A man called Syd

Entry 270

About a year, a year and a half, ago I had this splendid idea of making a small Flash based game, basically a point and click puzzle that would use Pink Floyd covers (mostly by Hipgnosis) in a kind of interactive way. I made a preloader (a pink pig, of course) and an introduction that consisted of 16 Floyd covers that had to be clicked in chronological order during the game.

Puzzle #1 (of 16!) was based on the famous See Emily Play 'train' cover that uses a drawing from Syd Barrett himself. Add to that the apocryphal story that Syd Barrett named the band after he had had an encounter with a flying saucer and - bingo - this is were the first puzzle came in.

I started making puzzle two, based on the A Saucerful Of Secrets cover, but this was deleted (read the introduction for that) and the projects was abandoned...

This was not my first Flash encounter with Syd Barrett. When Dion Johnson started his much acclaimed Astral Piper (The New Syd Barrett Appreciation Society) website he wanted the members to send in a poem or some 'art'. I made a small Flash movie but that was rejected as only gifs or jpegs were allowed. Although a screenshot of the Flash movie made it into the gallery the movie itself was not published.

I have now glued these two files together and the result is here: Syd Barrett Unfinished. Nothing to be proud of but I am not ashamed either.

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If you liked this post - you might be interested in this one as well: The Pink Floyd Pie Chart 

Tourette's Planet (18+)

Entry 290

The Unfinished Projects category was originally set up for those old ideas that are floating in my brain but that were not realized for a lot of obvious silly reasons. The fact that I have not started cataloguing these projects on this page is because I am using exactly the same obvious silly reasons for not opening my blog editor.

So here is an idea I came up with this week, perhaps it could turn into a short science fiction story as the plot is really too meagre to full a complete novel.

The trigger that started it all is the news that Telecom Italia illegally wiretapped thousands of its clients, probably to sell the secrets to the highest bidder. Illegal intelligence activities are mushrooming and apparently we, us, and them cannot be bothered anymore. When the Echelon email analysis network was discovered the European Union seemed to say: “it exists, so what”? Swift bank data is sifted in order to trace terrorist money and not a single entrepreneur finds this an intrusion of free enterprise. Illegal CIA flights move suspects, kidnapped from the European Union, to secret prisons in states were torture is consider a way of life but this is a thing we have to learn to live with…

All this has lead to a situation were people do not communicate anymore in a normal way. Mails, letters, and everyday conversation have been enriched with pornographic, racist, xenophobe, aggressive phrases, insults, and stop words. The result is that the intelligence services cannot make the difference anymore between real and fake security threats. (This situation is not entirely impossible, it has been claimed that the East-German secret service Stasi had so many informants giving so many irrelevant facts that the service crumbled under its own weight.)

Then there is the man (or woman or person) who has enough of all this and who starts speaking and writing civilised again. Now this is a menace the secret service deals with immediately. Because his/her messages spring out in the open and are immediately trapped by the bots.

He/she is abducted, tortured and will only be set free when he/she shouts to the evil goat fucking son of a bitch hangman/woman/person that his/her/its mother will be raped by his/her/its dog and that his/her/its daughter’s squirting masturbation web cam sessions will be uploaded to an active popular pederast blog.

Like I said, not enough in it for a full novel, unless you name is Dan Brown of course…

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If you liked this post - you might be interested in this one as well: Heinlein Manoeuvres In The Dark

The Abandon Earth Kit aka How To Leave The Planet

Entry 307

Don't panic!

This 'Unfinished Project' of mine has finally been, euh, finished. It contains a text from Douglas Adams that he once wrote for a shoe company. A Belgium shoe company! Although written in Flash it isn't flashy at all. You are warned.

How To Leave The Planet

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If you liked this post - you might be interested in this one as well: Nomen Est Omen: Starship Titanic

The Pink Floyd Pie Chart

Entry 315

From time to time I get these weird ideas. Most of those just stay buried in my head. You have maybe already wondered why there is a Star Trek category on this blog with two and a half and only two and a half messages inside. That is because I had (and still have) this crazy plan to write a sequel to an original Star Trek episode. Because I often wondered, what happens with the inhabitants of a certain planet after Kirk leaves the crease? I even downloaded some population viability software and that came to the conclusion that a certain tribe may well have died after Kirk and his goofy droogs left the planet they supposedly saved.

Some of my opinions on some original Star Trek episodes can be found on Phil Farrand's Nitpickers site. He is the bloke who wrote those excellent Star Trek Nitpicker guides BTW. Phil, if you ever read this, let it be known that your Nitpicker's Guide for Classic Trekkers is the best Star Trek book ever I have in my unhealthy collection of Star Trek books. It is also one of my plans to publish my comments for all original Star Trek episodes on this blog. We'll see when these beam over here as well...

But that isn't what this post is about. It is about a small Flash quiz I have made, aptly called, The Pink Floyd Pie Chart. On the Late Night forum, I am a proud member of, there has been an Internet quiz addiction lately and so I just made one up myself. Probably I had more fun creating it then you will have playing it.

Back to the dishes now... I should buy me a dishwasher one of these days...

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If you liked this post - you might be interested in this one as well: A man called Syd   

True Story

Entry 360

It was the time of year when the evenings were cold and dark and SDSL routers gave up transmitting bits and bytes per kilobit and kilobyte.

It was also the time of year to call the helpdesk that gets loads of money for a guaranteed 24/24 7/7 technical service.

- Belgastar helpdesk, Jeroen speaking, how can I be of service to you?
- Jeroen, My SDSL router broke down.
- Indeed sir, I can see that.
- Thanks for monitoring my line. Now send me a repair team right a way.
- Sir, it is Friday night 10 pm.
- Yes and?
- Our people stop at 5.
- I can understand that. Send them tomorrow morning at 8 then.
- Sir.
- Yes?
- Tomorrow is Saturday.
- I am aware of the days of the week, but thanks for reminding. And?
- Our repair people don't work on weekends.
- Listen Jeroen; I think you don't understand the situation completely. I am not a horny ADSL light user who can't get his weekly porn chat. In two hours of time hundreds of EDI messages have to pass through that line, weekend or not. In two hours of time ftp servers are going to connect from all over the world. In two hours of time Citrix and VPN connections will start transferring megabytes of data that is necessary for the future existence of the company I work for. So get me the professional users techdesk.
- Sir.
- Yes?
- I am the professional techdesk.
- I thought you were the home users helpdesk? At weekends I am the home users helpdesk as well, sir, but not now as it closes at 10 pm.
- So when can you send me a repair team for my router then?
- Monday morning sir.
- At what time?
- Depends sir. They may have some others jobs to do.
- One last question then. Why do I pay over 500 euro per month for a SDSL router with guaranteed 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, technical assistance if you do nothing more than for a 20 Euro per month ADSL line?
- The extra is, sir, that we answer your phone calls 7 days a week, night and day. Have a good evening, sir.

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If you liked this post - you might be interested in this one as well: Tourette's Planet (18+)

Franco's Frocks

Entry 363

Douglas Adams once wrote a column, not one of his best - I might add, about New Year's resolutions but I won't go further in that. You might otherwise think that I am one of those I am your biggest fan guys that stick knives in author's overfed bellies just because they destroyed all parallel instances of planet earth. See also: Stephen King.

But there is one thing we both agree on and that is that New Year's resolutions can and may easily be forgotten starting from January the second. So why does one want to make these lists anyway? My LA-girl, may her soul rest in peace but as she is, last time I checked anyway, still among the living she will carry on harassing me, had this splendid idea a few silvesters ago. Before this would end in a tremendous row I sullenly agreed. I felt like the pimple-faced boy again who was obliged by a Spanish priest with Opus Dei roots to confess my sins in front of him. Before I could invent some minor catholic felonies he asked, no demanded, with tremor in his voice.

Do you masturbate!!!

This priest, who obviously found Franco a rather nice chap, was still wearing a frock so I couldn’t see if this question turned him on, yes or no, not that I was really interested in that matter to start with.

But we had a kind of linguistic matter here. As I had no clue what the priest was talking about I said no and could leave with a few prayers just to be on the safe side. The first thing I did after I was released from the priest's claws was asking my group leader what that particular word meant. "Jerking off.", he replied. Now here was a word I did understand. This was the same bloke who would later introduce me to Pink Floyd's underrated Obscured By Clouds. That album really was the trigger that started a life long obsession for that particular band. Good man.

This was also the first and very last time in my life that a priest actually thought me something I didn't already know.

Anyway, to get back to the subject, instead of making up some minor New Year's resolutions my LA-girl found it more appropriate to do a list for me. It took her ages and pages and it was all relatively overzealous as well. I only had one New Year's resolution for her and that was to stop making those lists to begin with.

But this year I'll make an exception and here it is. Somewhere next year, well it's already THIS year, isn't it?, this blog will move to its own domain and it will be called: atagong.com.

That's all folks, have a nice day, 2008 promises to be as shitty as all other years.

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If you liked this post - you might be interested in this one as well: Tourette's Planet (18+)

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 n^x, n^y or n^z 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.

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If you liked this post - you might be interested in this one as well: True Story

Ringmaster

Entry 755

A few days ago in a ridiculously overcrowded bus somewhere inside the bowels of the local souk at the inner town of Brussels a chador-veiled beauty offered me her seat. I politely refused, trying not to drown into those big brown virgin eyes of her. My face turned red, partly from those fresh spring inner fluids that suddenly rushed through my veins, partly from a streak of anger that blitzkrieged through my body.

A woman just offered me her seat in the bus. It suddenly appeared to me that old age had fallen upon me like Damocles’ sword.

So far the text I had already prepared for today’s post… I wanted to add some more funny observations here but I’m not in the mood. Yesterday Poekie died. He’s the cat that’s been polluting my MySpace avatar for ages.

In 1998 he (regardless of English grammatical rules no cat from me will ever be called an it) was rescued by my LA-girl from the local Steiner school were the director vehemently threatened to poison him. I haven’t been able to look positively at Steiner education since. In my nightmares I portray him, alternative progressivism smudged all over his face, saying: “Today, my children, in the name of anthroposophical education, we will show you how to poison a cat.” Teacher, leave those kids alone.

Poekie was brought into our home where it would take him years to adjust to us. Basically he was a one-cat-one-person felid. The last couple of years he had switched his attention span from LA-girl to me for whatever reason a cat needs to change his opinion. I still think that luring him with Whiskas Crunch did the trick. Although he remained very shy he was the happiest cat I have ever seen (really). Behind the safety of the glass he liked to show off to the people on the street, when we came home and saw how our front room window was plastered with sticky children’s handprints we knew that he had been playing ringmaster again. The last couple of months he finally found the courage to come and have a look, from a safe distance, at people visiting us. He didn't like people visiting us. Not two weeks ago he jumped for the very first time in front of the computer monitor I am now watching at. He licked his feet and decided this was a safe place to sleep.

During the uneven fight against death he bit me hard in the finger. Way to go Poekie. Way to go. If there is a cat’s heaven, jump over to the human one, and give Rudolf Steiner my regards will ya?

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If you liked (?!) this post - you might be interested in this one as well: Franco's Frocks 

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.

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If you liked this post - you might be interested in this one as well: Just like Belgium 

Don't mention the war

Entry 1036

German radio- and television-administration, die Gebühreneinzugszentrale (GEZ), send several letters to a Mr. Friedrich Schiller with the urgent question to pay his radio- and television-tax. These arrived at a local primary school in Weigsdorf-Köblitz (Saksen) and its principal replied that the German poet, philosopher, historian and dramatist the administration was looking for had been dead for over 200 years. Schiller is world renowned for his Ode an die Freude that was put to music by a certain Mr. Ludwig van Beethoven in his Ninth symphony and that became the official European anthem in 1972.

But of course one does not mess with administration, especially not the German one. Believing that this was the biggest scam in German television-tax history the GEZ now wanted solid proof that Mr. Friedrich Schiller was indeed dead and not merely acting dead to avoid taxes. The German newspapers do not reveal how this was achieved but finally a spokeswoman from the tax-administration accepted that a database error had been made and that Mr. Friedrich Schiller had died before television and radio had been invented.

At the current annual fee of 200 Euros Friedrich Schiller already owed the German state 40.600 euros.

Nur der Irrtum ist das Leben, und das Wissen ist der Tod.
Only mistakes are alive, and knowledge is dead.
(Friedrich Schiller, Kassandra).

In everyday life I am an IT monkey for a service company and because I used to be the only one around who spoke German I was always the first to be chosen as a volunteer to deal with our neighbours from the East.

One day one of my colleagues had a small problem with a manager of a German Kooperation we had recently joined. She had send the German administrative unit a small note saying that the Belgian partner would not be able to render any service on the 21st of July, because that date happens to be the Belgian national day. It is that day, we Belgians snicker, that working people have a day off and the king has to do something to earn his pay for a change.

The message was not well received by the Head Administrator of the German cooperation. They send a page long official letter, signed, sealed and delivered, that according to the rules of their Arian brotherhood no member could close its offices on any other day than those confirmed by German law, number such and so, paragraph whatever.

The girl was nearly in tears from anger when I came in. She had already tried to explain, by phone, fax and mail to the representative of the Herrenvolk that this was our National day and that there would be no need whatsoever for us to stay vigilant to render service to companies that were closed anyway. Can you do something, she sighted.

I took the phone. Called the bloke. Explained him that since he had already lost two wars against Belgium we were considering ourselves as an independent country and not a mere province belonging to the German federal republic. It was quiet for a while. For a moment I feared I had done a Franz Ferdinand that would lead to World-War III. But he understood. Sometimes you just have to shout a little bit harder as they do.

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If you liked this post - you might be interested in this as well: EUlogy