Halt! Who goes there?





Before I actually went to look at this, my wife told me that it was a meteorite, which I could not quite believe, as I am sure such a large space rock would be in a museum somewhere. I also suspect that such an object would have been plundered for souvenirs and vanished long ago.

I suppose the sad interpretation one could put on my locality having had a rock presented to it is that I live in a very boring area but it is actually quite interesting as Stephen Fry would have it. Not as interesting as a meteorite though.



These are my daughter's windmills. They power the docks and the project management she must have put into getting them commissioned and built is amazing. I never saw her go to any meetings but still they got put up. Notice the whacking great kite lying on the sand in the foreground. Not quite as whacking as the ones in Bali. I can place the photos of those so you may get a post. Are you still waiting for the other windmill? I am carrying out painstakingly intricate digital editing on the photo to reconstruct what it would have looked like when it had sails.

Ho Hum!

I Love Shuttle

Listening to Julian Bream and John Williams (arguing about strings possibly).

Where was I? Rubbish Copyrighting. I have a slight acquaintance who is a copyrighter of the highest order. He would never even think about using any of the messy and ambiguous constructions you can find on the likes of cereal packets and shampoo bottles. It seems that meaning is sacrificed for a stylish justification; a sentence that does not make sense is pointless. Stones and glasshouses! I know. You may want to know what prompted all this. It was the smellies bottles arrayed on the shelf in the bathroom. I really do need to put batteries in the radio so I won't be tempted to read the back of shower-gel bottles just to keep my mind active while showering. Thoughts about sloppy wordy stuff come to me when reading the menus at eateries. The use of adjectives to describe the food on offer had reached new heights. No steak is just steak; it is always 'juicy' or 'succulent'. If it was dry and horrible I'd send it back.

Ranty Old Man alert. Should I have put that at the top of the page?

Sometimes, I really just want to write with a pen and paper. When I first started cursive writing (new way of saying joined-up), we were given the opportunity to buy specially designed cartridge pens which for me at the time meant inky hands rather than nice writing. I have tried to find one in the same style for ages but they don't seem to be made any more. They took short cartridges and had a long tapering body supposedly to balance the pen properly in little chubby fingers. I still use a cartridge pen with a wide nib as I think it makes writing seem easier. Even a roller ball doesn't seem to have the exact feel of a 'proper pen'. It is quite amazing that you are able to distinguish such a difference just by the slight drag against the paper.

I have been told the Panda Active Scan is the best virus scanner. I suppose it must be down in Black and White somewhere.

Sorry!

From the Mental Notebook

Things to write about today - if I get around to them all.

Dan Cruickshank, the Lucky Blighter
Taschen art book of 40s/50s Travel posters
Rubbish Copyrighting

There was something else but I have forgotten it. Maybe it will come back to me after a spot of casserole.

Back to the Lucky Blighter. The Radio Times led me to believe than Mr Cruickshank's contributions were nothing more than "My Goodness" and "Oh My Word" and that it was only the beauty of the artefacts he was describing that allowed the programme to work. Rubbish. We might have learned a bit more if it had been David Starkey or Simon Schama but it would all have seemed a bit clinical. But with Dan Cruickshank, you get the impression that he feels the same today as he did when seeing versions of the Easter Island Moai when he was very small. I was worried that to get through all the 80 treasures in the 150 days allowed, we would feel a bit rushed but there was none of that. The travelling was suggested well in the editing without being overwhelming. I know some people are against the falseness of contracting 150 days of travelling into six or eight hours of TV but would you watch something that long? I've just thought of Big Brother or IACGMOOH. Yes! People will watch. I'm with Dan.

Right! Next one. I found a mint condition Taschen Art book in Help The Aged at the weekend. It's called See the World and isn't the Taschen site good? My daughter, who has not yet got to the Nike and Hilfiger stage of fashion, was pleased to find two Laura Ashley dresses as well and everything came in under a tenner. Fifty Quid Man? Where's he live?

Be Kind To My Mistakes

Ho Hum!

Listening to All Music on Shuttle Play (Currently Vivaldi)

I forgot to upload any photos last night so you will have to wait for the ones of out one great local landmark. This is in fact a sailless and soulless windmill on the edge of our town so I will leave you to your slavering anticipation re that. However, the phrase 'edge of our town' has reminded me of the times when I lived in the rough and ready inner part of Liverpool and used to cycle out towards Southport. Where we live now really is the edge of the city. The last road has houses backing on to either sand dunes or a golf course. If you take the train from here to Southport, you will find yourself projected out of the cluttered suburbs and into open country. Proof at Multimap. I always feel slightly disturbed but thankful that no one has managed to apply successfully for permission to build on the green bits. This Northern defined edge contrasts with the blurry edge of South Liverpool where huge estates fade into dusty scrub and farm land and then into the strange black-and-white village of Hale famous for the Child of Hale. Some photos of that in future editions no doubt.

That ejection by the city as you travel North on the train has reminded me of sailing back into Fort Lauderdale after a 'cruise' to the Bahamas. It was after dark and the ship just sailed at the skyline of Florida with no feeling that it was going to stop. The docks are set way back from the sea front and the ships just sail in, manoeuvre and dock. Maybe it's the inspiration for the end of that wonderful film, Speed 2 or is that just a load of Bullocks?
Again, the internet provides wonderful confirmation.

Bags me Virgil and all his Contrafibularities

A good part of yesterday morning was spent on the phone to my brother as he asked questions about faces, edges and vertices for his boy's homework. I found out that I was being used as a sort of proxy internet as their PC is 'in storage' at present. Shamed me it did. Should have known that "vertex", in sharing the last two letters of "apex" is a point and that the word for an edge is in fact "edge". Still, at least I was able to tell them who Beatrice was. I was a might surprised that Dante was actually homework for a seven-year old but that was really my brother asking questions out of his dictionary. Still, let's step forward and introduce The Divine Comedy to Year 4 and see how moral the world becomes. Back on your heads lads!

Not quite as sad to see Hunter S Thompson's demise as I was about Spalding Gray. I thought that the chemical that finally saw him off would be anything other than lead but then again, maybe he saw himself as a counterculture Hemmingway. Need to read the books I suppose.

I'm currently in the middle of The Meaning of Everything for which I have to have the Dictionary in question to hand (the concise version natch) as the author seems to delight in throwing in one little-used word on each page. Some of them appear not to exist in the concise so maybe they are made-up just to be obtuse. Maybe I was spleepy and had lost my ability to look things up which, if it isn't a known medical condition, should be. There must be a syllepsis in there somewhere.

Yesterday Was Total Bobbins

A Half-Term visit to Paradise Mill in Macclesfield


"The start of all Technology in this world"


300 times for one Inch of Cloth


My Office yesterday while I was out of it. (See the 3 Ghz PC on the desk to the right.)

It was interesting to note after seeing all the expensive processes that had to be carried out to produce silk, that the museum shop was selling silk at £3 per square metre which brings home how advanced the technology has become. It used to take three days to set up a loom to weave silk. Once a roll of Warp threads ran out a new one had to be connected in and rather than redo the whole thing, a Twister-In was employed to connect up all of the warp threads from the old roll to the new one. This only took a day and so saved two man-days. The Jaquard cards were used to lift the Weft in pre-defined patterns so as to create the designs.

My daughter was pleased to be able to have a go at loading a shuttle bobbin using a large sort of spinning wheel. Kids of six would come to the mill after school to do this work.

Love the irony in the name Paradise Mill

Bliss Out

Listening to the 5 EP by Slowdive

Poem of the day Renascence by Edna St. Vincent Millay

(Her spelling - not mine)

I hear the special sound of Radio Moscow, that strange squeaky Russian and then the stilted English as if the presenter was reading phonetically. It just came to me now. Maybe my fillings are picking up the radio. That makes me think of the empty air just filled with all that radio and TV. So much information in space. The world is such a fascinating place with so much to wonder at and we have to make up things to explain it. My wife tells me that I have to look for a scientific explanation for everything but when the science is so much more jaw-droppingly interesting than the airy-fairy guff that humans make up to account for anything that they can't understand then I'm with science. There are still enough things unexplained by science to make the Universe interesting enough for me. Having said that, there are so many things that have been understood that I do not yet understand.

Excuse the long sentences. I'll catch myself using the word 'Cognizant' by the end of the day. Oh Damn! I already have.

I hope that 'z' is correct.

More Scraps

      

An interesting article about Robert Moog at the Guardian website - relates to a new film about him. So much more interesting than the rest of the news. Yawn!

"Fingers McClaghlan decided he would buy the fags himself."

Try the Virtual Synthesizer. Watch out for that Alarm Jack!

Potential photo overdose yesterday and then I had to go out.

  

I flicked through the Capa book but I need to go through the lot. Too many books.

I had a very weird experience last week. I drive in to work very early and use what I think is the shortest route to get here. The evening drive requires a different route which is slightly longer. On Friday I left work early and decided to try the reverse of the morning route to get home as the traffic would be lighter. It was like being in a foreign country even though I drive the same road every morning. I cannot imagine that waking up as a cockroach could be stranger.

After Shadows

I was watching the last episode of Mary, Mungo and Midge from our Complete MM&M DVD (£3.00 at MVC with free copy of the Complete Fingerbobs) when my daughter spoke up that Midge had just looked at everything he'd done in previous episodes. And she was right!. In a long panning shot, we saw references to everything that had happened in all the previous episodes, a funfair, a shop with a black cat on it, a man selling balloons and so many other things. It was a weird moment. Midge then went on to fall asleep on top of a sandcastle and dream about all the things just referenced. I am trying to work out if this is the plot of some cult film. I have also worked out why I think I can hear another theme tune in the end credit music for MM&M. It is almost the same tune as the theme to All Creatures Great and small. A nice loose end tied at the same time as another starts fraying.

In a water-cooler conversation the other day I mentioned that I feel confused because I never get to finish anything. When I die, I will not be worried about the impending flight into oblivion, but by the loose ends, unfinished projects and unresolved conversations that I am sure will come flooding back to embarrass me. I can at least say that I have seen every episode of MM&M and that I know about the post-modern ending.

Scraps

      
      
      

Full Reverse!

I was going to talk about a post-modern dream-sequence in Mary, Mungo and Midge. But that will have to wait because I have arrived here angry at the implications of this article about the insipid spread of anti-evolution and anti-science in US classrooms. The Simon Singh book has been talking about the anti big-bang ideology of the Soviet Union triggered by the idea of the Big Bang implying a Creation and therefore a Creator. It seems that religious ideologues are trying the opposite tack against evolution and indeed the whole of science. Already we have seen extreme feminists questioning the idea of serious and controlled scientific study because the idea was invented by White, Middle-class men. I can only hope that the outrage I feel is a false response to a small problem magnified by the sensationalistic media. I know that the world is run with few exceptions by stupid people who cannot hack it actually working or producing something but at least their stupidity up to now has been excused by the fact that they can't really help it. It seems now that they are actively promoting their stupidity and encouraging others to be stupid as well. I am right, you are wrong and no amount of supposed evidence from the Bible which is after all not much more than a promotional marketing tool for so many zealots, will make me think otherwise. When the west is in the grip of a Government Newspeak campaign to ban the teaching of science, I will be leading the Samizdat with the resistance at my side. Tick your boxes all you like. Creationism and intelligent design is a big lie. When the world is so amazing without any need for all of this noise, why to we continue to require the mysticism and fuzziness that so many people need to survive.

On the same theme, graphology seems to have gone the way of astrology.

The British Psychological Society ranks graphology alongside astrology - giving them both "zero validity" in determining someone's character. Dr Rowan Bayne, a psychologist who tested top graphologists against their claims, says the practice is "useless... absolutely hopeless".

Maybe Mary, Mungo and Midge at lunchtime.

Whatever Happened to System A, System B, System ... ?

      

Guess where I used to live.

Spot the same man on the bridge twice. I used the panorama function and he was walking. The Bridge is the road bridge at Upton-Upon-Severn which was opened in 1940. The telephone exchange is not actually System X but a good old Strowger at the Avoncroft building museum. And yes, I did used to live in that twee cottage. I posted a very old picture some time ago but this one is only a few months old. Top left used to be my bedroom. You cannot see it here but on the left, there is a small two-storey extension. The downstairs of this was a utility room but upstairs had no access from inside the house. There was a door to it half way up the wall but you had to climb a ladder to get to it. Of course we called it the secret room and filled it with soldiers and lego and a very cool Bulgarian Political poster, which I regret, losing in the move. I actually bought the poster in Bulgaria though I can't work out how. I tried to buy a newspaper in one shop and was refused with a shake of the head. Of course I now know that in Bulgaria the head movements for yes and no are reversed. Wonder what the shopkeeper though about me wandering off without picking up what I wanted. I thought it was some Soviet thing about not letting local news out of the Balkans.

Hogarth Was Here

      

Spot the Thunderbirds moment here. Easy wasn't it?

Take That You Varlet! Hand Over That Cup-Final Ticket!

WARNING OF LONG DOWNLOADS AHEAD!

Listening to Dancepieces by Philip Glass

Digital Camera heaven coupled with at last remembering how to ftp to the site equals what you see below. Yes they could be more interesting. I have not yet transferred the full card of images of drain covers from the old PC but when I do ...