John's Quavering Pencil

I went to the library today and I started ‘dice reading’ one of the books I borrowed, this afternoon. If you are not sure what dice reading is I suggest you have a look at one of my previous posts a couple of blogs ago in which I describe it in some detail.

I have done 20 throws of a single dice and that has taken me up to p.66. There is something not altogether surprising about this. A dice throw will produce a number between 1-6 and each number is equally probable on each throw. So the mid-score is theoretically 3.5, lying between the two middle numbers of three and four. So, if the dice is more or less unbiased, 20 throws should get me to 20 x 3.5 = 70. Obviously, with such a small number of throws, we would not expect the theoretical estimate to be 100% accurate, but my actual p.66 is not too far off the estimated 70.

The reading experience really is quite strange. It can be a bit frustrating starting a page in mid-sentence (and finishing it that way, too). Still, it is not a hopeless task. I have started to develop a sense of the plot and am beginning to recognise some of the characters. The act of reading, in this way, feels a little like problem-solving. It involves lots of speculative guessing. But even that varies depending on the dice throw. After all, a throw of #1 simply involves carrying on to the next page, whereas a throw of #6 takes you 6 pages further forwards. So, the nature of the puzzle experience ebbs and flows with each throw of the dice.

Well, I just wanted to give you a sense of how things were progressing. Speak to you later, my dear blogophiles.

As it is getting near that time of year, I thought I would let you know that I have just uploaded my original song Brussels sprouts blues to
http://fyrmusica.bandcamp.com

The first line of the lyric sets the tone:
“I gave my baby a well-cooked Brussels sprout….”
and basically it goes downhill from there.

Anyway, you can download it for a small fee, should you so desire.
Speak to you later, my dear blogophiles.

This morning, I wanted to do a sound check with an old Marshall amplifier I have. It is designed to take the input from both a voice mic and an electro-acoustic guitar. I used to keep it my wardrobe, since I tend not to use it very much. An inspection of the dust-encrusted depths of the space known as the bottom-of-my-wardrobe  revealed a complete absence of any amplifier, Marshall or other. I then began the tedious task of searching my memory. I recalled an episode that occurred a couple of years ago where I completed a major reorganisation of one of the upstairs rooms. I had a feeling that I might have stowed the amp in a small storage space off that room. There is a cupboard door, about one metre high, that leads into this hidey-hole. It is where the rafters, covered by insulating material, lie beneath the roof tiles.

I opened the door and saw a rectangular box-shape in a sealed, dusty, white plastic bag, with the words ‘Marshall amp’ printed across it in felt tip marker pen. I was about to reach in for it, when I saw a load of very dozy wasps moving around a fairly large nest. I quickly closed the door and phoned pest control at my local council offices.

They would, for the price of 50 GBP send someone up to spray the wasps. However, the very helpful woman on the phone explained to me that all the wasps would all be in the process of dying right now, and they don’t use the same nest next year. She suggested I just wait until we get a few cold winter days and that will finish them off. Apparently the queen wasp will already have flown off to hibernate somewhere.  So, once they are dead, she advised me to put the nest in a plastic bin liner and throw it away.

This was the first time I have ever had to abandon a sound check on account of wasps. Speak to you later, my dear blogophiles.

Hello! Well, I finally ground to the end that book I borrowed on the whim of the dice, last week. 408 bloody pages, and I mean that as a vampiric literal truth. At least the next book about Tokyo Geisha girls should provide a change.

Now, for the benefit of those of you who have read my e-novel The Hexagon Hex (you can get a link to it on the Amazon book shelf from my homepage) I have decided to define the Hex seasons in the following way:
Hex-Spring = Hex-month Green
Hex-Summer = Hex-months Blue & Purple
Hex-Autumn = Hex-month Red
Hex-Winter = Hex-months Orange & Yellow.

The Hex-seasons relate loosely to the conventional calendar as follows:
Hex-Spring runs from the beginning of March to the end of April
Hex-Summer runs from the beginning of May to the tail end of August
Hex-Autumn runs from early September to the end of October
Hex-Winter starts at the beginning of November and goes through to the tail end of February.

Perhaps I should remind you that the fit to the conventional callendar dates is only approximate. I do like the way that both summer and winter are long seasons, in Hex, while spring and autumn are both  short.

In case anyone is interested, today’s Hex-date in 2014 is RYOG. This translates into the colour sequence as follows:
Hex-month = Red
Hex-treek = Orange
Hex-Day = Green

I think that is all for now. Today I play a gig at the Hippy Haven in Second Life at midday SLT (that is 8 pm in England). If you are not in Second Life you can find out how to listen to my live show by going to the relevant link off my home page. Speak to you later, my dear blogophiles.

Hello folks! I have just eaten a delicious turkey breast sandwich. I made it with very fresh multi-grain brown wholemeal bread and some breast slices which were cut at the supermarket deli counter. However, I also added a good dollop of Heinz salad cream (I am NOT talking mayonnaise, here). I have to say that I found the salad cream more enjoyable than cranberry sauce which I have typically used in my turkey sandwiches, post-Xmas dinner in the past. I think that eating this sandwich amounts to the peak experience of my day, so far. What an exciting life I do lead! Speak to you later, my dear blogophiles.

The Vargas book is rather gruesome. It seems to be concerned with the investigation of an exceedingly bloody murder where the victim’s body has been chain-sawed, axed and cut up into some 460 fragments and about 300 of those were pounded to a pulp. For some reason, both the French police and Scotland Yard are involved. I have found a self-issue reciept, tucked into one of the pages, that suggests it was last borrowed in March, 2013. I feel that the book has either been poorly classified (as General Fiction) or was misplaced upon the wrong shelf by the librarian, back in March 2013. I think the Crime shelves might be a better home for it. Maybe I shall raise this point when I return the book. Anyway, I am on page 134 and the initial suspect has just been shot. I am not really enjoying this story. At least there were no murders in the Stoner book! Speak to you later, my dear blogophiles.

I have just finished a novel entitled ‘Stoner’ by John Williams. There is a ‘puff’ on the front cover of the Vintage Classics paperback which says: ‘The greatist novel you’ve never read’. I wish it still was. I have not read such an utterly depressing novel for quite some time. I got hold of the book on the basis of a positive recommendation from a friend. So, this got me thinking…

I was in the city this morning, doing a bit of shopping. While I was there I popped into the library to pay off a small fine that I had accrued. I decided to take out a couple of novels to tide me over the next week or two, and I decided that I would pick them from the General Fiction shelves. I was ascending the escalator to the stacks when I recalled the time I read Luke Rhinehart’s The dice man. I was a post-graduate student at the time, and a bunch of my friends and I used to carry dice around with us so that we could randomly determine what to have for lunch, whether to go for a coffee or not, and a host of other quotidian activities.

I did not have any dice with me today, but I figured that I might be able to use the seconds reading on my digital watch timer as a substitute for a random number generator, coin-toss, or throw of the dice. I found a comfortable chair and started to set up the possibilities, jotting down a few notes on the back of my shopping list. In my library, General Fiction is kept by alphabetical order of author’s last name. There are 26 letters in the English alphabet. I therefore decided to select the author letter for each of two books. I made a mental note that it would be possible to select the same letter twice.

I decided that I would mentally number the letters of the alphabet sequentially from 01 to 26. I then looked at the setting of my digital watch timer. It was set to reduce from 22 minutes. I think I must have used it for cooking some cod fishcakes and oven chips (French fries to my dear American readers) yesterday. Whatever! I decided that I would start the clock, sing a couple of lines of one of my songs (silently, to myself, in my head) and then press the stop button. If the seconds read-out exceeded 26, that would be null and void; I would simply repeat the process.

The first valid number was 17; Q is the 17th letter of the alphabet.
The second valid number was 22; V is the 22nd letter of the alphabet.

I then moved on to the next phase of my system for randomly selecting novels to read. I went to the shelf that housed all the Q books and counted a total of 18. I then went to the V shelf and counted a total of 41. This was good, since I could use my Fishcake-and-Chips kitchen timer technique for the selection of both books, since neither 18 nor 41 exceeds 59 (the largest number to appear in the seconds counter on my digital watch).

I went to Q and to my surprise my watch gave me #18. Actually, I should not have been surprised, because in my system each number from 01 to 18 has an equal chance of being selected. The fact that #18 is the outlier generates spurious psychological significance for it. No matter. I went to the end of the Q shelf and selected the book: Susanna Quinn Glass Geishas. Well, my dear blogophiles, I can assure you that I would have been far too embarrassed normally to choose a book about the ‘mysterious world of Japanese sex for sale’ (as the back drop of the novel is described on the book jacket). Still the virtual dice had spoken, and I tucked the book under my arm while I walked along to the V shelf. Actually, when I was a boy I lived in a house on a street named Tokyo Road. And this led me to think back to Carl Jung’s notion of a-synchronicity (don’t you just love it when I degenerate into psychobabble mode?)

My watch dictated that I select the 6th book on the V shelf: Fred Vargas An Uncertain Place. The book jacket informs me that it is crime story with an international flavour. It starts with the discovery of a row of shoes outside Highgate Cemetery in London; the shoes contain severed feet! The dust jacket also alludes to the appearance of vampires and vampire hunters within this macabre plot. I have never enjoyed the vampire myth and would almost certainly not have chosen this book of my own free will. Interestingly, Karl Marx was buried at Highgate. And some folks have thought that were one fully to espouse Marxism, that might be the last act of free will one could hope for. Thereafter, one’s actions and intentions would properly be dictated by the framework of Marxist ideology. And here I am, abandoning my free choice to the whim of the virtual dice!

I should make a start. The question arises as to which book to read first? Geishas or vampires? Let me roll the digital dice: an odd number of seconds will mean geishas first, an even number and it will be vampires. The watch says 54 seconds. Therefore I shall start with the Vargas book. Speak to you later, my dear blogophiles.

When I was studying for my degree, as an undergraduate, I had to take some exams in basic physiology, especially as it applied to the brain and the central nervous system. I never felt that I excelled in this area but I learned the names of a few bits and bobs, such as the corpus callosum. I was pondering this as I mowed the lawn this morning and I was struck with an Archimedean light bulb flash. The reason why I have not the slightest bit of interest in football is because my brain is a bit wonky: I am lacking the Corpus Footballus. In fact an adjacent bit (the Corpus Athleticus) also seems to be missing, since the flood of Commonwealth Games TV gobbits from Glasgow is filling me with dread already, and it only starts today. For somebody with a hard-wired sports phobia (the generic term is Olympophobia, I believe) there is nothing else to do but move into the cupboard under the stairs with a packet of chocolate biscuits for a week or so. And I’ve only recently recovered from a very nasty bout that was induced by the world cup. Even the swing of a golf club in Scotland triggers a few nerve spikes.

Turning now to my international fanbase, Fyrm’s Firm, I have to say that I am somewhat concerned that I have lost some of my regular repeating gigs lately. Apart from Acherusia (who simply gave me the boot – very unfortunate term, given my Corpus Footballus problems), Minstrels Watch and the Village Café have both closed down. The Helle’s Angels venue is on its regular summer break but will be starting up again in August. I think my strategy for the moment will be to put on about three shows per week at my Terra Fyrmusica venue. Ringo Sicling has kindly agreed to host me at the Ragged Edge venue this Thursday (24th July), and I have a show planned for Saturday 26th at Terra Fyrmusica. I’ll sort things out for next week, at the weekend.

Speak to you later, my dear blogophiles.