Tricks of the mind

TV. I spend a lot of time giving out about it. That soul-eating suckbox sitting in the corner, dominating all your senses. Slowly eating your life. Hours where you could be making, creating, living, loving. Or even depleting the long list of depressing chores, to live a more clutter-free life. Not just ridding the pile of unironed clothes but the cobwebs in your head. A night on the sofa, wasted life-hours, ending with a fat gut, laden with guilt, like the soiled sock hidden under the bed of a teenage boy.

Woah. I'd just intended to post that I read Derren Brown's book recently and I'm looking foward to his Trick or Treat show again tonight and all that bile just spilled out. What I'd intended to say is that while I do loath the tellybox at times and would love to see it in the bin, I do love good TV, rarity that it is. I've a few heroes I love to watch on the box; David Attenborough, Roy Mears, Richard Dawkins, Armandi Ianucci, Charlie Brooker, Stephen Fry. And I love a good film, or a good quiz (not to be confused with a gameshow).

I just hate when we end up sitting in front of the stupid thing watching crap as if its some kind of domestically social event. And I hate that late night plastic soap plaguing the screens; neither serious nor funny. Desperate Housewives, Ugly Betty, Plastic Polly, Fucking Funty. They're all the same shallow numbeties. And I despise the kind of TV programming designed to reel you in and suck on your very soul, either for the rest of the night (Top 100s) or the rest of your robotic life week after week (soaps). And Fridays are the worst, just when you're too tired to do anything else, they lay on the thickest excrement from the bottom of the barrel.

Woah. Let's try again. Derren Brown's Trick or Treat is on tonight. I like Derren Brown and I find his work intriguing. He could so easily be dismissed as an annoying magician, and he often is. But he doesn't do magic. Psychological tricks, amazing memory feats, and general head fucking but no magic. And he'll be the first to admit, nay shout from the rooftops, that anyone who claims to read your mind or predict the future is nothing but a shyster.

I read his book, Tricks of the Mind recently and it's highly entertaining. Actually it starts off a little bit puerile, with the kind of bad jokes and puns, that people new to writing haven't learned to resist yet. Like people dabbling with electronic music using too much reverb, or budding design enthusiasts using too much drop-shadow. Resist! But the silly puns are gone by the end, as are the silly tricks, from the start of the book. There are fascinating insights into lie detection, cold reading, hypnosis, NLP and memory. Not that showing you the tricks of his trade makes it easy, or possible, to do likewise. Could you fly a plane after reading the manual? The second half of the book is a scathing attack on all forms of mumbo jumbo, from fortune tellers and psychics to healers and religion, which puts him into hero ranks for me.

I'm suddenly reminded of an otherwise clever young guy who constantly regurgitates a line that I reckon some lecturer told him and he thought it was clever. He reckons that Irish Atheist are just rebelling against the Irish Church and it doesn't reach any further than that, which is the biggest load of cock I've ever heard repeated. Like most Atheists, I despise all forms of superstition: fortune tellers, mind readers, lucky black cats, unlucky magpies, psychics, mediums, the number 13, prayer, heaven, hell, god, afterlife, auras, amber beads, luck, souls, ghosts. It's all the same mumbo jumbo to me. Catholic or Muslim, Jew or Gentile.

Woah. Let's try again. Derren Brown's Trick or Treat is on tonight. It's an entertaining little show. Last week was a 'Treat', a guy was shown how to add facts from hundreds of books to his short-term memory and kicked ass in one of the biggest pub quizzes in the UK. In tonight's episode, a girl picks the 'Trick' card and has to wrestle with her conscience over the torture of a cat. I'm guessing that it's Brown's version of that famous obedience to authority experiment carried out by psychologist Stanley Milgram.

Trick or Treat

10.00pm. Channel 4.

Then turn it off and play some scrabble, or bake a cake, or see what fun you can have with some facepaint and a sleeping child. Or... maybe... just watch Peep show on straight after Derren Brown. Then if you've had a few cans, Balls of Steel might seem like a good idea. And then before you know it, it's 2AM and you're woken by the stale beer spilling onto your lap in a cloud of self-loathing on another wasted night.

Still drawing willys

Yeay my first published graphic work (well first time in a book anyway). Much bigger news of course is that the first copies of the book have arrived. Congrats again to the Missus. Booyakasha!

I reckon my images would have been a fair bit different had I not read Tufte's classic Visual Display of Quantitative Information last year.Very worthwhile read.

Shantaram

Shantaram is one of those books that kept pestering me until I decided to read it. In the space of one week I heard three different people say how amazing it was. And then I started to hear little bits of legend, like how the author, Gregory David Roberts, had to write it three times because prison guards kept destroying it. I still held back, I bought it as a Christmas present for someone else, read the back of it, then handed it over. But the same person had also bought me Shantaram for Christmas! So there it was. Read me! Read me! Read me Read me!

I loved the start of it, so all's well that starts well. Not really. I found it changed drastically as it went on. It actually took me a while to realise what had changed, and then I noticed that I really missed Prabaker, one of the characters at the start of the book. Prabaker made me laugh out loud a lot. And that's what was missing. Now it's not supposed to be a comedy but it was seriously lacking any sense of humour towards the end and got very serious. And then it really kicked in, the serious, manly, testosterone filled bollox that bores the me death in books, films, and BLOKES I know who think it's big, clever and impressive to be big and manly. Yawn. I loved it when he lived in the slum, and then in a small indian village but I got seriously bored when he joined the mafia and went on to fight some pointless war in the name of manliness.

My second critiscism is on the philosophy of the book. I'm not going to completely knock it. Some of it is written with great charm, and some of it even made good sense but a lot of it was schoolboy philosophy, complete boloxology. You cannot assess situations by stretching their components to the uttermost extremeties, and taking the outcome to be comparitive to any point on the path. Example: say you're wondering if you're better off running from the bus to your house when it's lashing rain. Thinking in extremities would lead you to think that if you ran at 1000 miles an hour, then you'd spend so little time in the rain that you wouldn't get wet at all. So you're always better off running in the rain, right? No. Bollox. It doesn't work like that. And most people have figured that out by the time their acne is dissapearing. You cannot judge by extremeties alone. Degrees of magnitude vary the outcome. Yet this extremism is the core of the book's philosophy, dressed up in the form of a wise religious leader, who in turn inherited this knowledge from his wise and honourable master. We're not just talking about two blokes in the pub. This nonsense is supposed to come from generations of very wise and learned people, but because it's such playground philosophy, its a big let down to the book.

Another thing that bothered me is the whole 'Is it truth is it fiction?' thing. It's a mixture of both, and that never left my head, I never knew what I was reading and I found that very distracting.

Right.... whenever I start giving out about something like this so much, I start thinking 'Who am I to give out?' 'What have I written?' but the truth is if I did write books I wouldn't dream of criticising other books. But whatever (Dude), I spent long enough reading it, so I'm going to say my thang. Though I don't think I even meant to start out writing a bad review, I did love lots of it, and most of it is really well written (though there is quite a bit of purple prose too, oops, there I go again). Gregory David Roberts, obviously had an absolutely fascinating life, and Shantaram is a fascinating read, just be prepared for the different parts of the book to be quite different and decide if it bothers you or not if you don't know whether you're reading fact or fiction. Oh, there was another good thing I forgot, like many others no doubt; Shantaram is a love story, a story of a man falling in love with a country, and I too, fell in love with India and its people while reading Shantaram, and it's definitely on the big list of places I want to see before I die.

The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid

It must be great to be such an established writer that you can just write about your [normal] childhood and know it will sell. But deservedly so. Bryson is such an entertaining writer with a great turn of phrase and the kind of genuinely funny writing that can catch you off guard. Several times I came as close to laughing out loud on public transport as I'm likely to, which admittedly for my quiet self, translates into a barely audible snort.

I found a memoir of growing up in 60s america strangely nostalgic for a son of 80s dublin but in essence it's just boys being boys, climbing trees, sneaking into cinemas, trying to outsmart vending machines and doing everything we can think of to see girl's bits.

I also completely forgot how fascinated and in in awe of America I was growing up - bubblegum, cowboys, neon lights and a drool inducing drink that resembled our lemonade only in name. I'm sure I even loved some things that now grate on me, like loud confident voices with no sense of self or disturbance. But there's no grating in The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid. it'll surely warm your cockles.

Lance Armstrong V Stuart Shorter

I recently ended up reading two books side by side, It's Not About the Bike by Lance Armstrong and Stuart: a Life Backwards by Alexander Masters. Now I don't like watching sport, I don't like talking about sport and I don't like reading about sport but a friend in work gave me 'It's Not About the Bike" and told me it's not about the bike. Most of it is about Armstrong's remarkable battle against cancer, and he is a remarkable person but where I started out rooting for him, I ended up disliking his smugness. As the battle against cancer, which is an intriguing read, became history, and he began to win the races I just got a bit bored, and found his cocky competitiveness to be a big turn off.

In the meantime I was getting to know Stuart Shorter, a paranoid homeless alchoholic violent suicidal self-harming junkie. Stuart's life is told backwards, (as Armstrong's simulaneously goes forward, onwards and upwards) , so you get to find out what made Stuart the man he is, and the more I read, the more I found myself rooting for him. I wanted him to win and Armstrong to lose. But the tragic are tragic to the end, and winners are winners. Stuart and his biographer, Alexander Masters became friends of sorts, through a field of differences. It's a fascinating read, and their story has recently been televised and it's on this Sunday:

Stuart: A Life Backwards

BBC2. Sun 23 Sep, 9:00 pm - 10:30 pm 90mins

The Persistence of Memory

A few years ago I got sick of having a terrible memory. I've since nailed it down to a slighlty bizarre portion of bad memory in that I can't for the life of me remember proper nouns. So I can't remember names of pubs, shops, roads, restaurants, people etc. However, like most people I'm better with faces, much better though, I could see a bloke walk by in the street and remember that he was two people ahead of me, in a queue in a chipper, in Dun Laoighre, eight years ago. So I have a good visual memory and when I came across a book called Master Your Memory by Tony Buzan, I scanned the back cover and saw that it had a system to improve your memory through your visual memory. So you could remember long numbers as images in a story for example. But it didn't really make any sense without it's precursor Use your memory. So I bought that and spent every morning on the bus to work practising the techniques in both. And they are fairly amazing techniques. Definitely a step above your average self help book.

The first thing I memorised, just for practise, was Pi to 500 decimal places. The second half of Master Your Memory contains lists of trivia to memorize so I went to work on them.

• All the countries of the world - including their capitals and currency
• The periodic table - including atomic number, atomic weights etc
• 100 most frequently used words in Spanish
• 100 Painters - including a famous work, its location, the artist's lifespan, nationality and school of art

For the list of painters, I tracked down all the paintings on the web to make it a bit easier, and then discovered that the a lot of the data isn't that well researched on any of the lists. When I reviewed the book on Amazon, I slated the content (while praising the system) for not researching any of the material properly even in it's later editions. And Tony Buzan is definitely not short on pennies.

So, after quite a bit of waffle, the main point of this post is that list of paintings - if you're looking for all the paintings in this list like I did, or just want to have a look through 100 famous paintings, here's my list of 100 Artists, thoroughly researched, and backed up by a few books I've read over the years. And more importantly, there's an image to go with each painting. There were a few cases where I couldn't find the famous work that Tony Buzan chose, the fact that they were so hard to find was testamant in itself that they weren't the most relevant works. In a couple of other cases I chose a different painting anyway just because it seemed much more relevant - but in most cases, I stuck to the original list as much as possible - apart from correcting all the mistakes, which were mostly dates and locations of paintings.

By the way, after years of this 'Brain Training' I still have a terrible memory! It didn't do a thing to improve my day to day memory. Arsebags! Still an amusing way to pass the time at the bus stop though as you have to keep going through these lists in your head. Specially if you have a head like a sieve, like I do.

100 Artists - 100 paintings

Raw Spirits

Big Brother is on. So I'm off. Even though I was just about to tackle a scary pile of ironing, I’m just so rock ‘n’ roll these days! So I'll write this instead. I’ve just finished reading ‘Raw Spirits’ by one Iain Banks. When this book came out years ago I thought I’d never read it. I had absolutely no interest in reading a book about whisky, I didn’t really like non-fiction and liked Whiskey even less. But I am a total Banksie fanboy. Anyone who knows me will have heard this before. I picked up ‘Consider Phlebas’ in the library years ago and loved it so much that I read his other 17 books, joined an Iain Banks newsgroup, and released a record with a track named after a star system called Trontsephore which plays a part in his finest sci-fi novel, The Player of Games.

Banksie is not only a fine story teller, with a great imagination, but his social commentary, philosophical meanderings, and political stances are all spot on, and nicely weaved around a ying-yang of lighthearted fun versus wry dark humour. Uncle Banksie brought me up right through my twenties, nurtured my fledgling atheism, and no doubt nudged me in the right direction on various political stances and beliefs.

So I came across ‘Raw Spirit’ again had a flick through, saw something about drunken urban climbing, which pasted a knowing smile across my face and I realised this is just Banksie waffling on about whatever he likes and mentioning Whiskey now and then. Some of the Whiskey stuff is interesting but it’s the bits in between where the good stuff lies; anti-war rants, pro-legalisation rants, drunken stories about him and his mates, setting up fake firework companies, childhood, the odd insight into writing and the usual ramblings about life in general. Was very amused to see Banskie bow down to the superstitious magic of Bill Drummond by counting some pylons in reverence (see previous Bunnies post).

He’s a self-confessed petrol head and drools over GWR (great windy roads) and the love of his life, his Landrover Discovery. Amusing enough but maybe a bit too much about roads, regardless of how great or windy. I was a waiting for the guilty punch line and was surprised to see it never appeared. In hindsight, he’s since traded in his four vehicles (including the Discovery!) and now only has a Lexus SUV hybrid. I say only….

So, it’s a pretty light hearted but fairly enjoyable read overall. Would be a bonus if you like whiskey, and a bonus of you like the mighty Banksie. Actually if you were only after a whiskey book you'd probably be annoyed by the other ramblings. From a practical perspective, I think it could have done with a summary of all the whiskies at the end, was hard to retrace and decide what to sample. I finished the book with a baby bottle of Auchentoshan, appreciated the aftertaste a bit more than your average Whiskey, but then committed the mortal sin and added some coke to finish it off. Sorry Banskie!

Bunnies!

Two of my favorite things share a common theme - bunnies! Donnie Darko and a book by Bill Drummond called 45. Ok, they're called Echo and the Bunnymen, so the link to Donnie Darko is pretty obvious. But another subtle link is that in 45, Drummond (who managed the Bunnymen), becomes obsessed with the album cover for Crocodiles, because by pure coincidence, the tree in the background looks like a big bunny; but no-one else he shows it too can see it.

45 is an absolute gem, it's autobiographical, but it's more like a random diary of highly amusing events between his last book, 33, which he wrote when he was 33, and 45 which he wrote at... well done! Blue Peter badge for you. If you can see the connection here, you'll expect another book at 75. 45 is full of boyish quests, poignant observations, and personal superstitions.

For some odd reason I've always had a lot more time for personal, made-up superstitions than I have for established ones (horoscopes, broken mirrors, god etc). One example of Drummond's hokery pokery is his story about drawing a magical ley line across a UK map, somehow guided by the magnetic poles and somthing to do with Elvis, then making his way along this line by foot, while concocting his own soup, in various locations, for anyone who's happy to eat it.

Anyway, chatting in work this morning, we were trying to remember the first track in the original Donnie Darko, and of course it's The Killing Moon by Echo and the Bunnymen (a couple of minutes in, in the clip above). Of course because I saw this version first, I think it's a much better opening track, than the one used for the editors cut (Never tear us apart by INXS) and almost as good as the school scene with Head over Heels by Tears for Fears. I can watch that scene over and over, it's better than any music video, I'll refrain from adding 'ever'. These are the kind of films I love, where each scene can stand on it's own as a great piece. Mullholland drive is chocka block with these. They're especially potent when crafted around some enchanting music. Silencio!

More bunny waffle; My standard doodle is a cartoon bunny. I get bored very easily, and I always want to be 'doing' something, so I fidget and doodle a lot at meetings etc. I've drawn this bunny hundreds of times. Annuvver fing is that I tend to get carried away with things that I get into. When I was 11 I got a rabbit. One year later I had a hundred foot compound, housing about 50 different rabbits, I mixed my own rabbit food which I sold to people who had previously bought rabbits from me, and I also sold rabbits to pet shops. I had special breeding bucks that were bred to sire litters of 12 or so, rather than a standard 5 or 6. I can honestly say I had more of a disposable income when I was 12 than I do now! I also had terrapins, mice, a single pigeon, budgies, guinea-pigs, koi, a hooded crow, and a gerbil city. They say pets can help teach kids a thing or two about life, the unverse and everything. I'll say! I had to do some things that no 12 year old should have to experience, like mercy-killing sick rabbits and drowning baby gerbils born with no legs. And I still, very frequently, have dreams about rabbits burrowing their way out of the garden!

"You still wake up sometimes, don't you Clarice? You wake up in the dark and hear the screaming of the lambs. "

What a load of waffle! So much for writing about web design.

What is web design for?

What is this book for!? It's not for me that's for sure but it's not for anyone. I don't know who would read this. It starts with the same old tedious stuff you get for novice web material -history of the internet etc. Yawn. Then when the content eventually starts its mostly related to really big budget web design contracts. The guys who are doing those sites don't need a book, that thirty pages in is still explaining what a browser is. So it goes from that to the scoping, planning, organization, user testing etc of large and complex sites. There's nothing for the thousand's of web designers like me and our clients who do sites for small to medium business and organizations. People who don't have budgets for a month of research, and use cases and meetings and contracts and other crap that just doesn't happen in grassroots web design.

I kept waiting for it to get better but it just got worse. It's packed full of the kind of ridiculously useless common sense that always gets my goat. This nugget takes up half a page: "Clients can find designers in a variety of ways. They may have had personal contact with someone in the company, or the designer may have been recommended by a colleague. The client may know about the supplier from the trade press or work with a client in their industry. They may have found the suppliers name in the directory....." yadda yadda yadda. Might as well be saying "A designer may get up in the morning and brush their teeth. Or the designer might have a shower first".

The language throughout is fairly dubious. Lots of talk of 'suppliers' and 'engineers' and things you don't associate with web design. Suspicions are confirmed when you get to the test cases. A few of them are unapologetically products of industrial design. What is Web Design? Well It's not a bloody Arm band Sensor that's for sure! I thought it might get interesting when I got to the test cases but they very quickly end up sounding like minutes from a boring meeting and aren't greatly insightful.

In this industry a 4 year old book would be extremely dated and trust me it is, it looks and reads like a ten year old book but that's still no excuse for all the elements that make it such a useless book. I wouldn't be so harsh if I just made a bad purchase, and it wasn't for me but like I said at the start - this book isn't for anyone! I bought this alongside its more recommended big *sister What is Design For? I'm still interested in reading about good web design practice and theory, but this is a bad start! I suppose I've only myself to blame for such a hasty internet purchase.

The God Delusion

I've pretty much given up novels in recent years. I'm a bit tired of fiction but I've recently got a great hunger for learning and information, not too uncommon in your thirties apparently. So I've been reading a lot of non fiction. Lots of art and design books. I just finished Leonardo Da Vinci: The Flights of the Mind. There's a lot of Leonardo pap out there but this is a pretty thorough account of DaVinci's life. But it was a bit too historical for me. I don't really care where or when his mother was born or what she did - just get to the flying machines already! So, I did enjoy a lot of it but I found a lot of it pretty dry and it but it didn't really hold my attention throughout.

But then I got a The God Delusion, another well chosen present, thanks missus! and in comparison it was a really enjoyable and fascinating read. Iwasn't really that bothered about getting it- I'm a strong Athiest so I didn't really need the spiel. I also got the impression Richard Dawkins might be a bit of a tough read, but he's a really down-to-earth, fascinating, funny, and entertaining writer. He expressed a lot of my thoughts on the subject with far greater lucidity than I. There's also some really fascinating stuff about why people 'do' religion, some really primal psyche stuff. On top of all that it's just pretty re-assuring, I didn't need to be assured about my beliefs but sometimes I feel like I'm in invasion of the body snatchers or something and everyone I know has been taken over by alien beings which make them believe in the most ridiculous of things. So it's re-assuring to be in such good company.

Although I've a lot of strong personal politics, I'm pretty apolitical when it comes to professional party politics, but I feel more than ever now that I'd like to be a more active Atheist. Its one thing that I feel very strongly about. If there's one thing I'd mention when politicians knock on my door its the separation of church from state. There's a list of Atheist organisations at the back of Dawkin's book but nothing for Ireland. How shit is that?

Which reminds me, I came across a really good blog a while ago called pharyngula. I was searching for something completely unrelated and stumbled across it and ended up reading loads. It's not a strictly atheist blog but definitely leans that way. So, considering I came upon it by chance I was amused to see Dawkins give it a few mentions. I really want to read a lot more Dawkin's books now, maybe the Selfish Gene. Any recommendations? Anyone? Bueller? Bueller?