cloudsoup

I missed going naked day but it’s inspired me to ditch my WordPress theme and my CSS and build them again from ground up. Just for fun.

Saw Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man this evening. At several points Herzog directly voices his opinion that Nature is fundamentally chaotic and brutal, and contrasts this with Treadwell’s romantic, anthropomorphic and sentimental take on the huge Grizzly bears of Alaska.

You might initially think Herzog correct, given that Treadwell and his girlfriend were killed and eaten by a bear; but although Herzog’s a compelling presence on screen and behind the camera and I admire his seriousness I wondered why anyone should think there’s a fundamental nature to Nature. Germanic tendency to theorise, I guess.

Recommended.

Summer hols booked. Or anyway, flight to Washington (DC) and car hire for road trip to Memphis. We’re looking at running down the Alleghenies for some white water rafting, something Helen first persuaded me to do in 2001 (shortly before 9/11), on the Ocoee River, part of the the Atlanta Olympics course, in Tennessee. We rafted again in Spain in 2002, when we stayed in the Parador de Vielha; I bounced out of the dinghy that time. The Vielha Parador, by the way, had a very good restaurant and an even more fantastic menu which in English included:

• Attacked of fresh pasta(cash), sepia and leeks
• Eggs in jumble with girgolas and you live(inhabit) tender and
• Loin Code to Ticken

What else? On the way south and west from Washington, black bears and civil war landmarks I think. Need to do more research and planning.

Only an 8-hour flight this time (11 hours two years ago to San Francisco) but I’ve crashed a jumbo on Flight Sim going into Dulles twice now. Low cloud at the moment and ILS landing’s a bit rusty. First thing I do when I’m flying somewhere, to reduce more than vestigial fears, is to Flight Sim it. Flew into Venice, Cologne, Talinn, SFO, Heathrow, Atlanta, Barcelona etc all before flying in for real. My best tip for calming nerves is to stare at the faces of the flight attendents and only get twitchy if they’re looking unnerved. If they look disinterested, I’m happy.

I’d read that Lawrence Lessig had been talking to the BBC about ways of opening up their content along the lines suggested and pioneered by the Creative Commons. Now, as the BBC unrolls its latest beautifully filmed natural world prog, Planet Earth, it seems they’re allowing people to patch together their own videos using content and music from the series.

The Beeb is using a ‘Creative Archive Licence’, a pilot of a Creative Commons-style licence that’s being used by Teachers’ TV and the BFI. Now Helen can patch together something for the animal behaviour bit of her A-Level Psychology lessons.

Lessig’s given an inspiring talk on the subject of copyright, copyright extension, and the creative commons that you can download as an MP3 from this page. Listen to it.

Alexander Nevsky Cathedral, Talinn – the Estonians don’t like it

Estonian’s related to Finnish and, more distantly, Hungarian. It’s absorbed quite a few German influences over the years but it was still the only place I’ve visited in years where I had, basically, no clue how to say anything, even with an English-Estonian dictionary and phrasebook.

I read a recommendation that there wasn’t any point even trying to speak Estonian – most Westterners get the pronunciation so wrong they can’t be understood. Take the word for ‘thank you’ – tanon (I think). The ‘t’ is pronounced very hard with little aspiration so the word sounds like danon, as if you have a blocked nose – and I tried and I was still almost unable to persuade anyone I was speaking Estonian.

Nouns and adjectives in Estonian decline in fourteen cases: nominative, genitive, partitive, illative, inessive, elative, allative, adessive, ablative, translative, terminative, essive, abessive, and comitative. This is almost impossible for me, who stuggled in school with nominative, accusative, genitive and dative in German verbs, to begin to comprehend. The word for house changes depending on whether I’m going into it, leaving it, viewing it or burning it down.

Well that was interesting. More to come later but, briefly – Estonia, history of foreign control by Germany, Denmark, etc. Gains independence at end of WWI with help of British fleet, enjoys a couple of decades of freedom, then is occupied by the USSR, then Nazi Germany, then the USSR again.

Freedom attained after the singing revolution and a 600km, 2-million person human chain stretching across Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia.

Long talk with old man in the City Museum who took us carefully through the 20th Century section. He’d lived through the Nazis and the USSR occupation and despised Stalin and Hitler and all their works.

• Hitchens on cartoons and the State Department
• Drinking from Home on police priorities
• Theo van Gogh, slaughtered, Ayaan Hirsi Ali under protection
• Hitoshi Igarashi, murdered, Ettore Capriolo, murdered.

Here’s one of my favourite Tom Lehrer songs, called The Vatican Rag.Mr Lehrer wouldn’t be with us now if it had been The Mecca Rag – he’d have been butchered by some fundamentalist fascist freak:

First you get down on your knees,
Fiddle with your rosaries,
Bow your head with great respect,
And genuflect, genuflect, genuflect!

Do whatever steps you want, if
You have cleared them with the Pontiff.
Everybody say his own
Kyrie eleison,
Doin' the Vatican Rag.

Get in line in that processional,
Step into that small confessional,
There, the guy who's got religion'll
Tell you if your sin's original.
If it is, try playin' it safer,
Drink the wine and chew the wafer,
Two, four, six, eight,
Time to transubstantiate!

So get down upon your knees,
Fiddle with your rosaries,
Bow your head with great respect,
And genuflect, genuflect, genuflect!

Make a cross on your abdomen,
When in Rome do like a Roman,
Ave Maria,
Gee it's good to see ya,
Gettin' ecstatic an'
Sorta dramatic an'
Doin' the Vatican Rag!

Travelling beyond the Eurozone make me a little edgy these days. It’s all so comfortable, popping over the Channel. No need to order currency in advance, banks everywhere, everyone accepting the Euro.

A couple of years ago we drove to Italy via the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, France, and Switzerland, popping into Germany on the way back. Only Switzerland retained its old currency but even then we could use Euros in the shops. That’s the holiday I drove over an Alpine pass while Helen was playing, ‘I can’t get over the Alps’ on her iPod. And when we drove past Interlaken while she was playing ‘Interlaken’ by the Alpine Stars.

So here, while it lasts, is part of our order of the Estonian Kroon, known as the EEK.

Fingers crossed there are banks in Talinn.

Peter Black, Lib Dem AM (Liberal Democrat Welsh Assembly Member) posts a halfway approving piece about Mary Riddell’s wittering in the Observer. Riddell’s article, supposedly on image in politics, is about Daniel J Boortein’s early stab at pre-empting silly Continental ‘philosophers’. I suppose Riddell’s education stopped before 1968 because she name-drops Sartre rather than the obvious post-structuralist comparisons. I think she’s simply got the wrong French philosopher and misunderstood Sartre. Baudrillard and the precession of the simulcra would have been a better reference. I confess to having read Barthes, Derrida, et al. At least Barthes could be funny. Baudrillard and Derrida, simply meaningless crap.

Riddell seems in thrall to the notion of inauthenticity and pseudo-events. Yes, a bird flu pandemic hasn’t occurred but it could – and only the royal inbred half-wit Prince Charles was ever much worried about nanotechnology and ‘grey goo’. She seems to ignore her own role in writing up non-events – as if she forgets that weekly grind of having to find something to write about.

Riddell then loses it completely when, amongst a random list of contemporary, supposedly ‘synthetic’ experiences, she includes podcasts. That is, saveable audio files distributed over the Internet, a convenient way of me hearing Melvyn Bragg’s In Our Time because I’m working after 9am on a Thursday when it’s broadcast. This is one of Boorstein’s nightmares come to pass, apparently.

No, this is shockingly poor journalism. Why does Peter Black seem to like it?

Maybe, like that anti-philosophe Paul de Mann, who preferred post-structuralism to admitting an unfortunate history of collaboration, Black preferes an understanding of events and experience that have only a passing resemblance to fact. At the moment, with reference to MP Simon Hughes, he is maintaining that the Liberal Party did nothing wrong in the Bermondsy Election of 1983 except for not speaking up against the homophobia targetted at Labour candidate Peter Tatchell. This despite Tatchell saying they fought a dirty campaign and Hughes apologising for it. Inauthentic indeed