a DVD helps me find the counter-poison in Cosmopolis

A couple of recent evenings out have created some music and film swapping moments. A few of us emailed quick lists of recent music we liked - it gave me some new ideas as a result.

Separately, a different group of us exchanged a single DVD with one another. I received Cosmopolis, which is the 2012 Cronenberg movie adaptation of the Delillo novel. Someone else got Lady and the Tramp.

I read Delillo's book a few years ago, which I remember as a sort of road-tripping life-loop compressed into a single journey.

I hadn't seen the movie, which stars Twilight's Robert Pattison playing Eric, a different kind of blood-sucker.

The focus is a 28 year old billionaire in a white stretched limousine crossing a road-blocked Manhattan to get a haircut. He's received a death threat. The soundproofed limo is configured like a gleaming space capsule and on his journey he meets his wife, lovers, his art advisor, a doctor and colleagues as well as going through the asteroid shower of an 'Occupy Wall Street' type demonstration.

Many of Eric's reactions appear as automaton-calculations, challenging the notion of richness and smartness being linked. A quarter second of a real shared glance could violate the agreements that made the city operate.

The immersive numbers soup echoes current global trading where markets are tweaked and debts offloaded to unwitting consumers.

“Look at those numbers running. Money makes time. It used to be the other way around. Clock time accelerated the rise of capitalism. People stopped thinking about eternity. They began to concentrate on hours...using labour more efficiently.”

As various brainiac accomplices of Eric briefly join him in the car, there's only a fuzzy understanding of the way the markets work. The machine algorithms rule the organic charts. No shoeshine story, but a 24 year old who briefly joins him has had enough and wants to get out of the markets.

From a book written in 2003, there's plenty for 2015. Take falling energy markets where oil slid from $130 to around $60 per barrel. Everyone trades with all the right software. Allegro, Openlink, Triple Point, Amphora. Roll out the names. Roll out the barrels. Yet be surprised.

US fracking increases oil availability, energy efficiency in cars improves, middle east conflicts fluctuate, China shops around, Russia creates embargoes and the Saudis keep production levels for market retention. A few events outrun the systems - halve the price. Now wait to see whether Saudis hold their nerve and American fracking becomes unprofitable.

The machines' trades win over the humans' comprehension with the capture of margins creating an ultra-minority wealth. Just like the 28-year old in the story.

"Money has lost its narrative quality the way painting did once upon a time. Money is talking to itself. as Delillo puts it.

Frankly, it's a tough movie to watch. Tight one-to-one interactions with Pattinson's character, dealing in whip cracks of Delillo thought. Eating and sleeping in the shadow of what these people do.

piloting the platonic deranged, frivolous and oblivious?

I've been watching two different Sky series recently. One is about 700 people stuck in an out of the way place which has a crime free record for ages and then someone gets murdered. The other is about 600 people stuck in an out of the way place which has a crime free record for ages and then someone gets murdered.

Okay, one is set in let's say Iceland (Fortitude) and the other appears to be in outer space (Ascension). There's a whole bunch of quirky characters. In one they can carry guns into the supermarket when shopping, because it's okay in they'd only ever point the guns at a rampant bear. In the other, despite being 1960s all-American, curiously, they don't have any guns at all. Except when one gets discovered as part of the murder weapon for the unfortunate person that was strangled, drowned and shot.

The victim's name was Lorelei, which is coincidentally a great name for a spirit that might re-appear and murmur warnings from time to time. Ideally close to water, of course, like the German folklore.

Later in the same story a Rilke book is found. Rilke, whose haunting images focus on the difficulty of communion with the ineffable in an age of disbelief, solitude, and profound anxiety. Tellingly, in this story, the pages have been made blank which sets the tone for the rest of the space series.

When I watched the Sopranos, I always thought they'd written two endings. There's one at episode Final minus 3, when Tony Soprano stands triumphant on the edge of the cliff. Then the main script team return for the last two episodes to set up the final Final ending. The one where the audience don't see it coming.

The same for Breaking Bad. There's a change of tempo for the finale when Vince Gilligan is clearly back in the driving seat.

Not so for Ascension. It looks as if the moment when the Rilke was discovered becomes the point when the plug was pulled. It reminded me of that ending of the original Prisoner series (closed world with maybe 200 people in it) when the Beatles play 'It's all too much' or something similar. For Ascension they brought in some fixed-price context-free scribblers who were told to repurpose a defunct and humourless kitchen sink drama and add space bits.

For Ascension, I get the Narrenschiff idea. The ark of salvation and the ship of fools. The Catholic Church and skittishly the rest. Albrecht Durer famously illustrated the original German version of the ship. The pigs from the Durer seemed to make it to the deck of the madship in this story.

There were some half-hearted allegorical references to Eurydice and Orpheus too. People being rescued, but don't look behind you or you'll get zapped.

Fortitude is still on Episode One. Great scenery. A super cast. All High Definition arty colour palates. A metal bar that makes the Underworld at World's End in Camden seem jolly quaint. Mysterious Mammoth remains. A Science Research Block That Seems Too Big For Its Stated Purpose.

My fingers are still crossed.

time to set the gorilla onto the Hershbury cads?

George Cadbury, the original creator of Cadbury's chocolate was famously known for his Quaker beliefs and for the well-being of his workforce. He built the Bournville garden village adjacent to the factories, to 'alleviate the evils of modern more cramped living conditions'. It became a blueprint for other similar worker villages and set a high bar for worker care.

Cadbury's was sold off a few years ago and their products diluted. This season's Cadbury's Creme eggs have a recipe change, as well as moving from half a dozen in a pack to that well-known egg quantity of five. That's the effect of Kraft, the processed cheese slice people that manage Cadbury's in Europe.

Now it's the American version of Cadbury's brand that has created further mutants. Hershey's operate the Cadbury manufacturing in America and have been dabbling too.

To my palate Hershey chocolate tastes chemical, as if it has some kind of antiseptic injected. I'm told it's just got a higher percentage of sugar and lower amount of cocoa, but whatever it is, nowadays I won't even accept the English 'dare' to eat it.

Hershey's money-savers have also re-engineered the Cadbury ingredients. Less cocoa, more sugar, less milk, more powder. More like Hershey.

And now I see the Hershey lawyers have prevented British-style Cadbury chocolate even being retailed in the USA. They might as well lose the purple Pantone 2865c packaging on the American variant to avoid confusion.

Far removed from George's principles of improvement?

swap, twist or spin?

I often drive past a huge advert on the M4 near the North Circular off-ramp which says something like 'Been mis-sold SWAPS? Phone this number'. It's been there for quite a while and another sign of the times.

Wide boys in the city create ostensibly fixed rate business loans but then embed derivatives to hedge their position. It's another round of sharp practice and some big name banks have been implicated.

And I'm expecting the next few months to be full of politico mis-selling as we hit the election on-ramp.

According to Parliament.uk, I see the UK national debt is up at around £1.48 trillion, with £48.1bn in interest per year. That’s without adding in the extra bit for the part government owned banks.

This debt is about 80% of GDP, or about £25k per person.

Now between, say, the mid 80s and around 2009 the debt was in the 40%-50% range, but since 2009-ish it has risen steeply every year and looks set to continue at least until 2016/17. Not my figures, they are from the Office of National Statistics and the Office for Budget Responsibility.


So despite any pandering give-backs before the election, it's highly likely we’ll see another taxation rise after the election. Nothing new there, according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies, each of the last six new elected governments have announced net tax rises, which average £7.5 bn per annum.

That's unless we go back to printing money, I suppose, like the £375bn that the Bank of England electronically issued during UK quantitative since 2009. Instead of channelling the money into public schemes like, say the NHS and schools, it shunted the money directly into gilts, consequently driving bonds and equities.

And guess what?

The richest few percentage of share owners own 40% of all the shares and saw them rise 20%. They liked this and invested even more in upwardly mobile shares. Not in trickle-down spending. Okay, maybe some champagne and caviar. The banks could use their quantitively eased books to create more twisted financial instruments aimed towards those from whom they could make quick bonuses.

As for where the gap gets hidden. As gilt yields fall, so do pension annuity prospects. No biggie for the ever decreasing number of people still on final salary pensions, but for those in pension pots or whatever follows in April, it's a another devaluation.

So, most of the quantitive easing money didn't make it to the 'real' economy. That's the economy where a mere £1bn will rebuild more than 500 schools and £10bn will build 200,000 starter homes. The real workers that would be deployed could spend their sovereign money on stuff, which boosts other parts of the economy.

Oh no. This would never make a Westminster Village scheme, would it?

Even with my profligate spending above of £11,000,000,000, there's still the other £364,000,000,000 of the quantitive easing scheme to consider. That's still more than half a year's total UK government spending.

There's still arguments being trotted out around future austerity - sometimes that's also a code for punish the poorest. Another argument is about how low growth deepens debt so the private sector cuts spending - not what they said when the money was being printed. All of it seems like broken logic after the 2009-14 performances.

The political classes need fresh thoughts as we enter the last 90 days. I suspect it will all be trite polemics whilst the meaningful graphs remain hidden.

another snowflake falls on London

Just about enough snow overnight to adjust the plans this morning.

The usual combination of people and things in the wrong place.

That full one centimetre depth might not sound much, it is still enough to disrupt things. Read today's sensationalist newspapers and they are talking about 5 months of Arctic conditions.

Frozen?

I don't think so.

Yesterday's equally loud headlines were about all the people in Europe's largest city with its now record-breaking population.

Surely all those people will cause it to thaw more quickly?

And, that reminds me, anyone for a Frozen flashmob at Waterloo??

the day breaks instead so you hurry home

A curious side-effect of the evening's drinking was that time-effect compression, where time moved suddenly faster in the later part.

It's not like that thing where as you get older, time is supposed to move at a different speed. I get that a single day to an eleven year old is only 1/4000 compared with to a 55-year old when its 1/20000. No - it's the more pronounced effect that somehow kicks in (in my case) between 1:30am and about 4am, where waking time can then seem to pass much faster. 'Gosh is it that time already?'

My theory is that there are some kind of bio-chemical reactions at play. I don't just mean booze-related, because the same thing seems to happen with or without alcohol.

I suppose if the middle of the night is normally low threat then the body may deliberately slow things down to a lower frame rate, which could have the effect of compressing the perceived action? Maybe a 20%-50% reduction, but it would need some experiments to work with this.

Some say 11pm to 1am is the body's bad fats, smoking, caffeine peak processing time (gallbladder). Then 1am to 3am peaks with liver processing - prime cortisol and epinephrine time - sugar pull and detox. 3am to 5am can be lung and allergy processing and then - let's face it we're on to 5-7am large intestine and all that.

Some also say that a regular time night wake-up is mainly to do with one of these functions mis-processing.

So I'm wondering if the 1:30am to 4am is a kind of cortisol reduction, lower the speed, thing? The body usually doesn't need as much cortisol (adrenaline-like booster) in the small hours, so this could just be slowing things down, creating the telescoped time effect?

Or maybe it's just me??

a few drinks by the river

A view from the top deck of the routemaster bus today.

This would be the 'going to' picture rather than the 'coming back from'.

We'd all arranged to meet at the Barrow Boy and Banker, and I took a bus and tube to Cannon Street before walking over London Bridge to the pub. Turning into early evening Cannon Street looks something out of a near future sci-fi movie nowadays. Glittering glass and ever more white lighting all around. Like parts of the West End, there's a Day for Night substitution walking around the area.

We'd agreed to start at the Fuller's pub. Predictably rammed it took me a while to work out that I was the first of us to turn up. When the first drinking buddy turned up we made a subtle land grab to acquire a table, where we could watch for other arrivals.

Much later we decided to move on, towards the Borough Market and a selection of other equally busy 'Londoners at play' pubs, mostly of the spill out onto the pavement variety.

We joined throngs standing outside the Wheatsheaf, with its mysterious pipe-works channeling the beer from ceiling mounted storage tanks, across its yard and into the bar.

Even later we'd head back to warmth, this time to the Shard's cocktail bar. A wholly different experience where we could observe London from a hawk's height. A prime position to continue to enjoy good company.

Ex_Machina

I've just been to see Ex_Machina, the Alex Garland film about a cyborg, which is played by Alicia Vikander (Who also took centre stage in the recent 'Testament of Youth').

Coincidentally, I re-watched Jonathan Glazer's 'Under the Skin' a few days ago (it's free on Amazon Prime at the moment), where Scarlett Johansson plays a kind of alien 'Woman who fell to earth', set in Scotland.

There's similarities in some of the ideas around empathy and adaptation. Without spoilers, Ex Machina explores whether a created AI can pass the Turing Test, where another human considers it indistinguishable from a human in terms of its responses.

After the jolly opening scenes, the movie is mainly a closed-world three-hander showing the interplay between the off-key billionaire software developer (Oscar Isaac - who played Llewyn Davis in the film of the same name), the unwitting software guy being used to conduct the test (Domhnall Gleeson) and the initially somewhat transparent cyborg played by Alicia Vikander. As you'd expect, the tension ratchets in the closed surroundings.

Probably the last proper gag in the movie is in the first 20 minutes, when Gleeson gets his pass into the billionaire's science hideout.

After that, it's all set in a secluded high-tech designer-cool secure laboratory in a lush wilderness of mountains and streams. There's a strong storyline that certainly had me thinking about the themes.

Garland previously adapted the Ishiguro story 'Never Let Me Go' which I though was a superbly haunting movie, and there are some similarly big questions in this one. I can't really say much more without spoiling the plot, but it's one I enjoyed and will probably watch again.

(sorry if you need to skip a particularly long youtube BMW supermodel advert before the trailer starts)

time to restart the cycling TSS climb

My silver bicycle has a somewhat chequered history, being made of parts from other bikes cunningly re-assembled.

The underlying frame is a modest aluminium Carrera and it has bits of SRAM road climber gearing on the back and mountain bike doubletap shifters on the front. The wheels are unidentifiable because the original labelling has been removed leaving them -er - black. The saddle is a leather Brookes B17 narrow. Altogether a bicycle built for comfort over speed.

It's been out and about in the winter months because it can easily take fatter tyres and mudguards and even the occasional rack.

Most useful of all, it easily hops on to the turbo, where the little number windows on the gear shifts are a handy way to keep track of the gearing. It is easily my best bike for the turbo, even if it rides differently from a normal road bike.

This Gryphon remix has been my friend as I restart some pedalling for 2015. The Garmin keeps track of my progress and my accumulated TSS (Training Stress Score) graph shows I'm at a very low level at the moment. It is nearly the lowest since I started recording back in 2011. A few of us have entered for the L2B again later in the year, which gives me a friendly target to aim towards.

re-booting the house for the Internet of Things

At least my tee-shirt still works.

They tell us all about the Internet of Things, but we still all need to read the small print.

Here at rashbre central we often utilise low serial number products, although this can sometimes create a few hiccups.

A recent case in point is the change to our internet connectivity. The man from Openreach connected up the new box and made sure that a single internet connection was working. Job done for him, and I'd already reconfigured everything else to plug back in.

It raised an interesting point about the way we're already using the Internet of Things.

As quick examples, the heating here is internet enabled, with separate ZigBee connections to the smoke detectors. Then there's the television. That has an internet connection for Sky+HD. Oh, and another one for the DVD player. And one for the Apple TV. Come to think of it the amplifier is connected to the internet. And the remote control uses a wifi hub. That's the same hub that controls the fireplace ignition.

I could go on about the lighting dimmers or the energy monitoring system (622kW right now).

The thing is, modern stuff is progressively adding Internet of Things components which are a hybrid of wifi and IEEE 802.15.4, but it's still somewhat unpredictable.

The manufacturers are tinkering to get the technology to work and do things like creating ad-hoc wifi networks (like from a smoke alarm) which is then used to configure the device. In 2015 it's okay if you know what you are doing, but I can see it becoming more impenetrable unless these systems are somehow standardised.

There are still many loose ends: They don't tell you that our BT Home Hub struggles to pass DHCP through a bridge after a certain loading. They don't tell you that multiple wifi nodes can confuse some of the Zigbee products. The antivirus and firewall software loves to play a cheeky part in blocking things unexpectedly. And some of the IoT devices don't behave quite as one would expect on a LAN for the purposes of keep-alive and renewal of IP leases.

The stuff in rashbre central works fine, but it's partly because of random knowledge of the weird bits. I suppose it can start a whole extra home industry when the repair man starts to get called out to fix things. It starts to get beyond just switching it off and on again.

I'm waiting to hear about the first 'reboot home' buttons. Like something out of a space movie, perhaps, but without the reference manual.

neeps an tatties this eve

We've not been to rashbre north in Craigendarroch for a couple of years now, but what with it being Burns Night, we thought it about time to do something Scottish. We could also earmark a date for our next visit north of the border.

The very last minute plan was for haggis, neeps and tatties, but down south here there was something of a local Sunday haggis shortage. Fortunately a tasty Macsween vegetarian variety appeared just in time, so we were able to recite the words and an' cut you up wi' ready slicht, after sip or two of the single malt.

I should admit that this is my first boozy tipple since the new year, and was a concession to this particular supper, before I resume my dryathalon until the 30th.

It would otherwise be tricky to try the champit tatties which had soaked up improbable quantities of the whisky sauce and then the cranachan pudding also steeped in malty goodness.

Okay, we may not have done all the stages of a full Burns Supper, but it still worked pretty well for a last minute Sassenach improvisation.

we bump into Madam Zaskia, and cross her palm with olden coins

Across cobbled streets, we found ourselves in an arcade, filled with ancient slot machines. After I'd won few sweets from a crane, we passed by one of those fortune tellers.

It was a great opportunity to ask for a prediction for 2015. Well, we are still in January, after all.

Madam Zaskia needed large old coins to operate, which we managed to acquire and then after a satisfying 1d clunk, she wound into life and enchantingly began scribbling away on a note which eventually was delivered from a small slot in the front of her booth.

Here's Madam Zaskia's prediction for me, and I shall be intrigued to see what happens on Thursday. I'll be around Chelsea, in case anyone wants to join in.

These fortune tellers remind me of the thrill of seeing another one, when I was in a small town called Eureka, on the West Coast of the USA, a couple of years ago. Right outside the second hand bookstore was a Zoltar.

'What's a Zoltar?' I hear you ask. Why, only the very fortune teller used in the Tom Hanks movie 'Big'.

Of course I had a go, although I don't think I was on the extra lucky fourth turn, on that occasion.