H R Giger RIP

Sad news today, everybody.
































Rest easy, Mr Giger. If there's an afterlife, I hope it doesn't look like this (though maybe if it did, I'd fit right in).

Shakuntala Devi November 4, 1929 – April 21, 2013

Shakuntala Devi RIP

Shakuntala Devi

The first I ever heard of Shakuntala Devi was a long time ago, when I stumbled across her book Figuring: The Joy of Numbers in the WH Smith's bookstore in Birmingham, W Mids. Dad had business in Brum, and we all came along for the day.

When I came along with the book, Mum was scared that it was some sort of black magic text. It wasn't - quite the opposite, in fact - and the book never left my bookshelves and relocated with me wherever I went.

Figuring: The Joy of Numbers became one of the most useful and helpful books I have ever had. It turned what could have become a fear of mathematics into a love of mathematics, and Figuring: The Joy of Numbers helped me to ace university and, later, work. Catalysed by the book and inspired by further experience, I learned to be familiar and comfortable with numbers, calculation, mental arithmetic and mathematics thanks to Shakuntala Devi's early influence in my life.

I just heard of her death today, and I share the great sadness all of India must feel. A great and beautiful mind is no more, and the world is diminshed for the passing of a woman whom I have long held with the highest esteem.

Stargate Universe and the theme of the Voyage of Death

You know, I have a theory about the sorts of shows such as Stargate Universe, Space: 1999 and, to some extent, Star Trek: Voyager where the characters are on some moving vehicle flying through space on a seemingly random trajectory. They've got the same theme as Life On Mars, Ashes to Ashes and (from what I have been told) Lost. It's the same theme as The Prisoner, really.

They are all dead.

The crew of the Destiny; the inhabitants of Moonbase Alpha; Sam Tyler, DI Alex Drake, Number Six ... it's the end for them. Finito. The explosion of Nuclear Waste Disposal Base Two; the opening of the gate from the Icarus planet; they didn't escape. The Stargate opened, but it went nowhere, because they never got as far as the wormhole. The Destiny crew just don't know that, because like Bruce Willis' character in The Sixth Sense they only see what they want to see. Confirmation bias writ large; the hamartia of every ghost.

And the rest of the show, while it appears to be about intrepid people trying to get back home, is really about unquiet spirits who, in the middle of the journey of their lives, found themselves within a dark woods where the straight way was lost. Their stories are not so much about how they get home, as how they come to terms with the realisation that there is no going back; that the role of being dead is now their lot.

Either the story ends on a note which clearly reveals that their entire voyage was a literal journey home by living beings over the earth of the living - The Odyssey, Star Trek: Voyager; or the story ends without resolution or even a downbeat minor key ending - The Time Tunnel, Space: 1999, Stargate Universe.

(Edit: I have to tell you - the downbeat ending is the only true, natural one. A happy ending like the end of 2000 AD's series Leviathan or the Star Trek: Voyager series finale "Endgame" always seems forced; shallow, by comparison.

If you hear the premise of the story ending "trying to find their way home," you can immediately dismiss the story as a VoD show. You know it will only ever have two endings; the natural one or the Hollywood one. So why wait for it? Just wait to hear of its cancellation and then go and watch the finale, and place a bet on whichever ending wins. --Me)

And, having now seen the finale of Stargate Universe, I have identified the genre of fiction being portrayed. Stargate Universe's story is that of the Flying Dutchman - the Flying Coffin, Moonbase Alpha, Voyager in its first three seasons.

No lone hero braving his way through the Inferno to reach Heaven, this, like Sam Beckett in Quantum Leap or even Alf and the kids from the Eighties Saturday Morning cartoon Dungeons & Dragons; but a crew of people having mutinied on the ferry and thrown Charon overboard, and their strenuous efforts to try and commandeer the ferry so they could navigate the Styx only to discover, to their horror, that the damned boat can only be guided by its pilot, and unguided, it will just plough on down the river, further away from life but also further away from the Elysian Fields which was to be their true destination, forever.

The Voyage of Death, derailed for entertainment; souls lost, having been separated from their psychopomp, deluded into thinking that their destiny is back home, where the truth is they can't go back home, ever.

And in the case of Stargate Universe, there is yet another tragic undernote to consider here. With the ending of Stargate Atlantis and Stargate SG-1, this show was really meant to be a continuation of the franchise; but instead, like Star Trek: Enterprise, it was its coda.

Just as Moonlighting's ending was some surreal nightmare where the characters became self-aware that fictional TV characters in a light-hearted comedy detective series was all they ever had been, like the characters in SLA Industries who discover the grim secret that they are only player characters in a roleplaying game, the ending of Stargate Universe becomes just as meta: Stargate Universe is the final story of the Stargate franchise, after the stroke that destroyed it, and all that happens during the series is nothing more than the franchise experiencing its entire life flashing before its eyes before it finally, along with Destiny, hyperwarps its way into nothing, leaving behind an empty, starry void.

The ending of John Carpenter's Dark Star. Flareup. Wipeout. Roll credits.

Fade to black.

2013 04 08 - Margaret Thatcher Is Dead

Today was the day that Margaret Thatcher's death was announced. The former Prime Minister died today of a stroke.

No, I don't care how old she was. Unlike so many of those who rued the day she was born, she lived entirely too many bloody years.

Some of her words ...

"... the British character has done so much for democracy, for law and done so much throughout the world that if there is any fear that it might be swamped people are going to react and be rather hostile to those coming in." ["Mrs Thatcher fears people might become hostile if immigrant flow is not cut". The Times. 31 January 1978.]

"... in many ways [minorities] add to the richness and variety of this country. The moment the minority threatens to become a big one, people get frightened." ["Britain: Facing a Multiracial Future". Time. 27 August 1979. Retrieved 20 January 2011.]

She objected to immigration, which back then meant Vietnamese boat people. But that was not the limit of people to whom she objected, and worked against.

Economically, she presided over a recession in the early 1980s, and her policies saw three million people made unemployed, rising to 3.3 million in 1984. Her response: to shut down and privatise Britain's state-run industries: railways, coal, oil, gas, water, buses and public transport. They all went to private hands, without deregulation - and immediately they were seized by asset strippers, who turned them into the rapacious, marauding private companies which are ruining the economy today, overcharging for basic services such as water, gas and electricity, bringing whole high streets to their knees and turning them into shuttertowns and ghost towns because no small firm can afford to run their premises with the rates they are being charged as businesses.

Her regime committed a number of atrocities, and was mired in scandal.

She curbed the power of the unions, using the press to demonise the left and turn it against itself. Frankly, at that time that did not require much effort. When the miners began to strike across the country in protest at Thatcher's plans to shut down Britain's coal mining industry, she turned the police into virtually a private army against them, beating down the miners and breaking the NUM, the National Union of Miners. She then went ahead and privatised the coalmining industry, leading to the destruction of a way of life which had been the backbone of Britain's economy for centuries. Miners' Strike 1984-'85 on Wikipedia, Battle of Orgreave (Yorkshire) - a battle in which the police only prevailed through infiltration of the protesters by MI5 officers as agents provocateurs.

Under her regime, another crucial element of Britain's economy also fell foul of her butcher's axe - the kissing cousin of the coal mining industry, the steel industry. British Steel

A close friend of Dame Shirley Porter, under her regime the "Building Stable Communities" regime was, basically, massive gerrymandering - forcing poor and unemployed people out of their communities so that, under the guise of "gentrification," affluent tory-voting middle class dupes could be put in their place again, shifting Labour constituencies towards the tories.Dame Shirley still has not been stripped of her title, despite efforts to do so since 2003.

The Westland Helicopter Crisis, also known as The Westland Affair, was an early political scandal which could have brought her regime down as early as 1982. Some political experts maintain that it was her efforts to distract the country from the corruption exposed by Dame Porter and Westland that the Falklands War of 1982 was started, possibly by the deliberate sinking of the Argentinian Navy vessel the General Belgrano. Falklands War, General Belgrano

Then there were the little matters of state censorship during the Troubles, where the voices of Irish people were censored, requiring that news reporters employ actors' voices to speak for Irish politicians; Clause 28, later passed as Section 28 of the Local Government Act (1988), which stated that a local authority "shall not intentionally promote homosexuality or publish material with the intention of promoting homosexuality" or "promote the teaching in any maintained school of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship" and led to a shameful demonisation of LGBT groups across the country; coverups of places such as Bryn Estyn as part of a massive national organised child abuse scandal; and last, but by no means least, the famous Community Charge or Poll Tax, which prompted the Poll Tax Riots and, ultimately, brought about the end of Thatcher's political career.

In March 1988, three Irish Republican Army (IRA) members - Danny McCann, Sean Savage and Mairéad Farrell - were shot dead in Gibraltar. A Thames TV show of the investigative journalism show This Week, titled Death On The Rock, examined the shootings and asked why there was no attempt by the Special Air Service (SAS) to arrest the IRA members. People could only conclude that the SAS had been operating as a death squad, carrying out state murders along the lines of the squads being used by the Argentinian military junta at the time.

At midnight on December 31, 1992, Thames TV permanently ceased broadcasting - some say, silenced as a reprisal by the government for Death On The Rock. Oh, and let us not forget, the year before she was booted out of office, the government's divisive, derogatory, egregious response - in collusion with the News Of The World newspaper, editor Kelvin McKenzie and Sir Norman Bettison - to the Hillsborough Stadium tragedy of 1989. (Personal note: This was the last football match I ever watched on TV. I'd only watched three in my life - they were Bradford when the stadium caught fire, Heysel Stadium during its disaster, and lastly Hillsborough. Every time I watched a live match on TV it seemed disaster followed - so nowadays I avoid the TV altogether when the footie is on).

Margaret Thatcher's regime, known as Thatcherism, was a vast, ugly train wreck. Everything she touched brought evil and despair to whole communities, and like any schoolyard bully the government of its day - the same tories shamefully carving up this county today - insisted on gloating at the poor and disenfranchised, telling the people of this country that their pain and suffering were all their fault.

It wasn't the kids' fault when Margaret Thatcher cynically killed off the program of giving free milk to school kids - a policy instituted in a previous regime to ensure that kids would have protein and calcium to promote their general health. She did this to save money. She will always be known across the land as "Maggie Thatcher, Milk Snatcher" to this day, and forevermore, long after today.

On another, closing, personal note: As someone who lived through that time of darkness, when it seemed that nothing could stop the tories raping the country, I remember the things that people did while living in Margaret Thatcher's regime. I also remember saying "Never again," when they were swept out of power in 1997.

So when people accuse me of bad taste for celebrating Margaret Thatcher's death today, I can only point them to the links above, and probably to other sources of independent accounts of life during her brutal, brutish regime, and laugh.

Today, a tyrant is dead. And other tyrants currently in power must know that their time will come when they, too, will be ushered out of office and into taxis, departing to obscurity amid jeers.

This is how I want to remember her:
despairing, as she had caused so many others to despair.
So many.

Philosophical Post

Someone on a blog I follow suffers from a terminal disease. He knows that his time has come, and he has resolved to chronicle his impending demise with as much dignity as his death will allow.

So today, he asked a philosophical question; "What Happens When We Die?"

I thought I'd write him a few words in my comments. And I thought I'd add them to my blog here as well.

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I'm still following your posts.

When you close the fridge door, what happens to the light?

When the bulb goes out, the diminishing spray of photons emerging out from the cooling bulb continue their outward journeys across the short distance through the atoms in the air, spilling out into the room, impacting on the opaque matter of the walls of the fridge, the room ... you ... and then they are absorbed.

Some of the photons are reflected, which is why you see things and colours in particular: but ultimately, most of the light gets absorbed into the surrounding matter, where it adds its tiny bit of momentum to the atoms' vibration.

The few photons that escape through the window vanish into the night, maybe to begin their journeys out across the void forever.

We are fields of information. The one thing about us that distinguishes us living things from inanimate rock and water and air is the information we all generate. All of us, from viruses through the the ecosphere of Gaia itself. We cannot not generate information: it is what makes us alive.

We are an intricate, overlapping field of information that interacts to generate this information spraying out of us; and when death takes us, as individuals the capacity of our bodies to sustain that field suffers permanent, catastrophic collapse. The information we generate ceases; but like the wave of photons emerging as the lightbulb goes off, it all gets absorbed into the surroundings - the ecosphere, enclosed by the Earth's magnetic field. And Gaia harvests a little more information about the world through her little sense organs, the humans.

In a way, put yourself in this place, where you imagine the field of your data merging with this greater field of data, where it will mingle with the generating fields left behind by Archimedes and Marie Curie and Einstein, Gandhi and Mother Teresa and Martin Luther King, all melding together like two lumps of different kinds of bread dough being kneaded together to form a loaf of hybrid bread that has the features, tastes and textures of both, plus its own unique flavours and textures.

Just as you enrich the world in life, so you will continue to enrich the Gaiasphere in death - both from your permanent record of your life and from your merging data fields and all the information you let loose upon the world, flying in all directions, forever.

I hope this helps.

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