Mervyn Peake is most famous for the Gormenghast Triogy, a sequence of stories that tell of the birth, adolescence and finally emergence into adulthood of Titus Groan, the 77th earl of Gormenghast, reluctant inheritor of crumbling dystopian castle that is ruled by tradition.
Having read this trilogy I had assumed that I had read all there was to read; however while absent-mindedly browsing the internet I discovered that there was a fourth story in the trilogy; a “childrens’ book”, hence excluded from the cannon of Gormenghast fiction.
Boy in Darkness is a shorter, easier read than the other three books; It’s cast a great deal smaller and it’s story is somewhat more frightening: Thematically it most resembles “Titus Alone”, because it departs from the purely human drama of Gormenghast and enters into the genres of horror and fantasy.
Growing tired of the endless ritual of Gormenghast, titus resolves to escape the castle over which he has recently become lord. His departure is assisted by a pack of hounds who apparantly without malice push him along a silent river towards a desert of lifeless grey.
There he is abducted by Goat and Hyena, a pair of men who have been partially transformed into beasts by their insidious master Lamb who has been waiting paitiently in his lair for Titus’ arrival. Lamb once ruled over a world of beastialised people, but of the hundreds who once worshipped in his subterranian court only the two others remain; however with the arrival of Titus the Lamb may once again have a chance to practice his occult transofrmative art.
Hi-fi nuts are legendary for spending a whole lot of money on chromed plated tat. Most audiophiles would like to think of themselves as perfectionists in the science of sound, when in actual fact they are just a bunch of emotional suckers addicted to exchanging cash for electrical bling.
Manufacturers of high-end audio gear are happy to cater for this audience; all they need to do is make products that look cool and write spiritual sounding blurbs about how the latest interconnect will counter-balance the electro-ohmic resonance of your valve-biassed interossiter.
A great example of pseudoscience (and fraud) are Shakti Stones; apparantly a noise reduction technology that look a little like ingots of iron. According to the astroturf campaign intended to promote this product, customers typically need to acquire more than ten of these (at $200 a go), and place them onto hi-fi interconnects. At best these lumps of metal act like choke cores, however any percieved improvement in quality over what a $5 choke is imaginary. Pseudoscience debunker “The Amazing Randi” calls them “The Stupid Stones“.
What good is a $2000 set of iron ingots without a $2000 power cable for them to rest on? Even if there could be a benefit from optimising the last meter of power cable to your-hi-fi, the other 10 miles to the power-station remain the same as ever. The manufacturers do not explain how this wire magically brings perfection to a power-supply that is 99.9% based on cheap industrial copper wiring.
The cable promises to virtually eliminate “capacitive and inductive reactance” (whatever that means) because it has no ferrous and carbon components… which in English means it does exactly what any other power-cable would do because it is made of copper… just like any other power cable.
Why do all stories based on Asimov stories suck so badly? Just in case you were tempted to see the latest hollywood blockbuster film based on an one of his stories, please be warned that “I Robot” is just as you would expect; the suckiest suckfest of 2004. I did not pay to watch it in a cinema, I downloaded it for free… but I still want my money back.
If I had actually paid to see this film I would have been profoundly upset; This film is every bit as unrewarding as Bicentennial man (with Robin Williams as the soppy robot who wants to be a man), however it trades Robin’s shcmaltsy emotion for Will Smith’s childish action oriented bravado.
According to IMDB, this script was in development for more than 5 years before it got optioned by a big studio and I suspect that this task was handed over to a team of teenagers who decided to develop it by striping out any hint of intelligence from the original story; adding a series of robot-themed yet James Bond style action sequences and then peppering it with stale-sounding sci-fi jargon and abundant product placement. In summary, if you want to see Will Smith fight robots, watch this film. If like me, you would much rather see Smith be brutally maimed by robots you will most likely be dissapointed.
According to this slashdot article, poorly managed databases are preventing many U.S. citizens from boarding domestic flights in their own country. At least nobody can claim they are victimised, because powerfull senators are treated as badly as the old and frail.
It occurs to me that terrorists might enhance their terror, merely by changing their names to match those of leading politicians. For example, a terrorist organisation could exert a very “asymmetric threat” by adopting the names of pro-government politicians and campaign managers in the months before a general election. I imagine it would be hard to run a nationwide election if you were prevented from flying anywhere. Once those nasty terrorist/freedom-fighter types discover this, the “No Fly List” system will be turned against the people that created it.
10 or so years ago, I got my first internet connection. Back then I was using a US-Robotics 14.4kbit modem that took up the entire length of the 486 computer I had just obtained. A new company called Demon Internet was offering unlimited dial-up access for
According to Ananova, Terry Nutkins wants to make a biopic (or should that be autobiopic?) about his own life. Nutkins, 51, who lives in Glenelg, west Scotland, said the film would mainly focus on his childhood experiences of growing up with author Gavin Maxwell - whose own life was chronicled in the film Ring Of Bright Water. Nutkins would like Dennis Waterman to play the part of himself (Nutkins) in his later years, even though Waterman is 5 years older than him! (My italics.) For those who don’t know, Terry Nutkins is famous to a generation in the UK for presenting children’s programmes about wildlife, including Animal Magic and The Really Mild Show, and for having some of his fingers bitten off by an otter.
It came as a shock to discover that there is another blog called Brainpipe, a better established and more consistently well written journal than ours, I’ve grown quite fond of it. I had hoped that one day we would establish a healthy competitive rivalry, perhaps culminating in a series of man-on-man wrestling matches to decide which is the best blog called Brainpipe. Sadly I will never get to experience this kind of jolly horse-play as the original Brainpipe blog is no more… abandoned… truncated… gone.
Mistakenly believing that only 5 people read his blog, the primary author has decided to abandon it and concentrate on other projects; I’m fairly sure that blog has more readers than that because our blog has approximately 5 readers and they sometimes go to Brainpipe.com by mistake. At least 10 readers who are likely to be dissapointed.
Dictionary.com tells me that Synecdoche is “a figure of speech in which a part is used for the whole (as hand for sailor), the whole for a part (as the law for police officer), the specific for the general (as cutthroat for assassin), the general for the specific (as thief for pickpocket), or the material for the thing made from it (as steel for sword).”
Compare this with Metonymy, which I am told is “a figure of speech in which one word or phrase is substituted for another with which it is closely associated, as in the use of Washington for the United States government or of the sword for military power.”
So what’s the difference? Difficult to say. Can you use steel for military power? What figure of speech would this exemplify?
I just recieved my “Linux Technical Resource Kit”, a 3 DVD compliation of pretty much everything Suse, Ximian and Novell have to offer on the Linux platform. It all looks like cool software however I doubt I will ever have time to use it. In any case, there is something strangely off-putting about the cover:
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Is this elation or is this insane fear? Is he delighted with his Linux infrastructure or has Darl McBride offered to stick that biro up his nose. |
I guess folks do things different in Utah…
Roll up, get your SCOX shares; If you believe what the shills say, it’s going to “too the moon!”, however the only way I can imagine this happening is if it first plummets from orbit, smashes into the Earth (leaving a 10 mile crater) and then ricochets onto the unfortunate planetoid. If this were to happen, lets hope that the crater is somewhere near Lindon, Utah.
Fantasy aside, thanks to handy investment calculator I can see how SCO group could be nurturing my investment; If I had been smart enough to invest $1000 on th 21st March 2003, just look at how much sweet wonga I could have made!
And on a lighter note, IBM has just filed for “Partial Summary Judgement” against the vast majority of SCOX’s claims in their increasingly absurd SCOXvsIBM case. It’s quite a heavy read for the unaquainted, however if it helps, you should picture IBM spreading it’s corporate butt-cheeks adjacent to SCO’s nose and issuing forth a trumpet of heavy brown lawyering gas. This will leave SCOX coughing and spluttering for days.