Observations from a Hill

A couple of things from this week's New Statesman, which plopped through the letterbox this morning. Will Dunn on Trump, and Andrew Marr on the status quo thus far here in the UK. Will Dunn's beautifully observed sketch serves to emphasise the unreality of Trump's continuance of his own 'reality' show, masquerading as a 'Presidency'. If one looks back at any of this orange clown's public pronouncements and the context in which they are given, it is fairly obvious that he is still living in his very own, self-created Truman Show, a Man living in a fantasy of his own creation. The only difference between Trump and Truman, is that Truman was the unwitting dupe and Trump is the willing but witless participant, who has simply lost track of the boundary between actual reality and his self-confected personal 'reality'. Andrew Marr quietly takes us through the veil of the hysterical political commentariat to assess the actuality of the current governmen...

Pictured, my re-strung Komboloi , which previously disemboweled themselves when the original cord broke, a while back. My temporary repair was missing one of the twenty-three beads and the string was too short anyway, so less than optimum. Anyhow, I stumbled across the missing bead this afternoon and decided to do a proper job on them. So, here they are, replete with papas [priest - the single bead: in my case a bead with the addition of an ornate silver one] and the founda [the soft tassel, which I made from some fine thread in a pleasing dark red colour] to terminate the string. They are sitting in the rather nice old - it was described as antique - Backgammon board which I won on eBay for just over twenty quid the other day. Whilst a 1970s tourist purchase could hardly be described accurately as antique, it has a nice feel of age to it - slightly knackered? - that renders it pleasing to the eye; and I suppose that although the mid-70s doesn't seem that long ago to me, it's s...

Just mulling over the number of malicious code injection instances that are frequently wreaking havoc on all manner of victims lately, from the deserving of malice to the frankly innocent, who should not be targeted [why on earth was Citizen's Advice blitzed? Makes absolutely no sense: they're the good guys, people]. Thinking about such stuff brought to mind a post of mine from five years ago, where I described hiding a tribute to a recently deceased friend in our then software product, FotoPage, via the C command ' malloc ', which as any programmer knows is not great practice and potentially dangerous, but I made sure that I wasn't feeding my message into a chunk of memory remotely sensitive, so I felt reasonably safe in doing so [no-one lost all their data, so far as I am aware]. In that post I mentioned that I had buried similar tributes to dead people in other softwares I'd had a part in creating, not least of which was a tribute to the lately departed Fran...

A couple of things: today we went over to Beaumaris for our usual Monday light lunch of soup, chips and Bass ale. I've written before about the taking over of this ancient hostelry [The Bull Inn, blog posts passim] by a chain and its gradual decline in standards. Today we turned up to find the bottom bar and the snug - the heart and oldest part of the place - closed 'for renovations'; with a note directing punters to the newer Bistro and top bar behind, where we found a long queue [across the Bistro floor!] and frankly harassed staff [the old, experienced crew have magically re-appeared - from where?], to be told that there was a minimum thirty minute wait for food. We turned tail and headed back to Menai Bridge and The Anglesey Arms for soup, chunky chips and onion rings [washed down in my case with a couple of pints of John Willie Lee's finest bitter]. Excellent so it was.  On Saturday last, the monthly lunch club gathered at The Oystercatcher in Rhosneigr, where we...

Just a brief note tonight as I'm full of roast chicken, roast potatoes and gravy after a visit for an early supper with us by the boys, and I want to watch a documentary on the Jesus Army cult in half an hour [on terrestrial, if you're wondering about me having a scheduling issue]; some of us still use linear media, you know. I was wondering earlier about the relative sizes of the English and Welsh vocabularies, given that the largest Welsh dictionary I own is the slightly appropriately titled Y Geiriadur Mawr [literally The Big Dictionary], which consists - in my edition - of a single, albeit portly, volume. I know that the average daily vocabulary of English speakers is around 20,000 words out of a total of around 171,000 current usages and that the Oxford English Dictionary runs to twenty or so volumes; and so I wondered what the figures were for Welsh. The number of regular usages is pretty much the same at around the 20,000 mark, although the total number of current dictio...

I wrote the other day about the recent discovery that Nvidea's GPU chips have been found to be potentially vulnerable to Rowhammer attack, posing a possible massive security threat to those industries heavily reliant on the technology, not least of which are AI, blockchains and data encryption generally. In today's FT, the newspaper reports that a billion dollars worth of Nvidea chips, including the sought-after B200, have appeared in China via a black market route seemingly unfazed by Trump's export controls, tariffs and sundry other of his attempts to play the big man on the international economic stage. What the confluence of these two facts portends for the world, who knows? But it sure won't be good for the majority of us. Also in the same paper, the FT reports that the US economy is currently pretty stable and apparently unmoved by the endless crass pronouncements and executive orders that issue forth daily from The White House; going on to say that the knock-on ...

One thing I simply don't understand and can't get my head around are the deportation programmes that seem to be de rigueur amongst the boneheads of the right, and by default these days, the left. Leaving aside the late Tory government's bonkers Rwandan scheme, we have Donald Trump's El Salvador lunacy, and according to the the latest information, even Denmark and Holland are jumping onto the bandwagon. But weirdest of all, are Farage's pronouncements on the issue, wanting not only to include illegal foreign-born 'miscreants', but UK born lifers and sundry other inmates to be deported to a raft of random destinations, too. "Why? How? What for?" are the questions that immediately spring to mind, followed by "What sort of country actually wants to willingly import some other country's criminals in the first place?" Frankly it all beggars sodding belief and equates to a kind of human fly-tipping: quite ugly and pointless in the extreme, a...

We have an increasingly worrying problem in the situation in Gaza. And not just worrying from the standpoint of the Palestinian people caught up in this maelstrom, but worrying because of the West's turning of a blind eye to what is not just the elephant in the room, but rather a beached and putrefying Blue Whale lying full-square before us all. This conflict has long ceased to be a proportionate response by a nation to an act of terrorism, but an all-out attempt to enact a pre-meditated policy of ethnic cleansing, possibly even genocide, at the behest of Benjamin Netanyahu principally, and the Israeli state as a whole. It's there for all to see. There's no question regarding the facts of the matter, as Jonathan Sumption wrote in last week's New Statesman: the Geneva Conventions have been given scant regard and ridden roughshod over in Israel's prosecution of this latest horror in the region's torrid history. He was also right to point out the utter disparity be...

A lot of metaphorical water can flow very quickly under the allusive bridge at our age. On the sixth of this month I referred to my teenage encounter with a very young Ozzie Osbourne and the recently infamous Black Sabbath in 1970, and now, just seventeen days later, that satanic scion of Aston himself is indeed dead, taking his inevitable, final, bow, having played out his life with a last curtain call at the Villa ground. Not many bands can be credited with inventing a musical genre, but Ozzie and Sabbath did, reflecting the dirt, noise and grit of 1960s Brummagem in the direct analogue of their sound: abrasive music for an abrasive city and its people. The Swinging Sixties never really got much further than the Watford Gap: Birmingham was still grinding its way out of postwar austerity even as late as 1980, and the soundtrack that Sabbath provided, more than most, was always more appropriate - and indeed local - than any of the West Coast psychedelia or prog-rock that we were liste...

I note with some amusement that up until tonight's, ie. this, post, I have hitherto 'created' 2050 previous scribbles over the past five years or so. This made me ponder that by the year 2050 - should I still be physically around, capable or otherwise, I'll be ninety-five. It'll be a nice trick if I can pull it off, despite my best lifestyle efforts to make it probably unlikely. When I made the - admittedly rash - promise to post here without fail at least one jotting a day, I had little hope of so doing, let alone reaching the point at which I find myself presently. It is, to be frank, still a bit of a chore, a rod for my own back; a self-inflicted wound: but I would not wish it otherwise, lest my mental state deteriorate as a consequence of the inevitable inaction that would follow should I stop. If I'm to advance in any way, shape or form towards my nineties - and I've yet to negotiate my current decade: it's just beginning, anyway - I need to remain...

Harking back to my post of the night before last, I want to mention a phenomenon I was hitherto unaware of until Joe sent me a cryptic text about Nvidea GPU [Graphics Processor Unit] chips now being vulnerable to RowHammer bit-flip attacks. As is my wont, I decided to at least attempt to plug this gap in my knowledge by digging around the InterWeb™for information. I soon lit upon a couple of academic papers from Carnegie Mellon University and The University of Toronto: the first a retrospective paper concerning researches carried out by the authors, published as early as 2014, and the second published as recently as July this year on the phenomenon having been proven to be usable in attacks on Nvidea GPUs, the chips used widely throughout the computing industry for gaming, encryption, blockchain farming and AI. The practical upshot from these researches is that there is a known fundamental vulnerability to 'bad actor' attacks, using a particular characteristic of modern compute...

  OK - it's a gratuitous Sunday night meal post again: after much driving yesterday and cooking supper this afternoon, I'm taking it easy this evening. I've started reading in on the topic I alluded to in last night's post, which I intend to amplify and comment on tomorrow. In the meantime, pictured is tonight's repast of Welsh lamb cutlets, which I air-fried; steamed [microwaved] carrots and my signature Greek-style garlic and lemon roast potato wedges [cooked conventionally]; a rather fine M&S cheat lamb gravy - it is good, however; and that old British staple, mint sauce, made with mint from our garden and cider vinegar. It should have been a clash of cultures and tastes, but it all worked perfectly and harmoniously together, and was frankly scrummy. A bit like our relationship with the EU before we kicked ourselves in the nuts and left it? I ask you...

The ingenuity of mankind knows few bounds: '... What a piece of work is a man, How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty, In form and moving how express and admirable, In action how like an Angel, In apprehension how like a god, The beauty of the world, The paragon of animals.' [Hamlet, Act II, scene 2], and it would seem to be obvious that our ingenuity as a species is a self-reinforcing feedback loop, with one idea or physical invention of our ingenuity leading either logically or tangentially to another, and another, and so on. The development of human natural language is inextricably linked to our development of technology and vice versa.  Out of the need to teach and pass on our tool-making came language, as much as it emerged out of our need to navigate the wider world beyond our immediate environment for survival. As we gradually corralled our environment to serve our needs, so too did language develop and feed ideas back into further technological advances; in agric...

So, the government is acting on its pledge to lower the voting age in the UK to sixteen from eighteen, a move that has created much debate amongst the chatterati and on social and linear media alike. For myself I have long thought that if you are considered old enough to work and pay taxes, join the armed forces and in years past, potentially fight and die for your country, you should at least be granted the courtesy of having the franchise to vote in governmental elections. No brainer. The Conservative pundits and Nigel Farage have said that the Labour government is trying to rig the electoral system in favour of the Left. Really?  Give the youth of this archipelago some credit for having political thoughts of their own - I know I did at that age, and the two years left before my enfranchisement kicked in changed not a whit of my thinking, nor has it altered since. Given that one's mental acuity peaks before the age of twenty, and even given a teenager's relative lack of expe...

I was taken, by a chance meeting with a very old friend this morning, back to the earliest years of our tenure here in Gogledd Cymru; some forty-plus years since. We were the foundation stones of the Gerlan Bohemia [blog posts passim], along with several other couples, all involved in the early days of the local food co-op, in which we shared bagging-up duties, banter, laughs and partying in equal measure: a little slice of true communal endeavour that belied the Thatcherite ethos starting to wreak its - unfortunately long-lasting - havoc in the wider world beyond our semi-rural idyll. We were, it has to be said, escapees - or so we supposed - from the increasingly fraught world of Mammon out-with our particular slice of paradise. Of course, we were youthfully optimistic and probably quite wrong that the world wouldn't catch up with us eventually, but there you go. It has to be said that we are still making a fight of it, forty-odd years later, nevertheless, despite the attrition a...

There's currently a lot of traffic about Trump, the Epstein papers and the DOJ. Trump's MAGA support is faltering because of this one issue: the DOJ's not releasing of the 'papers' related to Jeffrey Epstein's operation and criminal activities regarding sex-trafficking and abuse of minors. From Trump's standpoint, he says there's nothing here to see, and his '...it's quite boring actually, sordid but boring...' attitude, would suggest one thing, alluded to by his erstwhile buddy, Elon Musk. As far as MAGA are concerned, it would seem they are up in arms about it, but not for the reasons one might think. It's not because they feel affronted at the President's apparent passive defence of Epstein, or that the accusations of his complicity in Epstein's criminality might actually be real; but rather that they still wholeheartedly believe in the entire Democrat/Pizza Parlour/Sex Trafficking/Alien Lizard King conspiracy. They now seem to...

On our way up to Junction 10 of the M56 to meet up halfway with Kev for Jane's visit to her family in Carnforth this week, we were listening on Radio Four to Mark Kermode and Ellen E Jones on the film programme, Screenshot. The topic of conversation was centred on Wong Kar-wai's film of 2000, "I'm In The Mood For Love", which apparently is finding a cult following amongst new cinema-goers born around or after the film's actual release; which can't be at all bad: bringing young people back into long-form media can only be a good sign after the last few years of mind-sapping insta-this and insta-that short-term bollocks. Add to this that the film is unashamedly romantic and emotional, and you have a ray of hope in the current wilderness of disconnected humanity. Films mentioned in the same breath that might also be current favourites with this new generation of romantic cinephiles were "Casablanca" and "Brief Encounter"; both similarly ab...

I got a link through on a feed this morning to a piece on the blog "The Conversation", about an article written eighty years ago by Vannevar Bush on information overload and its impact on the efficiency and effectiveness of academic research. In his original piece of July 1945, he argued that the sheer weight of information produced by academia in the form of papers, books and journal articles stood as a bulwark against the useful absorption and cataloguing of those data for re-use in future research. In those days, research was very much a case of sifting through physical catalogues and index files in order to make the connections between ideas and the concrete findings of individual researches to further advance knowledge. He argued that the volume - even then - of works which needed to be considered in any rational assessment of a particular subject's development was too onerous, given the very linear nature of the filing structures and access methods then available, t...

Tonight, a Lazy Sunday food post that is actually vaguely justifiable, as I've had to juggle cooking this meal and watch the Wimbledon Mens' Final at the same time. The fish won, as I missed the denouement of the match whilst tending this rather large slab of Scottish salmon fillet. The fish turned out rather well: in the pan to the left is olive oil warmed through with lemon thyme, chilli flakes and a Kaffir lime leaf, to serve as a drizzle for the fish. The pan to the rear holds a mixture of Camargue, brown Basmati and wild rices. We ate all this with a Greek salad, and very fine it was to be sure; very apposite, too, given the weather: very warm, humid and promising some manner of rainfall, given the appearance of some rather impressive cumulus clouds in the sky this evening. That's all for now, folks...

Pictured is the view of the mountains of Eryri from the top of The Eagle Tower of Caernarfon Castle, which we visited today to exercise our newly-minted CADW joint [oh, how I do despise the descriptor 'Senior', but I guess I need to get over it and ignore the epithet] membership. I'd not been inside the walls of the place for probably fifteen or twenty years, when I worked there as a telecoms engineer. Much work has been done on the place in the intervening years, with the Museum of The Royal Welch Fusiliers relocated to a larger site in The Queen's Tower, the addition of accessibility features such as ramps and lifts, the opening up to the public of much of the castle which has lain unseen to the public for centuries; and of course the usual tea, coffee and retail outlets obligatory in this late-stage-capitalist age. The castle was one of the locations where we as a small AV company, back in the early 1990s, installed and maintained a visitor display that ran for some ...

Pictured, my latest eBay find, which arrived this lunchtime: a Parker Duofold Senior fountain pen, which I chanced upon last week. I made a speculative and fairly low bid, then let it be, not going back to check upon or watch its progress. A few days later, I got the message/email notification that I'd won the thing. It came in an [its?] original box, having been cleaned and serviced by the seller. I duly filled it with Diamine Imperial Purple [my favoured] ink, and gave it a go. It's a little broader of nib than my Parker Duofold Maxima, and very slightly shorter of stature, but nevertheless a decent handful of a pen. It goes into my little collection of Parker Duofolds, alongside the Slimfold, the Junior and the aforementioned Maxima; all of which do see regular service. The thing of interest - for me, at least - is that this latest piece of retro writing technology is exactly the same age as me, its year of manufacture being 1954. It of course, was destined to be mine, natc...

  Pictured, the fruits of yesterday's endeavours in the workshop - amid much chuntering, walking back and forth to the bathroom and back down to the studio - measure, cut, measure, cut [it's a good step back and to from studio to house and some thousands of steps can be added to my daily total this way]: a seemingly trivial bit of boxing-in twixt bath and bog. It turned out pretty well, methinks, although its reverse is nowhere near as neat as its obverse, but I care not; it's only set-dressing, after all: this smidgeon of carpentry now hides the excrescence of assorted pipework and shit plaster that has been a domestic bone of contention for some - too much - time. I started work on the bathroom woodwork sometime in the last ice-age, and for some unaccountable reason, I've let it slip. And let it slip. And let it slip: und so weiter, ad nauseam, ad infinitum; a victim to my procrastination and the diversions of sundry other probably - certainly - less pressing tasks. S...

  A while back I posted a couple of pieces on my recently acquired old chess table, and how I'd decided that it was possibly originally a tilt-top that had been hard-tailed [to use a term borrowed from the worlds of guitar and motorcycles] at some point in its history. I was going to try and use a stout hardwood dowel as the hinge pin - as many antique tilt top tables do - but ended up using two short lengths of 6mm silver steel round bar instead, running through interference-fit holes in the top and pedestal crown, a solution which works fine. The top is secured in the horizontal position by a small brass catch and all is pretty solid in use. I've just got to find house room for the little beauty now; no small task in the rather overstuffed edifice we call  home! Keep you posted...

Pictured, my table saw - which I stupidly allowed to remove a 5mm chunk out of my thumb, thankfully now all healed with little sign of that particular trauma: mea culpa in spades - with today's construction in the background, the second bit of woodwork in the glacial completion of our bathroom project: again, mea culpa. Having cut, glued and pinned the thing together, I've just applied some wood filler to hide the panel pins [that brown gloop], which I'll sand down tomorrow before offering the piece up to it final resting place to await a coat of paint. In the mid-ground of the picture is a book that came today from the estimable World Of Books, which cost me the princely sum of around three quid plus postage. It's packed with great ideas and beautifully illustrated, so I look forward to building some of the tools within its pages. Keep you posted...

There's a good piece in this week's New Statesman by Will Dunn, a man with no small measure of sagacity in matters politic and economic. Briefly, his contention is that the UK's current Byzantine taxation system needs to be ripped up and replaced with something more logical and frankly just plain simpler to manage. The complexities and absurdities of the extant tax regime serve only to complicate and obfuscate what is, after all, a relatively straightforward goal: to raise money from the working populace in order to run the country and its public services. Simple. He suggests removing National Insurance altogether and hiking direct income tax to compensate. I agree: National Insurance long ago lost any semblance of its original meaning or function, and is an over-complication which serves no concrete purpose of its own. Similarly, Road Tax; originally the Road Fund Licence, which was designed to act as a central fund to maintain the highways: completely inoperable in the pr...

The last hurrah of Black Sabbath this week in Birmingham prompted a brief flurry of emails from The Lads [blog posts passim], about our listening to a tape of their eponymous first album - pictured above - on a dark evening in Lightwoods Park, Birmingham, just after its release. We were, as my dad would have phrased it 'just bits o' kids' back then, firmly convinced that there was a secret incantation buried within the sounds of the title track that would elicit dark forces. Old Nick fortunately never made an appearance that evening, but we all enjoyed the night, nevertheless. Some time after, we got to see the band in one of their first outings at Birmingham Town Hall [ticket stub also pictured]. My ears rang for a good three days afterwards, and my tinnitus to this day bears witness to those youthful good times of over half a century ago. Glad I was there to see the birth of Brummagem's indigenous musical art form, as it happened, though. By the way, my ticket to the ...

The UK Labour government has a monumental task still ahead of it, no question. U-turns, vacillations and direction changes are to be expected at this still early stage in the current parliament. As my son wisely said over lunch, it's still far too early to call the next election result, and to be frank it's positively damned stupid to do so. The Sisyphean task of righting the totally shagged UK economy they are faced with is enormous, vied against the weight of the collected 'always on' media pressure against them is daunting, to say the very least. They inherited this poisoned chalice willingly, and they knew exactly what it meant. It's not going swimmingly to date, and they are still learning how to navigate their way through the shark-infested waters of a shattered economy, but who else do we have as a credible alternative that could even make a fist to shake at the manifestly crap situation that we are suffering as the direct result of fourteen years of Tory n...

OK - too lazy to confront the world outside my door today, so a supper post it is. Pictured, belly pork strips with Greek-style olive oil & lemon-roasted potato wedges with apple sauce made from the residue of the meat roasting dish [white wine and apples], seasoned with salt and lemon juice. Mighty fine, and a good deal less stressful than current politics or even the second test match against India...

I was pretty pissed off at today's coverage of Rachel Reeves 'event' at PMQ's yesterday. She appeared 'tearful': so what? So far we know nothing of the reason(s) behind her obvious emotions [caveat: I didn't catch PMQ's this week, but I think the pictures show something actually occurred], and so any speculation as to their origin is plain bloody moot and frankly immaterial until further notice. Why is that the press still feel that it is OK to pontificate about a female politician in a way that would be unthinkable were the person concerned a man? Yes, the Government and its ministers have thus far not played a great game on the economic front, let alone the public relations one; but for God's sake, surely we are above the crass sexism of old by now, even if we can't shake off the racist attitudes that go hand in hand with it. We all deserve better of ourselves, and the press and social media are simply amplifying the very worst of us in the nam...

Pictured, Fairview Heights this evening, with the moon rising in what can only be described as the unbroken azure of the skies above us [how poetic/clichéd]. Whatever, this time of the year is the sweet spot for this place, and the gardens never look better at any other time of the year. We've both been out this morning and have cut both lawns [they'll need another do before the week's out, however], and trimmed a few of the coiffed shrubs of their more enthusiastic growth after the recent rains. The sunshine is glorious and the air at present is sensibly cool, so probably the perfect balance for an early summer's evening here in God's own country. Hwyl!

I have nothing against offshore - or indeed onshore - wind power electricity generation: we need it, and we need it and other renewable sources of power desperately urgently, if we are to stem the tide of the climate disasters that threaten to overwhelm our planet. No beef with this particular technological path at all; rather with the principal pecuniary beneficiary here i the UK: the King. The Crown Estate owns the bloody seabed around our archipelago for God's sake, and so so directly benefits from the sale of rights to erect wind farms offshore. In the King's case, he will benefit from an income of £132mn next year, due to profits from offshore wind making the Crown more than £1bn.  Whilst I applaud all efforts made toward greening our islands, I do feel more than a tad peeved that so much money can be siphoned off by the institution due to the serial accidents of history that is 'our' monarchy. I've said it before: my late father's constant litany was that...