Below are 20 journal entries, after skipping by the 20 most recent ones recorded in enlivend's LiveJournal:

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Saturday, September 1st, 2012
8:13 pm	Don't tell Doris In the September 1st 1985 issue of Red Rag: it might indeed be four years since the first women started camping at Greenham Common; and rumours that Red Rag has been Reading's Only for six whole years are quite reliable; but it's twenty years of Anarchist organisation in Reading that catch the headlines. Happy Birthday Doris! On Nagasaki Day a group of women break into A.W.R.E. Aldermaston (not the first time this has happened) and phone the Press Association to draw attention to the connection between the two places; the Women's Centre gets a three month reprieve; Social Security is under review; and evangelicals converge on Reading Abbey in an attempt to drive out covens, sects, and occult practices. Despite malicious and dishonest statements by the Evening Drivel, no police presence will be required. If someone does think it becomes necessary, I am sure that they will be able to use a telephone kiosk like anyone else... The Drivel may hanker after a "Smash Stonehenge" operation; that took 18 months to plan, and it will take years to repair the damage to their "good name". To attempt anything similar in a large conurbation like Reading, with only a few weeks preparation would be the height of foolhardiness. Besides, "The Authorities" are of course checking all mail going to Box 19, and they can see as clearly as anyone that the Party is not a front for some insurrectionary outbreak, but just what we have said all along, a weekend of pleasure and creativity. (Comment on this)
Saturday, August 18th, 2012
2:30 pm	The Shadow Project In the August 18th 1985 issue of Red Rag: when the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, human beings were instantly vaporized, leaving behind only their shadows. Early in the morning of August 6th 1985, people were hard at work whitewashing shadows onto Broad Street, as a memorial and as part of a project which spanned 100 towns in 17 countries. After an hour and a half (and three hundred shadows) the police showed up; they couldn't find any ringleaders; the cells had an incredible acoustic and the eleven arrested settled down to an extended vocal workshop. The two women charged with £60.76 damage to a fence at USAF Greenham Common plead guilty and are given a two years conditional discharge plus costs of £30, to be paid back at £2 a week; women in Reading now have a maximum of 6 weeks left at the Women's Centre in Old Shire Hall; and Doris is almost 20. (Comment on this)
Saturday, August 4th, 2012
3:03 pm	Left to rot In the August 4th 1985 issue of Red Rag: if you leave your door unlocked when you go on holiday you'll come back to a house full of squatters, but don't you mind all those boarded-up houses in Whitley; two Greenham women go on trial, scapegoated for causing 60 pounds (and 76p) worth of damage a USAF perimeter fence; the Queen Mum is 85; we're averse to live drama; Mark hesitates; and we find out what was in Box 2001. (Comment on this)
Wednesday, August 1st, 2012
11:31 am	chart.ravenbrook.com We're pleased to announce upgrades to chart.ravenbrook.com, the free service for converting graph specifications into png and pdf images. It's being used to generate the images you see here. Over the last year we've improved the spring-embedded layout and added support for: node and edge drawing styles and classes, arrowheads on edges, UTF-8 support for character sets beyond Latin-1 (voilà), and output to pdf. Click on the image to see this graph full-size. Further examples and full details of capabilities, API, desktop edition, etc. on our website. And of course it's all still written in lisp. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Saturday, July 21st, 2012
8:09 am	The Borocourt Rock In the July 21st 1985 issue of Red Rag: post punk progressive rock might not be everyone's cup of chlorpromazine but residents at Borocourt Hospital react to local bands with seemingly limitless energy; it's Cultural Week at the Apollo Youth Club; "Wednesday is Women's Day" at RCU has proved so popular that it's continuing over the summer; there are blue clouds over Henley; a Gay / Lesbian self defence class is starting up (is self defence the same as resistance? the Rag tries not to draw a line); and Ian's leaving Acorn. One of the older residents, named Lenny, was asked what he thought of the band, and replied "Eh?!" I repeated the question loudly and he replied - very loudly - "They're Too Noisy!" (Comment on this)
Saturday, July 7th, 2012
12:03 pm	Defining your anarchists In the July 7th 1985 issue of Red Rag: the Henley Regatta draws to a close and with it maybe also a debate lifted straight from the Ladybird Book of Cliche Politics; £700 has been raised for the Free Festival to celebrate 20 years of the Reading Anarchist Group; Japan intends to ignore the moratorium on whaling that seemed so certain in back in 1982; we struggle with a politically correct spelling for "boycott"; and someone's got it in for Ragwort. (Comment on this)
Saturday, June 23rd, 2012
6:22 pm	Messing About in Boats In the June 23rd 1985 issue of Red Rag: Does physically attacking rich people at the Henley Regatta count as legitimate protest against idle privilege or a stupid left-wing imitation which diverts attention way from the Government actually responsible for disadvantage? Five Greenham women on trial for criminal damage to the Aldermaston fence; what constitutes an authentically gay pub; an alternative to all those new roads and bridges; Red Rag for the hard of hearing; Emma Goldman's birthday; and Sir Keith Joseph is invited to a closed meeting at University and although the time and place are a closely guarded secret, the Vice-chancellor has threatened the Labour Club (but nobody else?) with action if there's any trouble. In other news: anyone looking for the flour bomb party should be at the Palmer Building by around 11.30am. (Comment on this)
Saturday, June 9th, 2012
12:28 pm	Armed Cult In Sex Terror In the June 9th 1985 issue of Red Rag: Late on a Saturday afternoon in the centre of town three kids from Tilehurst meet an empty panel of plywood and a shopping trolley full of paint; there are plans for USAF Upper Heyford to store Binary Wave gas, whatever that is; the Tudor Arms loses its credentials; tickets for Glastonbury CND are on sale at Acorn; a loosely situationist meeting will attempt to discuss the secret life of Reading and how to influence councillors by remote control; how to get a sleeping bag from the DHSS; and the Rabbit Squad is back in town. Do not let them into your house. I rushed over to begin snapping away with a telephoto lens on my camera. I had shots of a pregnant woman being dragged away while her husband was savaged by a dog and beaten. I had pictures of a truck attempting to leave the field while two riot vans hurtled over tents and benders to ram it to a halt. A pity I have them no more. At the first opportunity my camera was taken by a sergeant and two constables and, in my presence, the film very unceremoniously removed. (Comment on this)
Saturday, May 26th, 2012
8:42 am	You people have got a good case. Why aren't you publicising it? In the May 26th 1985 issue of Red Rag: Bracknell anarchists run a 24 hour squat in the old cinema and 300 people turn up to watch a film, play with paints, and enjoy a 5-band gig; the following weekend there's another gig at the same venue but with different organisers and this time the event is unashamedly money making. It'll take ten years to build a £75 million road system through Reading that will only cope with five years' worth of rush hours for the 40% of Berkshire who travel by car; we remember the fuss about the possible links between the Pill and cervical cancer; Reading Borough Council notices that advertising for playworkers in Reading's Only might result in some very undesirable characters working with Reading's children; a revolution which fails to make the reinvention of everyday life its central aim will leave us standing in paradise (or: why not to declaim at your houseplants); and Laura was unhappy about her letter not being printed in the last issue and has written a letter to complain, but we haven't printed that either. (Comment on this)
Wednesday, May 23rd, 2012
6:44 pm	Lattices isomorphic to their ideal lattices Today I finished reading a paper from a Maths journal ("Lattices isomorphic to their ideal lattices", by Dennis Higgs, from Algebra Universalis (1971) 1: 71-72). Actually I'm feeling really very chuffed with myself as I think it's the first time I've ever attempted an algebra paper, let alone got through the entire thing and out the other end. It's just one side long and understanding it only took me six weeks. (Not full-time, I hasten to add. But still...) I'm wondering now whether to try and write up my notes in neat as a way of winkling out any remaining misapprehensions, or to go away and generally get a life. I might be swayed by offers of supervision from anyone who understands this stuff better than I do. If any non-mathematicians are still reading and wonder what all the fuss might be about, the paper explains how - for instance - you can take a fairly small infinite set (say: all the fractions between zero and one) and by adding just one more member to that set (say: the square-root of one half) produce something whose structure is irreconcilably different. If you line both sets up in numerical order it turns out you cannot get them to match. (Whereas if you took that same set of fractions, doubled every one of them and then threw away everything greater than one, you'd end up with exactly what you started with. Even though you'd just evicted infinitely many fractions from it.) I guess that's just how it goes. It's given me plenty of food for thought along the way. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Saturday, May 12th, 2012
5:19 pm	Inside Greenham In the May 12th 1985 issue of Red Rag: in the first half of April over 100 women were arrested inside the airbase at USAF Greenham Common and charged with trespass. They had cut many holes in the perimeter fence, disturbed some rabbits, graffitied buildings with red paint, and made it onto the runway. Picnics are now being arranged inside the fence, not outside. Back in Reading, DHSS claimants under 26 living in Bed and Breakfasts will have to keep moving on every 4 weeks; a new, more severe Anarchist group hits the streets; someone around here's in trouble; and we consider the parental behaviour of the Mongolian Gerbil. At the pub, just ask where the meeting is. I don't know if the landlord will like Anarchists. (Comment on this)
Saturday, April 28th, 2012
11:39 am	Amercian Werewolves in Britain? In the April 28th 1985 issue of Red Rag: following the cycles of the moon, the next Cruise convoy is predicted out on Salisbury Plain in May; a mass trespass onto the dispersal area is planned; this would be easier to arrange at the weekend, but the MOD refuses to co-operate over the timing. Fifteen new hospitals are to be built and then stand empty, waiting to receive American and N.A.T.O. personnel in the event of nuclear war; the Greenham Food Van will spend the summer supporting a re-opened Red Gate camp; fifty ways to kill the slugs in your back garden (some of them without flattening Reading in the process); and something quite disparaging about the situationists. (Comment on this)
Saturday, April 14th, 2012
7:45 am	Swansong In the April 14th 1985 issue of Red Rag: two of the Greenham peace-campers are attacked in the night - one of them is hospitalised - and suspicion falls on U.S. servicemen; three other women have been found guilty of criminal damage at the base and one of them now faces a month in Holloway; two members of the Red Brigade are sent down for two years each, for fucking in the dock during their 1982 trial; Liz leaves Acorn; if you didn't understand what that Nosferatu article was about neither did we; and there are calls for patience as work gets under way on the two-mile road scheme that's going to solve all our traffic problems this side of 1990. Road works are expected to last for four and a half years, which means that this concrete monstrosity will be able to handle projected traffic flow for about three months. (Comment on this)
Sunday, April 1st, 2012
11:25 am	Ink on the page I get sufficiently distracted by the sight of package prefixes that I tend to make rather heavy use of use-package — enough to call attention to myself in some circles. Reading Cyrus Harmon's piece on Cheminformatics this morning got me wondering whether there was a local alternative to package use... CL-USER 46 > (defmacro using ((&rest packages) &body body) (let ((packages (mapcar 'find-package packages))) (labels ((symbol-try (symbol package) (multiple-value-bind (symbol status) (find-symbol (symbol-name symbol) package) (when (eq status :external) ;; being lazy here about foo:nil symbol))) (symbol (symbol) (let ((possibles (remove nil (mapcar (lambda (package) (symbol-try symbol package)) packages)))) (cond ((cdr possibles) (error "Symbol ~a exported from more than one package: ~{~a~^, ~}" symbol (mapcar 'package-name possibles))) (possibles (car possibles))))) (form (form) (loop for thing in form collect (cond ((symbolp thing) (or (symbol thing) thing)) ((consp thing) (form thing)) (t thing))))) (let ((expansion (form body))) (if (cdr expansion) `(progn ,@expansion) (car expansion)))))) USING CL-USER 47 > (pprint (macroexpand-1 '(using (java) (with-open-file (out-stream pathname :direction :output :if-exists :supersede :element-type :default) (let* ((r (jnew |AtomContainerRenderer| (jlist (jnew |BasicAtomGenerator|) (jnew |BasicBondGenerator|) (jnew |BasicSceneGenerator|)) (jnew |AWTFontManager|))) (vg (jnew |SVGGraphics2D| (jcall "getWrappedOutputStream" out-stream) (jnew |Dimension| 320 320))) (adv (jnew |AWTDrawVisitor| vg))) (jcall "startExport" vg) (jcall "generateCoordinates" (jnew |StructureDiagramGenerator| mol)) (jcall "setup" r mol (jnew |Rectangle| 0 0 100 100)) (jcall "paint" r mol adv (jnew (jconstructor |Rectangle2D$Double| 4) 10 10 300 300) +true+) (jcall "endExport" vg)))) )) (WITH-OPEN-FILE (OUT-STREAM PATHNAME :DIRECTION :OUTPUT :IF-EXISTS :SUPERSEDE :ELEMENT-TYPE :DEFAULT) (LET* ((R (JAVA:JNEW |AtomContainerRenderer| (JLIST (JAVA:JNEW |BasicAtomGenerator|) (JAVA:JNEW |BasicBondGenerator|) (JAVA:JNEW |BasicSceneGenerator|)) (JAVA:JNEW |AWTFontManager|))) (VG (JAVA:JNEW |SVGGraphics2D| (JAVA:JCALL "getWrappedOutputStream" OUT-STREAM) (JAVA:JNEW |Dimension| 320 320))) (ADV (JAVA:JNEW |AWTDrawVisitor| VG))) (JAVA:JCALL "startExport" VG) (JAVA:JCALL "generateCoordinates" (JAVA:JNEW |StructureDiagramGenerator| MOL)) (JAVA:JCALL "setup" R MOL (JAVA:JNEW |Rectangle| 0 0 100 100)) (JAVA:JCALL "paint" R MOL ADV (JAVA:JNEW (JAVA:JCONSTRUCTOR |Rectangle2D$Double| 4) 10 10 300 300) JAVA:+TRUE+) (JAVA:JCALL "endExport" VG))) CL-USER 48 > (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, March 31st, 2012
6:45 pm	A Useful Occupation In the March 31st 1985 issue of Red Rag: several hundred people pass through the doors of the old dole offices in South Street during a ten day Squat, with over a hundred and fifty attending the various workshops. They produce the largest screenprint in Reading, some 30 foot long by 12 high. The miners are still on strike but you'd have to look hard to notice it; Wokingham Tory M.P. William van Straubenzee gets quite uppity when he's told that smoking can result in cancer and cancer can result in death; Ladybird proposes a new method of timekeeping; and the Women's Press launch their sci fi series. (Comment on this)
Saturday, March 17th, 2012
12:11 pm	Are You Occupied? In the March 17th 1985 issue of Red Rag: the old Unemployment Benefit Office in South Street is squatted for ten days and hosts a series of workshops and projects: from music to video, screenprinting to street theatre, Tai Chi to Red Rag production. The media might think that the Greenham Womens' Peace Camp has faded away, but Newbury Council have set aside £52,700 for evictions during the current financial year; one of the student halls of residence goes Nuclear Free and its president writes with great enthusiasm to Red Rag in the apparent if unfounded belief that Reading's Only Newspaper is the body that can bring this change about; and Woozy Wombat is keen about something but we don't know what. This is where you get a reputation for oddness, sneaking around town with rucksacks of nettles or bags of rotten vegetation. (Comment on this)
Saturday, March 3rd, 2012
10:35 am	Free Kronstadt! In the March 3rd 1985 issue of Red Rag: one year into miner's strike is marked with a brace of benefit gigs and a march in London; we also note the anniversary of the Kronstadt rebellion of 1921. (March 5th: Trotsky arrives in Petrograd. Aircraft drop leaflets on Kronstadt ordering the population to surrender at once or "be shot like partridges".) The Greenham Support Group celebrates International Women's Day by organising Veggie Dining; after the government's show of muscle at last month's overnight invasion of Molesworth peace camp the Easter demo there may be even bigger; and a small cavalcade proceeds onto a snowy Salisbury Plain in search of the Cruise Missile Convoy hidden nearby (pretending to have melted into the British countryside, as Heseltine would have us believe). We joined hands (no, not with the soldiers, who were too busy). (Comment on this)
Saturday, February 18th, 2012
9:17 am	Aid for AIDS In this Dymo Labelled February 17th 1985 issue of Red Rag: in between the Greenham evictions, Molesworth blockades, Citizen Cain prize for the most interesting leak, new premises needed for the Women's Centre, Reagan setting the CIA on the Sandinistas, Real Time Video's newsletter, and Red Rag's computer problems: a sobering account of current understanding of a new sexually transmitted disease, and where you can go for help locally. AIDS is caused by a virus, called LAV, which is thought to be passed on in two ways: during sex, or if a person comes into contact with infected blood. It is also possible that the AIDS virus is passed on through saliva, but there is no reason to think that the virus can be spread through the air or by touch. It seems that not everyone who has the virus develops the symptoms of AIDS, but that everyone who does develop the symptoms dies, sometimes quickly, sometimes after two or more years. There is no immediate prospect of a cure for AIDS itself, although doctors are becoming more expert at treating the infections and illnesses which follow the failure of the immune system. (Comment on this)
Monday, February 13th, 2012
8:40 am	Mini weekend break in Bury St Edmunds. A charming hotel, a slap up dinner, some abbey ruins in the snow, and the end of the world. (Comment on this)
Saturday, February 4th, 2012
4:28 pm	70% still on strike In this most OCR-unfriendly February 3rd 1985 issue of Red Rag: the strike has by no means been lost, and even if the demand of No Pit Closures cannot be won, the Miners will not accept defeat, but will go on as will their supporters to fight this tide of destruction this Government has launched upon us. Most of us are stuck between the unslightly and the serene, floundering in a love like blood and can do without "Lifelines" from Nietzschean superwomen, unless it's to bring on the clowns in the twilight of idols; Veggie Dining becomes co-ordinator free and the Vegan Ramble will now have to deny that they check your sandwich box for salami sarnies; two rival teams appear to be running courses at the Centre for the Jobfree; and Acorn becomes a Workers' Co-operative, but Ian and Liz are leaving. (Comment on this)