Tidbits for an early Thursday.

Before I go to bed here I just wanted to jot some random things down.

1. A really good combo for wheat-ale lovers. The Colorado "Belgian-Style" wheat ale Blue Moon Belgian White is a tasty enough brew on its own, definitely above average. But it takes on a whole new character, as a waitress once kindly showed me, by squeezing and then dropping wedges of an orange into it. I knew my limes and lemons, but an orange? Sure enough, this beer, suitably chilled and in the correct glassware, transforms itself like Bowie between LPs when a bit of (preferably organic) orange is added. Don't ask me why; it just works. It's a great, unique flavor that I can't really even compare to any other ale. It's refreshing given the citrus involved, yet not a summer thirst-quencher. I'd say it's a taste best enjoyed in the crispness of autumn or winter, and if you like Belgian or wheat beers at all, you'll like this one. It doesn't demand that you prepare for some exotic new taste like, say, one of the Chimay ales would. It's a user-friendly ale with full flavor and the obligatory wedge of squeezed orange puts it over the top in my book. 6.5/10, verging on a 7 depending on the weather!

2. Disney: The 'D' stands for 'Dumbed down.' I recently noticed that Disney is marketing a film called Earth, in theatres everywhere no less, which is simply a severely edited version of the BBC's landmark documentary series Planet Earth. So far I've no other information on it other than it "follows the stories of four unique animal families." I look at this two ways: One, they've condensed and bastardised an epic documentary achievement to make a few bucks with the family-with-young-kids demographic, almost certainly dubbing over the original Attenborough narration with something more understandable and lame for young Americans, and changed the whole Earth-as-ecosystem timbre of the original epic for a series of heart-wrenching personal stories that may interest kiddos in the great cycle of life the way The Lion King did and yet do nothing for them or their yawning parents in the way of actual scientific understanding of these animals, all the while narrowing 14 hours of high-definition footage shot over five years into something well under two hours; OR, I can be positive and say something like, 'better the kids watch this and get an inkling of the trials of nature and the character of the real world than watch another psychedelic cartoon conceived only to babysit them whilst their parents snort coke in the other room.' I haven't decided which view I should take yet - it's probably prudent to think somewhere in the middle.

3. How on earth did Fleetwood Mac stay together as long as they did, and make the music they did? I'm talking about the famous second iteration of the band, with Americans Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks, along with Brits Christine and John McVie, and the ever-present namesake Mick Fleetwood. Think about it: Buckingham and Nicks were a long-time, feverishly-in-love couple who broke up just as they joined the band; John McVie was an alcoholic who estranged his wife Christine, who in return then went on to have a series of affairs with a number of people within the band's entourage, and Mick was the only sane one, except for the fact that he was almost totally insane. And they all wrote very personal songs about each experience and refrained from killing one another! This band churned out three to five great albums, depending on your tastes, and arguably the greatest album ever (certainly one of the bestselling the world over) - Rumours which last time I checked was just behind Pink Floyd's Dark Side of The Moon and Michael Jackson's Thriller in terms of 'real' total sales (a topic for another day), and still going, recently earning its 19x platinum badge in the USA. And I'm forced to agree, behind a few Smiths albums and Pink Floyd albums (and maybe tied with Brendan Perry's debut), it is one of the great albums of all time. Flawless. It's up there with Abbey Road and OK Computer in that competition. It's a perfect album - the worst track on it is better than more than 95% of albums' best track. This is my opinion of course, but you'd be hard pressed to find a critic who will disagree with me. Not that might makes right, and you're within your Magna Carta-granted rights to dislike the album for some reason, but then again, that's kinda like disliking The Clash's London Calling and exposing yourself as a complete noob to music and also a dork. Ok, sorry, that was a bit harsh. Anyways, two broken up couples and a man with what we would now call ADHD made one of the greatest albums in history. How is this possible? I suppose the same way four Beatles who couldn't stand one another made Abbey Road (IMO the greatest album ever), and four Smiths who couldn't stand one another made Strangeways, Here We Come (IMO the second greatest album ever). Five completely egomaniacal, genius, and completely dysfunctional musicians somehow made (IMO) the third greatest album ever (ok, maybe fourth behind PF - another horrific band chemistry-wise). Maybe it is adversity and living on the traumatic edge which truly dredges forth the greatness in people, and comfort is where art goes to die. Opinions?

4. What's the most fundamental concept of all? Philosophy, which purports to explore truths underlying all other things, yet relies upon assumptions and axioms or else it couldn't say a single thing; logic, which takes those axioms into account and acknowledges its limitations but makes superb sense within those boundaries, and underlies all of mathematics and science and indeed rationality itself; or physics, with its theories backed up by concrete, empirical examples, which can seemingly explain every phenomenon in the micro, normal, and macro worlds, at the beginning of time, in the present, and in the far-flung future, but cannot do two things: answer why things are set up the way they are, nor agree with itself across the board with a so-called "theory of everything": a unified quantum theory of gravity that postulates simples rules explaining everything from subatomic quarks to the formation of galaxy clusters, and especially the time when the two were essentially united - that is, in the first femtoseconds and microseconds of the big bang; or is it religion or spirituality, as defined as a demesne outside of experimental access - a realm of faith extending outside, underneath, and beyond reason. Or is it, as some might hold, pure mathematics, as the ultimate truth, incorporating order and chaos, complexity and entropy, and obviating the need for God or anything apart from its all-powerful reach (read Douglas Hoffstadter for more on this). What IS the fundamental layer of reality, if such a question has meaning at all? I'm asking because I really don't know. You can cheat and answer "cosmology," which is sort of a catch-all field incorporating all of the above, but to me that's not a satisfying answer. I've probably read thirty-plus books on cutting-edge cosmology from various perspectives written by various leading academics in their field, from Cambridge to Harvard, from Berkeley to Princeton to Oxford, and I still cannot make any sense of what "truth" is. I'm inclined toward the "logic" answer as per the Greeks, especially the Pythagoreans, but then again Pythagoras of Samos was a complete mystical nutter and all his followers tended to believe in the occult of number (in particular, ratios) as the basis of the rationality of truth. So I just don't know. Maybe it goes Philosophy (including religion or any belief system) > Rationality (logic, math) > Physics (relies on mathematics, after all). Then onto Chemistry > Biology > Physiology/Anatomy > Neurology > and back to Philosophy. Or where you want to build your castle, one depended, smaller layer atop a larger, more inclusive one. It's the bootstrapping at the very beginning, though, the need for beliefs/postulates/axioms or call them what you will, that bothers me. This is just faith, with nothing inevitable about it. How can anything rational from that point onward be taken seriously if the most fundamental, foundational layer of it all is just "let's assume these couple things are true." That's why ultra-rationalists like Dawkins and Dennet bug me, because they never seem to address that point. The universe doesn't HAVE to be rational; it could be absurd for all we know, and only appear rational and self-consistent within the limits of our measurements and experience, and in a small region surrounding our solar system or something. Unlikely, but there's no way at present to KNOW that it doesn't become completely absurd just beyond our grasp. That what David Lynch is always on about. And that's why I'm agnostic and not an atheist, no matter how hard Dawkins tries to convince me. I feel there is absolutely no way we can know The Truth, probably even by definition (see Kurt Goedel's incompleteness theorem). To "believe" anything, whether God at one end (capriciousness) or rationalism at the other (determinism), to me is an act of faith. There is no basis for choosing either, we simply don't know and in my view cannot ever know. Maybe I'll paint up an Agnostic Bus and drive it round London and see how many followers I get.

5. Swine flu. I'm really interested, a bit morbidly I'll admit but more in philosophical/"univeral organisational" terms, in immunology. I gobbled up The Hot Zone, The Demon in the Freezer, Darwin's Radio, and similar books, while also reading lots of nonfiction by Lynn Margulis, Nick Lane, Ernst Haeckel, and popular accounts of Louis Pasteur and his contemporaries. Bacteria and viruses are disgusting, but one insterested in the big picture must admit they are fascinating. Especially viruses, which seem to span that artificial border between life and non-life, possessing coding proteins ('purpose') but no means to replicate on their own (needing a host to procreate, thus lacking one of the hallmarks of evolutionary biology). What is all that about? You'll have to wait for my book, which speculates on the true nature of complexity, chaos, entropy, life, and the second law of thermodynamics for more ideas from me (which also takes care of the points in tidbit 4 in much more detail), but in the meantime, I still continue to devour the literature available in the professional journals and in popular books and documentaries - even magazines - on these topics. It gets to the heart of what we call "life" itself, and calls into question our cultural/species-based endmemic group-o-philic mores and puts them to the logic test - again, see tidbit 4.

6. Primeval has officially jumped the shark. One of my guilty pleasures in life - no, not Jessica Alba in the first season of Dark Angel or Scarlett Johanssen in Ghost World, nor even my early fascination with the Sorceress in He-Man, Madonna's first album with songs such as "Borderline" (pre-"Like a Virgin" days, mind you), nor yet even my early devotion to Men At Work's two brilliant (to me) LPs - was the BBC "paleontological" action/drama Primeval. Without going into dirty details, everything about the show was a bit low-budget and shoddy, but it had charm and chemistry and some semblance of nerdy educational value wrapped up in a hip package, all of which the producers have managed to surgically extract in seasons two and three by killing off more than half the team, including Douglas Henshall as Cutter, the only non-cliché character of the lot and the main reason for watching besides Abby Maitland (although I hear it was his decision to leave, seeing that the scripts were becoming sillier and sillier and might blemish his CV), replacing historically accurate fauna (for the most part faithfully reproduced by the CGI team responsible for the "Walking with Dinosaurs" series of documentaries), and informing the audience which geologic epoch and era such 'monsters' called home, while nescessarily weaving a drama and some rudimentary soap-opera elements into the whole contraption in order to suck everyone in - in other words a fairly brainy show on the level of Dr Who or Star Trek - The Next Generation. But since Cutter's death (sorry for any spoilers, sucks for you I guess), the show SUCKS BOLLOCKS, all in capitals, having turned into The A-Team with no Hannibal to lead them, and with B.A. Barracus and Murdock replaced by Abby (Hannah Spearritt in real life... yumm), and Connor (who cares what his name is in real life? ...emo bastard is engaged to Hannah now for real). And as much as I disliked "Stephen" in the first two series (I guess he'd be "Face" in my A-Team analogy), his replacements are even worse. The show has degenerated into a soap opera "Babylon AD"-level show with fictitious and "future-evolved" monsters now menacing the team, who no longer really even feel like a team, except for the excellently-played dour Home Office paper-pushing leader, James Lester (Ben Miller), which is saying something, as he was the guy you loved to hate in the first season whilst pulling for Cutter and his team. He's grown a pair or two (two?), and is a decent reason to keep watching, but to cut to the real chase, the only true reason to patronise this dying farce of a once-promising show is the steamy-hot Hannah Spearritt, if you're into mousy blonde waifs with green eyes of course, like I am. Other than that, it's pretty much time to find a new show. House, anyone? Oh wait, that's becoming the Foreman/Remy Hadley show now...