Ah-ha! As I suspected. It seems that if you play back a speech in reverse you will hear the person saying what they really think. In fact, according to this site, children start talking backwards before they start talking forwards. “Children start to say one word at a time like hullo, then a few months later a couple of words may come out like help me.” Scary. David John Oates can train you as a Reverse Speech investigator in three months, an analyist in five months or a practitioner in nine. I’d do it if I had the money. And the time to kill.
Check out these scary sound clips of children. So scary.
Monthly Archive for September, 2004
I know I’m probably the last blogger in the world to have visited newsgaming.com. But I did today and played Madrid. If you haven’t played it you should, and September 12th as well. I was in Madrid on the day that the bombs went off. My hotel was at the other end of the road that leads down to the station. I was also there for the huge march against terrorism and for the amazing election night. I felt so much respect for the Spanish people and the way they responded to the bombing, it really gave me hope.
Haven’t we been here before? It seems that the long-running story about the efforts of the Bush clan to keep their little boy out of danger during the Vietnam war is itself in danger; in danger of being discredited because of one mistake in one news report. According to Newsday.com a CBS “60 Minutes” story was based on documents that may have been forged. This reminds me of how the British government seized on a BBC story about how they lied about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction because one journalist said in one broadcast that the lying had probably been deliberate. The story was true, that fact couldn’t be shown to be true. One mistake enabled the government to discredit the whole story.
Sometimes I wonder if these little killer details aren’t leaked to the media as poisoned pills by our governments to help undermine inconvenient stories.
Meanwhile, cluster ballooning is a fantastic idea. Floating thousands of feet into the sky with big bouquets of colourful helium-filled toy balloons.
I suppose it’s the time of year for thinking about terrorism. There were a couple of programmes on television last night about the bombing by the IRA in 1984 of the Grand Hotel in Brighton during the Conservative party conference. Five people were killed and thirty four injured. Both programmes were presented by an old school TV journalist called Peter Taylor who was unable or unwilling to keep his apparent sympathies for the British government entirely hidden. Even so they were both good programmes, the first showed very deftly the events that surrounded the bombing and the second contained an interview with the man who put the bomb into the Grand Hotel, Patrick Magee.
I am sorry to say that I was very pleased in 1984 that the Tories had been attacked, and disappointed that Thatcher was not killed. It happened during the miners’ strike and my loating and hatred for the government and their cronies was at its height. These days I don’t think that the killing of politicians, however richly deserved, is any better than the killing of civilians. What I was really pleased to find out about during the programme was that a woman called Jo Tuffnell whose father Anthony Berry was killed in the bombing has met and is working with Patrick Magee helping victims of violence to meet and maybe achieve reconciliation with the people who carried it out. I admire this sort of careful, gentle work towards peace so much.
By a strange coincidence my cousin Mark emailed me yesterday to tell me about how he took part in the Stonewalk monument walk in August. Another group of brave and inspiring people, this time relatives of people who died on September 11th.
I watched Fahrenheit 9/11 a couple of days ago, on the 11 September actually but I only noticed the date afterwards. During a painful sequence showing pictures of Iraqi children hurt during the American bombing I saw an injured kid being carried out of a ruined house. The kid had wet himself and for a moment, probably because I am in the throes of toilet training one of my own children, I felt the fury and desire for revenge that must motivate many terrorists.
Of course, I know in my rational mind that revenge is a self-destructive motivation and one should try to free oneself from it. But I can’t rid myself of the feeling that someone must pay for the crime that is being committed in Iraq. In fact, as the film tries to explain, there is no point in taking revenge on Americans, or American soldiers, or indeed on anyone apart from those guilty politicians themselves. Maybe it would be just for Bush and Blair and their corrupt cronies to feel the same pain that those grieving parents of dead children and soldiers feel. But I know that the only way that justice can be delivered is by carefully and thoughtfully exposing what they have done so that they and everyone else knows exactly what they are guilty of. So it’s journalists, documentary makers and artists who will be the avenging angels, not suicide bombers.
Ah, this site is looking so lovely these days. I’ve used Giles’ new ‘typestick’ program on my wardy site for some little labels. It’s dandy. othermachines.org
I’m just reading a biography of Kraftwerk by Pascal Bussy. I was getting a bit disillusioned as I learned more about them. Like a magic trick it’s better when you don’t know anything about it. But their web-site has reminded me about how super-cool they are.
This anti-gmail site is a bit woolly in its arguments, but I can see their point. Those of us using gmail may be being a bit careless with our data. Gmail is too creepy
What a relief! Sebastian Peake’s agent says that they are happy for my Figures of Speech site to stay up, as long as I acknowledge the new edition of the book on the site. So I’ve made an advert for the new book, although I have to say I’m not sure that I like the new cover as much as the old one.
Latest Comments
RSS