Isn’t it ironic

Hmm… just got hold of an air conditioner and, on the hottest day in three years, I’m being asked to keep it off. Funny. Actually my apartment’s not been so bad today – I already had a lot of heat reduction tricks in place to keep the heat low. I’m lucky being on the fourth floor with not so many houses around that any breeze that does exist comes straight in. Not to say some nice Spanish style shutters outside the windows wouldn’t go amiss.

Still, on the plus side my washing’s dried in record time. Can’t say the same for the apples someone’s left to dry out on the top floor landing though. Mmm… apple stinky.

But is it art?

In order to distract myself from the currently cordoned off street outside (one of a number of bomb scares hitting New York at the mo) I decided to try and find a web cam of the activity here at Madison and 54th Ave.. No joy yet, but I did come up with an idea “Webcam Theatre”. You find a suitable WebCam, such as one of the low ones at Times Square, and then carry out Guerilla type theatre. In fact you could even do it in front of a number of web cams at the same time to make it more interesting. Not sure how you’d do the sound, but liked the idea of it… Now back to the bomb…

Surfing Possibility

For some reason the subject of positive thinking and inspiring words has been coming up a lot recently, hence this article from the Beeb caught my eye. A retired school teacher is suggesting that the word ‘fail’ be removed from the educational lexicon, replaced by more supportive phrases like ‘deferred success’. It’s an interesting idea, if not necessarily practical. The whole concept that our psyches form around our ideas and beliefs and this affects our actions (as well as our physicality) is an interesting one that is echoed in writings since the dawn of time. Last night on Family Guy Stewie dropped the classic ‘Whether you believe you’re right, or you believe you’re wrong. You’re right’ aphorism into his spiel. Then in re-reading The Invisibles, Grant Morrison was recommending the use of symbols to define your intention and focus your subconcious mind – ie, you can make what you want, or ideally need, come to pass.

Many people would call this ‘magic’, but I’ve seen enough of it to know that this stuff just happens – the world is full of latent possibility and the trick is to be in the right place at the right time with the right intent. It’s kind of like surfing; waves are always surging powerfully onto the shore, passing under your board as you float there. Start paddling at the right time however then whammo! Off you go, picking up this huge surge of energy and having the time of your life.

So come on in, the water’s great!

Book Review: Cold Snap – Thom Jones

Cold snap – Thom Jones. This collection of short fiction is another pulled from my the abandoned books from my apartment’s previous tenant and it’s a beaut. The stories are richly imagined and the characters vibrant, even though they only ‘live’ for a handful of pages. Each story is a contemporary look at a different person and their life, focusing strongly on their backgrounds and habits. Sometimes the characters seem a bit stereotyped, in particular an aborigine surfer whose language is fair peppered with Australiana to a degree that even the punctuation seems antipodean. Strewth. All in all a good read and great for twenty minute periods that need handy filler.

Book Review: The Photograph as Contemporary Art

The photograph as contemporary art – Charlotte Cotton. This book breaks down recent trends in photography in an attempt to give a background as to the rationale that drives practitioners of the photographic arts. The explanations and backgrounds are interesting and informative, complete with a selection of prints of the artists in questions. As someone who is interested in extending their photographic practice this background is essential reading, with my only gripe being that a larger sized book would provide much better access to the photos in question – perhaps a coffee table reprint is in order?

Hot in the city (still)

Summer is definately in full swing this year. After last year’s vague attempt at hotness, which still felt pretty icky to my British inheritance, summer is back with a vengence now. The thermometer doohicky installed on my Firefox toolbar is showing me a lot of 30+ C temperatures, with the only upside being relatively little humidity – this is a good thing. The hot temperatures can be uncomfortable, but it’s that feeling of total dampness combined with rivers of sweat that bring true misery. Over the weekend I was up in Montreal again and the humidity was painful – 91%. You step out of the shower, dry yourself and are immediately wet again, all very strange. All of this hot dampness really made me appreciate the English weather when I was back the other week – of course England’s been suffering from its own heatwave this week, and they’re a lot less used to handling heat than New York!

Where you really want to be when it’s hot is Spain. They really know how to keep things cool. Siestas at the hottest part of the day – genius! Dark wood shutters outside of your window that still let the breeze in – marvellous! Sangria – si senor! I’m trying to apply some of this ecological sense to keep my own apartment cool, especially since I don’t yet have an a/c (plus I’m not convinced the electrics in my apartment will handle it at all well – when I turn the toaster on everything flickers). I have a box fan that gets moved into the window on the coolest of the two sides to the building, luckily being on the fourth floor there is more of a breeze to enjoy. Last night I made my own sun reflecting shades using tin foil and paper to try and cut down the window heat from my bakingly hot east facing wall. All of these tricks seem to be working well. So far. On the other hand there is something nice about a bit of cool, clean conditioned air…

Can you tell what it is yet? – rolf harris. Rolf, for those of you who aren’t British, is an Australian children’s entertainer turned general entertainer (via student entertainer) and a true superstar. The title comes from his most famous catchphrase, used while he used to paint huge wall sized paintings live on TV joking and making strange noises at the same time. This biography is a great read about someone who is a true superstar – self-effacing, humble and talented in a very different way from other people. From his early days in Perth, through to his emigration to London and subsequent rise to childrens TV fame – it’s all in here. Plus he even mentions his first student gig at Birmingham university – ah, fond memories. A real feel good story and insight into a strange industry.

Post by Matt Hobbs

How far does trust go?

Those paranoid posts in my last entry got me to thinking: at what point do you not trust your government, partner, etc? There are certain things we’d like not to believe; such as our government works in our best interests (duly elected to serve the people anyone?), and that our partner is always honest with us. Note here that I can accept a government ‘lies’ in the interests of the people, as long as it is in the interests of the people.

One day down at the World Trade Center I stood and watched a conspiracy theorist expound on his own beliefs about what happened on 9/11 and in Iraq. A group of college age kids was listening intently, with occaisional smiles between themselves, as he pushed flyers on them and told them what he believed to be true. Further back a group of middle ages guys stood shaking their heads and pointing, till one of their number eventually went up to the guy and told him what he thought (paraphrased here as “you’re crazy you are” but with a lot more expletives). The conspiracy theorist stood his ground and said “it’s all on the internet if you want to see for yourself” – to both the kids and the adults. The adults didn’t seem to want to hear that themselves and stormed off, swearing.

So what does this tell us? Everyone has certain beliefs they don’t want questioned. We don’t want someone to disprove the existance of God if that’s who we’ve put out faith in. We don’t want someone to tell us that our Prime Minister is a liar who was actively involved in the deaths of innocents. We don’t want to believe that man has not walked on the moon. The big lies are the easiest to believe sometimes. At what point do we start to question these beliefs?

Would there be an uprising against a government if people found out that government had been involved in faking or supporting ‘terrorist’ acts against their own people? I believe not. A few people might complain loudly. A few individuals in the government would be sacrificed. A few more people would ‘take their own lives’ rather than testify. So at what level of evidence does a ‘conspiracy theory’ become ‘fact’? Fact that is strong enough to motivate a change in behaviors amongst a populous that would rather sit and be force fed placating crap on the TV? To be honest I don’t know, although I’m inclined to think it requires a helluva lot these days having seen what evidence does get ignored.

So let’s look at this another way; say you found out something, something mind blowing that would cause such change. What would you do with it? Philip K Dick had a number of short stories about this, my favorite of which involved a fictional college run by the army, and blueprints of a secret engine of 1000% greater efficiency that the army was hiding – the student in question was faced with the choice of tell the administration or hand the idea over to the public. He chose the administration, and was booted out of the college for not being a free thinker. If only that was true.

These days the good old interweb offers you greater freedoms for such world changing information. For me, there’s my blog – but that could easily be pulled down should I say something too controversial (yes they are listening, to all of us – text search on keywords is not that hard). There are bulletin boards on shared servers, drunken conversations in bars or even television (but not Fox of course, unless you’re just in the business of scaring people even more – even CNN is less than positive, witness the other day when the words ‘London Attacks’ as a headline was presented with the word ‘London’ only half the size of ‘Attacks’ implying it could be anywhere, even in YOUR neighbourhood so watch out…). All of these are monitored in some way, even the harder to find newsgroups.

So I’ve come up with a couple of ideas, should anyone feel like using them; The first is simply to have peer to peer sharing of text based information, a ‘rumour net’ so to speak. Someone finds interesting ‘facts’ or rumours, they post it to the gossip net, it gets instantly replicated across 1000s of servers – both in hosted facilities and at people’s homes. Even if a government takes a dim view of certain information escaping then it’s hard to put that genie back in a bottle once it’s free. This idea has it’s good and bad sides, and still relies on you, the reader, to make up your own mind.

The other idea is more radical – total transparency of government. At present government documents are ‘de-classified’ (unless it’s too embaressing) after 50 years or so. However how are we to know what is kept classified or ‘lost’ in the process? Here’s a solution: using the aforementioned gossip web you release all government communiques using encryption keys that are changed on a daily basis. Current encryption methods keep information safe for a certain period of time before brute force hacking works, but that creates it’s own release date. Keys could be doubled up based on the level of security – with keys for differing levels of government applied successively. Hence you could always tell who was involved with a decision based on what keys were applied to the information. If this mechanism was linked to all government e-communiques then there would never be anywhere for people to hide should they be abusing their power. Or conversely, politicians who are as clean as they claim would be vindicated.

Of course this wouldn’t work in practice, there are always ways around it, but it’s a nice idea to believe that no government would be scared to deploy this method. In the meantime I’m going back to believing the only thing that ever happened at Area 51 was that aliens landed… faking moon landings? What a crazy idea! Surely the reason there aren’t manned scientific stations with telescopes on the dark side of the mood is because.. erm… it’s too dark! That’s it.

Reality Show or Real Life?

Metafilter pointed me towards this article in which a consultant claims they were running ‘war games’ in London based around a terrorist attack that was almost identical to what happened the other day. The claim by the website is that this means that government officials could be involved with the bombing, yet if questioned they would be ‘involved in an exercise’. This is pretty f*cking scary thinking.

Elsewhere in the site they claim that around 9/11 the American government was running multiple air attack ‘war games’ in which hijacked planes were involved. Consequently when the ‘real’ hijacked planes were in the air noone knew the difference. Again, this is pretty scary stuff.

Assuming this is true then one important question is raised in my mind: did the respective governments know (or worse yet instigate) these attacks, or is it that someone in Al’Quada has access to security briefings in both the US and UK governments? Both are paranoid considerations with far reaching implications.