Geoff Coupe's Blog

Reflections on life at “De Witte Wand”…

Year: 2005

  • Platform For Change

    Chris Clarke over at Creek Running North reminds us that there are a number of anniversaries associated with September 11. In 1973, September 11 marked the day that President Salvador Allende of Chile was overthrown in a coup backed by the US. Clarke writes movingly in his post of the last days of Victor Jara.
     
    Having read that post, I happened to look up at the bookshelves above my computer monitor, and there in sight is a copy of Platform for Change – a book by the cyberneticist Stafford Beer published in 1975. Beer was invited by Allende to implement his ideas on operational research and cybernetics into a real-time computerised system – Cybersyn – to run the Chilean economy. The coup, led by Pinochet, dismantled the system, "disappeared" 3,000 Chileans and imprisoned and tortured 27,000 more.
     
    Stafford Beer ends his book with an ironic comment on a lecture he gave in February 1973 on the Chilean experiment. He repeats unchanged, apart from the typographic layout on the page, a quotation from that lecture given seven months before the coup:
    It appears to me that the government did not
    anticipate the full vindictiveness with which
    the rich world would react to its actions,
    which I emphasize have – so far – been
    perfectly legal.
     
    At any rate, a true resolution of the very
    potent conflicts in Chilean society is not
    discernible within the mounting instability,
    and may be long postponed.
     
    But I consider that this is largely a phenomenon
    of the cybernetics of international power :
    you could say that the Chilean people have not
    been given a chance.
     
    They are being systematically isolated behind
    those beautiful Andes mountains, and are in a
    state of siege.

  • Am I Real?

    Jason Striegel is a blogger. He’s recently come to the conclusion that in this wired world, he’s unable to convince some people that he’s a human being. The Turing Test as seen through the Looking Glass, perhaps?

  • Brave New World – Same Old Crap

    The Guardian has launched its new look today, complete with thrusting new articles to boldly go where the Grauniad has never gone before. Unfortunately, one of these articles is a woeful interview with Michael Behe, the guru of Intelligent Design. The interviewer, John Sutherland, clearly either hasn’t a clue that ID is tosh, or willingly pats easy questions to Behe and sits back while Behe spouts disinformation or lies.
     
    Thankfully, PZ Myers is on hand to shine the torch of truth into the depressingly dank holes of this interview.
     
    Note to Guardian: do try and keep up…

  • Surely You Jest?

    The news comes that Oxford Brookes University is planning to bestow an honorary degree on Jeremy Clarkson for his "contribution to learning and society". This strikes me as new definitions of the words "learning" and "society" that I have not heard before. The man’s a loudmouthed buffoon, surely?

  • Compare, Contrast, Discuss.

    Professor Simon Schama, writing in today’s Guardian, ably outlines why we should not be conflating 9/11 with Katrina. Go and read it.

  • Flushed With Success

    A slightly scary story in today’s Guardian about a man in Cannes who got swept into the city’s sewerage system by a downpour of rain. He was flushed through the system for more than a mile before being spat out at the outfall on the beach. I trust that rainwater was the only thing coursing through this particular part of the system…

  • World Naked Gardening Day

    Dammit – I missed it – it was yesterday! Well, I don’t think the neighbours would have been too impressed had I entered into the spirit of it, anyway.
     
    (hat tip to Orac)

  • Plus ça Change…

    … c’est la même chose.
     
    I grew up in the days of the Little Red Schoolbook – a book originating in Denmark that gave sensible and straightforward advice to teenagers on sex and growing up.  It was roundly castigated when published in English in the 1970s by do-gooders, Bowdlerisers and religious conservatives in the UK, and finally legally suppressed. In America, history is repeating itself 35 years later…

  • Mole Crickets

    And talking about Moles, our neighbour this morning said that he had another infestation of Mole Crickets in his garden. This could be bad news if the little buggers tunnel through to our garden as well.
     
    The last time they did that was back in 2000. I had noticed that the lawn was starting to show bald patches, which I found surprising, because it didn’t get that much wear and tear. Then, one day, I noticed something moving in the grass. Grabbing a jam jar, I trapped it. Holding it up for inspection, it turned out to be a large (8 cm) insect of some kind, which I had never seen before.
     
    Looking it up in the section on pests in my gardening encyclopaedia drew a blank, so I took the jar and its contents off to the local garden centre for identification. Oh, said the man, it’s a “veenmol”. Having established that he knew what it was, I asked for something that would exterminate the beasts (having a suspicion that the damage to my lawn was more than could be accomplished by a single specimen). He then did that thing that I have come to dread in any interaction with a tradesman – he sucked his teeth. It’s a sound that usually translates to delay and/or serious expense. Ah, he explained, we used to have poison for it, but the manufacturers have taken it off the market, and anyway they’re difficult to get rid of. Upon seeing the rolling of my eyes, he did offer to check if another garden centre in Gouda had any of the necessary material. Yes, I said, anything to prevent the lawn from becoming Yul Brynner. Luckily, a telephone call established that the garden centre on the other side of town had some remaining stocks, so off I cycled and snapped up the last three packs of poison in the known universe.
     
    I sprinkled the pellets on the lawn, and then followed a gruesome week of veenmol hunting with my jam jar. Every day would reveal more of the damn things surfacing on to the lawn in mortal agony (die, damn you, die! – an apposite quote from Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd, I kept thinking, as I would find another one and pop it into the swiftly filling jar).
     
    Curious to know what veenmol was in English, I consulted the dictionary, and found it meant “mole cricket”. I went onto the Internet to look for “mole cricket” on the Web, and was rewarded by a number of sites explaining that these rare, and delightful, creatures were a protected species in the UK. Ha!, not in my garden, they’re not, I thought grimly, sprinkling my pellets, and humming Tom Lehrer’s “Poisoning Pigeons in the Park”.
     
    That time I managed to get rid of them, but it sounds now as though They’re Baacckk! I shall be keeping a careful eye on the lawn in the next few weeks…

  • Moles

    Today’s public health service announcement comes to you courtesy of Tom Reynolds’ Random Acts of Reality blog. Learn to check your moles. You may be glad you did.

  • Last Night of the Proms

    The annual series of classical music concerts held during the summer months in London’s Royal Albert Hall has become a Britiish institution. The Promenade Concerts – now known simply as The Proms – have been running for 110 years. What has also become an institution is the Last Night of the Proms, where the second half of the concert always includes the same three pieces: Elgar’s Pomp and Circumstance march, Henry Wood’s Fantasia on British Sea Songs and Parry’s Jerusalem. The concert is invariably broadcast on BBC TV, and I invariably watch it.
     
    I have to say though, that I am getting increasingly disenchanted by the trio of pieces that concludes the concert. Not because they aren’t good music – they are – but because the atmosphere in which they are received comes across to me as jingoistic little englander nationalism of a particularly creepy kind. A point taken up by Anthony Holden’s review of the last few concerts in today’s Observer.
     
    That feeling was hammered home again to me while watching last night’s performance. And what I thought was especially interesting was the audience in the Royal Albert Hall – that sea of thousands of faces: they were overwhelmingly white. Where were the black or the brown faces? I did not see any, and believe me, I was looking. I did see a very few Chinese or Japanese faces in the audience, but surely the enjoyment of classical music is not confined to the British white middle classes?
     
    When I lived in London, I went to quite a few Proms – including one Last Night. And yes, I waved and shouted and sang along with everybody else, and perhaps it is just a bit of fun – that is how I viewed it at the time anyway. But that season, I was also in the audience for the concert on the night before the Last Night – and at that time, there was also something of a tradition to include Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony as the finale. And that, to me, was something far better – the Ode to Joy  filled my soul and made it one of the great musical experiences of my life. These days, Pomp and Circumstance and Jerusalem come with too much baggage for me to be able listen to them without prejudice.

  • All Things Must Pass…

    …even, apparently, that favourite little diversion of mine, The Guardian’s Pass Notes column. Bloody typical, The Guardian wants to reinvent itself in a new format next week, so it ditches one of the few things that I could rely on to lighten my day. No place for a little levity in their trendy middle class cappuccino-quaffing excuse for a serious newspaper any more. Damn them. See, I am turning into Victor Meldrew.

  • Pastafarians Proliferate

    What started as a parody in June this year has become something of a phenomenon. I’m talking about Flying Spaghetti Monsterism: the belief that the universe was created by an invisible and undetectable Flying Spaghetti Monster. Followers of this creed are called Pastafarians, and they seem to be popping up everywhere.
     
    I particularly like their argument that the increase in Global Warming is directly related to the decrease in the number of pirates since the 1800s. Makes perfect sense.

  • The Pushmepullyou Car

    Our car (that’s English for automobile) is too old to have one of these new-fangled electronic key thingies. However, reading about this interesting design quirk by Mercedes, I’m not in any hurry to upgrade.

  • The NYT on Mr. Wainwright

    The New York Times has a story about the influence of opera on Rufus Wainwright. It’s quite interesting, and throws up a couple of good images – such as the music war played between Wainwright and his mother – she contending that "poor people’s music" (jazz, the Blues) was "real music" – and him replying with Verdi.
     
    But what also struck me about the piece was that way that the author (Anthony Tommasini) consistently referred to Rufus Wainwright as "Mr. Wainwright". Strange how that seems prissy and old-fashioned in today’s journalism.

  • Mirrormask

    I see that the film Mirrormask is about to go on release. Story by Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean (who stamps his visual style on the film, as well as directing it), with work from Jim Henson’s company, this promises a lot. Early reviews on IMDb are positive (with a couple of dissenting opinions).
     
    I bought the book "The Wolves in the Walls" for my young great-nephew a couple of Christmases ago. That was the result of an earlier collaboration of Gaiman and McKean. Andy and I both love the book, so I’m curious to see how their very distinctive style will translate into the medium of movies.

  • Decivilisation

    A pessimistic column from Timothy Garton Ash, writing in today’s Guardian. His thesis is that the veneer of civilisation that we human animals possess is thinner than we think. While recent events in New Orleans may have been the catalyst to his thoughts, recent history has provided plenty of other examples as evidence. He worries that, as we move further into the 21st century, the pressure on the veneer will increase, not decrease. I can’t help feeling that he’s right. As the old saw has it: a pessimist is an optimist who is in full possession of the facts.

  • The Swizz of the Cards

    Courtesy of Boing Boing (once again), here’s a political cartoon taking the mickey out of the UK government’s touching belief that ID cards will actually work…

  • Beautiful Mutants

    Courtesy of Boing Boing comes this pointer to Beautiful Mutants, vintage photographs, digitally manipulated. Some disturbingly eerie images here.

  • The Dutch Tartan

    Courtesy of Steeph’s Blog, I learn that the Dutch now have their very own Tartan. I think we can blame Sir Walter Scott for the success of this meme. I’ve never actually had occasion to wear a kilt – although I think I could be tempted to wear one of these. I have, however, been known to sport a sarong in the days of my youth.