More trouble for Apple

It’s the Zunephone! Welcome to the, er, social..

Songsmith

I am, of course, a huge fan of the great classic songwriters – Bacharach/David, Carole King, Smokey, Brian Wilson.. some remain behind the scenes, relatively unrecognized, like Jimmy Webb, while others go almost completely unnoticed but for their work – Roger Nichols, who wrote the sublime ‘Goodbye to Love’, amongst many, many others..

But there’s one one man of such towering ability that I find it a travesty that his work is not more widely exposed. Oh, sure, the purists know, and appreciative nods are exchanged at the mere mention of songs such as ‘Pigeons in Flight’, or ‘Up and Down Like a Bride’s Nightie’, but surely it’s time to give this man the place in the history books that his work deserves. I refer, of course, to Mr. John Shuttleworth. Here he is performing one of his lesser known pieces, ‘I Can’t Go Back to Savoury Now’. Enjoy a master at work..

Why we despair of people in bands

Noah Lennox, drummer of US hipsters Animal Collective, shares his insights with the Guardian technology section..

Hitch your wagon to a star..

Thanks to my little widget, I’ve been enjoying plowing through reams of Ralph Waldo Emerson quotes. Here are some that caught my imagination..

The key to every man is his thought. Sturdy and defying though he look, he has a helm which he obeys, which is the idea after which all his facts are classified. He can only be reformed by showing him a new idea which commands his own.

People seem not to see that their opinion of the world is also a confession of their character.

Our chief want in life is somebody who shall make us do what we can.

Let not a man guard his dignity, but let his dignity guard him.

Those who cannot tell what they desire or expect, still sigh and struggle with indefinite thoughts and vast wishes.

Truth is beautiful, without doubt; but so are lies.

Sometimes a scream is better than a thesis.

Speak what you think today in hard words and tomorrow speak what tomorrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said today.

He who is in love is wise and is becoming wiser, sees newly every time he looks at the object beloved, drawing from it with his eyes and his mind those virtues which it possesses.

A man builds a fine house; and now he has a master, and a task for life; he is to furnish, watch, show it, and keep it in repair, the rest of his days.

If I have lost confidence in myself, I have the universe against me.

I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea, and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside me is the Stern Fact, the Sad Self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from.

And. my favourite..

I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.

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Record-breaking Dalek gathering in Manchester

Hey! Museum of Science and Industry makes it into Boing Boing…

Record-breaking Dalek gathering in Manchester: “Cory Doctorow:

Tony sez, ‘I work a MoSI, the Museum of Science and Industry in Manchester and earlier today we had a Dalek invasion!

The aim was to set the record for the most Daleks in one place and it was even attended by Raymond Cusick.

The rule was that a person had to be inside each Dalek, hit the link for replicas, one from an old episode and many awesome costumes – including a one year old Dalek.’

(Via Boing Boing.)

…actually, I was there a couple of weeks ago on a family outing and must admit I was impressed by the whole cotton industry installation. Lots of actual industrial-strength spinning and weaving and general noise-making – prettay good, prettay prettay good..

20th century schizoid cats (again)

Video depiction of schizophrenic painter Louis Wain, who was the subject of one of the first posts I made on this blog, and still one of the more interesting, I think..

Plus ça change…

A brief excerpt from a lengthy and intelligent piece by Dr. Ray Tallis, refuting the babble spouted by noble savage, back-to-nature, global village idiots, far too many of whom I seem to be running into recently. Wow, that was a bloody unwieldy sentence and no mistake..

“Tereza is staring at herself in the mirror. She wonders what would happen if her nose were to grow a millimetre longer each day. How much time would it take for her face to become unrecognizable? And if her face no longer looked like Tereza, would Tereza still be Tereza?”
The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera.

“…If, as I believe, the distinctive genius of humanity is to establish an identity which lies at an ever-increasing distance from our organic nature, we should rejoice in the expression of human possibility in ever-advancing technology. After all, the organic world is one in which life is nasty, brutish and short, and dominated by experiences which are inhumanly unpleasant. Human technology is less alien to us than nature (compare: bitter cold with central heating; being lost without GPS and being found with it; dying of parasitic infestation or spraying with pesticides). Anyone who considers the new technologies as inhuman, or as a threat to our humanity, should consider this. Better still, they should spend five uninterrupted minutes imagining the impact of a major stroke, of severe Parkinson’s disease, or Alzheimer’s disease on their ability to express their humanity. Those such as Fukuyama who dislike biotechnology do not seem to realise that the forms of ‘post-humanity’ served up by the natural processes going on in our bodies are a thousand times more radical, more terrifying, and more dehumanising than anything arising out of our attempts to enhance human beings and their lives. Self-transformation is the essence of humanity, and our humanity is defined by our ever-widening distance from the material and organic world of which we are a part, and from which we are apart.

L’homme passe infiniment l’homme. (Blaise Pascal, Pensées)

In short, do not be afraid…”

Tilt/shift Sunday

Tiny Roppongi, or ‘Midtown’ as the cool people now call it..

(more Tiny Tokyo pics here..)

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Great ‘cosmic nothingness’ found

Astronomers have found an enormous void in space that measures nearly a billion light-years across.

It is empty of both normal matter – such as galaxies and stars – and the mysterious “dark matter” that cannot be seen directly with telescopes.

The “hole” is located in the direction of the Eridanus constellation and has been identified in data from a survey of the sky made at radio wavelengths.

“If you were to travel at the speed of light, it would take you several years to get to the nearest stars in our own Milky Way galaxy; but if you were to go to this hole and enter one side, you’d have to travel for a billion years before you would get to the other side,” he told BBC News.

The void is roughly 6-10 billion light-years away and takes a sizeable chunk out of the visible Universe in its direction.

“In essence, this latest study gives us a very elegant demonstration of the existence of dark energy in a way which is very convincing,” commented Professor Carlos Frenk, the director of the Institute for Computational Cosmology at Durham University, UK.

“We keep getting evidence for dark energy, this component of the Universe which is so dominant, and yet we still have only a tiny glimmer of what it could be.”

The reason the void exists is not known. “That’s going to be a challenge for people that work on the development of structure in the Universe. It’s a very hot topic in the cosmology right now,” said Professor Rudnick.

(via BBC News)

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Today’s Deep Thought..

I can still recall old Mister Barnslow getting out every morning and nailing a fresh load of tadpoles to the old board of his. Then he’d spin it round and round, like a wheel of fortune, and no matter where it stopped he’d yell out, ‘Tadpoles! Tadpoles is a winner!’ We all thought he was crazy. But then, we had some growing up to do.

by Jack Handey

Bigger than Jupiter, less dense than water

A new planet is leaving scientists baffled. It’s apparently 70% larger than Jupiter, and would float on water. I want one..

Bigger than Jupiter, less dense than water | Technology | Guardian Unlimited

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Control

Elephant shower

No earthly reason – just a fabulous picture, I think..

The deaths of others

.. some thoughts from the eminently sensible Adam Phillips..

“…The deaths of others should be the only deaths that matter to us, not because we are altruistic, but because they are the only deaths available to us (death in the abstract, that is, one’s own, always makes people portentious and pretentious, that is, sentimental). We can’t forget about our own death, because there is nothing to remember; but we can resist being lured into the larger profundities of taking our own deaths at all seriously (my death should only be a ‘problem’, or whatever, for others, and so it goes on). Grief, even at its most desolate, is at least full of surprises, in a way that people talking of their own ‘finitude’ tends not to be. When people are alive, for example, they can be a barrier to what we feel about them … When the dead cannot reply we find, occasionally, that we can speak to them; when we know there can be no answers we can ask our questions. Indeed, death often reveals most shockingly not only whether people have mattered to us, and the unexpected ways in which they did and didn’t, but also how we shied away from them, how we kept to ourselves. It is easy not to notice people when one is in their presence, and far more difficult to hide from them when they are no longer there…”

True dat..

So it goes..

Chinese hospital sign

..Cheechwizard hits the motherlode once again..

No beating around the bush here. And Fetal Heart Custody is the best band name (or possibly album title – can’t decide) I’ve heard in a good while..

That bloody book they’re always going on about..

…and, while we’re at it, here’s a spoiler for that other bloody book they’re always going on about..

One for Cheech

 Saw this and thought of you..

Safari

I’m aware that this is in danger of turning into nothing more than a ‘quote of the day’ page, but I couldn’t resist this one…

“..Reminds me of my safari in Africa. Somebody forgot the corkscrew and for several days we had to live on nothing but food and water..”

– WC Fields

Quote of the Day..

Rock journalism is people who can’t write interviewing people who can’t talk for people who can’t read.
– Frank Zappa