Sinister: Spare us from these thoughts that shake us nightly

[David with a 'D']

"I love riding trains, and feeling responsible and cool, listening the best
of B+S."

Too right, Lila.  Belle and Sebastian are the perfect soundtrack to travel,
in my opinion.  I spent endless weeks going to college on the train, with
B&S in my ears.  Three things I loved were firstly that I never seemed to
get tired of hearing them, as normally happens with any other tapes of mine,
secondly that all the albums fit nicely on one side of a 90 min tape (I have
still to upgrade to a portable CD player, minidisc or MP3 player.
Someday...), and thirdly B&S had the curious effect on me that when I met my
friends on the train, I really did not want to turn them off.   Down, maybe,
but not off.

Which is going to come in handy when I go inter-railing next Wednesday, for
five weeks of train riding around Europe.

On the subject of cloning and so on, somebody once mentioned the following -
or something similar - to me (I have forgotten my source, so if it was a
post on this list, may I take this opportunity to apologise for the blatant
plagiarism which now follows and to commend the original person for getting
me thinking for so long):

In evolutionary terms, we are the next step towards self sufficient
machines.  Nothing more.

As time goes on animals get smarter, we develop and get smarter, we design
machines which develop and get smarter to the point where they don't need us
any more, and they can continue to develop to "perfection".  We're the
equivalent of monkeys in the greater scheme of things, only we created the
machines and we have bigger egos.  And less hair, usually.

I wonder, though, if machines that become conscious and "alive" will
actually want to stay alive.  Will they enjoy life at all, when they see the
sunrise or go out in the rain?  Maybe machines will realise, in their
conscious states, that they don't need or want to do anything and so
reproduction is futile and they will die out and the world will be organic
again.  An Electronic Renaissance.

Goodbye for now.

Go and suck the marrow from the bone that is life, my friends.

David

P.S.  I do not necessarily like or agree with some of the things that popped
up in the last few paragraphs, train thoughts apart, and if anyone's
beliefs/hopes/dreams/feelings/little fingers are upset, incensed or
aggravated by what I've said, I apologise.  I just like things that make me
think without getting me too depressed, like the real world.

Farewell.
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