Manifold Destiny

   I drove three hundred miles today, encountering the usual depths of ignorance from those obnoxious cell colonies presuming to qualify as thinking beings.  I initially chose to restrict my locus to the customary four dimensions, the other seven being a bit of a tight squeeze: but - Yauser! - imagine my surprise when I discovered that a spatial anomaly had manifested halfway down the A423.  I suspect that certain pranksters from the Utnepi sector had been at work: only they could have pulled it off so effectively.

   The thing was magnificent, protruding out of the Cotswolds like a Julia set on acid.  An obvious seven-dimensional manifold if ever I saw one.  Others were driving past, oblivious to the new formation in the rocks; but I saw it immediately, and pulled over to have a look.  Highly amused, I leaned against my port side wing and watched as a sheep ambled down the hillside and underwent a translation via what I guessed was a pair of homogeneous 8-matrices.  As it passed overhead all its entrails flickered around me in an incredible display of ovine innard acrobatics, and I could even see the normally-infinitesimal fields of the standard forces stretched out in a scintillating web of rippled spacetime.  The animal was oblivious, and ended up happily trotting away in a field on the other side of the road.  I chuckled for a moment as I contemplated the forthcoming reaction of the farmer to this mystery.

   Whipping out an envelope, I did a quick sketch and calculated that there was a Point of Universal Projection.  I derived its location, and extracted the entry point for my destination.  It turned out to be just beyond the hedge where I was parked.  Thinking I would save some time getting home, I opened the gate and drove through, closing the gate behind me (I may be an insane incognito Cosmic Lord, but I know my Country Code).  Driving quickly up the muddy field, I found the entry point and accelerated into it.

   And that's where I made my blunder.  I am writing this entry from Indonesia.  Kdapt knows how I'm going to get home.

   Dammit!  I never could integrate by parts with eight variables without dropping a term somewhere.

Mercy

   Decided not to detonate the bomb, since I calculated a 0.00453% chance that it might cause a dark matter chain reaction and destroy the galaxy.  Better safe than sorry; I've fed it to the dogs next door in the vet's - they sounded hungry, and although I can't reveal the full design, it does involve a quantity of prime steak - lucky for my canine buddies!

   Well, the daffodils are late this year, aren't they?  Late, as in the late daffodil.  It's a sort of threat, you see... I'm trying to make it clear to my floral cousins that I don't want any more of this "now you see us, now you don't" nonsense next year.  We want a good solid showing for a minimum of a week.

   ee's 'avin a go at the flowers now!


   Who said that?  Centurion, arrest that man.  And give me his gourd - I can use it for my next experiment.

I Can't Believe They're Not Flora!

   Well, bless my spiritually-interpreted neural macro-pattern!  I appear to have been awarded the Nobel prize for Poppycock, for my work on cultivation of very spiky, luminous and hardy flowers to grow in pavement cracks, preventing pedestrians from stepping on them and thus reducing the annual count of ursine predation events.  In recognition of this momentous event, I have decided to name the flowers, which are genetically engineered of course, Cockpoppies.  I must say this is such a great honour!  The award ceremony is in July, so there will be plenty of time to grow my original head back after my brief role as an extra in the virtual retro B-movie It Came From Earth! (in which I play an unsuspecting redshirt from Tau Ceti and die in the first 15 minutes, but hey, it's still fame!).

   So anyway, back to the humdrum world of my personal projects, and the total conversion bomb is coming along nicely in the back garden.  Fortunately, the landlord doesn't suspect anything: he thinks I'm building an amateur radio.  His life will be spared when I am emperor of the universe.

On This Day In Future History...

1. Floods and mudslides in the Sudan, as global warming proceeds apace (2028)
2. New VR TV show called The X Multiple launched, featuring talents with very little people.  A rival network starts a show called X Spots the Mark (2031)
3. NASA bought by Nissan, who proceed to construct a new space passenger shuttle with a typically lame Engrish name, probably something like the Nissan NASA Nice (2045)
4. I awaken from cryosleep and am given a hot new young body.  Unfortunately someone mislabels my dewar as female, so it's a woman's body.  Making the best of a bad job, I change my name to Loretta and go on to become an actress (2090)
5. Ice age begins (2092)
6. Ice age ends abruptly after world government decides to abandon alternative energy and reintroduce coal-fired power stations (2102)



   Well, it's been a less than frabjous day, as I am weaning myself off the caffeine.  Headaches all round!  Actually, headaches shouldn't really be described as round; they are rather more star-shaped.  With the points poking through the cranium like a hedgehog in a deflating balloon.  I like hedgehogs (though I couldn't eat a whole one).  Yes, the day has been positively (or negatively) scrumshawn to the plipth degree.  A total waswonger if you ask me.  But at least I got some music written.  I wrote half a note.  I plan to write the other half tomorrow, and if they match I shall have to rest for a week before writing the next one.

   In a master stroke of high curmudgeonly pigeon dudgeon, I note that there appears to be a foreign pigeon in my garden.  Instead of singing if you knew Susie it seems to be singing if you knew where I was last Tuesday you might tell MI5 but they would never believe you, and even if they did, how are they going to penetrate the rain forest and find my top secret hideout?  At least, that's what it sounded like to me.  Catchy tune, too...

Unglamorous Uses Of A Time Machine

1. Taking a photo of yourself when nobody else is available.
2. Showing a modern day thug how hard he really is by giving him a ride on the Crystal Beach Cyclone.
3. Nipping back 30 minutes to go to the shop when you realise that you've forgotten to buy an essential ingredient and the recipe's already cooking.
4. Transport of water from your pond to the top of a turbine sluice in order to set up a temporal paradox that resembles perpetual motion, but actually escapes this impossibility by draining potential energy from the space-time continuum in your locality, in order to power your garden barbecue lights.
5. Returning to when you wrote unglamorous uses of a time machine, number 5 and erasing the end of it just to make people wond
6. Retrospectively stocking your beer fridge when a friend visits unexpectedly.
7. Washing your clothes when you are about to leave for an interview and only have a dirty shirt and 20 minutes to spare.
8. Ringing yourself up to make it look as if you have friends.
9. Finding out whether you snore.  OK, this is for single people only, but let's face it: if you've built a time machine, you're probably single.
10. Cheating at the local pub quiz.
11. Getting in that extra pint when closing time has arrived.
12. Capturing a slapstick moment for You've Been Framed when you had no camera at the time.

Déjà vu

   Found a time machine in the garden; it had been uncovered by the excavations for the new house.  I took a quick trip back to the Wednesday before last to check that it worked, and played a little prank on my former self.  Heh!  On returning, I hid the machine in the trees by the disused path that leads up the hill - it should be safe enough for now, until I can think of a safe use for it.  Actually, I already have a few that have occurred to me over the years.  I'll dig them out a bit later and share them...

Astrovalva

   Discovered today that spacetime is curved, not like a toroid, but like a Klein bottle. This means that if you travel far enough you will arrive where you started but everything will be inside out.

   I have a nasty feeling I have already done this.

Fractious

   There was utter chaos throughout the day today, which I choose to blame on the death last year of the father of fractals, Benoit Mandelbrot. One assumes he has passed on to another (fractional) dimension... perhaps 2.554?  Anyway, my adoration of caffeine continues unabated, and my juggling skills appear to be stagnant, but getting faster (these two facts are of course merely correlated, not dependant). I managed to collide two overlapping pairs of balls in a Venn diagram of topological impact loci - an experience I am in no hurry to repeat with anything capable of drawing blood.

   On my way home I stopped, stopped upon me. Force the tools available. I decided to use the tools available for cabarets, Bar Mitzvahs and all kinds of outdoor function of the two mutually exclusive variables whose partial differential with respect to time may be expressed himself through the unusual medium of moulded... well, mould. Taken from cheese and biscuits with your coffee, Sir?  Or perhaps a grapes of Wrath of my beard shall slay thee; fear ye the wrath of my beard for it is mighty and bears no facile jest.

   Sorry, I appear to have gone a bit jacket.

New Ron

   Today was a little less fraught: my damaged knees coped very nicely with my lunch-time excursion over the limits of subjective identity to the foothills of the id. I noticed that the temporal revisionist theory of perception was looking a little drab though - maybe someone could give it a lick of paint. Tomorrow I plan to hike through the continuous nature of conscious self-awareness as a pre-requisite for personal identity, provided the rain holds off. It will give me a chance to try out my new "Concept Footwear" with the think-faster stripes.

Start Of Stream

   Today I attacked my toes with a crampon in a fit of pique, and ended up climbing the North face of my own legs. Having negotiated the knees, I decided that the view would be better from my head, so I returned to my Cartesian Theatre. As i got in, I saw my reflection for an instant, then realised there was no mirror and I was looking out of the window. It was really strange!  Why would I see myself looking in my own window?  I must be going crazy. Crazier, actually...

   Quite a boring day ensued, with the possible exception of the arrival of five alien press-gang heavies who demanded to know why I had not shown up for my tour of duty on their intergalactic pirate ship. After a somewhat heated "discussion", the green stains of which I am still cleaning off the walls of my living room, we managed to use a process of elimination to establish that I had been drunk at the time, and in fact had agreed to be a pilot, having recently watched The Last Starfighter. The three of us had to laugh!  I managed to placate them by pointing out the uncanny resemblance to the first act of The Pirates Of Penzance, and I gave them a copy of my DVD, which was received with enthusiasm (though they insisted that I remove the anti-piracy warning or they would vaporise the Earth).

   The only thing I want to know is, what on Grootix am I supposed to do with the three bodies?  I suppose I could incinerate them without getting into too much trouble with the council. After all, they aren't human remains.