Discuss

Ah. My latest column's up at Surefish. It's a bit meandery and mentions vampires, which accurately reflects my state of mind recently.

A point of discussion which you may find it interesting to comment on here:

I sometimes try to imagine a scientific discovery which would persuade me that my faith was spurious. As yet I’ve come up with nothing.

What do we (and by "we" I mean "you", given that I wrote it) think of this? If you have a religious faith, can you think of a potential scientific revelation about the universe which would convince you to become an atheist? If you're an atheist, what revelations (actual or hypothetical) do you think should so persuade me?

Or do you think the question's a meaningless one?

[M]emetics

With apologies for the delay, here are the actual answers to last week's pop quiz:

1. "I have a dream, a song to sing to help me cope with anything."
     ABBA, "I Have a Dream" (Gold)
2. "I returned a bag of groceries, accidentally taken off the shelf before the expiration date."
     They Might Be Giants, "Dead" (Flood)
3. "Here I stand, looking out to sea, where a thousand souls have prayed and a thousand lives were laid on the sand."
     Iona, "Here I Stand" (Iona)
4. "Robin, the hooded man."
     Clannad, "Robin (the Hooded Man)", (The Collection)
5. "One, two three four... Oo-ooh, oo-ooh..."
     Queen, "Innuendo" (Innuendo)
6. "Life's a bitch then you die, black Hell."
     The Pogues, "Hell's Ditch" (The Rest of the Best)
7. "My life goes on in endless song..."
     Enya, "How Can I Keep from Singing?" (Shepherd Moons)
8. "Yo; el otoño. Yo; el vespero."
     Enya, "La Soñadora" (The Memory of Trees)
9. "Well, I was born an original sinner..."
     Eurythmics, "Missionary Man" (The Ultimate Collection)
10. "It was upon a Lammas Night, when corn rigs are bonny..."
     Magnet, "Corn Rigs" (The Wicker Man soundtrack album)
11. "Eurus, Afer Ventus..."
     Enya, "Caribbean Blue" (Shepherd Moons)
12. "If you change your mind, I'm the first in line..."
     ABBA, "Take a Chance on Me" (Gold)
13. "Much has been been said of the strumpets of yore..."
     Magnet, "The Landlord's Daughter" (The Wicker Man)
14. "He's a hypnotist, hypnotist of ladies."
     They Might Be Giants, "Hypnotist of Ladies" (Apollo 18)
15. "I work all night, I work all day to pay the bills I have to pay..."
     ABBA, "Money, Money, Money" (Gold)
16. "Toe to toe, dancing very slow..."
     Blondie, "Rapture" (Atomic: The Very Best of Blondie)
17. "What is there left for me to do in this life?"
     Queen, "Was It All Worth It" (The Miracle)
18. "When the ship runs out of ocean and the vessel runs aground..."
     They Might Be Giants, "Women and Men" (Flood)
19. "Why is the world in love again?"
     They Might Be Giants, "Theme From Flood" (Flood)
20. "Another red-letter day..."
     Queen, "Friends Will Be Friends" (A Kind of Magic)
21. "Bright the light through my windowpane. Shield my eyes from the beam."
     Audience, "I Had a Dream" (Life on Mars soundtrack)
22. "Monday finds you like a bomb that's been left ticking there too long..."
     Eurythmics, "I Saved the World Today" (Peace)
23. "I spy a boy, I spy a girl..."
     Pulp, "I Spy" (Different Class)
24. "Wasted youth! Wasted youth!"
     Meat Loaf, "Everything Louder than Everything Else" (Bat Out of Hell 2)
25. "Tell me that you've got everything you want, and your bird can sing..."
     The Beatles, "And Your Bird Can Sing" (Revolver)

...hence my embarrassment.

Minimal Kudos Points go to Not Invented Here for identifying 3., 4. and 7. and (implicit in her very correct diagnosis of "way too much ABBA") 1., 12. and 15.. Matthew (I'm not entirely sure which one) identified 10. and 13., Jon Dennis 9., 14., 23. and 25., Pete 2. and 24.(sort of), 19. and 20., Rebecca 11.. Simon BJ implied he knew what 5. was, but wasn't saying.

I conclude that you're all incredibly ignorant about The Pogues and Blondie, and are becoming regrettably lax regarding the works of Queen.

For the record, I'm ashamed of the Enya and the Abba, and wish the Walkman had picked a less banal Clannad track. And something from the two discs full of The Pet Shop Boys.

And more Beatles, obviously. Nothing confers musical respectability like a Beatle.

Patagonia of Tiny Feet

OK. I'm not going to make a habit of this, you understand, but while I'm slavishly copying other people's ideas, Simon Guerrier has rather eccentrically requested me to select an S.F. book of my choice, turn to p123 and record the fifth sentence here.

Predictably perhaps, but also because I can reach it without getting up, I've chosen Olaf Stapledon's Last and First Men, which says:

"It became the party's most sacred object, for it kindled in every mind the strong parental disposition so characteristic of Patagonians."

So there you go -- Patagonians like having babies. You heard it here first, unless of course you've read Last and First Men at any point during the past 78 years.

Because I don't really do "memes", I'm not going to oblige anybody to continue this. If you think it would be fun, feel free to link to this post and say I told you to.

I'm still trying to write vampires today, although I've also sent off another Surefish column. As usual I'll mention here when it's been put up.

I'd normally be writing tomorrow as well, but I seem to be obliged to turn up here and learn to cook tapas instead. Saturday I'll be attending festive Midsummer nuptials in Oxford, which will be fun.

Mi Mi Mi

I'm suspicious, frankly, of my Walkman's ability to select songs with anything resembling actual randomness.

Usually I'm too much of a control-freak to listen to music on shuffle mode in case a song I don't like comes up (although as you'd probably expect I'll listen to such songs all the way through if they come up in the correct play order on an album, because skipping them would be wrong).

On my way home from work today, though, it occurred to me that I had no strong feelings about what I wanted to listen to. Then I realised that, if I shuffled the contents of my Walkman, I could use the experience to generate a spurious blog post in the manner of those LiveJournal <air-quote> memes </air-quote> where the poster posts the lyrics of the first 25 songs selected randomly from their playlist, and their friends try to outcool them in the comments by identifying all the songs in question and sneering politely at them all. Given how little work this would be, and how much I've been neglecting this blog lately, this seemed appealing.

Admittedly my Walkman's memory, while not remotely approaching the trenditude of the LiveJournalling community, is somewhat catholic in scope, and in order to pick tracks with actual lyrics I had to skip past various instrumental pieces, Karl Jenkins's ravishingly beautiful but untranscribable choral gibberish, scenes from lost black-and-white Doctor Who stories released by the BBC on CDs with idiotically intricate indexing (just one of the five-disc The Daleks' Master Plan set contains 76 tracks), one of the quotes on the Life on Mars soundtrack album and that bit on Made in Heaven where Freddie Mercury says "Yeah".

Even so, the resulting edited list shows a disturbingly heavy bias towards the stuff which even I'd admit to being embarrassed about liking, rather than the stuff which was, at least, pretty damn cool during the late '80s. It also contains two separate instances of three songs coming from the same album. Some of the entries appear to have been carefully selected for their crashing obviousness.

Minimal amounts of kudos, therefore to those who guess artist, title and the album I found the song on (not always the one it was originally issued on).

1. "I have a dream, a song to sing to help me cope with anything."
2. "I returned a bag of groceries, accidentally taken off the shelf before the expiration date."
3. "Here I stand, looking out to sea, where a thousand souls have prayed and a thousand lives were laid on the sand."
4. "Robin, the hooded man."
5. "One, two three four... Oo-ooh, oo-ooh..."
6. "Life's a bitch then you die, black Hell."
7. "My life goes on in endless song..."
8. "Yo; el otoño. Yo; el vespero."
9. "Well, I was born an original sinner..."
10. "It was upon a Lammas Night, when corn rigs are bonny..."
11. "Eurus, Afer Ventus..."
12. "If you change your mind, I'm the first in line..."
13. "Much has been been said of the strumpets of yore, of wenches and bawdy-house queens by the score..."
14. "He's a hypnotist, hypnotist of ladies."
15. "I work all night, I work all day to pay the bills I have to pay..."
16. "Toe to toe, dancing very slow..."
17. "What is there left for me to do in this life?"
18. "When the ship runs out of ocean and the vessel runs aground..."
19. "Why is the world in love again?"
20. "Another red-letter day..."
21. "Bright the light through my windowpane. Shield my eyes from the beam."
22. "Monday finds you like a bomb that's been left ticking there too long..."
23. "I spy a boy, I spy a girl..."
24. "Wasted youth! Wasted youth!"
25. "Tell me that you've got everything you want, and your bird can sing..."

I imagine all of these can be guessed by at least some of my readership without illicit googling. My tastes may be eclectic, but they're hardly original.

Blood Harvest

Note to the National Blood Service: you'll generally find me rather more sympathetic to a call for donations than I was yesterday. It's just slightly unfortunate that, when you phoned me, I was in the middle of writing a story about vampires, and therefore rather sensitive to the topic.

(But I love the fact that their website is at www.blood.co.uk. Perhaps they should let "Blood, blood, blood!" be their motto...)