The only thing we ever do.

                                                    Happy Birthday !            The new British Royal Prince has barely been on the planet 24 hours but he has already been put to work. His job as Prince (name) of Cambridge has already been decided. Isn't this compulsory labour ? Won't his child-hood be shadowed by the expectation to act according to his job?   Shouldn't we at least ask him if he wants to be a Prince?            Not satisfied with child exploitation, British society will be grooming him for his future job that, in all probability, will be 40 or 50 years from now. It has already been decided that, at some point ...

                                                                                 Pour encourager les autres.             In Stanley Kubrick's film Paths of Glory, Kirk Douglas plays a World War 1 French Colonel who refuses to obey a suicidal attack order. The Top Brass deal with this by choosing three soldiers at random to be executed. Within the system, the lower orders must obey the orders of their commanders no matter how ludicrous they are. For if the command structure were to falter, who knows what might happen?         ...

                                                                  What is it?           The part of communication that is giving information can be most easily expressed as: Describing and Explaining. We describe and explain whenever we give information, and from this information there is an idea, because communication always, and most basically, works as:                                              Information ---------> Idea ...

                        Blair/Thatcher - 21 years in power: absolutely barking.                                          Bela Lugosi is unwell.              The asking + checking ( Bela Lugosi) parts of communication are almost everywhere most often greeted with garlic, crucifixes and sharpened stakes.  Asking + checking  is met not only with the anger of the pitch-forked mob, but also with the fury of the guy in the castle. Those in power recognise that any effort to communicate represents a danger to those whose privileged position must never be exposed to the examination of sunlight lest it turn to dust. Human history ...

                                                             Asgard: remarkably dull, considering.      The late film critic Roger Ebert described 2011's Thor as: "a failure as a movie, but a success as marketing". Indeed, with the talent involved and the basic interest from the fans of the comic it was never going to be a particularly difficult sell. Yet it was rubbish. It lacked almost anything of interest. Dull scene after dull scene ponderously dripped into the expensive production barrel which was then dutifully scraped.      However, clearly a lot of people enjoyed it and Ebert also pointed out how well the film was doing on Rotten Tomatoes , so why ...

                                      Wherever you're going I'm going your way.                                              The murky brown waters of the canal near Yokohama Station contain a lot more action than the casual observer might at first notice. There`s the usual carp, but also some pied wagtails and the odd duck. Crabs claw a living from the concrete banks and very occasionally a lost frog will attempt the survival course of rusted bicycles and dead umbrellas.                        ...

    When I first came to Japan I worked in Ofuna, a city about fifteen minutes from Yokohama by train. I would get the train back to Yokohama every evening,  Occasionally, an Anglo-Australian expeditionary force would reconnoitre such points of interest as the "Pub and Snack" whose neon sign promised familiar comforts.  Remarkably, this venue completely failed to contain a dart-board and a jar of pickled eggs on the counter. Instead, it seemed to be some fiendish kind of Japanese device for removing a substantial amount of money from foolish pockets for very little entertainment in return. Wiser but poorer, we were.     All part of the normal learning process when moving to a new place, of course, but what would baffle me for over a year was nothing more complex than the station's escalator.     Here's Ofuna Station and its escalator in 2013:                ...