Sighting of huge dumbo octopus

The Dumbo Octopus is one of the most popular posts on the blog, so I'm overjoyed to present a follow-up - a huge dumbo octopus.




other sightings:

Here
And here

Review: Dave Eggers' novel The Circle (2013)

Do you remember this famous quote from the Google CEO Eric Schmidt?

Google CEO On Privacy: 'If You Have Something You Don't Want Anyone To Know, Maybe You Shouldn't Be Doing It'

If so you may want to read Dave Eggers' book, The Circle. 

Set in the near future, this book follows the fortunes of Mae, a new employee at The Circle, a thinly disguised version of Google. It treats its employees impeccably, providing all the food, education, sports, entertainment and other amenities on campus so they never have to leave. The Circle wants to accumulate all knowledge – from the web, from emails, from texts and Twitter, from Facebook updates, Instagrams, from biometric bracelets, from universal placement of web enabled cameras, from facial recognition searches in old digitized film, videos and photos, and eventually from always-on cameras carried by increasing numbers of people, who pledge to live their whole life In The Clear (i.e. while being watched by anyone at all times – a choice initially made by canny politicians when they begin to see their colleagues losing their seats for various nefarious activities mysteriously unearthed from their hard-drives and family histories).

After a few false starts, newbie Mae finds that she cannot live without the instant and constant feedback she gets from being connected to her customers and peers all the time. In contrast, one of the founders of The Circle likes his playboy toys. He has a submersible built that can navigate the Marianas Trench, and brings back his finds to keep in gigantic tanks at headquarters. He's particularly fond of watching a brutal Feeding Time ritual for his allegorical shark, which is when we begin to understand the true nature of his company.

The Circle's company values are "Privacy is Theft"; "Sharing is Caring";  and "Secrets are Lies". In droves, the tens of millions of addicted users of The Circle's extremely shiny and time-saving devices, apps and beacons begin to assimilate its company values.

The tension in the book is created by Mae's gradual understanding of the enormity of The Circle's intentions and whether she is in a position to do anything about them. She has developed a rivalry with her original mentor, Annie, which she has to win. She loves her online friends, her new fame as The Circle's Steve Mann-style human video-recorder with millions following her channels, her ability to see everywhere remotely through the proliferating camera network, and above all, she needs the health insurance for her ailing father. Will she wake up and warn the world in time?

This is a long novel with a short, tightly plotted skeleton. The length comes from the inescapable fact that if you have to suggest Total Information Awareness, you have to describe a lot, lot, lot of information about your hapless protagonist, from pulse rates to customer surveys to consumer surveys to customer satisfaction indices to texted friend requests from her horde of followers, and of course her reaction to the requests. Didn't join their LinkedIn network as soon as they asked? Her approval rating is in jeopardy. Didn't retweet their link? Could be a problem. (The book avoids proprietary names like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, but it's clear what type of service is being described.) At one point, the whole onboarding/new employee orientation at a large tech company is told in such detail that it was unsettlingly like having to go through one in real life (again). Also, having to script long conversations where one character convinces another that The Circle's company values are actually universal takes up another few dozen pages. (It reminded me of those old-fashioned polemics-novels, like De Sade's Justine or Voltaire's Candide.) It's an easy read, though, and five hundred pages fly by like a short novel.

When a novelist takes on a theme of society being entirely altered by a technology, he's writing Science Fiction, whether he knows it or not. I think Eggers would probably shudder if this was shelved with SF, since it's billed as a novel about society and "digital utopianism". The flyleaf reviews are very keen to compare it to Brave New World (which I assume is too good to be Science Fiction as well), but it reminded me more of Ira Levin's This Perfect Day. The big difference between The Circle and those two books is that the earlier writers assumed that a population must be drugged, or conditioned, or specially bred, to be docile consumers. In The Circle, the population adopts total surveillance willingly, because the chance to be safe from crime, spot strangers in the neighborhood and vicariously live the life of celebrities who do fun things is worth giving up just a little bit of your own privacy, and then a little bit more, until they all tumble down the Well.  Whether this is believable or not probably depends on the reader; I found that Mae had to be written as a ninny for her motivations to make sense, but on the other hand I do know a lot of people who spend a great deal of time sharing things online and fishing for a 'like'.

As for faults, the book has few. I was glad to see a female protagonist, but got irritated when it became clear she had no agency at all. Things happen to her and she rarely makes things happen to others. She does not even realize for herself there is a less-benevolent side to The Circle – she is coached by a shadowy (male) Phantom of the Opera figure. Picking a female for a passive role is an easy, if not actually sexist, choice. There were only a few proofreading or grammatical errors, which is a wonder in this day and age. But as usual, when a novelist gets into the Science! part of the explanations, things become a bit iffy. Shark metabolisms, even allegorical shark metabolisms, simply can't be that fast. And an allegorical shark may metaphorically eat everything from a 100 lb. Ridley's Sea Turtle to a sea horse, but I found the description a bit silly – sea horses are tiny. [*] Anyway, creatures from the Marianas Trench can't live in open-topped tanks in a building. Just no. And fire alarms do not measure carbon dioxide levels.

In sum, it's a good fast read and if you've ever wondered vaguely about how a surveillance society could come about, it's worth a few quatloos.

[*] Edit to add: After sleeping on it, this is probably like saying, "Eating babies is silly, as it takes more calories to have a baby than you get by eating one." But I still think the whole allegory could have been handled better.

It never rains in southern California

Who says it never rains in Southern California? Why, only this evening, it rained this much.



It rained that much a couple of months ago too. And only last year, we had an actual downpour!

In case of imminent sonic destruction...

Some things, when added to any video, will make it better - trebuchets, cats, daleks, and of course Brian Blessed.

So Hawkwind have brought in Brian Blessed for the shouting track of Sonic Attack.

The 1973 original is one of my favorite tracks ever. Written by Michael Moorcock and shouted by Robert Calvert, it is one of the most sinister and heart-thumping pieces of space rock that could ever exist. In the case of imminent sonic destruction, Bob Calvert orders, it is imperative to "think only of yourselves" - you are statistically more likely to survive if you think only of yourselves. Hearing him intone that instruction during the hippiest of Acid Daze was quite something.

Brian Blessed brings a more, well, Brian Blessedy performance to the lyrics, and the rhythm's a bit watered down as well. I understand this is being released for charity - go, Team Badger - so everybody should go buy it and then go to YouTube and listen to the original, preferably while tripping.

Note: The first two lines are NSFW. The rest, being all violence and not s*x, are quite suitable for the workplace.



BTW, if you think the hippies protested too much[1] about things like sonic attacks, here is an LRAD (a sonic attack device) mounted on an armored truck being used against ordinary American townsfolk, in Ordinarysville, i.e. Ferguson, MO, on August 14th 2014.





[1] Hahaha I make protest march joke,  but yes I do know what "protest" meant to the Shakester. Funnies come before good usage.

Fiesta season

It's summertime, and that means fiesta season.

In England, I used to get dragged to county fairs by my parents, who took a tentful of winemaking and beermaking equipment for sale to the assembled hordes. I don't really remember very much about them except they were very green - verdant, even - and quite genteel affairs. We were always on the lot next to a group of Tree Surgeons, who never turned up, so we had quite a big lot.  We used to spend a lot of time with the company of mole eliminators, who used to bring their own moles and a stout fence, and we'd bet on the time taken for the moles to dig under the fence and escape, leaving in their wake graceful, arcing mole runs surmounted with mole hills. Usually whoever got the pool timeslot for about 24 to 36 hours won. Every now and again, there'd be people with quail chicks, which are the fluffiest things on god's grey earth and a constant source of squee for me, and of course prize pigs, well-groomed bulls and blackface sheep.


San Clemente Fiesta by STB

American county fairs have more of the "fair" aspect foregrounded. We went to the Orange County Fair on Thursday and the center was a circus-style midway so dense and loud that I got disoriented just walking along it, without going on the thing that flings people around on the end of a giant version of those executive chaos toys that rock around for a while before suddenly going on unpredictable swings and slingshot moves. (I didn't even see it at first. I just heard rapidly approaching and then rapidly retreating screams high above my head and eventually figured it out.)

The OC Fair does have a farm, of course, but it doesn't limit itself to pheasants, quail and nicely turned merino. There were vast quantities of yaks, camels, alpaca and their ilk along with the more usual pigs (labeled "swine"), and in one pen a collection of humans knitting and reading their phones. I don't think this was an exhibit, just a place for the volunteers to relax between sweeping out the bullpens. Since this is a long term installation at the fairgrounds, there were also crops, so now I know what brussels sprouts look like when they're growing.

Mostly, of course, the fair is about the food. The signature dish of the OC Fair is bacon-wrapped deep fried turkey leg (a bargain at $20) which we tried and was exactly what you'd expect. A skin-on turkey leg that had been nitrate cured (so the meat was deep purple in color), barbecued until it dried out and then deep fried until the bacon turned into little grey cinders around the thick piece of deep-fried string. Yum! We also tried fresh-squeezed lemonade ($6) and were told we couldn't have it with less sugar in it, because "the sugar is already in it" which made us doubt the "fresh-squeezed" part of the title, and a Bavarian Funnel Cake. For those who have never tried a funnel cake, it is dough (or batter, I guess) that is squeezed through a funnel (obvs) into hot oil so it makes a little deep-fried bird's nest and then served with custard, cream and chocolate sauce. The Bavarian version ($6:50 Edit: Nope, $10) is exactly that. Other variants include more-or-less-that with strawberries and more-or-less-that with caramel. I don't know if anyone has told Bavaria about this.

On Sunday, we went to the San Clemente Fiesta. I'd only ever heard of it from a Google-grabbed newspaper headline a week ago, but apparently it's the 61st annual, so we have had 25 other opportunities to go it and failed. Like the San Juan Capistrano one a couple of weeks ago, it's mostly a venue for thousands of chiropractors to come out and ply their trade, though there did seem to be a growing presence of flat bottles and Marines this year.

As at the SJC Swallows' Festival, the uniquely American art of setting fire to large pieces of meat was on display.



This always reminds me of the bit in the Bible (1 Kings 18) where the priests of Baal try to burn an offering but Elijah's altar arrangement totally blows them away. (Literally.)

Wikipedia corner - fascinating facts division

I came across this assertion this morning:

Cleopatra lived closer to the time of Star Wars than the time of the building of the pyramids.

Of course I dived over to Wikipedia, to find that Cleopatra lived until August 12th of 30 BC and the Great Pyramid was built  "over a 10 to 20-year period concluding around 2560 BC".

So, it's true. Cleopatra's reign was closer to Queen Elizabeth II's than to Khufu (who had the Great Pyramid built).

But the Wikipedia article on Khufu's pyramid is stuffed with facts more exciting than that one. Try this - it'll knock your socks off!

There have been varying scientific and alternative theories about the Great Pyramid's construction techniques. Most accepted construction hypotheses are based on the idea that it was built by moving huge stones from a quarry and dragging and lifting them into place.

Heck, really? Hard-hitting stuff!

(This is obviously a picture of Djoser's pyramid (ca. 2650 BC, and therefore even older) but my pictures of the Great Pyramid aren't any good because it was a regular camera lens and the Great Pyramid is humongous.)

Jack White slays Pittsburgh

Jack White used Lillie Mae's violin bow to play his guitar during Ball and Biscuit at Pittsburgh on July 27th. Edit: The photo is by tour photog David Swanson.

I can't find any footage of him using it on Yootoob, but a friend who was there described it as the caressing style, rather than the Dazed and Confused "smacking" style.

Until footage appears, here's Dead Leaves And The Dirty Ground and Hardest Button To Button from the same show.

Jack White's Vescovo video explained

Jack White fans will remember the Vescovo & Co Clinic for Contagious Diseases gig on July 2nd in London.  Third Man Records describes it this way: 

Last night at midnight in Central London, Jack White played a secret show in the basement of a disused office block, to fans clad entirely in powder blue medical gowns.
The event was a collaboration between Jack and the Punchdrunk Theatre Group who had temporarily transformed the space into the Vescovo & Co Clinic for contagious diseases, and had staffed this fake medical facility with dozens of their actors playing the roles of doctors, nurses and orderlies at the time of a disease outbreak. 

Drawing on the themes of Jack White's current album, 'Lazaretto', a term used to describe a quarantine island, the experience began with an elaborate online treasure hunt. A spoof medical infomercial from 1949 appeared in the archives of online medical resource The Wellcome Trust, which contained various obtuse clues that led Jack's superfans to a website belonging to the fake medical company, Vescovo & Company. Thousands of fans submitted their details to this website as part of an online screening for a contagious disease. A lucky few progressed through the screening process that lead to them receiving a telephone call from Punchdrunk actors inviting them to an out-of-hours appointment at the Vescovo Clinic. The clinic had been created for this one occasion by Punchdrunk Theatre across multiple floors of a disused building owned by The Vinyl Factory.

On arrival, fans were asked to change in to blue medical gowns before being subjected to a variety of treatments testing in a maze of medical rooms staffed by Punchdrunk actors. Chaos descended as an outbreak alarm was raised and terrified fans were herded into a smoke filled quarantine chamber. Finally a screen was dropped to reveal Jack and band in full medical uniform who proceeded to belt out a thirty minute set before Jack himself succumbed to the mysterious disease. The rock star fell to the ground in a fit of convulsions before being strapped to a stretcher and wheeled off to a waiting ambulance.

As the press release states, one of the items in the online treasure-hunt for clues on how to win attendance was "a spoof medical informercial...appeared in the archives of...the Wellcome Trust".

I wondered how a record company could get a spoof video into a medical resource library.

The infamous video.

Well, on the 23rd July, on the Wellcome Trust's blog, a post appeared explaining how this occurred. 

The US musician Jack White (formerly of the White Stripes) recently launched a new album, ‘Lazaretto’. Lazaretto is also the name given to maritime quarantine stations typically in the Mediterranean with many being established during the time of Venetian mercantile domination. Some were associated with the slave trade and others with leper colonies.
He got in touch with the Wellcome Library through a production company, Nomad, about a secret gig he planned for fans on 2 July whilst on tour in the UK (just after he played at Glastonbury).Punchdrunk who produce immersive theatre were engaged to create a one-off event themed around the idea of a lazaretto and contagion.

The producers at Nomad had already selected one of our videos – How to Mask (above) – and re-edited it. They made the highly unusual request of asking us to ‘hide’ their video on our youtube channel. In the accompanying metadata we were provided with, there was a link to what turned out to be a ‘fake’ pharmaceutical company, Vescovo & Co, and people who navigated to this website were invited to register for unspecified medical experiments. After some discussion around the value of our contribution, we were keen to get involved in a project that used our content so creatively and we agreed to go ahead and host the new video called How to Stop Contagion part III, Vescovo & Co (1948).

Nomad agreed to let me attend the event.

So I guess the answer was: We got bribed by a chance to go to a Jack White/Punchdrunk happening.  And there was "some discussion around the value of our contribution", whatever that means.

The blog goes on to describe what a fun time they had.  They also embed the original film that was edited to form the Vescovo&Co video. I can't seem to embed it here, but it's worth a trip to their blog to see it and the rest of the write up.

Edit to add: It's hardly possible to use an ampersand on blogger without the html "amp:" appearing after it. I'll try to wipe it out but it will keep coming back.

San Juan Capistrano Summer Night

Yesterday my city put on a little fun in the park. We had a Creedence Clearwater Revival band called Creedence Relived for entertainment. They were a fun band who had the hassle of dealing with people who were already wedged in their folding event-seats, and yet managed to achieve about a 15 to 20% dance rate by the end of the second set.

Creedence Relived. The man on the right with the scrolls who looks like a town cryer is the town cryer.

It's odd how old this music sounds. I mean, it is old - CCR's heyday is before my time as a listener - but this sort of southern boogie is primevally old; it's in people's DNA now. It doesn't sound as though someone is playing it, more that it is leaking out of the cosmos on its own. I think everybody is born knowing the words to Proud Mary (hint: it's the "rolling on the river" one); Bad Moon Rising must be taught to everyone in the cradle by their mothers (STB described it as "a jolly little song if you don't listen to the words); and Susie Q sounds like a primal force, more like Zeus or Thor than something someone sat down and thunk up.  Still, the familiarity with the material didn't stop the audience from failing to complete their half of the sing-alongs.

We also had marvellous cream puffs by someone I've unfortunately forgotten, thingy burgers by someone I've unfortunately forgotten as well, and a whole park full of shills getting in on the act, including the famous Sectum Sempra Energy, who want to build a three-storey electrical substation approximately next door to me in a town which does not allow three-story buildings but apparently can't stop a utilities company from doing whatever it wants. In an effort to sway the populace, they were giving away beach balls and little flashlights with their logo on, or "outreach" as they called it. SJC's herd of chiropractors was out in force, adjusting people by the dozen. The Toll Roads were there - weird really. I mean the stables weren't there, or the ridgelines or the creek. But the roads made the trip, and handed out clever lie-flat emergency water bottles which I hope does not signal lack of faith in their product (which is otherwise branded as efficient transportation without the possibility of getting stranded in a dry desert). Elsewhere much coconut water was hawked, but I didn't see any salted caramels.

Mayor Allevato was there, looking tanned and well, along with Councillor someone or other, whose name I have unfortunately forgotten. No, I wasn't drinking. 

Success! My home grown pineapple

After only six years of hand-watering and personal care, my pineapple top has grown an entire new pineapple.



It's a very small version of a variety that's currently $2.99 in the stores. So this is a great victory indeed.

Low flyby of military planes this morning in Orange County

Two warplanes flew over my house this morning. Twice, unless there were two separate flights of them. I hid under a desk for the first flight as I thought the world was ending, but shortly after the second flight I took this picture of a much higher altitude plane that seemed to be associated with the low-fly group.



What is it? And what were the other planes? One friend suggests it was the Commemorative Air Force.

Minnesota would-be governor explains AIDS. It's caused by sperm.

The internets are a strange place. On the one hand, you can learn a lot from them. On the other hand,  it's rife with "facts" so erroneous that they make your eyes bleed. And, although I haven't set foot in a children's classroom in years, and I know teachers who will strenuously disagree with me, I get the very strong impression that American education is so fluffy that you can quite easily graduate high school without being able to tell the difference.

In this case, Mr Loudly Incorrect is Bob Frey, a candidate for Governor of Minnesota. At least I assume he finished high school.  His views, according to MinnPost:

"But when questioned about his position on social issues, Frey added that it “does certainly need to be addressed for what it is. It’s not about the gay agenda but about the science and the financial impact of that agenda. It’s more about sodomy than about pigeonholing a lifestyle.”

Frey then explained his view: “When you have egg and sperm that meet in conception, there’s an enzyme in the front that burns through the egg. The enzyme burns through so the DNA can enter the egg. If the sperm is deposited anally, it's the enzyme that causes the immune system to fail. That’s why the term is AIDS – acquired immunodeficiency syndrome.”"

His son Mike Frey said the same thing, when testifying before the MN House Civil Law Committee about Gay Marriage.

It's utter bullshit, of course, and anyway fails to explain why gays shouldn't get married, as I imagine if they couldn't get married they'd just go in for premarital sex. In fact, I think premarital gay sex may have been observed in some societies already.  So there aren't many benefits to preventing gay marriage on disease-prevention grounds.

Tracking this statement down a little further, I was directed to this page -Towleroad.  Here, the authors are debunking a group founded by yet another Minnesotan politician, Rep. Glenn Gruenhagen, which put out bizarre videos that make the entirely incorrect claim about anal sex, above, as well as a number of other equally peculiar ones. Weirdly, the video is entitled “Sodomy, Health, Money, and HF-826,” which is to say it was produced to address a school anti-bullying bill that somehow can only be attacked by videos filled with endless descriptions of anal and oral sex.  (Full disclaimer: I have not read HF-826.)

Here's the video which makes the anal sex claim.  If you're short on time, start at 3:21.

It claims that the references are peer reviewed before publication.  There's only one reference in there – Judson et al's COMPARATIVE PREVALENCE RATES OF SEXUALLY TRANSMITTED DISEASES IN HETEROSEXUAL AND HOMOSEXUAL MEN Am. J. Epidemiol. (1980) 112 (6): 836-843

Note the date.  It's from 1980. HIV/AIDS was not known at the time. Even the early name for AIDS, Gay Related Immune Deficiency (GRID), was not in use before 1982.  Judson's paper, which according to that site has been cited only once, concerns the higher prevalence of syphilis and gonorrhea in homosexual men attending STD clinics compared with heterosexual men.   Other STDs had a lower incidence in gay men. The speculation on the cause?

"It is speculated that higher rates of gonorrhea and syphilis result from a larger mean number of sexual contacts, more potential sites of infection, and more hidden and asymptomatic disease, while the lower rates of the other STD result from a lesser susceptibility of anal mucosa to the causative agent(s) of NGU, herpes genitalis, and venereal warts or from a lack of pubic apposition (pediculosis pubis)."

Nothing about the sperm "burning" through the mucosa with its enzymes.  This is because that is not a peer reviewed fact. It is more along the lines of hooey.

Larry Burtoft's Setting The Record Straight, also mentioned, is a book. Not a peer-reviewed paper.

Sperm do have enzymes in a vessel at the top of their heads.  Called the acrosome, it contains hyaluronidase (the -ase ending to enzymes means "I eat it") to break through the egg-surrounding cumulus cells it comes into contact with (they are suspended in hyaluronic acid, sometimes known as "goo" as it functions by "gluing" cells together or lubricating things that should slide over each other), and acrosin, which dissolves the clear zone around the egg so that fusion can begin . However, in the vast majority of cases, the acrosome is only activated after the sperm swims in the uterine environment and meets the chemical signals coming from an egg.  Sperm are not born as armed nuclear warheads looking for mucosa to "burn through", or happily burrowing with gimlet-eyed ease through rectal skin that's tough enough to keep billions of fecal bacteria – some armed with hyaluronidase – out of your bloodstream.

Still, that's not the weirdest part about the video.  Anybody can fail to remember what a zona pellucida is (or lack the nous to look it up), but most people can ask "what if?" questions. Such as "In that case, why aren't women getting AIDS in their mouths in vast quantities?" and "What about heterosexual anal intercourse?" and  "Why aren't all female porn stars dying?" and "If it's just due to the membranes being thinner there, why don't we see AIDS cases going back thousands of years? and "What is this HIV thing we've heard about – are you saying it doesn't exist?' and "If sperms have little cell-dissolving bombs on their heads,  why don't all teenage boys have a permanent rash on their hands?

Do politicians have a duty to at least partly understand the world we live in, or is it our duty to kick out the ones that clearly don't have a clue? In this case, he hasn't a clue. Don't vote for him, for heaven's sake. 


9:37 pm edited for clarity.
10:45 edited because Minneapolis is not a state

The Bees buzz awhile: Chicken Payback

This is not new to anyone who listens to adverts in Britain, but I heard it for the first time yesterday in a movie called How to Lose Friends And Alienate People, which I watched because Netflix said I'd like it. (It said that because it has Simon Pegg in it.) Like many oughties movies, it has a carefully curated soundtrack ranging from the worst torch singers yea even unto Motorhead, but the only one that made me want to get up and dance (which would have been inappropriate in my living room during a rom-com) was Chicken Payback, by The Bees.

Like the one that goes Woo-hoo woo hoo! and is probably called Woo-hoo! in Tintin Quarantino movies, it's remarkably catchy. At first I could have sworn I'd heard it on Nuggets, or Boulders, or Pebbles, or possibly Gravel, but apparently not. It's not real freakbeat. But I'm relaxed about authenticity, as I've mentioned before, so here are the Bees with Chicken Payback.

Jack White on Zane Lowe, 14-07-02 (audio file); follow up Vescovo show article

If you missed Jack White's appearance on Zane Lowe's show yesterday, it's up at the BBC site. But more importantly, it's up on YouTube, thanks to uploader Matthew and that won't age off the site (I hope). It's audio only, so there's just one nice picture to look at while it plays.

There's an interview with Jack first, and the performance is the last 45 minutes or so of this file.




Jack followed this up with a secret invite-only gig in a "contagious disease clinic" that featured a full immersive performance by the theatre group Punchdrunk.  It sounds thoroughly wonderful and I'm sorry I couldn't be there! (They did send me a consolation email with some nice pictures this morning, though.)

His record company, Third Man Records, described it this way:

Last night at midnight in Central London, Jack White played a secret show in the basement of a disused office block, to fans clad entirely in powder blue medical gowns.
The event was a collaboration between Jack and the Punchdrunk Theatre Group who had temporarily transformed the space into the Vescovo & CoClinic for contagious diseases, and had staffed this fake medical facility with dozens of their actors playing the roles of doctors, nurses and orderlies at the time of a disease outbreak. 

Drawing on the themes of Jack White's current album, 'Lazaretto', a term used to describe a quarantine island, the experience began with an elaborate online treasure hunt. A spoof medical infomercial from 1949 appeared in the archives of online medical resource The Wellcome Trust, which contained various obtuse clues that led Jack's superfans to a website belonging to the fake medical company, Vescovo & Company. Thousands of fans submitted their details to this website as part of an online screening for a contagious disease. A lucky few progressed through the screening process that lead to them receiving a telephone call from Punchdrunk actors inviting them to an out-of-hours appointment at the Vescovo Clinic. The clinic had been created for this one occasion by Punchdrunk Theatre across multiple floors of a disused building owned by The Vinyl Factory.

On arrival, fans were asked to change in to blue medical gowns before being subjected to a variety of treatments testing in a maze of medical rooms staffed by Punchdrunk actors. Chaos descended as an outbreak alarm was raised and terrified fans were herded into a smoke filled quarantine chamber. Finally a screen was dropped to reveal Jack and band in full medical uniform who proceeded to belt out a thirty minute set before Jack himself succumbed to the mysterious disease. The rock star fell to the ground in a fit of convulsions before being strapped to a stretcher and wheeled off to a waiting ambulance.

Completely missing the point personal note: I've worked with infectious disease (ID) doctors most of my working life and I've never heard them say "contagious disease" but what do I know? (Apparently it refers to diseases which are infectious on close contact - appropriate for a lazaretto, I suppose.)

He's done this kind of show in London before - Halloween at Shoreditch Church.

I won't shop at Hobby Lobby

I'm fed up with several recent events concerning the Supreme Court, so here's Maru sitting in a box. Really, he just sits in the box. But that's Maru!