That Was Then But This Is Now

A Complex Fractal Image, Public Domain

When I was in school I used to watch the BBC's Horizon, back when entertainment hadn't yet cross-bred with factual programming. Cosmology really interested me and I proceeded to loan A Brief History of Time from the school library. One thing that really irritated me was the way Hawking seemed to go out of his way to leave space for a god. Now, with his new book, he has closed the door on that - "It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going".

Over The Horizon Radar

I FAIL (Cropped), Prij, 2006

One of the reasons I've always advocated media studies, despite not having taken it myself, is to promote critical thinking - especially with regards to advertising and journalism. It's important to doubt what you're presented with, be it a brand of aftershave or a superbeing in the sky. Without free thought we become consumers, like farm animals fattening up to be led round the back and given a second mortgage. As a free thinker I hate to see lies and deceptions being mindlessly accepted by people. More so when it's me. In my pursuit of lucid dreaming there's nothing more annoying than not dreaming, than later remembering you did. Across three nights at the start of this month I missed three opportunities to become lucid.

In the first dream I had a false awakening and was presented with something I knew was not true and I successfully recognised that. However, I reasoned that I was being tricked into believing I was dreaming (a reverse Inception?) and proceeded to perform the finger-through-hand reality check in order to prove I was awake. It correctly proved (in narrative) that I was awake. To practise that reality check and see it fail was extremely frustrating. The following night I dreamt I was on what alternated between being a train and a plane. With obviously fictional characters present amongst the passengers, I had a conversation about lucid dreaming with the two women in the row behind. I even talked about reality checks but didn't perform one, perhaps because of the previous night's failure.

Pretending To See The Future

so happy there is INTERNET COVERAGE, irina slutsky, 2008

In a mobile multimedia multichannel world it's difficult to imagine just how centralised information and communications were in years gone by. I'm not quite old enough to have grown up with the web (online just short of a decade) but I do know from having limited access when abroad that disconnection from the hive mind is like suffocation. It's hard to understand the shared experience of millions of people listening to the radio as Chamberlain declared war on Germany in 1939.

I remember looking at the audience figures in What's On TV? in the 90s and the major soap operas would bring in a maximum of 9 million viewers. Only something like a Christmas Day special of Only Fools and Horses would break that and be able to claim the nation itself was focused on that channel in that hour. But to think of something with the same gravity as a declaration of war, that could only be 'September 11th'. The first global event of the modern era. I first heard it over the radio when I got in from school, then I went online to see it on every news site, and I turned the tv on to see every channel carrying US news feeds. There were probably instant messages and e-mails and phone calls all communicating the same thing to others.

In One Ear

Don't stop....no pares....., spanishgirl_in_oxford, 2006

The Spelling Bee is a curious Anglophone phenomenon. The idea of spelling out words as an academic competition is unheard of in countries that lack byzantine orthographies. I'm a long time proponent of spelling reform in English and also a long time hater of people who cannot or will not spell correctly. If I have to go back to the start and reread your sentence because you're not bothered about spelling, then I'm not going to read whatever you had to say no matter how interesting or profound it was since you obviously don't care enough to effectively communicate it. Perhaps a reform will come if we embrace the yoof's demotic - a silent letter cull at the expense of some 'sk8r boi' monstrosities and grammatical malformations.