Unlikely messiah

Bob Dylan rarely leans over his front fence. And though he's got messy hair, he's always been an unlikely messiah (of folk music anyway).

I mean, what would some parent say to his kid if the kid came home with a glass eye, a Charlie Mingus record and a pocketful of feathers? He'd say, 'Who are you following?' And the poor kid would have to stand there with water in his shoes, a bow tie on his ear and soot pouring out of his belly button and say, 'Jazz. Father, I've been following jazz.'

Udo Bolts (GER)

Soon the world's attention will turn from the heavily-branded carnival that is World Cup Football to the MOST HEAVILY BRANDED SPORTING PHENOMENON IN THE UNIVERSE: the Tour de France. I love this event for thousands of reasons (including the gladiatorial mountain climbing contests between EPO-addled supermen). But I have a special interest in the diversity of competitors' names. Here's a selection from last year's installment:

Axel Merckx (BEL)
Georg Totschnig (AUT)
Inaki Isasi (SPA)
Dario Frigo (ITA)
Maxim Iglinski (KAZ)
Pietro Caucchioli (ITA)
Laszlo Bodrogi (HUN)
Joost Posthuma (NED)
Haimar Zubeldia (SPA)
Vladimir Karpets (RUS)
Beat Zberg (SWI)
Wim Vansevenant (BEL)

Ravens

Ruined station house

Well, it was on the old Ghan line . . . but I suppose it might have belonged to BT the nomad or his brother FRASER, the retired mill worker.

Swans

Funny forest

Emiliana Torrini is the fisherman's woman

Don't know if the last line of this song includes the words "my saver". The transcription was pretty straight forward apart from the last line. In a softer state of mind, I might imagine that my inability to capture this particular lyric is symbolic of something - e.g. I can't hear my saver or, worse, I can hear something but I'm not sure that it's my saver . . .

Lifesaver, your timing's really strange
Catch me later
But can you please be late

And it's funny how your thoughts
Think they're right at all
And its funny how your cause
Makes no sense at all

Lifesaver, let's play a little game
Catch me later
But make sure you be there late

And it's funny how it seems
You're doing things
And its funny how you find
Your peace of mind

Lifesaver, I'm cancelling our date
Lifesaver, its time you had a break

Lifesaver, I'm cancelling our date
Lifesaver, my saver

Who has the perfect face?

Researchers at the Perception Lab (echo echo) have used the judgements of a group of 34 young women to generate a composite image of the perfect male face. Tony Little, the principal research psychologist at said lab:

Women find femininity appealing in a male face because they said they associate it with co-operation, honesty and parental ability. Strongly masculine features are considered threatening and less attractive, but they still want some combination involving masculine features because they want dominance, too.

Now there's a trap for young players.

Picture a man, a slightly weepy character, who is young for his age and has a twitchy eyelid. This man has made a routine out of nibbling on bits of cake and fingering his ears while mumbling to himself in the company canteen at lunchtime.

Deep down he knows the truth: whatever revision of his personal history can be achieved by cake-fueled ear excavation will always, in the end, be overridden by the fact that on every day at school his sandwiches were taken from him by Bull Thompson, soaked in urine, and, moments before the bell, smeared in his face.

At university, this boy almost failed his first year of animal behaviour science because he was addicted to muscle milk and four different varieties of thermogenic fat burner. He hauled weights around his mother's walk-in wardrobe till four in the morning, six nights a week. He wolfed strange powders and pills with his banana porridge. He even pasted theatre hair above his lip to conceal an expanding fuzz of bum fluff. He paid particular attention to sculpting his face in the manner of a Schwarzenegger, a Pearce, a Brereton or, on some confusing days, all three at the same time. No amount of drug-enraged screaming from his sister (who only wore her Howard Cunningham mask inside the house) distracted him from his late-afternoon vanity mirror ritual of prodding and reshaping, twisting, tugging, kneading and hoping that it'd all be worthwhile in the end, that it'd all make him absolutely irresistible to the opposite sex . . . in the end.

But before it got too hard, he discovered god, bought a skateboard that he never used and moved in with his psychiatrist's dog obedience trainer.

"I don't know where it all came from / I think I dreamed about my home" - Grand Salvo (aka Paddy Mann)

This picture is intended to be ugly. It kind of says something about the city, about the city's brain, about my brain, A BRAIN, that can fragment without warning and inhabit hundreds of little pokey compartments and sub-compartments that are damp and cold and don't have any toilets. Each place has many dimensions and can be seen from many perspectives. Each place is filled with the chatter of peculiar voices and the fleetingness of peculiar faces -- if I let myself think that way.

I don't want to think that way, not all the time anyway. And yet some days the will to rise above the tangled-up metropolitan world, the desire also, is just so hard to draw on.

Somehow, if only obliquely, Paddy Mann captures this. His words are beautiful: "It's like knowing a language that nobody speaks / or building a house where no one will live / it's the work of a lifetime that no one will read ... I remember when we used to sit / And the silence would be so complete and so sweet."

My abdomen is full of bile