Word Warrior?

So I was wondering why people get pierced after reading on the BBC's news site that, apparently, piercees are suffering silence when their body adornments go awry (Read it here.)

Being curious I went a-Googling and and after getting an eyeful of more than enough seriously desecrated erogenous bits I lost interest and clicked an advertisement. Yeah! Really. The irony is too funny ... and uh-oh I just realised that Constant Reader has already conjured up an image of yours truly done up like a dog's dinner with various dangly parts bejewelled with hypo-allergenic rings and dumbells. No! Not that. I stopped with my ears. One each side; and I only had those done because hypo-allergenic clip-on earrings are hard to find and uncomfortable to wear .... Where was I?

The ad I clicked, in a attempt to revive my flagging amusement levels, was for The Classic IQ Test. "Ooh," I thought. "Test. I like tests!" I also like IQ tests because they make me feel good cos I am a complete smart-arse and I had a distinct and (sadly) characteristically cynical hunch that the test would be a cinch. My instincts rarely fail me and I have a shrewd grasp of the advertising industry so combining cynicism with experience led me to conclude that the product, being both free and in need of a self-selecting subject, would be bound to inflate the result.

I was not disappointed. I am, it seems, a "Word Warrior". I was told that:

You are equipped with a verbal arsenal that enables you to understand complex issues and communicate on a particularly high level. These talents make you a Word Warrior.

Whether or not you recognise it, your vocabulary is your strongest suit -- use it whenever you can. Since your command of words is so great, you are also a terrific communicator -- able to articulate big ideas to just about anyone. Your wordsmithing prowess will also help in artistic and creative pursuits. The power of words translates to fresh ideas off paper too. Since you have so many words at your disposal, you are in a unique position to describe things in an original way, as well as see the future in your mind's eye. In short, your strengths allow you to be a visionary -- able to extrapolate and come up with a multitude of fresh ideas.

You think? Aw shucks. I don't know whether to blush or start a tirade on the foolishness of those who believe that advertising is trite or cynical or both. All the same ... the test also identified me as having an IQ of 133 which is moderately above average, I admit, but it is a long way from genius level whatever anyone says. I am a long way below that. My number skills are slow and clunky and anything involving algebraic analysis (eg logic puzzles) leave me floundering in a verbal limbo of my own manufacture .... While the genii are solving the symbolic logic problems I am still lost in an internal committee wrangle over the naming convention for the elements that are to be algorithmically tabulated.

Christ! I am doing it again!

You can check out my result by clicking this link or take the test yourself and share your results via the comments.

Tempus Frustro

I have gone all slack in the publishing department again. (Memo to self: Remember to slap own wrists when you have finished typing this!) My mind has, however, been unusually active over the last weeks, in spite of domestic appearances to the contrary. Of course what goes on within the confines of my lame excuse for a domicile for my ego is not necessarily the same kind of thing that others members of the species commonly associate with rational thought.

I am one of those nerdy types that have actually read Professor Stephen Hawking's opus: A Brief History of Time and, if I did not actually fully understood all of it, I at least grasped the bulk of the essential gist. In thinking about it again recently I came to realise that if one accepts Einsteinian relativity and the Big Bang as fundamentally established truths then two conclusions are inescapable. The first being that science and theology are not mutually incompatible and the second that the nature of reality is truly as tenuous as suggested in the camp-fire song: Row, row, row your boat.

Now the first is not merely a matter of conjecture. A big bang is as clear an example of a spontaneous 'act' of creation as any described by any theological doctrine or tradition. But the second is significantly more disconcerting, much harder to accept, still more difficult to comprehend at the instinctual level ... and it is a lot less likeable once the logical analysis has left you entrapped in its essential truth.

Briefly it goes like this. Time stands still for a 'thing' moving at the speed of light. Of course only light travels at the speed of light but look up at the sky ... any time, day or night; the universe is pretty well bathed in the stuff. Now it doesn't seem unreasonable to say that if time has stopped then it has ceased to exist; at least for the light, it has. Next we come to the creation. The universe all starts with a big bang from a point with no dimensions and has been expanding ever since ....

Are you with me? If time doesn't really exist then universe only actually looks big to us inside it. It actually doesn't exist at all. Which is what a thought or a dream is (or maybe that should be isn't).

It might well be a slippery slope leading to the pits of total insanity or, worse, a slideway straight into the arms of that strange late twentieth century phenomenon: the conspiracy theorists. It is not a route I feel comfortable in following. Not because I wish reality to possess some substance of tactile realness which is immune to being reduced to oblivion by logic. Nor because I want a theology that possesses an immutable and incontestable "truth" (such theologies to include atheism, because believing there are no gods is as much an act of faith as believing there are). However I am comfortable in pandering to the curiosity that my monkey ancestry has bestowed upon me and this has led me into some strange places.

Nick Bostrom is a research fellow at Oxford university and is about as unlikely a candidate for conspiracy theorist as I can imagine. So I was intrigued to come across his paper: Are You Living In a Computer Simulation? a few months ago during one of my aimless meanderings around the net. "Come back Neo, all is forgiven!" But the simulation argument has been a favourite philosophical bone for centuries from Plato thru Descartes to today. Personally I subscribe to the demands of the philosophers in The Hitchhikers Guide To The Universe by the late Douglas Adams, who fatuously demanded 'rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty' when faced with a super computer that was designed to answer the 'Ultimate Question'. (Said question being risibly and rhetorically succinct, it was: Life, The Universe, and Everything..)

But that is exactly what it is about, isn't it? We demand to know exactly when the plane is due to land and we get annoyed if it is late. We need to know exactly how much we are to be paid before we agree to go to work. Some absolutes are not just desirable they are absolutely essential. But we blithely accept a reality that utterly defies any absolutism. I just dropped a cup in my kitchen. It broke. I knew it was going to break as well as I knew that would fall toward the floor by the shortest possible route. I was not then surprised to see it broken. Was I disappointed? No. My expectations were fully realised and in consequence I should have felt only pleasure. But I was annoyed, damn it! I was annoyed because it was one of a set of six. I was annoyed because it was broken and although breakage as a probability was so close to unity as to be certain for all intents and purposes there remained an incalculable and very small, but nevertheless real, chance that it might not break. On such a minutely honed area of doubt and uncertainty I shall now retire to consider my future options for dispensation of hot infusional beverages to such guests as I from time to time entertain in my shabbily humble domain ....

Besides, I just discovered that this blogger has been over the same sort of ground and, worryingly, made more sense. Maybe I should just sit down in front of the TV and pick at the thick dead skin on my heels until they bleed ... again. Oh! Why do I keep doing that! (Unless I am unconsiously fulfilling a desire to be "interesting" in order to procure for myself an extension to my existence ... but that would only serve to define my level of craziness and -- frankly -- I am not entirely convinced that would be a negative goal regardless of its practicalness!)

To Ellen Back

As a life-long giver-up, a procrastinationista extraordinaire, the kind of person for whom tomorrow is an infinite resource ... and which is always between 1 second and 23 hours 59 minutes 59 seconds away, I freely confess that I shamed myself into writing. Doing this seemed to be the easiest option as all the alternatives are far too mundanely domestic. But even I am forced to question the logic of the decision. Writing. Well, typing, to be pedantic, requires firstly to be written and secondly to have at least the semblance of a hint that there is actually some purpose to it ... or failing that some originality.

Logic would dictate that I really ought to get around to making contact with some of my elderly relatives before paper and words cease to be a viable method of communication with them (as opposed to a ouija board or planchette!) My godfather, for example, lost his wife in January. Their Golden wedding anniversary would have been next week. Life's a bitch and no mistake. I really must write to him. He was nothing but kindness and generosity to me in my youth and I liked my aunt a lot too. She was a real motherly sort of person and it is a matter of sadness (mine, I suppose, in the form of unrequired and unlooked for empathy) that they never had children of their own. Aunt A___ was pretty much an enigma within the family; a family, it should be said, that has too often been torn apart by feuds and disputes over the stupidest things. Many such rancours remain smouldering in that sullen way that childish sulks always do.

I have not been immune to the disease. I was made a personna non grata by a cousin after a wedding nearly 20 years ago. I am still in the dark as to why, exactly. The old aphorism concerning relatives and friends and choice is pretty much on target as far as I am concerned. The concept of a wide and happy family circle is more or less dead on my branch of the human family tree. Sour? No contest, your honour!

All the same, I want to write to Uncle B___. To tell him of my sorrow that I have been too wrapped up in my own life to find time to visit him since he and A___ moved into their bungalow after they both reluctantly conceded that they could no longer manage their large house and garden. But it is hard to do. And here the reason is even harder to express ....

It's the damnedest and daftest reason I ever heard for one not writing a letter of condolence to a fondly loved elderly relative. I am ashamed to write. We have been out of touch for ages. Years. I dread to think when was the last time we exchanged letters. He never was much of a man for conversation on ther phone; he was -- still is -- a letter writer. Worse, he's one of those endearingly exasperating ones who reply by return of post answering every query you raised except, invariably, the one you really wanted the answer for. He's also very partial to what I call "literary condiments"; those quirky little clichéd phrases and hackneyed expressions that some writers use, either as a written version of umming or else as a gauche way of attempting to seem urbane. I alwasy found it charming and endearing ... although that is probabkly as patronising as it possible to get .... And I still haven't been honest enough to blurt out my reason for putting off writing.

Well ... it did not help that my mother, uncle's sister, reported to me that the cousin with whom I am an unwilling feudster had been reported as the first family member to get a condolence card on uncle's door mat. He is a crawling little creep, really! As a child he was the snivelling sneak who would rat on anyone who baulked him ... and years have done little to nurture his charisma rating. That isn't the reason ... but, like I said it doesn't help. The fact is I am just ashamed that I haven't written for a dogs age and now I feel that to write would merely give the impression that I am belatedly hoping to bolster my claim on a share of dear Uncle B___'s estate.

Yeah I know. It's gotta be the dumbest reason for not writing to someone ever thought up. But that's me. Dumb and dumber.

The title to this piece came to me from reading through this morning's news. Ellen MacArthur is on the last leg of her latest epic solo adventure. I am looking forward to the inevitable TV series made up from her video diary recorded en route. Nothing is quite as entertainingly inspiring as seeing the miniature heroine make her pitifully lonely and tearful pleas to the gods for respite from nature's vigour (or lack thereof) and the mortal and material frailty of flesh and boat. Why, one is forced to wonder, would anyone in their right mind do such a thing? Because! That's why. And I am so jealous.