A few thoughts on black magic

My first dream of black magic

I had a dream with plenty of black magic in it last night. I was on an island. I went into a tunnel into the ground. There was a bunker with a locked wardrobe in it. I open the wardrobe with  key, although I knew there could be problems with evil. I looked around the bunker, but delayed too long. The sense of evil increased and I panicked. I couldn't get the wardrobe closed and locked and I had to escape from the bunker by another way. Black clouds were swarming around and I needed sunlight.

On the roof I met a goth chick who was worried about evil, but who almost kept bursting into flame.
I then met some other people who worried about the dark forces swirling around us.

So what does the dream mean master? Well on the positive side I am not actually welding black magic, but somehow I am being tempted. When I was awake I wandered whether black magic could  be used to help me win the Templeton prize. That is not really normal is it, but the Templeton prize is a lot of money? I think the dream was more influenced by watching the end of Merlin (but not the BBC series) on  TV, before I went to sleep.

How I came to love steps

On boxing

I am trying to get fit. In the past I have gone to the gym and done a little weights and used a stepper to warm up. However the University of Wuppertal is on a hill, so I thought I should use the real steps. So when I feel like it I walk down a road to the bottom of the hill, so that I can walk up the steps -- for fitness. If I feel real keen I also walk up the stairs to my office on the 10th floor.

So here are the first third of the steps to my office

Perhaps it will end like the Rocky film. I will run up the stairs and start jumping and down.




Many people have filmed themselves running up the same steps as Rocky. Perhaps when I get a bit
fitter I can be a professional boxer. At the moment I stagger to the top and wander around with my nervous system completely destroyed. Until I get a coffee.

My core

 On having a strong core

After a post about satanism, I thought I should post a saner post -- just in case any future employers are reading. After all, even  Aleister Crowley was a mountaineer, so fitness is important not just for life, but also for the occult.

Apart from being fat, I think my abdominal muscles are very weak. I find it hard to have weight on my stomach.  I have in the past used an ab roller machine, but I have read that it is not good for the neck. Also I am not very good at doing sit ups.

In a book by a hard core weight lifter he recommended an ab-wheel. Mine arrived last week. I can feel it burning my abdominal.

When my abs are strong I will be able to do stuff like invite people to hit me in the stomach. But I remember what happened to Houdini.

Late night porn

When porn didn't help

One of the TV channels in Germany plays some mild porn adverts after midnight. These are mostly adverts for chat lines and feature some nudity. When I was a younger man I would not have watched such TV, but rather I would have turned over to watch an action film with plenty of honest Godly violence.

Last night it struck me that this mild late night nakedness, might give me better dreams. But no I awoke with a confused dream about a physics calculation. I wouldn't mind, but I have had the dream before, and it is not about any project I am working on. But perhaps my subconsciousness has noticed something that will help solve the fundamental problems of physics, if only I would pay attention.
At the very least I now know physics is better than late night (mild) porn.

What not to read in public

On why buying a book by Dennis Wheatley was not such a good idea

About two weeks ago I felt like reading a book by the "horror writer" Dennis Wheatley. He was famous for writing occult novels filled with devil worshipers. He was once very popular, but now his books are almost out of print. So I chose a book on amazon and ordered a copy.

When It arrived I was a bit shocked by the cover. I thought perhaps I shouldn't read such a book outside my flat. I just hope the police come round to my flat. They would see  the book and I would have to explain that I was interested in Satanists rather that Nazis. This would be a conversation that would not end well.

Let us hope that they don't start reading, because a father and a daughter have just done something wrong in a black mass. And the father may turn out to be a hero.

On becoming slightly less fat

More exciting weight news

After a lot of hard core sulking because I didn't make my weight target last week. Being a mature adult, I dealt with my disappointment , by having a couple of beers on Sunday, Luckily I made it to 91 kgs on Saturday. This blog will become very dull, if I record every kg lost. It could be 10 posts to get to my target of 80 kgs, unless I start to gain weight again.

I am reading a book on fitness. The author went on the "velocity diet", where he only drank 5 shakes per day, but ate no food. He lost a lot of weight in a month. The Guardian have a report on an even more radical way of losing weight.  These solutions seem very hardcore to me.

Bait and Switch

I have managed to finish a book. This is the first book that I have finished this year. The book was
"Bait and Switch: The Futile Pursuit of the Corporate Dream" by Barbara Ehrenreich. Barbara is a independent left leaning writer. She wanted as an experiment to get a job at a corporation to see what people were complaining about. However after almost a year she didn't get a real interview, apart from two in sales -- that involved her fast buying the stuff she would later sell.

Finding a white collar job looked a depressing business. There were strange "job coaches" who drew weird and pointless diagrams. There were also networking sessions run by churches. A lot of the job seekers seemed to be broken. Things are bad in the USA, where there is no NHS too take care of them, between jobs.  She spent a huge amount of cash with a CV coach.

Given that I am on a fixed term contract-- I of course worry about being unemployed all the time.
I found it strange none of the IT guys tried to write some code, or learnt a new computer language.

The 7th dimension

I watched the film "the 7th dimension" on Sunday and Monday by the magic of Itunes. Th blurb for the film had something about hacker breaking int the Vatican computer network. The film started badly for me, because it had two women students talking. There is great line in a Dylan Thomas story that goes like: "he still loved her, but he didn't like anything she set or did."  The two students were attractive in a non-verbal way.  Anyway things get weirder as they go to flat where a group of three people are indeed trying to hack into the Vatican,

It was clearly a a low budget film that had some interesting (although) common ideas. Midway through the film, I thought that the two women had hidden talents, but no they both messed up -- and one had to ring there mum up. I did like the goth chick in the flat. She had started out selling wine and beer in a shop, but became an elite hacker. Interesting!

This film is another nail in the coffin of string theory. String theory was not mentioned in a film about higher dimensions. I am no expert in string theory, but I don't think it is consistent in 7 dimensions, it prefers 10, 11, or 26 dimensions.

Carnival

 Carnival time

So were big procession in Cologne and Dusseldorf today. So it is time to remember past Carnivals. Last year, i didn't go either. I watch on TV, but I don't feel the need to wear a big bunny costume, drink lots of beer, and collect sweets from the floats.

I always have great plans for work, but after lunch I start to get bitter, because I keep thinking everyone else is wearing bunny suits and drinking lots of beer. Last year I went out and purchased a coffee maker and kettle -- that seemed very important at the time, but I have only used the coffee maker once. This year I went shopping to ALDI -- more for the walk, but also to try out my shopping basket.

Shopping basket blues

On shopping

There are a lot of budget supermarkets in Germany. For example there is an ADLI sort of close to my flat. One thing that annoys me about these shops is that they don't provide hand baskets. Fucking why?  I am a single man -- I refuse to push around a shopping trolley. They get in the way. I like the feel of the weight of the shopping as I push it around.

In Netto - another cheap German supermarket I saw that they were selling hand baskets, so I laid out 5 Euros and got one. I would feel a bit uncool walking around the city with it, so I keep it in my rucksack outside the shop, because of the shame. Look without a basket I can only buy 3 beers at one time.

I hate cleaning

 On cleaning

When I lived with some friends in Salt lake City,  my flat mates once told me there were scared when I cleaned the bathroom. This always seemed to me outrageous because I could never remember cleaning the bathroom at all. My attitude to cleaning is usually summed up by a quote from Quentin Crisp  that the dirt reaches equilibrium, so why bother to clean.

However, at some stage, even I can't stare at flat full of papers. So I have slowly tidied up  the last two weeks, so my flat is a bit more ordered. Although no doubt if you were to visit my flat of solitude you could swipe a finger in your while glove over the wall and find some dust (I would then throw you out).

Some people may be thinking -- we clean our house every week, so what is the big deal? Interesting question, as I think I am really cleaning my flat rather than studying for my German exam.

Dream goals

On better dreams

At some stage I was scared of sleeping. I was worried about the dreams, and also not waking up.
But now I should embrace my fear. I want better dreams. My imagination is broken, so it needs to be grown.

I read in a book about the history of the literature of vampires. To write better stories, a group of friends, ate rotten meat before they slept. This seems a bit extreme to me.

So how can I get better dreams. What to do? Well I looked on the web and I found this link. I like the idea of controlling my dreams. Why pay for renting a new film, when I can dream myself into new places.  Perhaps I will not bother to get up, just spend all day in bend dreaming. Better still, I could run new particle physics simulations in my mind.

But I also remember a film by Wim Wenders called " Until The End Of The World", where they film dreams and they claim it makes them go insane.

Sill not thin

More about this weight business

Boohoo. My life sucks. I weighed myself on Saturday and I was exactly the same weight as last week. It is so unfair I was hoping to be pass the 90 kg barrier, but no. I have been walking up the big hill to the University and when there is light, I have been going up the 8 flights of stairs to my flat.
Also I had stopped my chocolate fix at 11:00 -- replacing it with an apple.

But it did no good whatever. Of course I did eat a chocolate bar on Friday, but I needed something to settle my stomach for the duration of my German class. Of course my stomach was a little bit upset from the beer from the previous evening.

Perhaps I will have to give something else up to meet my goals.

 Flashpoint

Yesterday I watched a great film called Flashpoint on Itunes. It was a standard police action film set in Hong Kong, however the fighting sequences were very impressive. The main star was not really using kung fu. but more Thai. He had some great moves, one of which made me wince. He threw a person over his shoulder  and them on their head

You can see that the lead actor is very skillful from the "making of the film" video below.
I wish I could do that.




I should mention that I might have seen the film before. There is a scene where there is bomb in a roof top flat that seemed very familar.

A boring dream

Last night I dreamed that I was walking to work. I was naked, but I was carrying a T-shirt. I decided to  have more time for work that I would just put the T-shirt on and not go home to get my trousers. After breakfast at a cafe, I felt confused and decided that I would go home and get my trousers. At the end of the dream I was trying to understand an email from a physicist in the US.

What would Freud made of the dream? My sexual needs are not being made. I don't need a dream to tell me that. It is coming up to Valentimes day and I have no date. Frankly, If I have a dream about my sexual repression and emotional coldness, I would rather have other  people naked in the dream.  I can't even turen to Jung to find some hidden racial  memory from ancient times.

More worryingly perhaps my dream is about my future. In 20 years I will already be senile, wandering around the nursing home wearing no trousers....

On death and pop music

My formative years were in the 80s. I really used to hate pop music. This was the time before the internet, so it much harder to find new music, and we were all force fed pop music. (Of course there was John Peel and fanzines). I didn't wish anyone harm. Certainly any rumours that I keep a little black book with a list of 80s pop stars  that I wish vengeance on, is untrue (its all in my head: Bono, Duran Duran, ...).

I was sorry to hear of  Whitney Houston's death. Perhaps I could have saved her. Even after the drugs and booze, she was still attractive. I could have been her new manager. We would have started slowly.
Perhaps working the Liverpool karaoke scene. There is good money of you can win on one of those nights. I could have helped with the rehab. I would get off champagne and onto something more healthy such as pints of Stella lager. Then I would make my master stroke. Who would be your idol, if you were a sex symbol, but then had problems with drugs. Well obviously, it would be Nico from the
velvet underground. Yes an album of covers of songs sung by Nico would have put her career on a new path.

Dreams of flying and lenohard Cohen

So last night I had a dream where I was flying -- in an airplane. The strange thing was that Lenohard Cohen was in the coach area as well. He seemed happy and relaxed. As the plane took off, he started singing Suzzane (one of his famous songs). Best of all the seat next to me was empty, so I could lie down. I was surprised that Cohen was not in first class. What does it all mean? I think my body was trying to award me for not drinking any beer on a Saturday night.

On Soup

On soup fascism

When I was growing up my mother tried to teach me how to eat soup in the correct manner. Some how  I didn't like tilting the spoon away from me to get the soup into the spoon. It always seemed more geometrically natural to tilt the spoon towards me, so that when the spoon left the soup it went in a smooth arc to me mouth.

Now that I look into this I see that there is plenty of advice on the correct way to eat soup on the web.
In fact in the good olde USA they claim that it is better to eat soup from a mug rather than a soup bowl. There is a video that shows the way my mum wanted me to eat the soup.

I was going to end the post, by saying that I am adult now, so I can eat my soup any fucking way I want to. However, it is coming up to valentines day, and perhaps my soup eating skills will be used as a way to judge my skills as in the bed room.

How fat are you

I was happy to see that my scales told me today that I am 92 kg. There is still a long way to go , but things are slowly moving in the correct direction for my health.

There are various ways to work out what your correct weight is for your height. There is a famous number called the BMI index that tells you what range your weight should be. After looking at the wikipedia page I see that I am now overweight rather than  Obese Class I.

However in my reading -- particularly in weight training , many people don't like to just use the weight, because they are trying to increase their muscle mass. So my own measure is looking to see whether I can see my penis under my beer gut. At the moment this measure tells me I still need to lose
10 kgs or enlarge the size of my penis in some way.

On will power (or lack there of)

I am trying to lose weight. I have had no problems eating less food in general. I don't eat chocolate or crisps in my flat. I don't miss eating half a pack of pringles in an evening. You perhaps will not believe that I eating less food, if you see me in the Mensa. The standard meal is pretty hearty. However, I have replaced pudding with fruit.

Everyday I was eating just one bar of chocolate at 11:00. This week I managed to replace the chocolate with an apple -- but it was so hard. The vending machine kept winking at me. The twix looked so tasty and that mars bar!

There was an article in guardian about a new book on will power. In the interview one of the authors says that will power is like a muscle. You have to train it, but also using too much will power can  tire you out (that is my excuse for buying 4 rather than 3 beers yesterday).

Later in the review he suggests that some sugar can be a good quick fix to improve will power. So I am not sure, whether I should go back to the chocolate bar at 11:00. Anyway the main thing is to stop thinking about food.

Or what about it being deep fried?

Yummy!

The priest

I watched The Priest on Itunes. This film was about a band of super warriors who were priests fighting   vampires in a bleak future. I enjoyed the film -- although it was standard action fare.  I was expecting the bishop at the end to be the bad person behind the scenes. But he wasn't -- he was just annoying.

The cold is starting to get to me

It was a fairly warm winter up until the start of this month. In February it suddendly turned bitterly cold. Every time I walk to or from work, my poor little fingers freeze, even with the gloves. I am beginning to feel bitter myself.

Last night I saw a toy's pistol lying on the road. I thought, some poor child has lost their toy. I was going to pick the gun up, but then I thought, I don't want the little kind learning to use weapons. In 10 years time the little shit will probably shoot me, while trying to rob a bank. Or perhaps with the Euro crisis, the Daily Mail newspaper will get its wish and we will be back at war. The man (or woman) will shoot me when I am heroically hiding in a cave with a bad leg. The kid is crying now, but it will help him become a man (or woman). Anyway it was too cold to do anything but run to the warm embrace of the supermarket.

Tinker tailor soldier spy

So I have just watched the film. It is a difficult film to watch, because I kept thinking about the famous TV series. The film was so much shorter than the series, so everything was very stripped down. I know that I should be able ti get past the series, but I can't. The time of the series is also a history lesson because it shows the time before Thatcher's evil influence started the final major decline of the UK.

Ip Man 2

Well I tunes were renting "Ip man 2" for 99p, so how could I resist? This time Ip man is Hong Kong and starting a martial arts school. The plot was fairly standard, with a big tournament fight at the end, where he beats a nasty English man.

What did make me laugh was that his wife was almost ready to give birth, but she moved out so he could train on the wooden dummy in preparation for his big fight. In fact she gave birth, but didn't tell him so that he wouldn't lose focus. Why can't I find someone like that for a relationship? Not that I fight in many competitions. In fact I dimly remember that something similar happened in one of the
Rocky movies, but that didn't seem as natural as in Ip man 2.

There is a WingTsun school in Wuppertal -- that I wouldn't mind training at. However, they may not be happy to train someone so unfit with a dodgy ankle. I did train a little bit at a JDK club and I liked all the sticky hands. However, some of the classical martial arts have problems. I like the video below, however no one attacks like the way they use in the drill. Still the defence is robust.

On getting fucked up

Like many people I have an  urge for self destruction that is balanced by my cowardice. Sometime I liked to get a bit messed up. For example I was going to buy a coffee maker, but instead I got some sachets of instant coffee and milk. I drink a lot of tea, so sometimes I like to drink something different.

So I drink my instant coffee, but it makes me fell like shit. Still I will persevere. It is a nice way to feel bad. Hopefully the coffee is just bad, rather than dangerous.

On gloves

I don't have a fever at the moment, so
I can tolerate a normal amount of cold.
However, it is now -4 C and even though
I wear gloves, my fingers were cold when
I got to work. It takes a while for my fingers
to warm up. I just have to wander about
my office crying about frost bite, until
I feel human again.

For many Christmases I have got gifts of
gloves and socks. I have to admit I am sometimes
a little bit disappointed with the gloves. It is a sad fact that
women, don't really understand what is important
for a man's gloves. They think that the colour, style and warmth
are important, but a man knows that the most important
things is that the glove properly protects the
knuckles in case you need to hit anybody. It has to be
east to slap someone with the gloves if you want to
challenge a person to a duel. Black leather works for me.
Man amazon in Germany even sells some gloves that have
sand in them to protect the hand. Wow!

Cohen and me

One way to tell whether you are listening too
much to one particular singer too much, is if
your mum knows all the tunes too. When I was at
studying at University, I would come home, open
a can of beer, and put a  Leonard Cohen record
on the record player. And thus the holiday would
pass.

I liked the early stuff best of course, but
I liked the 80s sounds as well. For a long time
he hardly ever made records. I think I only
got the second to last album, but I remember being
disappointed in it.

The Guardian streamed his latest record:
"New ideas". On the strength of that I downloaded
it from itunes. I think it is a great record.
People say he is depressing, but I would say he
is more realisti. He started singing later in life,
so he missed the teanage angst faze.