old men's necks

Another unwanted reminiscence, while at a lecture I recalled (this is definitely not as classy as Proust, but a step up from potty training) joyless attendances at church, which mostly seemed to involve starting at the backs of old men's necks.
The necks always seemed to be very heavily lined and porous and the lines and wrinkles and pores seemed to be a darker colour so I spent a lot of time wondering if the the old geezers actually washed the backs of their necks properly. As a virtuous child, I usually regretted such unkind thoughts immediately it being in a church and in the Presence, but at the same time I resented the elderly gents for having necks that brought on such thoughts.
They seemed to be healthier old men than in recent times, they didnt seem to cough and shake and suck their gums as geriatric types in symphony concerts do now, or maybe the repetitive nature of mass and the droning of the priest was unimportant enough that coughing and spluttering livened things up in an acceptable and wholly forgettable manner

Dont go there

It suddenly occurred to me, while engaged in similar activity -- that my earliest clear memory is not as I normally think, related to not going to school aged three and a half (I remember the school sending somebody to find out if I would go -- a happening so bizarre I couldnt have made it up and certainly nobody ever told me such a thing -- a suspicion which taints a lot of my other supposed early memories)
but instead recollections of toilet training. Various vignettes of same. Definitely dont want to go there, but its the truth.

Fingers crossed

The slow motion car smash of the Great Plague of 2009 continues to glide at the speed of melting toffee. I hope everyone is being a bit alarmist, because if not we are in big trouble. Over the last two days I went to the three pharmacies in my local area to see if they had any anti-septic hand-sprays and all were sold out. Only one of the sales assistants even had the presence of mind to say that they had re-ordered, and even she didn't think to say when the next delivery would be. It doesnt look good for salesmanship or customer service. Most of these places are in dispute with the government about the massive hand-outs they get for giving out the social welfare drugs. If they spent less time moaning about the unjust cutting of their shamefully over-inflated fees and more time checking demand and stock-levels maybe they would actually make money from the business they are supposed to be in instead of scabbing off the tax payer. Even the lowliest dunder-head in the local book-shop will ask "Will I order it for you" or "it will be back in stock in two weeks and we can phone you if you want" or even "the other bookshop might have one in stock if you cant wait"

things that make you go hmmm

Still not thrilled at what awaits us all in the Autumn (northern hemisphere)
Its the winter in the southern hemisphere, so you would have to wonder about swine flu and how quickly it could develop. With luck it wont be any big deal, but we are relying on luck. I still think the reaction from governments and health professionals in the area has been pathetic -- and has been for many years when you look at the record for an instant. There are drug-resistent strains of all sorts of lovely long-forgotten plagues out there, such as Typhoid, Typhus and Tuberculosis --
diseases that used to cut people down like flies and still do when there are earth-quakes and other disasters which cause crowding and bad sanitation. We have become very complacent, and diseases our grand-parents no longer worried about are coming back to teach us a lesson

Its been months...years actually

between the second last and the last post. No excuse for it.
I will be forty four this year. I feel a chill of dismay even writing the words.
I seem to have lost about fifteen years along the way, by rights I should be only about thirty, the amount I have achieved so far only amounts to what a sleepy thirty year old would have got done. Must try harder

Football is evil

I think I said this before and no doubt I will say it again -- ever since I was a lad I have had an instinctive aversion to team sports. The essence of team sports is, we are all told, character building and all about getting along with people and working as a group. But to me, it seemed and still seems to be about Winners and Losers. And there are lots and lots of Losers. The guys who lose the match. The guys who only get to be substitutes. The guys who were'nt good enough to even be substitutes. The guys who the gym teacher didnt think were good enough to not even be enough not-good-enough to not be considered not good enough to be substitutes. You get the idea. It sort of sets up the pattern for being a loser. Sure, you can be a Winner, or you can be a bad loser such that the next time you become one of the winners, but the Life Lesson lurking in here in all the loserness is that life is like sport and life is about losing and you might as well get used to it bub.
Of course, if we want to project the World as it Really is that would be fine.
But, last time I checked, there was still a lot of guff about Opportunity and the Equality thereof and how we were all in it together and were supposed to be helping each other ... so where are all the heart-warming cooperative games where no child is left behind and everyone's contribution is valued?

Different kinds of writing

I have 'suddenly' discovered that there are two, possibly separate, different kinds of writing.
There is emotional writing, where you have the scene in your head and are living it and the words come tumbling out and you just go with the flow and hope to capture enough of the feeling on paper and come back afterwards and tidy it all up without losing the original fire. With luck.
Then there is literary writing, where you are putting one word in front of another across the page, and you know pretty much exactly what is going to happen next and what the nearly right word is but it all feels like not much fun and a lot of effort and far far from inspired or inspiring. I think I was able to combine the two when I was younger, but now after a gap of some fifteen years I seem to get the literary, smart-ass word play stuff far more often than the inspired driven automatic writing (or typing as Truman Capote is supposed to have said of Jack Kerouac).
The inspired stuff can be a bit frightening because it gets a bit like method acting where you are actually living the story, and in that situation you really shouldnt be operating heavy machinery or interacting with people on an emotional level, accidents will happen in which people will get hurt and you may not be paying attention -- perhaps this may be why there are so many unhappy writers!

The illiterate age

I despair of some of the technical magazines I read -- the rise of sloppy writing seems to be unstoppable. This of course is where I should go back and carefully re-read all my own blog posts, because I'm sure I am guilty too. Pedantic and all as it sounds, there is an awful lot of English As A Second Language type stuff going on, and mostly it is from English as a First Language people who are just being lazy or rushed and not checking. It is even in books. I have just been reading part of "Mao The Unknown Story" and the sloppiness is astounding at times. I would not be a Mao Tse Tung fan, in fact I am well able to accept that he was a complete monster, but allegations are thrown around in a not always believable manner and not backed up with much evidence. Admittedly as China is still offically in the toils of the Communist Party the evidence wont be forth-coming, but as a person from a scientific background I would prefer if the wild stuff was toned down in that situation. Lack of evidence is indeed not evidence of lack as we used to say in college, but you have to be careful to point out where the gaps are in your theory.
Also, the English is very sloppy at times. It is a big book, and an enormous editing challenge and Jung Chang is a non-native speaker, but I believe Jon Halliday is, and really at times the wording is so obtuse as to throw the meaning of the sentence into doubt. The most glaring example is (to paraphrase) that Mao has series of enormous identical houses built -- at least I think that is what is meant, the word repeatedly used in the book is 'Identikit', which if I remember correctly is the sliding puzzle thing the police used to use to make up pictures of suspects in the days before computers ... Eccentric as Mao was, I very much doubt that he had any desire to live in houses built in the style of a police wanted poster. This is just the worst example, there are plenty of other places where your brain is left hanging trying to figure out what you just read.

Greyness

Sometime in the last five months or so my hair has made the transition to looking grey as opposed to having a lot of grey. Light indoors makes it still look brownish, but outdoors and in other better lit places I look older. Pity I cant pin it down beyond somewhere between age 43 and 43 and six months!

The Minstrel Tensions

A tongue-in-cheek concept for the story of the rise and fall of an all-girl band,
We are the Queens of Pain would be there big hit, although it would be different from the Shawshank one ...

Shawshank the Musical

I see the Shawshank Redemption is now a stage play, pity they couldnt leave it alone -- since there is no redemption in the movie (and its kind of hidden in the play, Red does admit to remorse)
But anyway, I think there should be a musical -- Enter the Killer Queens, who do ballet high kicks as they go to rape Andy Dufresne:
We are the Queens of Pain /
We go to the laundry to do do do
Andy do do do Andy Dufresne

300 Million could die

Not wanting to be alarmist, but the result of a high-mortality global influenza pandemic would be a death toll of about 0.5 per cent, which if there are an estimated 6000 - 7000 Million people on Earth, means that 300 to 350 Million could die -- why is everyone sitting around on the frigging hands?

Disband the W.H.O

Another shower of useless bastards if the news reports are anything to go by -- if indeed their reaction to the Mexico Pig Flu outbreak was along the lines of "Oh Well, its too late to do anything about it" then being total fatalists they wont mind being fired without a pension. Some countries at least are instituting quarentines, and even if it doesnt work at least something is being done -- apparently some isolated spots managed to avoid the 1918 flu epidemic by having a tight quarentine, we are a hundred years on, with chemical warfare suits and so on, surely we can do better

Writing is Rewriting

Indeed it is. I have been concentrating on getting to my million words to throw away, so I havent paid that much attention up to now. But over the last couple of weeks I had a bit of writing for somebody else to finish, and I had some difficulty. I found myself staring at the screen and then at paper (usually printing stuff out gets the juices flowing) but the words just sat there, limp and about as responsive and inspiring as a shopping trolley with three stuck wheels. I have a funny feeling I actually now understand what Hemmingway was on about with his talk about 'a one true sentence' -- it could be that he meant that you could sit (in his case stand) there all day wrestlng with awful words and get one working sentence out of it all at the end of the day ... oh dear

Oh dear. We're all doomed I tell ye!

Paul Krugman mentioned the irisheconomy.ie blog, and mentioned Ireland as being ' like us only worse' and said something ominous along the lines of small countries being a canary in the coal mine type indicator of bad stuff down the tracks

the horror of fake bell-towers

Architecturally and aesthetically speaking of course -- nothing really bad, its not life and death!
But really, they lost the run of themselves at one stage -- two of my least favourites -- Milltown shopping Centre, and the Goat pub -- what were they thinking. At least the Milltown one now has a use -- it holds up some microwave transmitters for mobile phones.
I may do a photo-blog on hideous public/private buildings at some stage

Write to throw away

This is a discipline also recommended in of all places, the computer programming field.
I am only reluctantly coming around to doing it. Jerry Pournelle's advice was aim to throw away a million words before you become a writer. I hope he meant 'over many drafts', because throwing away a million words of first draft would take a very long time -- as in, at three hundred words an hour, it would take you three thousand three hundred and thirty three hours -- which is 416 8-hour working days, which if you could afford not to starve would put you back less than two years of 5 day weeks, but it amounts to a hell of a lot of Saturday afternoons (about 22 years worth, give or take some change:-)

Should we enjoy aging?

Its a strange question. Recently a friend of all of thirty-two said that she actually enjoyed the aging process. Being about eleven years further along the curve, I thought that was rich coming from someone so young who didnt even appear to have a grey hair.
My own reaction is that there is nothing enjoyable about the aging process, its more something you have to endure. Certainly, people gain in experience and wisdom and patience and other things over time, but that happens at the same time as aging does, and even though some of them are part of it, they are the only welcome parts of it.

a more topical idea

A musical called "The Great Depression of Zoo Nine" -- this title being in itself being a side-swipe at semi-illiterate "designers" who rendered the year 2000 as Z000.
The show would be a modern day updating of "42nd Street".
And why not they have a stage show of The Shawshank Redemption now, gawd help us...

Ideas are cheap

My scenario for a comedy musical to be launched before the year 2000 --
"The Naz" -- the story of a gay Hollywood celebrity Lawyer who discovers to his horror that he is The Nazarene Re-incarnated, that is to say, Jesus of Nazareth's Second Coming. It would have been a great idea for a satire, but tricky -- would probably have offended just about everyone on the planet with religious sensibilities of any sort!

Bob the builder -- No we effing can't

I've tried to avoid being negative about the Big Depression of Oh-8/Oh-9, but there is such a lot of hog-wash being talked I cant resist. For the Record: Nobody in 1929 sat down and said: Lets see how bad we can make this for everyone. It just happened. And politicians and economists are no wiser or smarter now than they were then, so hold on to your hats while they squirm around -- if they pull it off, its pure luck, and if they dont, the same. We live in Interesting Times

The Graduate (DVD)

Having just watched for the first time, "The Graduate" on DVD, I have to agree with the following:
http://www.ropeofsilicon.com/article/watching_the_graduate_makes_brad_wonder
Benjamin Braddock is a complete psycho, he is almost as bad from going to college as De Niro's character was in "Taxi Driver". A deeply troubling film, mostly because I didnt think the makers really knew how nasty it was, behind all the nineteen sixties shock which no doubt came out at the time, forty one years later is uncomfortable -- Hoffman's character is a proto-Rainman in fact, and his destructiveness is appalling

holy moley

where did the second half of 2008 go to?