Leaving a country where you've spent a lot of time is pretty hard, especially in the couple of months leading up to leaving as nothing seems to really matter that much any more so it's hard to motivate yourself to do anything. Annoyingly of course this is the worst time for this to happen as it's the time when you actually have the most to do. I am coping with it by making ridiculously detailed lists of things to do and writing the sort of poetry where if you feel it's starting to go a bit slowly then you just have someone brutally dismembered in the next stanza.

My boy is handsome as can be,
I tremble when he holds me near
I have given him my heart
He keeps it close, and holds it near.

I saw him working in a field of corn
The sun blazed lordly at his back
True to his task and yet unworn,
His gaze caught me in its sweet trap.

He took me where the river flows
And by its banks we kissed
He gave me a single blood red rose
His strong embrace was like a fist.

He said, 'Let us never part,
You're all the good in my wicked life'
I felt the beating of his heart
As he drew his shiny knife.

He stabbed me in my snow white throat
Then showing a cruel butcher's art
He slipped his knife beneath my coat
And with a twist cut out my heart

My boy is handsome as can be,
I trembled when he held me near
I have given him my heart
He keeps it close, and holds it near.

To a mouse by Robert Burns - rewritten in the style of Sylvia Plath's Daddy

You do not do, you do not do,
Any more little mouse
That has lived in my field,
For a year, or maybe two.

Your house was squashed flat,
When I plow, plow, plowed,
And now I must pray
For you, Ach Du, Ach Du.

The rolling fields of the West
And the cold winds blowing through
Are not very pure or true
So cannot help,
Or even get close to you.

Though you may steal from my barn
And break my pretty red barn in two
The best laid plans
Of me and you,
Have come to nothing now.

But you have it easy compared to me
As I can comprehend the past
And the future too.
You are pointless and brown,
And no one on the farm likes you
They are laughing and pointing at you
So mousie you bastard, I'm through.

Pretty Things

So what if we like all these pretty things,
Get gored by pink and lilac unicorns,
Are bound with tinsel and shiny rings,
See rainbows so bright they cause radiation burns,

So what if we like all these pretty lies
Stories of worlds that pop like a bubble
Words that glitter like sharpened knives
And monuments smashed into gilded rubble.

Some pretty things cause ugly scenes
Wakeful nights when time refuses to flow
To blot out the memory of terrible dreams

In which a hideous beast makes an unwelcome call
And comes close to whisper what we all know
That pain is the prettiest thing of all.

You've heard of the Mobius Strip, well this is about the Mobius striptease.


The Mobius Striptease

Ladies, Gentleman
Your attention please
For the fabulous
Erotic, MOBIUS STRIPTEASE!

Our own Salome
Takes to the stage
In time to the music
She begins to sway

In fevered frenzy
Her passionate hips
Describe first a circle
And then an ellipse.

The diaphanous fabrics
Fall away from her body
Revealing convex, concave,
Geometrical glory.

She bends in a circle
Caught in passions throes
Naked and lithe
She touches her toes.

Now for the finale
As the crowd gasp
She vanishes,
Suddenly, up her own arse.

The Unending Search for the elusive Higgs Boson and the dire consequences of the continuing failure to apprehend this menace to society.

They seek it here, they seek it there
They seek this boson everywhere.
They sometimes catch the echo
Of its condescending laugh
There are rumors that it watches you,
When you are in the bath

But when they try to detect it
It is gone without a trace.
It could be in your garden,
Or it could be out in spacem
It could be in the petal
Of a crimson damask rose,

It could be in a bank vault,
Or it could be up your nose
Anywhere where mass exists
That's where it can be found
It could be in the ocean,
Or it could be underground.

It's known to certain physicists
And some of the police,
But most of all it's name is known
On Geneva's meanest streets.
It's rampant reign of terror
Breaks symmetries and lives.

The Large Hadron collider
Was silenced to deprive
The cops of vital evidence
Of where it had fled to,
And soon the elusive Higgs Boson
Will be coming to get you.

'Strange how potent cheap booze is'
Noel Coward - sort of

We must DEAL WITH THIS HIDEOUS ANGST through the use of really bad jokes and inaccurate quotation. The internet, my dear boy is for being on, not for watching porn.

'An end to boom and bust'
Gordon Brown

Price of new computer = price of car - $500

Priorities = straight.

Sales tax = V.A.T. + stealth.

'I aim at the stars (but sometimes I hit London)'
Werner Von Braun - subtitle suggested by Mort Stahl

Ironically I've been writing rather a lot recently, but in a more technical sense. Writing a scientific paper - or any other technical document - is rather like assembling a jigsaw right from the begining whereas when you are writing something more informal then there is a sort of splurge at the begin when you just get a big lump of text and then edit it into something that somewhat resembles the thing that you actually intending to write. Of course life is futile and stupid and completely unedited, showing an appalling lack of of stucture and pacing combined with an apallingly predictable resolution, i.e. being slowly digested by various micro-organisms.

Random list of things I've been reading for no reason:

Von Braun: Dreamer of space, Engineer of war - Biography of Werner Von Braun, inventor of the V2 rocket that was fired on London, ex-member of the SS, brought to the US as part of the well-known Operation Paperclip to assist the US missle program. Gets rather bogged down in the details but fascinating in that it gives a fairly unflinching look at some of his moral failings. Most famous scientists get sort of retrospectively cannonized after their deaths (it'll probably even happen to that great onanist, James Watson), but some of the things that Von Braun was complicit with were so awful that there's no point in trying to defend them.

Darker than the deepest sea - Biography of Nick Drake. Pointless - nothing really happened to him; then he topped himself.

Pale Fire by Vic Nabakov - Half a poem and half the fictional notes to the poem. The notes are only obliquely related to the poem. Apparently written with the explicit intention of annoying literary critics. Hilarious, beautiful, with lashings of irony and homosexuality.

Ada, or Ador also by Vic Nabakov - If this wasn't so incomprehsible at times it would be incredibly popular on the internet since it is basically a steampunk fantasy set in an alternate America/Russia with lashings of incest. It does have a wonderful style - even more so than Lolita, but can be a bit annoying if you dislike tales of gilded youth or are a bit of a feminist, as there's a fairly long section about how much fun it is visiting brothels. I have to admit that this book and I have a bit of history and having read it about 10 times I'm still not sure if I actually like it or not.

Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson - I want to be nice about this since it was recommended to me by a really good mate, but.... well, there were about 5 chapters out of 70 that were really interesting and a lot of sub-William Gibson antics where the author tells you how COOL his characters are, AND HOW ONE IS THE MOST BADASS DUDE EVER, AND YOU COME AS SOON AS HE PENETRATES YOU!!! I'm not joking about the last bit (Chpt 51)... oh, and delivering pizza is the coolest thing ever apparently. In the appendix the author says 'I have probably spent more time coding during the production of this work than I did actually writing it.'. Probably not the best thing to admit, but it's nice to know that there's a reason why instead of plot development you just have several chapters of exposition. It is exposition of a rather fun theory though.

Right Ho, Jeeves, The Code of the Woosters, Jeeves in the Morning, Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit, all by P. G. Wodehouse - obviously. Is it me or is P. G. Wodehouse one of the great modernist authors? Unreliable narrator, experimental use of language, reflexive commentary on the process of narration, it's all there.

Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman, this is the only one of his books I've ever gone a bundle on. Which is somewhat ironic because some of things that he appears to have just knocked off in an idle moment such as the memoir/parody I Cthulhu and The Day the Saucers came make me go several bundles, a couple of bails, a small silo and a tractor.

'I don't know why I even bother getting dressed, as soon as I get to the Naughty Hellfire club I'll be ruthlessly debagged for non-payment of debts'
Prince George in Blackadder the Third

As a result of my obsessing over the journal article of doom my to do list now features everything from 'Get New Job' to 'MOAR TROUSERS'. Bother, are of course as vital as the other. It is not possible to get a job with no trousers and visa-versa.

The same thing we do every night. Try to TAKE OVER THE WORLD'
The Brain

One of the disadvanages of working in the physical sciences is that it's a lot harder to get people to be interested in what you are doing, however at least you never get headlines in the papers saying 'Scientists spend $300,000 proving that spin glass phase transitions take place at critical temperatures of 0.17K, what a waste of the tax payers money'. The moral of the story is that people are impressed by big words... and big magnets - (see NMR).

Ducks like water study 'waste of £300,000 taxpayers' money'

(Of course it would have been a lot cheaper, but the ducks flipped their second homes.)