Last updated: sometime before November 16, 2001
�To Hegel, there is no world as it appears-to-us and world as it is in-itself, but rather a whole of which both subjects and objects are manifestations.� (Greg) Isn�t this really rather like the agent as a bubble in the Godviron???
amongst the fundamental problems of utilitarianism is that happiness does not equate with (the pursuit of happiness by) max/min pleasure/pain
it does seem that you have to get away from the notion of everyone striving for happiness as the ultimate goal
doesn't the fact that we can see modern difficulties and solutions in aristotle's writings imply that there has been no progress since then, since he hadn't intended them yet the subtleties can be read into his work
can i form a morality from the ground up, i.e. from personal identity?
can we historicise philosophy???
17:38 Saturday, 03 June, 2000
how can virtue/health/music be means in themselves?
�/span> Mill PAristotle O
= desired for itself, and this �/span> � own happiness
virtue also � others’ happiness
requires metaphys assumptoins
habit
Hume: why is the world algorithmically compressible?
can i come up with a set of ethical dilemmas that any complete consistent ethical system should be able to solve?
reason alone cannot supply motive - we only deliberate about means
philosophy is the cognitive equivalent of frying your brain in its own juices. so why do it? because nothing satisfies the epistemic hunger better than a good fried brain.
write to nick about the baldwin effect of speech production/perception - the phonemic inventory of the world's languages is based on the sounds we can produce and perceive, and vice versa???
in my letter to tom p, i didn't mention that empirical investigation can't really help in certain ways though it can in others, and i didn't mention the despondence that came over me when someone laughed at me when i told them i was searching for ideas with my philosophy
everything which does not kill me makes me stronger ... - what does nietzsche mean by this? should it be taken seriously
are there any modern-day empiricists? if so, then surely they must realise that unless we are to be characterised as either non-mental beings or finite state machines, our brain must do some *processing* on the experiential information it receives. indeed, this processing needs to be far more complicated and far deeper than merely filtering and computing sense-data. kant's categories, of space, time, number etc., whether they are properties of a metaphysical reality or constructed as we experience by our minds, require the data being received to be digested ... moreover, in order for our minds to be able to compare ideas (as Locke requires it to), associate and combine ideas (as Hume considers), use language (a discrete combinatorial system capable of producing an infinite number of sentences), understand mathematics and logic, reason step-by-step, be creative - all these things show the analogy of the blank piece of paper to be quite (deliberately) misleading
if philosophy is too hard for me to feel that I'm ever going to satisfy myself using its methods, am I not better diverting my energies elsewhere and accruing wisdom by living???
in some ways, I'm less concerned about how I ought to live, as how I ought to feel to feel content in a mad world. having said that, it would be nice to know how other people ought to live so that I can tell them.
might it not be that your ethics will change as you develop, so the answer to ‘how should one live’ will be different for a pleb as opposed to a saint??? e.g. zen monks whose very values, priorities and thought processes have changed
the way to slow down experience is to have salient experiences as bookmarks and embodiments of an era for you - you don't remember a stream, even though that's how you experience, but rather you remember episodes
false consciousness – if a slave doesn’t want to be freed, why should I care or try and convince him or free him, as long as he has access to TV, the chance to educate himself and leave at any time
what’s the difference between the beautiful and the sublime???
difference between ‘I think \ I am’ and ‘I perceive \ I am’???
is there an argument against certainty of our perceptions???
is there any similarity between Hume’s argument against necessary connection in causation and Mackie’s argument from queerness against objectivity in values – they both show that we are ill-equipped to see or comprehend objectivity as woven into the fabric of the world, even if it were to exist. can I use this as an argument against reason, or that reason is inadequate to this, its most important task???
what’s the difference between Jesus’ Golden Rule and Kant’s Categorical Imperative???
was it even Jesus’???
problems with virtue ethics:
doesn’t necessarily lead to the best consequences
how do you decide on the virtues? how do you resolve conflicts between them? are there a finite number? will they necessarily work in a pluralist society??? does the ‘justice’ virtue sort out problems with pluralism???
what substantive grounds are there for believing in it??? can there be substantive grounds for believing in any ethical system???
it’s relativist. if it’s not relativist, then different societies will want different virtues…
does it give me a way of deciding on individual actions???
when you say that you're looking for substantive grounds for believing in an ethical system (SXP), what can that possibly mean???
what does Dennett have to say about free will???
how much does having/not having 2nd-order desiring affect the compatabilist position???
is there any difference between quantum superposition and massive parallelism?
are there any causally stochastic phenomena???
in the theory of chaos, what's the logistic map?
what is the difference between the 'energy' and the 'material' resource?
anthropomorphisation of the first cause and value giver is anathema to the atheist/agnostic, the only intelligent man’s stance?
we know he can’t be interventionist, don’t we?
chiaroscuro /kI<ssm>A:r<schwa>"skU<schwa>r<schwa>U/ n. & a.M17. [It., f. chiaro clear, bright + oscuro dark, OBSCURE a.]A n. Pl. -os.1 A style of painting in which only light and shade are represented; black and white. M17. 2 The treatment or disposition of the light and shade, or brighter and darker masses, in a picture; an effect or contrast of light and shade in a picture or in nature. L17.3 fig. The use of contrast in literature etc. E19.2 B. MOORE The sky was a shifting chiaroscuro of grays and blacks.B attrib. or as adj. In chiaroscuro, in black and white; fig. marked by stylistic etc. contrasts; half-revealed. M19.J. GROSS Strip away the rant, and what remains is a daring chiaroscuro prose.chiaroscurist n. an artist distinguished for or painting in chiaroscuro L18.
����� editorial, jokes, pictures, excerpts from bible, piss-take agony aunt letter, poems, blake pictures/poems, (descartes) proofs of god, nietzsche madman - what happens if we live in a godless world (implications for life, metaphysics + ethics), quotes (opiate of the masses), history of christianity (protestantism's dubious grounds for breaking away from catholic church), top 10 atrocities committed in the name of christianity/religion, top 10 failings of the pope
����� web address where comments will be posted
����� is it attacking, christianity, religion, anglicanism or the CU???
marriage vows are either broken, enslavement or redundant
people linked together not by any particular qualities, but only by a shared disgust for others around them
tall, great ape, hairy, bearded, booming, pin-striped and handkerchief-pocketed, Conservative MP, domineering
mysterious, god-like
mincing
human, fallible???
voice in your head, Master and Margarita cartoon fat, goateed devil
how do I search inside proprietary file formats???
it seems easy enough in Word, if slow
what about PDF???
why doesn't C check for out of array bounds???
most modern C compilers point to this as warnings, don’t they??? often they can’t know until run-time
would a C program compiled in Visual C++ in Win 95 run in dos???
does C++ look like Java, eg array.elementAt(x) etc.???
what's the difference between scanf/gets and printf/puts???
why don't other languages have pointers??? is it a low-level thing???
can you declare variables anywhere as often as you like??? what's the compiler error i was having with niall???
can’t define variables half-way through a function
what are far and near pointers???
unicode support???
do you have to write a C++ program to use its string features???
functions vs procedures???
to do list
find out why my network falls over w v high number of hidden units
rename and reshuffle java files
try c/java interaction
find out what sort of data you can pass between c and java
try binary base changer
find out if you can edit bitmaps in java
NN that watches parameters vs success, and builds the ideal net for a given task
bar chart along the top showing h/r etc. of each neuron
consider modular architectures
automatically employ hard disk as supplementary ram
to keep abreast, or just to find out what's happening, ring Poultry Storage Ltd on this number
dartboard (photograph of a dartboard and stick it on someone’s face???)
apologies - important life skill – easier to get forgiveness than permission
approach with extreme candour
do you ever wonder where mothers get their chicken farmer instinct from? they’re always trying to fatten you up. do you think it’s some sort of genetic throwback to our cannibalistic days?
demonic babies – keys down toilets, labels off tins, taking out the Safeway power system, knocking over/dismantling cribs
50 fun things to do when ...
dolphins smarter than humans – thinner cortices, don’t get water up their nostrils, solution to all the world’s problems is just give them all fish, you can hear them giggling at the rich people on their yachts – douglas adams’ theory
marriage is crap
I don’t want to read it – I just want to have read it
iTunes quotation marks problem in programming
prof. ellory and his physiology textbook - any other funny tute stories? rolls, assuming he’d found his own name everywhere
dyeing hair – how people view you differently
philosophy is a fickle, fibrillating female/woman
as we search for the g-spot of climactic truth, we find ourselves lingering over her other distractingly beautiful and entrancing areas
use vodka in economy orange
valentine's cards
no seasonal variations - no winter wardrobe
edinburgh weather
scary computer science graduates passport photos
i escaped from the circus into academia - too regimented - my trick was playing baseball with my ...
bi-colour hair - retinal disparity
colour my eyebrows - but they won't grow back
circumcision desensitises the heads of jewish men's penises
how hurried the bbc world service is - afghanistan, still a war, taliban losing. britain, tony blair still PM. amazon, depleted. niagara, still going. and a huge spiel about david beckham.
new hypothesis: dye hair cos visibility is the biggest factor in pulling
de profanitis
siberian pine needles
the brain that powers it all...
all sorts of odd things happen when you start putting people's heads into magnets
this phone's on its last legs. it's been on its last legs for 6 months. unfortunately those last legs are the only reliable ones.
is swearing important in comedy??? why is swearing important in comedy??? it all helps foster the sense of unreality, to isolate the experience from the real, convention-driven social world.
oh they made a mistake today. didn't wear the brown trousers. now we're going to be able to see their fear as well as smell it.
that'd be as painful as riding no-handed down a cobbled street
limerick about a rabbit being raped by an elephant
i did have to apologise after for leaving her alone and unprotected in the social bearpit that is my friendship group - of which i like to think of myself as the alpha male (barry)
'teach your grandmother to suck eggs' - what does that mean? i assume by the way it's usually used that grandmothers are particularly expert at the lost art of egg-sucking. do they do it often? how? why? what sort of eggs - boiled, presumably. do they pierce a hole, and if so, where does the shell go? do they pop the egg in whole, and chomp? is it cos they don't have dentures?
about a bloke being a bit feminine, not knowing about cars or hammers - but i do know about computers - same masculine part of the brain??? changing my desktop (futzing) as surrogate DIY impulse???
wife in a glass coffin coffee table
find mouse with ear grafted on
are you a christian? - it's 100% diamond
i'm a pure soul trapped inside a testosterone-charged man's body
she can be as obtuse as a fucking skewed scalene triangle
just want to be friends - i already have plenty of fucking friends.
our scout likes to make her presence felt - if we leave our bins out too many days in a row, she punishes us by not leaving any toilet paper
stop it now, you big tease - you'll make me cry - tears of mocking laughter
what happened to your hair? it's congenital. please don't press me about it.
i am the proud owner of a brand spanking new girlfriend (don't read too much into that)
time-travel advert
i was asked by caribbean, canberra, columbian! friend to bring him some coffee over. he bought me a free holiday back, and all he wanted was his suitcase that he'd left at home. v nice of him, but he is a rich bugger after all. so i did it, obviously - i'm not a mug.
and afterwards, he gave me some of his coffee. it was v good. v cheap. it comes with the dried milk already added. i wonder why columbian coffee is
the answering message on the ... hotline
i had a philosophy teacher once who had a singular approach to children's irritating questions. when asked, 'is there a god?', he taught his 4 year old son epistemology. that shut him up
skinnerian box
laptop, ethernet connection and a spare pair of underpants - it turned out that i needed more than one pair for a month - but then i discovered three-legged underpants. in and out - 6 degrees of freedom
do i actually have a girlfriend?
no, not using your archaic spacetime metric, but yes, if we sufficiently relax our assumptions, then yes i do.
plenty more fish in the sea. it's funny - at the beginning of this term, i was absolutely deluged by fish. i had to beat them off with a stick. fish in my hair, fish in my shoes, fish everywhere, but now, there seems to be a bit of a fish famine. i'm casting my rod about, but nothing's biting - i'm just sat here, miserable, it's starting to drizzle, taking a bite of my sandwich.
do you want to know what my greatest fear is? a girl turning me down cos she's afraid i'm in too deep, when she just wants things to stay casual. can you imagine, if, a couple of months down the line when she's going out with some other guy, you'd spent all that time wooing her and all along she just wanted you for your body. how pissed off would you have been at squandering the perfect relationship?
beat them with each other's limbs
my uncle oswald
invitations - date to be announced, dress code colourful/hell/grim reaper/prudish
i like to burn incense in my room. it means i can fart as much as i like. of course all the scouts assume that i must be smoking pot 3 times a day and i'm trying to drown out the smell. that's not helped by the fact that you can actually buy incense that smells like marijuana. this seems quite curious to me. i can only assume that you'd buy this if you really do like the smell, even devoid of effect, or, if you're trying to be really clever. if the dean charges in and says, aha, i can smell marijuana, then you can just point to the incense smugly and tell him he must be mistaken - there's nothing illegal going on here offisher.
it would be quite nice to live in a city where you don't get that little frisson of anticipation every time you leave a building to see if your bike's still there. at the back of my mind, i'm continually anxious to see if it'll still be there when i next look - i feel reasonably safe while i'm actually riding it, though i do tend to clench hold of the handlebars pretty tight when i stop at traffic lights, just to be sure
hyperactive bunny jazz drummer
belligerent over-serious table football player
i've always wondered - and perhaps someone in the audience can put me straight here - we've all been to the toilet, and had a really satisfying dump - men often talk about it, and verbally relish the anticipatory feeling, licking their lips (figuratively) at the prospect of getting a 'weight of their mind' etc., even proudly contrasting their efforts with various missiles. "i wouldn't go in there for 10 mins if i were you" they say. i've often wondered about anal sex. i've never been curious enough to be on the 'wrong end' of it. in my head it's painful and disgusting to ram something up my anus. having said that, ramming something up someone else's anus is highly erotic. a mystery. well, i started thinking that maybe having anal sex with a man is sort of like a really really satisfying, repetitive shit
when i think about my attempts to woo women, i'm reminded of von hindenberg's comment about the british soldiers during the war - lions led by donkeys - courage in the face of insurmountable odds, but ultimately no viable strategy, and complete failure as a result
hello, is the mike working? excuse me, can you hear me? hello, um, technician, do you think you could sort this out??? stupid wanker. oh. ah. thank you. felching felching, cunt - poo - pee. spank you. jizz.
theoretical pseudoscience
we're all just figments of our own imagination
having a row over something someone said in a dream
rub my face, crotch, wiggle leg, wink a lot, inspect pockets and wipe on trousers
hugh jackman's comedy action programmer
incomprehensible to a sub spaceship sized intellect
pee-pee pads - could we have evolved to rifle our urine???
auto-castration - is this the way forward?
do eunochs have a sex drive? do i have to cut off my penis, or just my testicles?
lust is the single source of almost all of my unhappiness
fall in love with another eunoch
compassion is beautiful because it briefly deadens the lust
just to keep the goalposts on their toes, i've added and improved on things a little bit
slit someone else's wrists
they taught me nothing in business studies gcse that i couldn't have learned by sitting down and reading the paper one morning
tobacco as vaccination for the lungs
hot ribena weaned off milk. never found a girl to help
rugby prop who smelt like he'd just masturbated before every practice
saved by the bell as cultural imperialism - ntsc
i say 'i'm sorry' - what i mean is that i get a mild (but easily suppressed) feeling of guilt that i don't care enough to act differently
new interface for men to replace the standard keyboard – it’s based a blow-up doll [sick teethy grimace/grin] – I call it the feel-real tit mouse - point and clit interface
adam's smell-personality - obnoxious, filled the room and wouldn't go away
died probably the same way he lived his life - in serious pain, trying to be first out the office without anyone noticing
Ribena berries on see-saws???
ads - bring your drinking shoes - drinking as a pain killer
i'm marshalling every brain cell to the cause at the moment
alcohol-induced neuron gigadeath
do you think that white men can sing the blues?
����� are you calling me white?
����� pierre, she has a point
����� what! after all these years, growing up in harlem -
����� [gently] pierre, we are parisian
whoops
now look what you've done. you'll have bruised it
lemons don't bruise
how do you know that? how on earth does anyone retain facts like that? how many lemons died so you could state that with such infuriating insouciance?
vegetarianism - i respect your principles, but i couldn't adhere to them myself, and consequently i must denigrate them through mockery in order to feel principled myself. surely you understand that - it's basic human psychology�������
dedicate to two towers victim - who i imagine died the same way he lived his life - in pain, in fear of his life, hoping that there would be a special someone who would rescue him, hoping no one would notice his blatant attempts to be the first out of the office
talk about my family life
����� party games
����� gods
����� capable and rabbit wheel brother etc.
����� talk about sport as war
what tiny tragedies occurred last september that i can be referring to instead of two towers???
����� i know that i've probably alienated a vast number of the americans in the audience - but they were pretty alien to begin with. and i thought it was fairer to them to make an honest joke about it, than to talk about ironically, and so exclude them without their knowing it.
i'll tell you something that irritates me. people screaming in concerts. you don't find that in the albert hall, do you? it's a particularly teenage phenomenon, as far as i can tell, and the ones just below bat auditory range are usually female. it's not a recent thing either. john lennon complained that the screaming was so loud when they played that fuckoff stadium in new york that no one could hear their music. if i was a front man for a band, and i was strumming my favourite track, about love or suicide or the trials of being rich and adored, and the pain of overly-frequent ejaculation, and all these girls were screaming at me, i'd just stop playing. till they stopped. maybe even hold up my hand, and make the audience sit quiet before i started again. because i'd feel like just some sexually-charged, sexual being, some sex object that people would just want to have sex with. but i'm a musician goddamnnit. all that sex. i mean, it's not the volume as much as the incoherent, wordlessness of it. i'd feel like a freak. walk on stage. everyone screams. i'd be, what's wrong. [touches face to check it's all there].
two men, dressed like oxford undergraduates trying to be dressed like mel smith and griff rhys-jones trying to be dressed like two old men in a pub, which is where a lot of the best british comedy happens, so it has to be ironic
if any of you have seen my show before, you're probably best off going and getting wankered at the bar, cos it's all the same. or, go and talk to the big men dressed in black at the door and tell them you'd like your money back. bouncers, if that happens, beat the shit out of them, so that i don't get bored while i'm onstage
the average punter asks himself, have I wasted my money on this bloke? do I feel embarrassed for him? if not, I’m going to fucking laugh, because I’ve paid fucking ten pounds. and so it doesn't matter a jot that i’m fucking crap at telling jokes. because you’re all laughing. you stupid fuckers. this is great. you nasty smelly desperate species. when the mothership lands, I swear, you’re all fucked. anyway. let me tell you about…
threatening a computer - try the vulcan techie death tap - listen, you hunk of shit, i'm going to use your keytops for scrabble letters, and your flatscreen as an etcha-sketch, i'm gonna use the mouse as a door wedge and your motherboard as a pumice-stone if you don't start behaving
carnivorism – i'll eat anything that bleeds. actually that's not true. i draw the line at menstruating women.
lewis – women pmt, excuse for moodiness, masturbate so hard they bleed
difficult customers sketch - baked beans, no sauce please. and a rare steak - dodo if you've got it
bell-ringing - you'd think they'd make them practice on the smaller bells before they let them loose on the big ones - here, little johnny, you have a go - isn't that great, the whole town can hear little johnny's spastic tug of war with a 2-ton clangfest
allergy allergy
I have all 3 – it seems unfair that they go together
voodoo, madame tussauds
osama’s latest plan – they’re going to sneak into madame tussaud’s late one night and hold the world leaders hostage
i have more violent mood swings than a pregnant woman on cocaine
i slept like a baby on rohipnol
osama aslef as sketch, dismissing the two towers idea
al qaeda find out that osama's grandfather was jewish
acupuncture - it's a bit of a wild stab in the dark
I often trace my lack of self-confidence back to my childhood days.
I had asthma, ezcema and hayfever. apparently it’s medical fact that they tend to all go together. it was after I found that out that I founded my religion based on the realisation that god is actually a sadistic small child. with a strong sense of irony.
the best thing about having excema is that people just assume it's dermatological cream if you cum all over yourself
the terrible fallacy of ‘anything that does not kill me makes me stronger’ – cognitive gullibility test that natural selection has devised so it doesn’t have to bother with predators any more to weed out the maladaptive losers
sperm donors as evolutionary suicide
I was bullied a lot
when I was at school, they used to spike my hayfever spray with dandelion cordial, and put helium in my asthma nebuliser
at the last school disco, I finally plucked up the courage to ask someone to dance – I thought it was going quite well. till she told me at the end of the evening that if dancing is poetry in motion, then I dance in blank verse
i bought a power station off a bloke in the pub the other day. i was swindled. he said it was practically new - only 30 years old. lifetime guarantee he said
girls who can eat like a horse are the biggest turnon. because you see, I’m hung like one, and it can be a problem, frankly.
I went on a memory course cos I was finding it impossible to keep up with the crucial little personal details of all the women I was stalking at once
walking stick club
darwin awards
there’s a sick joke that the only reason we haven’t met with other alien civilisations is that they normally destroy themselves when they get to this stage ...
see a a gill
virus that sends snippets of your hard disk out to everyone in your address book: Daymart buying granny thermal vest; love-letters; rude jokes; emails to mates about your professor
independence day – what bollocks, eh?
virus-writers are unmitigatedly evil fuckers
sent a mate some of my material in its early stages – didn’t tell him it was mine – showed him some of my material - i've seen it before - but it was funnier then...
the comedy concept of walking down a street talking into a microphone, recording comic streams of thought, and pretending to be a spy
palimpsest - infected hemorrhage
the flesh is weak but the spirit is … � the meat is rotten but the vodka is good
[appear as nervous as a rabbit in a headlights. carry a cup of tea. or a bacardi breezer.]
Most comedians go in for self-deprecation. I thought, fuck that, let me tell you about being hung like a horse – the major difference is that my tail doesn’t swish when the vertebrae snap.
Yes, the trials and tribulations of being a small man with an enormous cock. I could tell you some stories.
Of course they’d all be made up, but I don’t think that would detract from them.
people often ask me, why would a man with the stage presence of a gnat and the timing of a kinder surprise atomic clock do comedy?
I don't know why they ask me that
but I tell them that I do comedy, because it's kind of like getting a blowjob from every single member of the audience at once. of course, it could be that i associate comedy with fellatio because my girlfriend used to laugh during sex.
did I ever tell you about my girlfriend? I like to think about her when I’m alone. [wrap mike cable round hands like bondage]
As a result, I've got a girlfriend who can, well, let's just say she can suck out the corks from wine bottles. That comes in pretty useful when you lose the corkscrew. Actually, sometimes I hide the corkscrew so that I can show her off to my friends. I taught, well, trained her to do it, you know – lot of *cross*-training in fact :~. We started off by picking up raisons with a straw. Then we moved on to cherries. She can manage whole plums now. Then what I used to do was hoover up an entire ball of string, and I’d make her suck the string up back out of the hoover. Good for improving cheek capacity too. Very important. For added incentive, I’d run the hoover up and down in a cowpat for ten minutes beforehand, just so’s she wouldn’t be tempted to dawdle on her alloted task. Obviously, I’d turn the hoover on half-way through. Our hoover has a button to spew out the contents of the bag, to make it easier to empty. Everything inside goes everywhere. That’s really funny actually – every time I do that suddenly, she gets the same surprised look she gets just after I start to … anyway – I don’t want to be indiscrete.
The first time I met Jessica, I could tell she was a bit … ‘special’. Classy, obviously. I’ve got a bit of a technique going. Finding a fuck is sort of like a modern-day mating ritual. Fewer tribal drums, and humans are limited by the lack of a huge bright blue fuckoff tail like a peacock. I had a mate – he had no trouble with women. He’d just sit by the bar, licking his eyebrows, and they’d flock to him. Anyway, I realised with Jessica that when you’re going for a girl like that you have to handle the situation very delicately. Girls in England require finessing. First - you take her out to a pub and get her drunk. But not too drunk, just so she realizes she really does like you. Then, when she is all over you, you say "no, i can't – you’re drunk". But at least give her a kiss – you'll be drunk too so you won’t care if you look like an idiot and bite her by accident. Then if she wants more, go for it, otherwise wait for the next day and go in for the kill.
Even despite my finely honed skills and my sensitive nature, and I expect you all find this, but it really isn’t easy finding a partner to suit you. Actually, I’d been single for quite a long time before I met Jessica. I’ve been on quite a few blind dates, I can tell you. In fact, a while ago I devised a sort of rule of thumb for whether a girl’s right for me or not. I think of it as kind of a relationship litmus test. I usually wait till the second date, and this time it’s me that gets really really drunk. As tanked as I can. More. Any plan that starts with alcohol abuse can’t be all bad, after all. Have a big meal. Chinese is ideal for our purposes. Then, using any means at your disposal, begin the vomiting, controlled at first, and build it up to test their tolerance. The way I see it, if they really love you, or at least if they’re ever going to love me, the sort of girl I want’ll stand by me by the toilet. Jessica’s been the first one to pass the test, actually.
Well, you’re probably all thinking that I lead a pretty enviable existence. Sex drugs etc. The sex drugs are expensive though, and even they lose their effectiveness after a while.
Unfortunately though, I got piles. I’m not ashamed to say it. The doctor says that I might have picked it up sitting too long in a fixed position – on the toilet, as it happens. Unfortunately though, I had no choice – that’s where the peephole to the women’s changing rooms had to be. Piles is not a very attractive condition. Texturewise, it’s a little bit like when your shoelaces are undone, and they drag on the ground, so that if it’s been raining and you step in a puddle, then when you bend over to tuck them back in, they’re all stringy and damp and dripping …
Anyway, there’s this brilliant stuff called Annyusol. Please pay attention to the pronunciation. I had an argument with the store manager at Boots about it. He told me that unless I had an ‘annyus’, it’s Anusol. It all started because at my local Boots, all the check out girls are 18, and *nubile*, and not very bright. So I go up there this one time to buy supplies. I tried to get in the queue with the ugly old biddy serving, but they swapped just as I got to the front. And so I look at this blonde girl desperately, hoping she won’t pass comment. But the price is missing on the box, and so she calls it out, ‘Linda, how much is the Anusol?’. So I hiss at her, ‘Annyusol’, but she doesn’t get the hint. I say the same thing to you that I said to her. ‘Kiss my arse’.
Where possible, I like to offend. and the only thing I enjoy doing more than offending an entire group of people at once, is offending two entire opposing factions. So you can imagine the scene at the Heroes and Villians bop, when I misunderstood, and thought you had to go as a hero AND a villian at the same time. So I went as Osama Bin Laden cum Jesus Christ. the more i thought about it, there seemed to be quite a striking similarity. they both spend a lot of time in deserts, have big beards, and wear white. Admittedly Jesus hasn't been fingered for any suicide bombings, and Bin Laden doesn't preach a message of universal tolerance, but he is going to get crucified when the Americans catch him.
Did you hear about the lateset bungee-jumping escapade – last week was the occasion of the first bungee attempt off a helicopter. Unfortunately, they misjudged how much he'd bounce back up...
I met the inventor of the bungee jump – he’s just invented a trebuchet. It’s based on the sort of catapults they used in medieval days for storming castles, but it’s been scaled up to propel a man 200 feet into the air at 55 miles an hour, so he told me proudly. It’s all very carefully calculated according to body weight. I looked up the story on the Internet. It’s true enough. He designed it in secret as his (like-minded) wife’s birthday present. And sure enough, she was the first to try it. Hwuuuhng, perfect trajectory, landed beautifully in the centre of the enormous net they’d erected, and bounced beautifully back out again to land and shatter her hips. The first trial was a *mitigated* success, he’s quoted as saying.
My other favourite bungee story is about bungee running. You get two people in a funfair, and they both peg it like apeshit to get as far as they can before before the elastic rope tied round their waists flings them back. There’s a story about this guy who clearly had some sort of vendetta against his trusty postie. He wired his vicious dog up to a bungee rope, so that when the postman comes to deliver the letters and sees the dog careering towards him, he fled helter-skelter straight into traffic. He made it to the other side of the road just in time to see the dog catapulted straight back through the living room bay window.
I lived in a house with 8 people and 1 fridge, lots of milk, and a lot of milk-stealing. I hate milk theft. I had to use more and more elaborate ploys to catch them after they got wise to the beartrap.
First, I tried to convince them that my milk was really mouldy and off. I find that adding little pink bits of chopped-up marshmallow dipped in parsley are ideal for this - they like like rotting pussy ... no, pus-ridden, i mean, bits of flesh
Got a medic mate to procure some hospital urine sample containers - unused. Decanted the milk into that. Worked pretty well for a while, just cos people are finicky like that. Just to be sure, I stuck a label on it: ‘Sample F96Z, super-smallpox strain, control experiment, Ealing Centre for Islamic Studies, 10th September 2001. Likewise with powdered milk – just pop it into an envelope.
Then, I ended up dyeing the milk a sort of uriny yellow orange colour, which really did the trick. No one touched my milk after that. But I developed a taste for piss. If you drink piss before going to sleep, it sends you right off to dreamland, and best of all, you don't have to warm it up like milk. When my housemates got wind of my ‘acquired taste’, they starting safeguarding their glasses of beer by disguising them – they’d dye them white and hide them in milk bottles and I wouldn’t touch ‘em.
It got quite embarrassing. Once or twice, I got caught in the bog, quenching my thirst for the ‘amber nectar’, so to speak. The landlord at my local pub caught me out – he noticed that I’d cut down to just the one pint a night, and he put two and two together when he also saw me going into the men’s room holding a half-full pint glass, and coming out with a brand new pint. He took me to one side, very nice about it he was, and he gave me his brother’s business card – a psychologist. Well, I was too embarrassed to go back to my local for a little while after that. But after about 6 months, seeing the shrink twice weekly, I felt able to go back again. I thanked him, because his brother had sorted me out beautifully. Well, what I didn’t know was they’d put CCTV in the toilets, so the first time I go in to ‘refill my glass’, the landlord rushes in and he says, ‘I thought you said you were cured of that!’ ‘Yes’, I said, ‘it doesn’t bother me at all now.’
do you have time for a wee drinkie? it would have to be wee though
I wrote an article. It got published in a peer-reviewed philosophy journal. Pears don’t know shit about philosophy.
I was arguing for a� new criterion of aesthetics – I said that what we look for aesthetically is for something to be a little bit familiar, but different enough to be interesting – sort of like your girlfriend’s sister.
everyone thinks bin laden is holed up in a cave in afghanistan. I can reveal an exclusive – the reason we haven’t been able to find him is because he’s in london. he’s a smart bugger, and he realised that the way he could cause most havoc would be as head of the london underground train drivers’ union. he can fuck up a million people’s day and cost a Western country billions of pounds in one fell swoop. he’s been at this game for 20 years now, and it’s getting harder and harder to come up with reasons for striking. “the sandwiches were cold last week” – we can’t work in these inhumane conditions. we need showers and lockers. we want more rights for claustrophobic tube drivers. etc. then, a couple of months ago, someone comes up to him with an idea. “yeah, whatever, fly it into the building if you think that'll work – this, here with the tube drivers, is where the real action's at”. so that’s how it started.
mcdonalds as cultural imperialism
I’m not a very tall person. You may already have noticed. Unfortunately though, two things happen as a rule when I get drunk. I vomit. And I get quite aggressive. My two best friends are 6 foot twins, so I’m usually alright. But there was this one time, coming home to Harrow, and I’d had to run for the train. I caught it, and before long I was on my own in the carriage, possibly because I was noisily but contentedly vomiting into a plastic bag I’d found. Quite a civilised solution, I thought. Anyway, it all happened when I was waiting for a taxi in a long queue at 1, outside the station, and I’d finally got to the front when this bald fat bloke tries to jump into *my* taxi! I tried to tell him, and was even quite assertive. Fucker didn’t even register. You’d have all done the same thing next, I’m sure. I tapped him on the shoulder <blow into bag and splat it>
I’ve got to admit, I wasn’t entirely prepared for the results. A pretty effective solution, I can tell you. I didn’t know this, but regurgitated curry is still quite potent, and very caustic if it gets in your eyes, nose, mouth, all over your shirt, down your neck. He was a little shocked, I can tell you. I went to jump in the taxi, and we disappeared down the street. He wasn’t happy. Just as well I was able to make a quick getaway, because I wasn’t keen on the prospect of hitting him, for obvious reasons.
osama-jesus or piles
roses are red
violets are blue
this poem sucks
about as poetic as poo
fuck shit fuck
mouth like a supermarket trolley
a mind of its own
tried a career as a poet once. tried to write a sensitive portrayal of living with disability
there was a young man with tourettes
had terrible trouble with etiquette
his girlf
celebrate in the time-honoured, if impoverished, fashion of my culture
Roll up, roll up – everybody, buy your tickets now to see the amazing maladaptive man – an evolutionary dead-end folks, only able to survive in today’s overly permissive society
I wonder, did your mother cry very hard when you were born? Do you think it’s normal that she’s still suffering from post-natal depression?
To have been beaten black and blue with both the stupidity *and* the ugly stick - sheesh, that's harsh - I'll forgive your comment because I pity you
Listen, you were born a turd - there's no need for you to work at it
Ah yes, i'd forgotten about the restricted vocabulary of your impoverished dialect
You like to stir, don’t you, sir – it’s just a shame that you’ve only got a little spoon
I'm terribly sorry sir, but you appear to have got your aesophagus and your anus confused - try speaking out of the other one
Shutup you shit-eating, algae-swilling, trogolodytic fuckwit
Mate, my job is to make you look like a dick, but you're doing just fine on your own, so if you just want to carry on, i'll go and get a drink
Were you abused as a child? Perhaps you should have been
Are there any other incoherent peasant eejits in the audience who have a view? if so, kindly leave, because i don't give a bestial fuck for your opinions. thank you
Would you do that in the theatre? you wouldn't, would you? would you? *would* you??? perhaps you would. you clearly have no manners whatsoever. i mean, why do you do it. it's not big, and it's not clever. i wouldn't mind if it was clever.
are you fat, or stupid, or in �some other way discompensed and disadvantaged relative to the rest of the animal kingdom so that you feel bitter and justified in your uncomedic rancour?
i mean, do you really think that just because you are pitiful you have some god-given right to be irritating as well? please, be quiet. don't add public self-embarrassment to your list of achievements before dying in a messy and probably pathetic fashion.
Quiet over there or feel my colossal wrath – whoah, don’t get angry, wrath’s just my petname for you-know-what
Without meaning to cast aspersions, it's clear that he pees sitting down
I know what you're thinking - when I walked on stage, you thought tosser, didn't you? I know, because when i walked on stage and saw you, I thought the same thing
bugger you! listen mate, you could be buggering me with a raging erection and i'd still have room to shit
Can you smell shit? are you a cattle farmer? check your shoes. oh no, it's cos you're such a brown-nose
Nice of you to grace us with your smell
I refuse to have a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent[1]
sketch about how they come up with TV shows
Driving While Dumb - A man in Swansea, Wales, who managed to violate the gamut of driving laws and basic common sense in one action-packed incident, takes the prize for poor motorist skills. The one-armed driver -- drunk and clutching his mobile phone to his ear as he sped down a city street and jumped a red light -- has been fined and banned from driving for 18 months. Stuart MacNamara, who lost half his right arm in an accident, was found to be well over the legal alcohol limit when stopped by police over the weekend. "I think it would be fair to say this is a pretty unusual case," police superintendent Richard Lewis said. "We urge the public not to do any of these things in isolation -- let alone all together."
As a Chinese proverb puts it: "If you wish to be happy for an hour, get intoxicated. If you wish to be happy for three days, get married. If you wish to be happy for eight days, kill your pig and eat it. But if you wish to be happy for ever, become a gardener."
i saw this ad in the personal columns last year. WANTED: somebody to go back in time with me. This is not a joke. P.O. Box 322, Oakview, California 93022. You'll get paid after we get back. Must bring your own weapons. Safety not guaranteed. I have only done this once before.
And all that rocking and rolling late at night sometimes wakes Jessica up when I go to get a tissue.
milk-stealing - One guy wasn’t too impressed – he called me names, things got violent, now my refinery only stores one gallon not two, so to speak
Did any of you ever play that game where you had to spunk all over the biscuits?
It’s not all been beer and cookies though.
what is modus polens and modus tolens?
skolemization
art is something designed to evoke emotion through fantasy
art <=> life-ness
is business a 'game' - it's competition, but is the interaction between the agents direct? ok, there's ambiguity there
what was the significance of the roses in american beauty?
We don't have to make our moral choices subject to Darwinism. That's what makes us human," he said.
top in business
manchester, warwick, bath, leeds, birmingham, cambridge, LSE, bristol, nottingham, oxford
a novel about a buck rogers-esque travel into the future by transporting my memories into a program which lives on and is discovered by the people of the future – like karaoke/cold lazarus, my spirit seeks rest eventually, but they won’t switch off the computer
how are the governors of a school elected/dismissed? who are they responsible to?
over simplification
does not give transcendentalist/metaphys justification/sanction, which undermines utilitarianism
ought vs can/do desire something
(logical) fallacy of collective/aggregate good
is moody (medical ethics for the aged) a philosopher?
sociopathy vs psychopathy
is it the ability to respond to internalised info that gives the impression of spontaneity, ie voluntary movement
if the speed of light is absolute, isn't then distance and time fixed too - or are they only fixed relative to each other, like Heisenberg: position + momentum ...
when he says that quantitative hedonists assign some actions extrinsic value, he's saying that intellectual activities might have greater extrinsic value cos they give more (though not better) pleasure
any ethical system wh can only evaluate actions or states of affairs exclusively (i.e. particular aspects/levels of ethics) is insufficient/flawed - morality should be discernible in any form
cognitivism
logo = Michaelangelo God's hand touching a robot hand
abstract art is -ve brand value for philosophy
abduction???
perhaps the solution to a multi-dimensional vector is being able to create new strings/threads/variables and give them a name as part of the constructor - this might require extending Vector to have setName and getName methods and a new constructor which allows us to call them by their names (as I think you can with threads). these names could be automatically generated and then referenced as a co-ordinate system.
humour as my thesis: humour is our way of celebrating the efficacy of the mental - the fact that we find robotic actions funny (see Laughter, Bergson) is the same reason that we find unexpected (i.e. non-determined) punchlines funny. it's all tied in with the fact that we have phenomenology, with downward causation, so we find cultural stereotypes funny cos we have a them-and-us mentality, and because it's almost as if the stereotypical figures *don't* have the conscious ability to alter their actions on the basis of mental states. it's a social phenomenon because language evolved to serve a social communicative function (though humour is not necessarily linguistic - hmmm???)
Sloman moment-by-moment trajectory of PI
SF story – the merits of telepathic (imagistic) relative to writing + speaking. because the other person feels the sense of the idea in the same way that the person who had the idea, it’s harder to criticise it as a 3rd person. can one do philosophy by mind-transfer – no, because though words are inherently interpretive, their unavoidable vagueness is at least made publicly explicit.
maybe I'm an idealist, in some senses at least. I believe in the agent and the environment, bubbles in the medium, and that we float about, perhaps with agency and self-propelled, perhaps not, and that matter, energy and mind are one, as they must be
is memory slipping through my fingers in any way beautiful???
why didn’t they use the huge 26-mile radius gun on the trenches???
how about a separate subspecies of humans who are predisposed to be HAPPY
we should move towards better GCSE education, earlier employment, shorter working weeks, post-retirement education???, fewer university students, more full-time workers self-educating
what should the goals/point/quantifiable benefits of education be?
the Corpus Conundrum philosophy discussion group
blindsight as good company name???
the foreplay of fiction
dream of an orgasmically heavenly organism
ahir akimbo
in Quarantine, couldn’t the Lucy figure have done literally everything, not just the unlikely but the impossible, and wouldn’t she have been all-powerful in a pre-quantum era???
why couldn’t she smear into a state where her brain grew to accommodate her in a smeared and collapsed states???
who were the humans who erected the quarantine???
- About me - Outbursts & outlets - Collected mishmash
Greg Detre, grog@dial.pipex.com, November 2001, http://users.ox.ac.uk/~corp0517/
Home - Blog - About me - Outbursts & outlets - Collected mishmash
Greg Detre, greg@remove-this.gregdetre.co.uk, http://www.gregdetre.co.uk - updated June 29, 2003