My thoughs on Personal Morality and Right Action



  1. In most cases you should be able to clearly see the right action (there is no mystery about morality).
    1. It is very hard to construct a hypothetical situation where it is not clear what is the right action.
  2. If the right action does not appear to be the most compassionate action, it might not, in fact, be the right action.
  3. If the action you want to do doesn't hurt or betray anyone, it may well be the right action.
  4. The right action is often the fairest action.
  5. The right action is never the least fair action.
  6. If you cannot see the right action, then decide on the most compassionate action.

My thoughts on: The Darjeeling Limited

It was pretty good. But I missed the start. Which meant I never really got the hook. And if you don't get the hook, you don't finish the book.

I also missed various bits of the middle and latter parts.

My domestic assistant seems to think it was 7 out of 10 but I will have to unrate it.


The Beerpiphany of St Carlsburg, Part Two: Avoidance of the Alcoholocaust

The mega-myriad readers of my blog will know that I have a problem with alcohol. I'm not an alckie, I'm not even a big drinker. But when I drink, whether I end up sober, or so drunk I bone a bollard, my hangovers are evil. Invariably I enter a state I term the alcoholocaust.



In case you didn't know, hangovers are rated on the the H:E ratio (Hangover:Ebola ratio). The relative proportion of the hangover has a psycho-phsyiologiocal equivalent to Stage 3 Ebola. As a point of reference, a 19 year old rugby playing Russian would typically have hangovers with an H:E of 1:480. When you have an average H:E of 2, things get pretty bad. That's basically half an Ebola; an experience that can change you, as a man, deep inside.


Here am I, 36, with an H:E of a 68 year old.


Two weeks ago I went for a casual drink with my wife. I hadn't drunk much, maybe four pints... certainly not six. The next day, for literally about three hours I thought I had at least Marburg, possibly full-on Ebola. I was haemmoraging bile from my nose, which, considering my wife is a vegetarian, isn't very nice. At all. I pretty much puked myself into a mobius strip... inside the latrine. It was hell.
There is a scant dignity remaining in life when four pints can do that to you. This much, now, is clear.....




It gets worse...


In the week I'm out for a drink with my dad and Conan. I was sober, we all were sober, I had max four pints... the next day... gesus fricking cristos.... another bout of full scale gastro-meltdown....


Que pasa?
"Feels like Lassa"

It is 2008. I had to take action. I went into Boots in the wonderful City of Truro. I asked the pharmacist if he could help me out with some sort of pre-emptive hangover cure. Yes, yes he could, he said.... but he couldn't.... he only sold what The Hegemony wanted him to sell... and that was just Resolve.

Resolve is not a cure. It is an insult to the cause. I knew I needed to go deeper...



  • I started researching, learning, understanding. I was becoming a sage of alcohol. But even with the vast power of the internet I found no cure for my kind of alcoholism: high hangover susceptibility.
  • I went far into the neurophysiology of alcohol on synaptic-dysfucntion.
  • I searched for the philosophers stone of beer.
  • I saw, under electron microscopy, how the decompositionals of alcohol by the body's organs effect the same neuro-receptors as those effected in auto-nausaic reactions, ie, the two finger tonsil tango.
  • I fed rats Chocolate Liqueurs for months and watched them get more and more sleepy and podgy.
  • I even went into the matrix and saw the back-end code for drunkenness as sensation and behaviour.


From fermentation
To defecation
And urination
There was no part of the alcohol equation
That was not very much, in my acquaintion








Last night I found the answer.

I didn't find it by luck. This was not muttered to me by some crazy from the crazyhouse...no wiki gave me tell.... this was found... by investigation... meditation.... dedication... and insight....


There comes a time in a quest
When you must do what is best
When you must make, and take, the test
When you must stand beyond the rest

And the answer... this
enlightenment I bring to you.... this extinguishing of the alocoholocauststic anguish.... is summed up in the Four Noble P's which much be practiced before alcohol induced sonoration kicks in. The Four Noble P's, these which I have discovered, are the right and clear path out of Alcoholocaust:

The Four Noble P's
  1. Pint (of water)
  2. Pizza (purchased/prepared previously)
  3. Pint (of water)
  4. Paracetemol.

Perfectimondo.... Sunday morning.... I get up.. I check myself... and ?


Ebola?
"No la!"
Feelin' good?
"I'm feelin' fine?"

What's the time?
"Ten past nine"

AM?

"Amen..."
Having fun?
"Going for a run..."











The Beerpiphany of St Carlsburg, part one, is on salted.net



Salted Movie Review: The Nines

What is, or are, The Nines?


I'm fresh from this fantastic freak fest of a film, and I use that term not lightly. This film is a mesmerizing, if at times unpolished, masterpiece that not only intrigues right to the end, but at the end leaves you as if you have just done three Kaiser Sozes, two Matrix trilogies and half a dozen Monkeys.



It’s like one of the best quirky tales from 2000AD but made into a modern, well acted movie with great production. It has an unusually compelling style - and oodles of conceptual layers. But it’s complex and weird and hard to follow in a close to exhilarating way.



We just kept asking... "but?"... "how?" I think one of the brightest aspects of the movie is that it doesn't try to out weird you. So unlike, say, Eraserhead or Jacob’s Ladder (both great films, mind), there is always the chance that everything you see could be normal. And maybe, at the end it is all normal. Even with the revelation (I won’t spoil it by telling you what that is), even if you accepted it as this reality, even then, it could still be normality for all of us.



Q: Is it complex and weird like The Number 23?

A:No, the biggest part of The Number 23 is a number two.



I won’t tell you what The Nines is about, but I will tell you the nearest thing it reminds me of. My wife and I both will testify that my clothes (and of this weekend some soft toys) sometimes duplicate. Literally. As if someone has logged into reality, taken an unusual T-Shirt bought in a "London fashion sample sale" and then made an exact copy of it (except that one now has an oil stain that cannot be removed. I think it’s probably WD-40, so any tips appreciated). An exact copy. The same with a pair of brown trousers that I know, and would testify in a court of natural laws, that I only bought one pair of. No questions. I now have two pairs of them.

I think it also happens with socks, but my wife is sceptical of this.

Sure, the trousers and T shirt spontaneous duplications are mindboggling in the degree to which they render all notions of laundry normality.... abnormal, but it gets worse:

There have also been discoveries of soft toys that there were never, until recently, two of. One of the ontological clones was won five years ago by my dad in a raffle (probably Rotary) and could not possibly be duplicated (OK it’s possible. But I don’t think so). We have debated the possibilities. All of them, with a Doyleian keenness to the causal and material structures of our domestic reality that could allow this. Sure, perhaps the crazy lady across the road saw me wearing the shirt, spent four months on Ebay to get a copy, bought it with Paypal and slipped it in my smalls one spring morning. Maybe so. Maybe my brother in law, when he bought me the shirt, bought two, one for me and, knowing I'm a sharp dresser, one for him. And then at Easter three years ago accidentally left it in my house. Maybe....


It is rare in these days to have even the smallest of epiphanies.



Just as The Nines has lots of "buts", this crazy flux in our existential architectonics makes us have many more "maybes" than simple folk deserve. If you have objects disappear in your house, it can be weird. In English we call this "losing things". But when things don't vanish, rather they are duplicated... that’s mega weird... there is no word in any language for that kinda spooky. No word (ED, how about "isoanatanmorphic?", but that only applies to fruit.?).




These events, along with some before the little people came and took all my liberty away, have made me question the nature of reality at a very fundamental level, or at least, the nature of the material world.. and I guess I mean "material" in both senses here.



I wouldn't wish these kind of metaphysical palpitations on anyone, but luckily for you, you can experience even more weirdness than this by watching The Nines, without any actual weirdness in your clothing inventory. What is more, the weirdness The Nines can massage into your porridge is a kind of meaningful weirdness... a thought pumping weirdness... a metaphysical maelstrom... set conveniently in the Hollywood Film and TV world.



The Nines is in my Top Ten. That’s top ten of all time.



9/10 (duh!)


(Note: If there is a word for a review trying to represent what it describes, then I want that word to apply to this review).