You see, stag dos (doos? does?) aren't my thing because honestly I would just rather sit in the pub and have some good pints, but my mon Ching is getting married (as are several of my other university contemporaries, but he is first), so we were invited up to Bristol for miscellaneous events and entertainments. Friend Wntrmute (off of Everything2) is also in Bristol and I hadn't seen him in ages either so I decided to split the difference. I opted out of the morning's paintballing and quad biking and instead turned up in Bristol in the middle of the afternoon and Wntrmute and I went for a wander and what turned into a very lengthy chin-wag.
Bristol is a very vertical city, much more so than Winchester. It has hills. It's also a reasonably nice-looking place, there's some greenery, some water, some modern architecture, some nice 19th-century stuff which reminds me very strongly of Cambridge. We traipsed up the hill to Clifton and sat at the White Lion pub which overlooks (well, underlooks) Clifton Suspension Bridge and talked about the highly advanced mathematical work that Wntrmute does these days. The man has access to supercomputers now, which is braggable, and routinely runs month-long programs on dozens of cores, and flies to other countries to converse with other mathematicians. He rubs shoulders with, just to pick one example, Clifford Cocks, the man who created RSA encryption years before R, S and A did. (His work - having no practical value at the time due to the lack of powerful computers - was classified by MI5, for whom he was working at the time.) Wntrmute feels like he's an imposter working with such people, as if any minute somebody will reach over and say, "Wait a minute! You're not a qualified mathematician at all! It's a MASK!" Wntrmute works mainly for the University of Bristol and intermittently for the government and his working environment is fascinating. For one thing, they deliberately try to keep their bus number low, which is surprising. For another: no internet at work! This is data compartmentalisation and security taken to serious extremes.
The cleaners have Top Secret clearance, because ultimately all rooms need cleaning.
*
After we'd killed the afternoon and drunk some beer, we parted ways and I joined up instead with the stag party who were recovering from paintball bruises and we went to Hooters. The paintball thing had been pushing it, but when Hooters had - weeks earlier - entered into the evening's planning (not introduced by me or Ching or anybody I knew), I seriously considered not turning up. Ching and I have crossed paths too few times since university but he (was and still is) a decent, God-fearing man. It did not feel like a good fit. Counterpoint (and this is what pushed me over): he might need moral support.
So, Hooters is probably the worst restaurant I've ever dined at. Everything in there is greasy: the chairs, the tables, the cutlery, the menus. (Arguably: the wait staff.) It is noisy and orange and brutally low-brow, like accidentally stepping into some horny jerk's Valhalla. Since wedding season is summertime, that means that this is stag season and there were a LOT of independent roving stag parties in Bristol this evening. Many of them were at this restaurant. The range of food on offer effectively started with burgers and ended at chicken wings. The presumably idealised photos in the menu were grossly unappetising; the menu itself was literally slimy to the touch. Beer was served in big four-pint pitchers, but it wasn't until the bill arrived that I realised that we were paying £15, or £3.75 per pint, for Budweiser. And not the good Czech Budweiser either. The stuff that tastes cheap, like lemonade.
Cutlery dumped on the table in a pile. Instead of napkins, a roll of kitchen towels. Food: salty and fatty to the point of inedibility. Other adjectives coming out of this experience: Insulting. Unflattering. Base. Confusing. Surreal.
*
We paid and wandered back and then up the ruinously steep Park Street to Antix where one of Ching's other, non-Corpus friends was able to get us in, which seems like the nice kind of favour that is worth rolling out on a stag night. Antix fits a very simple and familiar profile: very dark, insanely loud music, dancing, spirits. We hogged a bunch of tables in the back. There was room, which is something I do like in a bar. It would have been around ten or eleven at this point, so maybe we were relatively early in the grand scheme of things. We drank vodka and Red Bull and some people danced but I didn't get nearly drunk enough to join that nonsense. We actually had some useful conversation, which in my experience was unprecedented in such a context. Usually you just sit and stare at each other and drink.
Having a standing offer of (very nearby) crash space from Wntrmute, who was staying awake late anywayto work on a Steam-related issue, I eventually decided I had enough for a decent hangover and ducked out. Maybe a little early. I heard that the Woods got visited (?) and Ching successfully avoided being forced into a strip joint (fair dos (doos? does?)). As for myself, Wntrmute and I found ourselves yammering about even further advanced mathematics until 3am which is coincidentally when the actual events concluded, so, "split the difference", there you have it.
*
I crashed on Wntrmute's airbed. Later that morning, I was able to drag myself out for brunch with the recovering stag night crew. Ching's fiancee turned up to say hello. Plenty of fried food was consumed, though, for myself, after a rough night I prefer water, fruit and fresh air.
On the train to and from Bristol I succeeded in reading all of Isaac Asimov's "I, Robot" for the second or third time (and the first time since secondary school). These stories were interesting to me: firstly, the way the Powell/Donovan stories (and the others) seem to have informed the Ed Stories, and secondly, just how mind-bogglingly wrong Asimov's conceptions of robotics and AI programming have proven to be. You have near-human AI which can clearly hear and understand you, but making it talk is the problem you haven't solved yet? You built the monumental ethical framework needed for the Three Laws to be remotely meaningful and yet you need a psychologist to predict what these wildly unpredictable computing machines are going to do in any given situation? You honestly think that gigantically powerful machines could run the whole world better than humans and predict everything?
But then, there were no computers at this time. These were the 1940s and the Good Doctor was a mere chemist. There was no chaos theory. Thinking machines and talking machines were equally vastly improbable, so how could you predict which of the two is the tougher to solve? How much slack do you give a sci-fi writer for his retroactively nonsensical vision? It makes you worry whether it's worth writing anything down.
