Overheard in the Glastonbury crowd during Metallica’s headline set

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Elaine Daley makes predictions and is never wrong. Here she speculates on what you’ll hear being said in the crowd when Metallica take the stage. Remember Glastonbury sold out before Metallica were announced, so all those metropolitan boys and girls hoping for a bit more Tom Jones or Mumford and His Sons will be ‘awfully upset.’

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Which bottle am I supposed to throw? The Cabernet Sauvignon or the Merlot?
For heaven’s sake, Hattie. The Sauvignon is a ’74, throw the Merlot.

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Why are they headlining? I couldn’t find any of their CDs in Waitrose.

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(Hetfield)
Can’t hear that shit, man. Seek and. . . .
(Crowd member)
Seek and what? They have two predicates in a sentence with no subject.

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I had to reassure father. I told him they’re a frightfully diverse band. The drummer is Danish and the bass player is a Chinaman or something.

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I say, the singer has tattoos all over his arms.

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(During the song One)
Actually, this song is rather agreeable. What’s it about again?

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Of course, when the Bayliner arrived and mother saw the upholstery was lined with blue she absolutely threw a fit. Threw a fit.

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D’you know, I think my ears have just popped.

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(Crowd member 1)
I’m from Humberside.
(Crowd member 2)
Ah, yes. That’s near Portugal isn’t it?

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These American bands are so awfully loud these days.

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Metallica, oh yar, Metallica, oh yar.

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Godfrey, what exactly is a motherfucker?
It’s a member of the heron family, I believe.

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Nathaniel claims to listen to them in the MG, but I wouldn’t give them house room.

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This place has gone orf.

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Look Bunty, I’ve deliberately spilled cous-cous down my tee-shirt.
Oh, Roger, how terribly rebellious of you.

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I say we go back to the tent. The servants should be in bed by now.

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Weren’t they the band on Loose Ends?
No, you’re confusing them with Hinge and Bracket.

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The bass player’s guitar must be so heavy. His legs have buckled again.

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I could have swore one of them played the bassoon.

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For Whom the Bell Tolls. Gosh, I adore Hemingway.

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They played a concert at the Antarctic apparently.
Oh, well done them. Must have been frightfully chilly.

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The chappy on the drums, I believe his father is a member of the same club as the Dean of Winchester.

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(Crowd member text to Provincial Life Insurance)
‘Am I covered for death by moshpit.’

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I came out of the toilets and walked straight into Terry Waite. I was astonished how tall he is.

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My god!
What is it, Justin?
I’ve just been hit on the head with a bottle of Merlot ’96

–

elaine

 

Wallpapers

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With the band’s growing public confidence new visual material is being produced. The first wallpapers are now available in glorious muted colours and moody monotones, depending on how depressed you feel at the moment.

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See the ones produced so far here.

Ebook relaunch

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cover-WATH-2nd-edThe second edition of We Are Toten Herzen will be relaunched on Kindle this week. The new cover (left) and strategy will go hand in hand with the website redesign and, finally, first glimpses of what the band looks like. If you’re reading this you’ve already seen the new web design. And if you’re reading the novel thank you.

And if you see any advertisements within this website they have fuck all to do with Toten Herzen and are not endorsed by the band!

Terence Pearl and the science of the paranormal

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In the first novel We Are Toten Herzen, blogger Terence Pearl speculated on the nature of the paranormal and the science of the paranormal. The blog post is reproduced here without Pearl’s permission

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Are we at risk from ourselves? Human and antihumans cannot exist side by side in a relativistic universe.

A question that came up in a recent pub quiz I frequent left me in a confused state for several days. It was a trick question: who devised the thought experiment known as Schrödinger’s cat? Now the obvious answer is of course, Erwin Schrödinger (a detail predictably lost on the other quiz contestants), but the reason for leaving its mark on me wasn’t the fact that the question came up, but the implications of the original experiment. In short, a cat in a box is either dead or alive; until the box is opened and the cat’s condition observed it is both dead and alive.

The idea that a cat can be both dead and alive is called superposition: being in two opposite states at the same time, and the reduction to one state at the moment of observation is described as a collapse. There have been numerous interpretations of the experiment, but what struck me was the possibility that the issue of matter and antimatter had not been taken into account. If everything has a duplicate, it’s anti-form, let’s call it, then objects can exist in two states. Not necessarily alive and dead, but in some other form of superposition. That would mean somewhere in the universe there is another Terence Pearl!

Associates of mine would probably shriek at the thought of there being two copies of me, but Yves Sunier and Diana May Ronson at the Institute of Quantum Biological Studies in Vienna have considered the possibility and implications of every human being possessing an anti-matter version of themselves. In a recent paper published in the Vienna School’s journal they gave a name to this anti-human: the Janome, after the double faced Roman god Janus, and postulate what properties a Janome would have. Where antimatter differs in that it has opposite charge and spin to matter, a Janome would have to portray some outward (anti)human equivalent of this opposition.

So, just as scientists question why matter seems to outweigh antimatter in the observable universe, an asymmetry brought about by baryogenesis, Sunier and Ronson have left open the question: where are the Janomes?

All around us, according to Alexei Berkoff, the Ukrainian philosopher and author of the book Quantum Effect and Supernature (Megelev, 2002). Berkoff argues that all elements of myth and folklore can be explained by looking to quantum mechanics and theoretical physics. In a symposium held in September 2011 at the University of Kiev, Berkoff, Sunier and Ronson shared a stage and discussed the possibility that Janomes could account for the myth of the vampire, werewolf, ghosts and other elemental forms that are found throughout the world’s cultures in their folklore.

Accepting for a moment the idea that the vampire is an example of a Janome, separated from its original body it would contain a different physiology on account of the charge and spin of its component antiparticles, it could be prone to annihilation if it came into contact with some bosons and hadrons (the particles responsible for forces), it might well interact differently with light resulting in three dimensional shadows where its four dimensional self blocks out antiphotons (Solidity of Nothing: the effect of anti-light in four dimensional space. Wadjanewski and Soamas, 2009).

What Berkoff refuses to be drawn on is what happens to the real human if the antihuman comes into existence? ‘That is a postulation that strays too far into moralistic philosophy, which Erwin Schrödinger may have been prepared to discuss, but not me. The ephemera of morality is a radioactive by-product of factual research.’ What is common to many myths and legends is that the human body must first die before its Janome can come into existence.

Is death caused deliberately or accidentally by contact with the Janome? Does it kill us or come into existence after death? Is there a superposition regarding human existence and what causes the collapse that brings about the Janome’s life? Sunier and Ronson don’t have the answers yet, but as scientists in the field of theoretical and experimental physics continue to unravel one quantum mystery after another we may soon know how these supernatural creatures come to exist and perhaps, if they pose a threat, how to stop them existing in the first place.

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We Are Toten Herzen at Amazon Kindle

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Toten Herzen: The Lost Valley

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About five chapters complete. This is first draft stuff so still rough and raw. I’m using a tablet more so that I can get out when I’m writing, but being a 7inch device it’s hard to work on. I can type faster on a full size keyboard, as fast as I can write, but on the tablet it slows me down. It forces me to write in a sort of truncated form and then flesh it out on the laptop when I get home. Here’s a sneak preview paragraph from a magazine interview with Dee Vincent:

“Let me tell you about Tom Scavinio. Nice man, charming even, down to earth. Has a history of showing empathy towards young people starting off in the music business. Presents this persona of the man crushed under the weight of New York City, its buildings, its streets, its traffic, its history, its cultural baggage and social malaise. He is a man who wants there to be alligators in the sewers, he likes the steam coming out of the manhole covers, the idea of Hell’s Kitchen really being Hell’s kitchen. He lives off it, he feeds off it, draws blood off it. He plays with its personality disorders, absorbs them and then projects them back to you in his expressions and body language and long walks in the dark and tales of family tragedy. He personalises all the ills of the city and then rebroadcasts them, for maximum sympathy, for maximum effect, like some kind of human black hole with billions of tons of radiation pouring out of him. We were perfect for him because we gave him another element to add to his psychosis, his neurosis, neuroses actually because he has more than one. And then he goes and gets a scratch on his face and he skulks off back to his tombstone making out that we’re a bunch of heartless monsters responsible for everything that ever went wrong in his life. That’s Tom Scavinio and if he reads this, you’re a fucking coward Scavinio. You’re a fucking coward for running out on us. We may have nothing but contempt for Rob Wallet, but I’ll give him credit for his staying power. He’s taken every ounce of shit we’ve thrown at him and he’s still here. You, Scavinio, you’ve had worse scars after cutting yourself shaving and you go running back to America like the little self-obsessed fluffball that you are.”

Sequel in the planning

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The second Toten Herzen novel, The Lost Valley, is in planning.

The band will be in the studio recording their comeback album. Rob Wallet will have more mysteries on his plate to solve, Raven wants to become a witch and Susan Bekker finds out how bad a singer she is.