Does anyone else think that Olivia Wilde as Quorra in Tron: Legacy looks eerily like my sister? I think it is the Clara Bow "It" Girl dark bob cut, rather than anything requiring Dr Freud's attention, that seals the deal.
In a possibly related development, glowing Tron-like white detailing magically appeared on the photo to the left that I took yesterday of the Bomber with the 19 assorted sporting medals he has acquired this year. We took them to Cardiff to show his grandfather. It's just the flash reflecting on the decoration of his Ben 10 dressing gown, but it certainly looks strange.
That is my take on 28 December 2010 at least. I concede it is difficult to discern any coherent narrative thread.
Look out kidMix you own medicine here.
It’s somethin’ you did
God knows when
But you’re doin’ it again
The Bomber started muay Thai in 2006, the swapped to Judo in 2009. Everything I have seen over the last four and a half years suggest to me that the message of Fight for Peace is correct.
I can't explain it though. It is just an empirical observation.
Islington wishes you and your significant other/partner a very GM-free, organic, locally sourced, carbon-neutral Winterval and a diverse gender/colour-blind, differently abled 2011 CE.
The Manic Street Preachers perform their new single on Strictly Come Dancing above. It all seems a long way from hobnobbing with Fidel Castro.
In the official video (which I can't embed) James Dean Bradfield walks around in Cardiff while Ian McCulloch strolls Liverpool in split screen. It is hardly the Thomas Crown Affair, but I can certainly identify all the home town locations.
You?
In 1971, when I lived in London, I was working with a friend, Alan Power, on a film about people living rough in the area around Elephant and Castle and Waterloo Station. In the course of being filmed, some people broke into drunken song - sometimes bits of opera, sometimes sentimental ballads - and one, who in fact did not drink, sang a religious song "Jesus' Blood Never Failed Me Yet". This was not ultimately used in the film and I was given all the unused sections of tape, including this one.I may hate Dignity, but I love this post-minimalist hymn. Go figure.
When I played it at home, I found that his singing was in tune with my piano, and I improvised a simple accompaniment. I noticed, too, that the first section of the song - 13 bars in length - formed an effective loop which repeated in a slightly unpredictable way. I took the tape loop to Leicester, where I was working in the Fine Art Department, and copied the loop onto a continuous reel of tape, thinking about perhaps adding an orchestrated accompaniment to this. The door of the recording room opened on to one of the large painting studios and I left the tape copying, with the door open, while I went to have a cup of coffee. When I came back I found the normally lively room unnaturally subdued. People were moving about much more slowly than usual and a few were sitting alone, quietly weeping.
I was puzzled until I realised that the tape was still playing and that they had been overcome by the old man's singing. This convinced me of the emotional power of the music and of the possibilities offered by adding a simple, though gradually evolving, orchestral accompaniment that respected the tramp's nobility and simple faith. Although he died before he could hear what I had done with his singing, the piece remains as an eloquent, but understated testimony to his spirit and optimism."
Chris is back in hospital again! Wound infected and may have an abscess - he's been through the mill in the last 9 days. So, back on IV antibiotics and we'll know more after an ultrasound tomorrow.Considering the corners of the world to which our compadres from university and the Pamplona jaunts of the 80s have scattered, I thought I would note it here as I know that some of them check in to these pages from time to time.
Hardeep Singh Kohli explores the religious and cultural make-up of the UK by visiting three of its most diverse cities.
His first stop is Cardiff, and he starts his journey at Cardiff Bay, now the home of the Welsh Assembly building and rows of gleaming luxury flats. But this was formerly the site of the docks and the gateway for hundreds of thousands of people from all over the world who settled in Cardiff, making it the vibrant, multi-cultural city it is today.
Hardeep travels around the Butetown district, once a melting pot of nationalities and faiths, such as Somalis, Yemenis, Norwegians and he will hear how 60% of Cardiffians can actually trace their lineage back to the Irish labourers shipped in to build the docks in the nineteenth century.
He will hear how these different groups lived, worked and worshipped together in Butetown before the area was flattened in what is still known as 'the deluge'.
[Chazz and Rex are testing Chris]Airheads got it right all those years ago. His Indesctructibleness gives us his diet advice in the Observer today:
Chazz: Who'd win in a wrestling match, Lemmy or God?
Chris Moore: Lemmy.
[Rex imitates a game show buzzer]
Chris Moore: ... God?
Rex: Wrong, dickhead, trick question. Lemmy *IS* God.
When I lived in Heaton Moor Lane in Stockport in the early 60s there'd be 35 other people living in the same room, so it was kind of cramped. The basic diet consisted of creamed rice. Punch two holes in the can with an old beer-bottle opener and you can suck the Ambrosia out, no problem.What can Delia, Nigella, Gordon, Jamie et al offer that holds a candle?
Doc note: I dissent. A fast never prevents a fatness. I diet on cod.
Larsson left about three quarters of a fourth novel on a notebook computer, now possessed by his partner, Eva Gabrielsson; synopses or manuscripts of the fifth and sixth in the series, which he intended to contain an eventual total of ten books, may also exist.
Scientists have identified a way of prompting nerve system repair in multiple sclerosis (MS).One reason my ears pricked up when I heard of it was that neurogenisis was mentioned and I had read the chapter on it (3. New Neurons for Old Brains) in the book "The Plastic Mind" this weekend.
Studies on rats by Cambridge and Edinburgh University researchers identified how to help stem cells in the brain regenerate myelin sheath, needed to protect nerve fibres.
Could David Hume Have Known about Buddhism? Charles Francois Dolu, the Royal College of La Flèche, and the Global Jesuit Intellectual Network.Could anything be more up my street than this? Speculation about Le Bon David and Jesuits who had studied Buddhism in Thailand and Tibet.
the cloud is the water we're swimming in.
Somethin' ain't right
Gonna get myself, I'm gonna get myself
Gonna get myself connected
I ain't gonna go blind for the light which is reflected
I see thru you, I see thru you
I see thru you, I see thru you
Ya dirty tricks, ya make me sick
I see thru you, I see thru you
Gonna do it again, gonna do it again
I'm (gonna do it again, gonna do it again)
Gotta do right (gonna do it again)
'Cause somethin' ain't right
(gonna do it again)
Gotta do right, come on
Prodnoose: I take it you're gonna do it again.
If you make sure you're connected,
the writing's on the wall
But if your mind's neglected,
stumble you might fall
is the post that best explains how I drifted towards that, I think.A book is the only place in which you can examine a fragile thought without breaking it, or explore an explosive idea without fear it will go off in your face. It is one of the few havens remaining where a man's mind can get both provocation and privacy.
Well, you see, Willard, in this war, things get confused out there. Power, ideals, the old morality, and practical military necessity. But out there with these natives, it must be a temptation to be God. Because there's a conflict in every human heart, between the rational and irrational, between good and evil. And good does not always triumph. Sometimes, the dark side overcomes what Lincoln called the better angels of our nature
“I hope it is true that a man can die and yet not only live in others but give them life, and not only life, but that great consciousness of life.”
My work compromises one vast book like Proust's Remembrance of Things Past except that my remembrances are written on the run instead of afterwards in a sick bed. Because of the objections of my early publishers I was not allowed to use the same personae names in each work. On The Road, The Subterraneans, The Dharma Bums, Doctor Sax, Maggie Cassidy, Tristessa, Desolation Angels, and the other are just chapters in the whole work which I call The Duluoz Legend. In my old age I intend to collect all my work and reinsert my pantheon of uniform names, leave the long shelf full of books there, and die happy. The whole thing forms one enormous comedy, seen through they eyes of poor Ti Jean (me), otherwise known as Jack Duluoz, the world of raging action and folly and also of gentle sweetness seen through the keyhole of his eye.I'm very tempted to go straight back up the mountain with Desolation Angels which is the next in the series chronologically - though not in the order of publication.
Zeitgeist is "the spirit of the times" or "the spirit of the age." Zeitgeist is the general cultural, intellectual, ethical, spiritual, and/or political climate within a nation or even specific groups, along with the general ambience, morals, sociocultural direction or mood of an era.All of which is a long winded way of saying that the Monarchy Facebook page got teased on "Have I got news for you" see http://www.bbc.co.uk/i/w0yw7/?t=18m54s.
The term zeitgeist is from German Zeit- 'time' (cognate with English tide and "time") and Geist- 'spirit' (cognate with English ghost, without being really translatable into English - this is why the German term is used).
This week, web security company Webroot released a new Firefox plugin called “The Social Media Sobriety Test” with the tagline, “Nothing good happens online after 1 a.m.”With the week I have had, I am starting to think this should be compulsory.
The deal is simple, download the plugin and customize the settings for a variety of social media sites — from Facebook to MySpace to Tumblr (for the bloggers among us) to e-mail accounts like Gmail or Hotmail.
Set your hours of intoxication, and if you try to sign on to one of those sites during those times, you’ll be asked to pass a test. I tried it out — about five minutes ago and fully sober — and failed said test, however. You try typing the alphabet backwards. It’s not as easy as it looks.
\b(fag)(\b(s)\b(got)\b(gots)\b(ot)\b(ots)\b)will return any word starting fag and ending with nothing or s or got or gots or ot or ots. You join the dots. Don't assume that people typing through gritted teeth will necessarily spell their rants correctly.
Let's raise our glasses to Scruton. Who else makes Aquinas, Wittgenstein, Kierkegaard and Schopenhauer funny?Thomas Aquinas, who devoted some two million words to spelling out, in the Summa Theologica, the nature of the world, God’s purpose in creating it and our fate in traversing it, ended his short life (short by our standards, at least) in a state of ecstasy, declaring that all that he had written was of no significance beside the beatific vision that he had been granted, and in the face of which words fail. His was perhaps the most striking example of a philosopher who comes to believe that the real meaning of the world is ineffable. Having got to this point, Aquinas obeyed the injunction of Wittgenstein, whose Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus concludes with the proposition: “that whereof we cannot speak we must consign to silence.”
But Aquinas was exceptional. The history of philosophy abounds in thinkers who, having concluded that the truth is ineffable, have gone on to write page upon page about it. One of the worst offenders is Kierkegaard, who argues in a hundred ways that the ultimate is inexpressible, that truth is “subjectivity,” that the meaning of life can be given by no formula, no proposition, no abstraction, but only by the concrete experience of surrender whose content can never be given in words.
The same idea occurs in Schopenhauer, for whom the truth of the world is Will, which cannot be represented in concepts. Schopenhauer devoted roughly 500,000 words to this thing that no words can capture. And he set a fashion that continues to this day.
How does 84-year-old Queen Elizabeth II -- that iPod-owning royal star of"148,344 people like this" says the page as I write. That has been clicked up at a rate of 540 a minute (coming up for 10 a second) since launch.
Twitter, Flickr and YouTube -- manage to get even more hip?
The same way anyone else does: She joins Facebook.
yesterday.Hello cats and kittens,Danny Baker, my favourite "personality" to use a word he would loathe, has issued the dignified statement above about being treated for the big C. I wish him all the best for a speedy recovery. What I wouldn't give to have him in my team in a pub quiz.
Apologies for the cloak and d. over recent weeks. However as it appears this is going to continue for the forseeable I really ought to offer up some sort of breadcrumbs trail as to what's going on. (As you know I am queasy about introducing vulgar real life onto the vaudeville stage so let's keep this crisp.)
After a pretty mouldy diagnosis about a month back I finally begin chemotherapy on Monday with further radiotherapy from January. Yes radiotherapy; can you beat it? This being so, the old treehouse baggy pants will be donned but sparingly. Once the quacks have soundly thrashed this thing I shall return like a rare gas and as if out of a trap. In the meantime I am watching Tommy Steele box sets (and has there ever been a more lying title to a film than TS's "It's All Happening"?) and urge you all to keep yakking up a storm and laugh extra loud at the incumbents.
Thank you for all the best wishes and concern from those who suspected as much about my "condition" and by all means keep ringing up Baylen and Amy to demand more and more Atomic Rooster and Spooky Tooth records.
So. Manly handshake. Walk right on. In the words of King George, "What what and there it is..."
Bizarely I was nudged into reading it when I told Miranda the story of Penylan Well (see Icons passim) and she told me that she had just finished it herself and that it was "a book about someone who spends a lot of time in a well."Hillary Clinton and Cherie Blair launch mobile phone scheme for women in developing nations.
The tumult and the shouting dies—
The captains and the kings depart—
recently. It is a fascinating book which has led me (via the its references to the author's Vipassanā retreat I think) to Jon Kabat-Zinn's Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction, thence Richard J Davidson's experiments - in cooperation with the Dalai Lama - on the effects of meditation on the brain, which introduced me in turn to the wonderful Matthieu Ricard. (Much to my astonishment, a subset of Google Tech Talks - the ones curated by Chade-Meng Tan - is a great source of information in this area.)The Odd Boy lay down by the football field
Took out a slim volume of Mallarme
The centre-forward called him an imbecile
It's an Odd Boy who doesn't like sport
Sport, sport, masculine sport
Equips a young man for Society,
Yes, sport turns out a jolly good sort
It's an Odd Boy who doesn't like sport.
I have dropped the Bomber off at an early morning running club before school today. He was signed up after his cross country triumph last week, and certainly seemed keen enough considering the hour I had to rouse him from the arms of Morpheus. From Friday week, he wants to do indoor cricket as well which means he'll be doing judo Thursday evening, running Friday morning, and cricket Friday evening.
Andy asked him to have a trial for AFC Wimbledon, but he has politely binned that notion having given his heart to rugby football. If he'd taken it up he could have been playing or training in some sport or other six days out of seven.
I'm in a bit of a quandry. I can see that - given that he seems to be quite able - it is likely that he will get a lot of opportunities to try out interesting recreations, but I also see a danger of it getting overwhelming.
I'd be perfectly happy if he just stayed with judo and rugby plus whatever he does in school to be frank, but on reflection I think that the prudent way to handle this going forward is to be equally relaxed about him giving things up as well as taking things up.
Note to my future self - the day he says he wants to quit judo or rugby, grin and bear it regardless of what you would actually prefer.
When you are proficient with the small sword and sabre, the quarter-staff and bayonet, you will know at once what to do with the leg of an old chair, an iron bar, a hop-pole, a boat-hook, or even a lady's parasol. Depend upon it that any moderately strong and active man who is a good boxer, fencer, and wrestler may be a very nasty customer for even two or three footpads to attack.I can't get enough of this stuff.
They key quotes are:
By way of a corrective to yesterday's Utopian speculation about computer games, a more cynical diagrammatic appraisal of the congruence of personality traits driving social networking.
You pays your money and takes your choice.
As a planet, we collectively spend 3 billion hours a week playing computer and video games. Today’s youth are contributing a particularly heavy share of that load: The average young person in the UK will have spent 10,000 hours playing games by the time they turn 21. It’s enough to make you ask: Shouldn’t we all be doing something better with our time? Something more productive than, say, slaying virtual monsters, racing virtual cars, and managing virtual football teams?I'm not sure I agree with Jane McGonigal, but that is an intriguing thesis, artfully expressed.
But the gamers (and they make up more than a third of the UK population) may be on to something: It turns out that gameplay is extraordinarily productive. It may not increase GDP. But it does produce, more cheaply and reliably than almost any other activity, the positive emotions – such as delight, curiosity, pride and bliss – that scientists say are crucial to our health and success in real life.
It turns out that people who experience on average 3 positive emotions for every 1 negative emotion they feel live 10 years longer. They’re more successful at work, school and personal pursuits – and they also have longer, happier marriages. Scientists say it doesn’t matter where you get these positive emotions – it just matters that you sincerely feel them. And if you watch the faces of gamers while they play – whole-heartedly engaged, passionately motivated, and intensely rewarded – you know that they’re not just playing games. They’re also building up their inner reserve of good feelings.
They’re also producing social capital. Research from major universities such as MIT and Stanford show that we like and trust other people more after we’ve played a game together -- even if they’ve beaten us. More importantly, scientists have discovered that we’re more likely to help someone in real life after we’ve helped them in a cooperative game. Games aren’t just making us happier – they’re also building up our social bonds. No wonder 40% of total hours spent on Facebook are spent playing games. Our 3 billion hours a week gaming are producing the two most important aspects of well-being – positive emotions and positive relationships. There’s simply nothing better to be doing with our free time.
from Amazon for £26.93 but I've still only watched one episode of The Wire, and I've had that for over a year now.Before I first acquired a Kindle, exactly one year ago, I didn't usually buy books while under the influence of alcohol. I won't say I never did it, because that would be a lie. But it wasn't a habit. After a couple of glasses of wine, I tend to fixate on the present. I have no use for five to seven days' delivery time. The Kindle is wonderful for drunk people because you can climb into bed, press one button, and The Anatomy of Melancholy instantaneously materialises before you, plucked by the so-called Whispernet out of the surrounding ether.
The number of books I buy while sober is, I have noticed, inversely proportional to the number I buy while drunk. It's a zero-sum game, as Proust once observed of wet dreams: when all the resources are consumed in the night, none are left for waking life.
Counting free samples and e-books from the pre-1923 copyrightless domain, the total number of books I "purchase" per month has actually gone up by about 200%, while the number of books I purchase while sober has dwindled to about 5% of the total. You used to be able to say that someone's library looked like it had been assembled by a drunk person. Now, for me, the metaphor has become a reality.
..... read further......
You have got to watch the video above. I was genuinely crying with laughter. What elevates it to the sublime I think, is the way that our hero looks utterly bored to death throughout, as well as the telling detail of his wordless opening and closing of the brolly before he belabours each consecutive prop.
The Unbreakable Umbrella works just as well as a walking stick or cane but does not make you look funny or feel awkward. Whacks just as strong as a steel pipe but it weighs only 1 lb. and 9 oz. (710 g). And yes, this umbrella resists the wind and will keep you dry in rain just like the best umbrella should. www.UnbreakableUmbrella.com
At the Viva Las Vegas Wedding Chapel, the owner, Ron DeCar, has 150 ceremonies planned in five chapels, beginning at midnight. He has had to hire extra Elvis impersonators, he said, to bring the contingent to six.So for all the freaks and geeks jumping the broomstick today, I sincerely wish you wish you all the very best.
There was a similar surge on July 7, 2007, and he is already planning for 11/11/11 and 12/12/12.
For those of a geeky bent, the date has another layer of importance — it is made up entirely of ones and zeros, the binary language of computing. Kevin Cheng and Coley Wopperer of San Francisco have been waiting nearly two years for their wedding date to roll around, having realized over dinner with friends in 2008 that, as one suggested, “you could have a binary-themed wedding!” he recalled.
“Both of our eyes just lit up,” he said.
“We’re very much technology people,” Mr. Cheng explained, as if it were necessary to point this out.
The dinner group quickly calculated the more familiar base-10 value of the binary number 101010, and found that it was 42. “That totally sealed the deal!” he recalled.
Footnote: For fans of Douglas Adams, author of the series of science fiction comedic novels beginning with “The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy,” the number 42 is instantly recognized as the punch line to one of literature’s most revered shaggy dog stories. In it, super-intelligent beings have created the most powerful computer ever to provide the “Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, The Universe, and Everything.” The computer labors for 7.5 million years. Finally, it answers: “Forty-two.”
Which means, gentle reader, that Kevin Cheng and Coley Wopperer are truly meant for each other.
Wedding vows in Vegas
Weren't meant to last for ages
You've got to be courageous
To play the odds that love will win
Whatever city you're in.
KINGS FESTIVAL UPDATE : 0600hrs SUN 3rd OCT - FESTIVAL OFF. OVERNIGHT RAIN HAS FLOODED ALL HARD STANDING CAR PARKING. MORE RAIN FORECAST FOR THIS MORNING LATER. SADLY WITHOUT ANY ON SITE PARKING FACILITY THE FESTIVAL IS CANCELLED.First kids rugby cancellation of the year this morning. First of many if last year and the Ryder Cup is anything to go by. I'm surprised we haven't evolved gills in the UK.
SEATTLE – September 28, 2010—IMDb.com, Inc. (www.imdb.com), the authoritative source of information on movies, TV and celebrities, and part of the Amazon.com, Inc. group of companies, today announced and launched IMDb20, the company’s 20-year anniversary campaign. Beginning today, IMDb will treat fans to an original video interview with a different A-list artist each day, culminating on Oct. 17, 2010, (the date of IMDb’s 20th anniversary). The goal of the online countdown and companion editorial section is to celebrate the films of the past 20 years.
Yes my pretties, but in 1992 when it kicked away the shackles of rec.arts.movies and launched itself onto the World Wide Web (a network in its infancy back then) it was known as the Cardiff Internet Movie Database and was powered by a database residing on the servers of the computer science department of Wales' Cardiff University.
For IMDb.com is - and will ever remain - a Welsh Born Icon.
Katherine Jenkins started the Swansea Bay 10k yesterday and then ran the course with John, me and a few thousand others. I believe it is now compulsory for her to officiate at all public events in the Principality.
