New Element Discovered

While I was in the US, a major research institution announced the discovery of the densest element yet known to science. The new element has been named "Bushcronium."

Bushcronium has one neutron, 12 assistant neutrons, 75 deputy neutrons, and 224 assistant deputy neutrons, giving it an atomic mass of 311. These particles are held together by dark forces called morons, which are surrounded by vast quantities of lepton-like particles called peons.

The symbol for Bushcronium is "W".

Bushcronium's mass actually increases over time, as morons randomly interact with various elements in the atmosphere and become assistant deputy neutrons in a Bushcronium molecule, forming isodopes.

This characteristic of moron-promotion leads some scientists to believe that Bushcronium is formed whenever morons reach a certain quantity in concentration. This hypothetical quantity is referred to as "Critical Morass".

When catalyzed with money, Bushcronium activates Foxnewsium, an element that radiates orders of magnitude more energy, albeit incoherent noise, since it has ½ as many peons but twice as many morons.

Afternoon Subtext

It was my turn this afternoon to invigilate the show in the Long Gallery. Not a burdensome task, but not one involving any great excitement.

Several punters came and went. An MA student slopped past in shoes with no laces, dragging first a pile of paint cans on a trolley, then a compressor and spray gun.

A woman came in by mistake, thinking we were the show of false teeth and haphazardness next door in the public gallery. Finding we weren't, she looked uncomfortable and then asked which were my pictures.

"The ones in the middle," I said.

She stood for a while, then started to say "They're........" "......very individual."

On the basis that this was meant as a compliment, I thanked her, though it did feel like a compliment that had been searched for with care not to offend. She scuttled off, looking flustered.

One of the benefits of being in the University is that there are often students from other Departments looking for volunteers to help with their projects. So it was today. A guy from the Royal Victoria Infirmary over the road (a teaching hospital affiliated to the University) was doing some research into the workings of the brain.

Recognising that I might actually have a brain he asked me to don some headphones and listen to some sounds which would be repeated twice. All I had to do was tell him what I thought they were.

At first I hadn't a clue, but gradually the electronica gave way to distorted human voices.

The next stage involved my listening to various spoken sentences and repeating them back to him. Pretty easy, that one. They were something on the lines of :

Ben has corked two bottles.

Liz has crashed two cars.

Ben has driven a red car.

Don has a red car and a yellow car.

Liz has cracked two cups.

Finally, I had to listen to the original sound sequences and tell him if I thought any of them were the spoken sentences and to point out any words I recognised.

I got soft cries of "Excellent!" several times on that one. Apparently, artists and musicians do better at this kind of recognition than non-creative people. I hope I might get to see the results of his research some time. Interesting.

Even more interesting was the obvious subtext to this exercise. It became clear that:

• Don is a rich bastard who has two cars.
• Don is really pissed off with Liz because she has crashed both of his cars.
• Ben is pissed off with Liz, because occasionally Don let's him drive the red car, but now he won't be able to borrow it because Liz has crashed it.
• Ben makes his own wine, but the cups he used to drink it from have been cracked by Liz.
• Liz is a real liability

Jack me into the broadband and pass the stem cell toffees......

Torquil, Oil on board

You can't beat it, can you, a good night of amiable conversation and argument over an enjoyable meal?

Patsy123 is up from London again so we spent the afternoon wandering round the shops in town, just mooching. I bought another ludicrously expensive colour cartridge for my HP710c and Patsy123 found out the carpet she has on order for Tynemouth is gonna take another 4 to 5 weeks. I came off best.

And then it was time for another meal out. Can I afford it? Like hell. Should I stop? Like hell. This time it was an old favourite - for me at least - Paris Texas. It's an old student hangout in St Mary's Place; cheap and cheerful. If you stick to what they do best, like pizza, pasta or vaguely Tex-Mex stuff, you'll do fine. If you push the boat out and opt for something like grilled tuna steak, you'll be making a big mistake (won't you, Buddy K?)

The food was excellent, anyway. In fact I'm tempted to think they've got a new chef - they've definitely got some nice new bistro-style tableware. Must remember, also, to tell Will Barrow that there seems to have been a sufficiently large turnover of staff to maybe make it safe for him to go back again.

As the pretty good house red loosened my tongue, I found I was talking myself out of what Eric Maisel would call a meaning crisis. With some effort on my part, it may be that I should channel my efforts into a slightly different meaning container.

And what meaning container might that be, I hear you ask. Well, no, I don't hear you ask anything of the sort, of course, because you probably haven't the faintest idea what I'm talking about, so I'll ask it for you.

"What meaning container might that be. Mr Zip?"

Why, thank you for asking. I'll tell you. One of the strands running through my thoughts for some time, has been an urge to do some figurative painting. I spent years doing cartoon figures and all the while wanted to do figure paintings. When I finally got to painting, what did I do? Don't worry, these are all rhetorical questions. I began painting townscapes with no figures in them whatsoever.

In the last year or so, perhaps as an expression of my need to make and keep contact with people, figures have started to walk into my pictures. In ones or twos at first; in crowds later on.

But I've been trying to make sense of my attraction to certain kinds of figure painting. It's not a school to which one might attach oneself. The painters are as apparently diverse as Stanley Spencer, Paula Rego, Alan Feltus, Carel Weight, Balthus and Hopper (you'll have heard of him?)

In his foreword to a 1998 exhibition, Jeffrey Carr, the Curator, has this to say:

Embodied Fictions is an exhibition of twelve nationally known realist painters who use the figure to create fictionalized worlds. These paintings demonstrate the power of painterly figuration to embody content. The quality of embodiment relies on the depiction of visual appearances to create fictional worlds, in the way a novel or film can make an invented situation seem "real". This use of the figure is distinct from the way a modernist might use the figure for a purely formal exploration, or the way a postmodernist might use the figure as a cipher, a sign or a decorative symbol to generate content.

I think this, and his even more interesting essay, may be enough to point me in the right direction. "Go for it," said Patsy123, and she's often right.

But she wasn't right, I felt, when we later turned our attention to an argument about the current proposals for human embryo cloning. I'm much too tired to cover the ground of the entire argument - and it was a proper argument, not simply a difference of opinion - but basically I came down on the side of support for stem cell research, broadband connections for nursing homes and colonies on Mars (I think if you're going to have an argument, you should be wide-ranging). I ventured that science, research and technology are the only things which will get us out of the hole we're very likely digging even now. That they may have got us into it in the first place is irrelevant.

Patsy123's arguments tended to be more like reservations about the fallout from technology. Really, she's been reading too much Oryx and Crake. If Margaret Atwood would simply admit she's writing science fiction, I'd have a whole lot more time for her.

I think I played my masterstroke by telling Patsy123 that she was arguing from a position of a glass half-empty, while mine was half-full. She doesn't like to think her glass is half-empty. If I hadn't seen her opposition wilting, I'd have played my trump card (what kind of game requires strokes and cards?):

Anything the Conservative Right Wing Bloody Moral Majority in America are against must be OK.

I rest my case.

And my weary body.