gamboling.co.uk

I get up early. This is my morning.

Please switch to the 720p version of the video after you start playing. You’d imagine this would be a feature of WordPress but it isn’t… Because wordpress sucks. WordPress ignores the information that is trying to force the HD version to play. Insane. Grr.

We have a new chest of drawers. It has a deep drawer at the bottom and two medium height drawers on top of that. On the top level, there are two drawers side by side. Or to put it another way 5 drawers; 2 on the same level, then 3 one under another.

The top right hand drawer smelt of incense, Katherine could smell it keenly. I had opened the drawers so they wouldn’t stick and our house was already beginning to warm the wood up. Katherine had some lavender drawer liners stashed away to use for something – maybe this. She put the whole roll of draw liners in the incense drawer.

The chest is made of pine and has been quite badly painted white. But the bad painting makes it look interesting. There are places where you can almost see the wood through the paint. Places where you can see the brush strokes. Places that were just missed.

It has been knocked into and bumped about, and then it was painted, and then it has been injured again. You can tell. You can see where paint has been put on to cover a knock, and then you can see where paint has been chipped off.

Every drawer has a lock, but they’ve all been painted over. And we don’t have any keys for it.

A bloke came to help us carry it into the house. He smelt of smoke, it didn’t look like it was his incense. He asked us if we’d had a nice Christmas.

I have recently finished the current series of my internet radio show. It was broadcast every Sunday for around 2 hours. When I started the project, I decided that there would be a controlling theme. I include only songs that start with a certain letter. What I didn’t realise, which must count as one of the most stupid things imaginable, is that using the alphabet meant that there would also be a natural end.

The discipline of having to find good and interesting songs starting with certain letters is actually pretty helpful to the creative process. It helps in that it makes it impossible to throw something together, you have to invest the time in the selection or people can see right away that you’ve missed obvious things. I still miss obvious songs, sometimes on purpose, and sometimes because I sadly don’t have perfect recall of every song – but of course everyone remembers their own favourite songs.

But having the constraint also adds the prospect of an end. Of course in theory I could go around again, with all of the letters, there are certainly enough songs on some of the letters (although two more hours on Q might be a stretch even for my music collection). But simply repeating oneself is, of course, less creatively interesting.

I was thinking about how having an obvious end was a real problem just when I happened to be having dinner with Christine and Mr C from Sidepodcast (where the comments for my radio show are hosted). They had recently made a big shift with their podcast to help them pursue other creative challenges (among other reasons). While it would seem that Formula One has end points in the form of seasons, the sport just keeps creating news even in the off season. The point is that you don’t get to set and control the constraint. They suggested that in fact having a natural end where people expected things to end might be an advantage rather than a disadvantage.

As I reached the end of my current run I got to think about the things that have worked well, and the things that have been less successful. The parts that the audience have enjoyed and the parts that I have enjoyed. It’s an interesting mix. On the S show, for example, there were so many fantastic songs that I snuck in a special show so that I could get in all of the songs that I needed. On the Q show it was hard work to find the music. However, on these harder shows I get to play more of the songs that I really enjoy playing. I really love playing songs that I think people will like but haven’t heard before. On the really popular letters I often feel pressure to drop those songs in favour of the classics. Also some people regularly feel that there are more songs that they wish they could hear, where others want me to talk more between the songs.

The interesting question, as I was thinking about all of this, is how do you think about that kind of thing with a blog? Blogs often, by their nature, have no set plan or pattern. This one certainly doesn’t. I started thinking that maybe it should… Then I started thinking about how that would work… And then I stopped.

One of the great advantages of blogging is that it removes many of the barriers to starting. When you are writing a book, for example, you can get caught up in the planning stage very easily. You get stuck in the bit I call “colouring in the revision timetable”. It’s very easy to end up spending far too much time colouring in your revision timetable, putting exactly the right balance of hours for each subject in to the grid. Then you realise that you have spent so much time doing the timetable that you’ve eaten into a whole chunk of the revision time, so you really need to redo the revision timetable. This pathology can get so bad that you begin to realise that you really are running out of time, so you now know that you have to get the revision timetable absolutely right or you will never get anywhere. You wouldn’t do something as foolish as that of course. I mean until you get that iPad, its valid that you haven’t done any blogging because its worth having the right tools for the job… In fact it’s easy to see that until you find that right theme in WordPress, you can’t really write anything.

We all do these things, of course we do. And one of the beauties of the blog is that it can be your low friction publishing place.

So I think a plan, which means knowing when to stop, can help you start. But sometimes it can stop you from starting. It’s important to know when to do which.

Imagine you are standing out in the countryside on a wonderful beautiful day. You are standing by a field of corn (or maize depending on how you look at things). The heads of corn wave in the breeze. Isn’t it lovely to get back to nature? Except what is natural about the scene? Man created this situation – corn can’t self propagate. It didn’t exist until man bred it into being a foodstuff. And it can’t now survive without us. It has helped our population grow. It’s in almost everything (including a can of Coke). And if it disappeared overnight we wouldn’t be able to support our population. We created something that we now depend on.

Let’s leave that field in the countryside and head to ancient Greece. Socrates is upset by the modern kids of today.

Why do children waste all of their time today playing dice and writing poetry?

Everybody, and I mean everybody, forever, has been pessimistic about the next generation and everybody, and I mean everybody, forgets that what is man-made would have seemed totally unnatural to previous generations. People want things to return to, “how they always were”, when what they usually mean is, “return to how they fleetingly were when I was young”.

It’s a fools errand to predict the future, but I’m optimistic. The more the world connects the more the it understands. The more the world connects the more educated people get and that can only help.

Lots of people are scared about the next generation of technologies. Will artificial technology take over and rule us? What about genetically modified food? Well, if you didn’t know that corn was man-made by breeding and essentially is not natural (it is the way it is for our benefit, making it so has made it sterile), then maybe we need to learn more about it rather than just being scared of it?

What do you think people are scared of now, but which soon will feel perfectly natural?

There must be something in the way that I look that encourages people to come and ask me for directions. I’m not sure if it’s the way I dress or something in my general demeanour but I get asked for directions a lot.

This isn’t even limited to the country in which I live. I am just as likely to be asked for directions in foreign countries where I clearly don’t even speak the language. I do often have a map on me though, and I would assume that this is why I am asked, or rather I would if it weren’t for all the other map wielding tourists that never seem to get asked. Maybe it is because I have a map but I don’t appear to need it?

Whatever the reason, it often creates interesting moments in my life. Somebody the other day happened to ask me to direct them to a road that no longer exists – an interesting metaphysical question that one. I listened out for the unmistakable Tardis landing noise just in case I was dealing with the Doctor in a new incarnation (female and possibly Brazilian at a guess).

While in Italy this year, Katherine and I went to the island Capri. We were going to have lunch in the town so we looked up some recommended places while on the ferry and decided we would explore the town in such a way as to head past each of them. So we established a kind of circular route which did involve some backing up on itself. Now while on holiday of course, or in fact pretty much anywhere, Katherine likes to take a lot of photos. While on holiday, however, things are a little easier for me because I generally use this time to read more of the guide book. I do this mainly because I know how much Katherine enjoys me explaining everything about everything we are seeing [ahem – Ed.] and I like to swot up.

There we were on Capri, Katherine taking pictures across the sea, and me leafing through the guide book when suddenly I heard some words, “Where you wanna go? I tell you.” I looked around but there was nobody there, I looked again and there was a quite small elderly lady down near my elbow gesturing toward my guide book. She said it again, “Where you wanna go? I tell you.”

Of course we knew where we wanted to go really, but I tried to be polite and so I mentioned the name of the restaurant. She then insisted on being shown the map, it seemed now that the only English she knew was, “Where you wanna go? I tell you.” Sadly she could not make out the map so she vaguely pointed us in the direction we had already been planning to take, I thanked her and then some time later when Katherine had finished taking her pictures we headed off.

After walking past the restaurant we had to kind of turn back before we could head towards the next restaurant, but I didn’t really want to walk past the lady because I worried that she might think that we hadn’t found the place that we had been looking for. I decided to head up a different route, one that looked like it would probably work but that I didn’t quite remember from the map. A few minutes later Katherine found another spot to take a photo from and I took the opportunity to take a look at the map. Suddenly I heard at my elbow, “Where you wanna go? I tell you.”

It was the same woman, she showed no sign of recognising us from our earlier encounter. I told her the name of the next restaurant on our list, she again wanted to see the map, which she still couldn’t see and then she pointed in the right direction.

For the rest of our time on Capri I was slightly fearful of opening my map, but she never did come back. But we did discover a new phrase to use whenever anyone gets out a map.

Park in it, man. How old is that joke? It has probably existed since the fifties. Space culture and science fiction have been influencing us for such a long time that it’s hard to conceive of life without the promise of the future. In recent years it has seemed to fade into the distance a bit, but has it faded, or have we just forgotten how futuristic our lives actually are?

Lots of people ask the question, “If this is the future then where is my jet pack?”. But while flying cars and jet packs are all very well in theory, they aren’t really terribly practical. Even if the technology worked perfectly, people never seem to consider the practical concerns. What would you think when, having bought a quiet place in the country – away from any busy roads, you suddenly realise that your house is, as the crow and now every other bugger flies, the quickest way from A to B. So do we build lanes up in the air? Why is this better than what we have now? At least if your car breaks down mid-journey you don’t drop to the ground like a stone. If you are at this point thinking, “Hello, I said jet pack not flying car!”, then you are only allowed to hold this argument if you regularly ride a motorbike.

Consider auto-focus on cameras. This was, at one point, considered one of the most complicated things to achieve – now it is ubiquitous. Handwriting recognition is pretty much there now, just late enough for most people to have realised that handwriting was never such a good system in the first place. Speech is pretty close now as well. I am writing this article by tapping my fingers on a solid piece of glass. If that’s not from the future, then I don’t know what is. How long ago did Graham Bell say that he could outlandishly predict that one day every town would have a telephone? How many telephones are there on this train with me?

When we looked at the future in the 1950s we predicted: auto-focus, handwriting recognition, speech synthesis and recognition, artificial intelligence and we imagined they would be in machines that would do our dishes for us and vacuum for us. We have dishwashers now, we have little machines that will do the hoovering for us, will mow our lawn for us. People don’t like to call them robots just as they don’t consider artificial intelligence to be working in their camera when it artificially decides what it thinks you want to focus on.*

Next year IBM are going to complete the next of their big projects. These big projects were made famous with “Deep Blue” the computer that beat Gary Kasparov at chess. The current project will pit a computer against humans playing Jeopardy (the US game show). It will answer questions that involve understanding categories of things, word play and puns and will do it faster than the best players of the game – if it works. An amazing step when it happens. Of course when the same technology is in your computer a few years later it becomes known as just another computer program.

We don’t notice the things that are happening by degrees. We look back and see times like the 1850s when so much seemed to happen in just a few short years and marvel. How could we go from the invention of these devices to their widespread adoption in such a short space of time? We assume that people living in the 1850s must have been amazed, but I have a different view. Mobile telephones are only around 30 years old and their adoption is far wider than technologies like the train and the car (in the first 30 years). And yet we are all pretty blasé about our mobile phones. I once heard somebody using a mobile phone on an aeroplane that was flying in the sky above America. They were calling Europe and complaining about the poor reception. We come so far and yet what is brilliant about us humans, and endearingly frustrating about us too, is that we are never really satisfied. This is why anyone who thinks we will ever arrive in the future is wrong. We’ll always long for the next version, next time it’s going to be awesome.

Open the iPod bay doors HAL.

*For those reading who think that it is less artificial intelligence and more artificial sight there is a difference. Making a device like the eye that can be set to focus based on instructions from a brain is like a manual focus camera. It is the brain that says, I want to focus on this bit. Cameras use all sorts of tricks (the artificial intelligence) to determine which bit of the image in front of it is foreground and background and then which of the several bits of foreground is most likely to be the one you want to focus on.

I have some strange dreams, most people seem to. Except when I talk to people about them, my dreams seem to be at least a bit different. Mine are often complete stories, I mean sometimes I have ethereal dreams like this:

I go to bed, Katherine is to follow me up. Pete and her are downstairs watching tv. I fall asleep upstairs, Katherine falls asleep before making it up to bed. I’m woken by a knock at the door. It’s Pete carrying a still sleeping Katherine. He says, “she was talking in her sleep. I wrote down what she said, in case it was important, on her face”. And sure enough very delicately written on her face were several notes that I couldn’t make out.

That dream doesn’t really seem to have a point, which makes it like most dreams that people describe to me. But that’s a kind of rare dream for me. I normally dream in something approaching full stories or movie pitch ideas. For example the other night I dreamt this:

Emma Thomson is a giantess, she is around 12 foot tall. She is otherwise a normal person, this isn’t science fiction. Being so tall has taken its toll on her physically, society has taken its toll on her emotionally. She’s so self-conscious, the only time she goes outside is for her physiotherapy sessions. She spends time at home, online, where she falls in love with a man on the internet who now wants to meet her. She is worried, and is scared to let him see her. Meanwhile at her physiotherapy office, her doctor is retiring and is going to be replaced by Jim Carey. Emma isn’t sure but she thinks Jim actually likes her. When he asks her on a date she freaks out and has a panic attack but eventually allows him to take her out. When home she feels guilty – has she betrayed the internet guy?

But Emma knows that when she was alone she reached out to meet John on the internet. She needed something. And he provided it, and he had been very sweet tonight. She hardly knew Jim really, but there was something magical about him. Something so exciting. Maybe she needed somebody who would take her outside, somebody like Jim, that would take her out of her shell. But really… Really… It has to be one thing at a time. John was exciting enough a development in Emma’s life. She turns to her computer and finds that he’s still up. He’s staying in a local hotel. She asks him to meet her in the bar. And despite herself she goes.

So yes. My dreams are a bit weird. I mean that would be a pretty bizarre movie as so much of it would be happening off screen in Emma’s head and on the internet. But that’s the way I dream pretty much. Most nights. Complete stories just like that. As Katherine often says about one of my terrible puns, at least I amuse myself.

Once, while having my ticket inspected on a train, the guard looked at the book I was reading and said, “Oh, you’re reading that. My brother read that once – hated it”.

The book in question was “How to read a film” by James Monaco, a book which talks about not just what makes up the shot you are looking at, but also where it’s come from, how they did it, and most importantly what they were thinking when they did it. I don’t mean, “what they were thinking” like this – “ooh, after we get Cleese and Cruise to climb this cliff, I’m definately going to eat that cheese sandwich I saw on the craft cart. I hope Cruz hasn’t snaffled it.” No, not thoughts like that, although I would certainly read a book like that [Note to self: write book like that.]

No. Instead it’s things that you don’t notice in films until they go wrong. Watch a bad movie, a movie that just somehow nebulously feels bad. Why is it bad? Part of it is bad writing, part of it is bad acting, bad music, bad lighting. But often if you can’t put your finger on it – it’s bad direction. Directors don’t just tell actors their motivation and tell somebody to point a camera in their general direction – they frame the movie for you. And there is a language to it.

Think of a novel, sometimes you can hear the author’s voice really loudly, they might have a distinctive style of their own. Sometimes the author gets the hell out of the way, something that’s really hard to do but very effective. Sometimes you can hear the gears grinding as they struggle to…

…find…

…pace.

The same thing happens with direction. It’s the combination of the director of photography’s choices, the editors choices, and the director giving them enough options to work with. There’s a language that’s been built up. Two characters (mid two person shot, waist up, push camera towards), one speaks (cut to close up face, push towards) “We can do this.”, other responds (same shot on the other), “It’s a deal.” (slam cut to hands shaking, slam cut to legs walking away, slam cut to long shot with the two full body). You’ve seen it so many times before. It’s surprising now when you don’t see it. It’s the language. Or it is? They didn’t use slam cuts before Kubrick and this book was about how this language emerged. Yeah, remember that book, the one the ticket inspector recognised.

“Your brother didn’t like it? It’s great.”
“Oh he liked the book, he just found he couldn’t watch films properly any more. He couldn’t enjoy them once he kept seeing how it all worked.”
“Ah, shouldn’t be a problem for me, I’ve always seen the joins, I just felt I couldn’t admire them until I understood them.”

Many years ago I came into possession of a signed picture of Terry Farrell. Terry played a character in the Star Trek series Deep Space Nine. I had actually interviewed her on the telephone earlier that year and asked her such probing questions as, “What’s your favourite drink?”. It was Diet Coke, for reference.

But now I had this picture that clearly needed protecting. The best way to do that would be to frame it. But I had a problem, it was already 9 o’clock at night. What to do… Well actually it wasn’t that much of a problem, I lived right in central London. Zone 1 baby! Round the corner from my place was a 24-hour framers. Man, they have everything in London.

I headed out. And then I learned that the 24 hours represents how long the framing would take rather than the opening times. Honestly! Don’t they realise that people need things framing round the clock? We don’t want to wait!

An archive article at long last, we haven’t seen one of those in a while ironically. In these articles I take a look back at a thing from gamboling of yesteryear – this time Auto Antonyms.

Why different species can’t mate – https://gamboling.co.uk/2006/08/28/why-different-species-cant-mate/