Guess who just got back today, um, yesterday?

And just like that, Unkie Dave was home.

Yes indeed, for early yesterday afternoon I experienced the Release portion of my latest encounter with the medical profession's Catch and Release programme, being deposited once again upon the streets of Dublin with a glint in my eye and a swagger in my step, and curiously enough after watching the last two episodes of Season Four of 'The Wire' last night, I no longer feel as though my life is as miserable as I did twenty-four hours previously.

Its all about perspective.

According to the Kübler-Ross model of grief I appear to have landed firmly in the fifth and final stage, Acceptance, but if you ask me I haven't spent nearly half enough time on Anger, and will no doubt be making a concerted effort to return to it at some stage in the not-too-distant future.

In the meantime I will continue to console myself with the contents of an emergency care package sent to me by my sister after one of the previous hospital internments, the rather tasty Biscuiteers' First Aid Kit, containing an array of biscuits helpfully shaped like medical implements and surgical accoutrements, just in case I had forgotten for one moment the trauma of recent months.

Which I hadn't.

and all of it will happen again

Stop me if you've heard this one before. A man goes to see his doctor about a pain in his abdomen, the doctor says, "hmm, let's get you admitted to hospital for tests". The tests come back and the doctor says to the man, "Sir, it appears you have pancreatitis"

Ba-dum-tish! Thank you ladies and gentlemen, I'll be here all night.

What, you don't think that's funny? Neither did I at 11am this morning.

"Excuse me sir," I said to my surgeon, "but I must have misheard you. It sounded like you said that I 'have pancreatitis', present tense, as opposed to 'had pancreatitis', past tense. You know, the pancreatitis that I had for three months of agonising pain that was finally and absolutely 99.99% cured by the major surgery that you yourself performed on me just over eight weeks ago. That pancreatitis."

"No," he said, "not that pancreatitis, that was in the base of your pancreas. This is in the head of your pancreas. This is a completely new pancreatitis."

Yay!

So, what does this all mean? Basically everything that can be done medically to treat and prevent pancreatitis including major surgery has been done, and I still got a second attack four months after the first, all of which is very, very unusual. There is still no explanation for any of it, and on the basis of when you eliminate the impossible whatever remains must be the truth, we're getting close to deciding that I was stung by a scorpion or two sometime in February. There is nothing more that can be done at this stage, and I can look forward to a long life ahead of multiple painful episodes occurring with unfortunate regularity. All that we can do is figure out an appropriate pain regime to deal with them when they happen.

Double-plus Yay!

As Professor Farnsworth would say, "Good news, everyone!"

All of this has happened before... (let's not finish this sentence)

Guess where Unkie Dave is right now. Go on, take a minute or two and see just how good your powers of logical deduction and/or innate luck are.

If you said "In a far and distant land enjoying strange and exotic adventures", you would be wrong.

If you said "Sitting comfortably at home deciding which target to round his steely gaze of bile upon next"' well, you would also be wrong.

But if you said "In hospital, again", the balloons and confetti would be streaming down from the ceiling as the Dixieland band in the corner struck up a rousing rendition of "When the Saints Come In". Rush out now and immediately play the Lottery, you are on fire tonight.

I've been in a fair bit of pain for the last few days and as it happened I had a scheduled check-up with my surgeon today, this being the seven week anniversary of my last discharge from hospital. I told him about the pain, he had a bit of a poke and a prod and said, "right, we better get you admitted", which I was not expecting.

It's more a precautionary thing than anything else, it was the easiest way to get a CT scan (my seventh of the year so far) arranged at short notice, and hopefully I won't be here too long. But I've said that before, a few times.

More than the pain, more than the discomfort of being hooked up to wires and tubes again, more than the sleepless nights of yet another hospital stay, what upsets me the most is the fact that something that was "99% almost definitely cured" seven weeks ago is now within the space of a few days suddenly a very real possibility again.

Which sucks.

On the other hand maybe I should play the Lottery tonight, with odds like that in my system who knows, it could be me.

All in your head (or 'The Ironing and the Ecstasy')

Just under two years ago I went far into the Arctic Circle, to the Svalbard Archipelago, for a few days of hiking, kayaking and other general outdoorsy stuff. One particularly memorable day involved an open sea kayak across water so cold that I didn't need to worry about drowning in it (I'd freeze to death long before I drowned. Yay!) followed by a hike up the 1000 meter-high Hiortmountain. A hundred meters or so from the end of our climb I had to stop and couldn't go any further. The slope of the mountain was rising at a 60 degree angle, covered in loose sharply pointed scree, and at that time of year was basically on the snow-line. As I started to climb over the rocks a strange thing started to happen, the angles of the loose rocks combined with the alternating dark and white patches caused by snowfall created a powerful strobing effect as I looked at them, triggering a rapid and deeply painful migraine. Ignoring the decidedly un-existential threat of polar bears I sat on the side of the mountain as my companions headed for the top, took some pain-killers and waited for it all to pass.

This was not the first instance of a landscape triggering a migraine. Earlier that same year I arrived in Monaco by train at the fantastic Gare de Monaco underground station (along with the Oceanographic Museum possibly the best thing about Monaco). The platform is buried deep within the side of the cliff and curves around sharply so that the start of the platform cannot be seen from the end. The ceiling is curved like most underground stations, but unusually is covered in horizontal slats of wood. As I walked down the platform the rows of curving parallel lines started strobing and we spent our first hour in Monaco looking for a pharmacy to get some pain killers.

While I am prone to migraines, not all are accompanied by overwhelming pain. Frequently I will simply get a strobing effect in the corner of my eye, seeing ghost-images of black and white geometric patterns in my peripheral vision which gradually increase in size until I experience a form of tunnel vision surrounded entirely by cross-hatching. I will feel woozy and light-headed, but not in any actual pain. While this effect can occur spontaneously, lately I have noticed that it tends to happen with alarming regularity as I iron two or three of my shirts, the type of shirts a PR person would advise me not to wear on TV because the stripes don't play nice with the cameras.

Since this seems to happen with some frequency, that the interplay of light and dark geometric shapes, parallel lines and/or sharp angles all seem to be able to trigger a physical response in me, I assumed that there was a biological and/or neurological explanation for this; I was, however, honestly surprised to find one in recent readings on the subject of our earliest truly human ancestors.

In his exploration of the motivation for and meaning of Paleolithic art, like that found in the caves of Lascaux, David Lewis-Williams examines the geometric flashes that I have experienced:

"...geometric visual precepts that include dots, grids, zigzags, nested catenary curves, and meandering lines. Because these precepts are 'wired' into the human nervous system, all people, no matter what their cultural background, have the potential to experience them. They flicker, scintillate, expand, contract, and combine with one another; the types are less rigid than this list suggests. Importantly they are independent of an exterior light source. They can be experienced with the eyes open or closed; with open eyes they are projected onto and partly obliterate visual perceptions of an environment... This particular precept is associated with migraine attacks and is therefore well-known to sufferers from that condition." - David Lewis-Williams, 'The Mind in the Cave', p126

Lewis-Williams refers to these geometric illusions as 'entopic phenomena', from the Greek for 'within vision', for they take place between the eye and the brain. In fact they seem to be hardwired into the human nervous system itself:

"It has been found that the patterns of connections between the retina and the striate cortex are (known as V1) and of neuronal circuits within the striate cortex determined their geometric form. Simply put, there is a spatial relationship between the retina and the visual cortex: points that are close together on the retina lead to the firing of comparably placed neurons in the cortex. When this process is reversed, as following the ingestion of psychotropic substances, the pattern in the cortex is perceived as a visual precept. In other words, people in this condition are seeing the structure of their own brains." - David Lewis-Williams, 'The Mind in the Cave', p127

In his novel 'Blindsight' Peter Watts explores many psychological oddities, amongst them a race of vampires imagined as an early hominid predator whose 'crucifix glitch', a genetically hard-coded aversion to right angles, only became a lethal hindrance once their prey became civilized, as a character in the novel states, "How many intersecting right angles do you see in nature?".

While fiction, it is not as far-fetched as it sounds (the triggered mental effects of constructed geometric shapes, not the vampire bit). Geometric shapes are not that common in nature, and yet are common to Paleolithic art across the globe. While many have argued that these are representative of images seen in psychotropic trances, it has also been argued that their depiction on cave walls were used to induce these trances, overwhelming the neurons between the retina and the visual cortex with visual stimuli that trigger Lewis-Williams' entopic phenomena. Once in this state the mind can be induced into even deeper neurological states where full-blown visual hallucinations are triggered, and many explanations for the origins of religion use these hallucinatory states as their starting points.

When Feuerbach argued that god was merely the projection of our own internal nature, he couldn't have known how close to the biological truth he was, and this use of angles and lines to indice a religious experience is not confined to our neolithic ancestors; one only has to think of the geometric patterns of Islamic religious art or the Christian cross used as an object of mediative devotion across the globe to see that Watts' vampires might not be the only hominid with a 'crucifix glitch'.

It could then be argued that as civilization advanced and the artificiality of the environment in which we dwelled increased, our susceptibility to religious experiences increased rather than decreased, as our mind reeled from constant exposure to geometric shapes. Or perhaps less harmfully, the low-level trancelike state induced by an urban environment stimulated the mind to make subconscious leaps of understanding. Thus the city itself has literally rewired the human psyche on a neurological level, the city created us as much as we created it.

All of which goes a long way to explaining how as I sat on the side of an Arctic mountain, once the exploding pain inside my head had been brought under control by the finest of modern pharmaceuticals, I experienced a calm and serenity that belied the precarious nature of the situation, and why ironing a shirt in the morning is perhaps the closest thing to a religious experience I will ever enjoy.

Photos
Top: Hiortmountain, Svalbard, September 2009
Upper Middle: My shirt, this morning
Lower Middle: Lascaux II, Vallée de Vézère, May 2010
Bottom: la Sagrada Família, Barcelona, June 2005

Links
The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art by David Lewis-Williams
Blindsight by Peter Watts

Upstart at Ignite

Speaking of unemployed architects (do try to keep up), Ignite have posted a number of videos from their lecture series at the Science Gallery back in June, and included are the UpStart folks giving a short overview on the project. Keep an eye out during their slide show for the map of poster locations, if it looks familiar that's because its made up (substantially, but not entirely) of my Flickr set and accompanying geodata.

UpStart were in touch a while ago to say that they are in the process of organising an exhibition of the posters that survived the election campaign more or less intact. Look out for it later on in the summer, when I know more myself I'll post about it.

You snooze, you lose

One of the disadvantages of recovering from a major illness is that you are recovering.

That means that while you may think that because all the wires and tubes are removed you are operating at or near peak efficiency, the reality of the situation makes itself very evident every now and then and forces you back to bed for an afternoon nap, or an evening nap, or possibly even a pre-bedtime nap. If you are really lucky then all three can hit you at once and you end up writing off most of the weekend.

This weekend I was very lucky.

Weakness and exhaustion forced me to miss out on all manner of excitements this weekend, from the inflating of a seven metre-high Aidan Walsh accompanied by Penny-Farthing bikes on a tightrope above Temple Bar Square on Friday to the anti-IMF march on Saturday, with festival fundraising gigs and friends' housewarmings in between for good measure, all of which I slept through. I did make it to a friend's gig in the Concert Hall on Friday night (all 60 minutes of it, followed by an immediate return to sleep), and enjoyed a visit to the Unkie Dave household on Saturday evening by Phnom Penh's latest bluegrass sensation Mr Alex (though I slept through at least half of it), but this weekend is more notable for the cornucopia of events missed than anything that actually transpired.

In a valiant attempt to rectify this cavalcade of sloth The Very Understanding Girlfriend and I ventured forth into town yesterday afternoon in search of adventure, excitement and possibly also exciting adventure, or at least the reasonable facsimile thereof that can comfortably be found of a Sunday afternoon. In addition to The Very Understanding Girlfriend pointing out the rather excellent 'They Are Us' piece by Maser (above) which somehow I had failed to notice before, followed by a casual stroll down to Cow's Lane just in time to miss the end of an outdoor screening of Alice In Wonderland, and an enjoyable hour spent in the Chester Beatty Library at their Matisse exhibition, something else that we stumbled across made me pause for thought.

NAMAlab!

Located on Cope Street, just behind the Central Bank, this project brings together academic, student and graduate architects in an attempt to catalog exactly how much of the city has fallen into NAMA's hands and, by extension, should be in the public domain, and to ignite a conversation about what to do with these properties by offering a series of alternative uses, both provocative and constructive.

Based at the Dublin School of Architecture, DIT, the group has launched a manifesto for the architects of this brave new post-Tiger world:

To make the spatial reality of NAMA transparent to the Public
To present information in order to stimulate debate for a broader social change in Ireland
To look beyond the economic value of NAMA's assets
To design alternative propositions for these sites that will benefit society
To declare that architecture can no longer be a slave to short term speculation

Radical architecture, with a mission - fantastic! While its a pity that it took the complete collapse of an overheated property market and the subsequent closure or downsizing of a sizeable majority of architecture firms in the country to encourage architects to sit up, think about the physical nation they were building and try to engage with the collective consciousness of the citizenry, the project concept stopped me in my tracks and had me peering through the windows like a giddy child outside a wonka-sized sweet shop.

NAMALab at Cope Street is a combination of exhibitions showcasing alternative uses for properties acquired by NAMA, walking tours of the current NAMA portfolio, discussions, workshops and lectures meant to provoke and inspire and get people thinking about ways that physical space can regenerate the city.

Apparently.

I say 'apparently' because this was Sunday, and it all ended on Saturday. While I was sleeping.

Poo.

You see, the lesson here is that despite my frequent castigations of this city for being a deep dark pool of despair that sucks in all the life and joy of its inhabitants and spits out nothing but a toxic miasma of recalcitrance and antipathy, the fact is that actions and events of wonder and positivity occur with alarming frequency, both spontaneously and carefully nursemaided by people who have a genuine love for the city, or at the very least a fervent belief that it can be better than it is.

All I need to do is not spend my days sleeping through it all.

Links
Made In Temple Bar - festival running through to July 24th
The Art Books of Henri Matisse - until 25th September at the Chester Beatty
NAMALab - they are planning a Symposium in October

[PAUSE]

As I've mentioned before, in fact quite recently, I try not to post anything here on Booming Back that isn't original Unkie Dave material. I may quote or reference external or offline material occasionally, but it is as a complement to what I write rather than the bulk of any post. The internets are full of reposts, from the journalistic freebooters at Huffpost to the blatant blaggards at BoingBoing, with every manner of scurvy scraper and content-thieving corsair in between. The last thing the world needs is another "I just read this and wanted to share" site.

So a year ago I set up a new "I just read this and wanted to share" site.

*ahem*

During long spells of underemployment I have been reading, quite a lot at times, and by reading I mean real reading, of books made of paper that sit uncomfortably on sagging shelves, drawn down from what Nassim Nicholas Taleb calls, in reference to Umberto Eco, an anti-library, that collection of books that you have yet to read and remind you constantly of how ignorant you are. My anti-library grows faster on my walls than any extra time liberated by missed deadlines, postponed projects or extended hospital stays can compensate for, but that doesn't mean I stop trying to catch up with it and overtake it, or at the least wrestle it to a stalemate.

And as I read, sometimes a passage will strike me and I say, "I must write that down and remember it", then get embarrassed if I'm not sure whether I said it out loud or not.

This is what [PAUSE] is, my other site, a place where I have taken a moment or two to write down something in my offline reading that I want to come back to at a later stage and explore further. This being the internets it also has some pretty pictures, and at least they are original Unkie Dave material even if the words that accompany them aren't. There's not a huge amount there, I average about two posts a month which speaks volumes about the glacial speed of my reading over the last year, but if you are bored someday and have a particular desire to see whose writings have been stoking my recent wrath and ire, you now have a place to go.

Get a brew on

Speaking of tea, which we were, I was delighted to find Mr Scruff's own 'Make Us a Brew' tea for sale in Down To Earth, the health food shop on George's Street. Anyone who has been to a Mr Scruff gig recently will have seen his tea stall sitting in some corner of the darkened room supplying tasty hot beverages to all and sundry.

In addition to being rather tasty his tea is all 100% organic, most are fairtrade certified, the packaging is recycled and the tea-bags are chlorine-free and compostable. Its difficult to see how they could be any more of a guilt-free pleasure without collapsing under the weight of full-on smug-Hippy-ness.

If you aren't in Dublin, you can find a full list of tea-merchants at his tea website, where you can also buy some his fine brews online. And if you are unfamiliar with the lyrical stylings of Mr Scruff you could do worse than take a moment to listen to the track below:

double-plus Goog

I am a dinosaur. Not because of my weak, enfeebled and barely manipulative arms nor the furtive look that passes over my eyes as I stalk the last morsel of food on someone else's plate, ready to snatch it away the moment they are distracted by, let's say, someone squawking and bellowing while rising aggressively from their chair, fanning their napkins around their ears like an improvised neck-frill (which may or may not have happened in Dali's of Blackrock last night). Nope, I am a dinosaur because of my apparently outmoded and outdated attitudes towards online privacy, attitudes which at any moment will be swept away by an asteroid of Social Sharing if our online masters were to have their way.

The latest extinction level event to come hurtling my way is the Orwellian sounding Google Plus, or Google+ as it is apparently written by those whose lives are lived too fast to bother with typing out words. Google+ is the latest in a growing line of attempts by the search giant to create a social network and cash in on all that internet money that is to be made by interposing one's self between two or more people trying to communicate directly with each other. And unlike Google's previous attempts at social media like Dodgeball, Jaiku, Buzz or Wave, Google+ will almost definitely revolutionize the way an internet company interposes itself between you and your friends, and will almost certainly do so in a way that is less creepy and intrusive than Facebook.

Yup, almost definitely.

Learning almost nothing from my disastrous experiences with Buzz, I happily accepted the proffered invitation and spent the next two hours running around the internets trying to undo all the damage this simple act had done. It may help the sense of dramatic tension here to mentally picture me waving napkin neck-frills and squawking loudly while standing on my desk.

To be fair to Google, they have learned a little from the great Buzz fiasco of 2010. As you create your account they only suggest folks from your gmail contacts to be your friends, rather then automatically spamming everyone with your latest drunken bar photo of a cat/house/slice-of-toast that looks like a European dictator. As you probably know by now (if you read about the internets) with Google+ you have a high degree of control over who you share things with, placing contacts into different groups called Circles, and deciding with each post which Circle to share things with; I thought it made sense to create nine Circles, ranging from Limbo, Lust and Gluttony through to Fraud and Treachery, but had difficulty assigning my contacts to only one Circle at a time.

There are other features of Google+, like multi-user video chat and suggested RSS feeds, but the service that most people will use is the basic "I can't believe its not Facebook/Twitter/MySpace/Friendster/etc/etc" of status-updates and shared items that Google+ calls your Stream, and the key selling point here is that each item/update you share is only seen by those people in the Circle you've chosen to share it with.

So far so good, and Google seems have addressed some of the privacy concerns people had not only about their own disastrous launch of Buzz but also with the service Google+ is mainly meant to compete with, Facebook. The trouble is, and you only discover this after you've signed up, Google has drunk the "everybody on the internets must use their real name" Kool-Aid and is forcing it down the throats of everyone who wants to use their new service.

Google+ is based around your Google Profile, a public "about me" product that has been around for a few years tied to various Google services. The original idea was to find a way to index individuals in their search results, ie if someone was to search for you the first result would be your Google profile, then followed by whatever else the organic search results pulled up. If, like me, your first Google product was Gmail and you signed up to it using your real name, then your Profile would have also listed your real name by default, but at launch Profile allowed you to use a nickname (like "Unkie Dave") instead rather than your full name. Soon, however, it restricted you to using your real name only, but allowed you to just display your first name, and now finally it is only allowing you to use your full name which must be publicly displayed. Signing up to Google+ changes your Profile across almost all Google products that you may use, so for example my Picasaweb albums, linked to this blog, instantly started broadcasting my full name, and according to some reports this change will be extended soon to all Google products, including Blogger.

Yes, the simple retort is that nobody is forcing me to use these services, I can always stop using them or take my online business elsewhere, but I have too many years invested in some of these products and too much data stored with them to make such a migration easy. And that is what Google is counting on.

So the next few hours after signing up to Google+ were spent trying to figure out how to remove my real name from everywhere it was now appearing. Google helpfully suggests that if you have privacy concerns over this new policy, you can set up a new Google account with a new first and last name, and migrate all the services that you don't want associated with your real name to that new account. The other way, which I opted for, is to change the name on your Profile, which affects all Google products including Gmail, and then (assuming you still want your gmail to be sent from your real name) under 'Accounts and Import' in your Gmail settings you can edit the 'Send Mail As' settings to make your real name as the default setting. So now, hopefully, all my Google products except Gmail list Unkie Dave as their happy owner, and my clients are firewalled from my online wrath and ire.

This is where I feel at my most Jurassic, the fact that I still use a pseudonym while blogging, and would like to continue to do so, thank you very much. I came of age on the internets back in the early 1990s, and the concept of online anonymity is something that runs deep in my veins. I don't like the idea of my every thought and rant being instantly available to my clients, future employers, officers of the law and other ne'er-do-wells. I have many friends who are teachers and academics and feel the same about their students having too much access to their online lives.

But it seems that as each new wave of 'openness' and 'transparency' is forced upon us, the cries of the outraged grow quieter and quieter, and I am left with the inevitable conclusion that the majority of web-users simply don't care about online privacy. For those who only encountered the internets in the age of Web 2.0 (ie anyone under the age of 20 or over the age of 50) it would seem that there is no distinction between their online and offline lives, they have always used a public internet where the new badge of honour is how much of your life you can broadcast to complete strangers.

Since hierarchical society first emerged governments have tried to gather as much information about the citizenry as possible, telling us that those with nothing to hide have nothing to fear, and these attempts have been fought tooth and nail by individuals and civil liberties groups of all colours and creeds. And yet in the space of ten years Western society has been reshaped by the online technologies and services that we use to the extent that we collectively post and upload more information about our private lives and thoughts than even the most oppressive police state of the last millennium could only dream about capturing.

The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world to add him as their Friend.

*sigh*

And on that note, I have a few invites for Google+ if anybody wants one. The service only works for folks with an @gmail.com or @googlemail.com email address at the moment, and a low prioritization of personal privacy. Give me a shout if that sounds like you.

Better than a double rainbow

Dolphins!

In Dublin!

Yes, dolphins!

Additional statements with exclamation marks!

On Sunday night The Very Understanding Girlfriend had the amazing experience of seeing some dolphins at night off White Rock Beach in Killiney, something normally most unusual but apparently a pod of up to three dolphins have taken up summer residence there. This evening we decided to head back out there to see if I would be lucky enough to see them as well, and just as we were about to head home we caught sight of one rising almost vertically out of the water. For the next thirty minutes we saw at least two appearing and disappearing under the waves, just at the limits of my zoom lens.

Click on the images above to greatly embiggen, and there are a few more photos here, mostly of fins and tails, but once you know that its a dolphin that you're looking at its all pretty self-explanatory.

Dolphins!

Feed me weird things

In which our hero learns that a waist is a terrible thing to mind...

Friday saw us pass two significant milestones here in the Unkie Dave household, the first being that it was a full calendar month since I was discharged from hospital, the longest single period that I have been out of hospital since March 10th (Yay!) and the second being the six-week anniversary of my surgery (double-plus Yay!).

Being a manager at heart I find it almost impossible to mark any anniversary of significance without comparing my progress against some notional targets and/or key performance indicators, however an extended illness tends to lower your expectational horizons somewhat; gone are the lofty goals of 'Change The World For The Better', 'Create Something That Will Last The Ages' or even 'Make Them All Pay For The Humiliations They So Casually Rained Down Upon Me', to be replaced with the somewhat less Herculean 'be in slightly less pain', 'move bowels regularly' and my current favourite, 'put on a bit more weight'.

On this last I can report some not insignificant progress. When I came out of hospital a month ago I weighed 60.9 kilos (about 9.6 stone or 134 pounds), and after just over four weeks of Hansel and Gretel-style enbiggening I can now proudly report that I weigh in at the truly gargantuan 63.5 Kilos (10 stone, or 140 pounds on the nose). This is still not great for someone who is 6' tall, but just inside the lower level of a healthy BMI.

The trouble is, however, that it is not going on in the most even of proportions. I've put on just enough weight on my face to stop old people nervously challenging me to a game of chess when they see me shuffling towards them, but I still find trousers with a 30" waist too big for me, sliding comically down my legs as I walk along and exposing my underwear to the world like a hippity-hop young person. The surgery left me with a seven-inch horizontal scar across my abdomen, about halfway between my rib-change and my navel, curved downwards asymmetrically leaving my torso with a permanent acerbic frown. Scar-tissue doesn't grow, so as I have put on weight the flesh above and below the wound has inflated around the scar, leaving me looking like a deformed balloon animal made be someone who has never set eyes upon an actual animal, nor who has even a passing familiarity with balloons as an artistic medium.

I'm meeting with a physiotherapist this week to try and develop an exercise program that will herd the weight around to where it is most needed, but in the meantime I am left ruminating upon the various reactions of people to my new found super-svelteness. Last week I met up with a number of former work-colleagues, most of whom hadn't seen me in about eighteen months. As I walked in to meet them, their first reaction was "wow, you look amazing, have you been working out?". This threw me, and I think I stammered back, "um, no, I look like poo, I've been in hospital for three months in intense pain", which quickly silenced the table. Yes, I can be a bit of a mood-dampener, but at least I didn't lift my shirt and say it with an acerbic frown-scar.

The reaction from my family and friends has been altogether different, with concern quickly replaced by the need to stuff me, foie-gras like, with as much food as possible. Cake, biscuits, fried-food and lunches-a-plenty have all been offered up, and received with genuine gratitude, and this weekend I wandered from one food encounter with friends to another like a munching mendicant on a high-calorie Camino de Santiago. All-in-all a good time was had by all, especially me.

The reaction of my former colleagues was not callous, rather in the absence of any information about the cause of my weight-loss they defaulted to the societal-norm of weight-loss being a good thing and assumed that it was intentional or, at the very least, desired. My friends and family, knowing what I have been through, are more comfortable saying, "you look better than you did last week, but here, have another chocolate cake".

This will all work out fine in the end as long as I figure out how to send that extra cake to my arms, legs and other areas where it is needed most, and stop the warlords of my abdomen from hijacking it and adding it to their growing stockpile of purloined and sequestered calories.

Seriously, how can putting on weight be so complicated?

Fit to print?

There are two things that I don't like doing here at Booming Back, the first is simply reposting a video, image or article taken from somewhere else and using that as the basis of my own post, and the second is commenting on a unfolding event before the dust has settled, all the facts are known and enough information is available to start making an informed analysis as opposed to snap judgements. As you can expect from well-worn literary conventions, I am now going to break both of these guidelines.

It cannot have escaped anyone's notice in the UK and Ireland that there is a bit of a kerfuffle going on in the British media. A major Murdoch-owned newspaper with strong links to the Tory Party and Prime Minister has been caught doing really unpleasant and intrusive things involving murdered children, soldiers and the victims of terrorist bombings. Phones and computers have been hacked and a sizable number of serving police officers have been bribed in the process. To protect a single person an entire newspaper has been shut down, which also allows for any and all evidence of these activities held by that newspaper to be legally destroyed before any investigators can get their hands on it.

If you are not sure of the full details thus far, I strongly recommend you watch this interview with Nick Davies, Guardian journalist and authour of the fantastic expose of the underbelly of British news journalism, "Flat Earth News", and the man who broke this News of the World hacking story (also available on the Guardian site here):


Angry yet?

News comes this morning of the arrest of Andy Coulson, Cameron's former Communications Chief and editor of The News of the World at the time that some of the hacking incidents are alleged to have taken place. Cameron has been very slow to investigate any of the allegations, or make any move that could be seen as threatening Murdoch's media hegemony. In this case he seems to have definitely put the business interests of a global corporate empire above those of individual citizens whose privacy has been violated in truly horrific ways.

Cameron's connections to the shadowy world of global media don't end at the doorstep of News International though, also part of the inner circle of Cameron advisors is Steve Hilton, his Director of Strategy and godfather to his eldest son (and the 'inspiration' for the Stewart Pearson character in "The Thick of It"). Hilton's wife, and former chief of staff to Cameron's predecessor as Tory Party leader Michael Howard, is Rachel Whetstone. Whetstone is currently Vice President of Global PR for Google. The person charged by Google with defending their privacy policies on the global stage is at the very heart of Cameron's new Tory revival.

Concerned yet?

As the politicians like to say, let me be perfectly clear, I do not believe that there is a global conspiracy of shadowy figures pulling the strings of the world economy with governments bowing down to do their bidding. There doesn't have to be, we have Capitalism, no conspiracy is necessary. The interests of the Corporations are the interests of the Governments, over and above those of the citizenry, and there is no attempt to mask this, even the Bilderberg group takes happy media-friendly nature walks out in the open now. The business of government is business.

The corporations donate to the political parties, the political parties make decisions that favour the corporations, and executives walk back and forth between jobs in both sectors with alarming frequency, slipping from one role into another with ridiculous ease. The two are so tightly intertwined, as Orwell said, it is impossible to say which is which.

This is obvious not just at a global level, but painfully at the local, for here in Ireland the only issue that is non-negotiable for successive governments is our 12.5% Corporate Tax Rate. Everything else, our health care system, education, welfare, individual income and tax levels and even our national sovereignty itself is happily put on the chopping block, but the Corporate Tax Rate is sacrosanct. The business of government is business.

In the UK Nick Davies has done a good thing, and exposed what seems to have been the standard operating procedure of the Murdoch papers to the cold harsh light of day, but it remains to be seen what, if anything, comes from it. A newspaper has closed and individuals may go to jail, but the politicians that protected them will emerge unscathed and the system that enabled it all will remain unchanged.

That's Capitalism, folks.

Links
The Guardian, which broke the story, has pretty much the most comprehensive ongoing coverage.
Adam Curtis has an excellent summary of the rise of Murdoch and the effect this had on UK media.
Back in 2006 Murdoch's flagship UK paper The Times had a glowing review that heralded the arrival of the UK's new power couple, Hilton and Whetstone, as the power behind Cameron's throne.
Charlie Skelton covered this year's bizarre Bilderberg meeting (again for The Guardian), complete with Peter Mandelson's media-friendly nature walk.
"Flat Earth News" is Nick Davies' excellent expose of the reality of British media, one of the best books that I read in 2009.

It's only a model

Staying with the theme of our material Universe, news reaches us today that we are probably not, after all, living in a hologram. I've written before about Leonard Susskind's theory that what we experience as reality is but the two-dimensional hologrammatic projections of three-dimensional happenings beyond the Event Horizon of a super massive black hole at the edge of the universe. Got that? Good, because apparently Professor Susskind is wrong.

According to an article in Wired yesterday recent European Space Agency (ESA) experiments looking for pixelation at the quantum level of reality have come back sharper than a Carl Zeiss lens. No fuzziness means that not only are we unlikely to be living in a hologram, there are also big implications for other areas of string theory, another area of great importance for Susskind.

It will be interesting to see if either Susskind or Stephen Hawking, who both exist in an eternal Farnsworth/Wernstrom struggle over the nature of the universe (at least according to Susskind's subtly titled "The Black Hole War - My Battle With Stephen Hawking To Make The World Safe For Quantum Physics") make any public response to this latest news from the ESA. Academic feuds are fun to watch when they unfold like a bullet-time train wreck across a Horizon documentary.

Of course, if we've learned nothing from Star Trek: The Next Generation, or any lazy writer since up to and including Christopher Nolan, its that the moment you finally believe that you are no longer in the simulation, that's when everything really starts to go crazy.

Links
Wired article on the ESA experiment
Original ESA press release

Susskind explains his Holographic principle in this excerpt from a Horizon documentary, "What is Reality?", from January of this year.

Susskind's book is genuinely called "The Black Hole War - My Battle With Stephen Hawking To Make The World Safe For Quantum Physics", but his earlier book "The Cosmic Landscape" serves as a much better general introduction to String Theory. Also worth reading for a general overview on current thinkings on the nature of our, and other, universes is John Barrow's "The Book of Universes", though possibly Michio Kaku's "Parallel Worlds" is a bit more accessible.

As an aside if you've read Paul Murray's "Skippy Dies" (and I know somebody has to have read it) Ruprecht's idol Professor Hideo Tamashi is basically Susskind with Michio Kaku's hair. Interestingly enough according to @HelenCFinch UK government research funding is directly tied to both the number of your media appearances and the edginess of your haircut. Which also explains Brian Cox. And possibly Jedward.

Straight ahead of him, nobody can go very far . . .

The ever talented Ms Snag Breac has been working away like a busy little felting beaver recently. Not content with having her knitted bomb featured in Craft (sister magazine to Make for the arts and crafts set), nor resting on the laurels of her essential kit for cuddly Police States, she now brings us the first stage of her masterplan to reproduce the entire Universe in felt form, and she needs your help to make it all happen (bwah-hah-hah!).

She has put together a kit for making a scale model of the Solar System, minus the Sun (which would end up being 1.25 meters in diamater and far too much wool to include in her kit), and needs a brave volunteer to test it out for her. Head on over to her site, leave a comment begging for a free tester kit and your name will be put in a hat from which one lucky winner will be drawn on Friday 8th July. If you miss out on the draw the completed kits will be on sale at a later stage in her Etsy store.

We here at Booming Back enjoyed a very pleasant day or two this weekend with Ms Snag Breac, who traveled all the way down to Dublin from the wilds of the countryside, braving the Big Shmoke and all of its depravations, and it sounds like she had a lot of fun designing this kit.

I avoided getting into an argument with her over the legitimacy of Pluto's inclusion in the kit, I figured it would be easier just to chuck it out the window when no-one was looking, just like the IAU did.