Thoughts from the bottle.

Two heavy days of work is quite hard, especially for a soft scientist unused to such manual labour. Although I was eased into it by frequent short shifts for a couple of years, so managed it just fine. It is tiring but having the job compressed into two days gets it over with. Fewer hours, okay, less pay, but much more time to do what the job was supposed to let me do – write.

I will have to accept that the period from Friday night to Sunday night is knackered. There is a big silver lining in that the rest of the week is free. Another silver lining is Tesco having Whyte and MacKay at £13 – a low enough price to tolerate this blend. It’s a bit harsh and if it wasn’t Sunday I could have got Glen Orchy for a few pennies more, but Lidl was closed.

The baker at work has a new assistant. This will be her seventh, and she hasn’t been baker for a year yet. It’s not her, she’s lovely, it’s just that assistants tend to be on their way to somewhere else – college, or a better job. This does not prevent me strolling past when they are together and casually saying ‘Another assistant? I didn’t think they’d let you have any more…  after what you did to the last one’. Then making a hasty exit.

Not yet though. The time must be just right. Maybe next weekend. I can wait.

The baker knows me well enough to impart words of wisdom. ‘Sometimes he’s lying and it sounds like the truth, and sometimes he tells you the truth and it sounds like he’s lying. Sometimes it just makes no sense at all’.

There is also a new young girl cleaner who I have not met and never will, unless I call in midweek. Apparently she has blue hair. Nothing wrong with that, my grandmother had blue hair but then hers was natural. In all the 23 years our lives overlapped, it was always blue. She never succumbed to the vanity of dyeing it another colour. I have the impression that blue hair was once common because all her friends had it too. It must have died out because of birds. They all wore nets on their heads to keep the birds off.

I have already dubbed Blue-haired Cleaner ‘The Purple Minion’. I hope she stays around long enough to find out. She is a temporary, apparently, along with one named in my absence as Forrest Gump (by a reliable source) and Frankenstein’s First Attempt, who has temped before. We have a new girl in the mornings who has been described as ‘a bit special‘ and I have been warned that if I meet her, I am not to confuse her too much or she might break.

Challenge accepted.

She’s pretty safe though, she works mornings and mornings give me a headache. I might never meet her. Purple Minion I must meet. She also wears a dog collar, apparently. Not the one worn by vicars. The one  worn by dangerous dogs. With spikes. She sounds exactly the sort of person who would enjoy my books.

Speaking of books. I read ‘The Men Who Stare At Goats’ some time ago and have recently read ‘Extraordinary Knowing’ by Elizabeth Lloyd Mayer because, well, I like the weird stuff. It gives me ideas. Coincidentally, there was a story in the Mail about telepathy today except… it was nothing of the kind.

The ‘sender’ had a magic electric hat that transcribed his thoughts of horizontal and vertical movements into 0 and 1. That is the only interesting part and it’s not really very interesting. Brainwave reading and feedbacks have been around since hippies bought computers.

He used those 0 and 1 data to construct ASCII characters to make two four-letter words (no, not those two, a benign two). Then his part in the experiment ended.

The data was then sent halfway around the world (who thought we’d ever be able to do that, eh?) and was bleeped as light flashes representing 0 and 1 into the eyes of blindfolded and earplugged idiots who thought that they might see or hear the other side of the planet by accident. The ‘receivers’ knew how to translate the 0 and 1 impulses into ASCII.

That is not telepathy. Its only mildly interesting part is in the transform of thought into computer data at the start and that has been done many times. Remember the alpha wave feedback stuff? The young ones won’t but it was an amateur electronics project at one time.

The rest is Email and code-reading. Load of cobblers. And yes, I am slipping into a Romulus Crowe rage at this nonsense. How the Hell did this shit get into a peer reviewed journal? Then again, anti-tobacco nonsense does so I shouldn’t be too surprised.

Is telepathy real? I don’t know and am not likely to. I am not keen on listening to what people say out loud and as to ‘what’ they think, well, in most cases I’m still wondering ‘whether’.

The sight thing in ‘Extraorinary Knowing’ was especially nteresting  It will get a post of its own once this knackeredness fades.