Badphone's Last Stand

 

 To think there was a time I balked at the thought of putting my face on this blog. But here's a little record of my business trip to Praha! for another advert, and catching the mood board for my character at the wardrobe fitting, I see who I have to thank for it...

 

 Thank you, Michael Cera, for giving me a type. 

 In my time off, I revisited many sites still standing from my last trip with Lanna in 2011: the crazy babies crawling up TV Tower – I had forgotten the massive holes in their faces – the weird, giant metronome which replaced the statue of Stalin  – the third AD told me they were thinking of bringing the statue back, but pink this time, of which he approved – and there was, of course, new mad shit too...

   The Giant Prague Museum of Endless Glass Cases of Minerals now boasted other stuff as well! Like a life-sized diorama of "dog-bears" fighting Early Cenozioc ungulents, a complete whale skeleton...

 

 I've played smaller. And those beautiful Šalamoun "Hobbit" illustrations I mentioned last post – here are more...

 There were also harps you could play, suits of armour, skulls, typewriters, and that big, empty room in the video, none of which I remember from 2011, but what I really went to the Museum for of course was the stairs, and they never disappoint...

 

 I also – for the first time – went to the zoo, as recommended, which was huge, its enclosures far less enclosing than those of Regent's Park...

 

 At its centre was a giant statue of Radegast on Mount Radhošť. Not just a guano-soiled wizard played by Sylvester McCoy, Radegast is also it turns out a Slavic Beast God overthrown by Christian missionaries – a deeply disappointing legend. 

 With of all this, Badphone did its best, bless...

 

  But my PR's given me her old phone now, which I didn't take with me, and I think it's time to start taking better pictures.

 

 (Reviewing the video, I notice it's actually shot with a different – and possibly worse – Badphone from the one I took to Bucharest in '22. I fell for Prague just as hard [and indeed for Norwich, when I did Polar Express there {and indeed Croydon, when I went to voice video games there}] but while I did make it to the last two minutes of a band in a cellar playing Watermelon Man, I didn't discover any cool, new music to round off this post with like the Bucharest one.

 So here's Alan.)

 

The Real Professor Bum-End

 Argh! You have exactly TWENTY-FOUR HOURS left to listen to the latest episode of John Finnemore's Souvenir Programme HERE, recorded back in April in what I thought at the time to be a very hot venue, as Lamda had no means of turning off its radiators. What other backstage gossip would you like? Why is there an illustration of a reconstructed elasmosaurus skeleton at the top of this post? Light might be shed on this by the corrected version below ("Drawing Number Two", for any fans of The Little Prince) with the head now on the right end...

 

 And here's the man responsible for both: "Bone Wars" veteran Edward Drinker Cope, photographed, so it would appear, at the exact moment that he realised his mistake:

 

 

"F********CK!"

 

All other episodes of all nine other series seem to be up on in perpetuity now (HERE), but – I repeat – there are only now twenty-THREE hours left to listen to the latest one. All the gangs's back: Frint, Wattis, Straightwoman, even Uncle Deaduncle. I mean... I know you all probably knew this already and have obviously heard it, but that's the plug, nd if you haven't heard it, apologies for that baffling paleontology tangent. The idea now, I believe ideally, is to produce a new forty-five-minute special every year until we're all dead. Can't wait! No hang on, I mean I can't wait until the next...  You know what I mean. Is it warm where you are? I've noticed a distinct smell of stale punch around trees this week and am trying to remember how I know what stale punch smells like. ENJOY!

 

(What swearing is John referring to? Listen to find out!)

I Bloody Love Big Pictures

 

 On the last train out of France a week ago, I checked the map on my phone to see if it sould show us going through the channel tunnel, and was surprised to see a shape I didn't recognise: the shape of the channel itself. I was reminded of what I'd felt seeing a map of the Mediterranean in a charity shop window in Clapham. There was nothing here I could recognise as a country, or two countries, or three. Just a place. Just land and water. I zoomed out. 

 And I still didn't recognise anything. I was familiar with the shape on the left, of course, but nothing stood out. Great Britain didn't stand out. And now I could see, for example, why Norwich had had that centuries-long history with the Netherlands, because why wouldn't you? If one pictures the British Isles on a rectangle – which is the shape most pictures appear on, let's face it – all of that land in the bottom right corner is missing, isn't it, airbrushed out like Trotsky? We're not brought up on maps of Britain, but on portraits. Shakespeare's definitely a bit to blame for this. I heard somewhere that countries are actually quite a new idea though*, so I still have hope.

 Here's a zebra-crossing to nowhere.

 * I'll tell you where I heard that, actually. I've only just started listening to the "In Our Time" podcast, and it was in an episode on the battle of Traflagar here. "In Our Time" is brilliant, by the way. In the last episode I learnt that before the dinosaurs, the world was ruled by crocodiles! Some went around on their hind legs! Some had hooves, some had beaks, some were the size of whales! An entire planet of crocodiles! And it was Earth! MERRY CROCMAS!

 

(image source)

Where to Find Hippos at the North Pole

 SPOILERS: The answer's underground, and in bits, because fifty million years or so ago the Arctic was a swamp! Did elephants have antlers back then, as imagined in this engraving? Who knows? I mean, absolutely not, according to the fossil record, but unweildy tusks and supernumerary knobbly bits were abundant in the methane-rich Eocene. Also, more recent, scientifically verifiable visualisations of the epoch show a planet ruled by giant parrots, so let's not rule anything out.

 I couldn't find any attribution for the engraving, but it looks as if it might come from a children's book published in 1887 by Henry Davenport Northrop, called Earth, Sea, and the Sky (I wonder if Ursula K. Le Guin had a copy). Illustrations from it are all over the internet, and well worth seeking out. Here, for example, is a Megalosaurus where they sort of get the head right...

 Speaking of windows on the world, the reason I know the Arctic used to be a swamp is because it's one of the many things I learnt playing around with PBS' Nova Polar Lab, as recommended by Sarah Airress after her own trip to McMurdo in Antarctica. The brilliantly engaging, slightly glitchy interactive website takes you round the globe, to visit actual field scientists in their often extraordinary research stations – like David Holland's here, on the Jakobshavn Glacier, which sank the Titanic –

– and then dig up fossils, bore down miles into ice sheets, or send seals out to measure the water temperature, to learn, first hand, the history of this planet, and the stark reality of the sharp change in its climate. You can find it HERE. I really recommend it. It is probably for children.

 

You get to visit McMurdo too.

dinosaurs, reconsidered

swans

 According to an interesting thought experiment of  "Artist and Researcher" C. M. Koseman's (ah, but are we not all artists and researchers?) this is what a swan would look like "if we drew modern animals the way we draw dinosaurs, based on bones alone". Having questioned this monstering of dinosaurs myself, I would like to support Koseman's work, so here's more of it, accompanied by some relevant ponderings from this post on the old myspace blog back in May, 2009:

 "I ended up at the Natural History Museum. Passing the animatronic T Rex I was struck for the very first time by how bare not only he, but most of the other reconstructions seemed to be...

 "And I passed an illustration of a T Rex sinking its teeth into a hadrosaur and thought - Yes, if we've got that wrong, then that's exactly how we get it wrong: Take what we know about something and paint it killing something else...

 "Seeing the bones, remembering how wrong we might have got it, gazing at a scene of antlered hadrosaurs gathering at the water-hole, all this suddenly made me want once again to see not a clone, but THAT SCENE...

"I wanted a time machine. I wanted to step out of a time machine and see a T Rex at dusk trailing feathers like a peacock and scavenging some long-dead carcass while the hadrosaurs were left to butt heads in peace."

 You can see Koseman's full TED talk here. He's not a natural public speaker possibly, or indeed a scientist, but he's not claiming to be, he's just having some not unhelpful fun with the unknown. I wonder who the woman in the pictures is, whether she's real, or just another of Koseman's speculations. She's there to give a sense of human scale, I know. But, ah, are we not all here to give a sense of human scale?

 Finally, on the subject of dinosaurs actually being lovely, have a listen to this but be warned, it's powerful stuff:

Fenn, my nearly 4 year old daughter, recorded her first ever solo song today. She came up with all the words herself and I helped her a little bit with the tune. It’s called ‘Dinosaurs in Love’. 🦕❤️🦕 pic.twitter.com/erCgG0sUvP

— Tom Rosenthal (@tomrosenthal) January 28, 2020

UPDATERY: There is science behind Koseman's work. Ned Mond's just sent me a link it here.

dinosaurs

dinosaurs

IS IT TOO MUCH TO ASK TO CHANGE WHAT MAKES YOU HAPPY?

Internet still down, but I finally got round to transcribing the notes I took in hospital and see now that nearly all of them were made during the one 24-hour, steroid-enduced, psychotic episode of February 17th, very far from the "natural high" I took it to be. Throughout this episode, I took my own stats with the box that had been left by my bed, and saw my blood pressure sink finally to an acceptable level. And I slept on my back for the first time in eleven days, and was Thor. So these are the notes from that day and that night. Not all them: I also embarked upon the first chapter of a children's book roundabout the time of the words Epiphany for Everyone, my first concentrated stream of thought since I'd been in hospital. And, as I think I've already recorded, I also euphorically lost it with a visiting pyschiatric nurse called Anthony Tang who refused to turn off his reading light at roundabout one in the morning. 

Some of this still stands.

 

 

17th Tuesday Feb

Been given a whole Manga face of pills this morning. I take the mouth, the eyes, the Japanese tear

Shaky because of the NEURALIZOR (sp?) no nebulizer

SKELETOR (sp?)

I’ve been taken off 15cc Oxygen and put on 4. My coughing’s RUBBISH now. It brings up no smoke pups, NOTHING.

MOOMIN Page 38

TELL US ALL THAT’S HAPPENING IN THE WORLD!

FUSS AND MISERY…

Two of last night's dreams:

The freighter that picks me up from the Ice Flow is manned by tall silent men with long waterproofs, square heads but aquiline profiles, smooth black dishes for ears and receding chrome spirals on their head. Maybe the cube inverts to accommodate the face. Anyway a nice kind image.

 THE GOOMB MEN

There was wrestling in the street at the crossroads at the bottom of the hill, now I think of it, like Brixton Hill, only windier and more seventies ish. The two wrestlers are huge, twice the height to normal.

They kind of looked like that but in a way that made sense, & each had a tiny cox on their head, like their trainer. The two wrestlers never actually fought they collapsed, knackered, but like they were playing a joke. A lot of controversy in the news after about how much more genetic tampering to allow these coxes. None about the genetic modification made to the wrestlers although it later struck me that they must have had some work done.

I WANT A MONTAGE!

  

AN EPIPHANY FOR EVERYONE

(in which everything suddenly makes sense)

 

Brilliantly I ended the evening wheeling around a cylinder of oxygen that I’d forgot to turn on. 

 

FROM THE GUARDIAN 17.02.09

Paul Garner co-organizer of the Creationist conference: Many people have the mistaken impression that it’s Genesis, chapter one that drives young creationism – a rigid understanding of the word “day” in the creation. But that isn’t it at all. It’s Genesis three, it’s the introduction of death and suffering and what you might call natural evil into the creation. If those things pre-date Adam there’s a big theological problem for me, because it undermines the foundation of the gospel. The young-earth position is the only one that has a coherent understanding of the history that doesn’t have suffering, death and bloodshed before Adam’s fall.

IS IT TOO MUCH TO ASK TO CHANGE WHAT MAKES YOU HAPPY?

I HOLD REALITY SACRED

DON’T TELL ME ABOUT SOMEBODY SOMEONE MADE UP FOR WHICH THERE’S NO EVIDENCE AND ASK ME TO PROVE HE DOESN’T EXIST.

I’M IN A BREAKING TARDIS

CLOSER – NOT NARRATIVELY – BUT PHYSICALLY – TO DEATH – IE NOT EXISTING AND OF COURSE ALL THE IDEAS ARE COMING. THIS IS INTERESTING. AND OFTEN OBSERVED. IDEAS COME FROM NOT BEING

BUT 17^th/18 it’s only NOW – 10 days in that I’m feeling weak enough to get it.

Man, if Jesus really was just one guy this is how he must have felt EVERY **ING DAY!

There are no italics you can put on “If that is what you want, that’s what I’ll have to do.” to make it sound polite ANTHONY TANG

IN MY MIND – IN MY MIND! – there is nothing sweeter than the idea of an elderly man who must be at all hours attended by a tiny, sleeping Maori. The reality, however, is a lot more unwise.

RELIGION IS THE PARENT OF ART AND SCIENCE THERE IS NOTHING RELIGION CAN TEACH US THAT ART AND SCIENCE CANNOT TEACH US MORE CLEARLY. BUT WE HAVEN’T HAD ALL THE ART WE’RE EVER GOING TO HAVE YET. OR THE SCIENCE.

(WE MAY NOT HAVE HAD ALL THE RELIGION. BUT IT’S TELLING THAT THE “BEST” WAY TO DO THIS NOW, AS L. RON HUBBARD WORKED OUT, IS JUST MAKE UP SOME VERY BAD ART AND THEN HIRE YOUR OWN POLICE FORCE.)

SO YES THIS MUST BE A NATURAL HIGH – AND I’M LOOKING FOR THE WORD FOR THIS TRIP AND IT’S AHH! “SPIRITUAL” BECAUSE THAT HAS TO STOP. THIS IS REAL. That’s the point of “epiphany” it’s real – and SPIRITS DON’T EXIST. So don’t succumb and go I’M SPIRITUAL. I’M SPIRITUAL

–        NO: I’M REAL.

IT WAS REAL

FUCK ME I’M BREATHING

Hawkins' First Hadrosaur

DO NOT WATCH THIS:

 

 

*update: Oh. You can't.

 

 I wish Hesketh would get a shift on and forward me that strand of a hundred insults because "Jesusophile", as he terms himself here, lacks them all. Lack. Exactly. It's a lack. He should have them because it's a lack. (Sorry, you'll only get that if you've seen the video, which you mustn't). Videogum drew this Shitwizard to my attention after he posted an argument for the okayness of inflicting pain on women during sex. Someone else then posted a video where he demonstrated AIDS passing through a condom with some off milk and a strainer, at which point I smelt a rat and went and did my own research. It was the interview above that convinced me he was actually for real. Except he isn't. It says so on his youtube channel. Oh curse you, Internet. "You obviously have no idea how evolution works."
"People always tell me this. It's such a weak argument." Okay so he doesn't exist, and he's Dutch, but I didn't know that three hours ago when I had to walk him off, and a good thing too, it was a beautiful day and I ended up at the Natural History Museum. Passing the animatronic T Rex I was struck for the very first time by how bare not only he but most of the other reconstructions seemed to be, and became thrilled by the idea that dinosaurs had once been covered in feathers, not a new idea I know but one it became impossible to shift. Every animatronic now seemed very obviously plucked, and how would we know? I thought of those brilliant medieval bestiaries in which geese grew on trees and all that's known or cared about the crocodile is that it weeps after eating a man.

 ("Meh, that's a crocodile, yeah it'll do. Might have got the wings the wrong colour but sod it, it's a naturally occurring allegory, no need to sweat the details.") And I passed an illustration of a T Rex sinking its teeth into a hadrosaur and thought - Yes, if we've got that wrong, then that's exactly how we get it wrong: Take what we know about something and paint it killing something else. And for the first time since I was probably ten I yearned to visit the Cretaceous period and find out what it was actually like, which was GREAT because until that point all those post-Jurassic-Park, CGI "reconstructions" had pretty much seen off my childlike di-curiosity. But THIS, seeing the bones, remembering how wrong we might have got it, gazing at a scene of antlered hadrosaurs gathering at the water-hole, all this suddenly made me want once again to see not a clone, but THAT SCENE. I wanted a time machine. I wanted to step out of a time machine and see a T Rex at dusk trailing feathers like a peacock and scavenging some long-dead carcass while the hadrosaurs were left to butt heads in peace. Bliss. 

 

   original

 

 One of the best things about my stay in Crystal Palace was that the train pulled up right next to Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins' placid - downright pekinese - dinosaur enclosure. Googling "hadrosaur" I found an illustration of Hawkins in his studio in New York working on new wonders. Yes, New York: Apparently there was going to be a Paleozoic Museum bang in the center of Central Park until the evil Boss Tweed broke all the molds. You can read about it here, lots of nice pictures... Now when I used to work at Quinto's the second-hand bookshop - sorry if I've already told you this - there was this anti-semitic, ghastly-headed twenty-something, Joe, a bright and polite former monk with some very bad ideas. Among these was that "the Passion of the Christ" was "accurate", and that the world was six thousand years old. I took him up on this, and heard his thoughts on dinosaurs. They'd drowned in the forty days of rain caused by the bursting of Earth's original meniscus, an ozone layer of water that made all carbon dating useless. He believed in evolution and "Survival of the Fittest" but when pressed had no explanation for coal, or caves or tectonic plates. Shortly afterwards he was dismissed following a chat with our Spanish manager about Franco. But if ever you meet a creationist don't raise the subject of dinosaurs. Surprise them with coal, or stalactites. I mention Joe here merely to explain my gullibility in the face of Jesusophile, and I post Jesusophile's video up even though he doesn't exist, and isn't funny, because this is the internet and I'm an atheist and it appears that that's what we do, we like to make ourselves mad.

Finally here's something I wrote for "Money", which fits fine here:

'I want to show you something. I want to show you what we will look like in 200 thousand years time. And before I do, remember: survival of the fittest does not mean survival of the best at running. It means, or did mean “Who fits here? They can stay”. Okay. Behold. The man of 200 thousand years time... And they say variety is dead. And they’re right. Because look around, look – we didn’t adapt to this. We adapted it. Evolution can stop now.
Variety is dead.
It’s “Where fits us?” now, not  “Who fits here?” Where fits us can stay. And the rest, the deserts, the tundra, the bits with snakes, they go. And on their remains will be built a city without frontiers.
And it will be very expensive.
But we’ll be able to afford it.
That’s the other thing about the future. We’ll obviously all be able to afford it. Something to do with technology. Thank you, man of the future.'

(Man of the Future comes courtesy Paleo-Future, another cracking source of odd and ahh.)