See Emily Play

Emily Howell does not exist. She is a computer program which from the video attached to this article at The Times, is quite competent. I cannot agree with Mark Lawson in the Guardian who will one day be caught out by something created by computer. Music is defined by numbers - some of it requires high quantising but the bottom line is that there are limited number of notes and a limited number of ways you can put them together. Computer-generated music can and will be indistinguishable. Any other approach is just pompous and snobbish.

My absence has been due to flu which was bad. Not sure if it was of the swine variety and to be honest I'm not sure if I care - I certainly didn't care on Wednesday last week when I just wanted to lie down for a month. All gone now apart from the tiredness which means I'm not particularly bothered about writing any more today.

Post-Dated Pigs

Oh dear! Forgot last night but we do have an excuse in the shape of coughs and sneezes and temperatures of a worrying value. Will this do?

A Quarter of Beyond the Fringe Please

To be had in the Oxfam shop in the village today was Jonathan Miller's epic companion to his TV documentary series The Body in Question, the first show of which nearly put my dad under the table with its shock introduction to DIY autopsy. Dr. Miller is of course a member of the fruity-voiced fraternity of the presenters of heavy 13-parters, a man whose resonant tones radiate from any tie-in of their work you might read. At £1.49 this was very good value and I can't quite remember why I didn't request it for Christmas. Perhaps it turned up the same year as The Ascent of Man or Einstein's Universe and so was vetoed under the strict budgetary conditions pertaining in the late 70s. Anyway, in return I have to parcel up a significant number of books to return to various charity shops as we are rapidly approaching book-criticality, the point at which the house folds in on itself and we all end up as characters in some cheap pot boiler.

The children have been glued to Hole in The Wall while I have been writing this and it is such a struggle not to turn round to watch. I suppose you could look at it as z-listers being pushed into water which sounds like fun to me.

They have been dropped.

Link heaven with this article about the music for Children's TV programmes. The music of The Clangers was indeed homely and off-the-wall at the same time - we just didn't notice it at the time. Much of kids' TV these days is backed with unemotional noodling that I suspect comes straight off Cubase or any number of knocked-off applications from a PC to a CD in one easy lesson, stretched to fit the scenes to which it is applied by an automatic process akin to the harmonisers which allow the most tone-deaf of pretty boys and girls to become stars.

And now the breaking news of Barack Obama getting The Nobel Peace Prize. Against all my namby-pamby, wishy-washy leanings I would actually like to see some results before someone gets a prize. This seems a knee-jerk reaction to the euphoria of his election. Still it's better than Kissinger getting it. Funny old world

Evolved Dissolution

There is a ghost peers round the doorposts here,
A white-shrouded child made real in silver nitrate,
A wraith with sunken teeth, a howl, a cripple’s gait,
Repelling fellow spirits of the mind; she is in fear,
Of the troubled course to paradise she has to run,
Through purgatory, the years of sins that harm,
The child with ignorance of scripture and of psalm,
The putsch against the freedoms that were won.

And we send her to her rest with logic and reality,
End dreams of dark mind with travel to the stars,
An ark in space containing all her father’s thought,
The last of Earth that failed in ships we wrought,
With hard metals, knowledge gained in many wars,
Through history that nurtures ghosts and liquidity.

Yes - I am am Polbathic - Why do You Ask?

I was challenged to play my ring tone the other day and was met with sniggering and references to my "Fisher-Price" phone. I am proud of the fact that my mobile cost me 20 quid and still allows me to call and text everyone I want to. I have my D40 to take photos and that does me for carry-out devices. And though I realise that an iPhone might have a novelty value in excess of some gadgets I have owned in the past, I suspect that it would not be too long before it was in the drawer marked "Pimlicos and other stuff". The chorus of ring tones on a train is now getting to bizarre proportions, a sort of spotted dick in sound, the rumble of the train being the spongy majority and the pinpricks of sound at all points as the raisins. I can't imagine that any large part of the texts and conversations that these herald are at all important. Maybe I'm just jealous that I get about three texts and one call a month on my own phone. With my simple beeps perhaps that is just as well.

The International Plant Absorbing Association

I was alone in the house last night - well son was sleeping upstairs while my wife and daughter went out to see Jacqueline Wilson - and I ended up slumped in front of more of BBC4's Electric Dreams programming, specifically The Life and Death of a Mobile Phone. The programme itself was a bit of a throwaway just like its subject but it did suggest the idea of a documentable network of all the phones in the world - each list of contacts overlapping with other lists in a gigantic super-Venn Diagram. I suppose Facebook already has this ability. Looking forward to Synth Britannia.

And now in my quest to bring pretentious and intellectual themes to the common-place, I thought that the Tory suggestion that the state pension age be raised to 66 from 2006 might end up like a version of Achilles and The Tortoise. Get to 66 and they will push the age up by six months - get there and it will go up by three months and so on. We will all have to work until we keel over into a conveniently dug grave.

We Float

I dreamed I had just started work for Bob Hoskins who was running a large industrial pottery company which seemed to be situated in an estuary in North Wales. The premises were badly in need of refurbishment with discarded equipment all around and with most of the buildings unsafe. I remember asking him about whether he had built the place over some clay deposits but he didn't seem to know anything about the processes his business involved. He fell off one of the buildings and lay dazed while a flood rose up though the water surface seemed to slope. All very strange and with the usual theme of any buildings not having walls or ceilings.

Anyway - in the real world we spent a great afternoon in the park listening to a free talk from The Liverpool Astronomical Society followed by a sort of astronomical treasure hunt round the park grounds. Both children got a great glossy poster and as many flying saucers as they could eat. All this left me feeling far happier than I deserve to be but luckily Charlie Brooker brought me back down to Earth with this article about having too much stuff. Actually we have managed to cut down quite a lot by getting books from the library. I did try to listen to all my music on shuffle once but I only got half way through before giving up.

Arthur Megapode's Cheap Show

FACT yesterday for the afternoon showing of Creation. Very Guardian Weekend, coffee, free wifi and settees to consume it all at but we don't want to talk about that do we? The real show was the film and my fears of it being over sentimental were unfounded. The trailer condensed all the embarrassing lines ("You've killed God sir!") into a single minute and so when they came separated by the dreamlike, ghostly tale of Darwin and his daughter, they didn't seem so bad. It demonstrated the randomness of our existence linked (via time lapse of the rotting body of a bird) to the randomness of life on Earth, the unfairness of the death of a good and clever child in the face of the survival of so much ignorance. It was beautifully shot and paced, acted with brilliance and helped by a sound system so perfect that I felt I was there. The only fault was to use Bradford on Avon as a stand-in for Malvern. It was clearly not Malvern but I suppose is more photogenic. Not too much of a distraction except that I grew up there.

Closets and Coffee

Mega-series on Radio 4 - A History of Private Life - a sweeping history of about three hundred years of the normal people at home, stuffed with music and recollections from people like us. It comes on just before my drive home so it is recorded and replayed later in the evening when the house is quiet and seems to suit the rather calming atmosphere. Listen again here.

Daughter is doing her homework at the moment so the only sound in the house is this typing and the rather gusty wind outside. Wife and son are at a party so imagine the noise there. Of to see Creation at FACT this afternoon. Not sure that private life gets any better than this. Work is not so bad either.

BBC 4 has been stuffed with many programmes about death and dying and Richard Wilson's doc about same (inevtitably called "Two Feet in the Grave") was excellent, pitched just right between the normal maudlin take on the subject and a clinical investigation in to the mechanics. In one section he showed photographs of recently-dead people returned in replies to an advert he placed in the paper. It was sad to see that this advert prompted The (Sunday?) Times to condemn the BBC in a bit of shock jornalism. In actual fact, the show was measured and interesting, something you couldn't really say about newspapers thes days.

No Way in Hell Would I Go

It burns! The son of man is here and all around and needs no manual, no list of instructions. We have come from nothing and to nothing we shall return - that is our common ground. Science strives to remove the logical inconsistencies and yet it leaves room for love and hate and all that colours the world for us. You bring me water and the relief it brings me moulds my reaction to you in ways that seem only possible to understand with recourse to strange little ideas that fill the gaps for you. Griefs hurts me, my mind is subject to all the issues of human life - the joy, the passion, the annoyance and all the other petty little things that make us irrational in the face of daily stimuli. My grammar fails me, I will react in unexpected ways because my brain is not a designed machine but an evolved and inefficient mess of energy and matter, brought about as the heuristic best-fit over millions and billions of years. My thoughts are a waterfall of ideas - some rational and some so fantastical that it is a wonder they ever manage to reach the conscious mind. Death is for celebration - time is one way and yet it all exists at once and therefore so do we. There is no one at the wheel - the ship is on the rocks or in the roaring winds of mid ocean - it does not matter for that is the random nature - we are not the pinnacle of design bur are instead are just one species amongst the random nature of the universe. And yet it seems to organised. Your ideas deceive you; they make you think that the ability to write things like this, to contemplate the very nature of writing and thought means that you are the ultimate in design. You are not!

What is the miracle is all of your ability. It is no miracle that an omniscient being can create the universe and the complexity of the human mind - it IS a miracle that the the universe and the complexity of the human mind can arise out of nothing ate the start and billions of years of random movements of molecules. But deep down the complexity is simplicity multiplied - an exponential clumping of particles and chemicals. You just have to believe that if you cannot understand how it works, that it just does. So - yes - you have to have faith but with this faith you can work towards a way of replacing those gaps with understanding and experiment. It might be a sad truth but one day the secrets of the mind will fall to some scientist and then we will be able to explain love and hate, the create our own artificial minds. And if this is in my lifetime, maybe I will be with The New Luddites, bringing violence down on those who wish to use this knowledge for gain and pain. However, we have to recognise that this will happen and to set in place the apparatus to handle the implications, to be able to do what is right for the planet, indeed for the whole cosmos for this depth of understanding of the mind will go hand-in-hand with the theories of matter and the physical creation. The very small and the very large are just different manifestations of the same primitive elements and forces - maybe consciousness is linked in somewhere as the middle component of some scientific trinity.

McChrystal Reports

I have no theme for the month to come but I have a lot of notes, one of which is Pavlov's Dog, Amazon and the Safety Cup which is to do with the slight salivation that occurs whenever I see a parcel from that Particular online Emporium.

To start with something meaty we have banned books (well attempts to ban them anyway) - one step down from burning books which is then only a few grades under burning people. It is nice the see that Philip Pullman looks on his entry in the top ten as a badge of honour. I'd love to see what Sunday reading is like in the homes of people who think that banning such things is a good thing. I wonder what horrors lie under the beds of some of them. Knee jerks - with the emphasis on jerks. Let's go back to executing people for changing their underwear on a Sunday shall we. (deep breath - rant over). But before I finish on this subject, as far as I know there is only one f*** in The Catcher in the Rye - and it definitely needed to be there - it was the focus for the climax of Holden's crisis. Read the books you complain about people.

Aha - something a lot more measured now - The Art of Dying - Dan Cruickshank on his own death on BBC 4 yesterday - well let's face it many people have died on BBC4 before but only in the "Glasgow Empire" sense. Dan did reign in his usual arm-waving and breathy expostulations (as if humbled by their mention in the obituary he requested from the BBC) and together with this and the silences of a length not seen in any documentary that I remember, we had a measured approach to our own mortality. New things learned - Dan's father was a communist and he has a daughter.

I'm now in terrible limbo - the cursor was after that last full stop for sometime because I was thinking that I should really try and write more per entry if I am to make this a full month. I have many little notes in the book but none of them are worth expanding. You want to see inside my head? You couldn't handle it!