The Webword email today pointed me at a little bit on Elegant Hack which reminded me of an essay on punctuation I’d read a while ago. I like good watching people punctuate well, but it always stresses me out to have to do it myself.
To love the ideal more than the reality
“High on hope, he has forgotten what he loved and, instead,
loves the ideal more than the reality, which is the cause
of all the misery that the human species creates for itself.”
Dean Koontz, Seize The Night
I’m not normally much of a person for quotes. But every now and then one will jump up out of a book and grab me. When I was reading Dean Koontz’ Seize The Night (a seriously good book, btw), the above quote struck me straight away. I remember at the time stopping for a while, and just turning around the implications of it in my mind.
Today more than at any time recently, this quote feels relevant to me. All throughout the day I’ve been tying myself in knots, wondering “What if I do that…?” “Will they…?” “But how about…?”
But then I came home, and there was Alex. He was sitting on the floor of our bedroom, with his grandma Foley’s walkman in his lap and the matching headphones in his ears. He’d fumble with the buttons of the walkman, then reach over to Abi’s hand, and make her press “Play”. Whereupon he’d get a blast of music, and start nodding his little head with a big grin.
For me, Alex is the reality. I come home every day to warm baby lovin’. And so long as I remember that, and keep his happy smile with me, all the other stuff is relegated to a status of “nice to have.”
Gnocchi
There’s a good reason gnocchi come in packages. It’s because they’re stupendously boring to make yourself. As I found out over the course of three hours yesterday.
In the end I gave up at the point where I had enough dumplings for our dinner, and didn’t bother making more to freeze. I’m willing to pay money to a supermarket or grocer to have them take that hellish dough-rolling slog right out of my life.
New year, etc.
Wow, it’s been a while since I wrote anything here. Well, it’s been a busy time over Christmas and New Year. We had a wonderful time up in Murthly, lots of presents, etc. Abi’s back at work (3 days a week), and I’ve now gone part-time as well (4 days a week), so we’re both taking care of Mr Bobo when he’s not at Nursery.
And my Playstation2 broke down 🙁 On the other hand, Sainsbury’s gave me a full refund for it. And the refund was for the price I’d paid for it a week before Sony dropped their prices 🙂 On yet another hand, there is currently a nationwide shortage of PS2s, and hardly anyone has any idea when they’ll get them back in stock. I’m down on the local Game store’s pre-order list. They say they may have some in over the weekend, but it’ll be strictly limited stock. And judging by the pile of pre-order cards they had stacked up behind the counter, I doubt if I’ll be far enough forward in line. Oh well.
A few years ago, I got thoroughly burned out on role-playing. It was too much Amber that did it. Amber’s a great game, and it really broke diceless playing through into the mainstream. But despite having infinite Shadow to play around in, I found that it got a bit stale after a while. And going back to another system after Amber seemed, at the time, like a step backwards on the evolutionary ladder of gaming. So I didn’t. I just took a complete break.
But just before Christmas, I had an idea… And it slowly wormed its way through my consciousness to the point where it became ripe for a game. (Seeing The Lord of the Rings over the holidays whetted my enthusiasm even more.) It’s a fantasy kind of thing. Not true Middle Earth, not true AD&D…just a blend of worlds and mythologies.
I’m still building the maps and a lot of the background, but the world has already taken quite a firm shape in my mind. And the stories, characters and plot lines seem to be flowing quite freely right now. In fact, I’m having a hard time remembering them all for long enough to get back home and write them all down. (I suppose I should use my old Psion 5 to record them on the bus, but ever since that incident with the backup battery failure and the de-spooled tape drive back in 1997, I just haven’t found myself able to trust it completely. And my handwriting is bad enough without travel jiggles making it completely unreadable even to myself.)
When we go down South to visit Jules in February, I’m going to give it a spin–assuming that Mr Bobo will co-operate long enough to let us play a bit. I think I’ll probably put the background & stuff up here on the Sunpig web site, so it’s easily available both for myself and anyone who’s going to be playing. (Somehow the web makes it seems so much easier than the last time I created background info for a game. Cool.)
(Note to self: must also get around to uploading more photos on Alex’s site. We’ve got stack of them! And one of the main points of using Movable Type was so that we could more easily update the photos on his pages.)
Bundle o’ stuff
James and Katriona McGregor are now offering their house in Islay for holiday rentals. Their web site gives full details. The photos of the house, and of Islay itself, look stunningly beautiful.
We’re definitely planning to have a week in Rome next year, but Islay is starting to look very attractive for another break.
EmotionEric.com. A simple idea: Eric takes requests for emotions, then acts them out and photographs himself doing so. The simple ones, like “Suave” and “Perturbed” are amusing, but some of the later ones, like “Realizing that Dan Quayle is your father” and “Answering the ‘does this make me look fat’ question” are bizarrely funny.
As a follow-up to my entry from November 30th (“Bait-and-switch War”), I found an article in The Guardian (“Fighting the wring war” by Jonathan Steele) that talks about the same issues:
“The toppling of the Taliban may eventually prove to be the best thing to have happened in Afghanistan for a decade. But it was not an initial aim of the US-led war.”
I found this article through the web site The Smirking Chimp, a site dedicated to collecting news about George W. Bush that shows him in the worst possible light. A worthy cause. (The title of the site is a nod to the Bush or Chimp? web site, which points out how much Bush looks like a chimpanzee.)
Abi today writes about how she–as an American–feels about the atmosphere we found when we were on holiday there in November. I’m so glad we’re so much in agreement on these issues. (But then that’s probably why we’ve been married for over eight years now: because fundamentally, we think very much alike, and hold very similar social and moral values. And this despite Abi being Catholic, and me being an atheist! I suppose this bodes well for consistency when it comes to raising Alex.)
The Media Workers Against War web site features an article by the brother of one of the people killed on September 11th. He is thinking along the same lines, too:
The United States should try to examine economic, military and political policies to understand how they bring about anti-American sentiment. The U.S. should change these policies in order to ensure peace and justice for America and the world. The current reliance on military force does not confront the conditions that foster terrorism.
This may be a crucial conceptual barrier for the collective American consciousness to break through: not everyone likes America, and what it (now) stands for.
Faking it
One of the most entertaining shows on British TV at the moment has got to be Channel 4‘s Faking It.
In each episode, an ordinary person is given four weeks to become skilled enough in a different job to be able to “fake it” with the top professionals in that field. At the end of each episode, this person is placed up against these same top professionals in a contest. The contest judges aren’t told that an imposter is taking part until they’ve made their decision on who is the best.
This week, an Irish farm hand was taken to London, and trained to be a hair dresser. Although the judges thought his work was good, all of them picked him out afterwards as being the impostor. Last week, however, a burger-flipper and dish-washer was trained up to be a head chef, and given a team of kitchen staff to run in a coooking contest. Not only did the judges award him first place, but none of them guessed that he was the plant.
I find the show interesting not only because of the challenge the subject is given, but also because it gives a sideways-looking insight into the professions being targeted. It’s pretty cool.
Next week, they’re training someone to be a pro wrestler!