The Sun Has Got His Fez On

It appears that Spring has finally sprung in the old country this week.  The weather stunned us all by pulling its finger out.  In a massive about turn, it decided it had had enough of sh1tting down stairrods on the wretched inhabitants of the sodden island and would ease off for a bit.  And very welcome it is too, this wanton act of kindness.

The last six months has been bereft of seasons here.  It's just been a relentless one-act Kafkaesque production of warm-ish drizzle and low grey cloud.  The English are no strangers to sheight weather of course, but even they had had a gut full of this stuff by the end of February this year.  People would laugh ever so slightly too hysterically when the subject of the weather came up.  "Ooh, I expect the weekend will be awful" - cue shrill strained giggling and facial ticks.

But all that's behind us now.  One useful outcome of the battering we've all taken over the last few months is that expectations are at an all-time low.  If the weather broke now, and it didn't stop raining until November (think Gabriel Garcia Marquez meets Eastenders), people would probably settle for that.  "Remember that week in March," they'd reminisce "when it stopped raining for nearly 95 hours?  Great days..."

As Henry Hill observed in the opening monologue to Goodfellas "...everybody has to take a beating some time."  Well said, aitch.

T D M

I'm bored today.  It's a much underestimated affliction, boredom.  It really lays one low.  It generally gets short-shrift from high profile head-shrinkers and dramatists because it doesn't come equipped with the usual eye-catching mental and physically flailing normally associated with mental maladies.  But make no mistake - it's a dangerous foe.  It really takes the joy out of life.

I've been a sufferer for as long as I can remember.  Shortly after I learned to speak, I started haranguing my mother.  I would complain incessantly at her about being bored, and demand satisfaction.  I always had this semi-formed notion that they was a clever workaround to avoid it, like paracetamol for the ego.  But apparently there isn't.  That was a lesson hard-learned.

I don't ever remember my little playmates being like this; they all seemed content enough with a combination of Playschool and Fuzzy Felt.  The sufferer becomes an island in situations like this.  You feel divorced from your peers and polite society as a whole.  They seem to be enjoying themselves, which makes them the enemy.  And this just makes the sorry business of getting on with the rotters and with life itself even more tiresome.

The funny thing is I've always held on to that youthful belief that there is a salve for boredom; I just need to continue the quest for it.  I've worked through umpteen hobbies, drugs, careers, body-modifications, religions and esoterica during this fruitless journey through life.  Nothing yet.  If I should happen across something, however, I'll let you know.  Perhaps half a dozen espressos might do it?

A fool and his money will see you now...

There's *hooge* excitement in the office today as it's the first day of The Cheltenham Festival.  For those of you who aren't au fait with National Hunt Racing, perhaps I should explain.  The Chelt Fest is the premier event for fans of horses that can jump.

Racing is divided between those who like their horses to leap and those who believe that had God wanted horses to leave the ground even for an instant, then He'd have give them massive flaps of skin betwixt their fore and aft legs, much like the flying squirrel.

 Kauto Star

The fact that He didn't (they "reason") makes His intent clear.  Racing fans get really het-up about this shit, really het-up.  What does it matter, frankly?

I'll be honest with you - I can't abide horse racing.  Actually, it's not so much the racing itself; it's the human flotsam that hangs around it like a bad smell.  They're so wilfully unfashionable, and yet they revel in it; they ought to be locked-up.  Your average racing fan makes John McCririck look relatively normal.  Think about *that* next time you're walking past a bookies.  Eugh.

What's the biscuit situation?

I'm working from home today, by which I mean of course I'm at home whilst being paid.  For form's sake, I've had to fire off a few emails over the course of the morning.  The joy of WFH is that you can sit in your jimjams and drink tea, but pretend to yourself that you're aiding the country's balance of payments deficit, or something.

I particularly enjoy being at home during the school day because I'm good at it.  I have the mentality of a pensioner.  I fill my day with domestic tasks, and complete them religiously whilst Radio 4 blares in the background.  By lunchtime I always feel as if I've really achieved something, the exact inverse is true of my time in the workplace, which is filled with nebulous meetings and middle-management brouhaha.

Could you do my back for me?

As I've stated before in these pages, I cycle to work.  To avoid upsetting my workplace neighbours, then, I have a shower in the gym in the office prior to beginning my meagre duties.

This morning, as I was running a little late, I spotted a chap whom I hadn't seen before down there.  So far, so ordinaire.  I noticed he was very tanned, as if he'd just stepped off the plane from Gran Canaria or Florida.  As he stripped off to abulute, I noticed he was tanned all over.  But something didn't look quite right.  His tan was a little too good.

He was the colour of builder's tea from head to toe.  The were no tide marks on him at all.  He was covered in nut-brown skin in all directions.  There wasn't an aperture or crevice on his not insubstantial chassis that wasn't tanned right up to the event horizon.  Presumably he'd paid some unfortunate immigrant to intimately apply the creosote for him.  He was a big chap, and didn't look flexible enough to have slapped it on, himself.  

Are people really so impoverished that they have to do things like this for a living?  It's 2014, ferchrissakes.  Also, what's the thinking behind getting your perineum painted brown?  Is it supposed to make one irresistible to women?  Even if it did, they're not the kind of women you want to introduce to you mother, are they?  Great Scott - people died defending this sceptred isle...and for what?  For the liberty to do *THAT* to oneself?  The brain fcuking boggles at times.

A simple game, complicated by idiots...

I have a new mobile phone.  The old one started developing the unmistakable signs of phone Alzheimer's, and had to be institutionalised for its own good.  Its replacement is the finest model Samsung could provide for five pounds.  That's right, five hundred pee.  Initially, I could scarcely bring myself to look at the wretch, so cheap-looking was it in comparison with the one it replaced.  However, one day in its presence changed all that.

I've always been someone who champions simplicity.  It's usually the most subtle and elegant solution to a problem that proves also to be the most robust.  Complication adds links to the chain, weak ones.  Actually, that's quite a potent analogy I've happened across there.  When constructing a chain, one wouldn't make it any longer than the task at hand demands it be.  Additional links would simply inhibit its ability to do its job properly.  So why would you bother?  That's right - you wouldn't.  *But* this problem-solving Occam's razor approach to design seems to have gone the way of the Bakelite Dodo in our digital age.

It seems the more complicated and diverse the applications to which an electronic device can turn its hand, the better.  And we all just take this change as shorthand for progress.  No-one steps backs from the crash site for a moment to ask: is this device a better solution to the problem than its predecessor?  With phones, the answer is a resounding no.

Take my wife's phone for example.  It's an all-singing all-dancing smart phone.  It does a number of things quickly and well.  The only fly in the chowder, in fact, is that you can't really make phone calls on it.  If the manufacturer had a shred of self-knowledge and/or decency, service-pack 2 would be a loudhailer; it's that bad.  My new phone, on the other hand, excels in this regard.  It's battery lasts for months on a single charge.  And should I lose it or drop it down the karzey by accident, I won't need a bank loan to replace it.

Occam's razor...tell your friends.

Physics? - it's the Devil's work

I've been reading quite a bit of physics lately - specifically Profs Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw's rather lovely "Why Does E=mc2?".  It's an admirable and ambitious undertaking, this, by the Britain's foremost chalk-and-board-worriers.  They propose to take a lay reader (Hello!) and bring him or her up to speed with modern physics over the course of 250 pages or so of easy-to-digest prose and maths.  The maths, the geek Ant 'n' Dec are keen to point out, never gets any harder or more abstract than Pythagoras' Theorem.  And this is true.  But, then, that's not really the issue with modern physics, is it?  It's not the maths; it's the mind-bending implications of that/those/them maths that send the noggin into a tailspin in the small hours and cause nosebleeds.

For example, Pythagoras gets dragged into matters to explain Minkowski space-time.  I won't go into the nuts and bolts of MST here because to do so would go well beyond the scope of this blog and indeed my brain.  Suffice to say, Minkowski space-time is a model of the universe that allows us to agree on an objective definition of distances between objects and events in space-time.  These distances are the same of all observers of the two events or objects, so they are useful to physicists.  But, crucially, the Minkowski space-time model does this without rupturing the law of cause and effect.  Actually, it's not P's classical theorem, which *would* upset cause and effect; it's a small variation on it: it's the difference twixt the square's the other two sides, not their sum. 

Any fool can follow the logic of the distances in space-time, then, but this is only half the battle.  The implications of space-time are shattering to the jobbing liberal arts graduate.  Time and distance are relative, and the nothing can outgun the cosmic speed limit, "c".  That's not the speed of light, incidentally; it's the speed of any massless particle.

Don't let all this demi-ranting put you off, however.  It's a wonderfully accessible book.  You just need to read it like a textbook, which is what it is after all.  I find that the more intractable passages and chapters need at least 8 re-readings, and one should leave 10 hours or more between each re-reading to allow the ideas to percolate and fester.  You're not going to tear through this over the weekend then, but when you consider it took the finest minds in history nigh-on three thousand years to concoct all this bullsh1t, then you least you can do is spend a month or two staring at their findings, with your tongue stuck out and your eyes crossed.  No mental pain - no mental gain, and all that.