Monday, August 13, 2012
The algorithm that ruins the world
Well maybe it's not that, maybe it's the algorithm that runs the world, the world has, according to most religions already been ruined. So it was invented by Euclid, developed by Turing and Shor and everybody else and then let go to run wild in order to power inventory systems, banks, manufacturing, digital recording, rockets, 747s, Olympic Scoreboards and the tills at MacDonalds. Anyway it may be broken and so may be all of maths and geometry and as result at some point the world will just end, like that, with a whimper. (Sigh!).
The same can't be said for the Olympic Games. It overran and ended with a peculiarly bombastic celebration based on a focus group / committee's idea of what Britain used to be all about. Taxis were covered in copies of the News of the World, Mary Poppins walked dogs for a living, BMWs abounded and everybody hummed Beatles' tunes and spat on Rolling Stone's albums. You could tell more about modern Britain by the featured acts that didn't turn up or appeared on screens in grave spinning drag as flickering chanting ghosts. An interesting catalogue of weird juxtapositions and misunderstood or deliberately distorted songs; Kate Bush, John Lennon, Take That and a punk free generation worth of hypocrisy and cheese, all trotted out for a TV scoop and calibrated fireworks. At least the Pythons in the guise of Eric Idle had a brief spotlight reprise and a few moments of managed lunacy. None of it really matters of course because history is written by the planners and the victors and at the moment that's not the medal winners or the "inspired" and fickle public, it's the Conservative Party. It was a late night for a Sunday and the new working week but looking back I did enjoy most of the last sixteen days. Soon it'll be a distant memory.
Meanwhile it turns out that today's featured artiste, the divine Mr Ronnie McD (above) is a real person and there is only one of him operating in the UK. Now I'd have thought he'd be well fagged out and burgered somewhere in the Olympic Village or washing up at that world beating restaurant, a man has to do etc. But no, turns out he was visiting Dunfermline (but just for 60 minutes or so) and then onto some other drive-through or superstore. Apparently there's an algorithm that works out his magical McD venue appearances. It may of course be in the process of slowly running down just like the other bigger one.
Sunday, August 12, 2012
Aberdeen
The beach, Aberdeen, looking south and looking north. Up early today thanks to a wonderful two year old grandchild who has her own time clock running on it's own individual time pattern. So it's blueberries and Shredded Wheat and out for a walk. Healthy.
Saturday, August 11, 2012
Strathcaro pie and cake
Strathcaro Services: A non nuclear, unabandoned location that's a time paradox stuck in a time warp caught in a time slip and at junction between opposing parallel universes, so quite a normal place in which to find yourself on a Saturday morning in modern day Scotland. You don't go there for the food, the ambiance, the value for money or the clientele. You go for the uncomfortable experience and physical improbability of it all. So what of the coffee, the chicken and mushroom pie and the sponge cake? Indescribable and edible and bizarre and strangely tasty. **** = 4 Stars but I refuse to score the toilets under any circumstances. Of couse I'll be back.
Friday, August 10, 2012
Tesco: daily shoplifting journal
A old bloke (well a bit older than me) sitting by the exit in Tesco, he has a charity tin, a clip board and a rather glum expression on his face. "Men's cancer!" he says."No thanks!" Says I. (I got 99 problems but that's currently not one of them *).
* Editors Note: the people involved in this blog and the relentless stream of consciousness recording and pointless blethering that goes with it do on occasions contribute to minority and mainstream charities and are by no means rubbishing the efforts of the good people of wherever who tin rattle in such a self sacrificing way.
* Editors Note: the people involved in this blog and the relentless stream of consciousness recording and pointless blethering that goes with it do on occasions contribute to minority and mainstream charities and are by no means rubbishing the efforts of the good people of wherever who tin rattle in such a self sacrificing way.
A guitar in the sunny garden - a desperate attempt to retain some kind of musical linkage, credibility and content in this otherwise unfocused blog. |
Thursday, August 09, 2012
We plough the fields and scarper
It's harvest festival time and once again we celebrate the gathering in of the garden's booty with our drunken naked midnight dancing across various lawns, ponds and woodlands and thanking the wispy spirits of the fields and of course our old friend and deity the Great Pumpkin. These simple carrots offer up some evidence of this year's growing, encouraging and well manured triumphs, they are of course the dirty variety with lots of fine green shoots that reflect the current healthy UK economy and ongoing Olympic bubble. They can be eaten by anybody and they are not that bad at all, says I. In fact I'm sure they are good for the smooth running of the constitution and for other necessary but even more unseemly body parts to function. The remainder of the crop are still hidden in the soil, I'm hoping for even bigger things to come along in early September.
Wednesday, August 08, 2012
Takes a lot of effort to stay connected
A portrait of a third rate artist as a young man turned old prematurely but still fairly happy with his lot in life. |
Monday, August 06, 2012
Heartbreaker stringbreaker
Tommy: Almost from a safe distance. |
Yesterday, as below, entertained by the CBQ man and his good lady, box set received also c/w grilled sea bass. Yum.
In other irrelevant news our house was magically struck by a combination of the Wrath of God and lightning at 1800 tonight, that ended the prospect of two hours of the Simpsons. So all the lights, TV, computers, cookers etc. stopped. God had spoken and we listened. We ate lukewarm pasta for tea and repented in sack cloth and white wine. The power came back on at 2115, now I'm checking emails. I do love a good power surge, spike and the unkindest cut of all.
Sunday, August 05, 2012
Saturday, August 04, 2012
Cake and eat it
Even when you're old and cynical you
still get affected by things despite all the inner conflict and
conflicted denial you may feel. Most of our world here in the
relatively stable and affluent west is good and deserves
appreciation. It can't all be allowed to be polluted by the
politicians, corporate dogs, kill-joys and those in the know in the
media and the shadows. Kittens, puppies, sunny days, football
victories and breath taking views all should be celebrated, music,
light, life, babies and chocolate, music, nice motor cars and wine
and feeling light headed and wonderfully happy for no particular
reason. Enjoying the food or the TV you like without guilt or any
necessary explanation, liking what you like, loving who you love. I'm
actually enjoying bits of the Olympics, there's nothing at all wrong
with seeing people do well and vicariously sharing in and feasting on
that special moment that belongs to someone else but is on public
display. Pity the BBC can't quite strike a balance in their coverage
between hysteria and ordinary news reporting.
Thursday, August 02, 2012
Those three graces
1. Thank you for the world so sweet, thank you for the food we eat, thank you for the birds that sing, thank you Lord for everything.
2. Some hae meet and canna eat, some wad eat that want it, but we hae meet and we can eat, so let he Lord be thankit.
3. God is great and God is good and we thank Him for this food, by God's hand we must be fed so thank you for our daily bread.
Ariston v Indesit
OMO = On my own. |
So yesterday our faithful Ariston
failed after seven years of near criminal abuse centred around the
mysterious programme 4, whatever that was for. I visited Comet, home
of the good deal and special offer, none of which were in stock so it
was a gleaming Indesit (7kg capacity I was told by a bored assistant)
available for delivery between 0700 and 1200 this very Sunday, an
offer I could hardly resist at an extra £15. I fits our busy
schedule, apart from the sleeping in on Sunday part.
Tuesday, July 31, 2012
More holiday snaps
Monday, July 30, 2012
Holiday snaps
Useless and unwanted headphones strewn across a bus stop roof in Barcelona. |
Pan tiles and vines: Cote d' Azur. |
Serious but dead fish: the fish market, Mahon, Minorca. |
An image of a young Spanish god, rocks and sticks on a cliff in Ibiza. |
Car parked in the shade, the Zen Gardens of Nowhere, Ibiza. |
A spectral piece of Majorca viewed from the sea. |
Barcelona residents protest about noisy diesel engines running amok at peak times. |
The blue, blue sea, a distant Nice, a beautiful day in the South of France. What did you see and do on your holidays? |
Sunday, July 29, 2012
Some time in Terminal 5
Terminal 5 roof, detail. |
Once the flight is called you're photo is checked, then your papers and passport. If you pass you can fly, if you fail the machine stops and you are cast out...somewhere, perhaps they put you on a bus. I asked a few of the BA operators, MITIE staff and Border Control folks why these extra checks were in force, nobody answered, nobody quite knows, they just do what they are told it seems, eyes like saucers. A glitch in the great system then halts our plane's boarding, nobody explains, they stand, we all stand, nobody says anything, we stay in line. When you ask why you get no answer, just a nod to move on. So why bother with new passports, their chips and codes and images, why bother with on-line checks and bar codes? We think we are British and can prove it but Britain or BA or BAA, whoever they are, isn't so sure.
Thursday, July 19, 2012
Thank you sir!
It's great when the shared wisdom of the internet is available to the common, perplexed and stressed man when he requires something inspirational to draw upon for his guidance in the ways of primitive arts and secrets. There is no god, no science, no law, nothing out there. In fact there is only...whatever you call it.
Arrested Development
Oops, poor lady, I hope it wasn't her first tattoo, you have to admire her for going public with this. |
I lifted this (lazily) from the Daily Telegraph Pole and I'm no great fan of Starkey but I am a great fan of history and the occasional rare burst of common sense:
There are two arguments in David Starkey’s new series The Churchills. The first is that for Winston Churchill it was the process of writingMarlborough: his Life and Times in the early Thirties, a million-word megalith about his great ancestor John Churchill, first Duke of Marlborough, that transformed Winston into the masterful statesman we know. Churchill, Starkey maintains, was immersing himself in a story which in so many ways would anticipate his own: Marlborough, in his wars against Louis XVI and then in the Wars of the Spanish Succession, was fighting a power, France, whose parallels with the growing Nazi Germany Churchill couldn’t fail to acknowledge.
“France was a profoundly militarised power which expressed itself not only by warfare and foreign expansion but also in terms of its aspirations as a hegemonic culture; and also massive internal persecution of a minority – the Huguenots. When you read Churchill’s account of this you think, ‘Is he talking about Louis XVI… or about Hitler?’”
That would be a perfectly juicy thesis, enough certainly to sustain a series. But Starkey is an intellectual unable to resist stirring the pot as much as a toddler in wellies can resist a placid puddle. And so to argument B: The Churchills is about more than just Winston and his 18th-century ancestor. “The series has a not very well concealed propagandistic role on the importance of history – and the catastrophe that no modern politician has this kind of background,” Starkey says.
His point is that it was Churchill’s absorption in history that made him great. And though he says that the timing of The Churchills is accidental, he sees worrying similarities between now and the Thirties.
“I think there is a real sense now that we genuinely don’t know where we are, or what we are or where we’re going. We’ve lost confidence in our leaders in exactly the same way as happened in the Thirties. There’s a sense of some huge indefinable threat which is both from abroad and within our societies.”
The problem, he says, is that our politicians lack the historical perspective to assess the situation and then act accordingly.
“Arguably since the Twenties, but certainly since the Second World War, we’ve tended to try to understand the world through the so-called social sciences. It seems to me, for example, that the 2008 crash was the moment at which we realised that we don’t actually understand economics any more than a bean counter. Mervyn [King] was my colleague at LSE and he’s a deeply nice man. He’s one of the world’s top two or three academic economists. And he has no idea what he’s doing.”
It isn’t just King, or economists in general, that Starkey feels have failed. “It seems to me the same is true with the management of our social policy, the health service… infinite academic resources have been devoted to the so-called social sciences. It’s obvious we have no understanding of how they work at all. I think the so-called social sciences frankly are mumbo jumbo. If you want to begin to understand the strangeness, the patterns – in so far as there are patterns – of human behaviour then there’s only one way of doing it. That’s by looking at what human beings have done before. And if you do it systematically it’s called history.”
Wednesday, July 18, 2012
The Great Scottish Summer
Actual Greggs steak bake and actual simulated coffee. |
Baby Swifts in the coal cellar, either asleep or awake, I'm not sure. |
Seen in Perthshire, nicely overgrown and possibly in the wrong place. |
So after all the transport and traffic delays and strange dank, putrid water lying in pools across the roads and housing schemes I wished, for once, I wasn't here. Please tourists, explorers and aliens, don't bother coming to Scotland (stay in London and soak up the Olympics) everything is truly shite up here these days.
Tuesday, July 17, 2012
Perthshire Rambler
Every so often you come across a tree that has a chain wrapped around it's trunk. Why does this happen? I don't really know but that's just some of the Perthshire magic that you may or may not come across as you wander through the Perthshire wilderness. Go wild in the country if you will.
Monday, July 16, 2012
Banned by the Brand Police
Olympics organisers have warned businesses that during London 2012 their advertising should not include a list of banned words, including "gold", "silver" and "bronze", "summer", "sponsors" and "London". Publicans have been advised that blackboards advertising live TV coverage must not refer to beer brands or brewers without an Olympics deal, while caterers and restaurateurs have been told not to advertise dishes that could be construed as having an association with the event. At the 40 Olympics venues, 800 retailers have been banned from serving chips to avoid infringing fast-food rights secured by McDonald's.Watch out then all you small businesses, gangsters and ordinary people.
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