11.05.06
Posted in General at 12:44 am by Jon
The little boy’s grandma returned from Poland having scoured the place for a suitable toy to bring back with her. I’m told that everything was cheap plastic ‘western’ tat.
In the end she got hold of some properish wooden Russian dolls, which on closer inspection turn out to be the seven dwarves (claimed by the region around Krakow as their own). Someone has carefully painted on the names of Disney’s seven dwarves near the bases. Gloriously, however, these names seem to have evolved as they have been handed down from doll-painter to doll-painter’s apprentice, so the set now reads:
[blank]
Sleepy
Grimpy
Basheol
Happy
Sneezy
Dog
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10.30.06
Posted in Dreaming of England at 9:20 am by Jon
The reliably eccentric Proceedings of the Athanasius Kircher society notes that the Horniman Museum in south London is currently showing an exhibition tracking every stuffed polar bear in the UK, courtesy of a couple of professional northernists. We’re all in favour of professional northernists, and we’re all in favour of polar bears too, even stuffed ones.
Last Monday, in fact, I took a very very small person to see the very very big bear (rampant, snarling, and adopting an approximately southpaw boxing stance) at the Horniman. The very very small person stood something less than knee high to the bear, and did that looking-through-it trick one does when something is so huge that it’s impossible to see it as a thing in itself.
Everyone left in agreement that bears really are exceedingly big.
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10.24.06
Posted in General at 9:11 am by Jon
Do you sometimes find small books or even booklets tucked away in your otherwise sensible bookshelves? Just now I disovered that besides all kinds of peculiar ephemera and a copy of Peter Blegvad’s painful-sounding ‘Stones in my Passway’, I find I’ve got a booklet entitled Testimonio del Trabajo del Pueblo by Pablo O’Higgins. This turns out to contain about 20 sketches and characterful lithographs, plus a text that claims to be translated from the Progressive Weekley People’s Daily World, a newspaper or three if ever I heard.
To my surprise, Pablo O’Higgins turns out to be from Salt Lake City. I still have no clue why I have the booklet, but am quietly pleased that someone has pointed it in my direction for some reason.
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10.06.06
Posted in General at 3:05 pm by Jon
I can’t be the only person who actually prefers delayed gratification to the hyperkinetic promises of instant retrieval offered by internet shopping. These days even the most obscure stuff is only two days delivery away, less if it’s information or a download.
Pleasure, so often, is in enjoying the wait. They used to call it anticipation.
So huzzah! to Penguin for releasing a proper old-fashioned serialised novel, The Glass Books of the Dream-Eaters, sent to you (if you live in the UK) in weekly installments. It’s a lovely website, too, also using the idea of an elegant delay (the slowly materialising text) to further sharpen the appetite. I hope the story lives up to the format.
In the spirit of Deferred Gratification, though, what about this for a web service? You pay in a modest monthly fee (say twenty pounds) and progressively select from all over the place Nice Things that you spot: books, CDs, gadgets, stationery, trinkets, all kinds of gewgaws and folderol that it would please you to have, but which you can’t really justify splashing out for while there’s real life to worry about. Every six weeks or so, the service sends you something from your wish list, only you don’t know what it will be or when it will arrive. Of course, the idea is that over the months you’ll build up a surplus in your account and at some point — but who knows when? — it will send you a really large treat you wanted but couldn’t ever justify buying.
Blissful surprise!
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10.03.06
Posted in General at 2:47 pm by Jon
My mobile phone thinks it knows me in all kinds of ways.
I’ve just noticed that it has a little feature called ‘Quick Notes’. This is a set of pre-written text messages for me to hurriedly send out to friends, colleagues, lovers, because I’m just too busy. Too busy, that is, not only to talk to them, but even to do anything better than send them a proforma response.
Here they are, and don’t they just paint a pretty picture of modern life:
- I am in a meeting - will get back to you.
- When does the meeting start?
- Please call me back.
- When can we meet?
- Where are you?
- See you later.
- How is life?
- I will be late.
- I am here.
- Thank you very much.
And don’t they just paint a pretty picture of a lifestyle filled with rushing to meetings, missed liaisons, missing information, faint attempts at gratitude and abbreviated social life. If you ever catch me sending you a prewritten text reading “How is life?”, take it from me, life is not good.
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Posted in Dreaming of England at 12:19 pm by Jon
The hard low sun was casting brilliant rainbow against the massive black raincloud to the east. The traffic moved slowly. A young guy in his dark grey Audi finished tapping his cigarette out of the window and reached inside the car for a moment.
As it trickled onwards towards the mini-roundabout, he leaned out of the window, holding his mobile phone sideways, pointing it at the rainbow.
Finally, digital evidence to show his girlfriend back at the flat that it’s a beautiful world.
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10.02.06
Posted in General at 2:15 pm by Jon
It sometimes feels to me as though every day brings further and more confusing evidence in an attempt to settle the age old question of whether we humans are really really smart or really extraordinarily stupid.
In the happy corner today, evidence at last that astronaut Neil Armstrong did not in fact make a mess of his moment of history. Analysis in a piece of audio software costing 24 pounds shows evidence of the missing ‘a’, meaning that Armstrong did probably say “That’s one small step for a man…”
And yet, restoring the karmic balance, in the sad corner, we have a new UK service providing nappy cakes, optimistically labelling itself “The greatest gift for any new mum”. In my book, neither a cake nor, as far as I can see, much of a gift at all. In fact, pretty much an overpriced pile of nappies.
Verifiably not a giant leap for mankind.
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09.29.06
Posted in Forteana, Meeja, Online memory at 9:18 am by Jon
I don’t usually ‘do’ politics here, but Project Censored’s Top 25 censored news stories of 2007 (yes, that’s 2007 for some reason I haven’t quite penetrated) is fascinating, as much at the macro level as the micro.
Project Censored, a long-standing research group at Sonoma State University in the US, publishes this list every year, focusing on ‘overlooked, under-reported or self-censored’ (mostly American) news stories. Not really ‘censored’ then, but presumably ‘Project Ignored’ would sound too quixotic.
Nevertheless, the list is shame-making:
Internet freedom, Halliburton in Iran, destruction of the ecology of the oceans, homelessness, genocide in Congo, whistleblower protection, US torture of detainees, freedom of information, the Israel-Palestine wall, air war on Iraq, GM food, landmines, weedkiller, “detention centres”, private sponsorship of public bodies, the international criminal court, OPEC’s implication in the Iraq invasion, the obligatory 11th September ’sceptic’ story, rainforests, bottled water, gold mining, secret security spending, US ducking climate change commitments, Halliburton (again), US military in Paraguay.
I don’t know how much of this material is proven, but the very themes of the list ring horribly true. Here’s a randomly selected rage-inducing tidbit:
Let me make a generalized statement about a trend I see in the U.S. Congress that I find disturbing, that applies not only with respect to the Iranian situation but a number of others as well. I think we Americans sometimes make mistakes . . . There seems to be an assumption that somehow we know what’s best for everybody else and that we are going to use our economic clout to get everybody else to live the way we would like.
That, apparently, is US vice president Dick Cheney, speaking in 1996 in his then role as chief executive of Halliburton Corporation, arguing against both intervention and any kind of restriction on business with Iran, at a time when Halliburton was illegally dealing with Iran. More recently, it is alleged, Halliburton has supplied Iran’s nuclear programme with key components.
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09.26.06
Posted in Forteana at 12:36 pm by Jon
I fully accept that the ‘Pasty by Post’ service (below) may not be canonical evidence of the imminence of the end times, but it’s good enough for me. I’m fairly sure there’s a glancing reference to pasties from foreign lands in the apocryphal Book of Thomas, though this may be a scribal error for ’strange hats’.
Regardless, when the end times come, increasing numbers of people seem to think it will be in the form of the machines rising up and enslaving us all, leaching off our brain energy and making us do endless Sudoku puzzles for them (karmic punishment perhaps for us using thousand pound laptops to play card games on the train). Ars Technica covers a survey of ‘technology experts’ who were asked, more or less, in which way the world will end and which piece of technology will be responsible:
By 2020, intelligent agents and distributed control will cut direct human input so completely out of some key activities such as surveillance, security and tracking systems that technology beyond our control will generate dangers and dependencies that will not be recognized until it is impossible to reverse them. We will be on a “J-curve” of continued acceleration of change.
Rather sweetly, Ars Technica maps all of the disaster scenarios back to Star Trek episodes, which makes me recall that for a lot of alpha geeks out there, Star Trek pretty much fills the hole the Bible fills for Christians, a text that can be queried and analysed and subjected to gematria for the answer to every and any question.
The best prediction is Ars Technica’s own, that we will not be wiped out by supercomputers or war machines, but by something pathetic like cleaning robots.
Amen to that, and may Kirk preserve you all.
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09.25.06
Posted in Dreaming of England at 2:05 pm by Jon
Try finding anything other than Lipton’s nasty tea in the US or on the continent and you’ll understand the market that UK2YOU are after, purchasing and sending on your vital supplies of jam, pork scratchings and Panini stickers of Everton’s reserve team.
It seems to be an active market, judging by the thoughtfully named Pasty by Post. Yes, they do send you Cornish pasties by post. I can’t think why nobody thought of it before.
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09.11.06
Posted in General at 3:20 pm by Jon
I’m waiting for the first appearance in a thriller plotline of predictive texting. My mobile phone learns words that I use frequently in SMS. A cleverly projected analysis could tell a great deal, albeit impressionistically, about the phone’s owner.
Oh, and another piece of inadvertant texting rhyme: ‘broken’ on the way to ‘apology’.
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09.07.06
Posted in General, Books at 8:11 am by Jon
Some miniature delights.
The author of the hoax Betjeman letter mentioned below has identified himself, and to nobody’s great surprise, it was rival biographer Bevis Hillier. A literary banker if ever there was.
Football, which I don’t talk about much, but do follow, rarely offers up memorable lines. Savour then this from France manager Raymond Domenech on the increasingly irritating Chelsea boss Jose Mourinho:
He is the best coach in the world, he said so himself.
Finally, from Jared Diamond’s enthralling Guns, Germs and Steel, which for 378 pages has been patiently scientific and relentlessly prosaic, this moment of inadvertantly Carollian verse:
Most [plants domesticated in the Sohel zone of northern Africa] are still grown mainly just in Ethiopia and remain unknown to Amercians - including Ethiopia’s narcotic chat, its banana-like ensete, its oily noog
The oily noog goes right on the list of things that I must see.
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08.30.06
Posted in General at 11:29 am by Jon
You wait a long time for a really great news story, then two come along at once.
First, A.N. Wilson was been well and truly the victim of naughtiness in his biography of John Betjeman. Some helpful soul decided that the book would be a lot brighter if it included details of a previously unrecorded affair, and rattled off a Betjamenesque letter as evidence. Sadly, A.N. failed to spot that the letter was an acrostic, spelling out “A N Wilson is a shit”.
Wilson’s response is priceless:
“Of course I saw the funny side - I laughed about it a lot when I found out,” Wilson told the Guardian yesterday. “It is quite childish of somebody and I have absolutely no interest in who wrote it.”
A response notable for containing at least three untrue statements. If Wilson isn’t currently making evil signs over rival biographer Bevis Hillier’s friends and allies I’ll eat one of Betjeman’s old hats.
Second, madness multiplied in this clearly barking claim about Scientology developing superpowers. The joy here isn’t with the rather sad sounding fellow at the centre of the story, it’s with the (alleged) list of L. Ron Hubbard’s developable superpowers (”perceptics”), of which a quick sample:
Awareness of awareness
Personal size
Emotional state of other organs
Reality (self and others)
Awareness of importance, unimportance
Moisture (self)
The possibilities for a superhero with superperception of his own personal moisture are, er, intriguing.
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08.24.06
Posted in General at 1:36 pm by Jon
I’m looking out the window right now at a little boy very patiently riding his tricycle up what is, in effect, a very flat concrete river bed. The wake of his trike in the shallow water behind him is daftly mesmerising. What fun.
Some other bits of fun to be had around these parts at the moment:
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08.18.06
Posted in General at 12:13 pm by Jon
The most extraordinary little gadget is hidden away in Microsoft Word.
Go to ‘View’, ‘Toolbars’, ‘Customise’, and select ‘‘.
This gives you a fancy-dan little tooolbar that allows you to select a range of appropriate Japanese greetings, openings and closings to letters, with submenus for salutations and statements of appreciation (what nice people). Most special of all are the long lists of comments appropriate to the month.
After the summer we’ve had, I’m just imagining the British version for Japanese users:
- Hot, isn’t it?
- It’s just like the Mediterranean!
- We’re all sweltering here
- Hope you’re coping with the heat better than I am
- Phew!
- Normally I like the sun, but I can’t wait for the weather to break
- Do you have air conditioning?
- Can you sleep in this heat?
- We just had some rain here, at last
- It hasn’t stopped for days
- Nice weather for ducks
- I can’t believe the summer’s nearly over already
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08.17.06
Posted in Meeja at 8:48 am by Jon
This week’s spam news is entertainingly recursive:
AOL to dig up Spam Nazi’s gold
(reported everywhere)
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08.11.06
Posted in Dreaming of England at 3:20 pm by Jon
Back from a few days finessed away from the city, tucked away on what passes for a hilltop in central Essex. There was a warm pool for the relaxing, there were many animals for the little one to admire loudly and expressively. Also, a lot of beastly hornets, who at least had the grace to make a satisfying splat when got with the swatter.
The real shock was the extent of the dry spell. Crossing Blackheath, it looked bleached, nearly unrecognisable. In Essex, it was harvest time, and the combine harvesters were out in force, all night too. The locals were saying that the crop is so dry this year that much will be lost. Each combine was followed by a huge yellow plume of dust drifting out, and looking suspiciously like the old stubble fires.
Looking out from the slight incline over the flat cropfields, tracking by eye the brute machines with their fiery tails, it looked like the end times had finally come.
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08.04.06
Posted in General, Cricket at 11:23 am by Jon
While enjoying the first morning of the third test against Pakistan (oddly starting on a Friday), I found Cricinfo’s rather nice cut-out-and-keep glossary of cricketing terms.
Retire To postpone or end one’s innings, either voluntarily through boredom when you’re simply too good for the opposition, or involuntarily and in agony, when a nasty fast bowler has taken his pound of flesh
Reverse Swing When the ball is 50 overs old and the pitch is as flat as a pancake, this phenomenon is often a bowling side’s saving grace. First mastered by the Pakistani quicks of the 1980s and 1990s, it involves sideways movement of the ball through the air that is contrary to your average everyday laws of physics. If it sounds like rocket science, that is because it is
Trundler Slow, laborious type of bowler who thinks he’s quick, once was quick, or is simply old, fat and unfit and needs to be put out to pasture. See military medium
And so on and on. Two particularly caught my eye.
First, ‘Cow Corner’, the deep long-on position on the boundary, which is allegedly so named for a real cow corner (with real cows) at Dulwich College. This is just down the road from me, so I must check, though modern Dulwich being what it is, the cows have almost certainly had to move to a cheaper part of town, like Nunhead.
Second, that English eccentricity, ‘Nelsons’:
Nelson - The English superstition that 111 and its multiples are unlucky. The sticks resemble 111, and is loosely connected with Lord Nelson’s physical attributes.
Perhaps I should just accept that it is Friday and my brain has gone off for the weekend before me, but Nelson’s physical attributes (or, as I thought, lack thereof) are at this point mystifying me.
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08.03.06
Posted in Meeja at 12:18 pm by Jon
The news story about a guard dog at Wookie Hole that destroyed the things it was supposed to be protecting caught my eye, and not because it’s a typical silly season story.
It was the front page trail for it that tipped me off:
Dog mauls Elvis’s teddy
That’s not a headline, I thought. That’s just a collection of random words lumped together. It might as well be ‘Cockatoo swallows Nero’s shoes’ or ‘Hunger strike hip replacement’.
A sinister thought: perhaps the spammers are infiltrating the news services. Admit it, pretty much every week there’s a news headline you spot that looks as though it comes from a spam email. Now you know the reason.
Semi-relatedly, the Hamstead & Highgate Express is currently offering another example of the art of the ambiguous headline:
George Michael defends Heath cruising
Poor old Sir Edward. He never did anyone any harm on Morning Cloud.
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07.31.06
Posted in General at 3:29 pm by Jon
After discovering that Ms Lily Allen isn’t the complete deal until she grows up a bit, it was time to follow a different recommendation, and fetch the latest album from Icelandic mystifiers Sigur Ros (and listen to their MySpace offering).
I know, I know I’m slow off the mark, but all I can say is that it’s a good job I was sitting down and in daydreaming mood when it kicked in.
Our perception of Icelandic music has been irrevocably skewed by the birdlike eccentricity of Bjork Gudmundsdottir, so it’s quite bewildering to be faced by an album quite so beautiful, but also determined to be quite as leapingly mad as possible. It’s not as if they’re living down the stereotype, and this is certainly music you can imagine being forged deep under the lavafields by sprites with a fondness for piano riffs and endless orchestral climaxes.
It’s marginally disappointing that only half the songs are sung in the portmanteau ‘Hopelandic’, which featured across the entirety of the previous album (). Then again, listening to beautiful singing in an alien tongue is one of life’s particular pleasures, and I can’t tell which language it’s in.
A winner, and listening on hot tube trains these last couple of weeks has felt strangely right, as if any minute one would pop out into a hot spring, shimmering with volcanic crystals.
And for that, much thanks.
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