Zombies

By dcassa.

Wifey wonders how she slipped so easily from one persona to another; last week I was wondering whether I had a persona at all, or whether I was rather a multiplicity of different selves co-existing in a single body united only by a common set of memories,

I asked Mrs Botogol: "Do you think each of us is a coherent single self, or do you think we all contain a multiplicity? Different people, if you like, in the same body?"

"Please don't call me Mrs Botogol when we are at home, dear" she said.

At the ICA opinion was mixed: Rita Carter believed she has no free will and no self. "I, zombie" if you will - I am a zombie and so is my avatar. I didn't agree, but it's such a nihilistic viewpoint that is rather difficult to take issue with: arguing with a self-identified zombie is like arguing with the SatNav. I wished I hadn't praised her book, but comforted myself that perhaps I probably couldn't help it.

On the panel Raymond Tallis gallantly declared his faith in Rita Carter "I believe you have a self" he said and I was surprised to find myself on Tallis's side, arts against science, as Carter frowned at him (rather ungraciously I thought, but then it must he hard for her, surrounded by unthinking zombies acting mechanically and without imagination. A bit like being at work)

I jotted down random nuggets from each speaker. The most intriguing was the idea of different-sized selves (mania being swelling of self, and depression a diminution). The most confounding was the question of whether we are still ourselves when we dream...ouch.

The most amusing factoid (ie it appeals directly to my prejudices) is that, apparently, when a Myers-Briggs test is repeated there is only a 25% chance of finding the same personality type.

That would explain it then.

Hot and Bothered

By the sweat of your face
Originally uploaded by MrUllmi.

"Are you all right, Botogol?" asked the Head of Human Resources, Strategic Operations & Shared Services Division, EMEA (excluding Russia), for it was she, standing behind me in the queue at the Starbucks kiosk.

Absorbed as I was in my new mp3 player, on to which I have podcasted an entire week's programming from Radio 4, I hadn't noticed her.

On the one hand I was pleasantly surprised to hear evidently genuine concern from someone in Human Resources; on the other I was a little miffed at the implications. "Of course I am", I said, brightly, "I've been to the gym, is all. It just takes me a little while to cool down"

She appraised me suspiciously. It was 8:30am, I was outside without my coat and I was (OK, I concede it) a trifle pink.

As I smiled, a bead of sweat ran down the side of my face.

"Don't I look well?"

"To be frank", she said, not unkindly, "I thought you were having a diabetic induced hypo"

We stared at each other for a moment and the barista coughed, gently "Gingerbread, Cinammon Dolce Latte with a caramel shot?"

Shakespeare on Life Planning

The Botogol family know what's hot* and what's not, and on Saturday we eschewed the black market demand for our tickets and went to the Donmar warehouse to see Othello

Jealousy, scheming, race, deception; Yes, yes, yes, Othello is all of those, and very good indeed it is too, but the bit that struck me (perhaps the £800 we supposedly could have got for our tickets was preying on my mind) but the bit that got me was Iago's unequivocal advice to the love-lost Rodrigo:

No, don't drown yourself, says Iago, but instead:

[...] Put money in thy purse;
follow thou the wars; defeat thy favour with
an usurped beard; I say, put money in thy purse. It
cannot be that Desdemona should long continue her
love to the Moor,-- put money in thy purse,--nor he
his to her: it was a violent commencement, and thou
shalt see an answerable sequestration:--put but
money in thy purse. These Moors are changeable in
their wills: fill thy purse with money:--
[...],
she will find the error of her choice: she must
have change, she must: therefore put money in thy
purse. If thou wilt needs damn thyself, do it a
more delicate way than drowning. Make all the money
thou canst: if sanctimony and a frail vow betwixt
an erring barbarian and a supersubtle Venetian not
too hard for my wits and all the tribe of hell, thou
shalt enjoy her; therefore make money.
[...]

RODRIGO:
I am changed: I'll go sell all my land.

Roderigo, thou shouldst have lived at this hour! and thou shouldst have have had an indescribable job in the City, for it's the start of every City worker's plan: Moving out? moving on? moving up? Staying put? New house, extra house? Trading up? Trading down? Mid Life Crisis? New Bike? New Car? New Boat? Interior designer or writer of the great 21st Century novel? Whatever.... just two more bonuses should be enough....

"It's the only bit of honest advice Iago gives to anyone in the whole play", I remarked, sagely in the interval much to the spluttering amusement of the Botogol daughters whom I sometimes think have received a sight more education than is good for them, "Yeah, right", they said, once they had mopped up their J2O "Thus do I ever make my fool my purse"

* Ewan McGregor and Chiwetel Ejiofor, that's what's hot. Oh, yes, and Shakespeare.

Plinth Happy

I am SO going to spend an hour on that plinth
The cutest thing might be simply to sit there with a placard:

This. Is. Not. Art

Now, would that be a protest?
Well, it would certainly wasting a once in a lifetime opportunity to show-off...

Introducing The Extraordinary Spectacle of Botogol-On-The-Plinth

Timetable of Events
(to be displayed on a large placard on the edge of the plinth)

• 10:00 Arrival of Botogol
• 10:02 The setting up of video cameras for the purposes of YouTube
  
• 10:05 Impersonation: Nelson On His Column
• 10:10 Moonwalking Demonstration
• 10:15 The Best of Botogol - Selected Readings from Green Ideas
• 10:16 Impersation: A Lion at the base of a Column
  
• 10:20 Short Extract from Paradise Lost, Book One
• 10:25 If you look closely you can see his ears wiggling
• 10:30 Repeated Bellowing Of "It's no fun" to a bewildered Crowd
• 10:35 Juggling Display (I can you know)
• 10:40 Ventilation of the Arm-Pits
  
• 10:42 Recitation of Shakespeare's Sonnet 116
• 10:45 A sit down for a nice cup of tea and a biscuit
• 10:50 Q&A
• 10:58 Farewell and Last Words
• 10:59 Bows to Tumultuous Applause
• 11:00 Refusal to Dismount from the Plinth
• 11:02 A Confrontation with Security Guard with ensuing
  
• 11:04 Comedy Chase-round-and-round-the-edge-of-plinth
• 11:05 Dramatic Fall on to Safety-Net
• 11:10 Humiliating Rescue from Same
• 11:15 Autograph Signing and DVD Sales

What's not to enjoy? If you would enjoy seeing the Botogol show vote, vote for Antony Gormley

Gormley's idea is clearly streets ahead of the others. (Yesterday I actually heard people talking about in the lift and, well, meercats, really...) Sadly though, I don't think he will win for the idea is just too scarily democratic - "I mean they could do anything".

My prediction: they'll turn it down on fabricated health and safety grounds and go for the conventional, low risk (and seriously, seriously dull) anti-Iraq War option instead.

Mind you, if they are looking for a good car..

New Year Resolution

I'm not sure I'll have time, this year, to improve my performance at both the Triathlon and the Wii.

My experience since Christmas certainly isn't promising: last week, increasingly wild and agitated while being thrashed by silent five year old at tennis, I felt like one those old, stooped, furious but impotent Silverbacks in an earnest BBC nature programme, being outsmarted by a younger, lither rival, clearly after his harem.

I smashed, I passed and I lobbed and Mrs Botogol, watching from the sofa, had to tell me to calm down and for Goodness Sake Mind That Lightshade! Eventually, though, through persistence and guile, my luck turned, and a wild, reaching cross-court baseline stroke caught my miniature opponent a glancing blow on the side of the head with a nunchuck and the game had to be abandoned. Out of the corner of my eye as we mopped the blood, I could swear that the baldy little left-handed Mii that I have built actually winked.

But forget tennis - my favourite game on the Wii is Coarse Fishing. Its brilliant, and very realistic. This is how it works: you stand motionless in your living room, grasping your controller firmly in both hands waiting for a bite.

About every hour (on easy) or two days (difficult) the little float moves - a bite! - and you sharply hoik your nunchuck upwards and back and ... well, that's it! Its just like real fishing.

Anyway, as you can imagine, it's quite a favourite with Mrs Botogol and I. Of course with two you need quite a big room to play - the second player has to stand at the next stake, quite a distance along the bank. However it has one considerable advantage over the tennis: with some practice you can prop up your controller on a book and can go and make a cup of tea and a sandwich. There's not many Wii games you can say that about.

The Triathlon? May 5th. I promise not to blog about it again.

I'm back

For the last three months I have been mostly reading Paradise Lost

"No one ever wished it longer than it is" (Samuel Johnson)

It's all because of Philip Pullman of course. That's the trouble with hero-worship: it starts innocently enough with the books, then comes the much-better-than-you-thought film; before long you're in the front row at obscure gigs, hanging on every word, and three weeks later you find yourself striding round the house like armoured bear shouting at the children Surely. At. Least. ONE. Of. You. Must. Have. Seen. My. New. Alethiometer.


It's not that my other project didn't work exactly, it's more that I didn't try: I managed just two posts. My sister read them. She told me they were good but, compared to greenideas, they made me seem a little embittered. I must have been in a jolly mood.

Anyway its 2008 and I'm back...with resolution (it's to weigh myself every Tuesday)

----//----

After Satan sets out on his mission to Earth to suborn (or enlighten?) mankind the other devils are left to their own devices. Some horse around, some form a choral society (really) and others, well...

Others apart sat on a Hill retir'd,
In thoughts more elevate, and reason'd high
Of Providence, Foreknowledge, Will and Fate,
Fixt Fate, free will, foreknowledg absolute,
And found no end, in wandring mazes lost.
[Book II, 557]

They invented the blogosphere! How could I stay away?

Smiles and Goodbyes

It's not often that Mrs Botogol and I go to the pub of a Friday evening, but last Friday we did: we found ourselves with a small window of time: after some oohing and aahing at a riverside firework display and some 'yes, butting' at John Humphrys In Search of a Decent Mic, and prior to collecting a Botogol child from a party (100 noisy teenagers crammed into a biggish suburban Victorian house, all texting their absent friends).

"D'you know what I fancy doing, Mrs B", I said, "in this snatched and precious child-free hour we find that we have together?"

"Scrabble, I suppose?" she said, not entirely unenthusiastically.

"Nope", I said , "well, actually, later on, yes, possibly, but nope: right now I fancy going down the pub, so fetch your coat".

An old joke, but a good one, and a cheap laugh is always worth a smack round the back of the head. That's what my Dad says, anyway.

So that's how, dear reader, we found ourselves sharing a jumbo packet of cheese and onion in the Twickenham Tup, snucked up hard against each other on a large leather sofa shared with two spotty teenagers, all of us watching the house band Cambio strum out their very own version of Babylon (yes, indeed: they made it their own)

I say 'band': it was actually two kids with guitars; and less Pet Shop Boys - more Flight of the Conchords.

To be frank I thought Their Good Riddance (Time of your Life) worked better than their Moonlight in Vermont but, at the end of day, I'm a sucker for live music of all sorts and as Mrs Botogol sagely observed: if they haven't ever rehearsed Mustang Sally they can't really be expected to play it for any random bloke in the pub just because he shouts loudly, now can they?

So it came to pass last Friday evening, while two unappreciative old men in a far corner of the cavernous suburban pub nursed their quiet pints of London Pride, unseeing, unhearing and while, behind the bar, three strappy-topped young barmaids danced and pranced, Mrs B and myself, on our leather sofa shared with two young texting teenagers, well: we rocked.

While we rocked our sofa-companions texted blurry camphone pictures to absent friends, and eventually I went off to the bar for two more glasses of Australian Pinot Grigio before the second set, then at 10.25 we had to put our coats on and left: no encores, no cheers, no vote of thanks, no epitaphs, we just slipped away.

I'd honour Cambio with a link, but they appear to be the only band in the Western Hemisphere without a page on MySpace

John Humphrys, since you ask, was rubbish. Well, for anyone who, perhaps, hadn't realised that Humphrys has met quite a few famous people, some of whom have been mildly funny, it would have been a revelation. But for the other 569 people in the building, the ones who had come to this Book Festival event hoping to hear about his book it was a tad disappointing. "Thank you very much Mr Humphrys", said the hapless MC sending Humphrys off into the deep, dark night with a few well chosen words, "for coming here to talk about your book. Although you didn't actually say much about it did you?"


We could hear the teenage party a good three roads before we got to it: music, voices and dancing, merged with the bleeps of incoming text messages and missed calls. In the shadows of the front garden our particular teenager answered her call, and we set off for home. What was the party like, we wondered "It promised a lot, Dad, but yielded little"

We took the short-cut home, over the railway station bridge, and it was there, high above the platforms and the electrified tracks, in the neon gloom of an autumn night that we spotted our S J Harvey's peculiar and poignant notice, and we paused, and we hurried on.

-----------------------------------------------------------

There have been 107 green ideas since I started in Oct 2006, and it's been a lot fun.

I'm not stopping now, not exactly, but I have a new project in mind and I'm not sure I will have time to manage both. If the new thing works I'll be back in the new year, I reckon; if it doesn't - well perhaps next week. Or perhaps once a month.... or once a week :-)