We are plummeting into the future and Neil Armstrong died yesterday aged 82. We are living in the future. Pretty soon we will look back to the old days, when Europeans first discovered America, when Napoleon ruled Europe and when men walked on the moon.
Below is a music video by a guy named Roy Cooper. It fits very well as a tribute to Neil Armstrong.
Neil Armstrong
Fulking Bonfire
In the old days, perhaps before the mass hysteria about drugs, scientists used to conduct experiments on the effects of LSD. The first two videos are quite fascinating. I love the way that, in the second video, the girl seems to be having one revelation after another until she realises “I can do everything!”.
The miliary thought they could use LSD as a weapon and so they experimented too. Happily the results seems to have been merely to incapacitate a bunch of Royal Marine Commandos by causing them to giggle and “lose their sense of urgency”. Oh, and one man “nearly succeeded in felling this tree using only a spade”.
Buy Roses at Fine Art America
Newfoundland Rescue Dog
What an idea! A 999 fun day! Experience all the violence and ghastliness of the emergency services in a fun day out. In fact it was no such thing. Just the police, ambulance, life guards and various other organisations setting up shop on Hove Lawns to let the public get a better look at the work they do. I was particularly interested in the Newfoundland dogs which are trained to swim around picking up struggling swimmers. Beautiful animals and they save our lives. What could be better. Though watching this video I can’t help thinking that one of the men should have had the guts to jump from the helicopter rather than throwing the dog in.
Newfoundland Rescue Dog
Newfoundland Rescue Dog
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man and dog at sunset
Budapest
I spent this week in Budapest staying at the excellent Intercontinental Hotel with a fantastic picture window overlooking the Danube and The Castle. Hot and sunny during the day and just plane hot at night. There is nothing like travelling around Europe for a few years to make you understand just how crap British weather is. Once the light faded the castle illumination came on. Gorgeous! As was the parliament building a little further along the river.
room with a view
For lunch one day we drove out to Budaörs and visited the Adler a traditional Hungarian restaurant where I ate good goulash. One evening I took a boat ride along the river. The commentary explained the architecture and mentioned that a Hungarian invented the computer. Odd, as I’d been told that it was either Allan Turing or Charles Babbage, both Englishmen. This reminded me of a Dutch friend telling me that a Dutchman had developed ideas on gravity before Newton. When I was a kid I was led to believe that Britain created the whole of the modern world. At school I was told that William Caxton invented the printing press and it was comparatively late in life that I learned about a German named Johannes Gutenberg.
A little later I ate in the excellent Sörforrás restaurant. Comfortable, good service and delicious Hungarian and international food. I think that, really, the whole of European history is one. We speak of globalisation now but centuries ago there existed a Europeanisation of scientific and artistic thought. Presumably the educated people understood this but the illiterate masses were oblivious to it. Not so different from today when the world’s elite flit around the globe paying their taxes wherever convenient but when they need our support they appeal to our nationalistic feelings with terms like “in this land” and “We British”. Remember Tony Blair banging on about being “passionate” about British this and that yet when he left politics he got a job with an American bank. Patriotism, as Samuel Johnson observed, is the last refuge of a scoundrel.
Hungarian Parliament Building
In truth, I don’t believe that many great discoveries come about in isolation. Ideas about relativity were simmering away amongst the world physics community before Einstein finally hit the nail on the head. Ideas and memes swirl around in our culture like the currents in a river. They ebb and flow and occasionally some bright spark gets drawn into an eddy and brings it all together. The sum of human knowledge is ratcheted up another notch. Yes, it was Einstein who made the final move but if he’d fallen under a car, someone else would probably have got there soon enough.
It crossed my mind that, like a river, human knowledge has many tributaries and side channels. Perhaps Einstein’s marvellous discovery helped us focus our attention on the material world and we’ve made great progress in this respect. Yet I wonder how it is that a civilisation which can place men on the moon and robot cars on mars can’t figure out an economic system which does not either get bogged down in authoritarianism inefficiency like Socialism or have periodic catastrophes like Capitalism.
The odd thing is that nobody seems interested in developing another system. People who don’t like Capitalism have an irrational faith in Socialism. People who mistrust Socialism think that recessions, depressions and credit crunches are just something that society has to endure along with the concomitant suffering of the poorest. If the brightest and the best could be dragged away from their Bloomberg terminals then maybe they could figure out a sustainable economic model. Ah, but that would mean change and nobody likes that.
The banks of the Daunbe
Perhaps the relevant ideas and memes are swirling around us already; climate change, the Internet, super-complex and reliable consumer products, globalisation, a common language, the creative class, additive manufacturing. Perhaps all the pieces already exist and we just need some Einstein to put it all together?
On this visit I did not board the funicular railway up to the castle but I hung around one evening near the station at the bottom and took photos as evening fell. Vast cruise boats slid by, many from Germany. The Danube rises like an enormous cake in Germany’s Black Forest and flows through Vienna, Bratislava and Belgrade not to mention Orşova, Drobeta-Turnu Severin, Calafat, Bechet, Dăbuleni, Corabia, Turnu Măgurele, Zimnicea, Giurgiu, Olteniţa, Călăraşi, Feteşti, Cernavodă, Hârşova, Brăila, Galaţi, Isaccea and, of course, Tulcea.
As I crossed the bridge back to the hotel I looked down and saw one of these floating leviathans drifting by with a swimming pool on it’s deck. It has never occurred to me to cruise along a river before. What a great idea. You can stay in one place while visiting the great cities of Europe.
Kürtőskalács
The hotels are near the main entertainment area in Budapest and the night was busy with tourists and locals. I bought Kürtőskalács, or Chimney Cake, from a street seller. Spirals of pastry dipped in nuts and sugar that tasted, to me, like mince pies. One starts to eat this delicious confection and gets the idea that one will eat just one more ring before stopping. But these are not rings, this is a spiral and one munches on and on and on until one has devoured the whole thing.
A driver had been organised to take me from the hotel to the office the next morning. I emerged early and he had not yet arrived and so I stood gazing out over the river and waited. The hotel concierge approached, asked my name and said I should get in one of the taxis that always wait outside the hotel. I explained that I had a car coming but he insisted. I walked to meet him at the car and explained again that this was unnecessary. This time a second concierge joined in telling me that I should get in the car and when I tried to speak a passing young man with a rucksack said to me: “He couldn’t come”. For just the twinkling of an eye I thought I was back in The Village. Either that or some Soviet era spy thriller. It seemed that the whole of Budapest knew who I was and was conspiring to kidnap me.
I got in the car and went to the office.
Banks of the Danube
Roses
The Man On The Radio is telling me that Lounge Music is making a come back. It seems that Lounge is music like Herp Alpert or the stuff they played during the Austin Powers films. Come to think of it, Herp Alpert performed the theme to, what must have been the inspiration for Austin Powers and still the best Bond film ever, the original Casino Royal. TMOTR also suggested that Ursula 1000 are a modern band who make Lounge Music. Some time ago I bought a CD by a band named Lamb Chop who are also said to have dabbled in Lounge and The Saturday Option is a definite must listen.
brighton bulldozer
Damp Squid
Saturday evening me and a friend drove up onto Dartmoor to watch the Perseid Meteor shower. We parked in a small car park by the Warren House Inn and looked around for a place to camp. After getting wet feet trapsing through marshland we found a bit of flat ground high up away from the road. Returning to the car we picked up the gear and retraced our steps, this time avoiding the gullies. After the tent and camp bed were erected we headed for the pub.
Dartmoor
The Warren House is a friendly old fashioned place which serves lamb hot pot, lasagne and the like. The sort of grub you want if you have been wandering around in English weather which was of course misty and overcast. We expected to be heading straight for bed once the pub closed.
After a few pints the landlady told us that the fire in the hearth had been brought from another pub which had burnt down and was never allowed to go out. Slowly the place emptied of customers and about 11:30 we emerged into the darkness. As it was so dark I took the opertunity to fall into a ditch by the side of the road and after that we switched on our head torches. We hunted around and eventually found our camp and cracked open another couple of beers. By now the sky had begun to clear and we could see some stars.
We stood about and looked and looked and looked. I saw one but it was pretty obvious that, like the rest of the tourists to England this year, the Perseid’s had mostly stayed away. The cloud began to draw in but we retained a small patch of clear sky. As I lay on my camp bed in my sleeping bag I gazed up and saw two more tiddlers. Another Perseid damp squib.
Star House
Palmeira Square
Drove home last night. Sunshine, windows open, hammering down the A23. Summer has finally come. Approaching Britghon I noticed the mist over the hills and as I drove down The Drive I discovered that the city was immersed in dense fog. Though this gave a chill to the air I knew that just a few feet above my head it was still summer and it was beautiful to watch the fog rolling along Kingsway. As the sun set the fog drifted out to sea and the horizon seemed to undulated.
Today the fog has gone and the flowers are out in Palmeira Square. On the down side it looks like Harry’s English Restaurant has closed but I guess this is a lesson to us all. You don’t know what you’ve got ’till it’s gone and I should have frequented the place more often.
Still, the sky is clear which bodes well for the seeing since tomorrow night is the start of the Perseid Meteor shower.
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Harry’s Restaurant
Adelaide Crescent
Adelaide Crescent
brighton bulldozer
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Art Photography
waking up with a pencil in your ear wont get you pregnant
Tags: Felicity Gerry, George Galloway, Legitimate rape, pencil in your ear, rape, rape is rape, talking bollocks, Todd Akin
It was me. I was Talking Bollocks!
It’s been a bumper week for those in the public eye TALKING BOLLOCKS!
First I heard that Respect MP George Galloway had blundered around like a bull in a china shop on the subject of rape and said that having sex with a sleeping woman was “not rape as anyone with any sense can possibly recognise it“.
Hmmmmm………I’m not sure I’d considered this question before but it’s pretty insensitive. Rape, like race and illegal drug use, is a taboo subject which politicians mention at their peril.
The liberal intelligentsia were quick to jump on Mr. Galloway. On BBC Radio 4′s PM program a criminal barrister named Felicity Gerry was interviewed. She was very clear in her opinion which I have been unable to find on the web and so must quote from memory. When pressed for a definition of rape she said something along the lines that it was “anyone putting anything where someone else didn’t want it” and gave the obvious examples of a penis in a vagina as well as a pencil in someone’s ear!
I kid you not! I heard this almost verbatim on the wireless. The really strange thing is that no other pocket bureaucrat thought it necessary to come on the radio and condemn such idiotic remarks. Imagine if Mr. Galloway had said this?
The interviewer suggested that the law could have different levels of rape and that not all were identically serious and gave the example of murder and manslaughter but Ms. Gerry was adamant: “Rape is rape”. The idea that “rape is rape” is, of course, bollocks as it puts a 16 year old boy who has sex with his 15 year old girlfriend in the same category as a psychopath who has raped multiple women at knifepoint. “Rape is rape” she kept repeating unaware that she was talking as much bollocks as George Galloway.
Then we had a barmy American politician wade into the argument. In an interview with a TV station Todd Akin, the Republican nominee for the Senate in Missouri, was expressing his opposition to the right to abortion for women who had been raped and, in an attempt at justification, said: “First of all, from what I understand from doctors [pregnancy from rape] is really rare……If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.”
Woah!!!! This is strange stuff. First he implies that some rapes are not “legitimate” then throws in some weird science he must have read on some Christian Alien blog.
Remember that TV show Kids Say the Funniest Things? How about a new show where the we round up a lot of politicians and ask them questions. They could call it Politicians Talk The Most Bollocks – No, wait, they do it already only it’s called Prime Ministers Questions.
Trees In Silhouette
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