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Well, finally, I succumbed, so here are the questions from andrewwyld.

1. Why "gonzo"?

( The true answer is too rude .... )

2. Is the glass half-empty, or half-full?

( It all depends. )

3. Do you believe in a thing called love?

( .... I ... have a simple answer ... monotony. )

4. What experience most changed your life?

( This is a tricky one .... )

5. Sum yourself up in under ten words.

( ... denial ... moby ... snakewater. )

Question:

• Can God create a rock he cannot lift?

Answers:

1. If you can define such a rock without circularity (or, in this case, some form of logical Möbius band), yes.
2. Of course.  They're called asteroids.  While they are in free fall, there's no meaningful sense in which you can lift one.
3. This is just an excuse to ask if God can do logically impossible things, isn't it?  Tchuh, I don't know, you pesky kids!  If he can, of course, the value of truth becomes identical to the value of falsehood, as is clearly demonstrable in symbolic logic, which means the answer to every question can be "yes" (or "no", but that doesn't matter).  Hence if God can create a rock he cannot lift, he can do anything at all.  Thus to fulfil this requirement is a sufficient condition for omnipotence.  Now go away and make the tea.

Trees are no longer a comfort,
Messages sad in the wires,
My hair is hung down with the blackest of rain that I'm feeling.

Weird Of Hermiston, Jack Bruce

[	cognitive state	|	artistic	]
[	audio state	|	Shaun Of The Dead (soundtrack)	]

20041010

The Toyin Melody will be playing Sensible Sundays on the 10th October, 2004 at around 9pm.  Door is free, drinks are of high quality and the music will be just the thing to ease you back into the week.  Sensible Sundays are at Nambucca, 596 Holloway Road, London N7.  The nearest train is Upper Holloway, and the nearest tubes are Archway and Holloway Road (and Nambucca is roughly halfway between them).  Buses are 43, 271, 17 and 241.

STOP PRESS!

We are having some badges made up.  Undoubtedly future collectors' items, these badges are to be printed in a glorious shade of green and laminated in luxurious plastic.  Ask your band representative for one today!

[	cognitive state	|	amused	]
[	audio state	|	Halls Of Asgard (Nidavellir)	]

For some reason or other, when discussing band names with my brother, I came up with Nidavellir.  This being a name too good to ignore, I wrote a song:

Halls Of Asgard

Guitars by my brother, drums by the computer, remainder by me.

Not bad for a morning's work.

NB:  This piece is a joke and is not in any way a serious piece of music.

[

cognitive state

|

thoughtful

]

Are you:

• the oppressor;
• the oppressed?

I would like to contemplate the difference between radio buttons and checkboxes.  Radio buttons are those little controls where you can select one of a number of options; checkboxes let you select any number of boxes, including none.  Wherefore concentrate on so petty a distinction, you may ask?

If the above question is asked with radio buttons, one may be either oppressor or oppressed, but not both, nor neither.  If it is asked with checkboxes, one may abdicate from the system altogether by clicking nothing, or one may claim total membership by clicking both.

How can one be both oppressor and oppressed?

The simplest form is the food chain or pyramid model -- one is oppressed by those above, and oppresses those below.  Nothing complex about that, although, to quote Dogbert, the last guy kind of gets it in the shorts.

Another, slightly odder form, is that one may oppress a person on one aspect of their lives and be oppressed by them in another, orthogonal, aspect of one's life.  Thus a black man and a white woman could oppress one another, using conventional asssumptions for the USA about who oppresses whom.

The final (and most interesting) type is where two people oppress one another about the same thing.  This sounds impossible.  However, I would contend that it is precisely this that the Arab-Israeli conflict is a perfect example of this.

All of these possibilities are opened up by replacing radio buttons with checkboxes.

It gets weirder still, however.  Three radio buttons give you three options.  Three checkboxes give you eight options.  Four gives you four and sixteen, and so on until I point out that I can count to over a thousand on my fingers, and a million on my fingers and my toes.

I'm really banging on about all this because I think the habit of linking questions together -- as radio buttons do, and as I suspect many people do besides -- may be reducing the amount of information we have about the world by factors of hundreds, thousands or millions.

Spare a thought for the oppressed oppressor.

[	cognitive state	|	creative	]
[	audio state	|	We Are The Robots (Kraftwerk)	]

I'm actually working on a new story for the script.

Work in progress.

Edit:  You might be interested to know that all the stuff about the Banville Garage is really true, as far as I can tell.  Truth is stranger than fiction.

[

cognitive state

|

nostalgic

]

Some of you might recall my foray into scriptwriting about a year since.  Following mirabehn's readthrough, Rebecca Daker encouraged me to resurrect this script for another competition ... I'm currently re-reading it to see if I like it.  However, I'd be grateful for your assistance.

Undercover (Word format)

Undercover (automatically-generated html)

My request is as follows -- can you please identify your two favourite parts of the script?  Thanks!

Edit:  It's fairly obvious to me that the whole thing is quite skeletal.  Expect modifications.

[

cognitive state

|

curious

]

Expect an entry on this subject ... right after these messages.

google INTERCAL.

[	cognitive state	|	relaxed	]
[	audio state	|	Trouser Jazz (Mr. Scruff)	]

andrewwyldgonzo is proud to endorse Mr. Scruff and his fine Master Plan:  To encourage widespread pie-eating and tea-drinking.

While watching the BBC's adaptation of Martin Chuzzlewit yesterday in a fit of attempted relaxation, I began to wonder:  Whatever happened to Chevy Slyme?

Dickensian characters are well-known for being called by names akin to Percival Chumbercould, Watkins Plumscombe, Mary Sweeting, Martha and Henery Simgood, Chester Subethical, whatever.  It's a fact that the sounds Dickens coaxes from the Latin alphabet and the English system of pronunciation are small miracles of onomatopœia, comedy, and description encapsulated in sounds which, occasionally, seem to mean something quite definite without sounding like any recognizable word at all.  It's also a fact that this practice was actually adopted to avoid by lawsuits brought by people claiming they were being misrepresented in literature -- John Smith might well object to a book whose villain was also called John Smith; he might object a hundred thousand times.

James Watt invented the sun and planet gear to convert linear motion to rotary motion because the crankshaft had been patented by someone else; the sun and planet gear was simply an expedient to enable him to build steam engines, but it actually improves on the device it replaces.  I think Dickens's surnames, also adopted as an expedient, improve on real ones.

Authors may now hide behind the disclaimer about persons living or dead, and name their villains for childhood enemies or former literary agents, should they please (although naming a vicious, alcoholic, rubber fetishist psychopath "Margaret Thatcher" is probably still inadvisable).  But it seems to me that realism's gain is entertainment's loss.

Marcus Quynte.  Frederic Spool.  Martina Cremfrid.  Susan Mopeley.  Arthur Mishevel.

If every word in a story should advance plot or reveal character, then why not find out what's in a name?

My sister and I wandered down Oxford Street today in search of pursuits to take the edge off a caffeine high fit for a stockbroker.  Oxford Street offers a dazzling array of opportunities to buy things.  The big high-street shops, expensively reproduced for the primary purpose of brand aggrandizement, lurid with the shocking-pink and the neither pastel nor not, beckoned us, and we answered.  Occasionally my sister would point out a garment or an item of jewellery, and I would shudder appreciatively.

There has never been before, and probably never will be again, so great an opportunity to acquire vivid, virulent, Barbie-doll pink clothing.  The seventies are often called the decade that taste forgot, but I know better:  I grew up in the eighties, and fashion designers who grew up with me are now inflicting their childhood trauma on the fashion-buying public, who are lapping it up, the poor innocents.  There seems to be a curious preponderance of things which can't quite work out what colour they are.  I eventually realized that these items reminded me of the housewives in Edward Scissorhands.  I think they're supposed to produce the effect of a colour photograph from about 1953.

My sister went off to watch Starsky and Hutch, and we parted company fifty metres shy of Tottenham Court Road tube station; on the North border of Soho, a number of strangely split-personality shops offered postcards of royals, beefeater hats and plastic thigh boots in about equal quantities.  With no attempt at coherency, they seemed to be selling whatever people would buy, picking up the falloff from the sex shops to the South and the tourist trade from the theatres and Oxford Street itself -- retail atavism, a bizarre bazaar.

I shrugged, and went home.

google pempslider.