Monthly Archives: March 2010

Who is the puppet?

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Yooooooohooooooooo!

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Whale ahoy!

Remember me? Don’t pretend! That’s right – I’m your BODY and you can think all you like but you aren’t going ANYWHERE without me. I’m with you your whole life, cradle to grave – and you can PRAY TO GOD about not needing me afterwards – but that’s not likely now is it?

No, you and me are deep in it together and you had better get used to it.

So you didn’t mind me when you were younger did you? Caught you looking  in the mirror a few times and it was ME that you were admiring. And you liked the feel of things – don’t need to remind you. Now you’re all pissed off that I keep getting older and your ‘mind’ stays young. I’ve gone flabby, my face is sagging and my hair is retreating faster than the Iraqi army. WELL TOUGH SHIT BUDDY. Take a good look in the mirror now because it’s just going to get worse and one day you’ll be howling to look as good as this again.

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I'm feeling a bit better honest.

It’s all your fault – that flab is all the good times you had pouring crap down my throat, lolling around in front of a computer when you should have been doing laps. A nice sculpture of all the times you had ‘one more’. Then there’s the lines that come from all the bad times – all the times you screwed up and had to start all over again from the bottom. Shake it with genetics and serve on ice. We’re a real work of art and the best bit is way we’ve started stooping, a little now and then, getting ready to be a wizened old hunchback.

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Pain is nature's way of saying hahahahaahahahah

Are you frightened? You better be. This is MY time. I already sent you a present with that pain in your joints. Enjoy that little tweak in your morning hobble? That’s just the first SOLO, you wait for the full ORCHESTRA. And you have to admit this week’s toothache was a real show – a lecturer that has 5 hours of continuous talking and a screaming pain in their gob. All those teeth got to go one day, may as well sound the first bugle!

Yep, by the time I’m finished with you, you’ll be looking at all the young people around you with a burning jealousy that’ll have you alienated and lonely in no time. But don’t be too jealous – for all their current youth they’re right behind you. Everyone has a body and they’re all dying.

Keep busy writing and recording and all that crap you think is going to ‘transcend’ me. We’re best buddies, and as I rot so will you. When you can’t even sign your own name – we’ll finally be equal, and maybe then you’ll just have to accept who was the REAL master here.

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Wanna start a band?

Dogs and Monkeys

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I can’t believe I got a couple of thousand words into an analysis of Something Awful dot com. I was trying to account for why I became interested in the site’s continuing success (100,000 members, around 4,000 online at once) and it was kind of interesting but, damn, that’s not really what I’m supposed to be writing about. Computers – they just eat everything and spit out little pellets of virtual life. Cyberpoop in the brain..

To hell with web culture.

There’s only two things really important about Something Awful and that’s when Zack Parsons writes insane multi-part science fiction and when ‘livestock’ writes about dogs. The rest of it is a pastime, and if you have pastimes then you are too young or have forgotten that death is hurtling towards you. Neither applies to me.

sailorI should instead write about Soggy The Sailor who, having taken on the guise of his previous idol, has returned after a long absence (off sailing with Sinbad or Popeye?) and has a new CD that he plays at around 1am every day. This adds insult to injury – it’s a compilation of songs by Paddy Roberts who as a child I liked very much. He sings about the Old Ladies Stuck In The Lavatory – it’s sophisticated stuff. Now one Paddy Roberts song is funny. 75 minutes of them is tedious. The same 75 minutes repeated at 1am every day is pathological. I think Soggy considers himself an Irish balladeer. He’s also a hipster douche who thinks that old comedy records make great random party music. As I live up the road from *the* hipster douche pub (rows of bicycles lined up outside each with the obligatory little wicker carrying basket, playlist of ironic 70′s and 80′s hits, goofy facial hair and so on) I bet some considerable fish that Soggy is playing his wretched music after a night on the flannelette microbrew. Not cool.

I should write about the VJ set I am struggling to create in the hours after making CDs in the hours after study that come after the hours of the day job. The original Over Barbara Island set was performed in 2006. The set was a disaster (was supposed to be outside with Tiki lamps – was inside in horrible white echoing room because of rain) but the music is pretty much my favourite of the late Sevs recordings. When asked to do a benefit set for Rainforest Rescue, Barbara was the obvious choice. The promoter has asked for a more up tempo set and so it seems time to add a few new tracks. Barbara was supposed to be exotica – cocktail music, slightly cheesy and slightly spooky and it did that well. Return to Barbara Island picks up on some of the ideas gridlocked in the Aerodrom project: aircraft graveyards, cargo cults, jungle. And monkeys, as this is my particular interest in the charity.

It’s not a matter of finding resonances, more of avoiding the common ones that have grown up around shows like Lost, which doesn’t interest me but will come to mind for most of the audience. It gets harder to exhibit a personal view when every possible preoccupation has been monetised at some point. You either wallow in it (hello Lady Gaga) which is cowardly, or strive for difference. I am not sure I can make that difference this deadline, I’ll certainly try. Erred a bit far in in using black box recordings which created intensity but was morally bankrupt and obvious. Now all have been replaced with hand made replicas of mysterious radio chatter. Also leaning a little on Prelinger but not in a lazy ass way (hello People Like Us). I think it’ll be OK.

I should write about Comics. I know very little about comics, apart from RAW back in the 80′s. Comics were art for a few years =everybody was into RAW (MAUS, Jack Survives etc). Now I find comics from the very early 90′s that I actually want to know more about. This shit looks like maybe there’s something there that will finally cause a WTF moment – which is a bit rare these days.

Comics?

Sean says:

“Hi Tom,

Funny about the comic thing, I was a comics geek in middle school, then lost interest in nearly all of it by high school, except for the Doom Patrol. So your blog took me back to the good old days circa
’90-’92, re-reading those things dozens of times over, finding some weird new thing every time, whilst fluctuating in and out of Severed Heads and early PiL obsessions. Almost makes me look back fondly on being a weird high schooler, but not really.
Best thing Morrison ever did, before he got into that snobbish-heroes-makes-for-cool-comics schtick. I don’t know how well they hold up over time – I seem to recall the early issues were a bit emo for my taste, but he hit his stride by the time they find themselves fighting the men from nowhere, those alien catholics and protestants, et al. The Flex Mentallo origin issue is a gem, especially for those of us familiar with old 60s comics with those Charles Atlas you-don’t-have-to-be-a-skinny-loser-anymore ads. Good times.

Cheers,

Sean

Why don’t people trust science?

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  • The entire universe – space & time – was created instantly in a single massive Big Bang that can still be ‘heard’ today as a musical note in background radiation.
  • After the explosion, stars and planets spontaneously formed over billions of years from the expanding debris, the  expansion initially slowing down but more recently speeding up.
  • This speed up is caused by an undetectable and completely invisible substance called Dark Matter. Most of the universe is made of Dark Matter.
  • Below the level of subatomic particles, matter is made up of vibrating ‘strings’. They vibrate in 10 (or 26) dimensional space, in which the mathematics is ‘elegant’.
  • A photon can act as a wave or a particle, responding to a measurement that has yet to take place.
  • Two subatomic particles can be ‘entangled‘ and their properties communicated instantaneously across infinite distance.
  • It is not possible to travel faster than light, as your mass would become infinite. As you travel near that speed, time for you would run at a different speed to a static observer.
  • Every time a measurement takes place, multiple universes are formed in which all possible outcomes are preserved.
  • There is no such thing as the human mind, which is simply a sequence of individual thought processes.
  • When people die, their souls live on in the form of ghosts, attached to a place that was significant for them.
  • By diluting a harmful substance it can be turned into an antidote, even if it is unlikely that any particles of the original substance exists – the water holds a ‘memory effect’ of the toxin.
  • We are visited by other alien races, who are performing experiments on us while keeping hidden. The world governments know this but deny it to avoid panic.
  • Some rare people are able to concentrate their will and cause physical objects to move.
  • There is a hole at the north pole which leads to a surface inside the earth, lit by a sun at the core.

Some of the above is ‘scientific’. Some is not.

When you are surprised by the pseudo-science that many people believe, take another look at the science that is also believed. Certainly we have evidence for Dark Matter and the Big Bang – we also have some evidence of the Yeti, UFOs and ghosts. My personal bias is to have more faith in string theory than homotherapy. But you have to keep challenging your bias and ask if it really is more foolish to believe in memory effect than to believe that strings exist because the maths is ‘elegant’ (in 26 dimensions no less). If tachyons, why not poltergeists? Both seem rather elusive.

If string theory was a complete joke, I’d have no way of knowing. I can’t read the maths and I can’t do the experiments. All I have is faith, the same faith that a parishioner has in a pastor – that a man of the cloth (or white lab coat) would not tell them such lies. My faith in the Big Bang is still faith, and uncritical faith. I accept that experiments have found evidence of a big bang, but I think if I was told that the evidence suggested the ‘steady state’ universe that Einstein once proposed, I’d probably follow that just as blindly.

It is true that most pseudo-science is based on very bad research (particularly in alternative therapies). Nevertheless, there is some good research in there, and some very dicey reasons for what is accepted as fact. The demarcation is not utterly clear.

Feynman said “I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics.” The people that made What the Bleep do We Know started properly by conveying how little we understand, they screwed it by claiming to understand it as a spiritual matter. I don’t want to fall into that trap. I don’t understand ‘spooky action at a distance’ under any model and if Einstein was similarly flummoxed I’m in good company. For me phrases such ‘a wave function collapses to form a particle’ have the same ring as ‘energy flows through your chi points’ – psychobabble.

Particularly galling is the ‘many worlds’ interpretation. Stephen Hawking might support it, but to me it sounds like Sir Conan Doyle and his fairy photographs. You can crap on about ‘quantum decoherence’ all you like – there is no bloody evidence of a multiverse, not the tiniest shred, and David Deutsch et al are selling the oil of snakes.

So what of this? For the science community to lament the stupidity of the common folk is to not understand how ridiculous much mainstream science can seem. Put your own house in order first. For me it means that when somebody critiques a system of thought as ‘unscientific’ I am not overawed. In studying Freud as a basis of my postgraduate work I’ve found it offends people as ‘unscientific’. Perhaps so, but the Id and Dark Matter have more in common than they might suppose.

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