Ciarán Ryan notebook

It’s called The Primrose Path

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Primrose_Path

“Heine identified the precise origin of the British-oligarchical way of thinking in Lockean empiricism, and utilitarianism. In the Englischen Fragmenten, he warns: “But don’t send any poets to London. This naked [mere?] seriousness about everything, this colossal monotony, this machine-like movement, this sadness of joy itself, this exaggerated London, oppresses the imagination and tears the heart. And you must certainly not send a German poet there, a dreamer, who must pause for everything he sees, even for a ragged beggar woman, or a shiny plate made by a goldsmith — Oh! He’ll have a rough time soon enough, and he will be pushed around from all sides, or with a mild “God damn” be pushed down onto the ground.”

http://members.tripod.com/american_almanac/heine.htm

Yesterday I walked past a Tony & Guy salon. Inside, the hairdressers were having a meeting - seated together and taking notes.

This got me thinking…

Q: How many hairdressers does it take to change a lightbulb?

A: One (if the bulb just wants a Wayne Rooney shaved head style).
Or two or more - if it wants a more elaborate style, like what Tina Turner has.  

===

For all you hairdresser joke fans out there, I’ve just done a quick google search and it seems that my joke is less hairdresser labour intensive than other hairdresser jokes. The usual response is:

A: Five. One to change the bulb and four to say “Marvellous Gary.”

A neuron can connect with 80,000 others. Human brain contains 20 billion neurons, capable of 100 trillion connections (does this include the brain gas-stuff used to make connections?).

So in 1999, Charles Jonscher in ‘Wired Life’ book said computers are nowhere near to brains.

And that knowledge is a state of being.

Information is transitive.

“We must not mistake gigabytes for wisdom”

Situation comedies need:

A hook - an intriguing situation with allows a strong plot (with conflict - the characters must be set against each other)

Dialogue - Every piece of dialogue must do three things:
1) Be funny (linked to other 2 and 3)
2) Advance the plot
3) Provide character background

Premise: Must be contemporary feeling (Yes minister was right for its time etc)

Evolutionary theory differs from behaviour genetics:

It’s unwise to deduce ethical premises from biology.

But you cannot understand ethics without looking to biology for explanations.

See:

Maths:
Robert Axelrod
John Maynard Smith
(Game theory illuminates why self-interested individual co-operate)

Evolutionary psychology:
Leda Cosmides (cheating causes)

Edward O’Wilson wrote Sociobiology: The new synthesis
Peter Singer attempted to refute in: The Expanding Circle (1979)

People are co-operative and competitive  - see:

Emile Durkheim’s ’social facts’ -  Customs, institutions, nations etc that are more than the sum of their individual parts.

Ariely uses another example. A study conducted in an Israeli nursery decided to punish parents for collecting their children late. They would be fined £10. But once the fine was introduced, guess what happened to lateness? It went up. Once the social obligation (turn up on time) had been replaced by a market transaction (Late? That will be £10 please) attitudes changed.
Predictably Irrational by MIT’s Professor Dan Ariely.

http://timesonline.typepad.com/comment/2008/04/the-behavioural.html

Smith was suspicious of “the mean rapacity, the monopolising spirit of merchants and manufacturers, who neither are, nor ought to be, the rulers of mankind.”

Remember, it’s:

“not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer or baker that we can expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest”.

Alice Lok Cahana - look up her story. Her mother arranging violets - in the ghetto.

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

Admass. This is my name for the whole system of an increasing productivity, plus inflation, plus a rising standard of material living, plus high-pressure advertising and salesmanship, plus mass communications, plus cultural democracy and the creation of the mass mind, the mass man.

J. B Priestley, Journey Down a Rainbow, Heinemann-Cresset, London, 1955, p. 51.

On War and Society…
“My own personal view, for what it’s worth, is that we must stop thinking in terms of property and power and begin thinking in terms of community and creation. …We want a world that offers people not the dubious pleasures of power, but the maximum opportunities for creation. And, even already, in the middle of this war [World War Two], I can see that world shaping itself.
” …Property is that old-fashioned way of thinking of a country as a thing, and a collection of things on that thing, all owned by certain people and constituting property, instead of thinking of that country as the home of a living society, and considering the welfare of that society, the community itself as the first test.”
(Taken from his weekly wartime broadcast, Postscripts, 1940)

An inspector calls

The ending is always negotiable.

I don’t know what this means - but I wrote it down 10 years ago - then put the scrap of paper in a box - and now I’ve typed it out and put it on here and it’s in your brain.

Good luck!

In ”Palimpsest,” Mr. Vidal endorses the passage in Plato’s ”Symposium” where Aristophanes tells his dinner companions that there were once three sexes, people shaped like globes: male, female and hermaphrodite; they were divided by the king of the gods for behaving offensively and have ever after sought reunion, to make themselves whole again.

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=940DE2D61139F93AA25750C0A96E958260&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=all

King leans forward. “I’ll tell you something that’s absolutely astonishing. In China, when Mao died, at his funeral there was a photograph taken of all the bureaucrats in a long, long line. But there were four carefully retouched blanks in the picture - the Gang of Four. Underneath, in the caption to the picture, they laboriously listed everybody, a name and then a comma. When it got to the Gang of Four, there were three x’s, comma, then three x’s comma… Amazing. They wanted you to know that they’d gone, and this was a warning: this is what you’re going to get, if you don’t watch out.”

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4158/is_19991130/ai_n14270884/pg_2

Arts: Retouched by the hand of God
Independent, The (London), Nov 30, 1999 by Linton Chiswick

also music

http://www.chesternovello.com/default.aspx?TabId=2432&State_3041=2&WorkId_3041=11869

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gang_of_Four

Fact and fantasy would collide. Reagan would famously recount scenes from films he had seen as though they had actually happened.

Reagan’s air of “gentle abstraction” as a child - got him harrassed by local kids

He tried to join the communist party in 1938 - but was turned down for being a “flake”

In his retirement - in decline - he would rake leaves from the pool for hours - not understanding that his secret service men were replenishing the leaves in the pool.

Dutch: A memoir of Ronald Reagan  by Edmund Morris