20071123
Some updates...
Entry 357
Audacity
beta
1.3.4
released
stable release version 1.2.6.
PokerTH
beta
0.6 released. With
this new version of PokerTH, you no longer need to exchange IP addresses
and configure routers to play on the internet. The makers are now
running a dedicated server which will host PokerTH games.
Thingamablog
beta
1.1
version 4 has been released fixing some bugs.
If you liked this post - you might be interested in this one as well: Freeware Poker
20071202
No time.
Entry 358
I had these superb ideas for at least half a dozen of posts on this blog but local warfare prevented me from writing, more about that later. Then yesterday, when I had some time at hand, my LA-girl threatened with divorce if I didn't go to the hairdresser.
So I took a bus to the hair stylist where a consultant recommended me what to do. In my days one went to the local barbershop where an elderly cantankerous guy would give you the choice of three different haircuts: short, shorter or bald. Nowadays you get a horde of women of the opposite sex who smother you with a lot of oohs and aahs. In those places that practice, for whatever reason, the haute coiffure you never get the same girl twice but as long as they carry the obligatory T&A you won't hear me complain. Yesterday there were 4 or 5 fresh daisies, so to speak, to choose from and one entity who I immediately baptised the hairdresser from Hell. Guess who took care of me? A while later I came home and this time my LA-girl threatened with divorce because I had gone to the hairdresser. Some things will never change.
Last week I also found a budget DVD (only 6 Euro!) containing the first two Age of Empires games and their expansion packs and that is what kept me busy on my PC for the last few days. So before I'm off to kill some Greeks (geeks?) here is what is new, in a hurry...
Again a bunch of useless iPod stats on my MySpace page.
For the top 10 list of the songs I've been listening to since January go to http://www.myspace.com/atagong.
For the top 10 list of the songs I've been listening to in the month of November, go to the MySpace blog section.
...and oh yeah, there is a new Thingamablog version as well... it has some goofy extra features, but I've got no time to explain you, I've only got some time to kill...
If you liked this post - you might be interested in this one as well: Heroes In The Sky (beta release)
20080111
Minestrone
Entry 365
I once found this interesting theory about how cosmogony took place. This may not be how it exactly happened but I like it so it's fine for me.
In the beginning, although you need some notion of time to coin that phrase and there wasn't any time to begin with you had nothing.
Now this nothingness was a kind of crystal-clear soup. A glass of pure water has neutral (read: zero) acidity or alkalinity. It is safe to drink. Next to it is another glass. Its content has also a neutral pH. It is also colourless. But after one sip you drop dead because it has been carefully made out of acid and base fluids that neutralise each other but that are highly poisonous. Big N was nothing when you observed it from a distance, like our ph neutral glasses, and if there would have been any dimension that would give the term distance any meaning, but peeking a bit closer would reveal the presence of particles appearing and disappearing quite spontaneously. These particles automatically sorted each other out: some of them positive (n+), others negative (n-). Sometimes some nx, ny or nz particles would even appear, who knows?
But on the whole the soup was very happy and very tasteless until one day so many positive particles were created on the left side and so many negative particles on the right that it seemed to be a general repetition for Moses' splitting of the red sea. For one reason or another the particles didn't dissolve but decided to come out of the closet with a big bang.
How long did it take before cosmogony took place? Well as time was born with our universe one could say that it was an instantaneous effect. Or one could say that it took an infinite amount of time.
How big was the soup? The soup was infinitely small and at the same time infinitely big, as our spatial dimensions weren't there either.
Why have I written this? I don't know, I only know I had a very tasty Minestrone yesterday. That's perhaps it.
If you liked this post - you might be interested in this one as well: True Story
20080125
Random Blueß aka sucking for statistics
Entry 367
In my youthful days I was a member of a, then illegal, university radio station where the lefty management proudly believed that revolution would come if we played enough Lynton Kwesi Johnson records. The Jam and The Clash (Sandinista!, what else?) were politically correct choices as well. As a voluntary contributor I always tried to sneak in some Pink Floyd. One night, I still remember this as if it were yesterday; I programmed a tune from Rick Wright's Wet Dream album called Mediterranean C note. When the track got on the air, one of the self-proclaimed radical managers peeped in the studio. "Is that Pink Floyd?", he snarled. I confessed that his guess was close enough. "I have had a Pink Floyd period in my life as well...", he sighed as if it had been an ugly disease he recently got rid off. Then he strayed away probably contemplating the fact that the Cultural Revolution was still a long way to go with revisionist buggers like Felix Atagong.
A while later I was put on the graveyard shift where I met this bloke who mixed (hard) rock, (vintage) blues, jazz and folk in one radio show and who also happened to be a very big Floyd fan. He taught me that you could actually appreciate different styles of music and introduced me to sounds I had never heard before. Nearly 25 years later the first bands I stored on my iPod Nano were The Beach Boys and Iron Maiden. They fit nice together.
For those that have never been on my MySpace spot - can't blame you for that, actually - I will hereafter give my iPod 2007 Greatest Hits list:
- Manik Shamanik (System 7)
- Hello (I Love You) (Roger Waters)
- God Only Knows (The Beach Boys)
- Le Soleil Est Pres De Moi (Air)
- Message From The Country (The Move)
- Burning Of The Midnight Lamp (Rotary Connection)
- Perpetual Dawn (Ultrabass II) (The Orb)
- Country Girl: Whiskey Boot Hill/Down, Down, Down/Country Girl (I Think You're Pretty) (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
- Wouldn't It Be Nice (The Beach Boys)
- I Think I'm Paranoid (Garbage)
2007. Last year's iPod statistics were biased, to say the least, because for the first few months my player practically lived on a Pet Sounds Iron Maiden diet. When I finally had enough tracks on my iPod to put the thing on random play the distance between the first dozen of high-ranking records and the rest was so big that only minor changes would take place from month to month. And of course I cheated as well by listening four times in a row to Roger Waters' Hello (I Love You), without doubt the best track he recorded in the last two decades or by making System 7's Manik Shamanik my morning train wake up tune.
2008. With 700 tunes transferred to my pc (still several thousands to go) I have decided to give only pure chance a chance. Starting from the first of January, well actually a few days later, I let the Nano shuffle menu decide what songs to pick as a kind of experiment in iPod randomness. At the end of the year I will know what the apple scruffs had in store for me.
The technical geeky stuff
Although the iPod is set to random the synchronisation between player and pc isn't.
As my hard disk contains more tracks than my player, and new tracks will be added on a regular basis, only a selection of tunes will be uploaded / deleted whenever I charge the battery. Some songs will have a bigger chance to stay on the pod than others or to put it into Orwellian terms: all tracks are equal but some tracks are more equal than others.
iTunes has this nice ability called Smart Playlists. I have created 7 playlists that are automatically updated whenever I synchronise. You can stop reading here if you want, the next is really boring:
Popular. This playlist contains the 50 most popular tracks. As I did a reset on the first of January this list started filling itself with each song that was randomly chosen by my iPod player from the other playlists. These debuting 50 songs may have a statistical advantage, as they will be picked up at the next synchronisation. And the next. And the next...
Confused, Wait till you read the rest of this chapter. I'm only starting...
Antiques. This playlist contains the 50 'oldest' tracks of my collection, sorted by the date I last listened to them. Basically this list was made to create a rotation schedule and to make sure that every song in my collection will be played from time to time. As my iPod statistics were reset on the first of January this list was empty to begin with. I found it amusing when I observed that this list started to fill itself after all places in Popular (see above) had been taken. The 50 songs on this list may have a statistical advantage as well, although that effect may wear off later in the year.
New. The title says it all, doesn't it? This list contains 50 songs that have never been played before. As everything was reset in January this means that all songs in my collection carry the 'new' flag. Recently added songs have an advantage, which makes sense, if you ask me.
Zero rating. In the beginning I didn't bother to rank my songs with the 5 star system iTunes offers. Only in October I meticulously started giving points. This list contains 100 tunes that haven't got points next to their name. As more and more songs will get a ranking - I check every tune that passes the pod - this list will get less and less important. When I write this 145 songs out of 701 haven't got a rating yet.
Three Stars. This list contains maximum 60 tunes that have a 3 stars ranking. This list is unique, meaning that songs appearing here do not appear in any other list. Counting at 58 it is almost full.
Four Stars. This list contains maximum 80 tunes that have a 4 stars ranking. This list is unique, meaning that songs appearing here do not appear in any other list. It is complete.
Five Stars. This list contains maximum 100 tunes that have a 5 stars ranking. This list is unique, meaning that songs appearing here do not appear in any other list. For the moment it only contains 59 songs.
So what about one and two stars?
I use the 1 star to rank songs that may safely be deleted from iTunes. In other words, these are garbage. Not Garbage of course, whose I think I'm paranoid rates 5 stars, has made the 2007 top 10 list but has utterly failed to be chosen.
Two star songs are bad, but not bad enough to be deleted. They will only appear on the Antiques list, unless of course they happen to creep into the Popular list. To my disgust three 2 star songs are in the top-pop list. The random generator picked Hey Stoopid by Alice Cooper (actually that songs merits a two and a half ranking), the syrupy Gary Moore ballad Separate Ways (yuck!) and the truly horrific Nip it In The Bud by the B52's. These will haunt me for the rest of the year.
That reminds me. I still have to upload Lynton Kwesi Johnson. Just for old times sake.
Note: I just remarked that the above mentioned Rick Wright Fan Site (that I found when writing this post) uses one of my entries on Wikipedia. Neat, not! It takes a thief to catch another one, I guess. Back to text.
If you liked this post - you might be interested in this one as well: iPod December Stats
20080203
13
Entry 369
It took a Belgian court 13 years to reach verdict in a computer virus case. Here's the story.
Somewhere in the dying decades of the last Millennium a 'professional' software company distributed an update by sending floppy disks to its clients. What the company didn't know was that about 10% of these disks had a virus hidden in the root section. Some clients found that out soon enough, got infected, complained and asked for very huge damage claims. The legal department of the software provider pondered on it for a few months and finally decided to bring the supplier, who furnished the disks, before court. As a matter of fact that happened to be the local computer store from around the corner. The shop owner argued that he had sold sealed boxes, that probably contained already infected disks, to the software firm but said that he couldn't be held responsible as he had ordered these disks from a national dealer who had delivered him the goods, already sealed in boxes. Just to be on the safe side the distributor was then invited to court as well.
The wholesaler claimed that he had bought the disks, packed, sealed and delivered, from the manufacturer in Thailand, one of those developing countries where the local Scrooge McDucks are proud to say that their booming economy is based upon child labour and woman exploitation. All boxes contained stickers saying that the disks were 100% virus free, so why should he have doubted that?
Now everybody found it stupid to attack the manufacturer, although, off the record, everybody agreed that the company in Thailand was as guilty as hell. But attacking Mr. Duck in Thailand would have meant sending over a rogatory commission and you know what is the first thing these commission members do when they arrive for one night in Bangkok. So the software company accused the local shop holder. And the local shop holder accused the wholesaler. And the wholesaler said that someone, but certainly not him, should accuse the manufacturer in Thailand. So, just to keep busy, he accused the local shop holder who, at his turn, accused his buyer who should've tested the disks before sending them to the clients. One could keep on going on like that so let us make it easy for ourselves: at the end everybody was suing everybody.
And thus they kept on meddling for the next decade until at the end of last year the judge in question finally reached a verdict. It took a Belgian judge thirteen years, that is 4745 days, to utter the following wise words. He decided that he wouldn't allow any of the initial complaints because he had received these outside the reasonable period of time...
They all had a good laugh after that, especially the lawyers, who laughed all the way to the bank. And for the youngsters among us: does anyone remember what exactly is a floppy disk?
If you liked this post - you might be interested in this one as well: True Story
20080209
20 Weird Wiki Entries
Entry 370
The Dutch online youth magazine Spunk
recently made a list of the weirdest Wikipedia entries, although Spunk
contains some rather weird stuff itself. I'm only trying to give you
good advice here, if you ever get invited to a Spunk cocktail
party try to avoid the Mojito (see picture to the left as well).
Weird Wiki(pedia) Entries (slightly edited by yours truly)
The success of Wikipedia has lead to different - more or less specialized - spin-offs:
20. Chickipedia
One of the most recent additions is Chickipedia:
a wiki that is entirely devoted to women of the opposite sex (© Allo
Allo). As everybody is entitled to add some goodies I tried one
myself: India
Waters, wish you were here I'll show you my dark side.
19. Some geeky SciFi wikis
Battlestar
Wiki The new Battlestar Galactica isn't that bad, not bad at all.
Now, in my opinion and that of mine alone, that is something that can't
be said of...
Lostpedia
At its best Lost looks like a lame The
Prisoner remake but without the psychedelica, but most of the time I
find that the episodes have been recycled out of rejects from the second
season of Twin
Peaks.
Wookieepedia
The Stones or The Beatles? Mod or rockers. Star Wars or Star Trek? The
next point will give you the answer, me thinks...
18. Star Trek wikis
Although Christopher
Lambert maintains that 'there can only be one' Star Trek actually
has got two: Memory
Alpha vs. Memory
Beta, but the feline
dancer on Nimbus III actually has got three. Don't overuse your eyebrows
too much or you'll finish speaking like this: Sov
qawHaq tlhab.
17. Uncyclopedia
Read all about Kitler
and other historic figures and events and also how
to pee in a cup.
16. How To Give A Tit Fuck
...or in plain English: Intermammary
Intercourse is a form of outercourse that takes place when a man
stimulates his penis by rubbing it between or on a woman's breasts.
15. How To Find A Dealer
Only interesting
for people who don't live in Amsterdam, California and Jamacia. Jamacia?
Death and destruction...
14. Toilet
relating injuries
13. Chess
related deaths
12. Microwave
related injuries
Fetishism. For one reason or another the 3 following items have been
deleted from Wikipedia. But luckily I could found some mirrors...
11.
Used condom fetish (deleted)
(mirror)
10.
Inside out eyelid (deleted)
(mirror)
9.
Partial unbirthing fetishism (deleted)
(mirror)
Much
more adult stuff can be found on WikiAfterdark
(except, strangely enough, the 3 previous entries).
8. The Mermaid Problem
Sex with mermaids can be a hassle
although Rene Magritte seemd to have found a way around it in his
painting l'Invention
Collective (1935).
And now for something completely different...
7. McDonalds
Urban Legends
6. YouTube
Celebrities Hmmm. Basically this is nothing more than a list
pointing to another list. Not my cup of tea.
5. Dwarf
Tossing
A funny thing happened on the way to the...
4. Toilet
Humour
3. Mathematical
Jokes
2. Engrish
And the weirdest Wikipedia entry, still according to Spunk, is...
1. Evil
reptilian kitten-eater from another planet
TTFN
If you liked this post - you might be interested in this one as well: Cyberhugging
20080217
When in doubt...
Entry 371
...make a list.
Last week's entry wasn't much of a post, I confess. It is a lazy and uninspired blogger's scapegoat to publish a list, especially when it is grabbed from another source, and calling it your own. Magazines do it all the time: the best 100 guitarists of rock, 20 rock stars who went gaga (Syd Barrett, for one reason or another, is always on that), 50 ways to leave your lover...
When sci-fi authors don't have enough inspiration to write a novel they add a touch of time travel. It is easy but also a bit cheap. I will have to elaborate on that subject in another post, if I ever find the time...
This blog is in the middle of being relocated to its own domain (and server): atagong.com. Normally I wanted to do this on the first of January but I have discovered that Murphy's Law also exist in Cyberspace. That goes for the Peter Principle too. But finally, my domain is up and running and now I am in the process of checking every single post and every inside link. As long as that phase isn't totally finished the old blog will keep on existing.
So until that moment not a lot will change over here, but in the meantime you can practice your billiard ball physics with this nifty and very addictive, game, called Shuffle.
Wish me luck.
If you liked this post - you might be interested in this one as well: Tourette's Planet (18+)
20080301
Wow!
Entry 505
Atagong.com should now be completely updated.
Time to open all kinds
of bottles of Champagne,
Spumante
and other fizzling stuff.
If you liked this post - you might be interested in this one as well: Penumbra Walkthrough (the very first entry on this blog).
20080315
Giordano Kazemi
Entry 517
Today at the rattrap aka bus stop this girl who had meticulously invested in the under-nourished-empty-cocaine-stare look perplexed me. Instead of proposing her a bite of my vegemite sandwich the only thing I could think of was if she would address me with that universal pick up line: ”Sucky sucky for a coca cola?” That would have to be diet coke obviously. I shuddered at the idea that a man’s mind lays not that far from under his belly.
When I finally escaped from my rêverie the girl was gone and I had almost passed my destination. I needed to see the health insurance because my taxman urged for a statement, written, signed, sealed and delivered on paper, that my health insurance tax deductions weren’t a kind of universal fraud scheme. I honestly don’t understand why the Belgian Tax Administration wants me to get that paper - on paper - because with a simple click on a button, provided that their computers at the office already have mice with buttons, they can dig into my professional, administrative and even financial life and browse through all possible databases without my consent.
The good woman at health insurance dot co told me that she couldn’t give me the paper on paper because the computer system was down but she promised me she would send it as soon as the computer would be functioning again.
For a living I mostly do some IT monkey work for people who think you need a PhD in applied programming just to change some printer toner. One of my annual recurring tasks is to give the Belgian VAT agency the yearly listing of all VAT activities of the company I work for. There are two practical ways to give that list to the Belgian Tax Authorities: either you write (or print) everything on a huge chunk of paper or you can save it on a floppy disk and send that - by snail mail - to the tax office. Although the Belgian tax department website brags that one can upload the data directly to their server not one single tax department employee, officer, manager or director has been able to explain me how. When I recently asked why I couldn’t send the file by mail or upload it to an ftp-server I received a long cold look combined with the grinding sound of burning brain tissue. Government! Bah!
When I left the immer-smiling girl I decided that luck (or fate) should guide my wanderings through the beautiful, albeit noisy, city of Louvain. In a local second hand bookshop I saw a TekWar novel by William Shatner, but because I couldn’t remember which one of those I’ve already got I skipped the offer.
The cosmology section of the bookshop had an Adrian Berry book called The Giant Leap (Mankind Heads For The Stars) (2000). I’ve already written something about him on this Popular science books are fun post. As a matter of fact his The Next Ten Thousand Year (1974) was the book that I used to carry around for years. Here was a non-fiction work that not only read like a brilliant SF novel but, even more, contained more tantalising ideas on one page than TekWar contains in a dozen.
I was so proud to have found this book and couldn’t wait to open it. It was as if I had re-found a long lost love. I sat down on a bench in the city and started reading. In the introduction Adrian Berry recalls how philosopher and sci-fi author avant-la-lettre Giordano Bruno was bound to a stake on the Campo de Fiori in Rome and burned alive. Of course the fact that he believed in a myriad of suns, planets and inhabited worlds was not his only offence. Bruno defied the holiest dogmas of Catholic Church such as the virginity of Mary and the transubstantiation. As an alchemist he also believed in metempsychosis (or incarnation, to keep it simple) and in the magical mumbo jumbo that alchemists seem to be keen of.
Giordano Bruno’s court case in the 1600’s is a nice show opener for Adrian Berry’s book, but I had the feeling to have to read it once too many. Berry wrote – very vividly - about the same subject in The Next Ten Thousand Years and it truly gripped me 30 years ago. But now it felt like sleeping with the ex-wife again and the only thing I could think of was: …so what?
Who am I to care about a Catholic heretic who died 400 years ago (insulting his judges even in the last minutes of his life, the man had panache, I admit) when today the UK government threatens to expel a young homosexual back to his home country where he will be promptly executed by the Iranian inquisition?
Nothing really changes. Not even when we make it to the stars.
If you liked this post - you might be interested in this one as well: Franco's Frocks.
20080324
Just like Belgium
Entry 559
I seldom write about politics
here. You wouldn’t care about politics if you are trying to get ArianeB
out of her clothes, would you? But sometimes this shithole of a country
I live in is getting more surreal than the Belgian painters who put
surrealism on the map.
It took the politicians over 9 months to create a government and yesterday, when the government was officially one day old; the first crisette (a Belgian neologism for small crisis) took place. One of the five (5!) deputy prime ministers found it necessary to contradict the prime minister on a signed agreement.
In 1962 Belgium was divided in two unilingual parts, Flanders and Wallonia, and one bilingual region: the capital of Brussels. But as the linguistic, judicial and administrative borders of those regions didn’t exactly match the Constitutional Court (the highest court in Belgium) decided, after 40 years of profound thinking, that this situation was illegal and that some revisions had to take place the next five years. This was in 2002. A consequence of this decision is that no federal elections can take place anymore because they will be considered illegal. Our last elections date from 2007 and thus the government is stuck. They need to find a solution before 2011 if the frail government doesn’t fall before that.
It needs to be said that the Dutch-speaking majority from Flanders is the winner in this court case. The francophone political world is only willing to agree with the court sentence if the Flemish majority gives some extra guarantees (read: money, power, young Flemish virgins) to the French minority. The Flemish point of view, before the elections, was that a court decision is a court decision and that the law has to be obeyed, regardless the consequences.
Nine months ago there was this distinct feeling that Belgium was going to split as the water between the two communities ran too deep. Today we know that the (Flemish) Prime Minister lowered his trousers in order to keep this country united. It only takes a quick sum to show who really rules this country: 10 Flemish ministers and state secretaries represent 60% of the population, but a majority of 12 French ministers and state secretaries represent the rest. The ones to blame are of course not the Walloon politicians who bargained, bluffed and won. The ones to blame are the Flemish politichiens who, to quote General Charles de Gaulle, ‘s'occupent beaucoup de leur carrière et fort peu de l'intérêt général’.
Today I read in the newspaper that the future king of Belgium, crown prince Philippe, has borrowed some Napoleonic furniture belonging to the Flemish region and refuses to give it back. In Napoleonic times, kings and would-be kings met Dr. Guillotin for less than that. Me thinks this country urgently needs euthanasia so that it finally becomes what it is most famous for: an interstellar swearword.
If you liked this post - you might be interested in this one as well: Nomen Est Omen: Belgium: WTF?
20080517
Kraft und Karl
Entry 796
I should be more careful with what I write, so told me a good friend. I
know. I gave up good manners a while ago soon becoming the fat bellied
belching and farting man in the restaurant at the end of my own private puniverse.
After dinner mint anyone? Slowly I've become the person I once loathed.
A transgression like in an Arthur Machen novel.
Taste, even bad one, does change with age.
In 2003, after nearly two decades of doing nothing, the German band Kraftwerk came out with their Tour de France album. I was ecstatic. I tried to explain to people who found the album dull and monotonous that Kraftwerk wanted it to be that way. This was a postmodern representation of a real cycling event: 230 km of monotonous macadammacadammacadam with just a hysterical sprint at the end. Kraftwerk had promoted monotony to an art form. Stuff like that.
The press, who are normally circling like hungry vultures around – what they describe as – dinosaurs of rock, were also extremely gentle to the German band as if Kraftwerk were a kind of electronic Illuminati who may not be contradicted. But that the band could still kick ass was proven on the European MTV awards in 2003 where they mimed Aerodynamik to a generally stunned public. At around 2 minutes 30 (starting from the beginning of the song) an open mike unwillingly records a comment from a baffled bystander: “What the fuck is this?” This, my friend, is Kraftwerk, and to quote a further unknown music journalist: at 50 it is of more importance to be able to say: "I used to be a member of Kraftwerk" then: "I used to be a member of Pink Floyd."(Note)
While Tour de France (TDF) flooded the world like an electronic tsunami a former Kraftwerk band member, Karl Bartos, retorted with a solo album called Communication. Karl had left the band in 1991 allegedly because the other members had been more involved in designing aerodynamic bicycles then in making music. The Communication album was an insult to my ears, and I didn’t hesitate to ventilate my opinion on alt.music.kraftwerk. The Bartos album was Eurotrash to the extreme and I just couldn’t understand that the man behind it was the same dude who had given us such classics as Numbers, Computer Love, The Model and the 1983 prototype of Tour de France.
But anno 2008 none of the TDF tunes have made it onto my iPod while Communication is represented by 10 titles. And I have to confess: each single track of Communication contains enough kling klang material so that Kraftwerk could make an entire album out of it.
I won’t call Communication a good album; I still find it pretty average. But average in a pretty decent way.
Note . I couldn’t trace the source of this quote. But I once read it in a Kraftwerk live performance review. Back to text.
If you liked this post - you might be interested in this one as well: Dreams come through
20080606
Picasso Power
Entry 843
This week, in the middle of the week, I found myself with a mini
writer’s block, not knowing what to comment about on my blog.
Professional writers have got little black books for that, with
throwaway subjects when this occurs. I don’t.
A few, two, three, weeks ago I wanted to vehemently comment on one single chapter from Adrian Berry’s The Giant Leap. I have already stated here that I had started reading the book; as a matter of fact I love reading those old science books because I’m a nitpicker at heart. It is amusing to point out the errors from an old book but, if I look deep enough in my heart, it is also a cheap trick. It can also be quite embarrassing.
In my thunderous days I was (a very small) part of an illegal radio station in the city of Louvain. Now it is a widespread rumour in Flanders that if three Flemings come together they form an association of some kind. If a fourth member comes along there will be a quarrel within a week and the organization will split. So after a couple of months there were about half a dozen of local radios in Louvain, all illegal, but because the police had other things to do than to arrest young boys with a bunch of records under their arms (there were hardly any females in the illegal radio world) the radios were left untouched and everybody waited for the political world to come up with a solution.
Anyway, we were sitting in an apartment above a pub called Picasso cooking a radio show (I did the sound mixing) when the presenter started a satirical comment about a television anchor we commonly disliked. We were all so bold and beautiful and fucking progressive and we knew it. What we didn’t know however was that the television star in question was having a beer in the pub downstairs. It must have been a million to one shot (or is that one in a million?) but it happened. The celebrity jumped up the stairs, broke into the studio and asked, in fact demanded, for a live interview so that he could politely react to our accusations. The presenter became very pale and suddenly vanished from the studio. We found him later in the toilet where he refused to come out again as long as Mike Verdrengh (who would later become a founding father of the biggest commercial TV station in Flanders) was standing there. If I learned a lesson (although I was - technically - just an innocent bystander) it was that if you throw a stone at someone it might come back and double hard so.
Back to Adrian Berry and The Giant Leap, as his book deals a lot with space travel and the speed of light in a vacuum (known and more or less unchanged since the Fifties) there aren’t many errors to be spotted. These can only lay in short term predictions between 2000 (when the book came out) and now (for a quite recent discovery involving speeds faster than light you can consult Adrian Berry’s website here). Note But I completely disagree with Mr. Berry’s viewpoints concerning starships and politicians (as one of his chapters is called). Adrian Berry is (correctly) suspicious of bureaucrats and politicians but to deduce from that fact that salvation is only possible when one gives all possible freedom to economical moguls isn’t quite healthy either.
Of course some politicians are corrupt, of course some government projects cost 3, 4, 5 times more than their privately managed counterparts. But government organisations don’t build these projects; they first ask privately managed enterprises to quote for it. If these privately managed enterprises triple the price whenever government organisations are involved and even bribe the politicians behind it, who is then to blame? Take away government control and you have child-labour, even in Europe, before you can utter the words Adidas, Nike or Reebok.
But I also realize that the stone I’ve thrown towards Mr. Berry is quite useless. If this world ever wants to build a starship it will indeed be a lot cheaper if it comes out of a private group than from a government organisation. But I hope it will not be build by childslaves because there will be no more government left to prevent it.
Note: One of his wrong predictions (in 2000) was that the Euro currency would (probably) have no future (p. 46). Back to text.
If you liked this post - you might be interested in this one as well: Popular science books are fun
20080621
EUlogy
Entry 854
What follows is a rather boring post, but I've spent a lot of time
writing it, so I'll publish it anyway. Sorry for that.
My country, although you probably won’t believe me, was one of the founding dwarfs of the European Union. Belgium itself is an amalgam of three different nationalities that, due to several historical atrocities, were cut off from their original fatherland, whether they liked it or not. Because Germany, Holland, France (and even England) had better things to do than to quarrel who would take care of that ungrateful lot a job search was done for an unemployed member with royal blood. Because they couldn’t find any they settled for a German duke who would become the first king of Belgium. His son Leopold II, still a hero in our official history books at school, would create his own little playhouse called Congo, where he could rape and murder and become immensely rich (and a while later very poor again).
At the end of the Second World War Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg created an economical entity called the Benelux (a Belgian-Luxembourg treaty already existed in the Twenties). A couple of years later France, Germany, Italy and the Benelux-3 signed a treaty that was known as the European Coal And Steel Community. One thing lead to another and today we have a political and economical community with 27 member states and a population of nearly half a billion. Hurrah!
But there is a strange thing going on: the bigger the EU becomes the less popular it is with the actual inhabitants of the Union. There are a couple of reasons for that. You’re not going to escape from my reasonings!
EU devours money by the quintillions
Because the principal members of the EU couldn’t agree to have a single headquarter they created two. A couple times a year they switch from one headquarter to another, meaning that files and papers have to be physically moved from one place to another. This cost about 200 million Euros a year.
Like any other country Europe has a set of ministries, commissions, workgroups, you name it. As every state likes to have its share these centres are based all over Europe. The EU can be easily be categorized as being Europe’s biggest travel agency.
EU is the perfect scapegoat for local mismanagement
For years local (national and regional) politicians used Europe as the perfect scapegoat to cover up for their own mistakes or to put unpopular laws into place. All over the European Union decision were taken, not because politicians, in their own words, deemed it was necessary, but because it was ‘ordained by the European Union’.
This created the image of the EU as an overzealous police officer, harassing the local neighbourhood, instead of dealing with the real problems (whatever these real problems might be).
EU is more concerned with its democratic appearance than with democracy itself
When the European parliament was founded (in 1979) nobody seemed to care that the institute had less power than their Soviet Russian counterpart. Although big shots from all over Europe wanted a well-paid seat they didn’t bother to show up anymore once the press attention had diminished. Slowly the parliament got more power, real power, but the real decisions are still taken outside the parliament. One of the most important items of the European Union, its budget, is totally out of control, literally and figuratively speaking.
EU loathes real democratic decisions
One of my unfinished projects, and I’ve got this idea for a novel over twenty years now, starts when the communist government of a further unspecified country in the east of Europe wants to inundate a historic site because the great Bozo who is in charge has decided to do so. Then the Berlin wall starts crumbling down and a couple of months later a democratic government is in charge. And guess what? Nothing has changed. The damming project will still go through because the communist decision makers have all turned into democrats and businessmen. Of course a lot of interesting things happen after that, larded with a lot of sex, drugs and rock-and-roll. Dan Brown and Stephen King may be happy that I never wrote the novel to begin with.
And I just thought up the following while writing this post. The European Union is the modern equivalent of the Papal States. Although the pope was a ruler of his own independent country (part of it what we now call Italy) his word was also law in the other countries of Europe. If, for instance, the French king wanted to take a decision and the pope said no - it was no. No reasoning with the pope. That is why every papal election was such big fun, with all European countries lobbying to have their pope elected; cardinals eliminating other cardinals to influence their chances and if a pope wasn’t really up to par for a certain party an antipope would be elected as well.
Anno 2000, when the European Union speaks the parliaments of the member countries jump. No questions asked. The main problem arises when some countries start to get difficult and really want to involve the democratic process by ways of a referendum. Then the results tend to differ a bit.
1972 - Norway refuses to enter the EU
1992 - Denmark votes against the Maastricht treaty
1994 - Norway refuses to enter the EU (for the second time)
2000 - Denmark refuses to join the Eurozone
2001 - Ireland votes against the treaty of Nice
2003 - Sweden refuses to join the Eurozone
2005 - France refuses the European constitution
2005 - Netherlands refuses the European constitution
2008 - Ireland votes against the treaty of Lisbon
Instead of finding a way to diminish the democratic deficit of the EU and to make the Union more attractive to its citizens the EU moguls choose the easy way out.
A referendum was negative? Change the treaty in such a way that for a second vote you don’t need a referendum anymore but just a vote in parliament. Satisfaction guaranteed (a few days ago this was proposed as a solution for the Irish problem).
A referendum was negative? If the no-votes only had a slight majority you can always try to organise a second referendum, hoping the weather will be better and the population is in a slightly better mood (Denmark, 1993 and Ireland, 2002). The strange thing is that consecutive referenda are sometimes held to switch the decision from negative to positive, but never the other way around.
So how does it all end? Well in my unfinished novel some committee decides to relocate a historical church to an open-air museum somewhere in America and the vampire that is freed per accident becomes the next president of the United States. Nobody notices the difference. “All’s well that ends well”, to quote Will the Great.
If you liked this post - you might be interested in this one as well: Just like Belgium
20080627
European Frontal
Entry 859
On Sunday mornings all is dull and quiet. Some people go to church; I
take a cup of Italian coffee, start the computer and surf a bit. Sunday
is the day I visit those sites I usually don’t visit very often, except
on Sundays that is.
One site I visit from time to time is Snopes that is dedicated to urban legends. Is or isn’t there a penis on the cover of The Little Mermaid home video? Is it true that Jessica Rabbit doesn’t wear underwear on four frames of the Who Framed Roger Rabbit movie (who are the people who have the time to go hunting after these things?). And can one really read the letters S-E-X in a dust-cloud during The Lion King?
(I really should quit writing these posts; I have just lost half an hour browsing the Snopes site again. And speaking about penises, is this warning label true? It comes from another minute muncher of a site that I just discovered a couple of days ago.)
Another of my favourites is Badmovies that lists a series of reviews of so-called B-movies. This is another one of those click-and-read & click-and-read-a-bit-further sites. Once you start you can’t stop and to add another cliché to the hopeless bunch of clichés I have already used… Badmovies.org is like a box of chocolates. Barf.
One of the movies that has recently been reviewed is Zombie Lake, aka Zombies’ Lake, originally Le Lac Des Morts Vivants (literally: the lake of the living deaths). The plot of the movie is simple enough. Somewhere near a small village in France lies is a lake and although it is forbidden to have a swim it takes victim #1 about 30 seconds to completely undress only to get devoured by an undead Nazi soldier who happens to be living, although living is not exactly the right word, under the water surface.
Normally an incident like that should discourage other skinny-dipping enthusiasts but alas, the French have their own way of reasoning and that is why a complete volleyball team, do I have to stress the fact that it is an all-female volleyball team?, jumps in the water a while later. The movie is set about a decade after the end of the Second World War, anyway in a period when textile was very scarce or during those odd years when all swimming suits were prohibited in France. So were razor blades. For the younger readers of this blog, who shouldn’t be reading this at all by the way, the black triangles you can see on certain regions of the female body are not the artistic product of an overzealous censor but the main reason why these body parts used to be addressed as beaver, muff or pussy.
But I just don’t want to publish another review, as there are already a few circulating on the web, and I’ve just spent most of the last Sunday morning (and afternoon) reading those. To get rid of the uncanny feeling that I ruined an entire day I present you hereafter…
Felix Atagong’s entirely useless review of 9 Zombie Lake reviews.
(Skip immediately to The Zombie Lake Movie First Five Minutes Faq if you are not interested.)
Bad movies (9/10). I like the reviews at this site. They are funny, witty with a touch of irony. The reviews are so well written that you actually want to have a look at the movie in question, even when it reads that this is the worst movie ever. The Things I Learned From This Movie rubric makes one chuckle, as it tends to demystify the ever-growing list of movie clichés.
Pro: every review contains a character overview, the plot, stuff to watch for, some sounds, images and a (short) video clip of the movie in question.
Cons: Almost every B-movie, even this one, carries a danger sign scene that is instantly disregarded by the person who is going to expire a few seconds later. Although this site has a warning that reads: “There are currently ZERO bare breasts on this website.”, this is actually the truth. Pictures that do contain a certain amount of pixels that could arouse the odd couch potato have been censored with a banner.
Antagony & Ecstasy (7/10). The thing I like about the review on this blog is its title: Zombies & Tits. As an appetizer this can count. Also the fact that reviewer uses a Belgian movie poster speaks in favour for him. Thanks to him I now know the Dutch title of this tiny masterpiece that is nothing more than a word for word translation of its French title.
The article contains some interesting titbits (I know I just can’t resist that word) about the creator of the movie (who was apparently so ashamed that he changed his name on the credits). The pictures have been chosen to illustrate the film’s cheapness and not its scarcity of textile. I would like to point you to the fact that the author uses a neologism I happen to like a lot: vaginidyll. If more blogs would use this word it could grow into 2008’s new big googly thing!
All Things Zombie (5/10). What is wrong with these people? Don’t they have a sense of humour? First their website takes as long to load as an average zombie needs to cross the road and then they simply trash the movie? Probably the reviewer didn’t have his brains for breakfast.
Realm Of Horror (6/10). A short review that is indecisive whether it should stay serious or not.
Bad Movie Planet (7/10). This review tries to describe the complicated (complicated as in incomprehensible) plot in much detail with an eye for the many flaws in the script. There are a few pictures, including one with the famous volleyball-team-skinny-dipping scene. The author is a weird person though, because he uses red rectangles on the pictures to hide the black triangles. What’s wrong with triangles?
B-Movie Graveyard (8/10). Man, this is a big review, and with big I mean BIG. Reading it takes about the same time as watching the entire movie, but reading about it is of course more pleasant than viewing the whole thing.
Pro: Many, many subdivisions and extras: the credits, the plot, a more elaborated plot, a character map, several downloadable video scenes, the many mistakes (wrong type of Volkswagen used, for instance), some pictures, an extensive review, a content breakdown, movie statistics (containing a dead bodies, boobs and bush count!), downloadable dialog excerpts, theme music, more photographs, more video clips, extra comments, unanswered questions and WTF moments containing a real pair of uncensored yummy boobs! B-Movie awards, trivia listing, the Final Word.
Cons: You need a lot of time to read this.
Bad Movie Dimension (6/10). Well, one of the serious reviews about this very unserious movie. Well worth the read and the fact that I only give it a 6 out of 10 could come from the fact that I have just been reading half a dozen of reviews before…
Movie Mistakes (4/10). A list of 27 mistakes in the movie, but most of those have been spotted in the other reviews as well. Pity for the annnoying ad in between pages.
But if you are more or less in a hurry you can watch the online video review of...
The Cinema Snob (8/10). The cinema snob doesn’t mind telling us what this movie really is about, so if you are not offended by quotes as ‘this movie has officially urinated on my face and told me it is raining’(3’33”) this is the review for you.
The Zombie Lake Movie First Five Minutes Faq
1. In the beginning of the movie you see a swan on the lake. Why
don't the zombies attack it?
Have you ever seen a restaurant with
swan on the menu? Duck yes. Goose yes. Swan no.
2. Why does the brown haired beauty remove her clothes?
Topless
sunbathing is a national sport in France. As a matter of fact it is
considered anti-French NOT to sunbath topless. Just like it is
considered anti-American in some circles to eat French fries, although
that is rather stupid as a: the French in French fries has got nothing
to do with France; and b: French fries originate from Belgium anyway…
3. Yeah but the brunette removes more than her blouse.
Technically
she is still sunbathing topless. Ask Bill
Clinton.
4. Come on, she is stark naked!
Sunbathing naked is perhaps
not a national sport in France but if you wander around at the French
Riviera you will count a respectable minority of nude sunbathers, even
on public beaches. God, I love that country!
5. Why do the zombies suddenly decide to attack the girl after they
have quietly lived at the bottom of the lake for a dozen of years?
Probably
nobody ever had a swim before in the lake, as the whole village is
apparently dimly aware of the curse.
6. Here is a small village in France. There is a lake nearby; did the
children never go for a swim then? It must be very tempting, especially
when parents forbid!
Perhaps only sexually mature maidens will
arouse the zombies. If one single drop of blood can turn a handful of
dust into a full-grown vampire, then the pheromones of a woman, swimming
in a lake, might wake the zombies as well. Call it a zombie puberty
catalyst.
7. Not all zombies are green, some have normal skin color, especially
in the neck and behind the ears. Surely this is a case of (very) bad
make up.
What if these undead only change skin color when they
turn into – what I call – zombie puberty, triggered by the female
pheromones (see faq question 6). A bit like black babies that are
(often) born quite pale and only turn dark after a while (and some body
regions of black people, like their hand palms, will always be lighter
in color).
On the other hand they could suffer from a mild case of
cupper oxidation as well.
8. That still doesn’t explain why the brunette jumps into the water.
Probably
because the girl is not only pretty, but stupid as well.
And if you have enough of reading all this, you can have a little fun with the Zombie Tower Defense game. Its simple, its dumb, its addictive.
If you liked this post - you might be interested in this one as well: Popular science books are fun
20080705
Buggy software
Entry 873
At the right side of the screen there is a link to the giveaway
of the day website. The concept of this site is simple enough. For a
day, and that day only, you can download a commercial software package
and license it for free. The deal is: no upgrades, no support and in
most cases no commercial utilisation of the program. What you get, so
they promise, is a complete version with no trial version limitations.
Up till now I have only installed a couple of programs of the site, less than half a dozen in fact, as I only download programs when I need them. A minus of the system is that it is impossible to migrate the program from one pc to another or to re-install it after a crash (unless you have a mirror or if you have used an installation watchdog that can copy back all the hidden files and registry entries that were created during install). As others have remarked before on the forum: there is no point of downloading an all performing crash recovering program if the day that your pc really crashes you need to buy the software anyway in order to recuperate your data.
Another thing is that most software comes from dodgy companies, some of those can't even spell their menus right, who offer pretty useless utilities at exorbitant prices. Who needs a password generator at 29.95 bucks apiece anyway? The good thing however is that each giveaway of the day entry is largely commented by a horde of critical people who often point you towards freeware that does things better and has free updates.
A couple of weeks ago I was again tempted and I downloaded an English dictionary that would tremendously enhance my blogging skills. Alas, Typing Assistant only spelled in American English and not the Oxford variety of the language. And crazy enough it crashed several times in the most popular and widespread text editor around: Microsoft Word; switching once too often between programs resulted in a terrible messed up screen.
But to add insult to injury whenever I wanted to input an apostrophe
- quite a commonly used sign in Shakespeare’s language I might add - the
soft automatically replaced my typed letters with an unwanted entry from
the dictionary:
here's was changed automatically into hereafter,
won’t
was distorted into wonderstruck; and
I’ve
miraculously transformed itself into interpretes.
I found out that the mistake was due to my exotic keyboard layout called azerty. The azerty keyboard, used in Belgium, France, Luxembourg and some parts of Switzerland has a top row that does not default to numbers. Top row numbers are only chosen with caps lock (or shift lock) on and when the caps lock is down the digits are not numbers but ampersand, hyphen, all those weird French letters with accents, brackets and so on. On my azerty keyboard (there are some different regional versions as well) the apostrophe is placed at position 4. To cut a long story short: although Typing Assistant rightly interpreted the 3 middle rows of my keyboard it failed to do so with the top row.
Because I still believed that the typing assistant had a valid function especially for non-native speakers I contacted the makers of the program. Although the giveaway number one rule says no support a reply came back sooner than I had expected.
It read.
We mainly target to English keyboard layout, because there are so many keyboard layout we can not research them each.
Free gift or not this answer does not entirely satisfy my soul.
In order to predict the right word this program needs to log the letter that has been triggered by a key and not the key itself (a mistake that was often made in dos days and that made games and programs quasi unusable for non qwerty users). In my opinion that is not a matter of a weird and exotic keyboard configuration but of bad programming. Period.
Some freeware typing assistants:
Let
Me Type
PhraseExpress
If you liked this post - you might be interested in this one as well: GiveAway Of The Day
Update (23rd of August 2008): The makers of Typing Assistant, Sumitsoft, have contacted me to test version 4.0 of their product. There were still a few bugs in that update but in two days time they came with a patch, taking care of all my Azerty-keyboard related problems and a free user license on top of it. Thanks guys.
20080712
F-Prot: Don't Panic!
Entry 880
Last week’s entry was about buggy software. This week I wanted to post
about the first of the most recent Orb
reissues, 4 in total, but then disaster struck.
I have been sympathetic towards the anti-virus product F-Prot since my MS-DOS days. F-Prot has saved my day and my ass at least a couple of times. F-Prot was (at least the dos version) freeware and with some tweaking you could make it run as a real-time scanner on Windows 3.11, 95 and 98 as well. Shame on me!
The dos versions refused to work on XP though (due to the NTFS file system) so I was obliged, well not really obliged because I could have switched over to another one of the free AV tools, to buy some licenses. I’ve got 35 of those now. F-Prot is not only very reliable it is also very very cheap. One single license costs you about 20 Euro but 35 licenses will only amount to about 100 Euros, and that is still cheaper than some of the big shots in the AV world for one license alone.
F-Prot released version 6 of their product last year and were so thrilled with it that they announced that the previous version, number 3, something must have got wrong with their numbering, would be discontinued in June.
But disaster struck with Thursday’s update. Apparently that one automatically deleted the old - existing - version without replacing it with the new upgrade. Every PC had a dreadful red security center icon telling that the antivirus had been disabled. I don't know how many clients F-Prot has, that is not my goddamn business anyway, but they must all have felt as protected as swimming without a tampax.
While some forum aficionados were contemplating what had just happened (and proposed solutions and workarounds for the problem) the F-Prot management and programmers had suddenly disappeared from cyberworld, as if they had been annihilated by a passing convoy of Vogon warships.
About 8 hours after the first forum message signalling the problem an official message appeared. It read:
“We are experiencing a minor temporary malfunction in our update servers.”
This kind of infantile crisis communication was of course like swinging a red flag in front of a jumpy bull. As another forum member sarcastically remarked:
“I don't think this is a minor temporary problem. I think this is a Major Meltdown.”
Don't forget that thousands, ten-thousands, hundred-thousands of computers had suddenly no virus protection anymore (or so it seemed anyway).
The official reason why the F-Prot management apparently didn’t find it necessary to communicate about the problem was explained (a day later, again on the forum) as follows:
“The reason was not that we weren't taking the problem seriously, it's been our only concern for the last 48 hours or so. We just didn't want people to panic.”
So far for the official reaction of F-Prot that was published in large friendly letters.
I just think the F-Prot heads were panicking themselves and had to clean the shit out of their own pants first. By the way, their website doesn't mention anything at all about the would-be crash. For them, it is like it never happened. They should perhaps check if there are still dolphins swimming in the ocean.
The DOS versions of F-Prot can (apparently) still be downloaded and
used. More info (and some utilities) can be found on the following
addresses:
Download
F-PROT Antivirus for DOS (official)
Claymania
F-PROT for DOS page
Living
with F-Prot for DOS Antivirus
If you liked this post - you might be interested in this one as well: True Story
20080802
Holy Cow
Entry 908
I’m typing this entry, sitting on a Serena chair with a solid wooden seat and armrests, a moulded dark grey leather back and four anthracite coloured legs. Some of the dark grey paint is already coming off. A 17-inch Dell 1702 flat panel UltraSharp colour monitor stands in front of me. My fingers rest on a Dell RT7D30 multimedia Belgian azerty keyboard. If you take a closer look at the interior of the keyboard you are likely to find crumbs of Spar American Style Apple Pie Cookies, small pieces of dried mozzarella cheese originating from Ristorante deepfreeze pizza, traces of some mashed potatoes, tomato sauce, a swarm of highly evolved nano-beings that worship the return of the big Coca Cola zero spill. The computer and its accessories have been placed in an Ikea Effektiv light willow cabinet with semi transparent fumed glass doors. The doors are open; otherwise I wouldn’t be able to reach the computer.
I’m quite sure the above probably doesn’t interest you at all; so let me start all over again:
There was a time that I read at least a book a week, even more. I guess I read 8 to 10 novels a month. Besides that I had quite an impressive collection of comics or graphic novels as we connoisseurs used to call them. Donald Duck was what we called a comic although we silently revered the originals by Carl Barks. Then came a sudden change of pace. No more comics, no time to read a book. Wife. House. Career. Television and a beer.
But I still read the book reviews in the newspaper. About 6 months ago I read this thunderous review about a hardboiled murder mystery set in an alternative timeline where the people of Israel have a fictional Yiddish homeland in Alaska. The book, so it said, was extremely funny, witty and ingenious and if you only read one thriller a year, this was the thriller to read. My mind reserved some space to contain this information.
Summer Holidays. I’ve got my annual sea and sun crime story to read. I’m entering the bookshop. What do you think I’d pick?
The Yiddish Policemen’s Union by Michael Chabon. I think I will call it YPU from now on.
Americans are known for their streamlined efficiency. There is the, probably apocryphal, story about the US Food And Drugs Administration who asked the Swiss, in name of effectiveness, to get rid of the holes in their Emmental cheese. The Swiss, mental as ever, politely told the Americans to fuck off. But one can’t stop progress, although progress is a rather inappropriate word to define this kind of evolution, and American cheese is now very stackable and transportable, but also almost taste- and fragrance-free.
But enough about cheese. There is still one field were Americans are not as fast, efficient and to the point as I would like them to be. It’s called literature. In American literature less is not more, quite the contrary…
A typical YPU scene looks like this. Landsman, the inquiring police officer parks his car, after we have been informed about his inner musings, the things he ate or didn’t eat in the morning and what kind of noises the car and Landsman’s bowels have made while parking. The detective gets out of the car, after we have been informed of its brand name and type, the building year, the present and previous colours and its average fuel consumption, and we are confronted with a description of the house at the left side, the house at the right side and finally the house in the middle. We know what the present and previous colours of the front door is and were, how many steps it takes to get there, why there is a curtain moving at a window of the third floor and who are the mother, the father, the nieces and nephews of the person who has moved the curtain. We get some historical background of the houses and the street as well and last but not least an explanation why there is a toyb sitting on the dakh. A dozen of pages later Landsman climbs the stairs, knocks at the door and has a word with the supposed witness. "How well did you know the murdered man?", he grumbles in a typical inarticulate way. "I didn’t know the shleper at all!", is the short and sweet answer. Another chapter has been written.
To quote the prophet:
It’s guff. It doesn’t advance the action. It makes for nice fat books such as the American market thrives on, but it doesn’t get you anywhere. You don’t, in short, want to know. (Adams, Douglas: So long, and thanks for all the fish, Pan Books, London, p. 114.)
This also reminds me of the notorious Syd Barrett interview that two Actuel reporters had in 1982 with the ex front man of Pink Floyd, but explaining that here would take us too far like an Emmental cheese looking for an absent hole.
Michael Chabon uses the same rock’n roll swindle as Anthony Burgess did in A Clockwork Orange. Alex, the central character in Clockwork mixed English with Nadsat, Chabon constantly obstructs American English with Yiddish expressions and words. In Clockwork this worked, but I found the same effect in YPU rather tiresome and often silly. It equates with the Mexican archetypical speech form that William Shatner used in his TekWar novels to depict Sid Gomez, the sidekick of detective Jake Cardigan: “Hey gringo, don’t be a loco and leave the muchacha alone or I’m gonna kick you right at the cojones!”
After 100 pages I was still very unimpressed with the novel and I almost gave up reading. But as it was the only unread book in my collection I continued.
Michael Chabon deliberately copies the lyrical similes Raymond Chandler was famous for. Comparing someone’s voice with ‘an onion rolling in a bucket’ can be witty in a P.G. Wodehouse novel, but the only thing I could think of now was ‘why on earth would anybody carry a single onion in a goddamn bucket?’, better to keep it in your pocket then, isn’t it?
In the book nobody, except for the reader of course, suffers from a common headache. In Chabon’s world a man's headache is like ‘a bus parked with its engine running in the middle of his brain’. No, I’m deliberately misquoting here, as a matter of fact it is ‘like the fumes of a bus parked with its engine running in the middle of his brain’. Makes a lot of difference, innit?
And a single-word remark from one character to another is miraculously
transformed into ‘a chamber ensemble of
'insolence,
resentment,
sarcasm,
provocation,
innocence
and
surprise’.
I kid
you not, Reader’s Digest editors will not have too many difficulties to
condense this book into a Select Edition. Just erase the superfluous
synonyms, the figures of speech and the book is shortened by at least
300 pages.
But somewhere between pages 150 and 200 something magical happened and before I could put my finger on it I had passed page 250. The narrative that had started like a diesel train with 105 fully loaded steel wagons heading from Antwerp harbour to a car construction site on the Eastern side of Germany had finally reached full speed and was heading towards Bahnhof West. When the novel asked for an end all emergency brake switches were suddenly pulled leaving the disoriented traveller behind on platform 6. What now?
This is a truly American story. When some Yiddish thugs, (who exploit a drug addiction rehabilitation clinic, that is located in the middle of Tlingit territory, that really is a cover-up for a paramilitary training centre, because their mean goal is to start a violent revolution in Jerusalem,) imprison Landsman they unclothe him to his underpants. Nobody apparently wants a naked Jew in the house. This is in shrill contrast to Mr. James Bond who was always stripped to the bone whenever a traitorous villain like Ernst Stavro Blofeld wanted to torture him. Landsman originally tries to infiltrate the drug clinic as a junkie in need for help, but he is spotted faster than the already cited James Bond in a girl’s dormitory. I can’t tell you too much about the plot, I only understood half of it anyway, but it seems to turn all around a sacred cow in drag. That idea is of course not unique and has already been used by the aforementioned P.G. Wodehouse who devoted a couple of his novels to the Empress of Blandings, but I just realise now that pigs aren’t the most appreciated animals in Jewish culture. Perhaps Michael Chabon is a master of irony because who else would think of painting a cow and hide it between the Indians.
The blurb at the back side of the novel says that this is ‘a dazzling, individual, hyperconfident novel… pure narrative pleasure… only a shmendrik would pass it up”.
Welcome to my world.
If you liked this post - you might be interested in this one as well: Heinlein Manoeuvres In The Dark
20080823
Bad Kompany
Entry 928
1
Belgium is known for its mediocrity. Maybe this has been glued inside in our genes because for the past couple of thousands years we have been invaded, occupied, violated, liberated and then invaded all over again. After a while if a soldier knocked on the door of a little cottage all he could hear from the inside was a deep sigh and “Who is it this time? Romans, Germans, Austrians, Spanish, French or Dutch?”
This is probably how the Belgian disease (as it is called in our country) originated. Belgians, regardless if they are Flemings or Walloons (and one always tends to forget the German speaking community of our land), have a built-in suspicion against any form of power: legislative, judicial or executive.
2
We don’t want to stand out. Ask for a volunteer in Holland and a dozen of Dutchmen will raise their hand. Not the Belgians. Ask for a volunteer in Belgium: we look sheepishly around and we slowly try to slide in an inconspicuous way to the middle of the group. That is quite normal. After each new invasion our new proprietors would get rid of the volunteers (suddenly called: collaborators) who helped the previous government. A quite effective method to do that was to attach a horse to each limb and to organise a horse race in opposite directions. According to the laws of Darwin this lead to the result that after a while the volunteering-gene disappeared completely from the Belgian DNA string.
So when we finally acquired our own independency in 1830, the first thing we did was to look for a mediocre nobleman to act as our king. Our royal family now owns a small fortune as they soon adapted to the Belgian custom to pay as less tax as possible and to put your money on foreign bank accounts where Belgian law enforcers can’t find it.
3
Irish people, who also suffered a lot, are proud and dance and sing a lot about how Paddy Malone stole a potato for his pregnant wife and his seven hungry kids and was consequently hung by the British. Flemings don’t. For decades our most popular dance was ‘In Zaire’ from Johnny Wakelin and our most popular songs exclusively narrated about the Spanish Costa del Sol and the American prairie. The Flemish anthem, a quite boring and – if I may believe Wikipedia – originally German tune (hence the fact that is boring), is about a… lion although that animal has never been spotted in our regions. Hedgehogs yes, but who would like to sing a tune that goes: “They will never tame him, the proud Flemish hedgehog”. Most of them are killed by traffic anyway.
4
A couple of decades ago the Belgian judo sport team was absolute world-class. European gold medals, World gold medals, Olympic gold medals. Of course the Belgian judo federation did not like this a bit so they did about everything to make us average again. Judokas who wanted to fight abroad couldn’t take their personal trainer with them and if they wanted to attend a foreign training camp they had to finance it themselves. While the complete Belgian judo team was sleeping in a drafty bungalow without heating or warm water and only one bed the Belgian judo officials explained from the local Hilton hotel that there was simply not enough money to give them some luxury. The matter of the one single bed aside, Belgian judokas were not very happy about that. One of them entered politics just to be able to sleep in a posh hotel from time to time. At the most recent Olympic games the Belgian Judo Federation finally accomplished what they had hoped for: zero medals.
5
The average Belgian is plain average, a little inefficient, a mild anarchic even. The same goes for Belgian television. A few months ago the VRT boasted that it had an exclusive interview with our crown prince who, for about an hour, gave the same answer to all the questions: he was deeply in love with our country, its institutions and its inhabitants. The future king of Belgium spoke in a language that sounded quite like Dutch but that was not exactly it. When the royal family speaks Dutch they do a robot talk act, feeding the opinion that these are not men but mere marionettes. The TV interview made me peer at the screen to see where the strings went and where the parrot was hiding who did the talking. A real journalist would have asked question such as:
- What do you think from your great-great-grandfather who butchered a few millions of Africans to get some rubbers?
Or if this question is a little bit too historical:
- Is it true the previous king stacked some billions on foreign bank accounts to avoid paying taxes?
Or if that question is not about the subject:
- Why do you, Monseigneur, refuse to give back Napoleon's bed (and some other valuable 19th century furniture) to the Flemish community you borrowed those from?
Simple questions like that.
6
A couple of years ago Belgian football, some call it soccer although sucker would be more appropriate, was infested by Chinese businessmen who threatened to break a few fingers if players such and so didn't do their best to loose with a 3 goals difference. Everybody knew it: the trainers knew it, the players knew it, the public knew it and the press knew it. There was only one big exception though: the Royal Belgian Football Association (RBFA) didn’t know it.
Even when police and court got involved, and as the Belgian courts are populated with Belgian judges representing the spirit of Belgian people it normally takes ages before they get a move on, even then the RBFA continued discussing the type of grass Belgian football fields were allowed to have or not. When finally the court made some decision and threw around a couple of sentences and penalties the geriatric football leaders were busy contemplating the important issue what to serve as hors d'oeuvre at the annual gala dinner.
Belgian official TV, normally a very average channel with very average programs although they prefer to call it polite (see point 5 above), named the RBFA a bunch of incompetent nincompoops and that on the news in full prime time. But all is forgiven and forgotten now because on this year's Olympic games, made in China and lead by the Belgian Jacques Rogge, the Belgian Young Red Devils (better call them devils than hedgehogs, somebody must have thought) soccer team is performing a small miracle. Needless to say that such splendid behaviour is not appreciated by the RBFA at all.
When Jacques Rogge, the International Olympic Committee president, called on football clubs to let their players compete in the Olympic Games, it inspired one of our top players, Vincent Kompany, to stay at the Olympics instead of rejoining the German club HSV he was under contract with. He did this for king, for freedom and for justice as our national anthem proudly goes (this is another anthem as the previously cited Flemish Lion, as we are dealing with Belgium we have national, federal and regional anthems).
This time the RBFA reacted faster than a bullet out of Lucky Luke’s gun. Who this Vincent Kompany thought he was? He had no right whatsoever to defend the honour of the Belgian king, our Belgian freedom and the Belgian justice on the Olympic games. “If he stays in China and his soccer club HSV decides to bring it to court he is on his own”, said an official, “The Royal Belgian Sucker Association will, under no circumstance, back him up. Now where is this bottle of champagne you were talking me about?"
7
At the time I write this it is not sure if the Belgian Young devils will get an Olympic medal or not (we didn't). That is of no particular importance for this post. But if I were our king I would ask the RBFA very politely to take the Royal away from their name, to remove the crown from their logo and to change the name of our team to the Red Chickens instead. Can anyone contact the guy who holds the strings for that?
8 Post Scriptum (at 5 PM)
Tia Hellebaut just won a gold medal on the Olympics and when I went to the baker's to order me some croissants for tomorrow morning the music on my iPod randomizer was the magnificent Into The Fourth Dimension by The Orb. Life can be so beautiful.
If you liked this post - you might be interested in this one as well: Just like Belgium
20080921
Kopfgeburten
Entry 991
This week, sad week,
brought me scattered thoughts, feelings and sensations. Let me empty my
cerebral scrapbook first before I continue with the subject of the day.
Activate cynical mood warning…
1
Three weeks ago a Belgian soldier was killed in Lebanon attempting to dismantle an Israeli bomb. He was posthumously decorated and the big shots praised him for his bravery. Strange enough nobody from the Belgian government had the guts to convene the Israeli ambassador and to officially demand for an explanation what the fuck these bombs were doing there and how on Earth they were going to indemnify the Blue Helmets, the family of the deceased soldier and last but not least the hundreds of innocent victims who have been mutilated and killed and will still be mutilated and killed for years after the initial conflict has taken place.
Whenever a believer of the true Zion faith discovers a swastika on a wall a mind-boggling tidal wave of complaints hits the media. One of the silliest moments of an anti-Semite counter reaction took place decades ago when the Belgian-Israeli Weekly accused Albert Uderzo to be racist because he had caricatured a Jew in Asterix and the Black Gold.
Don’t get me wrong. The Jewish people have suffered a lot, especially in the last century, and I’m not here to minimise or contradict the Holocaust or anti-Semitism. But I don’t like the fact that these historical barbarisms are still used today as a scapegoat to defend military actions against civilians. Just make the following headbirth: what do you think the international reaction would be if a Blue Helmet was be killed in Afghanistan by a Taliban cluster bomb? Catch my drift?
I needed to get this off my chest.
2
Some silly people bombard my mailboxes with funny PowerPoint presentations, funny jokes, funny movies and the odd portion of pornographic material. Depending on the mood I’m in I just delete the crap (with exception of the pornographic material, I confess) and nod very friendly when I meet the senders, mostly at the local pub, when they feel it necessary to loudly analyse what they send me a couple of days before.
This one nearly made me piss my pants: Statue of St George falls and gets beheaded in a church.
But it also made place for another headbirth. Why do I find this Christian blasphemous act rather funny and the bombing of the Afghan Buddhas of Bamyan not?
3
A second movie that cracked me up involves a hidden camera prank that turns bad. A moron with a bucketful of paint decorates a parked car and is promptly attacked by its owner. When the nose bleeding actor explains that the scene was set up for the general amusement of the tv glotzing community this isn’t appreciated by the victim, quite the contrary. The man doesn't feel invited to laugh in front of the camera and kicks the prankster a bit more. I sincerely hope the authorities gave the mental bloke a medal instead of a fine. But at the same time a little silly bird keeps on fluttering in my head.
Time for a headbirth. What if the beating was a scenario driven thing as well? These days it is so hard to trust television.
4
My Live In Gdansk cd/dvd/goodies box arrived yesterday and although I pissed on the concept a couple of weeks ago the situation has somewhat changed since then. Rick Wright, the quietest of the brothers Floyd, is no longer among us and thus this 5 double disc is more or less his musical testament. Friday evening I watched Echoes on disc 3 and cried a bit, alone in front of the computer screen. Thank God my webcam is broken or it would’ve been a hidden camera item all over the world. (Now on YouTube: grown man cries in front of a Pink Floyd song.) The close ups of Ricks Wright’s fingers floating forever and ever over the keyboard keys only strengthened me in my belief that the man was a fucking genius. The last track on the DVD is the obligatory Comfy Numb. Rick sings the parts that are normally done by Roger Waters. Justice is done.
This reminds me of the unchecked fact that somebody, EMI probably, waved a bucketful of dollars in front of the Floyd politely informing if they were interested in doing a sequel to Dark Side of The Moon. Apparently they all said no.
Headbirth: although Roger Waters did sing about a surrogate band in the Eighties he apparently doesn’t realise that the Floyd songs he does on his live shows sound more like a tribute band than anything else.
5
What is it with these sequels and remakes anyway? Those who know me know I am a bit a fan of the original The Wicker Man, a cult horror movie from the early Seventies. The protagonist is a 30 years virgin policeman, not even a wanker, who gets lured to an island where Christopher Lee, dressed like Neil the hippie from The Young Ones, is a pagan high priest. Although the women on the island have the tendency to dance naked in the daylight, dance naked in the moonlight and even dance naked when there is no distinctive source of light present, singing Scottish folksongs, the copper refuses to get involved. When the town’s main hottie, played by Britt Ekland, juggles her bare buttocks in front of him, he still refuses to spill his seed on the ground and thus he is exactly the right spicy man to be sacrificed to their sun god.
Recently I came across the American remake with Nicolas Cage. Frankly, I don’t like the guy and in this movie Cage proves once again that he is not a method actor but merely uses screaming as a method. Somebody should explain him that modern movie sets have hi-tech microphones that can record sweet whispers as well.
HB: Why do people make remakes and sequels if they already know for sure that the result will be worse than the original? Is this some kind of a postmodernism thing?
6
Part 5 was a mere intermezzo, because the real message is here: Eoin Colfer, his name reveals that he probably has been living on The Wicker Man island for too long, has been commissioned by Penguin books and the Adams family to write the sixth sequel of the Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy trilogy. The book will be titled And Another Thing and will resuscitate Arthur Dent, Zaphod Beeblebrox and Ford Prefect. I’m not sure about Marvin, the paranoid android, as he did the decent thing of dying in So Long And Thanks For All The Fish, but we can’t be too sure with all these parallel universes floating around, can we?
Kopfgeburten. Should I be happy or should I be sad with this news? I’m not sure and I don’t really care.
If you liked this post - you might be interested in this one as well: Ringmaster
20081005
Boobytraps
Entry 1030
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I came home with a broad smile on my face because I found out at my local book- and DVD shop that the cult-series of the Sixties The Prisoner has finally reached this continent. Years before Twin Peaks, years before Lost (getting stupider and stupider by the episode, pardon me for not watching it anymore), The Prisoner was Britain’s most haunting and psychedelic TV experience. Of course the series only got better and better in my mind and I can only hope that watching the seventeen parts, 40 years after they have been made, will not turn into a bad trip, or even worse, into a kind of Austin Powers flashback show. Trifles light |