A friend of mine is scared of science.

scientists: intense

Or to be more specific, he’s unnerved by theoretical physics, which he finds impenetrable and arcane. I’m sure that it’s some deep seated phobia induced by a long ago by watching sci-fi movies obsessively. All science leads to HAL, he feels, which leads to death in outer-space at the hands of a deranged, murderous A.I operating system  which likes to sing nursery rhymes…apparently.

 He doubts that science can explain everything, which is fair, but it got me thinking about the aspects of ‘everything’ that science can explain.

I was looking into ‘everything’, as in the theory of everything. (which I’m sure is one of eminent Mr Hawkins books; those hefty tomes so misleadingly subtitled ‘everything you ever wanted to know about theoretical physics but were just too plain dumb to even begin to form the correct coherent question to ask’) and I discovered that there are quite a few different theories out there, battling it out like different religious sects, or else like white coated scientist versions of Robot Wars, only with clever hypothesises instead of whirling buzz-saw arms.

‘Theories of everything’, in case you are unclear, are hypothetical theories of theoretical physics that basically aim to fully explain and link together all known physical phenomena. Quite a tall order by anyone’s standards, but one in which there has been more and more interest in over the previous century, and one which has resulted in quite a bit of scientific argument and verbal bitch-slapping in the boffin community. The problem with all of these various theories is of course, it is ridiculously difficult to produce any kind of results that are testable by experimentation. They don’t generally stand up to experimental scrutiny. But then, neither does the idea that a benevolent God created everything in a week (it’s hard to test that, unless you count it as a test of faith…which I don’t) So I believe they at least deserve five minutes on the ‘soapbox of explaining everything’ as well in my opinion.

There are four leading theories, so in order to endow you and my physics-phobic associate with glittering, semi-coherent and partially informed party conversation (if you are ever invited to a scientist’s dinner party that is – and if you are, don’t touch the dip, that’s not guacamole, it’s cultured Ebola) I have listed here, in no particular order, the four main theories I can make sense of below:

Number one!

Superstring theory: “Everything comes from excited strings”

bondage: not for fumblers

Everybody

has heard of String theory, even if you don’t have any real interest in science. It’s one of the terms you still hear people bandy about. People living in the deepest Alabama backwaters without electricity and with many guns, meet at whatever passes for the water cooler to discuss it. (The rusty horse trough perhaps?) Unfortunately, it’s usually a case of ‘ah yes, string theory, very hot topic at the moment, indeed, saw it mentioned on the cover of New Scientist….and….erm, well… there was a picture… looked like spaghetti on LSD’. And that’s about it.  (cue howling winds of humiliating silence as the source of your knowledge is exposed as being limited to magazine covers and whatever happens to be on Wikipedia)

So…to break down string theory into handy bite size chunks of tasty and low calorie Physics then:

Think of a guitar string which has been tuned by stretching the string under tension across the guitar. (It’s not really important if you think of an electric or an acoustic guitar, whatever your preference)  The important thing is that depending on how the string is plucked and how much tension is in the string, you will get a different musical note. These notes could be said to be ‘excitation modes’ of that particular guitar string under tension.

Now replace the guitar with a Particle accelerator, (not as sexy on a live stage I know, no matter how much dry ice, but bear with me) In String Theory, the elementary particles which we observe in particle accelerators could be thought of as the “musical notes” or excitation modes of elementary strings.

In String Theory (as in the most excellent of thrash metal guitar playing) the string needs to be stretched under tension in order to become excited. (classic ‘Rock stance’ also helps, although moreso in Thrash Metal than in String Theory)  However, the strings in String Theory are floating in spacetime, they aren’t tied down to a guitar, not even an enormous cosmic one. Nonetheless, they have tension. When I say tension, obviously I’m not talking about a moody silence in an English period drama, but tension of a different kind altogether:

 The string tension in String theory is denoted by the quantity 1/(2 p a’), where a’ is pronounced “alpha prime” and is equal to the square of the string length scale.

If String theory is to be a theory of quantum gravity, then the average size of a string should be somewhere near the length scale of quantum gravity (called the Planck length) which is about a millionth of a billionth of a billionth of a billionth of a centimeter. Smaller even than  the itty bitty wiggly things you might see underneath even the most powerful microscope. Smaller than the chance of Matthew Perry making a bearable movie. Yes. Even smaller than that.

 Unfortunately, this means that strings are much too small to see by any means we have at the moment, and so String theorists have to devise ever more ingenious methods to test the theory and convince us that they are looking for little strings we can’t see that are “definitely there, we just can’t see them, ever…so just take our word for it…”

There are several String theories, classified according to whether or not the strings are required to be closed loops, and whether or not the particle spectrum includes fermions. (not the Celtic Mythological demons…that’s Fomorians…don’t confuse the two)

 In order to include fermions in String Theory, there must be a special kind of symmetry called Supersymmetry, which, aside from sounding like the happy cry of an excited Feng shui obsessed interior designer, actually means that for every boson (particle that transmits a force) there is a corresponding fermion (particle that makes up matter). So Supersymmetry relates the particles that transmit forces to the particles that make up matter.

Supersymmetric partners to currently known particles have not been observed in particle experiments, but theorists believe this is because supersymmetric particles are too massive to be detected at current accelerators working levels. (you get this a lot in physics, things are either too small or too massive, known as the Goldilocks paradox… not really, I just made that up)

 Particle accelerators as well as being impressive and huge and terrifying a large portion of the general population with rumours of creating black holes on earth, are also quite useful however, and could be on the verge of finding evidence for high energy Supersymmetry in the next ten years or so. Evidence for Supersymmetry at high energy would be compelling evidence that string theory was a good mathematical model for Nature at the smallest distance scales. So there you have it. There is no proof really at the moment, but give us ten years and we’ll prove that everything comes from excited strings, which is not to say that I should be misquoted as claiming that everytime Metallica play a live set, they are creating existence. They’re not, just rapid screaming riffs.

Number two!

Holographic paradigm: “The universe is an Hologram”

holo-cherades was just as dull...

Don’t start off picturing the Star-trek Holo-deck here, or Al from Quantum-Leap. That’s not what I mean.
Basically the holographic paradigm is the intriguing bastard offspring of two concepts that were developed independently:

Idea number one: That the universe is in some sense a holographic structure

Idea number two: That consciousness is dependent on holographic structure

Combining the two suggests that theories utilizing holographic structures may lead to a unified understanding of consciousness and the universe, if I can risk sounding a bit Zen and new-agey.

The physicist David Bohm, as well as having intriguing hair, developed a pretty damn sophisticated approach to this concept of the universe, which he termed (rather pleasingly) ‘undivided wholeness’. He used the analogy of the hologram to illustrate the concept of undivided wholeness. So I suppose the first thing we have to clarify is ‘what is a hologram?’.

 Excluding that bit in the movie Total recall where there are two Arnies running around an alien base on Mars helping the bad guys to waste bullets playing ‘who’s the real Quaid’ a hologram is actually a special kind of photographic plate produced with the highly coherent light of a laser source. By coherent I mean ‘light which is all of the same frequency and which does not disperse’, not that ‘it isn’t drunk and mumbling broken folk songs’. Whereas an ordinary photographic plate records a flat image of an illuminated object, a hologram provides a three-dimensional reconstruction of that object. Spiffy.

 If a hologram is illuminated with the same coherent light with which it was produced, then the optical effect is as if the original object were being observed. When the observer moves his or her head around, different perspectives of the object can be seen. A remarkable property of holograms is that even if only a tiny portion of the plate is illuminated the whole of the object is reconstructed (although the resolution of the reconstruction is not as great as when the complete plate is illuminated)

Now, the physics of holograms is well understood and easily explainable (if I can explain it, it must be simple) The point here is that the hologram serves as a simple analogy for Bohm’s concept of undivided wholeness. ‘The universe is like a hologram, in which the whole image is contained within every segment. In other words, the whole is enfolded within each segment’. By shining laser light onto a part of the hologram, an unfolding occurs in which the form and structure of the whole become apparent. (imagine an enormous pitch black cathedral in which, if you hid in the corner and struck a match, the entire building would become brightly and clearly illuminated. That’s some match, and that’s why holograms are undeniably spiffy in the extreme)

 Similarly, processes of unfolding occur continually in the universe, yielding the patterns and structures which we can see and measure. Tenuous? Perhaps. But I still like this theory. It makes we want to go and sit on a mountain top and chant ‘ommm’ until I reach Nirvana.

Number three!

E8-based Theory of Everything:

crop circle regretted taking LSD

See this picture? Isn’t it pretty? It’s our universe (at least mathematically speaking) and according to theory number three, the imaginative and catchily titled ‘E8-based theory’.(give them a break, they’re scientists, not poets. You can’t be good at everything (unless you’re Stephen Fry)

This theory sprung, like a greek goddess from the head of her cannibalistic father, from the throbbing and powerful brain of Antony Garrett Lisi, an American theoretical physicist, and it describes a new unified field theory that connects the theories of quantum physics and gravitation using the mathematical shape ‘E8’. ( The pretty picture which admittedly looks as though it’s been done with one of those ‘spiro-graph’ toys for kids)

Lisi’s inspiration lies in this elegant and intricate shape known to mathematics, a complex, eight-dimensional mathematical pattern with 248 points which was first discovered in 1887 (under a rock in someone’s back yard in Ohio….not really) Although the shape has been known all this time, it was only recently fully understood in the last few years in mathematical terms, after a lot of very clever people worked though equations which, if written out in teeny tiny print, would cover an area the size of Manhattan island. (and you think your paperwork is hard to keep track of?)

 E8 encapsulates the symmetries of a geometric object that is 57-dimensional and in itself is 248-dimensional. Lisi was quoted as saying “I think our universe is this beautiful shape.” Then he had a nose-bleed from contemplating too many dimensions.

What makes E8 so exciting to theoretical physicists, and has them rolling around purring in the theory like it was a big pile of theoretical catnip, is that Nature also seems to have embedded it at the heart of many bits of physics. One interpretation of why we have such a quirky list of fundamental particles for example is because they all result from different facets of the strange symmetries of E8. Spooky. Proof of God via intelligent design? Not really. Proof of design? Arguably very much yes indeed. 

What Lisi had realised was that he could find a way to place the various elementary particles and forces on E8′s 248 points, like plotting a map. What remained was 20 gaps left over when he finished, which he filled with ‘notional particles’. (scientist-speak for ‘made up stuff) : for example those that some physicists predict to be associated with gravity…maybe, perhaps

Physicists have long puzzled over why elementary particles appear to belong to families, but if you follow the E8 theory, this arises naturally from the geometry of the shape. A place for everything and everything in it’s place. So far, all the interactions predicted by the complex geometrical relationships inside E8 match with observations in the real world. The chaos of reality, it seems, is actually not chaos at all, but a very very complicated form of order. Lisi must be very, very smug indeed.

The crucial tests of his work are still coming in through testable predictions. Boffins are now calculating the masses that the 20 new ‘spare’ particles should have, in the hope that they may be spotted through the tireless work of the notorious Large Hadron Collider (hopefully before it creates a singularity on Earth and kills us all, as crazy bloggers would have us believe)
Chances are much higher that the Large Hadron Collider, (something which if you mis-spell in a Google search brings up some very alarming results) will let us see some of these particles, than that it will see Superparticles, extra dimensions, or micro black holes as predicted by string theory. (remember the excited strings?)

Number four!

Integral theory: “everything in creation –except perhaps creation itself– is a holon”

holon pictures: hard to find...so heres a cylon instead

That’s right, a holon.
‘What the devil is a holon?’ I hear you cry in gibbering physics-fear. Well… The idea of holons came from the manic but thoughtful scribblings of Arthur Koestler. In considering what might be the basic building blocks of existence, he observed that it seems that every entity and concept shares a dual nature: as a whole in itself, and as a part of some other whole. For example, although you are made of parts (your nervous system, your skeletal system, etc.), you are also a part of your society, your country, your bridge club, the Sandy Duncan fan club etc. An alphabetic letter is a self-existing entity in itself and simultaneously an integral part of a word. (TV hosts Ant and Dec may be the exception to this rule, no-one has any proof they are separate entities)

Everything from quarks, matter, energy and ideas can be looked at in this way. Everything in creation except perhaps creation itself is a holon. Even you. Now you feel special don’t you? You are a holon. Add it to your online C.V.

AQAL lies at the heart of the holon musings. It stands for “All Quadrants All Levels” (not, as you might imagine “Atlantean Queens All Lactate) but equally it connotes ‘all lines’, ‘all states’ and ‘all types’. These are the five irreducible categories of this model of manifest existence. In order for an account of the cosmos to be complete, supporters of this theory believe that it must include each of these five categories. Every last one of the AQAL categories (quadrants, lines, levels, states, and types) relate to relative truth in the ‘two truths’ doctrine of Buddhism, (yin and yang: not just a bad choice of tattoo). According to this theory, none of the categories are true in an absolute sense: only formless awareness, “the simple feeling of being,” exists absolutely.

Each holon, or unit-of-reality-that-is-both-a-whole-and-a-part-of-a-larger-whole, has an interior and an exterior. It also exists as an individual and (assuming more than one of these entities exists) as a collective. Observing the holon from the outside constitutes an exterior perspective on that holon. Observing it from the inside is the interior perspective, and so forth. If you map these four perspectives into quadrants, you have four quadrants, or dimensions (these are unrelated to the three spatial dimensions, don’t get confused)

To give an example of how this works, consider four schools of social science. Freudian psychoanalysis, which interprets people’s interior experiences, is an account of the interior individual (or quadrant) Behaviorism, which limits itself to the observation of the behavior of organisms, is an exterior individual (or quadrant). Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics interprets the collective consciousness of a society, and is thus an interior plural perspective. Marxist economic theory examines the external behavior of a society.

Thus all four head-shrinking pursuits;  psychoanalysis, behaviorism, philosophical hermeneutics and Marxism; offer complementary, rather than contradictory, perspectives, which I find quite pleasing for some reason. It is possible for all to be correct and necessary for a complete account of human existence. The holon-hollerers (advocates of intregal theory) have here integrated these four areas of knowledge through an acknowledgement of the four fundamental dimensions of existence. Further, these four perspectives are equally valid at all levels of existence. And people say sociology is bull. Tch. For shame.

So there you have it. Everything…in a nutshell. Or four nutshells as it were. (unless you side with intregal theory, where the metaphor breaks down into a tasty and complementary holon-hazelnut spread. Broken down into user-friendly and hopefully less confusing chunks.  I hope my friend is happy now, and no longer scared of science. Theoretical Physics are your friend Paul, not the boogyman.

have i got something in my eye Dave?

Unless of course it’s the kind of Science which produces HAL.

On a final note, I have to add, for the sake of balance, that sometimes of course, Science is nothing more than a big fat waste of everyone’s time, as in the below, which is an actual scientific paper upon which people spent time, energy and money:

«Ultrasonic Velocity in Cheddar Cheese as Affected by Temperature»
(A. Mulet, J. Benedito and J. Bon; Polytechnic University of Valencia; 2006)

“The ultrasonic velocity in Cheddar cheese is temperature dependent. This relationship can be used to make corrections when determining ultrasonic texture or to determine mean temperatures in cooling/heating processes. At 0 < T < 35 °C ultrasonic velocity was 1590 to 1696 Ms, at 0 and 35 °C, respectively. Differential Scanning Calorimetry thermograms linked the temperature dependence of ultrasonic velocity to fat melting. Three parts are distinguished in the curve as a consequence of the fat melting and the appearance of free oil. The most reliable temperature interval to carry out ultrasonic measurements in Cheddar cheese is identified as 0 to 17 °C.”

  

Seriously?

I’m still waiting on the lab results regarding Brie. It may change our world.

 

 

 

 

It was the superhero movie that every bona-fide comic’s geek had been waiting for with breath so baited you could have caught fish with it, but was it worth the wait? Did the long-anticipated big screen adaptation of what is considered the BIBLE of superhero comics deliver more than we could ever hope for in the manner of ‘The Dark Knight’? or was it more ‘Batman and Robin’, an ugly mess of short actors in lifted boots hamming it around with rubber nipples?

In my opinion, it was on the whole very, very good, and in most places extremely faithful to Gibbons and Moore’s original work, sometimes literally frame for frame, with much of the famous dialouge lifted in whopping great chunks of untainted, unaltered fullness straight from the page. This kind of obsessive attention to detail was loving and necessary fanservice to appease the hordes of decades-long uber watchmen fans, whose near obsessive demand for perfect canon translation has no doubt led to sleepless nights of worry leading up to the cinematic release.

There were only a couple of differences between graphic novel and movie, but these were, as differences go, rather…huge. i’ll come to them in  a second though. first the pluses:

To start with, you’re working with great material. Rarely has any other ’comic book’ been the subject of more essays and serious literary discussion. It has been named one of the 100 greatest novels by Time Magazine. now over 20 years old, the 12-issue maxi-series was a groundbreaking achievement for comics. Written “for adults,” Watchmen was perhaps the first of it’s kind, lighting the way for intelligent and thought provoking storytelling in the comics genre.  anyone coming to the movie with no prior knowledge of the comic would most likely have spent the buttock numbing three hours faintly confused and bewildered, or else eating each others faces in blissful disregard for the history in the making unfolding before them like the irritating but eager couple next to me.

The superheros in Watchmen are not particularly, well…super. They have no powers, and in fact are at best rather pathetic, aging has-beens mourning the golden heyday of their super-past, or else closet costume fetishists with a questionable interest in moulded rubber, and at worst, sociopathic mask wearing vigilanties with serious body odour problems. They are frail and flawed, and all too human, and this is what gives them their charm. Well, most of them are human.                                                                                                                                                                                                                      Dr Manhattan, thanks to having his entire bodily matter dissolved in an accident and reassembled

Nylon shirts: dangerously full of static

through a sheer act of will, has almost unlimited power, and shunning such petty mortal trappings as clothes, hair and pupils, (all of which clearly get in the way of near-omnipotence) has basically become, for all intents and purposes, god. admittedly one who is not very interested in humanity at all.

But this is why we love Watchmen, it’s a dark, brooding story about (comparatively) normal people trying to save the world and avert an evil plot which threatens millions of lives, and basically…failing. Genius.

My main worries were with the cast, but on the whole they were excellent, Jeffery Dean Morgan’s ‘Comedian’ almost literally stepping off the page picture perfect, and even Patrick Wilson’s ‘Nite Owl’, though not quite as deep into mournful and jaded middle age spread as i would have liked, managed to stammer and bumble convincingly and true to the characters form. i would have liked Billy Crudup’s ‘Dr Manhattan’ to have had more of a deep and resonant voice, (to me he sounded too apologetic, but that’s just my own opinion), and i thought that Matthew Goodes ‘Ozymandias’ was less the chizel jawed, Aryan superman his character is portrayed in the book and more of a weak chinned and rather nerdy english public schoolboy. it was like watching Niles from Frasier portraying a superhero/villan. i expect at any moment for him to be chased through the superhero showers with a whip-cracking towel, or have his head flushed down the toilet by other kids at superhero school.

The soundtrack was a strong point, setting the 80′s mood in a way which (after the opening credits, loaded with images of studio 54, david bowie lookalikes and other flashing indicators of the era) seemed rather out of time and could have been set anywhere and anywhen. There were small nods to the wealth of period detail that the movie simply didnt have time to go into, (such as the lovingly recreated Gunga Diner and the cameos by Bernie and Bernie near the finale) but i would have liked to have seen some little cigarette-pipes and a little more genetically engineered lynx.

Overall the action was well paced and beautifully shot, especially the prison break out, which was lovingly faithful and shot in indulgent but very effective slo-mo. The scenes on Mars were stunning in all their IMAX glory, and i could forgive what they had to cut out, (the death of Hollis, the first Nite-Owl) and what they had to change, (Rorshach cleaving a child rapist’s head into two with a meat cleaver rather than simply leaving him in a burning building). the only thing i couldnt forgive was the lack of giant, genetically engineered, fake-alien squid.

i wont say any more on this, in case you haven’t seen the movie. the ending was still very satisfying, but i would have liked a little squid action. perhaps they thought it would be a little too Cloverfield, who knows. all i know is i felt squid-cheated.

Overall verdict is that I was very happy. Any comic book hero movie which has festishistic costume sex in a flying owl themed aircraft, Richard Nixon in very questionble prosthetics, a killer soundtrack, a hot chip pan in the face during a prison brawl, and a CGI blue penis lovingly recreated in IMAX is surely worth a look, if only for originality.

i’ll certainly be buying the inevitable 18 disc directors cut dvd, hoping for all the extras to be in there, including perhaps the pirate subplot. The movie wasn’t perfect, but it was close, and I will definately be looking forward to re watching the watchmen.

The inspiration for this rather morbid musing came during my lunch hour, in the most incongruous and unlikely of settings, that hallowed ground of pro-active and educational parenting, the Early Learning Centre.

i was happily browsing for potentially life and learning enriching tools for my as yet unborn child, lost in a happy, semi-sedated fog of cosy nostalgia as i browsed through some of the best books from my own happily incontinent and toothless years, greeting ‘The Very Hungry Catterpillar’ and ‘The Gruffalo’ and ‘Where The Wild Things Are’ like old freinds, and wondering which toys would be most likely to mould my child into a world famous concert pianist or heart surgeon, when suddenly, and quite unprovoked, my accompanying freind (who for reasons of identity protection shall be referred to as ‘The Posh Essex Girl’) cooed in a merry trill. ‘ooh, what about this?’, and thrust a shark into my face.

A Shark.

Obviously, to clarify, it wasn’t a real shark. as far as i know the E.L.C doesn’t hve any branches with petting zoo areas, and even if they did, i think there would be a very strong case of bad judgement to include a shark, and besides, The Posh Essex Girl (Tpeg) is quite small and unlikely to have been able to heave a vast fish at me even if she had wanted to….no, it was of course, a small, lovingly detailed (and responsibly accurate in detail) plastic shark.

But it was still a shark, and being wiggled lovingly less than two inches from my face. a face that only moments earlier had been as calm and composed as a smiling golden statue of Bhudda as I leafed through a pop up version of ‘Room on the Broom’ now froze in a pale and rictus-like death mask of sheer, viscereal terror, confronted as it was with the cold dead eyes and gaping cavernous maw of what is essentially death in fish form.

I soon recovered of course, although my manly squeal of fear greatly amused Tpeg, who, knowing me as well as she does, seemed both morbidly fascinated with my innate fear of sharks and at the same time sadisticly amused by it. she has a point. Sharks are a very silly thing to be afraid of.

Thinking about the origin of fears, you can umderstand how mankind, a virtually defenceless and rather pathetic band of hairless monkeys, with no claws to speak of and unimpressive teeth, would quite sensibly develop a fear of creatures much larger and more deadly than them. it makes sense to be scared of Lions and tigers when you live where they can quite easily kill you. ensuring survival of the species by the time honoured tradition of ‘running away and hiding’

But sharks? in the 21st century? They are very unlikely to enter the normal everyday fabric of my workday. i’ve never seen one in the inner city at all, now i come to think of it, (which in itself is suspicious). nor have i ever seen one when i’ve been at the beach, or out on a boat, anywhere in the world. in fact, apart from in movies, Jaws being the obvious one, and that bit in the beach ( the-one-scene-worth-watching, i think it was called), in real life the only time i have ever, ever seen a real shark, was at a sea life centre. in a secure, death-free environment. and then it wasn’t a shock, it was after following lots of signs saying ‘this way to sharks’ ‘sharks through here’ and finally ‘YOU ARE NOW ENTERING THE SHARK ROOM: WARNING, SHARKS INSIDE’. and even then, at the tender age of about six i think, i still weed a little in abject terror at the sight of dark, silent death gliding gracefully through the dark and foggy water towards me.

i managed not to wee in the ELC, much to both mine and Tpeg’s  relief, but i did regress, for a split second, to a blank, animal creature of pure, frozen-in-headlights fear.  and it was only four inches long and made of cheerily coloured plastic.  i managed to bat it away with almost herculean heroicism. in fact, to cover my initial embarrasment as having been unmasked as less than perfectly fearless in front of my freind, i even rearranged one of the cheery little jungle displays they have for kids (placing the shark halfway up  a jungle tree with a cute plastic baby pig in it’s jaws…we were asked to leave shortly afterwards) but the fear, that completely unreasonable fear of an animal i will never in my life come into contact with, was as real as if in a past life i had been a particulary unlucky minnow.

So…fear is weird. that was my point. i should be more afraid of buses and trams, seen as i step in front of them several times a day and, unlike sharks, actually may kill me someday. but fear is viscereal, unreasonable and completely beyond debating with. no-one ever made a beautifully shot nature documentary with a soaring violin score abou trams). Some people are afraid of clowns (not a fear of mine but one i can understand) some are afraid of spiders (my wife and her freinds during our Univeristy years actually had me ‘on call’ to come and deal with spider situations at any time of the day or night) Fears and phobia’s are manifold and varied, but we have no control over thei origin or their power, and they cut brutally without question or explanation to the very core of the tiny child you used to be and who still remains, deep within, ready to rear it’ quaking, snot-nosed face suddenly and unexpectedly in the middle of what you believed to be your confident and secure adult life.

my particular terror has always been sharks, based on the (i think) fair summary that they are PURE EVIL creatures with nothing complimentary to offer back to the world )and in fact, if you boil it down, are just enourmous mouths, waiting to silently glide up behind you and pull you down into the dark, airless depths, tearing you leisurely limb from limb in a foggy cloud of your own dark blood, their cool eyes as flat and emotionless as black buttons) even though i know, as i explained to Tpeg,  full well i’ll never meet one. unless they grow legs and evolve to come running out of the sea, scuttling around parks and forests, or worse, learn to fly…(shudder)

Tpeg, who i believe up until this point in our freindship believed me to be almost entirely unaffected by ‘scary things’, knowing well my obsession with Halloween, my predilication for splatter horror movies and gore (i sniggered through Hostel) and my self admitted ‘cold black shrivelled heart’, was quite simply over the moon that she had discovered a chink in my armour, a big shark shaped chink, and went merrily humming her way around the store, freshly armed with this new information and no doubt plotting how to use it at some point in the future for her own amusement and/or gain.  The bottom line is, i know they’re harmless to me, even David Attenborough likes them, and every creature has it’s place in God/Darwin’s (delete as appropriate) plan. 

 but seriously….

THATS F**KING SCARY

oh, and if Tpeg is reading this and sniggering at my all too frail and illogical phobia, allow me to remind her of this.

We all have our weaknesses, and they are all just as unfounded in sense>>

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 sleep well in terror my e-children

mysterious black oblong: Vatican City

Breaking news:

At 03:56 (GMT) a specialised team of carefully selected Biologists, Physicists, Archeologists, and Interior Designers were called to a code red secret meeting far beneath the catacombs of St Pauls, Vatican City, to be the first to uncover wht is arguably being called the most signifigant find since the history of mankind began.

Buried deep in the basalt upon which the very foundations of Western religion and the might of the Roman Empire was long ago founded, a large black oblong, roughly 25 feet in length, 3 feet in width and with a suprisingly heavy mass ratio of 3000 KJ /34 APN was stumbled upon yesterday morning by brother Armado Francesco Annalundi, who was searching the oft neglected lower catacombs for his Tamagotchi ™ which he had misplaced earlier in the week. Speaking from Rome he said : ‘I was very concerned…as what for many people was merely a passing fad from the late 1990′s had over the years become to me a close and irreplacable friend. John-Paul (the Tamagotchi’s name) had been missing for several days, and i had been unable  to push the little brightly coloured buttons which serve to ensure he has a healthy supply of virtual food pellets and a freshly groomed coat of healthy fur. i was beside myself with worry at the thought of him lost and alone”

John-Paul: artist impression

With every passing moment making it more likely that John-Paul was indeed lost and alone somewhere deep beneath the Vatican, trilling electronically for help and slowly drowning in his own virtual and pixilated feces, Brother Annalundi felt there was no other option than to explore deeper than ever before.

Russia’s Alexandros Potriosky, a leading Physicist and amateur Interior designer with Minimalist leanings, was amongst the selected cartel who were called upon the discovery of the Oblong, and filled in what happened next.

“Brother Annalundi was undestandably distressed.” the Physicist advised us ”i myself have never owned a Tamagotci, i recall them being both needy and irritating, and i spent much of the 90′s quite literally off my face on smack, although i have found that ’20Q’ machine to be quite entertaining, and i’m sure Tamagotchi was, at least organically, a protean precursor to this wonderful machines almost Delphic powers of prediction. Nevertheless, i digress, i can understand the motives he had for searching so deep in such hallowed ground, straining in the silence to hear the lost bleep of distress that might indicate John-Paul was somewhere in the musty darkness, wanting a food pellet or a virtual walk. it was the early hours of the morning when the Black Oblong was discovered, wedged between a collection of broken Metopes from the Parthenon  and a large box of stone penises, which i understand the Vatican had chipped off all of their Late Classical statuary during what we have come to know as ‘the Great Fig-Leaf Cover up’. My team and i were called soon after the discovery. we arrived in big black helicopters. it was very exciting, although i hate flying and was sick when we landed”

The Special ops team have now finished their careful excavation, bringing the mysterious object to the surface where it can be studied in greater depth. So far, the collection of Scientists and Stylists have been unable to determine either the Nature of the Material or it’s purpose, although it has been leaked that experiments in Audio-experimentalist-theology have discovered that when struck with a tuning fork, the Large Black Oblong emits what appears to be the very faintest strains of  Holst’s ‘Jupiter’. (this may merely be what other members of the scientific community are calling ‘a lie’ however)

Various theories are circulating that the Large Black Oblong may in fact be of extra-terrestrial origin, or else a rememnant of a lost Atlantean civilisation, whose technology is both far more advanced and more organic than our own.

“we believe it to be potentially a vast storehouse of ancient knowledge, a record of a lost or alien cultures, or maybe just a big black rock” says  Czech MacroBiologist Anya Dolosova, a carefully chosen member of the Cartel and an outspoken advocate of wooly thinking. “at this point, we are merely scratching the surface of this mysterious find, in fact quite literally, as we got it stuck in quite a tight space coming up out of the catacombs and left quite a nasty scrape on the reverse of the oblong. it was all quite embarrasing really. several of us swore. luckily we had Interior Designer Felicity Del’ollio at hand with french polish, she is the bes in her field, and you would really never know by looking now that it had even been scratched, unless someone pointed it out to you, you know?”

A base camp of large white tents has transformed St Peter’s Square into what resembles a military quarantine zone, and a tight belt of secrecy and security has been pulled around the whole endeavour. this find, whatever it may indicate and however much it might infringe upon the sensibilities and potential copyright of notorious and unkempt movie (and most importantly deceased) director Stanley Kubrick, it is sure to bring more questions than answers. questions about the nature of God and religion, about the very breakdown of the physical building blocks upon which our universe is founded, about the questing nature and search for self realisation of humanity since time began, and about whether black really does go withe everything. Only time, and a ridiculous amount of public money will tell. For now, the Black Oblong of Rock remains a mystery wrapped in an enigma wrapped in a queston wrapped in a big black rock wrapped in a bigger white tent.

(breaking update: this just in from the  top securityVatican cartel base. the following statement has been released:

“we have finally penetrated the secrets of the Big Black Oblong. We had hoped for mystical or arcane knowledge. for answers to some of life’s more elusive questions. for cures to the worlds diseases, for soultions to our manifold woes. what we have discovered is this: the oblong is actually papier mache, covered with what appears to be a substance know as ‘Crown gloss emulsion: sexy midnight black’.  Having penetrated the outer shell with careful scientific tools and a big hammer, we discovered it was filled with a mass of wadded paper, tightly screwed up into frustrated balls of mush, along with some toast crusts and a few scattered and near fossilised haribo. Having excavated the interior, we discovered the crumpled pages within were covered in hidiously cramped and scratchy handwriting, much of it indechipherable or just plain gibberish. from what we can tell, they are the Blog pages of someone names Seamus, who claims to be on fire off the shoulder of Orion, but who we suspect is merely a sociopath with too much time on his hands and a toast obsession. whilst we find this discovery to be dissapointing, in the name of science we shall be publishing the crazed, obscene and often quite offensive ramblings here periodically. the oblong itself is to be turned into a stylish coffee table, so at least some good has come of this venture.”

Post Script: at the time of this going to print, tragically,  John-Paul has not  been found, and it is likely he is somewhere deep beneath the Vatican Catacombs, gibbering with electronic insanity and slowly running out of time.

what follows here is the lost blog pages of Orion: