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This weekend; Friday 5th to Sunday 7th October, welcome to the twilight zone. It is a funny thing how several institutions can be rattled to their foundations at the same time; what association you have to synchronicity/serendipity/happenstance is almost irrelevant, but, just out of whimsy, what sort of weekend was it for the supernatural/crop circles/weird weather afficionados? I saw the looming typhoon over the Shanghai race track, and expected the worst. The remarkable rookie, Lewis Hamilton got the dark forces in his tyres and failed miserably; a little further east, the tennis in Tokyo was being turned on its head; Stuttgart saw a nineteen year old brightly coloured youngster shake tennis's number two in the WTA, and she is, as I type, shaking the world's number one. Rugby saw the dullest team of the World Cup take an easy game off the Australians, and the famous All Blacks, more suitably now called 'the All Greys', went down in a match with the French controlled by a partially blind referee; I hold no prejudice against handicapped people; they have risen to great heights in my world; it's the ones who only see one side of the competition I loathe, and dark forces indeed put these people in the wrong place at the right time. However, in the face of dark forces, it pays to have a good loud laugh; they can't stand that; so ho ho ho to all you winners who lost; it was real amusing, especially the bloke who wagered $5,000,000 the NZers would win the Rugby World Cup; perhaps the dark forces came from the bookies? I have a scientist friend who is the greatest disbeliever in such nonsense; however, he was strolling in the Oxfordshire countryside early one morning and came upon a crop circle; he was the first on the scene, and was able to inspect its form and doubtless authenticity/inexplicability, which bemuses him enormously to this day.... whether he's changed how he approaches his science is dubious, however, but he is my source of the information regarding the dark forces at work in the agricultural world.... I just have to frame my questions in terms a scientist understands and can easily respond to.... Yeah right; have you ever noticed (I might have asked this before) how all the scientists in your class at school were the most dysfunctional members of the school; never good at sport, not good mixers, probably shy/ugly/geeky/obsessed? I don't know where they are now, mostly, but those I do know of did some strange research which includes mashing the brains of lab frogs, (cannulating, I think it is called) and observing the results. So I've always been a little dubious of most science; the stuff MIT publishes is pretty good, consumer orientated of focussed at the drug companies; say yes/no to drugs; dark forces indeed, and I have no need of side effects personally, as those are dark forces I can control by avoidance..... a bit like TV.... surprised myself to get emotionally involved in an eccentric episode of an always weird medical drama last night; it's fiction, after all, and is just some director playing with my attention span; so I surfed the channels and got a replay of the All Grey's defeat by France, and they showed NZ's Prime Minister lurking in the shadows of the grandstand; I'd hate for those dark forces to be at my big game. Nuff said.

Blog S

How do we get 'Shanghai' into our language in so many ways? What does it mean to you? I know I used a shanghai catapult as a kid to put small rocks where they shouldn't ever go, stupidity at it's commonest; and I think more than once my fortunes have been shanghaied, and several of my acquaintances have had the same, negative experience, but, having said that, I also spent a fair amount of time in that bizarre grey city, where east really meets west, where I was denied a room in the Shanghai Mansions, my favourite piece of pre WW2 architecture, even though I was brimming with money, as these people have an inherent fear of how to dispose of my body if I should die on their premises.... no kidding; I had to stay instead in a nearby hotel where there were no showers, and one was obliged to go outside, round the block, and up a steel stairway to a strange commercial showerhouse, where you paid for a locker, undressed totally, put the key round your wrist, collected a towel from the indifferent concierge, and stepped into a low concrete room with twenty showers around the walls, the floor ankle deep in soapy water, and, abluting oneself under the agreeably hot deluge, one became aware that every chinese who came into that space was pissing directly into the water as he arrived at his shower space, and with never less than fifteen people showering and pissing, I was amusingly preoccupied with how I could step out of that space and assure myself that the urine of the locals was not between my toes still...... I needed, too, some film for my camera, and calling at the only photographic shop I could find, was only able to buy black and white film, looking remarkably like a Fuji product , but bought his entire stock of film, for a very modest price, and shot the lot in three weeks of walking around this strangely conflicting environment, but, upon reflecting about the place as I departed, chose never to develop that film, but carry it all, undeveloped, in an Xray bag, to this day, and maybe, should the chemicals be handy, I might just push the thousand or so images out one day and hang them in a flash Chinese exhibition hall to remind them of where they were not so long ago. Because I watched the Shanghai Grand Prix, with a typhoon looming over the new millennium architecture, in the reclaimed swamp of precious wetlands, and wondered if it could be any wetter than the Japanese one, which should have been stopped, and marveled that the enormous run of grandstands was completely packed with what must be entirely new fans for this weirdest of sports, and what do they get out of seeing the embodiment of 21st Century technology, when so little of it actually comes out of the Asian environment. Sure, Bridgestone is Japanese, Honda and Toyota are there, and a pc board or two will have semiconductors and resistors sourced in Asia, but, when you see how the masses of these people get about on a busy day in their corner of the world, and the immense gap between the man with a Mercedes ant the millions with a bicycle, and how they are so excited to be in those grandstands watching motorcars representing the pinnacle of performance and attainment, then, well, you do the math, we are all shangaied. Nuff said.