Being further unsorted contributions to the Church of the Cosmic Platypus, salvaged over the course of two seasons working at "Phantom Peak" from Pius' easel in the corner of Old Town, together with illuminations –
some by the author – also sundry anonymous annotations (click to embiggen)...
"Platypus Vobiscum. That's how you work the system. When it works, it works. Peace. Peace. Stop saying Peace. Take. For example take a moment. Did you mean Piece? Do you remember the psalm about the jigsaw? He puts pieces in the jigsaw. And he starts with the corners. The jigsaw is the pieces. Pushing can be pulled. Ink can run out. And then come back. Personally hopping about on the track, listening for rumbling.
Back to the Circle. Start again. Start at the side."
"Well we start there. Stop saying Stop.
Leave me be believe me. NOT EVERYTHING IS A CLUE! THERE you are, you
naughty little bargain. I'm not saying the gloves are 'off' off, but
nobody seems to be wearing gloves. 'I literally just got off my horse.'
It is perfectly possible to exist in a state where you can INSTANTLY
decide what being – say – this pen feels like. Or the candles. But I
don't know you can do it with your eyes closed. Or you would do it
differently. The whole concept of 'wrong', in a way, is – Oh I wanted to say 'wrong'. But."
"Is any dance a mandatory movement?
Vanity. Vanity. All is vanity. Apart from dressing as an Oompah Loompah.
Mockery is the sincerest form of flattery. No? But mockery just means imitiation.
In
spite of its numerous legs and armour, the millipede is not the
strongest animal in the pet shop. The strongest animal in the pet shop
is the shopkeeper, for they feed the pets."
"The olden times had no eraser. So sometimes the angels would just look
like bats. Imagine if angels hated their wings. What works is a piece of
man."
"Who
was the first to sit down? When we were shrews, did one of us sit down
and realise our hands were now free. But they had not the strength to
use them. The more shoes I wear, the more I realise how little I
understand about shoes. They go up and down with your feet.
But how?
I'm bang on time, and now does Time bang on me. Ribbons. Safer than candles. Three & four & never more."
"This is why old Mister Sleevey is very
careful about where he sets up his knockoffables. And a good scribe
always knows where the paper ends.
I
met a blogger from some retro land who said 'Two massive kneecaps –
nobody knows whose – take up the landing, hairy lean and tanned. I think
they might belong to Nerys Hughes, but now I can't remember how this
poem originally scanned.' That's all they said. Then, falling on their
face – as if to salvage some measure of grace, after such a dwindling
finish – they uttered one last 'Thanks' in accents tinnish. But I would
not be moved. I stood there still. I mean still like – oh, you know. And
moved, as in Not here because they're there now.
All water is a feature. Even ice.
'a' came after 'the' because it changes the subject.
INFECTIOUS"
"Ordinarily this is not a forum for factional hoots. Changing one's mind
can be be very useful. Two types – at least – of crossing out (motives
for deletion) A mistake or a change of heart."
"This is just to say that
I have sold the elephant
foot umbrella stand
Things fall on my back. And the trays are wet. And the shirts we wash are never as clean as the shirts we didn't buy.
Handwriting
wasn't always calligraphy. Who wants to learn cursive when you can
sprout the sentence separate and friendly. Not formal and exclusive. And
when did exclusive become a compliment?"
"I've drawn a little city. It's looking pretty pretty.
One can imagine the future, and spend all that time grieving.
SINGS:
Elbows and kneecaps and drops of brown liquid. Nicknames that hurt like
a stone or a stick would. Hairplugs that give you a tickle-y cough.
These are some things that I hope will fall off. Hubcaps and
breezeblocks and bits of old sofa. Pablo Neruda and Gordon the Gopher.
These lines are but a fraction of my contribution to "Phantom Peak" as Pius, High Priest of the Church of the Cosmic Platypus, mini-penned at an easel in the corner of Old Town, where I would sit to receive tourists as part of a step on their trail. (Everyone who visits Phantom Peak is a "tourist", including those who know the place far better than me, and have made even greater contributions.) My character's dependence upon psychedelic fungus after an orchestrated blimp crash is one of the few details of the world's deep lore I was sure completely of. When a message like the following would pop up from a Head of Department on our work WhatsApp –
– uncaptioned, I might be thrown, but I'd figure if I needed to know what it meant, I'd know, and that generally proved correct. Another contribution, perhaps my proudest, was the innovation on day one of asking tourists, once our scripted interaction had been logged: "Would you like to take a moment?" It was fascinating how well this offer nearly always went down. People seemed genuinely delighted to be just standing still for six seconds or so, stopping, and insufferably, I began to feel like an actual church. Any post introducing Peak though, should really be about the extraordinary company I worked with, but I'm making this all about me because taking a moment is how I've been spending my fiftieth birthday. Today's been lovely. Thanks to all who've said and sent nice things. According to this mural in Strangers' Hall, Norwich, I am now finally half-way through my life! I'm now trying to remember one of Pius' sign-offs.
Ah, yeah: Nine out of ten.
Photo credit: I've become lax, sorry. If anyone knows who took that picture of me, let me know.
It's good to state at the outset that the reason something was developed might not be the reason it stays successful. In a episode of Radiolab called "The Cataclysm Sentence" contributors were invited to offer the single most useful sentence of human knowledge to pass onto a post-human intelligence, and of course I sarted thinking what I'd choose. I'm not a scientist but I'd want to pass on some fun short-cut to generating curiosity: maybe something about
doubling the length of a string, then comparing its pitch when plucked to see, or rather hear, that leap of an octave – or something about the
law of gravity: the idea that the very fact of our existence makes
us attractive. Cute facts.
One contributor was the excellent youtube mortician Caitlin Doherty, who's appeared on this blog before. She suggested, "You will die. Aand that's the most important thing... so you have to have Religion, you have to have Communities. You have to have Art. Those are created by our fear, and our strange, difficult, weird relationship with Death." Which is one theory for the invention of all the above, but listening along as a fellow atheist, I realised it wasn't mine.
What if we created Religion around about the same time we became evolved enough to start wanting to enjoy life, and to realise that wanting to enjoying life had a moral dimension – and that eating meat meant taking a life, for example, but that we still liked the taste? What if we created therefore a way to look upon the world not simply as an environment, but as a provider? What if we developed Religion not to help us deal with death, but to help us deal with killing? As I said however, the reason something was invented isn't necessarily the reason it hangs around.
No, not Lembit Öpik. He's just here to introduce the real winner – and, for all I know, only candidate – Dr. Igor Ashurbeyli. Dr. Igor keeps his victory address short and informative, and since I haven't been keeping up with the Asgardian Parliament, I was grateful to be brought up to date...
While Ashurbeyli admits the "so-called panemic" has stalled Asgardia's financial development somewhat, I was excited to learn that the Space Nation now has its own currency – the "Solar" – and that the exchange of fiat currencies into Solars has been "enabled", even if "the third part of the cycle" – namely the exchange of Solars back into actual money – "has yet to be addressed." A project for the next five years then.
The launch of a new sattelite called "Asgardia 2" is also on the agenda it
seems, although what it will do, how it will do it, and how it will be
launched is yet to be determined.
Ashurbeyli is keen too, he says, to create a new language for Asgardia, and website.
An imagining, I'm guessing.
But "the constitutional anchoring of Asgardia's primary mission" remains "the birth of the first human child in Space." The Head of Nation still seems really keen on this, and "on our path to achieving the goal," Ahsurbeyli announces, "we have come close to the first stage – an isolation experiment on the ground, simulating a year-long space flight involving several married couples of volunteers to conceive and give birth in conditions as close to those in orbit as possible. However," Ashurbeyli admits, "the cost of such an experiment is very high and funding has to be secured." Close then, but no cigar. Also I'm pretty sure the closest conditions to being in orbit achievable "on the ground" are forty second burts of zero gravity in a plummeting fuselage, so encouraging couples to volunteer for a whole year of that might really eat into the budget. Still, at least someone voted for him.
I've dropped you into this video just as the Head of Parliament Lembit Öpik – himself introduced by Asgardia's "Head of Administration" and one-hundred-and-third human in space – appears to be pretending to know sign language. Oh Lembit.
I finally managed to catch my friend Maude's show The Webcamming Chronicles tonight at the Cockpit – tickets for the second showing on the 13th here! – and thoroughly recommend it, but haven't time if I want to get any sleep now to explain why. So here as a placeholder is Carl Sagan's first attempt, as far as I know, to send a drawing of a naked man to aliens. I drop us straight into the explanation below, but the whole video, being a video of Carl Sagan talking, is typically superb.
The Space Parliament of Asgardia (the hard-drive orbiting Earth, chairman: Lembit Öpik) has just had its seventeenth (?!) international cyber-sitting, and put all three days of it up online, as is the Agardian way. I haven't taken minutes of the whole thing as before – because there are hour and hours of it – but looking in on the opening day I did notice a development you might want to hear about.
We're seventeen minutes into the first day, Lembit's late again, and someone's just complimented the Minister of Manufacturing Jacob Mulder's presentation skills, suggesting he should get his own radio show, which is nice, but just everyone's basically hanging around. Then Egbert Edelbrœk asks if he should play a commercial, and Jacob laughs, but no, Egbert's not joking, he's made a presentational video which was going to be played later so they might as well play it now.
And to my enormous surprise we then see... well, firstly, this:
Because it's always nice to get a glimpse of someone's wallpaper for a split second (this looks A LOT dirtier when only glimpsed) but then the video...
Is this Asgardia?! Is this what's up there, the hard-drive? Or just a plan for what to send up next?
"Is there sound?" someone asks.
Interesting shape too. I don't really know what a butt plug looks like, but it does look like something you might use to plug a butt. And what does "Spaceborn United" mean?
Then we get a cross section...
And it takes me a moment to realise what I'm looking at...
Oh wow, that's...
...
And then it ends.
By which point Lembit has joined us to start proceedings, munching on something, crisps? "Bon appetit, Mr. Chairman," to quote Ariadne Gallardo. Voting is about to start, Lembit explains: "You can vote Yes, No, or I don't know"...
Seguéing from Stooky Bill to Lembit Öpik is a cheap shot I know, but the Space Nation of Asgardia broadcast its first ever Live Weekly Q&A with the Chairman of Parliament over a month ago now, and I've been meaning to record minutes of it on here ever since. The questions potentially raised about the founding of an international space community may be more pertinent now than ever. Also, today is the founder's birthday! Happy Birthday Dr. Igor! Also I've been bingeing For All Mankind (and I've been trying to binge Foundation, but there are so many space guns!) So let's go...
00:00 – Live stream countdown starts.
10:04 – We begin not with the Q&A but an absolutely must-see promotional film. If you don't already know what Asgardia is this might not be the best introduction, so just to bring newcomers up to speed...
As first explained back in this post, the "dream driven space nation" is currently just a memory stick with its own national anthem, orbiting the Earth, whose "Head of Nation" and "Chairman of Parliament" –
former missile tycoon Doctor Igor Ashurbeyli, and former Liberal Democrat MP and
Cheeky Girl consort Lembit Öpik– are now keen to organize, among other
things, the first ever child born in zero gravity.
Obviously this enterprise raises some interesting questions, such as what might drive this new nation's economy? Well we now have an answer: Franchising! Really, the promo is quite something.
Now let's meet Opik...
12:04 - Q&A with the Chairman of Parliament begins! There's no sound. However it's hard to tell if anyone knows this. There's also no Chairman of Parliament.
None of these people is Lembit Opik.
13:39 – We have sound! But still no Chairman. It's not really clear if it's started. Some people are still trying to find the link.
15:29 – This flashes up for a second some reason:
...Which is fun.
15:30 – "Who's going to start the meeting?" Still no Chairman. Maybe Lembit missed the new time. There are Asgardians all around the world and it must be genuinely hard to arrange a globally convenient window: "This hour is not popular for many others." (By the way, despite it seeming to be the first language of absolutely noone pesent,
everyone is speaking English which is really appreciated.) Is it possible to contact Mr. Lembit? "A warning, maybe?"
16:21 – "Don't worry. We're going to send the security people to go and get him. Give me a minute," jokes an unseen "Aida M." It's all very good humoured. I don't wish to misrepresent this. Asgardian Mayoral candidate Ferda Inan suggests that migh have been an Agents of Shield reference, possibly for the record. More logging on. Everyone starts comparing their climates.
18:36 – Clearly unable to conact Lembit, the Chair of the Executive Committee Salvos Mouzakitis logs back on to get the ball rolling. (I've no idea what all these titles mean.) SESSION BEGINS!
Salvos really seems to know what he's talking about, so this all gets a bit harder to follow, but here are the topics covered:
18:45 – A hundred and forty four amendments to the Asgardian Constitution have been proposed at a recent summit of the "Supreme Space Council". No amendment was rejected on the grounds of not being liked it, only if it were deemed "non-constitutional". Salvos praises the professional focus of the four members of the Supreme Space Council who turned up – ("I didn't expect it, to be honest") – but he doesn't have the results of their vote because he's on holiday.
23:24 – There is to be a meeting of the Asgardian Legislative Forum on the twenty sixth. Salvos will attempt to participate again, at least in part, but he is still meant to be out of office, and is really beginning to piss off his wife. "I am in danger, real danger that my wife will divorce me," and his wife is a lawyer. Among topics up for discussion at the forum will be the decentralisation of Asgardia, as the franchising plan has hit a snag it seems: Apparently China is turning out knock-offs. 25:00 – That's really all Salvos can bring to the table right now, as Lembit still hasn't shown up and he hadn't prepared to chair this meeting, so the floor is given to Ferda Inan.
25:28 – Ferda was hoping for more gossip. Salvos says he wants to wait for Lembit. Ferda has no more questions and returns the floor to Salvos. "Thank you."
26:29 – Chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee Seref Kaplan has a question: Can we have subtitles? Salvos segues onto the topic of the translations, in particular the – understandably stretched – but
sloppy translations being provided in the lead up to Asgardia's
forthcoming constitutional elections. To further complicate matters, mistakes have been spotted in the English originals, "Head of Government" and "Head of Nation" being used interchangeably, for example, when these are entirely separate pillars of Asgardian Government, and differentiating between them will prove vital if the Asgardian electorate is to determine what either of them eventually
mean.
An announcement is expected from Lembit when the first Asgardian books are to be appear.
A succesful Persian translation of the Asgardian consitution has now been completed by "Navid".
31:08 – Tax law. Salvos is personally not in favour of Asgardian taxes as Asgardians aleady pay taxes in their native countries (and presumably because Asgardia doesn't actually do anything yet – also isn't there a joining fee?) If there are to be taxes however, Salvos prefers taxing gross profit rover net because it's less work.
33:43 – Once Asgardia leaves zoom and physical sittings resume, "Fernando" has proposed rotating the countries in which these take place. Salvos loves travelling, but of course there are visa considerations and also not everyone can afford it. Basic stuff, cooly considered.
35:20 – Fernando has also suggested the Asgardian website could be improved.
36:20 – MP Bridget. She proposes Canada for a physical sitting: "They tend to have much lower standards from what I'm aware of as far as entry into their nation." I'm guessing Bridget's from America, although from my own personal gap year experiences I can tell you she's not wrong.
She also suggests free language classes as a perk for Asgardian residents. Apparently there are plans afoot for an official Asgardian Academy.
39:22 – Seref has the floor again. He has uploaded a Turkish translation of the constitution to the website, but just wants everyone to know it's not a translation of the most recent version. Seref is very on board with Bridget's free langauage class idea. They could might a real draw. Or even just a separate enterprise, open to non-residents. He also proposes Turkey for the physical sittings, especially if it's off season.
44:45 – Salvos expresses doubts about how easy it will be to get a lecturer to give regular language classes for free, but would love to go to Istanbul.
47:33 – Ferda again. Apparently nobody should worry about how the Academy will be funded, and volunteers are welcome to upload educational videos to it. Salvos suggests preparing a promotional intro: "Make it nice." (Was Ferda behind the Asgardian promo?) Ferda: "Done already." Salvos: "Really? Great!" Ferda: "Why not?" I couldn't hear the topic chosen for the Academy's first lecture. Visas?
50:35 – Aida M has the floor: Not all countries have the internet. Could these classes be put onto a video or CD and posted out? Also not all countries speak English. Also either you've got to pay people or not. Also Aida has been asking for a while for sign language translations.
53:26 – Aida still has the floor but this has flashed up for a couple of seconds:
Some absolute crackers there.
53:50 – Salvos supports Aida's proposal and recognises how vital accessibility must be for the Asgardian
project to succeed. However, he points out there are as many different
sign langauges as there are spoken languages. "That's going to be a problem."
56:15 – Ferda says that sign languages aren't actually too varied. It's more like an accent thing.
58:30 – Aida says you have to start somewhere. There seems a general consensus then that "English" sign language will be something to look at. (The inverted commas are my own because I'm not sure British and American Sign languages are the same.) Salvos will bring this up with Lembit.
59:40 – Apparently there's a lot of talk happening in the chat about going to Canada. Salvos does not necessarily support it. I get the impression he's spent quite a lot more time on here than he meant to. Session ends. "Adios, amigos."
Lembit remained a no show, but two days later recorded the video at the top of this post.
I noticed, on the walk I took on Sunday evening, that the moon – like myself – had risen a little later than the day before, and I was reassured by this. Previously I had known only theoretically that it couldn't always show up on time for nightfall, as that's not how orbits work, but my regular urban surroundings had never been flat enough to prove it. I missed the city's pavements, though. The roads between these villages are fringed instead with ditches. I assume that's so you'll crash your car if you skid, rather than drive over a vine. You've got to protect the vines.
When I got home, my laptop died – or at least coudn't be woken – and I spent the next few days trying to bring it back to life, which is why this post is actually going out on the night of Wednesday the 22nd. Now the factory settings have been restored though, here, by the light of Sunday's moon, is another quiz for you, this one from August. Match the following ten Surrealist titles:
"The Decoy"...
"Disturbing Presence"...
"Floor 4706"...
"Men Shall now Nothing of This"...
"The Persistence of Memory"...
"Hamlet"...
"The Son of Man"...
"Stage Fright"...
"The Uncertainty of the Poet"...
and finally, "Bicycle Wheel"...
to the following ten Surrealist works. And I'll post the answers in the comments.
1. René Magritte, 1964
2. Salvador Dali, 1931
3. Remedios Varo, 1959
4. Marcel Duchamp, 1913 (originally, but pretty easy to throw together, and repeated since)
What are those pixels hiding? A lady nipple? Is it, somewhere, cock o'clock? (Source.)
Anyway, back to the quiz!
If any of these images are slightly familiar, it's because I've been to the Mitchell Beazley well once before, here. I don't have the book with me now, alas, to show you, but it's made up of heavily illustrated, two-page chapters, so each of the following illustrations comes from a different chapter, and I've jumbled up the titles. That's right. Jumbled. Can you unjumble them? Have you the time and inclination to scroll endlessly up and down this page and do that? Can't you just leave things as they are? I'll post the correct answers in the comments, for all the good it will do you.
"Is any dance a mandatory movement?
"Ordinarily this is not a forum for factional hoots. Changing one's mind
can be be very useful. Two types – at least – of crossing out (motives
for deletion) A mistake or a change of heart."
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