Driving Home from the Library

Driving home from the library yesterday afternoon with the urchins finally not fighting each other in the back seat any more because each of them has their (own) noses planted firmly inside their own book, and me with a giant stack of tomes sitting beside me on the passenger seat of the car:

and at one point a stoplight slightly surprises me and I don't SLAM on the brakes necessarily but I do stop more quickly than normal and the giant stack of books slides off the seat to the floor.

The kids are shocked, but with the proper seatbelt restraint units in place, they are completely unharmed.

And I look at the stack of books on floorboards of the car, and I realize that there are very few things in this world that are as pleasurable as a giant stack of literary delights scattered all around you . . .

and kids who are healthy, safe, and - for the moment - happy!

VG

New Zealand vs. Brazil

The other day as I was Googlin' info for Wellington Anniversary Day (which, by the way, I never really did find a fully satisfactory explanation - the closest that I got was that on 01-22-1840, 150 settlers on a ship called The Aurora set foot on what is now Wellington, New Zealand - so I suppose that's the reason for the holiday, but most of the hits just told me that all Wellington government offices and public libraries were closed)

but I digress.

As I was saying, as I searched for this information, I found a picture of Wellington - that of a railcar rolling itself up a beautiful tropical hillside, with the city down in the valley behind it, and I was amazed at how this picture looked like so many that I've seen of Rio de Janero.

Then I saw the caption of the picture that read that Wellington had the highest percentage of the population of any major city who felt comfortable leaving their doors unlocked.

Compare that to Rio . . . which is pretty much a death camp with tropical sun.

And I wonder why it is that two cities can develop so dissimilarly when they can look the same in pictures. Seriously. Why is that?

I s'pose it's more stuff to research when I gits time.

Or rather, when I MAKES time!

VG

Bricks on the Courthouse Plaza

As I was walking toward my hearing today I rounded the sidewalk onto the plaza that separates the Central Branch of the library from the Courthouse. As usual, I was looking down at the ground (reminds me of that old poem: Always look down/on the ground/and you'll get all the cool loose change!), and I noticed the bricks laid side by side and end to end.

Now, these were ordinary bricks, and they made such an interesting pattern backdrop to my newly shined shoes, almost as if my eyes were the camera of some movie showing the shoes walking toward destiny - brick by brick.

Then I thought that these bricks look all the same, at first glance. But if a person were really to take the time and trouble, they would notice that these bricks are not the same - each has a distinct and individual pattern - different tiny "pockmarks" on the face - their edges are not completely straight, and are made up of tiny little divots along the edges, and even their colouring is not completely pure, but rather slightly unique shades.

Then I thought how these bricks are like all of us - all of us humans, all of us bloggers, in that we sit here and write out noise out on these electronic notepads each and every day and if you were just to see all the blogs at once they would all look completely the same - that is, unless you took the time to look at each one individually, then you would begin to see the differences, those little nuances that make each one of us unique, and thus, special.

But you must take the time, you have to get down on the ground and pick out a random brick and just start mapping out all its special characteristics. You have to read that brick, memorize it, you have to run your finger along it, you have to lick it with your tongue . . .

and that's when Courthouse Security came and took me away.

Overheard on NPR: Memoirs

While driving back from a seminar on negotiation today I overheard something fascinating on NPR - fascinating for several different reasons - and please forgive me for not remembering this guy's name, but it doesn't really seem that important after all and if I'm meant to discover the book I'll come across it at some point, but apparently some guy wrote a memoir about addiction during his teenage years and the length of time that he stated that he was in jail proved to be completely bogus.

As in: a lie.

Now, what IS important is that this man's memoir was part of Oprah's Book of the Month Club, which, if you don't know about it, is the Holy Grail for writers. You get mentioned, you got an instant best seller, even if your dogwork had been out of print for years, you suddenly got yourself international stardom.

I thought perhaps that this might be a smirch on the armour of Oprah - like, she got snowed (which is not something that I would revel in, I assure you, I highly respect the work that she has done, but to snow Oprah I feel would be a shock, and definitely newsworthy) However, I thought she put an interesting spin on it by calling into Larry King Live when the writer was being interviewed and defending him, in that she stated that the important thing was that this memoir could help other people steer away from addiction, or get themselves some help, which is more important than determining whether his details were factual or not.

Nice spin - still, that's belaboring the point, and of course it's trying to shift the focus, essentially buying into the somewhat Machiavellian argument that "The truth doesn't matter, so long as it achieves a desired result - whether for good or ill."

And then, that naturally led into a discussion about the difference between memoir and autobiography, which I felt was very interesting, and in fact I had never really made any distinction before today, but basically it breaks down like this:

An autobiography is pretty much a linear narrative from your time of birth until the time you type "The End."

A memoir is a recall of a specific period of time in your life, or centering around a central aspect of your life: i.e. your stint in the army, or - as in this case - your dealing with addiction.

Then, of course, we get into the discussion about how much a memoir is coloured by personal perception, and how much distance an author has from the subject - what "good" memoirs are (the reviewers feel that "good" memoirs are those wherein the author slams themselves as much as they slam others - a point which I agree upon, but only because I've found in my life that people who don't have one bad thing to say about themselves are in general pure psychopaths.)

Got that? Not sure if I did, but I'll move on to my last point, which is:

Not withstanding the argument that nobody can ever be "truly" objective, the reviewers mentioned that perhaps a NEW genre of literature might be on the rise, that in which a memoir is coloured intentionally by certain "fictionalisation" of events, and eventually we might have something that is a hybrid of fiction and memoir.

Then they asked what such a genre might be called.

My first resposne would be, "That would be called bulls%!t!"

But then, a moment later, a less sarcastic name popped into my head:

Simmoir. Or even Sym-moir.

A "simulation memoir." I think that the secondary spelling of "sym" would even work better, but only because it looks cooler. That, and I've got Welsh roots. But that's for another time.

Any other offers on the table?

I'll check back in a year or so to see how the name has taken off. Then we'll see if I'm a good "prognosticator" . . . (if that's the correct word!)

VG

Hangaroo Games

Down at the Zen and Tao Acoustic Café the hit for the week seems to be Hangaroo, which is basically Hangman with a Kangaroo who is mildly insulting when you pick the wrong letter. Apparently the game was made in 2003, with most of the answers current as of 2002.

Regardless of the age, it's a fascinating game, and it's caused the various employees and hangers-out at the Z&T to print out copies of the Periodic Table of Elements and memorise the various names of the ages of Earth's geological history. And any game that encourages people to learn various bits of useless scientific trivia is a damn fine find, in my book.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the day was when Gloria got the category "Car Makes and Models" with a two word answer, first word six spaces and second word 5 spaces. She hit the first letter, "a" which popped up in 2nd word, space 2. Then she thought that first word would probably be "Toyota" so she tried "a," which popped up only in 2nd word, space 1.

That's when she paused, and had to go get table B26 another Viennese Cappy. So she left me to try to finish it.

So I cheated, of sorts, in a way. I consider it "using what's available," which in this case, was the Internet. I did a Google search for Car Makes and Models, which revealed too many hits and too many wayward sites, so I just looked for a list of car makes - which gave me all the car makes. Now, I searched the list for all makes that had six letters, but no "a" or "e" and eventually narrowed it down to Lincoln and Suzuki. So I tried Suzuki first (just a feeling that the makers would use a foreign car just to mess with the American players) and came up with the model "Aerio."

Trying an "i" filled in first word, space 6 and 2nd word, space 4 and we were on our way.

But what amazed me is how the human brain figures out puzzles. It's really simply using a list of that which is known, and then narrowing down (or rather, "winnowing out") all other possibilities, until you are left with a "relatively good guess" which, if correct or not, will give you more information from which to determine if your idea is correct or not.

I know it's a simple thing, really, and not terribly interesting, with the regular course of a regular day, especially since our minds are usually so filled up with things like where we're going to eat tonight or whether we should apply for that position that just opened up on the fifth floor or if we should take out a second mortgage or where we're going to go on this year's vacation or whatnot. And I know that this thought about how the brain solves puzzles isn't splitting the atom or mapping DNA, but to me it's fascinating: tracing the paths that our brain takes to solve all these puzzles.

Gloria was happy with my solving the puzzle, however, enough to slide me a free danish.

They really treat you well, down at the Z&T.

Novaspace's Beds Are Burning EP and "Possible Matches"

Put in my Novaspace Beds Are Burning EP (promo copy - NOT FOR RESALE!) warning label all over it and as my RealOne Player (tm) booted it up, as it always does, it tried to look for the information on the disc

which has always interested me - how the computer can call up what a product is - is there some informational code imbedded in the disc?

but this is further compounded by the fact that RealOne Player called up a dialog box that said

CDINFO - could not find an exact match . . . and then it gave me a list of "possible matches" from which to select, which were:

Joe Cocker - Could You Be Loved
Chocolate Fashion - Chocolate Fashion 1
Def Con Dos - Basta de Nacimientos
Pop Will Eat Itself - I've Always Been a Coward

Well, I just think this is absolutely amazing! Not only because my computer was trying to find a match for the disc that it had in the drive, but also because it could access such disparate information. Mira, what would the computer have to look at? The only think I could think of is that it saw that there were 3 audio tracks, of roughly 3.5 min, 5.5 min and almost 6 mins, plus a 4th video track. Did the computer take THAT knowledge, then somehow compare that against the physical construction as listed on similar musical items on the Internet, to then present me with those four choices? Do those other four discs ALL have 3 music tracks of exactly (or almost exactly) the same time limits, plus a 4th video track?

Amazing.

And what's more amazing, would I LIKE those discs should I track them down and listen to them? I daresay I probably would, knowing how I am usually interested in just about anything I read or hear. I think maybe I should track down those items.

As for what I actually WAS listening to, I feel that I might as well state (for anyone who might be interested in the disc) that I found it quite strange that any band would be able to take a song of great socio-political import of the 1980's such as the degenerate conditions that most Australian Abnorigines were subjected to for hundreds of years by European settlers . . . and be able to turn it into a dance tune.

That was quite surprising to me. Especially the video, which featured some blonde woman (or multiple versions of her) dancing around in a cube (or series of cubes) . . . it was all quite strange.

Incongruous, I might say.

Don't really know what the point is . . . either of the disc or of this post.

Oh well, más después, I suppose!

VG