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 A tentative blog to test the temperature. |
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Ten years ago I was writing several blogs on various subjects - F1 motor racing, Music, Classic Cars, Great Romances and, most crushingly, a personal journal that included my thoughts on America, memories of England and Africa, opinion, humour, writing and anything else that occurred. It all became too much (I was attempting to update the journal every day) and I collapsed, exhausted and thoroughly disillusioned in the end. So this blog is indeed a Toe in the Water, a place to document my thoughts in and on WdC but with a determination not to get sucked into the blog whirlpool ever again. Here's hoping.     |
| Nonsense Poetry A song that I’m currently obsessed with is One Headlight by The Wallflowers. It’s a very moody, and intense song but is limited in its stamina because it’s short on meaning. The lyrics start out well enough but quickly degenerate into a word salad. This is fine if the music is strong enough (which it is) but there’s a limit to how much meaninglessness we can stand. The human mind cries out for meaning and will insert it even into places where there is clearly no intent at all (a randomly patterned wall for instance). So any painting by Vermeer becomes more valuable and important than a Mondrian. Like it or not, meaning is essential to art and it’s not art if it’s merely pretty - it’s design. And yet I freely admit that, on occasion, I write nonsense poetry. Most frequently this happens when I’m confronted by a prompt that I cannot get inspiration from. In such cases, especially when I’m really desperate, I resort to nonsense. Heck, if Lewis Carroll can do it, so can I. My excuse is that you don’t have to take it seriously. Not all poetry has weight and is intended to last forever. Such things help, it’s true, but life is a matter of comic relief along with drama. Shakespeare was the master of this combination. All of which is a way of saying that I may yet write something in reply to the prompt, “Leather,” but it will be nonsense. I really don’t have that much of a relationship to leather. Since One Headlight was instrumental in providing me with this post, here it is. You can see how much of a story you can glean from the lyrics. Something about funerals, no doubt. Word count: 291 |
| A Stubbled Field Are we not all blackbeards? |
| Got One! Ended the short story drought this morning when I woke up with an idea in my head. "Hamelin"  I can’t remember how I began to think on this well known tale but it was easy to turn it on its head. So easy, in fact, that I pondered doing the same to a whole bunch of fairy tales. Who needs inspiration when a simple formula for a whole series presents itself? And that would be a terrible mistake. If you want to be noticed, never take the predictable route. Word count: 90 |
| Of Grandkids and Stuff It occurred to me today that I ought to ask Google about my step grandson. He is currently aged four and the smartest kid I’ve ever known. I considered asking you good folks about the lad’s incredible reading ability but then realised that I could just ask Google. And that fount of all knowledge informs me that it is possible for a child to learn to read at the age of three. Which I can vouch for since my step grandson could read by the time he turned that age. So it seems I’m not hallucinating and he is not some freak of nature. The thing is, however, he taught himself. Totally without our help. In fact, we were not even aware of the possibility until he started to read words on the television. Unasked for and often without any way for the word to occur to him unless he understood the principles and knew how the concept worked. We checked carefully by asking him to read things that he’d never seen on the TV. No problem - he could read words he didn’t even know the meaning of. Occasionally he’d get them slightly wrong in those early days, but it was clear that he was divining the word from the letters as well as its shape. Perhaps the weirdest thing is that he makes no big deal of this. To him it’s obviously normal and nothing to get excited about. He reads when he wants to know what is written and doesn’t bother otherwise. Buy him a new toy and he will read the package and tell you what the thing is before he’s opened it. At other times he might give no indication of reading things until you ask him. And then he answers with such immediacy that it’s clear he’s already read it but didn’t think it was worth commenting on. It’s the television, of course. The kind of kids’ shows he watches spend a lot of time saying words and displaying them on screen. And the little feller just has the kind of mind that automatically sees the connection and stores it. Both abilities are apparent in his facility with jigsaw puzzles and his putting jumbled things into groups and collections. So I was going to ask you whether you’d ever heard or had experience of a kid learning to read at such an early age. But Google has put my curiosity out of its misery. The kid really did teach himself to read at a ridiculously young age. I’m not a self-deluding old fool imagining impossible events in the real world. Kinda cool to watch the little guy too. Word count: 442 |
| Posting an Advertisement Today I placed an advertisement on the Newsfeed. Although I once had ambitions of getting into the advertising game, I think this is the first time I’ve thrown one at WDC. So the results are fairly amateurish. But advertising’s only job is to shout the name of the product into listening ears and hope it sticks, so this one might work. I used a pretty large font and emboldened it to make it clear that it’s intended to be loud. That was a bit boring so I figured I needed an illustration for extra interest. I dug around and found a pic of Pookie - that’ll do it, thought I. She went in. The idea is that people love cat photos. Even writers. So I’m on to a winner right from the start. Add to that the way Pookie’s feline stare insinuates itself into human souls and we’re definitely getting somewhere. She tells me that she was actually thinking about butter at the time but what we don’t know won’t hurt the ad, will it? Anyway, the ad is posted and I now sit back and wait for the thousands to sign up for Jayne’s The Daily Poem contest. Can’t fail, can it? Word count: 202 |
| A Personal Note on Writing Had a revelation today. This wasn’t a brand new one. It’s one of those I have occasionally and then forget for a time. Until something reminds me of it. Which is what happened this morning. Brought on by a note I wrote to a fellow WDC writer. I was reading it back to myself when the moment occurred. Suddenly I realised (for the hundredth time) that I don’t write anything - I compose it. Can’t help myself. Every time I write, I choose words carefully and give thought to its flow and readability. Even lists and notes to myself have the same technique applied to their creation. I just can’t stop myself from spending far too much time in making any writing sound good. I tell you this not from any desire to show how much of a writer I am to the core, but to point out how ridiculous it is. There is no conceivable excuse for being so picky in the creation of such unimportant things as shopping lists or memos. It’s like a disease or obsession that I am unable to control. This really came home to me in reading the note I had just penned. It was the most baroque assemblage of old fashioned expressions that I’d transcribed in a long time. I just hoped that the recipient (she knows who she is) would understand my verbal complications. In a futile attempt to vindicate myself, I should mention that I follow the creed of writing the way I speak. That’s what we all should do. And it’s hardly my fault that I speak like I write and write like I speak. I’ve always known that I’m a dinosaur. One of my two late sisters used to say that I was pompous. Mea culpa. Word count: 296 |
| Everything The song chosen for The 48-Hour Challenge Media Prompt for February is unusual in its title. The simple word “Everything” would seem a bit large to be dealt with in a song of less than four minutes. My mind drifts away to the everything bagel. The first time I saw an everything bagel, I thought immediately that it must be flavoured with all the spices in the book. That is surely what the name means, after all. And I continued under this delusion for a few years afterwards. In that time, I tried the everything bagel quite often and, while not becoming my favourite variation on the bagel theme, it was acceptable at least. I was even quite pleased when I discovered that it was possible to buy a bottle of this mixture of spices to sprinkle on things other than bagels. That was also the period in which I discovered it was possible to have too much of a good thing. Sprinkle an excess of everything seasoning on your favourite foodstuff and you’ll wish you hadn’t. Moderation is definitely the way to go with this baby. Anyway, that’s leading me away from my point in all this. The time came when I discovered that everything seasoning does not contain all the types of spices under the sun. It’s a selection! You can imagine my disappointment. The whole thing is a misnomer, apparently. In fact, it seems that the spice world has a weakness for this kind of thing. They also have something called allspice that is really just one spice obtained from a certain unripe berry. Talk about misleading the gullible public (yes, I know I’m a good example of this but I maintain that there’s nothing wrong with innocence). So my feelings regarding Michael Bublé’s Everything song are cautious, to say the least. Does he really mean it and is it possible that he’s managed to include everything in his offering? My newfound skepticism laughs at the very idea. Word count: 331 |
| Net Thoughts QOTD on this date asks about our responsibility for things said on the internet. That sparked lots of old theories in me, mainly having nothing to do with responsibility (I’m not sure I understand what the question is trying to get at) and, rather than bore everyone by departing so immediately from the topic, I decided to write down my thoughts in a blog post. And this is it, I guess. The central point of my thinking is that the internet is like reality but more so (rather like American weather compared to British). Because we do not have to take responsibility for what we say on the net, we have the opportunity to be both more honest than in real life and to lie if we feel like it. The net result is that we create a net world that is more true than our experience of reality. What we put out there, whether boldly honest or a figment of our imagination, is reflective of who we are. Liars may lie to their heart’s content and become known as liars in the doing of it. They are, indeed, being more true to their real selves than they are in the actual world. And the same for the honest - their masks are gone. This is why I don’t like seeing photos of the people I meet on the net. My experience of them has already created a picture in my mind of what they look like and it is invariably a disappointment to find that my imagination is always optimistic. So, if you introduce reality into my created digital world, I have to adjust my view of it - and that is inevitably downward. We all, and it’s true of myself too, spoil the appearance of my online world. I am weak enough to prefer the false beauty of the internet over the flaws and unhappinesses of reality. Of course, this whole idea is dependent on my own experience of the net. Others may see it very differently. But I can only deal with the thing as it appears to me. And that won’t change unless you tell me what your opinion is on the matter. Word count: 364 |
| Short Stories Squeezed out a short story of sorts today. I say that because it’s debatably a story and might really be called a joke. But any port in a storm, they say, and my storm of inability to write short stories has lasted long enough for me to use this port. My latest theory regarding the drought is that I’ve forgotten how to write the darn things. Looking back, I seem to have had no problem in previous years. But now I haven’t a clue of where to start. Maybe it’s old age catching up with me and I’ve used up my entire stock of tales to tell. I guess time will tell. Word count: 112 |
| Kubelwagen! This AI business is really getting on my nerves. I spend a lot of my time listening to YouTube videos on all sorts of interesting things and have noticed a general trend in the delivery of these ever since AI became the flavour of the moment. The allegedly human narrator seems suddenly incapable of pronouncing certain words in a sensible way. Being who I am, I find it impossible to continue without verbally interrupting the narrator with the correct pronunciation. I know he can’t hear me and that he will make the same mistake throughout the video, but I can’t help it - each offence must be met with my insistence that he’s getting it wrong. Just as an example, I watched a video about the Kubelwagen this morning. Everything was proceeding elegantly enough until the narrator decided that the way to pronounce the most relevant word was “kubel-varjen.” Now consider the idiocy of this. The blasted machine that had been chosen to read the script had obviously been told the basic information that the Germans pronounce the W as a V. Full marks for that then. But any applause for this is immediately dampened by that J instead of a hard G. Was it too much to tell the thing that the Germans would never commit such a crime? It’s pronounced “koobel-vargen” and I resent having the ignorance of AI rubbed in my face throughout the video by this stupidity. It’s worse than the video about ships that insisted on pronouncing the pointy end of a ship as the “bo,” as though the vessel were intended to be someone’s birthday present. And I’ll resist mentioning the abominations that pronounce the PS in corps. If the people who make these videos can’t be bothered to listen to them just once to weed out such annoying errors, I fail to see why I should continue to give them an ear. The trouble is, the videos don’t come with a surgeon general’s warning or anything like that. And that’s my rant for the day. For anyone that wonders, the Kubelwagen was the German equivalent of the jeep in World War II. Word count: 359 |
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