Black Dog Blog

Archive for February, 2009

Comment to this post and I will give you 5 subjects/things I associate you with. Then post this in your LJ and elaborate on the subjects given. (If you've done it before, feel free to add a link so I can avoid duplication.)

Altivo gave me the following five:

Doggerel [heh heh, make of it what you will]
The dictionary definition of doggerel is comic verse of irregular measure. I am not quite sure what this means, and my working definition of doggerel is "rhyming poetry written in little time, not (necessarily) any good".

The reason I wouldn't ever mind my poems being described as such is quite simple: it has the word "dog" in it.

I do enjoy poetry, reading and writing it, but it has to rhyme and scan impeccably and not be what I consider 'up itself' or 'pretentious'. It helps also if something happens in it and it's funny. Poetry written for children tends to be good for these qualities.

I've been criticised, within a small writing feedback group I've frequented, for my overadherence to rhyme scheme and meter. I don't particularly want to move away from it, though. Those are what I like about the stuff in the first place.
Otherwise it
tends to feel
like prose
with
unnecessary
line breaks.

Doggerel! Doggerel is when people rhyme fire with desire (or, worse, higher), love with above (or, well, love with anything that rhymes with love; it's all over-done) or alone with [on my] own. When I hear these, I want to smite things. A good one I heard once, from Shania Twain I believe, was optimistic rhymed with pessimistic.

A doggerel might also be a cross between a dog and a cockerel. It could comb its own fur, but it might give you some rather sharp pecks on the cheek.

English
I am, I suppose, what one might call very English. I am not talking about being born in Chester, but more about such things as dry and ironic humour, honesty, fair play, dislike of making a fuss, excess of reserve and not doing sex. Oh, and liking dogs. A lot. However, I never drink tea, don't think all that much of the Royal Family or the Church of England, loathe cricket and football and am chronically disinterested in the weather.

I like the English language, though am aware that it's a pig for non-native speakers to learn. (Something about a Great Vowel Shift, which always sounds vaguely scatological to me.) I have no ear for accents and sometimes have trouble telling what people with thick accents (of any sort) are saying. Perhaps for this reason, Received Pronunciation accents — posh English, also called BBC or Queen's English — are the most pleasant on my ears. My own accent might be described as modern RP or BBC English with the edges knocked off, or… well, perhaps I'll record it someday and let others judge. I've lived in the North all my life, but don't have much of a local accent, if any at all.

I find the Heroes character Mohinder Suresh's Indian-tinged (or… less) accent extremely attractive, and was most peeved to find it was fake. Still good, though! The actor talks about it here.

I'm extremely weak to wordplay, too. Puns aren't the lowest form of wit. They are de rigeur, even obligatory, at least when one is handed the perfect set-up.

I'm also a pedant when it comes to those parts of English grammar that I fully grasp, which aren't necessarily all of it. I do have the reputation as go-to guy within the office for matters of spelling, punctuation or usage. What surprises me is that people are so nervous and unsure of some really very basic conventions. What might surprise people is that I didn't study English beyond the mandatory level (GCSE; 14–15 years of age) at school. And I learned nothing from those lessons beyond parroting someone else's interpretation of a poem. (This is what I think of the analysis of poetry by classes of 14–15-year-olds.) My secret? Genetics and upbringing, sad to say. I came into the world hard-wired to read; the usual autistic difficulties with language passed me by quite. I learned to read when I was about two years old (apparently it wasn't a question of being taught by a pushy parent; Small Me decreed that I jolly well would be taught) and didn't stop for many years.

There, I used the phrase "jolly well" as an intensifier. What more proof of Englishness do you need?

Sang-froid
The dictionary definition of sangfroid is "coolness of mind; calmness; composure". A quality I much wish I had. On the other claw, a less neutral and more negative definition — 'cold-bloodedness' in the sense of not caring about people — might easily be applied to me. I wish mankind no specific ill. Let's leave it there.

I also write a character known for both sides, coolness and coldness. (He means well. The problem may stem from the fact that he means well in an entirely theoretical and abstract sense.) However, in my writerly universe, your Captain Kirks and your headstrong princesses tend to get themselves killed out of clear incompetence and what we might call excessively glandularly-oriented decision-making, to the benefit of chaps like him; in other words, I deeply distrust people who claim to be led by their 'hearts' or 'gut feelings', which generally means "prejudices and guesses I don't want to bother to substantiate", and so I do not do things like setting up such rather reptilian sorts of fellows as cheap fall guys to 'prove' emotional humans are superior to thinking ones. Calculating people tend to succeed. At least ones who know how to play the socio-political game.

I actually have a character called Sangfroid, too; she is the great-grandmother of the character I've been talking about. She was a military general. It's said her legendary composure only cracked once, when her infant twins were in danger of death. (I bet whoever said that wasn't present at the birth. "More morphine, darling?" "Only half a glass, thank you; I'm driving.")

Twine [not string]
There was once a little installation of UseModWiki, hacked a little bit to include a 'boilerplate' text functionality, which was rather an achievement considering its owner didn't actually know any Perl. Its name was Twine Encyclopaedia and it was and is is the main publically-accessible repository of information regarding the HellMutt's writing characters, not to mention those of des co-writers at Profusion.

The little UseMod that could is named Twine because Twine is a word associated with Profusion's shared universe — though in exactly what manner remains to be seen. That's the nature of shared universes. The idea advanced so far is that it is the name of an interplanetary organisation that sets itself up as some breed of self-declared police force, tasking itself with applying and upholding interplanetary treaties and laws.

According to current plans, The Twine Encyclopaedia shall eventually apotheose and become some manner of wiki add-on in an installation of Drupal, which shall be database-driven and PHPish and Chaotic Good. Its owner does not currently know any PHP, except phpinfo(). You may be sensing a pattern here.

Kitties
As aforementioned, I like dogs. In actual fact I grew up with two exceptionally good-natured and well-trained Golden Retrievers. The stupider one knew upwards of 100 words in three languages plus sign language. This is why I don't believe in stupid dogs, only unambitious (one might even say inhibiting) owners.

I do not, however, currently enjoy the necessary honour of living with a dog, instead being drooled and occasionally sat upon by a fat, eleven-year-old, somewhat toothless cat.

They say write what you know, and so far I have a character, and to a lesser extent an entire species, based on or influenced by my inept observations of the feline nature. According to my fair and unbiased assessment of catkind, the character is murderous, spiteful, graceful, hateful, extremely fast, distractible, equal parts cynical and naïf, excessively interested in moving objects, rather dim, insecure, almost impossible to keep hold of if he wants to escape, utterly convinced of his own species' superiority to all other forms of life, and obsessed with balls of yarn. (In addition, he loves high places, can't bear to have his tummy touched and really hates getting wet.)

The character fiercely denies being kittyish in the least. He does not have fur, pointy ears or a tail and never wears bells around his neck, so we will have to believe him.

Sometimes I think you're actually a 'Help' programme built into all BBC computers.

I mean that in a good way.

– a colleague in London who has never met me

This is not the first time someone has asked if I'm a virtual construct. Seriously. Welcome to my world Mister Anderson.

Good stuff coming up on Beeb radio: Sci Fi Season

Particularly Iain M Banks's The State of the Art (Culture novel squee, even if it's his least well-regarded one), Robert Rankin (lunatic ♥)'s The Brightonomicon and Arthur C Clarke's Rendezvous with Rama (artificial cylinderworld).

When I watch something based on a book, I generally like to read the book first wherever possible. Because I'm not a blinkin' illiterate and I'm not very visual. However, in the case of Dexter, I was only dimly aware that there might be a book (there are four, by Jeff Lindsay, the latest released just this month in the UK); in any case, I bought and watched the first two seasons on DVD before getting hold of the first novel.

And here's the thing. In a lot of ways, the television version is better. There are small characterisation and plot differences between book and series, nothing too remarkable until the end of the book—which only covers the events of Season One, despite the Season Two credits still claiming to be based on the first book, IIRC…

One difference is, well, it's a tradeoff, neither good nor bad. The book is first-person, which means you get a lot more of dear deranged Dexter and his alliteration, while the series is centred around Dexter but not exclusively following him, and fleshes out the other characters much more. I imagine this was done to give it human interest in case television viewers are unable to handle Dexter's viewpoint for so long.

Both have amusing situations in which Dexter doesn't understand the fine points of human behaviour while the audience does. (This even includes me. They are pretty broad points of human behaviour, actually, and made pretty obvious.) Humour of that sort, where author and audience share an injoke to the exclusion of the viewpoint character, is found a lot in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time.

The book is less satisfactory as to how Dexter reaches some of his conclusions than is the series. But the series gives Dexter too much character development, seeming to be railroading him towards normality at a sometimes frankly silly pace. Occasionally the second season suffered from the sort of backslides and backtracks I've seen on Heroes and always took to be a sign of being written by committee. (Perhaps not coincidentally, many of the like situations on Heroes also revolved around the reformation of a dangerous character. I refer both to Buffy with a stern frown.)

The book is short. I read it at two sittings and when I looked up halfway through, it was with some disbelief that it was half finished. I read quickly, which can sometimes make things seem briefer than they are, but in this case I much preferred the relaxed, calculating pace of the series. It had more room to introduce more side points, but also expanded on the main storyline at leisure, and quite astoundingly, all the changes I've noted have been good ones.

Naturally I can't tell what I would have thought had I read the book first. It's actually possible that I wouldn't have bothered watching the series. Odd, that.

Laughs out loud: perhaps four from the series, one from the novel.
Growls of pleasure: six to two, maybe? Actually, more. Perhaps twelve to one.

TL;DR version: this bookworm says the television series is better.

Behind the cut I'm going to paste two YouTube videos of Ed Alleyne-Johnson, an electric violinist. I'm sure many of my friends will appreciate the combination of long hair, biker leathers and mad skillz.

In the first clip, if you're wondering where all the other violins are, it's him recording himself on his effects pedal while he plays.

Read the rest of this entry »

I eat my peas with houmous.
I've done it all this week.
It makes me feel a dumbous
But it's keeping this physique.

*crunches an apple*

I'm holding steady just below 80. I want to lose more, but I can't muster the strength. It's just gone. Ah well, maintain for now… and never again the 80s.

Race for 'God particle' heats up. Please nobody shout Foe Yay or post LHC/Fermilab Rule 34 in the comments. This is a classy blog.

As fans of The Daily Mail know, everything in existence either causes cancer or cures cancer (example: Facebook). An extremely scientific study has begun to document these for the good of humankind. I give you The Daily Mail Oncological Ontology Project.

Also, grandmother playing Guitar Hero. I recognise the Easy difficulty of Pat Benatar's Hit Me With Your Best Shot, so you can tell I'm about on her level.

edit: some artwork and photography from dA's daily selection. Dog + snow = ♥

For Anke: Hello guys, kitties and something indescribable. And this, even though the corn is wrong and makes me very sick to look at *whimpers*.

Red pandas with an inescapable Now We Are Six vibe, cuddling, cartoony pandas (interesting take on the mask), a portly and catlike take that truly earns their nickname of 'catbear', a slightly more raccoonish-mousy-feline look, unhappy plushie toys, superdeformed legless versions (good face on the left one, though), some clearly drawn by an animator, a gorgeous painting if you excuse the love heart, NINJA PANDA and hilarity ensuing (I may have posted this one before).

Amazingly enough, there's also a new pangolin since last I looked. And have a cloud pard to round off the furfest.

I think I have the complete Canon as radio plays now. This is extremely cool and I have been listening to some of them on the walk to and from work.

It's someone called Clive Merrison playing Holmes. He's fine at it, and most impressively, he did a complete run (recorded all of the Canon stories—and, indeed, some extras). Wikipedia says he's the only person to have done so. This makes Merrison cool on a par with David Suchet (who, IIRC, has signed on with ITV to do the complete Hercule Poirot). He also looks cool: here he is with Andrew Sachs, who played Watson after the original Watson died.

Also, Irene Adler fans should go here.

I'm glad to have finished tagging and cataloguing the mp3s, anyway. It's kept me up far too late for two nights on the trot.

New meme! Test your gender as indicated by your self-confessed sins!

Gluttony, wrath, sloth — I'm 66% male, 33% female. Must work on Pride for that all-important equilibrium.

(Probably won't work outside UK, sorry.) Learning to Live, a 1964 sex edumacation film. I think it's quite good, actually, although of course it's dated. Simplistic animations work for me; in fact, they're the only moving pictures I understand!

(Film: "Well, we all know, don't we. The girl wants a boyfriend. The boy wants a–"
Mutt: "car."
Film: "girlfriend.")

One for architecture nuts. Audio slideshow: Le Corbusier's legacy [Flash]

There's plenty I, a non-buildingish person, never knew about this dude, not least that Le Corbusier wasn't his surname. His (epic Swiss-French double-barreled!) name was Charles-Édouard Jeanneret-Gris.

You can find photos of some of Le Corbusier's buildings here.

I personally don't like his buildings at all – well, except for this playful church. It's to be expected, though, because I'm a 21st-century pup and he was pre-1960s, when big concrete things were daringly modern.

It's very interesting what he tried to do to Paris! Here's a picture of the scale model, also shown in the
slideshow in the first link.

Is it selfish to have more than two children?

Interesting, if unbalanced, article. The women in it rather horrified me ("I never wanted this many children. I wanted babies. They got to a certain age and I wanted another. I love newborn babies." "I didn't think about money and what it was going to cost either. I just had this romantic idea.").

I'd have liked to hear from some sensible, educated women who had planned their families, however large those might be.

Is it selfish for an unemployed teenager who can't keep her legs shut to pop out three no-hope sprogs named Krystell out of some mistaken idea that it's an easy way out of school and onto benefits? Is it selfish for a late-twenties woman in a stable relationship and career to pop out three well-supported suburban sprogs named Cynthia at three-and-a-half-year intervals? And most importantly, in what way is [they have six kids but] they do their bit for the planet by never flying long-haul supposed to be relevant?

Also of interest:

The total fertility rate – the number of children a woman is expected to have in her lifetime – reached 1.90 in the UK in 2007, meaning 190 children were born for every 100 women, according to the Office for National Statistics.

That still means the population is shrinking – until of course, you count immigration and emigration. According to the graph in the article, in the 1960s the fertility rate was about 2.7.

In other news, I am astoundingly enough still glad I've steered clear of Facebook.

It is, I'm afraid, simply not a good idea for EU residents to let their data outside the EU. And yes, that means Yahoo and Hotmail, let alone companies who are making themselves suspicious, like Facebook and Google are.

Terry Pratchett's knighthood. I wonder what she said!

Text story instead.

Five-minute video interviews with Pratchett and Stephen Fry.

I'm gonna be a knight some day. No sword, though. They're crap.

How to train your cat

Give me a call. I can make 'em do the funnest tricks.

More seriously, making a groom into An Issue is not the correct way to go. Grooming is being licked by a big cat, which is done when one has eaten and is sleepy, and if your cat tolerates it at all it is most sensible to make it a normal part of the post-prandial sofa snuggledown. If it really hates it, then it may be best to do it before feeding. If so, be consistent.

Claw-clipping, by contrast, has no natural analogue and benefits the cat not a jot, and therefore kneads to be filed under Things You Will Put Up With Because That's How The World Works. For a food-motivated animal, claw-clipping should be done immediately before a mealtime, or at least with treats afterwards, and done with a degree of skill or a helper to keep the process short. You may prefer to do front paws on one occasion and back paws the next in the interest of making it a more frequent, less stressful process. The cat will enjoy the back feet even less than the front. Do not attempt to clip claws while the cat is high on catnip.

Teaching your cat a word like "Finished!" will remove a lot of stress. As soon as the command is given and the cat is released, that must be the end of the indignities and your attitude towards it must immediately return to normal. No guilt, no excessive fuss, I mean normal. Bare-faced cheek is a cat thing; they understand it. At first the creature will probably run off in high dudgeon each time, but once it gets used to the process the sulks will be shorter and shorter.

Piper, for example, gives no more than one token growl and doesn't even leave the room any more. He's just that lazy. As soon as he hears "Finished!" he snaps back into begging mode, goes to his bowl and waits for his biscuits. He knows that "Finished" means "safe"… and, sad to say, "reward". (This is helped by the fact that it's also the command I give him after feeding him that means he can start eating.)

This is what I have learned about cats and how they differ from real people.

Bear balletists. Ursine Peles. This is awesome once you realise that the reason for the whole rigmarole is that grizzlies hate getting their ears wet.

He is not a kitty. (PNG, 600×400, 58KB)

And yes, his skull's weird. Skull reference for artists and Zuni doll lovers

I think I've got Weft's face (in profile) pretty much cracked now, thanks to help from my parent. I'll plaster it up later tonight and invite feedback.

It's ridiculous how much easier it is to represent people visually if one a visual thinker and able to look at the things. Neither of those describes me, which is basically why I am not an artist.

Whereas if I write "his head is oddly shaped, rising shallowly backwards from a sloped forehead, while his face, wide in bone structure but very lean, tapers forwards at the front; his eyes are disconcertingly huge, he looks perpetually worried and he is by no means beautiful" you have to take my word for it, if you showed me a picture of someone like that, I wouldn't know where to begin describing him.

I live in words and concepts. A picture means nothing to me until it's decoded. I or someone else (and others are better at it than I am) must describe to me what's in it, or it remains a very vague swoosh of colour that slips out of my head.

Let's see… for example, have you seen the Armada Portrait? Think of it. Do you get a mental image of what it looks like? I have a very vague wisp of colour, consisting of a creamy wodge and red hair and a white ball, and a mental description that's more easily put into text than any other format: "squareish painting of a woman [Elizabeth I of England] in a large puffy dress covered with bows, a lace collar standing out around her neck, with red, styled hair. Her right hand is resting on a globe [representing conquering the world], and in two windows either side of her in the background are ships [representing the Armada her dragon smashed]. The colour is bad, as though the painting aged badly." Evidently I've forgotten the mermaid figurehead and the fan in her hand.

On reflection, this could be why I spend so much effort writing image alt text. I use it!

Incidentally, the Armada Portrait is best enjoyed while listening to Ayreon's Dragon on the Sea.

LOLJelly

And as an icon

Because We have decreed that he doth need one.

Another quick picture today.

Sketch of an Instarrian woman

I call her Jocelyn. *snerk*

Happy day-after-Friday-the-13th!

…Oh my stars and tri-corner hat. This is possibly the greatest thing I've heard this week.

I found the CD on the stairs today after I got home. I assume Slen dropped it round for me. ♥

Wolves of the Sea with Caribbean Monkey Island stylings. If I could get horny, that would be making me very much so.

On my commute today, I have been mostly listening to Sherlock Holmes v Dracula. This is cool and I am secretly delighted every time I hear Holmes say the name "Mina".

What do you think of literary mashups, crossovers, pastiche-hybrids and the like? Do you find the idea excruciating (cross puns lol) or do you enjoy them in a spirit of absurdity?

Normally I'm the former, on this occasion the latter, because it's well written and fun.

Which characters do you think should never ever meet — not because their settings or genres are incompatible, but because it would be a really bad idea to get them in the same location?

Discuss.