Everyone’s looks for a magic bullet at one time or another. In my case, I wasn’t sure what it was, except that a road trip seemed important. Not so surprising, when I’d just spent a large chunk of time cooped up in the studio. So, when I got invited to show Cognition Factor at the 2008 Grahamstown Film Festival, I made plans to ensure that a road trip was also what I got. I’d been to Grahamstown once before in 2000. At the time I’d promised myself that when I returned to the festival I would bring my own show. Eight [View Full Entry]

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The Ghana Totality caper. (Experienced on 29th March 2006) Going to Ghana wasn't something I'd ever considered, so when I answered Dr. Peter Martinez's phone call the last thing I expected was to be invited to join the South African team from SAAO to fly up to view a solar eclipse at the University of the Cape Coast in Ghana. I'd once, in December 2002, tried to view a solar eclipse. We'd driven from Cape Town to Limpopo Province in the far North of the country, a three day drive, but had been thwarted by cloud. At the time I'd thought [View Full Entry]

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Distilling some kind of message for future historians while offering entertainment at the same time is not as easy as I'd once thought, or maybe it will be after I get back from the Kalahari as I have been persuaded by my AD, Mike, and my best friend, Mike, (USA botanist), to take a 'quick' trip up to Augrabies Falls, tomorrow morning, to the Southern edge of the Kalahari desert, for 6 days. The Kalahari is reputedly the 'cradle of mankind', or it was last time I looked, but things change and anyways, the kalahari, 'is' one of Earth's most desolate [View Full Entry]

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Greetings, I'm back from Basel for nearly two weeks now. Usually I would have blogged live from the event itself, but the reality of shooting with three cameras slowed me down. The event started on Friday 13th January, but we arrived early on Thursday 12th in the morning, bleary-eyed after the long overnight flight from South Africa to case the joint, as we knew things wouldn't let up once it started rolling. We weren't wrong. The rooms at the Swisshotel Plaza in Basel are really nice. My room has a huge circular window which looked down onto the square. In the [View Full Entry]

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O illustrious denizens of compound interest in the fascination of dreamtime avenues, O Greeters of the dawn, O mindspring overloaders and resistors of note: Yeah though we walk in the shadow of bomber Harris, we fear no fear for we are the cut and pasted, the transplants of civilisation, the x-pollinators of memetic positivity, the destroyers of evil myth and unbelivers in lies, transhumanic fad creators, photons of half-life in the blue beam of fractal reality where an infinity of waiting for schroedinger's cat can't prepare the unwary to grok the fact that it's not all black...we each view r [View Full Entry]

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I looked back at some records and found that it was exactly a year ago today that I embarked on a trip to Tenerife and Spain. At that time I was surrounded by ever increasing piles of stuff requiring compression into various suitcases but now all I'm really doing is compressing my music collection onto my IPOD. There's this cool gadget called ITRIP that lets you play the pod onto your car radio, which will make it easy to stay groovy in the car. But I digress. This trip to Joburg has come about due to the fact that the movie [View Full Entry]

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Edinburgh. Met Iain M. Banks as planned, handed him over a copy of the Headspace movie and told him to stay in touch, which was a lot better than the day before when we got thrown out of the book festival because we honed in on Stephanie Turner, the so-called 'Press Officer' who was mostly out to lunch, even when doing her job, (stephanie@edbookfest.co.uk), and lets not forget about the pasty looking youth serving books who told me to 'hang on just a second' before calling security because I'd pointed my cam at him. Muttering something about; "invading my privacy", he [View Full Entry]

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Cognition on the Costa Del Sol: Adapted from a much longer version especially for TravelBlog.org It's nearly Monday afternoon by the time we get started and there isn’t much time left. Trying to film Dennis Mckenna isn’t easy because he keeps making me laugh, and to make things worse my arm muscles have locked up after hours of filming without a tripod and I’m oxygen starved because I’ve slowed my breathing to get smoother takes so when Dennis eventually decides to give it a break I’m relieved enough to offer him a ride to Gibraltar to see the Pillars of Her [View Full Entry]

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Sitting under the palm trees on Ibiza surrounded by Gods and Goddesses I could not help but thrill to the synchronicity of it all, even though I don’t really subscribe to any ‘pattern’. In a background window, my hilarity may even have cheered up the jetlagged Goddesses for some short time but after a few hours of core dumping the table folds back into two cars, Richard W. and girls, plus Dennis Mckenna, in the one car, Joey and I in the other. Joey looks at me and we both start laughing. I guess we both know that, although it’s after [View Full Entry]

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The Tenerife Experiment: Download the movie from www.webtrance.co.za/Travelblog/Media/Tenerife-Experiment-July-2004.wmv but because this movie server is in South Africa, please right-click on the link and save the file somewhere you remember on your hard drive before trying to watch it because there are spinning things in the movie which aren't optimized for streaming.  Tuesday 22 nd June Day 17: Woke up this morning on a mission to [url="http://www.iac.es/gabinete/in [View Full Entry]

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