Edible synchronisms

A few days ago I was chatting on-line with a friend about, as I do, Jungian archetypes in the context of some of the symbolism used in Western architecture.

I look at a structure like this …

and I interpret it as a large stone phallus capped with a 220 ton pentagram, erected to convey a specific message in accordance with a very specific belief system. My friend looks at it as an archetype with no specific message.

But that’s not important right now.

Jung is particularly well-known because of his writings on the concept of synchronicity. Whilst I appreciate that I may be suffering from a mild dose of apophenia, I have to admit that I buy into the synchronicity idea.

And after chatting about Jung a few days ago I have been delighted by a series of apparent synchronisms. Trivial synchronisms admittedly but they are often the most entertaining. A couple of examples...

Take the picture of the panda-shaped spam I posted earlier. I was cruising Google for pictures of mortadella (long story) a few days ago and came across the panda image. I paused my search for a while to catch up with my inbox. The first mail I opened was a link someone had sent me to a short film entitled – ‘They’re made out of meat’.

Good one

But not a clincher

Yesterday, after I had got chatting with someone about how much I loved Colorado I uploaded a few scans of some slides I took there twenty years ago

Just as I had uploaded the last jpg my other half returned home after a short trip to Berlin. We said hello and then she started showing me some of the things she’d picked up for me on her travels. The first thing out of the bag was this…

and, no, she hadn't noticed the name when she bought them

Now come on, spooky or what?

Ask an Expert - Update

A nice piece of spin control from the BBC today in response to its staff making complete bell ends of themselves by interviewing a ‘taxi driver’ on air instead of an IT ‘expert’. In the words of a report in the Entertainment News section of the BBC website…

Mr Goma, who was wrongly identified in the press as a taxi driver, was really at the BBC for a job interview.

Well that’s alright then.

Perfectly understandable.

And two slaps on the wrist to the naughty press for getting a news story wrong. What kind of idiot would do something like that?

And bravo to the BBC for being such good sports and placing the offending interview on line. The fact that every person connected to the Internet and their pet hamster have already hosted or linked to the clip might have something to do with that decision

Mr Goma said his interview was "very short", but he was prepared to return to the airwaves and was "happy to speak about any situation".

Now there’s a good sport

They're made out of meat

They’re made out of Meat – the short story

They’re made out of Meat - the short film

"... I thought you just told me they used radio."

"They do, but what do you think is on the radio? Meat sounds. You know how when you slap or flap meat it makes a noise? They talk by flapping their meat at each other. They can even sing by squirting air through their meat."

"Omigod. Singing meat. This is altogether too much. So what do you advise? ..."

Ask an expert

Even with the proliferation of TV channels that came with the introduction of satellite and cable TV, paid for television advertising is not particularly cheap

But there are other, more cost-effective ways to publicise your business, even on the supposedly non-commercial BBC channels. The two most popular wheezes are

1. Commission a low-cost public opinion survey and issue a press release based on its results. Fax the press release to everyone and pray that it’s a slow news day
2. Make an expert pundit available for incisive comment on current events, on the proviso that your company name gets mentioned and slapped up on screen whilst he’s talking

In my last firm we favoured Option 2 highly. We employed an economist with an impressive CV and we used to whore him around the likes of BBC News 24 and Bloomberg shamelessly. That’s not strictly true, very often they’d phone us. Twenty-four hours of television that needs filling. Day after day after day after day. I’m surprised more television researchers don’t turn postal and go into work with an assault rifle more often.

‘Can you make it? Great. I’ll send a car. Thank you. Dear God. Thank you’

The War on Terror in particular has led to a Golden Era for security and risk consultants from tuppeny hapenny firms getting onto to tele and advertising their flimsy wares by burbling government-compliant crap at 6.00 am in the morning.

The dismal quality of some of the ‘experts’ given airtime by the news channels only goes to demonstrate the ordinary public’s relative priorities when it comes to news stories. If a news channel were covering a football or a cricket story it wouldn’t dream of wheeling on some random nonentity and referring to them as an expert. Viewers wouldn't stand for it. However, virtually any other topic is fair game.

All this serves merely as a preamble for a link to the marvellous Guy Kewney interview on BBC News 24 the other day…

BBC Interviews Cab Driver

… where the BBC accidentally interviews the expert’s taxi driver rather than the expert.

I reckon they could have got away with it.

He was talking fish but his dreamy eyes were full of megadeath

I’m currently re-reading Michael Herr’s Dispatches for the umpteenth time.

Dispatches is the book about the Vietnam War in my opinion, arguably about any War the Americans have fought post 1945.

I only mention this because, and I’m not being particularly original here, it dawned on me some time ago that you could just do a search and replace on the text; replacing Saigon with Baghdad, Vietnam with Iraq and VC with insurgent, and publish it under a new name tomorrow…

Sitting in Saigon was like sitting inside the folded petals of a poisonous flower, the poison history, fucked in its root no matter how far back you wanted to run your trace....You'd stand there nailed in your tracks sometimes, no bearings and none in sight, thinking, Where the fuck am I?…

…Roof of the Rex, ground zero, men who looked like they'd been suckled by wolves, they could die right there and their jaws would work for another half-hour. This is where they asked you, 'Are you a Dove or a Hawk?' and 'Would you rather fight them here or in Pasadena?' Maybe we could beat them in Pasadena, I'd think but I wouldn't say it...

…That night I listened while a colonel explained the war in terms of protein. We were a nation of high-protein, meat-eating hunters, while the other guy just ate rice and a few grungy fish heads. We were going to club him to death with our meat; what could you say except, 'Colonel, you're insane'? It was like turning up in the middle of some black looneytune where the Duck had all the lines….

…(they had) chemicals, gases, lasers, sonic-electric ballbreakers that were still on the boards; and for back-up, deep in all their hearts, there were always the Nukes, they loved to remind you that we had some, 'right here in-country.' Once I met a colonel who had a plan to shorten the war by dropping piranha into the paddies of the North. He was talking fish but his dreamy eyes were full of mega-death...

A most recommended read. As with most decent books if you get ‘it’ you get it big time. If you don’t, fuck it, it don’t mean nuthing

Restless Natives pt2

Another weekend... another story about dead British soldiers in Basra

And as I mentioned in a previous post, no real explanation for the increasing Iraqi anger at the British presence.

After all, we are trying to do them a favour aren’t we?

Why would they be so ungrateful?

In a previous post I mentioned that one of the reasons Iraqis are upset with us is that they think coalition forces are behind some of the terrorist attacks ripping Iraq apart.

Unlike the mainstream Western media, which is curiously muted on the subject, alternative and non Western sources are airing the possibility that at least some of the bombs and killings are being arranged by our boys.

Their most common conspiracy theory comes in two basic variations

1. Ordinary Iraqi stopped at a check point. Taken into an office while his car is searched. Told to report to another police station or check point. Discovers Kinder Surprise bomb underneath car on the way.
   
2. Trainee Iraqi policeman given a mobile phone, told to get in an unmarked car and report on a demonstration. Drives to demonstration. Can’t get a signal on the phone. Leaves car to make a call. Car blows up.

I won’t bother pasting links to these stories as they are invariably phrased along the lines of ‘My brother in law in Baghdad told me that a mate of his heard that…’. Names, dates and verifiable facts are thin on the ground. That’s not to say the stories are necessarily untrue. They certainly represent a viable method to stage an apparent suicide bombing and some Iraqi, and non Iraqis, are inclined to believe them

And in the back of my mind I keep thinking about those two SAS men, at least we were told they were SAS men, caught dressed as Shia militia last year and the efforts our army went to liberate them – going so far as to demolish a police station with an APC.

And the locals went mental. And the reasons why they went mental and started lobbing fire bombs at British soldiers were faffed and obscured in the mainstream reporting of the incident.

Exciting SAS 'Basra' figurines available here. Shia militiamen uniforms, unmarked Nissan Sunny and remote controlled car bomb not included

Local Iraqi militia leaders were less reluctant to give their view on what was going on...

"What our police found in their car was very disturbing – weapons, explosives, and a remote control detonator. These are the weapons of terrorists. We believe these soldiers were planning an attack on a market or other civilian targets, and thanks be to god they were stopped and countless lives were saved."

And then, a few weeks later, the regular British Army officer responsible for investigating the incident, Captain Ken Masters, was found dead in his quarters.

If there has been any follow-up to what the supposed SAS men were doing in Basra or the circumstances of Captain Masters’ death it has passed me by. I don’t know anything near enough about these events to reasonably speculate anything but the very absence of information is a concern in itself. And I say once again, whether the rumours are true or not, some Iraqis believe them and that’s why they’re so angry and yet our media is reluctant to explain what’s pissing the Iraqis off with us so much.

Why would our television and newspapers be so coy?

And why am I so interested in the possibility of ‘false flag’ terrorist attacks, unwitting suicide bombers and spooks running around pretending to be somebody else?

Well, that should be fairly obvious…

So much for the Golden Age

Someone wrote to me yesterday from Canada asking if I'd mind taking a picture of his Mum's old school in Kennington for a book he's putting together for her 80th

He'd identified me via the web as someone who

• lives in/ near Kennington
• takes pictures

Apparently his mum went to an agricultural college in Kennington Village in the late 1930's

Village?!

Agricultual College?!

Kennington?!

Anyway, I did a few web searches and found the following extract from someone’s memoirs on-line

When my father was alive we lived in a big house in Kennington Lane, where he taught young men agriculture and chemistry. My father had a big meadow and garden, and had a sort of small farm there. Fancy a farm in Kennington!

Indeed

To cut a long story short I found out that there was an agricultural college in Kennington and that it was run by E Nesbit's father. She was born there. As in the E Nesbit who wrote The Railway Children and all those other children’s books depicting England's Golden Edwardian Age that never really existed, even before it was destroyed by the First World War. I read a fair few when I was growing up as a nipper just down the road.

But for the life of me I couldn’t picture any building on Kennington Lane that looked like it could have been an agricultural college

Still, any quest that results in images of a young Jenny Agutter popping up in my web browser is definitely worth pursuing

Last night we popped down there in a combined kebab purchasing/ local history exploration operation.

The address given as E Nesbit’s birthplace is now a row of derelict/ run down shops in an area just South of the Elephant and Castle notorious for its crack dens.

The only patch of once open space that could have been the college's grounds is now obliterated by the Cotton Field Estate - as nasty a collection of tower blocks as you're ever likely to see. It’s scary

So the question I am asking myself is

- Black and White or Colour?

- Film or Digital?

Alternatively, I could just lie and send the Old Dear a photograph of some twee school gates taken in Richmond…

Decisions Decisions

The Da Vinci Commode

This next post was going to be a continuation of the previous one but I noticed something last night that was both eerie and chilling that has interrupted my blogging schedule

I’ve posted a couple of times before about how much the success of The Da Vinci Code ticks me off. And that sense of irritation is being compounded by the all-pervasive hype that is being generated in advance of the release of the film of the book.

The success of The Da Vinci Code irritates me because

• The writing style is appalling. Dan Brown clearly graduated from the ‘The tap dripped in a drippety drip kind of way’ school of novelism.
• Finishing each chapter a page early and slapping the missing page at the start of the next chapter seems to be all you need to do these days for your book to qualify as a ‘page-turner’
• Such a spectacular triumph of hype over substance is truly depressing
• In spite of the verdict of the recent bizarre court case in which two authors from the same publishing house battled over plagiary charges, the Da Vinci Code is a rip off

And then we get onto the strange thing. One of the authors of The Holy Blood and The Holy Grail, a man calling himself ‘Richard Leigh’, was on the box last night talking about The Da Vinci Code, and all I could think was

‘Why is Lemmy pretending to be someone else?’

Richard Leigh

Lemmy

Restless Natives pt1

Over the weekend a British helicopter was downed in Iraq. Several people died, British and Iraqi, and riots broke out on the streets of Basra.

Now call me old-fashioned but after three years of supposedly benevolent occupation; with cheery, helmet-less British soldiers handing out Mars bars and Manchester United T Shirts, the sight of hundreds of people holding an impromptu street party celebrating one of your helicopters getting shot down does not look like a good sign.

Foolishly maybe, I don’t believe for a minute that our ordinary soldiers are making a balls-up of their responsibilities. If there’s one thing our army is practised at, it’s strolling around foreign countries, outnumbered a thousand to one, and keeping the peace. With the exception one or two unfortunate hiccups the British managed to keep a billion Indians under their thumb for a couple of centuries with something like fifty thousand troops. It’s all about exuding the confidence of someone with cojones the size of watermelons and not pissing the locals off so much that they realise they could totally obliterate you over the course of one not particularly busy morning.

Like I said, the British are traditionally good at that sort of thing.

So what’s going wrong for our Army in Southern Iraq?

Well, our news organisations certainly aren’t explaining to us.

At this point I’d normally launch into a rant about how controlled our media is, how it is owned by a handful of people, how it has got lazy and simply repeats PR bulletins yah di yah di yah dah.

However, I was fortunate to catch a painfully honest account of the impossibility of covering the situation in Iraq, presented by Channel 4’s Jon Snow, a couple of nights ago. Jon Snow seems like a decent, honest man who believes in what he does. To cut a long story short he basically admitted that no news worthy of the name is getting out of Iraq because the environment is physically lethal for journalists.

Which, in itself, says something about what’s going on there.

So, I’ll modify my standard rant about all journalists being whores to ‘all journalists are whores except for John Snow and a couple of his mates’.

Anyway, why are the Iraqis so pissed off with us?

Well, if you trawl around the alternative media and non-Western news organisations, it seems that at least some Iraqis believe that we are fucking their country up deliberately.

Even on Jon Snow’s program it was significant that the Iraqis interviewed chose to use very loose terms to describe the perpetrators of the atrocities happening in Iraq. Terms that could equally apply to coalition forces as other Iraqis.

Some Iraqis believe that it is the deliberate intention of the US, UK and, yes, Israeli governments to split Iraq into three parts and set those parts against each other for the foreseeable future.

After Hamas' victory in the recent Palestinian election, it is clear that the last thing ‘We’ really want is democracy in the Middle East unless it is the kind of democracy that delivers the kind of results ‘We’d’ like to see. A united, democratic Iraq is not on the table. It is not worth the risk to ‘Our’ interests.

We, in the West, are the terrorists

Actually, it doesn’t matter if any of this is true or not, the point is that significant number of Iraqis believe it to be so

And they’re pissy.

Latest and greatest daft link roundup

My occasional selection of links I can’t be bothered to email to people

There’s some choice material this time around...

Best Sean Connery impression/ voice-over ever?

Bozeta German Shepherd Dogs – don’t miss the ‘Contact Us’ section

The Lego ‘Brick Testament’

A fantastic achievement. There’s so much quality material it’s impossible to really single any part of it out. However, the Crucifixion scenes surpass anything Mel Gibson has done and the depiction of the End of the World was especially scary

Badger! Badger! Badger!

An oldie admittedly but I had cause to revisit it today and it still has the power to inspire – but not if the sound is turned off

Tom Cruise is Nuts

There are two reasons to be pissed off with Tom Cruise right now - all the hype surrounding Mission Impossible III and the suspicion that he was involved is getting an episode of Southpark pulled from UK TV because it made fun of his ‘fruity little’ Scientology Club.

As the makers of Southpark said ‘So, Scientology, you may have won this battle, but the million-year war for earth has just begun! Temporarily anozinizing our episode will not stop us from keeping Thetans forever trapped in your pitiful man-bodies. Curses and drat! You have obstructed us for now, but your feeble bid to save humanity will fail!’

As well as being nuts Tom also dances like a twat.

He does, however, have incredible, superhuman powers

My Travelling Face

An interesting experiment in blogging that features pictures of its author’s face instead of the interesting places the author has visited. I’m guessing wildly here but I reckon he started doing that because he doesn’t get out much. Fine work.