A song by Tim Minchin. A song about scale.
Thing is, when he sings,
This is my brain
And I live in it.
It’s made of love,
And bad song lyrics…
It’s hard for me not to think of this MRI image of, yes, my brain from October, 2011:
It’s not perfect (lord knows)… but it’s mine.
Made by leaning out our top-story mansard window. The middle of the 5e arrondissement in Paris, looking northwest up the Boulevard Saint-Germain. The thing about making black and white photos in Paris is, so many older buildings are still extant your image can be compared to classic images from the past.
Just in case it’s not obvious, all the header images are either by me, or of me. The woman shown across multiple headers is my beautiful, smart, and forbearing wife Ulrika (who also made many of the images of me).
At a pub called The Lincolnshire Poacher, in Nottingham, back in 2016.
This is the Churchill Globe. It’s 127 cm, or 50”, or 4ft 2in diameter. It’s priced at £57,500, which is almost $71,000 as I post this (and doesn’t even include sales tax).
It’s made by Bellerby & Co, Globemakers, a relatively recent bespoke firm. Not only do they make the globes, in many different sizes (though this is their largest), but they’ll customize them as you wish.
This post is mostly an expression of envy.
Wally: Do you mean you knew what was happening to us all the time?
Supreme Being: Well, of course. I am the Supreme Being. I’m not entirely dim…
— Time Bandits, 1981, script by Michael Palin and Terry Gilliam.
Usually misquoted by me as “completely dim.” Not sure why. Rhythm, perhaps?
Lexicon. This comes from a phonetic rendering of the word “Facebook” into Mandarin, and then translating the characters back into English.
Fēi sǐ bù kě
This is reminiscent of what Paul Linebarger (who also wrote science fiction as Cordwainer Smith) did during the Korean War:
While in Korea, Linebarger masterminded the surrender of thousands of Chinese troops who considered it shameful to give up their arms. He drafted leaflets explaining how the soldiers could surrender by shouting the Chinese words for ‘love,’ ‘duty,’ ‘humanity,’ and ‘virtue’–words that happened, when pronounced in that order, to sound like ‘I surrender’ in English. He considered this act to be the single most worthwhile thing he had done in his life.
Linebarger here is Paul Linebarger, the real name of Cordwainer Smith. The Chinese words mentioned are probably 爱责仁德, pronounced “ài zé rén dé,” a fair approximation of the English.
(Rooting around about him, I see Project Gutenberg has five works by Linebarger, one of which is a novella written under his Cordwainer Smith pseudonym, three of which are works about China, and the fifth is Psychological Warfare, the book that established the field.)
Lexicon for Ulrika and myself. This originally comes from the FAQ for the Usenet newsgroup alt.buddha.short.fat.guy, which has a number of amusing bits. This is by far the one we quote, though. Here’s the whole section:
3-4.
Hey, I heard a great Buddhist joke…
Yeah, we know. Let us tell it to you instead:
A zen student walks up to a hot dog vendor and says, “Make me one with everything.”
But we have a better ending:
The vendor then proceeds to throw the student to the ground and shove a Hebrew National, all-beef, kosher hot dog with Bob’s Own Zesty Vegetarian Chili into the student’s left nostril while screaming, “Do you know how many times I’ve heard that one?!?!”
The hot dog is enlightened.
From As Time Goes By, season 6, episode 1:
Jean: I just have a feeling.
Lionel: Not one of your more well-structured arguments.
The purpose of this post is two-fold: To bring some attention to a nice fusion tune.
Also, to test the YouTube block in WordPress’ fancy visual editor. Thus:
(After some experimentation, not all songs will embed in WordPress. Even when they work on Facebook. Is great frustration and puzzlement.)