Category Archives: Comedy

Absolute Idiot

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Did you hear about the guy who’s agreed to document his life in minute detail? I came across it in the BCS podcast recently. What an ‘absolute idiot’ (an insult btw hurled at me by an E-Bay PCTV software seller in 2005 after I failed to spot his digital product after it ended up in my spam. I am still barely resisting the temptation to turn his words into a T-Shirt design with: “DO NOT SELL TO, ABSOLUTE IDIOT” emblazoned across my chest – thanks for the e-commerce inspiration JohnathanR).

Been much better if he’d tried something simpler like recorded just one day and then tried to reproduce exactly what happened the next day; recording what was hard to reproduce (obvious like the weather and unpredicatable like a train delay), and what unavoidably was different just to show how small differences can be significant. But oh no because of the idiot/mass produced culture we live in it has to be all day, every day; way to go! I’m so lucky I have comedy and complexity next to each other in my Categories to tick for this one.

Game theory rules (sic)

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Saw the BBC2 programme on game theory last night which was amusing to see on a number of levels. The great mathematician John Nash expounding a theory about people’s selfish when he was mentally ‘ill’; R D Laing walking around in a cravat; the BBC in sonorous tones telling us when/how/why ‘we’ were being manipulated. But for me the best was seeing Margaret Thatcher talking about freedom in connection with the fall of the Berlin Wall (garden wall?:-). And so obviously now seeing on her face the lack of real comprehension as to what she was talking about – freedom that is. Ah well, it’s tough being an agent of history.

PS: See my own small contribution to the anti-psychiatry movement at the Foucault Tribunal back in 1998; was fun at the time hanging out in east Berlin; chatting to Kate Millett in the workers’ canteen, and mentioning to her that James Earl Ray had just died.