Plenty of Nothing

Twenty Years Ago Today

It's twenty years since Sgt. Pepper Knew My Father (1987) came out.  The LP was a song-for-song cover of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967), and featured a variety of Eighties acts like Sonic Youth and Wet Wet Wet, done in support of a child help line.  It hasn't aged as well as the original, but it has some interesting bits including Billy Bragg's "She's Leaving Home" and Michelle Shocked's "Lovely Rita".  For a while I preferred Frank Sidebottom's "Being for the Benefit of Mr Kite" to John's, but I've come back around.  The thing is, is there a 2007 cover coming out?  Because there's that "twenty years ago today" thing.  I think it would be cool if someone did a 1947 version.

Douglas

[Okay, sorry, Sgt. Pepper Knew My Father came out in '88.  But there IS a cover album due out this year, with Oasis among others on it.] ["Being for the Benefit of Mr Kite".]

If There Were a European Hockey Champions League

These teams would play.  MoDo (Sweden), Davos (Switzerland), Sparta Praha (Czech), Ak Bars Kazan (Russia) and Kärpät (Finland) have all won their national championships in the past few days.

(I guess this gaping hole in the layout belongs to the German champions, who will either be Adler Mannheim or the Sinupret Ice Tigers.)  [Mannheim won.]

Cathy Deirdre Zinck

Here's another Paint programme creation from the mid-Nineties. Or rather, this is the jpeg of the bmp.  I've lost some of the crisp detail by resizing, and the colours are a bit off, especially that toque, because I originally chose them according to how they would print off instead of how they looked on-screen.  I'm still aglow with the triumph of accomplishing that bungee cord, which took long hours with the zoom function.

So anyway meet Cathy Deirdre Zinck aged about 16.  I cooked up an extensive backstory for her around 1995 with the intent of writing a novel, and then I didn't write it.  But I've come to a better understanding of how I work as the years have passed, so there's hope for her yet.  JRR Tolkien used to sit in the potting shed cooking up elvish mythology, and eventually he was able to incorporate a little of it into his published works.  I find I have to work up a mythology and then leave it alone until I find a story that can make use of it.  Which can take decades.  (I'm banking on living to be 100.)

Zinck does appear in the forthcoming Wonderful Hell as a 30-year-old.  Once I'm done the current Cricket series (itself based on a mythology from the 1980s) I'll turn back to Zinck.

Douglas

Spare Personhood?

Here's one of the bronzes from the Famous Five group on the east side of Parliament Hill.  They're passing around cups of tea in celebration of having been declared persons by the House of Lords.  This lady strikes a characteristic Lower Town pose.  If ever we institute the guaranteed annual income, this statue will be able to serve double duty as the panhandling memorial.

The Time Traveler's Wife, by Audrey Niffenegger

When I was reading science fiction in the 1970s there would occasionally be a discussion in the forward to an anthology, or on the editor's page of an SF magazine, on the topic Why don't women read science fiction?  The answer seemed to be the failure of the education system to engage women in science.  But did the fault lie with the instructors or the females?  Nowadays the answer is more obvious: science fiction writers (often moonlighting engineers) tended to write characters without emotional lives.  Exposure to real writing at university put an end to science fiction novels for me, but I had enough history invested in them to wonder once in a while how you would write one that would also be literature.  I got as far as thinking, You wouldn't write about the time traveler, you'd write about the time traveler's wife.  Audrey Niffenegger was miles ahead of me.

The Time Traveler's Wife is actually about the time traveler and the time traveler's wife.  They share the narration in pretty much equal measures.  Most events in the story are told twice, though sometimes by the same person in different times.  According to the rules of the story, events cannot be changed by foreknowledge, so there's no going back to put things right, which gives the relationship an accumulating weight of meaning, like a real-time marriage but with the added burden of foreknowledge.  The last hundred pages gain tragic power as the number of once-told stories dwindles down.

The publisher has apparently gone to lengths to keep  this novel out of the science fiction section, and the SF people don't seem to have given it formal notice, which is too bad, because The Time Traveler's Wife is the book that has got women to read science fiction.

Douglas

In Case You Thought Canada Is In the New World

It's in Northern Europe.  No, Middle Earth.

Spring Snow

RBOC: Or, It's Been How Long?

So. I'm not doing such a great job at the regular blog posting.

• I've decided that one form of hell is called 'User Acceptance Testing'. It's a peculiar form of torture in which the "user" (only rarely known as the "customer") tests the application and gets that special joy of reporting that the written requirements have not been met and knowing that the schedule is so tight that the requirements will never be met.


• This week I learned that a snake is the least effective means of clearing a clogged drain. Boiling water, baking soda, and vinegar can make tiny improvements. The real solution though is an angry woman with a plunger.


• I also learned that disgusting things moulder away in bathroom sink drains. How exactly do toothpaste, hair, and spit turn into such foul gunk?


• Reading has slowed to a crawl. Graphic novels/comics are getting some play (Wimbledon Green and Kabuki Dreams). The dragons in the Napoleonic War series has been finished. The overall effect has diminished by the let's-make-this-into-a-fat-trilogy phenomenon. Still pecking away at the Communist histories.


• While I haven't located a copy of Crow Shooting which I wrote about back in November, I did find a copy of Man's Friend: The Crow at McGahern's. It's a 1937 pamphlet issued by the Emergency Conservation Committee of New York. Its reference section has made me add "You Can't Duck the Crow Question" (Field and Stream, 1934) to my want list.

Heather

Serenity Reckoned Most Shiny

Readers of SFX magazine have voted Serenity the greatest science fiction film of them all.  Of all time.  Better than Star Wars.  Better than 2001: A Space Odyssey.  Better, presumably, than Frau Im Mond.  You can read about it here.   
Now, don't misunderstand me.  I love Serenity like it was my own dearly begotten.  But it's not the greatest science fiction movie of all time.  2001: A Space Odyssey is the greatest science fiction movie of all time.  2001 is all visual, pure cinema with hardly a word spoken.  Serenity is all dialogue.  And gunfire.  And I think that's a zither in the soundtrack.  The readers must have voted strategically, to get a sequel made.   

Not that a sequel would be a bad thing. If I could trade 2010 for another Serenity movie, I would.

Gladly.  ...

Serenity is the greatest science fiction movie of all time.                         

                                                                                        Douglas

Detail, East Block, Parliament Hill