while cycling in paris...

...i noticed that the streets have rivets going thru them - it occurs to me that perhaps paris is floating on a sea of Dadaist flotsam and jetsam and is permantnely in danger of being washed down the Seine into the Atlantic, so has to be held down strongly by bolts and rivets...

this also explains the driving...

I have some pictures to prove it....but they are too big to fit in this
water margin

meanwhile, I've decided that while English has the biggest vocabulary in the world, this means that meaning is diluted compared, say to french, where every word is dripping with implications and significance....the weight of a single utterance in french can compete with the entire logos of the ancients of Athenian Greece in its overwhelming resonance. n'est ce pas?

from acton to padington by bike

so thios morning i dropped a car at one of the extremely far-and-few-between subaru approved garages and then cycled to kings cross - the garage was in acton, so i cycled thru harlesden and neasden and harrow and down on thru to padington....aweome - now i know why I hate west london - what is weird is that some of these places are quite nice, but only if you arrive at them from somewhere else (like from camden town) ratehr tan seeunbg them in successon coming on down the old ewst london dosser route..

'arrow-on-the-'ill
it ought to be called...

padington looks really rank when you see it arriving from under the A40 flyover ("westway") - truly the road to hell is paved with tarmac and suburbs

postcards to the edge

I'm sort of jaded about people living out there in extremis (out here in the periphery, here where the creatures live, out here where there are no grassy knolls, no death nolls, we are oliver soned, un-imacculate; out there, out of luck, out to lunch, out of limits, out of my mind, out of pure spite, out of change, same difference, plus ca change), not in the palace (jade or limestone, or limey tone, or lame), then when they get lost little girl, they try to come back ,and they write those sad sad stories

good therapy for them.

but if we were decent, we'd have sent them stories of RL, to lure them back sooner -
we would have written to them about breakfast and warm rain, and hugs, and sunlight on the pool by the beach, and dancing straight, and a beer with friends...we'd have written

postcards to the edge

cherie blair is a CIA agent...

made you look, made you look, made you look:)

anyhow, read Ghost, By Robert Harris - very good if you like a sort of
"revenge by fiction" that the novelist seems to be achieving - I think he is a very good thriller writer - the NY TImes review seems to regret that it wasn't a John le Carre book, but that is missing the point - it is meant to be more populist and the intellectually clever framing - the story is told by an anonymous narrator who is ghosting the thinly fictionalized brit ex prime minister's memoirs, and tries to get "under the skin" of a main who appears really just to be a cypher (pun intended). This is a neat way to pretend neutrality in the face of horrendous tales of rendition and waterboarding and daily suicide bombings on the streets of london and N, apparently a direct result of the "war" on "terror".

The quotes from a ghostwriter's manual that start each chapter are tartly ironic. The
events unroll slightly Tom Clancyesque towards the end, although, for me, that was more a result of Harris' very professional writing skill simply picking up the pace (as you do) when the plot gets more physical...

good stuff..if only it were true...

madman dreams of turing machines

Just finishing this fine book
A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines
by Janna Levin - lovely description of
Vienna coffee houses and mad math circle with Goedel
and also nicely captures early turing existence in Sherborne
school and in Cambridge pre-war, lying in Shepp's Green
thinking of unravelling a chess board into a tape,
and thence into a store and fsms and all the rest

bonkers...

camden town is burning down, burning down

so we made the LA times! which, like everyone else, reported that my fave pub, the Hawley is frequented by Amy Winehouse...well I dunno, but I prefer to remember Ian Dury there.

Anyhow watching the smoke and orange glare from our terrace was kind of amusing, but the complete chaos caused by closing chalk farm road last nite is and will continue to be a Big Pain in the Backwater.

One thing I don't get is the actual progress of the fire - it appears it started in the crappy garages behind the Hawley - so I don't see that it made it across to the stables (main lock/original markey/dingwalls area) since most the decent photos on news sites are _from_ there and I guess the fire peeps would have shut that down if it was in trouble....also they taled about threat to residential bits, but there aren't any on the left (west) side of chalk farm road - I suppose all will be clear in the cold light of day - time for a stroll along the canal, maybe to see!

My guess is that it aint as bad as it looks, at least not as extensive...and reports were that noone was hurt which tends to imply things didn't get too out of control.

I would take a modest bet that this was caused by a smoker going outside a pub and droppng a still lit cigarette (given it happened at peak pub arrival time...)

So the BBC managed to completely xcrew up their reporting - claimed the Hawley was a night club - this AFTER half a dozen websites had correctly shown pictures of the
pub and correctly classified it - doh - another example of Flat Earth News - indeed, people as far afield as Hong Kong and Vancouver emailed me asking if I was ok - proving that it is a Very Small World....

eurostarturnoff

yesterday on the usually reliable and pleasant eurostar, from paris to london, the train, about 1 hour out of paris, suddenly stopped. then the lights all went out. then
eventually they came on again and the "train manager" announced that there had been a tremedous electrical failure, and that the train would have to go back to paris.

several people said "huhn? if the lectrics have gone, how can we go at all", and "if we can go back, why can we not go on?"

some amusing explanations were forthcoming from various passengers- one elegantly dressed frenchman said " hon hon hon - eet eez because it eez a french train and it prefers to go to paris that to england". some english person said "I bet its just the driver left his phone charger at home and wants to go back and get it". My theory is that we had set off on the wrong line, and they realized that the passengers would notice that when th train arrived, it was brussels, not london...

strangley, the train only took 20 mins to get back to paris from where it had stopped after 1 hour....then, even more strangley, they told us all to get on to the next train using old seats- this slightly disrupted the passengers who had originally been destined to take this second train....thus causing twice as many annoyyed people pointlessly - the offer of a free return ticket was met by incredulous folks with remarks like "you want me to do all this again, again? what is this, groundhog day"

most unusual....

carbon fingerprints

accordin to the bbc news site Very Important Peeps Meeting in Hawaii (so easy to get to without incurring a major hit on the jetstream)
"will be looking to forge common ground between "old" emitters like the US and Europe and the "new" polluters, such as China and India.."

forge, as in fabricate, fake, counterfeit...

war

aside from the Edwin Starr song
("war: what is it good for? absolutely nothing")
and the Bob Markey song (based on the speech
by Haile Sallasie - "until the philosphy that holds one man
different from another, inferior, is finally, and utterly
discredited, everywhere there will be war"...etc etc)
I didnt realize that einstein and freud had ever collaborated
until i read this:

http://realhumannature.com/?page_id=26

english, as she is spoke

he sipped his aperitif, as the soiree wore on,
because it was the soigne thing to do
"my pensee du jour" he started
with faux naivitee,
"is that my metier manque
was definitely not les objets trouvees"

"dumpkopf" his hostess exclaimed
without a little schednfreude,
"dont blitz us with your sub-freudian
traumatic zeitgeist"

"nein, nein, mein libher herr"
he retorted, "lets have some chai, and improve our karma"

"you complete anorak", commented his older brother, mycroft.

smuggling up to the thought police authorities

so i've been traveling between england and france fairly frequently in the last 4 months and waiting for the point when some random customs person asks me why...in line with the old joke about the chap riding donkeys between mexico and the US for decades and cycling back each day, I will explain that my work involves
smuggling french words into england, and in exchange, english jokes into france

i hope there is no vat to pay (I can't see any value that I am adding:)

A true history of Pain and Chocolate, by Umberto Econot

this is true

I met a man from eurostar today who told me about the gentleman who travelled from
Quebec to Brussels to clinch a deal for the sale of surreal bicycles (one of the rare
quebcois products for which there exists a large belgian demand).

However, he flow into london, and then took the train, which is where things went
horribly wrong (or was it). Ce monsieur, this gentleman didnt notice that he took the
wrong platform (9 instead of 10) and the train was for paris, not bruxelles.
On arriving in said city, without putting on his glasses, he ran for a taxui,
and called out a hotel (Hotel de la Paix), and of course there was one in Paris too,
so the driver took him there. As luck would have it, when he arrived, and checkedin
there was a reservation in his name (his name, oh, Louus vuiton or something common enough)
so he still did't notice anythign amiss - of course, being quebecois, he didn't notice the difference in the french accent between France and Belgium either.

In the morning, he ordered another taxi, and went off to the customer, one
Lady O'France; of course, the taxi driver misheard him and took him to Radio france,
where there was a panel of surrealists and cyclists discussing the perfect breakfast.
Cyclists shouted "Chocalate", surrealists called out "Pain", the Quebecois, quietly
spread the chocolate into a croissant - a silence fell over the studio. THen applause
burst out.

He went home, not realising that he had created Pain au cholcat, but moaning ove the
weird way that belgians do business. It wasnt like this with Eddie Mercxx and
Magritte, in may father's day, he complained to his friends.

post jungian review of da vinci code

so the recursive matrioshka like nature of eve and jesus cannot be under contemplated, with birth after birth seen compressed over time as if, as if, a sequence of nested beings being unwrapped, or indeed, played out, like a turing machine, revisiting the same place on a coiled tape, with only slightly modified state - but the male nature of da vinci code must also be commented on what with fast cars and bald albino monks, there is something of the rat, something of the michael jackson, post willard, post billie jean, revealing in the end that god does play dice, but only with alannis morrisette

why did the mountaineer go to heaven?

everest climber has passed on presumably, to higher things :-)

patent blasphemy

so here's a mad idea: for most (abrahamic/of the book) religions in their purist (purest?) forms, it is a sin to try to compete with god - indeed, representations of humans are forbidden because "who are we to try to make something in our image so imperfectly, which god made in hers so perfectly"?

knowledge is similar - our knowledge is a pale shadow of the true, deeper knowledge.

so intellectual property (copyright, patent) is a form of idolatary, and therefore immoral and blasphemous under fundamental christian, judaic and islamic law

surely?

just as is usary...

the politics of privacy, the privacy of politics

one thing I think seems to have slipped by the britpopliticians in their mad rush to get all of our lives into government databases. we get all their lives too...

we know where you live, my brown, and the color of your cars, and your bank account details, and your tax return status, and... ... ...

surely you;d think that'd make them more afraid than us - after all,we know they have something to hide, whereas they can never be sure about us...

a fairytale of New York - PC Madeness

So PC (as in political correctness not Police Constable) Madness temporarily reigned at the Beeb when some bozo of a censor decided that various words in the glorous Pogue's xmas song, a fairytale of new york, had to be bleeped out as they (e.g. strumpet, fagott) were offensive - as one fan said "isn't this just about christmas food:)

the song is fabulous because it is so resonant - even the fact that it appears to be a love song between a couple of drunken homeless crusties, whereas the singer Kirsty MacColl couldnt ever have really be described as anything other than glamorous (alas she passed away in a bizarre scuba diving accident), and Shane McGowan[1] is alarmingly still alive even though he is a drunken crusty m just adds depth to the duet (Shane sings
"Well, I could have bin someone", and Kirsty retorts "well, so could anyone" - perfect punk ethos, and delicious in that they are both someone, but both "someone of the people"

so the Beeb moron who decided to ban the offensive bits in the lyrics (despite them being a little bit Olde Worlde archaic uage, and not even words in contemporary slang) was obviously not aware that, and how ironic is this (shades of that oirish standup routine about Alannis Morisette's crap "how ironic" ditty) - the band, the Pogue's full name is the Irish phrase "pogue mahone" which means "kiss my arse". Shane must be laughing all the way to the next pint of martini.

Kirsty (RIP) was once known as the Electric Land Lady (after Jimi Hendrix ELectric Ladyland:), but also, according to many, including Billy Bragg (who's beautiful song St Swithin's day she also sang beautiflly), was an angel....she sure was.....

[1]Shane's punk credentials don't seem to be dented by the fact that he went to a very posh school (this is not hearsay - i was at the same school at the same time, Westminster, and vaguely new Shane there; of course, I certainly have no punk credentials at all, despite playing in a band called Intensive Care Unit:) Perhaps this was coz I was let go from a band run by Matthew Seligman (very good bass player)...)gratuitous, Little Feat style extraneous parenthesis....()

I was kindly given a copy of the history book, Thunderstruck (signed by the author, erik larson, thank you kindly, sir!), by Rex Hughes at a luncheon to celebrate his recent doctorate. In this book is a marvellously rich, deeply researched history of the twin tales of the mild murderer, Crippen, and the seminal entrepreneur, Marconi, and how their lives (like many later) were entwined by long distance wireless communication!

but more to the point, there is a description of london in the late 19th and early 20th century - around that time, italian and french anarchists were highly active (see Joseph Conrad's novel The Secret Agent (filmed by Alfred Hitchcock as Saboteaur) - apparently, half the houses on Charlotte Street (near UCL, in London) were under surveillance by the New Scotland Yard and the Surete (interesting that the victorian and edwardian british let the french secrete service operate within london) - there was of course a famouse bomb at new scotland yard, amongst others

so today's hysteria by UK (and other) goverment agencies saying there's a "new threat from terrorism" and we must reduce rights so that terrorosts can be tracked and caught, is yet again shown to be completely bogus- there was always such a threat, and, of course, we need eternal vigilance, but that doesn't mean there's a change such that we need to relax habeus corpus or other (inalienable?) rights

oh, the way the marconi wireless telegraphy (sometimes beatifully known as "space telegraphy - prescient of Vint Cerf's Interplanetary Internet:), was used to warn american police of Crippen's imminent arrival on a boat, is eerily reminiscent of the way that cell phones were used to track the 2nd lot of london bombers to....italy, where Guilgemo Marconi came from...

are all novelists high functioning autistics?

was thinking about this - one thing that very intellectually smart but empathically challenged folks on the autism spectrum do, is apparently, to run simulations of what other people might be feeling...rather than actually experiencing empathy - isn't this what novelists do?

mohammed bear

so the teacher in sudan who entertained a classroom of kids with a nice
engaging game of "lets pick a name for the bear" is set free - and "pardoned".
(see, for example bbc report on this, amongst zillions of others).

frankly that is not good enough. frankly, the people that accused her are unbelievable hypocrites, and should be comdemned - the religious teachers who should have told the kids in the school that perhaps naming an inanimate doll after the prophet was inappropriate, they are the ones who are guilty - the teacher who was clearly very good at her job, and popular, was a victim of prejudice, and the appropriate thing would be for a trial under sharia law of those who levelled false accusations against her out of jealousy and bigotry - they clearly lacked understanding, let alone compassion. As has been made obvious by the (majority) sane part of the muslim community, this was an unjust case in the first place. So who will be tried for hiring the "rent a mob" people who cried out for her to be whipped? You know, I'm not a christian, so I'd be happy to throw the first stone. What is the punishment for lying in Islam? For threatening jihad/violence without justification? The sudanese religious leaders need to think very hard about just what they stand for, and how much the rest of the world will stand for them talking this sort of gibberish.