being beaten up in return. If you want to be Freudian about it you might determine that a lot of their abuse casts light on their own fears about themselves as well, though I'm not sure how much that would stand up to scrutiny.

I would link to some of the muddy cyberswamps which are populated by these squeaky-voiced children but I think it would be more fun for you to have a guess at who I mean. It is possible to be quite right or left wing without being childish. The trouble is that these guys are well aware of the specific criticisms which can be held against them and spit them back in the face of any disagreement. Any dissent is straight away labelled as one of the usual phrases - ad-hominem - useful idiot - straw man argument and others. There is no debate, only offence. I suppose it gels with the ever-increasing drive towards facelessness in society - the fact that interaction is now almost all through technology - outwardly society in developed countries looks like a lot of electronics talking to itself with a few organic microbes floating around inside it. It smacks of a collective autism, the removal of social clues. The future is antisocial.

Backwards I assume

Written On The Forehead by pjharvey

As one of the commenters says, if only all my idols surprised me like this. I did think that at last I might have found a Peej track that wouldn't make my wife say it was all just noise but unfortunately instead the response was that it sounded like Bjork who is another of the unacceptable face of the alternative in our house. Maybe it will sound better on the album which with this as the avant garde should be pretty damn excellent. Roll on Valentine's Day.

This is playing in a loop in my head - a haunting mess of a war-reporter's story of a devastated city - a place we've all seen on the news and put to the back of minds to stop ourselves going mad and now here it is in a catchy downbeat tune, cementing the right of this tragedy to be brought back in front of our eyes. This is The Human League's The Lebanon but done better - a song for The Killing Fields - a minor key for a major issue - and yet I'm still not sure what the issue is. It is perhaps a generic story of suffering and how we are all at fault for ignoring it. After the homely angst of White Chalk, this is the shout of despair at the rest of the world, the depression of states, the failed governments, the self-interest of those who claim to help.

From the backing samples on this and the first song we heard on The Andrew Marr Show all those months ago, I am wondering if Polly has been using old vinyl as a sort of Obliquely Strategic hook to start the writing process.

Mine Has the Blue Cover

I suppose I've been away but not really. Work has meant that days are seriously long yet very boring. So a walk in the drizzle to the local fireworks display was most welcome and while the recession and various regulations overs the size and volume of various pyrotechnics available to all but the most serious display runners made it less thrilling than normal, the general atmosphere of darkness, burger vans and small children wrapped up like spherical multicoloured sheep was enjoyable in the extreme. We all came home to the gentle glow of an autumn house very happy if a little damp.

I am annoyed that so many things I wanted to comment on have been missed because of the lack of blogging. However hopefully I can fall back into it. Things are still busy but the difference is that now I am in control.

First up for mention is what might be the ultimate geeks' book - Just My Type by Simon Garfield, a book about fonts. I'm not sure I should enthuse about this too much. I love it - I just can't see the difference between the a font that is lauded and the ones that are supposedly less attractive. Just as I can tell the difference between white and red wine, I can distinguish between Sans and Serif fonts - I can even happily side with the hatred of Comic Sans - but Helvetica and Univers, Garamond and Times New Roman? That's impossible. However from reading the book this is the whole point. As some high-up in the business said, if you remember the shape of the spoon you used at lunchtime, then the spoon is designed badly. This is not a technical volume - there are plenty of type encyclopaedias if you want to ward off insomnia - it just tells you the history and reasoning behind the names we all know but ignore the moment the drop-down has vanished. Another book to make you feel clever without giving you brain fatigue.

While finding the links for this I saw this :

The Rock Drill

Mutability

I spent a quiet couple of hours (quiet in the sense that I did nothing rather than it being literally quiet) at a table by the side of a Wacky Warehouse climbing frame reading about The Fourth Dimension and How to Get There again. Somehow I fell into a strange state where the 3 dimensional frames around me became the shadows of complex collections of hypercubes and hyperspheres and I was for a few instants able to see perpendicularly to this world and into the 4th dimension. I was woken from this reverie by the sound of one of the parent whooping as he came down the tube slide all the way from the top of said complex and I realised that all the children were eating leaving the play stuff free for us adults. I have been waiting to come down this slide for years. There have been rumours that on Wednesdays parents were allowed in but never having had one of the children invited to a party midweek I was never able to confirm this. But today I was allowed to squeeze through the various holes all the way to the top and into the completely dark hole that was the top of the slide. It was great fun but like Arthur Dent I bruised my upper arm (actually got a plastic burn) because I only just got down without getting jammed - damn those doughnuts.


The second half brought me the accompanying doodle of which I am rather proud - easily pleased that;s me. Och a Vay.