Catmachine

Walking down the street this afternoon I found myself in a part of town that I hadn't really visited that much of late, although it was an area I used to frequent more when I first moved down here some fifteen or so years ago.  Fifteen years!  Quite absurd of course to consider that such time had passed. It only seemed like the other day that I made my way down to the coast from London and... Actually no. I realised that it did seem like a long time ago. The biggest difference was how I felt. Walking down that street again evoked in me a Proustian rush, I recalled just how free and excited I felt back then. I'd made a big change to my life and uprooted myself. The possibilities appeared endless, above me an infinite blue sky that reflected my state of mind. I instantly became depressed. Things were so much more negative and gloomy now, the world a far more depressing place. What was it that had changed so much so as to skew my outlook to such a large degree? Aside from...

I don't have any wisdom teeth. I didn't have them taken out or anything, they're just not there and never were.  I am a mutant.  One of the first things some people say upon hearing about this unusual state of affairs is usually a hilarious variant on the " Why am I not surprised? " gag - the implication being that I'm a bit daft and lack wisdom. Of course that's all a bit arse over front and back to tit. As we all know very well they're called " wisdom " because they appear later in life when (presumably) one has accumulated some.  They're not called " wisdom " because their appearance imparts it, nor because their eruption makes you stagger about calling for Mr Grimsdale (unless that's your dentist's name). Age and wisdom used to be inextricably linked. Not so much nowadays. Anyone who hates Thugg the Caveman and his illuminating antics should skip to the end of the next bit. In Thugg's day reaching the rip...

It's probably a bit unexpected that I'm writing a blog entry with the same title as a Michael Jackson song, but in my defence I'd just like to point out that the late Mr Jackson doesn't hold a monopoly on the concept of mirrors, or the male inhabitants thereof. However, looking in the mirror these days I begin to understand his desire for plastic surgery. I have always had a curious relationship with mirrors. As a child and early teen I disliked them.  Firstly because they were frightening, especially at night. They reflected and doubled the scary luminous shapes that seemed to make their way into my bedroom no matter how thoroughly I closed the curtains. And what if I had to get up in the night?  In the small hours a mirror was an eerie portal into an unnatural perverse world where I could never be sure that the shape moving in there was only my reflection. And what would happen if I looked into it whilst I was asleep? Far better to cover it up with a blanket. ...

"I'm just a face in the crowd / Nothing to worry about Not even trying to stand out I'm getting smaller and smaller and smaller And I got nothing to say / It's all been taken away I just behave and obey I'm afraid I am starting to fade away" Nine Inch Nails, Getting Smaller I don't know what Trent Reznor thinks he has to worry about - he's the same age as me and yet made his mark years ago and chalked up an achievement that many of us would like to, that of credible songwriter rockstar. But I know what he's on about though. Given that it's been written by someone who doesn't know what it's like, the above quote is an uncannily accurate reflection of the thought processes of someone who's reached my age without achieving anything worthwhile. It's easy when you're young of course. You can entertain all sorts of notions about how you're going to be a rock star, a writer, a DJ, and it all seems quite achievable. The only p...

It's that time of year and that time of decade when people start looking back at the previous ten years and start making lists. This is the third occasion I remember clearly; in theory of course I was old enough to remember the Seventies Retrospective, but perhaps there wasn't as big a deal made about it at the time; perhaps there were still enough new and exciting things around for the media of the day to be looking forward rather than back. And perhaps the media itself was still enthusiastic and experimental enough still to find getting caught up in nostalgia and retro a bit boring. Never mind what happened in 1971, look what's around now in 1979! The Clash . Independence for Zimbabwe . Kate Bush . The first Star Trek movie . Tubeway Army . Sheep Farming in Barnet . Blondie . Blake's Seven . The Police . City of Death . Joy Division . The list is endless, the future looked bright. That said, the current look back at the past decade seems a bit lacklustre this time....

"Sorry, did I say something wrong?" said Marvin, dragging himself on regardless. "Pardon me for breathing, which I never do anyway so I don't know why I bother to say it, oh god, I'm so depressed." Douglas Adams, The Hitch-hikers Guide to the Galaxy Now that we have our thought experiment of me-as-robot fully set up in the Thought Lab, it's time to start playing with it. Settle down. There are any number of advantages to my new state. Instead of having to struggle with contact lenses and then having to hold small print documents at arms length, I can simply upgrade and get a new pair of peepers from eyeBay. And I'm sure once I get the mechanism calibrated I can do away with all that getting tired stuff and simply go onto standby at the end of the day; no more tedious insomnia. It's only when I start talking about it in this manner that it becomes apparent how complex the human machine is. How many of these things I think I could do without, or...

Sometimes I can't stand being made of flesh and bone. What with my current materialist reading material I've come to terms with the reality that I am in fact a machine. A highly sophisticated machine, it's true. A highly inefficient machine and yet at the same time an immensely, insanely complex one. But a machine nonetheless. What I don't understand is why they had to make it of such rubbish parts. I mean come on . The transportation mechanism is made of meat fer chrissakes. And bones. OK, they have that nifty self-repair process built-in (provided they're properly set after a break), but wouldn't it be better to just make them out of stainless steel in the first place and avoid the whole issue of breakage? If nothing else this is a compelling argument for evolution and against the ridiculous notion of Intelligent Design . Idiotic design more like. Still, as something arrived at by trial and error over the course of millions of years it's not bad ...

"Being born is not a crime, so why must it carry a sentence of death?" Robert Ettinger Who wants to live forever? To be honest, I wouldn't mind. No really. Sometimes I think anyone who doesn't want to live forever quite clearly hasn't properly understood the concept of death. Perhaps this attitude of mine is being affected by my current reading matter; as any regular readers of this blog may have noticed I'm attempting to give my mind a workout by reading a lot of philosophical and scientific texts on the nature of consciousness, the nature of being. One thing that the Champions of Physicalism seem to delight in gleefully pointing out is that we are no more than the sum of our parts, that this is all there is and that we're all going to die. We're all going to stop . Sometimes this becomes horribly clear to me in the middle of the night and I go cold with terror. Something must be done. It may be an illusion, but I'm quite attached to being s...

Is anyone else surprised (and perhaps a little bit alarmed) by the fact that it's September already? This year has been going by exceptionally fast - by rights it should perhaps be mid-May, no later. Anyone who knows me will know how I do tend to bang on about this - time accelerating as you get old - quite a bit. However, I haven't blogged about it yet so it will be interesting to put my ramblings in some kind of order. It's a common enough observation - those long hot childhood summers that seemed to last for about five years in today's temporal currency... a two and a half hour car journey being an eternity of boredom at the age of eight... and the past decade passing like a flash. But why does it happen? I've heard a number of theories advanced. Time is measured as a proportion of your life so far This sounds plausible. Let's take a week. When you're five years old, a week is 0.38 per cent of your life. When you're thirty five a week is only 0.05 per...