On stopping reading books
I normally don't like stopping reading books- I even made it all the way through Labyrinth by the implausibly named Kate Mosse- but I knew I'd run into trouble on p. 9 Matthew Reilly's promisingly-titled Seven Ancient Wonders where he describes Crocodylus nilocticus, the notorious Nile crocodile
. Apparently it is the most man-eating crocodilian in the world
. Too much excellent grammar for me.*
The book would make a passable film with an enormous special-effects budget to make up for the lack of real plot, unconvincing elite teams of ruthless military archaeologists who seem to know all the secrets of the places that haven't been touched for millennia, reliance on drawings to describe the numerous traps they are all bound to overcome, and the excerpts from encyclopedias that don't seem to, oh whatever: the point is don't bother reading it; don't waste the £1 or so I spent on it in the charity shop.
Sadly we no longer have an open fire on which I can dispose of this, so I will have to do the done thing and recycle it.
*Surely, it should be man-eatingest.
PRID. KAL. MAI. MMVIII
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Queen of cheese
To us it is a glorious theme
To sing of milk and curds and cream
While cataloguing some poetry books I came across a book called Pegasus descending : a book of the best bad verse / edited with notes and an introductory dialogue by James Camp, X.J. Kennedy and Keith Waldrop. In it is a superb poem, written in Canada in the 19th century by James McIntyre, called Queen of cheese. It was written about a prize 4 ton cheese made in Ingersoll, Canada, which later went on a tour of Toronto, New York, and Britain. The third stanza particularly appealed to me:
Cows numerous as a swarm of bees
Or as the leaves upon the trees
It did require to make thee please
And stand unrivaled, queen of cheese.
Now that's poetry! McIntyre became known as the Cheese Poet. Wikipedia quotes one of his other poems about cheese in Canada called Oxford Cheese Ode:
The ancient poets ne'er did dream
That Canada was land of cream,
They ne'er imagined it could flow
In this cold land of ice and snow,
Where everything did solid freeze
They ne'er hoped or looked for cheese.
Interestingly, the last stanza of the Oxford Cheese Ode also re-uses the comparison of many cows to a swarm of bees:
Cows numerous as swarm of bees
Are milked in Oxford to make cheese.
If you want to read more, which I am sure you do, Poemhunter has the full text of James McIntyre's poems, including the two above, although beware of pop-ups, even with Firefox with the pop-up blocker on.
A.D. IV KAL. DEC. MMVII
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Milton and Viz
Every now and then, one finds a perfect combination of complementary reading material. Some time ago, I pointed out the happy combination of Saul David's The Indian Mutiny followed by George MacDonald Fraser's Flashman in the Great Game.
Now, I can heartily recommend John Milton's Paradise Lost and Supergod and The Son of Man Wonder in issue 170 (November 2007) of Viz (p. 42-43). Supergod refuses to help a bus full of orphans teetering on the edge of a bridge:
You see, I'm not generally speaking what you'd call an interventionist God. When I created man I gave him free will and those orphans were exercising their free will when they boarded that bus. So you see, if I'd prevented those orphans from dying, I would have been taking that freedom away from them. Or something like that. It's all quite complicated.
fr. 7-8
Similarly, Milton's God, after letting Satan escape from Hell by putting Satan's own daughter (Sin) and son (Death) on guard at the gates (who, naturally, let him go), keeping an insufficient watch on Paradise where his angels do not spot Satan's entrance, and giving Adam and Eve one day's warning of Satan's presence in the Garden of Eden, makes clear where the blame will lie in the foretold fall of Man:
so will fall
He and his faithless progeny: whose fault?
Whose but his own? Ingrate, he had of me
All he could have; I have made him just and right,
Sufficient to have stood, though free to fall.
III, 95-99
After failing to save an old woman who is the victim of a mugger on the grounds that the mugger will receive a harsh punishment in the afterlife, Supergod replies to the woman's thanks thus:
Think nothing of it, Ma'am. The only thanks I require is to be praised and worshipped in your every word and deed.
fr. 20
Milton's God emphasises the need for free will in worship:
What pleasure I from such obedience paid,
When will and reason (reason is also choice)
Useless and vain, of freedom both despoiled,
Made passive both, had served necessity,
Not me.
II, 106-111
They are both ace, especially the escape from Hell by Satan in Paradise Lost where I also stumbled on the quote about His dark materials
, which made more sense in context. The Supergod strip is, however, considerably shorter. You also get read the exploits of Flush Gordon on other pages.
ID. NOV. MMVII
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Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction
The shortlist for the Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction has been announced. They are:
Your broadband will be reconnected within 15 working days.
and
You'll get an email address that you can access from anywhere online.
My money is on the first one: the second one is technically true, except that an increasing number of email addresses bounce off it, notably gmail addresses, but also including on occasion .ac.uk and ntlhome addresses. I have had two explanations for this. The first one was:
known server issues at this moment in time with regards to sending emails from or to yahoo,hotmail and gmail addresses.
The second one is more disturbing:
The most likely cause of the problem you are experiencing is most likely caused by the mail filter which appears to be recognising the email messages as spam. This is especially prevalent in issues of this kind when the same message is sent to a number of recipients simultaneously, and also when any of a number of phrases are used in the subject line of a message, or if a non-trusted file format is used for an attachment.
Unfortunately there is very little we can do to prevent messages being blocked by the spam filters in future as they are trained over time and use by the messages that pass through them, and to retrain the filter to accept message types that were previously blocked would, in effect, be to nullify the positive spam-blocking effects of that filter.
What I understand from the second paragraph is that I'll just have to live with a non-functional email address which will always bounce emails from several friends, relatives, and other people who might be contacting me so that I don't get spam. Maybe if I didn't use email, I wouldn't get any spam. This is made worse by the fact that the Orange filters are not that reliable in my experience, mistaking routine commercial mailshots for genuine spam and missing a great deal of genuine spam. The Gmail spam filter, on the other hand, I have found to be excellent.
This a shame as we have been with freeserve/wanadoo/orange since we got the internet years ago and, despite their bad press, I have never had a word to say against them. True, they took one non-working day longer than promised to re-install broadband when we moved house and were confused about when exactly we should notify them of our moving, but we have very rarely had a connection problem or anything like that. If, however, we are paying for an email address we can't use, our loyalty may begin to wane.
A.D. X KAL. IUN. MMVII
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Men's books
I recently went on an innocent trip to a Sandy charity shop the other week with my three year old son. After I had idly scanned the bookshelves for a short while, the mildly scary lady serving behind the counter asked if I was looking for men's books
.
"Er...not really", I replied, "I'm not really sure what you mean by men's books anyway. Ha ha..."
"I've got a load out the back I can show you" she said. I think it was at this point I got worried. Only the presence of the aformentioned toddler reassured me that she might not be wishing to expose me to her special stash of second-hand charity shop mank.
Obediently, my son and I ventured into the back to be confronted with the predictable box of Michael Crichton and Tom Clancy clones*. "Men's books I call them". Some relief, I can tell you.
I always thought the back of the charity shop would be filled with untold delights that are kept back from the common herd. Unfortunately, I now know that I merely have to wait for the box of men's books
to clear before anything good appears. Sue Ryder is much better anyway.
* Not that I mind such things, being a keen Frederick Forsyth fan myself when he's not being pants. I've also just read She by H. Ryder Haggard (bought from a charity shop) which is hardly pitched at the female market**.
** And is not, in my opinion, as good as Allan Quartermain, which is also better than King Solomon's Mines***.
*** Which, I would agree with Mr Haggard himself, is much better than Treasure Island.
A.D. VI KAL. OCT. MMVI
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Tom