BRAM Recursive Acronym Man

It did eventually rain though not with the Thunder Storms that were promised. In my best 'Vicar-on-thought-for-the-day' voice, that's a bit like life isn't it. You spend all your time expecting some wizz-bang event and what actually turns up is something far less impressive. Personally, I've been going through the old 'what have I achieved in my life?' internalising recently. Having said that I am going for positive thinking, I must say I have got rather a lot accomplished so-far. It's just that in this country thinking is so much less important than doing and as I only think about doing things rather than actually getting on with them, I feel slightly less in step. Anyway, I soon will have achieved something; I will have read all of 'Godel, Escher, Bach' in one go and understood it (well at least more than 50%). The first time I read it, I was flat on my back and drugged up to the eyeballs (A bad back rather than any recreational reason) so a lot of it seemed to pass in a blur. I just smiled at the difficult bits and hoped that they would go away. This time around, I can see much more of how the Mathematics fits with Grammar and Images and Cognitive Science. My wife has asked me whether I finished the Alan Turing biography. I started reading GEB because some of the stuff mentioned in the Turing book is described in GEB and I thought it might help. On another level, I have 'pushed' into the stack and will 'pop' back on completion. Anyway, I pointed out that she is in the middle of four different books. She corrected me; it is five.

We watched 'Maybe Baby' on TV at the weekend. At first I thought it was a bit 'Naff' (See yesterday for defintion) but it took off after a while. I mention it because it is a mine (or minefield) of self-reference. The bottom line is that it is about a couple trying to conceive. However, the husband works for the BBC (who made the film itself - Self-Reference 1). He reads other people's scripts while trying to write his own. Eventually he realises that the only thing he can possibly write about it his own life which is dominated by them trying for a baby (Awful expression!) He writes a brilliant script which is turned into a film as it is being written (a la 'The Neverending Story'). He does not tell his wife that he is writing it or that the film is production. His colleagues say that the only fault is that there is no authentic female voice so he secretly reads his wife's diary and incorporates that into the script. So this is a film about a man writing a screenplay (thought I'd better use the correct word there) about a man writing a screenplay about .... and so on to GOD - GOD-Over-Djinn (an acronym which includes itself). Or is it? I don't think that the character writing the screenplay actually includes the bits about writing the screenplay but the man who wrote the REAL screenplay does. He was Ben Elton and the Screenplay was actually a book - 'Inconceivable' (Shame that the film doesn't have the same name). Ben Elton writes a book about a man who writes a screenplay about a man who writes ........ Head spinning as the man says in the Amazon review? I know that Ben Elton and his wife tried for a long time to have a baby and that eventually they were successful without any IVF but did he write the book without telling his wife and read her diary and all the rest? I bet they had Emma Thompson to dinner at some point but I suspect and sincerely hope that Rowan Atkinson was not their Obstetrician.

I have a very mundane example of GOD-Over-Djinn. There is a Dog food in this country called PAL, I would guess originally because Pal means friend and a dog is man's best friend etc. However, for a time a few years ago they used to advertise it as an acronym - PAL for Active Life. That used to bug me because of the self reference. Maybe the advertising executive had been reading GEB or maybe it was just a large dose of Columbian Marching Powder.

Anyway, back to the rain and back to wanting to lie down under the trees in the wood while the rain falls on the leaves above. No self-reference there. In reality, I am buried deep in PC operating systems with just the sound of bits falling on the heat sinks overhead. It is 15 minutes before that start of the working day and there is no-one else in the office. A database has just gone down. See you later.