This sounds like something dreamed up by Gilbert & Sullivan’s Mikado (A More Humane Mikado…). Some amputees have not so much a phantom limb as a phantom John Thomas… which stands to attention… Life is so unfair.
Year: 2007
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I Can’t Wait…
…For Tim Burton’s upcoming version of Stephen Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd. Apparently, the executives at Warner Bros are a tad upset at the amount of gore that Burton sloshes around – but damnit, that’s the whole point of Sweeney Todd. Mumpsimus has more. Like him, I can’t wait to see if Burton delivers. The actors are good, no, the actors are great (Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham Carter, Alan Rickman and Timothy Spall amongst others) but Sweeney is an Opera, and it requires singing… -
Corncrakes
In the past week, I’ve had two sightings of a pair of birds. The first time, I saw them strolling through the garden, bold as brass, looking for insects, and then yesterday I saw them in the adjoining potato field. At first I took to be partridges, but now I believe them to be corncrakes. The colouring wasn’t right for partridges, and they had the long necks characteristic of corncrakes. Needless to say, my camera wasn’t to hand on either occasion, so I can’t provide visual evidence. I also haven’t yet heard their eponymous, and distinctive, "Crex crex" call. I’ll have to go out early one morning with a metal comb and a pencil to imitate it, and see if I can lure them in… -
Hello
I notice that the last entry I wrote on the blog was on the 28th. This is just a note to say that I’m still here, but that things are a trifle busy. Nothing untoward, but I also need to wait for my muse to return. In the meantime, here’s an image that resonates with me.
It’s a dead shrew that I found on the path through the woods that I take when walking the dog. Shrews have a short and hectic life in comparison to our own. I wonder what it felt in the brief interlude between being here and not here. I also wonder what my summary will be for my own brief sojurn in the light. -
Computer Workstation Ergonomics
Jeff Atwood, over at Coding Horror, has a useful summary of best practice when it comes to computer workstation ergonomics. I have to admit, I don’t have the same position as the drawings show – I’m hunched over the keyboard staring closely into the screens. I know it’s bad for me, but up to now, I’ve been too lazy to do anything about it. First thing to do is to raise the screens a little more – that’ll be another couple of packs of A4 paper stuffed under the monitors, then… -
Geek Humour
While it’s clearly a joke, the phrases uttered by the "designers" of this world-shattering piece of software are terrifyingly like the sort of crap marketing-speak that I’ve come to know and loathe.Nicely done. -
Drains
Geoff Manaugh, over at BLDGBLOG, has an interview with Michael Cook about drains illustrated with some spectacular photographs. Do go and read it and enjoy the view. -
Eight Random Facts
I’ve been tagged by one of the memes currently doing the rounds of the Blogosphere. The vessel by which the meme reached me is J. Carter Wood, over at Obscene Desserts. The meme challenges me to name eight random facts about myself, and then in turn tag another eight victims. Oh dear, the potential for the pretentious/boring index to reach new heights is dangerously high. Well, here goes:
- I despair about saying anything of interest when I realise that a Google search on the phrase "eight random facts" produces 123,000 hits.
- I still carry a faint scar that is now all but hidden in my left eyebrow. It’s the result of being hit and being tossed into the air by a car when I was about four or five. A lorry driver had stopped to let me cross the road, and a rather impatient motorist behind him decided he would pull out and overtake at speed to show his contempt for the lorry driver. Metal met flesh, which subsequently met asphalt face down. For years afterwards, I had nightmares of cars trying to run me over. I would hide in the dark shadows of alleyways, as the cars purred hungrily past, and would occasionally glimpse the sight of a lorry that carried an industrial sized meat grinder that was spitting out blood-drenched human bones. I was a somewhat over-imaginative child.
- One of my prized books is the facsimile fourth edition (published in 1972) of Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur, illustrated by Aubrey Beardsley. In 1972, I was living in Blandford Forum, which had a tiny bookshop run by a pair of little old ladies. I saw the book there and fell in love with it. It was priced at £12 (€18 or $24) – an impossibly huge sum for me at the time. In today’s money, that translates to between £106 and £230, depending on the indices used. I would go in there every Saturday for weeks and gaze longingly at the book. Finally, I succumbed and handed over my hard-earned cash. The little old ladies were pleased for me as well – one of them clapped her hands in delight; not because she had sold the book, but because she knew that it would be treasured.
- Le Morte d’Arthur is the book I am holding in this portrait of ourselves painted by Mary Grooteman.
- After leaving my parents, I have lived in a dozen places that I called home. Perhaps the most unusual was the caretaker’s flat in a disused hospital in London, which I inhabited for a short time with my then boyfriend during the late 1970s. I was into my roller-skating craze at the time, and we used to practise skating through the dimly-lit corridors.
- During my time with Shell, business trips harvested a total of 45 KLM houses (they are given to passengers who fly intercontinental First or Business Class flights). They now sit on top of the bookcase in the study.
- Now that I’m retired, people keep asking why I am not travelling the world. I point to the 45 KLM houses on top of the bookcase and say that I am now more than content just to potter in our garden or cycle in our area. I feel that I am just as much on vacation, and with a smaller carbon footprint to boot.
- I once had to take part in a team building exercise at work where we each had to make three statements about ourselves. Two were to be true and one was to be false, and much team-building, and of course, fun (because where would we be without fun?) was supposed to occur over the discussions about which were true and which were false. My three statements?
- "I’ve made love to a woman".
- "I’ve made love to a man".
- "I’ve had my tonsils taken out".
Dear me, but it took a while before number three was identified as the false statement…
I have failed to find a further eight victims to pass on this meme to. Those who spring to mind have already done it. So think of this of a bonus random fact – I make it a habit to break chains…
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Real India and Gated Villas
A news story with Ballardian overtones in today’s Observer about members of India’s professional class protesting over the fact that the dust, heat and squalor of India is seeping into their gated communities. Some typically Ballardian motifs are on display: the empty swimming pool, residents taking militant action; life is imitating art. Some unconscious irony as well:‘Many of the people who live here work for the finest international companies in the world. We will not be held to ransom by unscrupulous builders. This was supposed to be a luxury condominium, not a government building. We paid a lot to live here,’ he said.As you can see, I have a weakness for schadenfreude. -
The Power of Machines
Dan Dennett has a typically thought-provoking article in Technology Review looking at chess playing machines. One of the machines is IBM’s Deep Blue; the other machine has trillions of moving parts at the molecular level – the brain of Garry Kasparov. Dennett’s argument is that, so far as chess-playing is concerned, the substrates may be very different, but the outcomes of the mechanisms have more in common that many people would like to think. It’s quite amusing how some people want to move the goalposts in order to preserve mystery.(hat tip to Mind Hacks once again) -
Out-of-Body Experiences
Vaughan, over at Mind Hacks, points us towards some experiments aimed at either inducing the sensation of being located out of one’s body or having one’s body image extended to incorporate inanimate objects. I’ve tried the Ramachandran experiment, and can attest to the fact that it is a weird sensation indeed.I also recall one time, when very young, of opening my eyes while lying in bed only to discover that I appeared to be floating a few inches from the ceiling. Turning round I momentarily saw my body below me on the bed before "falling" back into my body. Was it a dream? I don’t know, but it was both scary and interesting at the same time. I wanted for it to happen again, but it never has. -
The Dead of Night
The Guardian has published an edited extract from a book called The Family That Couldn’t Sleep – A Venetian Medical Mystery, written by DT Max. Simultaneously fascinating and horrifying, it’s well worth reading. Oh, and the Guardian‘s links to the second part of the extract are currently broken, you’ll find it here.The thing that I find the most troublesome is that the disease – Fatal Familial Insomia (FFI) – is apparently passed on to 50% of the children of a person carrying FFI. The disease strikes and kills the carrier after child-bearing years. So, my question is this, would I be prepared to father a child knowing that there was a 50% chance that he or she would die no later than in their mid-fifties in a most horrifying fashion? I honestly think that I would prefer to adopt. I really don’t think the bloodline is that important. -
The Political Compass
Where do you fall on the Political Compass? It seems as though (with an Economic Left/Right score of -6.50 and a Social Libertarian/Authoritarian score of -7.49) I’m closer to Nelson Mandela and the Dalai Lama than I am to Tony Blair and Dubya. Not totally unexpected, then. -
Be Careful Out There
Job seekers using the Monster.com online service have been targeted by a particularly vicious trojan. I expect that variations will shortly follow. Be careful about that odd email inviting you to download a toolbar extension for your web browser… -
The Amazing Randi
The very wonderful and Canadian National Treasure known as James Randi recently paid a visit to Google HQ where his stream of consciousness was videoed. -
Science and the Islamic World
That’s the main title of an excellent article, written by Pervez Amirali Hoodbhoy, in Physics Today. He is chair and professor in the department of physics at Quaid-i-Azam University in Islamabad, Pakistan, where he has taught for 34 years, and he makes some telling points in his article. Go and read it. -
Darwin Award Entrant
Here’s a story about a teenager who is clearly aiming to get a Darwin Award. I find it slightly worrying that he was as old as fourteen. I had learned by the time I was seven that it was not a good idea to mess with electricity. I discovered that I shouldn’t check to see if a light bulb had burned out by removing it from the socket and then sticking in my fingers to see if the electricity was still on. It was. -
A Question of Identity
That’s the title of a fascinating article, written by Bob Harrison, about what makes a person. I see that he refers to the book Reasons and Persons by the philosopher Derek Parfit. It just so happens that I have that book sitting in my "to be read" pile. I got it through a reference to one of Parfit’s "thought experiments" mentioned in Douglas Hofstadter’s excellent I Am A Strange Loop. I think I’m going to have to raise the priority of Parfit’s book in the pile…(hat tip to Mind Hacks for the article link)
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