Barkerburgh

I heard a young man recite this on CNN, during an item on the North Carolina fire that killed several members of the Delta Delta Delta sorority and the Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity from the University of South Carolina. He was speaking about his late fraternity brothers.

It’s a little dated - and even sexist, in the sense that it could - and should - apply to women too, in any age, but I like the feel and the flavour of it.

So Tracy Barlow, after several months living with neighbourhood jerk Charlie Stubbs, the local builder, finally bashed his brains in with a bookshelf sculpture - he lingered for a while in hospital - and got arrested, all the time proclaiming her guilt but her love for him, even though we all know that she’s hated his guts ever since she found out about his fling with Maria from Audrey’s beauty shop down the street, which was convenient for both of them since Maria moved into Charlie’s old flat when Charlie moved in with Tracy in the Harris’s old house (which Charlie bought just to piss off Craig’s grandfather who was living there to look after Craig after his mother went to jail and his sister committed suicide after killing their father) , but after Tracy found out about the affair she started this long term plot/plan to make Charlie’s reputation among the neighbours even worse than it was after what he did to Shelley - who’s having his baby, but she moved away without telling him - by faking domestic disturbances and burning herself with an iron and letting neighbourhood good-heart and goody-two-shoes Claire think was done by Charlie, all the while denying he did it but smirking to herself every time, and of course Tracy’s family are supporting her, even her unrelated brother, Peter (her stepfather Ken’s son by a late ex-wife) and her usually fairly sensible mother, Deirdre and harridan gran Blanche, but not so much by her unrelated nephew Adam (Ken’s grandson through his late daughter, Peter’s sister, and Ken’s recently deceased arch-enemy, Mike Baldwin) and, of course, Claire totally believes that Tracy was suffering from battered woman syndrome - even though she wasn’t - and she’s starting a petition to get the charges against Tracy reduced to manslaughter and get her bail because she was denied bail due to the violence of her attack on Charlie (and maybe a flight risk too) , which pleases Tracy no end because everybody likes Claire and Tracy has no qualms about manipulating everybody and everything around her any way she can to get what she wants and has been doing so for the last few years ever since she came back to Weatherfield and Coronation Street.

Damn, it takes your breath away.

It doesn’t last long enough.
It takes too long.
It lasts just long enough.

There’s no place to put it, or there’s no room for it anyway, or you forget where you put it just when you really need it.
If you ever remember where you did put everything, you never remember where it all was to start with.

It takes too long to get everywhere and there’s never enough time.
It’s always too far from where you are to where everything all is, and then you don’t want to have to come all the way back.

Even if you’re really interested in everything, it’s way too easy to get distracted by everything else.

It’s too small.
It’s too big.

Some of it costs too much.
There’s too much free stuff.

Everybody else is into it all, too.
You have to share everything with everybody else.

The choice of size, colour and style is too broad.

The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
There’s too many parts of the whole.
Each individual part of the sum is as interesting as every other part.

You never remember everything’s name.
The signage is too complicated, if there’s any signage at all.
The instructions are too complicated, if there’s any instructions at all.

If it was a movie, it would probably be a prize-winning foreign film without subtitles.
If it was a book, it would probably be all table of contents, endnotes, appendix, and index.
If it was a game, it would calvinball. Or fizbin.

If it was a computer application, it would be from Microsoft (which would make Bill Gates God, so never mind that one.)

Christians see everything as Christian. Communists see everything as Communist. Bolivians see everything as Bolivian. Mac users - well, Mac users.

Everything’s too high. It’s too long. It’s too much. It’s too good.

If everything was a poem, it would be the Aeneid. All except for the part about finally arriving in Italy, because you never - ever- get to Italy.

There’s too much to choose from in a reasonable amount of time.

In the end, you never find what you really needed anyway.
You never get what you really wanted either.

But somewhere in the chaos of everything, you just might find your heart’s desire. Even if you don’t really quite know exactly what that is. Or just where it might be out there.  Wondering and searching are half the joy of everything.

If everything was time, it would always be about to run out.

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Edited/Improved Monday, October 22, 2007

Ever since the Future began in 2001 (January 1st, not September 11th, <i>pace</i> thousands), Reality has been catching up with Science Fiction, IMHO. But Reality’s also been fine-tuning Science Fiction as it goes along.

Face it, slidewalks, city-sized computers to <font title=”mmm, pi crunching…”>crunch pi</font>, or transfer booths might be cool plot devices, but Reality doesn’t have a plot (<i>pace</i> thousands of crazy-ass conspiracy theorists), the natural resources or the laws of physics (that we’re aware of so far…).

D’y'ever read David Brin’s ‘Earth‘? Published in 1985, it took place 50 years into that future, 2035. The title simply means that story action takes place everywhere in, on, and around Earth from the core to orbit. In terms of what he ‘predicted’ for the evolution of a shared global data network (and yes, I know, SF writers don’t predict; they’re storytellers first and foremost), almost everything he imagined (think of this kind of imagining as a type of private, subjective, storytelling-focussed prediction, spare and stripped down) is available now (1985+22) to some lesser or greater degree of sophistication, and then some.

‘So Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, Dave. Where ya headed?’

The Wiki. Brin didn’t call it that, but it’s here already; Wikipedia is probably the most well known example.

For my many soon-to-be-famous SF&F stories, I need to do background development, and occasionally considerable research and development. A while back I had downloaded an interesting looking wiki setup from SourceForge, called Wikka, free and open. I figured it would complement FreeMind, an excellent, simple and easy to learn Java-based (and thus cross-platform) mindmapping application, (like a much easier to learn and use Visio; flowcharting and the like) again from SourceForge. Wikka was okay, but a little like 1985 email, if anyone remembers those anymore. Very Flintstones. MS Word-style GUI functionality is mostly missing for formatting and editing - most commands are things like two apostrophes before and after a text string to italicize it, or two equals signs before and after to bold it. To be fair, wikis are web-based and some Word type highlight-and-click functionality is present, but it’s rudimentary, and sometimes even warmly funny for its earnestness, like a nerd doing a box-step at the prom.

Then, God bless me, I found Mediawiki. It’s the wiki engine that Wikipedia uses, free to download and install. (I’m running an Apache/MySQL/PHP server and it slots right in.) Its back end is more sophisticated than Wikka (and one or two others that I tried) but it’s got a GUI (still a bit too fancy a term for what it is, but hey, we’re living in the Future, not the Future Perfect), and it takes no time to learn.

The ability to order and categorize information, research, ideas, and connections - all interlinked - is built in (that’s one big idea of a wiki, after all) and I can construct glossaries, dictionaries, and encyclopaedias, with tables, images, and lists of all types to help me keep my ideas straight. Granted, one other big idea of a wiki is collaboration, but I like to think of this as a collaboration with myself over time.

MS Word is still the main tool to actually compose the oeuvres, but my beloved Mediawiki helps keep all my ideas straight.

What’s next? Well, I’ve always (insofar as a sentient adult creature with a limited lifespan can use the word) liked the idea of Geordi Laforge’s e-worktable in the engine room on the Enterprise, an IPhone-like touch-screen tabletop for whatever you need to do. Well, just this morning I saw on TV that Microsoft is introducing a prototype Surface Touch-Table, which they’re showing off at a downtown hotel today.

And next after that? The Lost In Space robot, a flying car, the space elevator and immortality.

C’mon, Future!!

I was watching ‘Princess Mononoke’ on YTV when I suddenly remembered I have it on disk somewhere.  I mean, why would I watch an edited TV version with commercials when I  can totally immerse myself in that world for like, what? - 2 hours?

Done.

I had almost forgotten how weirdly trippy the second half of that movie is.  I haven’t watched it for maybe a year and a half / two years and a lot of the imagery that sticks in my mind is from the first half.

Well,  not anymore.  Wow.  The imagery: the heads of the wolf and boar clans, the forest spirit, the kodama (maybe my favourite…), Yakul, and so on, on and on.

1. Make a longhand list entitled “Ten Things To Do During A Power Failure While You’re House-sitting.”
2. Read an entire book. (”X-Treme Latin! Unleash Your Inner Gladiator”; it’s basically a phrase book. From the Country Music Favourites page - ‘Sine Te Tam Miser Sum Ut Videaris Etiamnunc Adesse‘, which translates as ‘I’m So Miserable Without You, It’s Like Having You Here‘.)
3. Read Monday’s Globe and Mail, front to back, even Sports.
4. Ingenuously ask the neighbours if their power’s back on.
5. Disingenuously ask the other neighbours if their power’s back on.
6. Worry about the old lady across the street who seems okay but you’d feel bad if you found out something happened to her when you didn’t check.
7. Stare longingly at the blind TV. It can’t see you, so it’s not fulfilling its destiny. (Me! It can’t see me!)
8. Believe Reality when the power comes back on for about 3 minutes but then, haha, goes off again.
9. Try to teach yourself piano but give up when you realize that while you may never be the new Keith Jarrett, you just might be the new Charles Ives and that’s dissonantly disturbing.
10. Clean out the freezer. By eating.
11. Add some items to the list after #10.
12. Phone some local friends to ask their voice-mail, in all seriousness, “Is your refrigerator running?” But use a funny voice and an accent.
13. Read an entire Mad magazine. (March, 2007)
14. Make anagrams in fridge magnet letters out of “Squarebob Spongepants” (”Barges Squab Opponents”, “Abbess Pang Toque Porns”, etc) and “You talking to me?” (”Image Look Nutty”, ” Teat Ugly Kimono”, etc).
15. Return from the Stone Age when the power comes back on after almost exactly 3 hours.

The band is Crush Luther and this is their song ‘The Cools’.

Why do I like this song and the video?

1> I can understand the words.

2> It tells a nostalgic, bittersweet story of a high school boy, his band and his girlfriend.

3> It does not end well, but the boy gets through it. Bittersweetly.

<center><object width=”425″ height=”350″><param name=”movie” value=”http://www.youtube.com/v/jvi-H5Y5L64″></param><param name=”wmode” value=”transparent”></param><embed src=”http://www.youtube.com/v/jvi-H5Y5L64″ type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” wmode=”transparent” width=”425″ height=”350″></embed></object></center>

The next day. Like it? Hell, I love it. I watched it five times last night. The more I watch, the more I see.

I have to say, after seeing del Toro’s ‘The Devil’s Backbone’, I totally changed my expectation of what this movie would be like.

I now ‘knew’ it would be a dark phantasy (sic deliberately), and nothing like Harry Potter. I now ‘knew’ that it would probably deal with real world issues and events in a phantastical manner.

I did not expect to be so moved by the unfolding story, and definitely did not expect the ending, although I did.
The perfect quality of each actor’s performance within the story was enhanced by the fact that I did not know any of them, by name or reputation. So with no opinions on their skills or abilities to involve me or move me, I was able to immerse myself in the story almost immediately.

Having more than a passing familiarity with folklore and mythology, (and a tendency towards escapism in the real world, truth be told), I was nevertheless moved by an apparent contradiction: his traditional use of traditional motifs, and his sometimes sinister twisting of those same motifs against themselves in the service of the storytelling. (I say sometimes sinister because sometimes it’s not.)
If I am at all ambivalent about whether or not I like a movie, I can always tell I definitely liked it when the imagery keeps floating around my mind or bursting out unexpectedly when I am thinking about or working on something else.

I like this movie.

I wonder what a remake of ‘The Seven Faces of Doctor Lao’ would be like under the direction of Guillermo del Toro…

Found art, that is. I love the angles and the colours and the textures in this dumb-luck Riverdale Park foot-bridge camera phone shot.

Well, Jericho has been disencancelled! This is a message from Nina Tassler, president of CBS.

She warns that once it returns for seven midseason episodes next year, viewership will have to be higher than before, and current fans will have to recruit new ones. I wouldn’t do that. Too shy.

To be honest, it almost lost me midseason when they were concentrating on the ordinary people of Jericho trying to adapt pre-war normal lives to the realities of the current situation. I admit I drifted. But the last few episodes got me back because they started getting contact from the outside world, as the various federal governments (at one point six claiming the title) tried to aid the recovery, and we found out more about who was responsible in flashbacks. That was when I appreciated the folksy, homey tone of the ‘personal lives’ episodes more. These were small farm-town Kansans, not ‘Red Dawn’ action hero teens, with God Scriptwriter on their side from the start.

Now if the fans would only send nuts (or, you know, muffins or cheese baskets) to the devils who cancelled Studio 60 and Veronica Mars.