agnieszka's garden

i had such a weird night last night. it was supposed to be one thing and turned into another; the whole evening contorted itself this way and that way and I was at the mercy of the rollercoaster. and it was cool.

Such a great surprise to be there for the girls' all-too-brief return. I'm afraid i didn't win quote of the evening with my lyrical 'I .. I recognise that bird....'

we like the sound of our own voices

i don't believe in god.

i thought that i'd better state that up front, so you at least know that the thought that just went through me, that I am about to write here does not come from any religious standpoint. i am not trying to rubbish your religion with mine. because i don't have one. we are biological machines; when we die, we die.

blogger.com's dashboard has a list of recently updated blogs. In any 10 minute period there are hundreds of people who've all updated their blog. Just now. Like me. In a sense we're all talking into the void. Which made me think of a lady kneeling at the alter saying her quiet prayers to no-one. Zoom out. The lady is not alone, a world full of people chanting their mantras. A chorus of outcries.

the origin of religion is the question why; the need to believe in a purpose, a meaning. Each religion is a solution to this question, an answer to believe in. The correctness of the answer itself is irrelevant, it's existence is all that matters. Belief and trust in this answer gives meaning and purpose.

Do we give meaning and purpose to our lives by writing about them? Immortality through google?

Are we all the new religion?

bagel shop

salmon & cream cheese from the brick lane bagel shop. mmm. hit me again.

Ergo-gnomic

The other day I read an article about how the japanese are a little hung up on height; taller is better. More sexy somehow. The article described a girl who had her legs purposely broken iand reset several times, each time positioning the broken bones a little way apart to encourage new bone to grow her a little taller. After 3 such operations she could expect to be 3-4 inches taller.

She should try being 6 foot 3 and sitting on the number 242 bus. I can only describe my sitting position as "splayed". That girl out of the obsession billboard (sophie dahl?) would be proud of how I sit right now. I am surely provocative and maybe I should be banned.

Maybe I should ask the girl sat next to me

today we have a guest blogger

my friend L will would like to say a few words
 
didn't know what blogging was until just now...not yet convinced...a hell of a lot more fun reading 'em than wiritng... 

*time passes*

L you've stalled. maybe it's time to pose the questions.. umm.. what's your netname?

what's the point of having a netname when I've got a nickname??
 
oh ok, is it a dodgy nickname? we like dodgy nicknames, they reveal more about people. sometimes really interesting despicable stuff that they probably want to keep secret....? 
  
this is bizarre....why are we talking through the keyboard when we're sitting next to each other on the same sofa???...because the other one is full of boxes...
 
erm .... you've got me. Maybe because the music is quite loud? and maybe because i'm trying to draw that piece of wisdom from you...... give it up!
 
we may be here some time....
 
viperx was on the not-much-wisdom-sofa with L, whose nickname was not revealed at any point, more's the pity...

champagne superhangover

urrrgh. today i feel sooo bad. the price to be paid for the moment when a relatively well-behaved friday night of social drinking turned into something worse - an night of drinking champagne... nonstop.
 
time is moving on fast. in 3 weeks i will have left work, and in 4 I will have moved out of my flat.  Then a week or two later, it's off to europe for a while. There's really no plan yet, but I know where I will start and where I want to go. The actual schedule just depends on how things turn out.  It's exciting to look forward to, and I need the change. But there's a certain amount of trepidation too - this isn't just a career break and a holiday; the travelling is not just physical, it's a mental journey too. And that journey is just as important; it will determine what is next.
 
A record just came on the radio that I haven't heard for years but it's a haunting favourite..beth orton's 'touch me with your love' - reminds me of an old girlfriend - good and bad memories mixed together like a raspberry ripple's swirls. or a chocolate bar filled with caramel. 
 
Indeed, as Homer wrote in the Ilyad*, 'mmm..... chocolate......'
 
* probably

city of angel

the lights shine in your eyes
somewhere beyond, electricity burns
the excitement within
the city ignites you

the night is so long
when you can't sleep
you turn and you turn
each minute a lifetime

does the boy become the man
when the day becomes the night
and the dead meet the living become the dead
and the city is lost from view

there was once a time for this place
a glove that fitted, the slipper of glass
now there are  skies that are darker
and we are too
 
the glittering sky looks  down
on the grassy bank
and the boy who became the man
who has slept too long

I need TP for my wormhole

once, when my maths teacher long ago tried to explain that you can do equations in N dimensions, without being able to visualise their curves, his analogy was to scale down, not up. Imagine the one dimensional universe, a line. We in the 3 dimensional universe, looking at the 2 dimensional graph paper can see the quadratic curve pass through the line at 2 distinct points. Yet it remains a curve. But to the wormlike inhabitants of the one dimensional line, they will forever see 2 distinct points.

sometimes i read science books, the one's about how the universe was formed and quantum theory and superstrings and i read about this experiment or that theory and quite often all i end up thinking is, "why are they looking for the complicated answer without considering the obvious".

like with quantum entanglement, which einstein famously described as a "spooky action"

essentially, this is when two very small pieces of matter interact for a bit then go their separate ways, but remain somehow fated together. So if you were to turn up with a paintbrush and paint one of the two red, the other one would simultaneously turn red - wherever it had got to by then in the universe.

ok, so i messed with the concept a bit there, but it is the instantaneousness of the change induced in the 2nd particle (when the first particle is changed somehow) that is the deeply strange thing. Possible consequences of this: the potential for information to be transferred faster than the speed of light (which would be contrary to the theory of relativity) and the fact that for once in the quantum world we can infer something about a particle without needing to observe it.

serious consequences, then. But why is it (seemingly) never considered that we are most likely studying a reflection, that we only have a partial view of the whole. It certainly makes more sense to me to consider ways in which these two entangled particles are nothing of the sort.. they are the same entity. A loop in a dimension we can never see. If this were true, no surprise that touching one 'particle' has consequences for the 'other'. And no need to throw away relativity, nor to break quantum theory either.

Just a new worldview to extend them into.

plus ca change

today we celebrate the fact that we will finally get some peace because margot is flying off to leave us forever (sniff...) to live in canada. apparently we all smell here in london, and anyway she always had a thing for bryan adams. at least you'll get a second chance to be rubbish at snowboarding now m :)

la & m - c u later for drinks, food and evening sunshine (no chance)

music to blog to...

goldfrapp - strict machine
franz ferdinand - jacqueline
lemon jelly - in the bath
fragile state - four-four-four
guns n roses - live and let die

the secret life of us

All great subversive underground movements have a code. It might be a dialect they invented themselves, it might be street slang or it might be secret symbols hidden or not noteworthy unless you know what you are looking for. To take a tame example .. to the initiated, warchalking symbols show you where you can hitch a free ride on someone else's wireless network.

Cool stuff, but too niche for my tastes. It's time for a great useful overground movement.

The sandwich shops around where I work are rubbish. And if they're not rubbish, they're overpriced. I guess it's par for the course in a big city full of the also-lunchings; supply < demand and all that. Thing is, some places are not rubbish. But we don't all know where they are. Sure, word of mouth might eventually reach you but why wait? Enter Warlunching. Get out your chalk and draw..

10
\ /
|| bloody good (10/10) open sandwich (no mayo)
/ \

7
\ /
|| not bad (7/10) open sandwich (encrusted)
/ \
ssid

10
/---\
| c | damn good curry
\---/
HOT

words look weird

you know when you look at a word and it looks wrong, weird, strange. You know it is spelled the same, but just this once it offends your eyes, seems out of place. You could have sworn it didn't look like that, wasn't spelled like that. but you know it is, so you shrug and move on. an example would be pointless; the word would look normal to you :)

on a grassy bank, an autumn chill, there's noone around and I meditate in the darkness. the occasional sound of a dog taking his owner for a walk or whichever way round these things happen. I look at the stars, just as many times before. And suddenly a great sense of height, a fear of falling. I truly sense the distance and I feel scared.

maybe these two things are the same - a brief vision of truth through a parting of the clouds of normality and comfort