Kapitano: February 2007

Highbrow

I spent the night reading Hegel, and the day ill in bed. There's probably a moral there somewhere.

Every few months I try to read his stuff, and each time it's like trying to chew my way through a wall of cardboard.

Lenin wrote that to understand Marx fully, you need to understand Hegel thoroughly. Well, either Lenin was wrong, or there's the distinct possibility that no one in the world understands Marx.

On the other hand, seeing as there are a dozen or so incompatible interpretations of Hegel's system in academia, maybe it's not surprising there are so many Marxisms.

Here's an example from last night's reading, chosen at random:

Being is the notion implicit only: its special forms have the predicate ‘is’; when they are distinguished they are each of them an ‘other’: and the shape which dialectic takes in them, i.e. their further specialisation, is at once a forth-putting and in that way a disengaging of the notion implicit in being; and at the same time the withdrawing of being inwards, its sinking deeper into itself. Thus the explication of the notion in the sphere of being does two things: it brings out the totality of being, and it abolishes the immediacy of being, or the form of being as such.

- Hegel, "Shorter Logic", Chapter 7

Bertrand Russell is a joy to read, Hume isn't difficult, Wittgenstein's aphorisms are wonderfully suggestive, Descartes is long winded but clear, Kant needed an editor, Nietzche could have done without his editor, even Heidegger I can make some sense of. But Hegel...gah!

Stephen P took me out to lunch at the weekend.

He's rejoined the university's computer animation course, and is working on a short graduation film. The script and themes are almost shamefully Beckettian, and he needs appropriate music for it.

Which means he needs someone who (a) knows Beckett's work and its philosophy in depth, (b) can write and record music and (c) can do it to a filmic timeline. In other words...me!

Though all anyone else knows is I was taken out by a diminutive Irish blond cherub who's almost as gay as I am. Sometimes it's best to leave people with the first conclusions they jump to.

I'm told that, for each of his novels, Frederick Forsythe spends six months doing nonstop research on every aspect of the story. I can believe it. For one short story I've had to learn about the materials used in archery equipment, the structure of the British police force, autopsy procedures and a few other things

And I've had to brush up on Greek and Roman mythology. For this I used a Reader's Digest encyclopedia from 1964. Now, for me Reader's Digest is something of a symbol of everything that's wrong with the British middle classes.

It publishes "condensed" (abridged) versions of painfully formulaic novels about spys and romance in exotic countries. There's a monthly magazine containing articles like "Why We Need Identity Cards" - it's because of terrorists, apparently.

They also contain lists of obscure words to memorise and work into conversations - for the kind of people who think knowing long words makes them impressive - and the kind of "uplifting christian sentiment" that makes real people throw up. Though readers never say "throw up" or "puke" - it's always "vomit".

Reader's Digest publishes books of it's own, like "How to Do Just About Anything on a Computer", where "Anything" is recording your family tree, designing your garden and making christmas cards.

And it does encyclopedias like this one, with a section on myths and legends. Not Hindu myths, not Norse legends, not Celtic or Aboriginal stories - just the ones from Athens and Rome, because knowing about them makes you "educated", as opposed to merely knowledgeable.

Except it gets some of the myths wrong. Pluto wasn't the god of wealth - that was Plutius. Pluto ran Hades, which is not the same as Hell. And there were two characters called Ajax in the Illiad, which did not contain the Trojan Horse story.

Still, one of the useful things about being middle class is...you get to have a second home in the middle of nowhere, where you can lock yourself away for a week with no distractions to write your stories.

So that's what I'll be hopefully doing next week - sitting with a laptop in my parent's holiday home, miles from the mad crowd, with nothing to do but write. Or else be very very bored. One or the other.

Murder Most Flummoxing

I've been constantly tired and listless for the last few days, so today's entry is mostly a cut and paste of someone else's writing.

The "Golden Age" of British (read: English) crime fiction is usually reckoned to be roughly 1920-1950.

The dominant sub-genre was the "locked room mystery" - the seemingly impossible crime. The literal locked room crime involves a corpse being found in a room with no entrances or exits except one door, which is of course locked - from the inside. Often the victim is shot or stabbed, but there's no knife or gun to be found.

There are other impossible crimes in the genre - a man might be shot at point blank range but with no one near him, or found dead in the sand or snow with only his own footprints leading to him, or he might have been lying there for a day before discovery but have witnesses seeing him alive the hour before.

The author from that time most admired and collected is John Dickson Carr, a Brit living in America but setting his mysteries back in England. His most celebrated mystery is The Hollow Man (published in America as The Three Coffins).

Chapter 17 is set aside for a self-referential lecture from the detective, Dr Fell, on the subject of...locked room murders in fiction and their solutions.

He lists 7 types. Here is a precis of what he has to say:

1. It is not murder, but a series of coincidences ending in an accident which looks like murder. At an earlier time, before the room was locked, there has been a robbery, an attack, a wound, or a breaking of furniture which suggests a murder struggle. Later the victim is either accidentally killed or stunned in a locked room, and all these incidents are assumed to have taken place at the same time.

2. It is murder, but the victim is impelled to kill himself or crash into an accidental death. This may be by the effect of a haunted room, by suggestion, or more usually by a gas introduced from outside the room.

3. It is murder, by a mechanical device already planted in the room, and hidden undetectably in some innocent-looking piece of furniture. It may be a trap set by somebody long dead, and work either automatically or be set anew by the modern killer.

4. It is suicide, which is intended to look like murder. A man stabs himself with an icicle; the icicle melts; and, no weapon being found in the locked room, murder is presumed.

5. It is a murder which derives its problem from illusion and impersonation. Thus: the victim, still thought to be alive, is already lying murdered inside a room, of which the door is under observation. The murderer, either dressed as his victim or mistaken from behind for the victim, hurries in at the door. He whirls round, gets rid of his disguise, and instantly comes out of the room as himself.

6. It is a murder which, although committed by somebody outside the room at the time, nevertheless seems to have been committed by somebody who must have been inside.

The door is locked, the window too small to admit a murderer; yet the victim has apparently been stabbed from inside the room and the weapon is missing. Well, the icicle has been fired as a bullet from outside – we will not discuss whether this is practical...

The victim may be stabbed by a thin swordstick blade, passed between the twinings of a summer-house and withdrawn; or he may be stabbed with a blade so thin that he does not know he is hurt at all, and walks into another room before he suddenly collapses in death. Or he is lured into looking out of a window inaccessible from below; yet from above our old friend ice smashes down on his head, leaving him with a smashed skull but no weapon because the weapon has melted.

7. This is a murder depending on an effect exactly the reverse of number 5. That is, the victim is presumed to be dead long before he actually is. The victim lies asleep (drugged but unharmed) in a locked room. Knockings on the door fail to rouse him. The murderer starts a foul-play scare; forces the door; gets in ahead and kills by stabbing or throat-cutting, while suggesting to other watchers that they have seen something they have not seen.

He goes on to list 5 ways the door can tampered with to create the mystery:

1. Tampering with the key which is still in the lock. This was the favourite old-fashioned method, but its variations are too well known nowadays for anybody to use it seriously. The stem of the key can be gripped and turned with pliers from outside...

2. Simply removing the hinges of the door without disturbing lock or bolt.

3. Tampering with the bolt. String again: this time with a mechanism of pins and darning-needles, by which the bolt is shot from the outside by leverage of a pin stuck on the inside of the door, and the string is worked through the keyhole.

4. Tampering with a falling bar or latch. This usually consists in propping something under the latch, which can be pulled away after the door is closed from the outside, and let the bar drop.

5. ...The murderer, after committing his crime, has locked the door from the outside and kept the key. It is assumed, however, that the key is still in the lock on the inside. The murderer, who is first to raise a scare and find the body, smashes the upper glass panel of the door, puts his hand through with the key concealed in it, and "finds" the key in the lock inside, by which he opens the door.

Better than the Real Thing

Uncyclopedia is a spoof of Wikipedia. The entry on God contains:

God is love, and watches over each and every human being on Earth to make sure he or she has a happy, successful life. This is kind of strange though, since the central doctrine of Christianity is that all humans must live a life dominated by guilt and fear and that they must pray forgiveness from God every day from creating them. Unfortunately, God's Earth-shattering powers of supreme might are easily thwarted by people not believing in Him, so He cannot make some people happy. He is best known for creating the universe, forgiving our sins, and deciding who wins the Super Bowl.

Wikiality is another wikipedia spoof, based on Stephen Colbert's notion of "Truthiness" - lies that feel true. It's what people mean when they talk about "common sense" and "prejudice". The entry on "God" contains:

...God is a neo-conservative.. or a republican... whatever George W. Bush describes himself as being at any given time. This has been proven by many Bible verses.

Whenever you feel like asking questions, such as "why is the sky blue" or "why did George W. Bush invade Iraq"? Just remember the only answer you need ever know: "because God wishes it." No other answer is required.

And then there's Conservapedia. The genuine article. The wiki specifically created to showcase the idiocy parodied in the other two. In effect, it was spoofed several years before it came into existence. It's also the funniest of the three.

Some of the humour comes from sensible people (that is, nonconservatives) changing the entries, or creating new ones. And some of it doesn't. The point is, a lot of the time you can't tell which is which.

Conservapedia has become the latest plaything of liberals with a sense of fun and an hour to spare. Sadly, it probably won't last, because the host server can't take all the interest from surfers who go there for a laugh. I can't even access it now to tell you if they have an entry for "God".

Also, they no longer allow new contributors and have banned the more obvious satirists. It's a shame, because I had some ideas for articles to post there.

Nevermind. Here's some gems of conservative wisdom, preserved for posterity by others:

World War I was so deadly that it killed an entire generation of men.

There is no reliable evidence of man existing before 3500 B.C.

President Ronald Reagan finally ended the Cold War in 1989 because he caused the Soviet Union to fall.

Reagan left office in 1988

Forests are collections of trees as a whole, or large areas of trees. Forest is to trees as macroeconomics is to microeconomics. Forest is the opposite of trees.

Evolution has been largely discredited, though it is still taught in schools due to activist judges.

Only God is incapable of error, and that's why this website follows God instead of the fallible beliefs of Men. You claim that this information is "factually incorrect" but you don't prove it. Besides, the founder of this website has proven, in no uncertain terms, that macroevolution (what most atheists mean when they say "evolution") is impossible.

...gravity, like evolution, is just a theory and has never been proven to be true.

The Crusades were good.

Like all modern animals, modern kangaroos originated in the Middle East and are the descendants of the two founding members of the modern kangaroo baramin that were taken aboard Noah's Ark...

After the Flood, kangaroos bred from the Ark passengers migrated to Australia. There is debate whether this migration happened over land -- as Australia was still for a time connected to the Middle East before the supercontinent of Pangea broke apart -- or if they rafted on mats of vegetation torn up by the receding flood waters.

The Holocaust was the massacring of the Jewish race during World War II. The Germans are not to blame for this but the Nazi are. Besides 6 million Jews dying, 3 million Christians were killed also along with many priests and nuns. This is a very touchy subject for the Jews and is not often discussed amongst them.

(This is the entire "Holocaust" entry)

Stalin and Richard Dawkins are prominent atheists.

This theory [relativity] rejects Isaac Newton's God-given theory of gravitation

Quantum mechanics forms the basis for all computers and electronic devices today.

Unfortunately, the idea of non-determinstic physics runs contrary to the Biblical worldview of an omnipotent diety. Thus, quantum mechanics remains a flawed, ultimately incorrect theory.

...the Supreme Court sided with terrorists over the protection of the United States of America.

"Fundie" is a slang term...it is one of many terms coined and propagated by liberals, communists, atheists, and other puppets of Satan in an effort to counter God's will in the areas of evolutionary theory, murder by abortion or euthanasia, the rise of feminism, and uncontrolled sexual gratification via the homosexual agenda and premarital intercourse.

Entry now deleted - there's an entry there, but there's no text in it at all.

Liberals would like to see the economy of America destroyed by forcing us to drive solar cars to work, and use geothermal energy to heat our homes. Global warming is merely a thinly-veiled liberal attempt to destroy capitalism.

Self Self Self

Minge has tagged me with some questions. Here we go...

Name a book that you want to share so much that you keep giving away copies:

The Communist Manifesto.

Actually I've never read it straight through, and I've only given one copy of it away. But almost everything I read is technical material, most of which isn't great literature and doesn't make good gifts.

Name a piece of music that changed the way you listen to music:

"19" by Paul Hardcastle. Top of the Pops was on TV in the background, when suddenly this...sound intruded into my mind and wouldn't let go.

It wasn't a song about teenage love or dancing. It was actually about something real, and important. Something you could have discussions about that lasted longer than two sentences. For a pop song, it was deep.

Actually, it wasn't exactly a song at all. There were no verses or choruses or guitar solos - it had a willfully different structure. It used drum machines and synths that weren't trying to be other instruments, and cut up spoken vocals - it all seemed so audacious.

That one track started me listening to pop music, and it made me want to make music like it. That was 1985 and I was 13. It's 22 years later and I'm still inspired.

There are other songs I could say something similar about. "Close to the Edit" by Art of Noise, "Ultraworld" by The Orb, parts of "Einstein on the Beach" by Philip Glass.

Name a film you can watch again and again without fatigue:

I don't think there is one. I've been impressed by Network, Land and Freedom, The President's Analyst, Scanners, The Medusa Touch and even The Ipcress File at different times in my life. But there's no overall favourite, and not one that I frequently return to.

Name a work of art you'd like to live with:

Something by Rene Magritte. It's not that deep, not that clever and not that funny. But it tries, and I like it more than I probably should.

A bit like me, really.

Name a punch line that always makes you laugh:

Hmmm. I recently saw an early Jeff Stryker pornflick called...Powertool. Made in the 70s when it seemed inventive and fresh to set porn in prison.

There's one scene which opens in the communal shower, and the following exchange takes place:

Man 1: What are you lookin' at?
Man 2: I'm lookin' at your ass
Man 1: Well then. Here it is.

Well it made me laugh.

Wordy Rapping

I've found a new word and some new light reading.

The word is "Homintern". It's a pun on ComIntern (Communist International), and refers to the clique of gay businessmen in hollywood who have men on their casting couches instead of women, and therefore turn America's media into communist pederast propaganda. And destroy human civilisation. Apparantly.

It's also known as the Velvet Mafia, which has inspired the silliest porn film I've ever seen all the way through on fast-forward (NSFW).

The light reading is The Unjust Media, which at first glance looks like a deranged christian fundamentalist conspiracy site. However, it is in fact a deranged muslim fundamentalist conspiracy site, which means (a) it doesn't hate all muslims and (b) it pays lip service to notions of evidence and reasoning. Which makes it tower above its christian equivalents, and might just give it a reading age in double figures.

Apart from that, there's the usual semilterate "refutations" of "Darwinism", the new world order, jewish conspiracy, gay conspiracy, and CIA paranoia are all familliar old friends.

Did you know Rolling Stone is a far-left magazine? And therefore pro-corporate? Did you know British Jews control the World Bank? Or that sociologists are CIA spies? Atheism is a religion (presumably in the same way vegetarianism is a way of eating meat) and 3rd World Debt Relief is a fraud...oh, wait.

ANYWAY. No conspiracy theory would be complete without the Knights Templar, and here we discover they founded the Freemasons. And the (nonvelvet) Mafia. Though there does seem to be some confusion between the Priory of Sion (a French Catholic conspiracy) and the Protocols of Zion (a Russian Jewish Conspiracy).

Remember I said there was a mouse under my bed, keeping me awake with it's scratchings and munchings? Well, I've set a trap and caught three mice in as many days, plus there's been two caught in the kitchen and another two killed by the dogs. So I reckon there's a lot of them...somewhere around here.

My other light reading is a small pile of books on How To Write Murder Mysteries. The one thing they all agree on is that mystery stories aren't really about mysteries at all - they're about characters. I suppose that might explain why some of the greatest mystery stories are, when you think about them as puzzles, incredibly silly (Murder on the Orient Express), incohearant (The Hollow Man), and implausible (An Unsuitable Job for a Woman).

UPDATE: More light reading. That's 'light' as in airy, frothy, without substance, vacuous, empty of content. Conservapedia is Wikipedia for conservatives, featuring hundreds of one-sentence definitions of complex scientific terms (to show how scientifically literate conservatives are), and one paragraph potted histories of famous people and events.

It reminds me of a children's encyclopedia.

Tony

I've known Tony for around three years. We meet occasionally by accident in the street. He's an ex-soldier in his late 30s. He's also a homeless alcoholic. He never remembers me.

At sometime past midnight I was with Tom and Roxanne when he called out to us, begging for money. He was sitting on the ground, wedged into the doorway of a long abandoned pub, crying. He was in a bad way, drinking from a plastic bottle of the cheapest cider, dribbling saliva onto his shirt, which was stained and holed with cigarette ash.

The last time I saw him to speak to he was wedged into a different doorway, nursing a nasty cut to his hand. He'd cut himself opening a tin of sardines and the wound was going septic, the flesh starting to darken and swell. I bought him a packet of cigarettes, and sat for an hour trying to persuade him to see a doctor about it. He flatly refused, saying he hated doctors, and if the infection killed him he didn't really care.

A second homeless man joined us and also tried to persuade Tony to get the cut seen to. Then two people drove up in a van and greeted him. They worked for the Salvation Army, and gave him a plastic pot of heated soup. I asked them what could be done about his cut, and they said there was nothing I could legally do - it was illegal for me to give any but the most basic of first aid.

I could do nothing to help, so I said goodbye and left.

Between that time and this, I hadn't seen him around and sometimes wondered if he had indeed died, or was no longer living on the streets - or had simply moved to different streets. It turns out he had got a home and a girlfriend with the same alcohol problem, but his was much worse, and five days ago she'd kicked him out.

He was again homeless, half the time out of his mind on whatever drink he could find, the other half shaking and hurting from detox and cold. He couldn't remember how long he'd been sitting there - hours or days.

The cut in his hand had healed, but he couldn't move his thumb properly. There was a row of stitches on his head from where a group of teenagers had kicked him unconscious sometime recently.

Between us, we bought him cigarettes, some more cider and a hamburger. He hadn't eaten in days, but had the presence of mind not to wolf it down - he didn't want to bring it straight back up. He couldn't chew the salad because he'd lost most of his teeth.

Another two homeless men joined us, greeting him like long lost best buddies. One of them gave him a little book - "New Testament and Psalms", for which Tony was very grateful. The same man owned a tent an hour's walk away, and insisted Tony join him there for the night. In the morning they'd see about starting to get him off the drink and out of the gutter.

Tony didn't want to go, saying he couldn't walk that far because his feet were bleeding. The other man indicated that we should leave Tony to him. We left, feeling dispirited that we couldn't even help one man get his life back.

I walked home past the same spot some hours later. He'd gone. Perhaps as I write this he's asleep and relatively warm in a tent on the beach. Perhaps the next time I see him he will remember me.

Dum-De-Dum

Trying to get a computer to make speech sounds is called Articulatory Synthesis, and there are 3 basic methods.

The first is to sample human speech, chop it up into phonemes, and rearrange them into new words. I first used a speech synthesiser that did this back in 1991 - it came free with a sound card, and produced a voice described by one writer as "a constipated robot". Another said it resembled "a Bulgarian British Rail announcer talking through a cardboard tube".

The voice was a free Microsoft product called "Sam5", and there were a range of others which you could buy. Except I don't think anyone did buy them, given that Sam5 was (a) abysmal and (b) the showcase voice, so probably the best.

One year later I experimented with creating my own "phonemic speech synthesiser" - sampling my own voice speaking 18 consonant phonemes, 11 vowels and 13 glides, then writing a little MS-DOS program to concatenate them into words and sentences. The result had one speed, one pitch, no intonation and I think sounded more pleasant than Sam5.

The second method is to construct a synthesiser to produce white noise or buzzes, and filter these to produce sounds with the same formants as human speech.

A formant is a peak in a graph of amplitude over sound frequency. Each vowel, and to some extent each consonant, has it's own pattern of formants. One of the things that makes a human voice distinctive is that although the pitch varies, the formants don't much. This is why, when you hear different people saying the same vowel at different pitches, you recognise the vowel as being the same.

There are "vowel synthesisers" around which can filter any sound to a human-like vowel quality. They're often used to make breathy choir sounds going "oooh" or "ahhh" in music. They don't really sound human, but it can be a nice effect. Some of them mix in samples of real choirs to make the sound more realistic.

The third method is to create a mathematical model of the air in the vocal tract, and excite it while changing the shape of the virtual "throat" and "mouth". When done well it can be extremely realistic - the trouble is, it's monstrously complex and very processor-intensive to do it well, so in practice a lot of corners get cut, and the result isn't much better than the cut-up programs.

I've been trying to get my computer to read to me. It would be nice to have it read me a chapter of something when I'm lying in bed and too lazy to open the book. There are dozens of "Screen Readers" and "Text to Speech Engines" available, some designed to enable blind people to read webpages and use email.

The first I tried was Microsoft's "NonVisual Desktop Access" - and what should I hear when I installed it but...Sam5! After 15 years development, I'm not just stuck with a constipated Bulgarian robot - it's the same one.

There's a firm called Nuance who make "Vocalizer". The next time an automated voice on the phone tells you "All our operators are busy - please hold", you can probably blame Nuance for making it even more annoying than it needed to be.

I tried another free one called Thunder, which tells blind and partially sighted users what they're doing on the screen. In the voice of Sam5.

You can buy better voices for the program, from a company called RealSpeak. They use an advanced form of the "cut-up" phonemic method of synthesis, using specially recorded voices of professional speakers. They offer a free trial of their "Daniel" voice - instantly recognisable as the tones from a thousand corporate videos and TV adverts. I've no idea what the actor's name is, and I've never seen him in any role, but now his crisp, overearnest sound is on millions of computers.

It's just a small detail that the punctuation is hopeless, the rhythm completely inhuman, and they've made him pronounce "Firefox" as "Fi-err-faaarrks", as though drifting into a texan drawl for just one vowel.

But if you're computer can speak (sort of), why not make it sing (sort of)? Yamaha have a range of products called "Vocaloid" which use the same cut-up method to give you a range of classically trained singers. Judging from the best efforts to produce speech that way, I won't be trying out the singing products.

Probably the best "virtual singer" is a program called Cantor, by the German company Virsyn. I'm not sure, but this seems to use a combination of all three synthesis methods, and although you'd never mistake it for a real singer belting out the lead vocal, it's pretty good for backing vocals. When I can get around to it, I'll try using it to give myself some backing singers going "Doo-doo-doo", "Shoop-doo-wah" and "Ahhhh".

Thinking About Writing

Some story ideas:

At a seance, 7 people join hands around a table. The lights dim to black and for several minutes the table knocks and tilts, there are ghostly moaning sounds, glowing shadowy faces appear in midair and the medium channels messages from the spirit world.

When the lights return, one of the 7 is dead. One of the remaining 6 is a murderer. How did they do it?

A man has been held prisoner at a remote military installation for some months. He is being interrogated to discover why he suddenly defected to the enemy - though it is unclear whether it's his side or the other which is interrogating him.

During one session, he realises something.

"Everyone knows that everyone breaks. It's what you do - you break people. And everyone knows you do it well. So why haven't you broken me? I'm hungry but not starving. I'm cold but not freezing. You've been threatening me and disorienting me for months, but I haven't broken. Why not?

You're not even trying to break me are you? What's really going on? What do you really want?"

In a paranoid society where everyone is under surveillance, there is a resistance group. Finding they can't mount any real operations, they resist by pretending to be part of a much larger resistance, playacting cloak-and-dagger secrecy for the hidden cameras and infiltrators, and hinting that prominent government members are resistance members.

In this way, they try to make the oppressors turn on each other.

A series of people disappear, each leaving an apparent suicide note. For most of them, someone reports seeing them briefly several days after their disappearance. Some of those who claim to see then subsequently disappear, leaving notes. Some (and by implication, maybe all) of the sightings turn out to be fabrications.

It starts to look as though a group have produced a cloud of disappearances, hiding one or more murders. A tactic which enables several people to commit murder and disappear to a new life. But which sightings are genuine, and which disappearances are murders?

A corrupt senior police detective habitually plants evidence to get convictions. A new young detective decides the only way to get rid of the corrupt one is...to adopt his methods. Selecting a recent unsolved murder, he plants clues which lead his colleagues to their superior, but when they start to suspect the evidence is planted, he has to outwit them, forensics and the senior detective himself in making the older man appear guilty.

A Valentine Story

Yesterday, I wrote a story for Saint Valentine's day. Camy write stories about young gay love and the supernatural, and his latest is a valentine story. So, I sat down and wrote something inspired by it, incorporating those themes.

He was rather pleased with the result and said I should publish it somewhere. Well, I'm looking around for websites that publish the right kind of fiction - that is, stories which have gay elements but aren't just about being gay, aren't just for teenagers, and aren't porn.

Gay Authors looks promising. There's DaBeagle and AwesomeDude, and if I start to get established I might try the great Blithe House one day.

In the meantime, there's this here blog. I'm not sure what to call this story, but the working title was Future/Past. Here it is.

February 14th 2038.

An old man sits in a cubicle, reliving the television of his youth. Virtual reality patches attached to his eyeballs and sonic vibrators on his eardrums, showing him entertainment, drama and music from fifty years before. This how he spends his days, and this is what he plans to do until he dies. He hears a woman’s voice.

“There are those who say a person’s life is shaped by a single moment.”

He looks around, startled, but there’s no one there. After some seconds uncertainty, he returns to the comedy show being shown directly to his eyes. He’s seen it dozens of times before and never found it funny, but it’s a comforting presence.

“It might be that time you got lost in a strange house when you were seven, or the time your father first hit you for telling lies when you were telling the truth, or the time you snuck out of the house and got caught in a thunderstorm.”

The man carefully switched off the devices, and took them out of his eyes and ears. He didn’t turn around.

“I don’t know who you are”, he said to the voice behind him, “but I’ve got nothing you could want. This room is protected by nanolock. Leave now and I won’t summon security.”

“Some say we spend our whole lives trying to recapture a single experience. Like the first time you heard a certain song on the radio and you thought it was the most incredible, exciting sound ever. Then there’s the first time you got drunk, and fell about laughing though you weren’t sure why.”

The voice came from the wall behind him, where there were no doors, but he still didn’t turn around. Trying to make his tone sound confident, he spoke to it.

“Look. I don’t know who you are. And I don’t know what you think you’re doing. But whatever it is, just leave.”

“I can’t. As for who I am, I could be a dream. Or an undigested bit of fish. Maybe you’re going mad. Perhaps if you turn around you’ll find out. Turn around, Charlie.”

He spun around in his seat, expecting to see a blank wall. Instead, there was a woman. An ordinary looking woman he’d never seen before. She spoke again.

“I’ve heard it said that every time you fall in love, it’s your way of trying to recapture the last time. But I’ve also heard it said that everyone falls in love just once in their lives, because no one could endure those emotions more than once. I hear a lot of things. It could be some of them are true.

But who says it has to be about love? Maybe the single defining moment of your life was that time when you were six, and you saw an old man riding a bicycle up a country lane. You couldn’t shake the feeling that it wasn’t him pushing the pedals, but the pedals moving his feet.

“Who says it has to be from childhood though? There was that time you were twenty three, and you got a phone call saying your mother had been in a car crash. And your first thought was hoping she was dead, because you knew she was leaving you all her money in her will, and you were in debt. You never told anyone about that, did you?”

He stared at her for long seconds, incredulous. Then, “What are you? What do you want? Why are you…why are you doing this to me?”

“But you know what I think, Charlie? I think the defining moments of our lives aren’t those when we fall in love, or out of it, or give in to rage. Moments of terror, ecstasy, panic, joy, hope. No. I think it’s all about regret. Regret and shame.

If I asked you, Charlie, what is the one thing you wanted most of all…I think it would be to go back in time and change something you did wrong. What is it you regret, Charlie? What’s the one thing you wish you could make right again?”

The man snorted. “I wish I’d invested in nanotechnology. I’d be a billionaire.”

The woman smiled. “I’m sure you do, and I’m sure you would. But you don’t sit here day after day watching vidshows about money, do you. What else?”

He shrugged. “I’ve wasted my life. I can’t get it back. What else is there to regret?”

She nodded thoughtfully. “It’s a good answer. But not to the question I asked. What’s the one mistake you’ve spent decades trying to make up for, or forget, or persuade yourself wasn’t really a mistake?”

“You seem to know all about me, whoever you are. Why don’t you tell me?”

“Because you have to tell me. And when you tell me the truth, I can give you a second chance. But only then.”

“I don’t believe you. You’re probably an hallucination.”

“Maybe. If I am, why are you bothering to lie to me? What kind of man lies to his own delusions?”

“I’m not lying.” He was indignant. “I’ve got plenty of regrets. There’s probably hundreds of things I’ve done that I’m ashamed of. And hundreds more that I ought to be ashamed of. Going over them won’t make them better. It won’t even make me happier about them.”

“Don’t you understand what I’m saying to you, Charlie? You’ve spent years in this room trying to get back to the past. Reliving old memories again and again. You want to go back, because you want to do it differently. But which part, Charlie? Which part of it do you want to try again?

Not your fifties when you made enough money to sit here all day plugged into the past. Not your thirties when you saw the world and wrote all those songs about it. Not the earliest years of your childhood when you were secure and happy. Which part? Tell me the moment and I can send you back. Not in virtual reality, not in television, for real. You can start again from that moment.”

He stared at her, not believing but not dismissing what she said. His mind worked, trying to think of the one event that might be the one she wanted.

“When I was twenty five, I was living with…someone. What am I hiding it for? We were absolutely devoted to each other. And…I cheated on him. For no reason. We had everything together and I destroyed it. I cheated on him and then I told him about it knowing how much it would hurt him. I didn’t have to tell him but I did. It’s like I wanted to destroy our life together”

”So do you regret cheating on him, or telling him?”

“Oh I don’t know. It was all so long ago. I don’t know why I did any of it.”

“Find another memory.” She said it gently.

“I was eleven. I was playing near a cliff face with a friend. I can’t even remember her name. But I pushed her. I pushed her as though I wanted her to fall over the edge. We were just playing. She almost fell. I almost killed her.

She got her balance back and stared at me with the most hatred I’ve ever seen. She was my friend and I did the stupidest thing imaginable. I felt that if she pushed me over the cliff…she’d be right. I don’t deserve a second chance, because of what I did that day”

There were tears in his eyes.

The woman crouched down and looked up at him. “One moment of thoughtlessness, at an age when you scarcely thought at all. Is that the shame you’ve been carrying for six decades?”

“Yes.” He bowed his head and wiped his eyes.

“No. It isn’t.”

“Alright. Alright. I’ll tell you. But it’s so silly. Almost killing a friend, making someone I loved suffer for no reason – those are proper regrets. Those are the things I should be punished for.”

“Who said anything about punishment? This isn’t about the biggest crime you’ve committed in your life. It’s not about how much you’ve hurt other people. It’s about the one thing you can’t forgive yourself for doing – or not doing. It doesn’t have to make sense to other people.”

He took a deep breath.

“It’s so trivial. I was seventeen. It was Valentine’s Day, and I’d got a card. Just one. And I knew who it was from. He’d tried to disguise his handwriting, but I recognised it. He was so…”

“Go on.”

“It must have taken him all his courage to send it. He was so ashamed…hid his feelings all the time because he was afraid of what other people would say. What they’d do. But I knew. I knew how he felt. About me. It was just a silly crush. It would have gone away in a few months probably, and then he might get another crush on some other boy.

But just for those months, he was fascinated by me. Me! Why me?! I don’t know. He was just a kid, like me. We didn’t know anything. We thought love was something only old people did, and heartache was being dumped after two dates.

It must have taken him days to get up the courage to write it. Just a stupid valentine card. He wanted to tell me so desperately, and he was so terrified me knowing.”

“What did you do?”

“Nothing. Absolutely nothing. I never mentioned the card to him or anyone else. I just…ignored him. I don’t know if he ever found someone else. But I never told him I knew.”

“That’s it? He didn’t kill himself out of grief? Didn’t go mad because of what you did?”

“No. Nothing happened.”

“Thank you.”

The man closed his eyes and wept. After a long time, he spoke.

“So what happens now?”

“What’s that, Charlie?” asked his mother turning around. “There’s a letter for you on the table”

Charlie sat in the kitchen, his ears plugged into a stereo walkman. There was a small pile of letters on the table, one addressed to him in shaky handwriting. He pulled open the envelope and read the card inside:

Dear Carl,

You’ll never know I love you

Charlie – Carl to his friends – carefully folded the piece of card and put it in his pocket.

“I’ll be back in a minute, Mum.” He said. “Just going out for a bit.”

He pulled the headphones out of his ears, put on a coat, stepped out of the front door and started walking. After several streets he came to a low wall with three teenagers sitting on it. They nodded in greeting.

“Billy”, he said to the one on the left. “I got your letter.”

The boy on the wall froze, colour visibly draining from his face.

“Thanks, it means a lot”, said Charlie, turning away as if to go. Then he turned back, as though struck by a sudden thought.

“See you tonight? We can talk about it some more if you like.”

The colour rushed back, flushing with several conflicting emotions.

Billy managed a nod.

“See you.”

Charlie walked away.

Doctor, Doctor

A hospital visit yesterday for 90 minutes of tests on my eyes. Actually most of the time was spent in the waiting room between tests, where I sat with a dozen elderly patients watching the TV provided for us.

First programme: "Doctors" - a medical soap-opera, which is to say a soap opera set among doctors who are too busy having complex lovelives to practice medicine.

Followed by: "Diagnosis Murder" - a medical detective show, which is to say a murder mystery where the detective is a medical doctor. He's too busy finding criminals - in this case a murdering writer of bad medical murder mysteries - to practice medicine.

I was all set for an episode of "The Young Doctors", "Doctor Killdare", "Saint Elsewhere", "Doogie Howser MD" or even "Quincy" next, but disappointingly it was "The Chuckle Brothers". Though one of the patients in the room was a Mrs "House".

Anyway, the good news is I don't have glaucoma. The bad news is my astigmatism is getting worse. So if I walk into a lamppost, it'll be because of blurred vision, not floating black spots.

In one of those odd coincidences, I found my long lost spectacles later.

In the evening, I dropped into a meeting of PCAN - Portsmouth Climate Action Network - a group of 25+ people of various ecological stripes, discussing ways ordinary people can reduce their impact on the environment.

There was a powerpoint presentation from someone promoting a voluntary scheme whereby each household is paid to reduce it's carbon footprint, or pays to increase it. There was much appreciative nodding at this from those members who live in houses with good insulation and double glazing. Apparantly poor people who live in rotten houses don't understand how irresponsible they're being.

There was one lady who expressed her fury that electricity was being used to run the laptop and projector for the presentation. She didn't seem to mind the lights or heating. Or the pollution produced by the industry that made the laptop.

Much of the discussion was over a proposal to attract more members by holding a public barbeque. The vegan members insisted it be a meatless barbeque, while everyone else said only vegans would come if there was no meat - and the point was to attract everyone. The argument was long, and is still unresolved. And they didn't get around to discussing a date and venue.

I suppose if we're going to change the world we'll need the help of the idiots. But only if we can stop them behaving like idiots.

Waking at six in the morning, I spent 2 hours writing a Valentine's Day short story. More on that, plus the story itself, in the next post.

Sneak Preview

Just to show that I am trying to write something, here's a first draft of one scene from the story.

Detective Inspector Brandt and his sidekick, the young Indian policewoman Nisha Singh, are investigating the murder of a student at the university. Brandt likes to tell stories - probably entirely made up - about his early cases. They've just found that the murdered student had also taken an overdose of sleeping pills on the night of his death.

"It doesn't make any sense. No one would want to kill him, everyone's got an alibi, and now it looks like he'd done the job for them anyway."

"Mmm", Brandt grunted in agreement, still reading the forensic report.

Nisha looked at him, annoyed. "I don't suppose this reminds you of another old case?"

Brandt looked up, feigning surprise. "Would you like it to?"

"Well it might help. You never seem to run out of them."

"Hm. Well let me see."

Brandt thought for a moment.

"There was a married couple in their sixties. No children, no relatives, no close friends. They were in debt to a loan shark and the husband was about to lose his job. One afternoon the wife called the police - her husband had cut his wrists in the bath. By the time anyone arrived, he was dead.

Three days later he was cremated, and the day after she disappeared. All her clothes and belongings were still in the house, the car was in the drive, and there was a scribbled note on the kitchen table about how she couldn't go on. Everyone assumed she'd done away with herself, though there was no body anywhere.

I found them living in a little village in Scotland, as Mr and Mrs Smith. They'd suffocated the loan shark and put him in their bath, cutting his wrists to make it look like suicide. The husband hid in the basement for a week, and the wife identified the body as him. They made sure it was cremated quickly before anyone could say it wasn't him, then took the first train to anywhere - using money from the shark's wallet."

"So...how did you know they weren't dead?"

"I didn't. The clues were there, but we weren't looking for them so we didn't see them. The cuts on the shark's wrists weren't quite right, and hadn't bled enough to kill him. Plus the wife was in just too much of a hurry to cremate her husband, and the suicide note was like something out of a bad movie. Oh, and she had to buy a suit from Oxfam to cremate him in - all the husband's clothes were too small for the body, you see.

"No. We got lucky. They'd hired a prostitute to pick up the shark and take him back to her flat. The three of them suffocated him and bundled him into the couple's car. They'd told the prostitute he was a rapist and wife beater. It turned out he did like to beat up women, but they didn't know that.

The couple drove him back to their home, dragged the corpse through the back gate to avoid anyone seeing them, stripped him while running a bath, hacked away at his wrists with a carving knife, and put him in the water.

About two years later we brought in the prostitute for doing what prostitutes do, and found a little pack of heroin stuffed in her handbag. Seems she was a smalltime drug dealer too. So she did a deal with us. We let her off with a warning, and she spilled the beans about the murdering couple - being careful not to mention the part about helping to suffocate the client. In her version they just wanted to rough him up a bit and it went too far.

It wasn't difficult to find them. They weren't exactly master criminals. But there wasn't much point in prosecuting - they were sixty five and the wife had cancer."

Nisha blinked. "You mean you let them all off?! You had a drugpusher and two murderers and you let them go?"

"Well. You know. The loan shark was a complete shit. He probably deserved everything he got."

"But...did all this really happen? Did you really let them off?"

"If it had happened, do you think I'd be telling you about it?"

Nisha just stared at Brandt for long seconds. "Um. So how is that case like ours then?"

"The clues were all there, but they didn't fit the crime scene we thought we were investigating."

"So what crime are we investigating?"

Brandt sighed. "I have absolutely no idea."

Going Wrong

How not to write a murder mystery:
(1) Plan it out
(2) Write 5000 words
(3) Leave it for a day
(4) Read through what you've written
(5) Discover a gaping plot hole
(6) Discover another one
(7) Start planning it out more thoroughly this time

A few months ago I bought a video camera on ebay - a bargain for UKP20. It can't play back properly and won't run from batteries, but it's still quite a bargain.

Tonight my older camera stopped being able to play back - it's been getting more and more unreliable, which is why I got the other one. So now I've got two video cameras that can record, and none that can play back what either has recorded.

Ten minutes later I got a call, asking me to help with a student art project by filming it and putting the result on DVD. Well, I can film it, but...

I wonder if ambitious people are really just those who've developed ways to handle frustration?

Most plans never get off the ground, most projects end in failure, most hopes are dashed, most attempts to change anything about the world end in defeat, and most new ideas turn out to be unworkable.

Or if you prefer the optimistic version: The path to success is a thousand failures. It's just that the path to failure is also a thousand failures, but let's pretend we don't know that because we're being optimistic and focusing on eventual success.

My point is that most people, after a few setbacks, decide they can't cope with the disappointment and sense of futility, so stop trying. They call it "being realistic" or "being reasonable". And that's why reasonable people never achieve anything.

But what about those who don't get ground down by failure? I think there's probably lots of types, such as:

* People who treat setbacks as information on how to do better next time. Every single book on how to be a business manager advises the reader to be this kind of person. Effectively they're telling the reader to have no negative emotion at all about failure. Indeed, the implication is that failure should be welcomed, provided it increases the chances of future success.

Oddly, many of these same books talk about "emotional intelligence", which is a semi-mystical quality that effective managers supposedly have that involves feeling hurt but not disabled by failure, so they feel enough pain to avoid failure-producing behavior in the future but not so much they lose their sense of proportion.

The reason it's odd is that a person with the pure "setback as information" attitude they describe is someone with no emotional intelligence whatsoever, because they have no negative emotion.

Management theory isn't just bullshit. It's self-contradictory bullshit.

* People who persuade themselves they didn't fail after all. A subtype is those who redefine success to mean whatever kind of failure they got.

* People who say things like "Nevermind, it could have been worse" and "Mustn't grumble" and "Worse things happen at sea". This is called "taking a philosophical view".

One of the behavioural features used by psychologists to define insanity is "inappropriate emotional response", which turns out to mean very common responses such as being annoyed by sentimentality, laughing at funerals, being unbothered by a spouses adultery, wanting to blow up a bus because the government demonises you, and loving someone who beats you up.

Which means either everyone in the world is barking mad, or emotions are more complex than psychiatrists would like.

Anyway, if "taking a philosophical view" isn't "inappropriate emotional response", I don't know what is.

* People with enormous reserves of determination. Or an unshakable faith that they will eventually succeed no matter how badly they fail now. Essentially, those whose frustration is dwarfed by their drive.

Most such people are nutcases. A very few of these eventually do succeed and get called visionaries, even though they're really just lucky nutcases. A different very few look exactly like nutcases but actually are visionaries, though they usually fail. It gets complicated.

Personally, I've always lived in a cloud of small frustrations - each a trivial single fleabite on its own. I'm so used to them my only response is a kind of irritated boredom. This isn't a way to overcome frustration, but it is a way to be irritated and bored most of the time.

KaStoWriWe

That's the "Kapitano Story Writing Week". My version of the NaNoWriMo. I could call it the KaVaMuMyStoWriWe - "Kapitano Valentine Murder Mystery Story Writing Week", but that might be less catchy.

I've got about 2500 words written, with 2 or 3 times that number still to write. Or maybe 4. Is 10,000 words a reasonable length for a short story?

I've also got a miniature kettle, 50 teabags and half a pint of milk to keep me going through the night. And if I get really stuck I've been given a DVD from the Sinclair Institute.

If you're about my age and interested in computers, the name will conjour up images of Sir Clive Sinclair - his brilliant ideas for the ZX-80, ZX-81 and Spectrum computers, his less brilliant ideas for the QL, ear radio and digital wristwatch, and his completely mad ideas about motor assisted bicycles and miniature personal cars.

However, this Sinclair Institute sells sex toys and videos under the name "BetterSex" to American (heterosexual) married couples, showing them how to keep sex interesting and thereby lower the divorce rate. Apparantly.

This DVD is "Advanced Oral Sex Techniques" and shows actual vaginas (vaginae, vagens?) and errect penises (penii, penes?) being licked by actual mouths. All with insipid infomercial music and a soothing female voice explaining what's being illustrated.

The voiceover tells us that scrotums (scroti, scrota?) and the corona of the penis are highly sensitive. Actually I'm not sure the scrotum is more sensitive than the shaft, and the voice completely fails to mention the most sensitive penis part of all - the frenulum. But far be it from me to correct the advice of someone with "Doctor" in their name.

I'm not sure if the institute is pedalling bad porn for men disguised as patronising advice to women, or whether they're sincere. But they do also sell the Chocolate Clone-A-Willy - a device for making chocolate casts of your penis.

Two great oral pleasures in one. Right now, being on a diet, I'd rather just have the chocolate.

My Bloody Valentine

My valentine story is a murder mystery. That was decided within a minute of deciding to write it. Then in an hour I had most of the crime, most of the characters, and the settings.

It's taken me three days to work out the clues that lead the detective to the killer. Or rather, it's taken me three days of trying out permutations of the killer's method, the movements of witnesses, hiding place of the weapon, and clues left behind to come up with a pattern that:

(a) the detective can actually follow
(b) lead to the killer, and
(c) couldn't plausibly lead to any of the wrong suspects.

Is that the way proper mystery writers operate? Detailing the crime and characters, then making up clues to shoehorn into the margins of the plot?

Anyway, this is just a note to say: I'm still here, I'm trying to write, and I haven't reinstalled Windows or had sex since the last post.

Some Days are Better than Others

"Why does the universe hate me?"
- G'Kar, Babylon 5

I've got about 150 CDRs, containing various installation programs, drivers, and data backups. Plus around the same number containing mp3s. They're all marked with a serial code, and I have a database of which files are on which disc. Much is redundant, duplicated or out-of-date, but it's all there in case I need it.

This means I can find the relevant files for any program I need to install, and the data of any project that I've backed up in the last 4 years.

Or rather I could, until yesterday morning. That was when my beloved laptop decided to crash, losing me a load of programs and data. Usually when this happens, after a small amount of swearing, I can put most of it back from the disc archive. Provided I've got an up-to-date copy of the database. Which for the first time since I set it up, I haven't. Usually I put copies on two computers and one on a memory stick - but I hadn't got around to doing it, being ill and busy with other people's computers.

Oh, I'm sure I could find a reasonably up-to-date copy, somewhere in the 150 or so discs. And I could find it easily by searching the database, if I had it with me. Which, you may recall, I don't.

Seeing as I don't know which disc stores the latest version of the database, and I updated it extensively since the last backup, I'm taking the opportunity to rebuild it from scratch, removing discs that are completely redundant. And if anyone makes any remarks about blessings in disguise, I shall force all 200GB up their virtual arse, sideways.

There's a man I've been having occasional sex with for over a decade. A fuckbuddy. We don't have much in common, or much to say to each other, but it's been an amicable, mutually satisfactory arrangement.

He's been getting quite adventurous, and also more altruistic, in our sex dates over the last few months. But through no fault of his, I've become increasingly bored by our encounters.

In the new year I planned to tell him I didn't want to see him anymore - but then I was ill, and then decided to try it one more time just to be certain I wanted to dump him.

Tonight I did try it one more time, and couldn't wait for it to end. All I could think of was how much I wanted to be doing something else. So afterwards I told him all about it.

He was hurt, of course - even though I made it clear the problem was with my enjoyment, not his performance. He wanted us to stay friends, even though we never had a friendship - conversations were always short prologues and epilogues to sex.

There's patches of my skin that are sticky. Not with ejaculate - with mint. He ate several mints before we started, then kissed around half my body. When the saliva dried, it left behind a thin film of sticky mint sugar.

Dozey

Dad's birthday - he's 71. Actually it was yesterday, and we only think he's 71 - he's not telling. But it was a chance for a good meal out (which became a meal in), some glasses of wine (which became non-alcoholic), and some large bars of chocolate. Which we've all eaten.

So we're all feeling a bit sick now.

Camy is writing a short story for St Valentine's day. So I thought I'd try to do the same thing. 13 days to write a few thousand words - shouldn't be too difficult. Especially as I keep having ideas for stories.

While researching an aspect of the story on Google, I bumped into something I'd forgotten about: The Sleeping Beauty Probability Problem.

Sleeping Beauty agrees to take part in a scientific experiment. The scientists explain to her that this is what will happen:

She will go to sleep on Sunday, and on Monday they will flip a fair coin. If it comes up heads, they'll wake her up and the experiment will end. If it comes up tails, they'll wake her up, and then give her a sleeping potion that will also make her forget that she had been woken up a few minutes before, and wake her up again on Tuesday.

During the experiment, Sleeping Beauty is woken by the scientists, and asked what the probability is that the coin came up heads. What should she answer?

There are two different answers - 1/2 and 1/3 - to slightly different interpretations of the question.

In the first interpretation, Sleeping Beauty knows only that the coin has been flipped once, and there's a 50% chance of it coming up heads and 50% tails. All the stuff about potions and forgetting doesn't change that, so the answer is 1/2.

In the second interpretation, there are three possibilities. Either:
(1) The coin came up heads, this is the first time she's been woken, it's Monday, and the experiment is about to end.
(2) The coin came up tails, this is the first time she's been woken, it's Monday, and the scientists are about to give her the sleeping potion.
(3) The coin came up tails, she's been woken before but doesn't remember it because of the potion, so this is the second time she's been woken and it's Tuesday.

That is:
(1) Heads, Monday
(2) Tails, Monday
(3) Tails, Tuesday

(There's no "Heads, Tuesday" because if the coin came up heads she'll be woken on Monday and not sent back to sleep. If it came up heads, the probability of the day being Tuesday is zero.)

Sleeping Beauty has no way of knowing whether the coin came up heads or tales, and she has no way of knowing whether it's Monday or Tuesday. But she does know there are three equally likely possibilities, only one of which involves the coin coming up heads. So the answer is 1/3.

There is another question lurking behind that one: If you haven't been educated about probability, how likely are you to be able to work out the answer for yourself?

It's possible, but not likely. And that's why logic puzzles and IQ tests show what kind of education you've had, not how intelligent you are. Whatever that means anyway.

And that's why Mensa is a load of crap.

Who Invented the Sandwich?

Today I installed Windows XP seven times in a row. The mystical taxi driver who drove me home a few weeks ago - the one into internet marketing scams and books about Roswell. His computer was crashing and being unusably slow, largely because (a) he never deleted any files ever (b) he had no filing system at all and (c) it was a crap computer put together out of spare parts.

In a moment of madness, I'd offered to fix it. So today, being well enough to leave the house, I spent six solid hours installing from five different discs and getting a variety of crashes. All while thumbing through his endless supply of books about alien abductions and atlantis.

I was (unexpectedly) rewarded with UKP20 and a ride home - presumably to keep me sweet enough for him to ask me for help the next time it goes wrong.

My eyesight is definitely fading. I can't read the spine of books on the shelf six feet away. I have a hospital appointment about it next week. Maybe by then I'll have found my spectacles.

My current light reading is The Book of General Ignorance - a series of short articles debunking common misconceptions and explaining the realities.

Some I already knew about:
* Goldfish do not have 3 second memories.
* Whales can't swallow people.
* Lemmings don't jump and in any case can swim.
* Chameleons don't change colour for camouflage.
* The great wall of China is not visible from the moon.
* Rickshaws are not a Chinese invention.
* James Watt did not invent the steam engine.
* Glass is not a liquid.
* Haggis, whisky and tartan are not Scottish inventions. But chicken tikka massala is.
* Seven prisoners were freed in the storming of the Bastille.

Some everyone knew about already:
* Marie Antoinette didn't say "Let them eat cake".
* The cookoo clock is a German invention, not Swiss.
* Admiral Nelson never said "Kiss me, Hardy". And he didn't wear an eyepatch either.
* Alexander Graham Bell did not invent the telephone.
* Atoms are mostly composed of nothing.
* The smell of the sea is rotting seaweed, not ozone.
* Moths aren't attracted to flames.
* Nero didn't fiddle while Rome burned, and he didn't cause the fire. He wasn't in Rome at the time and violins weren't invented till the 1400s.
* Camels store fat in their humps, not water. Has anyone ever seriously suggested they did carry water?
* The speed of light is not constant.
* There never was a curse of Tutankhamen - it was a newspaper invention.
* Eskimos have no more than four words for snow. And most Eskimos aren't Inuits.

Some rely on nitpicking of definitions:
* Henry VIII had two wives, or four if you're catholic. He just went through the marriage ceremony six times.
* Humans have four nostrils. Two are on the inside.
* The deadliest animal in the world is the mosquito. More than half the humans who have ever died did so from diseases carried by mosquitoes.
* The earth has at least seven moons. Luna is the only one visible from the surface, and the only one in fixed orbit, but there's "Near Earth Asteroids" that follow us around.
* Mars isn't red. Actually the dust clouds in the atmosphere are red but no one knows the colour of the surface rock.
* There are forty six states in the USA, plus four commonwealths.
* The coolest place in the universe is in Finland, in a lab in the University of Helsinki that's cooled a piece of rhodium to one ten billionth of a degree above absolute zero.
* The most recent ice age...is still going on. We're in a warm period of it.

There are some myths debunked I'd never even heard of:
* Polar bears are not left handed and don't camouflage their noses with their paws.
* Rhino horns aren't made of hair. Has anyone ever suggested that they were?!
* Violin strings are not made of real catgut. I never thought they were.
* No culture anywhere has believed the earth is flat.
* The Quakers didn't invent Quaker Oats.
* Bananas don't grow on trees.

But there were some surprises - things I didn't know at all:
* The Richter scale is obsolete, replaced by the MIMS scale.
* Different species of centipede have different numbers of legs, but none have 100.
* The statue of Eros in Piccadilly Square is actually of Anteros, Eros's younger brother, and god of "mature love".
* The number of the beast in Revelations is 616.
* Symbolic feminist bra burning never happened - it was another newspaper invention.
* Buffalo Bill actually killed bison.
* The capital city of Thailand is called Grung Tape, and hasn't been called Bangkok for 200 years. Personally I think Bangkok is much more...evocative. But then, I think Londinium of more evocative than London.
* School chalk is gypsum.
* The Dodo was hunted for sport, not food.
* The Canary Islands were named after "Canis" - the latin for "Dog" - the canary birds after the islands.
* Dogs mate back to back, not doggy style.
* Hair and fingernails don't grow after death.

Inevitably, there's one or two entries that perpetuate myths. One article "proves" that the ancient Greeks couldn't see blue by noting that there are only four colour words in Homer, and blue isn't among them. It then speculates on minimal evidence that human retinas have evolved in the intervening 2000 years to see more shades - before mentioning that different languages break the spectrum up differently, without seeing how this questions the rest of the article.

Did you know Columbus thought the world was pear shaped? I think he was right.

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