Honesty

It sounds kind of boring and dull to talk about honesty, but I will. Billy Joel got it straight: honesty is such a lonely word. Although I don't think the statement adds anything new, the obscene lack of it keeps on slapping me in the face. Tough day, today. Tough. The kind of day you are about to send everything to hell. I feel stupid and alone, empty as the drunkard. Nothing makes any sense to me. I am the hero without cause. Always getting the worst deal for myself without any good reason for that. Honesty pays off stupidity. Wrong, wrong day.

My friend M. pushed me to read a few weeks ago the manual Adapt: why success always starts with failure by Tim Harford. Well, I dropped the book from my hands after a short little while in the tube for being crap and against the minimum rules of the hygiene. Crap, pure crap. I have read about 25 pages only, but I could find a few pieces of food for thought, though. For example, the story of Peter Palchinsky in the pre-revolutionary Russia, that Harford recalls. Peter was a young engineer when sent to the coal basin in the North of the Black Sea. He had orders of the Tsar's goverment to gather data on the coal's area, report it and build a dossier on the working conditions. He then discovered that everything was crap: "the miners were housed forty or even sixty to a room, stacked in shared wooden bunks like cheap goods in a warehouse. In order to sleep, they had to crawl into position from the foot of the bed because there was no headroom to clamber over their fellows. Toilets and other facilities were rudimentary". Palchinsky's superiors did not stand by the bare truth of the facts reported and sent Peter to Siberia. Tim Harford points here that, a few years before, Palchinksy won  himself a place at the Russia's top engineering school and that he had taken pride in the fact that he had gotten the position because of his exam results, instead of relying in having the right connections. Harford completes Palchinsky's portrait: "In short, (he) was bright, energetic, confident -and almost absurdly honest".

Alas! Absurdly honest! Honesty: a mistake, Mr Harford? Where is the limit to absurd honesty? Another fashionable stuff in the world of fashion?

My mother has just sent me a text: "how are u? All well around here"... . It is fucking amazing and mysterious... A very wrong day and she felt something... I am sure. Can anybody doubt that God exist? And that He is a gift?

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The flight of the Felix

When the capsule's hatch rolled aside and Felix Baumgartner saw the black frame of the vast emptiness and a thin realm of blue 39 km below, what did he feel? What could a human feel? For a person like me -and Mr. Bean, of course-, who gets dizzy at the sight from the top of the diving board or feels incapable of bungee-jumping from scarcely 150 m, the sense of being at the edge of a capsule ascending unflappably into space is something that a million of pounds could not buy. Apart from the physical demand of the jump, technical developments and economical efforts, Felix being suspended in the Universe is the most appealing deed for me: the capsule, being fatefully carried away; the oxygen, ticking down unmercifully. And three, four, six seconds before jumping that account for a whole eternity.

As for the speed of sound, I guess Felix broke the limit of the sound, although the information is contradictory and surprisingly imprecise. In any case, I think that any statements made in this direction need to be more thoroughly explained. 

Leaving aside the suspicion that a large percentage of people who have written and talked about the speed of sound does not know how much it really is or what it is, one can read that Felix reached Mach (M) 1.25 at a maximum velocity of 833.9 mph. However, the video shows different figures. In the video, it seems that Felix reaches a maximum of 729 mph and that remains there (terminal velocity) for about 20 - 25 seconds, after which he starts decelerating. (The video is cut in the best moment, but listen to the voice of the man). 729 mph is 325 mps, which is below 340 mps, the speed of sound in air at NTP conditions (atmospheric pressure and 20 Celsius). Of course, the speed of sound is lower high up in the stratosphere and, with this consideration, Felix's flight was probably supersonic. How much lower? If we take 833.9 mph as M=1.25, 833.9 mph is 372.5 mps, which gives a hypothetical speed of sound of only 298 mps. If 729 mph is the true maximum speed at which Felix traveled, his supersonic flight would have been M = 1.09.

Taken as a simple and ideal exercise, as good as I could, I drew the evolution of Felix's fall speed and estimated the acceleration he suffered from the data of the video. I have been unable to paste it here. The maximum acceleration takes place at the beginning of the fall, of course, but only amounts to 9.2 m/(s^2), approx. Given the altitude and the latitude (35N, Alburquerque), one would expect 9.74 m/(s^2), so let's assume that the difference is due to friction or/and drag or whatever (spinning, Magnus effect?, etc). Then, the acceleration felt by Felix reduces, although it is irregular, as expected. Both acceleration and deceleration shows peaks (up to 2.2g in deceleration) but, who knows, I just collected the data with pencil stopping repeatedly the video... .

I calculated as well the distance traveled until deceleration starts (first minute of fall) and got about 14 km. If this is correct, it means that when Felix started decelerating he was still in the stratosphere. The average velocity of fall during the acceleration part is, then, about 522 mph.

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Walk in loneliness

This blog looks lately as barren as my life in the last month. Nothing wrong with it... Otherwise, I would not "ritrovai (myself) per una selva oscura".

**

Today, as I do sometimes, I have walked from Euston to Highbury & Islington tube station, all the way up Pentonville Road and straight-ahead Upper Street, passed Angel. It is a nice 60-minute walk to be refreshed, full of pretty-looking people having dinner in nice-looking restaurants or having drinks in pubs. When I feel lonely it is not very pleasant, although I know that loneliness in company is the worst of its kind.

Right outside Highbury & Islington station I saw an image, not surprising anymore: a beggar reclined on the sidewalk hoarding its misery, holding an open book on his knees and talking in self-assurance through a cell phone. If I don't lose myself before, I will have to record a documentary with a factual message -how many times I have mentioned it!: the book as a hide-away shelter. And portrait the so-typical, so-familiar but universal image of the urban homeless reading a book inside his bag, in a puddle of dirt. It is the dark-side of the come-to-the-books-and-you-will-see horseshit.

Eight minutes later, a bald man, around 45, bad taken and ill-conserved, travels in the train reading a newspaper almost in tatters. He seems content, though. He is wearing shabby clothes and has not-cleaned hands. In his shirt's pocket he has stuffed an empty, half-a-litter can of Fosters... .

Ladies: such is the inextricable effect of loneliness on us men.

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The mighty minority

London is a rough city.
London is full of pride but not of joy. It is not a joyful town.
London is full of noise, crossed by myriads of bits of communication. But people are deaf: the sounds of silence stuff.
London is a city for the mass, the fashion and the pretense.
Don't you think?
Oppose to the appearances, only the soul that is lost and lonesome, out of place and astray can feel the frozen skin of a city like London.
Perhaps, it has always being like this. London, New York, L.A., the big monsters.

**

Everything is orchestrated in London. Even the good-will, the sacrifice and the perspiration. Independence and self-assurance are the name of courses and the right-to-be-brandished has a price on its own. Massive events, charity, taxes, scandals and Jimmy Savile are just too often one word. One thing lead to the other. "Excuse me" is a lonely request, followed by nothing else. "Thank you" has died in the hands of "Cheers", and "Bye" is a long, hollow wail from a set of white teeth and long eye-lashes. The same everywhere else?... Not even as bad as in other places?... Good God!

 

Four people, exactly four, pray like nerds in a square close to the British last Tuesday. Their claim is as pitiful as rightful, and lonesome... .

But God sees in secret.

God bless them, the Minority.

Love song for a vampire

If you were thinking "that's enough of this s*** Dracula, Dracula" -as I kind of think myself-  sorry, I have something else to say today. First, rule of gold: I am convinced that the commentators that write on the flaps of the books we read or in their back-pages usually do not know what they are talking about. It is like they had not read the book or, at least, let's be modest, we dare say that their observations are not very precise. My edition of Dracula is certainly not an exception: "Vampire expert Professor Van Helsing convinces Harker and his friends that if Mina is not to share the same fate as poor "un-dead" Lucy, Dracula must be caught and ritually killed"... Well, it is not exactly like this, is it?

Secondly, being as I am on page 300 (50 more to go), I suspect of an unexpected twist of the story, which is neat: Dracula really is a love story. Think about it. On the eve of the final events, Jonathan Harker, Mina's husband, writes in his diary: "To one thing I have made up my mind: if we find out that Mina must be a vampire in the end, then she shall not go into that unknown and terrible land alone". Love is the important stuff for this man, more than Life. He is willing to follow Mina and love her in the shadows of Death. That is what I understand. However, Count Dracula is on the other side pulling at the other end of the rope.

Harker shivers: Going alone in the terrible land! Here it lies this twist of the story I glimpse a few pages to the end. Mina is being attracted to the monster by the power of pity (is pity love? Can pity become love?). She says to all the men right before sunset: "I know that you must fight (...). But it is not a work of hate. That poor soul who has wrought all this misery is the saddest case of all (...). You must be pitiful to him too, though it may not hold your hands from his destruction". And it is not the first time Mina brings out excusatory arguments in favor of the monster, a creature who is going through the land alone. Annie Lennox's song captured the idea: "Oh loneliness, oh hopelessness, to search the end of times".

The spinal cord of the novel is blood, an element that match all the requirements to be a legal substitute of sex in it: passionate, dirty, unclean, unfaithful, weird and wrong. Mr Renfield, awfully betrayed by Dracula, highlighted the role of blood clearly: "blood is life". For the alive and also for the un-dead in the shadows of Death.

A final remark has to do with "unfaithfulness". The five men struggle to destroy all the places where the Count could possibly rest... But hide all their errands from Mina, on the fictional grounds of not disturbing her (after dinner the first night they send her to bed, even though she is not sleepy, which seems implausible in a woman like her). Jonathan feels a little awkward about it, but it is specially Mina who feels bad. And she hides back from them her dreams on the same grounds, which are, indeed, not dreams, but a point of unfaithfulness: Dracula is weaving his alliance with her. Interesting. This familiar fable of "I-am-not-telling-in-order-not-to-hurt" seems a plot for one of O. Henry's stories. Of course, it never does right. This is one of the first lessons one learns in business: the customer might not like it, but one must tell her.

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Bitter-almond smell

Only four years after Dracula was published (1897), Landsteiner made his discovery of blood groups. The appalling and unholy four blood transfusions that poor Lucy received before dying would have not being so easy or, perhaps, offered more possibilities to the fiction. On a different side, it is a discovery to me the use of telegrams that the characters of the novel make: telegrams can be sent and received in the course of a train trip and some of them are directed to the housekeepers or assistants. Kind of a common piece of technology, isn't it? The cargo ship in which Count Dracula arrived to Whitby, England, is however a puppet in the hands of nature, navigating astray and at the mercy of the winds of the storm. No communication existed with the coastguards whatsoever. In an invigorating walk along the White Cliffs of Dover today, I just learned that the first go-and-return ship-to-shore radio message using Morse code was transmitted on the Christmas Eve of 1898... Alas!

**

Diaries seem to mean a whole lot for the characters of the period. All effects of writing that we experience today were already manifested more than 100 years ago. Dr. Seward, Jonathan and Mina sooth their pain, anxiety, worries, doubts and stress in keeping diaries. Sometimes, one of them says "that's it! FINIS", only to come back to it a few days down the line. Sometimes they find themselves too worn out to write; sometimes, they record two or three entrances in the same day... . Messages, letters, telegrams and notes complete the urge for communication.

**

It is not a big thing, nor any original at all, but I would like to record here another example of the tremendous stupidity of excessive and zealous care for security in teaching labs nowadays. I keep asking: Why? Stupidity to the point to replace mercury thermometers by "spirits", alcohol ones, or to worry at the rotten-eggs smell. What, if not, is Chemistry for a student but a rotten-eggs and a bitter-almond smell?
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Desire-less

Again, a little bit of reading/writing before cooking dinner. 

I am getting kind of surprised, how many familiar scenes of the SyFy filmography, good or not that good (especially the bad and the terrible) are described in Dracula (which is, of course, primary to all of them). For example: the ghost boat with dead people on board, being swept away by a fearful, ephemeral and as much impossible as inexplicable storm; the clusters of dark clouds moving fast in the otherwise calmer sky; the fog and the mist; a pair of glaring red eyes and the atmosphere of fear and madness. "It", the poor morituri mortals  on board Demeter call Dracula. Quite familiar, isn't it? The image of Dracula crawling head-down the stony walls of his castle reminded me of Gollum (miserable, irredeemable creature) creeping among the boulders of an inhospitable and inextricable mountain. Like a huge spider of sharp teeth, sharp ears and sharp, bald skull. A sort of pale and disgusting larvae of the Allien _one that crawls instead of jumping.

**

But today I wanted to record a thought I have been pounding about lately: how would a group of humans survive if they were unable to define and defend their wishes against the very selves? 

Desire is a fascinating word. But Desire is been despised and distrusted. I guess it is so because Desire comes all wrapped up in aggressive flames, quite red and scorching, and has acquired the fame of being antechamber of sin. I am not talking about the sin of lust and debauchery, although I know it pops out in mind, but that most terrible of selfishness. However, what a beautiful word! Desire is the old term, full of wisdom, while Motivation is the decaffeinated shit, politically-correct surrogate, that acts on its behalf. Desire is personal and confidential. Motivation is a mere whore that can be showed, betrayed or used as an exchange currency to get jobs and such. How important are desires for the individual! How important to defend them from all sorts of intrusions!

Here is the topic for a short story or film: how would an unsecured man, ashamed and mortified by his true wishes (though legitimate) would survive? It would be entitled "The Desireless Man".

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Ebb tide in appetite

Yes, yes, yes, I know. I have pending the writing of my notes on Frankenstein. With Camus' essay at hand, the novel turned out to be crystal clear, even predictable, and more fixed to the conventions of Reason than bowed to the excess of Imagination. What a thing! Even imagination has its rules. It always had.

But as soon as I finished Mary Shelley's story, I started Dracula, written at the other end of the 19th century, in 1897. Fantastic stuff! It is gripping me like tales can only gripped kids. How many months I have been only reading in the tube (mainly, at least)! Today, instead, arrived home around 8, made a cup of coffee, and in the dim light of desk and bed lamps, amidst the fainted tickle of rain drops "without", kept reading. Like a child. It is more than 20 years ago, I kind of remember, when P. and I rolled down the streets boasting like a couple of peacocks in our 13, and were dismissed by V., who was always reading like crazy in the chamber upstairs his parent's bar. I kind of remember the day he was sitting by the window, wrapped in the skirts of the table, warmed by the heat of the brazier, reading Dracula. A king's pleasure.

The writing pace of Stoker is really nice. No point to make a more elaborate description of my opinion so far. I have felt the urgency to write this after reading Chapter 5, mainly after enjoying with ecstasy the first letters exchanged by Mina Murray and Lucy Westerna and the latter's account of her three proposals in a day: Dr. Seward, sunken in gloom spirits after her refusal ("ebb tide in appetite, cannot eat, cannot rest"), the Texan Quincey Morris and the fortunate Arthur. How beautiful is the style of Quincey! "Little girl, your honesty and pluck have made me a friend, and that's rarer than a lover (...). My dear, I'm going to have a pretty lonely walk between this and Kingdom Come. Won't you give me one kiss? It'll be something to keep off the darkness now and then". What a universal and timeless custom of honest men to offer friendship to the woman they love after being refused! Poor Dr. Seward does the same, less eloquently. Lucy relates to Mina: "he hoped I would be happy, and that if I ever wanted a friend I must count him one of my best". Oh, boy! Universal stuff.

Indeed, how similar we are to them, to those characters of that old, dusted time. The habit of writing letters, abandoned in the bottom of history, was revived by the emergence of the email, there is little doubt of it in my mind. And, despite the gap, there is something unchanged in the tone of the messages between Mina and Lucy, twenty years-old, and our own. Take as example (notice the three interrogation marks at the end): "Tell me all the news when you write (...). I hear rumours, and especially of a tall, handsome, curly-haired man???".

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