All entries for December 2008

Plans for Today

• Write a blog entry about how everyone I know in Warwick has gone home and that my plan for the evening is to sit in by myself eating bacon and onions and read Anna Karenin.
• Receive an email from some Coventry dwelling reader of Kempez’s blog. “Why this Kempez seems a capital fellow” she’ll say to herself, “I must rescue him from his solitude, for I fear he may be prone to melancholy on such an occasion. I shall invite him to dinner and we shall join his bacon and onions with my broccolli and courgette to make a feast unrivaled the world over. Then I shall gently caress his hair as he relates to me witty anecdotes about PhD mathematics”.

Hmm, that seems pretty unlikely, but if any of the four people that google analytics predicts will read my blog in the next three hours are in coventry and at a loose end then drop me an email. Hair caressing is not obligatory, axe murderers need not apply.

: 20 Dec 2008 15:48 |  Comments (3) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Bananana

I thought I’d join the spelling club,
and get right to the top.
I started to spell banana,
but I didn’t know where to stop.

I have to credit cat for that one, she recited it to me the other day. I think it’s one of the most profound things she’s ever said to me, apparently she got it from guides.

: 18 Dec 2008 23:10 |  Comments (2) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Kemponomics

Ever with our finger on the pulse of the big issues affecting our society, we at Kempez’s blog have been hearing rumours that the economy hasn’t been doing too well as of late. And so our team of crack problem solvers (think Jim’ll fix it on LSD) proudly present our solution as a gift to the people of Britain.

Modern markets, the forces which drive global financial trends, have long been considered a chaotic system. They are played almost exclusively by trained financiers who interpret the direction and speed of market behaviour. This in turn trickles down to the ‘real economy’, where house prices, salaries and consumer behaviour are all determined by public expectation, also known as whatever the BBC economic correspondent tells people is going to happen. Thus the study of economics can in fact be reduced to the study of economists.

With this in mind, the most effective way of positively influencing the global financial system is to develop new axioms of how financial systems behave that, if followed, would become self fulfilling and lead to stable markets. If we then edit the Wikipedia page on economics and replace the old rules with these axioms (and possibly shoot everyone with an economics degree) we would soon have a more effective global economy which behaves in the correct manner.

Kempez’s blog hopes that this will be the first of many ‘public service thinking’ entries.

: 13 Dec 2008 19:20 |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

An Englishman's Home

Now I understand that six major world religions, two thousand years of philosophical thinking and the lyrics to Blur’s ‘Country House’ all council me against such a position, but don’t you think I’d be happier if I had an excellent house? Sure our current place on Albany road is fine, it’s a really good location and very convenient, but somehow it’s just not home. It’s cold for a start, and the bathrooms are really manky, and there’s not enough water pressure to use both showers at once, it just isn’t quite what I had in mind.

Anyway I spent some time browsing the internet and dreaming (it’s what I do thesedays instead of cutting edge mathematical research) and found that if we were all prepared to pay the same amount of rent we did for Heronbank we could get ourselves a positively palacial home on Kenilworth road, less than a mile from the University, with a gardner included in the rent!

But then of course I realised that neither I nor my housemates want to pay that much for a house, but it’s fun to dream eh? I’d settle for a nice Kenilworth town house.

P.S. I suspect when they update their website the link will change to another house but I think that just adds to the excitement.

: 09 Dec 2008 20:11 |  Comments (2) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Kempez for Poet Laureate

Now I’m not sure if nominating oneself for poet laureate is the done thing, but with the papers speculating on potential successors to Andrew Motion it seems those self styled ‘literary commentators’ have overlooked me once again. So, if efforts like ‘The Bosphorous Blues’ weren’t enough to convinve the critics I’m going to have to engage in cynicism and write a poem specifically for them. Being a mathematician I made myself an algorithm for writing a critically aclaimed poem.

• Decide on a period of your own life which you wish to misrepresent
• Start with a melancholy tone
• Introduce some death and decay
• Have a line which is unnecessarily long and crude and which jars with the rest of the poem
• Mention Oxford, Cambridge or a rough northern town (maybe Wigan?)
• Make it a little bit gritty
• Be quite unable to think of an appropriate end to the poem and so just kind of trail off

My attempt was the following:

Some time from now,
when the flowers I bought her have withered and died,
when her memory foam mattress remembers me no longer,
when snow, wind and endless rain have washed the stains of my red wine vomit from Magdelane bridge,
I shall laugh a deep, gutteral laugh,
and smile a smile,
and remember.

Kempez would like to point out that he hasn’t bought anyone flowers in a long long time, and that to the best of his memory he has never been sick on Magdelane bridge. He regrets that the chances of him developing a Tom Waits style deep gutteral laugh are very slim.

: 03 Dec 2008 20:46 |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem