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April 15th; Sunday. Wasps are massing near my head upstairs in the gallery of Robin's studio, probably building a nest. I keep waking up with 30 or 40 of them on the window pane next to the sofa. A bit Amityville, though they generally just make grumbling noises and only buzz near my head in ones and twos as a well-meaning way of getting me to arise and engage with the day. Last night I puffed candle smoke all over them, and they seem a bit hungover this morning as a result. A large white cockerel accompanied by (his?) four fat white hens wanders across the grass I can see through that pane - I had no idea the birds roamed freely outside the wired enclosure. Strange portents abound.

April 14th; Saturday. The investigation of President Honey Monster continues to turn into an investigation of Obama, Clinton, & the FBI.
April 13th; Friday the 13th. Exciting! The Day Of Unluckiness goes relatively well, apart from accidentally arriving at work in Obuda short of sleep and an hour earlier than the early-enough 8am. In more Dr Moreau news, researchers are growing tiny human brains inside rats. Are we concerned?

April 12th; Thursday. A reflective piece about liberals versus "progressives".
April 11th; Wednesday. A short update on the global warming story.

April 10th; Tuesday. Back in the Big Pogacsa, at Michael's place. Suddenly weather is getting warmer. A "very angry badger" closes part of a castle.
April 9th; Monday. Looking out of an upper window in the studio, I vaguely realise that there is a subtle difference between the colour of the slices of sky between the branches of the bare tree depending, of course, on time of day. In the morning, when the sun is coming from that direction, the blue is sweeter, "higher". By evening the sun is the other side of the barn-sized studio, behind whoever is inside that window looking out, and the blue is more powdery, very slightly more violet. Closer to the opaquer, denser evening blue of a painting where the sunset is behind us. Yesterday, more baby chicks got installed in the smaller winter studio next door, and the orange-lit floor swarms with them day and night in the couple of feet low down under the heat lamps dangling on long leads from the high ceiling. Either black or cream, they crowd around like animated balls of cotton wool, fat furry apostrophes hopping, tumbling, and bouncing in the social melee. A peculiar effect from Saturday still sinking in, a sensation of freedom at giving back the keys to my former flat, despite the fact I'm dependent on friends and am now homeless.

April 8th; Sunday. Around 11pm an early count of today's votes seem to suggest Orban and Fidesz are not only returned to power, but have obtained the 2/3 majority that can change Hungary's constitution to further entrench his party's grip on power. Slightly oddly, this constituency map erases the region's largest lake.
April 7th; Saturday. I do a long day cleaning and packing, Robin turns up and we somehow pack his car. He folds his 18-year-old son Bela and me into the parcel-packed vehicle like some kind of 3D origami puzzle. Stopping for coffee at a petrol station on the way, Robin remarks how he threw a block of butter across a supermarket the previous day for his daughter Zsuzsi to catch, she dropped it, he called her 'butterfingers', and she didn't get the joke.
British firm designs a tea that tastes like biscuits dipped in tea.

April 6th; Friday. Wake up in the morning at 5.25am out of a vivid dream in which I'm near the top of an office block which rumbles lightly and then the top 3 or 4 floors twist round about 90 degrees, come off the block in one chunk and then somehow crash hundreds of feet to the ground without killing any of us. Feels momentous, yet oddly enough not really frightening.
Important stories in recent weeks include prosecution of Sarkozy in France over missing money and the war on Libya, and a Chinese firm buying a stake in Deutsche Bank. The first suggestion is that Gaddafi funded his election, and then France attacked Libya with British & American help and made sure Gaddafi was shot dead. The second suggestion is that China is picking up influence on European policy by taking on some German bad debts.
April 5th; Thursday. Dr D tells me more of the changes to the voting law that were made a couple of years ago, and discover that the prime ministerial candidate for the opposition socialists (and their election partner Dialogue for Hungary) rejoices in the name Gregory New Year Christmas (Gergely Szilveszter Karacsony).

April 4th; Wednesday. As I shift bags of dust and junk out of the slowly emptying flat, I run into the Man Of Shadow on the ground floor several days in a row. We greet each other as though in some kind of unspoken alliance. A memory comes back from last September when all the power went out in much of the district. I was downstairs on the front steps enjoying the sight of the whole street in darkness and he was standing next to me soundlessly rolling a cigarette. After a moment's silence he asks me about a time half a year earlier when I'd locked myself out of my flat for the first and only time and went to him for help in his janitor persona. He'd advised me against climbing up the outside of the building and said regretfully he had no spare keys. As we now stood in the darkness he takes his first drag off the roll-up, and quietly asks in a voice of mild curiosity how did I manage to get back into my flat that night six months ago? I explained I persuaded my neighbour to let me practise on his door with a relatively bendy store discount card I have in my wallet, locating exactly where his latch was so I could find just the right height on my own door to slide the card in. Small crumpled man takes another puff on his roll-up, exhales, squints out at the power-cut-darkened city borough, and murmurs with faintly donnish approval, "I was pretty sure you'd manage it somehow."
April 3rd; Tuesday. Back in Budapest, I was worrying about how to get the two giant plastic boxes Martin gave me off the balcony and into the rubbish, and then I find the upper parts crumble to the touch. My guess this is a UV light effect is confirmed when the parts of the boxes on the underside protected from daylight are much tougher and harder to break up.

April 2nd; Easter Monday. No nonsense today splashing aftershave on village girls.
April 1st; Easter Sunday. Hristos Anesti! Christ is risen. A delightfully odd 1830s account of spontaneous life created in the lab.

March 31st; Easter Saturday. Major scandal at US agency FBI now simmers on back burner. Britain's Labour struggles to respond to changing Facebook algorithms. Article with moving graphs suggests racism overrides social class in the US. Actual patent on robotic bees granted. Undemocratic nature of EU highlighted by rise of Martin Selmayr. Discredited sex-assault research warps US justice system.
Soon after we arrive at Robin's in the countryside after dark, Zsuzsi and I rush to the attic of the garage to find Sissi the Komondor daughter of the late Lupi has had 7 puppies after a romantic tryst with some local dog. Some black, some white, one cream, all with eyes shut, making small squeaking noises as they crawl around the dozing mother, taking milk.
Late at night in bed upstairs in the cavernous studio, I read by candlelight a 1954 edition of Aldous Huxley's 'Doors of Perception' I found in Robin's library. His title is poised between Jim Morrison & The Doors' 1960s use of the quote and the original William Blake line from the 1790s. Although he describes the effect of mescaline on him one day in 1953 Los Angeles with beautiful clarity, it was slightly odd to hear his confession he had always been a "bad visualiser" and struggled to form mental pictures under any conditions. This combines strangely with his frequent mentions of painters from the 17th to 20th century to explain some of what he sensed while the drug was in effect. Huxley speculates carefully & thoughtfully about mystics who have religious experiences, painters who see the world afresh via their visual artistic sense, and other people who enjoy neither way to glimpse the "isness" of the world outside our petty human frame of reference.
March 30th; Good Friday. A claim that historic trends between Islam & Christianity will be decided in Nigeria.

March 29th; Thursday. Does every sexually-permissive society decline & fall?
First trip to OBI in some time to buy bits for making the 2nd transparent plastic bookcase mobile on wheels. Feeling tired & hungry stay there another half hour in a sort of fake lorry-drivers' cafeteria inside the OBI building where I eat some chips with chicken, and then a goblet of tiramisu. The tiramisu is reasonable enough except that it smells powerfully of the epoxy resin adhesive I used to assemble those Airfix models of aircraft carriers or fighter jets or whatever they were. Older men courting my mother used to buy me them when I was around 5 or 6. This must be some non-alcoholic essence-of-rum flavouring the pudding is drenched in, but the aroma memory of small military plastic bits gluing together is strong.
March 28th; Wednesday. Self-driving car kills 1st pedestrian. Of course, the AI-boosters still make the utilitarian argument that robots killing people is better than people killing more people.

March 27th; Tuesday. Turns out a major feminist, Kate Millett, was mad & nasty. So claims her little sister.
March 26th; Monday. US military shows off creepy new weapon.

March 25th; Sunday. Haul boxes up to Robin's attic, even though somewhat wiped out from yesterday's lugging. Chat with Zeno. Late in the afternoon, the family of Robin's friend Aniko turn up and kindly drive me back to Budapest. They are returning to the metropolis after a peaceful day lounging in warm spa water in the nearby Alfold town of Cserkeszolo.
March 24th; Saturday. Student David generously helps me haul boxes down from flat to street level. Drive to Robin's in the countryside with a Russian man and a van. He tells me how he used to be a tax lawyer in Moscow, but found that even if you win in court against the Russian state and get awarded costs, the state then decides to only give you 10% & 20% of costs so you still lose money and go out of business.

March 23rd; Friday. Cambridge Analytica + Facebook scandal is overblown?
March 22nd; Thursday. Designer alleges golden ratio is twaddle.

March 21st; Wednesday. Here's one of Jacques Lacan's psychoanalytic students, a Paris feminist thinker from the 1970s, denying she was a communist informer.
March 20th; Tuesday. Useful piece about "thinkers" who deny consciousness.

March 19th; Monday. Despite photographs & film footage of ballot-box-stuffing, Vladimir Putin is again confirmed as Chairman Of All The Russias in yesterday's election. A brief word on his behalf a decade ago: "I Crush You".
March 18th; Sunday. Catch a bus to the now-enlarged Kunszentmarton cake shop for a coffee with Linguist & Folklorist Edina for the first time since her return from Azerbaijan. Pouring rain in both directions slightly dampens things.

March 17th; Saturday. Ewan Morrison calmly dismantles the dangerous mirage of intentional communities. On the other hand in Robin's rural cell of good living out on the Great Plain, wonderful cooking by Zeno the Alchemist, together with the mass of home-laid eggs and home-slaughtered meat, makes every meal a candelit feast.
March 16th; Friday. A woman entrepreneur who was the darling of Silicon Valley turns out to have committed fraud, and to have been seriously out of her depth running a biotechnology start-up. Pre-war, a now-largely-overlooked aristocratic woman was prescient in warning both of the darkness of both communism and of nazism, sounding the alarm before male politicians.

March 15th; Thursday. Bridge collapses days after completion, killing six. Turns out the building firm is proud of its women engineers & managers, and was given minorities-diversity preference during the construction tender.
I still have no flat to go to, but must move out. Robin swoops to the rescue, and drives me and my first 8 boxes out to his place in the countryside by night.
March 14th; Wednesday. China's sinister online 'social-media' network moves into a creepy new phase.

March 13th; Tuesday. Julia, Erika, & Krisztian come to see me in the Croatian pirates' bakery. Suggesting I might move into the spare room of a mutual friend, Richard, Krisztian waxes eloquent and waves his hands around: "Both you and Richard are intellectuals! You and he can enjoy a common life of the mind!" The two girls nod happily at this idea.
March 12th; Monday. Last night finished a book kindly lent by Mr Saracco, 'Life 3.0', by Max Tegmark. This is a very reasonable attempt to give an overview of what "machine superintelligence" might entail, and how we might be wiser to fear AI competence rather than AI malevolence. Strikingly, the cheery and thoughtful narrative is undermined by some blithe assumptions Tegmark doesn't think to question: for example that humans have mastered animals purely through intelligence. At one point he says that man has mastered tigers through cleverness, not through force, which is clearly wrong. Humans largely avoided tigers for centuries, and sometimes fought them not with cleverness but with spears or fire, which can be counted as forms of cleverness, but also required physical force, strength, courage. It's hard, for example, to imagine a race of super-intelligent mice overcoming tigers on the same timeline, or even being free to develop tools & technology while being constantly predated on by larger animals. Even worse, the idea that minds can be uploaded into machines, or that machines can become self-consciously intelligent and purposive, is also taken for granted with the exception of one sentence. Here the assumption is that physics is the supreme subject, and somehow from this Tegmark deduces that intelligence must be substrate-independent, that silicon (or some other substance) must be as able to carry a thinking mind as the fatty, meaty tissues of some mammals. Again, this completely fundamental problem with AI is just assumed away.

March 11th; Sunday. Still feeling weak, I finish a paid translation. I've slowly become myself again as the hours pass since Friday night's sickness.
Suddenly warmer the last evening or two, I go for a walk around 3am hearing spring-themed birdsong: yet more bachelors looking for a wife. One small tree behind the all-night grocer's has a very dark brownish bird, like a double-sized sparrow with an orangeish-yellow beak, warbling away in hope of companionship. I watch it from 4 or 5 feet off. Realise I've never been this close to a bird while it sings its song before. Seems unbothered by me.
Ways to infect a computer through the printer.
March 10th; Saturday morning. A bathroom sink filled with cold sick perhaps not the best welcome to the weekend, but at least my stomach feels less poisoned. Never before have I had vomiting where each heave made me involuntarily shout or bark like a dog the second before the puke comes up. Dignified! But such are the wondrous powers of our bodies as they defend us from harm.

March 9th; Friday. I get food poisoning. Really not a good night.
March 8th; Thursday. Communism was helped, not harmed by the west.

March 7th; Wednesday. Royal secret ritual. Part-return to form from the Mash.
March 6th; Tuesday. An academic wants to drug Germany. Not very encouraging.

March 5th; Monday. Yesterday's election in Italy shows big shift by voters against the EU lobby. Very high turnout at 73%.
March 4th; Sunday. A good discussion of Socrates, Plato, and the big lie.

March 3rd; Saturday. Frigid sort of weekend weather. I've been going easy on the one-shirt look, making sure to wear a shirt and pullover so as not to attract stares.
Interesting article from the BBC suggests life is mainly about luck.
March 2nd; Friday. Book review of superbly barmy-sounding AI tome. Review is readable and charming. I suspect unhinged tome will be fascinating.

March 1st; Thursday. Some rather lovely ley-line-type talks about esoteric landscape stuff. Landscape Zodiacs / The Belinus Line / The Arrow of Apollo.

Recent weblog entries continued:

Who can translate the next 300 words into Korean or Hindi? Contact us and there will be revelry.

Languages dying out each week - who cares?