Observations from a Hill

I'm indebted to this weekend's FT for the text snippet from 'Lunch With The FT' [interview in a Tokyo McDonalds with Chinese dissident commentator Li Ying] that gave me the title for tonight's post; which should absolutely be taken as in the imperative sense: as edict rather than desire. To my mind this directive sums up where we are in the advanced [?] capitalist ethos in which twenty-first century man-and-woman-kind finds itself; either at the hands of laissez faire arms-distance neo-liberals, as in "The West" or under the grip of the over-weaning controls of state capitalism such as obtains in modern day China; with all points in between pretty much just shades of the same. Pay, consume and move on with alacrity: you're taking up retail space.  Needs and desires shortened into data-compressible chunks as small as possible to serve the needs of The Great Stone-Eater itself [blog posts passim, and courtesy of the late Alex Harvey] in its quest for eve...

  Very lazy diary post tonight, as I'm totally frazzled for no real apparent reason. Leo's birthday supper this evening, so a family gathering here in Fairview Heights. Lots - and lots - of garlic in tonight's meal, so no fear of nocturnal vampire attacks, methinks! I'll leave it at that because I'm not five minutes away from crawling into my pit for the night...

Just watched a lovely encomium to Keith Floyd on YouTube this evening, which made us reflect on the very influence this bloke had on us - food wise - during the 1980s and 90s, a legacy that obtains to this day. I can't begin to count how many thousands of great meals that we and our friends cooked and shared with each other over those decades, but suffice it to say that Floyd's enthusiasms and flamboyance had a very big influence on us all and our cooking. One of the things that stand out about the man was that he was prepared to wing it and improvise, and often to - publicly - fail: jazz, mes enfants! - something that has always been dear to my heart. Very often you've just got to go with the moment and rely on native instinct come hell or high water. I once told my photographer cousin that I could operate a Sony broadcast quality Betacam camera for a video shoot for Toyota, only to get him to stop en route to the shoot so that I could rehearse what I'd only just read...

I wrote the other day about The Great Bishop's Castle Power Outage - actually it lasted little more than an hour, but brought the town to pretty much a standstill - which made me think: how much survival resilience do we actually have, here in the second quarter of the twenty-first century? Answer, practically none. As soon as the power goes down, pretty much every aspect of our lives goes down with it. Which is actually kind of worrying. We were subjected to a freak power outage in the mid-nineties, when we lived in Brynbella, down on the A5, on the outskirts of Bethesda, at Christmas. An ice-storm - a very rare phenomenon in the UK - had taken down every wooden power pole across the tops from Aber. We were amongst a very small number of properties that were still fed with electricity from this very old circuit across the mountain. Suffice to say, we were without power from Christmas Eve, through Christmas Day and beyond: we gave up and drove to the Midlands to stay with parents o...

I had a thought [shit happens, I know] this morning about chasing down some of the history surrounding our software development back in the '90s/00s: viz the VBase/InfinitImages days of yore. I then thought, why not chuck some questions at Claude AI and see what comes back? So, mindful of the fact that a carefully formed prompt or question posed to a LLM will elicit more sense than a stupid question, I simply stated the following: ' In the 1990s there was a Photoshop plugin called FotoPage which has disappeared from sale - can you research this for me? '. What followed was very interesting, as the AI came up with exactly correct details about both the product and our development of it, and found an archived, compressed version of one of the range on the Tucows archive. It correctly returned the chronology of the software's development, up to and including its year of demise. It then went on to accurately analyse the two principal technical reasons why the product(s) eve...

The late, oh, so great, Alex Harvey sang, or rather er habt sprechgesang gemacht '...another tree dies of shame...' on the 1975 Sensational Alex Harvey Band album, "Tomorrow Belongs To Me" in the song "The Tale of The Giant Stoneater". Like so much of the SAHBs output, the lyrical content and intent of the album's songs is so genuinely right on in the original meaning of the phrase - please don't use the term 'woke' in this context - and carries forward to the present day prescient warnings from over half a century ago: the radical shift to the right and neo-liberalism was a mere twelve/eighteen months in the future from the album's release. The environmental and political issues that have dogged us persistently since then are still as thorny and unresolved now as then. I picked up on a linguistic parallel to this today in a book review in this week's New Statesman. In Sophia Smith Galer's new book, "How To Kill a Language...