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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)