Observations from a Hill

We went over to Nantlle today for a wander around the old slate quarries there. We hadn't been for I guess a good thirty years, although I wrote about the place in these pages last year . It seems that at long last, there is some public admission that there is a major contamination problem in one of the upper quarries of the group, something we two were aware of some forty years ago. It is also the reason why no-one who buys the Nantlle quarries can ever get past first base in developing the place for leisure use for the general public: the cost of cleaning up the quarry in question would simply be prohibitive and could not attract any serious finance so to do. Pictured is an example of signage on the site that never existed before, in the days when the unitary authority simply glossed over the serial failures to complete any sale of the site to commercial third parties, all of whom ran a mile when the truth of the contamination and its scale became manifest at each successive surv...

I'm no more a believer in divination than the next rational human being; at least not in the sense that there are divine or otherwise forces at work behind any particular mechanical modus operandi of such practices. Tarot, i Ching, throwing bones, reading palms, crystal balls &etc., what have you. All carry a freight of superstition and arcane 'magickal-ness' akin to faith and/or religion: the unprovable 'proving' the improbable to the satisfaction of the naive. What I do believe, however, is the power of association of ideas, both the rational and the symbolic or rather, the concrete known, set in apposition to abstract ideas. What I mean by this, is that as a species, we construct our world from fragments of our immediate sensory inputs, memories of previous sensory inputs, and abstract constructs created from the combination of both plus the recorded history of our collective thought as humans; all mediated through our personal imagination: our own, personal ...

I came across a word new to me, today, in the FT Weekend Magazine's 'Departments' sidebar: ' RETCON/ rɛtkɒn / (verb or noun), a contraction of 'retroactive continuity', for when an existing narrative and the established facts within that narrative are overwritten, as in the [cited] Patrick Duffy shower resurrection in the TV show 'Dallas'. Having been killed off in the previous season of the show, it was decided that Duffy that should stay with the show, and returned, as if from the dead, with the entire previous season being written off as a dream. How so 'now' this seems, with The Trump Show performing this feat of narrative gymnastics on an almost daily basis, now that the scene has expanded into the catastrophic war we are witnessing in the Middle East. A man not overly familiar with or given to the telling of the truth, Trump not only mangles the English language on a sentence by sentence basis, but flips narratives to suit the expediency of...

I was reading a book this afternoon that I've mentioned before in these pages: "Cataloguing The World" by Alex Wright, and came across a reference to Esperanto, which immediately made me think of my old mate Phil, whose dad was a member of the Esperanto community, speaking and writing the synthetic language invented in the late nineteenth century by a Jewish opthalmologist from Bialystok [now in Poland]: one L.L. Zamenhof; in an attempt to create an international second and common language through which international relations could be built. The name derives from the Spanish for 'hope' or 'expectation', essentially the motivation behind the creation of the language: through commonality of thought and communication, the hope of a better and less divided world. No wonder that the Nazis characterised it negatively as a 'Jewish conspiracy', echoes of which mindset are still resounding at present in the divisive world of human affairs today. Quite tang...

Pictured, a rather old set of dominoes, still housed in their tinplate box, in lovely nick. I really can't remember how I came to have them, but there you go. As far as I can tell - knowing full well that the brand pre-dates my seventy-plus years - that this was a cheap line of cigarettes by W.D & H.O Wills sometime around the 1930s. That's as much as I know. What I do know, though, is that dominoes, like darts, bar billiards and cribbage, used to be the staples of pub games when I started frequenting the many ale-houses of Birmingham and the Black Country back in my youth.Though I almost never play any of these games any more - no-one else seems particularly interested to partake of these pastimes - I always liked a game of crib, darts or dommies, back in the day. In fact, one of the few things - alongside jazz - that my late father-in-law and I bonded over was a game of dominoes whilst consuming a pint or three of decent ale. It's a deceptively simple game that many w...

Reading a short piece in the latest US edition of Wired that dropped in the mail today, about COBOL [the ancient programming language that still occupies the bulk of extant working computer code on planet earth], I was struck by the tone of the argument - echoing a not particularly recent sentiment, either - that COBOL is essentially the spawn of the devil. The analogy used is with asbestos: at once ubiquitous and as dangerous as hell and difficult to eradicate, to boot. Well, yes, this is indeed the case: COBOL is pretty much still at the heart of mainframe business, banking and government administration computer systems to this day, and yes, the numbers of competent individuals left to deal with its many-fold exigencies [blog posts passim] are few and far between. However, whilst the piece outlines the historical and pragmatic expediencies that led to its widespread adoption by governments and agencies worldwide in the first place, its demonising of the COBOL language itself [and in ...