Straight in at number one is the Big Bang Theory, a very funny US sitcom about four nerdy guys in L.A. who work in the science faculty of the local university. Balancing out their geeky-ness is their normal, down-to-earth, feminine and very attractive neighbour in the apartment block. I’ve watched the first three series now and I can only remember one dud episode. Brilliant writing. A must see!

Shooting up to number 2, we have the daftest and funniest sci-fi gift I’ve seen in a very long time. For all discerning model owners, ThinkGeek have brought out a model of the Space Monolith from 2001: A space odyssey; it’s available to buy in the UK from firebox.com. Faithfully rendered, the monolith has zero points of articulation, may be full of stars and could raise the evolution of any small creatures happening to wander across your desk and bump into it. ThinkGeek even point out on the back that you can collect every one of the set; i.e. two more absolutely identical space monoliths…

In at number 3 is a book recommended by the Brainpickings website. Here’s what they said: “What if “Luke, I am your father” wasn’t the beginning and end of pop culture’s tensest father-son relationship?

Hovering around at number four, making people nearby chuckle, is Snorg T-shirts. They have an amazing number of funny ’t’ shirts, many with very nerdy points of view. Here’s eight choice designs. I think the first one is just right for Sheldon from ‘The Big Bang Theory’.

Finally, at number five, is something I’ve thought about buying for years. Keep in mind that I’m not a cosplay fan; I can’t really get excited about dressing up as characters from stories. I guess it’s just a personal thing but there is one exception: the absolutely authentic star wars stormtrooper outfits available from originalstormtroopers.com, the company run by the man who made the original stormtrooper outfits for George Lucas’s film.

They aren’t cheap but they are from the same moulds as the original outfits for the movie. Andrew Ainsworth had to win a court case against Lucas industries to continue selling them. Fortunately, the court ruled that the outfits were products rather than works of art (as far as I know) and so weren’t covered by Lucas’s commercial rights.

I’m not sure I’d even wear it for a party though. There’s a great line in ‘The Big Bang Theory’ when Penny is going through Leonard’s wardrobe, trying to find something fun for him to wear to a fancy dress party. She finds an outfit and asks him what it is. ‘It’s a Battlestar Galactica pilot’s suit’, he tells her. She says ‘wonderful, why not wear that as your fancy dress?’ He look at her in confusion and replies, ‘but it’s not fancy dress, it’s a Battlestar Galactica pilot’s suit’.

I know how he feels.

Winning at Snakes & Ladders

Okay, this isn't literally the Answer. I certainly wouldn't want to encourage anyone to play the game, unless the snakes and ladders are relatively short and you don't get one of those horrendous snakes that takes you from square 99 all the way back to square 3; that's just too cruel. It is though, strangely enough, fundamentally, exactly what we need to do. That's why the game was invented in the first place. To fully understand this odd answer and what led to it, do please read the whole explanation. As an encouragement, if you do, you'll find a fun string of logic involving quantum physicists, psychologists, a rocket engineer, hypnotherapists and one of the most brilliant minds of the twentieth century. It’s a trail that leads to an answer that the Jains, the Gnostics, the Orphics, the Buddhists, shamen and even, it seems, according to texts lost for a millennia, one that Jesus Christ agreed with.

It's been great fun writing 'The Meaning of Life'. I've learned a huge amount. It's also been very pleasing to explore an area traditionally left to religions or spiritualists, working out how our world works and what we're doing here using facts that aren't necessarily from priests or holy books but were instead gathered by physicists, psychologists, doctors and engineers.

If anyone has any feedback, especially about elements I've missed out or mistakes I've made, do please let me know. I'm sure I've made errors but the overall message is, I think, of value.

Enjoy your day!

It’s coming, filling the horizon like a great dark storm cloud with a massive advertising logo stuck on the side. The new James Bond movie is out this year and I’m dreading it.

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve been a huge fan of Bond movies my whole life, from the dark weirdness of Dr No, through the snazzy kit and cool style of Goldfinger, all the way to the visual panache and charisma of Goldeneye. I even like Timothy Dalton’s ‘The Living Daylights’, which, if you give it another go, is a really enjoyable action movie. But I hated Quantum of Solace. I hated it with vengeance. For months afterwards, I made voodoo Quantum of Solace dolls and stabbed them repeatedly with home made stilettos (which originally referred to a thin dagger by the way, rather than women’s shoes). I cursed the name ‘Quantum of Solace’ aloud on moonlit nights in the centre of standing stones, hoping for demons to do my bidding and remove it from reality, or alternatively a Chthulhu-like beast to come from another dimension and suck every square inch of its footage into the nether voids of space. Either would do.

While hunting around for reference material for a graphic story, I stumbled upon a very enjoyable site called Kuriositas. It's full of great visual material. I found it through its article about an artist whose made Minas Tirith out of matchsticks and it's a most impressive sculpture.

Kuriositas's current entry is a visual exploration of abandoned buildings; always great for fascinating and inspiring images. Here are a few examples:









Enjoy!

I wrote a short story recently for Arc magazine. Part of it contains a futuristic pastiche of listening to a record player:

"I did try, once, to get away from technology, move away from the latest kit. I took a therapy class; they called it a 'record player' class. Weird. They had this collection of 'vinyl records'. Have you heard of them? They're black discs made from alcohol and tree sap that had been carved so that a needle makes a sound when it's dragged over them. Very ethnic. Anyway, a group of us sat down in a room and then one person put one of these black discs on a sort of potter's wheel. She lay a moveable stick on the disc and music came out of vibrating cones that were standing nearby. We had to sit, in silence, while the device played four songs, one after the other, with no breaks. It was just audio and we couldn't stop it, or watch an accompanying video, or change anything. It freaked me out!"

Probably, in forty years time, people will regard a record player as a piece of history, a relic in the attic that about as likely to get used as a wooden tennis racket. If they do, they might be missing a trick. I think there's another angle to the record player; a very important one. When you listen to a record player, you have to sit down and listen to some music for twenty minutes and do nothing else. It's almost a form of meditation, at least in comparison to flicking between songs or flicking between channels or talking on the phone while paying for the groceries and herding your children and moving your trolley out of the way of someone else who's also talking on the phone...

I remember when I switched to storing my music on iTunes and an iPod, many years ago. I was over the moon; I could listen to music immediately. I could select from my entire music library at the click of a button. I listened to lots of songs that I hadn't bothered with, songs that had languished in albums that I was no longer interested in sticking on my record player or loading into my CD drawer. It gave my music library a new lease of life.

There was, though, a downside to this digital immediacy, a downside that became clear to me recently when I was at a friend's house. He has a large record collection and, one morning, he suggested we listen to U2's 'The Joshua Tree'. I agreed. I sat down on his battered sofa while he made some coffee. When it was ready, he handed me a cup, then walked over to his record cabinet and slid the album out. He took the record out of its sleeve and passed me the gatefold album. I looked at its atmospheric cover, large enough to fill my vision, then opened it up and gazed at the interior art; Anton Corbijn's photography of four moody blokes in a great expanse of desert and mountains. While I read the lyrics to 'Running to Stand Still', sipping the coffee by my side, my friend carefully placed the record on the player, took out a brush and carefully wiped the record's surface. When the surface was clean and clear, he put the brush away, turned the stereo on and let the valve amplifier warm up. Once it was ready, he put the needle on the record, sat down in his armchair and, together, we listened to side one.

That is so slow! And you have to listen to all four songs! But it isn't a bad thing, is it? A huge part of the enjoyment is that it's a ceremony. It unfolds at its own pace. You can't hurry it. What's more, you don't want to hurry it because the pace of it, the focussed, singular quality of it creates a bubble of quality, a short piece of sanctuary time. The process also gives that bubble structure. You don't just sit somewhere for half an hour, listening to four songs. That would feel like a gap, a lull. The record player ceremony is an event, with its own components and atmosphere and value. I touched on this idea in my article 'How owning a DVD ruined my evening'. The Record Player Ceremony is a little like the Japanese Tea Ceremony, perhaps not as rigidly structured but it shares, I think, the same ethos. They are both a structured period of time that can create a state of mind different to everyday life.

The Record Player Ceremony also used to be part of a larger process. You didn't just download the MP3 file from a remote internet server. You went to a record shop, with its atmosphere and smells and eclectic staff and fascinating customers. Inside, you browsed while listening to the music playing in the store and you bought your album and held it in your hands and slid the record carefully out. You looked at its shiny, scratch free surface and your head filled with the anticipation of listening to it, sharing it with your friends and losing yourself in the music it contained. The lack of immediacy wasn't a problem because it created anticipation and that can not only make the upcoming event more exciting but often be more exciting than the actual event itself.

I miss that. I think a lot of young people now probably miss that too. This might explain why vinyl record sales are actually increasing, and have been doing so for years, reaching a six year high, with a 55% increase last year and an almost fifteen-fold increase over the last twenty years. That's great to hear.

Let's enjoy the ceremony.

For example, a few years ago, my mum heard some strange noises from outside her front door. It sounded distinctly like quacking. She opened the door, stepped out into the street and looked around. There was no one there; there certainly weren't any ducks there. She heard the quacking again. This time, she realised, it was coming from somewhere close to her head. She looked up at the hanging basket she'd hung beside the front door. The quacking came again, from inside the basket. She went back in, got her step-ladder, came out and climbed up on it. This is what she saw:

There was a duck nesting in her hanging basket. She looked at the duck. The duck looked at my mum and quacked, looking quite relaxed and pleased with herself. Mum climbed down off the step-ladder, went back inside and left the duck to get on with her day.

Not long after, the duck's eggs hatched. There was now a duck and several ducklings sitting in a hanging basket right next to a busy road.



This is, quite patently, ridiculous. Why on earth would a duck nest in a hanging basket by a road that's on two bus routes! The nearest patch of grass is a hundred yards away! But she did.

Eventually, it was time for the ducklings to leave. They jumped off the hanging basket on to the street. Fortunately, mum and a helpful neighbour shepherded the duck and her ducklings to the river nearby, stopping all the traffic in the process.

Isn't life weird?

Just a quick note to say The Golden Web: Part 1, my non-fiction investigation into ancient mysteries, is now available to buy. I could do another proof read but I don't think that's necessary. At the moment, the book is only available from FeedARead's website (they're handling the publishing) but it should soon be available from Amazon.co.uk and major booksellers. It is also available from Amazon.co.uk as a digital download but I need to test the quality of the file first (by getting a friend with a KIndle to buy a copy). Once all that's sorted and checked, I'll add a banner to my website and populate the Golden Web page with the appropriate information.

I'll also improve the content on the Golden Web page on this website so that it's more informative. To be honest, you really need to read the book but I'll do what I can.

Enjoy your Sunday!

I'm in the process of self-publishing my non-fiction book, The Golden Web. I'm following the self-publishing route for the book because the standard non-fiction publishing route isn't really available to me. Since I'm not a television presenter or senior scientist or academic, it's unlikely a publishing house would want to commit funds to try and sell my book. I also don't have any personal connections in the UK publishing industry so I can't call on any favours or phone any ex-school publisher friends asking them to add The Golden Web to their list. That's okay though, because you don't have to be well known person to get a non-fiction book published and sold nowadays. Hooray!

Unfortunately, I read an article in the Independent at the very beginning of this year which I think is of huge significance. In the article, to quote, 'Dramatic and unprecedented plumes of methane - a greenhouse gas 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide - have been seen bubbling to the surface of the Arctic Ocean by scientists undertaking an extensive survey of the region.The scale and volume of the methane release has astonished the head of the Russian research team who has been surveying the seabed of the East Siberian Arctic Shelf off northern Russia for nearly 20 years.'

I've tried to keep the book light-hearted, even though it puts forward a radical new theory. As an example of this approach, here's the blurb I'll be putting in the description field:

When I was young, I thought people were much nicer to each other. This, I think, was down to the sci-fi books I read. When things went wrong in them, people pulled together, showed their mettle, overcame the odds like stars in a matinee war movie. It was a glowing, warm idea that was seriously dented when I saw ‘When worlds collide’

That wasn’t the scariest part. The Thing was scary, very scary, but the scariest part was that it was my first experience of watching a scary movie with my mates.
I say mates; looking back, I’d be hard pressed to think of a definite example in which any of them acted selflessly on my behalf. It never seemed to be like ‘Stand by Me’ in which the youngsters band together and face down fears and dangers because they love their friends. It was more like a prelude to The Road. They’re friendly and want your company but you realise that if they get hungry enough, it won’t be ‘you go! I’ll stay and fight them off!’, it’ll be ‘what’s the big deal? We only want your left leg.’

My entries were:

'Are you sure this'll be okay, Dr Jekyll?'

and

'And with that final drop, they had created the world's strongest espresso'

New Scientist are running one every week for four weeks, no purchase necessary!

After three weeks of working away (in between other bits and bobs), I've made some progress on the graphic novel. The first week or so was spent investigating whether I could do the work in gouache - a sort of paint similar to watercolour but less watery (I know that's not a very technical or accurate description but it'll do). I've done gouache illustrations before, I've popped one alongside this text.

I found though that it is a slow job doing the gouache. I think I'd need to spend six months or probably longer just practicing the gouache to get good enough to churn out an entire page of gouache illustration in one day (my target rate). Juanjo Guarnido - the Blacksad artist - has certainly found a way to produce his painted artwork at a viable rate but he's spent years doing fine art followed by more years working as a Disney animator. That's a lot of practice!

I fiddled away on my vector art program (I’m still using LineForm even though it’s going nowhere as a product. It’s really easy to use and very effective) and I came up with the logo displayed. My aim was to keep the logo as simple as possible while, at the same time, being evocative and a little bit humorous.

“The number of people in the UK who do not believe in global warming has doubled in the last two years, according to a poll from the office of national statistics. Does this represent the common sense of a British public who can see the claims of the climate alarmists dissolve before their eyes?”

Are we missing something here? Are these companies, with their skilled and experienced staff, pointing us in a new direction? If using ‘up to’ is such a gold mine, should we be trying to use it in aspects of our own lives? Maybe the power of ‘up to’ can be used in our emotional relationships?

Pay a penny for everything you say. Receive a pound for everything you do.

Film tie-ins aside, I picked up the two books by Lindqvist that I wanted. Sorted! I could go home and have a cup of tea. Then I spotted something. Sitting prominently on the front cover of both books was a sticker marked ‘3 for 2’. Oh. That’s good, I thought. I have two books I want. I can pick up a third for nothing. I looked around casually. There were lots of ‘3 for 2’ books on the tables around. I’ll definitely want one of those.

The only thing was, each one I spotted I didn’t want.