Killer performance art

An idiotic artist by the name of Simon Faithfull created an ‘art work’ by attaching an office chair to a weather balloon and setting it free over Hampshire. A video camera was attached to the chair to record the images, as well as a GPS so it could be recovered once the balloon bursts and the chair made a re-entry.

Here’s what the Telegraph’s art correspondent had to say about it:

You watch, in horrified fascination, as a generic office chair rises 18 miles (over South East England) dangling from a weather balloon.

The sound of static is ritualistically punctuated by a bell-tolling noise (which is actually sending back a GPS signal) as the chair twitches vulnerably in an environment where there’s no oxygen and the temperature is minus 60 degrees. Suddenly there’s a violent spasm and a leg hurtles off into the void.

“At that point, the pressure has burst the balloon off camera,” Faithfull says, “and the chair is actually falling. Only you can’t tell because there are no reference points.” While captivating at its most basic, physical level, Faithfull’s work also speaks of the futility of human attempts to escape “the trivial, the mundane and the self”. And also of the beauty in the soul’s constant attempts to soar beyond “the forces of everyday reality”.

To me it speaks of the danger of a bloody great 20 kilo (if it’s an ounce) office chair ploughing through someone’s skull at terminal velocity after hurtling through the atmosphere from a height of 18 miles - and the artist’s futile attempt to get a grip on reality. Christ - is the man totally insane? He needs locking up as a public nuisance!

A man in Australia burst into flames when he was shot by police with a Taser. He was carrying a can of petrol and a lighter at the time and had been sniffing the petrol. The police suggest that the lighter caused him to erupt in a ball of flame. Mmmm, strange that – you’d think it was the 50,000 volts from the Taser!

The end of civilization - and bananas

I’ve heard it all now.

Here in the UK some scientists are calling for the closure of schools at the start of the new term in September in order to reduce the spread of swine flu.

1. If swine flu is going to kill no more people than seasonal flu – which is what we’re all being told – then surely that’s an argument for closing schools every bloody autumn.
2. Where do these scientists think the children who are not attending school are going to go? In the vast majority of cases both parents will work full-time, meaning some holding facility is going to have to be created where the kids can be dumped. Such facilities already exist – we experts call them schools and there are a good number in each town and village within handy reach of most parents.
   

I simply can’t believe no-one has pointed out the ridiculous nature of this suggestion.

I’m incensed at the lack of responsibility being shown by the media over swine flu. If you were to believe the stories in the press then we’re all doomed and civilization is going to come to an abrupt halt this autumn.

I read an amusing headline this morning in a world trade news report concerning the fact that Ecuador has suspended trade talks with Colombia, Peru and the EU, alleging unfair tariffs on its banana exports. It said: “Ecuador, EU in banana split.” What made it amusing is that the publication concerned is noted for being rather staid, and hence the headline writer probably didn’t even realise that the headline contained humour.

The philosophy of chili sauce

The sanctimonious brigade have been at it again – this time in Scotland. Scottish ferry company, Caledonian McBrayne, has started a Sunday ferry service between Stornoway on the Isle of Lewis and the mainland, but a bunch of Keep The Sabbath Sacred fundies want it stopped for no better reason that they want to impose their philosophy on everyone else. No-one is forcing the fundies to use the service on a Sunday, so what’s their problem?

The danger in using philosophy as a moral guide and wanting to impose it on others is that there is not a single important question that philosophy has answered - ever. Answers are the realm of science; philosophy teaches people how to think – and you’d think that as a consequence it would also teach people to be open-minded. The problems occur when people adhere to a particular philosophy as if it were objective truth, which it isn’t – it’s one opinion, amongst many.

Oh – for the Irish reader who alighted on the blog searching for references to Lingham’s chili sauce at Tesco’s – you can only get it at the larger Tesco stores now.

Malmesbury Abbey

Went to Malmesbury again yesterday as the shop where we get our spices and sauces was closed last Sunday and we were running desperately short of Lingham's chili sauce, sambal manis and Ras El Hanout.

While there I thought I'd have a quick shuftie around Malmesbury Abbey, which is one of those places that Henry VIII dissolved in 1837 in order to pay off his cronies. Half the abbey is in ruins, not because of Henry's predations, but because the tower collapsed in 1500, taking half the building with it. What's left has been restored - and it's free to go in and look around. Well worth the effort if you're in the area and like a bit of history.

Athelstan, the first king of all England, was buried there. His half-brother, Edmund, was killed just up the road from us in Pucklechurch, probably on that nasty bend in the road that I've mentioned in a previous post. Edmund took over the throne when Athelstan died, but lost most of the kingdom that Athelstan had built up.


A magnificent vaulted roof.

The wall at the end marks the limit of what's left standing, the tower having been beyond the wall. The wooden contraption at the end is where the mullah casts his spells, although I'm not that familiar with what goes on in these buildings.



The box above - or watching loft - looks for all the world as if it's a '60s addition constructed of breeze block. It's apparently where the muezzin calls the faithful to prayer.


This is a set of magic wands used by the mullahs. I think they keep them in a glass case to stop the magic leaking out. Recipe for disaster, if you ask me - any old passing warlock could easily nick them.


In the middle of the picture is where the collapsed minaret stood.



This magnificent doorway is covered in delicately carved protective ritual symbols and magical incantations.


This is a peek through a gate into the Abbey Gardens, which cost £6.50 to enter (hence I didn't go in) and apparently quite an attraction. There was a notice forbidding photography, so I was wary of being approached by a pack of habit-clad Plymouth Brethren in wrap-around sunglasses with shoulder holsters and communicating by bluetooth.

Family history

It's just nice to know that my grandfather has a place on the web. He's never been here before you know, so it's a new experience for him. Please make him feel welcome.

It would be nice if you could click on him a few times, just to improve his Google ranking so he shows up on an image search.

Johannes van Bergen
09 April 1882 - 03 May 1947

A sense of perspective

Tried the piezo-electric gas lighter thingy on the ears last night. The secret is to allow some gas to blow into your ears before igniting it, rather than delicately playing the flame over the surface of your ear. Once ignited using the aforementioned method, a great fireball erupts outward at incredible speed, incinerating any hair in its path before having insufficient time to roast your skin. In fact, I’d go as far as to say it beats the Zippo; however the smell of burnt hair doesn’t half linger. Hay wouldn’t come near me all evening and accused me of smelling like a burnt jute sack.

Swine flu related deaths in the UK have climbed to 29. Based on the 55,000 reported cases that’s a mortality rate of 0.05272727%, which extrapolated over the 60m inhabitants of the UK comes to some 31,600 projected deaths.

Now it has been estimated that there are 36,000 deaths per year in the UK from ‘normal’ seasonal flu, however, the 36,000 figure has no science behind it and is seemingly plucked from the air, as flu is rarely, if ever, listed on a death certificate as a prime cause of death. However, it’s at least an educated guess, so it’s worth bearing the figure in mind. This suggests to me that swine flu is no more dangerous than seasonal flu, and as usual it will be the elderly, the young and those with underlying respiratory problems that will be chiefly at risk.

I heard the CMO, Sir Liam Donaldson, say on the radio that the predicted deaths related to swine flu are between 19,000 and 64,000, which averages out at 41,500, only slightly higher than the 36,000 guesstimate for normal flu. Kind of puts things into perspective – something the newspapers sorely lack in their sensationalist headline reporting.

The real danger is if swine flu mutates into a virulent strain of man flu.

I’ve heard it said that those worst served by the British National Health Service are the very poor and the very rich. It’s not immediately obvious that the very rich are ill served, but when you think about it they have the money to put into untested and very expensive non-NHS medicine and quack cures peddled by the unscrupulous and thus don’t really use the NHS at all.

Talking of sensationalist newspaper headlines, the Daily Mirror has this week called the UK soldiers who died tragically in a recent roadside bombing in Afghanistan ‘the bravest of the brave’. What then does that make the holders of Victoria Crosses and George Medals?

Several high-profile authors are to stop visiting UK schools in protest at new laws requiring them to be vetted to work with youngsters. The Home Office says the change, being introduced from October, will help protect children from paedophiles (my spell checker once more tells me that the Americans can’t spell). Anyone who has "regular" or "intense" contact with children or vulnerable adults will by law have to sign up to the Vetting and Barring Scheme from November 2010. "Regular" is defined as more than once a month and "intense" as three times a month or more.

On that basis every parent, uncle, aunt and grandparent should be made to register. It’s a well known fact that children are at higher risk of abuse from family members than strangers.

Of cars and hair and sealing wax

Note (12/01/10): This post seems to be attracting a lot of attention by readers in Holland and Belgium. Can someone please explain why?

Collected my old car from the garage yesterday. For £350 I had a 2nd hand door fitted and sprayed, a full service and the cam and alternator belts changed – the latter being £150 on its own. The rip-off merchants used by the insurance wanted £1200 just to fix the door. Given I got £900 for it and paid £100 back to the insurance to reclaim it, I’m well up on the deal. Seeing as I know the car intimately, that is has 20k fewer miles on the clock than the newer LPG powered one I bought and has packets more oomph, I’m going to get rid of the LPG car despite it being about 20% cheaper to run. After all, what’s the point of having a large Volvo estate if you’re going to fill half of the carrying capacity with a bloody great LPG tank?

I was checking on the hitcounter stats yesterday and found out someone had alighted on the blog by searching for “brothels leominster hereford”. How the hell that Google search resulted in a hit on my blog is a complete mystery.

Other search gems included:

• alloy wheels stolen in reading Berkshire
• sweden clogs -admin –hasbeens
• jodie marsh zoo 29/05/09
• bubble screen lambretta sx tv
• testiculus danglus

…and several variants of searches on National Beard Week.

You lot are really weird!

Since giving up smoking last October I am no longer in the habit of carrying a Zippo around on my person, which renders me unable to accomplish some basic aural topiary.

When I smoked, once every couple of weeks I would take the Zippo to my ears in order to singe the copious quantities of ear hair I started to sprout since hitting my late forties. As you will appreciate, it was a delicate operation involving cupping my ear in one hand from behind in order to eliminate the potential for setting my Barnett on fire once the ear fuzz went up in flames. Too much ear fuzz and the resulting conflagration could easily turn my ears into pork scratchings, thus frequent singeing was a necessary precaution to prevent too much tinder accumulating in my lug holes.

The curtain of hair from my eyebrows that occasionally threatens to obscure my forward vision is kept in check by occasional strimming with the beard trimmer, but rather than once or twice a year, this now has to be accomplished fortnightly.

Avoidance of suffocation through an excess nasal hair is performed with a neat little electric cutting gizmo which you stuff up your hooter every now and again and give a twirl. However, it’s not very good on ear hair and I need to find a better solution - one that’s as efficient as the lighter. Perhaps the gas / piezo-electric doofrey we use to light the gas cooker hob would do the job. Must give it a try tonight.

Just thought you’d want to know all that.

Had a shave of the neck area when I got home yesterday evening. Given I dry shave the neck can occasionally itch and sting abominably, so I applied some Polo cologne / aftershave, which I’ve had for some 5 years or so (don’t tend to use foo-foo much since my early 40s). It ponged awfully, so to cover the ming I applied another aftershave my elder daughter bought me a year or two ago but have never used. The resulting concoction was rather nasty and Hay commented that I’d better have a shower or else visitors might think she’d had a cheap bloke in her bed.

I see Sophie Dahl is to front a new BBC cookery show next year. Hay wonders why, as she’s renowned for avoiding the stuff like the plague. She used to be a size 16 or 18 model and then slimmed down to a size 6 or 8, yet being 5’ 11” tall. Her actual surname is Holloway, her paternal granddaughter being actor Stanley Holloway. Clearly she thought her maternal grandfather’s name would have more cachet. Her boyfriend is the musical midget munchkin, Jamie Cullum.

We had the TV on as background while Hay was cooking and I was composting today’s blog – suddenly I noticed Seasick Steve on the box doing his thing with his trademark 3 stringed guitar. He’s one of the few interesting musicians.

Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose

We have a furore in the UK about the so-called ‘injustice’ of the elderly having to sell their homes to pay for long-term care. What, in the name of all that’s holy, is unjust about someone selling their home to pay for their own care – providing their spouse doesn’t get kicked out of it. If they’re moving into a care home then it’s not as if they’re ever going to get to live in the bloody place again. This expectation that the state (i.e. we taxpayers) will fund every damned thing from cradle to grave really annoys me – it panders to greed, particularly the greed of children of the elderly who see their inheritance as their God-given right.

If you have assets, then you pay - and assets must be checked to ensure people don’t give their homes to their kids just before going into care. Anyone proposing free long-term care for the well-off elderly would lose my vote immediately, as I pay enough in tax as it is and have no wish to subsidise people’s inheritance.

I think there’s even a case for making the children of the elderly liable for all care costs, with only those failing a means test having the right to state funded care – much as the Child Support Agency means tests non-resident parents for child maintenance – herald the Zimmer Support Agency. If the children of the elderly then have to sell of their parents’ houses to fund care, then so be it.

In the winter of 1947 the author Dennis Wheatley penned 'A Letter to Posterity', which he buried in an urn at his country home. The letter was intended to be discovered some time in the future but was actually found in 1969 when that home was demolished for redevelopment of the property. In it he predicted that the socialist reforms introduced by the post-war government would inevitably lead to an unjust state, and called for both passive and active resistance to it.

"Socialist ‘planning’ forbids any man to kill his own sheep or pig, cut down his own tree, put up a wooden shelf in his own house, build a shack in his garden, and either buy or sell the great majority of commodities – without a permit. In fact, it makes all individual effort an offence against the state. Therefore, this Dictatorship of the Proletariat, instead of gradually improving the conditions in which the lower classes live, as has been the aim of all past governments, must result in reducing everyone outside the party machine to the level of the lowest, idlest and most incompetent worker.”

The above list of things you can’t do without the permission of those in power also includes assisted suicide. Even your body and life belong to the state.

It’s incredible to think that comment was written 62 years ago - it could have been written by a social commentator today. Seems little changes.

It’s Folly House Gig season again and we’ve already sent out invitations to all the locals to head off potential noise complaints. We’re combining it with Caravan Mummy’s 70th birthday. As usual, Perry’s group The Expressions will be the headline act in the Michael Jackson Memorial Tent – well, actually it’s the only tent – well, more of a small gazebo really. Following these gigs I always make a decision to learn an instrument by the time of the next gig so I can join in, but never get round to it. Looks like it’s going to have to be air guitar again this year.

What pleasure do monks have? Nun!

I was listening to the religious programme Beyond Belief on Radio 4 on the way home last night. The subject matter was poverty and one of the speakers was a Jain monk. Jains take a vow of poverty and are not even allowed to stay in one location for longer than two weeks in case they become attached to the place – attachment being bad for the spiritual self.

It struck me that this peripatetic monkish lifestyle is incredibly self-indulgent, as it is almost totally reliant on the charity of others to fund one's personal spiritual development and enlightenment. Worse than that, those who follow this lifestyle choice trick the general populace into subsidizing them by telling them that their acts of charity are good for their own spiritual development.

Taken to its logical conclusion, this philosophy is predicated on a permanent existence on welfare benefits emanating from those who are probably least able to provide it, something we in the west frown upon due to the lifestyle being unsustainable if everyone were to adopt it. A monastery-based monastic lifestyle, on the other hand, is sustainable as monastic orders are self-sufficient, having little almost no reliance on charity, except as a conduit for passing it on to the poor.

Been reading a couple of interesting books recently; The Biology of Star Trek and The Physics of Star Trek. Both are written not from the position of Trekkie geekdom, but from what could and could not be possible according to science.

I think everyone would love to have access to Star Trek transporter technology; however, if my mass were to be converted to energy for the purpose of light-speed transportation, it would release the equivalent of about 1,800 1 megaton nuclear bombs, clearly rendering the action of beaming me up (Scotty) a bit of a nightmare to say the least. If that isn’t enough, Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle would render any transported me a veritable jigsaw puzzle at the destination. Transporter technology simply ain’t going to happen – ever.

Another favourite theme of Star Trek is beings made of pure energy. These are not possible as sentient, intelligent life-forms due to the fact that intelligence requires memory, and memory requires matter in order to store and process information. This also has consequences for the continuation of one’s personality after death – it simply can’t happen, as the soul (if it can be proven to exist) is by definition immaterial and therefore incapable of storing memory. Additionally, energy travels at light-speed, so anyone who was converted to (or evolved into) a being composed of pure energy would immediately dissipate at the speed of light – literally disappearing in a flash.

Male display activity

Hay wants me to have surgically removed the spray attachment which she’s convinced, by the amount of mopping up and swabbing she has to do in the loo, I must obviously have attached to the end of my willy. Saw this in Malmesbury yesterday. Showed Hay the pic when I got home and said she’d buy one to install in the loo and see if it worked for me in terms of stopping me spraying the entire room whenever I go for a pee.

We were talking about male beard aggression the other day (as opposed to female beard aggression). Hay noticed how as the annual school reunion approaches, or any event at which there will be a reasonably large gathering of men, I tend to allow the hair on my upper cheeks to grow preternaturally long. She’s of the opinion that it’s an intimidatory, alpha-male, silver-back, virility display thing, whereas I explained that it’s a naval tradition – people in the navy who are able to grow hair on their upper cheeks tend to sport just a tuft of hair on each upper cheek.

"Shaving was a custom of the Macedonian military, taken over by Hellenic and Roman society. From then on the beard becomes a philosophical status symbol, a sign of non-conformism." - Peter Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason.

"A woman with a beard looks like a man. A man without a beard looks like a woman." - Afghan saying.

Ever wondered why almost all men with beards shave their necks? Adam’s apple fencing is why. You can’t engage in a display of Adam’s apple fencing with another male if you have a hairy neck as it hides the feature.

Sunday anxiety - are you a sufferer? If I don’t get up early on a Sunday and do something I get extremely anxious, knowing that I’m going to work on Monday. As far as I’m concerned the weekend is over by 4pm on a Sunday afternoon. Douglas Adams described it perfectly as the long, dark teatime of the soul. Hate it and can’t wait to retire – or at least get a job I actually enjoy doing.

Took Hay’s sister and mother to Coleshill in Wiltshire yesterday. Tried to get a meal at the Radnor Arms there, but was told by the surly girls behind the bar that they were full, despite there being at least 4 empty tables and it being only a quarter to two in the afternoon. In the past I’ve visited the Vine Tree at Norton when the place was closed, but was nonetheless welcomed by the landlord and offered a glass of wine when I accidentally walked in thinking it open. Some places, like the Radnor Arms in Coleshill, simply don’t deserve to succeed if they treat punters like vermin.

On the way to Coleshill I spotted this Mormon church, which looked suspiciously like a mini Tesco – you know the corporate Tesco superstore look; pointy white wooden spire and red brick? The Church of the Latter Day Tesco - hideous.


Saw a headline in one of the Sunday papers saying the police are going to be forced to admit a quota of gypsies (or travelers, as they were described in the headline) into their ranks. How the hell are they going to do that when the buggers don’t stay put in one location longer than a month before being moved on by either the local council or the police themselves? Also I can’t see police superintendents allowing their staff to dump old mattresses, prams and burned out cars on police premises.

I know this story is from the Daily Mail, but apparently 13 doctors are mounting a legal challenge to the verdict of suicide on Dr David Kelly. Excellent news.