lundi 30 juin 2003

Streaming radio, steaming consciousness I've been listening to some pretty strange, archived sounds out of Massachusetts. Somebody told me at the weekend they considered the Boston area another world from the rest of the United States. Pressed to explain, since I'd imagine that the US includes many more or less united places, my friend said: "Just different, sometimes bizarre... "Like being in a kind of England that isn't at all English any more." That didn't get anybody far. Now I'm invited to: "Walk down a dark alleyway, now -- remain naked, tracing the electromagnetic ley lines of your body with magenta nail gloss before having basted self with that moldy stink'in kefir in the back of the fridge, and go out and beat Bill Gates to the airport, mimicking a rival technology inventor (such as Mike Doyle at Eolas), and skip through the early streets talking to animals telepathically! ...well, go on...and get that megaphone digitalized just in case..." with this to boot: "you're the policeman, you work it out..." Maybe I don't need to know anything about Gary Geiserman, but sitting in my "inspect" folder has been an iTunes radio streaming playlist downloaded some days ago. It's a pity I can't remember where I found it and have lost that bit of browsing history. There's a whole load of archived shows, dating from 1995 to last month, where those quotes came from at New Metaphysics, which is apparently a site you can't always log on to easily. Elsewhere, no policeman, I learned at least this much. "Out of frustration I just called WZBC. The guy's name was Gary Geiserman. And his show was called The New Metaphysics. It was great. Unfortunately he was just fired a few weeks ago. For swearing or profanity on the air, according to the DJ I talked to. She said 'we want to push the limits but he just went too far'," someone wrote on the 'Joe Frank mailing list' (yeah, the what?) in November last year. The first stream I came on dates from February 1999, is tedious in parts, but in others a remarkable musical-vocal-movietrack-DJ collage by somebody who sounds as if he's been stoned forever. A wee bit of it's in German and there's even a kind of storyline. I begin to understand that poll about Americans and aliens I mentioned a while back in a "truth is out there" post. Good mildly brain-teasing listening for a rainy, convalescent-mood day like this, Gary's now sometimes at Stream475, while I've found iTunes -- the alternative being Real Player -- quite happy with equally offbeat, sometimes oldie places like Mountain Radio (ex-Café Eclectic). If I'm going to be stuck around the flat or not far away for much longer, I'll be doing more searching at Live365, as well as catching up on my CDs... The only other G.G. link I found worth pursuing led me to 'gullboy: New Sound reviews', mostly maintained by another generation from mine, but a good place (the G.G. reference was in an piece on 'Never Mind the Bootlegs, Here's Sex with Nid and Sancy'. I'll skip that, thanks...) zzz On new metaphysics, if I didn't always leave getting back into it until so late in the day, you'd get a quicker review of 'Mappa Mundi', my current read. I can't resist an extract: "...She made a face at him that said Ta-DA! and waved her hands in the air. Dan paused, forgetting the funny story about Bill and the security system, and looked at the gobbledegook that had suddenly cluttered the screen in the terse, efficient Courier font that meant he couldn't read anything properly without putting his lenses in. 'Stages One and Two?' He wished he listened to more of what she said. It would make life so much simpler. 'Physical Event Map and Mental Event Map,' Natalie grinned like a maniac and waited for him to get it. He waited. She said, 'You know, it means we've stuck together the real world of physical events like chemistry and electricity and the non-physical world of mental life. It's the big kahuna. The foundation for a genuine working theory of consciousness. Dan, for fuck's sake! The Holy Grail, man!' Her voice had risen on the last phrases as he'd kept his face straight and now he could grin too. 'Gotcha.' He nodded wisely." But he hasn't ... neither has Natalie, a research scientist, and nor have we. Yet. That's from pp. 141-1 and not a spoiler, but I bookmarked it. The semi-classic thriller part of Justina Robson's near-future tale about medical nanotechnology doesn't really begin until 'Map' starts on p. 63 ... or maybe 'Compass Rose' just a few pages before that. Natalie rarely swears, but she is on to something. So are other people, and agencies with ruthless ideas in mind. Robson's writing styles switch gear with ease, depending on which country she's got you in, and she doesn't go easy on the metaphysical front. I'm hooked. One of those novels you want to finish fast and also don't. As if the prospect of a "working theory of consciousness" wasn't enough, 'kuro5hin' has yet to post part III of an ambitious and well-written 'Introduction to the Theory of Relativity'. Don't rush it just for me. 11:10:08 PM  link   your views? [] A blog entry about the blog! Oh dear... Ok, this is it. So I hope all three and a half of you like it! I wanted a place easier to navigate, for the second half of the year. Especially now that I've realised that I'm catering to 3 ½ very different tastes, interests and occasional requests. A printing problem in some browsers persists. iCab still can't quite render the pages properly, which is either me or something destined to change when the full-featured final version comes out. I owe thanks to Dave Raggett at W3C, the World Wide Web consortium, for his beginner's HTML markup guide, which many of us must keep bookmarked. The Webmonkey people offer a useful HTML Cheatsheet, while Doctor HTML drives me to despair with an online single-page analysis my pages never completely pass! I prefer the less cruel W3C version. I also appreciate the HTML and web page design site put together by Kevin O'Connor. Ever to hand is the 'Bible' from O'Reilly, not quite the latest edition, but found at an unbelievable price at Gibert Joseph (Flash site) on the Boulevard St Michel, the best place for computer books in Paris, including ones in English. People in town should know that they often have "second-hand" bargains which are virtually new. You also tend to get better service there than at the better known Gibert Jeune. I prefer having such guides between soft covers, but O'Reilly's Safari online bookshelf deal is an interesting one if you want access to a great deal of excellent technical material. Post-midnight tweaking won me a "congratulations" from W3C on valid CSS. People can check their cascading style sheet online with the validator. zzz The new look started here, with Bryan's CandidBlue theme: The Moveable Type look of Bell's January offering pleased somebody lacking the skill yet for that, though I keep tabs on how MT's coming on. This is where you tell me you preferred the look this place had until yesterday afternoon! It's a slight pity I no kept trace of the blog's initial appearance on the Net, but even the second incarnation was becoming technically thorny. There's more to this than just a change of colours. Maybe I was the only person to see n° 2 as intended, using Omniweb, which could cope with a Times New Roman font set up badly for other browsers (hence a pictorial detail, running the 4.5b1 beta). What I didn't want from Bryan's templates were too much grey, topic of a pre-war pro-UN outburst in March. I couldn't do without some yellow alongside the blue dominants. Since the templates don't come with item titles switched "on", it took me a while just to figure that little touch out. Titles matter, since my mind's now hopelessly opposed to trying to classify entries by category. Even if used here, there would be rather a lot of them! Apart from obvious differences, some aimed at making this place more "user-friendly" (since I can scarcely believe it now runs to two sizeable books), I've decided, when it comes to sharing, to stop sitting on the fence and opt for a Creative Commons licence, removing the standard © mention. The Creative Commons concept is appealing and workable in jurisdictions outside the United States. The change mainly means that should you find anything useful in this log, feel free to take it unless it already belongs to somebody else, but please give credit as well. Anyway, that's enough writing about me writing, bane of all bloggers! Back to normal business after this. Ah, the HTML. Apart from a glitch of mine I might have fixed in line 4, no others appear until line 340, says the W3C. Then there are more than 100. Which means that Bryan's tweaked home and other page templates are fine. All the mistakes are my own. And yesterday I thought I was learning! Maybe I did. But, ouf! no more major make-up jobs for a good while to come. 2:02:16 PM  link   your views? []

dimanche 29 juin 2003

Work in progress... ...and it shows! After yesterday's lack of success on some fronts, I'm fiddling with a new template by Bryan B. Things will get better... 2:02:00 PM  link   your views? []

samedi 28 juin 2003

Behind the scenes Nothing but cleaning things up and a bit of spying today. Nice to see Marianne in poetic mood at belcatja (no "permalinks" there); Katja has been instead concerned with marking their teachers' performance this year. Great stuff if you can understand both French and their French, the text message and Net shorthand of our times... I've begun treatment. Today. For Crohn's disease (speculated about enough already, with the main links on May 19). We decided to stop hanging around for the conclusive tests to be done in a clinic on July 17. It's pretty clear, with virtually all other possibilities ruled out and something nasty still going busily in my guts. "Blogs are not simply online diaries. They are not simply a new form of instant publishing and group-think. Many are written by people who have been to hell and back. (...) Much of my early blogging was about my father's downward spiral into illness and finally his death last year on April 9th. Am I saying you have to turn your blog into General Hospital to get readers? Not at all. I'm saying that many of us have been through personal crises that have given us new wisdom, new clarity about what matters and what doesn't. (...) It's a life and death thing. It's not casual. We have some skin in the game." That's a savagely chopped excerpt from a 'Halley's Comment' entry well worth the read: 'Dying to tell you our stories'. With links, like a handful of mine, to people who "have been to hell and back". Not that my probable Crohn's is at a critical phase yet; on the contrary, the ongoing diagnosis is beginning to explain a lot, while the treatment could help with a range of problematic symptoms I've enjoyed for more than a decade... I saw Halley Suitt's thoughts via Dave Winer, whose telegraphic style is poles apart from my own, except when he waxes 'angry on 'Scripting News', a rare event (and insight into a technical row at one of the cores of the "blogosphere"). Behind the scenes here, a host of code changes were triggered when I noticed that my pages have stopped printing decently in the new Safari 1.0 browser. (They still don't, but that's another story and I've stopped blaming myself, for now...) Sorry if the slightly altered looks irritate some who don't use fairly big screen resolutions (I usually work in 1152 x 864). However, to cater to the majority of two and a half of my three and a half readers, all those links down the side should now open in a new window -- or you obviously retain the "new tab" option. Whatever. By request. As to the in-text links, that remains your call. 11:58:17 PM  link   your views? []

vendredi 27 juin 2003

Bravo, l'Entrepôt; bravo, 'Kaena'! Deux grandes réussites! Congratulations to the young new team who have restored life to l'Entrepôt, the cultural centre round the corner, at 7-9 rue Francis de Pressencé, 75014 Paris. If they maintain the new qualities, they merit all the success they can get. The rich programme includes concerts several nights of the week, a lot of jazz and some world music. The three renovated cinemas offer more than a dozen films from all over the world. No list here; suffice to say that this week Britain, Brazil, Guinea, Iran, Spain and Tadjikistan are among the sources. The current mini-film festival is devoted to Russian director Alexander Sokurov (his "island" in the Net, English or Russian - Александр Сокуров). There's literature, the bar, conferences, the garden, movies for children, and the restaurant. I haven't tested the restaurant ... yet. I'm told it's good at last. There are ciné-resto and ciné-concert formulas (each a very reasonable 20 euros). The cinema I sat in at the end of the afternoon (salle 3) was very comfortable, new seats, superb new sound. When I came out, a score of people were preparing for the evening or sitting around near the bar, ears open as jazz musicians set up and warmed up. The pianist broke off for a brief, dazzling but also moving excursion into Chopin ... or Liszt? Chopin. The quartier's resident Django Reinhardt, who now has somewhere to hang out, quietly said: "You don't have to stop." I briefly introduced l'Entrepôt, its history and the dynamic new team at the end of a May 24 entry. Thanks to Lynda, in particular, for the tip-off. She goes mainly for the music and dance. They don't do cartes de fidelité" (discount cards for regulars) any more. The chap I asked looked slightly abashed, but needn't have done. At their prices, the selection is already generous. They'll need little help to attract and keep a crowd. Still, the website again: l'Entrepôt. I wish them "une longue et fructueuse vie" (a long, fruitful life)! zzz The other fine achievement is 'Kaena, la prophétie' (Kaena, the prophecy). A fantasy fable, the first French computer-image movie is billed as a movie for kids. Careful. It's neither for small children nor ones who get scare dreams rather than frissons of fear. The heroine, even more curvaceous than Lara Croft, is easy to "identify with" but some of the monsters are truly terrifying. The plot, like some of the 3D animation, does share features with 'Ice Age': a journey from one era to the next; great big eyes for some of the human and alien beings; fun creatures as a foil for high drama; even a kind of "cradle of humanity" parallel -- not too serious. Attempts at great realism are largely absent from the people, but stunningly effective in the floating forest world inhabited by humans and in sequences such as the extended beginning, where a starship crashes to its doom on the planet Astria. A touch of 'Final Fantasy' video game comes as no surprise when you read that director Chris Delaporte began that way "in 1995. I was working on the 'Heart of Darkness' video game, which had 35 minutes of pure 3D animation." Delaporte tells a good tale of how a game idea became a feature film in an interview on 'Kaena', a remarkable bi-lingual website (link recalled below: interview in .rtf format on press page). Making a movie, he says, was Steven Spielberg's idea, the problem being that S.S. laid down a condition: "that he didn't end up being the fifth wheel". A sci-fi fan who wanted to get right into creating a fantasy world, Delaporte rallied co-director Pascal Pinon and a varied team to his dream, brought to the screen this month by Paris-based Xilam Films (the photos here belong to Xilam), with help from Studio Canal in France and Canada's TVA International. Parts are "played" in French by Cécile de France, Michael Lonsdale and Victoria Abril. In the English version, these roles go to Kirsten Dunst, the late Richard Harris and Anjelica Huston. The story itself is derivative - and who cares? The constantly roving Kaena has a people to save, a high priest is dangerously unaware of the true nature of those villagers' gods, there's a legend and a mad old man. A wise survivor from the alien starship might help, except that ending a 600-year struggle for survival could also close the book for humanity. 'Kaena' (the front door again) is breath-takingly gorgeous to watch and the music by Farid Russlan provides a sumptuous counterpoint. Despite some classic big fights, the absence of any "black and white" good and bad characters is noteworthy: everybody is doing their best to survive and much of the film is in sepia shades or a techno-electric blue. Afterwards, I read that Delaporte didn't want "goodies" and "baddies", while he acknowledges many influences but only one direct "link" to another film. "I can't believe in villains who are evil without reason, the kind you often meet in movies. I think that is such a caricature! I don't want to say, 'He's good, and he's evil'. I can't do that in life, so there really wasn't a reason for me to do that in the film," he says. I've joined those at the IMDb, where only two people have said anything so far, with a straight 8/10, a slightly weighted score but well merited by a first movie. Ah. The 'Axis', tree at the centre of the world. Now there's one of the oldest legends around, in a place where, as the "village madman" warns Kaena, up is down and down is up. 10:22:12 PM  link   your views? [] 'Comical Ali' is back?!? The BBC is reporting that Iraq's ex-information minister 'resurfaces'. "Looking thinner and greyer" than during the war, Baghdad's "grand master of spin" (the light relief in part two of an April spit) now reveals that he was interrogated and freed by the Americans. The only glitch is that US Central Command doesn't know this yet. So they say. Oh, what a minefield day this is going to be for "bloggers"! Not just them either. My mind is so boggled that now I am hitting the sandbagck. 12:44:14 AM  link   your views? [] 'Retarded' news. Brain machine. Five days late, indeed. So I'm slow? So I just use a tiny green chip in my pea brain? '''Remember that old saw which says that we only use a small part our brain? Well, it might just be true. Except that now we can actually prove it physically and experimentally. That has to be significant. I mean, it has to be, doesn't it?' (cognition scientist Allan Snyder) "C'est dans le New-York Times." So pssst told us this week. So the NetNewsWire reader says... 'Savant for a day' by Lawrence Osborne for the NYT Magazine requires quick and free registration to read. It's well worth it. Story of a chap who goes to Australia to have electricity beamed into his frontal lobes. (Which are what and where?) When I shortly go to sleep, I'll remember to stick plug in ear to stop said pea exiting during night and being crushed into carpet. This, as my regulars know, prevents long morning searches and reassures my daughter. 12:23:09 AM  link   your views? []

jeudi 26 juin 2003

A blogtree, roots, marshland and good web-weaving The day was too lovely to bury myself in the dark for 'Kaena' after all, but she'll still be round the corner tomorrow. Instead, I had something that needed getting to the Marais in the heart of town, an easy stone's throw from this delightful old house. I haven't (yet) asked permission from Alan "Z" Zeleznikar to pinch his picture, but he does say "my life is an open book"; it illustrates the good, "possibly true travel stories" at his site. Since la Poste is currently unreliable (I'm still getting mine from a cheery postal lass, but near neighbours say their post-people are being erratic), urgency warranted the detour. Especially a stroll much of the way back under a storm-laden sky which never quite broke. The murky Seine and its old bridges looked gorgeous and the brooding clouds lightened up. And there are many more Americans back in town than a few weeks ago, behaving and being treated perfectly well as far as eye could tell, so I'll lighten up too! When it came to checking back online, I went to a book-marked "blogtree" and decided that it would be fun to join in. Hence the novelty on the right-hand side of the home page. Figuring out which "parents" directly inspired me to start logging was easy enough (for a first three anyway -- discounting "Strangelove" Rumsfeld). Finding out who your "siblings" are proves amusing! zzz The Marais, or "marsh", takes it name from flooding by the Seine and has nothing to do with the sentiment I expressed yesterday. Moreover, I don't know why "j'en ai marre", which means "I'm fed up" or "I of it have (had enough)" appears to have the same root as the verb "se marrer" (pronounced almost like the marsh, "marr-eh" and "mar-eh", with those "r"s I still can't do right). "Je me suis bien marré" means "I had a really good laugh" -- yet "tu me fais marrer" means "you make me laugh" in a pejorative, unkind way. "Il est marrant" means "he's very amusing". "Marraine" means "godmother". Since I'm aware of no common root, this is a poser to be put to André B., whose explanation will be more marrant, if equally accurate, to any furnished by Littré, the 19th-century lexicographer (here portrayed by his longtime foes in the Roman Catholic Church. The G5 François was teasing about is the new Power Mac (I chose the UK Apple Store because I've been comparing the "official" price in different countries). It's a lot of money to lay out anywhere! And a waste of power for any needs of mine. As ever, Apple is offering a measly 128 MB of installed RAM, which is nowhere near enough memory to drive a monster like that. So bringing it up to speed for the new operating systems will cost even more from the outset. The video memory is much better though, and also at last on a par outside North America with what's being offered on "home ground". Before any change, I try to be sensible comparing day-to-day working practices and needs with the cost and hidden extra charges entailed in the "latest, greatest and fastest" machine. For my current and predicted requirements, a mid-range eMac is perfect, if not one of Apple's most elegant computers. The "tilt-and-swivel" stand was a ferociously expensive "extra" when I got mine, which is very secure but has a slight wobble to it when the desk gets bumped hard. This should count as a defect, but I regard it as inbuilt suspension. zzz On another technical front, Tom at 'plasticbag' has done some superb writing on how to make your website and links "accessible, clearly laid-out and fundamentally honest" for readers and search engines (linked to the article with its comments). For me, this kind of thing is indispensable reading. For this entry, like it's predecessor, I'm using a tool called HTML Creator, developed by Finnish-American computer science student Aram Kudurshian. He is asking just 15 dollars for a shareware gift to people like me. It has won awards, as well as being slapped down by real geeks on the VT info page. Apart from one or two things I've yet to sort out, I agree with somebody called 'The Mac Manger', who gave it five stars and said: "I'm not very knowledgable in HTML so the built in Reference is very helpful and the assistants speed up many of the monotonous tasks. HTML Creator might not be for the advanced user but it's great for new users and intermediate webmasters." It's also a fine learning tool, along with the O'Reilly tome I once mentioned, half a dozen websites, and a few other pieces of carefully selected shareware which I'm discovering how to use. All told, for less than 100 euros ($115/£80), I'm finding you can sift Version Tracker OS X (or Mac OS or Windows) and build up a neat collection of page-creation time-savers. These, unlike the big commercial products, fit well into my computer budget over two months. When I'm more proficient, I'll mention what else strikes me as outstanding. zzz The magic 26th. Monthly start-again date across France for budgeting, the unexpected or otherwise, with Visa. Now Tristam gets a proper birthday present, instead of a time travel entry and confusion with others, and a few software developers get their rightful dues. 11:10:57 PM  link   your views? []

mercredi 25 juin 2003

J'en ai marre! "T'as déjà commandé ton G5?" netmaster François demanded over lunch. No way, I told him. I'm happy with what I've got, thanks. Where's the rush? Moments earlier, Francis the newswhiz told me he was abandoning Apple. "Ah, foul treachery," I cried. "Don't do that!" "Too late. My machine won't do enough. I've already got a new PC, and it's got this and that..." The list was impressive and extensive. So I half forgave him, even if he pulled the GHz stunt. He added: "I'll keep the old one, though, unless--" The "unless" came back to mind before he shut up shop. Down I went and asked for all the specs: "je déteste le gaspillage!" In fact, I hadn't realised that it was a so-called "old" Mac, 1997, but it may have quite enough potential to kill two birds with one affordable stone. To be explored. Earlier, one of my e-mails said: "i'm surprised u haven't even mentioned panther yet, what with all the hoo-hah this wk. don't say u wr asleep? gonna grab it or not?" I wasn't altogether asleep. But it's sunny, glorious, too hot for some and likely not to stay that way much longer. Since Monday, I've preferred to let fellow enthusiasts rave or rant on about the great Mac confab in San Francisco. I read summaries of Steve's keynotes because when he makes his speeches: bits of the WWW choke up they're far, far too long he adores worship non-Americans will have to wait on many promises I can't stand "high mass" without amazing music. I also waited to fetch Safari One, which some might still consider a beta browser for a beta OS (that's their problem) and a handful, starting in French with MacGregor, who unleased a rumour from "relatively reliable sources" (MacPlus) that this marvel would be ported to Windows (that would be Apple's problem). That put the cat among the pigeons a month ago, sternly to be scorned out of court by John Farr at Applelinks in little more than a day. But. Steve has done some daft things in his time... zzz I enjoyed watching the ritual foreplay ahead of the act of consecration. One day, even a few Panther screenshots appeared at 4 OS X, and links spread like wormholes until all were tramped shut with the usual notice "at the request of Apple's legal department", which shovelled aside the grovelling snivellers. For the hell of it, MacRumors today produces a "who was closest?" rumour roundup. I'm quite happy to see that Frogland "deserves credit for providing the lead info on such an important Apple event, however, based on the above record, they remain consistently inconsistent in their accuracy -- which has also been true of them in the past." MacBidouille broke the first fairly accurate "niouz" about the new Power Mac and its insides from March 10, and whether or not their crystal ball is clouded, they are among the most lively French Mac sites. I note also from a MacPolls effort on Sunday that just 25.56 percent, or 764 people out of the 2,989 who bothered to answer the question, said they would not be following the Keynote live, one way or another. Were the other 2,225 telling the truth? Are we expected to believe that such figures are remotely representative of the Mac-using world as a whole? Could up to 74.44 percent of Mac-owners be such disciples, such ... sheep? Even were it conceivable, I'd imagine that a good number of such followers remain agnostics. I couldn't help myself: when I found myself having to register at MacRumors to do something there, the nickname I selected was "le loup". zzz Vagary (be warned: quite in character, there've been no more posts since June 16 till now) was on to something with this quiz(illa) biz. When I did the "what is your animal personality?" one, finding out that I was a wolf was inevitable. Even Marianne knew that from a very early age, and nobody ever told the kid. However, that particular quiz only proved to offer seven other possibilities. Not enough for my shamanistic mind. Quizilla kept me out of trouble. The only story I've been ahead of recently was about NetNewsWire. You got word of the clever new version of this newsreader here two days before MacCentral "broke it". They, however, bothered to add that Ranchero Software is offering a $10 discount on the full, paying version until the end of this month. Brent must be in a better mood than I am! zzz Now I remember what I was planning to write about it in the first place. "Oui, j'en ai marre!" With everything! I wanted a decent tantrum, of the kind I enjoyed when I was a tot. Since I've been feeling as sick as a dog for the best part of four days now, I want to stop counting my blessings (and clichés) and start bitching. Who at? Well, what at, then? We made a good start over lunch, François and me and a clever feller I didn't know before, with the Americans, flavour of the year. François, who has lived there, said nice things, but we soon put a stop to that positive, open-minded approach. It has obviously rubbed off too much... "Navel-gazers," I began. "Always needing assurance and congratulating themselves on really quite pathetic achievements." "Good start," said clever feller. "Their friendships turn out to be self-interested. I'm generalising, of course." "Please do," we agreed. We soon tired of the Americans and went on to the Brits. Clever feller saw his chance to place a cliché or two of praise but got stopped in his tracks with a mention of how the trains have gone off the rails and some of the health system down the plug-hole. Then I said: "Thatcher really turned them into a nation where it's every man for himself." Neatly committing at least three British sins at once: perfidy, self-flagellation and smug superiority. When it came to the French, clever feller again wanted to be kind! "We've learned to rejoice in the various comforts of life," he rightly said. I suggested that he meant France had discovered how to be a filthy consumer society like the rest when Valéry Giscard d'Estaing was president, but François explained that I was describing a change in mind-set which took roughly 10 years, 1975-85, and gathered further steam under Mitterrand. Clever feller defended Chirac, conceding that he was a "ripoux" (pourri in "verlan" or backwards, meaning "rotten", like a bad Apple) and less cunning than Mitterrand, but argued that the man at least had the whole of the national interest at heart. A "national" interest was an odd concept, I considered, in a country "so lacking in any sense of community spirit". François thought there was one. Even in internet forums. All kinds of "little communities"! zzz This put paid to a staggering headache which, at its worst for just two hours this morning, was initially eased by some lousy news from a friend on the 'phone, and finally vanished so that I managed to avoid throwing up during lunch. But. Again but: I am also fed up with being confined to quarters by the physical question of how far across town I dare go, screwing July's holiday plans into a ball and throwing them into the waste-paper basket, and being told that codeine is now just as bad for me as aspirin has long been. I'm temporarily enraged by what life and death have prematurely done to some of my friends. I am cross with friends who behave like cats which decide they want to be caressed and then spin round with bristling tails and claws and spit four-letter verbs not only at you but everybody else in their four-letter world. At such times, I can be known to frequent such crap-shooting places as Cruel Site of the Day and equally delightful Morons Dot Org. Their daily findings cheer me up. I don't care if they're not PC! Oh. Panther. Sod Panther for now. I haven't got the foggiest idea whether I will give Apple yet another 120-plus dollars for yet another OS upgrade. One, which to my eyes, largely looks more like a gadget-freak's wet dream than a major improvement like Jaguar was. Tomorrow, I am going to see 'Kaena'. It is a fantasy. It's for kids of all ages. It is French. It is a first for this country. And it's showing, literally, just round the corner this week. '2 Fast 2 Furious' would both bore me and give me more cause for anger. It may be topping the British film charts and heading that way here, but 2 Fast and 2 Furious are 2 Facts of Life which incline me to give 2 Fingers to other people's "realities". Like deadlines. 11:54:09 PM  link   your views? []

mardi 24 juin 2003

Nicholas Powell: fine arts, fine friend. A tribute Tragic news came almost out of the blue in the monthly e-mail from the Paris branch of the National Union of Journalists: Since My Condition prevents me from going either to today's funeral or to tonight's branch meeting, I'd like to say something here. My heart really goes out to Nicholas's family and especially to his wife, Véronique. In sillier times, Nicholas and I found ourselves locked into a similar trap. For lack of any other appropriate label in the France of the early 1980s, we had declared ourselves "travailleurs indépendants", i.e. self-employed journalists of a professional category equivalent to young lawyers, doctors, writers... Soon, terrifying chunks of our income and part of our souls were deep in the clutches of URSSAF, which then had no pretty face-mask. URSSAF, a fortress in a Paris suburb, was a monster of French administration at its most malign. We (and others) went that way as one of the required steps for state welfare cover, but URSSAF replied to no letters. 'Phone calls were nightmares. Forms and demands were regular. Nicholas Powell, in one of many fits of shared exasperation when asked for the umpteenth time to declare his "employees", simply filled in the names of his cats. He encouraged me to do likewise, as we pored over a table spread with fearful paperwork. Eventually, my only way out of URSSAF, which they befittingly called my "radiation", was to march into the keep of the castle itself and sit there until they agreed to hear and do away with me, which took a whole day. This radical move was my response to the only letter I have ever received written entirely in red ink, including the envelope, which I was ordered under bizarre rules of the time personally to fetch and sign for at the town hall, not even the post office. Braver and far more fluent in French than I was then, Nicholas declared war against the whole state machine, of which URSSAF was only a part. He enlisted a lawyer, the help of friends like me, the British ambassador, and the NUJ and French unions. He won a mighty victory. When he was done, all British journalists living in France who earned most of their income as true freelances working for the foreign press, and not French employers, were henceforth allowed to make their social security payments in Britain but receive the benefits in this country. Without being charged the rates handed out to French self-employed people in dissimilar circumstances. This battle has been taken on again since, by another admirable fellow in the branch, because years and several changes of government later, the French announced a change in the rules. Nobody was having this. Powell thus put in a rare appearance last year at a branch meeting where I did the same. It was the last time I saw him and he was too pushed over a deadline to hang around, but far from any battlefields, I have the very warmest memories of wild times. One night, we took my visiting mother to one of his favourite restaurants. Unfortunately, this was long before Eurostar. I had in my enthusiasm not bothered to think that my mum would have preferred not to have done the ferry and the haul into the Gare du Nord, then be dragged down to the Seine and a place where waiters were known to stroll on top of the tables and serve up digestifs with dead snakes in the bottles. Nicholas, however, she liked at once. Taken by a man so tall, fine-featured, cultivated and elegant, she enjoyed his stories, the shared interest in all things French and a real nose for the fine arts. Nearly two decades on, by January 2001, that flair was such that Nick telling the likes of Forbes.com readers "why it could be cheaper not to buy art in Europe" (he wasn't capable of perpetrating the horrible "to not buy" in their sub-editor's headline). Arts we often discussed, especially music, were my "patch" before arriving in France, and his career moved ever deeper in that direction while my own veered elsewhere. Away from work, Nicholas long helped keep me up to date. He also occasionally led me late at night to one or two Parisian "clubs" so dimly lit that I was both curious and glad not always to know exactly what was happening in some of the most shadowy alcoves. We emerged, unscathed, to find pre-dawn taxis. It was certainly a part of my education. After our weddings and family lives began, we saw less and less of each other, though Catherine and I sometimes had dinner with Nicholas and Véronique, who is also a gifted denizen of the fine art world and a teacher in more ways than one. On this grievous day, I can only wish her and their children all the courage in the world, as well as lasting happy memories. Nicholas became an increasingly specialised writer, producing catalogues and, I believe, at least one book, as well as many articles. In 1999, he contributed to a supplement in the IHT by announcing to the world that "In Paris, Autumn is Asian." When occasionally, in recent years, we were lucky enough to meet and chat, he asked me whether I'd yet visited the Drouot salesrooms he mentions there and told me it was "scandalous, Nicholas" that I hadn't, since I'd find it fascinating even if art collecting wasn't my thing. "Take Marianne too," he recommended. Most of his recent online legacy as an arts correspondent is to be found at the 'Financial Times'. The opera I knew about, but I didn't realise that Nick was such a frequent, as well as fine, theatre critic. The best way to judge for yourselves is to to head for the FT search page, type in his name and select the categories 'Search this journalist' and then, say, "Last 3 years". For more, you have to be a subscriber, but some of Nicholas's earlier work, for 'Variety', is most easily reached via 'Find Articles'. Not very long ago, Nicholas worked occasionally round the corner from here. I twice met him on Gergovie Street and the second time we made time to have lunch together. I'm glad we did. He was admitted to hospital shortly before I was confined, for the duration, to not very much further than this part of town. Few journalists expect ever to leave more than an ephemeral record of years of hard work. A handful of the best don't even bother with bylines. But qualities, such as the attention to detail, the perseverance, the curiosity, the almost fierce earnestness that would suddenly burst into a cascade of wit, and the sense of fun, which I remember from that lunch and many a high time in the '80s, stay forever with family and friends. There's no point in regretting I saw Nicholas Powell so infrequently after that decade when I was so lucky ever to have known him at all. 4:42:50 PM  link   your views? []

dimanche 22 juin 2003

Welcome bites from the blogroll I'm delighted, catching up, that the admirable chipstah, with whom I'm relieved still to find myself disagreeing about almost everything, has been invited to help "write the constitution of the 100% Capitalist 6th Republic". For France. The notion is generous to a fault since it's clearly painful for him to contemplate the French at all, but I wouldn't dream of suggesting he spare himself and his friends the agony. It could make for a fun read. From his new-look blog, I found the dissident frogman and learned that Marianne and I have both broken the law with the picture of Che G. Well, we'll be blowed! No wonder I'm interested in the whole Creative Commons concept. Brian Flemming and Bryan Bell are among several in the blogroll who are into this already. I've seen numerous pleas to sign this petition intended for the US Congress, on reclaiming the public domain. I'm happy to add my voice to those from outside the United States, since US legislation on copyright issues does not stop at the border. Holly finds that wine can help you pass out and save you from mishap. My drinking days are done, but yesterday I passed out with no problem. What was intended as a short after-lunch siesta lasted until well into this morning, with no interruptions but for nausea groans when I had to wake up occasionally to go the loo. How Marianne put up with it -- and what she did with her weekend -- I scarcely know. I hate fetching a doctor out on a Sunday, but occasionally there's no choice. Marianne tracked down an open pharmacy afterwards for the necessary, since I couldn't go anywhere. Just when I thought the worst was over. But the past week was far worse than mine for too many people I know, while I'm lucky -- I like it when the temperature outside hits 30°C and over. Thus, still getting up to date (without having served as any "role model" this weekend), I thought I might be glad to learn that "the marketing boys and girls have spotted a new type of man". I wasn't, but when Hash went on to mention "gastro porn", that was it. I had to read more... I'm more glad that Mike, had a "quiet day", since he's been (sparingly) blogging an ailment too. With him, it's the ear and he has all my sympathy, though I wouldn't have spent the night in a shop waiting for the latest Harry Potter (his books page). Then again, there's the "soon to be released 'Harry Potter Challenges the Pentagon' in which Harry Potter takes on Lord Voldemort, and (...) Lord Voldemort has an insatiable appetite for violence. I pointed out that the increase in the Pentagon budget takes money away from education. (...) Harry Potter knows that education or Hogwarts is the place where magic is made and we are going to create new magic in the country by rebuilding our education system." That comes from the blog of US "progressive" presidential hopeful Dennis Kucinich (thanks to Norm for the tip). While maybe I'm too cynical to conceive of Kucinich in the White House, there seems to be a sense of humour there fighting to get out. Something I liked about Clinton was his ability to make fun of himself. You don't see much of that in Washington these days. In California, Ian Newman feels uncharitable today even about US telephone operators because: "the way they pronounce their W's makes me want to send violent electrical currents down the phone line to enter their head and search out their brain and fry it into a hard, dry, blackened nugget." However, he doesn't tell them so directly (instead he reveals this on words with wings. No "permalink" yet.) Me, it's those damned buttons! Towards the end of last week, trouble at Apple robbed me of both my iDisk and my .mac page. And then my ISP went down for the second time in three days. The first time, Noos decently left a message on their machine right at the outset to say that "our technicians are working on it". By Friday, they were wiser. I pressed button 3, had to punch in my own 'phone number, then button 2, then 2 again and a few more to be told exactly the same. What you lose in service, they make up for in special high-rate 'phone calls, raking it in. The only thing worse when Noos goes down is being told to go to their website to find out why. Rainer is having no online difficulties. It's good to see his blog turned into a highly readable travelog for the duration. Even the erratic vagary is with us. Only one post so far this month, but with a "silly quiz": ADJUSTMENT "the mediator, adjuster, arbitrator" You have a deep love for simplicity, clarity, fairness, and balance. You have a great ability to edit, synthesize, and research ideas. Your sites are turned inwards, as shown on the card by the masked eyes. Alpha and Omega are symbolic of your need to complete that which you begin. You have little tolerance of complexity, as shown by the webbing in the background. 'Which major arcana of the thoth tarot deck are you?' 'brought to you by Quizilla' who have other "tests" too. That's supposed to be me. Now we know. 11:44:56 PM  link   your views? []

samedi 21 juin 2003

Flashes of browsing genius (OS X definitely; but Windows untested) Brent is brilliant. As are some of his friends, like Bryan Bell (blogrolled) who designed the icon and badge for NetNewsWire, as well as the original template for this log, which I have tampered around with considerably since. Several of my visitors have yet to work out that the little orange XML button in the "round here" section to the right opens a messy-looking page with a URL at the top like this: http://radio.weblogs.com/0120356/rss.xml There's no need to get technical. It suffices to use simply that link with the "/rss.xml" feed at the end to "subscribe" to this blog in a news reader. All week, I've been using Brent's (blogrolled: "inessential") marvellous NetNewsWire in the 1.0.3 beta, but it quietly slipped out of beta yesterday, going by the version number. Countless things have been fixed. The same goes for the free NNNLite, which is not as light as all that. It gets the most extensive list of reported changes at VersionTracker (where as I write, the new paying version has yet to show up). The coolest idea by far is a new ability to switch into "combined view". As shown here, on many weblogs, you now get headlines plus text in one place. With pushing 800 unread items to sift through among many subscriptions, this cuts the time taken substantially. Kudos, Brent. I've already learned to speed-read NNN, but what an improvement! Verbose as I am, I guess that for my own next clever trick, I should learn how to do as some others can and put the opening part of any entry on my home page, with the option to click and read on, so that each "article" no longer comes up in full here or in the combined view mode in NNN. zzz Where I pinched this little statement from now escapes me. For me, it's long since done -- apart from a copy kept on a Mac OS 9 partition just to check out any changes I make learning HTML. But if you use Windows and are happy with Internet Explorer, you might be interested in the freeware Avant. This purports to be the "fastest ... on earth" and, "an upgrade to Internet Explorer. Avant Browser is a fast, stable, user-friendly, versatile multi-window browser," i.e. IE with tabs. It certainly seems worth checking out. The site has a busy forum and offers "skins", if you want to change the look of Avant/IE. This I got from Brendan, a student at the Rochester Institute of Technology, who posted about Avant on his System.out.Blog. Brendan doesn't like IE, so his link was a kind thought. 1:04:03 PM  link   your views? []

vendredi 20 juin 2003

Births, marriages and ... a court circular "Don't forget Tristam's birthday." I shall, of course, when he actually celebrates it tomorrow, on that musical midsummer day. Not for lack of being reminded by his Gran, who's now kite-flying above the clouds after the winter wretchedness, this year, of one of her four-monthly cycles(*) and has said this still slightly short of half a dozen times to his wayward uncle of late. After all, a bright lad's "coming of age" is a once-in-a-lifetime horror. Unless I'm mistaken and in those badlands just north of Hadrian's Wall, they still expect you to wait until 21 and three-quarters. Since I haven't bothered to buy Tristam anything and have no ever-growing 18th-birthday present for him in the shape of the newspapers of his lifetime, I thought he might be proud and pleased to have the "blogosphere" shown two or three pictorial details of distant days. Above, for instance, is an illustration of how alarmingly tall the fellow already was during the last lengthy visit Marianne and I paid to his part of the world in the summer of 1996, after a stay in York. Despite those swords (with Marianne) and an interest in military history inherited from his father Jon, I'm relieved to report that Tristam abandoned a plan to enlist and have Her Britannic Majesty's forces pay for the furthering of his academic career. Nothing, however, stopped his growth in all other respects, not even a fire extinguisher or putting funny hats, hefty books and large rocks on his head, or even hanging him from trees. Moments after this second snap was shot, that swing snapped, but I forget who was projected like a missile down the garden when it did. Not Rowan, in the picture. Maybe it was me. Proof that even the Dumfries and Galloway lowlands of Scotland sometimes see the sun and a chill sea people are insane enough to swim in (myself reluctantly included, but where there are waves I just have to go in, regardless) came on the fine day of a beach picnic. Burying Tristam and making a Sand-Venus of him was undoubtedly, in retrospect, one of numerous bids simply to silence a youth whose capacity to ask questions is boundless and exhausting, even after lights out (thus Grandpa, pictured, pretends to be otherwise engaged). T's very first utterance was probably not "Waaahhhh" but "Why?"... I've never asked his mother about that, but the date is not swiftly forgotten. The event prevented his bit of the family from coming to one of those interminable French weddings where the food, while excellent, came so late in the evening that most of the cross-Channel guests must have feared they were going to keel over. At least one had to go and sleep in the car-park before the liquid sustenance was replaced by more substantial fare. That marriage required the renting of a lovely Norman manor-house for visiting guests and I remember most of it really quite well since it was my own. I shamefacedly confess that by the time Catherine and I cut the gigantic cake, I could scarcely still hold a knife straight. And I want, "M.K.", my picture, please, of your own much-photographed wedding dress. How many times need I remind you? Though I scarely blame you for second thoughts now you see what I do to people in the blog. Other attempts to silence Tristam included banishment. The lad may have spent whole tracts of his childhood under canvas or in an old caravan safely detached from the family home. But this is also because his Dad has a habit of acquiring ruined piles of stone and utterly transforming them, from foundations to roof, into robust and environmentally friendly houses. Bedrooms for T. and sister Rowan are rarely the first bits to get built. Maybe Jon will end up pursuing this multi-crafted skill in France one day. It's not as if there's a lack of demand. I have yet to reply to an e-mail from "the Colonel", Hugh, in South Africa called 'Champagne Time!!' where he announced to his own world that he now owned a house in southwest France (to reveal exactly where would be most unfair, if he's to have any peace: hence I do so). But now I digress from Tristam a moment to congratulate Hugh! He will not be alone by the time he gets there. A rough calculation performed by a bunch of us over lunch at the "canteen" of late suggested that, at the current rate of the purchase and rebuilding of relics, foreigners may outnumber the French in the south within another 15 years or so. This is not always resented by such "locals" as remain; at least one small town has its elected English mayor. Tristam's attention to detail extends to the building of things, as he was here. Exactly what it is I forget, but it absorbed him for as long as a rock-pool can, even one which appears to contain very little to the less practised eye. Despite the family gift for construction, design and (for the most part) stunning patience -- talents that have also given Jon painful back trouble and his wife Louise an awful time after too much exposure to the more toxic aspects of decorating -- once their present task is accomplished, it may be time to move on. What they do is neither recognised nor rewarded as it deserves to be where they are and the costs charged by municipal authorities for simple tasks they can manage better themselves but are not legally allowed to undertake, such as linking their piping to the water mains, are scandalous! So it's Louise who crops Tristam's head. At least, I think that's what's going on here, rather than a search for local flora and fauna. Why pay somebody else to do what you're fine at yourself, while it's evident that he thoroughly enjoyed it? Once he's 18, though, after "pestering" me with many a query about journalism, among other prospects for an interesting future, he might be empowered to deny his mother such pleasures. Oh well, since she's herself a darned good photographer, she'll have more time for such other skills. Yeah. Pix. I've spoken to Béa, long since back from Nigeria and her subsequent hols. She did remember to take some for me and they will be released to the world after I've seen her, maybe next week. Another colleague, Gina, has also promised to mail me some of her snaps from Algeria, where she covered the terrifying earthquakes that literally shook one of my friends at the canteen. He, poor Malek, was in an eighth-floor room during one of them, as part of the neighbourhood collapsed. His account of the aftermath is even worse than what I've read to date. That, Tristam, is no matter for your birthday, however, even in blogland! So in the hope that this e-card turns both of your ears bright red, I wish you the happiest of days! ______ *She, the poor soul, has it far worse than I do. Where my "downers" are, usually, relatively short-lived and manageable, as I indicated in an earlier entry on cyclothymia, for reasons nobody's yet been able to fathom, my mother's low and high spells are far more extreme and come evenly spaced in those four-monthly cycles which don't even coincide with the seasons. She copes admirably well with something for which a really effective treatment has proved, over the years, extraordinarily elusive, despite all the progress in medicine and psychology. 8:58:31 PM  link   your views? [] 'Where've I been?' Time-warping my mind. Somebody -- Neil McIntosh -- thought at 'The Guardian' that, let alone we novices, even seasoned 'bloggers' are bored now, or maybe even becoming boring. "This is a whole new social minefield...," Neil laments. One comment that "real life trumps blogging" does have its merits, along with a decent bit of sunshine, for heaven's sake! Recent absences have been for reasons mainly either too dull or just too distressingly horrible to disclose, but they've not stopped me getting my feet wet and my fingers burned. Fearful trouble resulted after I 'phoned an old friend, not spoken to in several years, who just happens to be the most gifted astrologer I know. Yes, I'm afraid you did read that right. S.'s insights astonish me. Being a practical, down-to-earth person, she soon switched on her computer and called up an old chart of mine. Whereupon I informed her that it was all a bit "wrong" anyway, since my mother had only recently expressed certainty about the hour I was born. This, you see, changes what's in the ascendant. It became a mite unnerving, but entertaining, to be told what had happened to me in the past couple of years, from My Condition (right down to the intestinal gruesomeness of recent weeks) to one or two travels abroad, the state of my finances, an encounter or two, and even a little detail about my previous evening. You don't have to believe this, of course, but I gave the woman no help whatever and most of S.'s findings were so spot on, despite my silence on clues, that it led to a fun conversation. Thing is, I'm not terribly sure that she gets any real assistance from the stars. Does it have to be that complicated? When she was done, I pointed out that I also had difficulties with reincarnation, something else she's long studied. But the other thing is: I've been reading too much leading-edge physics of late. Time appears to be non-existent, since we simply perceive things in terms of past, present and future because of the nature of our perceptual apparatus, while the other dimensions those frontline scientists are exploring are equally strange. Consciousness itself remains a wide-open debate. I have absolutely no problem, therefore, with the notion that some people can employ astrology, or whatever other mind-stretching or focussing "tool" or method it might be, to leap around those dimensions a little and even get inside heads, so to speak. Then S. told me she didn't believe in reincarnation either, except in purely symbolic terms. Since even for her, past lives were just one illusion among many, I asked her why she hadn't bothered to explain that little aspect of her outlook during the years I used to chase her. "Because you weren't ready for it then," she rather smugly replied. The hell was unleashed when I raved on to somebody I really should have known far better than to have bothered, since such matters can be profoundly disturbing to people who care not even to think of these things. I did apologise, but too late, I fear. Another somebody, however, who I've very long known as being at least as rooted in the "real world" as S. herself, but usually more Cartesian in her mindset, astonished me by asking whether I might put her in touch with my old friend! There's one condition. Even divested of the mumbo-jumbo, the money-spinning, the deceit, the false hopes and ridiculous trappings that go with so much of the "trade", I've yet to be convinced there's a clairvoyant in the world who can "see" any further than our "freedom of choice." That's why the quote that prefaces my newest read -- back in the sci-fi and bitterly controversial nanotech domain currently exercising politicians and those who want to carve out our ethical codes -- made such a striking start: 'Free will is an illusion caused by our inability to analyse our own motives' Charles Darwin Thus is the tone set for 'Mappa Mundi' by Justina Robson (her corner of the Web), which I'll write up in due course. On nanotech, Wired has yesterday/today produced an admirable, link-rich article by Noah Schachtman, called 'Rage Against the (Green) Machine', in which he covers not only "grey goo" but "green goo", and weighs up some of the arguments. zzz Back at the "canteen", fellow worrywart Baudier was exercised by the salts I was dropping in my water, which led to a discussion on something else long considered, like astrology, the domain of none but frauds and weirdos. He could never understand why France's scientific community almost unanimously set about crucifying one of their own finest, Jacques Benveniste (his own corner). This hitherto respected researcher in 1988 published his findings in 'Nature', on the "memory of water", suggesting that, as some people are proposing once again (HealthWorld Online), water retains a "memory" of substances dissolved in it, which might "explain" why homeopathy seems to "work". All the palaver earned Benveniste his special place at Charlatans, a lively French site which reported the "story of an imposture". But fellow Frenchman Michel Schiff, of the National Centre for Scientific Research (English door to the CNRS), wrote a book (Amazon France) in Benveniste's defence, which also made it into English. This is discussed by the open-minded meryfela, another liker of interesting controversies, also known as Jeff Merrifield (his home). It was a news brief on the Beeb early this week that sent me back to 'The Guardian' for more on Benveniste and indeed the 18th-century founder of homeopathy, Samuel Hahnemann, whom the paper considered "far out". The 'New Scientist' also returns to the scene, with an "Icy claim that water has memory" ... and a chance of vindication for Benveniste. There sure is "far more in heaven and earth...", especially earth! It was back in 1995 that I ventured into poetry on the grand scale, with 'Gaia's Complaint'. 'Gaia' got some kind and keen observations from an editor at Faber, and a mixture of high praise and rude remarks from others, but is probably best off where she is, unpublished! After all, Gaia is not the only woman in the work and the others (S. helped inspire it) are still very much alive. Poor old Gaia. She's endured some very low blows of late, but 'Gaia theory' is making a striking comeback. Except that now we're supposed to call it "Earth system science". So romantic, isn't it? What was wrong with the more heavenly notions? Maybe I'm just warped. Twisted neurones. 1:24:46 AM  link   your views? []

jeudi 19 juin 2003

Midsummer melodies. Or cacaphony. It depends. Well. I had to go to Uganda (via allAfrica), catching up on life, to be reminded that Saturday is World Music Day. Which, as that article in 'The Monitor' recalls, began here on the midsummer streets of France as the 'Fête de la Musique' (great where-it's-all-at site, partly in English) in 1982; truly a memorable night. Auntie Beeb, for all her doddery age, has a mind of her own and decided World Music Day was on January 1 (homepage and links). If you are lucky enough to have a decent internet connection, several intriguing, long and wide-ranging concert recordings there still work (and are the kind of thing very wicked Mac OS X users might be tempted to pinch with the formidable Audio Hijack or its "Pro" incarnation). On Saturday, it's all happening, from Bangladesh to Nova Scotia. "While some professionals criticize it for being a gimmick and others complain that it has been taken over by sponsors and media organizations, the fête de la musique gives anyone who wants to the chance to play or listen to absolutely every type of music. A virtually trouble-free festival of over 15 hundred concerts in a single night!" So Christian Dupavillon declared by way of the French embassy in the United States in 2001, in his article explaining what he decided to do on learning that "the French owned more than four million musical instruments. Three quarters of these instruments lay deteriorating in cupboards, attics and cellars before departing this life in dustbins and on rubbish tips." This year, energy permitting, I'll remember to decide what to do before it's too late. Because Dupavillon's right. Since anyone can indeed play anything anywhere and they will, there are parts of town you definitely want to avoid. It's all a matter of taste. 9:38:05 PM  link   your views? []

lundi 16 juin 2003

'Bel Canto': a hostage drama to grip the heart "A cleverly paced, suspenseful novel told with great emotional delicacy: its author earns a powerful, unexpected ending. To be read at a single sitting," wrote Erica Wagner in 'The Times' of my latest read. That's not the way I read, even on holiday. Books are the pleasure to close my days. While when I'm hooked, the light goes out much later than it should have done, one go is usually far too much. So the, yes, very cleverly paced 'Bel Canto: a Novel' was taken in doses, as I was drawn to hostages and hostage-takers alike, hoping against hope for an ending which would defy the laws of tragedy, stare fate in the face and win. Just as the bel canto of the title, the fragile beauty of a great art which becomes centrally important to charged, finely wrought relationships between the members of each of the main "sides" in Ann Patchett's claustrophobic huis clos brings a strange kind of redemption in the face of death. At less length, but with equal insight into character, Patchett reminded me of Pat Barker's phenomenal ability to work her way inside the heads of people caught up in terrible, impossible, almost unimaginable circumstances you just wonder how a writer can get so right, in the latter's 'Regeneration Trilogy'*. With one of several differences, since occasionally you have to remember to stop suspending disbelief. Roxane Coss is the great diva of an opera lover's dreams, who reluctantly renounces other commitments for an irresistible offer that be star of Japanese businessman Katsumi Hosokawa's birthday party in an unidentified Latin American country. And in the end, the lack of a name doesn't matter. Hosokawa agrees to come to the poor, dictatorially ruled place, bringing at least a prospect of good deals and business, if Coss -- the woman of whose language he speaks not a word but is his sole escape into art and dream in a life devoted entirely to his work -- can be persuaded to sing for him at his 53rd birthday party. One is lavishly thrown and hosted by puppet Vice-President Ruben Iglesias, the powerless, publicly "acceptable face" of a brutal regime. With him, Hosokawa brings the bright young Gen Watanabe, polyglot translator and indispensable aide. Gen is set to become vital to all in a multi-lingual stand-off after the party is brought to an abrupt end when the youths and three generals of a well-disciplined, stealthy, armed guerrilla movement burst in on the feast. The country's president is all they want. At first. But the president turned down his invitation at the last minute, knowing full well that he always would. His favourite television soap opera takes precedence over any affair of state, any visitor, however illustrious. The days, then weeks, that follow take the shape of any siege you may have read about: the threats, the sudden bursts of violence, the demands, the unpredictable, the bonds that form between captors and captives, a kind of complicity. The L.A.-born Patchett, who now lives in Nashville, Tennessee, tells this story with a conviction, a subtleness and, sometimes, a humour which draw you right into each of the hearts in the palatial house. There are two main love stories in 'Bel Canto' and a host of subsidiary ones. They end partly as the reader knows they must, and yet not, because Patchett does, indeed, surprise. And much is said and achieved without words. This is not "magical fiction" of a Latin American kind, but the prize-winning novelist does succeed in making you identify with people who do sometimes improbable things in settling into their new lives together, with the rules gradually relaxed. That music could hold such sway, for instance, over everybody at the ruined party stretches the imagination. But the solitary Gen, the fragile girl guerrilla Carmen, a young priest, the increasingly distraught Red Cross official who serves as go-between with the regime outside the walls, the reserved Hosokawa and Iglesias, the impeccable host, are among characters you soon really care about. Thanks, Mum. Your Chistmas present was far off my usual tracks, but I enjoyed it after all. ______ *For another day, perhaps. But Barker's brilliant, early 1990s insight (a review, among others) into the savagery, mental torment and dazzling poetry of World War One -- 'Regeneration', 'The Eye in the Door' and 'The Ghost Road' -- was the first thing ever ended in the Métro to take me into work absolutely shaken to the core and blinded by tears. An absolute masterpiece. 1:54:52 PM  link   your views? []

dimanche 15 juin 2003

Footnote to 'une nuit blanche'* Through no fault of his own, Tony was unable via the 'comments box' to rectify a point of info in last night's ramblings that, in fact, needed no correction. Only he will understand this, but that scarcely matters. ;). "One more thing," he adds, however: "When u publish yr autobigraphy, I shd like to appear as someone who had been there, done that & got the T-shirt & was therefore blasé about yesdy's film, rather than just a dozy philistine." Fair point, sir. Except that there will be no autobiography. Thus I'd say forthwith that Tony's collection of T-shirts is substantial and wide-ranging if largely metaphorical, since I have very rarely seen him in any such thing. His elegance of attire, on the contrary, puts me to shame. zzz As befits a rock of his stature, the man sent me today in search of John Donne, conscious that few others would fit immediate needs. Since it is all in the "wired world" now, Tony, not just lining your shelves, here's just one place for 'The Works of John Donne'. It's the "labor of love" of one Anniina Jokinen, who's also achieved such surprising -- and modestly introduced -- things as this: 'John Donne. ELEGY XX - ELEGIA 20. Finnish Translation. Suomenkielinen käännös.' Quite something, n'est-ce pas? In return for a kindness rendered today, I should tell you -- and others -- of Luminarium. Here's what Anniina and the others there say: "This site combines three sites first created in 1996 to provide a starting point for students and enthusiasts of English Literature. Nothing replaces a quality library, but hopefully this site will help fill the needs of those who have not access to one." You have much of the "quality library". For the likes of me, a find like this is precious indeed. zzz I ended up talking sense tonight, rather than risking further accusations from the likes of even Francis the newsvendor of speaking in "poetry rather than French..." And we're both still alive. Leopard and wolf alike. Nothing broken. Not even a plate. True, it started with a truce, under the aegis of the Red Cross (more neutral territory you can scarcely find) and ended with a fresh beginning under the full moon... It was more a matter, for me, of listening than talking. At a restaurant so rare and perfect that there's no way I am disclosing its name and location on the Internet. A place which can remain that good in Paris for 10 years deserves all the secrecy it can get! [Update: unfair, hence the photo.] Should you chance on this sidestreet and this gentleman, who loves his work, don't even hesitate. I have merely removed the address and 'phone number. I am under orders to sleep properly now. This shall be done. At this hour, the noise of a great party across the garden out the back begins to show signs of abating. Others may wish to close their windows. Not me. Not at this time of year. It's only too short, yet already the eternally dissatisfied are complaining of the "heat"! Where the wildcat has come from, with tales to touch me to the very quick but not for the Net, it was 35°C. That doesn't sound so bad... On Friday night, I finally fell asleep to what used to be the dawn chorus. Now it's one single bird, which I'm ashamed to say I cannot identify and will have to ask the lady who takes such loving care of that shared garden below. All the swallows disappeared after 1995. And I woke, not so very much later, to appropriate rumbles of thunder. One thing I have to share. What have I done? This I found when I dared set foot at Marianne's own, shared new weblog. As now she knows, I even did as I was told and read no more. I jumped to the end (of the love poem), for such it was, as her remark at the bottom of it pointed out. But I have also told her that you cannot go so public with such things and then always expect your father to do as he is warned at the risk of his very skin. It must be in the genes! For good or for ill, I dare not imagine. As for this entry, I think it was safely ... ahem, public. Dreamer, I knew. Spanish student, yes. But such comments about the CIA? When she's 14, should I be proud or alarmed? ;) Another log-link I was going to make, if amusing, can wait. [The party has just stopped, or quietened down sufficiently. And so to bed it is. Update:] No. Here it is, with the new day dawned and this entry subbed, though I'd wanted to serve it hot against the party background. "The waitress looked at me funny when I ordered it. But if they don't want anyone to order it, why is it still there on the menu? It's on a little paper insert of specials, so it would be easy to replace. I thought about ordering it as the "Fusilli e Minestra alla Scott Peterson," but in retrospect I'm glad I didn't. That would have been totally immature. When the waitress brought the order, she said, 'Who had the Fusilli e Minestra?' and I indicated that was me. Still, as she set it down, she said, 'Better known as the Robert Blake.' She said Blake's name loudly enough that people at the next table murmured excitedly--'Ooh, Robert Blake'--and craned their necks to see the plate." I'd not heard, myself, of Robert Blake. But some good food at last, again, plus a great liking for Brian Flemming's quirky eye (blogrolled) combined to draw my own to his 'Slumdance' restaurant review. Nicely illustrated as ever. I was glad the day came, revising that sideroll, when he felt able to return to being "brian flemming". The most observant of my own three and a half readers will recall that for a while, he felt his had to be called 'l.a. war blog', or something like. Brian first sharpened my own attention to the detail in the shameful story of the Baghdad flag (third part of this April 12 entry). (Brian is still concerned about the fall-out. "They don't like us. They really don't like us," he muttered on June 3, with a 'US image plummets' poll to make his point. It's not, as Brian knows, that simple. Mercifully. But this I would say. Though I get out and about less than usually I do at this time of year, I notice that for the first time I can recall, the number of Germans in town outweigh the Americans. By far. Off the cuff and in the Métro.) ______ *Nuit blanche. For once even the superb Robert-Collins dictionary also fails where the poor old Harraps almost invariably does. "Sleepness night" doesn't cut it. Or even just "to go through the night": faire la nuit blanche. The colour matters. Some things really just don't translate. 2:53:29 AM  link   your views? []

samedi 14 juin 2003

Sleepless after a trip to the Street How am I expected to sleep? It's only partly the food, which was a mistake. This I had learned by 2:30 am, when dangerous internal movements finally took a decisive turn. Odessa Street was tonight more like the "cour de miracles" of old than Picadilly Circus. Part of the colourful, multi-cultural throng attended the opening of yet another restaurant, this one Lebanese. Observing from our nearby pavement table, resident veteran Tony commented that were it an art gallery, the event should be described as a "vernissage", but all I could see in common was an abundance of alcohol, clearly on the house. I met Lee for the first time. She was kind enough to open a door for me while I was trying to remember the new code. Since it seemed unlikely she was anybody else, given a current high incidence of "coincidences", I did just make sure: "Are you Lee?" Then I introduced myself. We didn't chat long, because for her it was clearly a time for lugging heavy objects down and up numerous stairs and then rushing off. She's as nice as her place on the Net. While she used the word "weird" for our unplanned encounter offline, it wasn't as odd as too many things which happened this week, so I put it down to serendipity. zzz At Journalized, Mike Little made the best comments I've seen on the balloon being floated about a new flag for the Brits (he links to a Beeb story and one vision of what it might look like). While having a pee, Tony voiced his contempt for the notion with a single vulgar word. To put black in the UK's corporate banner, he then said, would "contribute to the "aggressive nature of much flag-waving, which is, after all, what the damned things were first mostly invented for." Going by some of the comment on that BBC page, I find I'm not alone in seeing something -- certainly unintentional -- neo-fascist in Nigel Turner's proposal. zzz The "Matrix Reloaded" sent Tony to sleep. This was among the more original statements on the most written about film of the year. At Blogcritics alone, they're still arguing the toss, laying claim to more than 30 articles from all angles (this list is only the half of it). As Tony slumbered lightly, I spotted two new details in a plot which my friend found "absurd from start to finish", where he followed it at all. Not that he regretted seeing the best part of it, he added, peppering a sparse commentary on a 'cultural phenomenon' with nouns like "archetypes" and "anti-clichés" ... "but I was waiting for the 'human element' that never came along and then I lost interest..." That's a fair point. If you've missed the Matrix hype, had just a quick briefing and find yourself cast into what, on second viewing, even I found too long, I readily concede that it could be less than engaging. Tony was exercised by the homonymous Blair's latest bids to re-engage the attention and regain some esteem from a public largely turned off by all the nonsense about the motives for that war. This week, the fellow managed two interesting moves: For dragonthief (via Tom's plasticbag, thanks), it's "about bloody time" Tony Blair "revealed a renewed thirst for radical constitutional reform (...) when he swept aside 1,400 years of history by abolishing the post of lord chancellor and setting up a new US-style supreme court in place of the law lords" (both quote from the account of all this in the 'Guardian'. For me, it's also about bloody time Britain sent troops, even if only a pitiful few, to join a force for the DR Congo. I've rarely heard such "not our concern" and "we have no interests there" bullshit as was broadcast from parliament in London. Similar rubbish went up at Instapundit. I'd show more respect for an assault on "how the United Nations is, and has been, screwing up in the Congo" had its writer, Glenn Reynolds, not made his case by judiciously selecting what suited it from the original article by Maj-Gen.Lewis MacKenzie (former commander of UN troops in Bosnia) in Canada's 'National Post'. There's supposedly a blogosphere rule about not bothering to quote people simply to flame them, but one I'll break when the widely read Instapundit opts for such slanted comment. If you have anything to say about the DRC, Rwanda and what MacKenzie correctly points out to be "the collision point of the old French and British colonial empires in Africa", then you could read and represent your source's views as a whole. MacKenzie may be right to consider UN Secretary General Kofi Annan's appointment of General Maurice Baril as a DRC envoy an error. But his argument about how these UN figures were central to a failure to tackle the Rwandan genocide of 1994 ignores the equally important role played by three key permanent members of the UN Security Council -- Britain, France and the United States -- in refusing to respond either militarily or financially to the crisis when warned. To blame Annan and Baril for not playing the right tune is to lose sight of the pipers who pay for the United Nations and use it as no more than a tool for their convenience. As Washington and London did when it came to Iraq. zzz That took me a long way from the Street. But I might get back to sleep for hurling a brickbat or two. Tony worked for one arm of the UN -- UNESCO -- for years enough to have more sensible things to say about its flaws and weaknesses than anybody passing on disinformation spooned out by governments and their witting or unwitting spin-doctors. zzz Anyway, it would have been difficult to stay asleep when the Street tonight also brought me "my" wildcat. Yes. I might say "red in flesh and claw", but it wasn't like that at all! It wasn't a total ... surprise. After all, I'd been told late last night of her arrival in town by 'phone calls describing her progress into the strike-bound city, until she was cut off in some tunnel. Nor was I surprised by the absence of further calls throughout Friday 13, until at least five in the afternoon, when mine was silenced just to vibrate against my thigh (the cellphone I mean) while Tony slumbered. I never said she was predictable! She didn't linger. But then, she rarely does. Despite the thumping in my chest, she denied me the right to so much as kiss her. On the grounds that she would worsen My Condition with her "ear, nose and throat infection." 'Mon oeil!' as they say on the Street. What she really didn't want to catch was what I've got. None of it, bodily or otherwise. ;) The pizzeria we happened to outside must now consider us "regulars". The new man who simply gave her a chair when she prowled up was swiftly over-ruled by la patronne, who knew that a table was required. But then what did the wildcat do? She took one look at her salad and decided, correctly, that it was not fresh. This occurred to her at the same time as Tony and I realised there was also something seriously wrong with the sauces on our respective main courses. In French fashion (now second nature to me but still shocking to friends when I do it in England), I questioned la patronne about this sudden decline in standards. I suggested that perhaps there was a problem with the fridge or the sauces may have served for too many days... and even remarked that the wildcat could not be sure of the reliability of normally impeccable pizzas. This achieved nothing but some hand-wringing. With further apologies at the end of the meal. (And the return, later, of something I've been spared for two whole days!) The wildcat had already rejected my proposal of a decent crêpe (also abundant on the Street) and other ideas, and instead taken herself off to somebody who would cook her a "proper meal". Not without warning me that should she see me tomorrow (i.e. today), "I will have a thing or two to say to you!" I can scarcely wait! But then again, I probably can. After all, it is but an extension of many months of waiting. Hope. Man's greatest strength and most serious flaw. As the A. more or less says in 'Reloaded'. Along with those two other qualities... Tony was well into a new tale by the time I confessed that he had lost my "undivided attention". "Ah." Well, he'd thought as much. "My heart's still pounding," I admitted. "Yes," he sympathised. "You do have a problem. Now I've seen why!" "Is she 'just' very pretty or absolutely beautiful?" His answer to that would bring blushes. What struck him most, however, was a "rare quality": the sheer "grace" of the woman (not, of course, the armful of shopping bags thrust into my brief care). Sweet dreams, wildcat. Tonight's moon might leave the almond blossom on the pillow. 4:16:11 AM  link   your views? []

jeudi 12 juin 2003

Tepid off the press: the truth is out there! "KNOBEL, Ark. -- They are the talk of Clay County, crop circles in a local field of wheat. But don't go calling Agents Mulder and Scully on the phone and turn this one into an X-file just yet." After a morning getting my head around Div X (just about - Marianne will be pleased, now we can play .avi movies and all that at last*), I'm back in the weird and wonderful. The reporter at Kait8 asks us not to think things bizarre, but swiftly adds: "There are some that maintain that there are aliens that are trying to communicate with us by the use of ancient Sumerian symbols." If there's no messing in the replies to the poll on that page, then the "some" are in a small majority already, but maybe only half a dozen people voted. Crop circles in Arkansas are as nothing, however, to the way in which British astronomer royal Martin Rees (here on 'Edge') has calculated that "the odds of an apocalyptic disaster striking Earth have risen to about 50 percent from 20 percent a hundred years ago," according to a story at -- yuk! -- CNN. Not that Professor Rees says when this might happen, though he last month published a book cheerily called 'Our Final Century' (Amazon UK). I found both these delightful items on my way to the 'Fortean Times', a copious chronicle of "strange phenomena" to be added forthwith to bookmarks of the bizarre. If that weren't enough, the FT (not to be confused with the pink one) gleefully surveys a miscellany of oddities, some less tongue-in-cheek than others. These include the British 'Lobster: Journal of parapolitics, intelligence and State Research'. Its Summer 2003 issue, scarcely surprisingly, would appear to contain much about Iraq and other recent hot issues for lies and spin. Other reviews have ranged from a favourable one of Alan Moore's story collection 'Voice of the Fire' to a nasty dousing of something else fiery by Carlos Castaneda (who maintains a website after being dismissed by the FT as "laughing all the way to the bank"). And almost at random, I'd mention 'Psychoactive Sacramentals' (hmm... entheogens, anyone?), along with 'Popular Paranoia' (Amazon US) and 'The Complete History of Jack the Ripper' by Philip Sugden (FT itself). zzz Incidentally, anybody who assumes that I've begun spending evenings delving into curious corners of cyberspace to keep my mind off the prospect of having probes pushed deep into my own innards in less than a week would be, of course, perfectly correct... So let me also introduce you, possibly, to 'The Anomalist, which yesterday noted with the help of 'The Guardian' that the impending apocalypse is a hot topic in America, but today goes to Australia and 'The Age', wherein Rachel Berger considers that 'Monday the 16th could be your lucky day'. Rachel notes that she "can't help falling in love with people who are too good for me and disappear every time I leave the room because I was a cruel princess during the Middle Ages and now it's payback time. Problem is, every time I read my horoscope or cast my runes or I Ching, I get a different message." But she's primarily concerned with the number 13, not 16, before informing us that "Monday 16th is associated with flogging dead horses". This is an activity I try to persuade people, including myself, to renounce, but why Rachel should think Monday 16th is the day for it, I haven't got the foggiest idea. 'The Anomalist', meanwhile, not only keeps a daily journal of "unexplained mysteries, maverick science" and suchlike, but has since 1996 handed out annual awards to books "that help to shed light on topics that science and history tend to ignore..." I'm only a week late in writing about the not-pink FT, since my sudden whim for the weird led me to learn that it won one of this year's 31 Webby Awards announced on June 5. The other winners who drew my attention were mainly in the "music" and "net art" categories. Most of the remainder were places already familiar to many people who browse too far and wide. It would appear -- unless we are all already deceased but simply unaware of the fact (a possibility which does sometimes occur to me after an overdose of theoretical physics, sci-fi, or eastern mysticism) -- that the month of June arrived as normal despite the dire predictions made by one "weird Webby" nominee. As Jeremy Rogers explains in an May 23 editorial at his gloriously extraordinary place: "After two years of preparing psychologically and logistically for the pole shift, I must finally concede it is unlikely to occur in the immediate future. I was almost 90% convinced up until late March of this year. Late March/early April was perceived as the verification time when Planet X would be visible as a reddish cross in the sky to the whole world, seven weeks prior to the expected pole shift. This was the time when the public following the Planet X issue would require little persuasion to convince them it was for real. Instead, when the long awaited period arrived, there were only personal anecdotal accounts of a red object in the night sky. The sketchy nature of these accounts, offered nearly in all cases by individuals aware of or biased towards the subject, arose doubts about their veracity. I held out despite this key prediction failure to avoid a potential scenario of being caught off guard. Planet X may have been stealthier in its infiltration of the solar system and overall visibility then we imagined." Planet X?? You'd better believe it, baby! Oh, and that's where I found the astronomer royal ... and the crop circles. Around March 20, Jeremy had been sure, "the Earth's rotation will slow to an eventual halt at least seven days prior to the day of the pole shift, which is now definitively scheduled for the 27th May 2003. The Atlantic Ocean is expected to be on the sunny side, facing Planet X and the Sun. Thus the eastern portion of North and South America and western part of Europe, for example, should remain in constant daylight or dusk depending on location. The rest of the world, mainly the continent of Asia, will be in total darkness." Well, 'Core' blimey! It's all straight out of the movies, almost... Pole Shift Preparation proved purposeless, Jeremy seems none too perturbed, keeps a human-looking head on his shoulders and reports going about quite ordinary activities when he's not updating us on the latest most horrible "earth events". He got his Planet X ideas, it seems, at ZetaTalk. While I don't speak Zetan myself, these friendly aliens may help unravel any number of our human myths for us (by way of a busy woman called Nancy). If you've got no idea what Planet X (alias Niburu) is, well -- just click on Niburu (where the picture came from)! zzz Silly me, really. I was convinced that some nasty things happening now had far more to do with global warming and insane humanoid behaviour than anything I learned tonight. But since Jeremy explains that the 'New Scientist' gave Planet X a spread, I searched their site. Inexplicably, I drew a blank, but discovered some reassuring things on the way; for instance, on Christmas Day 2001, we were reminded that: "The cranberries Britons eat with their Christmas dinners were probably flown to the UK from Los Angeles, clocking up 9000 kilometres and spewing out carbon dioxide all the way. The carrots could come from South Africa and the potatoes from Italy, all of them contributing to the planet's burden of greenhouse gases." (article) The following March: "A huge raft of ice has cleaved off the Antarctic peninsula and smashed into thousands of icebergs. The collapse was predicted by scientists but they are stunned by the size and speed of the event." (article) And "huge" meant 500 billion tonnes of ice sheet. By last August, the planet was getting "fatter round the middle": "The prime suspect is changes in ocean circulation, which geophysicists plan to investigate." (article) All in all, "2002 in the environment" was just wonderful. We did enjoy the "warmest first quarter for a millennium, said UK researchers. The year ended as the second warmest on record." (article) You know, when I read the same publication's "hot topic" site on global warming, I don't find it at all weird that a few places I've seen tonight would have me believe that half of America either thinks people have already been abducted by aliens or sincerely hope this will happen in the very near future. I wonder what they make of that at Exxon, ChevronTexaco and company... Back in the real world, I was wondering who had won those Sturgeon awards I mentioned yesterday, only to find I'd made a mistake. Got the month wrong. Like the pole shift people. Perhaps it's time I began learning Zetan. How do they say "egg on your face"? _______ *Successfully installing Div X proved more complicated than I was led to believe for Mac people nowadays, and I have no desire to write about those perambulations. But I will mention some good places to go: • VideoLAN, here in Paris (this site in English) as one "Open Source video streaming solution for every OS [operating system]"; • on "3IVX MPEG-4" video compression technology" (note their forums too); • there's DiVA at the same place; and • at DivX.com, I'd hoped to find almost all the answers, but didn't. However, they have excellent and lively forums, where I filched much help. 11:31:43 PM  link   your views? [] Sci-fi short story awards (Sturgeon) I'm delighted to see Ursula K. (blogrolled) listed twice among this year's Sturgeon Award finalists (posted by Cory at bOingbOing, with the winner to be announced at a dinner tonight (i.e. yesterday...) on July 11 (whoops!). More at Locus. (Only now do I know that Theodore Sturgeon wasn't the name he got at birth.) 12:57:11 AM  link   your views? []

mercredi 11 juin 2003

Weird and very wonderful (mainly Beaty and Bilal) Avoid clicking on what's coming unless you really want to see a vulgar cartoon Bob Ullman did of a Mac enthusiast in 2001. I found that totally by accident when I was looking at Alternative Comics ... and that I discovered because I was buried in bizarre science. Such odd matter was drawn to my errant attention by a reminder from "a small, reluctant geek who by twisted turns of fate ended up very cute and young looking instead of scarred and intimidating" named Quinn. You see, I'm surprised that my general purpose oven including microwave still works after some of the treatment it has received (even to write that is probably to give it the kiss of death). Now I have learned from Quinn, at ambiguous (which she shares mainly with Robin), that my misadventures with the microwave are but a tiny fraction of the appalling things you can do. Among them, for instance, are the Bubbling Soap experiment and one involving Steam Propelled Grapes. Since both are among sites I've recently come across offering DivX 5 movies, I think I should attempt what has until recently been difficult and bring the DivX codec to my Mac (this may not be the best place to start, but I'll explore...) Anyway, Quinn's link to some often dangerous behaviour is itself but a miniscule part of 'Weird Science', the work of a one-man dynamo, if that's the word, in Seattle: William J. Beaty. Bill's place is a house of many rooms, where I could spend hours! And conceivably will. He says he eats "Indian, Thai, Japanese, & anything weird", which makes me thoroughly jealous in my Current Condition. (Of the latter, I've little to say except that as of Sunday, my insides became sheer and mostly liquid hell, compounded by a dose of serious "black dog" blues I couldn't stave off forever -- hence almost no activity here or anywhere else. The wildcat and one or two other people have pulled me through that for now: I am grateful beyond words...) I can scarcely face yet more pasta and rice, but have little choice, and walk past the several excellent Asian takeaways in this street praying that one of these weeks I will be able to enter them again! But back to Bill, who is far more interesting, with an online encyclopaedia all his own peppered with good quotes, such as: "Physics is like sex. Sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it." - R. Feynman and a favourite I like to use when reproached at work about a corner I consider relatively tidy: "If a cluttered desk signs a cluttered mind, of what, then, is an empty desk a sign?" - Albert Einstein Mr Beaty adds one or two of his own for good measure, such as this excellent "advice": "Dump your TV set for a couple of years, it will make you... 'different.'" When I checked out his link to the 'Enigma Project', naïvely expecting something along the lines of cryptography and the machine, I instead found myself deep in "a Maryland-based association of scientifically trained and technically oriented individuals who investigate and document claims of unexplained phenomena". No. Frankly. What more can I say about Bill Beaty, save that if this kind of thing grabs you, his mind has many doors, but this might be the best to open first? He's also one of those 'best if viewed with any browser' chaps. Wish I could say the same of this humble log... I began with comics. And shall end this entry likewise. While I was either flat out or spaced out on Sunday, perhaps even asleep, Marianne perused the latest issue of Création Numérique (French), later to remark that she had no idea Enki Bilal was "such a nice man", given the dark weirdness of much of his work. Their featured June cover artist, he's a fabulous phenomenon. There's a first-class Enki Bilal site (also in French, but with loads of artwork), and bits and pieces about him (in English) at the excellent 'artbomb.net', the Harlequin Comics Page (see "Eurocomics"). The Roland Collection of films on art even offers Bilal video (in both QuickTime and Real format, as with most of its featured artists). 11:46:23 PM  link   your views? [] Audible progress: media software updates The riddles of QuickTime (QT) 3 (standalone installer entry page for Mac and Windows), which landed on my machine via the Software Update panel late last week, took some sorting out! I've been fiddling with this and the newish iTunes and I'm impressed by the MPEG-4 format and the quality of AAC audio. Decidedly impressed. But one swift experiment confirmed that converting the mp3 music files you have into the Advanced Audio Codec (AAC) format is not a good idea. Had I bothered to look, I'd have seen that Mac Rumors told us this back in April. Their clarification page still holds good for people confused by these formats. Meanwhile, TidBITS this month posted a helpful little entry about another aspect of QT 3: its support for 3GPP. Three what? This is "an extension of the MPEG-4 standard aimed at delivering rich media over wireless broadband networks (like Apple's AirPort) to a variety of wireless devices. (3GPP stands for 3rd Generation Partnership Project; Apple has collected together some basic information and pointers about 3GPP on its Web site. The format is seeing growing use among mobile phone and PDA users in Asia and Europe.)," Geoff Duncan tells us (and the Apple link he mentions is this one). I've yet to work out whether I have any use myself for the QT 3GPP component, but if I did, I'd download it here. As for iTunes 4, both news about it and praise for it are obviously plastered across every French Mac mag in sight and on site. But with one almost universal gripe. The likelihood that almost any of us will be able to buy stuff from the Apple Music Store any time soon, as opposed to simply listening to 30 sec soundbites, remains zero. When this month's SVMMac went to press, it reported that Apple hadn't even begun negotiations with the record majors this side of the Atlantic. Probably needless to add, I've not seen a word out of Steve Jobs' people in France either. So, short of piracy, we'll still stuck with 19.6 percent VAT on CDs (as well as DVDs, software, etc.). Oh well. I'm told that VAT in Sweden is 25 percent!! Audio Hijack, however, remains as invaluable as it was when first I wrote about it in March and the Pro version saw another update yesterday. Mainly bug fixes, according to the 'rogue amoeba' people, but including an important one, eliminating static in some QuickTime applications. 6:42:04 PM  link   your views? []

lundi 9 juin 2003

Great gateways for brain food A painful, but profitable, weekend. My insides began falling apart again after a whole day's blessed and almost complete "remission" (the first in five weeks?). The nausea became such that I slept away a whole chunk of the afternoon, something I can rarely do even should I want to. And then there was something else; I'm not going into details, but it inspired me to run a search for "mankind cannot bear too much reality..." I kick myself! This South African contributor to a 1998 philosophy of mind forum is entitled to a misquote for his subject matter revisiting Freud, but I should know better. The silver lining with the cloud came in the shape of Boston University's remarkable Paideia Project, with its publication of more than online 900 papers and articles arising from the last World Congress of Philosophy. The next takes place in Istanbul in August. As for the correct quote, somebody who has read and admired T.S. Eliot as much as I do should have realised straight away that it was from 'Burnt Norton', first of the 'Four Quartets'. Which led me through another astounding gateway at Literature Classics to the whole Classics Network, "committed to promoting the appreciation of classic works of literature, philosophy, history and politics." After inspection, that's certainly on my "blogroll", where (in some browsers only) a mouse roll-over the entries should now give you brief details about each one. The blogroll has seen a major overhaul in the past couple of days, but I've retained one or two currently quiet places in the hope that their authors revive them. As for the quote, which reminds me that just one "desert island poet" (Ted Hughes) can't be enough for me to survive, Eliot was a touch more "politically correct", even getting on for 70 years ago, than I'd remembered. It was "human kind": "Go, go, go, said the bird : human kind Cannot bear very much reality. Time past and time future What might have been and what always has been Point to one end, which is always present." On the Net, the whole poem, with other notable things, is at a place called spack, run by Earl Cahill, now a senior engineer behind the scenes at About. 1:12:05 AM  link   your views? []

samedi 7 juin 2003

The bare-faced cheek of it! It is really nice to catch up on other people's web-logs again. Among the many things that happened during a long day - it's a busy, as well as costly, business being off sick - the wildcat dropped a piece of (warning: cryptic) excellent news in with some inevitable hassles. My heart soared! But it had got late by then. What with union business, more on the hole-in-the-roof problem to be sorted out with uncooperative people in other flats, the latest from blog-hero Yang, and the last of the most important e-mails, I regret that I had to inform her that I was far too exhausted even "to feel randy any more". Whereupon she replied that she had not, after all, wished to hear what she hadn't caught the first time, since that was not on the cards. And that I should rid my mind of any such wicked thoughts. And she took herself off to bed. Alone. Well, her every wish being my command, I've got at least one thing to say to this. Instead, I shall let a young woman say it for me (courtesy of Lisandru Ristorcelli in an old copy of 'L'Echo des Savanes', which lacks a site of its own and thus sends me instead to the "masked cucumber").--> I would add: • that she should peruse and consider Kim's latest Friday Five at 'Fresh Hell'. • that she should look at the latest 'Day in my life...' picture Holly has put on her recently overhauled goinglightly blog and reflect on the prospect of foregoing, in the fullness of time, the best, most purr-worthy back massage probably the whole of Paris has to offer. • that, while I'm sorry I missed Rainer's departure for Europe on Wednesday and failed to add my own good wishes, should she continue in this vein, I'll no longer furnish her with clear, patient explanations of how to do relatively elementary things with even a Windows computer. I shall instead anonymously flood her mail with daily and extensive gems from Mr B's 'geek temple'. • that I shall use a whole "Gaumont card" in one go, strapping her to a cinema seat and making her watch 'The Hulk' five times in a row, then write a review of it, since I personally plan to give it a miss... • that any more intriguing French films will be out of the question -- also as due punishment for the perfectly admirable but disturbing 'Sex is Comedy' (tough to watch with an absolutely gorgeous cat I was stupid enough not to kiss at the time...) "Le coeur en reste secret. Comme le coeur du volcan." • that I shall ceaseless remind her, as Tom did on Thursday at plasticbag, that (i) there are reasons to be "in love with Radio 4" and (ii) until she networks herself at last, she will miss out on such notions as "there was Freud's discovery of the 'unconscious' - the idea that even though we claim to be in charge of our destinies, most of our behaviour is governed by a cauldron of motives and emotions which we are barely conscious of. Your conscious life, in short, is nothing but an elaborate post-hoc rationalisation of things you really do for other reasons." Tom used that extract -- not calculated here, of course, to make her growl -- as his introduction to this year's 'Reith Lectures', which I have yet to listen to despite frequent reminders. • that I shall do what Fraser said he did at blogjam on May 23 (we have yet to read of the consequences), save that my "online dating agency" contribution will be even more wondrous than his. • that if none of this works, I will go as silent on her as sexygeekgirl Racheli has, I hope temporarily, become since four days after this joyful entry on April 4 (it is pure chance that both an old grey wolf and a cat link figure on that page.) • and that if silence doesn't work (I don't think I could manage it regarding the magnificent wildcat for more than a week), I will publish all Marianne's comments. Including her response to the one about how the leopard is perfectly entitled to "**** ******* *** *****, just as long as she ***** ****"! That said, I remain, heart-bandit, your most obedient and loyal servant. ______ Marianne and a friend have started a... blog. In this instance, I think I'd better make sure it's OK by them both before I blogroll it. 3:34:43 AM  link   your views? []

vendredi 6 juin 2003

'Acquisition' acquired: OS X peer-to-peer software comparison Best of the bunch: Acquisition 0.92. That's my conclusion after almost a week of testing out the several file-sharing utilities for OS X announced last Saturday. Limewire may well be somebody's "chance to help promote an Open Protocol and the Digital Commons", as their site proclaims. But it sure isn't mine. My apologies to the developers, but despite the "important changes" in the version released on April 21, it falls so far short of doing anything for me that it ended up in the trash. "If it's not Limewire, then what else are you gonna use? There's no real competition, so Limewire will continue to be terrible until there is," thinks somebody called ox4dboy at VersionTracker. Wrong. Acquisition, which has an excellent interface, works by logging on to Limewire "Ultrapeers" among others, but with one important difference: it swiftly and successfully locates and downloads files of all conceivable kinds. My 15 bucks went to developer David Watanabe without hesitation, his work well worth every cent. Update 8 June: David dealt with an Acquisition registration problem. (I'd complained about the nag-panel that pops up frequently, but my registration number arrived with a nice note.) Direct Connect, from NeoModus, may well still be in a preview version, but it's a darned good one (and they do Windows too). I've little to add to what I've already said, but for the clarification that it works -- and well -- by giving you an extensive list of user "hubs" to choose from, categorised by those users themselves, and whence you can browse what you want and fetch it. The categories are pretty loose and one or two of the hubs will deny you access unless you're prepared to share 3 GB or more of your own files, which is certainly not my case. The one big drawback is that when it comes to music files, you have no idea of the quality of what you're getting until it's landed. Acquisition, by contrast, tells you all you need to know in advance. Neo's description of itself as a "sort of" KaZaA client for Mac scarcely does justice to Michael Thole's remarkable piece of work (the link, this time, take you to his complete software offerings page). Aware of the very large number of potential KaZaA hosts out there, in the latest version of Neo, Michael starts you off with a choice of 16 (by my count, not 10 as his notes say) "super-servers". They're all, going by their names, in the United States. You then have an option to pick any of these and build a "Master List" from it, which can consist of anything between 25 and 2,500 servers (a range of choices in the preferences). As I write, I've opted for the largest I've tried yet (with eight other applications open, five of them internet ones, on a cabled eMac (512 kb/s). At a busy time on a Friday evening, Neo has taken 26 minutes to scan 859 hosts, where I've just stopped it, got 4 refusals, 28 timeouts, 75 not found, 23 "other errors" -- and 703 operational hosts offering 197574 files. For "purely " purposes, you understand, I've selected Audio, typed in one of Marianne's favourite words at the moment (if not always mine after nearly a day of it once): Korn. It's just downloaded one of a choice of almost 50 mp3s at a perfectly satisfactory average 23 kps (and has done far better than that). As with Direct Connect, not knowing whether you're getting a high-quality mp3 or a mediocre one till it's done is currently a disadvantage. But Direct Connect is free and Neo donationware by a very bright student at an Indiana university. I shall make a donation. Both Acquisition and Neo run good user forums, and one part of Michael's is devoted to how to add more IP address net ranges to choose from. There's even a bunch in France - discussed in French, where some people have got the hang of it and others are still trying... At NeoModus, developer Jon Hess also maintains help, FAQ and news pages. Out of five ¤: Acquisition: ¤¤¤¤ Neo: ¤¤¤½ Direct Connect: ¤¤¤ Limewire: ¤ 6:54:44 PM  link   your views? [] Petty problems in perspective A couple of nights ago, 56 e-mails landed. Only 37 of them were spam. So yesterday, it was time to add all the important ones to the handful in my 'A = priority' box and set about the replies. Well into the process, my internet connection suddenly went down. After the usual checks, it was decidedly dead. "Dammit," I thought, "the modem's finally had it." After all, the poor thing's been a dust collector under the desk for years, and the gentle attention its various vents get from the vacuum cleaner is probably little compensation for many unintended kicks and occasional use as a footrest until I realise I'm doing this. But no. My cable ISP, Noos, was this time round kind enough to leave a message on their "robo-phone" service relatively early into the overpriced "which button to push" call, explaining that the technical problem was theirs. This was thoughtful. While they're on the whole an excellent ISP, the "infos réseaux" (network maintenance reports) they put on their website usually bear no apparent relation to reality. Because Paris Métro lines often run straight down under streets propped up on an alarming series of subterranean arches, my wicked thoughts turned instantly to the men who have taken more than a week simply to smash the old stairs at the Pernety station almost opposite "the canteen". Lord knows what else they're doing down in the bowels of the earth. The pneumatic drills that have run almost incessantly have not been good for business at the Pizzeria Pernety (PP). After all, it's no time of year to close the windows and door. This comes on top of the lengthy closure (mini-brickbat n°4) of a station which is usually an outlet for hordes of mainly American and German tourists in summer, spy the PP and decide that it looks like a good place to go. Yesterday, I sat with one of the other regulars and we watched the clouds of fine dust drifting over the plates of people actually sitting outside, in their insanity, at the bar across the road, which has seen a whole series of ill-fated owners, most of them perfectly miserable even when they arrived. I know little of exactly what happens when the Parisian summer pastime of deploying teams either to tear up streets (which reaches its peak in August) or to bury themselves underneath them for days, except that these people do sometimes cut things they shouldn't. Like pipes, lines and cables. As for the current wave of strikes, the foreign media have given up trying to explain what they're about. The same is now true of almost of all the local press, apart from 'Le Monde' or economic journalists in other papers, who I can't understand anyway. All I do know is that Tony (76, hero of Odessa Street) successfully made it both to Switzerland and back on major strike days. And all I can do is bow in admiration. If it were not so unkind to such family as he has there, I would tell you that on his triumphant return, he informed me that this latest trip has not "changed [my] mind. Switzerland is the most boring country in Europe and possibly the world." zzz Anyway, most of the mail has now gone. Losing part of my computer's abilities for a few hours was a minor hassle -- though you'd scarcely believe such things are trivialities if you bother to read the paroxysms of rage a handful of my friends kick up when similar things happen to them. Particularly Americans, it so happens, because their "business culture" is so good at service that it drives some of them potty if it stops. My other petty complaint is about salts. Body salts. I've written so many stories about African ailments with diarrhoea as a symptom that I slapped my head with stupidity when blog-hero (Dr Luc) Yang reminded me that I was currently daily emptying my own system of essential nutrients. The cheapest I have yet found come from Nestlé and are exactly the same thing as doctors give to babies in Africa and Asia. Here, a packet of 10 sachets costs nearly nine euros, which is bloody expensive! They're not reimbursed by the Sécu -- but that's no bad thing because one sensible step successive governments have taken is to see a whole host of pharmaceutical products removed from the list of those covered by social security. France has one of the world's best welfare systems and this kind of action, in favour of key "generic products", is one of the ways of ensuring we can just about afford to keep it that way. zzz Rather here than Zimbabwe. I remain in touch with a lovely friend whose name I cannot disclose. When things seem "rough" here, it helps to take a look at some of the things she tells me. She won't object to me sharing this much, which arrived a week ago: "Due to the vagaries of Zim's electricity supply, can't read you every day but catch up when I can. We have two power cuts a day now -- of several hours -- happily timed to coincide with breakfast and dinner. No water for several hours in the middle of the day and a very dodgy phone line. Cash a very big problem entailing shady deals (in the dark -- literally) and dashes home with bundles of the stuff terrified of being hi-jacked. Just waiting for the mayhem next week. But will it really happen? That is the big question..." As indeed it was. The Beeb's among those keeping regular tabs on it all, my friend. During the week, they even saw fit to bother domestic audiences again with your troubles. A brief interruption to the constant babble about Iraq. There was a nice one too: the twerp of a US general who announced that even though nobody's yet found WMD, they did get rid of the biggest one in the country: Saddam Hussein. This morning, we learned that the regime in Baghdad has no intention of letting UN weapons inspectors go where they want to go. Yeah. So what else is new? There was a little something. After several years in Nigeria, friend Peter is writing a book on the place which he hopes will prove a success, as do I. While there, he often got exercised about the world's indifference to Africa. I thought he was exaggerating with some of his outbursts. Until recently. The Beeb (again) this week interviewed a bunch of people off the streets in Britain in a haphazard bid to find out what "ordinary folk" know of the place. The only response that really had my jaw drop came from the man who earnestly explained why he couldn't understand there being a famine in the Horn of Africa. "I thought we had sent enough money to solve that," he said, "with Band Aid!" OK, I will state the obvious. Though I doubt many people think like that fellow. Let's assume Band Aid did raise $144,124,694 over the years as that site says. Today that's 122 398 890.87 euros. I don't know how much it costs to get a sachet of Nestlé's Alhydrate salts to an Eritrean village. But here, that would buy me 142,656,050 daily sachets. Just for me... $144 million went a long way, didn't it? Of course, I'm not knocking Band Aid. Far from it. But let's keep things in perspective. 1:03:43 PM  link   your views? []

mercredi 4 juin 2003

The cat, the garden gallery and the kid Recent news from the wildcat inspires, hence the perplexity I expressed yesterday, no fewer than three floral tangents. First, wormwood. The absinthe held to be stock in trade of many, particularly French, poets and painters (semi-commercial site) is one expression of a plant held to symbolize the "separation and torment of love". This is appropriate to the manifold aspects of an increasingly thorny state of affairs. To say more would be a grave disservice to "my" wildcat, but it came to me in the night that a meditation on some decisions in the bud was taking me down a path easier weblogged than half-heartedly e-mailed... Wormwood also features in a voluminous "Modern Herbal". The adjective may be taken with a pinch of salt, given that Mrs. M. Grieve's considerable work was first published, as its online editor judiciously reminds us, in 1931. Also out in the garden, I found Duncan Long, a man after a part of my own heart when it comes to much of his substantial graphic output, music and tales. It's Duncan's 'Wormwood Falls' I have stolen here, in the hope that his well-maintained corner of the Web may please others too. zzz Next comes the humble but courageous snowdrop, painted here, rather than photographed as would seem to be his custom, by Dutch-born Albert Koetsier. Koetsier is among 16 artists featured online by the Susan Spiritus gallery (Newport Beach, California). Tradition accords the snowdrop the qualities of both hope and consolation. In light of the tidings from afar, both the wildcat and I are going to need such qualities in the weeks and months to come. For all her absence from my side, so present is she in my heart, mind and dreams that ... well, maybe I should go with the intuition I had since even before we first met face to face. Maybe a simple weekend question from Marianne meant the youngster really has glimpsed something I've begun to suspect, though if the notion has ever seriously crossed your own mind, I don't doubt you've knocked it right back into some parallel universe. "Snowdrop, usually spoken of as the first flower of our year, though the Winter Aconite has perhaps a better title to be so considered, has never been of much account in physic,..." says Mrs. Grieve, before her further investigations found that an "old glossary of 1465, referring to it as Leucis i viola alba, classes it as an emmenagogue, and elsewhere, placed under the narcissi, its healing properties are stated to be 'digestive, resolutive and consolidante'." zzz Symbol of "adversity", the wallflower, has a second "meaning", nothing to do with the girl left out of the dance; or with this picture lifted from Michigan photographer Jim Riegel's "reaction to the phony 'Playboy' nudes or the 'Cutesie' nudes you see in commercial art galleries" (should it please you, Jim's other pages also merit the detour). My whirlwind of a wildcat has never been one to find herself "on the shelf". Even where adversity has been a part of her lot, I dare start to divine the "dark side" in some of the men who have been drawn into the storm. But for all the passion in her, events can conspire to leave her a solitary creature. A mounting fear of the night should be no part of the nature of cats! It's not what you see in the dark, my darling; new tides in your fortunes strike me as part of the process of discovering how to master such visitors. "Nightmares," you've called them. But admit it: you're usually quick enough when it comes to making sense of the ones that may matter. Sometimes I hear you pacing bare floorboards, however poor the line in those occasional late-night calls, but where you walk, there's no stairway to heaven (detail from 'Wallflower' by Derek Shorts. Derek engages in a wide range of computer graphics, "really [has] blue hair", and recently finished 10 years as a US expat in Germany for PDI/Dreamworks and 'Shrek 2'.) I too would be afraid to lie alone in the dark when the only visible door opens into a kind of enfer and each week brings a further closing in of the walls. But the latest twists of "fate", heart-bandit, while probably destined to keep you very distant from me for even longer than I had begun to accept, could yet bring the new dimension you're seeking. Trust me, at least, on that... While I shall not reveal what the wildcat worked in the last dreams she mentioned, safe to recount that one of my rudest recent awakenings was into this little nest beneath the eaves from - in all truth - an "expanding room" we were learning to share. Yesterday? The day before? I lose track of time. Space is but a part of what she needs, always has, always will. Just as long as she has a place to "come home". Sometimes, darling, you remind me of Carmen (my favourite recording, if an "old" one), not that I see you coming to the same end! You just need to run with the wolves. And I too need space. We're not all like this, you know (but I can't resist pinching the - uncredited - picture from the Valar Guild and their Tolkien Encyclopaedia, since any J.R.R. T. fan who may have chanced down this far will find it a treasure hoard of a site). I'll tell you who finally told me, quick as lightning, where my animal affinities lie, but not in public. I wouldn't want to embarrass her. As to yours. One day you said, "What you're describing is a cat!" Yes, that was the easy bit. The unexpected find and the certainty with it came just a short while ago: call it serendipity. zzz Shall the wolf lie with the leopard? It's an unlikely prospect, my darling, but Marianne believes so already. Perhaps more than I do... Certainly more than you do! Katherine Nelson, from whom I have pilfered a more likely picture of my own place in the clouds, keeps a rather lovely gallery of her own: Ancient Messages (or Peyote Wallpaper - with the warning that many files on part of her site "are very large, and those of you on dial-up connections may very well end up cursing my name forevermore.") Ms Nelson, also illustrated by a detail from the fuller picture, has a taste for shamanism, things comic, including her own. Her pleasingly "irrational dislikes include fantasy novels, all-girl folk music and small yappy dogs." Yes, those of the kind my foot can scarcely resist the impulse to treat as footballs, especially when almost tripped over on Parisian pavements. Katherine maintains a journal, where one of her latest (on June 1) "moods" was "weird". And her listening: 'Cake - "I will survive". As will you, my wildcat. As shall I... Today, I'm relieved to see that I'm in Ms Nelson's good company when it comes to a "cryptic entry"! Of your "beastly guardian", I wish whoever snapped this shot somewhere in southern Africa had also taken the well-merited credit for it. All I know is that the photographer would seem to live in the Netherlands. And should perhaps be introduced online to that brother of mine, whose own shot is quite a credit to his patience (Alex's Afrikeye galleries are, he says, undergoing an overhaul). One look at that and it's clear enough where the speed of the wind comes from! As well as the resilience most other people may characterise in you, darling, thus perhaps blinding themselves to other qualities it can sometimes prove less convenient for them to see. What's really hard, often enough, is to discover how to tap the source. Or as the already quoted Tippett expressed it (but I shall give a little more here): "The words of wisdom are these: Winter cold means inner warmth, the secret mystery of the seed. How shall we have patience for the consummation of the mystery? Who will comfort us in the going through? Patience is born in the tension of loneliness. The garden lies beyond the desert. (...) I would know my shadow and my light, so shall I at last be whole. Then courage, brother, dare the grave passage. Here is no final grieving, but an abiding hope. The moving waters renew the earth. It is spring." zzz Adversity? Before you should pounce on what I've "forgotten", see that I have yet to lose the thread: for the second "significance" of the wallflower is "friendship". And that's what counts today, isn't it? The warmth in the night. The outstretched hand and the ear that really listens. You know it's friendship that's on offer this end of the network; let's leave love out of it for a moment - a point on which Marianne would disagree, but then she is just 14 and another of the world's dreamers! What she thinks can wait till the end.;) Of course I miss you! After all, you did rouse my own need for the warmth of a body in the night from the place I had buried it for a good long while. Wolves and leopards may hunt alone, but to the best of my knowledge, they don't sleep alone. But hard though sometimes it is, there are one or two things in life that are really worth the patience and you're one of them in mine. And that, my wildcat, holds true even when you accuse me of being "harsh". Or whatever. Accusations I'll generally accept, moreover, since they're true! Trouble is, I know your travels are far from over. That I can live with. Just as long as wherever you are - and once this much has been said - you'll let me return to the rather more important business of drying a few tears and helping bring back that laugh I haven't heard in rather too long now... Where anybody else is concerned, wallflowers have a whole Gallery of their own in Miami. With becoming modesty, the artists there consider the place "the most unique cultural environment of any venue of its kind in South Florida". Well. Some of the things to be found there are of the sort I'd walk straight past before realising that you were still standing "outside the shop". Mrs. Grieve? Well, she has little to say about wallflowers, though her editor points outs that "a tincture of the whole plant has been found useful in the effects of cutting the wisdom tooth." Something I should remember if ever it comes to the day I have deliberately postponed since the dentist showed me, many years ago, the X-ray of the one that's growing sideways. He wants it out. I don't. I may be getting long in the tooth, but have precious little wisdom to spare. Anyway. I'm also done. Perhaps Donovan is much better at Speaking Cat than I am. I also found Donovan's Place by accident. Looking for wallflowers. And ended up with a 'Self-Portrait' as well. One which, to my eye, befits the current cycle of circumstances. OK. Now I'll tell you what Marianne said at the weekend. Even if it means you won't speak to her, or to me, for at least a month... She asked about the wedding. Sorry, darling, but she did. Who was I to disabuse her? Well. I did. A little bit. More than a little bit. Quite a big little bit. I told her that it wouldn't be for months. At least. Perhaps years. Probably never. "That's okay," Marianne said. "Can I wear black?" Dream on, kid. I know you've just got my best interests at heart. Come the year you - the leopard - do feel like snarling at me again, I hope they'll still be waiting in the Marais. Because this time, once we've bought those shoes, I'll make sure you even finish your food. Better run now. Though I'm nervous that the leopard can fast outpace the wolf. Hmm. Now there'd be an interesting match fight! 8:36:29 PM  link   your views? [] 'Ventus': probing fine-grained frontiers Picture yourself somewhere rather like the late Middle Ages: the twilight age of some feudal society where a queen can still rule with great power from a fortress palace, while forests are wild places ruled in their turn by superstition and fears, best left to themselves in the night. Roads are rough, and since horses, carts and carriages, and human feet remain the most common ways of getting around, travellers' tales are rare treasures. Now, think heresy. A frontier heresy against one aspect of science currently still in its infancy, but already bestirring the legislators of "developed" nations in this world of our own. Nanotechnology. In the centuries ahead of us, scientific designers will live in equally uncertain times as those neo-mediaeval village communities sheltered by their manors and townsmen behind their fortified walls. Karl does the writing. I make the judicious, but minor, cut or two to avoid "spoilers": '(The designers) did not feel they could rely on civilisation to preserve human knowledge; with their recent experience of nuclear wars, Marya supposed that was a reasonable fear. She had been taught that (...) artificial intelligences were designed as distributed nanotech in order to make it impossible to destroy the information they carried, short of incinerating the entire planet. It was obvious to her now that if the (...) design team had the technical means to create these consciousnesses, then they were thinking in terms of taking the functions of perception, investigation and organization out of the human body and placing them in "inanimate" objects. Commonplace in Marya's time, such an idea was closely associated with thalience in theirs. They denied the connection -- successfully, too. Their object, they claimed, was to actually create the metaphysical categories, as real things. They said they were going to embed the official view of science in nature itself (...). Wolfgang Krieger, the team leader, said, "Science has no way to show or access the metaphysical essences supposed to lie behind appearances. If these essences do not exist in themselves, we will create them." The understanding was that they would be creating them in the image of scientific truth. But what if, for whatever reason, the designers were to uncouple the nano from the requirement that it use human semantic categories? What if the real agenda was to let the (...) intelligences develop their own conceptual languages? Theorists as early as Chomsky had suggested that languages can exist that humans cannot even in principle understand. Perhaps they didn't plan for it to happen, but the Winds appeared to have developed such a language. All it would take would be for one of the programmers to slip a thalience gene into the Winds' design.' Thalience? Yes, and there's 'Mediation' too. There are Heaven Hooks, desals, morphs and Diadem swans. But if this intrigues you, then best I leave you to unravel the rest. As for Marya, an anthropologist, she has riddled out but a one part of a far greater mystery. Poor Marianne. Since I read her an early chunk of 'Ventus,' she's been pleading with me to tell her the whole of Karl Schroeder's story. All of it, darling? From the swordfights and sieges to the distant, powerful Archipelago conceived around a planet we know today as 'Earth'? Just how many hours do we have? What my daughter enjoyed, first, included a burial: 'The hillside rose steeply, blocking the stars. The torches lit a deep cut in its side, where a bare rock face had been smoothed, maybe centuries ago. Deep letters were carved over a slotted doorway uncovered by a huge stone slab. The slab had been tilted to the side and now leaned heavily on a scaffold made from catapult parts. Rough soldiers sat on the scaffold, passing bottles back and forth. They watched impassively as he passed under them. Another sky drew overhead, this one of yellow stone. The ceiling was centimeters away. The deeply pitted sandstone was painted in abstract clouds of gray and black by the passage of many torches. The smoke from those burning now swirled up and around him, settling into a layer of trembling heat. Around a corner, and now he was being carried down a steep flight of steps. His bearers spoke back and forth as they lowered him carefully. Ten meters down, then twenty, into a region of dead air and penetrating cold where squat pillared halls led away to either side. His bearers moved more quickly now, and the torchlight flickered off an uneven ceiling and dark niches in the wall where objects, long or round, were piled. He was lowered to the floor in front of a black opening and unceremoniously slid in. The ceiling here was just above his nose. Bricks thudded down behind his head. What little light there was disappeared, and of sound, only that of stones being mortared into position. After a few minutes, even that ceased. There had been no name carved above the niche. So, after a while, he raised one hand, slid it across his opened chest, knuckles scraping the stone, and felt behind his head. There, in a band of moist mortar, he wrote the word: Armiger. JORDAN SAT UP screaming. Calandria was at his side instantly, holding his shoulders while he shuddered. "What is it? A dream?" "Him, him again -- I saw him . . ." He seemed not to know where he was. "Saw who?" "Armiger!" Calandria lowered him back onto his bedroll, and when he closed his eyes and drifted off again, she smiled.' Even better than the burial and Jordan's "dreams", however, was where the elderly grave-robber Enneas and his young assistants (as scared as Marianne) pay a visit to General Armiger's niche. Not all of them live to regret it. Who is Armiger? Then again, perhaps the question should be, 'What is Armiger?' And as the back jacket asks: "...why have the Winds fallen silent? And is Armiger, or Jordan, carrying a Resurrection Seed?" Never judge a book by its cover. Had I done that, Alan Pollack's design on this edition would have discouraged me. Sorry, Alan, just a matter of taste. For me it doesn't "fit" the story. No, the reason I almost invariably blog about books I've enjoyed is because I've heard or read enough about them to know, in advance, they'll be right up one of my streets. Since I've twice linked to other people's 'Ventus' reviews already, today I take another tack and let Schroeder speak largely for himself. If that doesn't turn you on, nothing will. 'Ventus' is a magnificent achievement, in which Karl steadily introduces a rich range of well-developed characters, human and otherwise, as he builds from a relatively simple foundation to shape a whole host of mysteries. A Canadian, he writes with grace and style enough to slip from one genre to another with a confounding ease which renders any bid to pigeon-hole 'Ventus' most satisfyingly pointless. Ideas abound, but never get in the way of a plot which grabs you by the guts as well as stimulating the mind. The words of the 'Desert Voice' I quoted last month are among several passages haunt me (particularly when I have a wildcat rarely very far from my thoughts.*) "I understand now that each human has a ruling passion, one that serves as a fountainhead from which flow all semblances of happiness, sadness, anger and joy," was part of what the starship said. A starship ready for death once her mission has been fulfilled, her own story told. Except that the 'Voice' is not allowed to die, for a reason integral to an optimistic vision of a capacity for change on the part of sentient "life-forms" crucial to Schroeder's dénouement. Even that ending gets things just right. Karl succeeds in telling you what you wanted to know of the outcome for characters who win your affections, while leaving just enough open to the imagination and intellect to fuel some interesting further speculations. And I'll end this review with the quote for our nanotech concerned times (Beeb news story with some good links) which serves as keynote "frontispiece" to Karl's saga: "...Frankenstein's monster speaks: the computer. But where are its words coming from? Is the wisdom on its cold lips our own, merely repeated at our request? Or is it something else speaking? --A voice we have always dreamed of hearing?" from the The Successor to Science Marjorie Cadille, March 2076 'Permanence', Karl's newest born after 'Ventus', came out in 2002, has joined my list of must reads, and is up for an Aurora Award this year. But Karl has another newborn to keep his family busy right now. Paige Jody Nicole first saw daylight on March 17. Congratulations! How do I know this? Simple really, since the man keeps his own log, and not one afflicted by any false modesty ;). Oh. Marianne won't have to worry about English beyond her grasp. Not with 'Ventus' available now since last June in French. And sorry to hammer on so, but I do prefer the covers on the Denoël editions. ___________ "Irrelevant" footnote: Were this so, there are moments I could conceive of my wildcat's "fuel" as anger itself. Yet I know this not to be so; anger is but one expression of her essential fire, one I best understand in my ... dreams. Yes, I know. You're expecting mail, my love. But that's not how it's going to be. What I want, or is it "need", to say will be going up right here a while after lunch. When I woke up this morning, I realised that there are too many "links" for a letter. And that Marianne might be wiser than both of us. ;) 2:03:57 PM  link   your views? []

mardi 3 juin 2003

A foot back in the door At last! The book has arrived, on the "Ring and its symbols" (and a reminder that it's really worth taking time to shop around online). The book's been updated since first I devoured it in my late teens. More fuel related to my ongoing thoughts on archetypes... No blogging for a couple of days, due to a big mistake on my part when Marianne and I on Saturday took up a kind invitation from François, the wired wizard to join a few friends for a barbecue on his 8th-floor terrace on Saturday night. The conversation was scintillating, the company delightful, the storm steered mainly clear and the racket from the local bars where everybody else seemed to be watching football was such that it seemed the stadium itself was next door. The food was so good that I disobeyed orders. I ate no more than four strawberries, but plenty of salad. The consequences for two days, particularly Sunday, were nothing short of catastrophic. A full 22 minutes I spent on the loo at one point and that was just the worst time of many. My day of woe, also partly spent just stretched out to cope with the nausea, fortunately did no harm to Marianne. The test of file sharing devices pledged last time I was here was conducted, extremely thoroughly, by said child. "I'm becoming quite a good hacker," she proclaimed in the midst of a dozen downloads in hand or queued. "That's not hacking," I enlightened her. "What you are doing there, chérie, is piracy on the grand scale!" The outcome of these tests I will issue in the very near future. No movies to report on, since the cinema was absolutely out of the question. I have, however, finished 'Ventus'. I'm still wondering what I'm going to say about such an out of the ordinary book. Looking at enticing titles in waiting for the next read, guilt overcame me. It's nearly six months since my mum sent me what she describes as a "proper novel", and a serious prize-winner, at that for Christmas. So I decided I ought to try this instead. Hmm. Trying to, at least. A "tour de force" it might be, but for some reason any author has already put my back up from the outset when she sets a pertinently contemporary, semi-political plot in a fictional country. Because if the troubled nation in question is not Peru, then I'm a giraffe. In which case why be so damned coy? I'm not sure which flower to send my wildcat today. She's been distraught, with good reason to be so. So right now, it's just a long-distance kiss. And the sooner, darling, you're no longer sleeping alone, the better it will be... zzz Hours dealing with the social security people and other administrative tasks, including progress on the "welfare front" with my union hat on, gave the Mac plenty of time by itself to be thoroughly overhauled internally. The biggest chunk of it was still being "optimised" at around one in the morning, so I managed to get to sleep to the purr of an eMac. I know the latest heavy duty utilities for OS X are finally out, but the new Disk Warrior, currently landing in the mail boxes of friends, costs more than I plan to spend this month. So I'll carry on with the previous version, and with TechTool Pro 3.0.9, for a while longer. They both do a fine job (but I wouldn't recommend trying to optimise an OS X disk or partition with the latter. When I was done this morning, I was reminded of one little curiosity in the reboot (démarrage) panels. The "Classic" partition knows that I'm running Mac OS 9.2.2, both there and on the back-up one. But where on earth does the "Save" partition get the strange idea that there's something out there, or in here, called 9.1.7? The pictures tell the tale (in the fine print). Update: another reason not to upgrade utilities now, even the current ones are so slow. Elio kindly tried to open my door after lunch, since I'd slammed it on myself and found no keys when I reached for them to lock it properly. Where he failed, with both sets of spare keys just happening today to be inaccessible to me, the man who put in the new lock after a winter burglary succeeded. Same technique. Cost: just a bit more than that of the Disk Warrior and TT Pro upgrades combined. Life is fun ... for locksmiths. 2:20:48 PM  link   your views? []