2016
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September 30th; Friday. Out for a brief bev after dark with Robin, where I meet his friends Balinese-speaking Zita & Hungarian-deaf-language-signing Pal, both in a state of good cheer at a crowded outdoor beer garden. A chill most evenings is just starting to impose itself. Six nights ago, last Saturday, Robin and I were talking at his flat when a muffled 'boff' sounded somewhere outside, too short and discrete to be thunder. An hour later walking home I was trying to get through a closed-off street on foot, policemen everywhere. They stop us walking back out of this traffic-control lobster pot, tetchily refuse to answer questions, and crossly demand to see everyone's papers. I slowly realise these are the only things they know how to do. Eventually we drift off. Dr D on Tuesday three days later told me this was a nail bomb deliberately detonated to (seriously) injure two police constables, so no wonder their colleagues were in a bad mood. Apparently this might be connected with the recent sentencing to 12 years' inside for a Hungarian extreme nationalist called Budahazy. Meanwhile on Monday or perhaps Sunday the Spanish perfume-by-numbers stall in the mall had just vanished, only a yellow folding wet-floor sign to mark its passing. Not even a scratch on the shiny tiled floor to show where it was. Trying to get the hang of Spenser from a book now reading on the tram. A stately, unhurried feel to the poem 'Epithalamium', from which:
    And ye three handmaids of the Cyprian queen,
      The which do still adorn her beauty's pride,
    Help to adorn my beautifullest bride;
      And as ye her array, still throw between
    Some graces to be seen,
      And as ye use to Venus, to her sing,
    The whiles the woods shall answer and your echo ring.
September 29th; Thursday. Alternating hot and chilly days keeping us on our toes. I haven't fallen ill, and am in a wary state of microbe alertness. Norwegian researchers find that horses can learn to read symbols: nicely-designed study. "The researchers also report that the horses appeared excited at being able to communicate with their trainers in such a novel way, engaging eagerly in the training and responding sometimes before being asked." {Dobbin studied the control panel of launch commands, deep in concentration ///}

September 28th; Wednesday. The sound of a pneumatic drill / jackhammer (actually, they're motorised chisels) can be soothing if far away enough. The way distant lawnmowers can resemble buzzing bumble bees on a hot summer's day. Depressing that the world trains hundreds of thousands of anthropologists so they can tell us that men often like to wear ostentatiously practical clothing while women often prefer to wear ostentatiously impractical - even pocketless - clothing. For this Rousseau's find-the-noble-savage project trundles on?
September 27th; Tuesday. Strange rich dreams abound during recent nights. Some concern history. Here's a book review of a tome by Mr Tombs about the English. Elsewhere he describes trying to push England into the Franco-German tariff cartel as a "long-term miscalculation" by the US.

September 26th; Monday. After I ask a couple of American women on the tram how they might vote (for Hillary Clinton) a Hungarian man & I start chatting about the US election. He says he's concerned that Trump might not even understand government. I agree and jest that perhaps the other candidate understands government too well, and he chuckles, appreciating the pairing of opposites. Anyone who feels that it's foolish to avoid television and internet screens might want to look at this mind-control patent for using pulsed magnetic waves emitted by a standard screen to influence the brains of people nearby. Filed over ten years ago.
September 25th; Sunday. Wonderful lunch yesterday with Marion, then coffee with Mr K, Monsieur N, & Mdme O. 2D chart of European societies grouped by former allegiances. Clinical 2009 critique of Nassim Taleb by another financial-risk theorist.

September 24th; Saturday. Webster Tarpley's wild but fascinating claims that Galileo's, Newton's, and Voltaire's careers were all pawns in a multi-century covert battle of ideas waged by Venetian spies & diplomats. Not quite clear where Russell fits in. Don't give up just because the first 5 minutes sound mad.
September 23rd; Friday. Disputed island in Lake Victoria covered in shacks. So why is the bigger one next to it empty? It's clear who taxes them there?

September 22nd; Thursday. Last week's mix from colleague Q + yesterday's radio show from Petrograd DJ Lady Waks #397. They've changed the room they put her in.
September 21st; Wednesday. Nice Twitter account sending out old book illustrations.

September 20th; Tuesday. Some chilly & cloudy days sneaking into the timetable. AI program writes dire song billed as a "Beatles-like tune". Not even close. Not even a crass Wings-style melody - and it had human help. Oh yes, big-budget Hollywood movie written by 4-year-old. So bad it's bad again.
September 19th; Monday. Nifty filmette on quantum erasers: yes, change the past.

September 18th; Sunday. A tune mixed by Dimitri from Paris, who seems have stopped dressing as an airline pilot of late.
September 17th; Saturday. Back on Thursday evening was at Budapest's first virtual-reality/augmented-reality meeting and met some folk attending. Took place at a cafe slightly oddly themed after game known in Britain as Nine Men's Morris.

September 16th; Friday. Two long articles about spooks: the first from 2015 about the Athens Olympics, phone-tapping, and (by the sound of it) murder; the second about a spy looking for the mother he never knew.
September 15th; Thursday. Busy day. Yes, I occasionally have those too. British ambassador to the Saudi kingdom goes native. Unorthodox US commentator Webster Tarpley (audio interview) gives a persuasive run-down on the war against (and for) ISIS/Da'esh in late 2015. Some excellent detail.
Vaguely regretting 4 or 5 days ago not getting phone number off supermarket customer in black dress with magnificent mane of straight brown hair right down her back. Crisply sheared off where it covered half her bottom. Of course she had the gimlet-eyed Impress-Me Glare and was a bit of a titch at perhaps 5'7", but you can't have everything.

September 14th; Wednesday. Why self-driving cars "must" be programmed to kill. Oh dear, oh dear.
September 13th; Tuesday. Finished reading through 'Toynbee on Toynbee', also borrowed from Lorinc, a short book-length transcript from 1974 of a set of radio conversations between the then-elderly Arnold Toynbee (83 years old) and G.R. Urban. Their topic: history, and Toynbee's views on human civilisations past & present, thoughtfully and articulately presented on both sides. Although I read and enjoyed Toynbee's grand book about civilisations back when Mother and I read it in the 1990s, this set of radio talks was instructive. It confirmed me in two thoughts I had the ghost of when reading the earlier book: (1) Toynbee was wonderfully educated, as well as wise and humane, with a mass of useful detail at his fingertips, but (2) while he was moderately clever he wasn't actually very clever. In several places, he makes shockingly silly remarks. He says that the lesson England/Britain learned about staying out of Continental entanglements during the Hundred Years' War had misled Britain over the EEC (later EU), which he regarded as a good thing, and was a "lesson learned too well". Of course, he was wrong there, and in fact the Hundred Years' War lesson was still good value in the 1970s and should have kept Britain out of another Franco-German pact. Elsewhere he makes the startling schoolboy howler of regarding the world's resources as fixed, saying there is no way the poorer countries of the world can get rich without the rich getting poorer. This was in the 70s, with a global population of 3 billion and now we are at 7 billion with fewer people starving, and an unimaginably larger section of the world gallivanting around flying in jet planes, using mobile phones and laptops, working in spacious air-conditioned offices consuming modern medicines and enjoying longer holidays. For Toynbee to get something as basic as elementary economics wrong harshly undermines the value of all that fabulous scholarship he accumulated in other parts of history. Along with his embarrassing zero-sum view of economics is his residual partial respect for Marx (even worse, Mao), making him very much a creature of 20th-century fashion rather than an independent thinker. To grasp that Marx really was just a deluded crank with a genius for guru/prophet self-promotion would have demanded a leap outside convention it seems Toynbee wasn't capable of. So my nagging doubts about his great-civilisations taxonomy now filled out much better.

September 12th; Monday. Weather still hot. Know nothing about whoever it is giving Our Lady of Pleasure the good loving, but heartening to hear a couple of days ago her recognisable cries of approval ring out down the street both at midday and again just after midnight. There have been some early-evening trysts as well. Seems other men on this block still not making much effort by contrast. Perhaps an appropriate moment to ask 'Do We Really Want To Fuse Our Brains Together?'
September 11th; Sunday. 'A Pesszimizmus Haszna' ('The Uses of Pessimism and the Danger of False Hope'), by Roger Scruton and translated into Hungarian by Gabor Csordas. This was the book with the dreary front cover that I bought in Szeged one depressing day last summer. Slightly gruelling to read in parts, given how my Hungarian fluency slumps in the years when I have no local girlfriend to have daily quarrels with, the overall argument is Scruton's calm, wise thesis that utopians in power always become authoritarians. This is, he says, because utopianism is based on misleading optimism about human nature. A late chapter on hunter-gatherers is interesting, because Scruton's thoughts come close to my own ideas about how Hobbes and Rousseau got prehistory wrong, and hence their own philosophies of politics wrong.
Footage from the US reveals the second Clinton Twin Tower collapsing, right on schedule, in New York, at a commemoration of the 9/11 attacks ("overcome by the heat"). This rather overtakes a video from about a week ago where a woman commentator in a stripy red outfit says Trump has "100% chance" of becoming president. Dilbert cartoonist and now freelance analyst of this US presidential election Scott Adams claims Hillary Clinton's hopes are now finished, and looks back at his own predictions last year that she would be found to have a serious hidden health problem.

September 10th; Saturday. Finished Lorinc's copy of 'Point Blanc' by Anthony Horowitz. The second of his Alex Rider novels I've read, featuring a sort of teenage James Bond character, in which our young hero has to penetrate an isolated Alpine lair of classic Bond-villain types plotting evil and world domination. I can see how the twist on the old formula has done so well. Interesting to compare to the adolescent adventures of the Famous Five era, which I'm now thinking I ought to read.
September 9th; Friday. Read 'The Tenth Man' by Graham Greene, kindly lent to me by Lorinc. A text, about novella length, that Greene wrote up in the 1940s for a possible film for MGM, which he claimed to have forgotten about until finding it in a drawer in the 1980s. He also claims in his foreword to prefer it in retrospect to his better-remembered 'Third Man'. An elegant, sparely-told tale in which simple details crisply sketch out distinct characters and then the plot emerges from those. The story, in which a French prisoner of the Germans buys his way out of a firing squad at the price of everything he owns, moves smoothly & naturally to a surprise climax.

September 8th; Thursday. Our Man in Bucharest shares charming plot summary he found of an Italian opera called 'Il Brexito'.
September 7th; Wednesday. Versatile Latvian finance minister & grandmaster takes game off world's no. 1 woman chess player; Petrograd radio show #394; sobering tale of business founder overreach.

September 6th; Tuesday. 1st lesson after summer with Dr D. Meanwhile, Old Lady of Threadneedle Street talks sense on robots-will-replace-us panic.
September 5th; Monday. I think it was the small hours today finished reading Stephen Potter's short book 'The Theory and Practice of Gamesmanship', illustrated by Frank Wilson with wonderfully convincing line drawings. This is what people would now call a spoof text, a pretend guide to a fake field of sports theory, a humour book about psyching out opponents in tennis, golf, bridge, and other healthy pre-war pastimes. In fact, it's a satire about how people have cheated at all of life for all of history. This is the main text that was very loosely, but brilliantly, adapted for cinema in the mid-1950s as 'School for Scoundrels' which I watched with Jeremy & his wife a couple of Christmases ago. There were several Potter books, and I read most/all of them from the library what seems now like several lifetimes ago. Scanning this for signs I'd read it before felt odd. The faintest ghost of half-recognition floated over some pages, but since the Potter books are essentially all the same joke redone in lots of different ways, I could easily be recognising him through one of the other texts. One thing I enjoyed this time were the deliberately awful made-up quotes heading each chapter:
   Chapter II The Pre-Game
      "And now they smile at Paradine,
      Who but would smile at Paradine?
      (That man of games, called Paradine)
      For the Gamesman came his way."
           Paradine
   Chapter III The Game Itself
      "East wind dhu bleow
      En-tout-cas dhu geow."
           Essex saying
   Chapter VIII Lost Game Play
      "--- for the game is one of a series,
      and a fractional loser thou."
This is the first time I've been given a book with orders to destroy it once finished.

September 4th; Sunday. Cloudy skies make you think more clearly.
September 3rd; Saturday. Almost went down to sun-baked countryside yesterday to see Robin & Zsuzsi & Zeno, but 3 cold baths on Thursday plus some squiffiness made me a bit poorly. Glad I stayed in town to rest. Here's a way your computer can be hacked using barely-audible sound. Such fun.

September 2nd; Friday. Childrearing news: a) glowing screens are addictive? b) smacking toddlers helps up to 6?
September 1st; Thursday. Man kidnapped to teach English in North Korea: proper headhunting.

Mark Griffith, site administrator / markgriffith at yahoo.com