Falling Sky

Talk about the Blues (Brothers)

A couple of months old it may be, but I only just read this enjoyably compulsive account of the making of The Blues Brothers by Ned Zeman in Vanity Fair.  5 pages long and worth every word.

...Aykroyd spends his free time speeding through outskirts and befriending coroners. Belushi, being Chicago’s favorite son, does anything he wants. Everything about him—his lunch-bucket charm, his utter lack of pretense—makes Belushi a figure of such resounding local popularity that Aykroyd calls him “the unofficial mayor of Chicago.”

A trip to Wrigley Field, home of the Chicago Cubs, boggles [John] Landis. “Like being with Mussolini in Rome,” he remembers. Belushi, having entered one of the stadium’s crowded bathrooms, smiles and shouts, “O.K., stand back!” Everyone retreats from the urinals. Belushi does his business. Then, zipping his fly and beaming, he says, “O.K., back you go!”

“John would literally hail police cars like taxis,” Mitch Glazer says. “The cops would say, ‘Hey, Belushi!’ Then we’d fall into the backseat and the cops would drive us home.”

[...] The film’s budget is $17.5 million, then an expensive proposition, particularly for a comedy. Or whatever it is. Nobody quite knows. There’s comedy and lots of it. There are car chases and crashing helicopters. But all of the above revolve around four giant song-and-dance numbers, each starring a different music giant: Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin, James Brown, and Cab Calloway. Not to mention the performances by Jake and Elwood.

“You could tell there was confusion,” Landis says. “I told some of the crew, ‘This is a musical.’ They were so confused. They didn’t know what the fuck they were making.”

 

[...] One night at three, while filming on a deserted lot in Harvey, Illinois, Belushi disappears. He does this sometimes. On a hunch, Aykroyd follows a grassy path until he spies a house with a light on.

“Uh, we’re shooting a film over here,” Aykroyd tells the homeowner. “We’re looking for one of our actors.”

“Oh, you mean Belushi?” the man replies. “He came in here an hour ago and raided my fridge. He’s asleep on my couch.”

Only Belushi could pull this off. “America’s Guest,” Aykroyd calls him.

“John,” Aykroyd says, awakening Belushi, “we have to go back to work.”

Belushi nods and rises. They walk back to the set as if nothing happened.

It has a happy ending, until you remember what happened next. Read while listening to some of the greats, then follow with Strand Of Oaks's remarkable Daniel's Blues, the saddest song you'll ever hear written from the perspective of Dan Aykroyd.

 

Life, Death and Dadness

 

Audrey with toes and wrist bent, 2011 - Nadav Kander

It's been way, way, way too long since I last did any life drawing, and by god I miss it. While I wait for the opportunity to start again, it's good to see the work of others trying to capture the human form in a way that is neither lecherous nor tedious. As such, I was impressed by the ten photographs of nudes by Nadav Kander posted by the Guardian on Friday to accompany an exhibition of Kander's latest work (and, in their infinite wisdom, enabled comments - as always, best avoided). While the accompanying copy lays it on a bit thick - "nudity never loses its power to shock"? Really? - the images themselves are fascinating. All too often you'll see paintings striving to look like photographs, rarely vice versa, yet when you first look at these it's actually a bit of a struggle to compute the knowledge that they're not paintings, that these are not figures rendered in oils or pastel, but flesh and blood (particularly that first image). Pale skin blindingly white surrounded by darkness, monochrome but for red hair. Striking, beautiful, I love how these images capture the human body in a way that is both warts-and-all real (a la the paintings of Lucien Freud) and ethereal, like white chalk on black paper, dead and alive. Could've done without the chicken drumstick, mind.

 

I've blogged before about the wonderful Maurice Sendak and, on top of his exceptional body of work, what a delight he was to listen to in interview. Right at the end of 2012, the New York Times uploaded this wonderful 5-minute video, which takes an excerpt from an interview Sendak gave in 2011 to Fresh Air on NPR where he discusses his mortality, his atheism and the sadness of seeing friends go before him, depicted with simple but charming illustrations from Christoph Niemann. It's incredibly moving, and I cannot recommend it enough - please, do find 5 minutes to play this, but not in public. Every sentence is precious, heartfelt and raw, awash with emotion and sincerity, and I swear within 4 minutes I was in tears. His voice, oh god...

 

James Kochalka's sketchbook diaries came to an end on New Year's Eve - two weeks on, I still miss those daily glimpses of life and imagination, but I completely understand why he's chosen to move on after so many years (the first strip in volume 1 of the collected diaries is from 26 October 1998). Somehow I imagine rereading them now I'm a parent will add a new dimension to his more family-centred strips - just two weeks before the diaries came to an end, his strip for 16 December resonated a hell of a lot with me, given my abject failure to be an artist (unlike Kochalka himself). I'll probably print it out, pin it up and bash myself round the head with it the next time I'm bemoaning my (lack of) professional lot. Maybe it seems a self-evident message, that being a great Dad would be achievement enough, but it still means a lot to see it captured so simply. To the Elf himself, I would say thanks for keeping up that daily discipline for so long, and all the best for the future - you've been more of an influence than you'll ever know, and not just because I'll never look at a paddling pool the same way again.

"The Heart Is Not Good" - Commute Clippings 3/12

Hello! Things still very busy, plus I've been thoroughly under the weather for the last few weeks (having an 8 month old baby and sleeping a cold off? Not going to happen). Nonetheless, the commuting continues, as does the blog reading. Firstly, the most enjoyable article I've read in weeks - a nice long piece by Nathaniel Rich in the New York Times about Japan's 'immortal jellyfish' - and the man who loves them. Wondrous, fascinating and strangely sad, almost Miyazaki-like.

[H]e thinks we’re close to solving the species’s mystery — that it’s a matter of years, perhaps a decade or two. “Human beings are so intelligent,” he told me, as if to reassure me. But then he added a caveat. “Before we achieve immortality,” he said, “we must evolve first. The heart is not good.”

I assumed that he was making a biological argument — that the organ is not biologically capable of infinite life, that we needed to design new, artificial hearts for longer, artificial lives. But then I realized that he wasn’t speaking literally. By heart, he meant the human spirit.

“Human beings must learn to love nature,” he said. “Today the countryside is obsolete. In Japan, it has disappeared. Big metropolitan places have appeared everywhere. We are in the garbage. If this continues, nature will die.”

Man, he explained, is intelligent enough to achieve biological immortality. But we don’t deserve it.

This intriguing piece by Ian Jack in the Guardian compares the loss of locality in football teams with the foreign ownership of essential utilities, and how we've seemingly acquiesced to both.

[...] "Less and less are we a nation and more and more just a captive market to be exploited," Alan Bennett writes in the introduction to his new play, People, complaining that "the diminution in magnanimity" in the state's provision has rebranded the citizen as a customer "supposedly to dignify our requirements but in effect to make us available for easier exploitation". A few weeks earlier, the writer James Meek had published in the London Review of Books a similar diagnosis of the private ownership, often foreign, of public utilities. The commodity that made water, roads and airports valuable to investors was us, the people who had no choice but to use them. "We are a human revenue stream; we are being made tenants in our own land, defined by the string of private fees we pay to exist here."

And while it's all too easy to break into some kind of panic about our children and all the harms waiting to befall them, Fran Abrams in the New Statesman takes a historical perspective and sees reason to cheer, not dread:

Perhaps the great mystery about children today is not why they continue to suffer from abuse, neglect and overindulgence. It is why the adult world continues to worry so intensely about these things. After all, there is much to celebrate. A child born in the UK in 2010 can expect to live to be 80 years old; the average child born in 1910 lived to the age of 50. Of every 1,000 children born in the UK in 2010, just five will die before their fifth birthday; a hundred years earlier, 140 of every 1,000 did not survive infancy. Before the Second World War, three in every 100 children went to university; by 2010, about one in every two. The reported crime rate began dropping from the mid-1990s. Suicide and self-harm are becoming less common. Even unemployment is nowhere near as high as it was in the 1930s. Children nowadays are less likely to be in lone-parent households than they were during Victorian times – but now family break-up is usually caused by divorce rather than death.

But the fears and the myths are not just fears and myths about children alone. They are based on ideas and anxieties about mankind, anxieties that have emerged repeatedly throughout the ages because they have drawn people together as external threats tend to do. In uncertain times – and times often have been uncertain – there is a reassurance to be found in worrying about abstract, unknowable dangers. If the evil, the poison, the violence, is out there, prowling around the dark boundaries of the camp, then those huddled inside nearest to the fire may take comfort in the rhythms of their own lives.

Commute Clippings 15/11

Really enjoyed this opinion piece from historian Mary Beard at BBC News on how, when it comes to speaking down to the poor with coded (and blatant) language, it was ever thus:

More recent obsessions have focused on those immoral wastrels who supposedly choose to have another baby in order to increase their state benefits by a couple of thousand a year.

I guess that there may be a few people who do try this - if so, they probably need a few lessons in home economics and maths rather than in morals.

But what a preposterous view of the whole reproductive process you must have, with all its uncertainties, pain, disruption, responsibilities and expense, to imagine that people are going down this route in large numbers. It's not a line I hear coming from many women.

[...] The 19th Century notoriously had its "deserving" and "undeserving poor". Our own equivalent of the "deserving poor" is "hard-working families".

Politicians of all parties are forever parroting this pious phrase on television or radio. It's almost as if they've been told to never say the simple word "families" without its knee-jerk accompanying adjective.

Maybe I'm peculiarly counter-suggestible. But whenever I hear them at it, I feel a great well of support coming over me for the feckless and lazy, or - for heaven's sake - for the singletons who don't have families. Are you any less worthy of our political time and care just because you haven't got kids?

The Atlantic has an interview with David Allen of Getting Things Done fame, with a few observations that ring true for anyone stuck in the daily grind:

If you’ve had half a day of a lot of decisions to make, you don’t have much willpower left the rest of the day. So then we walk around with what I call the GSA of life—the Gnawing Sense of Anxiety that something out there might be more important than what you’re currently doing. You don’t remember what it is, but it might be more important than whatever you’re doing, so you’re not present anywhere. You’re at work worrying about home, and you’re at home worrying about work, and you’re neither place psychologically when you’re there physically. That’s hugely undermining of your productivity, and certainly adds hugely to the stress factor.

What’s different these days? Nothing is different really, except how frequently this occurs. You and I have gotten more change-producing and priority-shifting inputs in the past 72 hours than your parents got in a month, some of them in a year. I was reading that in 1912, someone was complaining about the telephone, exactly the same things you hear people say about e-mail: “Oh my God, it’s going to ruin our quality of life”; “conversations are going to become surface-only and not meaningful”; “all the interruptions and distractions!” It reads like right now. [...] The difference is that rather than a small minority of people experiencing this stress, it’s a much larger group of people, at every level.

And, rather fittingly given the above, here's a nice piece by Peter Bregman in Lifehacker on the productivity benefits of meditation - although, in all honesty, I've not done it myself. But I'd like to.

Sometimes, not following through on something you want to do is a problem, like not writing that proposal you've been procrastinating on or not having that difficult conversation you've been avoiding.

But other times, the problem is that you do follow through on something you don't want to do. Like speaking instead of listening or playing politics instead of rising above them.

Meditation teaches us to resist the urge of that counterproductive follow through.

And while I've often noted that it's easier and more reliable to create an environment that supports your goals than it is to depend on willpower, sometimes, we do need to rely on plain, old-fashioned, self-control.

[...] Meditating daily will strengthen your willpower muscle. Your urges won't disappear, but you will be better equipped to manage them. And you will have experience that proves to you that the urge is only a suggestion. You are in control.

Commute Clippings 14/11

Busy busy busy, but there's still good things to read. To start with, you absolutely cannot go wrong with an interview with the late great Maurice Sendak - and this recently published one in The Believer with Emma Brockes is a particular delight, aching with feeling, the thoughts of someone close to the end.

BLVR: Is the problem with e-books partly a problem of color?

MS: Yes. Picture books depend on color, largely. And they haven’t perfected the color in those machines. But it’s not that. It’s giving up a form that is so beautiful. A book is really like a lover. It arranges itself in your life in a way that is beautiful. Even as a kid, my sister, who was the eldest, brought books home for me, and I think I spent more time sniffing and touching them than reading. I just remember the joy of the book; the beauty of the binding. The smelling of the interior. Happy.

While the LHC's shattering of supersymmetry made the mainstream news, and with good cause, the launch of the largest simulation of the entire frikkin' universe (well, sort of) stayed in the specialist press. Still, it's fascinating stuff and this piece in Popular Science isn't so technical as to bamboozle non-theoretical physicians.

Sometime next month, the world’s third-fastest supercomputer --known as Mira--will complete tests of its new upgraded software and begin running the largest cosmological simulations ever performed at Argonne National Laboratory. These simulations are massive, taking in huge amounts of data from the latest generation of high-fidelity sky surveys and crunching it into models of the universe that are larger, higher-resolution, and more statistically accurate than any that have come before. When it’s done, scientists should have some amazing high-quality visualizations of the so-called “cosmic web” that connects the universe as we understand it. And they’ll have the best statistical models of the cosmos that cosmologists have ever seen.

And finally there's this rather sweet piece in Research Digest on why children of 3-4 think they're invisible when their eyes are covered, and the implications of this.

In both studies so far, when the children thought they were invisible by virtue of their eyes being covered, they nonetheless agreed that their head and their body were visible. They seemed to be making a distinction between their "self" that was hidden, and their body, which was still visible. Taken together with the fact that it was the concealment of the eyes that seemed to be the crucial factor for feeling hidden, the researchers wondered if their invisibility beliefs were based around the idea that there must be eye contact between two people - a meeting of gazes - for them to see each other (or at least, to see their "selves").

Commute Clippings 25/10

It's been quiet here these last few days, due in no small part to me being particularly exhausted after work, in a daze on the train home. Still, there's been some great articles sitting in my Pocket during that time - here's a few, starting with an absolutely cracking interview with Teller (as in Penn & Teller) by Chris Jones in Esquire magazine.

He has dedicated his life to the distortion of reality, to trickery and benign deceit. His startling, angular house, built against a hillside in the red Nevada desert — "a poorly camouflaged military installation" is how he describes it; it's the one with the giant skull painted on the roof — is a monument to his love. Every room has a secret. His library is filled with ancient magic books, including what's considered one of the art's seminal texts, Discoverie of Witchcraft, from 1584. (It's extremely rare, because, as the story has it, King James ordered every copy burned.) One of the hallways is built in forced perspective, so it seems longer than it really is. The window that appears to be at its end is actually in the adjoining wall; a full-length 45 degree mirror explains the illusion. In the garden, there's a large bronze bear that somehow greets guests by name. The bear also does card tricks. Inside the house, Teller might hand a bewildered visitor a deck of cards and ask him to pick one before they head outside. The bear will then growl, "Was it the five of clu— no. It was the five of spades," and the bear will be right. "That one fools magicians," Teller says.

[...] The real point of magic, Teller said during those lectures, is "telling a beautiful lie. It lets you see what the world would be like if cause and effect weren't bound by physics." It's the collision between what you know and what you see that provides magic's greatest spark.

This interview with playwriter Lucy Kirkwood in the Guardian left me feeling profoundly depressed at the screwed-up culture kids are growing up in today, so naturally I'm going to share it with you.

The more she has researched, the more disturbed she has become. "We are all sort of pretending it is not happening. I think 12 is the average age for boys to see their first pornography these days, but that doesn't mean picking up a copy of Razzle from a railway siding; it is like some woman having an object shoved into her anus on a sort of high-definition film. I have a friend who is a teacher who had to leave her job because a 15-year-old boy stuck a camera up her skirt and put it online.

"Boys are being force-fed this very plastic sexuality on a mass scale. It is not something they have found for themselves in a way. There is no discovery. The internet says, you know, 'The rest of your life you will find enormous boobs out there.' The question is how do you kind of reboot from that position?"

Very different, but just as disheartening, is this piece in the National Review on the Golden Dawn 'party' in Greece:

The foray into electoral politics did not prompt Golden Dawn to tone down its act. On the contrary, the violence has only escalated. Last year, the group threatened on its website to kill a left-wing journalist. Its vigilantes patrol stores to ensure that they hire Greeks, not immigrants. In the town of Rafina, they overturned market stalls belonging to anyone who didn’t have white skin. This summer, Golden Dawn distributed flyers outside gay clubs in Athens that read, “AFTER THE IMMIGRANTS, YOU’RE NEXT.”

Michaloliakos, meanwhile, makes it clear that his group has only a tenuous allegiance to democratic politics. At a rally where his supporters chanted, “Blood, honor, and Golden Dawn”—an adapted Nazi slogan—Michaloliakos declared: “If they want us to, we can abandon it at any given moment and take to the streets. ... There, they shall see what the Golden Dawn is really about, they will see what battle means, they will see what struggle means, they will see what bayonets sharpened every night mean.”

[...] As the center collapses, the future of Greece is increasingly taking shape as a vicious struggle between the extreme left and right for control of the ailing state. It’s telling that, so far, the response to Golden Dawn from the political establishment has been muted—parliament has debated anti-hate speech measures but taken no concrete action. Instead, it has been left-wing anarchist groups who have stepped into the fray, sometimes employing tactics as disturbing as those of Golden Dawn.

After that, you need a smile. Clicky, then, for the Daily Mash's take on the talking beluga whale:

Staff at the California Marine Park discovered that Pluto – or ‘Big Frank’ as he prefers to be known – has learned to mimic not only human words but also gibberish East End slang expressions.

Marine biologist Tom Logan said: “When any of our staff approached Big Frank’s pen, they could hear a muffled but audible voice repeatedly asking ‘Where’s the Lillians, me old China?

“Eventually we worked out he was asking for fish. This is a remarkable scientific breakthrough but it’s fucking difficult to understand.

“What’s most baffling is that Big Frank frequently uses several words when one will do, such as ‘apples and pears’ for ‘stairs’, or ‘under the arches and over to Hampton’ when he simply means ‘plankton’.

“He has also demonstrated other cockney traits, such as leaping out of the water during feeding time in an exaggerated show of mateyness, and insisting on buying a massive round of fish.

Commute Clippings 17/10

My animation tutor from Bournemouth and all-round legend, Peter Parr, has been blogging his sketches on Tumblr for a couple of years now. It's been fascinating seeing him take to sketching on an iPad, but for me there's still something very special about what happens when he takes a brush pen to a sketchbook. This drawing of the Blue Mosque in Istanbul, from a small series posted yesterday, is a particular delight. It's been 14 years since he taught me directly, but thanks to his blog he remains an inspiration.

For those bemoaning the conclusion of this year's Great British Bake Off, fear not! According to the Daily Mash, "Bake-Off will last as long as the recession, says BBC"

The Corporation assured a tense, angry Britain that while it toils in the midst of economic gloom it will provide a desperate country with lingering images of sugary comfort food.
Emma Bradford, from Hatfield, said: “I must be able to eat brownies all day and then come home to a programme about enthusiastic amateurs making brownies that, somehow, seem even more delicious.
“Otherwise I will paint the office walls with the blood of my enemies.”
[...] Tom Logan, a perfectly moist upside-down cake enthusiast, added: “Need it. Need it. Need it. Never stop doing this.
“Don’t fuck with me. I can make a bomb in my shed.”

Elsewhere, there's a fascinating article by Alan White in the New Statesman that takes the idea of being the subject of a Twitterstorm and uses it to consider what the Internet has done to our sense of ourselves and others:

[...] No – we don’t want to live in a fantasy world. What we want to do is sell our own narrative, augment it, share it. Again and again – Spotify, Instagram, Pinterest – we are encouraged to share our tastes. What are we doing? What are we listening to? Eating? We’re under a self-imposed, dull form of surveillance – useful for business, and usually boring for our peers.
[...] We have placed ourselves under an extreme form of surveillance. A bar-room joke becomes a statement of intent, viewable by anyone, anywhere. Our every error is now catalogued, easily searchable, impossible to forget.

The article includes the following quote from a piece by Adam Gopnik in the New Yorker that particularly resonates:

Everything once inside is outside, a click away; much that used to be outside is inside, experienced in solitude. And so the peacefulness, the serenity that we feel away from the Internet, and which all the Better-Nevers rightly testify to, has less to do with being no longer harried by others than with being less oppressed by the force of your own inner life. Shut off your computer, and your self stops raging quite as much or quite as loud.

A Couple of Conservative Conference Commute Clippings

It's not every day you see Daily Mail content in the hallowed liberal walls of the Guardian, but this evisceration of Boris Johnson by Max Hastings made both papers, perfectly skewering that "OMG Boris is a legend PM for life LOL" bollocks that so many otherwise intelligent adults continue to blurt:

If the day ever comes that Boris Johnson becomes tenant of Downing Street, I shall be among those packing my bags for a new life in Buenos Aires or suchlike, because it means that Britain has abandoned its last pretensions to be a serious country.
[...] Most politicians are ambitious and ruthless, but Boris is a gold medal egomaniac. I would not trust him with my wife nor – from painful experience – my wallet. It is unnecessary to take any moral view about his almost crazed infidelities, but it is hard to believe that any man so conspicuously incapable of controlling his own libido is fit to be trusted with controlling the country.
His chaotic public persona is not an act – he is, indeed, manically disorganised about everything except his own image management. He is also a far more ruthless, and frankly nastier, figure than the public appreciates.

Still at the Grauniad, still with the conference, there's this deliciously written sketch of the party faithful:

[...] Every party looks slightly scary when reduced to its rump, and in the Tories' case the look is particularly alarming. There are the angular, curiously pointy young men in three-piece suits, with staring eyes and towering foreheads, and chins that either jut out abruptly or do not appear to exist. There are alice-band girls in pearls with horsey laughs, bald middle-aged dandies in pinstripe, and the pensioners in blazers with features permanently fixed into expressions of sharp suspicion. These are the party's loyal, true-blue members – and they are emphatically not modernisers.

Commute Clippings 11/10

Essential reading at the Quietus, from a superb article by Josh Hall on depression:

[...] "Everybody gets depressed," [India] Knight blithely asserts; a sentence as blisteringly inaccurate as one suggesting that everyone gets the occasional spot of MRSA, or suffers from an annoying recurrence of brain tumour. Despite railing on Twitter about her late father's depression, it is clear that Knight has absolutely no conception of the illness; clear that she lacks the critical faculties to distinguish between a bad day and a mental disorder.
Not everybody gets depressed, just as not everybody gets cancer and not everybody loses a limb. In any given year, around one in four British adults will experience at least one mental disorder. Of those, depression and anxiety are the most common. Depressive episodes can be all consuming. They can render life unfeasible, exploding our capacity to deal with the minutiae of daily existence. They often come hand in hand with psychoses – delusions, hallucinations, an inability to interact with the world at large. Recurrence is common: more than half of those who experience a depressive episode will suffer from at least one more. Depression is chronic for one in five sufferers. It is not the same as feeling a bit mardy.

For something completely different, there's this post on Drowned In Sound looking at (well, listening to) the confused mess that is Radio 1:

[...] I personally fail to understand how anyone over 8 would be able to bear daytime Radio One, having endured it for a few days to write this. Stretched across a playlist that suggests an ADHD maniac with a Spotify account, bouncing wildly from chart pap to Muse and all points in between - in a manner that would redefine ‘eclectic’ to mean ‘random choice of music with no discernible taste or reason’ - the main problem I find with the station is the presenters. Whether it’s Fearne Cotton’s two ladies at the hairdressers chat with Cheryl Cole, in which the main point of conversation was how she had hurt her leg, or utter cuntery of Scott Mills with the weakest fart joke since my first year at big school, the bits between the random music selections are the real killers. Then there’s Newsbeat, which appears every hour with its ‘news for idiots’ approach that seems to take John Craven’s ‘Newsround’ as a starting point and then dumb down (and down some more). ‘Grimmy’ (urge to kill rising every time I type that) is undoubtedly a cut above the above, as it were, but he still has to fit into this template that is driven by demographics.

And this article by Patrick Stokes did the rounds on Twitter at the weekend, with good cause:

[...] The problem with “I’m entitled to my opinion” is that, all too often, it’s used to shelter beliefs that should have been abandoned. It becomes shorthand for “I can say or think whatever I like” – and by extension, continuing to argue is somehow disrespectful. And this attitude feeds, I suggest, into the false equivalence between experts and non-experts that is an increasingly pernicious feature of our public discourse.

Adventures in Space and Time

Today's commute clippings, starting with a cracking article by Stuart Nathan in The Engineer on a recent rocket test in Cornwall...

[...] The messy flame of the igniter pack gave way to a long, narrow tongue of fire and the roar of the rocket caused a perceptible shudder in the concrete floor of our building. During the ten-second burn, a row of diamond-shaped shock waves were clearly visible in the rocket plume, an indicator of smooth fuel combustion; Jubb’s painstaking CFD had worked, to the obvious delight of his team, some of whom had marked the occasion by donning false moustaches.

As the roar died away and the rocket plume diminished, flames continued to roil from the back of the rocket tube. ‘Well, clearly I’m going to have to have a word with the engineers,’ Green said drily. ‘Nobody told me my arse would be on fire at the end of this.’

Meanwhile, somewhere in space, this may all be happening right now...

Something very, very interesting is happening with Voyager 1, the human probe that’s the very farthest from Earth.

New data from the spacecraft, which I will discuss below, indicate Voyager 1 may have exited the solar system for good. If true, this would mark a truly historic moment for the human race — sending a spacecraft beyond the edge of our home solar system.
- from this post by Dave McComas.

Here, Sully nails the appeal of fundamentalism nicely:

[...] Fundamentalism is not about being dumb; it is an act of will to over-ride reality with totalist faith, so that nothing is left unresolved and everything can be explained by a single text, or a single religious leader. It is, in some ways, a neurotic response by many educated, intelligent people to live their lives according to something that cannot admit uncertainty or doubt.
- from this post by Andrew Sullivan.

Amazing discoveries are being made in our beloved Orkney. Before Stonehenge, before pyramids...

[...] This is the temple complex of the Ness of Brodgar, and its size, complexity and sophistication have left archaeologists desperately struggling to find superlatives to describe the wonders they found there. "We have discovered a Neolithic temple complex that is without parallel in western Europe. Yet for decades we thought it was just a hill made of glacial moraine," says discoverer Nick Card of the Orkney Research Centre for Archaeology. "In fact the place is entirely manmade, although it covers more than six acres of land."

Once protected by two giant walls, each more than 100m long and 4m high, the complex at Ness contained more than a dozen large temples – one measured almost 25m square – that were linked to outhouses and kitchens by carefully constructed stone pavements. The bones of sacrificed cattle, elegantly made pottery and pieces of painted ceramics lie scattered round the site. The exact purpose of the complex is a mystery, though it is clearly ancient. Some parts were constructed more than 5,000 years ago.

The people of the Neolithic – the new Stone Age – were the first farmers in Britain, and they arrived on Orkney about 6,000 years ago. They cultivated the land, built farmsteads and rapidly established a vibrant culture, erecting giant stone circles, chambered communal tombs – and a giant complex of buildings at the Ness of Brodgar. The religious beliefs that underpinned these vast works is unknown, however, as is the purpose of the Brodgar temples.

[...] What is clear is that the cultural energy of the few thousand farming folk of Orkney dwarfed those of other civilisations at that time. In size and sophistication, the Ness of Brodgar is comparable with Stonehenge or the wonders of ancient Egypt. Yet the temple complex predates them all. The fact that this great stately edifice was constructed on Orkney, an island that has become a byword for remoteness, makes the site's discovery all the more remarkable. For many archaeologists, its discovery has revolutionised our understanding of ancient Britain.
- from this article in The Guardian.

And finally this lovely snapshot from Caught By The River of Festival No.6 which sounds far more delightful than any music festival has the right to be, even more so given my love of The Prisoner.

[...] As rapturous applause died down and the band prepared to start their second song, the sky – by this point set to a monotone, perfectly Welsh kind of brooding grey – cracked open and the arc of a glorious rainbow shot across the estuary. Scrap that, it was a double rainbow. The band could see it from the stage whereas the audience were missing it, stood as they were facing away. To hear Emily from the band frantically trying to get the entire audience to turn around in a fit of sugar-rush excitement was to bear witness a moment of pure, unadulterated wonder. The rainbows deservedly got one of the biggest cheers of the weekend, a deafening roar of appreciation for nature and the genuinely psychedelic environment we were all stood in.