Fogged
I am sitting in the departure lounge at London City Airport, fogged in. I’m not sure if I will be going anywhere today. There is what police constables in Sherlock Holmes films used to describe as a “right pea-souper out there, sir.”
LCY is a pretty good place to have to wait. It’s a “no announcements” airport - they just have loads of flat screens with departure details, so you would have to work quite hard to be unaware that your flight is DELAYED DUE FOG.
This gives the place a hushed atmosphere, with the silence only broken by the hum of the air conditioning, a murmor of conversation and the gentle slurping of the early morning beer hounds at the bar.
As a result, I’m quite relaxed, in an unplace with food and drink and wireless Internet and plenty to read. I’m beginning to wonder if I actually need to go to Amsterdam at all.
Given the blankness outside the windows, this may be a good thing.
Update: Next time, Eurostar.
Shedding
Hello from Switzerland! (Thanks to the fragrant Anna Pickard for supplying me with some emergency exclamation marks. I’m using a QWERZ keyboard, and that particular character seems to be missing. I assume the Swiss don’t exclaim very much, things being so well organised here). (Update - found it!)
I’m here having a bit of a family get together in the Alps. I had never seen an alp properly before, and I can say that the Swiss know their alps, and if you need alps, this is the place to come. I’ve been having geography lesson flashbacks pretty much constantly since I arrived (Ohh, there’s a terminal moraine! Ahh, look at the arêtes on that one, etc.) It’s been great.
I’ll probably write more about the trip and even post some pictures - if the focus hasn’t gone wonky on my camera, as I fear it may have, but I thought I should mention I decided to try a new blogname for size, hence the new monica. I need to check the latin motto. I’m sure my learned readers will let me know if I have mangled my dead language monkey plural. (Now that’s a name for a weblog).
Just off now to climb every mountain, ford every stream. Barring a picturesque plunge from a glacier, I shall post more soon. Keep this page open and click refresh until I post again. (Though I know you do that anyway, you lovely readers). To the cable car!
It’s not about the rabbits
At the time I said that it’s not about the rabbits, but now I’m not so sure.
Cryptozoology
You will probably be aware of the Cryptozoology Season the Grant Museum of Zoology at University College London.
Next Wednesday night, they will be showing the 1954 classic Godzilla.
I may go. I think it probably counts as work.
Update: I went. It was a really interesting film and discussion. The film itself suffers at times from the glacial slowness and the wordiness typical of many films of that time, but the symbolism was where the interest lay. (I may be wrong, but some of the performances of the older actors even seem strangely stylised at times - I might say kabuki-like if I had ever seen kabuki).
We watched the original 1954 Japanese version of the film, not the adapted US 1956 version with Raymond Burr. The theme of Japan bravely defending itself against a mindlessly destructive barbarian force was always clear. Much has been made of the anti-American aspects of the film, but though these are obvious, I saw Godzilla as a more general symbol of willful destruction, regardless of nationality.
There was a fair amount of laughter in the audience at the ’special’ effects - a bit too much laughter, I thought, given what the original audience of the film had experienced only a decade before the film’s release.
I was surprised at how good the monster was. I finally understand why many people prefer Haruo Nakajima in a rubber suit to more recent CGI monsters.
Probably not one to watch again anytime soon, but I’m glad I’ve seen it.
Monochrome resurrection
Mr Mnmlsm
DC’s comment about Processing led me to revisit NodeBox.
Tonight’s final word goes to Alex Welby
My younger brother contributes some football punditry on the Guardian website. (It’s at the bottom of the page, so scroll! Scroll like the wind!)
Speaking for myself, I can’t really comment on the game. I have been to a few matches over the last couple of years, when I had the occasional use of a Chelsea season ticket. I felt like a Venusian on a field trip. In contrast, my brother has a Hornbyesque devotion to Liverpool FC and to football in general, so he knows of which he writes.
I’m getting worried
The urban spaceman
Tipped off by a Slashdot comment, I went to look at the xkcd forums, where they have conversations like this.
Frankly, any world where people have the time and inclination to discuss the behavior of free floating meatballs in space, as opposed to, say, killing each other, is a not altogether bad world. All I can hope is that the more troubled areas of the planet are helped to mature into the meatball phase, (which later becomes the tofuball phase, obviously, just before they start handing out the silver suits and the flying cars).
I suppose this marks me out clearly as a techno-optimist, which probably also flags me up as a child of the mid-sixties, with powerful early memories of technology succeeding in dramatic ways, as opposed to technology killing tens of thousands of people in a fraction a second (if you are a bit older than me), or destroying itself in a tragic and globally televised kind of a way (if you are a bit younger).
I’m now seeing how this mental stance has affected my views and behavior all the way through my life. The books I buy, the subjects I have studied, the jobs I have done, and the (relatively few) activities I find meaningful, all seem to hinge around assumptions caused by this very specific quirk of timing, that I was born when I was born.
I’m beginning to realise I’m a utopian vector head, and therefore seriously unbalanced in my thinking, as the world is not even bitmap. I’ve been living in Monty Python and the Holy Grail whilst performing the script for 2001: A Space Oddysey.
In the end I suppose we all have a position from which we originate, invisible biases which become more obvious as we bump into the scenery, talk over other people, and pilot our jetpacks into the walls of medieval castles. From this more detached viewpoint, my life seems to be an altogether different genre, neither tragedy nor comedy, neither farce nor sci-fi. A strange kind of dignity seems to appear. I see someone willing to keep trying, plodding through the mud of the world whilst being puzzled by all the shit on his space suit and the disturbing inactivity of his helmet radio.
I feel like those little robots driving around on Mars at the moment. Gamely going forward, spinning the occasional wheel, buffeted by winds and dust, sending back beautiful pictures while they can, knowing, in the end, there’s no going back.
Deep-sky object of the week
The Bullet cluster is one of the hottest known clusters of galaxies. Observed from Earth, the subcluster passed through the cluster center 150 million years ago creating a bow-shaped shock wave located near the right side of the cluster formed as 70 million degree Celsius gas in the sub-cluster plowed through 100 million degree Celsius gas in the main cluster at a speed of about 6 million miles per hour.
My mind. It boggles.
Update: A few days after I posted this, Wired posted a gallery of Hubble pictures of interacting galaxies.