Posts

When The Dog Dies, Robin and Wendy's Wet Weekends

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 In this post : For Reasons Beyond My Control I listed a few of my favourite comedy shows, but I'd forgotten two. The first is "When The Dog Dies", written by Ian Davidson and Peter Vincent, with Ronnie Corbett and Liza Tarbuck.  You'd imagine a quiet gentle comedy, and it sounds like that initially, but the deep grasping nastiness of Ronnie's children and the sexiness of his lodger (Liza Tarbuck, always half dressed or in tight leather it seems) gives an edge to the comedy.  Then there's "Robin And Wendy's Wet Weekends":  It is written by and stars Kay Stonham and Simon Greenall. It is about Robin and Wendy Mayfield, a childless couple from Stevenage. Robin is obsessed with Mayfield, the model village he has built in their garage. Again it sounds like a "gentle comedy" but involves (for example), adulterous sex with a dying man in a hospital.  

Nature beats mythology

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What strikes me about these monsters from ancient legend, Cerberus... ...Medusa... ...Pegasus...    ...is that they are all made up of bits of animals (or animals/people with unusual numbers of parts). It is as if they did not have the imagination to conceive of a completely new being. The same lack of imagination applies to old books on demonology. Demons are also combinations of parts of different animals. A man with a beak for a mouth, a tail and wings. and often horns borrowed from goats. And here are images of Satan's little helpers (again bits of normal animals stuck together in a human format):     That is why I can't watch Star Trek. I'd like to watch it, to relax with a bit of science fiction, but every F€$£ing alien is simply and clearly a man or woman with heavy makeup on. You can forgive this in the 1960s (and I did). But these days the makeup has become heavier. And the "aliens" remain human: ...the artistry and craft is there, but the imagination i

Arthur C. Clarke's First Law

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Arthur C. Clarke's First law: " When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong. " I was reminded of this as I started re-reading Goodbye Descartes by Keith Devlin (a mathematician/philosopher).  To quote from the book: " Toward the end of the 1970s the AI and natural language understanding bubbles began to burst. " Then he mentions a philosopher, Hubert Dreyfus, who wrote a book "What Computers Can't Do," saying that AI programs would never scale up to anything useful. Just a year ago I heard a philosopher on a BBC podcast declare that " there will never be driverless cars. " She did not know what to say when it was pointed out that they already exist. I started playing around with neural networks after 1997 (when Devlin's book was published). It seems I'd forgotten what Devlin and Dreyfus had taugh

You are not normal

"You are not normal," she said. "You make it sound like an insult," he replied.

Lindsay Kemp's Alice

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 I saw Lindsay Kemp's Mime Company production of "Alice" more than 20 years ago in Milano. One scene has remained in my memory all these years:  As usual a still photo (or even a video) cannot convey the atmosphere. But wouldn't it be wonderful to create something as strange and magic as that?   In reality, not on a screen.

Drawings 2020

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    2020-01-27 - 2020   Cowgirl - 2020     Cowgirl , detail - 2020 Veteran - 2020 Veteran , detail 2020 La Sposa - 2020 La Sposa , detail - 2020   September 2020 - 2020 September 2020 , detail - 2020 Untitled - 2020      Jamie at Todi - 2020         La Castellana - 2020 La Castellana , detail - 2020 FC - 2020   ANQHNL - 2020     ANQHNL - 2020     Untitled - 2020      2020-12-01 - 2020 2020-12-01 , detail - 2020  2020-12-10 2020-12-10 , detail EC - 2020  2020-12-13 2020-12-18 2020-12-18 , detail Drawings from 2019 and earlier drawings          

The Comfort of Fog

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I've always liked fog, it seems magical and mysterious. I went to school through fog, here's Rowan Crescent, Bigglewade, 1975... I was reminded of that photo when I looked out of my window here in Italy and saw... Ah. The Comfort of Fog.