Journal Entries
NaJoPoMo Day 18: Mouse Mat
Posted Nov 18, 2012
Time enough, I think, for a quick journal entry. I am in the tupical position of having no idea what to right, but the atypical position of havingover 6 hours in which to write it. Although I would rather not take six hours to write it, that's a bit slow for my liking. The question, as always, is what to tell you about?
Yesterday afternoon we took possession of a new mouse. My wife was contacted by a lady who bought the mouse for her son. Her son, surprise suprise, isn't look after the mouse. My wife was reommended to the lady by our vet as someone who took in small animals, and the mouse was brought to our door in a small toilet roll tubed sealed at both ends with seletape. All of which tells me more than I care to know about her and her son, so let's dwell on the mouse.
She is a uear old, and is black and tan like mnany of our current incumbents. She has, apparently, not been named thus far. We tend to experiment with animals, testing them with names until we find one they respond to. This little lady likes the name Inca, so Inca she is. Once she has been in quarantine for a few days we hope to introduce her into our girl mouse colony. I know you might be telling me this is madness, but trust me, my wife knows what she's doing with small animals. We have had rats living with gerbils and dwarf hamsters living with mice, all quite happily. She will conduct the whole procedure with great care and whatever happens it will be fine.
In the mean time she is sitting in a small tank on our dining table. It must be said that she is very hand tame and has been handled quite happily by both of us. She does seem to prefer my wife, but they often have preferences. She has been licked by our hare and given cucumber. She must be very nervous, poor thing, in unfamilliar surroundings with unfamilliar people and unfamilliar smells, but she seems reasonably content and I'm sure she will settle in fine.
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Latest reply: Nov 18, 2012
NaJoPoMp Day 17: End of the road
Posted Nov 17, 2012
Today is by way of being the completion of year long circle for my wife and I. Perhaps slightly less than a year, but it must have been some time in early January that we became definitely worried about a friend of ours called Arthur. He is an old chap (he changes he mind routinely as to how old) diabetic, overweight, and well nigh blind. He had been falling frequently and at least friends of ours had helped him into an ambulance from a prostrate position on the pavement. It was to these friends that we had already turned. We had met Arthur when we live in tHe same building as him, but now moved to a different part of the town. Our friends still lived in the adjacent building and since our phone calls had gone unanswered for longer than we were happy with we asked them to knock on his door and see if he was okay. They got no response, and further confirmed that they had not seen him around the area for some time. Due to his age and infirmity (he almost never went out, if he had gone out and not come back, anything could have happened) we were worried enough to call the police.
To cut a long story short, the police eventually tracked him down to the local hospital. He had suffered a severe diabetic attack and been found when the nurse from his doctor's surgery came by to check his insulin levels. He had subsequently been admitted to hospital and then trasnfered to the psyciatric ward where it was concluded that he had developed senile dementia. In the months since then we have spoken to him numerous times on the phone. Many of you will doubtless be familliar with the peculiar experience of talking with someone who has spilled their marbles and failed to pick them all up. It had been all the more confusing as we didn't entirely know what of his accont was true, and what was invention. Today, after having established that he had moved to a care home we could easily get to, we took our rabbit and hare with us and went to visit him. He was deleighted to see Luna and Eclipse, and they were very happy to see him. It was the sort of truncated visit you mught expect with someone who has a diminshed grip on reality. But the news was very good- the flat he had been living was in an increasingly deplorable state of hygiene. Where he is now there is communcal space but he has a very nice room of his own. It is beautifully clean, spacious enough for his needs and comes with en-suit facilities and a television. He has added an expensive but extremely comfortable electric recliner. He has lost a great deal of weight (he needed to) looks a lot healthier and reports that his eyesight has considerably improved. We had wanted to get him into a care home a good while ago. The trip there wasn't what we would have chosen for him, but he is happy and health in a nice home where he is well looked after, which is as much as we could have asked for.
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Latest reply: Nov 17, 2012
In the pipeline
Posted Nov 16, 2012
Even by my own standards, I am writing bloody quickly today. I have... 19 minutes to go and this is the day my wife has decided to start asking me what I am doing. I explained that I was in a bit of a rush because I had a deadline and it seemed fine because she was off to bed anyway. Ususally it's not a big problem because she's crawled into bed long since so I have only myself to blame for idling the time away when I should have been getting my journal done. Today I still have mainly myself to blame but two minutes of it is my wife's fault. Excuse me while I calculate how much to blame that makes me...
23 Hours x 60 = 2080 (I think) plus 39 equals 2119 minutes I failed to use. I was asleep for some of those minutes. I slept late this morning as usual because I go to bed late when I am off work and have no particular reason to get up in the morning. I also crawled back into bed later in the day to sleep of a nasty headache which was making me feel sick and dizzy. Otherwise, there was a certain amount of frittering. I went to the shops in my road twice and put the bins out, that accounts for maybe 10 minutes total. I spent maybe 30 seconds sending a work e-mail and another minute and half reading post. Then we watched television... no wait,I worked on the u-bend. Yes, I unscrewed all the pipes under the sink in the kitchen and reassambled them so that the leak I was searching for became more pronouned than it had been in the first place. Then I took it all apart again, by which time there was a broad improvement. That took bloody ages.
That's why I'm late today.
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Latest reply: Nov 16, 2012
Ebony and Ivory
Posted Nov 16, 2012
Excuse me while I try and type a quite complex argument against the wind. I have 28 minutes til midnight.
This evening I listened to the first two parts of a dramatisation of 'The Colour Purple' on the BBC iplayer. For those of you not familliar, it's a pulitzer prize winning novel by Alice Walker which was made into a film starring Whoopie Goldberg, charting the life of a black girl in the deep south between the wars. I don't know how it's going to end up, but so far it's involved a lot of deep unpleasantness.
I think you'll agree from that sentence that it sort of matters that the main character is female and black. I don't want to spoil it for anyone, but she is pretty downtrodden (so far at least) and she wouldn't work as well if she were rewritten as a middle class white guy from New York.
This brings me on to the first of two of my pet hates. Cultural Vandalism. Years agao I heard of a prodution of Hamlet where all the gender roles are reversed. I haven't seen the play, but I can't see how that would work properly because at least half the leading characters' behaviours are grounded in their gender roles. Okay, so it might well have been an interesting new story, but it wasn't Hamlet, it was a new play based on a stolen plot. If Shakespeare hadn't been long dead he probably would have sued.
TV companies have a great nack for this. A few years ago Billie Piper appeared in... I think it was Sense and Sensibility. She was supposed to be playing an unattractive, plain and overlooked. Billie Piper is not plain and unattractive. So they could have cast a less attractive actess (yeah, right) or they could have used skillful make-up to make Billie less attratcive (ditto) but they didn't. Instead, they decided (to quote the executive producer, who was a woman, by the way) to 'emphasise her difference in other ways'. Ways, that is, other than the ways Jane Austen chose. Jane Austen and William Shakespeare are widely thought to be quite good. Presumably if you're spending time and money dramatising their stuff, you must think they're quite good too. In which case why on earth do you see fit to throw bits of the ideas they spent their own time and talent on, and sling your ideas in instead? If you've got than many ideas, try writing something of your own. Okay, so you can't call it Jane Austen or William Shakespeare, but it will be more honest and you'll be doing something original, rather than destroying something derrivative.
Which brings me to 'Elementary' and thence to my second moan. Elementary is an American made remake thingy of Sherlock Holmes. In which John Watson is an Asian Woman. NO! No no no no no. He isn't. He just isn't. He's a white guy from the army. That's why he behaves the way he does. If he was an asian woman who'd been in the army, or even an asian woman who hadn't been in the army (since we're tossing the whole damn book out of the window) he, or rather she, would behave totally differently. Which makes him/her a totally different character which means it's not the same! Lucy Liu, who is playing Dr Joan (seriously- they're that desperate to stick to the original? Does Lucy Liu really look like a 'Joan') says that she's excited to be playing Asian Watson. Cobblers. Unless Lucy is a total idiot then she will realise that what this really means is that while there isn't going to be a mainstream original drama where an Asian woman gets to play the sidekick (god forbid the lead) she can get the hanger-on role in a lazy remake of something somebody else thought of ages ago. Allowing for the fact that she's also pretty hot. That's not really a great leap forward for race/gender equality.
When this was pointed out by Victoria Coren in the Observer, she was accused, directly in many cases, of being racist and sexist. This is what annoys me most. People who don't know what discrimination actually is. It isn't racist to call someone black when they are. It isn't intrisically racist to talk about their colour in relation to their work (especially if they brought it up). It's racist to presume that any member of an ethnic group can be presumed to be like, or at least broadly simillar too, any other member of the same group, because they're all basically the same.
Unless you follow the logic that an Asian Female American person is sufficiently simillar to a White Male English person that the change doesn't constitute so drastic a wharping of the original work that it's not a respectful copy but a half assed uncreative cherry picking of the bits of somebody else's idea that you happen to like. In which case we're all completely the same and prejudice is now impossible.
Which is nice.
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Latest reply: Nov 16, 2012
From little acorns
Posted Nov 14, 2012
Today is the 90th Anniversary of the first radio broadcast by the BBC. On twitter, the bbc radio four extra twitter feed invited it's followers to tweet their memories of bbc radio. Interestingly most of the ones that were retweeted were comedy shows. Several people tweeted about a show called HHGTTG. Seriously, I honestly wasn't sure what they were talking about. When it came up for the third or fourth time (it easily the most mentioned show) did I look over the initials at work out that it was the show I know better as H2G2.
It really is worth dwelling on, when you think about it. How many radio shows are that big? It spawed five books (that's FIVE Eoin Coiffer) a tv series a film and a website. How many shows make the biggest star out of their writer? I'm sure there are some, but none that spring to mind. And then there's us. What would Douglas Adams say if he could see us now? Are we living his vision, or have we morphed into a mutant nightmare alternative? Does it matter? How many more questions can I write in succession before I have to actually say something?
So here we are. A germ of an idea from a germ of an idea from a germ of an idea that's 90 years old today. Who ever thought it would come to this?
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Latest reply: Nov 14, 2012
benjaminpmoore
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