Comprehensive Molesworth

I cannot give platelets! They didn't even need to stick a needle in me to find out. I don't have the right sort of veins apparently - they are not near enough to the surface - despite the one that throbs on my temple giving evidence to the contrary. On a positive note it was the easiest coffee and biscuits I'll ever earn (proper snacks for Platelet People - Orange and Mint Club biscuits).

As you can see from the above picture we went on to the museum where much fun was had with new camera. One of the current temporary exhibitions is The Beat Goes On which consists mostly of walls of record covers, posters and general colourful pop-art style information, rather like a sub-section of the Opie Gallery at Wigan Pier (which, I am sad to discover, is now permanently closed). My wife said she could have stayed another few hours and I'm not sure I saw more than a few percent of everything there. Much Japanese information and photos were gathered for an upcoming project by youngest, not that he seemed particularly interested. 

I suspect my current reading affected my choice of subject at the museum. I was going to buy Blood and Guts - A History Of Surgery but I came across it at the library - which was nice. The opening scene of a Victorian leg amputation was brilliantly written despite being a scene so often told in anything vaguely medical and historical. The tale of the death of an assistant at another amputation was also recounted but this time a bystander is also mentioned, dying of shock at the carnage and therefore extending the mortality rate of this operation from the already-hilarious 200% to a side-splitting (almost-literally) 300%. We have whistled passed Galen who was an idiot - though slightly less-of-a-one than previous medically-inclined celebrities and are now up to the Blackadderish tale of Versalius swinging on the hanging corpse of a criminal, twisting the various limbs off it so that he could smuggle it back home to boil the bones off it and hence construct a full skeleton for study. Slight gag at the evocation of the smell of boiled bad-guy which reminded me of the penchant of our biology teacher for stewing up any roadkill brought to him as offerings by various rurally-inclined small boys. The foul bubbling and stench often accompanied our lessons in the prefab but the walls were lined with expertly-assembled skeletons. He occasionally dissected the animals before they were put in the pot and his joy at discovering a massive tape worm inside a rabbit was unbounded. I suspect that this unfortunate parasite is still coiled up in pickling fluid in a small jar somewhere in rural Worcestershire. I'm talking about the tapeworm by the way. 

Polyglottal Stop

I am like the Poet Laureate - I cannot write to order. Well that is the only way I am like the Poet Laureate and I am certainly lacking in the important things that go to define Top British Bard - like talent, vocabulary, general "hello clouds, hello sky" type things. So off we go into the wonderful world of wibbling for today's entry. First up is this article about why people ignore poetry. On the face of it the answer "because most poetry ignores people" seems true but I have read a lot of poetry which when distilled, does actually refer to real things. It is as if "hello clouds, hello sky" adds a veneer of unreality to verse which simply puts people off. Taking a few minutes to understand the sometimes-out-of-this-world patina of a poem, can reveal a deep and affecting heart - a bombshell that can turn something that appears to be gibberish into a penny-dropping moment of revelation in the the jump of salts between neurons. There is one poem in Birthday Letters which suddenly reveals it's intentions in a single line - an analogy to bullets fired at enemies/intimates/influences which sums up entirely the Daddy/Lover dichotomy of Sylvia Plath. It is a poetic investigation into the Wave/Particle duality of real life as against the black and white clamour that is standard entertainment these days.

Well was that Pseuds-corner enough for you? What next? Well if you are quick you may catch this - Pride and Prejudice with Zombies. I don't think it's a joke. Right! Make up your own misquote of "It is a truth universally acknowledged ...." for this book. I'm not up to it. Anyway that's it for today. The sub is waiting.

Smugness Squared

I have just been looking at some old forms I wrote in VB and was struck by the stark, military look I gave them. I've always worried that my eye for design in such matters is not as good as it should be but comparing these with some applications I have to deal with, maybe I'm not so bad. Of course I am restricted by various rules regarding logos etc. though the logo of the current company I work for seems to have a relaxed attitude attached to it - maybe a firm but fair uncle rather than a strict and horrible grandad.

We have nothing else today other than the standard clamour regarding what is predicted to be the coldest winter in X years. Actually we do have something else. I've been told by the National Blood Service that I may be able to donate platelets meaning I will be able to give more often. I have a test on Saturday to confirm this. The platelet donation process doesn't seem much beyond what happens for whole blood apart from the fact that the blood comes out, is spun to get the platelets out and then returned along with some anti-clotting stuff. I love giving blood - the general air of confidence exuded by the staff is relaxing and it seems that for platelet donation you are allowed to sit down and read as well because it takes longer.

Finally we have this set of wonderful photos by John Gay which makes me think about trying to make photos that purport to be of this time by playing about with photo editing. The problem is that people just do not look like that any more - even if the basic shape and arrangement of people is the same, they just do not look the same - they look younger in general. Anyway - enjoy the photos - as good as any Robert Capa ones, if not quite as dramatic.

Cuniculus In Pace

Every once in while, a thought about someone familiar makes you think about them outside the normal un-critical and accepting way that the mind craves the familiar and the routine. This happens now. Walking down that road, close to a friend, but in silence, as the day of null weather threatens to turn to something significant, she thinks of the friends she has known since the first day at school, how now she sees them every day, in and out of school, even on holiday together like today. This will end she realises, and she is lost in the despair of this thought, broken inside and trying not to show it. The breeze lifts the branches of the trees that line this road and so deep within the woods small sounds become strange, the creaking of branch on branch, the distant and final crash of an old beech brought to its end by the gentlest of touches of this weather, maybe the remnant of a storm in Russia. She thinks of the snow that this air touched only the day before, tinged with unfamiliar smells from so many degrees towards the rising sun. She thinks of the roads and paths that her little group explored as children, in their games imagining themselves dead soldiers, broken heroines driven destitute into the wilds when the world falls apart around them. They were explorers in safety, finding real secrets in their imagined games, piles of smashed bottles with the occasional whole one to take home and keep as a link with their ancestors who owned them. They found bones, human and animal, bleached and made delicate through age and never thought to report them to anyone. There are billions of people on the planet, millions must die every year and they have to go somewhere. The bones are not people and so what if their deaths were not natural? Their assassins, attackers and murderers would all be long dead too so there is no point in wasting resources trying to find them justice. Justice is death for us all in the end and our own bones bleached in the sun. The real secret that we should shout to the world is just to live and be alive and to be and have friends.

She remembers reading somewhere about a scientist who really believes that time is an illusion just to stop things happening at once, that deep in the workings of the universe, all time exists without needing minutes and eons to keep things apart. This of course is the opposite of our experience where we get older and worry about getting older, where the shortening of years as percentages of our lifespan means time seems to accelerate. All this to say seize the day she thinks, to tell us to get up and do things. She thinks as well that there is probably no bus, now drawn into practical thought by the need to get home before the rain starts. This is no matter and she returns to the automatic writing of her thoughts. Here is a small wood; a dark shadow it is at night as they drive home, just inside the limits of the village it has no lights, becoming a threatening place in darkness. But now, it is green and pleasant, mixing the brushing of its billion leaves against themselves with the white noise of the breeze and becoming a gentle music. This is one sound from her village, a homely, familiar sound at odds with the children's stories which tell of bad things that happen in the root tangles and clearings, water-proof even in leafless winter through density and age. In her scientist's mind she knows all these stories are made up over generations but in her lover's heart, the tiny truths of tales told in the pub are compelling. But nothing, true or otherwise, keeps the children then or now from exploring. Together, the village children know every part of this wood. You could take any one of them blindfold into the deepest, darkest mess of brambles and they would find their way home, still blindfolded, knowing every hill and every path and every body.

Time passes, dragged from the brains which are the only places it exists. We sit on the steps of the first house, swigging lemonade and shandy. We watch the cars that come through here everyday. There are not many for we are the last village in the valley. We know everybody in the further reaches up close to the moor edges. Some wave and some don't but they make us happy for they are familiar to us. Why do I want to leave here? I need to go for a mind needs other minds to develop. I hear some people talk about the wisdom of the ancients and even while they state their liberal opinions about listening to the masses, they cannot cover the sneers. We read between the lines and they think of us as dirty and uneducated. We need the urban sophistication to make us real. Many are the friends of mine who have stated that they will leave this backwater, this hole, as soon as they are of age. I know they will be back with their softer accents and partners from distant cities and new lands. This is good I know - we need new blood - but it is also a shame, a simple dilution of what makes this remote place a happy place. But I must go too. I see my first day away, me a staring ingenue, but wiser than all those who stare and laugh inwardly. Imagine me in some film, just arrived in the city, the camera spinning round me at some rate different to that of my own spinning head, taken in by the tallness and newness of the buildings around me. That is the saddest day and the happiest day as well, the main boundary in my life, the date from which all others before or after are measured.

We want to be democratic. I hope we will be one day. This is just brainwashing. I am supposed to think that they know more than me but they are just spitting it out of books, never bringing it up from deep inside themselves. They never make me believe that they believe. It is all just words. If I challenge them, there comes that wall of silent pointing and laughing again. And yet in classics and philosophy there is the answer to all this and yet they miss it. Enlightened Ignorance. It is the purpose of this teaching to make us challenge what is taught, to throw it back at those who tell us it is true and solid, to change the world, to change the world, to change the world.

All this she can tell in those few minutes. She looks back at the wood and imagines it back in time, seeing all the changes, from the few young saplings which broke the edge of the moor all those years ago when the ice retreated maybe, or when the Romans passed this way to man their posts between civilization and barbarism, up to the time they enclosed the land and the rough grass was stolen from the people. She sees at once all those who went into that wood and never came out until fragments of them returned in the pockets of small boys, stories untold of those who got drunk and froze one night, thinking themselves invincible, an agent of God on earth, an angel, a supernatural being, able to fly and escape from any prison. She sees how they lie down to sleep, happy and content and never return and are never seen as men again. And it means nothing to her now, all that misery in the shadow of her own at having to leave this place. But in a second, all things return to meaning, their relative positions in the spectrum of despair and leaving here is an adventure. There is the possibility of real flight and real wonders that were just not open to her ancestors. Home is happy and calm and linked to the rest of the world with pen and paper, with wires and radio and cars and trains. She smiles and the gloom lifts. It starts to rain but her house is in sight.

Mr Turing's Dog

At last a way of uploading other files. I know you'll tell me it was easy but I'm happy.

Random Sequence

Bell Ringing

Something Better Change

(From http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/4325921/TV-review-A-Short-Stay-in-Switzerland-BBC1-and-Generation-Kill-FX.html)

You should also see the video of Doctor Anne Turner talking to Fergus Walsh who appeared as himself in A Short Stay in Switzerland. I would like to think that this drama - like Vera Drake did - managed to show just a story without making judgements either way. Julie Walters is obviously one of only a few actors able to play a role such as this and she was memorable in what will obviously haunt a lot of people. I have to declare my support for assisted suicide but I was nagged by the worry that it is relatively easy to be convinced of the rightness of something by an eloquent, well-educated Doctor. I may have missed similar dramas with different social circumstances but the fact that Julie Walters made this dignified and (for the character of Doctor Turner) without doubts at any stage, will have gone some way to convincing people that this is right without getting them to think about the details in their own situations. My feeling is that the decision is mostly down to the person concerned but every case is different.

Methinks You Are Misremembering The Extent of Your Haggis

The Internet suggests that this is actually broccoli but I think it is much more like a cauliflower. It is called Romanesco broccoli and as well as being mathematically stimulating in having fractal and logarithmic properties, is also tastes wonderful - I can only say that the taste of this is to cauliflower what the look of it is to same. It has been an interesting food weekend what with above edible flower and the MacSween's Haggis that was consumed today. Back to bangers and mash tomorrow. Oh wait - Chinese New Year isn't it? Next year we shall combine the two celebrations. This will give me time to perfect what will be my signature dish of sweet and sour haggis with neeps and spring rolls. I've been Heston Blumenthal. Good night.

Sad Demolitions

I want to write about important things. I want to write poems that are carefully-crafted, lyrical destructions of the people I disagree with: the petty and the ignorant. I want to be right every time in what I say. But who is there to decide when I am right and when I am wrong? I want to listen to music that means something. But music is entertainment and entertainment is supposed to make us feel better. In these difficult times, stuff that means something reminds us of the reality of the world while all the airy-fairy pop that fills the radio these days has no meaning. Gloria might have been the last properly meaningful pop song and that was thirty years ago. Some of this personal malaise might well be chemical - though I'm not going to go into what that means; it is simply a marker to remind myself of what is happening at the moment. I'm going to turn to all those people in my head, all the thoughts of those I make up who try to understand the world by looking at it from a different angle to my own. I want to READ important things rather than the lists of facts and figures that fill up my head at the moment. Sometimes I'm wild, a throwback to something that has flowed through the junk DNA that survives from our common ancestors. I am a scientist who cries for tenderness in the face of the bleak emptiness of what science tells us is the truth.

The world looks sharper today. But as well as this, it seems further away - almost like looking at it over a video link. Anything beyond the window seems just to be part of a panorama - something like a David Hockney Painting of trees. We are just a cast tonight, lined up on some bridge to nowhere, a little arch across an ornamental lake. And I cannot work out whether the ambiance is dark and warm or light and cool as fits my empty feeling. It is high summer in my head, a network of flowers spread across the room to fill the air with heady sweetness. There are memories and dreams bouncing over me, taking me back to days when the image was everything and the future did not exist as anything more than a stark entry in a diary to tell my parents when to take me back to school. There are pipes in the distance, skirls in the hills, someone following page one of the instruction manual.

I am outside the station now, on the edge of sobbing, trying to hold myself together, to close the cracks that let out the darkness into the world for all the speeding commuters to see. In a city of thousands even a full breakdown passes unnoticed - what is one more person on the station steps with their head in their hands? I could certainly not spare the time to comfort them to tell them that we are all human and we all cry at being forced to live together so closely. The city is just buildings. It is not a community. We have simple minds; we want love, we want recognition and we want stability. Now here is a local madman, jabbing his fingers into my face, not to berate me in any particular way but simply to get across his idea of the workings of the world to anyone who will listen. He has scarlet trousers and wild hair. His angers fuels the spit that fills the air between us but he does not hate me. Even if he had a knife in that jabbing hand, I would not be afraid. He is the safest person in this place. I drift off; the street, the station, the tall buildings that frame us all disappear into some clear-aired wood. Maybe where Winston met Julia with their fear of hidden microphones and I cannot begin to care. They could fill the air with mind sensors and I would not worry.

I will distill a poem out of this. I will turn it into a scratchy, lost draft of all I want to say. I have had this idea for years - a rough list of notes - partly verse and partly simple recordings of everything that sits in here (points to head and closes eyes at the pain it brings). All that thought, the salts and electrons jumping the gaps in the brain, are drawn out, taken from the head like magic and dumped into inert paper. It is like keeping nuclear waste safe by casting it into glass when it stays solid and immovable for a billion years, monitored underground by humans and what follows humans until it can be turned into tasteful paper weights for our intellectual descendants. Maybe I am their common ancestor. Maybe the whole of post-2000 evolution starts with me and my children. I have no solutions.

A Little History

My daughter bought me this book for Christmas.


I was surprised to discover that it is actually a book for children - precocious ones I suppose. I used to read VM Hillyer's A Child's History of the World over and over. That book was simpler than Gombrich's. Gombrich is also know for The Story of Art and Art and Illusion - both studious but readable books. A Little History is in the same category and while some of the assertions may not stand up to QI's standards of rigorous truth (NOT!), it is indeed a smooth, well-paced gallop over the essential items in history. The first edition being written in the 1930s makes it even more wondrous. I find that it is indeed a surprise as Philip Pullman says on the blurb.

Talking of which, my wife has just started reading Northern Lights which may or may not lead to ructions in the deWeyden household. Pullman himself says he did not intend the book to make a point about the existence or non-existence of God and yet I can't help worrying. I am of course desperately looking forward to The Book of Dust. No sign of it yet I am afraid. Many, many Oxen ... er ... books from the library so very busy at the moment.

None of us know what we are talking about do we?

On a Pastel Ward

Listening to Julian Bream and John Williams playing ... er ... guitars.

... Cynic Mode Off

We should not go colour-blindly into this presidency - we should shout about it as loud as we can manage - within the lifetime of the new president black people were segregated and not granted the same human rights as white people. This day at least is permitted some positive discrimination. With all that is going on in the world there is plenty of time for a critical evaluation of Obama's performance in the face of the challenges to come. For MLK, Rosa Parks, for everyone.

... Cynic Mode On

I wasn't actually as excited by this until yesterday but the thinly-veiled racism put out under cover of the standard "I don't notice people's colour me" banner has got me worked up a bit. I shouldn't let it bother me because as you are probably aware - being a well-informed and well balanced individual who exists in the fuzzy area between scepticism and cynicism - most of the people shouting on the Interwebs have not got a clue about :- a. How the world works and b. How many people there actually are in the world from which every shade of opinion can be extracted. On the subject of understanding how the world works I am especially hopeful after Obama's statements about putting science back where it belongs. We do indeed need to put aside childish things - we need to think hard about solutions - we need to write essays that analyse the world to give us a rich picture of the state of things rather than the multiple choice solutions that have been offered to us with a view to making everything easy. We do not have to read anything because the punditry serves up a few black-and-white answers from which we take our best-fit pick. We have not had to think in recent years because that has been the job of someone else.

[Non-Sequitur removed for clarity and because my mind has run away with itself in the face of all the optimism]

Morpheus Comes to Me

I challenge you not to be moved by this. In the depths of despair - exams - bad weather on the cycle to school - general unbearable naffness of being ( ..being totally unlike poor, cool Daniel Day-Lewis), Tony Hart's cocoon-like world of happiness and self-propelling plasticine was a haven for me. He produced art which was within reach of all of us. I used to date my scrapbooks from the student who took the photos on my wardrobe and turned them around to create strange new art but I really think it might have started further back in Vision On. I still can't draw but I know when things look good.

I would like to suggest that the bad weather we have at the moment is Pathetic Fallacy in that today is supposed to be the most miserable day in history. However, the truth is that bad weather is part of the cause of this being such a day and therefore what else could we expect?

The PTSD Quadrille

Your love extends but one degree from you,
a single human with all your store of morals,
destroying with white phosphorous in mind,
the bogus wants of peace and settlement.

Your delight at death shows minds decaying,
corpses that flake and sink in acid,
bleached to less than bones of decency,
the last of truces washed away in blood.

You are rank, immobile, trained yet impotent,
with the patient fingers of your sergeant
at your hands, at the trigger, buttoning
the running men, the weaselled terrorists

who do not, cannot, play by rules of war,
and hide amongst the sparsity of hate
you plan with your own spitting malice.
Through you, the fire of youth is armed.

Your threads are buzzing now, with trash,
the effluent of war-obsessive adolescents,
now seen screaming as the clustered volleys
bounce off kids and leave you still and numb.

We'll drag you through the maths of risk,
the probability defined in disproportion.
Here are the odds: there is no God
to create the million enemies you spawn.

The Billionth Monkey

I know the result of bitwise shift operators off the top of my head - no having to learn it - it was just there having seeped in by virtue of having to walk past proper full-on geeks every day at some point in my career. The trouble is that, like the strange coppers in The Third Policeman who are merging gradually with their bicycles, I seem to be exchanging bits of me with java bytecode. I could actually be interpreted if I get too close to the relevant directory. This is the third day in as many weeks that I have dreamed of c-like code rather than the good old block-chords which make up VB. It is also really dark here today - all I can see out of the window is black trees, dark-grey skies and the odd gull struggling with the wind. However, none of this is bothering me right now.

Falling

There is lots of genealogy going on in our house at the moment. It is Victorian term at school which means costumes and trying to work out relatives who were born Victorians. I'm not sure if it is standard but I do not know much about my great-grandparents beyond names and rough dates so finding out what exactly they did is fun. However I am lucky in having a lot of uncommented data and family trees which we can consolidate into one annotated tree on the computer.

On Paranoia

I don't feel that I am being watched but isn't that the point? Or is it that we know we are being watched and therefore don't get up to anything we might be embarrassed about or might be punished for? That is what the telescreens in nineteen-eighty-four were for - they were on all the time and while you knew it was possible that you might not be being watched at any particular moment you could not take the chance. Anyway, our technology is far more advanced than that - the face-recognition systems will just be let loose on the exabytes of recorded data, picking out any undesirables and flagging them up on the teleprinter for follow-up during office hours. That would have stopped the 7/11 bombings wouldn't it? While those monitoring the input are not yet at the level of Malice that Big Brother exuded, we have walked dozily this far and it would be nothing for us to somnambulate into a full-on, 24/7, moral-judgement-by-rule society. Orwell's shock troops were never depicted as incompetent and of course in our real world they would be - the "you don't do anything wrong - you've got nothing to fear" argument is not just flawed - it is fractured - only useful for those with an idea of right and wrong which matches those who decide on the criteria. Without zero defects, in a population as large as ours, thousands of people are going to be picked out wrongly. It is identity theft condoned - indeed perpetrated - by government. The fact that I am talking about it as if it has already happened makes it worse. It's as if I have accepted that it has happened or is about to happen and that it is the norm - a sort of conceptual Newspeak where they make us forget what it was like not to be watched, educated us to be familiar and comfortable with being watched so we cannot even think about what it would be like not to be watched.

The trouble is how do we go back? The minute the first camera went up we were lost to it. We could not destroy the cameras because that would have been against the law even then. Had some shadowy anarchist group started a campaign of vandalism against the networks early on, their growth might have been stopped before the wider plan was realised. Now we would need more anarchists than are available to even make a dent on this. How far does the surveillance society have to go before we all take a stand against it? All we have at the moment is the rumbling of unease that retreats when the news story finishes and the next prole-numbing reality show starts. You may think I am over dramatising the whole thing and maybe I am - maybe those in control do have our best interests at heart but that goes against the fuzziness that is democracy. Our own ideas can never match exactly with those we vote into power. Politics these days seems to be a case of get as many votes as you need and then just wave, say "thanks for voting us in" and then get on with whatever you want. I am back to my standard idea that most people live in a fog of misunderstanding about the world, a sea of inaccurate science and lack of concrete views. Under the wire of this random gathering of dumb animals, the herdsmen send in their cameras and control until we can be shooed in whatever direction they want - 40 days detention - baaa - lock 'em up - that'll stop 'em. Teach everyone the same thing and they will mostly jump the same way - much easier for us.

I am afraid, as usual, that my mind on this has fractured into some undecipherable fugue state - wandering all over the place. Which means it is time to stop. In fact the time seems to have actually jumped which suggests I am using "fugue" in a sense closer to the real meaning than the incorrect and overdramatic one which I intended.

It's Called a Hypercube Because it Makes You Hyper

I have been trying to resist getting a new Rubik's Cube for some time now. I actually still have the first one I bought at The Three Counties Show in about 1980 - I think I still have the clear, plastic cylinder and display base in which it came as well. However, the last time I found it while supposedly cleaning out the attic or the garage, I found that the cover for the central white square was missing and while that doesn't actually stop the puzzle being solvable, it does not quite look right. So on Friday I actually got a new one, injected it with WD40 to loosen it up (we used to use butter and Fairy Liquid in the old days) and set about solving it. Strangely, I can still remember enough of the moves to do the first two layers without having to look at the solution. Reading the final moves I can solve the whole thing in about two minutes. All I have to do now is memorise the final sequences. It never stays solved for long - daughter is trying to learn how to do it herself and son just likes scrambling it up and holding it up saying "do that for me please".

Obviously I have not set about working it out from scratch and have used a solution so this news fills me with horror. 26 years is just too long. Our deputy-head girl worked out how to solve it without using any solution and she took about a week but she worked out artillery equations on her programmable calculator as well. I think this was a brushed-steel Casio whereas mine was a boring Commodore PR50 which lost everything when it was switched off, though I did have a plush velvet case made from spare bits of a new sofa cover. I worked out a method for converting decimal to binary in the 24 steps it allowed. The Casio was so much better - (though we never actually aimed for anything living). All this awesome power led us on to writing out BASIC programs on coding sheets and submitting them to the County Council computer department so that they could tell us we had a syntax error. When they eventually ran successfully, we would get a classic A3 sheet with the green stave lines showing the results and a little roll of punch tape with the code on it.

... Yes! This Space.

I finally did something I said I was going to do. Over at DogOfSmallThings is my new place for all non-Gee-Whizzery. Things described or pictured there might not be small physically, just unimportant yet worthy of note. I'm not sure whether I'm going to bother much with words . I suppose if I am claiming that "small" in the title does not mean physically, I shouldn't have used a picture of something small in this post linking to it but I have nothing else on me as it were.

The Return of Douglas Bean

This was taken with the camera wedged on the top of the car and the shutter left open for as long as it took. I've just bought a remote control for the camera which means I can do proper tripod-based astronomical photos. Of course after days of clear skies, the night that the gizmo arrives goes all cloudy. I may redo this picture when I have something a bit more sophisticated than MS Paint available. Here is a blow-up to show that The Earth actually did move while I was taking the photograph. Though of course the Plane shows that up doesn't it? Doh!

My response to the news story that it is claimed that a UFO damaged a wind turbine in Lincolnshire is yeah - right. The wittering about whatever hit it having to be 170 feet long to damage two of the three blades is just sensationalism - how about one blade flew off and damaged the other one? This talk of UFOs detracts from the real necessity of the moment which is to investigate what really happened and make sure it doesn't happen again. If there are indeed aliens buzzing the turbine I wonder why they chose that part of the country. Of all the things which could do damage like this why do people have to choose the most unlikely one. If there is ice on the road it is probably because it is cold but of course it might be aliens trying out some sort of new impulse drive which uses zero-point energy to magnify the potential temperature difference between -273 and 0 - but it probably isn't. That strange clunk you hear just before you go to sleep might just be someone breaking in but it's probably something cooling down because the heating has just gone off and overbalancing because of natural and boring contraction. Aliens may well exist out there but they are the least-likely explanation for everything that happens on The Earth. I was going to say almost anything but I've gone totally sceptical today. Wake me up when they land on the White house Lawn. Do you think they have eaten yet?

I apparently sound like Philip Larkin on this blog. Not sure that I even come close to his level of literacy and I am certain that his misanthropy was far in excess of mine. Bottom line I think is that I have to cheer up. I did reply that I wondered where Philip Larkin's blog was and I am now speculating on what such a blog would have been like. I am sure it would have got an R-18 certificate. Maybe someone should start one. It won't be me but I do have an idea for something which, while not original might be fun to do. Watch this .... oh you know the rest.

Non Tali Auxilio

Has The Earth stopped turning? It is so dark here despite us being after the solstice. Lights went out again before anyone else arrived but the screen gives me just enough light to keep typing. I was struggling to get motivated this morning but as usual the gloom lifts with the sun and it's just the normal boring slog. It is not helped by the vacuous, verbal fencing that I overheard at the coffee machine this morning. It consisted of what seemed to be a contest to come up with the most inane comment while obviously not listening to the riposte. I suppose my own conversations must seem as empty to some people so maybe I should just take it on board that boring existence is just that.

What have we got from the notebook?

The oily smell of instant coffee on my hands - his hands? A dog in the house of Capulet. Nick Cave is Philip Larkin. "I do not believe in an interventionist God." Defaulting to not splitting an infinitive.

It's a pseudo-poem if nothing else. We also have an article about Three Women by Sylvia Plath which I skip over in the Collected Poems but sounds as though it might be quite special when performed. However, reading the first few lines now I am struck by ...

The moon's concern is more personal:
She passes and repasses, luminous as a nurse.

So obviously Plath but I don't remember it. All this reminds me that I finished the Bill Bryson Shakespeare book which has made me want to read the sonnets which I will have to dig out from somewhere - they are on the web I am sure.

Have YOU Buried Your Cheese?

Should have been on Christmas Day but snow on New Year's Day is fine enough. There wasn't really enough to make anything but it did at least look good and The New Camera was able to cope with the high contrast. I still have not taken it off auto apart from a few sterile test pictures but point-and-shoot is far better than with the old camera and crucially the start-up time and the delay between the pressing of the shutter button and the actual taking of the photograph is almost zero. It also makes a satisfying click, the result of a physical operation rather than some electronic simulacrum in a program somewhere. Very happy here in the wilderness.

Happy also about the new choice of Doctor Who. I heard the name while driving and my reaction was as for almost everyone else but I do recognise him, primarily from Ruby in the Smoke and he seems to have something undefinable which bodes well for the mysterious Mr Smith.