Jazzy D's Soul Notes

Philip Pullman "Northern Lights" (Scholastic)




I started reading this book a good while back after seeing the film version, The Golden Compass, and well before the recent BBC TV series. Since I have been watching the TV series I was intrigued to see how well the TV adaptation follows the book. There are some minor differences such as introducing Will much earlier on in the television version, but not enough to distract from the book.


This story takes place in a world parallel to our own. Lyra's amazing spirit makes her the heroine to save children from being experimented on. The young adventurist travels across insurmountable odds with her daemon,(the manifestation of souls in animal form) and defeats evil forces at every turn. This mythic journey has mystic guides and animals who are able to communicate with humans.

I’m intrigued, but I’ll need to withhold comment on the larger meaning until I’ve read the whole thing= the second and third in the series. Lyra must fight some great battle without knowing she’s doing it, with the help of her alethiometer, a device that looks a bit like a golden compass. My understanding is that the later books will become quite vociferously anti-organized religion, but this book certainly shows it in a bad light which endorses my opinion about organised religion. The Church , the Magisterium, stifles valid research that challenges its teaching, while at the same time permitting the atrocities of severing children
's daemons. It’s definitely a sophisticated story that whilst aimed at children or teenagers can be read quite easily by adults. I was quite surprised to see one character say "The wave function of this situation is going to collapse quite soon" which children may not understand unless they have heard of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle fro quantum mechanics! A very good read and I look forward to devouring the next book, The Subtle Knife.

Hello folks. I am wondering why you have not seen the daily night and morning gifs. Well,mia culpa. I totally forgot. After my jaunt down to Paddock Wood and a fish and chip food and drink in Gravesend 'Spoons pub last night, i got home and promptly fell asleep. I woke up at four though totally refreshed!

This was a good thing as i snucked into the common room where the Quays WiFi is it at its "strongest" - guffaw! Anyway i caught up woith the latest episode of Supergirl "Medusa" ,which then continued to the next episode of The Flash and then Arrow with the denouement in Legends Of Tomorrow - they were fighting an alien horde known as the Dominators. It was an awesome three and a half hours of DC comic fantasy full on blast! (Shush TV excludes all the damn adverts).

Here is a You Tube explanation - well one explanation -  of the crossover - spoiler alert if not watched.



I thoroughly enjoyed this crossover.

Had a nice cup of breakfast tea this morning and then listened to Radio 4 about the core of the Earth, the core of the universe and the core of stellar formation which was fascinating.

After lunch i had some Xmas pudding whilst cousin was around his girlfriend's place and her kids having their Xmas dinner. I was listening to some jazz of course, and nursing this cold with a hot toddy, that is a whisky based one. Then later on, cheese and biscuits with some Taylor's port.

Last night i watched the Doctor Who Xmas special which i thought was quite entertaining and then a few couple of episodes from Agents of SHIELD second season, which i have seen before, and completely finished watching the fifth season of True Blood.

Today i might just watch some episodes of Charmed or complete that seventh season of Buffy again. For now i will do some reading.

Meanwhile i have been watching these two links to Shannen Doherty's FB page and her family dinging - with a few quick scenes of the beauty that is formerly known as Prue halliwell.


https://www.facebook.com/341362821729/videos/10153769529701730/

https://www.facebook.com/341362821729/videos/10153769523661730/

I really do love these lighter mornings. I just hope that the sun actually comes out today. It has not been cold but the last few days or so we have had this cloudy milkiness. It is just so frustration that i have not been able to top up the tan naturally. i would never consider a sun bed or spray as it is so unnatural IMHO.

I have been reading "Why Buddy Matters" and getting a thrill out of it. Next to Doctor Who it is the best slice of TV heaven i know. Talking of such heaven the adaptation of Jonathan Strange and Mr.Norrell has already started on the BBC - it is an hourly seven part series based on the Susanna Clarke novel, which i have yet to read its one thousand plus pages.



"I myself am quite a tolerable practical magician"

I have been watching episodes of The Librarians on the Syfy channel. I really do not know what to think of it and in some ways reminds me of Waehouse 13, although i did enjoy the Boston episode with the labyrinth and the Minotaur.

I also like the idea of a representative door to anywhere from the library to anywhere else, and hence an Einstein Rosen bridge , or in more familiar terms, a wormhole,that allows instantaneous travel between points.

As yet researchers have no observational evidence for wormholes, but the equations of the theory of general relativity have valid solutions that contain wormholes. Because of its robust theoretical strength, a wormhole is one of the great physics metaphors for teaching general relativity (see formula below). The first type of wormhole solution discovered was the Schwarzschild wormhole, which would be present in the Schwarzschild metric describing an eternal black hole, but it was found that it would collapse too quickly for anything to cross from one end to the other. Wormholes that could be crossed in both directions, known as traversable wormholes, would only be possible if exotic matter with negative energy density could be used to stabilize them.

An affect called the Casimir effect shows that quantum field theory allows the energy density in certain regions of space to be negative relative to the ordinary vacuum energy, and it has been shown theoretically that quantum field theory allows states where energy can be arbitrarily negative at a given point.

It has been hypothesized that such effects might make it possible to stabilize a traversable wormhole. Physicists have not found any natural process that would be predicted to form a wormhole naturally in the context of general relativity, although the quantum foam hypothesis is sometimes used to suggest that tiny wormholes might appear and disappear spontaneously at the Planck scale, and stable versions of such wormholes have been suggested as dark matter candidates. It has also been proposed that, if a tiny wormhole held open by a negative-mass cosmic string had appeared around the time of the Big Bang, it could have been inflated to macroscopic size by cosmic inflation.

The American theoretical physicist John Archibald Wheeler coined the term wormhole in 1957; the German mathematician Hermann Weyl, however, had proposed the wormhole theory in 1921, in connection with mass analysis of electromagnetic field energy.






I digress, going back to this fantasy series,it is too wayward as yet for me to like it. In general , i find it silly, and despite the fact that Warehouse 13 had silly moments, it had darker tones. For the time being i shall sit on the fence before committing to the series one way or another.

I see that there is another Spielberg related series coming to the small screen called Extant, which with Halle Berry in it, looks promising.

Just watched the penultimate episode of Marvel Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D before the mid season break. High octane stuff and i cannot wait to see the tenth episode where they reach the alien city. So Raina and Skye are descended from the Kree?

Wow. Just watched the latest installment of Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D  in which Sky and Ward are in a coffee shop or restaurant and Coulson;s amazing flying car. Definitely  one of the best shows on TV at the moment. Well, that is , until the new season of Doctor Who. I am trying not to get too excited but the anticipation is palpable.

I have just listened to the first part of  Neil Gaiman's "Neverwhere" on BBC Radio 4 catch-up service. Very intriguing storyline  with a good  Gothic fantasy  feel. Shall listen to the whole story, and the book is on my Amazon wish list.

Hopefully, I shall visit Faversham  tomorrow to put the cheque into  my bank, and get some pipe shag.

Just watched the DVD X-Men 2 based on the Marvel comics superheroes. After watching the first movie again a week ago i do think that this is the better of the two movies. I have yet to watch the Wolverine movie or the final one, but the films are a superb adaptation of the genre.

Last night I finished watching the second and final season of Stargate Universe. It ended on a slight anticlimax as the TV company decided against  commissioning a third series. It was a pity that the writers were not allowed to tie up the loose ends  particularly the discovery of the intelligent signal at the edge of the universe conveying that a life-form existed near the Big Bang, the mission that the Ancient's ship Destiny was programmed to seek out.

Still, at least another great fantasy series returns this Easter  with Dr.Who, which is still the longest running sci fi series going and that this year is the 50th anniversary of it.

Okay, I am with the geeks (such as the guys in The Big Bang Theory) and that nerdvana is cool.

On my list of films to watch, or watch again, are Sin City, The Fantastic Four, I Robot, The League Of Ordinary Gentlemen and Warehouse 13.