Hold The Sky

Sat next to someone on the work bus who's trying out all the ringtones on their new phone in order. They're sat next to someone who's using their phone to passive-agressively write about it on an ageing social blogging site which is so dated that it's got a full compliment of vowels and isn't operared by a private sector covert intelligence agency. It is so 2004.

I'm more than a little pissed off at sites which are supposed to be international constantly distracting me with foreign politics, whatever that politics is and whatever that foreign country might be.

Yes, SOPA would be a very bad law and, yes it would have implications on the wider internet community, including myself. But, you know what, I have sod all influence over that. That's the way empires work: foreign people you don't vote for shit on you. We've all had to get used to that from the US recently, and from Britain before that, &c. (And what did the Romans ever do for us? :-)).

What's unexpected is the implicit imperialism of sites who are supposed to be good guys, like Dreamwidth, Wikipedia, and so on, who I'm sure have perfectly good geolocation databases, inflicting foreign politics on the rest of us who have quite enough of our own, or else don't really care about the collateral damage in what are, to them, far flung shores.

I'm all for sites taking all measures to influence US politicians to stop being idiots or, with a greater likelihood of success, educating the US electorate to stop electing idiots, but I don't see why I need to be bombarded with nasty things which may well happen and over which I have absolutely no control or influence, as if the Internet were some new kind of Daily Mail.

It's bad enough that my, predominantly English and Welsh, Twitter followers insisted on retweeting US domestic politics and crime stories ad nauseum: now it's being done by the sites themselves.

(By the way, did anyone else notice that the Police Reform and Social Responsibility Act 2011 removes the requirement that even a single member of the government advisory panel on drugs have any relevant experience of expertise in medicine, pharmacy, dentistry, veterinary science, or chemistry? It seems that finding a single appropriate member of any of those professions who advised the government how it wished to be advised was proving too difficult. Or the bit about the elected police? Or the bit about protests in parliament square? Or the bit about local authorities being given powers to seize and retain property and cause it to be forfeit on the passing of council byelaws on whatever matter they see fit? No? I guess the news was full of New Hampshire Primaries and bloody SOPA and PIPA nonsense over which we have no influence, but can occupy ourselves worrying about).

Straw Bear was fun again. Gog Magog, Black Pig and Pig Dyke Mollies were as excellent as ever; Chiltern Hundreds clog was amazingly intricate, and Midwinter Mummers were fun. Missed The Witchmen (who are good), though I saw them around: they're usually good. Lots of good teams I didn't recognise too.

The A14 was closed today so we went there via Ely and Chatteris and accidentally via Ramsey Forty Foot, which is a much more beautiful way.

I'll have to go to Whittlesea on another day, too, it looks like a nice little town to spend a night over in with good walks. Apparently many of the pubs take half their annual takings during Straw Bear which explains why there are so many (that and the way there's not much else to do in the evening). I'll have to find out why Whittlesea is so obsessed with the Battle of Aliwal, in far off Punjab: I spotted an Aliwal Road, Manor and Pub.

I was looking forward to Straw Bear to get me through Chirstmas!

Interesting the way we relax: L is more into books and films than me, and I'm more into music and dance, and we both like pictures. All small, relative biases.

I'm thinking about giving twitter a bit of a wide berth for a while and see how it goes.

I grew up in a house which read the Daily Mail so I'm used to the soul-destroying effects of incessant misery, hatred and finger-pointing concentrated for who knows what end, but the effect being maintaining in the reader in a state of anxiety, anger and fear.

Unfortunately, twitter seems to be turning into something resembling this for Guardianistas. The targets are different, and could be argued to be more legitimate, but the effect is the same, at least for me in that it's a bit of a lodestone and whirlpool of misery describing, like the Mail, how the world outside my house is dangerous and wrong, how everyone's out to get me, how everything is collapsing, and how it's all my fault. If such twittery seemed to achieve anything other than general misery, I'd have more sympathy for it.

One of the problems with social networking is that everything is organised by person rather than by subject (as it was in good ole Usenet), so I can't just knock off people who do it, because we all contribute to the misery and many I consider good friends (I do it too, and that worries me more, really). It just seems that twitter is a place for people who like shouting and listening to shouting to do such.

A lot of people I only really keep in touch with through Twitter so I'm kind of pretty ambivalent about this, and may well re-engage at some point, but I think it's worth the experiment.

Fifth Christmas pub thing done in a week! I've gone out more in December than the rest of the year put together, I think. I've certainly drunk more in December than during all of the rest of the year. There's another thing tomorrow: I'm going to try to skive it, I think.

The goose isn't a performer, he's called Maria and lived in the park where the video was filmed and decided to join in. He now lives in LA zoo, while they do some remodelling.



(if you're very busy, skip to 3:00 but, for a good build up, I recommend watching from the start).

I do think Jim Bowen was lost to the underdeveloped field of social realist chat-show host:

Jim: So, what is it you do Brian?
Brian: I'm a wool carder, Jim.
Jim: And what do they do Brian?
Brian: They kind of remove the tangles from, you know, from wool.
Jim: And then it's...
Brian: spun?
Jim: spun, exactly, and then made into jumpers?
Brian: that's right Jim.
Jim: And how's business?
Brian: Very quiet. Bad.
Jim: Like that for all of us, isn't it?
Brian: It is, Jim.
Jim: Still, it will get better. It's going to get better. I mean, it has to: doesn't it? And you Arthur. You're an electrician's mate?
Arthur: That's right Jim.
Jim: And you've got a good story about British Rail, haven't you, Arthur?
Arthur: That's right Jim. On my way to a job the other day, I left my toolbox on the train and the station master called ahead to the next station who had it returned to me.
Jim: So, -- and we're going to switch to camera one over there, in a second, Arthur, -- what do you have to say to British Rail?
Arthur: Thank you very much British Rail.
Jim: Thanks Arthur. And I must say, well done. When we rehearsed I had to tell him to keep the story very short or we'd run out of time. And you did that very well Arthur. Anyway, let's get on with the game.

I was never asked anything nearly as interesting at my interview. Being a scientist, I was asked things about the arctan of 1 and how to turn a liquid into a gas without boiling it.

I was amused to see a couple of much more interesting questions on the beeb today, interesting in the sense of absolutely terrifying to some poor teenager.

Giving myself no time to think about it...

"How do you know that California exists if you haven't been there?"

Mmm, through other people's reports. Even if I'd been there, my senses can be deceived, so that's probably more reliable, if anything. Your senses can be deceived (Truman Show style) and I'm sure there's at least a thousand people in the world who're more expert than detecting California than me, have been in a position to do so, is honest, and would think it remarkable enough to raise a stink which would make it through to me. It's also quite difficult to simulate the existence of California because self-consistency is difficult to achieve. I think it would take a tremendous amount of energy (both literal and metaphorical) to create the deception of California. In fact the easiest way to do that would probably be to create it.


"Would you rather be an apple or a banana?"

On balance, probably an apple. It would be kind of dismal to know you were going to be turned into a fruit, but if you were an apple you'd at least retain a bit-part in the whole good/evil, god, sex, death and art thing.

Bananas have a certain modern feel, which an apple lacks: they're slightly exotic, what with their far flung origins indicative of international trade and globalisation, are famously radioactive, and were (from here) a product of empire. You could probably do a good study from the founding of the Portuguese colonies to nuclear terrorism, using bananas. But I don't think that's something I'd want to embody.

(I'm guessing the banana/apple thing would be the same one which a lot of people would give, because it's not very imaginative. And the California one is kind of pedestrian applied folk epistemology. I now know enough about the other side of this process that I'm sure I'd've been going to Leeds! Thank goodness for science).

This was going to be a review of Novacon from a neophyte, but there was a massive bit at the start about the kind of books I like that would unbalance it but thought it could be a post on its own. It's a bit self-indulgent me-me-me, but I guess when I post the other bit, that might excuse it a bit!

I like to read a fair, but not large, quantity of Science Fiction. I probably read it about 50/50 SF (or less) with the remainder largely what snooty people call literary fiction (which is far too grand a name for novels about middle class people having affairs, looking at what poor people do, and/or contemplating their mortality (in the same broad brush, incorrect way that SF is about aliens and spaceships). I particularly like books at the intersection of the two.

I don't really like books about spaceships having battles, or dragons and wizards in the Nethack/JRRT sense, both of which tend to have a tendency towards apologia for, or at least an unhealthy wallowing in, fascistic-state-corporatism and medieval feudalism, respectively. Though I'm iritated by people who feel superior by not liking them.

I like books about the far future or past; books with a religious context; about disasters, dystopias, and apocalypses; about magicians; about fairies, seances, ghosts, Ouija, etc, in the spooky Victorian sense; "Very British" setting; steam-punk Victoriana generally; diesel-punk; with female leads; with a maritime bent; about trips and psychosis and the insanity of the sane mind; books where a normal life is not considered a healthy ambition; books which involve philosophising about things like the nature of time. They must have strong characters: I don't care about plots.

So some of my favourite SF books are Solaris, A Canticle for Leibowitz, almost anything by John Wyndham or Ray Bradbury, and I've got Earth Abides on my to read pile and Death of Grass on my to buy list, both of which I'm very excited about.

Maybe passions such as almost anything wirtten by Angela Carter or JG Ballard, Atwood's The Year Of The Flood, De Lillo's Ratner's Star, etc, might also count.

Steering off into non-SF, I love The Magic Mountain, A Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich, Poe, MR James, most stuff by Iris Murdoch, Narcissus and Goldmund, The Glass Bead Game, Pincher Martin, and De Lillo's Underworld, The Body Artist.

Poetry-wise, I like Carol-Ann Duffy, Dylan Thomas, Ted Hughes, Christina Rosetti, and Philip Larkin. Betjeman drives me up the wall.

I don't read much compared to most of my friends, but significantly more than the general population, I think. I didn't grow up in a family which read. I read slowly and don't really want to relax with a book that I'll soon forget: if I read, I want to remember it for years afterwards for the effort. If I want to switch off, there's the internet and TV, but nothing yet does life-changing quite like a book, even in fiction, so am always slowly working through things.

At the moment I've got Cloud Atlas and Smith's An Inquiry Into the Wealth Of Nations on the go.

As for on-screen SF, favourites include Silent Running, Blakes 7, Solaris (Tarkovsky), (most of) Babylon 5. Star Trek after the original series and the revived Doctor Who drive me mad.

In terms of films generally, I tend to go by director: Tarkovsky is probably my favourite, but Bergman, Herzog, Roy Andersson, and Bela Tarr are also must-sees for me. I like 70s disaster movies, too, and most 40s and 50s World War Two films, a fair few musicals, anything with cinematography by Nykvist or Cardiff, a fair amount of Merchant Ivory and Powell and Presberger, the MGM Musicals of the Busby Berkeley era, and those endless "back stage" musicals of that same era involving chorus girls and princes of Ruritania.

Well, that's about it. In a while (when you've had time to recover from my navel-gazing) I will post my Novacon-and-me summary, :-).