Thursday 11 July 2013

How to get rid of whitespace (non-political)

Something fantastic has happened and I need to bring it to your attention.

I get so annoyed trying to read pdfs that have lots of space around the text. 

Maybe you feel the same.

Zooming in and out every page is such a faff. 

Well, it turns out you can crop pdfs really easily using the mac pdf viewer! 

Just select the appropriate rectangle (tools>>rectangular selection),

then enable thumbnail view (view>>thumbnails),

select all (cmnd-a) and finally

press cmnd-k.



I'm so happy right now.


Friday 21 June 2013

Sport sadness


So apparently while I was away from the internet Ricky Ponting announced that he is retiring. I thought he was great.

As a fielder and captain his plump cheeks and underdog expression were adorable, especially as he was often feeling hard done by, having grown up in an era when Australia had better bowlers than everyone else by far but been captain at a time when they didn't.

As a batsman he wasn't exactly elegant but he had this way of getting on with everything correctishly, unfussily and emotionlessly. Together these features turned him into a kind of psychological mirror. Whenever he was batting all the attention and pressure somehow seemed to divert away from him and towards the bowler. The fact that he had clear weaknesses (by general consensus his technique only became viable when his incredible hand-eye coordination kicked in after about half an hour of batting, and even then often got him into trouble against properly excellent bowling) emphasised the effect. If the other team wasn't getting him out, it always seemed to be because they weren't quite special enough when it mattered.

To illustrate here is a clip of Shoaib Acktar battling with his Ponting-reflection:


Monday 20 May 2013

Perhaps the quality of tv jingles is declining

You might be bothered by that possibility shortly before you start learning how to teach a maths class in 1966:



I'm nearly finished reading a book - `Patterns of Plausible Inference' - by the teacher, George Polya. It makes several tricky topics easy to understand, contains lots of fascinating and quirky examples and is beautifully written. There are also interesting lines of influence and comparison with the philosophers Jaynes and Carnap.

Biographical details: Polya was a pacifist, enjoyed playing football and didn't like maths at school.

Thursday 14 June 2012

Schoolboy issues on my mind


(i) My childhood newspaper hero Johann Hari (it went Robert Fisk, Johann Hari, Howard Jacobsen and then I started reading the internet instead) always used to go on about how it was really awful to claim (and many political horserace type journalists and people with radical politics did and still do) that there is no significant difference between the mainstream political parties when one party's focus is eliminating child poverty while the other's is cutting rich peoples' taxes.

Today I read that this was borne out in results: Labour reduced child poverty by nearly two-million compared to how high it would have been if they hadn't spent loads of money on it, while the Conservative party is dropping Labour's child poverty target on the grounds that, er, current measures of poverty aren't tracking wellbeing or something and anyway shouldn't we be forcing poor people to work for no pay rather than giving them stuff? Meanwhile child poverty is rising rapidly due to their policies and income tax for rich people has just gone down. Also according this literature review into housing benefit by the government department for work and pensions there is "no consistent evidence of cultures of worklessness in deprived areas." Basically this shows that Johann Hari was right: it is really bad to ignore the difference between different kinds of mainstream politics.


(ii) In Our Time was about Ulysses today and it was ok and made me maybe want to read it again. One of the panellists said it was like the Odyssey in being a 'great novel of peace'. I think that is fair in the 'not war' sense of 'peace' but it would probably be better to say or 'hospitality' or 'domesticity' or 'peacetime' or 'not-exceptional-in-the-grand-sweep-of-history times' or something like that as both books have loads of non-war conflict. I have these things to add: (a) it is the best thing ever for self-importance and not coincidentally (b) I agree with James Joyce about politics almost 100%.

(iii) Loads of stuff going on in football at the moment. If things go right I might even get passionate about Spurs again in a year or so.

Sunday 20 May 2012

politics


Here is roughly my position on what I consider the most important issue, as articulated by Karl Popper in The Open Society and its Enemies:
The existence of social evils, that is to say, of social conditions under which many men are suffering, can be comparatively well established. Those who suffer can judge for themselves, and the others can hardly deny that they would not like to change places. It is infinitely more difficult to reason about an ideal society. Social life is so complicated that few men, or none at all, could judge a blueprint for social engineering on the grand scale; whether it be practicable; whether it would result in a real improvement; what kind of suffering it may involve; and what may be the means for its realization. As opposed to this, blueprints for piecemeal engineering are comparatively simple. They are blueprints for single institutions, for health and unemployed insurance, for instance, or arbitration courts, or anti-depression budgeting, or educational reform. If they go wrong, the damage is not very great, and a re-adjustment not very difficult.
 Let's have an argument!

Sunday 13 May 2012

baby animals in danger


If you are wondering what to watch at the moment, and are fond of reality tv and fluffy baby animals, then please consider Planet Earth Live.

It's a really good concept for a wildlife programme: basically following a bunch of imperilled mammal families with adorable but vulnerable offspring around the world for a month and seeing which ones die. The reality twist is that everything is live: if baby macaque Gremlin gets eaten, we'll know about it before she has finished being digested!

They make it even better by anthropomorphising in a heartstring-tugging way that I don't think I've seen before, making the young animals' survival seem to depend on their parents' personalities or which side of the tracks they were born on. While the privileged lion cubs play with each other, we follow hungry Moja and his exiled mum, who have to roam the savanna on their own, scrapping with hyenas for whatever they can get and steer the pride. Meanwhile we hope that Canadian black bear Juliet isn't too inexperienced a mother to keep her cubs safe from the wolves and snow, and fret about bereaved giant otters Sofia and Diablo letting their desire for revenge cloud their judgement. In the ocean, a grey whale and her daughter are trying to reach Alaska through patrols of killer whales, a situation which the presenter plots on a map just like the Battle of Britain. This quote from episode two is typical:
"I guess if you're living on a lake that's jam packed with caimen who want to eat you, you have to grow up pretty fast"
There is plenty that is annoying - Julia Bradbury has the habit of calling children "little ones" (I think this is a contender for the most annoying habit), and Richard Hammond is obviously incredibly irritating - but overall I think it's really well done. It's a new dynamic to me to follow individual animals' everyday lives rather than just seeing a whistlestop tour of the most exciting things a particular species does, a bit like watching the whole match rather than just the highlights.

Also, for Joni Mitchell fans, in episode two you get to look a coyote right in the face in a place that could conceivably be near the road to Baljennie.

Friday 27 April 2012

mermaids




First here is a question: why is it that mermaids are scaly like fish but have vertical facing tails like dolphins?

Possible explanations:
  1. At the distance where early modern sailors are likely to mistake dolphins or manatees or seals or whatever for mermaids, scaliness can't be discerned but swimming technique can.
  2. The sailors didn't know about the animals in question not being scaly. 
  3. The people who actually witnessed mermaids didn't attribute scales to them, but that detail got lost somewhere between them and Hans Christian Anderson.
  4. Mermaids exist.
Second, here is a really nice poem called 'The Field of Mirrors' by Andrew Motion. It is about Orford Ness (the beautiful and desolate place in the photo) and a merperson. The buildings look like pagodas because apparently that is a good shape for surviving/dissipating massive explosions.


THE VILLAGE of Orford, five miles south of Aldeburgh on the Suffolk coast, survived for centuries as a fishing port; now it is separated from the sea by the river Alde, and by a strip of land known as the Ness. The Ness is ten miles long, stretching from Slaughden to North Wear Point. It is overlooked by a 12th-century castle, and is also known as the Spit and the Island.

All this is true;
what else can I tell you?

During the First World War, the Armament Experiment Flight of the Central Flying School was stationed on the Ness, which became a site for parachute testing and, later, a firing and bombing range. In the late 1930s, Orford Research Programme was founded, and the Ness became a Listening Post and a centre for experimental work on Radar. In 1946 it was taken over by the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment, which closed down in 1971. The Ness was then cleared by the Explosive Ordnance Disposal Unit. It was sold to the National Trust in 1993.

This is also true;
what else can I tell you?

In the reign of King Henry II, when the village still faced the sea, a local historian recorded the capture of the Orford Merman. This Merman was kept in the castle, where whether he would or could not, he would not talk, although oft-times hung up by his feet and harshly tortured. Eventually he was released into the harbour.

This is also true;
why should I lie to you?

In the late eleven-fifties
when the river and the sea
were still in one another's arms
and lived in harmony
there came a summer day so hot
the sea seemed hardly wet,
and the fishermen remained at home
until the sun had set,
had set and rustled up a breeze
and high tide at the full,
so just like that their sails were out
beyond the harbour wall.
A mile offshore, before the shape
of home had slipped away,
they hushed, and cast their clever nets
like grain into the bay.
One hour passed. Another hour.
The house lights on the land
began to jitter and go out;
the dark to deepen and expand,
and silence in a steady flood
rushed round them silkily
and even filtered through their nets
to calm the rocking sea.
No iron-filing shoal of fish
criss-crossed the rock-strewn floor,
no oyster winked, no battling crab
stuck out an angry claw,
the clear-cut worlds which make the world
lost all their difference,
the sea was sky, deep down was high,
and nonsense seemed like sense.
Enough like sense, at least, to mean
that in the red-eyed dawn,
with courses set and sails poised
to catch the first wind home,
it seemed the sort of miracle
that no one thought was rare
for one of them to haul on board
his streaming net and there
to find a merman large as life -
a merman] - half death pale,
half silver as a new-made coin
and fretted like chain-mail.

* * *

For a million years one life simply turns into the next -
the spider hangs between driftwood and sea holly,
the kestrel balances exactly over a shrew,
the hare sits bolt upright and urgent, all ears:
there is no reason why any of this should change.
But a new thought arrives and the island is invaded -
a radio mast stands up and starts cleaning its whiskers,
a field of mirrors learns to see clear beyond the Alps,
a set of ordinary headphones discovers the gift of tongues:
there is no reason why any of this should change.
Work goes ahead smoothly but no one breathes a word -
a slim needle is sensibly embarrassed by the red,
a pressure gauge puffs out its cheeks but is always steady,
a bird-walk of mathematics knows just where it is going:
there is no reason why any of this should change.

* * *

Not rare? Not like a miracle?
No, not until he spoke,
when feebly as a rotten thread
the spell that held them broke
and every clear-cut bit of world
snapped back into its place:
the sea was sea, the sky was sky
the merman's face his face,
which slid between its salty lips
an eel-dance of a tongue,
a tongue which could not fix or shape
the words it splashed among.
This made the fishermen afraid;
it told them they had caught
a devil deaf to every law
their own religion taught,
or else, perhaps, a different god
they could not understand
but had to honour and obey
when they returned to land.

* * *

To create an explosion is the point of all this,
an explosion neither too soon nor too late,
an explosion precisely where it needs to be
over the head of an enemy. Not yet.
Scientists arrive to test triggers for the explosion,
triggers which must boil like hell and also be frozen,
triggers which must shake themselves silly and still work,
still know how to create a vacuum. Not yet.
Weird laboratories spring up for these triggers,
Chinese pagoda-roofs which will protect the triggers
and which in the case of an accident with the triggers
will collapse and bury everything. Not yet.
But it turns out that the vacuum cannot wait to be born,
the vacuum feeds itself on the very idea of discovery,
wants to swallow the whole village and show
the explosion might as well already be over. Not yet.

* * *

They made their choice; they froze their hearts;
they bound the merman's wrists
and wound him tightly in their net
with clumsy turns and twists;
then turned towards the shore again,
and just as sunlight came
above the crescent harbour wall
they brought their trophy home.
Wives and children crowded round,
mouths gaping with surprise,
and gaping back the merman cried
baleful, senseless cries,
cried tears as well as sighs and sobs,
cried gulps, cried gasps, cried blood,
cried out what sounded like his soul
but never cried a word.
This made the fishermen afraid
again, it made them guess
the merman might have come to them
to put them through a test
and they, by cruelly catching him,
marooning him in pain,
and putting him on show like this
had blundered into sin.

* * *

Then the triggers are ready, they neither boil
nor freeze, they spin at any speed you please,
and are carried off like gifts in velvet boxes.
Then the bomb disposal men pick to and fro
with their heads down, each one carefully alone
and quiet, like pioneers prospecting for gold.
Then the radio masts die, their keen whispers
and high songs go, their delicate necks bow,
and voices fill up the air without being heard.
Then the field of mirrors folds too, its flat glare
shatters and shuts up, cannot recall the highest Alp
or anything except types of cloud, come to that.
Then the waves work up a big rage against roof tiles
and breeze blocks, against doors, ventilation shafts, clocks,
and moon-faced instrument panels no one needs any more.
Then the wind gets to work. It breaks into laboratories
and clapboard sheds, it rubs out everything everyone said,
clenching its fingers round door jambs and window frames.
Then the gulls come to visit, shuffling noisily
into any old scrapmetal mess, settling on this for a nest,
and pinning their bright eyes on bare sky overhead.
And in due season flocks of beautiful shy avocets -
they also come back, white wings scissored with black,
calling their wild call as though they felt human grief.

* * *

They wound a rope around his net
and dragged him through the square,
up the looming castle keep
then down the castle stair
and down and down and down and down
through wet-root-smelling air
into a room more cave than room
and hung him there.
Not hung him up until he died,
but hung him by his tail,
which shone like silver once
and crinkled like chain-mail,
then built a fire beneath his head
to see if he could learn
the language that he still refused,
plain words like scare, like burn,
and other words like agony,
like hatred, and like death,
though hour by hour not one of these
weighed down the merman's breath.
This made the fishermen afraid
once more; it made them see
that somehow they the torturers
had set their victim free.

* * *

The waves think their hardest task
is to work each stone into a perfect O;
the marram thinks all it must do
is hold tight and not trouble to grow.
There is no story, never a point of view,
there's nothing here that's trustworthy or true.
Each grain of salt thinks it is able to see
over the highest Alp with its pure white eye;
the sea holly thinks it alone
can support the whole weight of the sky.
There's no clue, never a word in your ear;
there is nothing here that is justified or clear.
Winter storms think they will bring
the worst news anyone can bear to be told;
the east wind thinks it can certainly blow
colder than the coldest possible cold.
There is no code, never an easy cure;
there is nothing here that is definite or sure.

* * *

They cut him down. They hauled him up
the whirlpool of the stair,
they dragged him past their wives and children
gawping in the square,
and silently, as though the words
they used to know before
were all dead now, they carried him
down to the shingle shore.
They slid him tail-first in the sea
and washed the bitter drops
of blood-crust from his finger ends
and salt-spit from his lips,
and all the while, still silently,
they watched the tide bring in
a brittle, dimpled, breaking flood
of silver through his skin,
then open up his glistening eyes
in which they saw their fear
rise up to greet them one last time
and fade, and disappear,
disappear while they stood back
like mourners round a grave,
and watched his life ebb out of theirs
wave by wave by wave.

Monday 16 April 2012

Unhealthy Obsession

Someone told me this blog is ok but there aren't enough Joni Mitchell videos:




Thursday 12 April 2012

I've said it before and I'll say it again


Phil Nugent knows how to write about films.

Here is his favourite Easter film, Bring me the Head of Alfredo Garcia:


Also, here is the Monty Python sketch that the article references:


Thursday 1 March 2012

Best Guitar Solo Ever


If you disagree then consider this a challenge: link to a better one in the comments!

Monday 6 February 2012

Sentence of the Year

"If one spends too much time knocking down and polemicizing against weak arguments, sooner or later all opposing arguments start looking weak."



Here is the full version of Tyler Cowen's biting rebuttal to Paul Krugman's needless nastiness.

For background here is another post where Cowen explains why he is generally disappointed with Krugman, who he thinks is spurning his chance to be a truly great public intellectual by not being charitable to opposing positions. Krugman responds here, arguing that being polemical increases his power in the grand intellectual battle he sees himself as fighting. Here is what someone articulate from the Marginal Revolution comments makes of the situation:
Yes, he definitely targets weak arguments, but that’s because he’s conducting a war, not a debate. Krugman believes (or at least he’s said so on many occasions) that his opponents — Republicans and “right-wing” (his term) economists — are either themselves malicious or dupes of malicious people, who (consciously or not) are pursuing goals that will result in massive negative results, on the order of trillions of dollars of loss, hardship and death. He believes he needs to win this battle on the stage of national opinion (and for better or worse, he is on it), or these terrible things will happen. 
Picayune details like whether or not specific little arguments are right or wrong are irrelevant, and that’s why he reacts so rudely to you — as an average person might to the argument that “at least the trains ran on time.” He thinks that if he grants any ground to you or any other “right-wing” footsoldiers, he may lose the war, and then the truly evil (again, his words) will use that as ammunition to enact policies that will harm billions of people. I imagine that’s why he rarely repeats all the free trade stuff that he wrote in the 90′s — that position has been overrun by the enemy. He no doubt continues to believe those words then to be true, but talking about them today doesn’t serve the greater purpose. 
I don’t want to armchair psychologize or demonize Krugman, because I feel everyone tends to think like that: when you’re opposing something that is truly wrong, no one goes out of their way to analyze their arguments, or take care to ensure they’re addressing only the strongest points of the apologists. I feel like he’s taken a form of Pascal’s wager: when the risk is so great, can he afford to let any doubts fester? 
It is cool to see such a widely-read economics debate take a turn towards philosophy. The question of whether people do better by picturing their intellectual interactions as group play or as wars is quite a deep one I think, but not so deep that it isn't totally obvious who is right in this case!

Friday 3 February 2012

Songtime

Mavis Staples: True Religion

The Lovelites: Get It Off My Conscience
"Watch out! Watch out!"

I found the second song by watching this incredible documentary about the Wigan Casino, where in the 1970s/80s young northern people congregated to dance through the night to obscure soul music. It has interviews with a reveller, a record-seller, the proprietor and an old couple who tell you about the price of cigarettes in the 1910s. Watch it!

Wednesday 1 February 2012

The BBC does not take complaints seriously, part 851




I read an article mischaracterising GPs' views about the government's healthcare bill and wrote the following complaint to the BBC:


The BBC news website today ran a prominent story featuring claims by some lobbyists that many GPs support the government's NHS bill. 
The results of a recent survey according to which 90% GPs would support the RCGP in calling for the NHS bill to be withdrawn can be found here http://www.rcgp.org.uk/news/press_releases_and_statements/health_bill_survey_results.aspx
This shows unambiguously that the quoted lobbyists' views are highly unrepresentative of those of GPs as a whole.

Since it does not mention this important information, the BBC story gives the impression that GPs support the NHS bill, when in fact the opposite is true.

Please change the story so as to mention the survey results.



Today this response came back (quoted in full except some irrelevant links):



Many thanks for your message, and interest in the site. The story does reference the fact that the Royal College of GPs is opposed to the government reforms. 
Our extensive coverage of the reforms over many months has given a lot of prominence to the opposition of many of the leading professional groups (see examples below). 
In this instance we felt it was newsworthy that a group of doctors had come out in favour of the reforms, partly because this is not an organised voice from which we have heard much. 
We strive for balance in our news coverage at all times, and while it may be true to say that the majority of doctors have deep concerns about the reforms, this is not a universal view.



What I wrote back:



Thank you for your prompt reply, which I find deeply unsatisfactory.

(i) As far as I or cntrl-f can see, neither the phrase "Royal College of GPs" nor any other information about GPs' overall opinions appears in the article in question. Your claim that "The story does reference the fact that the Royal College of GPs is opposed to the government reforms" is therefore incorrect. I am astonished that you have made such an incompetent error.

(ii) Whether or not your coverage has "given a lot of prominence to the opposition of the leading professional groups" is irrelevant to my complaint, which was that your article gives a misleading impression of GPs' opinions.

(iii) Your account makes your standards of newsworthiness seem bizarre and arbitrary. Needless to say there are many other unrepresentative groups whose organised voices rarely feature on the front page of your website.

(iv) I do not understand what you mean by 'balance' in this context. I struggle to think of an interpretation of the word that would override the duty, which your article strikingly neglects, to give the public an accurate impression of the distribution of GPs' views about healthcare reform.

I repeat, please update your article to make it less misleading, using the information I have provided.



Not even exaggerating about the astonishment: is there not some kind of procedure to ensure that complaint responses are not false?

Friday 6 January 2012

how to protest awesomely

A masterclass by a marching band in Wisconsin.


At 1:05 they stop in front of the union-busting governor, whip out some incredible choreography and play this song:


Meanwhile the commentators discuss how many degrees the next turn in the road has: 105, apparently.

Found on NewAPPS, an excellent philosophy blog that also has good music on it.



Thursday 5 January 2012

Racism part 1


Dianne Abbott said "white people love playing divide and rule". The question is, does that show that she is a racist?

I think one reason why arguments about this question are on the whole fruitless is that different people mean different things when they talk about "racism" and "racists", so in this post and some more coming soon I am going to try to make sense of the situation. First here are what I consider the two main definitions:

Racism1: A state of affairs where members of some races are systematically disadvantaged compared to members of other races 
Racism2: The claim that there are true race-based generalisations  
 
Racist1: Someone who promotes Racism1 
Racist2: Someone who believes in Racism2 

These definitions fit the Dianne Abbott situation pretty well. There is ample evidence, all things considered, that Dianne Abbott is not a Racist1: for one thing, she has spent most of her professional life trying to reduce the systematic disadvantage that black people face in Britain. On the other hand, her tweet suggests strongly that she is a Racist2.

This isn't yet satisfactory: there are several questions that still need to be answered. Specifically:
(i) Is it bad to be a Racist2?
(ii) If the answer is "sometimes" (clue: I think it is), then when? 
(iii) Is there a connection between the two kinds of racism? If so, what is it? 
I want to think about these a bit and then write some more. In the meantime, is this a good rational reconstruction so far? Are there forms of racism that these definitions don't capture or do they label things as racism incorrectly? Also any good articles on this subject would be appreciated.
 
 

Wednesday 4 January 2012

Publicising Medical Information Humourously

First here is Vinnie Jones keeping us up to date about what is the best song to think about while administering CPR.





Second, here is a poem from the Oxford Book of Twentieth Century English Verse (which is really good and was compiled by Philip Larkin. And yes I'm blogging about what I read on the toilet again). Key quatrain: "So do not wait for aches and pains/ To have a surgeon mend your drains/ If he says “cancer” you’re a dunce/ Unless you have it out at once". The writer, J.B.S. Haldane, was a fairly awesome biologist/statistician/Marxist and you should definitely check out his wikipedia page.


Cancer’s a Funny Thing

I wish I had the voice of Homer
To sing of rectal carcinoma,
Which kills a lot more chaps, in fact,
Than were bumped off when Troy was sacked.
 

Yet, thanks to modern surgeon’s skills,
It can be killed before it kills
Upon a scientific basis
In nineteen out of twenty cases.
I noticed I was passing blood
(Only a few drops, not a flood).
So pausing on my homeward way
From Tallahassee to Bombay
I asked a doctor, now my friend,
To peer into my hinder end,
To prove or to disprove the rumour
That I had a malignant tumour.
They pumped in BaS04.
Till I could really stand no more,
And, when sufficient had been pressed in,
They photographed my large intestine,
In order to decide the issue
They next scraped out some bits of tissue.
(Before they did so, some good pal
Had knocked me out with pentothal,
Whose action is extremely quick,
And does not leave me feeling sick.)
The microscope returned the answer
That I had certainly got cancer,
So I was wheeled into the theatre
Where holes were made to make me better.
One set is in my perineurn
Where I can feel, but can’t yet see ‘em.
Another made me like a kipper
Or female prey of Jack the Ripper,
Through this incision, I don’t doubt,
The neoplasm was taken out,
Along with colon, and lymph nodes
Where cancer cells might find abodes.
A third much smaller hole is meant
To function as a ventral vent:
So now I am like two-faced Janus
The only* god who sees his anus.
I’ll swear, without the risk of perjury,
It was a snappy bit of surgery.
My rectum is a serious loss to me,
But I’ve a very neat colostomy,
And hope, as soon as I am able,
To make it keep a fixed time-table.
 

So do not wait for aches and pains
To have a surgeon mend your drains;
If he says “cancer” you’re a dunce
Unless you have it out at once,
For if you wait it’s sure to swell,
And may have progeny as well.
My final word, before I’m done,
Is “Cancer can be rather fun”.
Thanks to the nurses and Nye Bevan
The NHS is quite like heaven
Provided one confronts the tumour
With a sufficient sense of humour.
I know that cancer often kills,
But so do cars and sleeping pills;
And it can hurt one till one sweats,
So can bad teeth and unpaid debts.
A spot of laughter, I am sure,
Often accelerates one’s cure;
So let us patients do our bit
To help the surgeons make us fit


*In India there are several more
With extra faces, up to four,
But both in Brahma and in Shiva
I own myself an unbeliever.

Wednesday 28 December 2011

new cat power video

Featuring renowned boxer Manny Pacquiao hitting a ball rhythmically and with focus. It's fairly mesmerising. Thank you, twentyfourbit.com!



The song is called 'king rides by': here is the original version from 1996. Sad words!

Wednesday 21 December 2011

Good Golly!



Why Little Richard became a born-again christian:
In early October 1957, on the fifth date of a two-week tour of Australia, Penniman was flying from Melbourne to appear in front of 40,000 fans in concert in Sydney. Shocked by the red hot appearance of the engines against the night sky, he envisioned angels holding up the plane. Then, while he performed at the stadium, he was shaken by the sight of a ball of fire that he watched streak across the sky overhead. He took what was actually the launching of Sputnik 1, the first human-made object to orbit the earth, as another sign to quit show business and follow God. The following day he departed Sydney on a ferry and threw his $8,000 ring in the water to show his band members that he was serious about quitting. The plane that he was originally scheduled to fly back home on ended up crashing in the Pacific Ocean, which he took as confirmation that he was doing what God wanted him to do.[58]
Fairly understandable!

Tuesday 20 December 2011

The Werewolf


By Angela Carter, which I read while having a poo the other day and quite liked:

It is a northern country; they have cold weather, they have cold hearts. 
Cold; tempest; wild beasts in the forest. It is a hard life. Their houses are built of logs, dark and smoky within. There will be a crude icon of the virgin behind a guttering candle, the leg of a pig hung up to cure, a string of drying mushrooms. A bed, a stool, a table. Harsh, brief, poor lives. 
To these upland woodsmen, the Devil is as real as you or I. More so; they have not seen us nor even know that we exist, but the Devil they glimpse often in the graveyards, those bleak and touching townships of the dead where the graves are marked with portraits of the deceased in the naif style and there are no flowers to put in front of them, no flowers grow there, so they put out small, votive offerings, little loaves, sometimes a cake that the bears come lumbering from the margins of the forest to snatch away. At midnight, especially on Walpurgisnacht, the Devil holds picnics in the graveyards and invites the witches; then they dig up fresh corpses, and eat them. Anyone will tell you that. 
Wreaths of garlic on the doors keep out the vampires. A blue-eyed child born feet first on the night of St John's Eve will have second sight. When they discover a witch--some old woman whose cheeses ripen when her neighbours' do not, another old woman whose black cat, oh, sinister! _follows her about all the time_, they strip the crone, search for her marks, for the supernumerary nipple her familiar sucks. They soon find it. Then they stone her to death. 
Winter and cold weather. 
Go and visit grandmother, who has been sick. Take her the oatcakes I've baked for her on the hearthstone and a little pot of butter.The good child does as her mother bids--five miles' trudge through the forest; do not leave the path because of the bears, the wild boar, the starving wolves. Here, take your father's hunting knife; you know how to use it. 
The child had a scabby coat of sheepskin to keep out the cold, she knew the forest too well to fear it but she must always be on her guard. When she heard that freezing howl of a wolf, she dropped her gifts, seized her knife and turned on the beast. 
It was a huge one, with red eyes and running, grizzled chops; any but a mountaineer's child would have died of fright at the sight of it. It went for her throat, as wolves do, but she made a great swipe at it with her father's knife and slashed off its right forepaw. 
The wolf let out a gulp, almost a sob, when it saw what had happened to it; wolves are less brave than they seem. It went lolloping off disconsolately between the trees as well as it could on three legs, leaving a trail of blood behind it. The child wiped the blade of her knife clean on her apron, wrapped up the wolf's paw in the cloth in which her mother had packed the oatcakes and went on towards her grandmother's house. Soon it came on to snow so thickly that the path and any footsteps, track or spoor that might have been upon it were obscured. 
She found her grandmother was so sick she had taken to her bed and fallen into a fretful sleep, moaning and shaking so that the child guessed she had a fever. She felt the forehead, it burned. She shook out the cloth from her basket, to use it to make the old woman a cold compress, and the wolf's paw fell to the floor. 
But it was no longer a wolf's paw. It was a hand, chopped off at the wrist, a hand toughened with work and freckled with old age. There was a wedding ring on the third finger and a wart on the index finger. By the wart, she knew it for her grandmother's hand.  
She pulled back the sheet but the old woman woke up, at that, and began to struggle, squawking and shrieking like a thing possessed. But the child was strong, and armed with her father's hunting knife; she managed to hold her grandmother down long enough to see the cause of her fever. There was a bloody stump where her right hand should have been, festering already. 
The child crossed herself and cried out so loud the neighbours heard her and come rushing in. They knew the wart on the hand at once for a witch's nipple; they drove the old woman, in her shift as she was, out into the snow with sticks, beating her old carcass as far as the edge of the forest, and pelted her with stones until she fell down dead. 
Now the child lived in her grandmother's house; she prospered.