To me, looking at my old posts are an indulgent excavation, too frequently a surprise for me to feel entirely comfortable about the state of my memory, but at least quite commonly a pleasant surprise. For the most part, any sentimental journeys I make into the archives are prompted by someone wandering past and dropping in a comment on some (to me) long-forgotten post. It’s always nice to be reminded that, once written, the words are not dead, even if they seem irretrievably distant from me-now. To whoever reads something you’ve written for the first time, the dialogue is taking place now, this very alive moment.

And so we get the curious encounter of some passing web traveller now with the ghost of me two years ago. Sometimes, as in this exchange on stone-sucking, it’s a Note & Query that can happily take place over the span of years. Sometimes, as in this shared journey back to beginnings, returning to the past feels very appropriate.

On other occasions, as with this ongoing and increasingly Byzantine thread on academic conferences spam, I feel as though it would be rude of me to step back in with my casual opinion when so many people feel so much more strongly about than me.

Best of the lot, the comment that asks or offers no explanation, but quickly sketches a picture of a place where, frankly, I’m very happy not to be.

I’ve been noticing, after a large clearout of the old spam comments folder, a marked increase in the quality of the junk coming in. A large amount at the moment seems to be created by throwing together short phrases of random dictionary words, obviously in an attempt to circumvent analysis. What’s nice is that, while there’s an infinitessimal chance of creating real meaning this way, the word patterns produced often take on the cadences of real English, producing a pleasant illusion of literal meaning in the obvious gibberish.

To be honest, it makes me think of a lot of the incandescently incomprehensible poetry I encountered around university arts departments when I was in the USA. Like listening to beat poets ranting from behind a closed door: it sounds as though it probably makes sense, though you’d be hard pushed to say what it is.

I call this one ‘Increase your performance’:

Mint fiat bakery as oaks
Hopefully list interconnecting tremor potting
Scribbled saucepan crutch Catholicism
Weight opened, humiliated wariness.
[goes on for another 12 stanzas]

Athanasius Kircher’s illustration of the Tower of Babel, as posted on the just-found blog of the Proceedings of the Athanasius Kircher Society. You may wish to follow up with Kircher’s sketch demonstrating exactly why the tower couldn’t have reached the moon (it would have been so large that it would have tipped the Earth out of balance.

The Kircherblog, in the spirit of the man, covers everything from Kircher’s own notorious cat piano to feral children (a topic of interest to Kircher because of the chance they might spontaneously speak the original Adamic language) to buildings made out of trees and shaped as elephants.

Sometimes I still love the internet as a child loves its favourite bear. This is why.

1. The North York Moors
2. Life on Mars, starring the equally excellent John Simm and Philip Glenister (who, in a moment of brilliance, seems to have partly based his rough & ready copper on Brian Clough)
3. Battrick, the cricket management game
4. Kate Bush
5. Babies who sleep through the night

ALL STEMS FROM COVENT GARDEN

At the very opposite end of the scale, a local barber has decided that he really grab a piece of this upmarket “hairdressing” malarkey. Sadly, his sign doesn’t really do his bold offer any justice:

ANY HAIR
CUT ANY
STYLE £8

Further cheers as the first story we find there is a thigh-slapper about déjà vu:

One man had it so badly that he stopped watching TV because everything seemed to be a repeat, even the news, recalls psychologist Chris Moulin of the University of Leeds, U.K.

Yet when Moulin offered to help him, he adds, it was futile at first. The man “said there was no point visiting the clinic because he’d already been there.”

I supposed that it must be more to do with the need for the head to feel as though it’s vertical, but this is completely wrong: the head ends up at a more severe angle than otherwise. I think it must be two things.

First, it’s about keeping your weight above your feet, reducing the likelihood of trying to maintain an impossible angle and slipping off entirely.

Second, once you lean your whole trunk over, you can’t correct: you’re committed, and you might just as likely overcompensate and fall over the other way. With hips out one side and head the other, you can perform that recognisable finessing wobble until you’ve recovered fully.

Me, I cheated. The dog, on a retractable lead, had already crossed, and was ahead and to my right. Fixing the lead and giving a sharp tug pulled me back upright and on over the bridge. Good dog, as I effused afterwards, to her bewilderment.

I had thought that this would mean that updates will be non-existent. Now I think that, perhaps, updates were virtually non-existent anyway from London, so you might get something resembling normal service for a few days.

The various evils of the smoke (greyness, too much coffee, too much dirt, lack of horizons, illness) seem to be slowly dropping away. More than anything else, here there seems to be more time: time to unwind, think, eat, sleep.

London, I fear, eats time: not just hours, but whole months and years.

I used to use a program called Cool Edit to do this kind of work as well as other audio editing things. I’m not even sure if it’s around anymore. This was a long time ago.

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It’s a great anecdote, but it’s a false premise. The poster looks fabulous and I just know the play will live up to it. I’m looking forward both to the reviews and to its UK premiere.