[thought for the day] saturday evening

Never forget:

A hen is just an egg's way of making another egg.

[unsung achievers 1] alison clarkson

Eurasian Alison Clarkson [born 1970 in Kensington] was and still is a talent whom Madonna called "criminally overlooked". I'm no fan of Madonna, nor of Clarkson's later dance work but the woman can write songs and is more than useful as a performer.

There are those who say she helped save the British music industry which in 1990 was under severe assault from the American rappers and it needed someone to step up for the Brits. She did and how. She later said of this time:

Basically I wrote my own stuff, I wrote it all in my bedroom and I had a lot to say really. Having been bullied when I was younger I just saw it as a way to get my own back on everyone."

Here's one of her biggest hits and you might wonder how this blogger can like something so kitsch and shallow. I like her, that's all and admire what she did in swimming against the stream at the time:



Of course she was big in the UK but didn't do so well in the US market - predictable really as she didn't try to be black or appear to be any more or less than a Londoner.

Betty became a journalist's favourite due to her forthright and sometimes downright catty opinions on her fellow popsters. She once said she didn't like former New Kid On The Block Joey Lawrence because he had 'girly arms'.

Relations between Betty and GA's record company soured when they asked her to pay for her own Platinum disc of their first album. She asked them how big the disk was. They replied, "normal size." She then asked, "Is it big enough to stick it up your arse?"

Unfortunately, Boo came a cropper in Australia when she dropped her mike onstage and in that country in particular she is vilified for "lipsynching" which practically every artist does anyway.

In this blogger's opinion, people, particularly women, who go their own way as she has done, are always going to come a cropper and for that also I like her. I like that she refuses to play the record label game plus she's a homegrown girl - one of our own.

Here's a recent interview which is quite entertaining if you've got this far in the post:

[twilight zone] where rationalization ends

Where to and why?

Some time back I asked an ultra-rationalist mate of mine about UFOs, knowing what his reaction would be.

Then I asked if he believed in G-d [he does] but he said the two things are completely different. Why, I wanted to know. A spirit world is a spirit world. If there be angels and all that stuff, why not UFOs?

The look I got - I changed the topic.

Michael Palin, in his Ripping Yarn Curse of the Claw [and I can't find an online script] is a boy sitting in the family living room and he asks about, I think, India. His austere Victorian father says it doesn't exist.

Palin answers back and says he's heard all about it and his mother cuts him short: "Your father has spoken, dear."

End of discussion.

I don't believe the receptors we have are capable of discerning the nether world and every so often something comes up which defies rationalization. In come the rationalists and say it had to be the light reflected from a plane or else it's hallucination or whatever.

Not for one second does the person stop and try to analyse the thing and admit - well, we just don't know. Then, in an attempt to come to terms with it, the cliched put downs begin - talk of little green men and so on.

This could be double exposure - or not

North of England

A group of us were on the side of a hill in the early 90s, looking across to a rocky point where a hotel had its lights on. I didn't see the thing come but there was a hubbub and everyone started looking at the hotel. Above it was an elongated light and I can't recall the colour - it was light and the shape from the side was cigar shaped.

Then, some twenty minutes later, it went up and then veered off to the right and disappeared. That was all. There had to have been twenty of us who'd seen it. Now I've been guilty in my time of perpetrating hoaxes like convincing a kid that Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy do exist but this was different.

Double exposure again or what?

Real, hoax or error

There was an article in the physics area in New Scientist which showed that many rational phenomena are equally inexplicable, e.g.

“Cold fusion would make the world's energy problems melt away. No wonder the Department of Energy is interested.”

It just doesn't seem sane to me to dismiss these things out of hand, just because one's mind can't come to grips with them. Roswell, Philadelphia, crop circles - possibly hoaxes, fevered imaginations or perhaps true.

Here are ten of them summarized.

I'm semi-sceptical about much of it - for example orbs or double-exposures in photos but some still seem a bit hard to fathom.

My favourite below - shots 4 seconds apart

[dreams] the waxing and the waning

While researching this post, I found an interesting piece on kid's dreams and nightmares. Can't say I was ever prone to them and even as an adult, have missed out on the pleasure of the erotic dream.

There were one or two times in childhood where a dream occurred and it was always the same - someone was after me, chasing me, bunch of thugs I'd provoked and at the end of the dirt track, near the cliff, was a huge pile of spaghetti and I was always able to hide under there. Always thought my pursuers were so stupid not to look under the spaghetti.

There is one recurring adult dream, not particularly traumatic and it's a bit like this:

I'm in the clouds [always cumulus for some reason - golden in the sunlight] and things are pretty good, when from the left front [45 degrees] appears a woman [I think a young woman but that's not clear].

She has not particularly shiny golden hair and robes of white which are also not crystal clear. The thing is that I must be looking ahead or whatever.

I don't notice her hands and feet, just the heart-shape of her face and she's neither pretty nor not, neither tall nor small. I look across and smile and she returns the smile. She stretches out one hand towards me [let me try to remember which - I think it must be the right because it is closest to me] and now I look more closely and she becomes clearer and is very sweet and fair.

Before I know what I'm doing [and I know from experience not to] I reach out what must be my left hand and as that happens, as my body turns towards her, she starts to fade backwards [neither down nor up and not particularly gliding]. I almost reach her hand but then she recedes into the cloud and is gone.

I turn back to where I was going and continue on through the sunlit cloud. It never happens at night, this dream - only through the day.

The dream came back today.

I was chatting with an overseas friend this morning and it was nice and then she was gone. So I looked at the dialogue window, typed a couple more things and then just went on composing the last post below this.

The last few weeks were like this too. When we got to the point of some sort of joy or solace, for some reason she faded away and is now like a wraith that occasionally answers an e-mail. She visits, I know but I don't know for how much longer.

My ex-love faded away this way some years back but now, as if orbits are once again coinciding, it's waxing again and the other evening was close once more. I'm expecting it to fade again as usual but will have to wait and see.

The puzzle for me is not how it gets off the ground nor why it continues but why it fades. If you like something, it doesn't fade and if you don't, then why did you remain so long? Better touch wood but it seems that I'll continue on through the day and night and people will come, people will fade.

Do you dream?

[thought for the day] friday evening

On the human race:

It's in your nature to destroy yourselves.

[The Terminator]

[wrong way gordon] round table trek

It's now hit world punters how Gordon, Czechoslovakian geography guru, impressed the Queen with his navigational ability:

Witnesses say she then leant across the table, laughed, and said to her daughter Princess Anne: "The Prime Minister got lost. He disappeared the wrong way ... at the crucial moment" Her comments were picked up by the microphones placed on the table for the speeches.

One guest said: "He thought he was supposed to be in line for the greeting, but he should have been sitting down like the rest of us. "When he discovered his mistake, he had to walk the long way round the table."

Thank goodness the country is in such good hands.

[mobiles] and the curse of the texter

Lifted virtually complete from fellow blogger Grendel, this sums up the issue better than I could:

I dislike mobile phones. The premise being based on your availability or the expectation that others may have of your availability 24 hours a day.

However I went on to say that the thing I really disliked was text messaging. The constant ‘mipping’ noise indicating that a new message has arrived. The daily vision of people hunched over their phones, their features seeming ever more gaunt when picked out by the LCD backlight.

Groups of kids huddled together all with phones in hand most likely texting each other. It seems that one can’t go for a walk, a bus ride a train journey without seeing people bashing away at the tiny little key pads as if their very lives depended on it.

‘Oh I must text because if I don’t text other people they won’t text me and than I won’t have any friends’.

And I’ve often thought that there must be something wrong with quite a few of these people. But as I found out today there actually might be something wrong with quite a few of these people in reality.

According to an editorial by Dr. Jerald Block, a psychiatrist at the Oregon Health and Science University published in this months American Journal of Psychiatry text messaging is becoming an increasingly commonplace compulsive-impulsive disorder. Dr. Block goes on to suggest that it should be added to psychiatry's official guidebook of mental disorders.

Block says users can lose all track of time or neglect "basic drives" such as eating or sleeping. Some may need psychoactive medications or hospitalisation to combat their over-reliance.

I personally detest them and ban them from anywhere in my space, at university or elsewhere. My ex-girlfriend knows very well that if we go out, the texter goes away.

Unfortunately I can't do much about private clients. One usually lays two or three of these implements out on the table in front of him and our "conversation" involves getting into a topic, losing it to the texter or mobile then trying to start all over again.

For a start, it is insulting to the person you're with. One or two girls have recently made a joke about being able to Multi-task. It's not multi-tasking - it's simply old fashioned insulting. If someone comes to you, then they should get your undivided attention, at least for a space in time.

Not possible says the compulsive texter/mobile obsessive. "I might lose business. I might lose friends." I'm afraid ths speaks volumes for the modern slide to zero respect for one another which manifests itself from everything from loud train conversations to road rage.

[thought for the day] thursday evening

Two out of every three people wonder what the third one is doing.

[power of the blogosphere] at the end of a switch

How it started

The power of the blogosphere, particularly the UK sphere, was shown in the Usmanov affair, if you recall, where the Uzbek bully-boy forced certain blogs off air because he disagreed with them.

That was reversed and the result was a sort of camaraderie between certain of us.

But who is "us"? Well, it doesn't appear to be the "myspacer youth" or "the garden looked lovely this morning" type.

I suppose it's a loosely defined club of political bloggers, mostly male, who inhabit the sphere and charge around each others' blogs doing what they can.

I feel proud to be partially accepted into this although my personal reputation is slightly left field.

The Kareem rally was a little less successful for mainly logistical reasons and for the lack of clear intent - how would this change things?

The recent "ban the UK Chancellor from all pubs" campaign began like this:

I'm delighted to say that [as of Tuesday afternoon] the Snob's campaign to get Alistair Darling barred from every pub in the land has now crossed over, with today's Edinburgh Evening News covering the story.

News of the first pubs to take action is also now trickling in. Let's just say I wouldn't go to Lewes on my summer hols if I were him.

A worthy cause indeed but perhaps not relieving the suffering in Darfur or getting the troublemakers like DEFRA removed from positions of influence. Plus one other very worrying, ever-present danger for the blogger, for example in Myanmar:

The 45 megabit per second circuit connecting Myanmar to Kuala Lumpur that is Myanmar’s primary connection to the Internet came back up at 14:27 UTC today. It had mostly been “hard down,” indicating either that it had been unplugged or that the router it was connected to was turned off, with the exception of a few brief periods since September 28.

The truth is, chaps, we can be disconnected at any moment and the tools we use hacked:

Did Laura hack Blogrolling.com?

Blogrolls around the globe now all point to Laura's blog. Laura doesn't sound like your stereotypical evil hacker to me, but something sure went wrong at Blogrolling.com. Anyone know what? Laura's blog seems to have gone down what with all the hits it must be getting, but you can still read Google's cache of it.

It's a very tenuous thread connecting us to each other and thus the notion that we can be a powerful force in society must be seen in this context.

[23 today] get thee over there one day late