“People Kill People”

Dear Americans,

If "guns don't kill people; people kill people" is true (and I'm not going to argue with that), then here's a thought:

If you really want to stop people killing people, why not try denying people easy access to really easy and efficient methods of killing people? Like—just for the sake of argument, you understand—guns.

This edition of Stating The Bleedin' Obvious was brought to you by
—Daz

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FNIMN: Rubber Biscuit

According to The Fount Of All Knowledge™, on this day in 1935…

Gerard Berchet, under the direction of [Wallace] Carothers, produced a half-ounce of polymer from hexamethylenediamine and adipic acid, creating polyamide 6-6, the substance that would come to be known as Nylon.

While it certainly wasn't the first artificial material, Nylon is without doubt the product that's most-often held up as being emblematic of the latter part of the industrial revolution, prior to the transistor and the silicon chip. And so, Gentle Reader, this week's Friday Night Is Music Night is on the theme of all things artificial. Or, bearing in mind the cultural baggage of the word "plastic," of cut-price shoddiness and fakery.
—Daz

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Blueberry Hill

Lying on my back,
Up on Blueberry Hill;
The stars were sharp as razors,
The air was cold and still.
I gazed up at the cosmos;
The cosmos gazed at me,
And I fell into the sky
And swam the starry sea.
A living paradox, I felt
So huge and yet so small;
A speck of dust lost in the void
And yet I touched it all.

A momentary fantasy
But, yes, I found my thrill—
Just a minute of pure wonder
Up on Blueberry Hill.

—Daz

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Void

Imagine that you are alone in a void. You have always been alone in a void.

You've never experienced any sensory input which didn't arise from your own body.

There is no light—not a single photon—so you have never seen anything; even your own body. The very concept of sight is, therefore, completely alien to you (as is the concept "alien"). You might have noticed the movement of your eyes against your eyelids, but that's just an odd sensation arising from your own body; you have absolutely no reason to suspect that those twitchy bits can perform any useful function.

You've never felt anything external to yourself; there is nothing external to yourself. Not the wind, not the pull of gravity.

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Love-2

There's no doubt your lover's voice
Can set your heart in a race;
Their caring eyes,
The serious look on their face
As they discourse on poetry,
Or their hatred of fashion,
Or why the dawn
Fills them with passion,
Or how the world
Would be better off fenceless.
But, sometimes, you wish they'd
Just shut up
And shag you senseless.

—Daz

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Love

Pardon my intrusion,
S'cuse me if I seem rude;
But this god you're speaking of—
This perfect, loving dude…
Is he the one who drowned a world;
Who raped a virgin-bride?
The chap who killed the innocent,
For the Pharaoh's pride?

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Good Grief!

Dear Person Who Landed On My Blog, After Searching Google For This:

how to set font 'comic sans ms' as default in my bt.com e-mail

The short answer: don't.

The long answer: Hell, don't.

That is all. Your regular programming will resume shortly.
—Daz

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FNIMN: Take The World In A Love Embrace

The burble of my exhaust unwound like a long cord behind me. Soon my speed snapped it, and I heard only the cry of the wind which my battering head split and fended aside. The cry rose with my speed to a shriek: while the air's coldness streamed like two jets of iced water into my dissolving eyes. I screwed them to slits, and focused my sight two hundred yards ahead of me on the empty mosaic of the tar's gravelled undulations.
—T.E. Lawrence, The Road

I was wandering back from the shops this morning, when a bloke caught up from behind me and said, "Nice to see someone who knows what a proper bike looks like." Huh? I thought to myself, and then realised I was wearing my old leather jacket with the BSA logo painted on the back. So then I had to endure (well, okay, to be honest it wasn't that bad, and twas nice to have a bit of company) him regaling me with tales of his long-past motorcycling days, back when British manufacturers ruled the motorcycling world, almost uncontested. This modern "jap-crap," I was told (for perhaps the thousandth time in my life) isn't a patch on Good Old British Engineering™.

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“Lads”, He Said Proudly. “It’s Looking Really Quantum.”

I have, Gentle Reader, come up with a foolproof system by which you may know whether you are completely and utterly shit-faced, or merely a little bit wobbly in the leg department.

1. Find a book which deals, in whole or in part, with quantum physics.
2. Read the part about the two-slit experiment, wherein a particle is found to be, at the very same time as being a particle, a fuzzy probability-wave extending throughout the universe which, nevertheless, will collapse instantly to particleness, as soon as its position is known.

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Non Stamp Collector: Biblical Slavery

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