gamboling.co.uk

When casting about for something to write for the site I tend to scan through my notebook. Today I was a bit surprised to find this nugget:

Optiplex superhero without superpowers except he can shoot yellow beams out of his eyes. Controlled experiment with eyepatch. Doesn’t light things up – useless in dark. Placebo effect.

I mean… What on earth is that about? I think an Optiplex is actually a kind of Dell computer. But beyond that? I’ve got no idea.

When I were a lad you didn’t have the internet… Well you might have if you were one of the five government scientists who were keeping it all locked up before they all decided to relax, chill out, let their hair down and distribute some of those lovely IP addresses. And in those days they used to have these things called newspapers. They were these things which had yesterday’s news written up and printed on them. Of course there was already news on the television and the radio so they still didn’t really report news live but sometimes you’d read about something in the newspaper you didn’t know about that had happened yesterday. But then the internet came along and they all died out. People said it was because the internet was free, but of course the real problem was that you had to cut down bamboo to make newspapers and that’s bad for pandas… Or what I’m trying to say is that it was because of the distribution model. It was always out of date once the internet was there. The best you could hope for was for it to be only half a day out of date by the time you read it.

Of course I have always loved reading, so I used to read newspapers until they died out. And even then they had realised that something was a bit wrong and so they kind of reduced the amount they focused on news. They really should have been renamed Opinionpapers but people would have got upset and written to the editor of the newspaper saying that it was ridiculous to just make up words and telling them that if they didn’t change it back to newspaper, they would cancel their subscription. They wouldn’t seem to notice that somebody had cancelled their sense of irony previously.

So here’s a weird thing. A few years ago the school my mum was working at decided that it wanted to get rid of its bird collection. Its collection of dead birds in a box. Birds that had been stuffed. But apparently you can’t sell these birds because at least one of them was rare and of course the sale of them would encourage people to kill them to sell them. The school didn’t know what to do because if nobody wanted them they would have to just throw them away. And somehow throwing them away would be a far worse crime against these dead birds.

Well you can imagine where this is going I ended up with the birds and since I have owned them I haven’t really known what to do with them. It’s make or break time for the birds so they are currently sitting in our living room on display. I think I quite like them… but I can’t be trusted. Would you be freaked out if you came to visit?

I have been doing a lot of programming this week. This has been at work and at home.

Sometimes changing scene like this is enough to kick start things. But the main thing is that I’ve really enjoyed the short order start/finish/result element.

Of course this probably means I am avoiding the novel… But at least I’m having fun. It’s at least better than avoiding it by watching trash television.

I’m sure that you all have problems remembering birthdays and anniversaries. It’s a very common problem. In fact, I’m pretty sure everyone is bad at it, we just don’t like to admit to it. It’s the same problem with people’s names. It’s easier to work around the problem with birthdays because you can always write them down somewhere.

I guess the problem comes from the asymmetric situation. We have to remember lots of events that aren’t that important to us, but at the moment that something goes wrong, the date we’ve forgotten is really important to somebody else.

A Dutch friend of mine told me that the situation for them is even more complicated. It’s hard enough remembering you anniversary, but in Holland the first big wedding anniversary used to be 25 years, but now it is common to celebrate the half of that anniversary. So you celebrate 12 and a half years after you marry. So it’s on the wrong side of the year. Now that’s got to be hard to remember.

My father and I have been talking for a while about the fact that this year is our half birthday.

The concept is simple. On what day are you exactly half the age of the other person?

For my father and I, the date when this occurs is today! I took him out to dinner to celebrate.

I have made a widget so that you can work out when yours is: http://aaserver.co.uk/widgets/halfage.html Let me know in the comments when yours are.

There are some pieces of admin you pretty much have to do to be creative. Things that have nothing to do with the actual creativity. They are things like posting that blog post you’ve written, buying more ink etc.

I vaguely talked about this in a recent article ‘Start’. I warned against creating a lavish revision timetable. It’s good to have a plan, but you need to ensure that you don’t turn the act of deciding what to do into an easier option than doing something.

I assume the reason we all have tendencies towards this is that the plan is never published. That’s not the point of the plan. So it’s safe.

There is a secondary problem and I hesitate to mention it. Only think this is relevant to you if you have already created something. Okay, you are already known for creating stuff pretty successfully. Only then is this relevant, otherwise forget it.

I have spent such a long time getting myself away from the crippling habit of finding the correct pen to write with. Sitting in the right coffee shop. I have forced myself to just create. And I think I can do that pretty effectively. But the problem comes that now, from time to time, occasionally, I need to be thoughtful and long-term. I need to sit and think.

I am writing this instead of working on my third draft of my novel. I’m so turned around that I procrastinate by being creative. Procrastination doesn’t go away, I guess.

But what I need to do this week is write a plan for how the edit will work. I need to think about the book as a whole, rather than diving in and “editing a certain amount of pages per day”. It’s not possible. That’s not what is needed.

But I’ve been running from that kind of creative thinking for 10 years because that’s the kind of thing that stops you from having something to edit. You spend so long planning you forget to write anything. And now I have to change.

I wish I had a tip for now…

I think it probably started with ‘bad’ being good. And then when I was a kid, ‘wicked’ meant good. Because these happened before or while I was a kid, these terms seem perfectly reasonable. However, as with so many things, we are comfortable with all of the progress that occurred until we are around eight.

The kids of today call things ‘sick’, which means good. And obviously, that’s bad (actually bad not ‘bad’ good). The trend seems to be to use more horrible words each time. And there seem to be two phases. The early unmodified state when the word is shocking enough to work by itself. Then when it needs a bit of jujjing up we add the “well” modifier.

1. Bad
2. Well Bad
3. Wicked
4. Well Wicked
5. Sick
6. Well Sick

I am afraid to tell you that we are in the “well sick” phase. And that means that we are going to have to establish what comes next.

There hasn’t yet been enough data to tell if word length is oscilating. But the words have been getting “worse” pretty consistantly.

I think we might eventually get to ‘dead’ as good, but that’s probably too much of a leap. I think we need to have a couple of stages of illness in between. Maybe a milder one and then a stronger one. Let’s just focus on the next one, a lighter illness.

For some reason, the first thing that came to mind was ‘Rubella’. Not that I am saying rubella is that light. Wicked was a longer word and it got through the net. But wicked is only two syllables. I think Rubella is pushing things a bit far. So I pushed rubella to one side and suddenly I hit on a sure fire hit: ‘Mumps’.

“Oh man, that is so mumps.”
“That is well mumps.”

I think we have a winner.

So alliteration is roughly when a serious of words start with the same letter or sound (or the first sylabul does but there are several definitions). But you get the idea: Alex almost alliteratively articulated.

When something is alliterative in speech I like to mention it. But I would like to make a change to the accepted language. I would like the first letter of alliterative to be fungible. What I mean is that I would like to change the first letter to whatever the alliterative letter has been.

So say somebody said, “can’t cancel, can’t confirm Calum.”
You would respond, “Gosh that was clliterative.”

Who’s with me? Nobody… Oh.

I know a French restaurant manager. Now French waiters and restaurant managers are famous for their surly serving style and their disdain for their customers.

The guy I know is nothing like that at all so I asked him why he thought this reputation was so prevalent.

He said, “in France we treat the customer like a king, unfortunately you must realise that in France we also cut the King’s head off”.

These days, a lot more people have heard of John Nash than had back when I was learning about game theory. John Nash is the Nobel prize winning economist whose life story is told in the film ‘A Beautiful Mind’.

At the time I was learning about him, I had discovered that a biography of him had been written. I was suddenly far more interested in him. Now I just needed to lay my hands on the book. At this stage buying books on the internet wasn’t a common event. So I had to roam around central London to purchase it.

The reason I had found out about the biography was that I had seen in the movie press that Ron Howard had optioned the book. For some reason, I expected to see this book available in “all good bookshops”. In fact, nowhere had it. Finally, in a random Waterstone’s, I gave up looking and asked if they had a copy anywhere in London. They directed me to a different shop across town and told me that I would find this book in the “mathematical biography” section.

Off I went to this book shop at the top end of the Charing Cross Road*. Once in the shop it was hard enough to find the mathematical biography section, but suddenly there it was… And the book was there. There was only one copy and I grabbed it.

I took it back to the counter and I was confronted by one of the ladies that had helped me find the mathematical biography section.

“So did you find your ‘book’ then?”

There was something about the way that she asked the question which made me start. I was about 17 and male and she was about 17 and female. I didn’t want her to think I was the kind of guy who was into ‘mathematical biography’. But I didn’t really have a good way of making that point, considering I had a mathematical biography in my hand, so I just said, “yes, thanks”.

As the till mechanics were getting underway, I decided to have another stab. “It’s amazing that you don’t have more copies of this in stock.”

“Of a mathematical biography?”
“Well, it’s more than just that.”
“Is it?,” she sounded decidedly unconvinced.
“Yes. I bet you that one day you’ll have this downstairs in the best seller category and maybe then you’ll remember this.”
“Books don’t normally leap down there just because one person bought them.”
“Oh I know that, but you see Ron Howard just optioned this book this morning. It’s going to be a big film with people, you know, stars in it.”
“Really?,” she still seemed utterly unconvinced.

We finished the transaction and I left the shop and pretty much forgot all about it. I read the book, I saw the film; the book’s a lot better.

Then, one day, I was walking through the very same bookshop when I suddenly hear, “Oi! Beautiful mind”. I turn, thinking that perhaps the deodorant adverts are more accurate than I previously thought, and somebody has mistaken me for Russell Crowe. But no, it was the girl from a year and a half before. And with a jerk of her head, she revealed that indeed ‘A Beautiful Mind’ had made it downstairs.

*It was that strange Waterstones that was about five different shops that they hadn’t bothered combining into one.