A Level Of Banality

“…They just looked at me and said, ‘What? We really can’t show that at all.’ So I said what do you want, and they said, ‘We had Patsy Kensit in today and that was good.’ She said, ‘Culture is buying my daughter an ice-cream at the Natural History Museum.’ So that’s what you’re up against. That’s the level of banality that’s desired.”

Frankie Boyle shares his views and talks about ‘My shit life so far’.

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The I Inside

Image by ocean.flynn via Flickr

The BBC’s Horizon is perhaps not the TV programme  it once was (some have accused it of dumbing down of late) but it can still provoke thought. Monday evenings TV outing tried to answer what exactly is consciousness albeit simplified to the question ‘Where am I? ‘. I’m not sure that anyone can answer that for certain but for me it raised an almost worrying prospect that the body influences the mind just as much as the mind influences the body.

In my own thoughts (wherever they may begin and end) I’ve probably just thought of the body as a shell for the ‘I’ inside.

I and you without a body move

The prospect that consciousness could even just  be the side effect of neurons firing in a particular way and reliant on a certain biological structure in the physical brain perhaps dents my own feeling the ‘I’ inside the body would desperately enjoy being freed from the constraints of the physical body. It sound much more like a co-dependency arrangement.

The point at which we become self aware seems related to a certain point in our development. Perhaps even at a point that the physical brain reaches a certain point of physical formation. The body may even be the one that’s really in the driving seat.

The programme also dealt cast a modicum of doubt over the notion of autonomous free will and determination. Maybe we are more at the mercy of random electrical impulses than we would like to contemplate.

For UK viewers the Horizon programme is still available for a while on the BBC iPlayer

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Public Enemy Postie

Image via Wikipedia

The phone-in on the radio in the background tells me that there’s not a lot of love lost between the public and the humble postal worker as the prospect of strikes loom.

I find it quite sad how many people can only see the how a strike would inconvenience them rather than any degree of empathy for a rapidly diminished workforce who are enduring an antagonistic management and a government hell bent of paving the service for part privatisation.

Meanwhile much of Britain at times unable to put themselves in the shoes of others and finds it easier to believe that everybody else is having a cushier time than they are.

Striking, it has to be said, is seen in this instance as akin to a man with a gun at his own head and threatening to blow his own brains out if he doesn’t get what he wants. Unlike say France striking seems to be a less effective bargaining chip in this country  perhaps because in Britain today there is much less of a sense in the wider population that we are all ‘in it together’ any more.

In this environment it would seem that the public has probably now been won over to the prospect of opening up the domestic postal service to commercial competition.

Another one bites the dust. Will we miss it when it’s gone or is it just  now a service that is past its metaphorical sell by date?

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Monophonic Minority To Polyphonic Ubiquity

more about “BBC – Press Office – BBC Four autumn …“, posted with vodpod

BBC4 explores the historical quirk that was Synth Britannia on October 16th (with the usual time shifted repeats on and around that date). Obviously of interest to anyone who ever fiddled around with a synthesizer (that’d include me then) or anyone who has a passing interest in the influence that the early years of electronic music had on the British music scene of the late 70′s to early 80′s.

Also this autumn BBC4 will be exploring Metal Britannia. Not sure I’ll go out of my way for that one but each to their own musical tastes eh.