Another true story. Stranded mid pacific.

A young man lies sleeping in his cabin aboard a 20,000 tonne, 30-year-old Russian Icebreaker. It is 4am and twilight has become bright enough, but the sun has not risen yet. The décor of his cabin is all wood effect with a 1960’s feel. Certain points of interest are labeled with tags in Russian - the plug sockets, the intercom, the alarm bell. The ship is mid pacific and the retro-fitted aircon struggles to keep the room cool. The noisy air rushing in, and the ships engine do not disturb him, for he has lived like this for 2 months now, and has another 2 months to go.

4 hours ago he was on watch, and looked into the deep dark of a lightless ocean, then to their position on the charts. A week away from anywhere, there are few places on earth as remote, he reflected. The weather was calm, and the forecast and barometer suggested this would be the case for the foreseeable future.

A force like he had never felt before gripped him. Mid-ocean something was shaking himself, his colleagues, and 20,000 tonnes of vessel violently. A feeling unnatural to him, as he woke suddenly, he got up, put some clothes on, and headed to the bridge as the violent shaking made every hand rail judder from his grip.

The captain was already on the bridge, as captains often are in moments of nautical interest or emergency, and had stopped the engine.

A small slender, british man, he lifted the sound-powered telephone that had been built to survive nuclear fallout. He wound the handle and spoke to the chief engineer, who was understandably vexed. Everything in the engine room was mechanically as expected, except for the fact that the propeller, a 15tonne chunk of brass, would not move. The most powerful part of the ship, engineering was a likely culprit for such forceful discomfort.

The chief and 2^nd Engineer were both keen recreational divers. As such, they had brought their diving gear with them. Scuba equipment is a handy thing mid-pacific, though not part of a ships compulsory outfit.

5am, a week from civilization, the chief engineer donned their scuba equipment as the sun rose over a placid Pacific sea. A boat was lowered and without a second thought they entered the deep, unfathomable abyss.

Rising from the surface minutes later, they told everybody that they could see a humble log lodged in the propeller. Waterlogged, the log must have attained neutral buoyancy in that particularly saline water, and had lurked in that unimaginably vast volume of water, waiting for natural decay. It could never in a million of years have expected to be wrested from its slumber by a 20tonne piece of brass rotating around 120 times per minute. It would have expected even less to have won the fight, which it did.

They chief and second engineer attached a rope to the submerged log, lodged in the propeller, and the crew wound the rope around a capstan. Powering up the winch, the reluctant log let go of the propeller, and was hoisted onto deck.

Engine checks were made, no seals had been broken and the propeller was slowly rotated.

Happy that passage could continue, the engine was again powered up and power shifted to the giant electric motor which drove the propeller.

Happy with events the young man went back to his cabin and went to sleep. Ready for another day, and a glass of beer in Tahiti, a week away.

The end.

A True Story.

A burly Polish man on a steel ship walks along the decks towards an officer dressed smartly in uniform, smoking a cigarette by the starboard lifeboat. The officer speaks in a british accent:

‘Adam, the airtight doors on deck 2 need to be undogged and opened before we get in. Take a man and see to it, would you?’

The Polish bosun speaks:

‘OK chief. I do it myself. No problem’,

The chief officer looks at the bosun with concern, but respects his experience.

‘Very well’

The chief watches Adam walk away along the deck, a plume of smoke leaving his mouth.

Adam approaches the doors on deck 2. Sledge hammer in hand he hits the dogs on the door. One by one they ungrip the door, until only 2 remain. The head of Adams hammer flys off and skids along the deck several metres behind him. Unperturbed, he looks at the second last dog and bashes it in the desired direction with the palm of his right hand. It gradually unlodges until with his final thrust the metal dog spins round at speed and smashes the back of his hand causing a cracking noise and blood to pour from his hand at the point of impact. Adam looks at the back of his bleeding, broken right hand for a moment without an ounce of concern.

He approaches the final metal dog and uses the palm of his other hand to smash the dog in the desired, unlocked direction. After several hits with his whole body weight behind them, the metal dog dislodges, spins around, and smashes the back of his left hand. The bone cracks and blood now streams from both hands.

The door now undogged, Adam walks to the electric motor which will open the door.

As the blood drips on the legs of his boiler suit, Adam leans over and uses his elbow to activate the lever. The noisy motor whirs and the door starts to open.

The chief officer walks down some stairs to where Adam is. Their eyes meet and the chief notices the blood on the boiler suit and floor, and the flaccidity of Adams hands.

Without emotion Adam breaks their eye contact and watches the door open. The hint of a smile can be detected as he proudly watches the door open, and know another job is well done.

Derren Browns Lottery predicting services Ltd.

OK. There are a million ways he could have done this. None more ridiculous than the next. Illusionists have used the most elaborate setups imaginable (or indeed so simple you would never dare to guess) in order to achieve illusions. In this blog are ways I think Derren Brown may have predicted the lottery numbers last night. It is not how I think he did it, just how he may have. In the buildup he used heavily edited VT's played in a variety of ways that I think indicate that editing and indeed the inherent artifice of most television has a big part to play in the Illusion.

1) Move-matching and spherical image layers on balls.
Thinking about it.. it would make sense if the whole thing was prerecorded - except for the actual BBC footage. That could be superimposed onto the TV screen pretty easily with use of chroma-key. Then when we say the numbers somebody just entered the numbers into the editing software to display the numbers on the balls whose movement on screen has been recorded and determined previously (very convincingly).
If I filmed you a month ago moving some balls I could map the movement of it, rotation/movement etc, then apply that to a layer which i've just entered a number/word/image into. I would be surprised if this is how he did given the anticlimax of it all. But it is how he could have done it. I wouldn't be surprised if on the reveal on Friday he was actually in the BBC studio himself.

2) Left part of screen cutaway
Again, using move matching a stationary layer is held over the left third of the screen, then when the numbers are read out and he's writing them down in order his lovely assistants are putting the balls in place (behind a digital false wall).

Anyway. That's what I think.

Creation.

Come sit my mortal friends, human friends, dirty friends and I will tell ye a tale of the cesspit of origin from whence both you and I were originated. Let ye not be mistaken human , into thinking that you are in any way a clean being. Were you to shower, bathe and scrub for an entire lifetime, your pitiful waste of time could never remove the legacy that enshrouds your very being. Your very organic being. Your very dirty being. For a clean being is not a living being. Without sweat to cool, fecal matter to jettison or shrubs to eat then the chemically balanced waste of space that is your body would cease to function. Not that the universe would care.
So it is we must start at the commencement of life itself. Take from your mind the ipod, the website, the car, the human. Forget you are listening to a radio show, via radio, or computer. Such items of artifice are far removed from the actual way of things. Put yourself- if you will- by a marsh. This marsh possesses no plantlife, no insects, for such things are far ahead of our present predicament. Within the lifeless murky waters a cloud of chemical imbalance exists. In a moment of chance transit it meets a region of another chemical imbalance. Together they appear to have created a third region. A new region of chemical existence. Fast forward us now several millions years hence. the transaction we spoke of before has now repeated itself several million times, and now an orb exists. Withing this orb there exists every chemical that existed, however now in a dance entirely alien to the tundra of planetary lifelessness, they work in unison. They are sentient. They are alive.


As before it learned to use those thing nearby to enhance its existence, we now see that it learns a lesson that will still hold sway among boring animals 10 million years hence - safety in numbers.
A pair of cells became a trio of cells. A trio became ten and so on until the sight we now behold is a haunting spectre, navigating the murky depths, in hunt of other beings who underwent similar metamorphoses in a similar environ, but yet evolved entirely differently. Moving through a motion not entirely dissimilar to sexual writhing, the beast lurches towards its goal in an appalling manner. You would vomit if you could see it. Chasing one prey our beast has now found its ugly head piercing the membrane that capped off its previous world. Flying now our hideous abomination writhes in slow motion, hoping to again catch an element of its known world. Its dirty world.


Never before had this beast experienced such trauma as when it bodily crashed to the earth it had never known before. Indeed, such was the incomprehensible scale of the revelation our 'fish' was too stupid to realise, that as its skull impacted on a mighty pebble and its brains were smote across its immense 10mm diameter, our fishes last thoughts were not of the gravitas of the situation - but more on how next time it should hunt that prey differently. This process was again repeated countless times. Until one of our fish's descendants finally survived the unsurvivable trauma, and gasped at the air of this new realm it distantly had a faint cognition of. Until to navigate, their fins became nubs of vile, slimy semi-usefulness. Until the earth was over run by beings who created for themselves their own environments in which to thrive, exerting their own biological hegemony upon their own prostrate world. Anthills, beehives, houses, sprang up the world over.
Which brings us to today. We must breath a chemical to survive. To survive you must eat the fruit of the earth and in return we give back the earth the mushy unwanted pulp of our biological snobbery. We must escape the real through films, video games and our own ongoing inconsequential drama. Such as this.

INT. BRAIN - DAY

I hate blogs. Seriously.

Everytime I see one or have considered doing one I feel a slight nausea to think that I (or anybody for that matter) should deem their own words and opinions to be of sufficient gravitas to be broadcast to the big wide world. Often intimate words, often indiscriminately pointless, self agrandising, self-depracting, all destined to be meh'ed at by the masses.

Another reason I dislike blogs is because of the fact that they only exist in the ether. You can not touch them, when you die nobody will find these in your attic and if humanity were to cease right now no subsequent species would discover these words. They would find the server and use it as a coffee table. No doubt - more on this later.

So here I am. Entering fingers first into the treacherous cringe worthy world of 'blogging'.
My words dont matter. Your words dont matter. The moment we think they do is the moment we lose ourselves in the artifice of the world we have created. We are beasts who cannot survive without the organic, without chemicals.

No doubt this blog is going to be shit. I can in no way lay claims to having been a pioneer of blogging (gladly). In fact I view such claims akin claiming to be a pioneer of littering. I cant 'code', im not entirely 'web-savvy', 'web 2.0', or '*insert slightly cringemaking slogan*'. All I know is that I have seen a lot, done a lot and think a lot.

Hopefully this method of catharsis will work and we will all reach some ridiculous kind of electronic nirvana. Probably not though.

the end