Geoff Coupe's Blog

Reflections on life at “De Witte Wand”…

  • Whose Culture Is It Anyway?

    Once again, Toxoplasma gondii is back in the news. Carl Zimmer, over at the Loom, continues to be fascinated by this organism and draws our attention to some new research. This seems to suggest that Toxoplasma is capable of modifying human behaviour to the extent that the influences can be seen in human cultures.
     
    I find the implications of this fascinating, and was particularly struck by some of the comments on Zimmer’s post, to whit, what is my mind’s "I" anyway? Is it not simply the collection of my (brain) cells and the chemicals produced by both them and any parasites and bacteria that I am currently playing host to…
     
     

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  • Disrespectful To Dead Eels

    The traditional game of Conger Cuddling at Lyme Regis is no longer going to use a dead conger (a type of eel). Animal Rights activists have claimed it would be disrespectful to the dead eel. Spare me, don’t these folk have anything better to complain about?

    One response to “Disrespectful To Dead Eels”

    1. Gelert Avatar
      Gelert

      I saw this Geoff, and I knew just what you’d say!! I was rather glad the poor eels were spared this further indignity!

      Reply

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  • Stiff

    I’ve just finished reading Stiff, by Mary Roach. It’s a delightful book (no, really), all about human cadavers. Roach writes with a wry wit, possibly in part as a way to cope with the subject matter at hand, but she does it very well. She opens her book with a bang, describing the scene of forty heads (each "about the same size and weight as a roaster chicken") sitting in individual roasting pans awaiting their turn to be practiced on by plastic surgeons attending a facial anatomy and face lift refresher course. Subsequent chapters are devoted to cheery topics such as body-snatching, human decay, crash test dummies, crucifixion experiments, head transplants, cannibalism and such like.
     
    One chapter gives the back story of the work of Susanne Wiigh-Masak, who is turning dead bodies into compost (and good luck to her, I say; it seems an eminently practical thing to do). When Roach met her, Wiigh-Masak was still trying to get her ideas accepted, but as I reported last year, it does seem as though she has now won over the parish administrators of Jönköping.
     
    In the pages of Roach’s book, we meet not just sensible people and dedicated professionals, but also (in Roach’s words) a number of wacks. Somewhat unsurprisingly, one of them (a Dr. Pierre Barbet) was devoted to proving the authenticity of the Shroud of Turin. This involved crucifying dead people and he spent many happy hours banging in the nails. 
     
    I was also delighted to see the appearance in Stiff of another "wack" – the simply wonderful, and completely barking, General Albert N Stubblebine III. Roach can’t resist retelling the story of one of General Stubblebine’s experiments in remote viewing, and who could blame her. For more on the General, and his colleagues in one of the wilder shores of the US Army, I thoroughly recommend Jon Ronson’s The Men Who Stare At Goats. Ronson opens his book by describing the true story of the scene where General Stubblebine believes that he can go to the office next door by simply walking through the wall. Yep, you read that correctly. Ronson’s book is by turns both hilarious and chilling, and its pages are liberally sprinkled by a cast of characters who are either deluded or certifiably insane. The really bothersome part is that Ronson’s book is ostensibly not a work of fiction. These people are real.
     
    So there you go, two book recommendations for the price of one. Both are excellent.

    2 responses to “Stiff”

    1. Claire Avatar
      Claire

      Claire
       
      Hi Geoff,
      I’m so glad that Gelert steered me your way. You have a very good sense of humor! I work with a lady who teaches surgical lab procedures to doctors. She is brilliant and not the least bit squeemish, so she has stories to tell. I’m a chicken when it comes to blood and guts and suffering so I could never go into the medical field, but I do admire those who choose such professions for they at least attempt to alleviate disease and suffering. I agree some are a little kooky or eccentric. In general, they’re brainy and their hearts are in the right place. I loved your book reviews and I will tell my friend about the books.
      Take care.
       
      http://media-lapdog.blogspot.com

      Reply
    2. Geoff Avatar
      Geoff

      Hi Claire,
       
      Glad you liked the blog! Hope that your friend enjoys Stiff – I’m sure she will. One book that she might also enjoy is Mutants, by Armand Marie Leroi. I confess that I’ve had it in my library for over a year, but I still haven’t got around to reading it. I’ll save it for the long winter evenings…

      Reply

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  • The Burton Repertory Company

    I got around to seeing Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride tonight – and thought it was brilliant. In these days of CGI, it is wonderful to see how good stop motion animation can be, when it is carried out at the very highest levels. Corpse Bride, like the best works from the Aardman stable, is filled with an unstoppable inventiveness that makes the puppets more alive than many live action films. The film is filled with visual and verbal jokes on all levels (the second hand shop, with the second hands pointing the way in which the fugitive Victor has fled, for example)
     
    What also struck me is how Burton increasingly seems to be the manager of his very own repertory company – he uses the same actors time and again in his films: Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham-Carter, Christopher Lee, Albert Finney, Michael Gough, and, doing the music, Danny Elfman.
     
    Whilst Elfman’s music is immediately recognisable (and in Corpse Bride, has clear echoes with his Edward Scissorhands and The Nightmare Before Christmas), there were moments of pure Gilbert and Sullivan or Cab Calloway coming through in this score. In several places, the music took centre stage to advance or to illuminate the plot (for example, According to Plan or Bojangles’ Song), and animated film became operetta.
     
    There were also some new additions to the repertory company, who I hope will make reappearances in future Burton films: Joanna Lumley, Paul Whitehouse and Jane Horrocks.
     
    All told, Corpse Bride is simply wonderful.
     
    Oh, and as an aside, it was interesting to see Burton and Bonham-Carter, who are, apparently, an item, sporting the same birds-nest hairdos…

    2 responses to “The Burton Repertory Company”

    1. Gelert Avatar
      Gelert

      Geoff – would you mind if I featured you in my blog? I love coming here and reading your posts and think lots of other peeps would to. Anyway, I wanted to flag you as being worth visiting, but if you’d rather not, let me know.

      Reply
    2. Geoff Avatar
      Geoff

      Gelert, flattered that you think the blog is worthy of flagging. Not a problem as far as I’m concerned… Thanks

      Reply

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  • Don’t Lose Your Head

    I’m somewhat disappointed to learn that the female praying mantis does not always bite off the head of her mate during the sex act. Apparently, it’s much more likely to happen in the laboratory, where the sights and sounds (of anxious observers?) can make the female become more aggressive.
     
    Coturnix, over at his imaginatively-named Blog Around The Clock (he specialises in chronobiology), has more information about what the male praying mantis should know before he goes a-wooing…

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  • Clarifying the Big Bang

    The Angry Astronomer (Jon Voisey) has a useful post over at his blog that addresses some of the misconceptions that people have about the Big Bang. For example, despite the name, it was not an explosion – it was an expansion of space… It’s worth a read.

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  • Photosynth

    Microsoft Live Labs has some news about their Photosynth project. It will be shown at Siggraph next week. Meanwhile there are a couple of videos on their web site. An Overview and a Demo – this latter video is the more interesting one, as you get to see something of what the system can do.
     
    And may I just say, as a grumpy old man, that whoever was responsible for the making of these videos should be taken out, put against a wall and shot. There is nothing that gets up my nose more than videos with lots of insane jumpcuts, weird angles and DEAFENING, IRRELEVANT BACKGROUND MUSIC. I blame MTV for the death of narrative cinema* as we know it.
     
    *With thanks to Mark Kermode, despite his reported cynicism about evolution.

    Addendum: And of course Microsoft has now scrapped the Photosynth product and technology, so none of these links work anymore. It’s dead, Jim.

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  • The Forbidden Corner

    My brother is just back from a trip to Yorkshire and recommends a visit to The Forbidden Corner in Middleham. Apparently it’s a series of architectural follies created in a four-acre garden by a Colin Armstrong who was once the honorary British consul in Ecuador. It sounds intriguing, just the sort of thing that would appeal to me.

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  • The Silly Season Has Begun

    Margot has discovered that the Silly Season has begun in the media. Sometimes I wonder whether it ever went away…

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  • A Hairy Tale of Soy Sauce

     
    I’m intrigued to see that the original paper (published in the online Internet Journal of Toxicology) is by Alexander Tse-Yan Lee of the Queers Network Research in Hong Kong. Alexander is clearly on a mission to alert us to the dangers of what we eat, and seems to have plenty of source material to research. Some of his other papers include The Foods From Hell, Vegetable Borne Poisoning, Deadly Cooking Oil and Faked Eggs.

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  • Rita Gets Another Award…

    I missed this when it was announced, but the latest issue of the Gay Krant (the Dutch gay magazine) draws my attention to the fact that the Lovely Rita Verdonk was awarded a place of honour in the Hall of Shame by the Human Rights Watch in May.
     
    Rita can now add this citation to the Big Brother award she picked up in January.
     
    Rita Verdonk was summarised well by Job Cohen, the mayor of Amsterdam, who said of Verdonk, “The position of Minister for Integration needs to be filled by someone with a cool head and a warm heart. Unfortunately Rita Verdonk has a hot head and a cold heart and has done nothing but exacerbate the growing divide between immigrants and the rest of the Dutch society.”
     
    (hat tip to Mike Tidmus for the Cohen quote)
     

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  • That’ll Do Nicely

    Mike, over at Coffee Corner, draws my attention to the fact that the makers of Monopoly are planning to replace the paper cash in the game with credit cards. He does some nice riffs on similar implications for other games.
     
    And as a result, I learn that the good old British game of Snakes and Ladders is apparently called Chutes and Ladders in America. I wonder why Milton Bradley substituted chutes for snakes?

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  • Spin and Deliver

    Sometimes, there are good reasons why inventions stay on the drawing board.

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  • Art Foretells Reality

    Last night, BBC Four showed a couple of programs devoted to the life and work of Terry Gilliam. First up was an interview with Gilliam by Mark Lawson, which was interesting in itself. But for me, the real revelation came with the showing of Gilliam’s masterpiece Brazil that followed the interview.
     
    Of course, I’ve seen Brazil before; several times, in fact. But this was the first time that I’d seen it in many years. Post 9/11 and 7/7, the film has taken on many resonances that simply did not exist for me in the early years. I was struck by the parallels between the political landscape of the film (unseen terrorists versus the state and its propaganda machine) and today’s world. It was, I have to say, a much more uncomfortable experience for me than when I had previously seen the film.
     
    I’m not the only person to feel this way, it appears. Check out this essay from Robert Blumen. While Blumen naturally views Brazil through the lens of being American, I can report a similar frisson as a Brit, viewing the recent history of Blair’s Britain. It makes for uncomfortable thoughts of where we are and where we are going.

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  • What Grandmas Are For

    I’m currently reading William H. Calvin’s A Brief History of the Mind. Calvin writes really well, and puts together an absorbing and convincing story of how the human mind has developed. While he traces the development of the human species, starting about 7 million years ago when hominids shared a common ancestor with chimpanzees and bonobos, it appears that the evidence for the modern mind only appears as little as 50,000 years ago. And that’s even though Homo sapiens has been around for at least 100,000 years.
     
    So something caused (in Calvin’s phrase) "the mind’s big bang" to occur around 50,000 years ago. He posits a number of candidates for the trigger, for example, the use of the structured planning that is necessary to throw things accurately being applied in other modalities and time scales. He also argues that "if children are exposed to structured stuff can softwire their brains to better handle it, and if the younger they are exposed, the better they do as adults, then the more precocious children will soon double the amount of structured speech heard by the next generation of youngsters… So the transition might be language, acting like a contagious disease over a few generations’ time."
     
    This is EvoDevo, when evolution interacts with the development via the einviroment. Today, I ran across an interesting article in Seed magazine: Why Do Grandmas Exist? This points out that the menopause is something that is unique to the female Homo sapiens – none of the other primates have this. Other primate females are capable of becoming pregnant until they die. So the menopause might also be one of the triggers of the big bang: females who are no longer capable of child bearing have more time to babysit or to forage for food. And the babysitting might help the children be "exposed to structured stuff".
     
    Food for thought.

    2 responses to “What Grandmas Are For”

    1. Gelert Avatar
      Gelert

      Coming here always sends me off on your links and further reading on the fascinating topics you put up. This is another one. I love the idea of a mental big bang in human beings. Something happened. You deserve more readers – so many people would enjoy coming to read you.

      Reply
    2. Geoff Avatar
      Geoff

      Hi, Gelert, thanks for the compliment. But really, it’s just intriguing – thinking about these things. There was something else I was going to say when I started this reply to your comment, but it’s fled my consciousness. Bugger. I’m sure it was really profound, but I’ve had the equivalent of a visit from the person from Porlock… Oh well, you’ll just have to wait for my comments on Mary Roach’s Stiff…

      Reply

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  • MRDA

    Fareena Alam writes a nasty and spiteful review of Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s book The Caged Virgin in The New Statesman. Sample: "Hirsi Ali, a woman who has built her career on portraying herself as a victim". Er, no, Ms. Alam, Hirsi Ali certainly does not portray herself as a victim, quite the opposite in fact.
     
    Alam relates, with relish, the story of the Dutch TV documentary that in May this year led to "the Hirsi Ali affair", whilst neglecting to point out that the fact that Hirsi Ali had lied to get asylum was public knowledge back in 2002. She also quotes Jytte Klausen ("who knows Hirsi Ali") as saying that "She wasn’t forced into a marriage. She had an amicable relationship with her husband, as well as with the rest of her family. It was not true that she had to hide from her family for years." As far as I can see, the source of this quote is a telephone conversation that Haroon Saddiqui had with Klausen in May before penning his poisonous attack on Hirsi Ali in The Toronto Star. I don’t know how well Klausen "knows" Hirsi Ali, besides the fact that they have appeared at at least one seminar together in Sweden in 2003, but I do feel inclined to treat her statement with some scepticism.
     
    Alam also writes: "Practically all of her conclusions are based on her own ‘tortured’ experiences and observations of Islam". I can well imagine that if, as Hirsi Ali did, I worked as an interpreter in abortion clinics and refuges for battered women, then I might see the world through a jaundiced eye, but that does not remove the reality of those observations and experiences. One chapter entitled Four Women’s Lives gives the stage to others to tell their story. One of the strengths of Hirsi Ali’s book is that she does provide the source references to her claims – although Alam sneers that: "she provides little evidence to back up her claims that the Muslim woman is a caged virgin – sexualised, segregated, denied human rights – and that Islamic theology is responsible for this". Really, I wonder whether we’ve actually read the same book.
     
    But then, MRDA – Mandy Rice-Davies Applies. When it comes to facing unpalatable truths about aspects of one’s religion, Alam’s reaction and subsequently the review should come as no surprise. To paraphrase Mandy, "She would write that, wouldn’t she?" 

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  • Play Anywhere

    An interesting user interface from Microsoft Research. Although, I have to say that it’s not the first time that I’ve seen something like this. At the Boijmans van Beuningen Museum in Rotterdam, their digital archive already uses a similar system.
     
    In one gallery, the Digital Depot, a sample collection of some of the museum’s artifacts is displayed along the wall. In front of the wall are transparent touch-sensitive screens with images back-projected on to them. Visitors can look through the screen to the objects on the wall, as well as see the images on the screen. And just as in the Microsoft video, can use their hands to manipulate the images, to drag them around the screen or "open" them to retrieve further information about the objects in the gallery. 

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  • History Repeats

    A thoughtful piece by Brian Keenan in The Guardian today on his reaction to the current events in Lebanon. For those who don’t know Keenan’s background, here is a reminder.

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  • Kids, Don’t Try This At Home

    Ben Goldacre, over at his Bad Science blog, contrasts the scientific fakery of the Brainiac TV show (emphasis on show: it’s entertainment, not science, kids) with the genuine article in the form of Theodore Gray dropping a kilo and a half of pure sodium into his lake.

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  • The Wicker Man

    The Wicker Man was a British horror film released in 1973. It’s become a cult classic. Well-deserved, in my opinion. The first time I saw it I was stunned. There’s no obvious blood and gore – all the horror comes from the underlying story. The reworking of folklore tales and music into a convincing creation of a pagan society is very well done.
     
    I was reminded of the film by two things today. First up was an article in The Guardian about the impact that the film has had on British folk music. Secondly, I’ve just been having a video call with my brother in Scotland, and he tells me that my niece and nephew are off to the Wicker Man Festival in Dundrennan tonight. I’m sure that they’ll have a great time… Hopefully, no one will get burned alive…  

    2 responses to “The Wicker Man”

    1. Gelert Avatar
      Gelert

      One of the classics. Scared the pants off me when I was a kid, in a way that most schlock-horror films can’t match.

      Did you ever see ‘Don’t Look Now’? Another classic in my opinion.

      Reply
    2. Geoff Avatar
      Geoff

      Ah, Don’t Look Now – one of Nic Roeg’s masterpieces. Loved it – the ending is climactic in all sorts of ways. Roeg is a brilliant filmmaker. I remember the first one I saw – Walkabout – and being stunned by the filmic "turn the page" effect as the Girl tells the story. I’d never seen anything like it up until then. And then there’s The Man Who Fell To Earth, which is simply superb, IMHO. I didn’t like Bad Timing – it struck me as sterile, despite the passion of the protagonists. His most approachable film for me was The Witches, which I also loved – he captured Dahl’s autistic take on humanity perfectly. But I have to confess that I’ve never seen Performance – and that’s an omission that I must put right one of these days.

      Reply

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