F 1 D 0 -- 02 06 28 at 03 30 Full Beige Moon. I am out of practice. I used to write this every day for a while. Well, I used to SAY I wrote this every day, but did it often. Then twice a week. Then once a week. I did this last on the 17th, while the plane was going back home. Long time ago. Tonight I had trouble sleeping. Not for lack of beauty. The moon is very full, and not its usual fluorescent cool white, but a fluorescent warm white for a change. Global warming at work? Here on the street, from where I'm writing this, all I see is the quiet street, alight by sodium lamps. But the back yard is just as bright with the warm moon light. I could have sworn the cat was basking in the window upstairs with us, making believe it was sun light. I have a new distraction. When we were in London, there was a small market outside one of the churches. One of the craft sellers had these Tantrix tiles for sale. They were £6 each, or two for 10. I thought, but decided that they were overpriced for me. Well, a day or two later, Ann showed up with a couple of them for me. I've become a bit addicted. The game itself gets incrementally more difficult, but that's not really why it appeals to me. Oh, I'd better describe the tiles. They are black hexagons, with three lines passing entirely through. One yellow, one red, one blue. There are ten tiles in the kit, and it doesn't cover every possible mathematical permutation. The tiles are numbered, and your first goal is to make a yellow loop. Easy. The next goal is four, and to make a red loop. Then you have to make five. I'm getting these images by visiting the tantrix web site at http://www.tantrix.co.uk If I finish the puzzle, it erases it, and won't let me capture the screen to show you. But the play is easy. Drag it around. Click one of the sides to rotate. I like how these tiles are letting me experiment with loops of roadways. I did this by putting the tiles onto the glass plate of the scanner. When you break the rules, I think the paths taken by the tiles are more visually interesting. They are like a tool set into exploring. I tried making some of my own. When I duplicated the style, but finished the set, all was well. Ok, at home we just have a nice laser printer, so I have to fudge the work, but I've been using Corel Draw 5.0, and it is happy enough to do the job for me. I found that the set excluded some important tiles, which I have made up for myself. I also tried to create a similar system, but using squares. My square set had not six, but eight places a line could go. It just wasn't as pretty. The system works for six, and for eight, it is a six set, with two extra spots. But I was able to prototype the system quickly, and that was gratifying. Tonight we went to see the new Tom Cruise movie Minority Report. I rather liked it! It kept me interested in Cruise. It had a bad guy, someone from the government. Except that he turns out to be just doing his job, and he gets shot shortly thereafter. It had a certain realism. The department of precrime had a judge and someone else as professional witnesses of the things to happen. I liked that. After you dig in, you see that the ability to fortell the future is a side effect of a drug, which happens to be criminal, and very popular. The police reminded me of the ones in the Bruce Willis movie, Fifth Element. Anyway, I liked it. I was worried about being grossed out, but in the end, I didn't have to be so worried. Go see it. I've been here in Ontario for a week. I've had time to think about England. In Ontario, and most of United States, when you go out into the countryside, you may see farms and all, but you also see a lot of people who are simple, and like that simplicity. They have no use for computers. Nor people in cities who use them, for that matter. England was so different. I found the people who lived in the countryside to be doctors. People who worked hard for their way of life, and had some visible wealth to show for it. In North America, you don't have to look very hard to find idiots. Actually, I was going to tell you that isn't true in UK, but I suddenly recall men and boys, eyes red from drink and maybe drugs, clapping and shouting to nobody in particular. But the sense you get as a visitor is that the signal to noise ratio as regards normal people in UK is better than North America. If you ask the people there, they disagree. What else can I tell you? The clothes line? That is very high, and required climbing up something which wanted very much to be unstable. Well, we overcame it. I've been to a new music festival. Wow, I want to find more nice things to say about that. But it was an awful lot of pop squeak, POP Squeeeeeeeaaaak. Low piano softly. Highest violin note, loudly. Hit piano with arms. Bow violin and cello wooden side of bow. Play alto clarinet facing a different wall for each movement. Some of the notes are made by not blowing, but by fluttering the valve. Other notes are made by singing into the reed. I have nothing but super duper respect for the wonderful musicians who pulled this off! They could not go down to the local music shop and buy a CD to hear this, and give them some idea about what to do for us, the audience. Actually, I got to see some of the directions to the musicians. Often they were instructions to not follow rules at all, but to "keep the tone and length of note in flux." One score quoted Albert Einstein on Mathematics, something like, "laws of math do not apply to reality. When they do apply to reality, the mathematics is flawed." I should have written the quotation down, huh? The percussionist was amazing. He had to be able to play a drum kit, marimba, vibraphone, and other percussion. Some of the works were better than others. Someone found a Peanuts comic strip, and pinned it up. "Why do they keep changing the music?" asks P Patty. Marcie answers, "Because they're afraid we might start to enjoy it." Vignettes, After pierides, Carol Barnett Fla, Christian Asplund Erwin's Playground, Rajmil Fischman Transformations, Dinos Constantinides Moon Down, Piotr Grella-Mozejko Re:pair, Alex Shapiro Northwest Sketches II, Greg A Steinke Phaestos Disk A I, Alexander Mihalic Chronometrics, Robert A Baker Magritte Variations, J Mark Scearce Images, Michael Matthews Bilbies V, David Cleary Joy, Peter Knell Lyveden, C Scott Tresham Hurry Wait, Frederic Glesser Photographs from the 21, Robert Lemay Coronae, Virginia Samuel Laissez une voix, Jean-Sebastien Durocher Just one More, Timothy J Bowlby Do you truly love me more than these?, Tony K T Leung Nula, Chedo Barone Sixteen Ways, Michael Hynes Oboe Sonata, Dana Dimitri Richardson Lac Superieur Apres L'orage, Darlene Chepil Reid Hammer and Wind, Leonard Enns From Stillness, Emily Hall Uncas pocas, Steve Benner Halcyons, Aris Carastathis More soon. That's all I know.