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Tuesday 29 April
The following telephone conversation probably did not take place...
George - "Hey Osama - why in heck are you blowing up our skyscrapers?"
Osama - "You are all infidels...and you have troops stationed in my country"
George - "Well we have troops there to protect your country from invasion by Iraq!"
Osama - "So the real problem is Iraq Mr President yes?"
George - "Um...I see what you mean....."Anyway, regardless of whether the phone call was made, the US is now pulling out of Saudi Arabia. This has been discussed here before.
******** Last night's gig was in aid of Results - a charity which lobbies politicians to divert resources to the third world in order to alleviate the dire poverty which exists in so many areas.
Monday 28 April
The Peter Lemer Quartet at UCS. A pleasant occasion.
******** What is there to say? Have I not had a thought in the last week worthy of committing to this archive of 21st century experience? Perhaps we'll never know.
12 noon and I seem to have a million and one things to do. The main activity is deciding which of these tasks should be accorded priority. Making the bed? Wiring up a computer? Making bread? Or avoiding all of them for the moment by writing about the possibilities here? Or did this activity suddenly reprioritise itself ahead of the practical substance-moving patterns of a "normal" daily existence?
You decide. I'm sorry I haven't a clue.Chris visited on Friday night. We played a bit of music, talked about his recently aquired hurdy gurdy, watched "Have I Got News for you", argued about GWII for a while before having our temperaments calmed by the ingestion of cauliflower cheese, wine and other more discreet accoutrements.
(Note to self: If you're going to use long words in a place like this it might at some time be advisable to set up a spell-checker)That may be added to the list too.
Anyway Chris has been involved in a musical venture in Leicester called Farside Music. They have an interesting agenda of encouraging performances from a variety of (mostly) folk based artists from many different musical traditions and are looking to extend their activities if enough support can be generated.
A thought: let whatever nees to be done bubble to the surface....
In the hallway I find a fresh deluge of flyers from various local pizza selling establishments and go to throw them away. I am halted by the realisation that I should be putting them in a recycling bag along with all the other waste paper. It is uncharacteristic for me not to have a recycling bag in use and my sober analysis is that I must have been speeding throughout the last week. The blog with virtual cobwebs festooning its bon mots is further suggestive evidence that events have been whirling me faster than my usual orbiting velocity.
So I search, tentatively, for a more organic progression....
....making bread and listening to the news
....descaling the kettle
....washing my hair
....contemplatingI phone Tchibo tech support to ask why my camera causes the XP machine to go into continuous reboot mode. A callback...? I wait.
Billy takes the sun
I feel a little odd today. A feeling around of....dissatisfaction perhaps?
************ Wednesday 23 April
I now have a new machine running XP. It's a modest 1.8Ghz Celeron based affair but it will take some of the strain of applications leaving my internet machine operating under a lighter load. Unless there's a particular call for me to write up my techie adventures, my output here is likely to be a bit limited in the near future. I have a lot of "exploring" to do....
Saturday 18 April
We are indebted to an unofficial Belgian branch of the League Of Spiritual Discovery for reminding us that on 16 April 1943 Bâle, Switzerland - Albert Hoffman had one of the strangest bicycle rides in recorded history. Celebrate the 60th birthday of LSD by spacing out to some of the extraordinary content at Free Radical radio
Feel free to comment************* The mystery surrounding the disputed existence of Schrodinger's Saddam continues to perplex World leaders. I dare say it will be time for him to be killed again next week.
"President Bush and his advisers are said to be almost evenly split on whether Mr. Hussein is alive or dead. The uncertainty has frustrated the Bush administration even as senior officials say publicly that the question of Mr. Hussein's status is no longer important because he is out of power.
Even so, the release of each new tape seems intended to keep alive Mr. Hussein's political presence in the psyche of the region"
New York Times (needs registration)Rumours that the Ba'ath party issued instructions for the creation of thousands of Saddam Hussein lookalikes have been given credence by the discovery of large underground caches of what appear to be make-up kits in the North of Iraq and the deaths of at least three Saddams in the last month. An unconfirmed rumour has reached us that Saddam is, in fact, now travelling in disguise as a wandering tribesman with a beard and no moustache. We await developments with interest.
Feel free to comment******** I went to Metafilter which features a splendid link to a site full of oddities about railroad history including some fine old photographs. I was also rebuked by Internet Explorer -
"Sorry - you do not have permission to right-click"
No doubt I will get hauled off to Ba'ath party headquarters for my repeated attempts to right-click now....I was back at Metafilter (now added to blogroll) because the night before I'd had my first taste of their streaming music service. These are compositions and works of bloggers who have uploaded their works to the site. I was impressed by the variety and quality of the music and it's a definite change from the usual type of radio station.
********** Friday 17 April - Good Friday
Seen on a stroll in Waterlow Park, making the most of the sunny warm weather....
A family of coots
A feisty squirrel
and a Canada goose prodding at a pesky pigeon
Thursday 16 April
Netpad is a little text editor designed to collect and organise information from the web. It looks like it's going to be very useful here and it's available as a free download from the PC Plus web site.
******* Tuesday 15 April
Hard physical exercise alternately rubbing down the rust on the car and patching the rendering on the front of the house. Every so often I have to take a break, have a lie down and listen to some music....
...and when I do I am haunted by resonances of past situations which the music brings to life. If I hear anything from "What we did on our Holidays" by Fairport Convention I can place myself at a dining room table in Hong Kong circa the summer of 1969 opposite my sister and we are drawing or painting. We were having lessons from a Chinese artist during the school holidays. Once I did a kaleidescopic swirling water colour which had a girl with glasses and unruly curly hair at the centre. Six months later I met that girl in the vastly different circumstances of a South London squat and we hung out together for a couple of years as we grew up.
Anyway I guess I'm listening to a lot from music from past decades and so many pieces have that ability to put me back in the atmosphere and social setting of a previous time.
And that's especially when I miss some of my old friends and wonder how we could grow apart so completely that our fates seem like totally separate lines which crossed once and then continued on. I have no answers. I can but wonder...
It's just like Proust and les petites madeleines...but perhaps that's another story.
********* Sunday 13 April
Plug for London gig by the Peter Lemer Quartet on 28 April@7:30pm. Peter has played in various bands including Paraphernalia (Barbara Thompson and Jon Hiseman) and is an old online chum of mine (We jointly moderate the Evolutionary Psychology conference on CIX). I'm looking forward to letting my brain get an evening's jazzification.
******** Secret Russian links to Saddam
When, late last night I saw this story appear in The Telegraph online (needs registration).
"Top secret documents obtained by The Telegraph in Baghdad show that Russia provided Saddam Hussein's regime with wide-ranging assistance in the months leading up to the war, including intelligence on private conversations between Tony Blair and other Western leaders. By David Harrison in Baghdad"
I assumed it would be a huge scandal the today. Instead I haven't heard a thing about it yet on the BBC news bulletins. Curious. Shouldn't Blair be cross if the Russians have been passing on his private phone calls to Saddam's regime?
Maybe it's just another disinformation thing?
******** Is there any aspect of the world around us which a person considering themselves to be a well-rounded student of life should avoid? Some would say that an open minded eclectic approach is undesirable. The filters have to be slammed into place to prevent information overload. Ok - so who selects the filters is what I want to know? I have a nasty feeling that (in Freudian terms) the subconscious has a lot to do with these filtering decisions.
Of course it's easier to see the filters in another person's mind than the ones in your own.
Blinkers are used in horse racing to cut down the visual stimuli from the sides so the horse is not distracted from what is in front of him. It's useful in achieving a goal. maybe a lot of our filtering decisions are goal based ones. We want to filter out distractions so that a specialised study of something can be made - a "Do not disturb" sign hung on the frontiers of the mind.
Maybe my mind is roaming about this subject because of the filtering that I become aware that I'm doing while blogsurfing - some sites are passed over pretty quickly (Colour/font filtering) and some only a little more slowly (content filtering). But I am scanning and reading a lot of blogs that are new to me as well as those with which I've become half-familiar (see blogroll). It seems to me that there is a desirable ratio to aspiire to between accessing the writing of brand new people and the views of people whose writing style and life stance is already known.
******* And now (via Dave Barry) a rather specialised corner of the epistemological sphere.
I enjoyed "Easy Riders, Raging Bulls" tonight on BBC4 - a panoramic look at the new wave of US film directors in the seventies and their varied careers. I'm glad I get a reasonable enough signal for Freeview
******** Friday 11 April
Category Errors confound discourse
I think more than I write. I write a lot in my head. In my head I have already finished some novels, a few ground-breaking papers on evolution and psychology as well as a number of eccentric pieces which explain the obvious so well that even the unenlightened can't help themselves laughing themselves into nirvana.
In fact, last night, on the verge of sleep I distinctly remember finding the answer to life, the universe and all that, and I'd worked out what would be the best way to write it up in the blog. All that was missing at that vital moment was the energy to rise and commit a few pencil marks to paper, if not key impressions to screen. That's all that was missing...
...but I'm getting it back a bit. It's like people (in the main) have become hung up on talking about entities such as "the US", "the left", "Iraq" etc and discussing them as if the discrete components of such contributed towards a meta-entity that was at least the sum of its parts. However the real world does not conform to that model and it is this that makes so much logically impeccable discourse somewhat worse than a waste of breath (or finger muscles). In the real world entities exist and overlap in their spheres of influence and power and may be subject to change by elections, the actions of the markets, natural catastrophes, technological advances or military actions. It is this matrix that we have to unpick with care to discover the trends in the world and their energy sources. It can't be done by shuffling around blocks like "the Palestinians", "the Arab view", the UN (especially that one), "the peace movement", or "New labour".
Last night a repeat of a rock show from the Seventies "The Old Grey Whistle Test" featured a brilliant animation backing up Frank Zappa's "City of Tiny Lights". This animation featured strange faces who regarde their own skin with amazement as it bubbled and writhed and burst forth into multi-appendaged hybrids of a host of primeval species not unlike our own. You get the picture.
And this is what it's like with these concepts that are the daily debating ground of a hundred thousand news outlets and their comment fields. The concepts cannot stand the weight of the entities within and so they burst or sink messily and everybody wonders why a war went so well, or how such an election could turn out that way.
Come to think of it I haven't discovered anything new - just caught up with some of De Bono's ideas that I remember from 20 years ago. Now where's that copy of "The Happiness Purpose"....
********** Thursday 10 April
On a blogsurf. Thanks to Twisted Reality for reminding me what fun Googlism is.
********* Wednesday 9 April
"It's all about oil"
Well this was at least part of the conclusion reached in a useful analysis over at blog.org but one with which I have some trouble agreeing. My scepticism increased when I saw this piece outlining why oil didn't make it past the starting post as a reason for this war. The truth is out there.
******* As I write this morning it seems that the remains of government in Baghdad have melted away overnight. The News services are reporting that the minders have not turned up to monitor the journalists and the police have disappeared. Good tempered but widespread looting going on. People are joyfully taking it out on Saddam's works especially the pictures and statues and thanking the Americans. Speculation that the remains of the republican guard are using Saddam's network of tunnels under the city.
Even Mr Sahaf, the Information Minister cannot be found. Things are surely spiralling remorselessly downwards for the Ba'athists. The US need to turn their minds quickly to the task of establishing some sort of civil order otherwise there could be huge losses of both civilians and infrastructure.
One guy in Basra, asked by the BBC reporter if he would rather that the American troops were quickly replaced by troops from Arab nations, poured scorn upon the idea pointing out that the various Governments had nearly all supported Saddam Hussein. Hmm - I see a few karmic chickens coming home to roost there....more
******** Tuesday 8 April
"Saddam" was killed again last night. This is getting to be a regular occurrence. Are they wiping out the lookalikes perhaps?
Can we all get together with a huge cheer of "good riddance" for the news of the timely demise of "Chemical Ali". The Telegraph obituary tells it thus "Suave in appearance, military in bearing, and uncouth in his use of crude language and Arabic dialect, al-Majid had few redeeming qualities. He relished torture, murder and rape."
********* Monday 7 April
(pic from CNN)This man has a great future in stand up comedy...or rather he would have if there were not a few outstanding legal matters to be cleared up. His performance on the rooftop today was superb. The way he kept a straight face and exuded confidence in the face of journalists who were pointing out the US tanks crouching on the other side of the river, could be compared to the demeanour of an ostrich who has just invented blinkers.
******** "The idea that our closest relatives would go extinct is shattering to us" - The sad story of the decline in population amongst Gorillas and Chimps in Central Africa.
OK - it's not GWII but today Britain plans to start killing 2000 local inhabitants of a small offshore island by lethal injection. Here is the story. There's something very naff about this idea. I'm seriously considering becoming a human shield.
Sunday 6 April
Peeking into one of the current bucketloads of spam that pretends to be a mailbox I come across this plaintive cry
"Friend,
I'm really confused. Why haven't you claimed your cash?
We've mailed you several times, telling you the cash is yours. An award of up to twenty-five hundred dollars is waiting for you, but you've done nothing. You've ignored every message we've sent.
Maybe you simply don't believe us."
My hypothetical reply to Grouplotto Inc would be:
"Yes - I think you've got it in one"
Feel free to commentSaturday 5 April
American troops in and around Baghdad. The Iraqi Information Minister gives a bravura press conference in which he insists that the US soldiers are encircled and will be finished off any day now. It's easy to see why he got his job. But will he be keeping it for much longer?
******* Did you hear the one about the time traveller who made a killing on the stock exchange and was charged with insider trading? (via Accidents aren't naughty) Strange how they always get too greedy - even in the future apparently.
******** On my first drive in the new car (a full 20 yards to a new parking position) I almost contrived to reverse into a car which unexpectedly had decided to do a 3 point turn right behind me. My feet are having problems sorting out the distance between the brake and accelerator pedals. Carefully does it Johnny boy....
Friday 4 April
"Saddam" has reappeared strolling around Baghdad today as if he owned the place which, I guess, for a limited time, he still does.
I'm buying a small car - an oldish VW Polo from the dealer down the road in order to get a sense of mobility back into my life. I'll have to learn to drive properly all over again. It's years since I last grappled with vehicle ownership and, frankly, the whole thing makes me rather nervous...
I also finally cracked and bought a Freeview Box - a Grundig GDT2000. Almost to my surprise the results are good and I'm looking forward to watching programmes on BBC4 which seems almost designed for someone like me. The audio outputs will be useful for recording the digital radio stations too.
I suppose that this new structure at the head of the draughty new shopping mall is supposed to represent an Angel. It put me in mind more of a giant moth which for some reason has decided to pick up that litttle round building.
Thursday 3 April
I'm feeling a bit insecure. Nothing new there then. I wonder what the root of it is. My feelings of self worth and competence plummet at times. I have huge doubts about my ability to make the changes that need to be made in my life. Whatever they are.
Having said that, things will turn out as they will. With luck and good grace the outcomes will probably be at least tolerable. I have no particular reason to think that they will be anything other (except for the feelings around self worth etc...) Bugger.
Anyway I walked down to the Angel this morning and took some more pictures along the New River.
I think this is a young heron. If you think it's something else please let me know.
I had an interesting conversation with this cat. I told him that he was too friendly for his own good but I'm not sure he was paying attention to my lecture.
Wednesday 2 April
Positive spin on the Big Picture from Douglas Rushkoff (via the delightful Noosphere Blues).
********* Something that nearly slipped under the radar
In the first few days of the war it was widely reported that the US had a line of communication open to elements of the Iraqi leadership and there was talk of negotiation on various topics such as the removal of Saddam et famille to foreign parts.
Since then it has all gone very quiet. What happened? Do they still have these lines of communication to the military open?
*********** Tuesday 1 April
Some more photographs of the chapel at Oxborough and its surroundings.
******** Reporting of the war on the two 24 rolling news programmes available to me - Sky news and BBC news 24 is chaotic. They are reporting events 24 or even 36 hours old in the same breath as something an hour ago or even live. They have a current talking head on one side of the screen and some unrelated footage on the other side whilst garish "headlines" scroll remorselessly across the bottom of the screen. I start to feel nauseous after a few minutes exposure - guess the footage doesn't help much either.
******** PC Plus has two full programs on the cover disc this month. Paintshop Pro 5 and Extensis Portfolio 5 - the former for manipulating images and the latter for cataloguing them.
******* February's posts here are now available via the archive.
********* After a prolonged spell of sunny weather the rain has come sweeping down from the North today. Knowing it was forecast I went out for a stroll to the New River yesterday afternoon. Parts of the walk have a very magical look at the moment - somewhat like a Chinese grotto.
On the way back I saw this unusual car - a replica of a 1926 Bentley, undergoing some running repairs.
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