Alterna-Front

The Best-Kept Secret

Being an easy pushover for a good UFO book (something I’ve not shaken since my childhood), I’ve just read Jacques Vallée’s and Paola Harris’ Trinity: The Best-Kept Secret. It’s an account of a hitherto unknown UFO crash in San Antonio in 1945 very close to Ground Zero where the Manhattan Project had tested the first atomic bomb just days before. In reality, other than the testimony of old men who saw the crash as small children and a piece of aluminium, there’s not a great deal of physical evidence. Nevertheless Vallée and Harris link the first wave of UFO phenomena with the use of nuclear weapons and with the 1964 Zamora close encounter in nearby Socorro and the similar 1965 Valensole, France close encounter. Vallée’s approach is open-minded and investigative and he is as interested in the psychic effect of anomalous incidents as their physical. Though it’s never entirely clear what Vallée believes, he seems to interpret the UFO phenomena as a form of communication or signal to influence human society.

Goodbye, Things

Just read Goodbye, Things by Fumio Sasaki which advocates an extreme form of extreme ascetic minimalism. Fumio argues that through discarding material possessions other than those that are absolutely essential is the path to happiness. I can’t disagree with most of Sasaki’s advice but feel that it’s aimed at much younger adults without families. He’s clear about a need to shift priorities. For example: “There’s no point in putting up with a terrible job or working yourself to death just to maintain your standard of living. By having less and lowering your minimum living costs, you can go anywhere you want. Minimalism can really be liberating.“

UK Grim

But what’s gone on, what can I see?
You’re all getting mugged by the aristocracy
But what’s gone on, what can I see?
You’re all getting mugged by the right wing beast.

I had a long car journey today which gave me the chance to listen to UK Grim, Sleaford Mods’ new release. Aside from the bleak portrait it paints of Britain, it’s wretchedly – absurdly – funny. The Mods’ appear to have both personal and political hypocrisy in their sights. Andrew Fearn’s synths seem to me to be the soundtrack to the days we are living through here in the UK. (Oh, and without any sense of irony, The Daily Telegraph made UK Grim album of the week with a perfect score!)

Whither the Woes of Winter?

On our walk today we notice the first signs of Spring: the early flowerings, the reddish tips of bushes regrowing after being cut back. It’s still cold, though. My hands are still sore from not wearing gloves. It’s an age thing.

Star Wars-level dismemberment

Alas, Luigi seems to suffer Skywalker degrees of injury in our house lately. He’s been glued several times. He always has that complex shocked-but-resigned-to-suffer expression.

Attentive photography attempt

Realised that – except for two or three family snaps – I haven’t taken a photograph since Christmas. Or non-family photos for a very long time. Which must indicate that I’m not paying enough attention. Inspired by a recommendation to use an old Canon SD1000 as a “sleeper camera”, I hunted through the boxes in the attic until I found my old Canon Ixus 130 which I’m going to put to deliberate use to take attentive photos. I’d certainly like a better camera – and have long had my eye on the old Lumix LX 100 – but the 130 will do for a start.

Older Microblog entries HERE

UK Grim

But what’s gone on, what can I see? You’re all getting mugged by the aristocracy But what’s gone on, what can I see? You’re all getting mugged by the right wing beast. I had a long car journey today which gave me the chance to listen to UK Grim, Sleaford Mods’ new release. Aside from the bleak portrait it paints of Britain, it’s wretchedly – absurdly – funny. The Mods’ appear to have both personal and political hypocrisy in their sights. Andrew Fearn’s synths seem to me to be the soundtrack to the days we are living through here in...

Gone!

After nearly 15 years on Twitter, I’m gone. I’ve never used it that much anyway and was always more of a lurker than active antagonist on the platform. I followed a small number of people, mostly from education, writing and comics. I didn’t post very much. When I added something to my blog it automatically forwards it to Twitter (I’ll end that after this). For the last couple of years I’ve been aware how toxic things have been – particularly in educational discussions. Lots of people I’ve followed for years seem to be on a right-ward shift and don’t just...

Godmode9 Sysnand Backup

For the love of all that is Good, how tortuous is this?

This application requires…

It’s happened! My phone – an iPhone 7 bought in 2016 – is now supposedly too old to update to iOS 16 and, consequently, won’t install newer apps. The phone is perfectly good. It’s in great condition, continues to work really well and seems fast enough to do everything I want. I don’t need a faster processor for games or a better camera lense. Enforced upgrading!

Tom Strong’s Terrific Tales Vol. 1

Got this for £5. Have been after a reasonably-prices copy for at least 5 years.

New Year’s Day

To see in the new year we went for a walk in Hayle Park Nature Reserve and then down into part of the lower Loose Valley. Enjoyable wander.

Obsidian Canvas Tool

Obsidian’s latest update, 1.1.8, introduces canvas, a type of infinite note that encourages visual note-taking. Although it’s only currently available on desktop, it brings much of the functionality of OneNote. Once on mobile/tablet, all that’s needed is a stylus/handwriting  plug-in (which, undoubtedly a developer in the Obsidian community will be working on). Fantastic step forward for the app.

iFixed iPod

Frankensteined a classic iPod out of two broken ones today. I continue to like the idea of a dedicated music player rather than using a phone. It could be familarity and nostalgia that puts me off the current (terribly-designed) mp3 players. At some point I’ll swap out the hard drive for a larger sd card and add a new battery.

FURTHER DOWN THE STREAM...

Gone!

12 November 2022

After nearly 15 years on Twitter, I’m gone. I’ve never used it that much anyway and was always more of a lurker than active antagonist on the platform. I followed a small number of people, mostly from education, writing and comics. I didn’t post very much. When I added something to my blog it automatically forwards it to Twitter (I’ll end that after this). For the last couple of years I’ve been aware how toxic things have been – particularly in educational discussions. Lots of people I’ve followed for years seem to be on a right-ward shift and don’t just...

Gillen’s A.X.E.

16 October 2022

Find myself agreeing with Chad Nevitt’s fierce admiration for Kieron Gillen’s coordination of Marvel’s A.X.E. event: “I was stunned by the complexity of the narrative he is telling. It is absolutely stunning to see the various threads weave in and out of different comics, pulling together all of these characters. Most events have a variety of narrative threads that the writer must hold together, though I find that they’re usually left loose for others to pick up or cast aside when the time comes to focus on a specific, singular endpoint. Somehow, Gillen’s narrative for this event has grown more...

60 Years Ago Today: Love Me Do by The Beatles

5 October 2022

Someone to love. Somebody new. Someone to love. Someone like you. Time plays odd tricks. It’s 60 years ago that The Beatles released Love Me Do on 5th October 1962. The opening harmonica hook remains haunting and evokes the grainy black and white early Sixties. Melancholic images of fog on the Mersey. John, Paul, George and Ringo playing the smoky Cavern Club. Screaming teenage girls tearing out their hair. The thaw in post war austerity. Yes, the first few notes of the harmonica hook are instantly recognisable as redolent of a seeming moment of cultural change in Britain. By the...

October comes with rain whipping around the ankles / In waves of white at night

30 September 2022

Autumn is definitely here. Not the lingering, warm Autumn of early September, but the damp, wet Autumn that points with trembling finger towards Hallowe’en and the first chill winds of Winter. For me, September has been one of reading tales by Algernon Blackwood that seem to anticipate this change of weather: of islands of willows on the Danube, of remote Canadian wilderness, of ghostly monasteries. I’ve also enjoyed reading Thistlebone by T. C. Eglington and Simon Davis. In the background of my September life has been The Advisory Circle, Pye Corner Audio, Boards of Canada and (more upbeat) Stereolab.

Indicators of an Effective Teacher?

27 February 2022

Digging through one of my boxes of stuff, I found this copy of Elizabeth Perrott’s 1982 Effective Teaching, a book I’d bought and intended to read but had put away for the future. It’s a weirdly prescient book: outling many of the approaches to teaching that are currently being promoted in schools. According to the book, Perrott was the director of the International Microteaching Unit at the University of Lancaster. I guess the term “microteaching” captures the general pedagogical approach to classroom practice in schools at the moment.  I’m particularly taken by the question of what are the indicators of...

Fantastic Four No.1 Panel by Panel

11 December 2021

Comparing Panel by Panel with Maximum FF suggests the change in the way that the November 1961 first issue of Fantastic Four seems to be viewed (at least by Marvel). In 2005, Walter Mosley’s presentation of the issue is as an art object: something that “crystallized an art form that has had an impact on our culture”. Mosley delights in Kirby’s “dynamic motion within a single frame” and the way in which the narrative draws a reader into its fictional world which, he says, expressed the world view of a younger generation and “put words to our suspicions”. Chip Kidd’s...

Black Beth and the Devils of Al-Kadesh

3 August 2021

Very glad I found this in W.H. Smiths. Written by Alec Worley with art by Dani, Black Beth is the revival by Rebellion of an obscure British comic originally created in the 1970s (but unused at the time) with one published story appearing in the Scream! Holiday Special in 1988. This is the third adventure of the current version of Black Beth, a sword-and-sorcery “slayer” character (Worley has described her as a mashup of Red Sonja and The Punisher). Beth’s motivation, established in the original story, is “to combat evil in all its vile forms”. Dani’s art is gorgeous and...

Maintaining a #digitalgarden

28 July 2021

Since the mid-1990s, I’ve maintained a personal web site of some sort. Originally my sites were constructed using Frontpage and Dreamweaver, then I used Blogger for a period until around 2010 when I moved over to keeping self-hosted WordPress sites. There was a period when I used it as a form of online diary and then Twitter and Instagram came along and I became confused about where to post and everything became a mess. At least twice I’ve had catastrophic losses of everything I’d written. More recently, I tried to use Micro.blog for about a year before I realised I...

Robert Aickman’s Introduction to The 5th Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories (1969)

10 July 2021

Aickman’s fifth introduction is brief. He summarises his previous views: that ghost stories are separate from both horror and SF and that its “true affinity” is with poetry as it is “a projection and symbolisation of thoughts and feelings” that are excluded from usual written discourse. Ghost stories, he believes, began as tales of the dead returned but have widened to include Romantic notions involving the Imagination. Aickman asserts that “Ghost stories are exercises of the imagination.” Ghost stories are works of art and “the good ghost story offers the freedom of a lyric poem.” Aickman goes on to discuss...

Then we danced the dance ’til the menace got out

27 June 2021

Positively pleased with my new Synology DS220+ NAS. Last week, part of my old NAS, a WD My Book Live, was remotely wiped. WD’s solution is to tell users to disconnect until they investigated the issue. It was clearly too late for me and I was worried that the other part of my NAS, a WD My Cloud, could be similarly affected. (An upgrade earlier this year had prevented the NAS from backing up in the way it had done for years and I’d procrastinated in sorting it out.) My last proper backup was in April so I’ve lost about...

Talk for Learning

8 June 2021

Notes from A Dialogic Teaching Companion by Robin Alexander (2020). Chapter 2 – Talk for Learning In this chapter, Alexander explores the relationship between talk and the development of a child. He examines the shift in the 1970s between the child as “lone scientist” to “apprentice”. The persistence of recitation and the typical oral classroom interactions are explored. Alexander goes on to explain the research-supported positive benefits of classroom talk. Much of the chapter is given to the way in which talk has been stigmatised by politicians and has been now largely removed from the school curriculum, despite the evidence...

Prologue to A Dialogic Teaching Companion

6 June 2021

Notes from A Dialogic Teaching Companion by Robin Alexander (2020) Chapter 1 – Prologue In the Prologue, Robin Alexander gives a case for teaching talk as an essential tool in teaching and learning. He describes the positive value of dialogic teaching and asserts that there is a strong evidence base for using dialogic approaches. He presents his involvement with oracy since the 1980s. Alexander goes on to consider the broader civic value of dialogic teaching in what he terms a “collision of discourses”. Alexander broadly identifies the benefits of dialogic teaching for students and teachers. ” Dialogic teaching is both...

Robert Aickman’s Introduction to The 4th Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories (1967)

3 June 2021

Aickman leads his fourth introduction to the Fontana Ghost Stories collection with a renewed attack on modern rationalism: “science will end the world,” he asserts. He goes on: “Even if there is no big bang, we shall destroy the world in no time, if we go on as we are. We shall crowd ourselves out; starve ourselves out; bore ourselves to bits; choke with protest against all the wrong things.” Such nihilism is offset for Aickman by his Romantic conception of the Imagination, where “Knowledge lies within us” in a manner that doesn’t respond to scientific enquiry. “Truth can be...

“build a ladder of opportunity so that the able can get ahead”

2 June 2021

Provocative New Statesman article by Adrian Wooldridge which insists that the key to the “reinvention” of the Labour Party is by going back to basics – appealing to the “new working class that is growing alongside the old one” – and reinstating a belief in meritocracy, “the belief that individuals should be treated according to their own merits rather than their family connections or membership of various pre-determined groups, and that the state’s job is to build a ladder of opportunity so that the able can get ahead regardless of where they are born”. Wooldridge almost exclusively focuses on education...

To Coalition and Beyond: Back to the Future?

23 May 2021

Notes from English and Its Teachers by Simon Gibbons (2017) In Chapter 6, Simon Gibbons brings the book up to date (to 2017 which – after Covid 19 and the lockdowns – seems an age ago). He presets a largely bleak and somewhat dispiriting picture of current English teaching in schools which Gibbons feels has suffered under 20+ years of direct government intervention. He points out some small attempts at presenting alternative approaches to teaching English – Looking for the Heart of English, John Richmond’s proposals and a (new) National Writing Project – but the his summation of the state of...

Writing Wrongs, TES

22 May 2021

Great article in this week’s TES about the teaching of writing. Liz Chamberlain (Open University) and Rob Drane (English subject lead at the University of Cambridge) argue that writing is being taught in primary schools causes “a disconnect between how we view writing in the real world, and how writing is taught in schools. And, in some classrooms, this is having a detrimental effect”. Chamberlain and Drake assert that the complexity of writing is too frequently reduced to separate components/threads – transcription, composition, vocabulary, grammar and punctuation – when it is actually a “complex and personal process”. They refer to...

New Labour, New Policies

8 May 2021

Notes from English and Its Teachers by Simon Gibbons (2017) In Chapter 5, Gibbons focuses on New Labour’s impact on English. The Labour government sought to tackle the underachievement of poorer children. This was when I started teaching and remember all too well the exhausting period of the National Strategies. Gibbons examines how schools were directed to look at boys’ performance, the radical impact of the National Literacy Strategy on primary schools and its KS3 counterpart (objectives-led lessons with a focus on non-fiction genres). The impression given is that the £4 billion Strategy had limited impact. Finally, Gibbons presents the...

“Honestly, I think I would know if there were aliens”

20 April 2021

It’s a long time since I’ve read anything interesting about UFOs, but this article for NBC by Rizwan Virk, founder of Play Labs at MIT, seems to indicate that – while the area of ufology is generally mocked by scientists and big tech – there’s obviously something significant happening. Virk rounds up the usual recent news from the US military admitting they are investigating unidentified objects that they encounter. The famous toc tac is mentioned. Stills from fuzzy footage are shown. What I wasn’t aware of was that senior officials at the Pentagon have been investigating UFOs for a while:...

Denial and Delusion of the Thatcher Years

19 April 2021

As someone who grew up in Thatcher’s Britain, it’s hard not to see the parallels between how fragmented and bleak things seem now and how it was back then. I’m not the only one. Very good piece by Guardian columnist John Harris who notes how the visible decline of Britain – or at least the sense we live in a troubled country – is accompanied by nostalgia, patriotism and brittle optimism. His concern is that we continue to be governed by the same Thatcherite thinking by a Conservative Party that maintains its dominance: “This development might suggest grounds for optimism,...

Some Thoughts About Caitlin R Kiernan’s Black Helicopters

15 April 2021

Professor Zeh sits in his office in Heidelberg. It’s 1969. Rain falls outside and Zeh’s office window is nothing but a dark grey rectangle. He’s smudged the ink in his notebook, jotting down a thought about Bohr’s interpretation of measurement he had while staring at his reflection in a mirror brushing his teeth this morning. Gemeinsamer Realität, Zeh writes over the faintly smudged word Mehrfachinterpretationen. Immediately, he crosses it out and writes dekohärent. Zeh frowns and feels irritated. His thinking this morning is messy. Inexact. In another room nearby he hears someone’s muffled shout followed by laughter. Here is the...