GUsundheit….
June 30, 2008
“You’re not bad, GU Books Blog,” the young dog said,
“But your tone has become rather light;
And some of your writers aren’t all that well-read;
Do you think, for a litblog, that’s right?”
“In the past,” GU Books Blog replied, “we were pleased
When our articles tickled the brain;
But now blogs about books on which people have sneezed
Will attract far more hits in the main.”
“Yet before,” said the pup, “you attracted a crowd;
Not all of us crusty old fogeys:
But now all I see are the proud unibrowed,
Just responding to blogs about bogies.”
“You are snobs!” cried the Books Blog, “elitist and picky!”
Besides which, you’re simply too few:
We’d rather draw millions like Facebook and wiki
Than expend any effort on you!”
“So it’s kids’ books and Kindles, celebrity fluff,
And a once-a-week pome for the weird:
Do you think,” said the young dog, “that’s really enough
For a site that was once so revered?”
“But today,” said the Books Blog, “who on earth reads?
You’re all browsers, not readers, and so
Our articles follow where everyman leads:
And he’s hardly the sharpest, y’know.”
“That’s apparent,” said pup, “from the comments he leaves,
And from him I expected no more;
Yet the guys who write comments at cynicalsteve’s
Are the creme de la creme and top drawer.”
“We do Hay,” sighed the Books Blog, “for day after day;
Intellectual blogging or what?!”
“What….” thought the pup, who recovered to say:
“I’ll agree it’s a step up from snot.”
“You’ve the chance,” pup concluded, “to be a great site,
To draw volume and class to your blog;
With a little more planning, and less of the trite,*
You’ll get more than one man and a doggerelist”….
*Now, now….
June 30, 2008 at 6:23 am
Excellent Father William parody, Steve and very pertinent.
June 30, 2008 at 9:23 am
Nice one, cs. It’s funny because it’s true.
June 30, 2008 at 10:02 am
Uncomfortable admiration. :-0
June 30, 2008 at 10:26 am
…………..
……………
June 30, 2008 at 10:56 am
For your latest, O Steve, my mind was agoggerel,
To see how it worked, its machinery, its coggerel;
If it was approved by Mishari’s black moggerel,
Or a puzzle enmeshed in a deep wordful foggerel;
And now it’s appeared, it is prudent yet frolic,
Both sober, yet tuned to a mind alcoholic.
It containeth some acid, both nitrous and folic,
And rightly remarks that GUs full of bollicks.
June 30, 2008 at 2:04 pm
freep is revealed as a monarchist. I think we should chop his head off…in a caring, loving ‘it’s for his own good’ sort of way, natch..nothing personal, freep. I’m sure it’s a very nice head.
June 30, 2008 at 2:16 pm
To be fair, I thought there were strong indications that GU had been getting back on track recently….at least until *that* blog which got up my nose….I *hope* it’s just a blip….a fair few other bloggers btw had a pop at that one; even Juliet….
****
Thanks for the verse response, freepoland – and after your “Elizabeth rrrrrRRRrrr” I’ll not look at our behatted ruler in quite the same light again….
June 30, 2008 at 2:49 pm
who’s Juliet?
June 30, 2008 at 2:55 pm
Juliet’s blog “Musings from a Muddy Island” is linked in the blogroll >^ She blogs about allsorts of arty things & her site is always a good read….
June 30, 2008 at 3:13 pm
Tis true I’m a toady to our monarch so pure;
She allows me to cart off the royal manure
When I trail round at Ascot with shovel & bucket.
For to roses there’s nothing so good as her muck, it
Makes blooms fine and regal.
Oh bugger and fuck it!
I long for the day when her comely head’s bowed
On the block in Whitehall, like her ancestor proud,
And it falls to the axe and she’s wrapped in a shroud,
And our coins bear a countenance humble, not loud
With the wealth of a dynasty bandits endowed …
Otherwise, I’m quite patriotic. If there has to be a state, there may need to be a head; and we the citizens may reasonable ask for it to be removed occasionally, with thoughtful force. It’s been a long time since 1649. And I am rarely so pleased as when threatened with polite, caring and impersonal decapitation.
(I was peeved at the adolescent piece on books and nose debris, cs; I am not sure what licence should be permitted to children on a blog. But it was worse than usual, and deserved contumely. Yet so much blog traffic is measured by quantity. Royal manure is at least scarce and can claim quality)
June 30, 2008 at 3:32 pm
As I general rule, the very best (that is, the most interesting to me) GU blogs tend to get something between 3 and 10 comments. Honourable exceptions are Carol, of course, and Sam, who does some very good stuff while still attracting traffic.
I like to think that the Poster Poems blogs are reasonably well-written, but they’re not designed to be thought-provoking, really.
June 30, 2008 at 3:49 pm
I firmly believe that articles should attract the exact number of comments they need to attract.
I know this is all hypothetical but surely laying down ideal number of comments for an article brings about the very focus-group orientated, calculated work that we’re all up in arms about when it appears?
June 30, 2008 at 4:37 pm
The ones I generally find most interesting certainly tend to attract fewer comments (poster poems and PotW aside)….but then I find myself unable to comment on those interesting ones, mainly through ignorance, but also from a desire not to sully the serious threads….there’s a balance to be found, and I can imagine it exercises the eds at GU – I’m sure they’d be as unhappy with 100% erudite blogs attracting a handful of learned comments as they would be with wall-to-wall mucus regularly snaring 200+ unibrows….a bit of fine tuning ought to suffice….meanwhile the Telegraph Paper Tiger blog seems to have sorted out its gremlins, but still seems to have trouble attracting comments….of course blog visits are more important than comments to both papers, and we can’t see those….I hope Paper Tiger prospers as competition might shake GU out of complacent mode….although GU is still pretty good – if it was truly terrible we’d have all left by now….
June 30, 2008 at 4:51 pm
Billy: one good response is often enough, but if there’s a bright conversation, sometimes that’s worth following, even if the original blog is dull and wet. The weather or some loathsome sport may affect comment numbers.
If you look at the mainpage cif responses, they are fairly predictable as to numbers; Simon Jenkins clocks up 50 – 100, Toynbee 100 or more, anything Palestinian goes up to 200 etc. And by now, many of those have become a bit flat because of two things – the new format, which is slow to load and fussy, and the lack of new blood among commenters. On the other hand, there are really just too many GU blogs, and lots of them attract no comment, not always deservedly.
Yours is different, Bill; it is an invitation to practice, rather than comment (or, as you say, provoke thought). And its life needs to be 5 – 7 days, rather than 24 hours. You attract singers as well as whingers. Some of us have bad voices, some are cuckoos, and some are sweet. And there seems to be a fair supply of new voices, which is the needful thing. Agree about Sam; he has the right touch, like Carol.
June 30, 2008 at 7:49 pm
freep, I do realize that like every true-born Englishman, you yearn for a peerage. I shall be sure to bring your work to Betty’s, (as she insists I call her), attention. Would Earl of Warwaw suit?
It seems that the puerile toss spouted by the likes of Oliver Kamm and Chav Newcastle-Broon get an enormous response because idiots like me are easily provoked. I often make no comment on the most interesting threads because I either know nothing about the subject or I have nothing to add that’s worth the posting.
One of the reasons that Sam is good is, I think, because he clearly loves books and expresses his love and pleasure in them in an engaging and thoughtful fashion. That’ll win me over every time.
June 30, 2008 at 8:09 pm
“That’s apparent,” said pup, “from the comments he leaves,
And from him I expected no more;
Yet the guys who write comments at cynicalsteve’s
Are the creme de la creme and top drawer.”
Entirely agree with doggerel:=
Just reading (is becoming a luxury) a curious article on professional movie reviewers not being invited to pre-views, for distributors are scared of the bad reviews that could kill a film on the spot. You know, replace book for movie, and! (?=
What up from snot, liked that one too.
June 30, 2008 at 8:19 pm
I joined and stayed at BM´s blog because it is an invitation to practice. Once it is over, (any plans?) will have to find other site. And it was good to combine it with doggerel´s. “Bad” voices can be improved by the choir, emulation, so on. So many strengths.
June 30, 2008 at 8:33 pm
freep,
you realize, don’t you, that a couple more of decapitation poems, a couple more links and you could be charged as a terrorist suspect?
And don’t we find this amazing and shocking?
June 30, 2008 at 8:37 pm
“Yet the guys who write comments at cynicalsteve’s
Are the creme de la creme and top drawer.”
“Entirely agree with doggerel”
Oh come on rope, that’s the most self-congratulatory bullshit. If it appeared on any GU piece in respect of that site it’d be shot down in flames. But here it’s allowed stand cause some like to have their furs stroked? Creme de la creamed.
Sorry to come out so negative steve, maybe if you’d decided between blasting the gruan and praising yourself you could have got something good out of it. As it is, it looks like the young dog is only too happy to lick its own bollox.
June 30, 2008 at 9:07 pm
fmk – ouch! Fair point though….as usual I wrote the first two lines of that stanza, then looked for the rhymes and worked the second two lines around that….I suppose I was too easily satisfied with the leaves/steve’s rhyme rather than sticking to the brief….of course it wasn’t meant too seriously….but I can see how it jars….here’s a quick alternative:
“That’s apparent, said pup, “from the comments he makes,
And from him I expected no more;
(Although, frankly, my own crowd are insincere fakes;
Sycophants to a man – what a bore.” )
****
I may well change the original if I think of an alternative….and harsh criticism is always welcome….
June 30, 2008 at 9:40 pm
I did, of course, like A WedgBenn, give up the peerage so as to fight political battles from the clay barricades. And, of course, to lay a trail away from my sickening closeness to the Windsors. To pose as a regicide was ever an effective counter-espionage ploy. Two clicks to the Tower? Hm. The ravens eat from my hand.
Mishari, you may be a prince, but I urge you to think on the eternal aristocracy of The Common Men Who Find Rhymes in Their Sheds. Which is complicated by the fact that George IV potted and poetised under cover of lustful liaisons.
[Seem to have caught the sun].
June 30, 2008 at 10:33 pm
freep, would that be the same Common Men that see the world in a grain of sand, heaven in a wild flower, infinity in the palm of their hands, and eternity in an hour?
Fuck ‘em. Bastards needs their eyes examined.
I’s true. the creme de la creme do post here…except for fmk, of course, who invariably lowers the tone. Riff-raff. Never mind. We’ll get him a peerage. That’ll raise his game.
June 30, 2008 at 10:54 pm
“so as to fight political battles from the clay barricades.”
You’re right of course, what is the point in…joining clay barricades? I am but truly shocked sometimes at this country’s antics, Has anyone read about the lyrical terrorist girl, who wasn’t such, but was convicted, then sentence suspended and finally cleared of all, very recently? She was denounced by her own work colleagues, for writing a couple of poems. Some voices stood up for freedom of speech, i mean don’t join any barricades, why should you, but, , well don’t get all flushed about poor Salman Rushdie…if you’re here, you are also there.
Apologies anyway in case they are needed.
June 30, 2008 at 11:35 pm
Did you read the lyrics in question, ropeofsand? In my view their abysmal quality demanded a long sentence.
July 1, 2008 at 12:49 am
No i didn’t read the lyrics, because they were not recommended))as recommendable, I did read Midnight’s Children though, in a translation.
July 1, 2008 at 12:52 am
i’ve got a copy of The Jewish Rhyming Dictionary. here’s a brief excerpt:
mahjong: – schmahjong
Mahlerian: – schmahlerian
mahmudi: – schmahmudi
mahogany: – schmahogany
Mahomet: – schmahomet
mahout: – schmahout
Particularly good for derisive verse, I find.
btw
fmk:
not available on your average internet, but i just discovered a paper that Zizek wrote on Laibach. I’ve downloaded it to read later (or, as Zizek would have, so that my hard drive can read it on my behalf while I just obtain gratification from knowing it’s there.)
That Evers article annoyed me (again), but I thought this time I’d avoid commenting on it. Like yeah, there was Murakami, and like then people weren’t afraid of foreign lit no more and they like went out and bought Ruiz Zafon too: – like, nothing like this has ever happened in the course of western civilisation, isn’t it.
July 1, 2008 at 2:05 am
perhaps it’s too late to go on, but, hang it all, Zarathustra!, look it wasn’t about the quality of the verses, Melton, but about the fact, that you shouldn’t use poems (even if poorly written) as evidence against a person. And don’t tell me you approve of the measure, of course that is the politically correct thing to say nowadays, but really no further comment is necessary.
~~~~~~~~~
fmk: i thought doggerel’s paragraph about the “creme de la creme” was well placed, mid-piece, and provided some sort of balance.
July 1, 2008 at 3:14 am
No, no…mowbray’s right. Her apalling verse merited a prison sentence at least. I mean, what’s the use of building bloody prisons if you’re not going to use them? There are far too many soi-disant ‘artists’ running around loose, doing untold damage to impressionable young minds. String ‘em up. They’ll think it’s a performance piece, the saps.
Now if we could only get Andrew Motion onto a Mississippi chain gang..it would, I suspect, improve him out of all recognition.
July 1, 2008 at 3:56 am
Come the revolution….
****
Meanwhile, this is fascinating:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2008/jul/01/animalbehaviour.wildlife
July 1, 2008 at 7:21 am
…..By the beginning of February the chameleons had already started to show signs of old age, becoming slower, losing weight and occasionally falling out of trees because their grip had weakened. Some were found dead on the forest floor from unknown causes..
Found poetry. Thanks, Steve. Finding this obviously gave you a sleepless night. On my next woodland walk I will glance upwards more often, fearing the decline and fall of small, prematurely senile, inconstant lizards. Maybe they change colour as they fall.
July 1, 2008 at 9:33 am
On the whole GU comment thing, I just thought I’d check the first week of July last year. There were 21 articles posted and they attracted this many comments:
26
38
11
33
5
21
30
7
35
119
13
45
220
13
18
21
7
19
6
17
10
The two biggies were What’s a ‘perfect line’ in poetry? by Nick Seddon and Why re-reading is a crime by Jack Thurston. As it happens, I had an article (on poetry readings, 38 comments) and the PotW, picked by Sarah, was by Rochester! It got 21 comments, I suspect this week’s might get more.
It seems to me from this non-scientific sample that not much has changed really. Maybe we’re just victims of the “it was better in my day, sonny” syndrome?
July 1, 2008 at 11:04 am
didn’t we have an article on spam lit before, by the redoubtable Myers himself?
July 1, 2008 at 11:49 am
Billy: have you checked for percentage of comments posted by Des / OvidYeats / Practicing etc? Was it better in them days?
July 1, 2008 at 11:49 am
“onto a Mississippi chain gang..”
yes, a few heads…Gordon is a goner, even the Daily express or Mail is asking for his head, before November isn’t?
With due respect, and apologies again, decapitation has always been, on its own rights, a literary hot spot (St. John the baptist, Oscar Wilde…
doggerel,
i meant your “damned” paragraph provides symmetry. Semantically, in a framework of derision.
July 1, 2008 at 11:53 am
“have you checked for percentage of comments posted by Des / OvidYeats / Practicing etc? Was it better in them days?”
It’s better these days. In that he’s being stomped out. Twelve months ago he was all over the place like a rash. Which means the numbers Billy’s quoted are quite inflated by the Des-effect.
July 1, 2008 at 11:59 am
‘It seems to me from this non-scientific sample that not much has changed really. Maybe we’re just victims of the “it was better in my day, sonny” syndrome?’
With an exploding medium — blogging — surely it’s the trend line that matters? Static numbers in these circumstances are a pretty poor showing, don’t you think?
And I do agree with clever GSundheit’s suggestion that the site is magnetising far fewer _new_ bloggers than it was last spring and summer (except for the miserable week and a half of Hay).
. . . Also, so many memorable screen names from faraway places have disappeared. Eg., off the top of my head, @Possible from Seouls and @maninthecornershop from Osaka. Yes I realise that they could be posting in new fancy dress, now.
Something else that GU didn’t have at this time last year was . . . er, optical illusions. I mean, the number of posts bearing absolutely no relation to the the number of bloggers — on certain threads. Particularly pome-nerd threads. . . No, I’ve absolutely no idea why I think so . . .
July 1, 2008 at 12:02 pm
Sorry, GUsundheit . . . achoo!
July 1, 2008 at 12:29 pm
Unscientific research part two: OvidYeats’ contributions to comments in the same week last year
2
8
3
0
1
1
6
1
9
12
2
0
2
0
0
2
0
0
0
3
roughly 5.65% of the total. There’s a myth that needs dispelling here. Des wasn’t really all over the place, it was length and not numbers that made it seem that way.
I suspect that there are no more sockpuppets now than there ever were, but as WN7 persists in innuendos without actually naming names, who knows?
July 1, 2008 at 1:49 pm
Comparing the week above with the week beflre last (last full week with all comments closed)
2007: 21 articles with 814 comments
2008: 15 articles with 835 comments
Overall increase of 2.6% (and allow for OY’s 5.65% lost)
Comments per article 2007: 38.76
Comments per article 2008: 55.67
an increase of 43.62%, which I suspect is significant because, within limits, I think there is a cumulative effect of having more articles per week for people to comment on.
Not that this proves anything, but it’s not a bad idea to place some raw numbers beside our subjective feelings.
July 1, 2008 at 1:51 pm
I don’t care about your stats. I shall continue to believe that there was once a Golden Age and that every day we are moving further away from it.
July 1, 2008 at 1:54 pm
Oh, me too. I’ll just know I’m kidding myself at the same time.
July 1, 2008 at 2:05 pm
No, no, Billy…there really was a Golden Age. I remember it well. Every working man wrote sonnets in his luch hour, beer was -1p a pint, it was sunny all day every day and I could run the mile in 3 minutes flat. Those were the days. Et in arcadia ego, chum.
July 1, 2008 at 2:17 pm
Soon as the deathless Gods were born, and Man,
A mortal Race, with Voice edu’d, began,
The heav’nly Pow’rs from High their work behold,
And the first Age they stile an Age of Gold.
Men spent a Life like Gods in Saturn’s Reign,
Nor felt their Mind a Care, nor Body Pain;
The fields, as yet untill’d, their Fruits afford,
And fill a sumptuous, and enevy’d, Board.
From Labour free they all Delights enjoy,
Nor could the Ills of Time and Peace destroy;
They dy, or rather seem to dy, they seem
From hence transporting in a pleasing Dream.
Thus, crown’d with Happyness their ev’ry Day,
Serer, and joyful, pass’d their Lives away.
But how many comments did it get?
July 1, 2008 at 2:55 pm
Never mind the number, Billy, feel the length. I remember a year or more ago glancing at the books blogs and wondering why many posters had so much to say. And when I read a few (you know the suspects – there were / are 4 or 5 of them besides Des), I was not enlightened and so stayed away for a long time.
How about an age of lead? But please don’t go back with your tape measure; some measuring just breaks the heart. The numbers stats were interesting, and I guess you may be angling for the post of Assistant Director, Quality Assurance and Customer Services (Traffic Supervision), Literature and Creative Urgings Subsector.
July 1, 2008 at 3:31 pm
At least three of the blogs from two weeks ago in Billy’s survey were featured on & directly linked from the G front page – and those were 3 of the top 4 in terms of comments (Billy’s was the other) and not especially “booky” topics (nothing wrong with that btw; except that pure “booky” topics rarely get featured there.) Many of the commenters on those sites were recognisable names from Cif but as far as I could tell, few made the lateral move to other blogs on the books site.
Purely subjectively, comparing the two weeks, I found more that interested me in the older selection – I certainly commented on more threads that week (perhaps contributing to freepolands then reluctance to comment.) Perhaps it was simply due to the greater number of blogs then. And certainly that 2007 week had “fluff” pieces – although I’d still argue that Thurston’s rereading blog was a class above Chas’s soiled books, even though both attracted 200+ comments.
I don’t see it as a golden age, but for some reason I enjoyed those blogs more then, perhaps because I was relatively new to commenting then & still in the first flush of excitement.
July 1, 2008 at 3:47 pm
Steve – your contributions, however many and however foolish, never needed the attention of seven maids with seven mops, and I don’t recall you being self-indulgent. I am just amazed at how much some posters must be paying their secretaries. Des probably bought up spare capacity from the Ministry of Defence typing pool.
July 1, 2008 at 3:51 pm
freep: I know numbers can be a bore, but they do ask us to see our impressions in a wider context. Actually, I’m at one with our host here: @I don’t see it as a golden age, but for some reason I enjoyed those blogs more then, perhaps because I was relatively new to commenting then & still in the first flush of excitement.”
July 1, 2008 at 3:57 pm
The spam poetry piece has indeed been done before – as Gallix acknowledges….not sure what’s changed between then & now….oddly, my “street sign” poetry never took off in the same way:
“I have already spotted some contenders:
“The Magic Roundabout
Ring Road
Cirencester
A4289″
In this delicate piece, it’s the wistful nature of the “4″ in the last line that turns what would otherwise be merely a piece of useful information for motorists into art….and yet most people would, believe it or not, fail to see it for what it is! Another example:
“Please
drive slowly”
Awesome! The line break in *just* the right place….truly genius. But my favourite (so far….) has to be the majestic:
“!
Traffic
queues
likely”
Don’t you just love the witty *pre-punctuation* ? Any fool could have read the ! at the end, but to read it at the beginning has one laughing before the poem even begins.”
(From a comment on a TO’N blog; I’m not averse to a bit of self-indulgence….)
July 1, 2008 at 4:07 pm
How about some self-referential found poetry?
I’m not a-
verse to
a bit
of self
indulgence
July 1, 2008 at 4:08 pm
A positive result of the book blogs becoming less compulsive is that I’m back to reading as I did. Instead of hunching over a keyboard tapping away, checking this thread and that thread, this blog and that blog, I’ve resumed my old habits.
I stretch out on my divan under the pear tree in the garden, a pile of books close at hand, my concubines preparing my opium pipe, a plate of my favourite biscuits, (handmade from moonbeams and gossamer by nymphs and dryads on Mt Olympus), within easy reach, a crystal goblet of nectar by my side…Aye, it’s a man’s life in the world of books…
July 1, 2008 at 4:17 pm
………..and your nobler parts? Do they receive the attention needed?
Alas, here in the North we have to be content with committing to memory another page of Calvin’s Institutes, and averting our eyes from the dugs of mothering dogs lest we are inflamed. Pass the Irn Bru, Seth, and let us once more enumerate the blessings vouchsafed to culvert-dwellers. One, we have hessian and lentils sufficient for the week …
July 1, 2008 at 4:19 pm
….self-referential found poetry….
I did wonder about commenting on Gallix’s piece to the effect that making found poetry from snippets of GU comments might be fun….
Never quite understood “found poetry” – I suspect it depends too much on the vocation of the reader: ie, computer people finding poetry in error messages; scientists seeing it in papers in learned journals; gardners in plant names. I’m not sure these things work outside of self-selected groups – they’re often just in-jokes.
July 1, 2008 at 4:41 pm
cs, wasn’t the Naming of Parts, ahem, partly what I suppose one would call ‘found poetry’? Segments of it seemed to approach what we call ‘found poetry’, I think.
freep, hessian and lentils doesn’t sound very appetising. Mind you, plenty of roughage to grant ease to the costive, a common complaint oop north, or so I’m told…
July 1, 2008 at 4:43 pm
A Pedant Writes:
It’s the A429 which passes through Cirencester.
July 1, 2008 at 5:01 pm
MM – see pic about halfway down on this page, which must have been my original source:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Street_signs
July 1, 2008 at 5:06 pm
Mishari – I liked “The Naming of Parts” so much when Billy linked to it a while ago that I bookmarked it….couldn’t say though how much is found….either way, it reminds me of a character in (I think) book 7 of Powell’s Dance, who says something along the lines of “I thought it was just a matter of aiming the bloody thing and pulling the trigger, and then we’re given a bloody great thick book of instructions”….
July 1, 2008 at 9:21 pm
I’ve loved Reed’s Lessons of War since I first came across it some 30 years ago, (introduced to me, funnily enough, by a soldier friend, who said,’you’ll like this…’.
I meant found in the sense that Reed was using whole passages from the manual of rifle drill, which, as a soldier he would have been very familiar with, and using what one would not think of as poetic language in a poem. It works beautifully, too- the emphatic, imperative language of the drill contrasting with Reed’s own lyrical, mordant and tender words.
The language of the drill takes on a kind of lyricism itself and seems strangely natural in the poem, making it instantly memorable. I didn’t really mean ‘found in the ‘objet trouvee’ sense.
July 1, 2008 at 9:32 pm
It’s a great piece Mishari, and as you say it flows very smoothly & naturally.
Re the spamlit blog: one of the poet chappies has put up a list which are apparently search engine terms garnered from a blog….all well and good, but I see a similar list each time I check the stats here….and I gather there are books (”dictionaries” ) which contain lists of these “words”….must try looking in one of those sometime for some raw material….I’m amazed it had never occurred to me before….the things you learn from GU commenters….
July 1, 2008 at 10:17 pm
‘but they do ask us to see our impressions in a wider context.’
Ah! exactly, BM. But to be really boring about it, . . . if the impressions are statistical they must surely be weighed in a properly angled statistical context.
(see #36 above) Selling twelve glasses a day at your lemonade stand, just as you did in the same week last year, is pretty pathetic if (a) it’s hotter this summer, (b) your competitors are still taking lemon-squeezing lessons, and (c) you’ve lost customers who were confirmed citroholics.
I don’t believe that there was ever a Golden Age exactly, but GU has lost not a few of its sharpest commenters — some of whom returned for Sam’s Coetzee blog . . .. hallelujah! I’m thinking of OffClowns and mastershake, but we once had marioncandenza, Killigan, liberaldogooder and Caracucca too, and in the same threads – and those debates really did sing and dance.
A most curious change appears to have come over Sam, btw. How could he expect a declaration that the Swedes and Bookerites were off their heads in honouring JMC not to be met by an equal and opposite reaction? . . . He used to have the most wonderful sense of humour, but now appears only to like bloggers who doff their caps and stroke whatever position he takes, . . .
You are young, SamJordi, the wordnerd said,
But your skin’s turned appallingly thin . . .
July 1, 2008 at 10:35 pm
I suspect marioincandenza (aka seanmurraydublin) is still reading the blogs even if not commenting as I caught one of his comments on a GU football blog yesterday….perhaps he’s pining for moanerliza….
July 1, 2008 at 10:59 pm
Well, I hope he’s still reading — and not posting only because he’s writing his second novel. . . also, I wondered if he might have been CaptainSean on the ‘chicklit chappy’ blog the other day. . . Losing server locations beside sreen names has made that sort of guessing harder. If it had said ‘Dublin’ with Cap’n . . .
July 1, 2008 at 11:12 pm
I get this awful headmasterly urge whenever I see booky types on the sports blog (and there are many; you know who you are….) to post and chivvy them back to their rightful places….
July 1, 2008 at 11:48 pm
…perhaps a subject for a short essay, cs? The Role of Corporal Punishment in Literary Appreciation. There’s a very telling story about Lenin I read in someone or others memoirs of him, (Trotsky, perhaps?). Lenin said that he couldn’t listen to Beethoven’s last quartets because they made him want to weep and pat people on the head.
‘..and people should not be patted on the head! They should be struck! Forcefully!’, he concluded.
See? It’s for their own good…
July 1, 2008 at 11:54 pm
More effective, as I recall (and certainly more dreaded), was to make ‘em do six laps of the (muddy) sportsfield….
July 1, 2008 at 11:59 pm
But it’s nice sometimes to get away from the same old arguments on the literary pages and read them instead on the sports pages.
July 2, 2008 at 4:53 am
MM, you tricksy bugger. A Lyric, Some Music, A Hymn.
I stared at it in dull incomprehension for about 5 minutes until the penny dropped. Well done.
July 2, 2008 at 7:57 am
I’ll remind you that I started mu GU life on the sports blog!
July 2, 2008 at 8:13 am
Billy, you doubtless took your Juvenal seriously:
orandum est ut sit mens sana in corpore sano.
fortem posce animum mortis terrore carentem,
qui spatium uitae extremum inter munera ponat
naturae, qui ferre queat quoscumque labores,
nesciat irasci, cupiat nihil et potiores
Herculis aerumnas credat saeuosque labores
et uenere et cenis et pluma Sardanapalli.
monstro quod ipse tibi possis dare; semita certe
tranquillae per uirtutem patet unica uitae.
It is to be prayed that the mind be sound in a sound body.
Ask for a brave soul that lacks the fear of death,
which places the length of life last among nature’s blessings,
which is able to bear whatever kind of sufferings,
does not know anger, lusts for nothing and believes
the hardships and savage labors of Hercules better than
the satisfactions, feasts, and feather bed of an Eastern king.
I will reveal what you are able to give yourself;
For certain, the one footpath of a tranquil life lies through virtue.
-Satires X
July 2, 2008 at 9:46 am
No, mishari, it’s just more fun to watch sport on the telly than it is to watch bad adaptations of books. My playing days are long behind me. Even then, I favoured goalie and spinner because they generally entailed less running; nobody expected a spinner to be able to bat or field in those days.
July 2, 2008 at 10:28 am
Billy: I recall somewhere above that you had been an admirer of Derek Underwood, master of spin. I was at school with him, and I am pleased to report that he was an idle youth at school, and was kicked out at 15 because he preferred bowling to schoolwork. It was the kind of pretentious suburban grammar school that failed to recognise or nurture talent. For a spell he was the world’s greatest bowler. And was good at lounging.
July 2, 2008 at 12:14 pm
freep: Underwood is probably still the best medium pace spinner ever. I always wanted to be a pace bowler, in theory, but was far too lazy in practice.
July 2, 2008 at 2:22 pm
Billy – you introduced the Poster Poems blog by saying that at one time you taught EFL….and your wiki biog says that you taught in Eastbourne….I wonder if the two are related as we then have something in common: I briefly taught EFL in Eastbourne in the summer of 1983 for the ef school….
July 2, 2008 at 2:37 pm
Yep, Eastbourne School of English a few years after you. I also taught in Barcelona for a few years before that.
July 2, 2008 at 2:55 pm
Hi Billy
So how many years did you teach in Barcelona? News to me. How did you like the Eastbourne School of E.? My partner happened to teach EFL in Salamanca and Madrid around the 1990’s.
(I can’t see the point in numbers, statistics, etc… unmeasurable parameters are hanging from thin air.)
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Hi obooki,
“But it’s nice sometimes to get away from the same old arguments on the literary pages and read them instead on the sports pages.”
yep.
July 2, 2008 at 3:02 pm
ropeofsand
3
a lot
July 2, 2008 at 3:46 pm
It’s a small world….I thoroughly enjoyed the EFL experience….both of the groups I was involved with were Danish – good groups of youngsters both….I made a good friend in the Danish teacher of one of the groups & visited him several times….sadly, we eventually lost touch – I’ve tried finding him online many times & even sent speculative emails, but he has a fairly common name which makes searches difficult….
July 2, 2008 at 3:55 pm
btw – I also stared at MM’s poem for ages last night….but failed to work it out
It’s ingenious….and genius….the bar has been well and truly raised….
July 2, 2008 at 4:00 pm
Yes, it’s stunning, MM.
July 2, 2008 at 4:05 pm
3
a lot
I understand,Billy, and there might be a point in numbers,
Teaching EFL there, guided by corporations was not so enjoyable for my partner, but of course it might be, as a brief experience.
////////////////////////////////
and staring at MM’s poem, neither can i see if it’s an acrostic or what, but will work out later…
July 2, 2008 at 4:34 pm
rope
try the first sounds of each line, not the letters….
July 2, 2008 at 6:54 pm
you mean, phonetically? i get something like
“ai see ai so” “I see i saw”// is that it?
A
Elaborate on the antique theme
why the carpenter had to die
are tools to hand? Yes. It does seem
eye, brain, hand can together tie,
see the mortice filled, beam on beam.
Some
Embedded in the aural stream
you must be sought, found, then supply
essential unguents to the scheme.
Eye, ear and hand can codify
see the air in the anatheme.
A
Ancient truth or modern lie,
why visit that exhausted seam?
Employment in this industry
enacts an Ancient & Modern dream.
July 2, 2008 at 8:08 pm
ropeofsand – try spelling aloud (in English, not Spanish….) a word such as “scull” & see if that unlocks it….as I said, it eluded me until I read freepoland’s hint on that thread….
July 2, 2008 at 10:35 pm
The word I keep finding in a convoluted, squirrel-chasing-its-own-tail way, and by more than one means is, A-W-E-S-O-M-E.
July 2, 2008 at 11:21 pm
Fancy being at school with Deadly. What was he like in the school team, freep? A couple of boys in my kid’s Sunday league team went on to play pro football (one for bloody Pompey, poor sod) but I never thought they were the best players. Definitely the most athletic, though. My own claim to fame is that I used to work in Charlie Barnett’s (England/Glos cricket, 30s/40s) High-Class Poulterer’s shop in school holidays. He was a miserable old bastard.
I’ve never seen that road sign, cs. I’ll have to look out for it next time I’m round that way.
July 3, 2008 at 12:02 am
Don’t you read your own blog, cs? I gave you the answer at 4.53 am, in post no.66, a good 4 hours before freep’s post…(insomnia, you know).
July 3, 2008 at 12:29 am
Mark Thompson, DG of BBC, is the grad speaker. Good in that it’s not Dr Rosen, bad in that it sounds intolerably dull. Sheikh Yamani is on another day (Ex Uni apparently has an important Islamic faculty, funded by the al-Saud family), which might have been interesting. Or not. Dave Attenborough was highly favoured, but he’s on another day.
July 3, 2008 at 12:36 am
Mishari – I can’t remember in which order I read the blogs today (I don’t always check here first….) in any case having “the answer” and seeing where it comes from are two different things….
One interesting point that emerges from MM’s piece is the balance between making these things fun and their complexity. Any fool can make a *really* complex puzzle poem – say, where you have to subtract prime numbers in sequence from the sums of the values of the initial & last letters of each line, and convert back to letters whereupon one reads a phrase in Czech – but no-one will ever solve it these days….how much time can one spend on each blog poem? MM, I think, got the balance right – and, of course, given the theme of that blog, and our fore-knowledge of MM’s devious nature, we knew there was likely to be gold at the end of the rainbow….
I try to give a strong, if oblique, hint in the title – as with “WYSINWYG” & the pseudo-titles in the blurb for the self-referential “doggerel….” from a couple of posts ago. It’s frustrating & a little disheartening though when the balance is wrong (as it perhaps was with “doggerel….” when no-one picked up on the links in the dots.)
Some of the acrostic-type puzzles that Billy mentioned in his blog article would be pointless today as no-one would ever find the hidden messages – for all we know, such messages are common, but where’s the satisfaction for the writer if no-one realises how clever he’s been? I can understand that in the past it was an opportunity to say what couldn’t be said openly; but nowadays if I want to insult a politician or proclaim myself an atheist I don’t need to hide the words in a poem….
July 3, 2008 at 1:53 am
‘in any case having “the answer” and seeing where it comes from are two different things….’
oh, indeed . . .mmmm, on and on and on . . . Never have we seen you waffle like this before.
Why don’t you show us exactly how the doppelganger was just clever enough but not too clever, o doggerelist, o torturer, o wretch?
William of Occam would not have liked my proposed solution, so I don’t, either.
July 3, 2008 at 2:07 am
“Why don’t you show us exactly how the doppelganger was just clever enough but not too clever…”
MM’s thunder; not mine to steal….but you just need to *listen* rather than read….
….and don’t think I haven’t been *trying* to come up with an even more fiendish, deceptively simple, yet soluble one before threadclose on Friday; it’s just that I bloody well can’t….I *have*, though, come up with a very rude “daffodils” variant, which I hope will form part of a future post here….
July 3, 2008 at 3:49 am
“A Lyric, Some Music, A Hymn”. comment 66, mishari.
If you think that clears it all, nope!
OK, then we’re writing in riddles that can be unlocked, eventually.-
July 3, 2008 at 3:54 am
(Awesome)
Attenborough, Richard, rings a bell. He discovered, for me at least, the sacred Indian city of rats, where their population needs not be culled, staying stable, pampered by the human inhabitants, as their reincarnated dead.
There might be more than a way of spelling MM’s hymn, but he doesn’t say. Fiendish, dangerous liaisons.
July 3, 2008 at 4:17 am
Some of the acrostic-type puzzles that Billy mentioned in his blog article would be pointless today as no-one would ever find the hidden messages – for all we know, such messages are common, but where’s the satisfaction for the writer if no-one realises how clever he’s been? I can understand that in the past it was an opportunity to say what couldn’t be said openly; but nowadays if I want to insult a politician or proclaim myself an atheist I don’t need to hide the words in a poem….
Are you so sure about it? Gonzalo Torrente Ballester thought differently: there was a pleasure in hiding, and for the reader another pleasure in finding<. Nowadays, many a speech is banned, forbidden and cancelled, inside our own minds, so it can’t be spelt out. There are things you just don’t even dream of spelling out. Sometimes they are revealed, if only to oneself.
July 3, 2008 at 6:41 am
MM: Mishari unlocked your secret code for me. I’m sure I’ve come across something like your aural acrostic device somewhere some ingenious poet like Calverley, maybe? Is there a model, or did you invent it?
On Underwood. A year older than me, bit of a lout at 14, smoked (badly), played truant, had an older brother Keith who was also a prodigy at cricket. Played for England boys or such like. No doubt at all that what he had was an accuracy like a snooker player’s, and a perfectionist urge. What I remember (this is 1961 or so) is the mixture of pride and resentment that people felt at the skills of someone so much better than they were. In the staff / student cricket match, there was a teacher called Waffles who did everything he could to catch out or undermine the boy wonder, but never did, and showed this in ourbursts of moody rage. When someone is prodigiously gifted, they will have as many enemies as admirers.
(That sounds miserable, but in sport it is often true. It is obscured by the public discourse on sport, which highlights spectators and their passive, limited, fanlike experience, where admiration is easy. When you participate and play alongside brilliant people, their skills can become a reproach to you for your abysmal uselessness. The vileness of competition. Note to self: is this true about writing?)
July 3, 2008 at 7:03 am
‘a teacher called Waffles who did everything he could to catch out or undermine the boy wonder, but never did, and showed this in ourbursts of moody rage.’
But what did he have to be jealous of, . . . him, a ventriloquist able to act through more than one medium at once?
Well, as you suggest, jealousy _is_ irrational.
July 3, 2008 at 7:08 am
ropeofssnad, here’s how it works:
A
Elaborate on the antique theme = L
why the carpenter had to die = Y
are tools to hand? Yes. It does seem =R
eye, brain, hand can together tie, =I
see the mortice filled, beam on beam. = C
Some
Embedded in the aural stream = M
you must be sought, found, then supply = U
essential unguents to the scheme. = S
Eye, ear and hand can codify = I
see the air in the anatheme. + C
A
Ancient truth or modern lie, = H (naughty)
why visit that exhausted seam? =Y
Employment in this industry = M
enacts an Ancient & Modern dream. = N
You see now? It’s a sort of sound acrostic, the letters being spelled phonetically. Once you see what MM’s doing, it’s easy, but it took me a while to see it, the sly bastard…
July 3, 2008 at 8:42 am
Brill. . . BRAVO! . . . to the puzzlemeister and decoder/s. Not at all the sort of thing I can do for the same reason that I’m the world’s worst proof-reader. Cannot get my mind to stay focused on what’s in front of me — . . . it obstinately persists in being carried away by the imagery, or (non)sense. . . And I only ever find other people’s typos by accident.
I recently said somewhere that I most enjoy solving puzzles. No sooner had the words left me than I realised that I should have said, _except_ for the kind that are deliberately set — such as crosswords. I meant, the kind all around us, in living. . . Such as, about Mowbray, how could someone who stores his coal in his bathtub and only bathes once a year, with his dog, have dreamt up a riddle like that?
July 3, 2008 at 10:32 am
freep: I think the two posts on Welsh writing on the GU say something about competition in writing. Almost no comments on the first, a load on the one about the prize cock-up. Some people are more interested in writing competitions than in writing, but these prizes tell us nothing. At best they are an indication of the jury’s consensus “second best” writer. I hate them.
July 3, 2008 at 10:49 am
“…but these prizes tell us nothing…I hate them.”
I’m guessing Tom Bullough is none too keen on them now, either….poor chap….
July 3, 2008 at 11:07 am
Fair point.
July 3, 2008 at 11:21 am
“When you participate and play alongside brilliant people, their skills can become a reproach to you for your abysmal uselessness. The vileness of competition. Note to self: is this true about writing?)”
thought you had answered yes to your self-questioning…there’s a slight difference if you’re competing for fame, glory, immortality,?
IMHO, it can’t be applied to poetry, nor to doggerel, ‘cos the muses are there, it’s for them that we champion and struggle, our triumphs are theirs, not ours. So the only problem here is to name the muses (who can’t be human).
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
MM’s unlocked, revealed, stripped off bonds! Graceful, elegant skeleton.
July 3, 2008 at 11:33 am
it is called “transcendentalism”, versus “reductionism”.
July 3, 2008 at 11:59 am
obooki: “just discovered a paper that Zizek wrote on Laibach” may have missed this earlier, haven’t been reading online much this week. Do let me know about it if you get a chance. I have read something from him about Laibach and I did ask him a question about them shortly after WAT came out, when he was plugging The Puppet book. He’s no longer a fan.
July 3, 2008 at 1:01 pm
Why no longer a fan? – Did he discover their Nazism wasn’t such a post-modernist stance after all. – I chanced to buy another book by him the other day – the Iraq War/kettle book – for £1, a pristine hardback.
July 3, 2008 at 1:31 pm
Why no longer a fan – he felt they’d served their purpose and had become pointless. Their original dalliance with the trappings of totalitarian ritual (he claims) frustrated the system through over-identification but the system (Tito/Communism) was gone and the world had moved on, but they were standing still. Kind of a bit like himself, to some extent.
The kettle book – I’m sick and tired of that kettle joke. It’s mildly funny once. Like the wheel-barrow one. Did you see his bees piece at the weekend? Yet another version of the Rumsfield “unknown unknowns” line. Was surprised such a pop culture guru missed the obvious Doctor Who tie in WRT the bees. But I think that was why the piece was scheduled for Saturday’s paper.
I think I prefer him when he’s half talking about films and fiction. His original Matrix piece was one of the best things about that film. He’s one of those who can make a bad film seem good by coming up with an entertainingly outlandish reading of it. I do think he can be entertaining. And his wrongness kind of challenges you to think a bit (though it’s amazing how many people buy into him unthinkingly). And sometimes his rightness kind of challenges you too. But his repetition does bug me.
July 3, 2008 at 1:49 pm
“I do think he can be entertaining. And his wrongness kind of challenges you to think a bit (though it’s amazing how many people buy into him unthinkingly). And sometimes his rightness kind of challenges you too. But his repetition does bug me.” – Yeah, this is what I am finding. I’m reading the 3rd chapter of How to Read Lacan – I can’t think of 10 pages of philosophy which contains more individual statements that I disagree with.
July 3, 2008 at 1:57 pm
It was an ex got me going on him. They rather bought into everything he said and I tended to only agree with him in places. And disagree with him in lots of places. I suppose my biggest problem has got to be that I just don’t buy into psychoanalysis, esp an obscurantist like Lacan.
Why do you read him? Your inner masochist?
July 3, 2008 at 2:25 pm
“I just don’t buy into psychoanalysis, esp an obscurantist like Lacan.”
Interesting.
@hard to read, yes, but obscurantist?
Anyway, psychiatrist “sciences” are even more reductionist than psychoanalysis, the latter an extinct species hereabouts (don’t know in France).
~~~~~~
doggerel,
just read something about freedom of speech, or rather freedom of reading, that sadly seems to confirm points.
“US teacher is suspended for letting pupils read bestseller”
http://books.guardian.co.uk/news/articles/0,,2288658,00.html
July 3, 2008 at 2:31 pm
I think Lacan accepted the obscurantist tag.
July 3, 2008 at 2:43 pm
Something to sharpen my wits on my morning commute. (it’d take me a long while to analyse all the true reasons). – Not that I’ve even started the Iraq/kettle book yet, but it strikes me that the analogy in the title: kettle joke against justification for Iraq war doesn’t quite hold water. (let alone boil it!). – This is a feature of Zizek I’ve noticed so far: the argument by slightly awry analogy.
July 3, 2008 at 2:46 pm
“This is a feature of Zizek I’ve noticed so far: the argument by slightly awry analogy.”
Yeah, that’s fair. See the bees piece, for instance. It’s not really about bees. Though many of his fawning fans seemed to think it was.
I’ve actually totally forgotten how he applied the kettle to Iraq, it was that convincing.
July 3, 2008 at 4:16 pm
I’ll admit to not having the faintest idea who Zizek is (although I did read the bees piece on Saturday; and again just now – good onomatopoeic name, btw, if you’re going to write about bees….) Wasn’t impressed on either reading….I came away feeling that I’d *really* like to disagree with him; except that, as he hadn’t actually said anything, that unfortunately wasn’t possible. (Wasn’t terribly impressed when Rumsfeld started us off the whole business of the “UUs” either; stating the bleeding obvious is not, in my book, the mark of an intellectual….)
Just what is Zizek famous for? Or is the bees piece typical – elegantly saying nothing? Shall repair to wiki, methinks, for deep analytical research….
July 3, 2008 at 4:44 pm
No, it is typical – particularly the name-dropping of Jacques Lacan. I’m sure the bees are tired of being caught in jampots etc and being attacked at picnics, and are conspiring to eliminate mankind.
July 3, 2008 at 4:48 pm
i heard the “kettle” analogy in “the Linnux kettle” 3 years ago!
July 3, 2008 at 4:52 pm
Steve: “Just what is Zizek famous for?”
Apart from having a name that gives a totally excellent scrabble score? A number of things. Mostly his use of pop-culture to help de-obscurantise Lacan. See the Reading Lacan book obooki has or the much earlier stuff on Hitchcock and David Lynch. Using pop-cult makes him hip and trendy and cool.
He’s also kinda famous for some apparently odd beliefs (eg Lenin and God).
The LRB site probably still has some of bis best essays. I’ll did out some links over the weekend if you really want em. Generally (IMO) the older they are the more likely they are to have something interesting in them (he did a good piece on the use of torture before it was popular and profitable to have a view on torture).
As I’ve said, he *can* be entertaining, on the right subject and at the right dosage level. And atleast when you disagree with him violently he forces you into arguing (even if only to yourself) why you’re right and he’s wrong. Who wants to read only things you agree with? Reading things you disagree with helps strengthen your reasoning as to why you’re right.
I’ve more or less stopped reading him at this stage (though I’ll still quote him, when I think doing so makes my argument look a little less thin) but for a while he was fun. Saturday’s was so short I did read it but couldn’t be arsed adding a comment.
The bees piece for me is typical of his current output, pithy and pointless. I mean, all you need read in it are the final two paras – the bees and Rumsfeld are MacGuffins. And what does he do in the end? Anthropomorphise plants. Which he’s already said is the problem. His own kettle seems to be a bit broken.
July 3, 2008 at 5:04 pm
obooki: “I’m sure the bees are tired of being caught in jampots etc and being attacked at picnics, and are conspiring to eliminate mankind.”
Too right. Did you see how twelve million of them ganged up and over-turned some lorry transporting them a couple of days ago? It’s only just beginning.
July 3, 2008 at 5:08 pm
One sentence on wiki made me feel at home:
“The philosopher, for Žižek, is more someone who criticizes than someone who tries to answer questions.”
The further I read though, the more I thought it was surely a hoax page; any moment I expected to come across “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity”.
Admittedly I understood practically nothing there, so my thickness no doubt colours my reaction; nevertheless, I’ve “read” plenty of other material where ignorance prevented comprehension, yet I could dimly perceive that there was actually something there to be understood – that feeling somehow eluded me with Zizek (or at least with his wiki page.)
Indeed, on any other site bar this, I’d be tempted to rustle up an inarticulate sock-puppet just to say what I otherwise daren’t….
July 3, 2008 at 5:12 pm
fmk – yes, I wouldn’t mind a couple of links to something else of his that might be more meaty or entertaining (or both) – thanks.
July 3, 2008 at 5:27 pm
steve: I think Z would actually approve of Sokol. Or atleast offer Lacanian analysis of the true subversive value of that paper.
I haven’t looked at his Wiki page in a while but it’s doubtlessly edited by fanboys. Who deserve to be shot. Or at least hit over the head with rolled up newspapers.
Will dig out some LRB links when I get a chance, to some of the pieces I liked.
July 3, 2008 at 5:35 pm
A Pedant Writes:
Proper mames are inadmissable in Scrabble.
July 3, 2008 at 5:37 pm
Or, possibly, names.
July 3, 2008 at 5:41 pm
Bloody rules. Which is why, in my opinion, the only game worth playing is Mornington Crescent.
“Proper mames are inadmissable in Scrabble.”
I don’t think I’ve ever mamed anyone playing scrabble. Though I did once hurt someone’s feelings by playing the word scrotum. Playing scrabble with your other-half’s parents is never a good idea.
July 3, 2008 at 5:43 pm
fmk – Ta.
Meanwhile, as I couldn’t sleep last night, I moonlighted on Cif….did anyone else read any of the supposed debate between Inayat & Harun Yahya on evolution from a Muslim perspective? One of the most embarrassing Cif pieces for some time – Gogarty, Theo & those silly twins notwithstanding….the comments (500+ and counting) were dominated by a handful of cut’n'paste merchants which the mods (normally hyperactive on this type of thread) allowed to filibuster the thread into total chaos….even my comment asking “if there’s no evolution, where do trolls come from?” failed to be deleted….an own goal for the G, and for once I feel sorry for Inayat….
July 3, 2008 at 5:46 pm
MM: except in the variant, Disease Scrabble, in which only terms authenticated by the Oxford Book of Illness are allowed. This includes some names: Alzheimer, Crohn, Graves and Weil. If Mr Zizek has described a pathological condition and given it his name (The Zizek Headwart?), then the word may be used. However, the current Disease Scrabble board shares the original’s defect of only one Z.
July 3, 2008 at 5:58 pm
There’s only one Z in zcrabble? I live and learn.
July 3, 2008 at 7:01 pm
From Mr. Lea:
“Equally intriguing was the trend Wired magazine identified in 2006 as “empty spam”: Spam Lit messages that were, paradoxically, all lit and no spam.
The consensus among geeks is that they were probably “misfires” due to faulty server connections.”
Have you read it? It’s great, an accurate picture of our doggerel poetry as well, fantastic, terrific! No words can do it justice.
It’s sad, though, ahem, that Darwinist books are also banned somewhere in Indiana, doggerel. My condolences.
July 3, 2008 at 7:03 pm
Andrew Gallix, not Mr. Lea, sorry.
July 3, 2008 at 8:30 pm
OK
This argument will go on forever, with or without us
artpepper
Comment No. 1183124
June 24 21:04
When will you understand me, in that particles and gods are not incompatible?
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
and i quit,
July 3, 2008 at 8:45 pm
Rope, God is an unecessary hypothesis. I don’t need to invent magical elves living inside my laptop to explain how it works. There are perfectly adequate explanations, to do with physics and electrical engineering.
If it pleases you to invent God or Gods, (man creates Gods by the hundreds but has yet to create a fruit-fly), fine, have fun. Personally, I have no need of God or Gods but you must please yourself.
July 3, 2008 at 8:57 pm
“I don’t need to invent magical elves living inside my laptop to explain how it works.”
What is this? ‘Shatter All Of fmk’s Delusions’ day?
July 3, 2008 at 9:33 pm
“I don’t need to invent magical elves living inside my laptop to explain how it works. There are perfectly adequate explanations, to do with physics and electrical engineering.”
Dear mishari, i don’t need either, In fact, i admit IT as one of the technologies, invented by the military, that has empowered people like us. And the beauty of washing machines. And the beauty of sciences, their terminologies, can’t you understand. How TF can you read (in the deeper spiritual travelling sense that iant tells also about), the Cantos without gods?
I still think we’re arguing because we’re missing a common dis-ambiguity reference, and misguided by prejudices. Perhaps fmk would enlighten us.
July 3, 2008 at 11:16 pm
I dunno about magic elves but there are some tragic ELVs coming to rugby shortly….
July 4, 2008 at 12:05 am
freep: regarding the poem, I was just looking for another way to do it. Interesting memories of Underwood: what always surprised me, on the rare occasions I saw him interviewed, was that such a weedy-looking, seeming-diffident character was such a confident talker. As far as Mr Waffles goes, it works the other way too. In return for helping him set up the nets, Mr Barnett (hard to think of him any other way) gave me free coaching in his (otherwise quite expensive) sessions for the offspring of the local county families. From the moment the first ball was bowled the old boy’s temperature began to rise. You could almost see the waves of exasperation at our feebleness radiating from him. One morning, after bawling fruitlessly at some limp Harrovian, he marched down the wicket, took the bat from the chap’s hands (the only time I ever saw him use one), told someone to throw the ball at him as hard as possible, then smashed it into the stratosphere. ‘That’s how you do it!’ he shouted, and charged off to the pavilion to stick his head under the tap. The competent resent the incompetent just as much.
I was going to mention the z, but it occurred to me that you could use a blank for the second one. I wonder how good wordsmiths are at Scrabble. I see those strong on technique, such as Auden for instance, as excellent Scrabblistas. Your average freeverser, however… three-letter word men.
Psychic maiming is a feature of Scrabble in my wife’s family. On my first visit as The Boyfriend the whole family played. I placed ‘zoo’ on a convenient triple letter score to make 32 and looked up to find six faces staring accusingly at me. Abbreviation for ‘zoological garden’. Take it off.
July 4, 2008 at 12:21 am
“Zoo” is fine as a word according to Chambers, which is the usual reference work for crossword fans – but Scrabble uses a different dictionary as standard: it’s a law unto itself, I gather, although I’ve only ever played it a handful of times in the distant past.
July 4, 2008 at 12:48 am
You surprise me, cs. Scientific types are usually keen on the game. Anyway, what else is there to do when you’re married?
July 4, 2008 at 12:57 am
Another classic from the other Underwood on Shirley Dent’s thread. Christ, he thinks he’s got problems…
July 4, 2008 at 1:12 am
“In fact, i admit IT as one of the technologies, invented by the military, that has empowered people like us.”
HELLO?!? Earth calling Venus, Earth calling Venus, come in Venus, can you hear me? Set your tinfoil hat to receive Venus, set it to receive!
July 4, 2008 at 1:13 am
I can only asume his post was meant to be ironic (in which it fails)….but isn’t he the one (or more precisely, one of the ones) who’s always moaning about having no money to buy books, yet won’t get a job since he’s divinely appointed to write….?
July 4, 2008 at 1:15 am
“Scrabble uses a different dictionary as standard: it’s a law unto itself, I gather”
As I’ve said, Mornington Crescent beats zcrabble. At least they’re honest about the incomprehensibility of their rules.
July 4, 2008 at 1:17 am
“I can only asume his post was meant to be ironic”
CJU and irony? Are you out of your fricking mind as well as everyone else round here today? That boy doesn’t *do* irony!!! Deathly earnestness in his only setting.
July 4, 2008 at 1:29 am
I *did* say it was (possibly) failed irony….
Anyway, since we were talking puzzles, mention of Underwood reminds me of the coded American address on an apocryphal letter:
Wood
John
Mass.
July 4, 2008 at 1:53 am
Silly boys! CJU outed herself as a girl months ago. And yes she can too do irony, if she’s got readers with the right smarts.
July 4, 2008 at 2:12 am
She did? Oh well….and sometimes it’s tricky to get a cigarette paper between irony and earnestness….
July 4, 2008 at 2:40 am
Oh no! I’ve been linked to again by A Mysterious Benefactor….better hide all the disparaging comments & anti-GU rhetoric lest someone actually reads them/it….
July 4, 2008 at 3:05 am
“I *did* say it was (possibly) failed irony….”
Perhaps it died slowly and painfully of metal fatigue?
July 4, 2008 at 3:08 am
“CJU outed herself as a girl months ago.”
He did? Fuck me. He sounds *so* like an adolescent boychild.
July 4, 2008 at 3:13 am
“I’ve been linked to again by A Mysterious Benefactor”
Those sock-muppets. Don’t they just make you wanna laugh? Innit?
July 4, 2008 at 3:37 am
I did a brief search on CJU out of curiosity – indeed some referred to her as she even last Autumn….the G should insist we all register as “Mr X” or “Ms Y” to prevent future misapprehensions….
July 4, 2008 at 4:13 am
Good God no Steve. Even Facebook is trying to force people to reveal their gender now. I still prefer gender neutrality and having to try and work it out yourself. Even if I am wrong about CJU’s chromosome count.
July 4, 2008 at 8:09 am
I suspect Atalana9 is wordnerd7. The tone is remarkably similiar. Isn’t it true that those who are guilty of a particular sin always suspect others of that same sin? and isn’t wn7 always droning on about other people using multiple usernames?
I don’t think, steve, that CJU is being ironic. She spouts in this ‘woe is me, the artist’s lot is a hard one’ vein far too consistently for that. I especially loved her, ‘ I will soon be 24 and times merciless inroads are made manifest..’ guff. 24? Jesus. I’ve got suits, (admittedly, once my father’s), that are more than twice that age. 24, forsooth…
July 4, 2008 at 9:22 am
No, I don’t think CJU is being ironic either. S/he is 23 and looks in mirrors. The last time I looked in a mirror for non-functional purposes (eg to remove shrapnel from from lower lip) was about 1973. Shirley’s blog about being 40 was worth it for the sonnet, but another is needed to consider the Great Climacterical Year, 63, 9 x 7, when we enter death’s waiting room. Men acquire a beard proper at 21, wisdom at 49, and at 63 the certainty of fatality.
Atalanta9 I have seen before, but it is somebody’s secondary identity. WN7 is a suspect, if only because name/number is an uncommon formula.
MM: Thanks for your account of a more generous view of human nature and cricket. Cricket is a valued game because of its many many rules, just as Mornington Crescent is valued as a deep psychological examination of rules in games. To be more literal, sports are felt to be civilising because of their rules and certainties. A football match is always 90 minutes, on a rectangular pitch. If a tennis ball falls outside the white chalk lines it is Out. Jockeys must be scrupulously weighed. Those who disobey are anathematised.
Personally, I am impatient with rules. Football should be played with eight different sized balls on a triangular pitch, with six men, two men and a stuffed giraffe challenging any combination of nine other individuals or objects. Until it rains. There should be a referee, who should be red haired.
Scrabble is a great game for subverting, when it is snowing outside.
July 4, 2008 at 10:04 am
‘Isn’t it true that those who are guilty of a particular sin always suspect others of that same sin? and isn’t wn7 always droning on about other people using multiple usernames?’
Ah. You and fmk couldn’t possibly be more confused about the point I’ve been making, Misharious — just as dear atf was.
Look up — for instance — my argument with BM and carolru in the Christmas (no-)contest poetry thread and you’ll find me fiercely DEFENDING the imaginative proliferation of screen identities. On many another blog, I’ve also fought for anonymity and pseudonymity – and once quoted a marvellous historical anecdote from John Mullan(?)’s book on the subject to underline that no blogger should ever be obliged to give up a disguise.
Any complaints I’ve had about screen names being a poor guide to blogger counts or identities have never been about the bloggers or their spawn. They’ve been about Authorities basing decisions that affect all of us on illusory head-counts. . . Eg., as I’ve said before, since the advent of the icky pink Most Active Blog Posts box — now the only quick guide to what’s on offer at the booksblog — the comment count is distorting the way the site works.
Even if a single blogger writes virtually ALL the posts in a thread under different screen names, it can now look as if the subject of that thread is really popular. If that blogger is sufficiently brilliant and inventive (and there’s at least one such person there), s/he can ensure that his favourite subjects and above-the-liners always leap into the pink fink — and the oblivious Authorities obligingly supply him/her with more of, or from, the same.
Disagree with me about that, if you like, but that’s my point — not mock socketry, or whatever fmk calls it.
And about er, Atalanta9 . . . unfortunately, that blogger is pretty clearly a ‘her’. . . So sorry to keep harking back to the booksblog before your time on it, Misharious, but any old-timer will tell you that I don’t merely agree with fmk about the delightfulness of gender neutrality. I’m one of its most ardent advocates, as Des — with whom I’ve had many an argument on the subject — will confirm. Fits with my love of debate uncontaminated by details of personal identity, and loathing of prejudice . . . Fits with my love of blogging as today’s virtual answer to masked balls. . . See?
July 4, 2008 at 10:32 am
Masked Balls? You said it, wn7.
July 4, 2008 at 10:50 am
You beat me to it, freep. A remarkable choice of words from wn7.
July 4, 2008 at 10:58 am
Only lightly masked, at that.
July 4, 2008 at 11:12 am
Imagine a Victorian or Edwardian blog: no-one would dare post without the correct style, be it Esq, Hon, Mr – and they’d have all their degrees appended, too….
cynicalsteve Esq
July 4, 2008 at 11:26 am
“Fits with my love of debate”
News of the year to me that is. All I ever seem to see from the sock-muppet is marble-mouthed waffle and lots of stirring. Call that debate? Well clearly wn7’s a master debater then.
July 4, 2008 at 11:29 am
Bloody hell. There’s trigger-happy mods even on the sports blog. This is really gonna make talking about the Tour difficult.
July 4, 2008 at 11:39 am
Yeah, possibly they didn’t know whether any of what you said was libellous or not. It’s certainly a tricky one.
July 4, 2008 at 11:51 am
obooki: I worded it as carefully as I could and only repeated documented facts. That’s what upsets me most about it.
July 4, 2008 at 11:54 am
“Fits with my love of debate uncontaminated by details of personal identity, and loathing of prejudice . . . Fits with my love of blogging as today’s virtual answer to masked balls. . . See?”
Wn7, i see, and as eye witness for a short period, i confirm each point you’ve made. You deserve more than an acrostic!
July 4, 2008 at 12:02 pm
Didn’t you state in quite plain terms that Riis was pumped up on drugs when he beat in Indurain? I mean, this may indeed be proven fact – but I don’t know that and I’d guess neither does the moderator. So you’re going to have to compensate for cowardice born of ignorance.
July 4, 2008 at 12:06 pm
Dear Mr Steve
Apropos your plan for the adoption of the recently patented Blog Device by this Society, it is my duty to inform you that, having considered your proposal carefully, the Committee have a number of questions outstanding
Firstly, is there a provision for a Ladies Only area?
Secondly, to what extent does your proposal further the interests of the Empire?
Lastly, we not there is no portrait of Her Majesty on the example Blog you submitted. Can this be rectified at your earliest convenience?
Yours, etc
Sir William de Mills (Bart.)
July 4, 2008 at 12:10 pm
Indurain, ! Memories of green Cantabria, uphills, downhills…
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
“In fact, i admit IT as one of the technologies, invented by the military, that has empowered people like us”. Unfortunately, a message from Earth, recorded inside my brains about… let’s see, before 9/11. Information technology, albeit in a limited sense, “world wide web” was invented by the US military. I can collect proof if you need it, of this assertion, statement and fact, served to me as I said before 9/11, Madrid, by an enthusiastic academic hacker, speaking to a learned audience and just arrived from the Far West and Silicon Valleys.
July 4, 2008 at 12:11 pm
“Didn’t you state in quite plain terms that Riis was pumped up on drugs when he beat in Indurain”
That’s actually in the article itself
Riis was commonly known as Mr 60%, his red-cell counted was boosted so high. I think it was Riis’ beating Indy was what really pushed David Walsh into removing his blinkers and starting to report on the real extent of doping within the sport. It really was that obvious with him.
July 4, 2008 at 12:16 pm
Moreover, provision has not been made for a reserved parking spaces for the Blog President, Ladies’ Vice-Chair and Secretary.
July 4, 2008 at 12:18 pm
“Information technology, albeit in a limited sense”
A very limited sense. And the www was not invented by the military. The advent of the net was funded by military.
“I can collect proof if you need it, of this assertion, statement and fact, served to me as I said before 9/11, Madrid, by an enthusiastic academic hacker, speaking to a learned audience and just arrived from the Far West and Silicon Valleys.”
You seem to have a propensity to buy into conspiracy theory crap and repeat it unquestioningly. I suppose some people who believe in a God will believe anything.
The only conspiracy theory I believe in is that conspiracy theories originate at Goverment level, as a way of making citizens believe their government is more able and sinister than it really is. When really stuff just happens around them.
July 4, 2008 at 1:06 pm
come on fmk, nothing conspiratorial about that. On the contrary, i found it uprising or uplifting, that a technology created by the military was finally put to a much wider use.
End of argument//
July 4, 2008 at 1:13 pm
So you really, really, *really* believe that the military invented the world wide web? Can we just be clear on that? The world wide web. And that IT can effectively be reduced to the world wide web? I want to give you the benefit of the doubt on this one, so here’s your chance to worm out of what you’ve said. In your mind, IT = WWW = Military invention.
July 4, 2008 at 1:15 pm
Actually, rope, the internet was first created, in a limited sense by ARPA, (Advanced Research Projects Agency), funded by the Dep. of Defense, who wanted a bomb-proof communications network. The ‘military’ had fuck-all to do with it.
But what actually made the internet possible was the theory of a ‘packet-switched network’ and that was first proposed and implemented by boffins from the Ministery of Posts, Telephones and Telegraphs here in the UK.
They attended a conference in the US and gave a speech outlining their project. The US boffins from ARPA realized it was just what they needed and ran with it.
If you’re really interested, there’s an excellent history of the internet for the general reader called A Brief History of the Future by John Naughton. I recommend you read it before making assertions.
July 4, 2008 at 2:10 pm
the Dep. of Defense, who wanted a bomb-proof communications network. The ‘military’
So the Deparment of Defense is not semantically related to “the military”?
com’ on,
July 4, 2008 at 2:11 pm
mishari,
you are confirming my point, and thanks for providing further reference. Our academic meant your “Department of Defense”.
And i am not making assertions, just recalling what another expert had explained.
July 4, 2008 at 2:16 pm
and look, supported you are by non believers, when asserting that anyone who can’t see the beauty of atheism is a numskull, (nice to be in friendly company, mm),
If you have powerfully accurate reasons for your atheism, so do i for not. So that’s the end of this argument, before we start looking like “woolly minded liberals”. (God does not exist! My cat killed him!”)
July 4, 2008 at 2:32 pm
The net and the web, as any IT expert will tell you, are not the same – though we might consider them that way in common parlance. The net is merely the hardware involved in linking some computers together. If we say the military or the MoD invented the net, then all we are suggesting is that they linked a few cables together in a bomb-proof way so that they could communicate with each other in some apocalyptic momentum. The web, on the other hand, is this odd thing you look at through your browser – which indeed uses the net but is not the same as the net, in which sites have addresses and binary gibberish is rendered intelligible. The web was not invented by the military.
Brilliant mistyping by a man informing us today he was leaving: “Dear all, Words cannot express what I flee now”.
July 4, 2008 at 2:58 pm
Looks like D Barnett is experiencing the books blog bull run. Ay caramba!
July 4, 2008 at 3:50 pm
obooki, maybe it wasn’t a typo at all?
July 4, 2008 at 3:51 pm
MM, maybe you should lend him a rolled up newspaper.
July 4, 2008 at 4:01 pm
Yes, I considered that too. I have a tendency to read things very literally in the first instance. – Knowing the man and the department, however, I think that it was probably a true statement of affairs, but nonetheless a typo.
July 4, 2008 at 4:14 pm
It would take the Daily AK47 to hold you and Mills off. That ’soul-affirming sensation’ etc richly deserved a tossing and goring all by itself.
July 4, 2008 at 4:31 pm
Can I pragmatically suggest that the battle over using the terms “internet” & “web” precisely has effectively been lost? I’d contend that the majority of people who just *use* the web use both terms interchangeably (I know I do.) Although there are a not insignificant number of pedants out there to gleefully raise the point whenever some poor ungeek uses the “wrong” term, words do change their meanings with time; and the blurring of meaning for these two terms may be one of the most rapid on record.
July 4, 2008 at 4:54 pm
Maybe, but if we’re going to discuss who invented what, and what the US military invented… You might just as well say Alexander Graham Bell invented the web, since he invented the telephone and it uses(d?) telephone wires. (Or stole the idea of someone else, as it may be).
July 4, 2008 at 4:57 pm
good, doggerel,
######
“If we say the military or the MoD invented the net, then all we are suggesting is that they linked a few cables together in a bomb-proof way so that they could communicate with each other in some apocalyptic momentum.”
Not exactly. Erase “apocalyptic”.
Will find you my reference later.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Theology *and philosophy) missing words: anyone who despises theology is worth a long sentence, washing dishes day in day out, ignorance in the subject is nothing to be proud of. According, but not verbatim, to Jorge Luis Borges (one of the avatars/philosophers to laugh at, o dear)
July 4, 2008 at 5:03 pm
Didn’t I hear on QI that an Italian invented the telephone and that AGB nicked his patent; the Italian subsequently dying whilst suing AGB?
I have no problems with people using the two terms precisely; and in certain contexts it’s important that they do; I just feel it’s not worth quibbling about in everyday usage.
July 4, 2008 at 5:07 pm
now just type Internet military invention
and google. I found contradicting assertions, but this looks more like what we heard in Madrid, on that windy afternoon, at the Complutense University,
This is a rather long quote, and i promise no more:
“On a cold war kind of day, in swinging 1969, work began on the ARPAnet, grandfather to the Internet. Designed as a computer version of the nuclear bomb shelter, ARPAnet protected the flow of information between military installations by creating a network of geographically separated computers that could exchange information via a newly developed protocol (rule for how computers interact) called NCP (Network Control Protocol).
One opposing view to ARPAnet’s origins comes from Charles M. Herzfeld, the former director of ARPA. He claimed that ARPAnet was not created as a result of a military need, stating “it came out of our frustration that there were only a limited number of large, powerful research computers in the country and that many research investigators who should have access were geographically separated from them.” ARPA stands for the Advanced Research Projects Agency, a branch of the military that developed top secret systems and weapons during the Cold War.
The first data exchange over this new network occurred between computers at UCLA and Stanford Research Institute. On their first attempt to log into Stanford’s computer by typing “log win”, UCLA researchers crashed their computer when they typed the letter ‘g’.
Four computers were the first connected in the original ARPAnet. They were located in the respective computer research labs of UCLA (Honeywell DDP 516 computer), Stanford Research Institute (SDS-940 computer), UC Santa Barbara (IBM 360/75), and the University of Utah (DEC PDP-10). As the network expanded, different models of computers were connected, creating compatibility problems. The solution rested in a better set of protocols called TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol) designed in 1982.
To send a message on the network, a computer breaks its data into IP (Internet Protocol) packets, like individually addressed digital envelopes. TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) makes sure the packets are delivered from client to server and reassembled in the right order.
Under ARPAnet several major innovations occurred: email (or electronic mail), the ability to send simple messages to another person across the network (1971); telnet, a remote connection service for controlling a computer (1972); and file transfer protocol (FTP), which allows information to be sent from one computer to another in bulk (1973).
As non-military uses for the network increased, more and more people had access, and it was no longer safe for military purposes. As a result, MILnet, a military only network, was started in 1983. Internet Protocol software was soon being placed on every type of computer, and universities and research groups also began using in-house networks known as Local Area Networks or LAN’s. These in-house networks then started using Internet Protocol software so one LAN could connect with other LAN’s.
In 1986, one LAN branched out to form a new competing network, called NSFnet (National Science Foundation Network). NSFnet first linked together the five national supercomputer centers, then every major university, and it started to replace the slower ARPAnet (which was finally shutdown in 1990). NSFnet formed the backbone of what we call the Internet today.
“The Internet’s pace of adoption eclipses all other technologies that preceded it. Radio was in existence 38 years before 50 million people tuned in; TV took 13 years to reach that benchmark. Sixteen years after the first PC kit came out, 50 million people were using one. Once it was opened to the general public, the Internet crossed that line in four years.” – quote from the U.S. Department report “The Emerging Digital Economy”.
Next Chapter > Intel 1103 -
July 4, 2008 at 6:00 pm
“Although there are a not insignificant number of pedants out there to gleefully raise the point whenever some poor ungeek uses the ‘wrong’ term, words do change their meanings with time; and the blurring of meaning for these two terms may be one of the most rapid on record.”
Well colour me pedantic then steve, but no, let’s not surrender, just yet, not on this case. Especially to someone like rope, for whom IT means WWW (which could mean fuck knows what) and for whom military means DoD and for whom invent now just means funded. Words mean what they mean, not what someone wants them to mean. Especially when that someone has been given ample opportunity to climb out of the hole they’ve dug themselves into.
July 4, 2008 at 6:03 pm
“You might just as well say Alexander Graham Bell invented the web, since he invented the telephone”
Well why halt the credit at mere mortals? God invented the interweb. I mean, God made man and made made technology QED God made technology. That is the level of logic rope wants us to play with here, isn’t it?
July 4, 2008 at 6:08 pm
“now just type Internet military invention
and google.”
Hey, I just Googled George Bush Eats Babies and got more than two million sites back! Oh! My! God! it’s on the interweb! There! In front of your own eyes! It *must* be true! I just read it!
STOP PRESS!!! Google Poetry Kills, quickly, before it’s too late!
July 4, 2008 at 6:10 pm
Yeah, thanks for the refresher on IT history (see any introduction to IT n the web. All these matters are quickly forgotten). I see your author doesn’t use the term *web* anywhere, or www – keeps going on about something called the *Internet* (%net crops up quite a bit, you’ll notice). Perhaps he knows what he’s talking about.
July 4, 2008 at 6:32 pm
rope – what actually *is* the point of that screen scrape you posted? It doesn’t support your initial assertion that IT was invented by the military. It doesn’t even support your modified assertion that IT means world wide web and it was that that was invented by the military. Were you just hoping it was so long no one would be arsed actually reading it?
July 4, 2008 at 7:42 pm
fmk
I am astonished at your aggressive tones, therefore i refuse to go on.
@
BTW, can you write a poem at all?
July 4, 2008 at 8:02 pm
What’s astonishing rope? That someone would actually call you on the “verifiable” bullshit you spout? Remember saying “I can collect proof if you need it, of this assertion, statement and fact, served to me as I said before 9/11, Madrid, by an enthusiastic academic hacker, speaking to a learned audience and just arrived from the Far West and Silicon Valleys.” Well, where’s your proof? You’re not claiming that Mary Bellis was your “enthusiastic academic hacker” are you?
Can I write a poem at all? Well, let’s see – do I claim to be a poet? No, I don’t. So what’s the point of your question? Does my ability to write poetry have any bearing on your assertion that IT was invented by the military? How about my ability to ride a bike? Or fly a plane? Or sing the Marseilles backwards while standing on my head and drinking a glass of water?
July 4, 2008 at 8:38 pm
…actually, if you can do that last one, I’m prepared to take anything you say as gospel.
July 4, 2008 at 8:46 pm
Surely the Esialliesram?
July 4, 2008 at 10:35 pm
Near where I live there’s a plaque on a wall saying the inventor of the light bulb, Mr Swan, lived there. Now I think light bulbs are nearly as important as www or the internet. And have served well in the making of many jokes, besides providing illumination. I don’t know if it is true about Mr Swan, because there may be others with a claim, Mr Duck for example. I know that if I want attention on a blog all I have to do is make strong claims in favour of Mr Duck and I will get it. But I don’t much care about that.
What I do care about are arguments such as whether gravel is more important than a wombat, or what animal we should buy as a present when we club together to buy cynicalsteve a token of our respect for being allowed to play in his garden. You have a decent real garden Steve; a wildebeest? Are there import, health and licensing problems? Would a wildebeest be an embarrassment to you? There would need to be discussion about how to giftwrap it; and if it was pregnant, does anyone else have a good big garden to accommodate a young wildebeest?
July 4, 2008 at 10:50 pm
One solitary wildebeest might be a bit lonely with only the resident roe hind and a few moles to play scrabble with….how about a Tasmanian doggerel devil….? I sadly have no pond, so doggerelfish are out….there’s plenty of room though as the ministry recently culled the bards….
July 4, 2008 at 10:52 pm
freep, you’re in very real danger of committing a serious faux-pas. A gentleman never gives a single wildebeest. They must be given in herds. How else to enjoy the sight of them sweeping majestically across the plain, (or a back garden, as the case may be)? Wombats are more practical, if somewhat less majestic when sweeping ect, ect…
July 4, 2008 at 10:58 pm
I would be happy to oblige, but the resident pack of hyenas might be a problem.
July 4, 2008 at 11:07 pm
you can hardly blame the Ministry, cs. I mean, consumptive bards picturesquely wasting away in garrets is all well and good, but when they start infecting cattle, it’s hail and farewell…
July 4, 2008 at 11:18 pm
freep: “the inventor of the light bulb, Mr Swan”
I thought he invented the safety-match. Though I can see the thought progression that might have lead him from one tot he other …
mish: “if you can do that last one”
I’d YouTube the attempt for you – even though that would give Viacom information they ought not be allowed access to – but Franco-Irish relations are already fraught enough post-Lisbon Treaty and Sarko’s already called-off one visit to us this week. I fear gurgling my way through La Marseillaise backwards would lead to an international incident and the Frogs would respond by pressing ahead with their plans to unify Corporate Tax rates and kill our economy dead.
July 4, 2008 at 11:31 pm
“Wombats are more practical”
What are wombats actually used for?
July 4, 2008 at 11:41 pm
“What are wombats actually used for?”
Hitting wombles, of course….I wrote a ditty about it somewhere….
July 4, 2008 at 11:48 pm
Aren’t they used by cockney gynaecologists?
July 5, 2008 at 12:21 am
I thought it was just for playing Wom with … but I never knew what the rules of Wom were and it gets so little coverage in the sport pages. I think some ancient Chinese guy wrote about it one time, The Art of Wom. Or something like that.
July 5, 2008 at 1:39 am
“Well, where’s your proof?”
fmk,
you were talking like a policewoman, actually.
My thought lines and processes are, surprisingly, quite different from yours. Particularly in the english language.
I didn’t know if you had claimed to be or not to be *a poet( that’s why i asked.
I rather dislike aggressive tones, though they might have been bent towards irony, and also dislike thought processes based on cross-examination techniques, such as yours, preferring, ahem, ellipses.
But you want to win at all costs, win what? we’re here talking and playing with ideas. If you need more space, fair enough, you don’t need to throw shit at me to make room for yourself, or do you?
Or is it an apres adieu mon cheri, that is hurting you? Not my fault.:(
“Can I write a poem at all? Well, let’s see – do I claim to be a poet? No, I don’t. So what’s the point of your question? Does my ability to write poetry have any bearing on your assertion that IT was invented by the military? How about my ability to ride a bike? Or fly a plane? Or sing the Marseilles backwards while standing on my head and drinking a glass of water?”
~~~~~~~~~
But this blog, however open minded, is about doggerel, slightly related, semantically at least, to “poetry”.
~~~~~~~~
July 5, 2008 at 2:09 am
I’m not sure doggerel has anything in common with poetry actually: where is the “Doggerel of the Week” blog? (Come to that, where is the DotW in the paper?) We have no Doggerelist Laureate, no prizes for doggerel, no Doggerelists’ Corner in Westminster Abbey – we get the short end of the stick on every count….when did we last get a GU blog on why political doggerel doesn’t work….? I could go on….and, being a doggerelist, I will….Doggerel in translation….? Is there any ancient Oriental doggerel….? Spam doggerel….? Welsh doggerel – with or without runners-up….? Doggerel tattoos….? Where are the biographies of famous doggerelists….? Or the articles about stoned doggerelists (or, more numerously if not more numinously, those who get pissed on snakebite….?) Doggerel bookshops might as well not exist for all the publicity they receive…. Religious doggerel? (ok, fair enough: that would be best suppressed even if it were to exist….) Celebrity doggerel at Hay was notable by its absence….as was eco-doggerel….we’re being airbrushed out of the literary world by a conspiracy of influential poets and it’s time we stood up for our rights: the Doggerelists’ Union starts here….
July 5, 2008 at 2:54 am
doggerel,
“slightly related, semantically” was my humble view, but of course you’re the creator here! It might interest you to know that i’ve being doing some research moved by scientific views expressed by yourself and freep on the subject of colour perception and subjective perception *which also relates to speech( and will continue reading science for my benefit.
And for whatever i write, be it called poetry or spam lit or maddogsong,
So my next creation, *not for tomorrow( will be based on the evolutionary notion of “exaptations”. I will work on “exaptations” alongside angelical metamorphosis . And yourself? Your next doggerel’s piece for when s’il vous plait?
“Exaptations are common in both anatomy and behavior. Bird feathers are a classic example: initially these evolved for temperature regulation, but later were adapted for flight. Interest in exaptation relates to both the process and product of evolution: the process that creates complex traits and the product that may be imperfectly designed”
Note to self: bird feathers: angel’s feathers…
July 5, 2008 at 3:19 am
“And yourself? Your next doggerel’s piece for when s’il vous plait?”
That’s a good question….there is nothing in the pipeline….the last week has been rather too sleep-light to allow for coherent thought, sadly….I have one last tranche of old plant pics for an emergency stop-gap post….and I might be able to rustle up a facetious “Nature Notes II”….will happily take suggestions (or substantial submissions via email – doesn’t anyone else have an epic doggerel or spoof article suitable for a post here?) for future posts….
July 5, 2008 at 3:33 am
rope: “I rather dislike aggressive tones, though they might have been bent towards irony, and also dislike thought processes based on cross-examination techniques, such as yours, preferring, ahem, ellipses.”
This is just foreplay rope. I save the aggression for the fifth date. I’ve really got to know you before we get into that stuff.
You may not like my thought processes, but I don’t like thought processes like yours, that are based purely on believing in things without question and then repeating them without understanding. I don’t do Faith as a default setting.
“we’re here talking and playing with ideas.”
Ideas are fine. Bring some on. Preferably some of your own and not ones you’ve just screen-scraped off the web and fallen for hook, line and sinker without questioning them.
You credentialed your ‘idea’ with verifiable sources that turn out to be nothing more than a Google search that throws up an about.com page which repeats something that can be found in any Dummies Guide To The Interweb and which doesn’t even support your original – or even your modified – assertion of ‘fact’. Maybe if you’d just offered it as a dumb opinion and not a verifiable fact I wouldn’t be snarling at you like this. But since you didn’t I’m really curious about the value of the credentials you attempted to buttress it with.
“this blog, however open minded, is about doggerel, slightly related, semantically at least, to ‘poetry’.”
And so I’m supposed to just shut up and pay respectful deference to those who are self-professed poets, just because I’m not a self-professed poet? Is that it? No poetic licence, no say? Only poets are allowed opinions on your planet and the rest of us should just nod and tug our forelocks and not ask questions?
And *you* had the gall to spout BS on the erosion of democracy and how our allegedly living in a post-democratic dictatorship made your hair stand on end barely a week back?
July 5, 2008 at 4:36 am
I don’t do Faith as a default setting.
Ok, that’s quite a doggerelish, comic reply. But you’ll make me answer seriously, which again i dislike.
How do you know what or what i don’t believe in, and whether i don’t question and try to understand, mmm, illustrious madam? You don’t.
Now, what i definitely dislike about the few messages i have read from her ladyship is they sound as if you were a potty trainer. you know, rubbing pets’ noses on what they have or have not done before,
“No poetic licence, no say? Only poets are allowed opinions on your planet and the rest of us should just nod and tug our forelocks and not ask questions?”
You’re pulling my leg.
If you’re not a self professed poet, you might be a self professed doggerel, who knows, there are infinite varieties, according to cs.
you could win me at the spelling games any time, missus. Fair point. You’re welcome as far as i am concerned, btw.
July 5, 2008 at 6:57 am
way back up thread freep mentioned Mr Swan, now here’s a conundrum: when Mr Swan hit on the light bulb idea did a light bulb appear in a cartoon thought-balloon above his head or would this have been an impossibility given that the symbol for a bright idea did not exist until milliseconds after the idea was formulated?
July 5, 2008 at 7:11 am
“How do you know what or what i don’t believe in”
You professed to believe that the military invented IT. Or maybe just the wibbly wobbly web. How do I know this? You said it. Beyond that, I don’t know. I question.
How do I know you don’t try to understand? I don’t. I do know you appear to not understand. And given how easy it is to understand the couple of things I’ve called you on, I can only guess you haven’t questioned very hard. Whether that’s due to failure to try or trying and failing, who knows. It’s the same difference in the end.
“If you’re not a self professed poet, you might be a self professed doggerel, who knows”
Anyone who’s ever seen or heard evidence of me making either of those claims would know. But they don’t exist. Cause I’ve never made either claim. And if I ever do then people have my permission to shoot on sight.
“you could win me at the spelling games any time, missus. Fair point.”
I hadn’t realised I’d ever called you on spelling. It’d be a cheap shot if I did, given my propensity for tpyos.
July 5, 2008 at 8:34 am
More interesting would be a discussion of Milgram’s Six Degrees of Separation experiment and its implications for networking theory. Six hops is, or was when I studied the subject, the default number before a packet is dropped by a router as undeliverable.
parallax, perhaps Swan had what I still get-a bolt of lightning, accompanied by a powerful rumbling, (although that might be the District&Circle line, which passes underground nearby).
July 5, 2008 at 9:02 am
that bolt of lightning, mishari, is your muse sparking your inner genius, a la michelangelo’s creation of adam fresco – tell me, does your muse look like this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Touched_by_His_Noodly_Appendage.jpg
July 5, 2008 at 9:30 am
yoohoo steve – i think my last post is languishing in your compost heap
July 5, 2008 at 12:13 pm
Don’t wake him, parallax, he must have found refuge in the arms of Morpheus at last.
July 5, 2008 at 12:34 pm
OK mish, having a prince around is dead handy when it comes to etiquette. So it has to be a wombat. They’re easily wrapped, too. It can wear a big nappy while it’s in the humane box. CS can join the ranks of the Rossettis and others who have kept wombats. They are vicious, though, even if less of a handful than a herd of wildebeest.
The Jehovah’s witnesses have just been, wearing ties as usual, given me a copy of Witness, and invited me to consider the lessons we may draw from Noah’s Flood. I asked them to consider the lessons to be drawn from Adam and Eve having navels. But I have to get down to Billy’s task.
Like your exchanges with fmk, rope. I would put my money, marginally, on fmk in three rounds, but you’re doing great without a gumshield. Just recite McGonagall at him and you can’t fail.
July 5, 2008 at 12:37 pm
Steve sleeps with Laurence Fishburne? I had no idea.
July 5, 2008 at 1:02 pm
thanks for your fiendish tips, freep. Appreciated. Happily met several snails and slugs today in back garden.
McGonagall, Fishburne, to check. Gascoyne, to check.
July 5, 2008 at 1:38 pm
The trouble with comments rescued from the spambat is that they get inserted way up thread & unnoticed. parallax’s is at #212.
July 5, 2008 at 2:10 pm
fmk – so what’s your prediction for tonight’s DW resolution? Three doctors? The doctor to regenerate as himself due to the influence of “the hand”? Donna as hidden Time Lord/Master/doctor’s daughter? Or the big reset-button cop out….
Hours of idleness here:
http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/organgrinder/2008/06/are_we_about_to_get_a_new_doct.html
July 5, 2008 at 5:56 pm
Steve: A threefold Doctor? But Caan is mad
The hand having something to do with it yes. Donna being more than she seems, yes. What, I dunno.
I think I saw that link when it was about a hundred comments. I’m too scared to click it and see how fanboy it’s gone by now.
July 5, 2008 at 6:03 pm
My favourite comment on that thread (400+….) pointed out that the name of the Cribbins character (Wilfred Mott) was an anagram of “timelord wtf”….
July 5, 2008 at 6:20 pm
400+ comments and anagramming fanboys? Call me yellow but it saved me from clicking that link.
July 6, 2008 at 2:59 am
Last round, since insomnia is protecting.
fmk
“You professed to believe that the military invented IT.” I was just expanding on the idea that mishari brought up, remembering words i had heard, and for which theories are recorded. And i suppose they are no more no less “true” than to believe that IT was invented by elves or by independent engineers. idem. 9/11: the theory on IT existed long before 9/11, a useful time hiatus or dead mark to locate events. Before and after 9/11, because it did change many things.
Note to self: Forget about it, or just discuss on
CiF.
second.
“I hadn’t realised I’d ever called you on spelling. It’d be a cheap shot if I did, given my propensity for tpyos.”
O no, you would win and beat me, my propensity for tpyos is superior.
What remains here for me to grasp is (and grasping is subjective perception): you have never called me on doing anything at all!
Fair enough, as they say.
@@@@@@@
July 6, 2008 at 8:55 am
‘And i suppose they are no more no less “true” than to believe that IT was invented by elves or by independent engineers. ‘
Independent engineer-elves, ros, why not? . . .
July 6, 2008 at 9:00 am
Since obooki is the calmest and least prickly pear-like being on this thread (aside from our host, dgg) I’ll start with his contribution to the wildly entertaining blind-men-and-the-elephant argument about whether the military did or didn’t invent the Internet. (Thank you, comrades . . .
. . .)
The Alexander Graham Bell parallel won’t work, obooki, because from the perspective of ‘money talks and has the last word,’ the Pentagon was indeed the sugar daddy that had the most to do with its invention. Bob (Robert W.) Taylor . . .(RWT) . . . , the key figure behind the conception of the net’s prototype, the ARPAnet, and manager of this research project, was a Pentagon employee at the time. The military commissioned the project and paid the scientists who worked on it.
After that, things get a bit complicated. RWT was a _civilian_ employee of the Pentagon, and he insisted that it would be impossible to hire the super-duper computer scientists he’d need unless the project was completely de-classified. That meant that all the new technology that flowed from the ARPAnet would have no military ‘copyright’ but would be in the public domain – free for anyone to use. . . Lots of the best and brightest scientists belonged to the rabidly anti-war Vietnam generation and only agreed to assist with that understanding. . . So in another sense, the project was as un-military as could be – for a military project.
Misharious was therefore mistaken and not a little reckless to say:
‘The ‘military’ had fuck-all to do with it.’
. . . but partially right in saying, . .
‘the internet was first created [because] the Dep. of Defense, who wanted a bomb-proof communications network.’.
But you’d have to call gratifying the wish for a bomb-proof network a happy coincidence with a more pressing need, that Taylor himself describes beautifully, here:
HOW THE ARPANET (PARENT OF THE INTERNET) WAS BORN
==========About 1966, Mr. Taylor recalls, his office in the Pentagon had a terminal connected to time-sharing community at MIT, a terminal connected to a different kind of computer at the University of California at Berkeley, and a third terminal to the Systems Development Corp. in Santa Monica. “To talk to MIT I had to sit at the MIT terminal. To bring in someone from Berkeley, I had to change chairs to another terminal,” he says. “I wished I could connect someone at MIT directly with someone at Berkeley. Out of that came the idea: Why not have one terminal that connects with all of them?
“That’s why we built ARPAnet,” he says.
With the immediate assent of his boss, ARPA started funding projects to make the world’s first interactive computer network. It contracted with Bolt, Beranek and Newman (BB&N) to build the brand new system; it arm-wrestled universities and computer centers to install stations to test the network.============
Dear obooki, I think you will confess that you were oversimplifying matters for us dumbkopf laybloggers when you said that the net is ‘merely the hardware involved in linking some computers together.’ . . Without software, you’d only have a scattering of plastic boxes of circuit boards and cables, innit, and please correct me if I’m mistaken in saying that software is _the_ key to computer networking – specifically the Internet protocol suite, or, as wiki puts it . . . ‘the concept of the network could be _separated_ from its physical implementation.’ . . . (wd7’s emphasis)
. . . ropeofsand, it was only by accident that I found that doux et gentil acrostic you mentioned, by someone I’d guess is an extremely close relation of yours. With all the fun some of us have with screen names, though, confusions of identity are all too common. That means I can’t honestly believe that thebookofsand wrote that post for me. I simply opened the wrong package under the Christmas tree, if you kwim
.. . (but _thank__ you_ tbos, is all I can say, if there was no such mistake, and if you ever see this.). . . Noticed that tbos wrote a poem called The Hunter, another of his creations that puts him in a class all his own and several cuts above any serious writer of verse here or at GU. Shivers ran up my spine, reading it. . . And btw, rope, I thought you made your point crushingly, here:
‘But you want to win at all costs, win what? we’re here talking and playing with ideas. If you need more space, fair enough, you don’t need to throw shit at me to make room for yourself, or do you?
Or is it an apres adieu mon cheri, that is hurting you? Not my fault.
. . .’
LOL, over and over . . . Your opponent does not understand debate, tant pis. Confuses it with knifings in dimly lit alleys. . . or yes, as you suggest, smelly dung-flinging. Pooh! [fans nose frantically]
July 6, 2008 at 11:42 am
So steve, what say you? All that jargon aside, too fanboytastic for the non-Whovian?
July 6, 2008 at 2:19 pm
hi wordy, you are speaking up:)
July 6, 2008 at 5:44 pm
fmk – it’s always been a self-referential show – and more so since the relaunch; in-jokes are part of the deal….I’ll forgive RTD the Tardis towing the Earth for hearing the Daleks bark German; I’ll offset the naff “regeneration? what regeneration?” first minute copout against the pathos of Donna’s fate; and I’ll overlook the convenient coincidences and plot-holes for the neatness of a human Doctor lacking restraint and attempting (unsuccessfully, natch) to finally wipe out all the Daleks….better than last year’s finale for sure….but not perfect….disappointing as it was not to see some of the loose ends tied up, at least it means that the more subtle Moffat is free to develop River Song & Baby Doc (”Who Spice”?)….
July 6, 2008 at 6:22 pm
So you liked it, on balance. Am glad to hear. Tate really was good in it. The original Christmas special she was in was a bit naff but she’s been great throughout this season. I’m almost liking her, after mostly hating her comedy programme.
And yes, German-spouting Daleks – Exterminieren! Exterminieren! Exterminieren! If only they could have been shown rounding up people shouting “Hände hoch!” and “Achtung!” and “Raus!” as well. A whole new generation finds a new way to learn annoying German phrases.
“the neatness of a human Doctor lacking restraint and attempting (unsuccessfully, natch) to finally wipe out all the Daleks”
Yes, but the point of Eccleston’s Doctor Who was that this is what he was, a killer, not just of the Daleks but of his own people too. It was Rose – and later Donna – who restrained him. His travelling alone seems in part penance for what he did in the Time War.
Sorry if I’m sounding too much of a Whovian geek here. I’ll get me coat …
July 6, 2008 at 6:33 pm
I’ve seen it suggested that that was the trade-off in the time war, and that an earlier Doc had to wipe out both sides to stop the Daleks….one of those back stories that can never be televised, just hinted at….I’m not convinced this is coat-getting territory, btw: you’re damned if you just take the stories at face value, and damned if you look beyond….anyway, from my present reading, Pamela Widmerpool scares me far more than a whole fleet of Daleks….
July 6, 2008 at 6:45 pm
Well, I hope the Time War is never televised, just hinted at drop by drop. Paul McGann’s Doctor seems to have been in it, regenerating into Christopher Eccleston’s Doctor during it (the line about being born in war last night). I think Moffett knows not to show too much of it when he takes over.
Will let you get back to being scared by your Pole. I’ve got The Long-Player Goodbye to finish so better get back to it too.
July 6, 2008 at 8:27 pm
thanks again, wn7, for putting the argument in a more consistent perspective and solid grounds.
if doggerel is asleep, let him rest for a while, while a suggestion springs from the brain, related this time to the multiple identities or just fictional identities game (if not illegal). Doggerel has in fact already started it (main poem, Gusundheit and his post to BM’s by “anonymous, unknown”).
Here’s my brain-scrambling suggestion:
creating, collectively, between us all, a fictional identity, a poet (him or her or both) with the background and attributes we’d invent for them. It could be hilarious, and company for @carol in long summer nights. If you want, you can take the name “Igor Klinki”, who BTW is a real friend, (he wouldn’t mind: on the contrary).
July 6, 2008 at 8:43 pm
How thoroughly original and totally transgressive. Wizard idea. Why hasn’t anyone ever done it before?
July 6, 2008 at 9:07 pm
I’m up for the collective Klinki, so long as he can have a dog. I suspect he (K., not dog) is not the best of poets, but he will try very hard.
July 6, 2008 at 9:14 pm
I may be prejudiced, but I think he should have a wombat.
July 6, 2008 at 9:32 pm
Estoy tan atarado que no puedo ni escribir
mis ojos, oh
no ven más allá de mi raíz
alguno dirá que no soy yo
María Fernanda de alas quebradas
Igor de película mala
Carlos que llega siempre temprano pero igual se pierde el chiste
Fundación Che Guevara de la guerrilla ontológica
Roberto que es el que más se parece a alguno de mis internos
Melina que un día se confundió de esquina y cayó
en las manos de un macarra
metemos todo y todos en la misma camisa de once guitarras
ahora atacan silvio y joan manel
y separados pero juntos en el orto espacio negro
reifican la nueva diócesis del silencio
dónde en qué cómo te has metido y cuándo
venerable padre de mi conciencia mundana
absurdo prometer insignias
o vender fruta en las facultades
con aspecto de san días y olor a blinda
¿qué dejaremos a la hora del inventario decisivo?
¿una o dos miserables palabras que no supieron ganarse el pan?
¿la luz de una verborragia intensa a la hora de la sombra?
¿el rostro enfermo de un siglo al que no le importamos para nada
pero que tuvo que soportarnos como nadie?
estoy ecualizado con la nada
partido de espacios
vagabundo por las ideas y los mares
voy copiando la cordura del idiota discreto
ay
tocar el caos
y abrazar el agua de la ignorancia
¿falta tanto para llegar a la madrugada final feliz?
acá hace una literatura infernal
y todo lo que no necesito completa el universo
July 6, 2008 at 9:57 pm
ok, that’s friend Igor’s voice? Telephatic waves wrapping us, !
thanks be given to Science!
###########
this sudden apparition will be witness, then, to suggestion:
a collective identity (whatever the name, dear igor, perhaps not yours) would require, to be used on the blogs, a shared password and email-address, any problem with that?
If not, what is needed is “some” preparation, collective imagining of background, bibliography, hobbies… what would his/her purpose be?
~~~~~~~~
July 6, 2008 at 10:30 pm
‘anyway, from my present reading, Pamela Widmerpool scares me far more than a whole fleet of Daleks….’
She does me, in every reading. But who’s scarier, PW or her mate? Now _there’s_ a hard choice . . .
ropeofsand, I enjoyed helping, and am as beguiled as you and freepoland are by the idea of a collective Klinki . . . always fun to pull the czar’s tail. . . But not being quite the linguist that other bloggers are — think of my braised shirt — I can only promise to lead the cheering squad (but here, not there).
Thanks for tipping us off with this most welcome trailer: ‘a suggestion springs from the brain, related this time to the multiple identities or just fictional identities game (if not illegal)’
It fits one last mention of the old Taylor interview from which I quoted earlier:
‘A second paper, [. . .] lays out the future of what the Internet has indeed become. Titled “The Computer as a Communication Device,” it starts out: “In a few years, men will be able to communicate more effectively through a machine than face to face.”
Already true, in certain ways . . . but they didn’t anticipate blobby mock sockets like effers, did they?
Btw, the Pseudonymphs blog was one of dgg’s finest. Was Pamela W. suffering from undiagnosed pseudonymphania, d’you suppose?
July 6, 2008 at 10:32 pm
‘what would his/her purpose be?’
Hierogamy . . . okay, an idea I got from Chewtoy at Cif.
July 6, 2008 at 10:34 pm
Oops, in 238, I meant, ‘pseudonymphomania’.
July 6, 2008 at 11:16 pm
and there is another difficulty, (i go on with the suggestion), in that all posts related to the collective identity (including these) would need to be deleted:(we need some kind of jargon to proceed.)
~~~~~
(busy with other things myself, best wishes)
July 6, 2008 at 11:23 pm
Strewth: another hero of mine on the blog – G’day Ern, and welcome….Igor is regrettably unknown to me; he’s nevertheless very welcome (although he’d better learn some English if his posts are to remain uncensored….)
****
wordnerd: “But who’s scarier, PW [Pamela Widmerpool] or her mate? Now _there’s_ a hard choice…”
Was Kenneth W supposed to be a scary character? I wrote in a comment on the Tel along the lines of “I have known a lot of Widemerpools over the years…”; which is true; and they were all powderpuff bullies – as is KW – sure, they can do one harm, but they never last….PW, on the other hand – well, I’m near the end of book 11; I’ll finish the sentence when I’ve completed the round dozen….
July 6, 2008 at 11:41 pm
Please present Wombat Student Identification Code; there appear to be intruders amongst us.
July 6, 2008 at 11:42 pm
I am I doggerelist. Easy to see through. As I should be, being made of glass. Or the makings of glass.
July 6, 2008 at 11:55 pm
http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Igor_Sergei_Klinki
bloody hell, you are even in wikipedia, Igor. I’m still trying to find another less telepathic way of contacting, hadn’t heard of for some years now. the makings of glass. (that has entirely betrayed the apparition).
July 7, 2008 at 12:00 am
“there appear to be intruders amongst us.”
Did they get in through their windows? Or are they mac types?
“G’day Ern, and welcome”
How’re ya doin ya pommy bastard? Thanks for the warm welcome. Chuck another wombat on the barbie there, will you?
July 7, 2008 at 12:11 am
Coo, Igor! we’d never have guessed (bats extra-long eyelashes, like a gender-neutral Bambi.)
‘Was Kenneth W supposed to be a scary character? I wrote in a comment on the Tel along the lines of “I have known a lot of Widemerpools over the years…”;’
Absolutely no reason why you should remember, but I said exactly that to Sam, the first time ADTTMoT was mentioned at GU. The trouble is, they can actually do a great deal of harm in the decades before they implode. . . Many of our highest-ranking politicians, civil servants, college heads, windy captains of industry, . . . are dead ringers for that horror. Unquestionably Powell’s greatest invention — with Pamela and X.Trapnel a close second and third.
. . . Now going where rope did, also with very best wishes . . .
July 7, 2008 at 12:20 am
Now that will be enough from you Ern; although the last secret door was unlocked, the safe is still there and codes must be in order!
July 7, 2008 at 12:29 am
I’ll try to comply with your address code Minerva me mate. But I hope you’re not accusing me of some safe cracking. That seems like a bit of racist mono-typing based on histerical events long before my time. Keep up comments like that and I’ll be asking if you still keep your legs crossed and suggesting you let me enter your cult.
July 7, 2008 at 12:41 am
No code showing for Igor; interesting that two others without codes have left.
Ern, I suspect you are showing why your ancestors were sent to that country; are you of that lineage?
btw a mutual email address and sock puppet, definitely disagree, think of the legalities doggerelist.
And untranslated material, unchecked on the blog! Igor in Spanish?
July 7, 2008 at 12:43 am
wordnerd – I’d quite forgotten about Sam’s Dance blog (almost exactly a year ago) even though I commented on it….hadn’t read the duodecameron then, of course; which is presumably why memory failed to engage….you said “…to be able to say, “Oh, a real Widmerpool, I’m afraid,” is to convey a small universe of details.” Yup: they’re out there; whole armies of KWs….can’t help feeling (and this is primarily for fmk’s benefit) that the Widmerpools (from the planet Wid) would make good Dr Who villains….the most blatant Widmerpool I ever came across (let’s call him “K”) was at one time my boss’s boss….an unashamed climber; intellectually thick (my boss (a Cambridge graduate to his undegreed & overpromoted technician) described him as “scientifically superficial” – and she *liked* him….as did I, on and off), totally out of his depth, backstabbing, arse-licking – the picture is, I think, adequately painted. And yet: the Widmerpools will always be with us….they just want it more than us (whatever “it” is….)
July 7, 2008 at 12:45 am
Ha! That smilie ^ was unintended; but not inappropriate….just mentally close the bracket after….
July 7, 2008 at 1:09 am
Doggerelist,
you need to check out that Ern, he may be giving the current generation of Australians a bad name; wait until the Minister hears about his suggestion of a W.O.M.B.A.T on the barbie. He’ll be tracked down for sure!
This is why papers must be in order; McAuley and Stewart are both dead.
July 7, 2008 at 1:14 am
But: who is Ern….or Igor….or, come to that, MINERVA….? And who was Damerel….?
July 7, 2008 at 1:16 am
My lineage is known to you already, oh saintly Minerva.
July 7, 2008 at 1:21 am
Doggerelist,
What you don’t know is your problem; I just need to have my list in order.
Damerel of the assumed name? I find it hard to keep up….
btw Michael Rosen’s recent memory test, I like. I could help, I remember July..
July 7, 2008 at 1:27 am
“What you don’t know is your problem…”
….indeed; but, pace Rumsfeld and, for all I know, Zizek too; I don’t necessarily know what I don’t know….
July 7, 2008 at 1:47 am
Saintly? You definitely have me confused with someone else.
I’ve got you down to one of three, Ern; to help in the process of elimination, just a couple of questions:
have you been around here recently?
Are you the gardening type?
Do you prefer summer or winter?
How many times have you been an an aeroplane in the last year?
Can you remember how many names you have had, or I’ll make it simple, can you count on one hand, two, or do you need more?
July 7, 2008 at 2:24 am
I am always open to being corrected Minerva oh sweet one. If you wish to meet to correct me we can swiftly organize a rendezvous. Whistle and I will come quickly. Not too quickly though.
~~have you been around here recently?~~
Recent is such a relative concept. As is around here.
~~Are you the gardening type?~~
I have upbraided you once over typing people. Don’t make me upbraid you further until our rendezvous, when we can correct one and other.
~~Do you prefer summer or winter?~~
Summer here is winter there. Where is more important than when.
~~How many times have you been an an aeroplane in the last year?~~
13.
~~Can you remember how many names you have had, or I’ll make it simple, can you count on one hand, two, or do you need more?~~
Ones that I have given myself, yes. Ones that others have given me, no. Yes, I can count on one hand. And I can count on two. Does the offer of more mean I can count on your hands?
July 7, 2008 at 2:40 am
Oooh, oooh, can I play?
~~have you been around here recently?~~
Oh yes….
~~Are you the gardening type?~~
No longer, sadly….
~~Do you prefer summer or winter?~~
Definitely winter: less guilt for inactive gardeners….
~~How many times have you been an an aeroplane in the last year?~~
None….
~~Can you remember how many names you have had, or I’ll make it simple, can you count on one hand, two, or do you need more?~~
Six – that’s six *names*, note, not six hands….
****
That’s a great questionnaire: may I cheekily ask other regulars here to answer? And it’s given me an idea for a blog post: if I concoct a list of surreal and bizarre questions (nothing too personal, too revealing or sexual), will you all have a go?
July 7, 2008 at 2:42 am
By the way, regarding ~~How many times have you been an an aeroplane in the last year?~~ I was assuming that that was a stutter and not a typo. I forgot to state my assumption. I hope that doesn’t color your interpretation of my answer.
July 7, 2008 at 5:24 am
doggerelist,
I don’t answer questions, I ask them.
Ern,
Have you been in my school before? What diploma/degree did you leave with; please truthfully state if you failed. Your number 261, has me puzzled.
I will rephrase, how many jet propelled flying vehicles have you been in in the past year (so you can leave out the carpets, brooms etc.)
Because you are cheeky, you get another question. What is the youngest age you have been in the past five years (please think carefully on this one).
And I am not sweet!
July 7, 2008 at 5:30 am
It’s alright doggerelist you are on my list even though I realize you didn’t do any of our courses; you are a skeptic.
July 7, 2008 at 5:33 am
ps. The age question is not a cheeky one, it relates to the youngest you think you have been.
July 7, 2008 at 6:25 am
Ern says “I hope that doesn’t color your …”
color? no wombats in your neck of the woods – I smell a groundhog in that spelling …
July 7, 2008 at 6:42 am
steve asks “That’s a great questionnaire: may I cheekily ask other regulars here to answer?” As you kindly let me visit your pavilion I’m happy to oblige steve:
~~have you been around here recently?~~
yep, I’m always popping in to enjoy steve’s, MM’s, mishari’s, freep’s and fmk’s banter. The quick change artists, on the other hand, hold no allure.
~~Are you the gardening type?~~
I have a bird of paradise in my backyard
~~Do you prefer summer or winter?~~
I’m a more autumn, spring type
~~How many times have you been an an aeroplane in the last year?~~
twice
~~Can you remember how many names you have had, or I’ll make it simple, can you count on one hand, two, or do you need more?~~
parallax is my name, or more formally, parallaxview
July 7, 2008 at 6:46 am
twice should probably be four times – i forgot the return trips
July 7, 2008 at 6:51 am
ok six … arrggh it’s all coming back – I had blocked out that journey
July 7, 2008 at 8:56 am
Minevra my Minerva. So many questions. I do hope that you are not all talk and no action. I was looking forward to some action.
~~Have you been in my school before?~~
Yes.
~~What diploma/degree did you leave with;~~
Too many to list. The cupboard was open so I just helped myself. I do hope you don’t mind.
~~please truthfully state if you failed.~~
Failure is not an option.
~~Your number 261, has me puzzled.~~
Just read. One word at a time. Probably aloud.
~~how many jet propelled flying vehicles have you been in in the past year (so you can leave out the carpets, brooms etc.)~~
13.
~~What is the youngest age you have been in the past five years (please think carefully on this one).~~
5.
~~And I am not sweet~~
I’ll be the judge of that. When I get to lick you.
July 7, 2008 at 9:01 am
Parallax: Do you have some prejudice against colored wombats?
July 7, 2008 at 9:04 am
That’s a great questionnaire: may I cheekily ask other regulars here to answer?
OK. Ern Malley. The multiple id. game has (Minerva, nice girl, knows) already been done for sure, before Internet!
Mr. “K”, Citizen Kane. Fine for me. The Wombat identification code, wonderful!
Questionnaire:
~have you been around here recently?~~
Yes, recently.
~~Are you the gardening type?~~
Yes.
~~Do you prefer summer or winter?~~
Summer forever.
~~How many times have you been an an aeroplane in the last year?~~
You can count them with fingers of one hand only.
~~Can you remember how many names you have had, or I’ll make it simple, can you count on one hand, two, or do you need more?~~
Two hands would suffice for about 10 years.
~~~~~~~~~~
” braised shirt evokes kisses kisses on a bra.
“pseudonymphs” sparkles genius.The Barbie batting her eyelashes is a real sweety too.
July 7, 2008 at 9:15 am
thehangedmantarotcard – Tom would appreciate that moniker, mate. I’m not sure many others would.
~~OK. Ern Malley. The multiple id. game has (Minerva, nice girl, knows) already been done for sure, before Internet!~~
As I demonstrated, yes.
July 7, 2008 at 9:20 am
~~have you been around here recently?~~
never.
~~Are you the gardening type?~~
more hot metal
~~Do you prefer summer or winter?~~
Of course
~~How many times have you been an an aeroplane in the last year?~~
nonce
~~Can you remember how many names you have had, or I’ll make it simple, can you count on one hand, two, or do you need more?~~
two, but not hands, but one here and one long gone
July 7, 2008 at 9:24 am
Parallax: Do you have some prejudice against colored wombats?
Ern Malley: When did you stop beating your wife?
July 7, 2008 at 9:25 am
~~When did you stop beating your wife?~~
I am not married.
July 7, 2008 at 9:29 am
to death then?
July 7, 2008 at 9:38 am
~~to death then?~~
??? A toast? I’ll drink to anything mate. To death! To life! To wombats!
July 7, 2008 at 9:44 am
here’s to true colours, cheers.
July 7, 2008 at 9:47 am
Well I always preferred Sindy to Barbie, so I’ll agree with you on that. If this world makes you crazy and you’ve taken all you can bear, you call me up because you know I’ll be there
July 7, 2008 at 11:05 am
Wow. Don’t you guys like, know about numbering questions?
1. have you been around here recently?
I don’t get why you’re asking this doggerel, when you know everything about *all* of us when we post here and get to look inside our laptops. Burning Man was the only time I haven’t checked in.
2. Are you the gardening type?
Do I look like it? Say yes and I’ll have to think seriously about offing myself. Dirt is real hard on acrylics and nail polish. Duh!!!!!!!!!!!
3. Do you prefer summer or winter?
Which do you think, for anyone with a hot toned bod? Not counting ski season of course.
4. How many times have you been an an aeroplane in the last year?
Helicopters. Boyfriend’s. Just about every weekend okay with you?
5. Can you remember how many names you have had, or I’ll make it simple, can you count on one hand, two, or do you need more?
Yeah, yeah and yeah.
Now when are you going to ask us something challenging, like your coolest guys
fmk
MM
freepoland
Mishari
parallax
would like, want to answer?
July 7, 2008 at 11:31 am
“Now when are you going to ask us something challenging…?”
You must remember this: a list is just a list, and a lie is just a lie. The fundamental things apply – all in good time….
July 7, 2008 at 11:56 am
Appears they are ignorant Steve to the true story here; you didn’t explain about my school? Very remiss of Mishari, Melton and yourself.
Parallelxview and Billymills you are exempt from further questioning from me; your credentials check out, however should you wish to add to knowledge or embark on your own check list,,please continue; I would appreciate further help in identification. (Though BillyMills I was unaware they had mining in Ireland, and a smelter too!)
Ern, you are a problem..
take for example your “Minerva, my Minerva. So many questions. I do hope that you are not all talk and no actions.”
You said you knew me.
btw confectionary is supplied in the classroom.
13 trips; doesn’t sound like you’ve spent much time on the ground..
LittleRabbitFooey….I’m struggling with your identity; when did you fill out the form?
July 7, 2008 at 12:36 pm
Minerva, or may I call you Pallas Athena, It seems we have a new gold mine. However, I was thinking this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_metal_typesetting
July 7, 2008 at 1:05 pm
Pallas Athena? Thank you for the thought Billy, but I can’t be worshipped; I was once taught to bow.
I’m fascinated by the metal typesetting; do you do that? I do recall, in fact I even saw.
July 7, 2008 at 1:06 pm
I will answer any reasonable questions, but may have to refer some of them to my principal, Antonio Cabral, for security reasons, which may mean a delay. Sr Cabral is currently working away with the World Administrative Secretariat, and I understand Signor Klinky will also be at his meeting.
July 7, 2008 at 2:49 pm
~~You said you knew me.~~
Did I? Or do you think I did?
Certainly I know of you. As you of I. And I might like to get to know you. In a WLTM/NS/P sense.
But enough of this. Time to return to the ether. G’day all.
July 7, 2008 at 3:03 pm
On a different slant from WTFAY (who the fuck are you) I’ve been meaning to say how much of the collective’s poetry has been hanging around in my head (not least that Billy needed ‘yellow’ in his eponymous acrostic poem).
Anyway, words in poetry/doggerel/what-people-say flow over like warm tea – but then parts come back to trouble you – ‘haunt’ is an overworked word I know, but it’s the power of an image conjured that haunts.
So thanks for:
Billy’s ‘Immrama’
MM’s ‘Blair leaves Downing Street’
Steve’s ‘moot, or moose, or pamplemousse’
and especially freepoland’s: (She has horny feet, clatt’ring the window.), which is so connected in my mind with the tapping on the window in ‘Wuthering Heights’ that it consigns you, freep, forever into my Gothic list of names
and more recently, crisosto’s ‘a small pause falls to the ground’ which was wonderful
but what has troubled me most is mishari’s ‘it’s out of my hands’ poem from Billy’s departure thread.
I want to ask mishari’s permission to deconstruct his poem (yes, yes, I know this is not a friendly term for the leavisites amongst us) because I think it is culturally encoded with ’stuff’ but I want to divorce mishari (the voice) from the words he’s created, to make sense of a disturbing and troubling undercurrent that makes his ‘out of my hands’ poem resonate with a troubling and problematic sense of where we’re at.
July 7, 2008 at 3:16 pm
“can’t help feeling (and this is primarily for fmk’s benefit) that the Widmerpools (from the planet Wid) would make good Dr Who villains”
Perhaps. They could certainly not be out of place in St-Ex’s Little Prince and I tend to think there’s a touch of the Prince to the Doctor. But could they be defeated by setting c-17 on the sonic screwdriver?
I think the best response the the Ks of this world is to be found in Donleavy’s Unexpurgated Code. By far the best bit of my recent JPD binge.
As for questionnaires – oh brother, can I spare the time?
July 7, 2008 at 4:28 pm
Ern,
you reminded me of someone that used to make me laugh; but if you were that person you could have emailed me.
July 7, 2008 at 4:38 pm
Blimey, wn7’s been busy. Must be a slow day at Monoglot Corp.
July 7, 2008 at 5:12 pm
“Arties she
squats to piss”
i wonder about the word “Arties” in these lines by BM, if here, he might help?
~~~~~~~~~~
July 7, 2008 at 5:17 pm
Klinki, Igor, is he supposed to be asked to do anything? He might answer f*** off!
This he wrote,
MALVINAS (FUCKLANDS)
Precocious incidence
Howled of flames
You will see each corpse
Dying of another death
Living in english
And speaking of Ireland
The prisoner is the jail
The slave is the master
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
(Argentina, 2000)
July 7, 2008 at 5:29 pm
Probably a typo, ros. Bally Mulls has the yips.
July 7, 2008 at 5:34 pm
Ern and Minerva-Athenea,
the Wombat identification code questionnaire immensely useful, perhaps, for future ident. kit game, given that right now perhaps a few go holidaying, without laptops, they forget about everything and would be a total mess. So perhaps later on, when Igor has answered yes or not or perhaps. (If igor he has to be.) Easier before Internet.
Now, the makings of glass, and, perhaps Minerva after all doesn’t know, but thinking about the game makes you notice how difficult in action, not in theory, it may become, if many (more than 10 players?) are involved and nobody is actually a physical body with IPS to be tracked and all that awful story, being traced and tracked to the bottom of the earth! Unless you happen to live in remote lands, US, Australia or Argentina, who’s going to step forward to the unknown?
Smaller couplings we must all know, already operative, the Christina Rossetti appartion was one, the Miranda Mowbray another, there must have been many more. Not that i am revealing anything, btw. Otherwise, don’t shoot, i’m already hanging.
July 7, 2008 at 5:54 pm
FWIW, “Arties” puzzled me too….
And I merely note, as it (aptly) jogs my memory: the construction Billy used, akin to “John he did that” would have sent my late English teacher (a man with an impeccably Irish name; and whom, fearsome and unbending as he was, I rather liked) into apoplexy had we kids employed it….but breaking the rules is part of the fun of writing verse; and I can just imagine Adam’s infamous and ruthless red pen scrawling over my recent efforts….
July 7, 2008 at 6:07 pm
i liked that structure.
“Arties she
squats to piss”
where arties is incognita, “squat” another, and to “piss”, well, to urinate and to get drunk?
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Minerva said:
“btw a mutual email address and sock puppet, definitely disagree, think of the legalities doggerelist.”
{not mutual. only one.)
legalities= all involved would be sacked eventually.
~~~~~~~~~~~~
“And untranslated material, unchecked on the blog! Igor in Spanish? That’s a mistake in perception, minerva. “X” is a collective mask, not for “X” but for A+B+C+D+E+F+G+H….+Z, …
~~~~~~~~~
July 7, 2008 at 6:27 pm
thehangedmantarotcard,
I would be no party to what is planned on GU bOOKS BLOG.
Some very disagreeable thoughts surface from the current discussion. Little hard for me to laugh it all off.
July 7, 2008 at 6:56 pm
and btw. you are familiar with W.O.M.B.A.T of Harry Potter fame, the secret room. There are some similiarites and really it was all very innocent. Unfortunately apparently some inquisitive minds are not so. This minerva does have a different surname to the one that was Headmistress. What others do to the names of innocent parties, is extremely distasteful.
July 7, 2008 at 7:11 pm
OK, Minerva, you haven’t heard anything.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
See, mmm,
http://klinki.hotusa.org/endless.html
(klinki is an infidel, unfaithful bitch, he published on that very link a poem dedicated to me and now the same poem appears dedicated to someone else, bollocks indeed.
July 7, 2008 at 7:38 pm
I wouldn’t take it so seriously, MINERVA….in effect, anyone who posts using a pseudonym is inviting speculation on their identity; it’s an interesting thought experiment to wonder how it would work with multiple but limited names behind one pseudonym – nothing more….IMHO it would never work in practice as senses of humour vary and a secret is only a secret as long as it’s confined to one individual….and only naive conspirators discuss such options openly….
July 7, 2008 at 7:51 pm
doggerel,
naive as i am, one purpose or goal this exchange has ellicited: the difficulty involved, so as to dismiss further paranoia about multiple identities. ~”Never” is absolutist word, actually the experiment might work for some time. But it looks as if it can’t be too openly discussed.
~~~~~~
and kisses and apologies all around.
~~~~~~
July 7, 2008 at 8:06 pm
Steve. You are immensely wise. Multiple contributors to one pseudonymous identity sounds possible and entertaining, especially given the kind of imaginative goodwill that exists here, but you are precisely correct. It would be farcical, and anarchic in a dull sense.
We probably all have a few avatars we would like to introduce to friends, or play with, or love and obey. Let us remain in control of our own imaginary firends. I have long had as an associate Antonio Cabral, a very senior administrator of huge but discreet international standing. He allows me certain privileges so long as I do not abuse his protection. And he has allowed me to answer the questions.
1. Nearby, yes.
2. Yes, without bark.
3. In winter, summer; in summer, winter
4. Two times
5. ‘Had’ is too confusing to answer.
July 7, 2008 at 10:47 pm
*Someone* was so curious as to some of the identities above that they did a “whois” search somehow….that just ended up (for some reason which I don’t understand) cluttering up my email spam….
July 7, 2008 at 11:05 pm
I have a toothache. It’s doubtless punishment for a life of unparalleled wickedness. I’m going to buy myself a set of leopard’s teeth and have them implanted. Anyone who annoys me will have their jugular ripped out.
Of course, that will neccesitate going on the permanent lam, lurking in shrubbery around Regents Park and such-like, but we must pay for our pleasures…
July 7, 2008 at 11:11 pm
Bad luck on the toothache….did MM sort his out I wonder?
July 7, 2008 at 11:11 pm
Apropos, it came to my notice this w/e that my wife has taken to referring to me as ‘Melton’ in text and email. She never reads any of my squibs, so I can only assume she likes the name. I suppose it is quite classy. Perhaps I should make it permanent.
July 7, 2008 at 11:13 pm
PS-parallax,de-construct away. For what it’s worth, the words were just feelings and impressions on a return home from Paris that week. There’s something about trains and train journeys that I find deeply satisfying…that and coming home.
July 7, 2008 at 11:18 pm
Have some high-quality cards made up, MM, (engraved, natch). The Comte de Melton. Foreign titles are so multitudinous and arcane that few will dare gainsay you. Cultivate some eccentricities. Carry a riding-crop. Wear a monocle. You’ll be ascending the ladder of High Society in no time…oh, and you’ll need a vicious mistress. Best keep that one from Mrs.MM…
July 7, 2008 at 11:21 pm
Messages crossed there, I think. Yes, I had my tooth out a week ago. My dentist, a large hairy ex-Iranian, chickened out and handed me off to his junior partner, a twig-limbed young woman. I was apprehensive settling into the chair, thinking she might not have the musculature to rip it out, but in fact she did a far better job than the ex-South African (clearly ex-BOSS) chap who did the last one and nearly tore my face off. I recommend clove oil and/or heroin to you, Mishari.
July 7, 2008 at 11:31 pm
Clove oil is more painful than the frigging tooth. Luckily, one is never more than a stones throw from a smack dealer in Whitechapel. The krauts knew what they were about when they named it ‘heroin’, (heroic). Truly, it is balm and nepenthe when pain relief is called for. Bless the Afghan war-lords.
July 7, 2008 at 11:32 pm
Glad it went well….nothing worse than hearing a dentist say “uh, oh”….
July 7, 2008 at 11:42 pm
Unless it’s a doctor. Or a plumber.
July 7, 2008 at 11:54 pm
….or a doctor-plumber (otherwise known as a surgeon)….
July 8, 2008 at 12:19 am
‘uh-oh’ is never what you want to hear from someone who’s going to be sending you a bill…
MM, I see you made the ‘coolest guys’ list. Shome mishtake, surely? Unless, of course, you become the Comte de Mowbray, in which case your chill-factor becomes almost unquantifiable…
July 8, 2008 at 12:22 am
Mishari – “fragments” I liked a lot….
July 8, 2008 at 6:12 am
Thanks, cs. One of those rare occasions when I wasn’t trying to be clever or tricky. Knowing how stringent your standards are, I take your words very kindly indeed…