Catmachine

Life seemed bleak and I was feeling sorry for myself - there didn't really seem to be much point in anything I was involved in and I could see no hope for the future. Then scrolling past in the Twitter stream came the news that Neil Armstrong had died. The sad news instantly took me back to childhood where my heroes were all scientists and explorers rather than sporty types or warriors. Neil Armstrong was the first and the only one with whom I felt a real time connection. Along with most of the rest of the species who were alive at the time and had access to television receiver, I clearly remember watching Armstrong step onto the surface of the Moon. It was the middle of the night but my parents had the foresight to wake me up and plonk me in front of the set. Despite my young age I knew exactly what was going on. Back then the Space Race was everywhere and I knew in my bones that it was only a matter of time before we were all living out there. It is a shame that collectivel...

It is of course typical that when  I write an entry making a big song and dance about how I am going to temporarily return the blog to its original purpose by writing about my short trip to the Edinburgh Fringe it mainly covers my journey up and then before I get the chance to write part two I get so distracted by space knockers that I have to write a blog in defence of the Mars Curiosity Rover . And then do nothing for several days. Of course it's not strictly true to say that I haven't been doing anything. I have been very busy. For a start, I have been writing, just not blog entries. And when not writing I have been commuting back and forth between Dolphinton and Edinburgh on the local buses. This means that I haven't been able to stay in town as late as I would have liked as the last bus is at 9.35pm. Nevertheless I have managed to see a few good shows - some of the best being  Bad Musical , Michael Legge: What a Shame and My Stepson Stole My Sonic Screwdriver...

I am pleased to see that the Curiosity rover landed safely on Mars after such a long journey. And having seen simulations of the landing itself I'm impressed with the technology involved - the rover was winched down to the surface from a hovering descent section. That's a far more exciting and suitable example of unsupervised robotic drone technology than some I could mention. I hope we can look forward to at least five years of planetary trundling and would like to think that in my lifetime I'll see TV pictures of Curiosity being retrieved by the men and women of the first human mission. Of course every time something exciting happens in the space programme there is a backlash from people who think the money would be better spent curing disease and feeding the hungry. Whilst I  applaud and share the core sentiment - who doesn't wish the sick cured and the starving fed? - as soon as I start unpacking this assertion I find it's riddled with flaws. For a star...

Far back in the mists of time when I first started this blog its main purpose was to make sure I didn't forget things. That was six years ago. But then it evolved and I started waffling on about any number of old things, often to do with philosophy or science. Then I started becoming busy with other forms of writing and blog frequency was one of the victims of my lack of time. In an attempt to remedy this I am now going to temporarily return the blog to its original purpose. I'm off to Edinburgh again to, amongst other things, see some shows on the Fringe and it would be nice to have a record of what I end up managing to see. I hope it's more than I used to - previously I seemed to simply end up sitting in bars drinking with the idea of going to see a show hanging over me like an unpleasant obligation. Ridiculous. After all, I can sit in a bar and drink any time. Of course I have to get there first. The trip did start suspiciously well when a Brighton bus driver l...

I am writing a short story for a competition at the moment. Whilst in the past I have always had trouble reaching a word count rather than squeezing down into one, on this occasion I have a rough idea of more or less everything that is going to happen in the story. As the narrative progresses this is beginning to seem as if it might cause a number of issues. I've barely scratched the surface of the events that are to occur and yet have already used up a full third of my word allowance. However this need not be a problem. I have decided to just go with it, write the story as it comes naturally to me and once it's complete then embark upon the editing with a vengeance. In the past I didn't used to like editing at all, feeling that it was a crime to discard whole passages of prose that I had sweated over, certain that the omission of certain facts or sequences would somehow leave the tale incomplete and incomprehensible to the reader. However the experience of editing m...

There seems to be an inherent impatience in the heart of humanity. You only have to be waiting at a pedestrian crossing to see it in action. Generally when I'm waiting at a Pelican (a bad portmanteau of PEdestrian LIght CONtrolled apparently) crossing I wait for the lights to change in my favour, no matter how empty the road is. You never know when some maniac is going to come tearing round the corner. Plus if there are young children with their parents waiting at the crossing I feel it's preferable to set a good example. After all, the parents are trying to drum a bit of road safety into their children's brains, brains which tend to see things in more of a binary fashion - things are either wrong or right. The last thing they want is another adult inspiring awkward questions about the important lesson they're trying to teach. "But Mummy, why is that man crossing when the red light is showing?" As I stand there motionless beside an empty road some pe...

The other day was a nice illustration of the way the online community - and particularly Twitter - is prone to react sometimes. The scientists at CERN announced the discovery of the Higgs-Boson. Unfortunately they did so with a Powerpoint presentation using one of the worlds most talked about fonts, Comic Sans. There then followed a stream of tweets - some amused, some outraged, some eye-rolling - about such a perceived display of unprofessionalism. That was the first wave. Then came the second wave. The second wave usually has far less of a sense of humour. This wave told people participating in the first wave that they were kicking up a fuss about nothing, that they should grow up, that only when they had discovered the secret of the universe themselves would they be in a position to criticise. Lightly peppered with a few Comic Sans apologists who, lets face it, are only doing it to be contrary - opinion as trolling mechanism. This is quite often the way things play out. It...

I don't like it when people describe plants as weeds . When I was a kid I thought that weeds were actually a specific variety of plant - the evil kind as it were - and that we had to fight them at every turn to prevent them taking over the world as they strangled and replaced the good plants. Then when I discovered that it was only a human definition it felt incorrect to me, wrong, and I could no longer accept it. No plants are "weeds" - who are we to say they are? Similarly, the judgement of certain kinds of animal that some people make, calling them vermin or pests sits equally uncomfortably with me. Who are we to judge? Just because their behaviour doesn't fit in with our plans - with our own animal behaviour - doesn't mean they have any less right than we do to display it. A common instance of such unfair judgement is when you hear pigeons described as "flying rats"; the implication being that they are worthless vermin and that our natur...

It has been of mild annoyance to me recently that I seem to have been having quite interesting dreams and yet before I can get to a keyboard to record them, they evaporate leaving only a sense of their ambience - if I'm lucky a pleasant and exciting one. I have already discussed on this blog why dreams might have to evaporate , but of course that isn't to say that they always do. Sometimes they stick . And sometimes the ones that stick are the nightmares. This is probably advantageous. Vividly remembering frightening things means we avoid repeating them and consequently may live to pass on the genes for vividly remembering frightening things.  The problem comes when dreams are so frightening that they pass this threshold - there's nothing you can do to avoid them and if you're unlucky they will recur  again and again and again... I have already covered the recurring dreams I used to have about the creatures called Dobods . But one foe appeared ...

After a while the novelty of there being an Amazon page for my book began to wear off. It was no longer enough for me to browse to it and look adoringly at a page on which the spaces in the dynamic web template were filled by my own creation's meta-data. So I had self-published. How was I going to promote it? Even though it was now available in paperback and ebook, the thing wasn't going to sell itself. True, I had already been bothering all my online contacts via the social networks on a regular basis. Every few days or so I'd tweet a link and a plug at the alleged optimum time of 5pm - when Europe was clocking off, New York eating lunch and Los Angeles sipping their coffee as they prepared to face the day ahead. I'd set up a Facebook page for the book on which I posted rare photos and other goodies in an attempt to engage with my audience and hopefully encourage some of them to leave reviews on Amazon. I'd taken part in a Goodreads Giveaway which incre...

Some people take things way too seriously. This has never been more true than online. Modern social networks are the ideal arenas for making jokes, puns, plays on words or other frivolous observations - things intended to raise a smile but when it comes down to it fairly disposable and transient. However, when doing so there's nothing more disheartening than getting a response from someone who has taken it seriously.  Sometimes they even find it necessary to point out or explain the joke you've just made (taking credit for it themselves in the process almost as if you'd said it by accident). Sometimes they completely miss the point. On other occasions they respond by making the same joke you've just made, just less subtly. Why is this behaviour so prevalent in the electronic age? For a start it might not be.  I might only think it is. It's fair to say that I can be a bit of a recluse and that as a result I'm now meeting and interacting with  f...

The world seems to have a schizophrenic attitude towards science fiction, fantasy and horror these days. It could be argued there has never been a better time to make genre films and TV.  Back in the bad old days you could probably count all the examples of science fictional TV and film on the fingers of a very small collection of hands and even after Star Wars arrived you could still, for a while, keep up with all the imitations that seemed to spring up overnight. But in recent years it has become impossible. There is simply too much of the stuff for one person to keep track without spending all their waking hours watching DVD box sets. And yet a love of genre books is, as it has been for a long time now, considered far less of a good thing.  Admit to this and one still runs the risk of being considered a "nerd" or "geek" with all the negative associations that entails. Even those who don't make such rash generalisations still wonder whether it isn't perh...

Self publishing has come a long way in a very short time. In the not too distant past it still bore the stigma of Vanity Publishing , a disparaging label casting aspersions on the motives and character of the author. But now? Now it's Print-On-Demand , the unspoken implication being that there is a demand out there for what you've written. These labels make all the difference to how the process is perceived and how seriously it is taken. But the major distinction is the way that the modern process works. You no longer have to shell out for hundreds of hard copies of a book that run the risk of ending up under the bed in ten years' time - in fact you no longer have to shell out for anything . All you need to make a book available is the ability to write one and the willingness to spend some time negotiating the twists and turns of an online administration process. As some of you may know (chiefly because I haven't shut up about it for the past six months) I have r...

I used to read newspapers more often than I do now, and back then I noticed a curious phenomenon. Most newspapers had two distinct identities. There was the main bit then at just over the halfway mark the quality of the content quality started degrading as it became predominantly ads, cartoons and crosswords. Then just impenetrable ads for increasingly bizarre products and services.  But if you persevered you would break free of this cruft and into another section of the paper altogether with stories and articles. It was like discovering a hidden city at the centre of the jungle. The problem was this new section was concerned entirely with sport. I was never interested in sport so as far as I was concerned this part of a newspaper's anatomy was analogous to the appendix. It didn't do anything and could safely be ignored. At times of World Cup or Olympics it did seem to become seriously inflamed but there was nothing really you could do about this. The option of a sp...

As far as buying our music is concerned, we've come a long way in what feels like a very short time. These days it's far quicker and easier to buy music at the drop of a hat - furthermore there's a far greater range of music to choose from. We can pick and choose the tracks we want and best of all we don't even have to leave the house. The downside of this is of course that it can be dangerous going online drunk - a hangover is rarely improved by the discovery that one has bought the box set of Mantovani's 100 Golden Moments because it seemed like a funny idea at the time. In general this means that things are more convenient and in some small way we are conserving resources. What's more we no longer have to cart around half a metric tonne of vinyl every time we move house and lets face it those cardboard boxes were always the heaviest ones. Usually designed for transporting bananas they also had a nasty habit of disintegrating halfway up the garden path ...

Ever since moving to this city I've had a Grudging-Acceptance / Hate relationship with the local buses as anyone who has ever read my blog or followed me on Twitter or other social media will already know. I never shut up about it and am in fact surprised you're still following me. What's that you say? You're not? Oh dear. There are many reasons for this (the bus thing, not the social media thing). For a start there was the whole breaking my arm and lying about it incident which I've already chronicled in this very blog, and then there was the time that The Worst Thing That Has Ever Happened occurred on the top deck of a number 25. But on the whole these specific events aren't a major part of the general unpleasantness surrounding such journeys. It's everything else. For a start where I live the nearest bus stop is on a large square - the other side of the square to the direction from which I enter it. This means that I can see my bus is already at ...

When most children play "lets pretend" they imagine a thing that isn't. Whilst I did do that as a kid, I also used to have little games in my head in which I imagined a thing that already was ... The first major incidence of the phenomenon that I can now recall was back in the seventies when we had an German exchange student staying with us, a woman studying architecture. As a favour to my parents - perhaps as a way of saying thank you for letting her stay - she took me off their hands for an afternoon on a trip to visit Welwyn Garden City and Harlow - of some significance to students of architecture and town planning as they were both "New Towns" built in the twentieth century in the commuter belt to ease overcrowding in London. Whilst we were in Harlow I started playing a strange game with myself. To clarify, this was playing a game in the sense of " let's play Star Trek " rather than " let's play Tiddlywinks ". I started ima...