The Travelling Pies

There is a bridge across the motorway here, always grubby, never been clean since the day the steam cranes left it balanced on the concrete. It seems to attract every local daredevil wishing to tag it with some witticism to further confuse the drivers already distracted by the radio, or their mobile phones, or some honey trying to interest them in some lurve-on-the-road. I've never been sure exactly what the graffiti means but there is a vast range of different styles. Some are obviously hip-hop monikers, taken to extremes of typography and art by being in all colours and shapes, anything but something readable. There may be teenagers or sadder older folks who know that a vertical squiggle outlined in red and crossed by a blue circle means that it comes from Bazza or Gazza or Shazza - but not me. I am too old for all this these days and while I can appreciate some of the art as art, most of it is bravado dressed up as something mysterious. And still I don't think of myself as old - this morning I was confused and thought that the next president was actually younger than me but he isn't. And what does that mean? Nothing at all.

I remember the year that Martin Luther King was shot. I don't remember him actually being shot but I do remember the B52s pouring High Explosive into the jungle and I also remember wondering what the point was, though not with any particular outrage as what it was doing to the poor people on the ground - horror developed over the years, probably reaching its peak when I discovered that the man-in-a-suit responsible for it had actually got a Nobel Peace Prize, something which removes all credibility from the award and seems to me the worldwide extension of double-speak and plausible denial. It is of course the ultimate expression of complexity which still plagues the world. The general solution to stuff that is difficult to understand these days seems to be to introduce some extra level of complication in order to handle the complexities rather than simplifying the equation and addressing things that way - so instead of cancelling out the square terms you multiply both sides by the square of itself - still valid but makes the whole thing far more complicated, and it is all simply for the sake of it or maybe as obfuscation. At a personal level we all want simple lives - we don't want all those forms to fill out, we don't want to have to answer loads of stupid questions that get recorded somewhere deep in a computer system and then never get used again. Huge percentages of the processes that humans are subject to are simply to justify the existence of the people who develop the systems - some of these people even accept this as a fact and laugh in the faces of those who wish to simplify things. (shh - Occam's Razor - yet again).

This was going to be a Random Friday but it seems to have developed a structure and meaning which I was hoping to leave out. Oh well - you'd better have some links then. This page has some Modern Jazz interpretations of Nude by Radiohead and very good they are too - wouldn't seem out of place on a Wiretapper and best of all you can download them for wire-free enjoyment anywhere.

Ruskin Speared. All Ego and no Id

This makes us look like professional ramblers - it's a pity that I can't walk more than 100 metres without gasping and calling for a copy of the Guardian and an Americano.

So - were you expecting my ribald poem? Hard Luck!

Notes from today are - Accelerating raindrops and continuous memory dump to paper. I think that someone actually has attempted to note down every little thought in pages of diaries. All I can find immediately is Ian Breakwell's Continuous Diary which is not what I am after at all. I seem to remember an American man with lever arch files full of stuff. It looks like that will have to remain in the aether along with the web page of the man who documented everything in his house.

Daughter was dressed an hour before having to leave for school this morning. For some reason she is desperate to get back to school. Now I'm not sure if that is parents pushing or peers pulling. Son starts school tomorrow though he has been in nursery for a year of afternoons only. Why is school so much more exciting these days or do I just remember the days when I didn't really want to go?

I've just been told off for the rationalism of my thinking in terms of doubt and uncertainty. I hate these arguments because where one person believes in airy-fairy stuff you cannot use logic to convince them otherwise. And if they say something which wanders over the line into offence, they take a step back and use some post-modern argument to justify it - though basically that always boils down to "I was being ironic". You cannot destroy the rigour of modern science by arguing that it fails to accommodate the more intuitive thought processes of women (and you can argue about whether that distinction is true anyway). At an extreme you cannot prove a theory by saying that it "feels right" - Relativity and Quantum theory are so counter-intuitive that they will never "feel right" to anyone. Extensive theorising, experimentation and research can help you KNOW that something is right - feeling never won a Nobel prize. Feeling is for art and music - for sensing the wind on an autumn day, for love and happiness. Knowing is for building things - for working out how the world works. Even if my idea that the details of the very big and the very small will retreat forever from our increasing ability to understand them holds true - we still have to be rigorous and firm in our research that leads towards that understanding. I refer you to joke number 3567 - the one with the Scottish sheep.

Well this entry certainly proves that I am a professional rambler - well certainly a keen amateur.