Ciarán Ryan notebook

If two identical foetuses look once in opposite directions, their brains will be different.

he wrote to Alfred Lord Tennyson:

“Sir: in your otherwise beautiful poem The Vision of Sin  There is a verse which reads: every moment dies a man/every moment one is born.

“It must be manifest that, if this were true, the population of the world would be at a standstill — I would suggest you have it read: every moment dies a man/every moment 1 1/16 is born.
“I am, Sir, yours etc, Charles Babbage”

See also: Ada Lovelace.  She tried to resolve the workings of the human heart through a programmable machine?

The Observer invited Hunter S Thompson to cover the Braemar Games in Scotland (Royals, whiskey and guns) in 1992. He never made it. He did visit London for three days though, as Robert Chalmers recounted in GQ magazine - 1999 - in an article called ‘Fear and loathing in the Edgware Road’.

My selection of what Robert wrote:

Friday September 4th, 1992. 8:25am: “Thompson has begun a commentary on the view from the rear window: ” Poor f***ing dingbats, slobbering idiots roaming in the streets, doom, death and decay.” (We have reached Clapham.)”

The gents toilet, the Fox and anchor, 10am: I am hailed by an animated, grey-haired man in a suit, standing on my right at the trough urinal. It’s only 10 o’clock he says, but by Christ, I’m pissed. He says he works for Dewhurst butchers, who are having a do in a function room upstairs; he looks like a regional manager, in town for the day and making the most of it. Behind him I can see Thompson (in the cubicle, but with the door wide open) vigorously snorting cocaine.

10:20 a.m..There follows a 10 minute gap in which Thompson is left upstairs unsupervised; in this time, which passes mercifully unrecorded, he appears to have wandered into the butcher’s convention and mingled. When he eventually reappears, Thompson is brandishing a battered hardback called The Games, a book which, he announces, is research material for his trip to Braemar, but which turns out to be a social history of bullfighting in Andalusia. He claims he was given it by one of the men from Dewhurst.

11 a.m., Hunter is rapidly descending into a amphetamine psychosis; rambling about not understanding his brief, not being taken care of, not knowing what he’s doing here. His conversation sounds like William Burroughs reading Finnegan’s Wake. I hail a black cab; Thompson emerges, snarling, from the fox and anchor. He is carrying a half pint glass full of neat whisky. As he sits down on the back, he turned to me and begins to speak. He says: I am a professional.

12.00pm, at his hotel:… Hunter is teetering on the balcony, peering out over the Edgware road with a pair of binoculars, muttering about dingbats in Canary Wharf. He is surprisingly keen on the Post Office Tower.

===

Later, Robert found at the Metropole, a room service menu on which Thompson had written the nearest he had come to written reportage in the entire trip - on the cover was one word: Dorthe

see also:

Oscar Zeta Acosta - what happened to him? Thompson wrote about him in 1977

1981 film, where the Buffalo roam, based on the Oscar piece

the great shark Hunt — another book by Thompson