Death From The Skies!
What? You don’t update for the best part of a fortnight and when you do it’s a picture of a book? Let me explain why I’ve posted a picture of Death From The Skies by full-time astronomer and occasional stunt double for Sir Clive Sinclair, Philip Plait… Firstly: I’ve been busy. Got a new job. Quite a bit of travelling. Can’t really work on my site while I’m making sure million-plus pounds a day in turnover websites are actually turning over. Especially in an open plan office. Kinda frowned upon. Then, by the time I get home… well, I’m only thinking of one thing and I think you what that is, right? Slippers. Yeah, you know it. Slippers. Secondly: shut your face. It’s my site. Thirdly: this book is pretty important. It takes my books by astronomers with more than a one in a million chance of actually being recognised by people who don’t ordinarily get excited by interference patterns in spectra (that’s a small but important genre of authors) to… one. Unless you count The Secret Of The Black Hole by Patrick Moore. And I don’t. Anyway, that’s in the attic somewhere. One is infinitely more than zero. Think about it. It’s also one more than zero so try to gloss over that. Fourthly: shut your face. It’s my site. That is...
Not Old
"Hooray!" "Hooray?" "We’re not old!" "I think you’ll find we are." "Nope! We’re officially not old!" "Officially? Not old?" "Shall I explain?" "Will any answer I give prevent you from doing so anyway?" "I wouldn’t have thought so." "Go on then." "It’s one in the morning." "Yes it is. That hardly qualifies as an explanation." "But we’re still awake. And not just awake in bed because the mattress is getting a little uncomfortable or we had a coffee after seven in the evening awake. We’re genuinely awake awake and downstairs." "And being awake and downstairs means we’re not old." "That’s right. It’s Friday night… no, scratch that! It’s Saturday morning and we haven’t been to bed yet." "And you associate this with not being old." "Exactly! It’s the hip kind of thing young people like us would do." "Except you’ve just used the word ‘hip’ which negates how not old you think we now officially are." "Well-spotted. Even still, we’re not old because we haven’t been to bed. We are officially not old." "And what have we been doing?" "Sorry?" "While we’ve been busy not being old, what exactly have we been doing on this Friday evening-into-Saturday morning youthathon?" "You were here. You know." "Yes, I do know. I just want to hear you say it so you can factor this into your not-being-old session." "We’ve been drinking. Young people drink." "Red wine?" "I’m sure there are some young people who drink red wine." "Perhaps they mistake it for Ribena?" "Sure, why not?" "And what else?" "Well… we watched that rather entertaining afternoon quiz Pointless on BBC2 on iPlayer catch-up…" "Go on." "And then there were those back-to-back episodes of Generals At War. The battles of Kursk and El Alamein." "Keep going." "And then we watched music videos for an hour or so. Music videos! That’s not old!" "What channel were we watching again?" "Er… VH1 Classic. DeBarge were great, weren’t they?" "No. No they weren’t." "We are so...
Vintage Borg
Sure, they assimilate everything in sight when they’re out cruising the transwarp corridors but get them out of their uniforms and you’ll find the Borg are just like you and me. Original vintage images courtesy of...
World’s Worst Sports Events
I’m something of a sports fan. Something is about as descriptive a term as I can come up with. I like sports. Well, I like watching sports. Taking part is another thing altogether. That leaves you hot and sweaty and in pain in several areas of your body where you didn’t protect yourself adequately. I get enough of that from bi-weekly tramp-raping as it is, thank you very much. I don’t like all sports or sporting events, though. This is because I’m a discerning sports fan. I like sports that make sense and produce excitement or admiration for the exposure of sporting prowess. It may be a bit of a stretch for me to label those that fall outside my personal realm of worthy sports as the "world’s worst sports events" but I’m nothing if not full of my own importance. Basketball Basketball is a sport that appeals to – and actively discriminates against those of us who are not – freaks of nature: failed high-jumpers; the offspring of medieval torture-rack victims; aberrations in the eyes of God; stunt doubles for that head alien at the end of Close Encounters Of The Third Kind: Pick An Edition, Any Edition. Basically, people who shop at Tall And Gangly are drawn to Basketball. The rules of the sporting event, as I have determined them, are: Team A scores Team B scores Repeat until owners of building throw everyone out The excitement in basketball only comes when you’re really tired, lost track of the score somewhere around 480-478, are barely able to keep your eyes open, and your brain tranposes the figures of galumphing, inelegant mutants on the court in front of you with giraffes. Suddenly you’re in the heart of Africa and the animals are bouncing balls with their long beaks (I don’t know much about giraffes to be honest) and the sport has taken on a whole new, thrilling meaning! It means… you’re losing it big time! Quite frankly, there are quicker, less tedious ways to experience hallucinatory highs. Baseball One of the reasons I’ve heard cited for why the sport known as football to the vast majority of the world or the sport known as cricket to everyone in the world have never really taken off and become super-popular in America is that these sports lack the high-scoring and high levels of thrillomatic thrillgasms present in really thrilling sports like basketball (which we now know has none). And, apparently, that’s a precondition to something being enjoyed by Her Majesty’s Canada’s neighbours. Yet, perversely, Americans (and, yes, other weirdos around the world too (I’m looking at you Japan, you tentacled-girl-loving...
The Derren Brown Lottery Trick
A lot of people are talking about the recent Derren Brown lottery trick; he predicted the lottery numbers drawn on Wednesday on live television and explained the way he did it on Friday: a group of volunteers used automatic writing and averaged their predicted numbers to get the correct results. A lot of people are upset with the explanation. This is because a lot of people are retarded. The trick – the actual trick – was not in predicting the lottery numbers. However that was done, whether it was: split screen trickery being really, really, really lucky using balls with electronic ink coatings and wi-fi-connected processors inside to reproduce the numbers automatically pixies is unimportant. That wasn’t the point. Has nobody ever watched one of Derren Brown’s programmes before? They’re very good. He will quite often get a person or small group of people and subliminally send them down a planned path of responses or persuade them that certain actions are the results of certain other actions. Persuading people that it’s possible to communicate with the dead, for example. Persuading people that they died in a car crash, for example. Persuading people that they’re fighting zombies, for example. Persauding people that they have the ability to predict lottery numbers using automatic writing, for example. Oh! That last one was this recent show. The trick was persuading people that they have a group skill in predicting random events. They don’t. That’s why it’s a trick. The trick was to convince 23 of them that they did have this skill though (one of the group was a stooge, needed to add up the random figures written by the others at one point and produce some amazingly close predictions.) Positive reinforcement of the group’s prediction abilities was the crux of the trick; they guessed one right, then three right, then four right with two really (gosh!) close, and then all six (wow! Magic Jesus Cakes Ahoy!) That everyone was so obsessed with the live lottery-prediction part of the show is classic misdirection. Even the BBC have wasted time and effort getting quotes from professors of Oxford and Cambridge about how it’s just not possible that the subconscious minds of strangers could combine with mathematics to predetermine the random rollings and selections of balls in another part of the city (really? That’s impossible? Really really? Are you sure? Can we get a few more professors to confirm this? Can we?) It’s sad that so many people missed the point of the show. You have disappointed me. All of you. Except you Derren. You’re...
Portsmouth Free Art And Live Painting
Last weekend I ventured down to Southsea Skate Park to watch the free art giveaway and live painting. Short version: it was great. But you don’t want to know how good the event was and how good it was of the skate park to allow this and how well local artists Elmo and Lex did in organising the event at short notice and how good it was for stencil and graffiti artists to come from near and far to leave their marks on our nearby wonder of concrete construction for all to see. You want to see pictures and videos. Deckchairs were painted and available for purchase. Collaborative piece by three artists Artist Farkfk working on his piece. That’s not a euphemism for masturbation by the way. Well, it’s not just a euphemism for masturbation. Interesting (subjectively) point: I have a piece by Farkfk hanging on my living room wall. That’s right! I’m hip and down with the arty kids or something! Bam Boo spraypainting a finger. By my reckoning he took approximately one hour per finger. Now that’s dedication! Or an inability to do fingers. Slikster86 outside the skate park, working it old school. I think that’s the sort of phrase you’re supposed to use in these situations. Close-up of the chain stencilled by My Dog Sighs plus the ladder from which he hung and refused to fall from for comedic value. Close-up of the sink hole/drain stencilled by My Dog Sighs. Included at no extra charge is… the lower half of his body! The finished sink. Great to watch it all come together during the day. Now Portsmouth’s skaters and cyclists can pretend they’ve been shrunk down and transported to a bathroom while they risk life and limb. It’s what’s been missing. These pictures and more are all available on my Flickr stream and on the group stream. Finally, a video. Not shot by...
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