Blogging/ Social Media/ Internet:
Seth Godin talks blogs. My review @Stumbleupon I quoted this part:
Just like the marketers of Oreo (now in 19 flavors of cookies) we’re dealing with clutter by making more clutter.
RSS fatigue is already setting in. While multiple posts get you more traffic, they also make it easy to lose loyal readers.
Joos de Valk has written pretty extensive articles for people interested in SEO (Search Engine Optimization). A good place to get started if you’re keen to learn but find yourself reeling under the deluge of data out there.
If you’re on wordpress, then eventually you might run into memory problems. This could be a blank admin screen, or someone attempting to browse your site getting a memory exhausted message. Either way, this terrific article includes a fix for the memory problem althought it’s primarily about fixing that blank admin screen after an upgrade. Whatever happens always remember the golden rule of Life, the Universe and Everything else — Don’t Panic.
Writing/ Reading/ Books:
Agatha Christie is well known as the Grand Dame of mystery fiction. She herself was involved in a mysterious disappearance which till this day leaves more questions than definite answers.
Lynn Viehl’s blogging can be a riot and the 7 deadly sins writing sins just goes to show why.
It would appear Mark Twain wasn’t a fan of James Fenimore Cooper, the writer of Last of the Mohicans.
Misc:
A group of ESPN bloggers got together and selected the NFL’s top 25 players of the last decade. A good list, and I’ll bow to their expertise but I have to say I would still have put Marshall Faulk in there.
If you need a laugh, then do check out the things that people say. There’s different categories and way too much to take in all in one go. My favourites are, without a doubt, the doctors making the lawyers look like dumbasses.
Real life superheroes. Can someone please tell me if this is for realz or some kind of subtle joke I don’t get?
Best of the Onion:
An ancient race of skeleton people discovered by daring team of archeologists.
Pick of the Month:
Do you know who the world’s first true supermodel was? This is actually a pretty good blog, Scandalous women, and I highly recommend people to give them a read.
incidentally, if you’re going to leave me a comment (thank you), please don’t do look beneath the comment text box where you’ll see Subscribe options like Subscribe to no comments, Subscribe to Replies, or Subscribe to All Comments.
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Stumbled across this old legend of how tobacco came to be and it was just too cute not to post. It’s attributed to Holland, of all places, and shows a superb disregard of historical fact with a mythological setting that’s a bit of a headscratch but probably no more so than the average Michael Bay movie, which makes me suspect a sailor might be have been involved. My own contribution to the saga is in italics1:
One day Jupiter invited all the gods to Olympus for a party. There was to be drinking, feasting, merry-making. And Dancing. Lots of dancing as it turns out. Gods don’t exhaust easily. Vulcan, who had a crippled leg, felt a bit embarrassed about not being able to dance, so he sat alone in a corner, smoking his pipe. He’d only come for the sake of his wife. Working a crowd wasn’t his forte, but Venus thrived when surrounded by people and he couldn’t stomach the idea of a century or seven of listening to her overly loud sighs and strategic crying if they missed this.
So he smoked in a corner, watching his kid brother — Mars of the gorgeous hair and cruel mouth — twirl and spin Venus around the room. Vulcan sat, fogotten, smoking and smoking and smoking until finally the smoke was so thick the gods couldn’t see one another and Jupiter roared, “Who is making this fog that stinks like my dead father’s testicles!”
It was only a matter of moments before Jupiter would sweep through the smoke and find the only being in attendance with a pipe emitting smoke.
Vulcan had 2 choices — 1) he could dump his pipe in a nearby pot plant. But he just knew the damnable thing would be whispering to his auntie Ceres later that night. And she at present was on the wrong side of that peculiar cycle where she either admired the beauty of the trinkets he fashioned in idle moments and revolutionary utilities of the creations and implements his rough hands crafted or she loathed him for ripping apart her earth in search of more metals to work on and boiling her rivers with the scorching offal of his forges; 2) he could leave the pipe on a table and pretend he hadn’t seen who put it there. But the table was covered in a cloth spun by his mother, and cloth burned easily. He couldn’t bear the thought. Even if it was her hand that flung him from the mountain to the ground, the soil and stone that so brazenly shattered an immortal knee forever, it was also her tears that was his only company all the cold, lonely way down. Or perhaps it was simpler than that, the simple fear of mother’s hand casting him away that was greater than a son’s fear of his father’s wrath.
Vulcan spent so much time pondering all this shite that inevitably Jupiter cleared the smoke and caught the culprit, aka him. Jupiter slapped the pipe from his son’s hand and it fell to the earth where it shattered, scattering unburnt seeds the world over. Soon after it rained, the seed lived and this is how the gods brought man the holy plant2, Tobacco.
~The End~
Also found a few more origin myths of tobacco — more grounded with the peoples who historically developed the holy plant and these accounts are devoid of my own interjections.
(Since I’ve already fabulously embarked on a post of useless trivia, it’s worth remarking that nicotine is named after one Jean Nicot, a French scholar of the 16th century who passionately crusaded for the holy plant’s medicinal qualities. He made a convert of Catherine de Medici, who championed tobacco. Nicot also compiled one of the first French dictionaries.)
I love origin myths. Creation myths are cool? But origin myths, the tales we tell regarding the simplest things is the most special and imaginitive of all forms of invention.
Never fails to awe, humble and entertain.
This is where and how and why storytelling began.
- hey, the point of these stories is not to preserve or remember them but to continue the yarn [↩]
- I kid you not, this is actually how it’s written in the account I read [↩]
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Nancy Fulda is asking for writers who have stories at Anthologybuilder who’ll be going to conventions, starting with Comic-con, and who’d be willing to help with promotion work to contact her. Promotion work like giving away stuff for free, and so on.
If you can’t go yourself then please spread the word.
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A Leonard Cohen song, and to me it’ll always be the Shrek song. This version by Jeff Buckley is my favourite:
Edit June 13 — I tend to schedule these video posts some weeks in advance, so it was a bit of a surprise to find the original Buckley video I had here has been removed from youtube, and another music video of this song no longer allows embedding1, but I did find this one which at least has the song I was looking for:
- friggin stupid imo, if you use youtube then why they hell do you turn off the embedding? [↩]
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Upgraded wordpress to 2.8, time to see if the posting is still working.
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Quotes — a corny collection of words taken out of context of its original use that I find irresistibly appealing.
A strong quote, one of my favourites, was written by Marianne Williamson although, as I’m not a Christian, I rather prefer the Coach Carter version thereof1.
Because of my soft spot for the corny things of life I’ve added a new widget to my blog’s sidebar that displays random quotes. At present, I’m erratically adding new ones in there. The nice aspect to the widget is that it allows me to add a link in to the source or author of the quote if I want.
Here’s the Marianne Williamson quote I added today:
Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine as children do. It’s not just in some of us; it is in everyone. And as we let our own lights shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.
- Speaking of which, this was an enjoyable movie and feauturing a Samuel Jackson I prefer a great deal to the “give me my light sabre. it’s the one that says bad motherfucker” type of Samuel Jackson [↩]
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Seen on Sharon’s blog.
|
You Are a Dragon |
 You are very charismatic and incredibly popular. People are drawn to your energy, but you are a very difficult person to get to know. You are very active. You are usually hard at work or play. You enjoy drama, and you enjoy anything unusual or eccentric. |
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I picked up this book at a friend’s recommendation without really checking what it was about and it turned out to be not what I thought it would be.
The War of Art by Steven Pressfield deals with overcoming one’s inner resistance, specifically when it comes to the pursuit of creative endeavors. The chapters are short, very short, some hardly more than a paragraph or so adding up to a breezy, fast and probably very quotable read.
It’s like a collection of motivational ra!ra!ra! epiphanies. Problem being I was in more of a reflective than revelatory mood, needed a bit more meat to the thoughts rather than a long list of “yes, we can!” boosts.
It’s not a bad book, actually, I’m just totally not the target audience. The heavy mystical slant lost me but in the hands of the right person I can well imagine this being an often-handled treasure.
It was cute, just not my cup of tea.
My GoodReads rating: 2
avg. GoodReads rating: 4.22 (471 ratings)
More opinions @
Ben Crowder — positive and enthusiastic, the opposite opinion to mine 
Arif&Ali — lifechanging, outstanding.
The Simple Dollar — high in readibility, lacking in depth. Found the metaphysical shift of the third section interesting, but distracting. Overall liked it.
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Okay, so I never did put up the May Links. So it goes.
I found a ton of good stuff the last month, but instead I’m only going to highlight a few. Some of them are very long, all of them are very worth taking the time to read:
Not exactly Rocket Science (love that name), has 2 interesting articles — Why the perception of yourself as good person can make it more like that you act in an immoral manner, and The usual approach of self-help theories with their emphasis on boosting people’s self-esteem could actually be detrimental.
In Defense of Distraction — the higher the volume of information, the lower our power of attention. It’s a common problem on the internet, blogs, social media, etc. People become frazzled by the amount of stuff that demand your attention.
How do people read websites? An exhaustive study examing every aspect of a website and blog and how people interact with it.
Dear Author posted a list of writer don’ts, which is not why I’m linking here. The comments are the fascinating part. At least to me it is, particularly all the stuff that writers do that people find creepy.
And finally, because it’s always nice to end on a happy note, LynnViehl’s Cafe Temptation is definite chuckles-inducing.
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A while back Look&Listen had one of these buy 3 DVD’s for R100 specials of theirs. Being in a spending mood with no obvious picks at hand, one of the movies I settled on was Kingdom of Heaven. Turns out, the DVD I took is the definitive edition, also known more commonly as the Director’s Cut.
I wasn’t particularly nuts about this movie the first time I saw it, but for R33 and a third, it seemed an okay choice. I mean, I am a sucker for lavish period dramas, the Crusades is always a cool topic and Ridley Scott is an outstanding movie maker. This was not one of his better attempts, but I still liked some parts of it.
Summary:
Balian, a young blacksmith, discovers he is the bastard child of a knight. He agrees to be adoped officially as the knight’s son and heir and journeys to Jerusalem in the hopes of gaining redemption for his wife, or at least to take her place in hell. His wife was a suicide, and the middle ages had a particularly unkind philosophy regarding suicides (they go to hell, straight to hell on the hell express, not passing Go and not collecting 200 bucks).
On the journey, the old knight dies. Balian comes to a Jerusalem under fading Christian rule, with a leper king fast nearing the end, bloodthirsty knights barely held under control and Saladin threatening.
Good times.
Bailian finds no answer from God regarding his wife’s soul but takes up the legacy left to him by his father, working his lands and humping Sybilla, the king’s sister (curious notion of honor these medieval folk had).
The king dies, the Templars run amok, Saladin invades, Jerusalem is left defenseless as every knight but Balian has fled or died. There’s a whopping big battle, Saladin cuts a deal with Bailian so the people of Jerusalem can leave unharmed and in return Saladin reclaims the Holy City and our noble knight takes the former princess home to France. The End.
Material restored in the Director’s Cut:
The opening sequence is much longer, spending far more time to introduce both blacksmith and knight along with their warped relatives. This does complete the background, although it’s debatable whether it was truly necessary material.
Sybilla’s son, on the other hand, as well as Balian’s inevitable last encounter with Guy (which might have been in the original but I don’t remember it), are far more vital.
Sybilla was never a great character to me and she does gain more depth here. The addition of her son raises the stakes, makes her decisions far more understandable and even goes some way towards making her sympathetic.
Let me explain — she’s just seen her brother die after suffering with leprosy. Her son is the new king. He’s still a boy and these are unsettled times. She has little choice but to turn to Guy, and ask for his knights in return for her remaning his wife. A chance incident reveals that her boy, too, has leprosy. Rather than let him waste like her brother did she takes the decision on herself to end his life, while young and peaceful. In consequence Guy becomes ruler of Jerusalem.
This storyline does add a lot more depth to the movie while not quite being able to raise it beyond merely okay. The actors were too cold, unconvincing, and the storyline itself might have attempted to do too much in too short a space thus leaving the whole uneven and poorly developed. Perhaps this idea should have been turned into a television series, something similar to Rome.
Watch Kingdom of Heaven if it’s on late-night TV, but I wouldn’t recommend anyone go out of their way to see it.
The movie did touch on a couple of topics I find interesting so in the next . . . while, I’ll use them as blog fodder.
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Old Man River | The Nebula Awards
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A Faithful Grope in the Dark
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Edit: not necessarily agreeing with everything he says, just find it interesting.
This is exactly the kind of book that someone would tell me about and I’d probably think it wasn’t for me, and then I read it and realize that it’s exactly my kind of book.
There are no great plot secrets&thrilling reveals in Atonement. Right from the beginning we know, or at least get hints at, what’s going to happen – Little Briony, budding storyteller with an overactive imagination and a newfound determination to pursue realism, will accuse the wrong man of a crime he didn’t commit. People’s lives cannot be unaffected by such an event. It can probably be stated as fact that a mistake of this magnitude can never be undone, that its repercussions will keep on rippling through people’s lives forever. Mistaken assumption will be piled on mistaken assumption. And even if the truth does come out, what possible difference can it make? Nothing can ever undo the past.
If by your actions the lives of innocent people are irrevocably shattered, is there any way you can make amends, do you have any right to ask their forgiveness and will they give it?
Knowing what will happen is very different from knowing why, or how it will end and how people are affected, changed, by this one event early in their lives.
It’s these latter questions that McEwan chose to focus on in this book, and he does it superbly, with the bulk of the story set in the years prior to World War II and during the Dunkirk evacuation. An excellent choice of setting and time, adding subtle touches of tension building in the background, threatening the stifled safe atmosphere we are presented with at the begining, of a home atmosphere at first glance balanced and ordered but all the while you feel the discontent bubbling beneath the surface and a threat building in the background that will tear this family apart. A sense of the world about to unravel as it were.
I think there are a number of fine writers who do story well, who can write exciting and entertaining books but there truly are only a few genuinely gifted for character writing. Being able to reach right into the heart of a person, to open a window and show you their essense, thoughts, what makes them tick and what makes them them.
McEwan has an impressive touch for detail, and the domestic scenes were some of the most vivid I’ve read yet. Oddly, the walk to Dunkirk was less vivid, more a struggle to imagine, although the characters were still superbly rendered.
It did feel like the book ran out of steam some during and after the middle sections, with the notable exception when we re-enter Briony’s — now a nurse, following in the footsteps of the older sister she wronged — point of view. This, the nurses and doctors and hospitals fielding the first casualties from World War Two, is not a subject or viewpoint I’ve read too often and it was a refreshing angle.
Briony was initially irritating, if occasionally amusing, but this middle scene of hers, with its wonderful blend of the child’s powerful imagination combined with a young woman’s maturity, went a long way towards making her more sympathetic.
Perhaps the idea was to present a parallel between the return journeys of Robbie and Briony — Robbie, returning from the literal hells of prison and war to respectability and the woman he loves; Briony, determined to be of service to the wounded and ease suffering rather than being the cause of it, an attempt to make amends.
Individually, each journey makes for the most powerful writing of the book and is captivating but it never quite gelled as a connected whole for me.
Still, I loved this book, I truly did, but I have to say the ending was anti-climactic for all that it was fitting. And, as powerful as the characters were, the story itself is sometimes in danger of meandering and losing focus which in turn cooled my enjoyment of reading it.
Overall, I was impressed and look forward to trying some more McEwan novels.
Other opinions @:
Rudy Neeser — loved the book, and provides detailed descriptions of the plot with additional commentary and he seemed to find the ending more satisfying than I did.
Bogormen — struggled with the 1st half, but enjoyed the second much more. We are in agreement that in this book the consequences of actions take priority over what happens.
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