Induction

One of those trucks which serve as mobile billboards sat at the kerbside as I went to buy some toilet paper (the Scott 1000-sheet rolls, since you ask - I'm an enthusiastic convert). This one was advertising Silver Reign. It said:

Free admission if you mention this truck.

Trying to imagine exactly how I would do the business of the mentioning, I settled on:

"I saw a truck which said that you give free admission if you mention it."

Because of course no-one would just say: "I saw a truck with your ad on it." That would sound lame, as if the speaker was just making small talk. The point isn't just seeing the truck; it's seeing what the truck had to say. It follows that what the truck is actually saying is something like:

Free admission if you mention that you saw this truck which offers free admission if you mention this truck.

It might then follow that the business of the mentioning properly goes something like:

"I saw a truck which said that you give free admission if you mention that you saw the truck which offers free admission if you mention the truck."

In which case the implied message on the side of the truck is:

Free admission if you mention that you saw this truck which offers free admission if you mention that you saw this truck which offers free admission if you mention this truck.

And so on and so forth, until the writing became so small that you wouldn't see the ad anyway. Yes, this is what I thought when I saw the ad. What I didn't think was: "Wow! Free admission to Silver Reign!"

The BDSM SDK

A funny dream last night. Mostly it was guided by a Grand Theft Auto narrative. It was one of those dreams where you're both observer and participant, both experiencing it and commenting on it. It was exciting and a bit scary.

Towards the end, though, it skipped to me watching (or reading about, or both) a cheesy BDSM-themed musical, which on waking left an impression something like Gay!, from The IT Crowd - well-meaning but horribly clueless.

What resonated after I'd woken up, though, was remembering that in the dream I'd been reading the lyrics for one of the songs, which were printed in a programme or somesuch. My waking memory is, as one would expect, of seeing the complete lyrics on the page, then scanning down line by line. Notably, the lyrics rhymed.

That needs some unpacking, I think, because taken at face value it's pretty amazing. If one assumes that the complete lyrics genuinely were on the page - such that I could have read them in any order - it entails that my dream created them in a single step. The me in the dream wasn't hearing the lyrics line by line, or seeing them as if typed out line by line. They were there, fully formed, just as if I might have picked up a book of poetry and turned to a poem I'd never read before.

That's extraordinary enough to imagine, without the extra problematical constraint imposed by the lyrics also rhyming. Rhyming imposes structure, which requires planning, memory, and all sorts of other cognitive tasks. If (again) the lyrics were genuinely complete on the dream page, available to be read in any order, and they also rhymed, then this amounts to the instantaneous creation of structured language in large blocks.

Or maybe it doesn't, because I'm deeply sceptical about my or anyone else's ability to do this, even in a dream. However much it seemed to me during the dream - and in retrospect after having woken - that the lyrics were fully formed on the page the moment I turned to it, it sounds far more likely that this was precisely the illusion the dream needed to convey. Though I felt that I could read the lyrics in any order, it's more plausible that the dream was furiously laying the tracks as the train steamed forward, making it up as it went along. This is in itself impressive, of course - both the illusion of completeness of the lyrics, and the ability to back up the illusion as necessary. It's not quite the alchemy of a poem from thin air, though.

As I read the dream lyrics in order, the laying of tracks ahead of the train seemed to work. My memory is that the rhymes were good, if not inspired. I regret that I wasn't able to fix the words in my head after I woke. Without that, I can't of course be sure that the dream created rhymes at all, and didn't just bamboozle me into falsely remembering that there had been lyrics, and that the lyrics had rhymed.

Except I did manage to grab onto the final word, and it convinces me that the dream machinery was indeed frantically making it up as it went along, that there actually were lyrics, which more or less adequately rhymed, and that the whole thing - structure, rhyming and all - hadn't appeared as if by turning a page. The final word was 'SDK'. It's techie jargon for 'Software Development Kit', the sort of hardware/software combo that, for example, Sony makes available to developers of PlayStation games. Funnily enough, I'd read a story a couple of days before about how Sony had reduced the price of its PS3 SDK.

Ah well. Like stage illusions, when you look hard enough at dreams the mechanism reveals itself. I guess the point is always to admire the trickery for what it is. Something doesn't need to be unexplainable to be magic.

Walking home

A nice little piece in the LA Times about Will Self walking in Los Angeles. LAX to Watts is a significant endeavour. I've done it by bus a few times and even that takes a couple of hours.

It reminded me of a day I walked from the outskirts of London into the West End. The Macguffin was the fact that I didn't have money for the tube, but it ended up being a pleasure in itself. It was almost a straight walk - maybe ten miles - down the Edgware Road, through Hendon, Cricklewood, Kilburn, Maida Vale, Marble Arch. I can date it precisely, because it was the Monday that the (fantastic) XTC album Oranges and Lemons came out, and buying it was my treat at the end of the walk.

Riding a bus gets you much closer to a city than driving a car, cycling gets you closer than riding a bus, and walking - especially this sort of long city-walk performed despite the existence of other options - is just the best way to soak up the feel of a place and really understand the geography. One of the alienating things about LA is that, not only don't people walk, it's more or less impossible to get from anywhere you are to anywhere you might want to be by walking; if you have a go at it, incidental pleasures on the way are pretty meagre. It's not a city for serendipitous wandering.

One of my heading-off-to-sleep thoughts (you can only really do it when you're safe and warm and home) used to be to imagine myself either dumped in the middle of nowhere - a moor, a desert, etc. - or some known but distant place, and then either to imagine the pleasure of arriving home after a monumental trek, or to play a game with myself, where I'd try to figure out what sort of reward I'd accept for willingly undertaking such an adventure. I'd put myself in a desert on the other side of the world, or perhaps just a long night's walk through the cold and dark away from the bed I was currently in. Would a hundred pounds be enough? In the end, the pleasure of arriving home - with the memory of what it felt like in the desolate starting place - always seemed the real prize.