A new year, a new hobby I don’t write about programming enough. This is a shame because it is a very interesting subject and I find that the problem solving aspects of programming are very satisfying. Keenly aware of the need to do more hobby programming and to get up to speed on areas of software development that I’ve been neglecting, I have decided to give myself the project of creating a computerised version of the UNO card game.

A question of identity Three letters for Dad in the mail today, three variations on our surname including the aquatic Dory version and the lesser-spotted Dorny. It is perhaps best not to go back to the time he was accidentally listed in the Thompson directory as Mr. Dopey, bringing forth prank calls from all teenagers within a ten mile radius. Fortunately, Dr. Dorey doesn’t have this problem with his mail: he doesn’t get any.

Background Ask anyone into pop music between 1991 and 1993 about The Shamen, and you’ll either receive a flood of euphoric good will about excellent tracks like Move Any Mountain, LSI, and Phorever People1; or they will rant at you about the evils of Ebeneezer Goode. The Shamen are either one of the pantheon of great acts from early 90’s dance and electronic music, or they are a shameless vaudeville novelty act.

Since the run there has been a bit of a hiatus in this blog. I wrote about how running was making me feel better. In fact, I should have said more. I recently stopped taking the antidepressants that I had been taking for eighteen months. This has been my longest period taking such medication but the running made me feel sufficiently good to decide that I could stop taking them.

So, Saturday. Finally. The big day. Would I a) be able to get to Greenwich in time for the registration? and b) be able to make it all the way around the course without collapsing and crying? Happily the answer to both questions was a resounding “Yes!” and I really enjoyed it. The weather was really good, especially compared to the two days before hand, and Marc came along to take some brilliant photos.

A Weekend In The City: Background This is the youngest album I have chosen for this series. I try to pick albums that are at least ten years old but every now and then, I will think of an album that matches the sort of things I want to write about. That’s the case here. A Weekend in the City is an unusual album that, in a reversal of the old adage, is “easy to love but hard to admire”.

Crystallising the world, the body, or the mind? At last, Ballard in full flow. The Crystal World (TCW) is definitely the most enjoyable of the early trio of apocalyptic novels. It takes the successful elements of the first two and embellishes them with new details and ideas. At time of writing, TCW is definitely the best Ballard novel that I have read in its entirety. The book begins with a steamer travelling up a river in Cameroon carrying the novel’s main protagonist Edward Sanders, a doctor at a hospital for lepers.

I bought this album in the summer between my two years at college. I remember listening to this music under skies glowering with clouds so 1997 must have been a poor summer. I’d just bought a book of photography too, which placed photos from the north and south poles on opposite pages. I bought it mainly for the penguins that were, of course, on pretty much every other page. The pictures of snow and ice soon became the ideal companions to this album.

The world created by nature versus the world constructed by humans On to The Drought by J. G. Ballard in my ongoing quest to read and review all of his novels. This is his second novel, if we assume his convention of never acknowledging “The Wind From Nowhere” as being his first novel. “The Drought” itself was renamed from “The Burning World” and additional content added later on. This was quite common practice in SF in the 50s and 60s where novels were serialised in magazines like Amazing SF and Interzone.

When is understated not understated? The trouble with writing a series of articles all themed somehow is that eventually you might find something that sits naturally in the sequence but at the same time goes against the grain a little. Et voila, I give you “The Circle & The Square” by Red Box. An album that hardly anyone has heard containing two top 10 UK singles that probably everyone has heard.

Does Science Fiction have to be believable to be meaningful? Should science fiction have predictive power? In plotting the vast unknowns of the future, should authors aim for prescience? Will people be able to say of the best SF novels in five hundred years time that some novels were right about some things and that these novels are better than the ones that didn’t? I would say no, otherwise we would be remarkably unfair on an awful lot of good writing.

I discovered The Aloof while listening to the Top 40 When I was younger, I used to listen to the Top 40 every Sunday. To begin with, this was partly an endurance thing and partly an obsession with one day seeing Roxette top the charts - alas, they never did, though for one thrilling spring “Joyride” did flirt with the upper reaches of the chart. Listening to the charts is probably the best way to become a lover of music.

This week Arcade Fire released their hotly anticipated third album “The Suburbs”. I loved “Neon Bible” but critics found it preachy, as overbearing as the religious folk it sought to satirise. I disagree and think it was an impressive continuation from an exciting debut. “The Suburbs” steps on from their previous two albums, both in subject matter and tone. It’s sad, thoughtful, resigned, angry and tetchy - among other things. “The Suburbs” isn’t the understated classic that I want to discuss though: with all the praise and plaudits, it may never suit this new thread of posts.

Reading “Crash” at 17 left me in a state of numb shock. It got me hooked and left me with J. G. Ballard as one of my favourite authors. I then devoured a short story collection called “Myths of the Near Future” around the same time. You may recognise it because the Klaxons appropriated the title for their debut album. Those stories captured my imagination, in particular the eponymous story of a world gone to run amid “space sickness”.