Validating your time with animals and abstractions.

So its a New Year and with it comes new responsibility, mainly coming up with something to write about on the blog that is of enough interest to justify not only me writing it, but you reading it and generally for this blog to not just be confined away to a "curiosity of last year". By the look of things, I'm not doing to well so far. So far I have pointed out not only the lack of progress in this first paragraph, but also the redundancy in its writing and therefore reading.

Which is an interesting point. Can something that was not worth writing be at the same time worth reading? Doesn't the reading itself validate the writing? Maybe when the reading is worthwhile only then does the validation carry through. Unforunately this is not a "If A proves B then B must prove A". In this case that would mean that by me writing it, I have validated your choice to read it. Or perhaps only if the writing was worthwhile does it validate any reading of it.

That didn't make any sense. And so I'm back at the beginning. I have yet to make a point to validate your little trip through this speach so I am yet to make all of this typing worthwhile. So let's try to make this all worthwhile. You are reading this to be either entertained/informed/provided with information to use against me. I have not really done any of this yet unless you count the psuedo maths applied in the last little bit which someone who studies both English and Maths is currently trying to unravel to prove that they understand either.

Instead I believe that you can be sated therefore with either a piece of information that will warm your head via the brain, or something that will make you smile. But of course if I could do that off the top of my head, then I wouldn't be typing this in in my spare time, but be writing it up to make a living off. So let's try to work something out between us.

I want you to think of an animal. Now I want you to write down the word least associated with it. Go and do this now... I can wait...

Okay so what did you come up with? A different animal? Not very inventive. Another object with another property? Getting closer maybe. Perhaps an abstract concept. Maybe a celestial object (going with far away= different). I'm rather stumped to come up with the all-trumping winner for this one. I'm stuck between 'Sufferage' and 'Apron'. It's suprisingly hard to come up with a word that has truly no way of linking back to the animal within a single spanning concept. You think that a Horse has no link to 'Wednesday'? -

Wednesday is from the Anglo-Saxon god Woden. Woden was worshipped during the Migration period, until the 7th or 8th century, when Germanic paganism was gradually replaced by Christianity. In Christianised Anglo-Saxon England, Woden was rationalized as a historical king, and remnants of worship were continued into modern times as folklore, Wodan featuring prominently in both English and Continental folklore as the leader of the Wild Hunt.

What better way to go hunting than on horseback? (Damn I'm good).

Never go to a party dressed as a piñata.

There is more than one reason for this. Firstly, you will get hit, a lot.

But secondly if there are any Japanese or Mexicans present at the party, then you will cause a cultural outrage.

There are many cultures that have rules that we simply don't know about, and risk anything from insult to decapitation from doing in their presence.

For instance, the Guatemalans believed that their dead become part of the grass, and so their "Keep off the grass" signs are actually tombstones. To read the sign without first speaking to the grass is just as bad as stepping on the grass. Interestingly, they don't mind cattle grazing on it, supposedly because they can't read so can not be judged by the same standards.

The Canadians will never put coins heads down on a wooden table because they believe that it represents the Queen's death and subsequent burial in a wooden coffin. Most of their tables have saw-toothed surfaces so that coins can never sit flat. You may have heard this through the phrase "Canadian flat".

But the Japanese know Piñatas for a very different reason. Back many thousands of years ago, the continental shelves looked rather different from today. As little as 500 years ago, the Isle of Man still hand a land link to the mainland which was flooded every 5 years to trap fish to then keep as livestock.

But look back even further to the time when Jesus was still writing the first draft of the Bible, Japan was much further East. A small slither of sand bank ran for hundreds of miles all the way to modern day Mexico. Few people ever tried to make the channel crossing on foot as there was no shelter and no source of food. At many points the sand bar was just a few feet across and Pacific waves often reached 100ft above them. Before long though, both countries declared ownership of the sand. Both knew that they could then use it as a blockade to tax passing ships. A war broke out after a small dolphin lept over the bar and was chased in to the water by a Mexican and a Japanese man. Both tried to play with the dolphin but the Mexican subsequently drowned. The Mexican government argued that the dolphin had colluded with the Japanese and sent an army of 2,000 men in single file the 5 week journey to Japan. The Japanese heard about this and sent a thousand of their best samurai warriors to meet them.

This epic battle is known as the Mizunobaka battle and it raged for 1 month. There was only enough room for 2 people to fight at the same time and the pile of bodies quickly piled up in the same place. This attracted the attention of the wildlife, which used the large waves to land on the beach, eat some of the corpses and then wait to get washed back into the ocean. One day a Piñata whale was beached. This brightly coloured creature landed on the Mexican side and crushed 50 men. The others started hacking at it to free the men inside. The Mexicans on the other side also broke off from fighting to free their comrades who were trapped underneath.

The Japanese didn't know what to do. Their enemy were weakened, but were not willing to fight. So the Japanese offered to help too and hacked open the whale. Eventually they freed the soldiers, but not before the sand bar had dissolved (whale blubber dissolves sand into a liquid). The two sides now could do nothing but wave and walk back home.

Every year, the two sides celebrate how nature forged peace by sailing to the sacred spot and dynamiting Piñata whale groups.

and on a lighter note.

"Welcome to the 4th national claustrophobics meeting everyone. Sorry again, we are rather overbooked this evening. If you could all just share seats and tables for now, I've just sent the caretaker to go and find a few more chairs to squeeze in to the room.

Now I'm sure many of you are wondering why we're not out on the sports field and instead we're pushed in to the wooden hut at its side lines. Well first of all the weather is coming down out there and the localised flooding is too risky. Of course we are in a glorified wooden, windowless coffin of a room. And also the only door keeps getting stuck shut. But...hey! Look on the bright side, we'll all probably float if it gets that bad. Probably.

John please stop crying, we've discussed this before. When things get bad then we'll all sing our happy song. Don't worry everyone, no more group hugs. I've learnt my lesson from that, and let's face it, the last thing we need in here is another mass panic attack of 30 people in a room designed to safely hold 10 people and a lawn mower.

The other reason is I don't see how we're going to conquer your fears by standing in open fields, so instead we'll be using smaller and smaller rooms to have our meetings in. Unfortunately the large open aircraft hanger that I had scheduled this meeting for collapsed yesterday, tragically crashing on the agrophobics group and trapping them for several hours in pitchblack pot holes with the rain water slowly filling it up. The upshot of that is it did cure 3 people. Though it did kill 2 others."

New News?

I find that my writings these days tend to be rather sparse and often are only motivated by strong desires to talk about something that has recently got my goat.

For instance, I could take this opportunity to make people aware that joining facebook groups on bandwaggon news stories is the greatest demonstration of a warped view of mob justice and social outrage since Sky news allowed its viewers to vote on news stories by text.

I'm not though. I'm not going to mention that you achieve nothing but make yourself stand out as a reader of tabloid journalism and struggle to form your own opinions, but I won't. Partly because this may upset those who read this page and who also like to text their opinions in to BBC News so that they can be read out instead of the informed opinion of someone who actually knows about the subject at hand, but mainly because this blog is more about light hearted meanderings and relaxing my mind. Not pointing out my own friends' shallowness.

Unfortunately that does leave a problem because although my intention is to now follow wherever my concious thought takes me, it keeps coming back to how people percieve the news. Instead let me work on this from an "invention" aspect.

So I give you the Daily Dichotomy. Though I am worried that the name alone will scare off many readers, I feel that the ones that will therefore not venture further are also those that form their opinions based on the front page of a newspaper, day time telly and the pub.

On every page there is a verticle line that runs the whole length of the page. No text or pictures may cross this line. An article may take up the whole page, but the section to the right of the line is in counter-point to the left hand side. It has no opinions, no views that the reader is expected to take away directly. Instead the reader must read both sections and should leave each page wondering where exactly they sit on the issue.

How wonderful is that? Someone finishes reading the newspaper, and sits down next to someone else who has done the exact same thing, and then DISCUSS the news. Not agree on the only opinion that they have heard, but disagree, discuss and argue. It is actually a rather alien concept, for a newspaper to not tell you a story with an obvious message.

Let's take a case in point- the recent child death story that has had people jumping on the bandwagon faster than you can say "front page worthy". Now I would not advocate a paper that says nothing went wrong here, but there is always two sides to things. Reading newspapers you wouldn't realise this.

The Sun (yes I had to sit through one of their speeches), has an article where it fills the pages with pictures of a bruised baby (insulting and unpaletable enough), with doctors queueing up to say, it's so obvious that these bruises are from abuse. The hindsight engine has been running overtime.

So there are our two sides.
1- This was avoidable and changes can be made (notice that I didn't say "changes SHOULD be made"?)
2- There is no way to improve current services without sacraficing other abilities of the service.

Instead the Sun (and I rather think others too) choose to tie the abusers to the stake and then go on to voice that if things had been different then it wouldn't have happened. That's not news. The fact that the child is dead and the authorities blame the parents is news. The fact that the child services were unable to deal with this problem is news. Finding the reasons behind any failures is news. Pictures of bruised babies is not news. It is a disturbing method of selling newspapers to the mob.

Point - Counter point

I am going to say nothing, other than I only agree with one of the two following "reckonings" by the British public on a recent "news" story. I will leave you to guess which one I think is spot on, and which needs to be recruited by the TRS:

What I reckon #1
Quite simply, if the BBC will do nothing it is time viewers and listeners did.

Time to turn off our televisions and radios when these two are on air, or at least watch/listen to another channel. I'd rather watch car insurance adverts for an hour instead of Ross, or listen to a tap drip perhaps?
SH, Hampshire,

What I reckon #2
War, corruption, global poverty, prank phone calls ... if only the indignant moral rage of the British public could be used to slightly greater effect than getting that 'rude man off the telly!' suspended. The phone call was tasteless and offensive, but some perspective might be nice, thanks.
Jane Douglas, Cambridge,

Why we're so very alone.

Let's just relax and let the mind wander for a bit. If I were a flower, I'd grow into the word help, twisting and contorting my leaves and stem to form the well placed, but unnervingly accurate word within the gardening store.

People would come from miles around to work out why a plant would produce such a specific and to them, a fluke shape. Unfortunately it would be very difficult for me to reply to their questions, as answering anything would take months of growth. In fact I don't think that even the most cognitive, fast growing and capable plant would ever be able to communicate with people. I find that a very sad thought.

Anything that even has a massive, billion to one leap in capabilities would still not be known to humans as such. I could be the sun, a massive ball of energy that is suddenly self aware, but any motions I make to say hello would be mis-construed as a solar flare, sun spot or apocalyptic fireball that wipes out the earth. Most things fall in to this similar category of communications through extinction.

And similarly anything that is too small wouldn't be significant enough to be watched long enough. A single bacterium pulsing sos in Morse code would not be noticed in its 20 second life span to be of consequence.

And perhaps that's where humanity sit. Either so inconsequential to the rest of the universe that we are just a small discolouration on a single spec of dust on the arm of a cosmos, or alternatively the large eared beings that could have been our gods and saviours were obliterated the nanosecond that we opened our mouths.

If you think about it, it's unlikely that we will ever meet anything in the middle ground. Something small enough to care, but big enough to matter.

"Individuals" please take note

...that when you're trying to do something "different", "new" or "revolutionary" it's important to remember that it hasn't been done before for a bloody good reason.

Sometimes its because the opportunity has never been there until now. See the moon landings, cold fusion experiments or the skiffle revolution in the UK for good examples.

But far more often these days people will simply make an attempt at something that hasn't been done before because they feel they need to. And while this is an important part of our progress as humans to be constantly finding out "what happens when I do this", it is also important to make sure that you have a reason for doing other than "I don't want to do what someone's done before".

For an example of this latter form, please see the god awful scultpure of the parapalegic woman that someone paid for, and someone spent their time making. I rather feel that the reason was more in the "because I don't want it to be like..." rather than "because I want it to be...". The statue says nothing about anything, and no amount of wine sipping, verbose, gibbering intellectuals will be able to shoehorn in one iota of meaning.