The Road to Wigan Pier Leads to Runcorn

Pipes and Stuff

Well Wigan is off the destination list - if they can't keep their websites up-to-date and their signage logical then why bother going at all. No wonder Orwell was late getting there. Anyway we turned around and made our way cross country to Catalyst Museum in Runcorn which as well as having the standard interactivity and quizzes has a brilliant glass lift and a panoramic view of the Mersey Estuary - so majestic it just about gets away with not having any Wildebeest sweeping across it.

Mad Men and Women

Be Like the Trees - Become One With the Trees

  More Jane Eyre, more Wuthering Heights. While I did wonder about yet more versions of both of these, neither of which are likely to be exactly as the author intended (though for WH, that's probably a good thing) I am still looking forward to seeing them. The journalist here could probably have looked at the sales of both books and saved himself a bit of puff for something with a little more point but you have to fill up The Sundays with something don't you?

Plants and Rags

Some Flowers and a Bee Yesterday

Is it obvious that I've just discovered aperture priority? Anyway, what goes on around here? Well after years of dismissing Twitter as the ultimate curse like Telepathy, for some reason I decided to start Tweeting to the account I set up some time ago. Of course, I am like most Twitterers in that I have nothing to say at all and so it remains a high-tech method of shining a torch at the stars. However, it was worth it for Little/Big Howard's Fun Fringe Facts especially the assertion that The Monkey House at Edinburgh Zoo wrote the Complete Works of Shakespeare. And if you are one of my three followers so far then you will know that this week I have been delving into such wonderful geek-stuff as BIOS and Registry settings. All of this was topped off with interrogating the pins on a parallel port attached to the back of a server in another country. All very ZX81 I thought. Isn't life exciting?

Literally - not Figuratively

"Pick up the Phone - Pick up the Phone"

We've been very taken by The Hour and have dismissed all the various clamour about it not capturing the times exactly. People who worry that the phones are anachronistic should get a life - this is a drama and I'm sure that some pompous lord somewhere had a go at Pride and Prejudice when it first came out. Prompted by a comment from one of the family I turned down the colour on the TV on a replay of a small segment on iPlayer on the Wii and with the slight blurring it looked very atmospheric so the triumph of Style over Content is complete.

I think I would take issue with the idea that the women in The Hour are too forthright. I'm pretty certain that the 1950's was not the earliest decade which gave rise to strong, independent women and the fact that many commentators feel the need to discuss it is quite disappointing as personally I feel it's not really worth comment this days. And if you argue that I have just commented on it I would reply that it was a meta-comment - comment on comment.

That is all.

Gloom, Gloomy, Gloomier, Gloomiest

I've never really though of Alain de Botton as a pessimist - after all as some sort of Swiss Trustafarian he does not have to work and seemingly doesn't giving him the freedom to be like a medieval polymath - simply thinking about thinking - oh - that's philosophy isn't it? Anyway after reading this characteristically-deep piece by him I am wondering whether it could be labelled "pessimism - the new optimism. As a supposed card-carrying depressive I now find that my view of the future lumps me in with the secular optimists who foresee a paradise on earth brought about by growth, science and benevolent dictatorships. And yet all my worrying about the complexity of things in the west being just too much for the human hive mind to contemplate seems to be the other side of the cusp of catastrophe in this Cognitive Dissonance. Anyway I don't have the intellectual equipment to process many things by AdB so you will have to make your mind up for yourself.

However, another thinker also brought to mind by a BBC article is the supremely-readable and also very clever Atul Gawande, an American Doctor and the author of the book Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance, which I picked up randomly from the library. Hence I was stopped from my normal breeze through the BBC news site by this article about Gawande's last book - The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right which was of course dutifully reserved and retrieved from the library to be pushed onto the top of the reading stack (above Conference at Cold-Comfort Farm). I leave you to puzzle out examples of Simple, Complicated and Complex systems. Clue; some of this might well be Rocket Science.

On Getting Something For Nothing (Again).

I'm struggling to identify the economics of all the free VST stuff I've downloaded over the last week or so. From an innocuous advert on a local paper website, I have managed to get a VST Host and  myriad instrument and effect VSTs which give me as much functionality as I used to have with a room full of kit and cables. On top of that some of the specialised instruments have sounds approaching the real thing - saxophones with the sound of spit through the reed, cellos with a mis-hit scrape of bow on wood. As an added bonus the single, twenty-year-old keyboard which I kept is still able to keep up and control this studio-in-a-box. .All I need to find now is some actual musical talent to put them all together. And some time I suppose.

Another frightening thing is that even with 10 instruments all with their own independent effects channel, the render is still able to turn this into a single sound file at many times the speed of the actual live music. It seems quite possible to produce a whole album to a high standard using kit that would fit in a briefcase. As none of this has cost any money I can at least spend something on important things like food, and the car, and comics.

Gompertz Hurts Hertz



Loading Gantry for PLUTO - Keith Henderson

That there Eighth Doctor was on TV the other day doing a short programme about hidden art. This is part of a BBC initiative called Your Paintings which aims to digitise much of the hidden public art that is either in storage or on display only in private areas of public buildings. The above picture caught my eye because my mother worked on PLUTO towards the end of the war. The following picture was also interesting because I've walked through the hangar in the scene and it was still full of aircraft. Sad to say they were Nimrods, all of which are now just piles of grey scrap.



Avro Lancaster Bombers at Woodford - Charles Cundall

However, the main focus of the programme was an almost forgotten war artist called Albert Richards who was killed in 1945 at the age of 25 when his jeep ran over a mine as he was trying to find a position to paint a picture of the retreating German Army. Although many of pictures show military subjects, quite a few show the routine side of life in the forces as the one below shows.


 Building a Hutted Camp - Essex - 1941 - Albert Richards

Richards' death, (the manner of which reminds me of Robert Capa's demise) is as poignant as that of any of the superstar poets from other conflicts and obviously left the Art World without a great talent. All of this comes about because a surreal self-portrait of Richards has been put on display in the recent refresh of the increasingly-inaccurately-named Permanent Gallery at The Walker in Liverpool. What with that and the new Magritte exhibition at The Tate (20 quid to you mate), we are really being spoiled for culture in this town at the moment. It's not all Shell Suits you know. Anyway one more picture from the war to finish with.



Multi-spindle Drilling Machines on Aero-Engine Work - A.S.Finlayson



First Try at a Julian Opie Style Picture

PJ Harvey in the style of Julian Opie

Not original I know and I'm not sure why I've suddenly decided to have a go at this but I'm quite proud of it. I was expecting to see loads of examples out there - maybe there aren't many people in the Venn Diagram of Peej/Blur/Pop Art fans.

Checking the Level at the Reservoir

Little Moreton Hall

Main Hall Windows

Marton Church

Wedding Car

Gamine Ultra

Adventures in Numberland has been pushed to the stack as this has arrived hot off the library man's van and despite the whinging over the supposed inaccuracy about the derivation of the phrase "Sleep Tight", it is a moreish and informative book stuffed with much more than the already-generous content of the BBC 4 programme which it accompanies. It appears that the BBC is far more prudish than Lucy Worsley in that she not only seems to delight in the juicier delights of home life but devotes whole chapters to them, though of course Pepys and friends have already alerted us to the historical predilections for rumpy-pumpy. The book manages to cover all classes though for obvious reasons, royalty and celebrity elbow their way in by virtue of being more recorded. From the show, it is obvious that the author enjoys joining in reconstructions but manages to avoid seeming like just another extension of the heritage industry.


And what else goes on? Well I still have a hole in my head .. which is nice, though it's doing it's best to become an ex-hole and I don't need to go back to see Mr Consultant for a couple of months. However along with the hole I have a dinge as well though I was warned.

No Flies on the Roman

This pair need their own series. I'd watch it. Then again, nearly all the characters in this episode need their own series. There were maybe a few too many threads in A Good Man Goes to War but that is no matter - it kept us interested and laughing. All back to mine in a couple of months for Let's Kill Hitler. Yes - lets - despite what happened in the book by that nice Mr Fry. Oh well I know technically they didn't kill him did they.

Anyway as you may have guessed from previous posts I have had a lot of time on my hands and of course none of this has been filled with me actually creating anything but I have managed to read quite a lot. I'm currently just about to finish Paradoxical Undressing by Kristin Hersh - the eloquent diary of a year in her life at the age of around nineteen. Next up is Alex's Adventures in Numberland by Alex Bellos.