My Struggle With Plastics

There are two kettles at work, one is plastic and the other stainless steel. Given the choice I would rather drink water from the latter...

My CHE reasoning on this issue goes something like this:

1) There are no claims or evidence that boiling pure water in stainless steel leeches anything into to that water. (Stainless steel has been around over a hundred years, ergo, we should probably know the truth of 1 by now. (Boiling acidic foods in stainless steel might have metals leaching in, as I understand it.)

2) There are claims and evidence that plastics leach into water, especially hot water.

3) I would like to reduce the amount of plastics I drink.

4) Therefore, ideally, I should choose stainless steel kettles over plastic kettles.

This, to me, seems obvious, sound and valid. It is a simple principle of CHE reasoning and one that I rationally apply to my life.

But where do I draw the line?

Q:”I have an awesome nylon spork that I got for Christmas, should I use it?”
A: “Yes I should, and do. Though not every meal, for ergonomic rather than material reasons.”

Q: ”Should I be worried about the scented loom bands that my kids are constantly playing with?
A: “Yes I should, they are now in the Das Ist Verboten cupboard, along with caustic soda and plasma grenades.”

Q: “Should I get into a tizzy-wizzy if I find that last night, whilst tipsy, I sipped from a plastic beaker that may contain unregulated and untested chemicals made by Chinese industrial slaves?”
A: “I just don’t know! Whose house is this?“

These kinds of dichotomies between risk and utility are quite common in my life, outwardly they might seem paranoid and kookie, but to me they are just prudent exercises in wellbeing optimisation, MMH. But, rather than get bogged down in investigating these things continuously I just take a reasonable shortcut and, as a general principle, I try to personally avoid internalising unnatural things.

The reasoning goes a little something like this:

Consider a new molecule that has been out a few years, new enough not to be able to conclude on its long term human and environmental potentials (This molecule could be anything that gets used in our environment, products, food, etc).

I think with CHI that there are three possibilities I need to consider if interested in my wellbeing:

1) The new molecule will positivise me if internalised. (By “positivise” I mean bring about an enhanced state of health, focus, energy, lifespan, appearance, driving skills or any other positive contribution to one’s wellbeing at some point in the future from the point(s) of internalisation.) (By “internalised” I mean to be taken from outside me to inside me, via eating, drinking, breathing, absorbing and even the “No doctor no!” route of entry into yours truly.)

2) The new molecule will negitavise if internalised.

3 The new molecule is biologically inert to to me at all concentrations. (I say all “concentrations” because if some new molecule is damaging at 100 parts then, even if it seemed safe at 1 part, then, call me “old fashioned”, but I would rather not have 1 part. (This is one of the many reasons I would rather not have saccharine and aspartame.... ))

But how can I apply CHE to a new molecule when there isn’t going to be the evidence (Is Reddit classed as peer review?) available in order to make the decision? The answer, I think, is to look at past examples and see where they come out on the above three possibilities and then hedge my prudence with going with that as the most probable and plausible. One cannot expect certainty.

What I have found in my long years of such investigations (I really do find it fun!) is that, overwhelmingly, 1 and 3 are not realistic probabilities, whereas 2, generally, is well evidenced; it does seem that if x is a new chemical in our lives then x is very probably going to do more harm than good. This is not scaremongering, woo or just being neggy, ‘most anyone would come to that conclusion in a short amount of home investigating time.

Life is short. Risk is everywhere. These two nobrainers that have a tension between them that can either be ignored or confronted. In my opinion, when confronted with reason and prudence the reward is good, balance can be achieved. Sporks can be used. I could get run over by a bus tomorrow, and if I do I would rather leave no BPA on the tarmac. Steel kettle on. High-5!

Images of Uxu

Many people outside of Cornwall are unaware of the remains of Uxu, the lost ancient city that was probably twinned with Atlantis.

A pillar carved from White Luxullianite, the undeciphered pictographic script can be clearly seen. This rock was not quarried nearby, but on the other side of the valley, nearly half a mile away.

It is unknown what this kind of pillar was created for. Twice the hight of a human. 

Most of Uxu has been destroyed by the Victorians so this is, very very rare. - That corner would, fifteen millennia ago, been inside a room.

The basement of one of the giant twin courtyards. This is in the restricted area.

Here we see modern (early Bronze Age) wall in the foreground with strewn facing stones in the background.

The top of one of only two of the Uxu Obelisks. One was excavated by The Victorians, it was two hundred meters, only in yards, tall. Ground Penetrating radar carried out by Time Team estimated this particular obelisk to be even taller.

Strewn Giant Facing Stones; these were three hundred meters up the side of the Uxu Citadel. What could have hurled them so far?

Twice the height of the Great Pyramid.

My Struggle With Vegetarianism

My struggle with vegetarianism goes way back... In the distant reaches of time, back before Google and keyboards that swipe to when I was first courting my domestic assistant, sometime around 1998. As a bet with my cousin I had spent 1997 totally sugar free and, alongside my new mate, I was looking for new adventures in self exploration. But this exploration was of a more comestible and edible variety, not so much "finding myself" as "finding myself enjoying meat far too much". And so, as another bet, this time with a lifelong veggie, I tried to become a vegetarian for a month.

It started well. One of our first joint shopping trips was to Iceland in Turnpike Lane to buy some Linda McCartney steak and onion pies which, I was assured, was the best you could get. I am not sure, but this might even have be BQ, that most special of lines in the sand for vegetarians.

They tasted OK a little bland on the run, perhaps.  We ate out much more back then and so I had a very quick introduction into how limited our choices are as a vegetarian on the recreational dining scene.  

It was about ten days into this hell that I learnt a brand new word, "pescatarian."  To most people the term "Pescatarian" means someone who doesn't eat fish, and when I first learnt the term,  that is exactly what it meant to me. But language changes, it is a game that plays out and new meanings pop into the game and, if they are useful or have some other linguistic accolade, their new meanings will spread. This is not often good, for example, "gay" used to mean "fashionable and stylish with an accompanying aesthetic erudition" whereas this  has now morphed into meaning merely "happy". The term "meme" used to mean an item of non physically represented information that is subject to the same kinds of survival and success principles as are seen in biological evolution, but now it refers to the experience of seeing an online cat that someone else has seen.

Words change. Langues moves on. Words don’t resemble walking sticks, they resemble trampolines. I knew this then, as now, but back then, I audaciously thought the bounce could be adjusted. “pescatarian", as a term, needed tweaking (not tweeting, of course, as at this time SMS was still a type of Short Messaging Service) and so by day...maybe fifteen... I was pushing for a bit of bet revisionism.

In a French restaurant on Holloway Road  I asked, "How’s about... instead of fish… anything that swims?”

Grenouille. I had eaten it once or twice before, as a teenager, and would never normally have eaten it, but there it was, this could be an out. And after every out, there comes an in and thus this could be, in my mind, a beach-head of the onslaught that would lead me to win the bet whilst at the same  time retaining at least some dignity alongside the legal right to eat a modicum of animal. Frogs swim. Ducks swim. Bears swim...  "this "pescatarian” malarkey might be the one for me….” I must have concluded, I don’t recall.

She said "No". I think probably a little arrogantly, as if there was some super secret code of morals and meanings that veggies had and that we carnies just didn't get. Like when Buddhist monks nod, often very mysteriously, when answering questions about dharma: "That is the higher dharma... And a frog is not a fish"

At that point I gave in. I walked to the ATM (back in 97 they didn't have retina scans in restaurants so we had to go to machines in the wall where you put a plastic card and a special number in to get out paper money) and came back with fifty crisp paper mammon memos.

I bought my way out of obligation and back into the nation, and notion, of We The Faceeaters. I can't remember what I had to eat as meat that night. Maybe it was frogs. Maybe it was horse. It had a face, and I know now  and knew then that, as a member of the human race, it is a disgrace to taste a thing with a face.

But it tastes so good. This is what people who are not carnies don't get. The flesh of another being can taste so good that you crave it for hours, maybe even in real time as it's bouncing through the field on its last full spring morn, you, and me, if we are carnies, we could be craving it.

But it's wrong! It's so wrong. If you are like the vast majority of the human race, wherever or whenever you are from, it's not difficult to see that there are many reasons why being a face eater is wrong. It's wrong for moral reasons, like causing suffering. It's wrong for ethical reasons like damaging the environment. It's wrong for health reasons, at least in the vast majority of animal deaths. Bla bla bla sheep have you any wool to pull over my eyes so I can keep on chewing you for empty but compelling mouth pleasure?

I know it's wrong. It's very close to smoking in being a total nobrainer. And yet, tonight I have eaten the flesh of countless cows combined in a mixer in a factory somewhere in Liddleput and really enjoyed it; I was the Burgermeister.

What's going on here???

I'll tell me what's going on, I am being force fed cognitive dissonance, by my own weak minded mind, which is how cognitive dissonance generally works. I've had it a few times over the years, about various things, most of us do, apparently. But this bout of CD has lasted well over a decade and in the bloody wake of its rampage probably twenty chickens and a third of an Angus has been needlessly killed.

My brother in law, like his sister, is a genuine veggie. He does not quiver or falter.  He is able to be clear and straight about the issues in a way which no carnie can muster without wetting themselves with hypocrisy. I want to be that kind of veggieman.

There is call for an aside here. This is my claim: It is a lot harder for a man to be veggie than a woman.

My reasons for this claim, and this is pure speculation, are to do with the fact that males have a primal protein requirement than females don't and so men should naturally crave meat more than women. I don't know if that's nonsense or not, I would be curious to know. Back to this tour de force fed gosling...

Once you see the state of this issue as it is, you soon see huge, QM like anomalies when you get down amongst the Quarks and Kalemesons. For example, why don't overeaters eat walnuts when they will eat almonds? Is it really because someone told them they were petrified baby monkey brains? Does that mean we could put almonds on the kill list just by pointing out that they look like chaffinch lungs?  If veggies are vegetarian for any moral reason, then how can they wear leather? If a veggie eats a chicken egg then why won't they also eat a fish egg? I can see why they won't eat foi gras, but not why they won't eat caviar. Even with these unanswered questions, I can enter the reason arena and come out completely certain that I should not eat meat.

We need another digression here. Moral beliefs are a bit like electricity and water in that they have a value of volume and a value or pressure, or  amount and time, as it were. So my belief that faceeating is wrong is full in the conviction sense, but not full in the moral sense. I would much rather eat a dog than torture a cat, for example. "I'm sure it's wrong but I can't help doing it...  I'm just going to wash my hands, they have that juice that comes out of beef on them”.

One option is to man up and be stoic and just not eat meat. I try this and have tried it so much over the years. In fact I'm trying it now, since dinner. I'm on a trajectory to be meat free. But I know I will fail. In part I will fail because I'm weak. But also because my urge and desire to eat meat is so strong. We carnies know what I am talking about, such struggles.

I'm a big fan of vegetarianism, I'm in the supporters club and I get a lot if their merchandise, but I'm just not a good enough player to commit for life. I play little league, and sometimes I drop the ball, not because I’m not trying but  because I'm stuffing my face with the liver of a lamb.

Midcornwall Diary: Level 3 Cider Fast

I am 52 hours into a 72 hour official Cider Fast and so far I haven't had any cider; just water and black coffee/tea.

I am very confident I will complete the fast, the hard part is going to be tonight, when I am out courting my domestic assistant, via the medium of Pub Quiz.

So far, since Sunday Lunch, I have battled errant hoola-hoops, delightful almonds and abundant free pizza, the latter being by far the hardest conquest. But tonight, in order to make this a both genuine and official Cider Fast (rather than a sham, "Ohhh... check me out,  I once ate a couple of apples on a fast" kind of a "Cider Fast") I am going to have to push through at least three pints... all whilst answering general knowledge questions.

To those of you who don't PTG, the official rules of a Cider Fast, according to the classic "Fast Games For Families" state that:

'one imperial pint of cider per full day period, which may, depending on the dedication and aptitude of the player, be consumed, adhering of course to common decency,  in constant sippage or in a single sitting of a more serious sipping."

Fast Games For Families, Gretchin and Karriboo, 1908 

I have done a couple of L1 Cider Fasts before, but this is the first L3, and I am confident that if I can master the cider tonight (which is essentially fizzy fermented apple tea, after all) I just need make my way through Kebab Ally and I should be good to go until tomorrow lunch....Yabadabado. Level Complete.

Try My New Ultra Mobile Game! For Free In MidCornwall!

Over the years I have designed a number of computer games...

I designed the vastly underplayed 22Kung (from the blurb:"Use your Monks and all your cunning to capture your opponent's Jade Fountain and become the master in a game that combines the tactical planning of Chess, the simplicity and gameplay of GO and the drama of Kung Fu.") which by now I was hoping to have been bigger than Sudoku and Online Poker combined. I think maybe the graphics could have been a bit better. 

And there there was Factland and of course, MP...

But now I have a new multiplayer game that you can try for free. For reasons of public decency it is only playable by pairs of Male Humans where at least one of the pair is consenting to play. The game, that is causing a stir, in at least the streets of my mind, is Eyebrow Tennis.

Eyebrow Tennis

How to Play: 

As you walk down the street and a man approaches you you must raise your eyebrows. This is your serve and the completion of the game. You must now decide who was victorious:

Winning and Loosing

• If the man replies with a Brow Raise, then you are both winners.
• If the man doesn't raise his eyebrows, then you are both losers.
• If, as you approach, he raises his Brows before you, then he has won.

You will find, as you get better, that there is much skill, subtlety and cunning in the game's tactics. 

Not only is this a great new game for all the men of the world to play so that there may be unity and a lasting peace, thus stopping, once and for all, masculine aggression's cancerous hurricane upon humanity and the planet; it is also a Paradox of soritian import.

PTG

Manwood Diary 6: In the Woods with St Jude

I am the Kingfisher

How many blind surrealists does it take to change a lightbulb?

A Fsh

Manwood Diary 2: The Spring Is Sprung

Manwood Diary 1

Five Stars, so far, from the Cornish Food Market

We have just had our first delivery from Cornish Food Market deliveries. In the spirit of impartiality, you shall have to google them yourselves. (You may need to understand encrypted Kernewek (though, in full disclosure,  I do not understand a word of it (I keep trying to learn "hello" but end up saying either "cheers" or nothing.))

So far its been Delicious, seemingly fresh and nutritious and all in all very good value.

Very CHE.

We are so lucky to be here.

Where is Midcornwall?

"...as decreed Midcornwall, being of 4.4' leagues in cirumnavigance(sic)  'pon  Grampound Well."The Histories Of  Demoina, c 1604

Rejuvelac, so bad it needs a blog post

It's been a while since I have posted here but I feel I have to, as today, nearly a week after the process started, I sampled my first brew of Rejuvelac.

This health drink, which is slightly fermented sprouted wheat grains, is supposed to be good for you. Even assuming it is, it is horrible to drink to the point of the undrinkable. My domestic assistant described the taste as "Liquid Mould."

Insipid, perhaps a little rancid, Rejuvelac must surely have the lowest taste to nutrition coefficient of any drink, trumping Wheatgrass and Spirulena by orders of magnitude.

Capitol City Bonkers

She is mighty like a tiger,
Painted on an Old Ladie's T-Pot,
She got it with petrol in 1989,
That time,
They drove past the Taymar, and up just past the Tyne,


Now the mighty city rocks and rolls where the three rivers cross,
But really they are streams, and mostly they are hidden,
Until they splatter out, a sludgy sludge into the neck of the slop, 
The foul mouth of Fal,  
Once the Germans wanted to pay to take the silt away,
Clear the city's throat and douche the city's moat,
To make bricks, "Probably for bunkers."
Truro turned them down on pennies in a pound,
And that, my friends is Bonkers:/

Bad Times, a Letter to Muji

To:Customer Services 
Muji Europe Holdings Limited 
8-12 Leeke Street 
London 
WC1X 9HT 

Dear Sirs/Hunnies,

I have long been a fan of Muji's functional minimalism. I believe your pencil cases are the stationary equivalent of a Zen Koan, and for this I thank you.

However, this festive season you failed me, and, in a deeper sense, you failed yourselves.

I received two Muji gifts from Santa, a pumice stone and an Egg Timer. The pumace stone was a well cut piece of solidified pyroclastic froth that will perform adequately upon corns and dry skin (which I currently dont posses). 

The egg timer leaves me with an incredulous sense of despair at your quality control. Both the package and the device specify it is a 3 minute egg timer but, after multiple tests, including the one on this youtube video, it saddens me to say the timer times a period of 2 minutes and 56 seconds.

I hope you will agree that a four second error is simply not acceptable when determining such relatively short metrics.

I like this egg timer, it looks good, and, before realising the temporal blasphemy this timer commits every time it times, I was going to carry it around with me to time things. This is no longer possible.

I am sure you will refund me whatever this item cost, but I don't want that. I want a either a three minute Muji egg timer that times for three minutes exactly, or twelve Muji egg timers with an error margin of no more than five seconds in either direction. This latter option provides the possibility that when needed I can use all twelve timers and average out the result. Thus, we would hope, achieving something like accuracy.

My address to send either one accurate, or twelve inaccurate, Muji egg timers is:

**********

********************

Once recvived I hope we can put this malign point in our supplier/consumer relationship behind us.

Warm regards,

Mat.....

On Saturday at Porthowan, we made a spiral jetty and watched the sea take it away.

The Old Grammar School, Truro, a Hamletropolitan Reveiew

If you have ended up on this post looking for a traditional educational establishment in Cornwall's finest city, I am afraid Google has let you down again.

The Old Grammar School is situated in a Georgian building with high ceilings and a warm three dimensional feel. I'm not much of an amateur buildings archaeologist, but I have watched a few episodes of Time Team, and a documentary on Alexander the Great, and I think it the building might have started off to do with dairy production. Allthough other evidence in the building might suggest it was some kind of Cooper’s yard or perhaps a huffler's bump house?

Whatever it was originally, The Old Grammar School is a very well decorated and furnisherized venue. You walk in. Its nice. ‘Nuff said. Great building. But what is a building save for its bricks, mortar, care, style, decor, attention and aesthetic?


I need to tell you not just what it is, but how it is. And I think the best way to describe that is poetically.

/me dons polo neck

The Old Grandma School

You started on a Friday,
But I couldn’t make your call.
We had Folks round for dinner.
And on the Saturday, I had a boat trip.
Falmouth for pasties, St Mawes for beers.
JKQ:Whats better, Falmouth or Fowey?
JKA:Truro
We got the ferry back to the City,
Saturday late at night, not Sunday morn,
You had the kind of vibe, like an opening night.
But it was your second night, not first,
(So that was a good good sign)
And then on the Monday, me, beer , MK,
You were the host that I could boast,
I had drunk in you on "the second night"
"Great bar, that"
"Yea, I was there on the second night"
"Cool"
"Maybe"
And then I went on the 6th afternoon.
Drinking
With people:
The kind of people I drink with at 16:30 on a Thursday
Wife. Two Kids. And Tarryn.
Great Chips.
Really Great Chips
Great Beer
Cold Glasses, Frosty.
Really great chips.
And nice staff.

/me removes polar neck


The Old Grammar School
Little Brighton
Zone 1
Truro
Cornwall

(For long term readers (Clive) I do think these chips were better than these ones reviewed many moons ago here: Review: St Austell Brewery Tribute Beer Battered Chips . These are probably the best chips in Mid Cornwall right now.)

What is the Purpose of Life in Cornwall?

The natural state of reality is systemless. It is disorder not order. It is less rather than more. It is simple rather than complex. It is low in value and information. The natural state of reality is devoid of complex and connected systems.

Persistence is existence into the future. Given the natural systemless state of reality the only systems that can persist are those that are able to defeat the collapse into the natural state.

Imagine a system at a point in time. If we accept the Law of Impermanence then it follows that this system must change at some point in it's future. This change can either increase the system's arcitechtonics (make the system more organised, structured, connected) or it can decrease it. The natural direction is for systems to decrease arcttechtonically.

All of everything is tending towards nothing and it is only the persistence of systems, you, me the galaxy, that holds this of.

The very root fundamental purpose of life, traceable through a linear and continuous, though vague, path down through the scaled of abstraction; Beneficial states persist.

The foundational fact of systems is that beneficial states persists. The beak of a finch, a job promotion, the distribution of matter in the universe, beneficial states persist.

The fittest survive. The beneficial persist. In many ways these are trivial and tautological, but in in understanding this tautology with the systems framework you can see why things are as they are. They are as they are because of enough impermanence (time and change and possibility) to allow increasingly more complex systems to emerge from more simple systems.

That is why we are here. The purpose of being here is to continue the persistence of systems. And the method of doing this is by increasing beneficial states within systems.


There is no fundamental meaning to life in Cornwall, in the way there is no fundamental meaning to a joke, but there is a fundamental purpose to life in Cornwall.

:)

My thoughts on inappropriate underpants

Today I had the kids at home all day; they are both under six but talking.

It was one of those days when I try to avoid them as much as possible, even though I am their guardian. There is an age old principle in parenting, if they are crying, they are probably not dying, and this something I adhered to. But come about three I decided it would be good to at least give them one activity that didn't involve asking them to leave my office when there was an advert on whatever TV channel they were watching.



So I decided upon that stalwart, Victoria Park and associated Children's Playing Facilities



They got dressed up as a bunny and a dog, as often they do, and I knew that I needed to get changed.


And for that, I needed underpants.



My domestic assistant does my washing. It's not a sexist thing, it's not a lazy thing. I do my things, she does hers. One of hers is doing my washing. And I must say, apart from the occasional fabric over-softening, She can't be faulted. But today, for the first time since I hired her, I was out of underpants.


There weren't even any available dry "one dayers" that any right minded guy would resort to. It was not a conspiracy, it was a black hole of underpants caused by the collision of various domestic singularities. It was the Perfect Storm (welcome to the first ever use of a storm metaphor to represent a lack of underpants).


I had two impatient kids dressed as super-sized pets standing in the hallway and I has no underpants. But I had options. Until you're strapped to the nuke, you always have options.

• Go Bareback - I don't really like to do it. I don't know why. Its not just hygiene, there are chafing issues. There is the higher probability of "monkey tears" after the use of a urinal.
• Go To Marks and Spencers and get some - it's just down the road. But it would probably involve leaving the kids at home.
• Wear some of my wife's- I don't really have "transsexual" issues about this, I just don't like the idea of my wife wearing panties that I have worn. She is above that, in my mind.
  
• Wear Swimming Trunks - There they were, in my drawer. In the drawer sans underpants, a pair of swimming trunks that would make an ideal pair of pants. Bingo!

Off we went. It emerged as an issue in my head, after a quarter of a mile, that my McGivered underpants would, for the rest of the day, be a real-time dual-side scrotal garrotte, with each step.


I tried to persevere, but it was just a few steps later that I realised that each step would also be but a stage in an endless cycle of self-wedgifying. I had to go bareback. And I had to go bareback fast.

Bear Grills

I got out my ever-handy pocket Swiss Army Knife and cut the right side. I walked a few paces and cut the left side. That was that... I thought.


Even though there was a full collapse of underpant topology and morphology with those two cuts, the underpants would not budge. The fabric, 90% Nylon, 10% Elastic, grips like a goat on a bramble, and so there was not going to be any lateral sheer between my balls and this alien skin. No sir-eeeee, Bob.


I had to go in.


Both hands.


I want you to pause for a moment and imagine a man standing in the middle of a pavement accompanied by two young girls, dressed in a full-on bunny suit and dog suit, tails, ears the works, and this person has both of their hands in their trousers, to the forearms, and is "aggressively fidgeting".


I pulled and pulled the front side was free... then the back... it kind of fell like a flat jellyfish into the seam of my trousers and I thought rather than extract, I would leave... I had achieved my goal.... la liberte du lingeree.


I was done. Free!


My kids by now had run off. I closed my knife away and looked behind me. There, standing watching me, were four workmen working on the road.


There was a hiatus in my head. I raised my hands and shrugged and all I said, with an accompanying (I guess) dumb-looking smile, was , "There's nothing to say!" before I ran off after the two kids.... expecting at any moment to be gunnded down by a Black Ops Paedocopter.... To die a nonce with my makeshift pants slithered down my leg.

The Beerpiphany of St Carlsburg, Part Two: Avoidance of the Alcoholocaust

The mega-myriad readers of my blog will know that I have a problem with alcohol. I'm not an alckie, I'm not even a big drinker. But when I drink, whether I end up sober, or so drunk I bone a bollard, my hangovers are evil. Invariably I enter a state I term the alcoholocaust.



In case you didn't know, hangovers are rated on the the H:E ratio (Hangover:Ebola ratio). The relative proportion of the hangover has a psycho-phsyiologiocal equivalent to Stage 3 Ebola. As a point of reference, a 19 year old rugby playing Russian would typically have hangovers with an H:E of 1:480. When you have an average H:E of 2, things get pretty bad. That's basically half an Ebola; an experience that can change you, as a man, deep inside.

Here am I, 36, with an H:E of a 68 year old.

Two weeks ago I went for a casual drink with my wife. I hadn't drunk much, maybe four pints... certainly not six. The next day, for literally about three hours I thought I had at least Marburg, possibly full-on Ebola. I was haemmoraging bile from my nose, which, considering my wife is a vegetarian, isn't very nice. At all. I pretty much puked myself into a mobius strip... inside the latrine. It was hell. There is a scant dignity remaining in life when four pints can do that to you. This much, now, is clear.....

It gets worse...

In the week I'm out for a drink with my dad and Conan. I was sober, we all were sober, I had max four pints... the next day... gesus fricking cristos.... another bout of full scale gastro-meltdown....

Que pasa?
"Feels like Lassa"

It is 2008. I had to take action. I went into Boots in the wonderful City of Truro. I asked the pharmacist if he could help me out with some sort of pre-emptive hangover cure. Yes, yes he could, he said.... but he couldn't.... he only sold what The Hegemony wanted him to sell... and that was just Resolve.

Resolve is not a cure. It is an insult to the cause. I knew I needed to go deeper...

• I started researching, learning, understanding. I was becoming a sage of alcohol. But even with the vast power of the internet I found no cure for my kind of alcoholism: high hangover susceptibility.
• I went far into the neurophysiology of alcohol on synaptic-dysfucntion.
• I searched for the philosophers stone of beer.
• I saw, under electron microscopy, how the decompositionals of alcohol by the body's organs effect the same neuro-receptors as those effected in auto-nausaic reactions, ie, the two finger tonsil tango.
• I fed rats Chocolate Liqueurs for months and watched them get more and more sleepy and podgy.
• I even went into the matrix and saw the back-end code for drunkenness as sensation and behaviour.

From fermentation
To defecation
And urination
There was no part of the alcohol equation
That was not very much, in my acquaintion

Last night I found the answer.

I didn't find it by luck. This was not muttered to me by some crazy from the crazyhouse...no wiki gave me tell.... this was found... by investigation... meditation.... dedication... and insight....

There comes a time in a quest
When you must do what is best
When you must make, and take, the test
When you must stand beyond the rest

And the answer... this enlightenment I bring to you.... this extinguishing of the alocoholocauststic anguish.... is summed up in the Four Noble P's which much be practiced before alcohol induced sonoration kicks in. The Four Noble P's, these which I have discovered, are the right and clear path out of Alcoholocaust:

The Four Noble P's

1. Pint (of water)
2. Pizza (purchased/prepared previously)
3. Pint (of water)
4. Paracetemol.

Perfectimondo.... Sunday morning.... I get up.. I check myself... and ?

Ebola?
"No la!"
Feelin' good?
"I'm feelin' fine?"
What's the time?
"Ten past nine"
AM?
"Amen..."
Having fun?
"Going for a run..."











The Beerpiphany of St Carlsburg, part one, is on salted.net

Exhibition Review: Of All the People Of The World, Truro Catherdal

I have just come back from the "Of All the People Of The World" exhibition at the Truro Cathedral.

The idea is to use grains of rice to represent individuals and then make heaps of rice that represent various demographic, statistical or trivial facts as piles on the floor.

The biggest pile was for "People with HIV in Sub Saharan Africa". I guess it was about the size of a badger. Then there were smaller piles for things like "Number of people who have walked on the Moon" and the "Number of Visitors in Cornwall in 2007."

It was interesting, but I am not sure really what it was trying to represent as significant, and aesthetically it wasn't very rich.

Sure, there was the suggestion of "global causes, man", and it was a mind-catching portrayal of humanity as quantity, but I left with not much else. Importantly there was no mention of overpopulation as a problem: www.dropthepop.org

As a footnote, it was strangely comforting to know that there are not really THAT many child soldiers (a heap about the size of a ciabatta).

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Movie Review: The Nines

What is, or are, The Nines?

I'm fresh from this fantastic freak fest of a film, and I use that term not lightly. This film is a mesmerizing, if at times unpolished, masterpiece that not only intrigues right to the end, but at the end leaves you as if you have just done three Kaiser Sozes, two Matrix trilogies and half a dozen Monkeys.

It’s like one of the best quirky tales from 2000AD but made into a modern, well acted movie with great production. It has an unusually compelling style - and oodles of conceptual layers. But it’s complex and weird and hard to follow in a close to exhilarating way.

We just kept asking... "but?"... "how?" I think one of the brightest aspects of the movie is that it doesn't try to out weird you. So unlike, say, Eraserhead or Jacob’s Ladder (both great films, mind), there is always the chance that everything you see could be normal. And maybe, at the end it is all normal. Even with the revelation (I won’t spoil it by telling you what that is), even if you accepted it as this reality, even then, it could still be normality for all of us.

Q: Is it complex and weird like The Number 23?

A:No, the biggest part of The Number 23 is a number two.

I won’t tell you what The Nines is about, but I will tell you the nearest thing it reminds me of. My wife and I both will testify that my clothes (and of this weekend some soft toys) sometimes duplicate. Literally. As if someone has logged into reality, taken an unusual T-Shirt bought in a "London fashion sample sale" and then made an exact copy of it (except that one now has an oil stain that cannot be removed. I think it’s probably WD-40, so any tips appreciated). An exact copy. The same with a pair of brown trousers that I know, and would testify in a court of natural laws, that I only bought one pair of. No questions. I now have two pairs of them.

I think it also happens with socks, but my wife is sceptical of this.

Sure, the trousers and T shirt spontaneous duplications are mindboggling in the degree to which they render all notions of laundry normality.... abnormal, but it gets worse:

There have also been discoveries of soft toys that there were never, until recently, two of. One of the ontological clones was won five years ago by my dad in a raffle (probably Rotary) and could not possibly be duplicated (OK it’s possible. But I don’t think so). We have debated the possibilities. All of them, with a Doyleian keenness to the causal and material structures of our domestic reality that could allow this. Sure, perhaps the crazy lady across the road saw me wearing the shirt, spent four months on Ebay to get a copy, bought it with Paypal and slipped it in my smalls one spring morning. Maybe so. Maybe my brother in law, when he bought me the shirt, bought two, one for me and, knowing I'm a sharp dresser, one for him. And then at Easter three years ago accidentally left it in my house. Maybe....

It is rare in these days to have even the smallest of epiphanies.

Just as The Nines has lots of "buts", this crazy flux in our existential architectonics makes us have many more "maybes" than simple folk deserve. If you have objects disappear in your house, it can be weird. In English we call this "losing things". But when things don't vanish, rather they are duplicated... that’s mega weird... there is no word in any language for that kinda spooky. No word (ED, how about "isoanatanmorphic?", but that only applies to fruit.?).

These events, along with some before the little people came and took all my liberty away, have made me question the nature of reality at a very fundamental level, or at least, the nature of the material world.. and I guess I mean "material" in both senses here.

I wouldn't wish these kind of metaphysical palpitations on anyone, but luckily for you, you can experience even more weirdness than this by watching The Nines, without any actual weirdness in your clothing inventory. What is more, the weirdness The Nines can massage into your porridge is a kind of meaningful weirdness... a thought pumping weirdness... a metaphysical maelstrom... set conveniently in the Hollywood Film and TV world.

The Nines is in my Top Ten. That’s top ten of all time.

9/10 (duh!)

(Note: If there is a word for a review trying to represent what it describes, then I want that word to apply to this review).

January 2008 was Worst Month ever for Midcornwall.com Blog.

Its official, unless I rapidly post, like, 5 blog posts today, before the month is out, then this month will be the worst in terms of posting since the now WORLD FAMOUS Midcornwall.com Blog started way back when......

"When?"

"About 13 months ago..."

"OK"


I could provide many reasons why this month has been so lax, but only one of the following is true:

1. Being a practitioner of Dharma I felt that January 2008 was an auspicious time for quite refection both internally and online. I wanted people to come to the blog, and on seeing it hadn't been updated, pause for thought... and maybe in that moment of mental stasis... become mindful of what Mid Cornwall really means.
2. I have my Ipod touch, I'm totally in love with it, especially now its jailbroken so that it has these awesome games and apps, its quite a distraction from writing blog posts. I am even writing poems to it.
3. THE HEGEMONY have decided that my writing and analysis is too penetrative and too dangerous to allow this blog to continue. Thus, by clandestine decree, they have undertaken to silence me using state of the art EM Countermeasures that have rendered my home and much else of Zone 1 Truro really poor for communal WiFi access. (OI! Zaffiros, don't be so tight!! Free WIFI is Free Advertising!!)
   

Anyways.... excuses over.... I may write some more, and the only reason I'm writing now is because of the comments the the last post which, I must say, little in number though they were, were catalytic to this post :)


So... thanks for reading, I'll try to keep writing...


xxx
Mat

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