Japanese Underground

Today I was most amused to learn that in Tokyo during rush hour, additional personnel must be employed on the underground train system for pushing people onto the trains. Nobody wants to be late by missing the current train, so they cram themselves on board worse even than cramming in London Underground, then somebody walks past each door of the train pushing at the bits that stick out so that the doors can close.

In other news, I recently bought a DVD of renowned randomist and Class One Funny Man Ross Noble, only to be met with the following blurb:

"...The result is this monstrously bumper 4 disc set packed with live shows and documentarys, as well as the ridiculous amount of extra's Ross Noble DVD's have become known for."

Does anyone else think it would be worth the time of the manufacturers to get someone to actually proofread the back? I quail in utter disgust.




Link of the day: Japanese commuters on Tokyo underground

...And All the Things They Learn They Cannot Do

I was writing to old friends last night. The ones which help me come up with all the crazy ideas that keep my soul alive. I miss them.

And I said... I am going to get out of here, as soon as I can. I am going to go do and be everything that I can possibly be. I am going to see the sights and do all the things that people learn they cannot do when they go to university.

I've thought for a long time that university was a place where minds were fed, and they grew into beautiful things with more knowledge and inspiration and even more ambitions and ideas and dreams than they went in with. For a select few people I believe this to be true, but actually for the most part, it's not. It's like shovelling carbon down a big empty hole and expecting it to turn into diamonds. It doesn't. People learn to meet deadlines, get their placements with the big companies, so that with that work experience tucked under their belts they can get to work sooner, better, more, more, more. They get better jobs so that they can get better jobs.

When we were younger we all still wanted to be vets and rock stars and professional footballers and teachers. I wanted to be a vet for a long time. The people who asked and got this answer from me would express a silent sort of "yeah right", not knowing I could tell that's what they thought and that I made a silent mental reply "I can do it. You think that's a hollow dream of mine, but even if I change my mind for now that is what I want to do. I know it is hard work and a long way away, but if I want to do it then I will do it." We all wanted to be the things that interested and excited us. The last time I went to a careers councillor, at least four years ago, when asked I replied that I would like to be either a clown or a particle physicist (I think), and I wasn't being deliberately facetious, that is what I wanted to do.

I can't help feeling that now most people, at least in my subject area, just dive into the leaflet pile and be the investment banker who received the most bribery to get there. I once glanced at that pile and saw a leaflet from AWE (the Atomic Weapons Establishment). Come work for us, they said, we're important for protecting Britain. We build and test, we have the opportunities, we'll give you bonuses, we're a worthy cause, we provide the deterrent capabilities for our country. But is this really what we wanted to do when we were children? Help make things that kill people?

It always seems like the easy option. People think they cannot be what they always wanted to be, so they convince themselves it was for certain a foolish, unattainable idea, and they set their heads down on the career path. I don't want to do that, I want to do something different.

No, I'm not being naive. I know success depends on effort, and I try hard. But that goes for the path to becoming a rock star just the same as it goes for the path to becoming an investment banker. But not everyone can live with their head in the clouds, you might say, people need to keep the cogs turning. The bankers need to bank. AWE needs to make the weapons to protect us. These things need to be done. Maybe, but if more people thought how they did when they were children perhaps more people would be inventors, creating more effective solutions for the future. Perhaps people would put their minds to diplomacy instead of organised destruction.

And maybe it's just a childish Utopian idea that wouldn't work in a million years, but that's only because not in a million years would people change the way they think. Until everyone thinks that way there will always be an undercurrent of people doing the usual thing that people wanting to do the excellent things will have to surf. For me, surf's up.



Cyanide & Happiness @ Explosm.net

The Prisoner

"Where am I?"
"In the Village."
"What do you want?"
"Information."
"Whose side are you on?"
"That would be telling.... We want information. Information! INFORMATION!"
"You won't get it."
"By hook or by crook, we will."
"Who are you?"
"The new Number Two."
"Who is Number One?"
"You are Number Six."
"I am not a number — I am a free man!"

Thus begins "The Prisoner", an English television series of epic proportions I finished watching today. It stars Patrick McGoohan, who is well and truly a Dude.

Number Six, as he is known for the duration of the series, is an important government spy who unexpectedly resigns. Before he can escape to go into hiding he is abducted and wakes up in a gorgeous but isolated settlement known only as "The Village". It is a 1984 type dictatorship where everyone is constantly and secretly monitored, tricked and experimented upon. His captors want to know only one thing, and then they will release him: why did he resign?

But Number Six will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed or numbered. In each episode a cunning plan is deployed to try to get Number Six to reveal the information, but he will never fall for it. He plans not only to escape, but to do so having revealed nothing, and to go back and destroy the Village afterwards.

It also features some giant, bouncing, screaming white balloons as the "police force", who subdue rebels by suffocating them in their terrifying latexiness. Fans of Muse might be interested to know this is exactly where the inspiration for the giant Hullabaloo balloons comes from.

Musical Modes and Eleanor Rigby

I received a marvellous dictionary of music as a gift last Christmas, and it has been about one of the entries that I have been thinking today.

It relates to modes of music, musical scales, of which there are eight. These are named the Dorian, Hypodorian, Phygrian, Hypophygrian, Lydian, Hypolydian, Mixolydian and Hypomixolydian. In typically Western and modern systems the use of modes has been severely limited; we get by with just two of these, which we refer to simply as major and minor. These modes are respectively "happy" and "sad", however each of the other modes may be described by entire spectra of other emotions. Try descriptions such as "voluptuous", "vehement", "pious" and even "uniting pleasure and sadness". So broad a range of emotions is accomplished with just the two modes, so imagine how we'd be able to reinvent and expand the poignancy of much mainstream music if only we leaned to use the other modes! A far fetched but amusing extract from my book:


"Europe in the Middle Ages inherited, through Boethius, the idea that ethos and mode were associated, and also a number of illustrations of the supposed connection. A favourite tale was that of a young man so aroused by the Phygrian mode that he was on the point of breaking into a young woman's room, when a change to the Hypophygrian mode restored him to a proper frame of mind."

from "The Oxford Companion to Music" edited by Alison Latham


Think of "Eleanor Rigby" by the Beatles. It is a beautiful but tragic tale of loneliness and a wasted life. The music is sad, but it has an extra dimension of quietness, of unspoken tragedy. It has touched countless people, and inspired numerous covers (at least 61 as proper album releases) by artists from the weepy and lame Tony Bennett to the dark and Gothic Godhead. Think about Godhead for a second. Just one of an army of bands enjoying success because the music they create is rooted in feelings of depression, cynicism, misdirected lust, disillusionment (being cool because you're just so deep and dark and eternally tragic)... all that gothy stuff set to resonate with the disaffected alternative youth of today. Why pick a cover from such an old and seemly happy and innocent band unless it expressed some of that rare darkness that the band would wish to cultivate?

"Eleanor Rigby died in a church and was buried along with her name. Nobody came.
Father McKenzie, wiping the dirt from his hands as he walks from the grave. No one was saved."

"Eleanor Rigby" was written in the Dorian mode, beginning in E.

Incidentally, Eleanor Rigby was created as a fictional character by Paul McCartney for the song. It was originally supposed to be about somebody called Daisy Hawkins. However, there exists the gravestone of a real Eleanor Rigby in a certain churchyard, who lived and died in Liverpool, a mere few feet away from the place where Paul McCartney and John Lennon first met.


P.S. Check out the Godhead cover, it really is rather awesome.

St Peter's Parish Church in Woolton, Liverpool

The Spoiled Rattle

"Tweedledum and Tweedledee
Agreed to have a battle;
For Tweedledum said Tweedledee
Had spoiled his nice new rattle.

Just then flew down a monstrous crow,
As black as a tar-barrel;
Which frightened both the heroes so,
They quite forgot their quarrel."

from "Alice Through the Looking Glass" by Lewis Carroll (1832-1898)


For no readily discernible reason I started thinking about that rattle today. A thought popped into my head - not my own, somebody's somewhere, I forget who, lost in the mists, it may even have been Alice herself in the book - how on Earth do you "spoil" a rattle? I asked my mum this on our way to the shops, and she suggested lining the interior with Blu Tack, if it were a cage-like structure.

"Why not just dip it in cement?" I suggested. "Throw it on some rocks?"

I think we stopped thinking about ways to spoil a rattle soon after that. It did remind me of all the times I loved reading from my Lewis Carroll book. It was generously given to me by my Uncle Sean and his wife Laura a number of years ago. I have loved it and absorbed it ever since, and it still occupies a prime space on the bookshelf in my bedroom. (Ironically, I looked up the passages for this entry on the Internet because it actually was a lot faster and easier than consulting a book which at this moment is sitting less than three metres away from me in plain sight. Oh, the age in which we live.) I extensively pored over all the riddles and lingual delights collected in the back and learned Father William off by heart so well that I recited some verses of it tonight word for word even though it's been several years since I last looked at it. So I know it's supposed to be a parody of some old boring poem about a youth asking old Father William about his great life's achievements, but I don't care to follow up on it. To me, Carroll's version is perfection.

I am reminded of a story about Queen Victoria. She read "Alice in Wonderland" when it first came out and immediately decided she was a fan. She sent an express royal request to Carroll that she was to be sent a copy of his next book the instant it was published. Carroll was a mathematician by profession, however, and so he did indeed send her a copy straight away, but the topic of the book was unfortunately advanced calculus.



Father William

"You are old, Father William," the young man said,
"And your hair has become very white;
And yet you incessantly stand on your head--
Do you think, at your age, it is right?"

"In my youth," Father William replied to his son,
"I feared it might injure the brain;
But, now that I'm perfectly sure I have none,
Why, I do it again and again."

"You are old," said the youth, "as I mentioned before,
And have grown most uncommonly fat;
Yet you turned a back-somersault in at the door--
Pray, what is the reason of that?"

"In my youth," said the sage, as he shook his gray locks,
"I kept all my limbs very supple
By the use of this ointment -- one shilling the box --
Allow me to sell you a couple?"

"You are old," said the youth, "and your jaws are too weak
For anything tougher than suet;
Yet you finished the goose, with the bones and the beak--
Pray, how did you manage to do it?"

"In my youth," said his father, "I took to the law,
And argued each case with my wife;
And the muscular strength which it gave to my jaw
Has lasted the rest of my life."

"You are old," said the youth, "one would hardly suppose
That your eye was as steady as ever;
Yet you balanced an eel on the end of your nose--
What made you so awfully clever?"

"I have answered three questions, and that is enough,"
Said his father; "don't give yourself airs!
Do you think I can listen all day to such stuff?
Be off, or I'll kick you down-stairs!"

from "Alice in Wonderland" by Lewis Carroll (1832-1898)


By the way, how *is* a raven like a writing desk?

"If you think we're wax-works, you ought to pay, you know."

1000 Paper Cranes

They say that if you fold one thousand paper cranes your wish will come true. And so, I set to work. I had much to wish for: world peace, riches, talent, more wishes, whatever. At any rate, call it a meditative experience, and a lesson in origami. I gathered around me one thousand and fifty beautiful squares of paper purchased from an art shop, the fifty spare as insurance for mistakes. I had every colour of the rainbow at my disposal and more. I had neon, metallic, gloss, fluorescent, striped, mottled, matt and holographic. I had big and small, stiff and flimsy, delicately transparent and robustly opaque. I folded, I botched and I triumphed and dreamed.

I bent and I scored and appraised and completed.

I bent and I scored and yawned and saw a plethora of faces that would have stared at me blankly if only they had not been so blank they weren’t actually there.

I yawned and I ached but I did not give up. I wanted to complete the task. I wanted the experience under my belt. My eyes seared and my hands ached dully from many tiny bird bites (paper cuts).

I woke up with a crane stuck to my face, peeled it off and resumed.

The quality was slipping but I hardly noticed through the lethargy-smeared stain of my vision. I suspect that if I had noticed at the time I would not have cared anyway.

A few days later I was finished, and finished. One thousand and twenty nine and a half pieces of not-so-artfully crumpled tree pulp littered the room.

I wished I had not folded one thousand paper cranes.

Link of the Day: Free Zmister Dashkevich They want 10 wishes.

They look more like swans to me.