John M Ford (Mike) is Dead

I never managed to actually get my hands on any of his official writings, but got to know him through his posts and comments at Making Light, the sum of which could fill quite a few very funny, very serious books. As Neil Gaiman has said, “…all of [his] great bon mots really did just come tumbling straight out -- they were always replies to something, with never a hint of ‘here's one I prepared earlier’ about them…”

Here are three of my favourites, from the particular body of work that Neil’s talking about:



“Scotty! I need a sonnet in three minutes or we’re all dead!”
“Och, Cap’n, ye canna force the muse. Have ye got a rhyme for ‘silvery Tay’ somewhere on the bridge?”

- John M Ford



Against Entropy

The worm drives helically through the wood
And does not know the dust left in the bore
Once made the table integral and good;
And suddenly the crystal hits the floor.
Electrons find their paths in subtle ways,
A massless eddy in a trail of smoke;
The names of lovers, light of other days --
Perhaps you will not miss them. That's the joke.
The universe winds down. That's how it's made.
But memory is everything to lose;
Although some of the colors have to fade,
Do not believe you'll get the chance to choose.
Regret, by definition, comes too late;
Say what you mean. Bear witness. Iterate.

- John M Ford



NASA ANNOUNCES PLANS TO EXPLORE LANGDON SPACE
For Immediate Release As Soon As We Find Some Money

As part of its “Mission Earth” program to do things that might, you know, be comprehensible to the average American (see “Manned Mars Program to Incorporate ‘Survivor’ Elements” above), the agency today announced its “Mission to Langdon Space,” in which teams of EVA-suited scientists would be “inserted” into multiply-connected Occupational Use Terrains (MachOUT universes) with the intention of discovering who is, in physical-science terms, getting any, with whom, and in what combinations.

The first question that came to reporter’s minds should be obvious. The second question was, “What if everybody just, like, fibs?” Mission Specialist Victor von Kinsey (winner of this year’s Nash Trophy for Interesting Paramathematical Behavior) replied, “We naturally expect respondents to fall back on constructions such as ‘It depends on what you mean by “whoopee” and ‘Nudge nudge say no more.’ The purpose of this project is to collect interesting data from which results suitable for premium-cable distribution can be redacted. Everything else is error bars.”

Asked what the practical application of this effort might be, Dr. Kinsey said, “Global warming,” and ran off singing “Du, du, bist eine kleine Teekanne.”

- John M Ford


(These I took from Making Light, without asking - apologies: http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/ )

RIP dear man, although I think you’ll be too busy entertaining the astrals for any resting. We have lots of your words to keep us company, and we’ll treasure them.

Science Idols

Ahem. This just in. The American Association of Petroleum Geologists recently awarded Michael Crichton a journalism award. For his novel State Of Fear.

I… I’m… zzt...

Speechless.


The Union of Concerned Scientists is running its Science Idols cartoon contest. I was vacillating between numbers 3 and 7 but now I’m sommer going to vote for number 10, dammit.

http://ucsaction.org/campaign/vote_now_for_science_idol/?qp_source=wacucs%5fhomearspotlig

So Not Cool

There is a certain elitist discriminatory practice whose purpose it is to put an extra razor-wire frill above the electric fence on top of the eight-metre-high two-metre-thick concrete-encased lead wall that separates the have-maths from the have-not-maths.

“Oh, don’t be silly, it’s not that difficult,” the number-abled will simper, “Look, I’ll show you…”
And it always ends in tears, for the differently-abled one. The genius will be smirking and puffed up and superior. But again, as I’ve said before, somebody has to make the sandwiches. I really think people ought to be nicer to the ones who make the sandwiches.

Read more about this scourge in an article by Tom Eaton, here: http://www.mg.co.za/articlePage.aspx?articleid=279760&area=/insight/insight__columnists

I am, as you know, his Number One Fan.

Pale Green Mainstream

I was wondering about civilization, and about climate change, and thinking as always about how interesting the next century’s going to be. I looked up ‘Civilisation’ in the dictionary, just to be sure that I knew what it meant, and came across ‘Poop’ (it happens all the time. Dictionary-induced ADD).

So I asked some adolescents what ‘Poop’ meant. They were enthusiastic about it, in the way that only adolescents and Leon Schuster can be about all things fecal. If you want to talk to adolescents about the back bit of a ship and you want them to pay attention and concentrate, then don’t call it a Poop.

Same with climate change. Don’t call it global warming in public unless you want some armchair expert pounding out letters to the editor about how much snow there’s been in Antarctica lately and that last time he checked that didn’t mean warm.

There’s glitch in the ECM (effective communication matrix) with regard to the telling of the climate and emissions story. It does need to be told like a story, and with pictures too, because that’s what ordinary people all over the world respond to. They don’t relate and certainly can’t respond constructively to papers by A. Climatologist et al. Actually, there are some marginally more-informed people who don’t respond terribly constructively to them either, as a quick look around the comments section of climate-related articles in MIT’s Technology Review will tell you.

For a good few decades now, climate scientists have been trying to say what they need to say but can’t say in words that most citizens (even ones who read Popular Mechanics rather than People) can relate to. The beleaguered scientists wave graphs around and talk about ‘albedo’ and ‘hockey sticks" and ‘ITCZ’ and people either pity them, or think they’re crazy and should get out more, or that it must be a conspiracy by eco-terrorists against Our Way of Life. The Greens, you know. I pay my taxes, I don’t hurt anyone, I put a Ronnie Bag on my pavement at least once a year, leave me alone.
There are poets and artists and other assorted activists who do understand the scientists to some degree but they almost always end up dementedly joining Greenpeace and are thus further lost to the world of reason, which does not help the cause. (By the way, Germaine, your comment in public about the crocodile guy getting his just desserts definitely doesn’t help the cause, even if it is true)

It’s Joe Soap who could, if he chose to, contribute to a huge whack of mitigation. Instead of to a huge whack of catastrophe. He won’t choose to, though. He has to be made to, and bullying isn’t allowed so manipulation is necessary.

Someone has cottoned onto this and is looking at how best to deploy the manipulation. It’s the British Institute for Public Policy Research (described by RealClimate.org as “a UK based left-leaning think tank”), and they’re using a company called Linguistic Landscapes, which has some nice window dressing but who are basically about PR and marketing. While there’s something about this affair between Marketing and Climate that makes me want to scream, it might be fairly good work. Depending whose side you’re on. Pale Green might become mainstream because you can depend on marketing to sell stuff or die trying, and that’s what they’ll be selling with this. They’re using language like “…we need to work in a shrewd and contemporary way, using subtle techniques of engagement… treat climate change communications in the same way as brand communications… Approach positive climate behaviors in the same way as marketers approach buying and consuming”. I’m biting my tongue.

The astonishing ongoing success of the Eden Project in Cornwall had mostly to do with horticultural determination in the beginning, but I bet marketing helped with getting the vital millions of visitors in. All those visitors leave with a smile that didn’t necessarily come from consuming stuff, and that’s cool. They also leave knowing what "waste neutral" means, and that’s very valuable in ways that money can’t buy.

I have this fantasy in which the mega consumers of Bedfordview get sentenced to a month’s tourism in Cornwall instead of Dubai and come back to happily convert their previously pastoral but now hideous suburb into an undulating valley of bubble domes and vegetable gardens, with little padstals along Kloof road. It’s nice, that dream. Sunbeds swopped for gaily fluttering umbrellas, gyms turned into concert venues, peace love and flowers man. Can you dig it?

A belated account, in three parts, for Dio.

Part I

In which an expedition is undertaken...

During my July expedition to Hermanus, I pondered over how few whales were frolicking in that comely bay. I began discreet enquiries as to the whereabouts of the great beasts. A local fisherman suggested that perhaps it might be a little early in the season and that I ought to consider myself lucky to have seen any at all. However, his toothless smile, twinkly eyes and candid manner did not fool me! My sharp instincts in these matters led me to consider the possibility of a scandalous conspiracy. Just then, my good father received a telephonic communication from my godfather in Amanzimtoti. With keen interest I learned from my father that my godfather and his wife were sitting on their lawn watching whales. In Amanzimtoti. We have always suspected my godfather and his wife of nefarious activities, and now here was proof.

“By gum, Daddy!” I exclaimed excitedly, “They have whales in Amanzimtoti and we don’t have any here in Hermanus!”

“Indeed, indeed,” mused my good father bemusedly, “Most curious indeed. Daughter, we must exert ourselves tirelessly in pursuit of a solution to this perplexing puzzle! We have always suspected your godfather and his wife of nefarious activities, and now here is proof!”

“Yes!!!” I enthused with enthusiasm.


Part II

In which the intrepid sleuths tirelessly pursue their instincts...

And so it was that we spent the week relentlessly wandering the charming cliff-paths and the beaches and the rockpools, with great courage fighting off bloodthirsty Tourists, Sabre-Toothed Dassies and deranged Whale Criers, stopping only too briefly for replenishment at various pubs, restaurants and coffee shops, and it was most exertional. We found no further clues. We even made two sub-expeditions to Kalk Bay, hoping to glean information from intellectuals with old grey-muzzled dogs in antique bookshoppes or arty types in quaint alleys, or indeed from the waiter at the Brass Bell, but alas.

News of our mission had spread, and those in the know had detected our stealthy footsteps on patina’d pavements, and had obviously gone to sit in their wretched little hillside houses to peer out from behind their genuine sash windows, smugly. I also tried, in vain, to obtain the autographs of Ann Donald and Finnuala Dowling, neither of whom was anywhere to be seen. I suspected that this was because they were in on the conspiracy. I noted their reticence, and marked them down on my trusty Suspicious Persons list.

In due course I returned home to Johannesburg, no closer to solving the mysterious mystery of the whales that we did not see in Hermanus but that my godfather and his wife did see in Amanzimtoti. Just then, I received a missive from Secret Agent S. It treated on a conference by SAUFOR (South Africa's Unidentified Flying Objects Resource) on the shameful covering-up of extraterrestrial technologies by Authorities and suchlike. Also mentioned was the Relatively Very Recent Incident in Port Shepstone, in which a spaceship was observed crashing into the sea by a great many eye witlesses. Authorities have to date found no trace of that spaceship and have expressed doubt as to its status as a spaceship at all, preferring instead to placate citizens with fairytales about weather phenomena etc, etc. But as we know, Authorities are always lying.

So I joined the dots, crossed my eyes, and came to a startling conclusion that I will now reveal to you!


Part III

In which a conclusion is reached, a revelation made, and a follow up expedition is followed up...

I will now reveal that:

My godfather and his wife were working for the aliens, in cahoots with Authorities, and had arranged for most of the whales to be in the Durban area whilst everybody who usually knows where to look for whales was looking for them in the Hermanus area, so that the heinous aliens might thus abduct our whales, undetected, from those Natalian waters! HA! We had always suspected my godfather and his wife of nefarious activities!

“Oh, Daddy!” I emoted, emotionally, “We cannot let the aliens escape with our whales, no, never! They can take our lives but they’ll never take our whales!”

“I concur most vigorously, Daughter!” My good father concurred, vigorously. “I will at once invite the traitorous pair to HQ here in Hermanus under a pretext, and lock them in my shed until your Mother returns from Cornwall!”
With this, he invited the traitorous pair to his house for the weekend under a pretext, where, as promised, he lured them into his garden shed, and where they presently remain.

I am happy to report that during my most recent expedition, from which I am now returned as you might surmise, we had some evidence that our brave plan has indeed foiled the terrible plot to abduct our Whales! Yes! There are more whales in that good bay right now than there are geeks at a gaming convention!

:-)

Hermanus

These three pics were taken in Hermanus. The last one is at Hemel En Aarde dam, the middle one at Kwaaiwater, and the top one taken from the cliffs just west of there – the dark blob in the water is a Southern Right Whale, just the top ten percent of him, about forty (maybe less) metres away. I get so beside myself with this that I can’t take proper pictures, and so I missed the rest of him. Nearby was a mother and her calf, they were just moseying around contentedly. Further out in the bay about a dozen others were leaping clear out of the water, and slapping their tails, and generally showing off as though they knew we were watching. Which, of course, they did. How do you know that a whale knows you’re there? If you’re standing on a cliff with a whale in the sea below you, and he rolls so that one great eye looks directly at you, you know that he knows. It’s nothing short of awesome, and it makes this silly world we live in seem irrelevant.
Apart from the whales, the sheer beauty of everything within a three hundred kilometer radius lets you know you’re somewhere special. There’s a valley here, called Hemel En Aarde (Heaven And Earth), and that’s exactly what you get. Who could ask for more?

I am completely in love with Hermanus. I will live there, soon. I’m doing everything in my power to make this happen. I’ve decided this, and once I decide something it’s practically carved in stone. I don’t decide things very often, something has to be monumental before I decide on it so hear ye, hear ye: I will live in Hermanus. I will grow old there, happily. Mark me.

Whinge

I am a very bad blogger. Sometimes, I even forget I have a blog. Today, I remembered, and shuffled over to see if it was still there. It was. Is. Bugger. Did I write all this? How is it that I have time to write this much waffle? And it’s not like I didn’t ask myself, at the beginning, when a blog seemed like an exciting sort of thing to do, how is it that people have so much time to write such waffle? So I knew what I was in for.
But really, what’s this all about? It isn’t real writing or anything and I don’t think anyone thinks it is. At the top end I suppose it’s all about traffic, and the point of it is probably equally divided between peppy popularity and product placement. But down here at the pond-scum end, it’s just us little amoebas whiffling away about whatnot. And haven’t we figured it out by now: the internet is not real life and 99% of the people who live there are not real people? Yes, of course we have. We watch the next generation blissing out on some myspace hallucination, and we know they’ll grow out of it. Or will they? It’s different now. Mind you, all old people say that, when they don’t feel like getting their heads around whatever new thing.

Doug Shaw Update

Doug Shaw loves me. He said so. And not just any old Doug Shaw either, but Doug Shaw Prime. THE Doug Shaw! Not just Doug Shaw the arch villain, or Doug Shaw the mad professor, or Doug Shaw the trapeze artist; but Doug Shaw Himself. Doug Shaw loves me because I mentioned his name so many times, a couple of posts back. So this is how it works, eh? Mention someone’s name enough times and they find your blog, just like that. And then they either love you or they hate you. Doug Shaw loves me, Mandy De Waal hates me: 50/50 odds, not bad… Neil Gaiman, Tori Amos, Neil Gaiman, Tori Amos, Neil Gaiman. Tori Amos, Neil Gaiman, Tori Amos, Neil Gaiman...Tori Amos…

So, Doug Shaw Prime, thank you for solving the Doug Shaw mystery. I’d leave a grateful comment on your blog but I can’t, it won’t let me. I’m not going to push it by hacking either , not because I can’t (he-he), it’s just that I’m dead scared of that half-a-cow corpse you have in your freezer…
Dear readers (all three of you :-) ): you can see the corpse for yourselves by going to http://revdj.livejournal.com/ and scrolling down a bit.
But, seriously: are people googling themselves or something? ‘Cos, how does this work? What are the chances of you stumbling across your name mentioned on one of a zillion piddly blogs, just by accident? If I google myself I don’t get anything at all. I am unfamous. Infamous would be more interesting and probably quite lucrative. But I’m not going to go there because I still have living relatives and there’d be hell to pay.

The Borg, The Devil and the Coffee Shop

There’s a difference between a coffee shop and a Coffee Shop. In a Coffee Shop, you’ll get high-concept, applied to a hundred franchised outlets nationwide (or thousands, worldwide). The overwrought menu will feature high-octane shooters with porno names, novelty ‘coffees’ and power smoothies, frou-frou fusion folly on twenty different types of stale bread slapped together according to the formula by underpaid high-turnaround staff. There is no owner, there’s a holding company. The manager will not be able to change the CD because there isn’t one, there’s a permanent shuffle of twenty prescribed popular trax. The rows of jars on the counter are décor, filled with coordinated coloured water. If you ask for Marmite toast they won’t have it. The patrons will be posers. They’ll click their fingers at the waitress impatiently. They’ll be networking, networking, networking. Many of them will have sunglasses on top of their heads. They’ll be loudly animated and will check to make sure everyone else has noticed how happening they are. You will not be allowed to ignore them.

By contrast, a coffee shop will serve real coffee, and you can ask the owner to change the CD if Eros Ramazotti’s annoying you. A coffee shop is where you can spend the space between the time and, unless a large table of lost Coffee Shop creatures has wandered in, which seldom happens, you can even spend it in peace. The décor is as invisible as good typography. If there’s a row of jars on the counter, they’re full of macaroni, or pickles, or tips for the kitchen staff. You’re assured of human kindness in a coffee shop, and of a menu which might be full of typos and amusing spelling but offers things that nourish, and that you can recognize. You’ll get honest sandwiches at a coffee shop and you can always get Marmite toast. If they’ve run out of Marmite they’ll trot down to the Spar and get some. Your fellow patrons will be people. They’ll greet the waitress warmly. They’ll be reading tabloids/Tolstoy/Time, or writing lists/letters-to-the-editor/literature, or chatting face to face. Or they’ll be playing backgammon, or agonizing over the lotto numbers. By and large, they’ll keep their business to themselves. You can eavesdrop if you want to.

So the coffee shop which used to be my home away from home is gone. One day it was there, and the next it was covered in paper which said, exciting new Coffee Shop opening soon. Sure enough, some weeks later, there was a Coffee Shop, where my coffee shop used to be.

This coffee shop thing is a symptom of a world gone Meta.

So is Wikipedia. I’ve been troubled by Wikipedia for a good long while now. I tell kids to stay away from it. But why? They ask. I stop just short of answering: because it’s the devil*, and say instead: because it’s often not accurate.

But it’s worse than that. Wikipedia is The Borg. And more direly even, it’s the Borg without a Queen.
Don’t get me wrong. In some ways I admire the The Borg (and I love dinner-time conversations that become incendiary when someone suggests that the solution to humankind’s angst could be to just go Borg), but everyone knows that there must be a Queen. Without one, the hive-mind disintegrates into useless units of hapless confusion. There are people who have found Wikipedia entries about themselves that range from wishful thinking to downright false, and after they’ve gone in and corrected the entry, they return to find that some kind soul has incorrected it back again. That’s the thing about popular opinion and the way it becomes canon, despite reality. The aggregate wins.

It also seems lately that Wikipedia and Google have some sort of galactic domination arrangement. I used to get a good variety of results on a Google search, from academe to news to popular opinion and all sorts of psychedelic stuff in-between, and I could more or less make my own mind up as to whose information I would get the most benefit from. These days, I have to sort through the first three pages of search results with a fine-toothed comb to get something that’s not Wiki. There’s a lot to be said for keeping information in context, and for keeping sources intact. When everything’s flattened out by aggregate, you get muddy puddles in isolation, with no paths leading to and from. When it comes to plain old information anyhow, I want a meritocracy. With Wikipedia, how do I know if the person telling me a thing is qualified to tell it?** And if all information is to become cast in this type of format in the future, as some people think it will be, what will there be to compare it against? There are whispers in certain circles, predictions of the imminent birth of artificial intelligence from deep within the womb of Google itself… who’d have thought? We thought it would be humanoid at least, didn’t we? Nuts and bolts, with an operator’s manual and an Off Button maybe – but humanoid. Or caninoid, or whatever. Reassuringly recognizable anyhow.
Wikipedia as AI’s 2-IC… I don’t even want to think about it. Not today. I’ll think about it tomorrow. Rhett, oh Rhett.

*What is the devil? Fundamentally, it’s things that scare us. It’s also things we don’t understand, and things that threaten to displace us, and things we can’t be bothered to investigate further. It’s the tokoloshe under your bed, it’s over here, it’s out there. It’s different things to different people and usually boils down to fear. So Wikipedia is not the devil, then. But maybe Google is.

**With apologies to The Cosmic Cabman, who does actually write good stuff for Wikipedia. If you wrote it, Dio, I’ll ratify it without question. This is flagrant cronyism of course, which excludes me from ever being considered by a lucid panel of experts for the post of Wiki Queen. Actually, Afrikaans Wikipedia is at this point probably a really reliable source of info, if only because the online community is small and cozy enough (by web standards anyhow) that everyone knows someone so credentials can be cross-checked… and anyone writing an inferior article risks have his biltong confiscated…

Praise Tom Eaton!

I’ve become Tom Eaton’s Number One fan, I hope he feels honoured.

Regarding his book, The De Villiers Code, some silly interviewer asked him: “As a South African writer / storyteller did you set out to write a story South Africans will recognise as their own?”
My Tom answered: “No. I set out to write a story that South Africans would recognise as Dan Brown's. Stephen Fry described The Da Vinci Code as ‘complete loose-stool-water’ and ‘arse-gravy of the very worst kind’, and while I think he may have been a little charitable, he was going in the right direction. It's not the gullibility of people that offends me. I'm also not a religious person, so I don't get worked up over the arrogance of assuming that 600 pages of drivel by a write-by-numbers typist can reveal what 2 000 years of scholarship couldn't. What I really mind, though, is that his excremental writing goes unchallenged. You wouldn't let a stranger stand in your living room for hours on end, shovelling faeces down your shirt while he screamed, ‘You're a moron!’ So why would you let Dan Brown do it?”

(The whole interview’s at http://www.litnet.co.za/ricochet/homebru_tom_eaton.asp )

The De Villiers Code is one of the most wickedly funny things I have read in a long time, but there’s a catch: you have to read The Da Vinci Code first. You’ll need one of those protective pointy silver foil hats that they wear in the movie Signs; it might help to stop your brains from leaking out your ears, but it must be done. I did it, and look, I’m still fine aren’t I?

Would the real Doug Shaw please sit down

At a Star Trek thing I was at last year there was an individual going by the name of Doug Shaw. He said that he was a writer of books on economics, and was busily speed reading (both of which habits I associate with psychopathic conditions) through a huge book (the kind you could use as a weapon) on the History of Western Philosophy. He had a tense, unhinged charisma and a scar on his cheek and struck me as being someone on whom I could loosely base one of the villains in a story that I'm working on. So who was this person? I embarked on an epic google, but it turned out that trying to find a specific doug shaw is tricky. There are hundreds of them. They even have a collective website, dougshaw.com. But then, if I were a real villain, I might also purposefully choose a name that allowed me to get lost in the crowd.
I finally found one with genuine villain potential. A MENSA member with a scheme for every occasion; a rampant capitalist whispering into the ear of politicians, offering the planet up for sale in so many ways; the host of strange pay-at-the-door parties and then: the piece de resistance – some sort of rabid underground religious evangelist. ACME Evil Genius! Absolutely perfect! I don’t even care if he’s not the right doug shaw! So, Doug Shaw, if you’re reading this (no, the other doug shaw. No, not that one, the other one… ) I hope you don’t mind too much. It’s a compliment.

Verily, my friends (and VERILY, my enemies!!!), I have risen up in the world. I have been quoted and also shamelessly flattered in a real article by a real editor lady: http://www.women24.com/Women24/Columnists/Article/0,7173,12-147_9791,00.html
The article is all about silliness, and how it’s okay to be silly, and about how silliness can actually save the world. I am vindicated, and newly galvanised to the promotion of the Great Way of Silly. From now on, this blog will be nothing but silly, silly, silly!

Lost Property

A friend recently failed the Scientologist's personality test. This is unfortunate, as I was hoping for a contact on the inside. I don't know any practicing Scientologists but I know people who claim to have escaped Scientology, and they're reluctant to discuss it - they seem a bit embarrassed and a bit broke, and one gets the feeling they'd rather just forget about it altogether. I'd very much like to know more about the interesting Scientology story regarding the alien ruler Xenu who fixed the overpopulation problem on his 76 planets by bringing millions of people in for a tax inspection, then drugging them and shipping them off to earth (presumably unpopulated at the time), where he had them stacked around volcanos before nuking the volcanos. The way I understand it is that most personality problems experienced by people today can be attributed to the fact that the lost souls of those unfortunate nuked aliens attach themselves to humans, clinging desparately to some vestige of existence and causing all kinds of schitzophrenic glitches in the average human's matrix.

Of course, this might just be a story made up by anti-Scientologists to discredit the religion itself. I don't know. One of the most interesting things about this church is the vehemence of its opposition. Something which is so hated by outsiders must surely be hiding great truths. Or not.
I wonder, if my friend made a substantial enough donation to the church, maybe they'd ignore the failed personality test and let him in. He can infiltrate, and we'll be able to see if all these stories are true. I mean, if I could prove that I had thousands of anguished alien souls hanging onto my aura, it would explain a LOT.

Girl put your records on...

...tell me your favourite song, you go ahead let your hair down...

This blog began as a medium through which I could stay in touch with friends and family all over the globe and in particular, with my sister B who was living with us at the time. That’s funny, hold on, let me check that… Yes it’s true: so I could stay in touch with B although we lived on the same property, in the same house in fact. It didn’t work quite the way I’d planned – I thought I’d make chatty, newsy day-in-the-life type entries. Looking back at the blog I’m laughing at all the concrete evidence of best laid plans coming to ruin…

But I don’t think I could stay in touch with my own pinky finger, quite frankly, because I have too many Fishies. Fishies are those bubbles that some people have in their heads. They go, “plook, plook” in the silvery depths and mostly it’s like Chinese torture, although sometimes, on really lucky days, it’s like an epiphany, or Christmas-tree lights. Some people have Nebulas, which are pretty much the same thing, just more sophisticated. I always felt odd because of them, and never fitted very well anywhere, least of all in my own real life, until I discovered Neil Gaiman’s “Sandman” some years ago. The character Delirium, who often trails a flock of bobbing rainbow-fish balloon-things and seldom makes sense in the traditional meaning of the word, was a revelation to me because I already knew her so well. I felt a bit better about my own fishies after I met Delirium because although she’s odd she’s basically a good person. When I discovered much later that Neil and Tori Amos were friends, and that Del was partly based on Tori, the world began to make a whole lot more sense to me, non-traditionally of course but nevertheless.

Anyhow, this is to say, I’m sorry about all the Fishies. There are a handful of people in this world who I love too, too much for words, among them: Ray; my Terrifical Teenage Daughters; Mom and Dad; B; Weez; Mom Joss; Nu; Dio; Migi; Choz; Alli Cat… if you’re reading this, guys – thanks for putting up with me.

The end of days is nigh, as usual

A while ago, after reading up about carbon trading, I wrote something about our planet being able to withstand the ravages of human nature, that for all our delusions of grandeur we could never actually destroy it as such. Destroy environments conducive to the wellbeing of our species and others, sure, but not destroy the actual planet. Well, I was wrong. It IS possible. See http://qntm.org/destroy

Well, Really!

! A request has been made to this blog. It comes from none other than a Compliance Officer (Resistance is futile). So: One of Two, also known as Nu, having been mightily impressed by our (patent pending) mouse-over-and-waft Sniff-n-Sneeze© plugin, asked that we develop a mouse-over-and-spell-check gizmo for the comment box. It seems she’s been unable to access the Natural Comment nano-betaframe thingy itself because of blogger-VS-word cut/paste (ERROR!!!DINGDING!!!FATAL:ERROR!!!! put your hands on your head and drop your cookie settings now:ERROR!!!) non-compliancy Issue no: 73.9. You know the one. Ok, fine, we’ll see what we can do but personally I think that this is just a terrible excuse - we geeks (hehe) know the error’s actually to do with her Sink Notification Socket. Thingy. And the way she always forgets to charge her Svchost Antimatter Modulator – I mean really, it’s no wonder.

Captain-Postman Pete said he’d tried to look at this blog but suddenly everything went all funny on his keyboard. So he tried to blame me for dropping some or other virus on him. Oh puh-leeez, come on. Pff. Like, I don’t have better things to do than script viruses all day long and fling them at non-geek friends and family. People like us (us geeks, you know) must just take a deep breath and count to ten, I suppose. So in the interests of the sanity of geeks (like me) everywhere, I have added to the FAQ. Sigh.

FAQ continued:

7. Why does my computer wig out when I look at/try to post comments to your blog?

Either a.) You're technologically challenged and should not be allowed within a 10 Km radius of any computer or b.) You have some heavy internet karma.

I can't help if the answer's a, but if it's b I can't help.

So try this: Go into the garden and find a portable-sized rock. Talk to the rock, let it absorb your frustrations. Feel the power of the rock. Respectfully pick the rock up and carry it to where your computer is. Place the rock gently on the desk near the computer. Now, while wearing a red knitted hat with a bobble on top (like the ones they wear in the movie "The Life Aquatic") inside which you have hidden a moth's wing, a blue marble and a flat penlight battery, sit down in front of your computer and switch it on. When the desktop appears (or, when it doesn’t – like if after waiting for over an hour all you get is a black screen with an ominous dos prompt instead of a desktop, for instance), put your right hand upon the rock while addressing the machine thus: "you bloody bastard computer, don't mess with me or I'll hit you with this rock." Then, phone a geek and request an emergency consultation. While waiting for him, keep your hand on the rock and your eyes on the monitor, scowling dangerously. When the geek arrives, have him look at the computer, but all the while, do not let go of the rock. The geek should have the problem sorted in no time, because in my experience too-big-for-their-boots computers always respond very well to geeks when there is a primed rock handy. This is a seriously dark and deep binary magick, you understand, so while you are performing this entire ritual it might also be an idea to have a shaman (or other intermediary) available, to intercept any demons which might want to take advantage of a rip in the fabric of spacetime.

If this fails (because nothing is perfect), then try seeing the loss of all your stuff (treasured letters form far-flung friends and family, for example; or your entire portfolio) as being a wonderful opportunity to start afresh. No, really. For heaven’s sake, stop crying. And next time, back up.