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Luxe, Calme et Volupté

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Why am I largely unmoved by the Glastonbury Festival phenomenon? Everyone else seems to deify this event in almost religious terms. Have I ever been? No. Not from a lack of love for music in all its manifest variety, that's for sure. Have I ever been to a festival? Just the one: Pink Floyd in Hyde Park, 1970. Did I enjoy it? Yes, but what I rather less enjoyed was the presence about me of 120,000 other people, something I found claustrophobic and frankly annoying. I never thought about attending another like event after that day, as much as I enjoyed the music. I guess one of the reasons we left Birmingham for North Wales in 1980 was motivated by our growing unease among crowds: I was always more comfortable, both as a child and as a young adult, with the gentler pace of the countryside. Even as an adolescent I gravitated to the quieter parts of the city I grew up in, venturing into the crowds only at night to drink to the early hours. Do I miss the throng? Not a bit of it: my freq...
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Ein Augenblick...

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Amidst all the clatter and clarion that passes for the norm each morning, noon and night in the news cycle at present, all I want to do tonight is draw breath and let the clamour subside into the background noise of my tinnitus, and say fuck it all for a bit. I bumped into an old mate from work today, quite out of the blue, in the village. I haven't seen him since some time before I retired five years ago, and although he's still only in his early mid-fifties, he reckons on retiring well before he's sixty, as he's paying a third of his salary towards his pension every month, chwarae teg. I hope he get's to have a long and happy retirement on the back of his efforts. As to me, I've found/created a sweet spot in my latest incarnation that I could only have dreamed about [and often did] in my youth, where I can get on with being me: where Jane & I can get on with being us: where the boys are now making their own way and are happy in their travels through life. ...
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Robbin' Hoodwink

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I don't know if it's me, but the arithmetic in Eliot Wilson's article [yesterday's i Newspaper, UK] on Reform UK's recently-touted idea of '... a system of wealth transfer from rich to poor.' just doesn't seem to stack up. The mechanism that Farage's party of no-marks and flakes is proposing would attract non-domiciled wealthy individuals into a new, tax-lite environment here in the UK. As well as being exempt from UK taxation for a decade on their overseas earnings, they would avoid all inheritance tax, in return for buying into a scheme Reform have dubbed "The Britannia Card", for a one-off payment of £250,000 each, the proceeds of all earnings from this to be distributed among the lowest ten percent of UK earners at the end of each year. According to the article's [Reform's?] figures, this would net around 2.5 million workers between £600 and £1,000 each per year. This all sounds very grand and dashingly Robin Hood of Farage and ...
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Retrogression

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Back in the early 1980's, in a former life [I've had many], I worked at The Unemployed Workers' Advice Centre in Bangor: a short-lived but valuable resource created by Richard Grimes of the Newham Rights Centre, London and others, in Bangor, in 1982. I was there for a scant two years, but we managed to make a significant impact on what was then becoming a hostile environment for the underprivileged at the hands of Thatcher's state apparatus. We were trained in how the various convoluted 'benefits' of our social security system were supposed to work by the [still] estimable Child Poverty Action Group, which gave us both the tools and the cachet to argue our claimant-client cases and win, usually in short order, against the then Department for Health & Social Security: a short phone call from us pointing out the niceties of the legal obligations the authorities faced was usually enough to get a result for the client on the spot. Further afield in the human rig...
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Where's My Towel?

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I was just reading an interview [ under the byline "Lunch With The FT", this weekend] with the computational linguist Emily Bender, who has been taking metaphorical chunks out of the AI gold rush's claims that it represents some sort of New Jerusalem [fans of the late, great Joe Don Baker will get that reference] in evolution, taking mankind out of itself and to the stars as immortals. Ahem . She wrote a paper in 2021 in which she described AI chatbots and image-creation tools as "stochastic parrots" [her neologism], the definition of which is, and I quote: '... a system for "haphazardly stitching together sequences of linguistic forms it has observed in it's vast training data, according to probabilistic information about how they combine, but without any reference to meaning"...' Apparently this led to much umbrage in the AI community, motivating OpenAI's Sam Altman to tweet '... "i am a stochastic parrot, and so r u"......
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The Very Essence of Sunday

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  I just had to post a Sunday food piece today, as we've had the boys around for the first family Sunday Roast in ages. To celebrate the occasion, I slow-cooked a whole shoulder of lamb with garlic, rosemary & bay from the garden, white wine and anchovies, pictured centre. My usual olive-oil roast potatoes and purple-sprouting broccoli, and mint-sauce from our own garden mint, served with a reduced sauce of shallots, white wine, chicken stock, vegetable water and meat-pan juices. It took around six hours to do, and I enjoyed every minute of cooking it. I enjoyed the eating of it even more... Hwyl!
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Grand Theft Identity

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OK - I was prompted to write this note in the light of an ' interesting ' conversation I had the other day on the subject of conspiracy theories. In it was mentioned a blog called "The Daily Sceptic", which to be frank I was unaware of, but the notion that was floated that this might be some sort of source of 'truth', regarding climate change scepticism/denial, big pharma vaccine cons and the even more grandiose concepts of global elites cashing in on the gullibility of the masses prompted me to stick my toe into the shark-infested waters of paranoid public 'debate'. What I found was pretty much what I expected. However, on reading the first article I turned to: "Universities Are a Conspiracy Against the Public", allegedly by one James Alexander, later credited at the foot of the piece as '... a Professor in the Department of Political Science at Bilkent University in Turkey...' I discovered something less obvious but rather more insi...
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