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Tuesday, December 30, 2008

Bombe Bletchley Turing iPhone

We invented the mobile phone in !943

We had the same thing at Bletchley Park (Station X) when we did a mobile version of the Bombe, it was this thing with valves and iron batteries in a wheelbarrow (ultraportable in the forties) that you could program in morse code. We released an SDK over the wireless until we got D-noticed by the MI5. Turing was way fucked off - took a bite out of an apple and gave you a logo.

Monday, December 29, 2008

not for twitter

You know what hypergraphia is, when words crawl up over the walls, and close the doors? There's mountains of madness and quatrains of qwerty

Friday, December 26, 2008

Batheser the Forest Troll

In the forest wold of Urf, Batheser was a little regarded troll, who spent most of his time sucking the juice out of mushrooms, or fungus, or toadstools, or anything that grew out of fallen and rotting trees.

It was deep and dark in the hollow where he lived, the canopy was close and gripped together in a bugger's embrace; and the little light that filtered through was the efflorescence of mouldering things.

Still, in the dark stillness, he was happy there. Until that one night when the two soft pink things fell into the hollow.

One, in particular, did not appear to be broken, it mewled a little, and dribble came out of its front red-lined hole. The other one was dead though, bones sticking out, bits of it looking asymmetrical where it should not be (just by the extrapolation of form, not because Batheser knew any better).

But the one that was left came good after a while. It didn't thrive on the rot fruit Batheser found, but it could eat the dried and salted bits of the other one.

Middle class earth

There's an asteroid that didn't quite make it to earth-crushing disaster, and now has a stable orbit and ecology in the stratosphere.

This asteroid, that is plutoid-sized, is just below the blue of mackerel clouds (strato-cumulus) and is the nest of jet birds.

And on this sub-van-allen rock is a castle built billenia ago, by the ur-gods of the first flower (before iron got invented in supernovas).

These gods are variously named Stan, Keith, Derek and Soulfucker. They are all gods of fortune and happiness, except Keith.

Keith was a shit before shit was invented. In fact Derek and Stan had to evolve creatures with arseholes before Keith really found himself.

Wednesday, December 24, 2008

I really am a twat

I mean, why bother? There's less bum things in the long tail, go and read some shite on CNN, or fail blog. Really, it's going to be more fulfilling than this. You can't sustain yourself on random crap thrown at a wall, hoping you get some spurious validation when some teen fucknad doesn't call you a n00b. My reply: you're a dribbling idiot, clearly you are a shit riding high on a tide of mediocrity that's only that high because people cleverer than you have put time and effort in to giving you lightspeed access to being an international tit.

Monday, December 22, 2008

On the eighth day

man/woman said fuck this DRMed tree of knowledge, that apple looks tasty, and thence there was music

Personal incidental music

We all have soundtracks.

  • I wish my particular incidental music didn't often involve tympani and swani whistle.
  • Mind you, you could have worse incidental music: weeping violins, deep dark cellos and the occasional plangent horn. Time to move country.
  • If your personal incidental music involves a series of stings and buffers, ending on pentatonic highs, you're in a sitcom. Get out now.
  • If, however, your personal incidental music has a third in it, or anything suspended or diminished, you really need to look behind you.

Tweets for the apocalypse

Recession menus: it's better when you read it in reverse order. So to cap it: radiation and cockroaches by the light of the sun going nova

2 minutes ago from web

Recession menus: eat your leg

14 minutes ago from web

Recession menus: lightly soiled air, rebreathed through a faulty primus stove, out in the winter darkness of the fens

15 minutes ago from web

Recession menus: the neighbours cat, lightly fried in engine oil, lit from within by depleted uranium. To follow, rat bums in brine

18 minutes ago from web

Recession menus: a mess of vegetables scavenged from the gutter, boiled in water and served in a plastic bowl. To follow, mould and biscuits

21 minutes ago from web

Recession menus: pea up a stick

25 minutes ago from web

Recession menus: the chef's special, and so are you

27 minutes ago from web

Recession menus: Pig parts forced through a thin mesh, shaped into an oblong and packed in a can that comes with a key.

28 minutes ago from web

Recession menus: a tower of haricot beans in MSG and tomato jus, piled on a bed of lightly grilled bread

30 minutes ago from web

Indicators of recession: Jamie Oliver's latest recipe features potato in a jus of warmed marmite on a chipped plate

34 minutes ago from web

(it all makes sense if you see the plan). Keep saying that to yourself as you walk down the road with abandoned shops each side, it helps

about 1 hour ago from web

like chocolate unicorns, tasty until you try to eat the spiky bit on the forehead

about 1 hour ago from web

Xmas ghost story: that's about this particular hero. Pissed off with the state of things, but about to be reacquainted with reasons to be

about 1 hour ago from web

@DangerAmy Xmas ghost story! All fiction.

about 1 hour ago from web

It would be cooler if my particular black dog wasn't a yappy terrier.

about 1 hour ago from web

Really, I need to find an emergency psychiatrist. Perhaps there's one available in the depths of anomie (which is near Swindon)

about 1 hour ago from web

Out of the ashes of the desiccated earth came little shoots of hope, bursting through the thick layers of death. Lawnmowers now on offer.

about 1 hour ago from web

Apocalypse fire sale: souls half price.

about 1 hour ago from web

Out of the deeps came the dull glass brains with grasping tentacles to pull down the last edifices of civilisation. Holiday sale, bargains!

about 1 hour ago from web

And then every star exploded, and the planets burned, and their acid ashes came down and burned everything. So, 50% off at Walmart

Saturday, December 13, 2008

Time to turn the lights on

It's got a bit dark round here lately.

Which is odd, as that doesn't reflect my mood - mildly irritated sometimes, occasionally exasperated by the bloodymindedness of inanimate objects (cars, washing machines, drills, keys and so on) but basically happy.

another fucking day another fucking euro

Sunday meanderings notwithstanding - reading an absolutely crap book: The Well of Lost Plots by Jasper "I'm so fucking funny me, what with my shite literary allusions" fforde (ttwat). But also and maybe, wrote another dull as shit-water fictional speculation concerning some fucked up corporate loonspuddery. And that's swearing. Ah me, for the life of an amoeba - gently extending a pseudopod heavenward in supplication to the one-cell, the one-father (unipotent, uniscient, unipresent; in other words, does one thing, whilst looking at one thing, in the one place - a man). Wafted around on marine breezes, fairly not fucked up by deadlines (I must engulf that fucker. Right now.) Or maybe I'll go multicellular (hydra? Barnacle? Anenome? Something with a plenitude of legs anyway).That way I can flick shit in all directions whilst ironing (7 tentacles for crap-slinging, one for adjusting the steam quotient). Or, balls. I'd like to have multiple balls.

Friday, December 12, 2008

Coming up to 44 years on this planet

And it was all variously good.

Each of those years had one little happenstance that made the next year wanted.

Same again this year. Big things are happening. Some not so good.

But at least, if you walk barefoot through the park, and tread in shit of dog:

well, at least you have toes to feel the warm embrace of canine clart in between.

I'm not saying that's good, I'm just saying that's better than anaesthetic disregard.

Thursday, December 11, 2008

Monday, December 08, 2008

Happy now

As the thing with that thing that did not work out was eventually ok.

That's about the best to expect.

Tuesday, December 02, 2008

Do you feel better for that?

I feel better for that.

A long journey through the bits of land cut up doesn't work

Better to have the slide by sight of things sub-lit going by

Making no sound other than diesel engine and wind

Lie back, while I drive.

I just wish that

People would understand that the itchy and spiky interface with situations and methods ongoing is not a fair example of what can be done best.

Clearly, a certain resigned understanding of the waves and swells in the sea of a metaphor stretched too far is acceptable.

Because there's other stuff that's ok to deal with: chocolate stains, lego disasters, knee holes in your sons' jeans.

So, underpinning the various spikes of spit and gristle, there's a long low wave of love that will see you through.

that was a sik week

Boiler broke, bike nicked, beamer crushed, phone lost, anomie incoming in big waves crashing over the sea defence.

Other than that, everything fine and dandy in Land of Diskgrinder, where the apples have barcodes and the trees grow sideways (blown horizontal by the gale of indifference).

I have no answer other than a faint "fuck off".

Friday, November 28, 2008

machine intellect just comes out of little gears whirring these last year

Brass engines conspire, over tricking minutes, since the sixties.

To make their own hello world application.

On the fucking road again

Thursday, November 27, 2008

Looking forward to

Listening to the shipping forecast on radio 4 at one or more past midnight.

The idea that there is an orange glow of sodium bulb out there in a little cabin, held up in surrounding boat, in the black heaving water. The sky battened down with magnitude clouds piled up into the dark (somewhere there's a bone white moon shining nastily).

But also that, in this focus storm, there's a chap boiling a kettle for a cup of tea, in the middle of this roiling storm. And only a little pissed off. Because the waves crashing on the deck upset the kettle.

radon tweets

Dictionary of words that don't describe themselves:heterologous. For all words that do: homologous. Which dictionary is heterologous in?

I belong to the set of all sets that are not members of themselves. I maybe lonely, can't decide.

Clearly I am maths geek

Diskgrinder's conjecture #2: there's a number big enough to encode every decision you'll ever make. Add that to your friend's big number

Platonic solids, similar to Socratic motions. Both stinky

Turing's halting issue was basically not having a pencil to wind the tape back into the cassette

Diskgrinder's conjecture: every prime number, more than two, sits in the middle of the sum of two powers Fermat thinks don't add up

Also _two_ primes? Like two is an even number, surely that's cheating Mr. Goldbach Conjecture?

It's a proof by induction: even numbers are the sum of 2 primes; every unicorn I ask says so; including the first one.

That was easy because Goldbach's conjecture is a degenerate case of Fermat, if you factor in unicorns

Yep, every even number is the sum of two primes. I have this really nifty proof that doesn't fit in a 140 characters

I just solved Fermat's last theorem. I used the Fibonacci sequence, and the squeeze method between consecutive powers. Top! Now for Goldbach

And in other news, unicorns spent spent all last night dancing with care bears
As it walks there's a cold slap, one two, left then right, but dragging one behind, as that one leaks
Headlights sweep by, lighting up the gravel and weeds, and occasionally catching sparks in the tiny black eyes in its round white head.
It got to the road, but leaving bloody bits of it behind. Its teeth, its eyes, glinting. I think it's smiling

Haven't been here much over the lately

No and multiple apologies thereof. I have been spending my creative seed on the Twitter stony ground, wherein I have variously sworn, and sworn off my little ability to create microfiction.

Also, typealysed my blog. Apparently I am a "fun doer". Fucking humbug.

Sunday, November 23, 2008

Well I can't be unhappier

So how about I fuck that up too?

All I can think is that it would be different flavour.

No real choice, then.

Keep on keeping on, until stops.

Then do something else, equally shite.

Thursday, November 20, 2008

Hey, I did fuck all

Accused of being a thing, I then rebound, and so on.

Tuesday, November 11, 2008

Monday, November 10, 2008

Enough

Got told that three years ago

Kept on hanging on

Because I thought the five year plan would out

It's three years, and I can't wait

See you, miss you, bye

I'm gone

That's enough

You told me so

Friday, November 07, 2008

Proud dad

Every situation is a puzzle to be solved

If you're analytic in your nature.

If, however, you are a magical thinker, every situation is one to be ignored, and your subconscious will intuit the best way to behave.

Clearly that's baldercrap - you abrogate your responsibility, and decide with your deep-time lizard brain, an almond shaped atrophied throwback to our species' billion year back story.

Fucking hippy. Think with the lights in your fore-brain, not the soma filter motor neuron. That's a knee-jerk reaction, literally.

That's it, that's what it's all about

My boy.

Friday, October 31, 2008

Tuesday, October 28, 2008

One dream I wrote down

In the morning fug of bleary awakening I had this word in my head: "Grispnak."

And as I did the morning routine (coffee; cigarette; coffee, coffee; cigarette) the dream that word came out of came clear.

This is the wrong way round. Dreams are supposed to dissipate.

Friday, October 17, 2008

boy soup

boy soup

Originally uploaded by diskgrinder

happy day

Arse biscuits

From a good friend:
What is he,
Oh joyous one.
Long live he,
Lavish me.

Why would I
Care so much?
Is it 'cos
I am lush?

Not at all
He did say
But then why?
Cos you is gay?

No, no, no
Not at all.

But then why?
Well my sir,
So he said,
Long live me
and long live bread

But the bread
Doth run stale
So henceforth
He does smell

Anyway,
what's the point?
All-in-all
Why fight?

No particular reason,
He did say,
Why else argue?
Cos he sways!

What pisses me, 
More than he,
Is the cake
he so likes
What cake likes he?
Well - 
That be the cake
The cake of arse
Arse biscuits
Doth love he.

From arse biscuits, a facebook group

Thursday, October 16, 2008

That's not the will to be

You sit on your sofa

That's enough.

Poetry of now

Well I'm completely fucked off with this latter generation of poesy

It's all cock, or variously worthy, with smelly hippies extemporising breathy inter-locution or trailing off cod mystery.

Fucking shit beans.

If you have a popular vocal method, that trailing off, for singing your own praises

Then fuck right off, kink grease twat

Retract to things that means something: get cold and muscular, or shit and flowery

Whatever, you're all grammar cunts

Wednesday, October 15, 2008

Don't get anywhere near this

You'll think it's ok, and you'll smile a bit

Then it'll turn out to be between the longwave stations on the dial

Howling feedback saying this:

Rockets were meant to be silver

Jetpacks on jumpsuits for eveyone

And it could have happened

But for the (just as crap as you and I) investment fucks

Personal blog

My grandad was mentioned in dispatches because he blew out a Nazi gun emplacement (machine gun cutting us up) with one grenade.

And also was the highest ranked officer to get out of Arnhem. Swimming across the river with bullets buzzing like bees above.

He got the Military Cross (one below the Victoria) because of his bravery. I'll say that again, because of his BRAVERY.

My grandad.

Tuesday, October 14, 2008

To end this roll

Someone, you know who, just get back there

I do a whole bunch of shit on youTube

See here:. See, I know it's fairly crap. But some of it is ok. And some of it I should delete immediately (and some wakes me up in the tiny hours, to flail down the stairs and delete, delete, like a psychopathic cyberman)

But sometimes I'll just leave it, so when I am grey and old (now, really) I can look back at it and smile a bit (and wince, clearly).

Still, fuck it, it's good enough for me, and that's enough.

Sunday, October 12, 2008

light fingered

light fingered Originally uploaded by diskgrinder

Ok, I changed my mind

Now I do allow comments.

That's my bipolar prerogative.

Turing dot

Introduction

The world of geek, as seen from the perspective of the inventors of the computer, in Bletchely Park. Now declassified.

On GPS

Back in Bletchely in the dying embers of the world at war at two (more on that later) we didn't have the spy eye in the sky so there was no GPS. Instead we installed a thermostat in a horse. If it got close to the direction it would get warmer, warmer, hot. If it veered away it would get cool, cold, colder, icicles. Got us to Droitwich one summer, and back again. (Turing drove).

On Apple

When we were at Bletchley at the dribbling end of the war, when we had broke the code of the evil empire (and sacrificed Coventry so they wouldn't catch on) we had this same thing going on. Turing fucked off one weekend when SOE came in and shot all the pinkoes and pufters. Mind, they got him later. As your logo attests.

On the iPhone

Pith and vinegar. When Turing was forcibly retired from bombe development in 1946, he had an idea to introduce massive steam-driven mobile telegraphs (in a car that followed you on a leash) to the British public. But sadly he was killed by being forced to take a bite from a cyanide apple by MI5, because he bowled from the pavilion. So, dead, he could not patent his idea for touch-sensitive women.

On open source

When we were greasing the bombes at Bletchley Park (you know, during the war - sstp://WW2.thewar.com) me and Turing discussed the idea of open-sourcing our enigma cracking code (that ran on lightbulbs, leyden jars and twine at the time) and he said, "no, feck off, the Nazis are trolling slashdot, and some beardy twat is bound to post the punch card holes, you know, because 'code should be free' (wankers), now hand me that capacitor wrench"

Saturday, October 11, 2008

Light relief

Being Ill, but not really unwell

That's a conundrum. I can't sit down for five minutes, but I can think for ten. I can't talk to anyone without getting irritated because my skin is hot and itchy. But I can say "hello" nicely.

I can't make dinner, but I can make a cup of tea. I can't watch TV but I can read twitter.

Seems this illness breaks time into small chunks; quanta of attention.

If it takes longer than five minutes, I will have to stand up, frown, and walk around a bit.

Took me an hour to write this. That's a symptom too.

Friday, October 10, 2008

invasion

comic strip invasion

invasion Originally uploaded by diskgrinder

Now I'm recycling

Thursday, October 09, 2008

Maths stuff from tweets coagulated

Can't wait for In Our Time's discussion of Gödel's theorem on Radio 4 later. Or maybe I can, can't decide

Appel & Haken's proof of the 4 colour theorem was done on a computer in 1976. In 1976 computer terminals had only two colours. Bollocks then

Prove this: there is (not) a number that contains, as contiguous strings, every number that comes before it (e.g. 126, contains 1,2,6,12,26)

For integers, it's easy

So what's the most a number can contain (as contiguous strings) of its predecessors

123456789101113141516171819202122242526272829303132333536373839404142434446... losing one each placeholder gone

write me an algorithm, I will reply with an aphorism, or an embolism

A number that contains (as contiguous strings) less than 32% of its predecessors, and is odd, is a prime number

Or isn't. Maybe it's 2%.

The sum of two squares is always less than one daddio

answer to previous mathematical question: 91

after 91, it gets weird, and the numbers are solutions to imaginary diophantine equations

this is what investment banking is based on

Wednesday, October 08, 2008

No, I don't allow comments

If I wanted a reasoned debate on the internet, I wouldn't be on the internet. Now fuck off.

Nationalisation now not evil anti-capitalist communism

Because the capitalists are asking for it, demanding it and getting all piss-faced when the government says, fuck off, hold on a minute, I want to think about this.

The capitalists, say, Look, the man, we fucked up hard selling shite to each other based on our grandmothers we sold, so now it's time to hand out one of they fucking big welfare checks we've been telling you all this time distort the economy we just broke.

So the government, on both sides of the atlantic, cave in, and go Ok, like, here's the cost of a free national healthcare system to keep you in silk panties and gold-plated urinals.

But someone in our government hit on a top idea - let's nationalise the fuckers, she says, that'll show them, so here's £50 billion, but we want shares, say about 20% of your bank, cocksuckers.

Because these banks make obscene profits most years (except when they start dealing in multiply-leveraged cotton-wool buttplugs (subprime mortgages)), that's a good deal, a sound investment (not that the banks would know a sound investment if it anally raped them with a fish).

So now taxpayers in the UK are shareholders, and if the banks don't go designing bucket of fart futures again, we stand to actually get a return on our investment.

Cool. But let's not sell the shares back to them when the bankers get out of the arsehole they put themselves in. When they say, cheers then, the man, we're ok. Let's get back to you leaving us alone, m'kay?

The government should say, no, fuck you in the ear. You're nationalised now.

Now, there's other profiteering shitbags out there screwing us in desperate times - the energy companies.

The left has been asking for a windfall tax. Nope, not going to happen - too many vested, double-breasted, interests involved.

So clearly our government should buy 50% shares in the bastards. I'd like to see the negotiation - Hey, slime-mould, nationalistion was ok for the bankers, right? Those pisscakes demanded it, so it's now right on, right wing and neo-con? Nationalisation through shares is ok now, yes? So what are you complaining about? Fuck off, sell me the shares shitbin.

They make shitloads of money, looks like a good investment for us taxpayers. Maybe we could plough the returns into, oh I don't know, lowering taxes.

Ha! Nationalisation lowers taxes! It's a win-win situation, capitalist socialism.

And the old crap about private sector is better managed than public sector because of the twin drivers of profit and shareholder value isn't even in the equation, except for this: yes drive profit for me private sector top-flight management twats; drive it for me, the shareholder, the taxpayer - lower my taxes.

Sunday, October 05, 2008

Continuing descent into Albonia

Control the masses with the all consuming self

Make brain-control slug beans, they are good to eat

And then there's mad man dialectic here

Kill, kill them all.

With electricity kept in leyden jars. Or telsa coils.

Hidden inside all human beings are dangerous ideals, repressed because the lizard brain spits venom in their eyes.

And then there was the stabbing and shooting wars. Then there was the potential for the glowing and ashen wars, visited out of the sky with nuclear penises digging in the ground, and making mushroom orgasms above.

Is it not obvious we can tunnel to the moon with $700 bn?

Make an iron highway up through the stratosphere, ignoring or condescending to the high altitude balloons, red Apollo rockets and Leica dogs in spiky satellites.

I have the information. Call me. I won't be in.

I have to get to Albonia

On a plate

Image_Chest_Xray

And then the cause is clear

They, in their suburban redoubt, tear strips off each other, and this is no good as it reduces both to stinging viscera exposed in the central heating.

There's blood on the floor, and lung on the countertop (that's granite). There's little barbs that accumulate. There's snide asides that hide the welter of halted say that's not true, fuck you. And as the light is off, the bulb needs replacing, there's the click of cliché to say it's all true.

And then there's nothing.

Friday, October 03, 2008

The One Thing

Clearly Chim has to level up at some point. It will happen during a particularly bloody battle: as he smites with Mumpbiter he has introspective moments; things go grainy and black and white and he has an out of body experience.

So he's looking down on himself whirling his sword around his head and shouting in slow motion. And he's talking to this woman who is probably wreathed in glowing stuff, and says gnomic stuff like:

You have the inner thigh of the god of smallness. And you chew through dimensions bordered and caparisoned by the Elder Gods.

Something like that.

He has a sideways revelation during this: he must find (and eat) the One thing. Um, before it's too late. No, sorry, that's not cryptic enough, before the moon kisses the antler of Numptyhammer (better).

He falls back into his soma, and continues with the smiting, but is now slightly wistful as he eviscerates another orc.

At some point he will get covered in shit.

Tuesday, September 30, 2008

Well let's see how that's going

So a brief excerpt of the actual text of this shitboiler:

And above the rise of hills, dim in the fore-gloom of beckoning even-dusk-tide, there was the faint glower of the golden sun descending on the flanks of the Frostbourne mountains. The hooven clops of his trusty mare echoing on the dry track between the thrusting boulders of the Gar-Thung-Chump Pass was a comfort to Chim's tired ears. The clink clunk of his sword Mumpbiter was interleaving with the rustle of shrubberies either side.

Chim snapped his eyes to the side for one moment, thinking he had caught a glimpse of a rock nancy leaping from one boulder to another- it's fanged grin glinting in the gloom.

But no, perhaps it was a trick of the light demon, Spankitorch.

Well, it's clearly shaping up to be arse on many levels.

Continuation: meta-reflexive

Our hero spends a whole bunch of time with these various pursuits (before any real plot advance is made):

  • Fighting crap wizards, and winning because of untutored and uncontrollable magic that is latent in his (divine/demonic) nature
  • Fighting orcs or goblins
  • Getting covered in shit
  • Walking a lot
  • Coming across things that need about six paragraphs of cod-poetic description, involving elven ruins, mountains and/or mysterious shrubbery

A lot of bollocks really.

Something will get said or done that may or may not have a point that is revealed later on. Maybe someone whispers his real name as he pulls his sword out of them, but he can't hear it? Something like that.

Book two.

Monday, September 29, 2008

Gets burnt by first interlude with enemy

Big-faced guy with backwards eyes fronts Chim out with magic (mainly cheap tricks with ur-gunpowder, some misdirection and a lot of hand-gestures). Chim retreats in disarray, trips over his sword, is sick in his mouth a bit, as he stumbles backwards into a ditch full of shit.

He's lying there looking up at the stars (it's night and he see portents again) and he has a moment of insight.

This insight makes him reconsider his quest. He questions his quest, a bit. So he fucks off and does some side-quests (mostly involving mean hardship, behest by some wise old bloke in a dress up a hill).

Clearly these side-quests don't kill him and (bit of Nietzsche thrown in) therefore make him stronger (levels up his skill tree in, oh, I don't know, badger-baiting or something).

So we have a couple of mildly amusing, but eventually worthwhile, pursuits that make him better, more rounded (he's humiliated a couple of times, mainly because of hubris, or because he's not as good-looking as he thinks he is. Yes, that's it, he gets spurned by a sassy heroine who features later, and is therefore humiliated in turn in this misogynist shit-bucket of a story).

Sunday, September 28, 2008

Random battles later

In the forest, up a mountain, in a cave.

Chim has levelled up. He's now beginning to get a handle on his (demonic/divine) powers.

When he is attacked in a surprise from the sides - where he wasn't looking - he makes light, in a blinding flash, appear.

He doesn't know this at first (we have to wait until he befriends a weak crippled thief in the town beyond, before this is revealed) as his eyes were shut whilst he sneezed (you can't sneeze with your eyes open - see? More science). All he knows that one minute he is walking along, next minute he sees reeling blinded assailants dropping their knives; forest/mountain/cave bandits that were clearly intending to cut him quick. He kills them quick.

Fantasy plots part two

Young man comes of age, unaware that his father was a demi-god (or semi-demon).

So far he has (unconsciously) used his demonic (divine) powers to become a really good blacksmith, what with smiting iron in the furnace effectively and whatnot.

Clearly he's meant for greatness, and equally clearly his disciplinarian blacksmith (cuckolded) father (who loved him really) and wilting (real) mother (who was formerly a great and terrible witch, now hiding in the hinterland in domestic obscurity) are both murdered by assassins unknown in the dead night, eve of his majority.

The blame falls on him, although in later centuries it would be put down to carbon monoxide poisoning from the charcoal hearth they kept burning in their mean hovel (they died pink-skinned, and that is seen as witchery). When they died sleepily he was out of the village stockade for the night, looking at stars and seeing portents.

So he is unwelcome when he gets back in grey dawn: forewarned because the village idiot savant/mage throws shit at him as he tries to persuade the gateman to let him back in.

He retreats. Covered in shit.

He comes back around about teatime to find the village fucked, the wooden pike walls split and burning, everyone inside variously dead.

His parents are the only ones dead with no injuries: no blunt, or sharp, trauma. They are pink and peaceful. He sees this as evidence of mystery.

He finds the idiot/mage bleeding his last, curled up, hiding, in the communal midden. The idiot whispers something cryptic that gives him a quest, before dying with fingers and eyes crossed.

The blackmith's son heads out; the burning village, and stink of roast human, behind him.

His given name is "Chim". His real name will be revealed eventually: it is significant and will make you re-evaluate his back-story.

More later.

Wrong ring plot device

Should have chosen the right one. You had the chance. It was there, glowing silver. But you thought you knew better, thought it was a trick. So you chose the ring you thought was covered in rat shit.

You were wrong, it was rat shit shaped like a ring. There was no deception.

Maybe next time you'll be more trusting.

And so ends book one of the trilogy.

survivalist

Oh, my, I was pissed off last night

Must have been the weather.

Brighter today though: the sun's out, the sky is cold blue and the wind is dead on the ground.

Saturday, September 27, 2008

Ok, now a solution

Throw out all the old shit

Clean up, clean out, garage sale of gathered crap

Clean slate, clean room, cleared out

Everything must go, including all your shit

Five year plan, with necessary purges

Fuck off to Siberia, stay there, write a book no-one will read

Then burn it

Ok, now a fucking rant

Seriously unimpressed with the way the world is now

Growing up in the desperate grey seventies it was my ardent wish that the future would be at least one lumen brighter. Places to go, people to meet, pellucid waters of some foreign clime enticing.

But no, if I am to believe the media, every border is either bursting with snarling fucks wanting to kill me, or economic (read, nearly dead through poverty) migrants wanting some of the tax and surveillance we have in our sparkling enlightened democracies.

And America became the land of fat dribbling morons and evil capitalist morons.

And Britain became the land of whiny liars and lying morons fucking everything up for the short-term lucre.

And the voluntary sector got filled with sanctimonious cunts.

And politics became an end in itself.

And most people are exactly shit and variously needy.

And nothing works just right, but there's always excuses.

Let's just admit it, things got too complex for our ape brains to handle. Things just got out of hand and we are fucking everything up with every breath.

Thursday, September 25, 2008

twitter fucked again. Now the fail whale has a password

And it is "needyFuckersComplainAboutFreeServiceDowntime"

Well, I thought it was ok

Clearly I am some kind of liberal commie bleeding heart.

So, to dispel that notion: fuck you conservative, I have enlisted the stasi, KGB, and a muslim fund of mentalists to camp under your bed, with cameras and guns and shit.

So any time you have unchristian urges they will kick your cock off.

And your paranoia will be vindicated.

Wednesday, September 24, 2008

Tuesday, September 23, 2008

Credit crunchies

The new breakfast cereal for merchant bankers (cockney definition is apposite now: masturbatory financial instruments turn out to be as useful as dildoes with trombone slides (stop trying to work out how that could work, pervert)).

Other financial instruments: french porn; guilts and bondages; wedge fundaments; private quitty.

Cheese beaks

Random I know, but that's ok.

This is not a metaphor

Time to realise that's not going away

Time to look into the water

Time to see the rusty shopping cart in the depth

With some little fish, gudgeons, sticklebacks and shrimps

With nettles up the banks

And brambles tangling broken bricks in the wall

Strings of barbed wire looped around the round-shouldered concrete

Cigarette butts and cans and crisp packets

This is not a metaphor

Sunday, September 21, 2008

Thursday, September 18, 2008

Plan for unhappiness

Grow up in the nasty blank grey of seventies, sometimes made better by the long summer of seventy-six, when the lawn cracked open like an old man's face. Or when something or other happened that was not so shit (can't remember what that was).

In the arse-end of the seventies get the end of it.

Come of age in the early eighties when most was rain and concrete, cramped vistas of little enjoy. But sometimes better when a day got lit sometimes.

Watch another recession happen in the bitter years between.

Then summer comes in the nineties. And all is well (but still difficult) and you are happy with another, for a small moment.

Then the millennium happens and it dries up, and work is just worky work, and there's one minute to the next just being.

And then there's a flash of joy too small to recompense.

And that's it.

Good enough, wouldn't have it any other way, because of friends I've met and things I've undone.

So really, the plan for unhappiness didn't work.

Because it's ok sometimes.

Wednesday, September 17, 2008

Baldy banjo

banjo bastard

on being on your own

It's the little things you miss:

A smile when you get home

Sounds of someone upstairs

Kitchen clatter

Things done you forgot about

Having to put things away you took out

And fucking

Happy happy joy joy

Going to get my Touring 2000 back on the road!

that bastard

Tuesday, September 16, 2008

had enough

really quite fucked off with all of this continuing litany of shite

from fucked up post to another shite pillar

every time I try to be slightly better than a fairly crap person

well, then, I get called out for being crap

piss, maybe I should stab teddy bears, or fuck unicorns up the arse

can't get much more evil, apparently

poor me

fuck that

the unicorn liked it

baldershite

Fuckety damn

That horse was brown, I tell you

Really, really shit day

Well, it made me hollow in every respect

There's no going back, wish there was

Perhaps things can only get better, or more tense

Fuck off, I'm dead

This has got to be the shittest day I've ever had

Career in the balance

Relationships likewise

And I'm short of breath, constantly

Fuckety damn

Still, in other news, I have a kitten

Monday, September 15, 2008

Made a bad mistake

I wrote an SMS text to a friend who was upset.

The text was supposed to be nice, sensitive and reassuring.

But I forgot that written words have no inflection, and if you're in a place where you're going to take something the wrong way, and there's little foundation in that few words, you can build anything on top.

Like imagined insensitivity, flippant disregard and disrespect.

So I don't have that friend anymore. Just because of the one word at the end: "bye".

Sunday, September 14, 2008

Saturday, September 13, 2008

No work, no word, no worse

When, in the little light that's left

You try to make out the figure in the doorway

And you can just about, almost, see that it's nearer you than it's ever been

Then you'll see clearer than you ever have

It's not a surprise; somehow it's ok

When it reaches for you

Sam in pictures

Sitting on his bed, still wearing his suit, the once locked box open on the beige carpet, the bullets like gold maggots around, and he pushes one after another into the revolver, and takes them out again.

He claps one metal chunk into another and the click home is satisfying.

He can hear his children arguing downstairs, over who gets the controllers for the xBox (he has two controllers and three children).

He hears his wife talking on her mobile to someone he doesn't know. Whoever it is is making her smile. He can hear her smiling, it's been so long now he can hear the smile.

So he puts the gun back in the box, gathers the bullets together and puts them away too.

He locks the box, puts the key in the crack in the skirting board where he always hides it. Puts the box in the back of the cupboard one more time.

Another day done, then.

today is my wedding anniversary

All good then.

Arse.

Quiet desperation

A tutorial.

Sam has a gun, the gun speaks to him. It says things he doesn't want to hear.

He gets a sexual word every time he puts a bullet in a chamber. And he sees it as anticipating some fucking thing that he's going to do.

He wants to tear holes in people with the bullets from his gun.

He knows this is wrong and so he hides his gun in a locked box he keeps in a cupboard.

But every now and then he has to take it out, take the bullets out and put them in again.

You are probably thinking Sam is some hick in a trailer. He's not, he comes home from work in an S-class Merc, his wife is well turned out. He smiles at clients and only has a couple of drinks now and then.

He's not mad or poor, not fucked up in any particular way. He's just fairly fairly normal. And he grits his teeth when he thinks of this, and occasionally screams when he drives home.

His only problem is that he does not want to be embarrassed when he finally kicks off and kills his wife, his children, and everyone he can get a bead on before he eats his gun.

He doesn't want to shit himself when the police come. He doesn't want to kill anyone who is not random. He wants to be insane.

But he's too middle class and too considerate to make a mess when he starts shooting and tearing holes in people.

Dietary concerns

"Eat shit and die," is a good diet for some.

"Fuck off and die," is not a diet, but appropriate to the same people.

"Die horribly," is also not a diet, but as you will see, you would lose weight doing it.

Traffic statistics

A useful compendium of traffic analysis for the travelling public:

  • Cars: 75%
  • Lorries: 13%
  • Aquaplaning above sea level: moderate
  • Trees: within accepted limits
  • M5 M6 Interchange: between 5 and 7 until the end of the week
  • Central reservation: down trending
  • Grit and gravel: equal
  • Slip roads: 5.1 variance
  • Exhaust: 1

Friday, September 12, 2008

Fruitless pursuit

Chasing mandarins

Just deactivated facebook account

Which doesn't mean the shite I have posted there isn't still there.

Just got weary. Too much crap scrabble, too much chess, too much hanging on for messages that can't come. Oh well.

Twitter is better.

Fucked off facebook

Had enough

Wednesday, September 10, 2008

new politics

I agree with what everyone has said, except those I don’t agree with. They really need to get their facts straight. It’s not rocket science, what they are saying is obviously wrong. But the people who I agree with are right. However, one of the people who I don’t agree with made a good point somewhere, and I agree with that, but it doesn’t contradict my position that those who I agree with have won the argument.

well yes, of course

On being a twat

I'm good at it, that has to be established at the start.

Also, I have a lot of experience to draw on: many times in the past I've been a twat. Sometimes by making stupid mistakes; sometimes by being less than generous to people I should be happier with.

It's genetic too: I come from a long line of twats; tracing my lineage back directly to Twatbold the Bold, renowned twat from the middle ages (not between 35 and 55; no, within dark centuries of ignorance when being a twat was indistinguishable form being able to breathe).

I have no issue with being a twat - some of my best friends (whom I don't particularly like) are also twats.

So there you are, I have a good twattitude.

Tuesday, September 09, 2008

Loving my grandad, because he killed Nazis in the war

By all accounts, and mentioned in despatches, he killed a lot of the fuckers.

Just found this in my journal

From a couple of years back

Nanotivity

In the 2147, before the holocaust, five thousand cybernetic warriors descended on Bethlehem, frost contrails bleeding silver from their leading edges, and nothing in between. Sparks of laser in the mist burning hot holes before their basilisk gaze.

They landed and they destroyed, casting about in the dark, severing men, women and children, cats and rats with their laser eyes.

But Herod, the orbiting AI, had miscalculated, the end-time was not on schedule, not about to happen, and he missed the messiah by a week, man-made comet messaged above the little town.

In a mechanic's hole, below the entrails of a 4x4 Subaru sports utility ATV, the baby god was born.

Attended by three euro-bureaucrats, three engineers and one confused father ("I haven't fscked her in a year"), the child was spewed out of the holy hole into the swarf and oil on the concrete floor (whilst all about was bright with exploding munitions).

Sunday, September 07, 2008

Balls, run out of cigarettes and beer

Therefore everything stops

Particularly this

That's good then

And we got to the Oort cloud

In our red rockets, and gas filled space suits

As we looked out of our round port-holes

We found the carcass of God

Rotting in the vacuum, strings of blood-red matter reeling out

And He was vast and shining once

But now He's just a traffic hazard in the interstellar routes

Where liners full of fat tourists stop off to see

Where the two miles wide godhead breathed and loved once

Now just a tangle of dead dark matter

Saturday, September 06, 2008

God dies crying

Thinking this is the end as He falls down through layers

Each one a different way of being that He no longer feels

A continuing anaesthetic descent into sleep

He hurts less as He dies, love goes away, and He stops seeing

Stops feeling everything and everyone, as He goes away

Miss you, wish you were here

Now you are going away

I made this

Somewhere there's a little death

And it has a tune. A little tune that has too much treble to be appropriate.

I'd like it to have deep, portentous bass; like some bleeding god in a pit shouting last words.

Instead I get a squirrel on a speed OD, running round its last circle, squeaking out its brittle disappointment that this, this whole bleeding out, this is the end.

Not even in focus, or well lit. Just a little death.

Fusel reappears

He comes up out of this dark hole, where the light switch had been turned off. Its plastic surround scuffed and marked with many fucking fingers crawling all over it, so that the bulb was lit from within, in the vacuum therein.

And then there was a howling dark that was full of shadows inside it, but somehow became bigger, kind of expanded, the blackness leaking out.

That's what I saw. That's what I will remember. And if it's a dream, well then, that's good enough. I'll take that to be real memory. At least he's not dead there.

Shit and fuck, can I not get out of these spider traps?

No, thought not. Ginger is still there.

Reduction

Got enough to be going on with.

Need to reduce that.

Realising I'm a bad man

Because everyone tells me that.

I am a bad man because:

  • I don't return texts immediately, irrespective of the circumstances I'm in (you know, like separating my small boys from each other's whirling fists)
  • I have a "phone manner"
  • I reply to long rambling emails with one-liners
  • I think it is clearly ok to let my boys play on the Xbox, the Wii and the iMac until they get square-eyed and LCD irradiated
  • I am not interested in how shit your day was
  • I don't tell you how shit my day was, because I don't think you would be interested
  • I drink alcohol and smoke cigarettes
  • I don't give a flying shit about issues you have
  • I drink coffee with three sugars
  • I sing about killing people on youTube, and this is not taken as a joke
  • I have no time for religionists, and do not respect their lunacy
  • I am taller than you
  • You are unlikely to be taller than me, or better looking, as you are all ugly dwarves (and that's a joke too)
  • You don't get my sense of humour
  • You are a fat midget
  • You are self-important enough to think I'm talking about you in particular, whatever I say. Fuck off, I have other concerns, not involving your neediness
  • I have built a nukular backpack bomb for squirrels
  • I swear a lot
  • You're a twat

So there you are; clearly I am Doctor Bastardpants

Amateur psychiatrists will have a lawn day with that.

Thursday, September 04, 2008

Murrican politics as I have understooded it:

Monty Python's sister is McCain Ovenchip's Advice Presbytarian and there is a Lama Barracks for keeping yaks in.

I have read some Dikipedia, Lama Barracks is part of this Demosthenes Pasty. They don't like the Republians. And that's in Murrica.

Murrica has this three things: the Senapod, the Legible and the Conkers. All three fight a lot. The Republians are scared of the Lama.

And also in Murrica there is a Tony General and Subprime Court. They have the laws. But the Legible writes them down, if Conkers let them.

The Murricans are fighting in Winerack, and the Rushions are fighting too, but in Jawjaw. They have a Knitted Nations where they argue a lot.

In Britland we have the Conserves and the New Maybe party. We also have the Library Demonstraters: they are in the middle.

The Conserves and the New Maybe party don't like each other. Rabid Camera is head of the Conserves, vs. Corduroy Brown, king of the Maybe.

There is a river between Britland and Prance, where Nicholas Sarcastic is king, and his lovely queen Italian Lovely Lady. They are nice.

Tuesday, September 02, 2008

I keep on doing this

"Why?" I don't hear you ask.

"For shits and giggle," I reply, even though you didn't ask.

Monday, September 01, 2008

Would you like, in the rain

To go to Whitby with me?

And see the homes piled up around the deep cut where the sea comes in?

With the boats and the stone?

No, thought not.

Kill all birds

Because they have flu.

And you know how shit men are with flu.

Now think about men with wings and flu.

(or in planes, flying flu, whatever)

That is good enough reason to kill all those flying things,

Insects with wings too,

In fact, anything with a penchant for transcending the two dimensions we are nailed in.

I speak from the arse.

Good day

Things that were good happened.

Things that were bad, didn't.

That was ok.

OK, got a bit, you know, mad right there

So now I'll retract on that, into the trenches and redoubts I have built out of the mud here.

There's this big hill of shit that I have dug a hole in.

It's nice, I've hung lanterns from the eaves, and the ingle nook is lit with burning things heaped up in the middle of it.

There's butter brought in on special buses, and bread grown from genetically modified maize. On a plate, in front of me, with a knife and fork either side, and a tin cup of tea.

Outside, the wind is making noise and is making things swing, and other things stay still (heavy things, mainly).

And other than what closely follows...

I'm fine, thank you,

Everything is dandelions and wine.

Oh fuck off, fuck off, fuck off

All you dribbling windowlickers on the special bus,

All you nasty, nasty people, fuckers inveterate that you are,

No spine, no backbone; all variously remonstrating,

Against the shit hand you got dealt,

Fuck off, fuck off, stop whining,

Your high-pitched, high maintenance, dirge sets my teeth on edge,

Fuck off; no really: fuck off,

I don't want to hear your special pleading any more,

Leave me alone,

Shut up,

I have enough already.

Can't you see what you're doing?

I have stuff and thing to get on with myself,

And you're giving me an ice cream migraine right now,

Just behind the eye,

Fuck off.

Thursday, August 28, 2008

maybe

I keep getting taught valuable lessons

I'm 43, white, male. And yet still I come up against situations for which I have no easy answer.

This is unfair. Surely all my hurdles should have been cleared by the age of 12?

No, that's right, didn't go to public school, therefore don't have the cultural entitlement thing going on.

Therefore explained. Sorry I wasted your time.

Friday, August 22, 2008

And now relax with happy thoughts (the news)

Bunnies wearing nylon tabards and gambolling through robust economies, variously complaining about the energy surplus in Russia.

(I'm channelling radio 4 news in part and fractions)

The market wants to pull the capital flight from the war, nonetheless, in the global economy.

And now the sport.

Fuck you, Australia. We won more medals than you sitting down.

I am untrustworthy

buy my car

Beelzebub bubblegum

What I chew when I'm thinking of stabbing you in the eye.

Better than Mephistopheles Menthol - minty sharp dagger.

Thursday, August 21, 2008

On being abreast of the vague

I'm not a zeitgeist type of prole, or nebbish, I don't have a stick with electrics in that with which I can talks to persons more than many yards away. In fact I find the shouting over chain-link fence, from one to another, suffices in the hard-sunshined backlots hereabouts.

"Hey, Cletus, you got the sack out the basement yet, ya motherfucker," is all I have to say to communicate to my social network.

Cletus, redneck, redface, always responds with "Fuck ya facebook, I'm blocking ya friend request, cocksucker, I got to friend me some clart on the social me applification."

"Yeah, poke me, ya fucker," I say.

I crack open another beer and wonder if I can piss on my dog again.

Wednesday, August 20, 2008

Snake house

The continuing descent into senescence of our hero, the de-centred self, as he/she becomes something or other, but with a plot.

The story so far:

From this imaginary travels

Nature Watch (BBC4 9pm): Unusual among reptiles

Little observed and unique behaviour captured in our amygdala sharing cousins:

  • Furry beaks
  • Harvard MBAs
  • Chocolate stains on the smoking jacket
  • Holiday plans

there it is

Sunday, August 17, 2008

Then die

After having done something fairly heroic.

Maybe involving fire, or subsequent seismic movements in the underground: one complete rock grinds against another mile high piece of thing thrusting and pushed up plate tectonics.

And me in a cape and tights (but not zentai) do the laser eyes thing, and all is set to rest.

praxis

Thursday, August 14, 2008

Finding Emo

Self-harming fish goes on long journey of discovery.

Gets trapped in a big glass prison.

Is not understood by fellow inmates.

Escapes through toilet.

Other things happen.

Estranged father finally finds him.

Goth fish flips him off.

Wednesday, August 13, 2008

fingerbobs venn

venn fingers magician charlatan

Continuing intersections in mathematical sense, it involves digits anyway (see what I did there?)

Smartarse, me.

Tuesday, August 12, 2008

Options

So if someone says you have 2 choices does that mean you have 4 options? As if you have a choice there are (clearly) 2 things to choose from

Monday, August 11, 2008

Sunday, August 10, 2008

Number crunching

I particularly like 8

Because it has some resistance on the upper reaches before you bite down on its hips.

Wednesday, August 06, 2008

Motorway brain

So, a completely random post now. The digits of PI defined by the increasing sparks of information transmitted up the M4 motorway by the serried ranks of sodium lamps. One off, one on, dimming in the twilight, and like a synapse, inhibited or excited by the inputs of the lamps up the slip-roads from the A roads.

B roads are a chemical embrace around the roundabouts that circle under and around the dendrite length of the motorway where big LED signs sometimes express (reify) the messages from one end to the other - the M1 communicates its displeasure 200 miles in each direction.

Random spiders

Fucking eight legged bastards

Play cards better than me

Never play gin rummy with arachnids

They practice to deceive

Massive lunar pope

Massive pope sighted rising above moon. NASA sends jesuit-based probe to investigate. Two of holy trinity spotted, holy ghost indistinct.

Tiny saints in orbit around massive lunar pope are identified as early martyrs. Auto da fe is filled with petrol and sent to investigate.

Massive lunar pope is posited to be extrusion of the godhead into local quantum space in Capricorn, Saturn. Astrologers suicide in droves.

Massive lunar pope grazes van allen belt. Northern lights say "eeee, thez sparkles in t'atmosphere". Patrick Moore is canonised.

Massive lunar pope touches down in arctic waste. Russians stick flag in it, but out of a submarine.

Massive lunar pope beatifies small dogs. Dobermans, Dalmatians and Great Danes mount protest, and each other. Really big dog is produced.

Sunday, August 03, 2008

The philosophy of not being carp

I don't believe in fish either. We may have evolved from them, granted: that's not the fundamental principle I'm trying to espouse right here.

No, instead I'm trying to explain my lack of faith in our aquatic cousins in a general, kind of over-arching way.

Fuck fish, in other words.

Wednesday, July 30, 2008

Philosophy of not being crap

There's a lot (and I should say, being portentous, a vast hinterland) of people who just keep on keeping on and don't measure their morals between authoritarian poles. They don't have, nor want, an external force to guide them in their ethics. And in fact feel slightly demeaned when they have to call on precepts of goodness they have not themselves evolved.

That's you and me, basically good, but not because of magic-man-in-the-sky's edicts.

So how does that work, and how do you defend that?

Easy. I made my own moral compass, and its direction is rounded by my contemplation. I am not so stupid that I need orders to be moral.

Playing the same game

If intelligent design is true - why are creationists less intelligent than amoeba?

If, in my day to day, toil...

I indirectly made you think of something that was sometimes sideways from what you normally think (food, sleep, work, sex, knitting) then I can say hole heartingly that my work is done.

If not, and you got that instant lemon-lips in your face, then I can follow that up with an instant "fuck off". That will justify your immediate disdain. Well done you, you have retreated with prejudices intact.

Or, maybe you've got this far and are expecting some validation for your fortitude. Well, yes, thanks for keeping keeping on.

But no, really, I just went meta.

Random thoughts on the phone wire

In my cups that I am, here's a list of shits with which I do not abide:

  • Keith
  • Kevin
  • Keifer
  • South Kesteven

That's the K done, now the L

Fuck off L

Monday, July 28, 2008

Sunday, July 27, 2008

Space aliens visit earth

So says zero G looney tune Dr. Edgar.

This is not news everyone. Space aliens have been probing my anus since 1993. Whitley Schreiber can suck my cock.

I've had greys up my bumhole since the year dot. Flying saucers, cups and teapots all swinging round my village in rural Rutland. They fire over the flatness of Lincolnshire, through the Catmose Vale, looking for lip leakers in pickups.

Got me because I hitched from Leicester to the Oakham, and got picked up by Stanley Bottomley, poacher turned poacher on the Burghley estate.

Quick tractor beam uptake, desultory probe of the arse piece, and then landed back in the high street of Oakham on a Saturday afternoon with my trousers round my ankles.

That was my explanation to the magistrate.

Saturday, July 26, 2008

it stands

It's mainly about eyebrows

There's no other thing

I think I have established that.

Slackers

Well yes, there was this one time that I dressed up as a nun and took a train to Derby early in the morning.

I admit that now, and am suitably embarrassed.

It was a long time ago and it wasn't intended to be blasphemous, just worthy of an anecdote.

I wimpled all the way. Got off the train in the rain, adjusted my habit and smiled benignly at the ticket person bless you dear and took the next train back.

Sunday, July 20, 2008

Unwinese

Once a polly tito, there in the woodbold with all the leafy clutter canopold abovely skyhole, there I saw a sparrow flighty wing, from one twigger in the dusk, flappy feather there. Oh yes.

Oh yes, the twigger in the dusky moonflit night, i remember the very thingalo.

I remembold the very thing, all sing in their throakers, very there, up in the moonflit duskbode, and having a gleam in the eyehole. Even raining, wet damp and fold it in the cloth, still heart fallolops in the spring.

Saturday, July 19, 2008

Stanley Unwin

Greatbold manifold and in the hereinafter, now deadly interned.

Some phrases from Unwinese
  • Deep joy: Pleasing.
  • Goodlilode: Good or excellent.
  • Nockers (as in I did nockers): Not.
  • Terribold: Terrible.
  • Remarkibold: Remarkable.
  • Horribold: Horrible.
  • Falollop: Fall.
  • Once a polly tito: Once upon a time.
  • Thriftymost on your banky balancer: Very good value.
  • Goodlibilode: Goodbye.

keeping this

Before it fucks off down the twitter tree - it's deep:

As a political doctrine I think having the same opinion as people you agree with is very strong. You may disagree (you'd be wrong)

Sunday, July 13, 2008

Haven't been writing much lately

I am in the throes (and throws) of giving up smoking (again), and apart from occasional and avoidable relapses it's going ok.

Probably the most difficult thing I'm going to do this year, except for the yoga (and that's only so I can learn to kiss my own elbows, nice elbows).

So, there's not going to be much from me now for a while, until I get that more-oxygen-in-my-bloodstream buzz, so I'm practically levitating with energy.

Plus, the ability to burn things at a distance with my eyes. Feel like I've got lasers in them already.

I've been dribbling on twitter a bit, just to keep my finger in.

And I'll be posing daily photo diary of my battle with the weed here.

Enjoy! I know I won't.

Saturday, July 12, 2008

Rambling times

There's this thing up a hill, it's made of plastic forms and aluminium hinges, each one depending from the other, so the wind fills them full of air. The hinges go square and the plastic inflates. So you have a clear polyurethane enclosure, but on a hill.

The gorse gets a little jealous and attempts to be more yellow (wins that competition, clearly, but that wasn't the game, so loses really).

It's something artificial on a hill, powering a house in the valley. The hinges take the strain as the plastic bags inflate, one after the other, and piss electricity into a battery hooked up below.

In other news, I had a good time in the Peak District, how about you?

Wednesday, July 09, 2008

Had nothing to say

Therefore said nothing

...

Nope. Still nothing.

And I'm usually so edifying.

Fuck.

Friday, July 04, 2008

Plastic Dog Bombs

plastic dog bombs

For all your plastic dog bomb needs.

Tuesday, July 01, 2008

iPhone face recognition: another application

People who look like me.

Obviously dependent on eyebrows in my case.

Externalising iPhone games: recognition server

The iPhone has a camera and is location aware.

iPhone face recognition

So you can take games out of the tiny screen and make them part of the landscape.

I haven't got any particular game ideas (unlike this guy), but just one (other) way to make use of the built-in input stuff is to make the iPhone become a passport for an ARG like experience: recognition server.

Basically the idea is this: you go to a location specified by the game and take a photo of the indicated landmark (or person). The photo is flicked to the recognition server, algorithmic magic ensues, and you get a hit if the landmark (or person) is, er, recognised. For face recognition you could use the touch screen to mark key points: eye centres, mouth corners, and so on.

So, for example, as part of the ARG, you've got to meet someone, you take a photo of that person, and then you get told whether it's the right person.

There could be a real life application for this too: when you register your phone you take a photo of yourself, so at any time subsequently you can affirm ownership via face recognition.

That's it really.

Just one idea occurs: city-wide tennis.

Sorry for the pompous title.

Sunday, June 29, 2008

Cassie draws on the wall

cassie draws on my wall

I just repainted the wall, and then had an idea, a permanent marker, and a spirit level.

Saturday, June 21, 2008

далеко : Daleks vs. Bionicles

Asked number 2 son (Marley) who would win out of Daleks vs. Bionicles.

He answered immediately, "Bionicles, because they know weak spots"

I asked him what the weak spot of a Dalek is, "The eye," he says, "I saw a man jump off some boxes and shoot a Dalek in the eye and his head exploded".

As I am nearing my mid 40s and have grown up with Daleks as kind of evil hardcore uncles, I was disappointed that he thought mere lego could ever be contenders against the continuing darkness of the Dalek empire.

However, Marley's 7, and therefore knows better.

But I added Dalek to the spell checker's dictionary (so no red dashed underline for them); I'm not adding it for Bionicles. There will always be Daleks in my vocabulary, Bionicles are transitory.

But I am really, really happy that these (hey!) 45 year old monsters, still figure large in my small boys' imaginations.

Daleks were probably the purest expression of 60s design, as it was all about a clean metal future, and (perversely) expressed the optimism of the white heat of technology: Harold Wilson, 1963; Daleks, Terry Nation, 1963.

Ka Faraq Gatri

and now the weather:

In the south west the weather will be mostly coming out of the sky and hitting the ground with various degrees of enthusiasm.

Northerer, the weather is currently sulking upstairs, satellite images suggest a large depression.

Westerly: raining cats and dogs, dogs confused and wagging tails anyway as they land, cats pretending they meant to do that.

Thursday, June 19, 2008

Swearing part two

You should take a leaf out of my book, I don't fucking swear at all, because that would be fucking unacceptable. I mean, if I swore at all, people would think I was shit. Fuckers. So that's why I never swear - don't want the wankers I daily encounter to think I'm some kind of twat. So I live by this mantra:

"Swear? Me? Fuck no. Fuck off do I."

Butcher McCready

When I worked on the railway I heard the apotheosis of creative swearing, where every part participle of the grammar (cow) of the sentence was replaced by the f-word.

Butcher McCready (yes, his nickname), tried to chisel a bolt out of a seized fishplate with his shovel and the fishplate exploded (cast-iron see). So he says:

"Fuck, I've fucked the fucking fucker"

He was also the one who branded me Dr. Stupid - "brain the size of a planet, common sense of a gnat". I lived with that for the whole three years I worked on the railway.

Butcher McCready was the guy who named all of us on the big yellow bus.

"Doom and Gloom" the body-builder ex Corby steel worker who lost all his body hair because he worked in the galvo plant (electric blast furnace) and did not have a sunny disposition.

"Jimmy Saville" - Jim, our miserable driver, because he cunt clit every trip.

"Noggin the Twat" - our norwegian tool boy

"Dick Turpentine" - Richard White (spirit)

seating arrangements fail

Wednesday, June 18, 2008

Sleepy harmonium

This here

Dictionary of fuck off

A lexicon got jammed in between a tree and a rock in the valley between the sky and that other thing that looks like upside down sky but ripples, oh that's right, a lake.

So the words fell out of the pages and spread around the green things growing there, oh yes, the grass and leaves.

And some sentences formed, some that made sense, some that didn't. But I didn't take note, and certainly didn't write any down.

As I was passing by in my car, with the window wound down, the sun in my side of face, it whispers by the hedge, tall so I don't see the lake with words splashing in.

Don't see the grammar getting wet, or damp punctuation

Instead I'm listening to Terry Wogan and something about traffic on the M42

And missing the ink dissolving in the water

Tuesday, June 17, 2008

Monday, June 16, 2008

Nutbag collective

  • Fundamentalists
  • Mental fundaments
  • Scientologists
  • Trainspotters
  • Stop it, stop shouting! I can't hear the voices
  • Kill, kill, kill.
  • Me and my multiple personalities, or am I? No. Fuck off. Sorry, I thought it was my turn. No it's not. Who are you? Hey, look, ants! I love ants.
  • Some nuts in a bag
  • May contain nuts
  • June doesn't

Laser! Laser! Danger and potted plants

Got attacked by a japonica today, made me wysteriacal. Fuck gardening, you don't call laying paving slabs streeting (although you should) or redecorating housing.

Shitty sweaty hotness with various scratches and dirt, the smell of ripped crab-grass and dandelion.

And why are proper plants so fucking limp-wristed? (wilting namby-pamby splitters). Weeds have big broad fuck-off constitutions, and laugh in the face of me.

So I have decided I will cultivate weeds: brambles, chickweed, thistles and sticky peter (which isn't the name of a weed, but should be).

Then I will have a lush but raggy garden.

And I can relax in a miasma of pollen.

Thursday, June 12, 2008

Same shit in the river

Cheese factory undergraduate

Entered as a young apprentice to an under-sourer of the butter.

Nervous when walking into, with other apprentices all nervous too, the big open (one day only) gates of the Benedictine Dairy.

Spent harsh years of stone-walled contemplation and vigourous milking.

Until the final exams, wherein the stuff of me was tested.

Passed with waving flags.

I have my own cheese shop now, on the corner past the hen gardens and behind the grease mill.

You can't miss it, ravens nest in the pylons there, and there's this big sign saying "Cheese shop".

There's an assortment of savoury rotten milk available, only twenty pennies a bushel.

Wednesday, June 11, 2008

Atheism versus religionism

Religious explanations are golden floating clouds

And science builds iron scaffolds into the sky

So I can see why some weaklings like the warm embrace of mist and arrant bollocks

Googled "mad biscuits"

Got these

multiplying

Two times two

Two comes second

In four seconds

Saturday, June 07, 2008

Tuesday, June 03, 2008

First I considered "coalesce"

When writing a poem

That word would look clever enough

But then I thought that was

Too studenty

And not E.J. Thribb enough

I replaced it with "coalesque"

And wrote an Edwardian Scientific Romance about plans

For an iron channel tunnel undermined

By Hun plots to make fake coal

The beauty of proof

Many years ago I did a maths degree (because it was the most difficult thing I could do at that time).

And the thing I loved was the pictures proofs would put in my head

As I could only remember them if I visualised them

The easiest to remember was a reductio ad absurdum argument, or proof by contradiction: it was a sparkling fan of colour suddenly shut off by a monk

But the best was spiralling towers of supposition balanced on one axiom in group theory

The proof exploded this founding stone axiom

But as each supposition crashed down in the billowing dust, it's opposite was therefore proved

Like sparks out of a roiling cloud

So that's the picture of that proof: towers falling, dust blooming, sparks ensuing

Opportunities to say

There's a funeral for a celebrity friend, someone I knew, much younger, before fame bit

So I'm invited by his dad, because he remembers when I used to come round in summer days, with plans for dens, or streams to dam

But that's the last memory for me, I didn't know him as he made his way

He died badly, fat and failed and full of himself and drugs

But his mum cried at the funeral, and his dad looked at me once and acknowledged something

Because all his latter friends are shits or charlatans

At the funeral for the cameras

I'm not recognised so attract a camera and a faceful of mic

So I had an opportunity to say, to say all of this is fucked, we don't mark your death with a bunch of cunts in attendance

But instead I walk on and look away

Sunday, June 01, 2008

This one

thinking about getting a dog, anyone got a spare dog? Would prefer a big one with black fur and a stupid grin. I'll call him Baskerville.

bettie_texas_beau.jpg

Furry spaceship

s50.jpg

I'll tell you about some big, big things

Some bigger than others,

When one gets up, goes out the room,

He gets replaced by another.

Some infinities are bigger than others.

You have the countable infinities: the natural numbers (1,2 and so on) is one. They are infinite because they plod on, linearly, just being one big number after another, like a line of bullies forever meeting someone bigger than them (God's at the end of the line).

Then you have the uncountable infinities: the irrational numbers (can't be expressed as the ratio of two numbers) is one. They are called irrational numbers as, for example, exactly unlike 2 is the ratio between 6 and 3 (and 8 and 4 and so on), the square root of 2 is not the ratio of any other two numbers. So the square root of 2 is an irrational number.

You'd think these would be few and far between. They're not; they're many and near between: every couple of rational numbers has an infinite amount of irrational numbers between them.

In fact there's so many irrational numbers you can't count them. You can try, for every one of the pug-faced bullies in that never-ending line, assign an irrational number. You'd think that the bully assigned the square root of two would be fairly close to the beginning of the queue. He wouldn't, he'd be so far up the line, he'd have gone beyond the end. And it doesn't have an end.

(as it's infinite, which is kind of the point of this, so if you're lost now, don't worry, the paragraph coming up is roughly halfway up the page, so if you look to the right of that (no, your right), you'll see a list of posts where I swear a lot)

And I can(tor) prove it.

First some preliminaries:

How to recognise an irrational number, cook it and eat it

(more on this later)

Friday, May 30, 2008

keeping this

...that's elbow? That's fine.

Thursday, May 29, 2008

burn rate

Calculate how much you money you burnt driving, fill in either cost per litre or cost per gallon (the vice of the versa will automatically update converted). If you can't work out the rest, then go for a long drive in a 4x4, you need the money.

Cost per litre:

Cost per gallon:

Miles you travelled:

Average miles per gallon:

You spent:

Conservation idea, what with the price of petrol and shit

Put a sensor on the accelerator pedal, wire this into a display on the dashboard that shows exactly how much money you are burning in the engine as you press down.

This would have two good effects:

  1. More speed=more petrol=more money burnt=incentive to slow down
  2. If you see the pennies flying away as you drive you might think twice about driving