samedi 26 février 2005

Togo? A cocorico cocktail teaser... ...for it's a rousing experience to coax a feisty lass out of sleep and back to husky-voiced active service duty several thousand kilometres away as soon in her morning as you dare, after you've used the first few seconds of your working day to learn what went down in the night, then come to need a hand. Especially when her great guy does the shoulder-shaking for you. And it's nice to discuss the temperature of the woman's shower before she takes a quick one you had no time for yourself. You close your eyes for an instant's wild trip on the light fantastic waveband before plunging into the deluge of news and reactions she'll help you through like a friend true as a rock, though you've just bitten hard into her well-deserved weekend. Everybody else had their eyes and ears turned to Rome. Not us. So Lauren's feller will have to forgive me -- both of us? -- the occasional foreplay that precedes any more hard slog on a dirt-poor small west African country, population around half that of Paris in and out of city walls. Last night's second round of "Who'll be leader?" has won me a 20-euro bet on how long it would take Togo's army and their chosen man to stand down. I confess I hadn't believed the tiny handful who forecast it would come as swiftly as during my few waking hours' absence from the Madhouse. Some of us have found the odd story of a regime change or two (AFP) in a country as "insignificant" in the global arena as Togo, which saw it ill-matched vs. a united front of African heavyweight leaders, more fascinating than the drawn-out agony of a very old pontificator. That's turned almost as embarrassing, in a sordid and wearying way, as the time it took the people's "great leaders" to die -- or be allowed to -- in the former Soviet Union. This is no place for the real stakes in the Togo drama, unless you're in a mood for a discourse on an alliance shaping up among Third World countries, Japan and Germany to tackle Washington in a cold war for permanent seats and voting rights on a UN Security Council reshaped to be relevant to the world of our time. What's going down in Togo -- and especially who gets to claim the credit for it should everybody decide it's duly "democratic" -- is a part of that bigger game. But even that interests and amuses me less than simply surviving long days of reporting on the power play by resorting to brief but wicked games on the 'phone with the correspondents on the ground. Truly the best politics are sexual ones, however relegated they may be to realms of pure fancy and even if they earn me trouble! I reckon we did a good job on Togo today. Should I be unkind enough to collect those 20 euros, they'll cover little presents for the others who shared the load ... or a bit of the 'phone bill if anyone whose job lies in cooking the books to everybody's taste is stupid enough to ask me just why costly calls are my preferred means of influencing friends and winning journalists happy and brave to the warm side of the wire. "Use notes!" those with the mindsets of pocket calculators instruct us. "Service notes cost less." Yes. They do. And any "factory" -- from a hard-breaking news and analysis packaging service to a poultry-slicing line for plastic supermarket wrappers -- needs its service notes to keep all concerned right in the loop, thus I left one in my wake tonight for the next couple of days. Along with a vow to buy a very big bar of soap and spend Sunday washing the thing down my throat so the bubbles float clear across town from Montparnasse to Madhouse. Not a promise I'll keep. I guess this wraps an unholy trinity of blog entries delivering, at least in part, a hefty few kicks below the belts of the insecure, frighteningly earnest devotees of some crazy "new school" of journalism who consider themselves right at the cutting edge of the ancient trade. For theirs is a folly and a dangerous conviction which makes journalists miserable, thought-free slaves of the technology now at our fingertips. To dish out facts without sense to them, placing priorities always on speed and "beating the competition", to bludgeon a potential audience with "trunk stories" and a dozen "sidebars" branching out into more than anybody could ever want to know about anything, is as counter-productive and damaging as it's arduous. Worse, I've heard it said sometimes: "Oh well, we might have blown it on the trunk story, but" -- note of cheery uplift in the voice -- "we did well with some of the 'sidebars'." When I muck about with colleagues and friends on the 'phone, boosting morale as best may before setting them to work, it's knowing they're the people who'll be out the next day rubbing shoulders with that "competition", trying to grin down the ones with the knives: "Did nicely with the bio, didn't you? But your lot really screwed up the main story of the day." Back to my Quiet Revolution? Sure I am: in front-line defence of the old-timers, the really wise guys -- and a few women too -- who'll dare still to stick their necks on the block for the sake of their nose and gut feeling for a story, take their time to tell it the way somebody might really want to read it. Somebody who may be learning a place exists for the first time, maybe. Any modern-minded smart ass may bring the axe swinging down, hacking a comma here, ranting over a typo there, even turning out news by committee and consensus if it suits them, that's the way of things. But when one of the old fellers changes colour and fumes quietly on having a story "sub-edited to improve it" -- often to "simplify" it -- I know whose side I'm on and I'm sufficiently reckless to say so, loudly. It may be a strange thing, but look hard to the media and you'll often find the real QRs among those nearing the end of their allotted careers, along with the younger ones still ready listen to them. Anywhere in Africa, I find it harder and harder to stomach nonsense spouted by well-off westerners, however "seasoned" they may be, sent in by big Factories to a "patch" of their choosing, if they start downgrading the "local hires" and their work just as soon as they can on the grounds "they can't write proper English (or French or whatever) and don't know how to put a story together." I'd rather talk any day to the "locals", pretty sure that when push comes to shove at a weekend, they'll frequently be the ones staffing offices and with an ear to the ground, often as not my unsung heroes, while the visitors passing through for a four-year stint are off at the golf course, or, if you're lucky as an editor, "filing from home". They can. They're the ones with the technology, a training somebody has afforded to pay for, plus a small fortune being stashed on the side to buy a flat or a house when their boat gets called in. Equally often, they're the ones who ask for a byline on the story: "Oh, s/he just gave me bits and pieces, you know, the stuff from the street. I did the work. Actually." Angry generalisations? Of course, but it's been an angry-minded week all around and not just in the Factory -- just another week where I've had a lot of time for those with the jokes and a sense of distance and proportion, right in the thick of it. Some of those who get rather hotter under the collar go home to take it out on their spouses, but I prefer to let off any spare steam right here, since that way if you don't like it, you can skip it, while I can save the fun for the friends I can count on. As for the sex? Well, I do try to keep my voice down low enough to spare ears that don't like it while it lasts, since it's all sweet nothings, but I can't get enough of it once out of the Factory, especially in the shape of 'Curved Air'. And good heavens, they're still there! The recording quality of 'Live at the BBC,' first cut when I was also live at the BBC, may not always be what it could be, but Sonja Kristina has really been doing it for me these past few days with 'Woman on a One Night Stand' and 'Hot 'n' Bothered.' Between those shameless offerings, her way with a 'Midnight Wire' is a bend on the blues about as good as it gets, the lyrics red-hot right. I don't mind telling Lauren and anyone else that yes, I finally did get to a shop tonight in time to sort out the "Daddy, my computer's exploded" problem -- at outrageous cost. 105 euros for a mains socket adapter for a PowerBook?! It comes cheaper from Apple and they're thieves themselves for accessories ... but it was in stock. Back in the Métro, reeling as my bank manager soon will in turn, a great-looking girl took a long hit from my midnight-wired eyes and paid me the courtesy of eyeballing me right back in leisurely fashion, up and down, until she got off. Then I noticed the two lads opposite, football fresh and into half-drunk hilarity though I couldn't hear a word they were saying. Both were taking turns, legs wide sprawled like some guys do in the M, to clutch and rub their crotches as they laughed, so that if stripped of the jeans, they would have been masturbating in public -- merely unconscious of it. So I discreetly pressed the rewind button and midnight-wired them as well. Nobody else in the carriage seemed even to notice this remarkable preening display, apart from me, in an anthropological kind of way, and Sonja. Ah, "to soothe my fire across the midnight wire..." Don't tell Bernie, just get to see who's first to pick up a couple of iPods on your travels. It's unceasingly astonishing what you get to see -- and to do or say to strangers -- once you've got a head free of Togo and anything else of passing importance, wiped of all thought but for music. Be warned. Things change! Of course, should Bernie have the misfortune to stumble on this elegy, he can take any needed reassurance, Lauren, from the certainty that you're far from the only woman I mess with nowadays. Today, you were just singularly unfortunate. 11:55:47 PM  link   your views? []

vendredi 25 février 2005

Six words, just one way A handful of people got a kick out of my last entry, they say, which comes as a relief close to the end of a working week in what can only be called -- and has by pairs of lips other than my own -- a Madhouse, no mere Factory. It won't stay this way for long -- nothing does -- but while insanity prevails among enough people temporarily to take the upper hand, all the rest of us can do is channel anger at it into laughter when we can. I can't be sparing when jokes are banned, as some would almost prefer. Nor when people who seem a little ... hmm, close to the edge, insult the ability of veteran journalists to understand "modern agency journalism" because they can turn out a good story and swap views on the world's absurdities at the same time. It's hard for a nice fellow like me to be mean, but people give me practice. One or two friends don't appear to have realised that when they insistently 'phone, get no answer and leave no messages, this is usually because I'll take nothing but messages when I know who's calling and that their aim is simply to suck me a little bit drier -- for reassurance, comfort, consolation or whatever it might be -- when I have none to give. Experience teaches who almost invariably calls because they've something to share, often upbeat and amusing, and who does so often because they feel they "need" something when either it's sticking plaster or to be found only in themselves. One joy of modern tech is a telephone which warns you which it's likely to be before you pick up. This frees us to decide to talk to those who come to "cry wolf" -- or just "help" -- as a near-automatic reflex, made easier by no-dial, punch-button tech, only when we're really "there for you". Tonight I added a second book by my ever favourite writer to the "current reading" list on this page, having long listed 'Ursula's world' among "fantastic bookmarks" because she is. Fantastic. For most of my life, I've enjoyed reading and re-reading almost anything by Ursula K. Le Guin as a constant source of guidance, first-rate writing in a whole range of styles, and a wisdom she found early in her own career, which has matured without cease. I come later than most of her "fans", but with immense pleasure, to 'The Other Wind', now out in paperback for almost two years, and can only agree with 'gretelhallett', whose Amazon UK review states she "always felt that the issues raised at the end of the Quartet were too big and powerful to just be left where they were and Ursula Le Guin obviously realised that too". Gretel also says it's best to read the collection of 'Tales from Earthsea' first. Right again. This is no kid's stuff even if booksellers insist on classifying it there. No mere fantasy either, to be heaped on the ever-growing pile of such writing by escapists offering brief reliefs from the "real world" for others the same way inclined. At one point in this slim book, Le Guin tells of a fellow who "knew he had asked Tenar to come to Havnor not only to take counsel from her but because she was the mother that remained to him. He wanted that love, to give and be given it. The ruthless love that makes no allowances, no conditions. Tenar's eyes were grey, not dark, but she looked right through him with a piercing tenderness undeceived by anything he said or did." Now that passage struck right home, setting the atoms resonating in harmony to the core of my being. They are not words my own experience -- since I can write from nothing else -- has taught me, moreover, to be confined to relationships between mothers and sons, fathers and daughters... I can't predict what more the fellow will learn in a novel I've yet to finish, but if I know Ursula, by the time the tale's done, he may also find "wanting that love, to give and be given it" has no part in the tough task of living. Some of us seem simply to live lives, I guess, where one day we have no choice but to accept there's no other right way -- as both Tao and 'I Ching' would have it -- to turn or behave than to take just six of those words: "ruthless love: no allowances, no conditions." And to say, "Yup, it's that simple." Or that complicated! Whichever you prefer. I prefer it simple, since I've of late had reason to tell people it's all I've got left for them, take it or leave it. Bearing those six words in mind and heart, from a while before they struck my eye put so succinctly, has helped me begin to deal with a lifelong anger problem: the kind of anger I'd once hurl, for instance, at that 'phone, which still rings every half hour or so. Failing to pick it up would then have filled me with guilt! What if, just for instance, this was the real "I can't take any more" close-to-suicide call? Now it's just a mild nuisance to have to wipe eight calls, no message, off the home 'phone, and another eight calls, no message, off the mobile, which was switched yesterday on to silent anyway. I know when she's calling, as with others. It vibrates. There's no way I can teach her and others like her it's pointless trying to tap into me this way when all the odds are that she wants one of around three or four things from me today which I've dispensed in the past, to the best of my ability, for so long and at such cost she's been trained to take it for granted. Thing is, "you don't always get what you want", however desperately you may feel the need of the hour. Nobody can teach anybody this because, one day or another, if we're lucky enough to live that long or hurt that bad, we wind up with no choice but to learn there's only one person with all the resources to get us through a day to the next: ourselves. Am I being ruthless with her? Undoubtedly. I feel no shame in it any more and will simply bury the phone under a cushion if she persists once I'm ready for bed, knowing a hard day lies ahead. Today, I have "been there" for enough people as it is. Tomorrow, it will be the same, with other people, other difficulties. As for her problems, almost certainly a variation on themes already tackled countless times, well I'll perhaps be ready for more come my weekend. Not before. Tonight there are "no allowances" for her, because I feel to my core that what Ursula also means is that a time has to come when we stop taking people on the "conditions" they've become too accustomed to choosing themselves, rather than living with and accepting my need, your own need, to resource yourself in yourself, the better to be ready for others again and more often with a laugh than a sob. I'm uncertain about the "wanting". Or the "need". We all have them. But I'm sure that love -- however ruthless -- is about "give and take" and learning how to do this with real freedom based on a respect for oneself, because if you've got no respect for yourself, then how much can you really have for others? So if anybody reads these words and gets "a lesson" from them, then I've really taught nothing. All it means is that you've read them, you may agree with them, and if you do, it's because you agree with what you've found for yourself, by experience. They resonate with what you've got, no more, no less, much as it happened to me, reading 'The Other Wind'. Solitude and loneliness can be almost unbearably horrible, true. Being unable to live with them is worse still. I only know because my life took me so far down that road and into myself for so long that when it was done and what I am was no longer of much interest, it became relatively easy to turn elsewhere, free to choose a fresh wind. 11:12:04 PM  link   your views? []

jeudi 24 février 2005

Hell's bells, it's chilly round here A decent snowfall in Paris looks just fine. Unless you have to set foot outside, that is, before the sandman gets to streets where morning traffic is fast and murderous as ever while slippery slush means you dice with the rest of your life each time you have to cross the road. This has become a winter where I fail to understand why the Métro authorities haven't opened the tube stations as shelters for the poor devils who have no indoors to stay warm in at night like they did in the mid-80s, the last time I can remember such gruesome weather. I got mail from a mate whose (physical) balance is such that venturing outdoors can be risky even in more clement times: "Did anybody notice how many times George Dubya used the word 'must' in his Brussels speech? I lost count," he informs me. "If that is diplomacy, as my RSM would say, then my prick's a bloater. "Cheers." If you're a regular visitor to this erratic log, one guess who sent that succinct comment. Can't say I did notice. I've almost zero interest in the European visit keeping many colleagues busy, apart from an absurd and fleeting thought that maybe he's to be blamed for grotty skies and killer pavements along with everything else I tend to lay at the door of the White House when I give Bush any credit for anything. But Heli's making the most of it. While this is no surprise, I reckon anybody who can still put so much heart into trying to keep track of such things the way they are deserves encouragement. She's decided a prime qualification for being a US president is "the willingness to bomb" ... to kingdom come ('Heaven and Hell'). I'm happier keeping tabs on what's going down in Nairobi, where Kenya's deputy environment minister Wangari Maathai, who won a Nobel prize last year for planting trees and other wise exercises in saving the world rather than making it worse, has suggested her country "ban plastic bags" (BBC), an example set by Ireland and, I'm told, Taiwan. Maathai was talking at a UN Environment Programme (Flash site) annual gathering which will -- "hope springs eternal"... -- mean that by the weekend the African cogs in the Factory machine may have something of lasting interest to report as good news. Africa has begun the year buzzing with international forums aimed at making the planet a more sensible place to live. However, it takes some digging through the endless ephemera of year-in, year-out politics to see it's there, so it strikes me a good part of my editorial job right now involves handing out all encouragement I can to fellow journalists around the continent busy with the spades, keeping them in touch with one another. What these people and all those they talk to are doing rarely makes headlines, that's for sure, but the long-term impact of their work will be remembered long after Bush is just another bore for almost anybody but historians. At the weekend, someone who knows me well told me she reckons I've permanently switched on to "African time", as she put it. Maybe she's right at that; I do my best to keep it out of the daily business of meeting deadlines and giving tremendous importance to so-called "news events" I know perfectly well to be totally trivial. That, unfortunately, is the name of the game these days... The Kid's mum is more excited about an exhibition about Inuit culture to be seen until March 27 at the Musée de l'Homme and she's right. A well illustrated page on Inuit shamanism (French only), part of the show at the national museum of humankind, tells me this is one event worth a closer look. The point, said Catherine, is how an environment as hostile as the one people we once called "eskimos" live in hones people's relationship with the "natural world" and its seasons, bringing out a harmony we've all but lost in our cities. If forced to choose, I'd opt for a few years among the Navajo, being more inclined to take intense heat for a challenge, rather than the cold, but either way, the woman's right. I've no more desire to go "back to nature" and renounce modern comforts than to throw away all the plastic bags thrust at me everywhere I go. One good reason for having a plastic bag is that in it, I can keep daily yoghurt supplies inside the other bag I use for reading material. This minimises the damage when one of the yoghurt pots blows its top in the Métro. But while keeping my eyes and ears wide open for more signs of the "quiet revolution" that's now obviously -- to me, anyway -- the theme of my slowly evolving screenplay, the word "primitive" is one which has almost dropped out of my vocabulary. Unless, of course, I take any more notice than absolutely necessary of our current guest from the other side of the Atlantic and the kind of "thinking" he doses out, to be turned into "urgents" and headline news by my less fortunate colleagues who have to make a fuss about him. When it comes to a lack of harmony, the more I hear it, the more I believe the AFP "bell" for a news story somebody considers important was invented by a person whose talent for aural torture is -- well, almost -- on a par with that of former Nazis whose war crimes were quietly forgotten in exchange for the scientific knowledge put to new uses by the United States and other countries after World War II. How it is in other newsrooms around the world, I'd rather not hear. Not that it matters. The man will be going home soon enough and life in the European cogs of the Factory will return to normal, whatever that means. I must be getting old, if that's what comes of finding most of the important lessons for the future are to be found as long ago as anybody anywhere can remember any more. While waiting as patiently as possible for the sun to come back out, here's keeping out the cold with Kathryn's kind of toast, an ancient one indeed, to life. Ever mindful, just slow down, she suggests, and drink about it. 12:04:56 AM  link   your views? []

mardi 8 février 2005

Evangelism, technically speaking Entry edited the better to illustrate it. Having been insulted, an IE browser on a Windows machine stubbornly refused to render its Firefox rival as required. I have to force it to surrender. I'd like to avoid it. I try to avoid it. I can't avoid it. I wish when the final disaster strikes and the time comes to buy a new computer, more people would see sense, spend that little bit extra required and get a nice friendly Mac, mini or otherwise. So still I suggest they do this. Very occasionally, somebody listens and does. A few delight me by getting fed up, buying a PC, getting even crosser with that and returning to the fold of the five percent (or whatever it is these days). Usually they were only fed up because, like the Kid, they never read the manual, don't realise the word 'Help' in most programmes means what it says, and waste prodigious amounts of time trying to prove they're smarter than their computers. They are, of course, but haven't realised computers are so much more stupid than them they need to be told exactly what to do, which it's easy to learn. Computers also don't lose their tempers and can be patiently stupid until they go wonky for ever. Should you believe this woman was caught at a critical juncture down at the copshop in a bedtime fairy tale for toddlers, rest assured that all resemblance to Sharon Stone is probably accidental. To buy the cultural artefacts, from Apple or elsewhere, I need these days may lead to a spot of bother for my bank manager. As a backup measure to help him out, I've planned a little job involving friends and a water pistol in minute detail, where the lady would drive the getaway car. However, my basic instinct is to make the poor man happy. So a friend will come and see the fellow with me. When he raises delicate subjects in our chit-chat, her easy task will be to have him see things in a new light, less or more than shown here, until we are done with the paperwork. Then he can have a nice lunch. Either way, if I'm later run over by a bus, it'll his problem, not mine. I wasted time being the blind leading the blinder for a friend unable to go on writing up a life of high drama and wild flings with men, which has so far been a wee bit messy, to put it kindly. She must get on with this book because though she complains it's "fucking hard work", parts she has read to me are well written and riddled with original insights and images. She was stuck because it had "gone". So she said. I knew it hadn't because she still had "something" on her computer and simply couldn't get at it. I have to use Windows at work, but seem unable to sort out the most elementary problems as a 'phone hotline for someone faced with such problems on a Windows PC. That word "backup" has never been part of my friend's vocabulary, in more senses than one. To her credit, she was fairly calm after four days of vanished book when I'd have been climbing up more than the walls, but insisted she needed what was done to get on. When my imagination ran out of ways to turn geek-speak notions into language she could understand and both our phone bills were too big, I was hugely relieved she decided to talk about sex. Macs only come into it because if my friend had one, her dilemma would have been sorted out in a jiffy and we could have started the far more amusing bit of our chat quickly. "So, please accept my apologies if I sound like an advertisement, but I love telling people about crap that works." Me too. Kate did about Outlook Spam Filter at Electric Venom and seems much happier with her Inbox. I'm paid up to Eudora and very happy with its way of cutting the crap and rewarding me with carrots for peppering my mails with foul language. It's to cut more crap that this entry is adorned with a picture of Firefox. This is for another friend and anybody else suitable who fancies me it. It doesn't matter if the text is almost illegible in the snap, dear, since all you need to see is those "tabs" across the top of the browser, ideal for quick-jump research, the "toolbar" that you can customise just how you like in a few minutes and the general look of the beast. For e-mail, you might take a look at Thunderbird, also free, from the same people and worth the raves going around, though I'll give it a whirl myself and then tell you just what I make of it. Both of them work just fine on Windows, Macs and the rest of it. Your life will become easier overnight. Then we too can spend more time talking about sex. Or not talking about it, if that's more entertaining for you. If anybody else reading this wonders what happened to the book, well, a tech in town gave it back to my other friend today and she's even learned how to back it up! I doubt very much that the technical fellow was allowed to read any, because it's full of sex, scarcely coy in the details, sometimes poetic ... and hilarious. This last aspect of the achievement is a view I've long held but kept to myself rather than telling its author, who preferred to believe she's writing a tragedy about Love and a very personal series of misadventures when walloped by the Big L. She needed so much encouragement to pursue the effort one day that I staked all on sharing the whole truth and told her it's so damned funny and about life as lots of people know and enjoy reading about it that her story will probably take the roof off the best-seller list in less than a week. As it is, she has a talent for taking the lid off men's minds. She was too distant to kick me, so instead decided to be speechless for a moment or two, realise she doesn't yet know enough about how space and time work to make the instant displacement required to give me a heck of a thump and then take her clothes off to make me well again, and took the appalling news far better than expected. So for the sake of us all, I hope while I've been doing a spot of evangelism, she's been getting on with her in-depth exploration of guilt, painful memories, jealousy and almost unspeakably delightful times for our general edification and benefit. "Cavewomen" was taken at India's Ellora temples by Rhymer Rigby, who informs us it's "an abberation and the puerile smut you've come to expect will return shortly". I strongly recommend his corner of the net to everybody after great pix and an entertaining read: "It has often occurred to me that, with eight arms, the human capacity for pleasure would be almost limitless." Quite. Rhymer took his freelance skills to India's Ellora caves many years after I did. This link and other pix came as a relief to find the old ways are still thriving. Why Ellora? The other night a woman and me were chomping away cheerfully in an Indian restaurant. She was too absorbed in what a very odd couple there were doing to notice that my own attention was at that moment almost totally devoted to the place her blouse stopped and her breasts began and other fine art of a related nature. She couldn't figure out a satisfactory answer to her question about the couple. It occurred to me she might if we did some kundalini yoga on the table while the manager and waiters did a suitable lingam and yoni dance around us and suggested everyone have some fun. So we did and soon she knew all she wanted about the strange pair she was engrossed in. Never the mind the mess and the food since they helped and such occasions need a little spice. It merely happened in another dimension. The Indian sculpture picture that accompanies a fuller description of what went on there is one you can run away and find on the Net yourselves because while there are many of them, maybe they're not for the children. Some people say "it's rude to stare." Can't say it worries me, most of my friends or those women at Ellora. 1:10:52 AM  link   your views? []

mardi 1 février 2005

A share in cheap telecoms A variation on "synch games" (mentioned yesterday) I play with BJ -- all about music -- has got even sillier. Back when the Soviets wanted suitable subjects for experiments in cheap head-to-head communications between their top naval brass and nasty nuke subs, it was a good job we weren't on call... Persistent people press me to consider online chat again -- the answer remains "No", on the strength of past experience and current uses for my time -- or if I won't, at least to slash international 'phone bills with Skype, however you pronounce it. That's a better idea, mentioned here since: "Skype, the Global Internet Telephony Company™, today announced the availability of its feature-rich Skype for Mac OS X Version 1.0 and Skype for Linux Version 1.0 software applications, enabling high-quality voice calling via the Internet for multiple computer platforms" (PR release). "Feature-rich" it may be, but until somebody corrects me and what I've read about this latest wonder of the world, it's of little use if you've got a cable Net connection and there's no 'phone line plugged in. Anyway, I yak enough as it is. Very often, though, I mess with audio broadcasts. Now the "podcast" phenomenon's a craze and my Mac's long since fitted with Audion from Panic -- now free but discontinued -- and Audio Hijack Pro from Rogue Amoeba -- worth every cent, Glenn Fleishmann's 'How to Record a Podcast' (MacDevCenter) is helpful. Thanks guys, once again. Sharing a sink is cheaper still. Those who've heard Barry and me comparing notes in recent days no longer protest it's "scientifically impossible" since we simply do it and it works. Today, Papa Haydn was the main man: reunited for a day's toil, the pair of us had just been listening, obviously for no prior or pre-arranged reason or this wouldn't be blogged, to the 'Drumroll': Symphony No 103. I forgot to ask BJ whose performance he was into -- mine was conducted by Jane Glover, a fine one. While I'd visited Vivaldi too, BJ has just performed some, but not the same bits. The Haydn, however, was our third "direct hit" when we've played Music Synch at the Factory ... like others might chat about last night's film on telly. We don't know why and who cares much? Maybe not caring much is half the reason. Playing synch with music is more fun and certainly far less costly than it must have been with missiles. I'm just a layman who thoroughly enjoys the X-Files and is writing his own, so I have little idea how much credence to give this kind of stuff, but for people who are interested, here are a couple of places to check out: The defunct ParaScope's 'ParaDocs' offers to put "the (US) Government's Paranormal Secrets" at your fingertips", but for a price, so mind your brain and your purse. Other "para-parts" of the home site remain a free ride to the bizarre if you take a clean bill of health with you. Someone else -- identified only as "mpc00" without further exploration I can't be bothered to do tonight -- has heaped up a more accessible pile of research stuff at 'Government Mind Control', which interests me more than the alarmist intro to the links. One of these days, when I check out "mpc00", there'll be a 3:51 am knock on the door. Apparently people get almost used to those in some places though they don't like it, but getting rid of cold-call hard-sellers fast suits me better. I'm polite because trying to make some income by annoying people with 'phone calls about rubbish must be thankless and not very lucrative. If BJ and me get to do our thing with ideas and images and work out how, we might send the telecoms industry down the plughole, but neither of us have a head for serious business. My feelings about the day telepathy becomes routine are mixed: I'll want to know where the "off" switch is before getting too involved. 10:01:59 PM  link   your views? []