Schtick Schtock

This is anger at the comparison of bread to salt,
His is some pap with bolt-on cleverness,
Stolen from the sincere and genuinely foreign,
The arrangement of a mind palace,
Like a child’s collection lined up for praise,
From a parent returning home from work,
To the dancing darling jumping in front of the eyes
For attention and justifying.

Here is the true poet, the feedback buzzing,
From ill-treated amplifiers,
Digging deep in the feelings of the bereaved and lost,
To cut trenches in the complexities of war,
With the text and belonging of the truly alive,
Badges of membership, encrypted and protected,
The lossless compressions of experience and doubt,
Kept by outsiders from the near-dead.

The Birth of Guerilla Accounting ...

... or The Rise and Rise of The Mary Quant Triplets.



A scandal in this house - this school - something happening at last - nothing really juicy since that plane came down and Stuart started smoking with all that jet fuel around - an idiot and a hero at the same time. What now though. Only hints on the telegraph, the ears at the staff room door. Maybe I should find an excuse and go up there myself. The head still has that book of drawings, I could go and ask for it back. He's usually there with the rest of them on Fridays but might there be an atmosphere that keeps him in his own little room. What to do mein freund? Anyone else coming up there? It's so big it'll make the School Magazine if they let it. I could do the drawings if Leyton doesn't want to do them. Actually he's far better then me, a proper artist and everything, I only trace things. Who cares. They won't let us print anything about this. Expulsions all over the place if we try I bet.

What if it's nothing? Back to the boring life of the potential accountant. That's all the future holds for this wallflower I suppose. Still the world needs accountants. Accountancy doesn't use much beyond the four main operations does it. Not much chance of getting to differentiate or integrate in double-entry is there? Though thinking about it Tricky Dickie did use the third derivative to argue for re-election didn't he, which means there is a small chance of introducing some mad maths to The Treasury. Extending that idea could be very interesting and profitable. Keep a note of this for discussion with Doctor Waters, it'll blow his socks off! We could make money on that idea. Now how to introduce Chaos Theory? All those graphs are based on imaginary numbers (aside - Electricians/Electrical Engineers use j for Sqrt(-1) because i is current - question - why to they need sqrt(-1) at all? How does i/j apply to the real world?). Well how about imaginary money which cancels out when you multiply it by itself? (or reverts to it's inventor).

How about probability? As in Heads I win and Tails you lose. Sounds a bit like the futures market to me. Ah - those pesky derivatives again - because that's what you really need in a food chain isn't it, something that lets you make money off something you'll never see and never have to pay storage costs for. No non-mathematician understands probability properly anyway so you could get away with anything. Chance of a Hurricane stripping all the Oranges off the trees in Florida? No idea. How sure are we to get all that coffee into Starbucks this week seeing as the ship carrying it might well get boarded by pirates? Not a clue. We'll makes fortune. That's your Breakfast Uncertainty Principle sorted. I certainly do know where I am AND how fast I am going thank you very much.

OK, it's not as rigorous as Doctor Bunting might want for a humerus skit this Christmas but it's been fun. Remember - I am the ghost of Christmas future perfect subjunctive - I will show you what would have happened to you, were you not to have changed your ways. Not original I will admit and not quite as funny as The Deputy Prime Minister's Practical Joke at the Expense of The Ex-Lady McCartney (look it up you lazy tyke).

Nelson - The best Graphic Novel Ever - Probably

I came across this when looking up something about Posy Simmonds. There is slight similarity to One Day in that each "chapter" represents a day, slightly more than one-a-year, in the life of Nel Baker, spanning from her birth in the late sixties to the present day. However the real twist is that each section is drawn by a separate comic-artist, in a wide-range of styles covering child-like scrawls to ultra-realistic. I bought this this morning (didn't see Leonard, Sheldon or any of the rest of them at The Comic Book Store) and finished it this evening, which isn't enough to catch the subtleties of the drawings but I'll probably be reading it again straight away, especially after reading the afterword which says that there is a jigsaw hidden throughout the story, an interlocking set of clues. The real beauty of this is that the whole thing seems properly held together. Nel develops properly as a person in a way that is lacking in novels written by a single person. A real triumph. Buy it!

Late Arrival to the debate

RAW Image Left - HDR Composite Right

At last I've managed to do some HDR merging. Now there is a debate about whether an HDR image created from edited RAW images based on a single RAW original count as true HD. Well the one above is from one image duplicated four times and exposed two stops under and two over. It's not quite like those gaudy images that clutter up the more gee-whizzy photo sites; it actually looks more real. The argument against this is that you can't drag more information out of an image than already exists but I always thought that RAW images contained the actual value of light which fell on the CCD and is processed into the stored images to simulate a film exposure. I may be wrong but it seems to work. I'm going to experiment with a comparison between a true set of five exposures and a single one to see what the final result is. Watch this space.

As Any Fule Kno ...

... or Hello Clouds - Hello Sky.

It Comes to us All

Yet another Curse of The Oldie (which of course is really statistics rather than anything genuinely supernatural) with the passing of Ronald Searle. Of course the TV news will illustrate the sad news with St. Trinian's in all its guises and ignore the great Masterpiece that is Molesworth. As the author of the piece linked behind the picture says, Molesworth is unfilmable - not least because any mention of Molesworth 2 would have most of the audience wondering when the first film came out. The Gerunds will be distraught tonight I imagine.

There is a more serious side to Ronald Searle in that he survived the worst that humans can throw at fellow humans. See this collection of drawings including some of his time as a POW on the Burma Railway.

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!

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.

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

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.

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.

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.