Robert Downey, Jr: “Pray you, avoid it. Do you get that? That was Shakespeare. Heard of him?”
Zach Galifianakis: “Yes I’ve heard of him! He was a famous pirate. And by the way, it’s ShakesBEARD.”
Infinite Monkey: Part One
If a monkey hits keys at random on a typewriter for an infinite amount of time he will “almost surely” type a work by William Shakespeare. At least in theory.
The Infinite Monkey Theorem has many variations. In one version it’s a vast quantum-vivisection lab filled with a million monkeys who merrily bash the keys for eternity. In another version it’s a single immortal house-monkey sitting alone at a beaten up Underwood with his ink stained sleeves rolled up above his hairless elbows. Trapped in perpetual labour, his sole directive is to compose the work that is not only beyond his ability, but also beyond his comprehension.
Obviously, the monkey is not an actual monkey but a metaphor for some kind of conceptual machine capable of generating a random sequence of letters … for ever. In the final analysis the odds of a monkey typing a precise work of Shakespeare is so tiny that the chances of it happening before a thousand universes expire are essentially zero.
… Although not actually zero. In any case, if a clever monkey does happen to show up with a fresh copy of The Merry Wives of Windsor some time before the end of the universe it will be the first time the phrase “Stranger things have happened!” can be answered with, “… No they haven’t!”
When you consider how much Shakespeare owed to agencies beyond his control—to fate, genetics, the success of his ancestors, the ability of several of those ancestors to shape his upbringing, the hyper-productive capabilities of his own subconscious, and the work of all the great writers, thinkers and scientists who needed to come before him—it was blindingly far from certain he would ever grow up to write the things he did for us.
Further, it’s even more blindingly unlikely that some of the atoms thrown up from the collapse of a dying sun would eventually assemble themselves into the precise combination: William Shakespeare. Modern neuroscientists might also make the point that even if you steered young Shakespeare to his table in London and shoved a quill in his paw, you’d be flattering him to say that he was truly in charge of the ship. We are only just beginning to learn the extent to which our subconscious mind is in command not only of our creative activities, but of all aspects of our daily lives.
It might be possible to think of the greatest writer in the English language as someone destined to happen regardless of conditions. But in a way I think it’s even more lovely to consider his happening as a grand chemical accident, the perfect storm of atomic constitution and external input. The chances of creating a clever monkey like Shakespeare are almost zero—but not exactly zero.
The Fabric of the Cosmos
In 2011 I finished my first novel. (I mean I wrote one, not finally got around to reading one.) Watch this space for further dramatic news.
The book I wrote explores humanity’s struggle to find meaning in a bold new quantum reality: where objects can exist in several places at once; where time flows not just forwards, or backwards but slantways too; where concepts such as ‘space’ and 'causality' and 'punctuality' are meaningless; and where our universe is just one of an infinite number of possible realities, each appearing and expanding like a bubble in a limitless ocean, only to vanish in a wink and leave not a trace of its existence in the cosmic foam.
Or something like that. To be honest it's all a blur.
I couldn’t have written my book without Brian Greene’s The Fabric of the Cosmos, a ‘… grand tour of the universe and the best layman’s guide to current thinking on how everything works’.
It's a brilliant and bewildering book. I very much hope you enjoy it.
Matt.
Fabric of the Cosmos (Penguin Press Science)
On the Road
On The Road is an autobiographical work describing Jack Kerouac's road-trips across mid-century America. Kerouac was fond of relating the story of how he wrote the book in one three-week typing frenzy onto a 120-foot roll of gold-embossed, 12-ply toilet paper pilfered from Orson Welles' guest-house, but this version of events is probably embellished.
Here is Kerouac's book ...
On the Road: The Original Scroll (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)
And here is my own Google-maps version, written in one exhausting session in 2010 on the back of a sheet of refill paper taped to another sheet of refill paper.
On The Road — Memoirs of a Motion-sickness Survivor ...
The Very Sucky Giant — A Christmas Story (Reposted)
There was once a Giant who lived in the middle of an old town in a high-spec, split-level home with semi-detached lodge for guests (though he rarely entertained, he mostly just used the lodge to get his head together.) The Giant also had a large, lovely garden. It had been designed by a Swedish landscape-artist known for his ability to create the illusion of space in restricted urban environs. Every afternoon, as they were coming from school, the children used to go and play in the Giant's garden."How happy we are here!" they screamed at each other.
One day the Giant came back. He had been away in Cannes promoting a film he had produced. When he arrived home he saw the children playing in the garden. "Get out of my dutch elms!" The giant said in a very gruff voice, and the children gaily soiled themselves.
Then the giant built a high wall all round the garden and put up a notice.
TRESPASSERS
WILL BE
MURDERED
He was a very sucky Giant.
Now the children had now nowhere to play, except the local youth centre - which was full of dealers and smelled of pee. They used to wander round the high wall when their lessons were over and talk about the beautiful garden. "How happy we were there," they said to each other. "Let's set fire to it!" But the wall was made of stone and the giant had installed thermal sensors.
Then the Spring came, and all over the country there were blossoms and birds. Only in the garden of the Sucky Giant was it still Winter. The birds did not care to sing there as there were no children, and the trees forgot to blossom. The only people who were pleased were the Snow and the Frost. "Spring has forgotten this garden," they cried, "so we will live here all the year round."
Spring never came, nor the Summer. The Autumn gave golden fruit to every garden, but to the Giant's garden she gave only grapefruit. "Enjoy your weird, shitty-tasting fruit!" she said. So it was always Winter there, and the North Wind, and the Hail, and the Frost, and the Snow danced about through the trees like annoying theatre people.
"I cannot understand this," said the Giant, as he sat at his vast window, on his beloved Eames, and looked out at his frozen meditation pond. He wondered if he was dreaming, but the Giant never dreamed. "Dreaming is for pussies," he often said to himself. "I can't think why winter would be localised exclusively to my garden, but I'll need further evidence before I can leap to the absurd conclusion that this kind of weather event is caused by human activity."
One morning the Giant was lying awake in his king-size Japanese memory-foam bed when he heard some lovely music. It was a little linnet singing outside his window. "I believe the Spring has come at last!" said the Giant, and he jumped out of bed and looked out.
What did he see?
Through a little hole in the wall the children had crept in, thereby evading his motion sensors and laser-guided tranq-darts. They were sitting in the branches of the trees. In every tree that he could see there was a little child. The birds were flying about and twittering with delight. Only in one corner it was still Winter. It was the farthest corner of the garden, and in it was standing a little boy. He was so small that he could not reach up to the branches of the tree, and he was wandering all round it, crying bitterly.
And the Giant's heart melted as he looked out. "How selfish I have been!" he said. "Now I know why the Spring would not come. I will put that poor little boy out of his misery, and then I will knock down the wall. So he crept downstairs and went out into the garden. But when the children saw him they they all ran away, and the garden became Winter again. Only the little boy did not run, for his eyes were so full of tears that he did not see the Giant coming. The Giant stole up behind him, licking his lips, but at the last minute he changed his mind and put the boy up into the tree, and the tree broke at once into blossom, and the birds came and sang on it, and the little boy flung his arms round the Giant's fat neck. Then the other children came running back, and with them came the Spring. "It is your garden now, little children," said the Giant, and he took a great axe to knock down the wall, but the children saw the axe and ran away, and it immediately became winter again, and the giant thought, "This is getting ridiculous." But they soon returned, and when the people were going to market at twelve o'clock they found the Giant playing with the children in the most beautiful garden they had ever seen.
All day long they played, and in the evening they came to the Giant to bid him good-bye.
"But where is your little companion?" he said: "The boy I put into the tree."
"We don't know," answered the children, "he has gone away."
Every afternoon, when school was over, the children came and played with the Giant. But not the little boy whom the Giant loved. "How I would like to see him!" he would say.
One winter morning he looked out of his window as he was dressing for work. He did not hate the Winter now, for he knew that by opening his heart he had made Winter his bitch.
Suddenly he rubbed his eyes in wonderment. In the farthest corner of the garden was a tree quite covered with lovely white blossoms. Its branches were all golden, and silver fruit hung down from them, and underneath it stood the little boy he had loved.
Downstairs ran the Giant in great joy, and out into the garden. He hastened across the grass, and came near to the child, and when he came quite close his face grew red with anger, and he said, "Who hath dared to wound thee?" For on the palms of the child's hands were the prints of two nails, and the prints of two nails were on his little feet.
"Tell me, that I may get some of my associates to hurt him!"
"Nay!" answered the child; "but these are the wounds of Love."
"That's weird!" said the Giant, and a strange awe fell on him, and he knelt before the little child.
And the child smiled on the Giant, and said to him, "You let me play once in your garden, but to-day you shall leave this world for another garden, a garden of fire!"
And when the children ran in that afternoon, they found the Giant lying dead under the tree, all covered with white blossoms. The little boy explained to them: "For years this giant ran a complex and clandestine ponzi scheme with several of his buddies. My Dad gave him our savings, and the giant lost it all. Because of that, Christmas in our house has not been a time of joy; it has been the suckiest no-present suck-fest you could ever imagine. Don't even get me started. Today I came to take my revenge on the giant, but it seems as if some of the imported cactuses in his garden have leeched into his drinking water, causing him to hallucinate that I was Jesus, and that Winter was localised entirely in his garden, and ultimately to die of a cardiac arrest. It's funny how life works out, isn't it?"
And the children all agreed.
THE END.
To the Editors, Random House & Associates
To whom this interests.
Twilight, as I’m sure you are no doubt aware, is a highly successful series of novels about a young woman who must make one of life's most painful decisions: whether to give her precious flower to a sulky vampire, or an angry moon-puppy. It is a situation that most young women can relate to. These books are the reason I became a writer in the first place, and in the second place, a waiter. The series has spawned many imitations, and publishers such as yourself are now slathering to find the next big semi-adult, supernatural-forbidden-love franchise.
Below are my ideas. Please get in touch by phone or send me a fax.
Below are my ideas. Please get in touch by phone or send me a fax.
IDEAS:
1. Phantasm of the Human Heart
Jenny, a young woman on the brink of sexual maturity is forced to move to a small mountain town where she has no friends (just the school janitor, Custer, who follows her everywhere.) She does meet another lonely outsider, Mark, who turns out to be a ghost. The pair fall in love, but are unable to consummate their relationship due to Mark’s nebulousness (which is a metaphor for all teenage boys.) Mark has the idea that he will inhabit other physical objects (table, lamp, draft-mule) and then Jenny can make out with them, but she’s not into it. Their love ends tragically one night when Mark is secretly watching her shave her legs and experiences a poltergasm which makes her house fall down.
2. The King of the Mountain Kings.
Tina, a young woman on the brink of sexual achievement is forced to go inside a mountain and live with a tribe of dwarfs -- for reasons I won’t go into. She has no friends; the dwarfs are surly and antisemitic. They have a lust for the ancient ‘black gold’ buried in the mountain and become angry when Tina points out that it is coal. On the precipice of despair, Tina sees that a tall, bearded stranger has arrived in town. When she asks about him she is told his name is Lord Sweathammer. She eventually discovers that her Lord is really one dwarf riding on another’s shoulders, but unfortunately not before the wedding.
3. Boy-Mummy.
I’m still sketching this one out and it obviously needs a better title. Mathilda is a young girl who is forced to go on holiday to Egypt with her archeologist, divorcee Dad. While wandering alone in a tomb she encounters a 4000-year-old teenaged Pharaoh, Max. Max is withdrawn, listless, unresponsive to Mathilda’s advances, and, on closer inspection, dead. When Clara asks a local wise man if anything can be done to revive the mysterious Max, the man replies, “Oh that’s just tourist shit. I will show you a resurrection.” Then it all goes a bit weird, and that’s when I wake up. Oh, I forgot to say this idea is based on a dream.
4. The Mysterious One
Kylie, a young woman on the brink of sexual magnificence, goes into the witness protection program. She meets another lonely outsider, Josh. Josh is a mysterious boy: moody, sullen, brooding, and with a fiery temper. Kylie tries to get close to him, hoping to learn the terrible secret of who he really is. Vampire? Werewolf? or something even stranger? In the end it turns out he’s just a dick.
My Fabulous Fashion Life
Here is an article excerpting my experiences as a glamorous international fashion blogger.
Descent of Species
David Eagleman:
"In the afterlife, you are treated to a generous opportunity: you can choose whatever you would like to be in the next life. Would you like to be a member of the opposite sex? Born into royalty? A philosopher with bottomless profundity? A soldier facing triumphant battles?
But perhaps you've just returned here from a hard life. Perhaps you were tortured by the enormity of the decisions and responsibilities that surrounded you, and now there's only one thing you yearn for: simplicity. That's permissible. So for the next round, you choose to be a horse. You covet the bliss of that simple life: afternoons of grazing in grassy fields, the handsome angles of your skeleton and the prominence of your muscles, the peace of the slow-flicking tail or the steam rifling through your nostrils as you lope across snow-blanketed plains.
You announce your decision. Incantations are muttered, a wand is waved, and your body begins to metamorphose into a horse. Your muscles start to bulge; a mat of strong hair erupts to cover you like a comfortable blanket in winter. The thickening and lengthening of your neck immediately feels normal as it comes about. Your carotid arteries grow in diameter, your fingers blend hoofward, your knees stiffen, your hips strengthen, and meanwhile, as your skull lengthens into its new shape, your brain races in its changes: your cortex retreats as your cerebellum grows, the homunculus melts man to horse, neurons redirect, synapses unplug and replug on their way to equestrian patterns, and your dream of understanding what it is like to be a horse gallops toward you from the distance. Your concern about human affairs begins to slip away, your cynicism about human behavior melts, and even your human way of thinking begins to drift away from you.
Suddenly, for just a moment, you are aware of the problem you overlooked. The more you become a horse, the more you forget the original wish. You forget what it was like to be a human wondering what it was like to be a horse.
This moment of lucidity does not last long. But it serves as the punishment for your sins, a Promethean entrails-pecking moment, crouching half-horse half-man, with the knowledge that you cannot appreciate the destination without knowing the starting point; you cannot revel in the simplicity unless you remember the alternatives. And that's not the worst of your revelation. You realize that the next time you return here, with your thick horse brain, you won't have the capacity to ask to become a human again. You won't understand what a human is. Your choice to slide down the intelligence ladder is irreversible. And just before you lose your final human faculties, you painfully ponder what magnificent extraterrestrial creature, enthralled with the idea of finding a simpler life, chose in the last round to become a human."
Excerpted from SUM: Forty Tales from the Afterlives by David Eagleman, copyright © 2008 by David Eagleman.
Anonymous writes: Snappy Answers to Stupid Spammers
It would be fair to say that a large number of the comments I get on this website are from young spam-artistes desperate to use my media clout to get them on the ladder of the potentially lucrative making-me-buy-sexual-enhancement-products industry. One of their key strategies is to praise my site in a way which makes me think that what I’m reading are some kind thoughts from a genuine fan. What they don't realise is that my true fans are literate individuals whose comments hardly ever contain the term “sturdy erections”. Here, for the first time, I publish some of my favourite unpublished spam comments, with my responses.
Anonymous writes: Dear Author www.suddain.com ! I congratulate, excellent idea and it is duly
Yes, my friend, it is Duly! But before you know it, it will be Daugust.
Anonymous writes: Wow! Thank you! I always wanted to write in my site something like that. Can I take part of your post to my blog?
Of course! You may take all the vowels - except Y, which I sometimes need.
Anonymous writes: lets talk about your favourite sport games. i live football.
Thanks, I enjoy greyhound racing and nude paint-ball battle reenactments. Where do you live? Let’s drink coffee!
Anonymous writes: Is it practicable to altercation interdependence couple with you? Regards, Mirek.
Mirek, you are asking if I swing? This is a big step for me and I would need to see some photos of you and your wife first. FYI, don’t just send your holiday snaps. You’ll increase your chances if you put some effort into costumes and scenery. Best of luck!
Anonymous writes: Good day You bored habitual sex!
Good day, you creepy cyber-ghoul!
Anonymous writes: Oh my god!!! This is so altogether incredibly amazing. Couldn’t notion that something as riveting as this was even now in the oblivion. Your in smithereens of situation is hardly astounding. buy viagra pills. Congo popinjay!!!
Thanks for writing, Congo. I do put a lot of effort into my posts, but my smithereens of the situation is only one point of view, and there are many other sites available in the oblivion.
Anonymous writes: Is it possible to truck identify with with you? Regards, Marie
Yes, Marie, meet me at junction 44 of the M25 today and we will truck identify together.
Anonymous writes: ...please where can I buy a unicorn?
At your unicorner store, friend! Or Harrods.
Anonymous writes: Stay us for the nonce to buy more information and facts!
I understand. It is hard to find a nonce to buy you information since they closed News of the World. Have you asked Piers Morgan?
Anonymous writes: Ей захотелось заплакать, но слезы не к лицу боевому офицеру.
Your typing's gone crazy there. I think you spilled боевому on your keyboard!
Anonymous writes: You pall its girl or wife you're tired of itspartner, a lover can not You bring, you looking for diversity in Personal Life?
Mirek. You’re coming on a little strong. Let’s just start with the photos.
Anonymous writes: Hey, I am checking this blog using the phone and this appears to be kind of odd.
It’s not your phone.
Anonymous writes: The plants are not provided with any support so that they make a thick layer of growth which will cover a wide area of the bank.
That is interesting. Please tell me you are not writing this while burying a corpse.
Anonymous writes: So qrazy.. Mmm.. After
You are strange and funny. You should have my job.
Anonymous writes: Delete shis text plz. Sorry.
Consider it done. For shiz.
Anonymous writes: Hello! I'm newbie in Internet, can you give me some useful links? I know only about Yahoo.
This might help ... www.piersmorgan.com
Great Books
An Artist of the Floating World
By Katzuo Ishiguro
"Yesterday morning, after standing on the Bridge of Hesitation for some moments thinking about Matsuda, I walked on to where our pleasure district used to be. The area has now been rebuilt and has become quite unrecognisable. The narrow little street that once ran through the centre of the district, crowded with people and the cloth banners of the various establishments, has now been replaced by a wide concrete road along which heavy trucks come and go all day. Where Mrs Kawakami's stood, there is now a glass-fronted office building, four storeys high. Neighbouring it are more such large buildings, and during the day, one can see office workers, delivery men, messengers, all moving busily in and out of them. There are no bars now until one reaches Furukawa, but here and there, one may recognise a piece of fencing or else a tree, left over from the old days, looking oddly incongruous in its new setting."
Kazuo Ishiguro was born in Nagasaki, Japan, in 1954 and moved to Britain in 1960. An Artist of the Floating World 
The book is sad and brilliant. I hope you'll consider reading it, then writing to me and telling me you loved it to.
Purchase An Artist of the Floating World
Face of the Day (On Beauty)
“Beauty,” said Albert Camus, “is unbearable, drives us to despair, offering us for a minute the glimpse of an eternity that we should like to stretch out over the whole of time.” “Beauty,” said W. Somerset Maugham, “is an ecstasy; it is as simple as hunger. There is really nothing to be said about it.” “Beauty is the evidence of why we are here,” said Adrian Canfield, and “Beauty will save the world,” said Fyodor Dostoevsky. “To me, Beauty is the wonder of wonders,” said Oscar Wilde. “It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances.”
“Angelina Jolie,” said Donald Trump, owner of the Miss Universe pageant “is … not beauty, by any stretch of the imagination. I really understand beauty. And I will tell you, she’s not. I do own Miss Universe. I do own Miss USA. I mean I own a lot of different things. I do understand beauty, and she’s not.”
Now you might find it hilarious to hear the concept of beauty so critically defined by a man sporting the black ocular pits of an ageing rhino, the limp jowls of a University Don, and a haircut that looks like a multi-million-dollar apartment development for sparrows. In an unguarded moment you might imagine Donald himself crossing the stage, to the hoots of well-dressed men, a mat of hair spreading like desert grass across his undulating torso, an ill-fitting swimsuit straining to flatter his sub-prime millionaire junk, the scant lycra hemmed at one edge, perhaps, by a stray frill of pinkish scrote, and the whole affair watched from above by a set of gray, pendulous man-tits. I would not be so uncharitable. Donald is not a beautiful man, I think we can all agree on that, but need one be a painter to appreciate art? And need one himself be an attractive person to dispense wisdom on the subject of beauty? Sometimes beauty can be best defined by its opposite.
I was a correspondent at the Miss Universe Pageant in Vietnam in 2008 (Please read my story here). I got to meet the competitors, host Jerry Springer, and a then unknown young performer who called herself Lady Gaga.
For entertaining and well-considered ideas on the nature of beauty, it's worth browsing the works of Oscar Wilde.
Complete Works of Oscar Wilde (Collins Classics)
An Open Letter to Mothers
I was recently commissioned to write an open letter to our mothers (on behalf of their sons) for Mother's Day. The letter was meant to express everything we feel about the women who created us, and how grateful we are for all the sacrifices they've had to make. It was surprisingly well received and my own Mum even emailed to say it made her cry (although she wouldn't say whether this was out of pride or embarrassment.)
Of course, in reality, I'm a very different person from the sensitive soul this piece portrayed. In reality, I am a total badass who has no time for feelings or emotions. Ask my Mum if you don't believe me.
Here it is.
Face of the Day
Keith Richards is a living God.
It is one of life’s great ironies that he probably has a reasonable amount of moss growing on him.
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