Farting through my Fingertips

• Don't you get it? It was never about the stick.

• To make REAL money, tailor your business to fundamental human drives

Disney's creation of the "Princesses" franchise boosted revenue from US$300m to US$4bn

• Map of USA warped to show frequency of States' appearing in American news

• I am moving to New York

Singles Map of USA, showing imbalance b/w Single Males and Females:

You couldn't make it up!

Al-Qaeda accuses Iran of 9/11 lie

Al-Qaeda's deputy leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri, has blamed Iran for spreading the theory that Israel was behind the 11 September 2001 attacks.
…
"The purpose of this lie is clear - [to suggest] that there are no heroes among the Sunnis who can hurt America as no-one else did in history, he said.

Times two

Are you real bad?

Stoners! Want somewhere to share with the world your higher high insights? Try the new blogging platform: blogpot.com! Now with easy to click big buttons.

"Evil be to he who evil drinks"

More correctly: "shame on him who evil drinks". But I like the mistranslation a little better.

There's no such word as


Never meddle in the affairs of dragons for you are crunchy and taste good with ketchup
Attributed to: Bumper sticker

To treat your facts with imagination is one thing, to imagine your facts is quite another.
Attributed to: John Bouroughs, Journal, Oct. 24, 1907

Some things have to be believed to be seen.
Attributed to: Ralph Hodgson

I still say a church steeple with a lightning rod on top shows a lack of confidence.
Attributed to: Doug McLeod

The habitual pattern of thought stands in the way of other impressions.
Attributed to: Patanjali, Sutras - verse 1:50

Politician, flag & priest.
In all the world I love them least.
When nations wage their bloody wars,
'tis they alone have been the cause
-- Pete Smith

Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?
Attributed to: Douglas Adams

We all have the same sky, but we don't all have the same horizon.

In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is.
Attributed to: Chuck Reid

What we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning.
Attributed to: (Heisenberg, Physics and Philosophy, 1963)

I put it to you that both you and I are atheists. It is just that I believe in one fewer gods than you.
When you finally come to understand why you don’t believe in all those other gods then you will understand why I don’t believe in yours.
Attributed to: Graeme’s mate Fred

Suppose we've chosen the wrong god. Every time we go to church we're just making him madder and madder.
Attributed to: Homer Simpson

A fanatic is one who can't change his mind and won't change the subject.
Attributed to: Sir Winston Churchill

The last line in this post's the best one.

I really love Wikipedia. Or rather, I hate it, in the sense of I can get lost in it for hours, enjoying the philanthropic result of myriad experts and obsessed nutters summarising neatly the most important aspects of wide reams of realms of knowledge.

gotta love the ALT tag on that image. apparently this particular session started with a search on "Taft in a wet t-shirt contest"

Now, something that deserves a fuller article by itself, for how it reflects in a deep anthropological sense upon how human societies evolve, is the growth of the wikipedia Gatekeeper Class. And the growth of that class's neophytes, its wannabes, prowling wikipedia pretending (to themselves) they are maintaining the value of its content according to the precepts of its rules. But, in the same way as so many 3-year-old girls (and a dramatically lower proportion of boys) discover the pleasure of having dramatic power over others by simply chanting the word "No" to any question or request, they uniformly ignore the overarching precept of Wikipedia (improve its content) in favour of simply DELETING anything they deem unfit. And "unfit" is nearly always decided on stylistic terms, rule-lawyering terms, without regard to semantic content or outcome.

Anyone despairing of the religious/PC tendency to devolve to interpretations of a holy-book/holy-meme should avoid wikipedia.


Occasionally I hit an article where the damage or the one-eyedness is just too offensive to tolerate.

And I fix it.

This usually involves recreating earlier work and supplementing it with additional research and write-ups, but occasionally involves essentially re-writing the article from scratch.

Here's 5 I think you might like that I've done under the Saltation login.

Dwile Flonking

Dwile flonking is an outdoor game of dubious parentage played in the UK's Suffolk and Sussex countryside during the August Christmas season. It is a game of dexterity and drinking, with the apparent aim of having a laugh and getting as drunk as possible.
This had been hacked by someone who'd first come across it in Schott's Miscellanea and decided that Schott's whimsical inventions around it constituted fact.
Fixed. And fixed in the tone of the game itself.

At the risk of tooting my own horn, I particularly like this line:

The Waveney Valley Dwile Flonking Association went on to make their television debut on The Eamonn Andrews television programme in 1967, which resulted in letters from Australia, Hong Kong and America asking for a flonking rule book, although in the Australians' case this may have been a misprint.

Gotta love those BBC photos linked to in the 1st section.

Okay

This had just been broken then broken again, then broken again.
Fixed. Complete overhaul.
I made a point of including ALL the major etymologies, not just (whichever) last-editor's favourites. You may be interested to know a very likely one is: an African lingua franca, with documented examples in America preceding the best-known etymology's earliest by 55 years.

Nominative Determinism

I ran across this when I went to add a rather nice example to the related article Aptronym. The Nominative Determinism article was essentially a mention of New Scientist and a list of examples. And the Aptronym article turned out to be infested by a troll with an obsession for the topic but a rather poor understanding of the word. Regardless, there was a surreal Request to Merge the two articles. This is equivalent to merging Cheese and Butter because they share a common base. I clarified the difference and the article kinda grew out of the clarification.

Annoyingly, though I had a good example of an aptronym which is not Nominative Determinism, I later chanced upon a wonderful example of Nominative Determinim which was not an aptronym but I didn't write it down. And do you think I could remember it by the time I next sat at a computer? My arse. This missing example is still pissing me off.

BIFF

Now, I realise most people won't have a clue who BIFF is, since he's only really known by us old-old internet hands who were active in the 80s. This is a shame, since:
BIFF, like Eliza Doolittle, appears to be a specifically created yet immediately classic shibboleth of some fundamental human behaviours, on the part of both the parodied and the parodying.

Fixed. And funny. Not my funny, but BIFF's. Read it for the quote from the Usenet Oracle.

}                ___                          (_)
}              _/XXX\
}             /XXXXXX\_ <-- MT. B1FF1NGT0N                 __
} __    __   /X XXXX XX\     MT. K1BO (SHORT3R    _       /XX\__      ___
}   \__/  \_/__       \ \    TH4N B1FF'Z) ----> _/X\__   /XX XXX\____/XXX\
} \  ___   \/  \_      \ \               __   _/      \_/  _/  -   __  -
} __/   \__/   \ \__     \\__           /  \_//  _ _ \  \     __  /  \____
}  __    \  /     \ \_   _//_\___     _/    //           \___/  \/     __/
} /_______\________\__\_/________\_ _/_____/_____________/_______\____/___
}                                    /|\
}                                   / | \       _____ ____
}                                  /  |  \      \    V   /
}     THE RO4D T0 B1FFN3SS!!!!    /   |   \      | R00T  |
}                                /    |    \     |  666  |     +---------+
}     ALL MUST TR4V3L 1T        /     |     \    \___ ___/     | B1FF    |
}                              /      |      \       V         | R00LZ!! |
}     SUMD4Y!!!!!!!!          /       |       \      |       o +---------+
}                            /        |        \     |      o
}                           /         |         \    |   |\__/|  .~    ~.
}                          /          |          \   |   /o=o'`./      .'
}                         /           |              |  {o__,   \    {
}                        /            |                   / .  . )    \
}                       /             |                   `-` '-' \    }
}                                     |                  .(   _(   )_.'
}                                     |                 '---.~_ _ _|

Next, comes what I've been leading up to.

French spacing

If you click on no other link in this post, please click on this.
I'm quite proud of this. It's professional-level academic and encyclopaedic work, gathering a LOT of fairly abstruse knowledge and research into one place.

One chap commented:
First off, the excellent entry on French Spacing prompted me to get a login for Wikipedia--terrific work that really demonstrates the value of Wikipedia. This might seem like a nuisance topic (spacing after a period), but the history of why people are choosing one convention over the other is absolutely fascinating.


You have almost certainly been told by various people, typically design- or DTP- professionals, that you should not double-space after sentences, that this is merely an antiquated and incorrect carry-over from the days of the typewriter and that no need for this exists anymore in this modern world of proportional fonts and computer technology.

This is actually a complete fabrication, relying on a staggering level of history revisionism (and a fundamental lack of understanding of proportional fonts).

In the real world, the "double"-space predated the typewriter by several hundred years and was considered best practice from before [sic] Gutenberg up until the advent of desktop-publishing.

Pick up a 19th century book, or an early 20th century book, or, as one contributor discovered, the American Declaration of Independence. Oh look: double-spacing.

More: notice that the old old books were often printed in type so small it's today only used for page numbering because it's not practical to try to set the whole book in so small a type. Note that not only can you read it easily, you can read it at length even under low-light conditions, and when you put it down you're not tired nor drained by effort as you are by today's printing examples, even at twice the typesize.

Welcome to what we've lost: the reader-centric quality-focussed traditional typesetting's spacing rules.

I really object to self-appointed elites pushing currently preferred bandwagons at the expense of the non-elite:  peer-aesthetics and virtue-theatre, regardless of consequence for their nominal goals. I mean: I REALLY object to it. In the sense of becoming deeply angered. Particularly when the result is so unequivocally negative for all the mere plebs subject to the result. Particularly when, as here, the demands flipflop according to the current direction of the bandwagon but the self-righteousness and the elitism does not alter.

As noted above, in the late 20th century there has been a designer-led trend to assert that single-spaced sentences constitute good style. The reasons offered in support of this trend are of three forms: stylistic, reader-centric, and historical.
...
Since empirical evidence contradicts both the reader-centric reasoning and the historical reasoning, the designer preference for single-spaced sentences rests solely on design choice.

Just HOW bad was the dissonance from reality?

Unusually for sociological research—extraordinarily so—no valid or even scientific studies have materially contradicted these findings.

This is so softly stated the sheer SIZE of the point could be missed. You can quite literally find better research refuting gravity than you can find research supporting these "designer" assertions. Yet in virtually all other sociological research, results wash back and forwards according to the sample (and, tellingly, the current bandwagon). This important observation is not so much extraordinary as gob-smackingly flabbergasting.

I REALLY object to people re-writing history to justify their current position.


When I ran across this article it was about 5 paragraphs long and claimed that french spacing was double-spacing (it's single-spacing), and evil, and stupidity by people who "Just Didn't Get It".

It had been created during a brief blogburst of discussion, and essentially re-asserted a few key preferences. It was created to support and justify their assertions. It used internet searches to assert the results of internet searches.

"Selective quoting of random people blathering at each other doesn't count as 'research' to me."
– Peters, Tim (2002) in ''Python-Dev: textwrap.py in Python-Dev newsgroup/mailinglist

I rewrote it, incorporating ALL points of view rather than just one, but also clearly describing where and when (and why and how) ALL the various points of view arose.

Apart from small portions of the Computer Software section and some minor but very welcome contributions (eg, the American Declaration of Independence, EBCDIC, various copyedit smoothings), essentially everything you see there now was written by me.

Note there are 114 references. Most are to real-world items rather than google hits, including a number of 19th century textbooks.


Give it a look if you have any interest in books or the printed word.

French spacing

I've never actually done one of these so what the hell.

Bid bag Ross of Romeo Mike's done tagged me for an meme the other day and I only just noticed. How WUDE!

Now, in olden days I looked on these things with more than a little reluctance, not to say aversion. Well, actually, aversion. Seemed like a little game to play, a little too self-consciously blogesque. And they were rife and seemed lazy when I started. But they're less heavily promoted now as "The In-Thing For The Cool 2.0 Cats" and, well basically it just hit me at the right time and the right mood.

And then Wross rote: "if you prefer to engage your masterly writing acumen, the longer twenty five is found here.
Anyhow, I thought it might both be interesting in your hands, and would suit your mien. Cheers."

Now, don't be mien! Flattery will get you everywhere, m'man. Well, not there. Sorry. No, not even if you wear the dress. Argh! No, put it back on—the reverse-camelfoot is meatier than my metier.

So let's use each Qn as an excuse to ramble, eh?

Click through the few links -- they're good.

1. Last movie you saw in a theater?

Bourne Ultimatum. As I wrote just before I saw it:

Bourne again

K :

Hi guys

Cinema next week – Tuesday – Bourne Ultimatum.

Will have a look on Monday where it is showing and what time. Let me know if you fancy it.

Sal :

Could do – do you need to know the back-story? I haven’t seen the other 11 Bourne movies, you see.

K :

I don't think so.

Sal :

Well, just to be on the safe side, I’ll make one up.

“Mr & Mrs Bourne-Yesterday were walking through the woods one day when suddenly they suffered a terrible divorce. Their baby son, Baby, took his father’s name, and crawled at high speed over the horizon with it clenched firmly between his moviestar teeth (which he’d won in a colouring competition), becoming embroiled in fearsome adventures and perilous dramas, until he ended happily ever after.

Suddenly, twenty years later, as he rocked to and fro on the deck of his moviestar house (which he’d won in a paint-stripping competition), he was struck out of the blue by a crushing crisis of confidence and assonance – who WAS he? Now read on…”

There we go, that should do it. I feel much better about the movie now that I know what’s going on.

And then I saw the movie.
Jesus.
I haven't been that bored in a very long time.
It was a cartoon pretending to be for grown-ups. Like "The Fountainhead". Every "action" sequence you're looking round the audience hoping someone'll do something interesting. After a while you give up and start counting your socks. If I hadn't been with new friends I'd have walked out.

2. What book are you [re]reading?

Got a few on the go as is my wont.

"The Iron Dream [Lord of the Swastika] -- A Science Fiction Novel by Adolf Hitler" (Norman Spinrad)

lovely concept (the blurb and "author's" bio are lovely: "Let Adolf Hitler transport you to a far-future Earth, where only FERIC JAGGAR and his mighty weapon, the Steel Commander, stand between the remnants of true humanity and annihilation at the hands of the totally evil Dominators and the mindless mutant hordes they completely control." "See for yourself why so many people have turned to this science-fantasy novel as a beacon of hope in these grim and terrifying times")
but increasingly tedious. Would have been better as a novella/long short-story. More pungency to the satire.

The Journal of Energy Markets, Spring 2008: "The impact of volume risk on hedge effectiveness: the case of a natural gas independent power producer operation"

Nice.
Simple intelligence on a real-world problem in a much-wider context narrowly focussed.
I miss my old jobs.

"Hampshire privies; A nostalgic trip down the garden path by Ian Fox"

This is true archaeology, though performed with the aid of living-memory —the quotes from people who had to live daily with the reality of in-house privies are more pungent than what they recall— and very reminiscent of the real-world rationality of another author whose "Medieval Britain" I read recently. ((Very) annoyingly, I can't remember his name off-hand. You Brits will know him as the archaeology geek main-man on TimeTeam -- I was startled to read his references to his very part-time attempts to popularise his vocation and to realise I'd seen him and dismissed him as a random background person trotted out for academic validity.) Most written works and nearly all archaeology works focus only on the high-status stuff: easily visible and widely declared/aspirational. "Oh look, we've found a chief's grave. From this we will invent a culture." Fundamentally divorced from the actual events and daily life of the day. The DaneLaw? Mostly peaceful settlers. Clovis? First and dominant culture of the Americas? A vanishingly brief cultural episode in a history at least 2,000 years older. Sewerage? One of the most important innovations in most people's lives.
You know Skara Brae, the oldest-ever-discovered village? That one up on the north-east of Scotland that was revealed when a megastorm ripped several thousand tons of soil off a random headland? They had built themselves in-house toilets on a constant-flow per-house freshwater sewer. 5,000 years ago. They could eat food and excrete food daily, without smell or disease or effort. And it was so important to them, they built the whole thing by hand. 5,000 years later in the then-most-advanced-nation-on-earth, the man of the house (never the woman (without vociferous outraged complaint of the injustice)) was still dragging out large buckets of shit and piss and trying to find somewhere to put it. And the houses often stank of it. But it was never mentioned in the literature of the day. That would be declassée.
Next time you stand and flush, stop and think about what your life would be like if the water was cut off for a couple of weeks.

"Philosophers Behaving Badly" (Neil Rodgers and Mel Thompson)

Neatly affirms everything I'd implied from reading their touted public works. "Philosophy" is a status game of faux-elitism played by intellectually feeble social parasites, just like "Socialism".
Please note: I'm a socialist, and Australia was originally constructed as a country along socialist principles with an amazingly prescient eye to the realities of human behaviour. But socialist principles have nothing to do with Socialism nor Socialists ("four legs good; two legs BETTER!").

"Ivanhoe" (Sir Walter Scott)

Surprisingly good. No, surprisingly excellent. On all sorts of levels. Works as an adventure story. "Desdichado!, to the rescue!" Go black slug, go. Works as a romance. Poor Rebecca. Works as a biting yet empathic observational commentary on the hypocrisy of man and of sub-cultures' anthropological strategies within the mass. Poor Rebecca.
The scene of the song of the Barefooted Friar sung by the drunken Friar Tuck and King Richard is magnificent on many levels. 200 years later, I similarly notice the top and the bottom are equally identical, and mostly only the middle is loathsome. "The dunes march but the desert stands still."
"I uncanonical! I scorn the charge — I scorn it with my heels! I serve the duty of my chapel duly and truly. Two masses daily, morning and evening, primes, noons, and vespers, aves, credes, paters —"
"Excepting moonlit nights, when the venison is in season*," said his guest.
"Exceptis excipiendis"

* deer was then the sole domain of the king (with whom he was unknowingly drinking), and hunting it let alone eating it was treason, the mark of an incredible outlaw, and punishable by death.

I expected a cartoon and found tongue-in-cheek knowing brilliance, with a superficial but still energising nod to childhood dreams.

3. Favorite board game?

Ogre/GEV.
But apart from that, and bending the definition "very slightly": Pictionary. A faster test of who can communicate/listen vs merely talk/dance I know not of.
Social people (by my framework's labels) uniformly love the game and uniformly fail miserably at it. Very very clever people-hackers, the designers.

4. Favorite magazine?

New Scientist, The Economist, and The Week.
New Scientist the tops. I use it to put me to sleep, actually. Not that it's dull -- quite the opposite. Rather it's the peace of knowing that despite the vast majority, there really are real people who care about real things and ferret after new knowledge for the benefit of all with keen intelligences and a joy of discovery. Bliss. I can relax nowwwwwwzzzz.

Performance Bikes used to be a standout fave, but my long years of enforced megapoverty meaning I couldn't run a bike mean that it's still too poignant a pain to read with the old real pleasure of anticipation and remembrance of adrenaline.

I miss my bicycle.

I REALLY miss my bicycle.

Screaming down the country roads on the crest of the wave of sunshine and field scent, dancing round the twisties and the corners and the wriggly bits, and random what-the-hell let's-liven-this-up-a-bit slaloming in between the white lines on the A-roads and motorways getting faster and faster till the front wheel starts to skip too much. Then hauling up at a country pub for a huge feed of top notch nosh and some steaming in the garden's breezes before creaking back into the saddle and bam! off and away again, dancing dancing down the country lanes.

Here's me and my little ninja playing in the sun at Cadwell Park:





...
And the sun is out and the summer's a-comin' and I want my bicycle back.

I want to go dancing again.

Life is too slow without machines.

5. Favorite smells?

Kylie.
That soft herbaceous Aussie plant that smells of happy lithecat, suddenly soft-startlingly bounding out of it and into your arms with a little gladsome yow.
The early autumn crispness air skirling sharp over a warm world, tweaking your nose with moist scent and contrast.
A fine full oaky red.
Good leather.
The winey dusty smell of a country winery's cellar, sleepy among the fields and trees, toasting under a yellow sun.

Memory as a small child (somewhere between 4 and 6): parents were visiting a winery, presumably in Victoria, and were tasting at the tall (to me) and solid wooden counter, barrels stacked high to our left, flavours reeking from every moisten tap.
And would the small child like a taste? He would? Oh, isn't that cute. OK, he's only little, he can only cope with a little white, says the well-meaning man. CRY! Oh! What's the matter? Oh, Sal, what's wrong? "I want that one!", pointing at one of the barrels. Are you sure? says the man to my parents. But against my mother's better judgement and in accord with my father's better judgement they relent to shut me up, and a tiny plastic tasting cup is tapped from the barrel and oh! the smell! And oh! the taste. Absolutely delicious, and everything it had seemed to me it should taste like. 20 years later when I finally broke out of my extended uni poverty, I made a point my first 2 years of buying a different red every week to learn, to learn, to discover the possibilities and to educate my palate.

Twining's "Finest Yunnan" tea.

Available only from the battered tin on the flimsy shelf behind the counter of their original shop on the Strand with the Coade-stone frontispiece -- 200 years old and it looks brand new. Mrs Coade, you(r) rock.

Fresh salad's leaves and the nip on the nose of olive oil and old musty hideously expensive balsamic vinegar, piled next to a butter seared kangaroo steak.
Toasted sesame oil.
You, my dear.

6. Favorite sounds?

Ahhh... so many.
The dawn chorus.
Rain hammering on the roof.
The humming of a well-set sail as the cat leans and races before the wind.
The ear-splitting crack and bellowing growl of a tropical thunderstorm in a tropical heat in Brisbane's leafiness.
The high happy whinny of the horse as it rears under you, and the sound and the sweat of the hooves at full gallop.
The spatter of high-spinning sudden screaming roars then burbles surrounding you and off in the pits of bike engines blipping in the pitlane as you take your place among them in the summer sun.
The 2-stroke 350 burbling on the stand and warming up as you leather up beside it on a sunny Sunday under the carport beneath the trees, a day of screaming up and over Mt Glorious trembling before you.
That subsonic groaning of too-soft metal and jittering squeaking ripriprip of rubber just past the limit as you jink skid round a suburban corner. The long ululating wail of the old (RWD) corolla's tyres as you sail past a sportscar at its driver's limit, round the outside in the Cahill Expressway's 270° in-rock half-tunnel curling up to the Sydney Harbour Bridge, racing fading vectors to slip in between the next and the barrier and off and across the bridge on the speedlimit with the outraged embarrassed sportscars buzzing past on the straight.
The plop and fizz of a restorative alkasetzer the morning after the night before.
The crunch of gravel underfoot.
The roar of mile-away surf on a hot and starlit scrapeclouded 2am verandah.
The squeakgrunt of a blissful cat stretchrolling in its sleep on the sofa beside you. Chirruping under your hand.
The cockcrying mew of a peacock somewhere off in the tree-drenched gardens.
"What are you having?"

7. Worst feeling in the world?

The bills. The debts. The loss of life. The letters piling up unopened as a shrieking shivering black wall of unreasoning terror drives you away from the cash machine and its brutal bald statement of balance with needles of poison ice lancing deep in your neck and gut, and a long deep black tunnel of unaskedfor future yawning remorselessly, carelessly, before you of over-qualified under-pigeonhole-able unemployed destruction of everything everything you hoped for in life.

8. What is the first thing you think of when you wake up?

mwUrgarhhhhgggfff-nnnmmkkg-arh-nnggg-k

9. Favorite fast food place?

Favourite?

Perhaps, in a nearly-fast food sense: Ponti's 24hr at Liverpool St Station. Italian ramshackleness and love for life and really rather good food, albeit adjusted for English palates.

10. Future child’s name?

John Connor.

11. Finish this statement. “If I had lot of money I’d….?

Pay someone to finish the statement?

Go back to uni and study physics and medicine and seek to ADD something to mankind's lives. I'm GOOD at solving people-problems. My current tools are deficient.
And put down on paper my anthropological framework. It explains and summarises so much. Too much, to ever hope to work again after it's published. Mankind survives on, believes in, lives by: deceit.

12. Do you sleep with a stuffed animal?

"I'd sleep with a black snake with a festered arse.
"Only if you held its head! ONLY if you held its head!"
But frankly, if it wasn't stuffed when it got into bed with me, it sure as hell will be by the time it crawls woozily dreamily out the next morning.

13. Storms - cool or scary?

FUCK YEAH!
Proper storms, anyway.
A happy memory. Dad and me the boy out on the caper cat scudding across flat water with hulls heavy with camping kit under the late afternoon sun. Then it suddenly goes dark and Dad goes oh shit and CRACK! a wind hits us so hard from behind the jib pulls both ropes THROUGH THE RATCHETS and stands out horizontal in front of us, then up at an angle as the boat pitches forward and sideways as the thankfully tight-drawn mainsail reefs us over and round with the hulls digging and dragging deep through the water. The weird loose waterfall of water continuously pearling greenly over a hull-tip designed to pop up and out immediately. A dry front. Dad kicking himself for being too lazypeacefulhappy to not pay attention with his pilot-trained eyes to what he'd seen earlier. Suddenly-cold rain slashing in just off the horizontal as we —we? he— regains control of the boat and then we're running before the storm in a tearing haze of cold gale rain and stiff chop, jolt-banging to the only reachable beach. Draw up and then up and up again on the hard wet sand and look, an old semi-abandoned hut, still sound but locked, but lee behind. Looking in the cracked dirty windows as the bellowing wind rips sand and spray through the dunes around me.
I can't remember much of the rest (UHT milk?). I only really remember the fun part.

One deep life regret. I never fucked the love of my life under a Brisbane summer thunderstorm, with the sky afire and the room ripped wet, bright, and calamitous.

14. Favorite drink?

Depends on the context.
Sunday morning? Tea. Hot steaming thick rich tea.
Sexy cocktail bar or good mates at home? Saltation's Velvet Brain Hammer.

Basis:
Absolut Kurrant, Cointreau, lemon zest, flamed lime zest, ice & cranberry juice to taste.

A hot afternoon with the sun drawing sharp shadows on the deck? Sal's Summer Libation.

Take a large-ish glass. By "ish", of course, I mean as fucking huge as you can lift. Or move on a trolley.
Into this glass, artfully arrange a selection of icecubes.

An English pub? A fresh real ale.
Good food, good cheese, and/or good people? A stomping stamping robust and soft Shiraz Viognier: Coonawarra or Clare.

15. Finish this statement, “If I had the time I would….”?

Finish this statement.

16. Do you eat the stems on broccoli?

Yup. Even the main stem -- lovely sliced fine and broad in a stir fry (especially with the outer leaves around a cauliflower) and toasted sesame oil and drizzlings of "clean bean Dipping Sauce" from the happily hapless hippies running their tofu stall in Spitalfields Market.

Here's a tip, for all you people who have learned to hate broccoli, and brussels sprouts. Don't boil it. Boiling sucks. (a) unless you get it Just Right, it turns into mush. (b) 90% of the vitamins go into the water. You're better off throwing away the veg and drinking the water. Except the heat's broken most of the vitamins anyway.
No, what you want to do is fry it. So next time you're cooking a steak, preferably sealed in butter and sage on the hottest heat you can get, throw the broccoli pieces and brussels sprouts into the butter and juices around the steak and cook it just as long as you do the steak. Broccoli is softened without mushiness, and can even get lovely crackling parts of sudden dried florets. And brussels sprouts are a revelation, cooked fast and hard in butter. Awesome. Delicious. Hard but soft and an explosion of taste. They are to traditional english sprouts as water(y) is to wine.

All you english types: this Christmas, try this tip from Sal. Butter-fry your sprouts on a high heat and fast. Coming from a man who hates sprouts, you can eat a bowl of them by themselves.

17. If you could dye your hair any color, what would be your choice?

I'd be happy with more hair, frankly. And colouring seems to be confined to people with control issues. But I've always liked the idea of genuinely silver hair. As in, metallic silver silver. So maybe silver.

18. Name all the different cities/towns you’ve lived in?

Ah. No. There isn't the space.

Oh, just the names. OK. Sunbury, Surfers Paradise, Brisbane, Sydney, London, Vienna, Frankfurt, Rome, London, Silicon Valley, New York, Stuttgart, London, P-thorpe. Love Brisbane, love London, could live in New York, could happily die in Stuttgart. Perfect life? 3 months in Brisbane, 3 months in London, rotate.

19. Favorite sports to watch?

MotoGP. About 5 years ago before the electronics removed a lot of the spectacle. Fun fact: last year's ultra-lovely Kentuckian world-champion volunteered second year running to ride a test-technology machine, and after acres of frustration asked them to switch off all the electronics at the start, and was immediately then quickest off the line of all but the most expensive of the pack.

20. One nice thing about the person who sent this to you?

He's exceedingly rational, and sees not just things as they are rather than just the current bandwagon, but tries to see the larger picture of ALL the things as they are, rather than just the approved subset. His blog can look a little right-ranty to the first-time visitor, but it becomes quickly obvious that's a function of his environment: he lives in a miasma of faux-left fantasists, and vents for balance.

21. What’s under your bed?

A serious backpack, some 2000ADs, some New Scientists, dust, and a 20-year-old Junghans Silentic™ alarm clock -- best ever industrial design EVER. 3-stage alarm: a few tiny thuds, a few bright shiny TINGs, then the fire alarm. Goes for 4 days between windings. You can accidentally leave it set and go for a holiday and the neighbours will only be woken once.

22. Would you like to be born as yourself again?

Actually, come to think of it: yeah.
Although, I AM extremely lazy, so it'd be nice to try coming back as a beautiful girl one day.

23. Morning person, or night owl?

Which part of "mwUrgarhhhhgggfff-nnnmmkkg-arh-nnggg-k" did you not understand?

I have very very high inertia. I start hellaciously slow and speed up through the day, very easily to dramatic levels, and the switching-off process at end of day is extraordinarily hard for me. Most people have a natural 25-26 hour day cycle -- mine is a bit over 28 and have gone 72 hours without sleep or chemical assistance (other than tea) back when I was fit.

24. Over easy, or sunny side up?

Yes please.

25. Favorite place to relax?

Any river bank.
Any deck.
Any (real) English pub.
Sunday morning in my borrowed (father's) Jason recliner on the hillside-high open-sided semi-verandah overlooking the Brisbane river with the Sunday papers and a steaming cup of Prince of Wales tea.
Tramping through any forest.

26. Favorite pie?

Steak and Mushroom in a soft Wholemeal "crust", from the University of Queensland's winningly-named Biological Refec. My daily breakfast for A$1.50 for 3 of the healthiest happiest fittest years of my life. 3% fat and clapping handstand pushups, anyone?

27. Favorite ice cream flavor?

I really don't like icecream. Sugar and nonhealthy fat and a total absence of food, what's not to dislike?

Having said that, tartufo I quite liked when I was in my growing spurts, as a novel wonder in the novelty of a restaurant as a special treat for a child.

28. Of all the people you tagged this to, who’s most likely to respond first?

Dunno that I'll tag anyone. I'm not really "in" the blogworld any more. It wouldn't feel right.

"Anyway, it seems as if winter in England goes on forever, by the time spring comes you really deserve it."
— George Harrison (1995)

[should have been posted: last Tuesday]

My god. Someone flipped a switch. Summer is upon us.

Not just: "oh look, it's got warmer." I mean the full-on super-psycho English explosion of countryside that is summer in the UK.

Overnight.

Or near enough as makes no difference.

There was a long weekend. The May "bank holiday". Up to that point: unremittingly grey, cold, and wet. Cold, wet, dark, and miserable. Soul-numbingly miserable. Seven months' worth of life-leeched miserable.

And then on Thursday the sun came out.

And on Friday it was warm.

And apart from some clouds on Sunday, the 3 day weekend was a gourmand's feast of sun and blue sky and outdoor joy.

Driving into work Tuesday morning, every verge, every bush, every open ground, every tree — every single absence of humanity was high and bushy and fluffy with virudescent new growth exploding from too-long too-quiescent plantlife. The last field of rape as we turned into the farm was a full foot taller than it had been on Friday. I'm serious. A foot. In 3 days.

Awesome. Literally.

People are blossoming faster than the plants. Life once more spreads before us, rich and warm and pleasurable; no longer a chore but something to be gripped with both lively hands and drunk up and shouted from the hillsides.

Summer is upon us.

[should have been posted: last Tuesday]

And... reLAX.

Last month was the third biggest month in history for debt sales and new debt sales. In history.

The credit market's liquidity is back.

The curve's flattening (long-term debt is getting cheaper, short-term debt is finally moving in cost: up from its previously frozen (untraded) artificial non-price), but that's expected in these conditions: uncertainty being removed at both ends.

Early days yet. But we've passed the crisis point. The world's money market is now in full recovery: funds are moving again, world-wide, with an initial dam-burst of false volume as pent-up trades are cleared.

The fever broken, the clear snot turned to green, the patient is kicking off the bedsheets and insisting, weakly, too soon, that it wants to dance again.

Requiem for a Relationship:

"The irony is that for all that we supremely worked. And if she hadn't lied to me, manipulated me, broken every promise she ever made to me and fucked around with another guy at Christmas we would have come through to be an awesome couple."

Here Be Monsters

On tabloid journalism:

"The Austrian incest story —the one about the "devil dungeon" or the "sex-hell pit", to use The Sun's descriptions— is the archetypal tabloid story. It is violent, macabre, conducive to easy moral outrage and of no practical interest to anybody."

Christopher Caldwell
The Financial Times, 2008.05.03-4, p.13
Never heard of this chap before, nor the paper he apparently normally writes for: The Weekly Standard.
Unbelievably remiss of me: one of the few genuinely intelligent writers I've read this decade.
"The larger meaning of the Fritzl saga is unclear. That does not mean we should not read about it. Sometime in the past few decades, quality newspapers gave up on stories that are interesting for their own sake. They limit themselves to stories with "deeper implications", ie stories that we can learn from because they reflect things that are likely to be repeated in future. In so doing, quality papers have grown biased against rare, unclassifiable, or once-in-a-lifetime stories. This is another way of saying they have grown biased against news itself. Readers, apparently, have not."

On Wikipedia and the Accuracy of Crowds clambering aboard a bandwagon:

"Wasn't it "Annie Hall" that turned the phrase 'negative space' into
a catchphrase/punchline?

I actually heard it used seriously the other night, in a show about
cinematography... and it occurs to me that it could be morphed into
a concept called "negative intelligence" that refers to *the quality
that prevails when intelligence is absent*.

And what I notice on netnews is that negative intelligence rules
almost everywhere-- newsgroups are great sucking black-holes of
negative intelligence, where the greatest bigots have the loudest
voices, and the greatest say...

The way people get smarter, generally, is by looking at multiple
points of view, and letting these pov's 'debate among themselves' in
the most even-handed manner possible. But in newsgroups, people who
try to lay things out evenhandedly get massively squelched by fucking
idiots...

just my opinion ;^/

j"

Jorn Barger
the redoubtable old-old-webpresence and -webanthropologist
he of Robot Wisdom

"You never enjoy the world aright, till the Sea itself floweth in your veins, till you are clothed with the heavens, and crowned with the stars: and perceive yourself to be the sole heir of the whole world, and more than so, because men are in it who are every one sole heirs as well as you."
- Traherne

"He saw the cities of many men, and knew their mind."
- Homer

"Happy he, who has
availed to read
the causes of things."
- Virgil

"The marks of that glorious bloody day are yet recent, the field being strewed with the skulls and carcases of unburied men, horses and camels. I could not look without horror on such numbers of mangled human bodies, and reflect on the injustice of war that makes murder not only necessary but meritorious. Nothing seems to me a plainer proof of the irrationality of mankind, whatever fine claims we pretend to reason, than the rage with which they contest for a small spot of ground, when such large parts of fruitful earth lie quite uninhabited. 'Tis true, custom has now made it unavoidable, but can there be a greater demonstration of want of reason than a custom being firmly established so plainly contrary to the interest of Man in general?"
- Lady Mary Wortley Montagu: letter to Alexander Pope, from the field of Karlowitz, Prince Eugene's victory over the Turks.

"'Tis you she holds, but sighs for other, absent loves."
- Tibullus

I want to own a small piece of land and a pub.

That way, I can sign all letters and emails and things, without fear of contradiction or clarity:

Sal Tation, Esquire and bar

To understand this joke, you need to know that when someone has won a medal more than once, rather than giving them another medal, a bar is added to the ribbon the medal hangs from.
It's a subtle but significant emphasis of just how extraordinary that person is.
Something you will never see: Joe Bloggs, VC and bars.
Something you might see: Joe Bloggs, VC and bars (RIP)