My birthday.

Even as he denigrates civic utopianism, a different kind of dreaminess underwrites Sinclair's own position: a longing for a London that might well never have been. WH Auden once described his ideal landscape as one that contained water-wheels, grain-mills, limestone and obsolete machinery. What would Sinclair's ideal resemble? Railyards and pin-wheel poetry presses, certainly. Dockers and detectives rubbing shoulders in greasy-spoon cafes. Mystics, cranks and quiet pilgrims wandering together down towpaths. Urban planning would be handled by Andrei Tarkovsky, Allen Ginsberg would potter around handing out bennies and yodelling protest songs, the odd authenticating psychopath would occasionally commit discreet murders and, once a century, through would stride Alfred Watkins and Eric Gill, each man clutching his penis before him like a ley-liner's staff as they dowse lines of heat and force.
[LINK]

Today is my birthday.

You know what I'm going to say; like I'm going to tell you about my birthday treat at a spa, how I'm surrounded by loving family and how I feel so blessed and totally at ease with today's reminder that I am 'moving forwards in the queue' to the moment of my inevitable demise.

You know me too well...I'd much rather look in my spam box.

What is in my spam box?

Ah, a birthday message from none other than Goodluck Johnathon.

Now I like the name.
Very gamer.
Not so funny though..electric toaster is better

'You were killed by electric toaster'.
Oh how I laaarfed.

You fragged electric toaster.
No, not so funny.

anyway

Goodluck wants to know if I'm still alive.
Very apt.

Here is his message:
Subject: ARE YOU DEAD OR ALIVE?

These power of attorney is now pending my authorization before the money can be released to Mrs. Veronica Thompson, but I need a personal confirmation of your death before I give the final order.

Open and read attached message for more details.

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Here is the full header.

From Goodluck Jonathan Sun Dec 4 19:39:53 2011
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Subject: ARE YOU DEAD OR ALIVE?
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Here is the IP address. Austin, Texas:

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Another jolly thing.
A death map...
Just put your post code in, and you get to see where all the road traffic accidents and unlucky pedestrians interacted in a catastrophic way.
[LINK].

Must admit, as I sit here in my very JG Ballardian mood- Gov.UK 'selling' NHS to pharma (or Pharmacy in England: building on strengths - delivering the future) and looking at the Crash map I'm tempted to hit one-click Amazon and buy:

Sinclair fails where Erik Davis succeeds and vice versa. Erik is your man for elucidating the histories and undercurrents that shape what happens in our environment.

Sinclair is your man actually there as it happens.

I prefer Erik Davis's style because I tend to see reality as a shifting of patterns (in other words I have psychological problems relating to East Enders or TV in general) and I like to watch the labyrinthine weaving the thread of continuity makes, as the patterns repeat, vanish and repeat once more. The undercurrents are often weirder and far older than the forces Sinclair describes.

What Sinclair does best is to describe the experience, rather than the story. Sinclair is the observer, the man  scribbling down a modern day beastery, writing a new demonocron: he is the namer of the forces; the man standing under the wave as it crashes down, rather than the guy plotting the rise and fall on graph paper and taking leaps of the imagination from point to point; comparing and contrasting and evoking images of other great waves...

Ghost Milk is about "the long march towards a theme park without a theme".

And ghost milk is the cultural ooze grand projects exude.
Ghost milk, he writes, means "CGI smears . . . Real juice from a virtual host. Embalming fluid. A soup of photographic negatives . . . The universal element in which we sink and swim."...