NORTHERN PLANNER

In case you were wondering what all the cryptic ‘get Marcus’ stuff was about, here’s the explanation. Marcus said The Smiths were rubbish. Now I happen to love the Smiths and told him so, wondering if Marcus had lost his musical taste in the land that loves Hasslehof.

Marcus got all shirty, claiming that Boney M are:

1. German (correct)

2. Good, ergo being in Germany cannot affect musical taste, and better than the Smiths anyway (dead wrong).

To settle the argument, we turn to you, the discerning blog reader to decide through voting.

There will be three rounds.

Here’s the schedule:

• Round 1: Best Album artwork: (Sunday 9th – Thursday 13th)
• Round 2: Best Music: (Sunday 16th – Thursday 20th)
• Round 3: Culture influence beyond the band: (Sunday 23rd – Thursday 27th)

The loser has to Ipod sing the winning band’s music online. It was flying to other’s home city to buy them a beer, but Marcus let me off since I have no holiday time and no money. Also he knows that the shame of singing Boney M is enough.

But it won’t come to that of course, because common sense will prevail.

And Marcus, or Kaiser or whatever you wish to call yourself, you may be cleverer and more likable than me, but in the end you have no chance. The darkness from the North is ready.

Here’s his lame launch if you can be bothered.

I’m going to need all the dark energy I can muster this week. The precocious David Mortimer is doing a week’s work experience with me. Exactly how I’m going to avoid him showing me up I don’t know. With any luck, I can mine hime for ideas and pass them off as my own when he’d gone. I feel better already.

While we were in London to see Prince, we had a look at Canary Wharf, since it was a stone’s throw from Greenwich. I used to work there and wanted to show Julie what it was like, even though it’s changed a bit since I was there ten years ago.

It’s funny how going back somewhere brings things flooding back. I was miserable, hating my job selling advertising for the Independent, and not too keen on wearing a suit and tie either. Every single day seemed to last forever, I did have a laugh in London too but in the end I couldn’t wait to leave. I was a different person back then doing the things you would a 23 year old singleton to do in London, it’s strange to think of that person, who hadn’t made enough mistakes yet to know how little he knew. I do have something common with my old self though.

That’s fight. I was angry then, I used every ounce of loathing and hatred for that job to get me through endless interviews, or should I say rejections, for my first agency job.It got me through the Docklands Light Railway (no Jubilee Line then) and living with two stockbrokers who played war games. (The other flatmate helped, an impossibly good looking Frenchman called David who was a runner for a film company. I managed to meet some interesting women thanks to him – basically the friends of his endless supply if love interest – "’Bonjour, I’m Daveeed",  was all it took for him).

I’m angry now, frustrated, ready for a fight. So I’m ready to churn up some lengths in the pool, I’m going to do my job twice as well as ever before, and Marcus Brown is about to find out what happens when you mess with an angry Yorkshireman. Rage can be destructive, but if you can control is, it provides the energy to go that little bit further, just a bit faster, be just a bit better.

Things will be dark around here for a little while. This mostly to do with something I dearly wanted to happen looking like it won’t. I don’t know for sure that it’s the case, but if it is, I have reason to believe it’s to do with me trying to tell people what they wanted to hear, rather than standing my ground. And it was all about rigour too.

As someone who has endless fight in them, and goes on about doing it right enough on this blog, I can’t quite work out what to angry about the most; being a clot who should have known better, or the (potential) thing I missed out on.

So things will be a touch flinty around here for awhile. This isn’t all that bad, since there’s the small matter of showing Marcus who’s boss. Some of you may not know what that means yet, but you will.

This would be enough, but that swim I was training for got canceled too. I’ve been quietly simmering about this, but the above is tipping me over the edge.

This is only the start.

Thanks to the wonders of Typepad allowing you time when posts are published, by the time you read this I will be on a train bound for London. I’m off to see Prince this weekend.

This little man is the Marmite of music, you love him and hate him. I happen to think Prince is brilliant.

Rewind back to the Brit Awards 1996. Prince walks off the stage to thunderous applause, after finishing a blistering set, a little smile on his face. He’d killed them again..after all these years, teh daft name change, the duff albums, he still had it in him to just blow them away.

It was exactly the same expression I’ve seen every time I’ve seen him live. On stage there is quite simply no one to touch him. From the moment he comes out to the final encore, he has you and he won’t let you go until he’s given you a good seeing to. And he plays guitar at least as well as anyone else out there.

On record of course, he’s been a different proposition recently, mostly average, sometimes good, now and again with flashes of the old genius, which makes him even more frustrating.

Maybe someone can only be that brillaint for so long, like Bowie’s run that started with Ziggy Stardust and ended with Scary Monsters. And mark my words, he was that good. He may have used a lot of infuences, but for a awhile there was nothing like Prince. He was a mass of contradictions; painfully shy off stage while charismatic enough to blow an audience away on it, deeply religious yet one of the perviest singers ever, neither black nor white, androgenous….these tensions peppered a string of albums that started with For You and ended with Lovesexy. Prince’s music had a dirtiness, a danger that few others could touch. And the wild experimentation meant that his albums sounded like nothing else.

It’s not for everyone, and for some it’s hard to get past the image, but that’s a real shame. He was breathtaking.

He was still really good until the horific name change saga, but less focused with some terrible experiments with rappers, and the music became too polished, safe even.

What’s really scary is the songs most people won’t have heard. Lots of people will mention Purple Rain, but Sign ‘o’ the Times sounded like it came from another planet. You can really here the claustophic urgency of a man working alone in a studio. And much of his best stuff wasn’t released…songs like Crystal ball and Crucial. Incedible creativity that most will never hear.

It’s a sad comment in the way he lost it that Bog George from the Black Album is funny comment on gangsta rap, yet 5 years later he was trying to copy the very thing he’d mocked.

But tomorrow night, it will be Prince live. And you just know that by the end of the night he will have that smirk again. He’ll have blown us away yet again.

More science geekery, but last bit for a while I promise. This is maybe the weirdest post I’ve ever written, but so be it.

When you go down as small as atoms, they are all basically the same…….which seems a bit odd since everything we observe in the universe that exists at our size is so wildly varied. It’s all made of the same kind of stuff, how can it look so different?

A possible explanation they’re throwing around is the idea of the universe acting like some sort of supercomputer, outputting a version of the universe we all see, while not really being the REALITY of it.

Don’t make that face, it’s not that far fetched when you think about it. An electronic computer combines a simple code to create 3 dimensional looking images. Think of atoms as bits of code that all look simple until you pull back and get chemical structure, and then pull even further back and get cats, dogs, stars and people.

When you think of things like this, everything we see is precisely that – shimmering information, no more permanent or real than the picture you see on your PC screen. It’s not real, it’s made of thousands of pixels, and the pixels themselves are made of simple code, imagine the world as a three dimensional computer screen and you get the picture, as it were.

BUT a computer’s information is manipulated by a physical architecture, usually stored in a computer chip. Some information theorists believe the world is like that…the information has no meaning without someone to READ IT, and it needs a system to process it.

From our point of view, subatomic stuff is like putting a magnifying glass to a computer screen and looking at the pixels. But we have to understand the processing architecture BEHIND those pixels to make sense of how the universe works.

Anyway, we’re all made of stars, the atoms in us are billions of years old, and billions of years later these borrowed atoms will still exist, but we won’t. If we’re fleeting patterns in this long term information, in what sense are we real?

Computers use 2 types of information, that’s it. The entire universe is built from standard particles……and these atoms are mostly empty space. So what’s really more important, the real solid stuff that isn’t (mostly) there, or the information it conveys? Like Lego.

The bricks are standard, but imagine you’ve built a cathedral model for them, but the next day all human culture is wiped from th earth, but the cathedral remains. In what sense is it anything more than a pile of bricks without us to process the information it imparts as a ‘cathedral’?

When you think like that, on what level does the universe exist without beings like us to observe it? To give it meaning? And that not so daft either.

Electrons are really important, it’s these little things that give us electricity when they flow. But we don’t really know what are, and when we try to observe them, it alters what they will do. How does it know you’re looking? Quite seriously, if you fire an electron at a wall with two holes in it and don’t observe it, the results show it went through BOTH. Yet when it’s observed, it goes through one or the other.

If we do test on an electron to see if it behaves like a wave – it does. But if we do another to see if it behaves like a particle, guess what? You got it, particle it is.

Are we making these things happen by watching them? Is what we see nothing more than information created by sub-atomic code? Hold on! I’ve see a film about that!

This story from the New Scientist (gist only I’m afraid, they charge for the whole thing) turns the received wisdom about the importance of breakfast on its head.

‘Eat a good breakfast it’s the most important meal of the day’, they say. Well sometimes it’s worse than going hungry, at least for mental performance. While a low GI breakfast works to help boost memory performance, its not so good for tasks that require a very quick reaction, so if you want to return a tennis serve, or win a game of snap, it may be better to do without.

Makes sense really, you can imagine evolution making hungry animals more alert so they can catch dinner……..

And if your stressed, be careful, breakfast may make you feel worse!

I wonder what Tony the Tiger would say.