saxo, glue and rock and roll

bits of last night keep coming back. I went to a club with 5 levels (different music each floor) near the charles bridge, but it was rubbish and I only stayed an hour I think. On by far the most popular floor they were playing really bad mid-nineties dance. Think of The Outhere Brothers and you'll get the picture. Bit of a shame there was almost nothing going on on the goth floor because it had a cool look - cages and manacles everywhere. Everything in black, naturally.

The other thing I remember was looking for a cab at 3am in Wenceslas Street (i refuse to call it a square, since it's not) and getting hassled by this girl. "Saxo Me!" she demanded. I'm pretty sure she meant she wanted me to pay her to fornicate rather than be driven around in a Citroen, but whatever rings your bell I guess.

hungover today. my eyes feel like lead weights, and my eyelids feel like someone took a gluestick to them during the night and glued them to my eyeball. It seems harder to blink, somehow.

sunday morning and prague centre is thankfully very quiet though. I am employing 'measures' to return to health. So far this has entailed :-

1. A freezing cold shower, although technically this measure was not part of the plan, it was just that the hostel had no hot water :(
2. Using up my SECOND TO LAST berocca :( ... things are getting desperate...
3. Two orange juices so far in this net cafe


anyway, today I am planning to do nothing except watch Leeds v Wigan at 2pm, and chill out and read.

a party political broadcast on behalf of honesty and integrity

"i don't do this often but it's" .... a political post.

this post is for the attention of the idle american browser. Maybe there will be one :) It is also for the british but not until next June. It is a request.

The request is both simple and phrased as 2 sets of questions:

1. is it responsible to vote without being educated about the facts about ALL of the issues surrounding an election? Do you question where you obtain your facts? Do you ever search out media outlets you would never normally access in search of a better grasp of all angles on issues relating to such an important event?

2. what are the consequences of re-electing any government that has lied to it's electorate, and which relies on spin / fear / religious rhetoric to drive elements of it's support, rather than substantial content or policies?

These issues apply to the UK and the US today. In the UK there is a lack of opposition. In the US there is a lack of media scrutiny and the corporation and 'special interests' hold a disturbing grip on the political parties. It would be too easy to re-elect the liars. Is this how democracy should be?

I thoroughly apologise to the american travellers I have met here on my eastern europe travels, who are all sick to death of agreeing with people here that things look different from outside the US

time out

don't feel 100% today at all. decided to go and see a movie. I was hoping that I'd get to see Team America: World Police but it doesn't seem to be on here yet :(

Instead the latest film out here is Sky Captain: The World of Tomorrow with Jude Law, Gwyneth Paltrow and Angeline Jolie. It's very strange. It's kind of a cross between (in order, sort-of) all of the following:
Dark City
Metropolis
eXistenZ
Moonraker
with a definite homage to Star Wars in there too. I liked it, but in reality it's just indiana jones with a cool new look. never really been a Gwyneth fan but she looks hot in this. Angelina reprises Lara but with a crapper outfit :(

When it first started I thought there was going to be a whole ('hey, look how things might have been if the nazi's had won') feel to things with the Hindenberg airship and the German dialog but this dispersed so I guess it was just stylistic.

Anyway, go see - if only for the strange and heady mix of visuals!

the others

for two days now, prague has been submerged in mist. Not fog, but it's misty enough to make city panorama photos completely pointless.

Anyway it was misty and I thought of Nicole...

I don't often think of Nicole Kidman, at least not in public, but it was her role in 'The Others' that sprang to mind. The old house, set in acres of land surrounded by woodland. A pea soup fog in the woodland: the edge of the haunted zone.

Scale up and here you have a lot of old houses surrounded by 'fog'. Please god, nicole *must* be here somewhere.... :)

blight(y)ed

man, prague is full of english people. and it's only wednesday. there are shitloads of people here, all tourists, many of them english. I dread the weekend that approaches because the english that are here do not appear to be the stag party crews. I fully expect to see a few of those on the weekend.

had quite a nice train journey today (albeit sloooow) from Wroclaw to Praha. The only intercity train of the day just had to go at 07.42. Surprisingly I am still awake (it's just gone midnight here in the hostel). The hostel is called Sir Toby. Apparently Mr Box has been drug-running out here and they were quite grateful. Lots of other things are named in honour aswell. The bar. The toilets. Anyway, kept that one quiet, eh Tob?

So I've left the blondynkas behind (sob), but never mind because instead of those rubbish blondynkas (just joking ladies) we have damn fine czech beer (star, pilsner urquell, budvar) at 50p a pint and even finer brunetki. who no doubt all hate the english tourists. damn, i wish i spoke italian. well, apart from the obligatory 'ciaooo, bella!' :) :)

john peel RIP

there will be many tributes. Mine is only that I hope I have that much vigour and energy and relevance when I am in my 60s.

vanity fair

Hmm, I need a haircut. I'm a little bit scared of going though - all the polish guys I see have number 1 cuts. If the worst happens, there won't be any pictures taken in prague. yes I am that vain :)

train of thought

What is speed?

On a train from krakow to wroclaw, it is about 120kph. kilometres per hour. So it is distance travelled within a fixed amount of time. Easy.

But on this train I was trying desperately to tune-out the very very $#%$ing loud German woman to my right who managed to blather on annoyingly for the whole 4 and a half hour trip, so it got metaphysical. And the ipod was deployed. And I fantasized about delivering an elbow to her face to shut her up. That bad.

Bring on the metaphysical goo.

Time slows down when things travel very close to the speed of light. So says einstein anyway. The idea being that if you (and your watch, and your atomic clock) 'experienced' 1 hour of time as you chugged along from Wakefield to Leeds in the number 110 bus at close to light speed, by the time you got into Leeds everyone in Leeds would have experienced several years of time. Some people you were going to meet for a burger might have gone home by then in disgust at your tardiness.

Which means the speed at which we experience time can vary. Those people in Leeds were able to do 3 years worth of stuff in the period demarcated by 2 events, my bus setting off from Wakefield and arriving in Leeds. Conversely, whilst on the bus I was only able to do 1 hour of stuff between those events. This is kind of weird...

I like to think of time as the 4th dimension, with an axis just like x, y and z from maths class at school. call it 'e'. I was going to call it 't', but I think it works better as an 'event axis'. You can mark on the axis the event of the bus leaving Wakefield, and the bus arriving in Leeds. Who knows what the scale is on the axis; it doesn't matter: the fundamental thing is that both I and those people in Leeds agree that my arrival in Leeds comes after my departure from Wakefield. Linear event sequence is a axiomatic property of linear time. We can also agree on when they occur, because we can define those events in terms of a rendezvous. But I experienced less time between the events than my friends in Leeds. From their perspective, I have been able to traverse 3 years worth of event separation in 1 hour.

Acceleration

So maybe time is the speed at which we travel on the event axis between events. I travelled faster, in Leeds they travelled slower. Travelling at the speed of light allowed me to accelerate on the e-axis for a while?

Observer and Observed

Another way to look at it is as a property of me, the observer. If I can move between events faster, maybe I am just 'sampling' the world at a slower rate. Like a film, my perception of motion-through-event-space ('time') depends on how fast I am shown the individual frames. If something changes so I am shown the frames faster, or maybe shown fewer frames in total, then time would appear to speed up. On the other hand, if I am shown the frames slower (but there are still fewer frames in total) then time might appear (to me) to progress as normal. I would perceive it the same as if I was shown twice as many frames at twice the speed.

Interaction

So maybe the passage of time is a product of an interaction between entities. An actor entity with potential to 'do stuff' given the opportunity, and spacetime to provide the medium. The two interact and the actor perceives the passage of time. If the properties/circumstances of either party in the interaction change, then the interaction itself will probably change.

Stuff

This suggests that spacetime is stuff to be interacted with. This makes sense to me. The idea that gravity and electromagnetics are surreal 'forces' that just work in the absence of a medium has never made sense. It's just not stuff in the normal sense; we don't know how to touch it....

Capacity

If passage of time is an interaction, it changes spacetime and observer. An interaction which does not affect both parties is no interaction at all. Just as moving (in the traditional sense) is a similar interaction (empty space becomes filled, filled space becomes empty). Is there an upper limit on the rate at which interactions can occur? If so, maybe at the speed of light there are so many 'movement interactions' taking place, there is little capacity for 'time interactions'. So less time can 'happen' at that speed...?

The wheels turn backwards

The TV shows my journey. Through the train window you can just make me out, as it travels through the pine forest. The camera pulls back a little. The train forages on, wheels turning. But what's this? - they are turning slowly backwards. A child watching the show asks her mother why the wheels turn backwards. She learns it is because the film can only capture frames tens of times a second and the wheels' rotation have a similar frequency. The observer's limitations exposed.


p.s. if u think i need help, then check out the next link. I found this after I had finished writing - decided to google... found this!.
this one seems a bit more sensible

a polyphonic spree

dammit, I'm buying too much. My backpack is getting harder to pack, and it weighs more. And worse - I'm haunted with clothing dilemmas: my favourite jeans have developed a seam split at the groin [..what can I say %) %)..].

anyway, the jeans are (just about) repairable, but they are 4 years old and I should just throw them away. But I can't. Not quite yet. So I just bought some more. This in addition to the t-shirt from zakopane (saw the mountain, ate the cheese, bought the t-shirt...), the warm jumper from warsaw and the CDs from krakow.

damn these capitalist swines trying to sell me things. successfully :(

tranzendenz

i love the mountains. the awe-inspiring snow-topped rocky peaks on the skyline. the lush alpine forest. and usually the snow.

not today though. today in zakopane, it is 2 months before the ski season will start and at the top of the cable cars and chairlifts (those that are operating), there is only grass. and sheep. the tinkling bells around their necks is the only sound on this day without wind, and beautiful sunshine. and hardly any other people on the mountainside, perhaps a virtue of arriving on wednesday at this weekend retreat.

The sense of peace is incredible. I took a few photos in a vain bid to capture something, probably a futile effort. The serenity cruelly interrupted by an SMS from Mum telling me of serious looking letters from my accountant :( bad timing mum...

I'm back in the basecamp of Zakopane now, a mountain town with the usual billabong and mcdonalds amongst the pretty restaurants and markets. Weirdly, the first thing I thought when I stepped off the funicular that had brought me back down to earth was 'I could murder fish and chips with curry sauce'. Maybe I miss England more than I thought....

radio polska

I was missing my music so the ipod has seen plenty of use today; and I did something else - I installed radio.blog (http://www.radioblogclub.com), so if you access the blog from http://notoftenin.edburcher.com you get a nice bit of music to listen to while you read. Funky hey?

the sunshine state

I am sitting outside bar "alchemia" in the bohemian kazimierz quarter of krakow. the sun is out; it feels great. I have a beer and something to read, and nowhere I need to be. stay a while..

It's nice here; across the street, in middle of plac Nowa, is a quiet market. A hyena laugh from the polish blonde with the group on the next table. If l was Murray, l'd have put headphones on by now...

it almost feels like summer. except the girls are wearing too much... :)

Polska

through the drain in the street
emerges a sound; the blondynkas pass by
or go down a dark stair
in the club, ecstasy; the sound I heard before

By day the clock chimes; a bustling square
high opulent spires meet low smokey cafes
in a narrow side alley, a model poses at sunset
soon night will be cold

her look is dry, unimpressed; but I need a ticket
speak louder? no difference :)
her look says, 'speak my language, not yours'
if only her language was not imposzszible

her look all smiles, and I feel silly;
I pronounce it all wrong, these Zs and more Zs
But when Zywiec is juh-vee-ets
it's still a lost cause; maybe another will help... %)

alone in kyoto

it's been a strange day.

going to a concentration camp is never easy. today it was auschwitz / birkenau around the polish town of Oswiecim - 70km west of krakow. Birkenau (auschwitz II) is worse. Possibly because it is mostly gone - a desert of barbed wire and fences, but few buildings. And a pond that is reputedly cloudy only because of the human ashes that still pollute it.

As last time (Dachau), the experience is distressing. In a quiet part of the destitute birkenau landscape, walking back towards the bus up a very long path (one of the things that really hits home is the size of the birkenau camp, compared to both dachau and the first auschwitz camp) I had a lot of thoughts. All of them depressing

History Repeating

First I was glad that I heard several american voices that day. Yeah, of course they're as whiny and annoying as normal :) But they had come to see. And that can only be good; Mr Bush, come and see. Any camp where citizens are held without charge is a step on the Auschwitz ladder. Come and see - and destroy Guatanemo forever.

Alone in Kyoto

The other thought was more circumstantial; I read the other day that airline fuel is a very major contributor to greenhouse gases and global warming. I felt a little guilty, for being a tourist and making it a little worse. At the death camp, I was reflecting on why I was there. Why anyone was. You don't want to feel like a tourist of death, so you need a reason to be there. All I could come up with was that I wanted to see for myself the depths of the horror. This seemed quite selfish to me. If everyone did so, the amount of jet fuel expended would be massive. In years to come (it's already happening...) the oil prices will rise, as less and less is available. Cheap flights will be gone. Such a trip will be a luxury. So I pledge to give back a little of what I can in exchange for the privilege. To always make sure that the people around me are aware... educated of this. It must never happen again.

apologies for the bleak nature of this post

ZZZambuca!

man, I am tired today. up early to fight it out with the masses for a seat on the train to krakow.

had a great last night in poznan with aggie & anya. I might post some of the photos if I find a net cafe with a flash card reader. *EDIT*: The photos are here!

aggie revealed she hates sambuca ("it makes me sick further than I can see") and anya had never tried it. so of course there was only one thing to do. athough aggie had tequila. wuss!

but they still never taught me any polish swear words. cholera!

everyone has a share

probably noone will understand, much less care, but for what it's worth - the blog can now be syndicated/aggregated via the following syndication feeds:

an RSS 2.0 feed provided by feedburner.com
the Atom feed provided as standard by Blogger

For those with P800 or P900 phones I recommend doHeadlines. For J2ME/MIDP2.0 devices you can use Feedburner's own J2ME Midlet although it seems to crash a lot for me. This might be because the P800 doesn't fully support MIDP2.0. P900 does though.

FYI RSS/Atom are XML 'syndication formats'. Meaning that a machine-readable digest of the posts is created. Software exists for PCs, Phones and Palmtops to periodically download the latest syndication XML. Because XML is machine readable, the software is easily able to determine whether there are any new articles available. Typically one adds feeds from multiple websites to the feed reader software and so the software is able to present a digest page of all new articles (across all feeds). The idea being to save you having to visit each website individually when in fact nothing might have changed since last you visited

feedburner.com is a free service. It's good for providing RSS 1.0 / 2.0 feeds of Blogger.com blogs because Atom (the Blogger-provided syndication format) is relatively new and a lot of Readers do not yet support it.

chcialbym zamienic bilet!

Arrived in Poznan today. I was supposed to be going to Krakow but things changed last night. I am meeting Aggie later on; it will be like a Poet reunion, except without the porno toilets :)

The Polish I used at the train station to swap the train ticket (written down, haven't got a clue how you say it!) is the title of the post. It means: 'I'd like to change my ticket'. That is, unless Agnieszka was winding me up and it actually means 'I love to kiss lettuce' or something. Anyway, we both know lettuce is a distant second to oh-so-lovely polish cabbage :)

about turn

sometimes i am too calm for my own good. perversely, as people know, sometimes i am too stressed for my own good. a happy medium would be nice.

29 years of crossing the road where people drive on the left is not good preparation for the zebra crossings of poland. I nearly got run over yesterday; I looked right instead of left and didn't hear the car coming the other way. But for the screech of the brakes I might not have looked at all.

When I did, I remember thinking calm as you like: 'oh, a car'. I took a step back. I was no more than a metre from the pavement anyway. The car slewed slightly, then realised he or she had a big space to drive into, stopped braking, and went past. Then I crossed the road, avoiding eye contact with the middle-aged lady who was on the island and starting across towards me.

I can think of a couple of other occasions I have escaped. The tumble dryer. Tottenham Court Road. But i think I still have 6 lives left. After all, your life is supposed to flash before you eyes, isn't it? It hasn't yet.

Must look left. Must look left. Must look left.

the importance of being earnest

I don't do this often but it's a tech post.

I've just spent 2 hours wondering why I couldn't access my noddy servlet. I even threw out Tomcat declaring it a 'pile of utter @$%$' and went back to old favourite Jetty albeit the newest version - Jetty 5. Still no luck.

It turns out I've been out of the game too long, it's been a few years since I wrote a servlet from scratch. But here is the answer proving once again that tech blogs are a wonderful thing.

it works now 8)

blogsurfing

he can't be that stupid, can he? from electablog
fiddling with gmail.google.com from the blog of doug
happy happy joy joy from 9 is not a valid option

perverted politics

bear with me on this one, i've got a number of things i need to introduce here before it will make sense

the (financial) times we live in
I was reading the FT the other day. Amongst the commentary and the letters page were Americans who were eloquent and sage about the negative effect their present leaders are having on the world, and their own image. that the road to national security is not through guns but by building ideological bridges; to make it less likely that the west is something to be hated. to not be a bully. It remains a shame, I sat there thinking, that more american citizens are not enlightened enough to see this. The fact that the polls in the us elections are even close is testament to how ignorant some of them are. it is not particularly even their fault - have you seen fox news recently? at least when we looked at Goebbel's output in school history class, we knew it was nazi propaganda. do some americans even know that some of their news channels pump them full of propaganda daily?

depression
I got depressed. When the corporation rules both the airwaves and the policymakers (through inducements / party funding), is there any hope for the masses to really have a chance to make up their own minds?

baltic breasts
In Riga and Tallinn some pubs have TV's. Not special, but in my experience pubs with an idle TV will either have it:
- showing 'background sport'
- showing 'background music' - usually MTV
- off
Noticeably, the pubs I mention were showing 'Fashion TV'. Fashion TV is a lot of breasts and legs set to music. It actually works shockingly well in a pub environment, although it can kill conversation completely :) So much so, that on a Thursday night, James and I were having a beer in PuPu lounge, Riga and ALL of the people on stools at the bar were transfixed by fashion tv. Mind you, they did have it on a big screen :)

1+1=2
I know what we can do; propaganda wars. But we don't need to start a news network - fashionTV shows us the way. screening a few fashion shows and playing music is cheap tv. Propaganda wars are never pretty, but perhaps (courtesy of yamila diaz rahi) this offering can be.
Premise: media propaganda works
Premise: sex sells
Solution: Think fashionTV crossed with Bloomberg crossed with Michael Moore. The models and the music remain. The bloomberg ticker scrolls across pumping you full of accurate propaganda, moore-style. Those guys and girls in PuPu lounge and wherever else are still transfixed by legs and breasts and the latest outfits, but once in a while they might take in some of the home truths scrolling across the bottom of their screen.

Campaign slogan
"you don't want bush, instead have a brazilian...."

i'll get me coat

drinking in the shadows

i went to sopot yesterday; part of the tricity (gdansk/sopot/gdynia), sopot is the polish version of brighton I guess. It has a pier, a nice street full of cafes and a burgeoning nightlife. As darkness fell, there were noticeably more people around and the place looked set to be injected with more excitement after it's afternoon lazy slumber.

but it never happened.

sure, if i'd have been around at 1am I fully expect that the beach-front clubs would have been packed, but I was unusually knackered and left early. but even before that, the restaurants and bars were mostly empty. It took me a while to work out what was going on: the streets were busy, people seemed to be out. But where were they going?

the answer is simple. In poland it is legal & normal to drink bottles and cans in public. People just go to the off-licence and buy their own. The dark stretches of seafront were packed with groups of people in great big warm jackets drinking cans from their plastic bags.

it seems strange to me. why freeze your nuts off in the cold windy evening when some of the bars around sopot are pretty cool? I guess it's a bit more expensive to go to the bar, but a pint is only 6 zlotys (1 pound) so it's still pretty cheap. And you can hear each other outside, but not all bars are too loud.

in the end maybe they just like drinking in the dark

music to blog to (eastern europe edition)

1. dragostea din tei - o-zone
2. the other one that goes dooba dooba yey
3. er that other one
4. hmmm

this post may get updated when i find out what they're called.....

the dawn chorus

something must have happened here, long ago.

there are no birds. except for pigeons which most definitely do not count. the birds all left. they were probably very confused and had a collective headache. made extinct here by the introduction of a disruptive foreign species.

no cane toads here, but night and day they are heard everywhere. a chirp or a longer wailing song, they never sleep, and never leave.

tame, they take an owner and become strongly loyal. and here it is where the problem starts. their owners become attached; paranoid someone will spirit their pet away. the creature feels the same. they wail if it even looks possible.

it had to happen. there are so many of them, it's classic foxes and rabbits. the rise of the fox population causes the fall of the rabbits'. the birds have gone. behold the dominant species: the car

a car with a proximity alarm can be set to chirp or fully go off at the mere presence of someone nearby. vilnius loves them. i do not.

reminders of self

i found this passage in a freebie magazine here in vilnius

This woman must have followed me for ages. I saw her reflection in the window of the flower shop. I felt that I was being observed and I turned around. She looked straight into my eyes, which was almost indecent. I removed my eyes and slowly walked away.

It was a summer evening when nobody was in a hurry: near-nude young girls glided through the streets, the smell of expensive perfume and rolls lingered in the air; somebody was reading a book or was kissing on the bench. At first, I was walking slowly, then, when I noticed the woman, I hastened the pace. She was very pretty and this aroused suspicion in me. I chose a strange route but the charming pursuer didn't lag behind. Having left one bistro, I started running. She rushed after me.

I was running as fast as I could till I finally stopped to regain my breath. We were near my home. I stepped inside and closed the door behind me leaving her outside.

Paying no attention to her expensive skirt, a weird stranger settled herself on the pavement, right across from my windows. We spent all night looking at each other. In the morning, I grew impatient and decided to talk to her.

Unfortunately the woman was gone. I just found a note with a telephone number on it. Full of curiosity, I dialled the number. At the other end of the line I heard an answering machine: "You're a complete idiot. Instead of talking to a real woman, you're listening to digital mocks". Later I called again. The same voice said: "You're funny. All night long you were running away from what you're looking for right now"

I called again and again and listened to interesting things. At the end of the month I had to cover an enormous telephone bill. I never saw the strange woman again.

I realized that I am a very silly person.