jeudi 29 avril 2004

Listening to pictures "So, the next time your other half finds a dog-eared copy of Playboy under the bed, forget the old 'I only buy it for the interviews' and try the all-new 'Actually, I bought it to support cancer research'. A guaranteed winner." 'Buy pornography, fight psoriasis,' suggests 'The Register'. A better idea (which also saves me translating a recent article in 'Science et Vie') has been 'Wired': 'Tiny Computer Could Fight Cancer'. zzz "The Bush Administration understands the importance of responding to the global explosion in anti-Americanism. Left unchecked, these irrational sentiments, harbored by billions of mentally inferior foreigners the world over, could contribute to an international consumer climate in which American corporations and products stand at a competitive disadvantage." Where would we be without 'The White House' (indirectly via the Cruel Site of the Day)? In the Red pink corner, 'John Kerry Has No Recollection Of Throwing Medals Like A Girl' (Broken Newz). (Footnote to self: Be nice, even to Americans. You do, after all, have a date tomorrow with the loveliest one you've met this year... Anyway, they can't help it.) zzz 'iPodding the Met' -- yet another great idea from "God's country". Actually, this time I'm not being a sarcastic smart-arse. "The song ‘Listen Up’ by Oasis goes great with Dutch landscapes, but I was an idiot a month ago and wouldn’t have guessed. A recent class on French wines told me as much. The instructor, a large man with a long nose, stood behind a lectern massaging his waddle and explained to us, his students for the next three hours, that we were there because we wanted to know how to pair wine with food. Not true, I thought. I was there because I had a gift certificate to his school soon to expire, and ‘Wines of France’ sounded more appealing than ‘Couples Are Garlic Lovers,’ which I already knew, or ‘How To Do Things,’ which seemed kind of vague." Rosecrans Baldwin spent a birthday afternoon pairing music with paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and wrote it up for 'New York, New York' ('The Morning News'). What Rosecrans tried at random inspires me to visit the Musée d'Orsay (English front door) with a fresh ear to the canvas. zzz It may not be just round the corner, but I reckon today's 'Bleat' gets it right. "In the future, I think, newspapers will become almost entirely devoted to local news and happy fluff, like me," says the blogrolled James Lileks. "I depend on my paper for local news, because I don’t watch TV news." I probably read a newspaper about twice a year. But that's more than I read Playboy... 11:58:44 PM  link   your views? [] 'Effendi': justice in the balance Blogrolled SF writer Charlie Stross -- who's rightly proud to have been shortlisted for a Hugo (The Herald) and must today merit a blog award for the shortest entry (after "suffering for your art") -- has beaten me to my noun. "Get them, read them, think about current politics in the middle east, feel your head explode. NB: contains raw, undiluted anger. May cause burns to mucous membranes. Not to be taken internally." Anger. A step ahead of me (eyes to the right at his place for the "Dead Trees"), Charlie's given us a brief review of 'Felaheen', the "capstone" to Jon Courtenay Grimwood's 'Arabesk' trilogy. 'Effendi' (Pocket Books, paperback 2003) is also an angry book, but the anger's neither raw nor undiluted. The crime thriller builds up a mighty head of steam, but subtly holds both the emotion and the reader in check until the climax in court. Back in El Iskandyria, the astute Ashraf al-Mansur has become chief of detectives, his first case a multiple murder mystery. Since Raf is a glutton for trouble, the man he's investigating is Zara's dad, his would-be father-in-law, Hamzah Quintrimala. Since 'Pashazade: The First Arabesk' did much of the scene-setting (as did I in my review of it here last September), Grimwood is more sparing with his fine brushstrokes for the city itself and even stronger on character, to equally potent effect and with as many twists, turns and tributaries as the Nile. "'Safety off,' said the gun. Stood beside Sergeant Ka, Zac said nothing. He'd spoken little enough when he was alive and now he was dead he talked even less . . . Ka thought that strange, because Zac's sister Ruth had also said little from the time she'd been captured to the moment she died. But now she talked so much that Ka couldn't concentrate on watching the growling trucks that rolled across the scrub towards him. 'Distance?' 'Half a click and closing . . .' Status and range. That was all the plastic H&K/cw could manage. It was an incredibly stupid weapon and the boy with the bone cross, feather amulet and boots several times too big didn't know why the manufacturer had bothered." This is not Isk. This is Sudan. 'Effendi: The Second Arabesk' is no more sci-fi or conventional crime thriller than 'Pashazade' was. And Grimwood's alternative today's world is no fantasy heaven and hell. Hence the anger: a tightly controlled rage laser-sighted in sparse but very telling prose, with wit, lightning humour and compassion, at some of the headline horror targets of our own First and Third Worlds. Like, just for instance, the use of child soldiers and the manipulation of "terrorism" in the affairs of state. In fewer than 400 pages, Grimwood takes a scalpel to some of the worst aspects of a modern Africa instantly recognisable to anybody genuinely familiar with the continent. That he can balance this against one or two of Africa's best features, write sexily about sex and make you smile in the process is considerably to his credit. 8:56:25 PM  link   your views? [] 'God Bless America': Patriotism Unltd. One term for them used to be "camp followers", but some of those did it for cash or their keep. There's no question of money for these women, who probably don't even "close their eyes and think of England the US of A": "(Kelly) McDonough energetically describes exactly what Operation Take One for the Country does, 'First, a military operation would not be a military operation unless we used an acronym, in this case, Op T.O.F.T.C., or as we say "To-FutK". Essentially we organize, discreetly, single girls to frequent bars and restaurants near military bases and, well, Take One for the Country, with members of the military, especially those about to go overseas. (...) 'The men go off into harms way gratified, and because the organization is covert, they get the boost in ego thinking that they scored on their own attributes, they ship out relaxed and confident, with a distinct impression of a grateful nation behind them.'" John Truman wrote up 'TOFTC'©. Kelly is as fond as John of striking punctuation and, like Mark Twain, doesn't give a damn for a woman who can only spell a word one way, telling us of hopes of making "The Howard Stern Show. THAT would be huge!" Kelly's warning: "Be DISCRETE! (...) To the group in Galveston Texas (Yes, I got word the NEXT day), you CANNOT, and I mean CANNOT go to a bar and get loaded and start chanting 'TAKE ONE FOR THE COUNTRY' like a zillion times. That's bad. I love you Texan gals and love your spirit but that's not what we are trying to accomplish and it's not safe." Via, with thanks, Soulhuntre's 'Core/Dump'. 5:28:00 PM  link   your views? []

nick b. 2007 do share, don't steal, please credit under artistic licence terms; contributing friends (pix, other work) retain their rights.