Aw Diddums

Searching for my style

I saw something yesterday that annoyed me. Many folk have a little piece saying something along the lines of “don’t steal my art”, which strikes me as understandable but futile, but one guy broke new ground with a general warning on his own pieces: “don’t copy my style.”

First of all, I didn’t see anything individual about his style; it looked like many others of that genre. Secondly, we are all inspired by everything else we’ve come across in our lifetimes, including this person so worried that he might be copied. Like any of us, he might well have come to it in his own time, but the likelihood is that he didn’t just make it up out of nowhere… there was nothing new about it. The piece I was looking at looked like a pale version of something from The Golden Compass.

The funny thing about ideas is that people tend to get the same ideas over and over… partly because they are drawing from the same wells of inspiration. Like when I took a photo of a cobweb with dewdrops on it, and was going to blog about it, and a little while later found a couple of blogs by other Scots around the same time, talking about these cobwebs with dew on that they’d taken photos of. There is no way that they copied me, as I never blogged about it… and I didn’t see theirs till after I thought of it. Actually, I doubt if they ever came near my blog.

He has a bit of a nerve to suggest that I (along with others) should stop experimenting and discard perfectly good examples of (cough) art I might have considered making just because it might look like stuff that’s already out there. There are many who post tutorials teaching us how to do this or that, and in the end we can combine the skills to make something of our own. They don’t complain when we post a few pictures like theirs; it’s more like “welcome to the party!” I could almost describe it as a type of internet apprenticeship, which is what it’s all about. Not “here’s my special brand… now you can’t ever do anything like this.” Like what, exactly? Perhaps I should just avoid looking at his work, and then I won’t be subliminally (or overtly) influenced. I can’t promise I wouldn’t have similar ideas on my own, without ever having seen more than two of his own pieces.

Wrongly labelled

An extra rant… things that appear in the wrong categories. It’s bugged me ever since my eBay days in the year 2000 or whenever. All people had to do was write “This is NOT a Steiff bear!” and it would appear in the Steiff listings, as if they weren’t long enough already.

There were the misspelled things that never got into the right listings, but if you were on the lookout, you might get a cheap ‘Stieff’ bear that none of the rival collectors noticed. Usually if they were serious collectors, though, they were on the lookout for misspellings themselves, hoping you weren’t noticing.

Or there were the ones with titles that just said “A lovely cuddly soft toy!” and you wanted to know (without having to look) what sort of soft toy. It might have been a Steiff. It might have been the old pink Woolworth mouse you’ve been looking for for years. But you only have so much time to spend on the search, and your old computer is too slow to look at every page that leaves you wondering. I didn’t spend much time or money on Steiff bears, but I looked occasionally to see what was out there.

And the miscategorizations spread to other fields… such as stock images. Recently I decided to look for spaceships, space shuttles and UFOs. The UFO category was stuffed full of women posing in Sci-Fi costumes, along with pages and pages of perfectly ordinary sky photos. I picked out three sky photos (not from the same pages) and would you know… they were all by the same person! I looked to see if maybe she had called them UFO Skies, or written casually in the description “this would be good with a UFO travelling across it”, because then it might not have been deliberate. But ‘UFO’ wasn’t in a single one of them, not even as part of a word… it must have been added to the search terms. Verdict: not accidental.

If I wanted a nice dramatic sky for a UFO to travel across, I would take or make my own, or search the ’sky’ section of the Stock Photos. I wouldn’t look under UFO if I already had one. A background, I mean… as it happens, I did have one of my own.

Pah.

(I ended up making my own wobbly UFOs).

Something I keep wishing we had is an automatic treatment unit in every house. I probably read about something like this in Ringworld by Larry Niven. Every morning you could step inside, and it would scan for irregularities and make any adjustments necessary. Cracked tooth? Repaired without pain or extraction. Furry arteries? Sweetly cleared. A tumour just starting to form? Safely zapped in seconds.

No need to worry your family with these mundane details – they’re carrying out similar checks and changes on themselves.

Broken bone? Beautifully straightened and set without pain. Poor hearing? Tuned to perfect pitch! Failing kidneys? Repaired, as good as new!

No need to go to hospital, sit for hours in waiting rooms and have tests… only for the doctors to say they don’t know what’s wrong with you, or they do know what’s wrong with you and can’t fix it, or they thought they knew what was wrong with you but got it wrong.

A treatment unit in the corner of your own bedroom would be lovely from an agoraphobic point of view especially – not having to go out to the GP, optician or dentist. Fewer people milling about in buses and on the roads (not having to go out to be treated). And just think – no more valuable land given over to grim hospital buildings and sprawling, expensive car parks. No more people catching superbugs they wouldn’t have caught if they hadn’t gone near those places.

I suppose it would be worrying if the technology really was that good, then one day you stepped inside your treatment unit and it said “sorry for any inconvenience, but you cannot be repaired.”

Imagine a society which has evolved beyond our current laws and adds the option of self-euthanasia. “You cannot be repaired. Your heart will self-destruct in 66 hours, unless you choose self-euthanasia.”

Panicking, you click on Y, and it says “are you sure?”

Some weeks later, it is realized that your treatment unit had a bug and wasn’t working properly. The engineers responsible are being sued to the hilt, but that’s no comfort for your grieving family and friends.

That sounds more like real life…. unfortunately.

I began Brother Odd by Dean Koontz at lunchtime yesterday, and was completely hooked from page 3 onwards… didn’t put it down till I finished it in the early hours of the next morning. I’d meant to write a letter and didn’t need the distraction – still, we can’t always predict these things! Brother Odd is quite an unusual book to me, though it seems there are other ‘Odd’ books by the same writer; I’ll have to look them out.

I have a headache again, I’m not sure where it comes from.

Delilah strained her paw a couple of nights ago and left poor Samson to bat toy mice around by himself for a while.

Cheeky is the adult cat who is chasing the kittens, but today she came prowling in here, looking menacingly under things… “here kitty, kitty, where ARE you?”… and she didn’t notice one of the ‘kittens’, quite a large tomcatty Samson, was treading on her heels. When she caught a whisper of something, and glanced behind, she got such a shock that she spat violently and galloped off with Samson pelting delightedly behind.

He looked so pleased with himself, whereas Cheeky was anything but. Perhaps Delilah’s opting out made him all bored, full of himself and ready for new adventures. Talking of which, I can see exactly how Delilah would have hurt herself – undeterred by her sore paw, she flung herself across the gap between the back of the sofa and a shelf. She slammed into the shelf and slid to the floor.

While moving my blog, I discovered it’s full of stories about my older cats, especially Sharky. Mostly I avoid talking about the cats too much, as I worry that it’s dull – but it made me happy to reread the posts about isolated moments I might otherwise have forgotten.

Here’s one from a night ago… Mum came up about 21:00 (unexpectedly) with some coffee for me, then toddled off. Samson came yawning and stretching from wherever he had been resting, and looked in his empty dish, then stared from it to Mum’s disappearing back. He couldn’t believe she hadn’t brought him refreshments as well.

I think he’s quite enjoying himself – he’s gone from being a terrified Invisible Sulk to an accepted and respected member of our group – no longer just hanging around in the background of a large crowd of kittens.

I discovered to my delight that it’s back-to-back Red Dwarf with subtitles on TV… goes on till nearly 3 in the morning, so I’m recording some for later. I wondered if I’d ‘grown out’ of it but was yelling with laughter the way I always used to, so it seems not.

Smoke me a kipper – I’ll be back for breakfast.

I went looking for some nice new desktop pictures. I found this elegant phoenix and fell in love with it; not just as a design but as a living presence! You sense there’s a real bird there, even though it’s the white hot heart of the flames. If you reach in to touch it, it won’t burn you – it’s soft and warm. Gorgeous. Who said there are only three ways of beating the winter blues?

Here are links to other pictures I liked – there should be something for most people here:

Blue Rain – if we had scenery like this around here, I’d never get any work done. Oh, wait…

Compass of the Soul – a luxurious, expensive looking desktop.

Galaxy Wars – an amazing abstract in blue.

Guardian of the Darkness – this one will worry your office colleagues.

Impatient Jungle – Now I want a little zoo too…

Innocence (quack!)

Liverpool Echo – did Rapunzel’s prince fall into a rose bush like this?

Misty Sunset – lovely snow scene for your winter desktop.

Sydney Bridge at Night amazed me, though I usually avoid city scenes.

What! An individual who would outmatch our cats, glare for glare and talon for talon.

Wild Blue – it would be an extra special dream, flying over a land like this.

Going Home – I have a special affection for this fantasy scene. I also love the song of the same name by Runrig.

Land of Nod – where I keep fetching up. I don’t see anywhere to spread my duvet, though.

I reckon I was a locust in a former life. Humming through the verdant stretches of cyberspace, when I hit a desktop picture site or similar, I gobble it up till nothing is left but bare stalks, then off I flit to the next place. The trouble with Caedes.net is that I’ve met my match. It’s like trying to drain a goblet filled with the sea. I’ve browsed the images till my Mac is burping, and I’ve barely scratched the surface. The gallery for new images boasts over 300 items and they’re still coming in. The three pictures featured on the main page refresh randomly. There’s a voting booth, which is horribly addictive – you don’t get to choose which to vote for; it’s chosen for you, and you always wonder what’s coming next. The main bad point with this is that sometimes you see a picture that has plenty of votes but is underrated (or deliberately voted down, maybe) but because it’s high enough on the vote map, you won’t get the chance to redress the balance. And then there are pictures which (in my opinion) have been rated too high – will they always be at the top of the charts?

I saw something on the site saying that you can only upload a picture after you’ve voted for ten images in the voting booth – interesting idea. I wondered if it would work on a blog site, but I don’t think it would. By the time I’d commented on ten Blogigo blogs, I would have forgotten what I was going to blog about.

Dishing out TLC to unloved images is not easy. You sit staring at a distant stick insect on an over-exposed stump surrounded by dry yellow grass, trying to think of something encouraging to say about it. I’m sure my forebears (whether human beings or locusts) never had this problem.

On Christmas afternoon we watched Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, then my sister and I went home. There was a large ’splash’ visible on Mum’s front doorstep which puzzled me no end. Finally I asked Mum, “What’s THAT?”
“E threw out the dog’s water.”
“Oh,” I said, relieved – “I thought maybe it was Voldemort.”
She gave me a look, but, you know, it could have been him in one of his half-life forms, having just been vanquished for the umpteenth time.

You never know.

I was online today, looking at some Lord of the Rings boxed sets (DVDs) to see if they had subtitles for the hard of hearing, and drew a blank. Not because the site said they weren’t subtitled, but because nothing was said about it at all – so you don’t really know if they have no subtitles or if the information was somehow omitted that they do. Or perhaps, because they’re boxed sets, some of the DVDs are subtitled, and some aren’t. I don’t know.

In particular, I was looking at the extended DVDs, and strongly suspect that if there’s any subtitling, only half the DVDs are subtitled – the ‘film’ half. That means half my money would be wasted.

Until I find out for sure (and perhaps other sites on the internet have the relevant information) I will not be buying.

The Lord of the Rings videos weren’t subtitled! I clearly remember the day I found out. I was having a bad day already, but was looking forward to seeing the film when it came out on video. I was standing in a Tesco queue with Mum. Mum spotted the video on a rack, looked at it, put it back, turned to me and said: “it’s not subtitled.”

I was stunned – this is the Lord of the Rings they’re talking about! The all-time fantasy classic! We’ve all been waiting for a film like this for years! How can it not be subtitled???

I pulled other New Line Cinema videos from the racks to see if they had subtitles – at that time, none of the ones I checked did. I don’t know what their reasons were; maybe they had a very good reason – that’s just how it was. It still didn’t seem right – not for something this big.

I think (but am not sure) that the extended versions had subtitles, but I couldn’t afford the shop price – I hoped they might turn up in the second-hand CD store or a charity shop, but so far all I’ve seen are the unsubtitled versions. Those were the regular ones that most people bought. I confess to a few moments of annoyance when thinking about this – “everyone should boycott the unsubtitled videos!” but I can’t expect that. A bit dog-in-the-mangerish. Everybody-focus-on-MY-problemsish. Ridiculous. “But they should still have been subtitled…” says a voice in my head, disbelieving. “Them nasty hobbitses forgot the captionses.”

Gollum, gollum.

So it was another while yet before I got to see the Lord of the Rings on TV. Other people were talking about it, raving about how marvellous it was, and how they had seen it three times already… and I hadn’t even seen it once. I fervently hoped I didn’t accidentally die before I ever got to see it. Wouldn’t that be annoying?

I remember I was storing up videos to watch and we were going on holiday, and I got to thinking “what if we all die in a motorway pile-up and I never ever see any of these videos because I was ’saving’ them?” So I sat down before the holiday to watch some, including Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.

Since then I’ve snagged plenty more videos, so there’s always something new. I’m a firm believer in having something to look forward to, no matter how small.

Edit Feb 2008: Comments to this entry when it was hosted on Blogigo:

1. Pacian wrote at Nov 23, 2006 at 23:33:
I worry about this too. Subtitles can even be poorly done on films that aren’t in English, which is the main reason I try to always find out beforehand.

Quick googling turns up: http://dvd-subtitles.com/
Is this the one?

For non-English films, DVD Times usually mentions if the subtitles are incomplete or correspond to a dub rather than the original language track.

2. Diddums wrote at Nov 24, 2006 at 00:29:
Thanks for the URLs! The boxed set you mention is partly subtitled, according to that site. Some of the ‘extras’ are not subtitled, but the films are. And what they have are ‘English subtitles, but not for the hard of hearing’ – presumably that means it doesn’t say “bell dongs” or “Balrog roars incomprehensibly” and things like that… doesn’t bother me all that much, though sometimes it’s important to know.

3. KatieK wrote at Nov 24, 2006 at 05:57:
Nasty Hobitses indeed! This is…incomprehensible. Spend 400 billion whatsits on film production and then leave out the subtitles. I am very disappointed in them and now I will think about this every time I watch my DVD version of the films. Bad Corporation, bad corporation!

4. Bunnyman wrote at Nov 24, 2006 at 19:36:
Hello Diddums. I’m a bit of a slow reader, but that’s me caught up now. You know, you really do have a lovely blog and it’s a real treat to read.

I’m very chuffed that I got a mention on one of your posts and even a place on your links list. An honour indeed, thank you!

On the subject of subtitles, I have the first two films as separate extended DVD editions for the UK (think that’s region 2 but I can’t remember), although they must both be over a year old. Both have subtitles for the film part. Not yet sure about the extras because I can’t get my DVD player to work properly right now – dratted thing’s being very badly behaved. If I do get it working, I’ll let you know

5. Bunnyman wrote at Nov 24, 2006 at 20:19:
Got it to work now on an old Windows laptop. Unfortunately, there is no setup menu on my Extras CD so it does indeed look like subtitling for the film part only. Seems to be just the voice bits too, no other sounds or hints. During that section where Saruman snitches to Sauron via the Palantir, it’s not that clear who’s saying what.

Don’t know whether any of this has improved in recent versions.

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is brilliant – all that running across roofs and up walls. I tried it once but scraped my fingers then fell on my bum – quite painful it was too. Might need to take some lessons.

6. Diddums wrote at Nov 25, 2006 at 13:59:
Hi Bunnyman, thanks very much for the information on the DVD – that does sound right; sometimes I get confused about who said what. Then they suddenly start placing the text right over the characters’ faces, as though they think it will help. Then stop and go back to normal again – no idea what that’s all about. It’s as though different people are working on it, with different ideas of ideal text placement.

Does it say anywhere on Croughing Tiger, Hidden Dragon ‘don’t try this at home?’ Heh.

7. Bunnyman wrote at Nov 25, 2006 at 14:24:
Well at least on my copies, the titles aren’t over the faces. Mind you, they would be if anyone had to bend to tie their shoelace; they do seem to be quite large, in the lower part of the screen. Perhaps they’ll obscure some critical piece of hitherto unnoticed plot such as Boromir passing Frodo a secret note saying “I love you really, it’s the script, it made me do it!”

I saw The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring last night – not for the first time. I enjoyed it more than last time, somehow – it felt more as though I was reading the book and ’seeing’ what was happening, and I wanted to repeat all the sonorous phrases that came rolling off their tongues. I was acting a bit silly for some reason, and when Gandalf paused, sniffed around suspiciously, and frowned, I said “it’s the Balrog!” and waited with bated breath… “blah blah blah blah the Balrog,” he said, and I cheered…

Proof that people over 40 aren’t any less giddy than kids of 14.

Fusspot the Siamese was watching when Gollum turned up. Gollum peered through a gap with his great golden eyes glowing in the night, and Fusspot sat up and stared. He didn’t relax till things started moving again.

I found myself thinking that if we fell through a wormhole in the middle of the night and woke up as characters in The Lord of the Rings, I would probably be Boromir. Nobody wants to be Boromir, though there are a lot of Sean Bean fans about (like me!) I didn’t realize it until, dying on a tree root, he uttered the following words:

“The world of men is failing. All things will turn to darkness.”

Aragorn tells him no – there is hope for us yet. Trouble is, I think many imagine that we live largely in a world of light, perhaps with war beating at the door, but I think there are a lot of orcs right in here with us, along with wizards like Saruman. The Shire is the achievable ideal, and we’re moving further away from that all the time.

It’s not a world of light yet. Nowhere near.

Edit Feb 2008: Comments to this post when it was on Blogigo:

Iain wrote at Nov 9, 2006 at 00:26:
re if LOTR had been written by someone else, here’s an enormous thread you might find entertaining – it’s patchy, but some bits are very good.

Diddums wrote at Nov 9, 2006 at 20:11:
Boy, they really went to town. I was only able to read 3 or 4 pages before my brain seized up, but one of my favourites was the Mary Poppins version.

This should be subtitled ‘Computer Artists Beware’. I’m going to have to set up a separate blog category for graphics.

I discovered some fantasy desktop pictures by Ryan Bliss at Digital Blasphemy. Most are not free (what a fantastic way to earn a living!) but he has a gallery of free wallpapers which had me happily downloading. My favourite is Endless Blue.

Ryan says there will be a Halloween picture or two dropping into the free gallery in time, and the pictures will regularly change, so if you like them, it’s worth keeping an eye on.

Gazebo 2003, Archipelago and Coalescence are all better than they appear in the thumbnails, despite the fact that Gazebo 2003 is at the bottom of the ‘download’ list and something called Orthohedron (which I didn’t like) is in the top five (now the top two).

I also (thanks to Timothy at Timmargh.net) stumbled across a site called Moodflow. My absolute favourite (of all my collected wallpapers so far) is Walking with Orion. Another one I love is Paradise Cove, but it’s not alone in the beauty parade.

There appear to be a lot of dreamers in the human race. Any time I’m going through an ‘everybody’s a rat’ spell, I will have these fantasy wallpapers to remind me otherwise.

One good thing about all this, displaying the same wallpapers on both computers, was that I finally focused on a big difference between the PC and iMac monitors. The PC’s monitor was dimmer and bluer – seemed to show less of a range of colours. Makes me wonder how any of my Paintshop Pro graphics ever worked out! Certainly explains why some look good on the PC and terrible on the Mac. I remember one in particular that shaded nicely into black (I thought) and then I got it on the Mac and you could see the stark edges. That was very disappointing. Next time you see graphics and photos that are absolutely horrible, consider that the owner’s monitor might be on the blip, or set wrong.

Meanwhile, my PC’s display had ‘drifted’ so that there was an annoying black strip down one side. Dug out the monitor manual, which was satisfyingly fat because it was published in a thousand different languages. ‘See Section 4′ it says, and ’section 4′ turns out to PART 4 in Italiano. The English section 4 is on page 17, still within Part 1. Having worked that out, I centred the display. Wasn’t allowed to change colours or colour temperature – something to do with the sRGB mode. I’m lost – will have to consult Internet later. Currently the PC is in a state of Endless Blue.

At any rate, I was able to raise the brightness. Is there a normal level of brightness? Mine was set at 40%, and it was a little like swimming through the depths of a lagoon. I raised it to 50%, and now the violet star in Space Dust by Anders Fernström looks fractionally more violet and less blue. In future most of my wobbly graphics will be done on my Mac.

I’m trying to think of something non-wallpapery to discuss, but my mind has gone blank. Remove the wallpaper and the colour vanishes. ‘Solid Aqua Graphite.png’, perhaps. That’s Apple for endless grey.

Edit Feb 2008: A comment to this entry when it was hosted on Blogigo:

Pacian wrote at Oct 28, 2006 at 10:27:
Sorry this took so long, but I have these links on my other computer, and this is the first time they’ve both been on since I read this. When my old monitor drifted, I used these sites to try and get it back to normal:

http://displaycalibration.com/
http://w4zt.com/screen/

My current monitors show everything just nicely, so I can’t be bothered to calibrate them properly according to these things, but you can waste a lot of time fine-tuning on these two sites.

(It took me about a week to realise that my old monitor wasn’t remembering the settings when it was turned off for any length of time, so they turned out to be useless for me.)

Hum well – last night I downloaded some desktop pictures for my Mac and PC. The Mac’s desktop pictures are set to ‘random’, so when I got up this morning and turned it on, this is what I was greeted with:

http://www.pc-wallpapers.co.uk/viewer.php?cmax=5&cat=TR&id=000011

If you haven’t got your specs on or don’t wish to follow the link, it’s Lara Croft from Tomb Raider. When I came back into the room half an hour later, it had changed to this:

http://www.pc-wallpapers.co.uk/viewer.php?cmax=8&cat=HE&id=000003

(Large green helicopter surfing the waves).

I don’t always stick to fluffy pink bunny wabbits and Hello Kitty, though (cough) I have a few of those too.

© 2006, Diddums

It shows what is out there if you’re bored with flying windows and false jaguar fur.

I have seen this book meme around a few times and nobody was tagging me for it, mostly because they don’t know me. Today I thought I could do it anyway – and then I dropped in to visit Pacian at Space Cat Rocket Ship, and he tagged everybody who visited! So here’s my excuse.

1. One book that changed your life.

They probably all changed my life by degrees, influencing my thoughts or giving me fresh inspiration. I can’t think of a single book that changed my life more than any other. Nothing pushed me down a specific career path. I didn’t want to become a vet after reading If Only They Could Talk by James Herriot, nor did I decide to become a secret service agent and circus acrobat after reading E. E. ‘Doc’ Smith. Maybe I’m not all that impressionable, and found it easy to see past the glamour to the gore, hard work and sadness, or maybe I’ve always been more interested in writing than living…

2. One book that you’ve read more than once.

Cranford by Elizabeth Gaskell. Slim, old, English. Amusing and sad. Must have read it four times or so.

3. One book that you’d want on a desert island.

Something fat and entertaining that I’ve never read before. Or the complete set of books by Jean M Auel. Or something that would tell me how to build a rudimentary shelter, or how to crack open coconuts without losing the juice. I would want a complete library on this desert island, as well as some blank journals in which to write about my experiences.

4. One book that made you laugh.

Merry Hall by Beverley Nichols. It’s attractive, refreshing, funny, and very English. I suggested it to an informal Book Club. Most of the other members lived in America and said they went to their libraries and couldn’t obtain it, as it wasn’t available. Some of them tried to buy it and discovered it wasn’t cheap. So they gave up, which was disappointing – but one determined lady returned to her library and said she would like to read this book if they ordered it in – and they did! She took it home and read it, and so did her husband, and she said she’s glad she went to all the trouble as it was just their cup of tea.

The Book Club fizzled out quite quickly because nobody ever seemed to want to get a recommended book for this reason or that (I found a surprising number of the books in charity shops or on eBay, so it wasn’t that difficult) – but I still feel something important was accomplished… there’s a library out there that has a good book in stock because of this short-lived club and because of a member who wouldn’t give up.

5. One book that made you cry.

Jennie by Paul Gallico. Fantasy novel about cats. Very charming, detailed, interesting and sad.

6. One book you wish you had written.

The Unlikely Ones by Mary Brown. Fantasy. I wasn’t expecting much from it as it had just fallen into my hands in a bundle of unwanted paperbacks… but it was imaginative and charming, and I’m not going to give it away!

7. One book you wish had never been written.

A few rather dark books I got rid of so quickly I can’t even remember what they were called or who wrote them. I do this with horror books, especially cruel or satanic ones.

8. One book you’re currently reading.

Only yesterday I finished Make Room! Make Room! by Harry Harrison (a slim science fiction novel which should be required reading for everyone. I wrote a little about it here). Have just started Mukiwa: A White Boy in Africa by Peter Godwin. In the preface he says Mukiwa is intended as a memoir rather than an autobiography.

9. One book you have been meaning to read.

One I got recently which I’ve had my eye on for some time and still haven’t begun is The Magicians’ Guild by Trudi Canavan. It’s the first book of a fantasy trilogy.

I tag…. well I’ll opt out like Pacian and tag every visitor to this blog who hasn’t already done this particular meme. Aw, go on.

Lunch time….!

PS: Pacian pointed out he is reading more than one book at present. Actually, so am I, but I was too embarrassed to say. The other book I’m reading is beside my bed. It’s Paddington Marches On by Michael Bond.

Edit Feb 2008: Comments to this post when it was hosted by Blogigo.

1. Pete wrote at Sep 6, 2006 at 21:56:
Ah Paddington, those were the days

2. Diddums wrote at Sep 7, 2006 at 09:24:
Only just realized Paddington had a wheelie bag too. My kind of bear.

At teatime today I finished Make Room! Make Room! by Harry Harrison. I bought it two days ago (see my last blog post Sunday Retail Therapy). The book’s tone is serious compared to others by this author, but he has a serious message about over-population, strained world resources and birth control.

The hero of the book seems to welcome rain as much as I do… it keeps people off the streets and even reduces the likelihood of riots (he’s a policeman and therefore has a particular interest in quelling trouble). At one point he says that he’s fighting to hold things together while all the other blackguards are intent on tearing them apart.

Self-interest will be the downfall of civilization, but I love the thought that even in such times, there could still be those who fight to stop things degenerating into total chaos.

It was published in 1966 but the topics of overpopulation, street crime and birth control have not gone away. I was interested in the bibliography at the back of the book – it includes titles like Controlled Parenthood, Our Plundered Planet and Must You Conform? They were all published between 1948 and 1965.

I’m sorry I finished the book. It’s a lovely rainy day and it was wonderful not to have to go anywhere – just curl up and read. I was looking forward to it, and now I’ve read it and I don’t have it to look forward to any more! Still, there are billions of other books, written by billions of other people.

Last night I saw Saving Private Ryan for the first and last time. “Earn this,” rasps Tom Hanks as he dies. I thought, “The whole world and everything in it (especially war) is messed up and people die all the time for nothing – I don’t understand why you try to put a price on just one life saved from the ashes.”

Maybe the message is for all of us, not just for Private Ryan. If we cheat and lie and steal and kill, and take more than our fair share, living only for ourselves and our close family members, how are we going to be worth anything at all?

It got four stars in the Radio Times. It’s not the first time I’ve considered the ratings and reviews by the Radio Times to be thoroughly screwed up. It gives four stars to films that tell me nothing I didn’t know already, three stars to ‘relentless’ films that are a waste of my time, and two stars to films which I suspect might have been relatively pleasant – only I missed them this time round. The tone of many of the reviews irritate me, and I’ve stopped reading the ones for Lost because they give the plot away!

Give me books any time…

Edit Feb 2008: Comments to this post when it was hosted by Blogigo:

Pete wrote at Sep 5, 2006 at 19:32:
Not read that one. I enjoyed the early Rat books.

Did you read the Eden novels?

Diddums wrote at Sep 6, 2006 at 01:29:
Not yet, I’ve not read very many Harry Harrison books yet. I just read them as they turn up.

Pacian wrote at Sep 6, 2006 at 13:41:
What a contrast! The only reason I always get the Radio Times is because it’s the only TV guide whose film reviews don’t annoy the **** out of me.

Diddums wrote at Sep 6, 2006 at 14:24:
Maybe there are ones out there I would find even more annoying, then :-). Either that or they take the mickey out of things I like – that could well be it.

Diddums wrote at Sep 6, 2006 at 14:26:
PS Pete, I’ve just noticed a couple of ‘Eden’ hardbacks tottering on the top of my bookcase over there! If it’s a series I’m probably waiting till I have the full set.

Agoraphobic people hate sunlight. Well we don’t really, but you know what I mean! It encourages people to come out and trail around in large shambly groups; everything we do is lit up in a bright glare which makes us even more self-conscious; some agoraphobics have a sensitivity to light – maybe all of us do without realizing it? We have to take off our jackets and sweaters when we would rather huddle into them, and there’s no excuse to put up our hoods (unless we’re hoodies) or duck under an umbrella.Bright sunshine is overrated!

Too many folks!

At one point I couldn’t move. “They have nothing else to do on a Sunday,” said Mum, apologetically. But on the whole I was in a good mood and smiled at everybody and made room for them, and me and the wheelie bag went skipping about (yes I know that’s bad grammar) and nobody fell over us this time. Well, when you were feeling agoraphobic in town – dizzy and not even able to cross the road – it’s a huge relief when you can go where you want and buy things without hesitating and gallop blithely across roads which would have made you shudder only a fortnight ago. That would put anybody in a good mood because then it stops being something you take for granted.

Jolly’s tricks

I bet none of you realized wheelie bags can walk – I was trying to move it down off the kerb, and it put one wheel down then swung the other down to join it. Thus, instead of falling down with a bump, it stepped neatly off, and I wanted to cheer and tell it how clever it was. Yesterday it had a slight accident when it crashed rather hard over a rough bit of the pavement, and I came uncomfortably close to patting it and telling it “there there, it’s alright.” It took me ages to shake off the urge. Anyway it did good work for us today by taking some heavy and bulky items off our hands; it wasn’t just wheeling around in our wake. Mum collected some used coffee grounds from Starbucks for the garden, and when we gave it to the wheelie bag to carry, it lumbered around like an overfed bulldog.

Buying beary love

Here’s a picture of two of my ‘junk shop finds’ for today – a Primark bear and a Disney Tigger. I collect ‘name’ toys, which includes Russ Berrie, Boyds and Disney – emphasis is on cats and bears. Normally I wouldn’t pay attention to something like a Primark bear as it’s just a cheapie, but every so often there’s something about a cheapie bear that I can’t resist! This one is very soft to the touch and has nice features. I always look critically at bears in shops – trying to give the impression I’m buying them for a child and am just checking them over. I’m not sure how many of the volunteers are taken in, as most of them know us well by now. Anyway, I turned him upside down and round about, gave the ears a tug, parted the fur and smoothed it back from the eyes to check for scratches or cracks, then seized the chin to make sure his mouth wasn’t flapping loose. I suddenly felt as though I was checking the teeth of a nag in Tattersalls.

Tigger only made it because he’s so beautifully clean and has a nice face too – normally Disney is at the bottom of my collection scope.

I’m not a horror fan but I’m an Alien fan

My prime find for today was a clean boxed set of Alien videos for £10. I’ve had my eye on these for a while as they are close-captioned but expensive brand new. After buying this set, we went into the charity shop next door and found they had a set for £11. I’m glad it wasn’t the other way around! A while ago I passed over a set which was £12 – I seem to remember one of the videos in the set was ‘the making of the film’, and those aren’t normally subtitled.

The set I bought was in the shop window, and I had to ask the volunteer for it - he was a boy of about 20, I think, and when I said “the boxed set of Alien, please!” a look of respect came into his eyes. I got much the same look in a shop in York when I grabbed a bunch of videos which were largely science fiction - one was Judge Dredd, unfortunately not subtitled, but I knew I had to have it in my collection ‘just because’. Maybe I’ll find a subtitled DVD of it one day? I love Judge Dredd; it’s one of my favourite films and I could watch it forever without getting sick of it.

The magic of books

I know some of you are a little suspicious of ‘things’ as they just gather dust and take up room (unless you can sell them for a profit on eBay), but ‘things’ are not all I bought - I got six books, including Make Room! Make Room! by Harry Harrison - £1.75. I’ve liked his books ever since I borrowed The Stainless Steel Rat from the library. Today I had to buy Make Room! Make Room! after reading the blurb on the back:

1999 – automation, total welfare, and weekends on the moon…. or an overcrowded world that knows that the dawn of the new century is the edge of disaster – a world of starving billions living on lentils, soya beans and – if they’re lucky – the odd starving rat. In a city of thirty-five million people, Andy Rusch is engaged in a desperate and lonely hunt for a killer everyone has forgotten… for even in a world such as this a policeman can find himself utterly alone…

Totally my cup of tea. And bagsies the well-fed rat I spotted near the car dealership.

Spooky purchases

We had lunch in a café and ate silently. Upon finishing, Mum announced rather loudly “I’m going to buy a broomstick.”
“Ha ha,” I said politely… but then we went into the garden centre where she picked up a really witchy broomstick and bought it without any humming and hawing. I had no idea these were available and my eyes popped. “What are you going to do with that?” I demanded, as we toted it along to the car. Her only answer was to tap the side of her beaky nose.

I felt a Halloweeny tug of my own when we passed a mound of pumpkins, and stopped short and gazed with all my eyes. I really wanted to buy one but was already carrying books and videos and rubber mats and things. Even the wheelie bag took fright at the thought of adding a pumpkin to the load. I’ve never considered buying one before, which is a good reason why I should do it for once. And only this morning I was attracted by Timorous Beastie’s blog post, Orange Rock. I don’t know about chasing the thing around my house, but I want to make Pumpkin Soup too. Anyone got any good recipes?

Edit Feb 2008: Comments to this post when it was on Blogigo:

Pete wrote at Sep 3, 2006 at 22:43:
bear is cute !!

Diddums wrote at Sep 4, 2006 at 09:19:
Bear says thank you!

Pacian wrote at Sep 4, 2006 at 19:43:
“Maybe I’ll find a subtitled DVD of it one day?”

It’s rare to find a DVD that isn’t subtitled.

Love the bear, btw!

The other night I watched Jurassic Park – I was horrified the first time I saw it (in a cinema with sonic mega roars blasting me out of my seat, and the deep thudding footfalls striking to my very core) but I couldn’t help watching it again when it appeared on TV – and now it’s a bit of a classic.

However, am I the only one irritated by the character called Ellie – the one who made the mad dash through the grounds to turn the electricity back on? She showed plenty of spunk and vivacity, but her little jokes failed to hit my funny bone. I was annoyed by her apparent obsession with children but I realize not everyone is as hard-hearted as I am. Just so long as no one assumes that all right-thinking women should be as keen, or that it’s every woman’s duty, or stuff like that. I don’t want people like Ellie to be the stereotypical woman, is all I’m saying.

I’m kind of like the guy in this…. I would be stumping hastily out of the car to avoid the talking child, but if we had to spend time together (preferably without Ellie giggling idiotically from the far corner) … well, a child can win you over as a person in his or her own right.

I remember walking along and a woman in front of me had a little girl by the hand. I was in a really grumpy mood that day, ready to scowl at all and sundry, and suddenly the little girl looked over her shoulder and gave me a huge sunny smile, as though to say “hey, Diddums! Nice to see you!” (though we had never met before in our lives). A big smile spread over my face in return – it was our own secret moment and I felt much better for it.

So, you see, children don’t all run screaming round supermarkets or catapulting stones through windows (as happened to my mother once – she was just lucky she wasn’t in the room at the time, as her chair was right by the flying glass. The police said they couldn’t do anything, though it has happened to other people in the same area – the little culprit had long since scarpered).

One way or another, there was a certain dated feel about Jurassic Park, and I suspect it’s because the character Ellie was supposed to the perfect woman – beautiful, intelligent, witty, kind, and mad keen to have children. In that sense nothing has changed. Also there was so much emphasis on her being the ‘top mind in her field’ and having to defend her right to be the one rushing around waving a gun…. We can only feel women have achieved true equality when the film doesn’t even bother to mention such issues.

Aside from that niggle, it was good, as always. Later on I had this little email exchange with Mum:

Me: It was quite a good day for all that dinosaury stuff on TV – misty and cool.
Mum: Aarugh!
Me (grinning): Jeff Goldblum was the best bit. All the way through.

And so he was.

The other day I noticed a little figure sitting on a rock, gazing at me, so I picked him up and took him home. I couldn’t leave him in the charity shop, could I? Especially as he was only 50p.

On the back of his rock is etched the legend ‘C.L. Penny Designs’. He’s delighted to have his picture put up on a blog – nobody’s ever blogged about him before. He will probably sit and stare at it all night when I’ve gone through to watch Battlestar Galactica. He’s probably looking at it even as you are.

I wonder what is the last little thing you couldn’t resist taking home with you? Anything like this?

Escapism, for me, is reading books. A good book makes everything whole again. I find fantasy is the most evocative genre, the one that takes me furthest away from the things I hope to escape. Good triumphs, magic exists and loose ends are rare. People enjoy their work, value their way of life and possess depth of character, understanding, and a low tolerance of injustice.

I miss the characters and their worlds when the last pages have been reached. I feel as though they still exist somewhere out there, and it won’t matter what happens to me here because I’ll always be able to go home to them. Maybe I will stay for a while in Bag End with the Bagginses and Gandalf, or with Badger, Mole or Ratty in their comfortable burrows. I won’t go anywhere near Toad – he makes me tired. I would rather hobnob with the weasels, especially those friendly with Badger. I could go wombling on Wimbledon Common with Tomsk and Wellington, looking in particular for sweetie papers to wallpaper their home. Better still, I could hibernate for the winter in Moominvalley – I always fancied the idea of a nourishing bowl of pine needles just before curling up to dream away the ice and the snow.

Do I prefer the sleepy stories to the adventures? It’s possible. Maybe I like the contrast; the sense of giving respite to characters who have been out in the cold for weeks on end. Or maybe it’s something deeper.

I’ve always been a sleepy kind of person, and have never been able to understand where people get the energy to do the things that they do. Where did Napoleon get his energy, for instance – or Alexander the Great? Too often I’ve lain in bed in the morning (instead of beginning the day’s chores) wondering about such people. Is there something wrong with me that I have never desired to leap up at cock’s crow to add to my little empire? Why do I never feel the impulse to go travelling, exploring, or to conquer Mount Everest? Why would I rather read about volcanoes than stare down into their smoking craters? Why are my favourite passages about people having rabbit stew for supper before turning in for a nice long snooze?

I’m sure there are various reasons. For instance, I sometimes wonder how The Lord of the Rings and other fantasy classics would have turned out if Frodo (or other fantasy figures) had been deaf? How about Gollum? “Sssorry, master, you’ll have to repeat that as poor old Smeagol don’t hear so good these daysss, gollum.” The thought of all the communication difficulties with innkeepers, magicians, trolls and the like, met while hiking along the road to defeat evil, makes me want to curl up in a ball and close my eyes.

Even more depressingly, I still wonder if Mum is right when she suggests I have an underactive thyroid. Maybe that’s always been part of the problem. That’s also why I don’t entirely believe in the concept of laziness – if you dig deep down, deeper than you expect, you may well find all kinds of unavoidable reasons why someone drags along and refuses to get involved with whatever’s going on.

Or perhaps my sleepiness kicks in because ‘modern civilization’ is so intensely regimented and boring that all the fun has gone out of it. Strange things happen but they make me more tired rather than less – people are criticized if they so much as put the words “Oh, shut up!” into the mouth of an Angry Beaver. It doesn’t matter what you do in this climate – either it’s something you’ve been kindly allowed to do (repeatedly) for limited amounts of money or it’s something someone somewhere will hate and despise you for, such as wearing white ankle socks or keeping cats.

There are so many parts of the world (even locally) that we never get to see in our lifetimes because they are the grounds of some reclusive ogre in his castle. Every so often they throw everything together into museums, trusts, collections, gardens or national parks and let everyone in (for a fee) to sigh ‘ooh’ and ‘aah’. They tell us with satisfaction it all belongs to us now and we can come and stare at trees, canyons, animals, old ships, musty houses or junk in glass cases for as long as we like, just so long as we get out before closing time, and provided we don’t get too close, feed the exhibits or touch things with our grubby fingers.

Doesn’t that seem a mite sanitized? You can’t say “hey, I visited the Grand Canyon” or “we went on safari and bothered a group of elephants” or “I found a marvellous whale skeleton that’s bigger than my house”… everybody else has visited/done/seen everything too, and will just look at you as though you’ve presented them with a hot and sticky bunch of daisies.

I don’t even like ‘discovering’ a wonderful blog post only to find the writer has already drawn an admiring crowd of other readers. They got there before me – how dare they! And if I can’t run shouting to everybody “look what I found”, then what’s the use? I can discard that unworthy feeling after a while, but it still leaps on me unawares every so often.

Have you ever noticed that the world has shrunk, and nothing and nobody is beyond your reach? We can dredge the Titanic off the sea bed without killing ourselves in the attempt, and nobody falls off the edge of the world any more. It used to be that you would send someone a carefully worded letter and if you haven’t heard from them after a couple of years, you start to wonder if maybe they died and nobody told you. Now, if you dash off an impulsive email and the recipient has not responded in the next five minutes, you get very angry and think “what did I do to offend the old blackguard? I sent a friendly ‘howdy doody’ across hundreds of miles of land and sea and this is all the thanks I get!” It doesn’t do much to lower your blood pressure.

Finally you discover that everything you do, whether it’s leaving your TV on standby, allowing your tap to drip, or cooking Scottish cod on your gas hob, is a threat to the entire planet. It gets so that they ask you to vote for a cast iron cooking pot on the grounds that it marked the start of the Industrial Revolution, which is a good thing, isn’t it? But then you think “that’s when people lost their jobs and their skills, and that’s also when we began to destroy the world”… and that squat black cauldron suddenly becomes the linchpin of evil. Not so suddenly, perhaps – there could be an underlying psychological reason why it was associated with witches and black magic.

Having embarked on all this industry and technology (how I love my emails and my blog) it becomes very difficult to quit without making enormous sacrifices, including (probably) our own lives. As slaves to the machines, computers and other systems that have been put in place for us and which only seem to fully benefit a select few, what is there to live for? Oh, right – books! Books that make everything fresh, whole, and exciting again. Especially books that allow you to put your head under the blanket and hide for a little while – not just from Sauron, the Weasels of the Wild Wood, the Groke’s frozen loneliness and the rising dark, but also from factories and other places of brain-deadening occupations, politicians, committees, intolerance, inequality, injustice – and pollution.

Where do people get the energy to maintain this way of life? I’m not just talking nuclear, solar or wind power here, I’m talking people power. I have always wondered.

Edit Feb 2008: Some comments I received to this post on Blogigo:

1. drifting wrote at May 18, 2006 at 10:38:
What a wonderful post. I love the way you wrote it coming around in a circle. I share your love of books as escapes from reality. I much prefer to live in the world of fantasy where there is justice and true love and honour, etc, etc. And you (or your mother) may be right about an underactive thyroid. I’ve never had the energy that everyone else seems to have – just watching them or thinking about what they do exhausts me. I did have an underactive thyroid (may still do) and with treatment it apparently ‘returned’ to normal levels but that was some time ago before I got fed up with doctors and checkups, and now continue my slow life. I believe in relaxation and activity in small doses.

2. Diddums wrote at May 18, 2006 at 20:52:
I don’t like the sound of checkups and pills forever more either. I can imagine myself making the same choice you did. I suppose I should go in for some tests, though, and see if the suspicion is correct… sigh.

3. Pacian wrote at May 18, 2006 at 22:28:
I can sympathise with preferring the nice scenes in a fantasy sanctuary to the brash adventuring, albeit perhaps for different reasons. It’s always scenes like that that make it feel real to me. If I was in some weird alternate world, I imagine I could take great pleasure in little things like having a home and a window to look out of.

I read something, on a blog not too long ago, that stuck with me. Someone wrote that when you find out more and more about people, you discover that everyone feels that they’re hanging on by their fingertips to a life that moves too fast and is too hard. All our media and stories tell us that happiness is doing loads of stuff and exerting yourself in certain ways, but I don’t actually think that this is true for everybody, or even most people.

4. Diddums wrote at May 19, 2006 at 00:53:
That’s a good point – they do add depth to the book; a little perspective and a chance to study the surroundings. People can sit around and talk to each other a bit more, too – and usually they meet somebody new, or hear something in the way of stray gossip…

I go off some characters if they turn out to be somebody really important – royal personage or such. They get trapped in their new roles and responsibilities at the end of the book, and that never feels quite right to me. Maybe it’s that lack of energy getting in the way again!

5. kateblogs wrote at May 20, 2006 at 16:03:
What a wonderful post, you sum up the modern world so well. There are a lot of great things about the 21st century, ease of communication for example. Oh, and of course electicity and medical treatment. However, sometimes I do envy people in the past. They did have new places to discover and explore, new theories to prove or disprove, and their lives don’t seem to have been as regimented as ours. Certainty is good, but I think we all need a little adventure too.