Well, you never know. Maybe the person who invents the world's first anti-gravity belt will be sitting on a bus in Edinburgh with nothing better to do than read the adverts above their heads. I live in hope. Because gravity is such a drag sometimes.
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I saw words
bright and colourful terms, limp
like rubbery worms in a box
then breathed into
squeezed into fierce animal shapes
shaken rudely awake by the breeze
to please passers-by -
not at the funfair
with brash signs and stalls
where the burly men
churn out a thousand blue poodles,
stick dirty balloons
to their hair: but
stood still in the street
over there
just a girl
with her words
and two lungs
of warm air.
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As discovered on the outside of the front door yesterday morning: ice crystals. They reminded me of some of the simple monochrome fractals I used to render in QBASIC on our old 286 when I was a teenager.
It was hard to capture them well because everything outside is white too, but at least I have some semblance of a manual focus feature and the ability to tweak the histograms. Click for larger versions:
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A year is a song
Soft stanzas in a smoky hall
Folded notes passing like roll-ups
From hand to hand
On a cold night;
Drunken cowboy tales
Waking the neighbours.
Or, earlier, when the lad
You never heard before stands up
Bows and takes the stage
As if winning the West
And grinning men play away
Urging you on:
Just this time
It's all right, even if they hear;
Grab a tambourine
Let's go.
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Actually I don't think it's ironic that hundreds of thousands of people went out and bought a song by a band signed to a major label in order to stop another artist signed to the same label from reaching the top of the UK singles chart.
More, I'm slightly miffed that they orchestrated the campaign around Killing in the Name, which is a fun track and everything, but not really the best thing Rage Against The Machine ever did, nor the most fitting for the message they were trying to send to the industry. Why not Take The Power Back, for example? Not that I'm complaining, really. I approve wholeheartedly of all shenanigans designed to leave Simon Cowell with egg on his face.
The media coverage was amusing. In particular the part where BBC Radio 5 Live asked the band to perform the track without swearing. (That would be like asking Alfred Brendel to perform Beethoven's Piano Sonata Opus 26 in A-flat major without using any A-flats.) And then they were then surprised to hear them reply (on air) "fuck you I won't do what you tell me"? I mean, Rage Against The Machine veritably pioneered music in the key of fuck you! What the fuck did they fucking expect?
Are we really still so hung up about "bad" language in art? Obviously a good 500,000 members of the public aren't, and they paid money to prove it. And the real irony would seem to be that most of those people were middle-aged - rebelling, if you will, against the bland conformity of the generation below them. Plus ça fucking change.
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Seen on the tree just opposite the house, a few hours ago:
I was shooting through a window into the sun at maximum zoom and didn't have time to adjust any settings, but it's unmistakably a buzzard. As I was trying to get a better photo it swooped down towards me and scooted over the house. Probably attracted by the small birds that were themselves attracted by the newly-installed bird feeders in the garden.
Birds of prey are awesome.
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This is sort of old news, but that doesn't stop it from annoying the crap out of me. Research into the physiological effects of phthalates - chemicals found in certain plastics - have showed them to have effects on hormone levels in humans. In particular, some of them mimic the female hormone oestrogen. It's well known that high levels of these chemicals can cause reproductive problems in boys, which is why they're widely banned in many areas such as children's toys.
So far, so uncontroversial. But now, some researchers are reporting that boys' brains can become feminized due to phthalate exposure. And how do they know this? Well, because:
Males exposed to high doses in the womb went on to be less likely to play with boys' toys like cars...
They found that two phthalates DEHP and DBP can affect play behaviour.
Boys exposed to high levels of these in the womb were less likely than other boys to play with cars, trains and guns...
Now, I'm not really a scientist and I'm certainly no paediatric psychologist or child development expert. But while I'm sure it's true that boys and girls have different play behaviour up to a point, the implicit assumption that there is a "correct" sort of play for boys to engage in, and conversely that "cars, trains and guns" are somehow not appropriate toys for girls, is really quite offensive to me. I'm not sure why, but it is. It smacks of the early indoctrination of gender stereotypes. "Boys are like this and girls are like that" leads on to "men are like this and women are like that" and continues to perpetuate a lot of mythical differences between the sexes that have no real basis in biology, but are simply self-fulfilling prophesies based on outdated social norms.
It amazes me that in all the coverage of this story I've read and heard, not once has this "cars are for boys" nonsense ever been challenged. For all the progress of gender equality in the last couple of decades, the way we treat male and female children so differently seems to have stood still.
If I ever have a daughter, she is so having a train set.
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The UPS which backs up the One-Way Pendulum webserver appears to have failed. Ironically, this caused said webserver to lose power and shut down, which is precisely the opposite of what is supposed to happen.
I haven't had time to debug it all yet but for now we're back on emergency power. Which is just like normal power, only I substitute a red LED for the green one on the server's front panel for dramatic effect. Or I would, if I didn't have better things to do than pretend to be on Red Dwarf.
This reminds me that I really need to see to the backup regime before something nasty happens to all my data.
The rest of the weekend was spent doing cookery, carpentry and plotting to take over the world.
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I have been criticised lately for not posting more regularly to the old Pendulum thingy. And frankly, I have to agree with the critics. Plus, while I'm usually not taken in by seductive wrongheadedness like the sunk-cost fallacy, I did fork out to renew the domain name, and it would be a shame to let it go to waste. After all, if I'm going to waste time posting my opinions on the Internet I might as well do it here as anywhere else. At least this way I can be relatively confident that no-one's listening.
My camera has a whole bunch of photos on it that I really ought to sort through and post. I have video footage of the Riding of the Marches, which passed nearby in September leaving a trail of sulky drizzle-soaked children and grass-based fertilizer in its wake. I have a picture of a very unusual beetle which I found eating the remains of a mouse which the cat had left on the doorstep. I have pictures of the cat asleep in a flowerpot. Picture-posts are, of course, the first resort of the lazy blogger. I'm hoping that posts in which I describe picture you might get to see if I weren't so lazy are somewhere higher up the food chain.
But what have I been doing that's so much more exciting than typing text into a box and clicking "publish", you may wonder? Well, stuff. Work, for sure. Software, at the moment. Also the piano. I learned the third movement of the Moonlight Sonata to the extent that I can play it all the way through, and it's recognisable, even if a couple of the notes are missing and/or in the wrong order, and even if I do have to make unscrupulous use of rubato to avoid my fingers jamming up in certain key areas (think of what happens to an old-fashioned typewriter when you hit the keys too vigourously - it's like that, only it also sounds like a cat got stuck inside the piano). I didn't write very much lately, on the fiction front. Not for lack of trying, but probably there aren't enough hours in the day. Or, at least, not in appropriate, contiguous blocks.
Then they put stuff on TV that I started watching, too, which is unusual. Damn you, Sci-Fi Channel! The new Stargate series (Stargate Universe) with Robert Carlyle is quite enjoyable. Ditto Warehouse 13, which is just silly enough and has a sufficiently strong cast to make up for the slightly weak plotlines. Ditto Merlin on BBC1, if only they'd stop moving it around from week to week. Throw in re-runs of Buffy and it's a wonder I have time to do anything other than eat and sleep. Probably TV series are like buses in the and-then-three-come-along-at-once stakes. Unlike Lothian Buses, which thanks to a pared-down timetable now come along about three times a day.
Item: audio books are pretty cool. Turns out you don't have to be partially sighted or middle-aged to enjoy listening to a story (while potentially doing something else, of course). And the Edinburgh mobile library van comes round every week and parks more or less right outside the door. This is, for want of a better word, awesome.
Item: the economy sucks, but it would suck less if the government stopped trying to "fix" it by "borrowing" newly-printed "money" and using it to inflate risk assets while ignoring all the warning signs from the currency and bond markets. This is a whole other post, though.
Item: there's a pair of tawny owls living in the woods next to the house, who are doing their best to keep us awake at nights (particularly the female one). I'm hoping we can train them to swoop down and carry off drunk people as they get out of taxis at three in the morning. Then life would be perfect.
(Well, I say perfect. There's still Harriet Harman.)
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