[writing] why would you bother

Currently in a quandary as to whether to leave a character’s wife crippled or else allow her to slowly recover from an initially debilitating injury, it might be time to pause and look at this whole bloody maddening process of writing.

Almost every blogger who gets past the ‘let out all the frustrations’ stage fancies himself as a budding writer. Some even start thinking in terms of selling their wares before they even have the product.

Obstacles before you even start

In no particular order, here are some of the obstacles to overcome, before you even get going:

1. Like dancing, modelling and waitressing, it’s oversubscribed.

2. Everyone fancies himself as a writer but not many have the feedback to put their abilities in perspective.

On this point, literary agents smile when someone tells them that a ‘writer’s’ friends advised him to get his book published becase it is so good. Friends and family are often supportive but all the same, all expect free signed copies and would like to get a mention.

3. This is like point 2 in that many amateurs, without a writing background, feel they can do it as well as any they’ve read. It’s like the teaching profession – how many amateurs think it’s a piece of cake – that anyone can do it?

4. How’s your articulation, grammar and spelling? You can’t leave it all to the publisher to proof-read.

5. Can you type? With one finger or ten? How fast? Do yu know hoe publishers like to receive the MS?

6. Are you interesting enough? You might think you are, you might think your story is the bee’s knees but how many share that view? I’m certain that only a miniscule fraction of my target audience would like my work.

Who’s your target audience and is their a market for that type of book? I was asked yesterday what type my book was. I usually say romantic-thriller or thriller-romance. How many people are interested in that combination?

7. It’s time-consuming and wearying. If you’re not knackered after 11 hours of writing, you’ve been coasting. It’s all over the place – inspiration comes in the middle of the night or during the working day. You never know when it wil strike and if you don’t write it down then and there, you’re gone.

8. You become self-centred and anti-social, neglecting family and friends and find yourself having to make excuses to those with a reasonable claim to your time.

9. You have to line up with each of the other 2.5 million ‘writers’ who are looking for a literary agent to accept them.

10. It costs money, not just in getting published but in all the ancillaries, including time lost.

The process itself

1. Are you intending to write fiction or non-fiction, the former harder to get published and far more subjectively received.

2. Do you use a straight line narrative, with lots of ‘and’ and ‘then’; do you have a complex series of sub-plots and do they lead to the inevitable denouement?

3. What’s your intention – to sell the work or just to get something off chest?

4. Are your characters rounded, are there too many of them, should all be developed to the same extent and do you, the author, betray prejudice towards certain characters, not giving them a fair chance?

5. Can you avoid the Mary-Sue, the super-hero, based on yourself, who has all the answers and is a vehicle for your own ego?

The editing drudgery

1. Do you really have your timelines sorted so that you avoid anachronisms and characters who never age?
On this point, I have a character in the second book, named Genevieve Lavacquerie and she starts out, around 2005, as ‘just into her thirties’. Then I thought it would be nice to bring her in near the end of the first book, which put her in 1998. The problem is – she’s meant to be a mature woman and how can you make a 25 year old mature?

It didn’t work, so I had to go back through and in the third book, she’s still prancing about as if she’s 30 but now she has to be 45 or so.

2. Do you have the seasons and weather right? Are you jumping from summer to wineter or haven’t you thought about it at all?
3. How much local colour do you put in? I’m obsessive about details being correct or at least consistent with that town or village and this is one of the most time-consuming editorial jobs.
4. How ‘constructed’ does your anrrrative end up, after all that editing? How natural does it still feel? Doe your book begin to resemble a write-by-numbers collation?

Longevity

How long do you intend writing for? Like national football managers and singers, it’s a notoriously shortlived business and you’re only as good as your last book. Arundhati Roy wrote:

I will only write another book if I have another book to write. I don’t believe in professions.

Promotion

Just how do you intend to get yourself published and/or read?

[discrimination] all right when they do it, isn't it

Andrew Allison:

If a child can no longer talk about heaven and hell and her mother cannot ask her friends to pray for the school without the risk of losing her job, sacred rights and freedoms have been lost.

Amen, brother.

[pro-liberi] have a read of this one

There's a new blogger in the firmament who calls himself Lord T, of all things, and he has a blog called Pro-Liberi [or For the Children].

You might not agree with all he has to say but his ideas on the future are definitely down to earth, practical and sometimes even amusing. What he's about can be found here.

Here's a selection:

On surveillance devices:

I see us dropping sugar cube sized devices in the garden to watch for intruders and they use bluetooth or WiFi to call our phones to warn us. Put one in the frame of your bike and it will shout out if it goes missing. Get the kids to swallow one in the morning so you know where they are every minute of the day.

On DIY doctoring:

I like the idea of doing testing at home. Many people wait and wait, myself included, until we are convinced something is wrong before we go and see a Doctor. By then it may be too late. Home testing however seems an ideal solution such as was proposed here for bowel cancer.

On evolution:

A boy has been born in the US with 24 digits on his hands and feet. Six on each hand and foot. Read the full story here. Now is this a move towards the next stage in our evolution? More fingers would be handy whilst typing and allow a better grip on tools. Not sure about the toes though.

I imagine Lord T is going to get quite a bit of comment, positive and negative, with views like those and others.

[chivalry] and the hegemony of feminism [revisited]

I'm running this post again. I was reading this new blogger's comments on gender equality and after a year and a half, the whole damned issue needs looking at again. It really does.


Most people know Michael Bucci's list of chivalrous acts which men should indulge in and I'm right behind the idea. Men should observe good manners and so should women.

Linda Lichter is far more hardline about chivalry:

[Writing of the Titanic] I never had the courage before to openly admire those men or envy the women they saved. At least a decade before the siege of political correctness, I was silenced by the unconscious but relentless intimidation of female friends and colleagues who are educated, self-sufficient, and eager consumers of the latest feminist books.

I am supposed to owe the authors of those books unqualified gratitude for all the hard-won rights the Titanic women never enjoyed.

I would add another [thing here]: that emotional and physical esteem for women is central, not tangential, to manhood. The British statesman Lord Chesterfield, a favorite source of Victorian etiquette writers, believed everyday deference was due to all women because it provided their only shield against men's superior physical strength.

He added, "no provocation whatsoever can justify any man in not being civil to every woman; and the greatest man would justly be reckoned a brute if he were not civil to the meanest woman."

This hits the nail on the head as far as I'm concerned and is central to what chivalry means to me. Though men and women are the same - i.e. we're both human but in different forms - and though there are good and bad on both sides, chivalry recognizes "womanhood" as something to be revered and makes no distinction. You're a bad woman? You'll still be treated courteously by chivalry. It's a safety net, a catch-all and chances are that the person who is chivalrous will be this way with men as well.

Blogger Kelly Mac [and I admit she is vehemently anti-feminist] is reflecting on the early years of feminism:

Namely, where were all the "good" women when feminism started? Why didn't the women who knew they were not being abused do something to stop the misinformation that spread like wildfire? Aren't these women just as deserving of men's contempt as the hardcore feminists who started it all?

Ruth Malhotra gets down to specifics:

The notion of victimhood, that “women are oppressed and exploited,” evokes strong anti-male sentiment.

Many influential feminists demonstrate extreme animosity towards marriage and family life, even likening the institution of marriage to that prostitution.

In Feminism: An Agenda, radical feminist author Andrea Dworkin declared that the home was a dangerous place stating, “Like prostitution, marriage is an institution that is extremely oppressive and dangerous for women.”

The feminist agenda is offensive to women. With Eve Ensler and her contemporary cheerleaders in the feminist movement, initiatives such as the "Vagina Monologues" have become a central part of Women’s Awareness Month programming on campuses around the country.

The "Vagina Monologues," often promoted as a wonderfully inspiring event to empower women, is, in reality, nothing more than an atrociously written anti-male tirade, portraying women as pathetic sexual objects who will forever be victims. Such programs are not only blatantly offensive towards women but are vile and vulgar.

Elizabeth Fox-Genovese sees it this way:

It has not been easy to acknowledge that feminism has promoted the unraveling of the most binding and important social bonds. Not easy, but unavoidable. Like countless other women who cherish improvement in the situation of women in the United States and throughout the world, I was initially quick to embrace feminism as the best way to secure our "rights" and our dignity as persons. Like countless others, I was seriously misled.

In practice, the sexual liberation of women has realized men's most predatory sexual fantasies. As women shook themselves free from the norms and conventions of sexual conduct, men did the same.

There can be no doubt that women's situation has demanded improvement -- and continues to do so throughout much of the world. But the emphasis upon individual rights at the expense of mutual responsibility and service is not the way to secure it.

Worse, it is destroying the fabric of our society as a whole because it is severing the most fundamental social bonds. Binding ties constrain women, but they constrain men as well. A Danielle Crittenden has noted, the family "has never been about the promotion of rights but the surrender of them -- by both the man and the woman".

Kelly Mac agrees:

It's about the fact that dating today has become nothing but a series of pick-ups and one-night-stands (thank you sexual revolution).

It's the new vulgarity in young women, societally enforced, which upsets me. I don't know if they are trying to shock [and girls are emotionally maturing much later these days, babies or no babies]; it's the lack of graciousness in John Edwards two harpies, for example [here's one of their political comments, courtesy of Michelle Malkin]; it's the desire to be some sort of hard nut hoe for the boys - who knows?

Seriously - there's some sort of paranoid mania going down here where any sort of respect between men and women doesn't get a chance to breathe, where bile and spite constitute debate and the desire of the ordinary person for a normal relationship is mocked and derided.

What's wrong with revering a woman to the point you can't live without her and want to marry her, to have children with her, to do what comes naturally vis a vis protective instincts, without dominating one another, without constantly going on about "rights"? What's wrong with working in tandem and actually enjoying one another? Why does it have to be outside marriage?

What's wrong with normality?

[persistence of delusion] and the obsession with maintaining it

The Catholic Encyclopedia, Volume VI, on Sanctifying Grace, states:

Among the adherents of the Augsburg Confession the following view was rather generally accepted: The person to be justified seizes, by means of the fiduciary faith, the exterior justice of Christ, and therewith covers his sins; this exterior justice is imputed to him as if it were his own, and he stands before God as having an outward justification, but in his inner self he remains the same sinner as of old.

This strawman of the Catholics, claiming that Protestants say faith alone justifies, justitia Christi extra nos, was negated by the consequent widespread reading of the bible by the population, as distinct from the interventionist medium of the priest who kept the bible chained to the pulpit and only accessible through the adepts, i.e. the priesthood.

Reading the New Testament yourself and reconciling it with what the Old Testament has to say, there is no disagreement between these two of the three major arms of the church, that grace can result from:

… faith to fear to hope to incipient charity to contrition, with purpose of amendment.

Further:

Without charity and the works of charity faith is dead. Faith receives life only from and through charity (James, ii, 26).

And even further:

Sine caritate quippe fides potest quidem esse, sed non et prodesse.

Interestingly, with the severe curtailment of the number of people actually reading the bible during the past two generations of social engineering, society has now reverted to the pre-Reformation state of ignorance, with the only adepts left being the druids of the New Humanistic Age, possessing the arcane knowledge and meting it out, as is their wont.

The hegemony of Science as the final justification is an aspect of this process and only now, cracks are appearing in the old justification, ‘Well, it’s been scientifically proven …’

It’s understandable that the Catholics imputed the strawman of sola fides justificat to the Protestants because, in one fell swoop, the whole corrupt mechanism of selling pardons and relics for lucre, together with the external mechanism of the rosary beads, the intermediary mechanism of the confessional and the justification for the hoarding of temporal riches oculd now be swept away.

Many Protestants would accept that, in the matter of sin and redemption, just as in any other aspect of life, there are the ignorant laymen, the learned laymen, the professionals and the adepts. Of course a Catholic priest is going to know his theology better than you or I but the levelling tendency of Protestantism merely fails to ascribe to the priest the power to redeem.

Does the doctor heal or does he put in place mechanisms, from his knowledge and experience, which facilitate and accelerate the natural healing process of the body?

Similarly, does the teacher create learning or facilitate it?

Surely we can admire and revere without ascribing divine power to all aspects of the process?

There was a lady I worked with on her presentation skills, who went on to get the job she wanted and she ascribed this to me.

No, all I did was bring some logic and knowledge to the process but it was her own ability and revamped CV which did the rest, along with her natural charm, which was now allowed to come out, in the context of her overall package, at the first interview. All I did was get her confidence going again.

There is a place for the adept to bring the ordinary mortal, you or me, up to speed on what is necessary but that’s as far as it goes.

And what is necessary, for us today, is to see the essential flaw in the illusion of the Tower of Babel. In other words, the humanist says that we have the capability of reaching an ascendant state through ourselves alone but this has been shown oh so many times to be not so.

The times we currently live in, more than any others in the past century, are characterized by an obsessive belief that there is no G-d, no maker, no spirit. The G-d of today is Consumerism and the belief that we are complete in ourself, in our ability to find our own way out of the morass.

Oh really? How are we doing on this just now? Is the society we’ve constructed in a good state? Recession, drugs, the prostituting of children, chavs, widespread unemployment, the list goes on and on.

In place of hope, faith and charity is spiritual emptiness and deep cynicism in everything from the people who govern us to things which used to be held in respect, e.g. the mystery of a woman’s charms. Where is there any mystery today, any respect, any concept that the body is the temple of the spirit?

In place of perspective is pride. An article in a folder here from my pre-blogging days says this about pride:

Overweening pride, arrogance, haughtiness: these have been the stuff of tragedy. Vanity, fussiness, delicacy: the stuff of comedy. These are all forms of self-delusion, and paper-thin masks.

Pride and vanity refuse the truth and substitute illusions for reality. While vanity is mostly concerned with appearance, pride is based on a real desire to be God in our own little circle.

The first requirement of pride is spiritual blindness. Just as a well-lit bathroom mirror shows the flaws in our complexion, so we build up myriad illusions about who we are and what we are about, to paper up the cracks.

We can busy ourselves with career and family, thinking we are being driven by a strong work ethic and moral values. In reality, we may be running away from ourselves and from the reality of our state of grace.

A second requirement of pride, indeed a symptom, is that each challenge to our pride drives us harder to prove our illusion of productivity, sanctity or compassion.

It’s been said that the definition of a zealot is "one who has lost sight of his goal, and so redoubles his efforts." We might say the zealot works twice as hard to keep up appearances.

A strong indicator of pride is competitiveness and resentment of the success of others, jealousy and envy. Our politics today are fuelled by envy, the whole sub-prime mortgage debacle was made possible for the greed of the bankers by the envy of the have-nots, which they liked to call ‘aspirations’.

Human beings do things in response to needs or desires and so, if this is happening:

In contrast to Catholicism, which has a very long historic presence in China but whose growth has been slow, charismatic Protestantism has found its natural element in an atmosphere of official suppression. Barred from churches, Chinese began worshipping in homes, and five major "house church" movements and countless smaller ones now minister to as many as 100 million Christians.

Where traditional society remains entrenched in China's most backward regions, Islam also is expanding. At the edge of the Gobi Desert and on China's western border with Central Asia, Islam claims perhaps 30 million adherents. If Christianity is the liquidator of traditional society, Islam is its defender against the encroachments of leveling imperial expansion.

… then what gap, what niche market is it catering for?

What so many in the west do not realize is that the new gods which the youth of today have had presented to them to follow are morally and spiritually bankrupt – they can’t lead anywhere but to a form of cynical hedonism where parodies of human activity like sexuality are taken well before time and the societal consequences have already started to manifest themselves in world-weary alienation and the snuffing out of hope and life goals of any import.

The Who, long ago, sang of the emptiness of man-imposed structures on the human psyche [905]:

Mother was an incubator
Father was the contents of a test tube in the ice box
In the factory of birth

My name is 905,
And I've just become alive
I'm the newest populator
Of the planet we call Earth

In suspended animation
My childhood passed me by
If I speak without emotion
Then you know the reason why

Knowledge of the universe
Was fed into my mind
As my adolescent body
Left its puberty behind

And everything I know is what I need to know
And everything I do's been done before
Every sentence in my head
Someone else has said
At each end of my life is an open door

Automatically defrosted
When manhood came on time
I became a man
I left the "ice school" behind
Now I'm to begin
The life that I'm assigned

A life that's been used before
A thousand times
I have a feeling deep inside
That somethin' is missing
It's a feeling in my soul
And I can't help wishing
That one day I'll discover
That we're living a lie
And I'll tell the whole world
The reason why

Well, until then,
Everything I know is what I need to know
And everything I do's been done before
Every sentence in my head
Someone else has said
At each end of my life is an open door

Not only are we financially bankrupt today, we’re spiritually bankrupt and like the zealots, determined to insist that we have no need of our Maker, whose spirit can still be found down some corridor, in some room, inside some packing case within ourselves.

We prefer to see society disintegrate and our children destroyed rather than admit the remotest possibility that in our own certainty that our humanistic world view is right, lies self-delusion.

Man, in the context of his Maker and his own well-aligned spirituality, can achieve anything. Anyone who has ever had a relationship where the bonding between the two reached almost mystical proportions, knows that the sexual component of a much bigger picture needed no Viagra.

It takes no great perception to recognize that the greatest achievements of man were based on the fervour of a vision and the people who were bonded together in that vision.

Vision is what drives us forward and upwards but a vision where the spiritual aspect is recognized and accorded respect in its rightful place.

In a human machine where all cylinders are firing, including the spiritual, only then can the sky be the limit.

[valentine’s weekend] sweet message for all

On the Valentines weekend just passed, regulars might reasonably expect here a right old bashing of the rabid feminist and her misandropic [misandric?] weapon, the CSA but I’m not going to be drawn.

Rather, it would be nicer to look at a resurgence of the old values, including chivalry.

A feminist said to me a year or so ago that my values are the values of yesteryear, inappropriate [now I paraphrase, to be honest] in her brave new positive discrimination world.


Misogyny

On the other hand, I’m equally against woman-bashing.

A fellow male blogger took me to task, some time back, for defending women against a net-predator, stating what is undoubtedly true: ‘Women are well able to take care of themselves.’ I think he means, in this grasping age, where women are taking all they can get and to hell with the consequences.

All of the above plays to the destructive breakdown in the ties that bind men and women. Even in supposedly sane relationships, which are meant to constitute the majority, these destructive tendencies are there, simmering below the surface but hopefully never breaking out into a malignant growth.

‘Don’t you oppress me! I’ve got rights, you know.’

It takes either a very special kind of man and woman, in today’s society or else it takes that little thing called love, to overcome the accumulated stockpile of petty and not so petty grievances between the sexes and to reassert the long forgotten mantra [from the male point of view]:

Women are absolute honeys, I adore them and a certain amount of their perspective on life, there’s no substitute for a good woman beside you in bed [beats Mrs. Palm any day], thank G-d enough people out there still fall in love and want to live their life with a woman and make her happy. Can you really imagine how dire life would be without them in the vicinity?

[Editor’s note - it would be quieter, for a start.]

Ssssh, I’m on a roll here. Now, where was I?


Yes, let’s get back to the age of chivalry and to hell with all the party-pooping, wet blanket arguments against it.

I walk around [cycle around now], positively trying to look for an old lady to force across the road against her will; I look for seats to sit on so that I can stand up when a gum-chewing, chain-smoking, foul-mouthed young harpie in caked-on mascara, whom I insist on calling a lady, comes along and glares at me.

I want to soften her heart, as Ford Prefect did in praising the Vogon poetry and …

No, I’m off on the wrong track there again. It’s so easy to fall into misogynist ways these days, isn’t it? Don’t fall into the trap, gentlemen.

Instead, ignore all that and just subscribe to Michael Bucci’s simple principles of etiquette from AskMen.com:

Always be polite

Even if you don't like someone, there is no need to lower yourself to his level. Be polite and courteous; show that you're the better man.

Never swear

Swearing is a big no-no. It shows that you don't have the vocabulary to express your thoughts appropriately. Furthermore, it is always very crude and impolite to curse.

Do not speak loudly

When you speak loudly, it raises the stress level among company. It always implies that you can't reason with people and rely on "brute force" to get your point across. It also draws attention; negative attention.

Do not lose your temper

When you lose your temper, you are showing everyone that you can't control your emotions. If you can't even control yourself, then how can you possibly control anything else? Keep your cool at all times (it won't be easy but it is worth the effort) and people will take positive note of your level-headedness.

Do not stare

Ogling at someone is the equivalent of psychological aggression. You don't want to intimidate people for no reason.

Never interrupt

Let people finish what they are saying before adding in your comments. Interrupting others is a sign of poor etiquette and a lack of social skills. If you want to come across as egotistical, you can do so by constantly interrupting.

Do not spit

A lot of men do this almost subconsciously. Spitting is very crude and not too pretty to look at. Do not spit in public unless you want to look like you were raised in a sewer.

Respect your elders

In fact, you should respect others as you would like them to respect you. I am specifying elders because it seems that today, young men think they know it all. Well, we don't. Just think of yourself 5 years ago... you're much smarter and experienced today aren't you? Of course, yet you thought you knew it all 5 years ago.


Never laugh at others' mistakes

This is perhaps one of the cruellest things one can do. When you mess up, the last thing you want is for someone not only to bring it to your attention but to ridicule you on top of it all.

Remove your hat indoors

This rule seems to have gone out the window these days. You should remove your headwear upon entering a building. Furthermore, never keep your hat on while at the dinner table. It reflects very poor etiquette.

Wait for seating before eating

When sitting down for a meal, you should wait until all the guests are properly seated and ready to commence the meal before eating. Everyone should start dining at the same time. This is a subtle but very important rule.

Always open doors

This is perhaps the most basic rule of male etiquette out there. It is also one of the easiest to follow so you have no reason to forget it. Whether she is about to enter your car, restaurant, club, or anyplace with a door, you should always hold it open. If there are many doors, then hold them open one after the other.

[Editor’s note – if she still insists on opening the door by herself, give her a quick hip and shoulder rugby bump to one side and while she’s still stunned, open the door and usher her through.]

Coat please

Always help a lady put on her coat or overgarment. This is a simple but powerful thing to do.

[Editor’s note – right, if it’s good enough to undress her, in order to carry out your unspeakable practices on her, it’s good enough to dress her up again.]

Help with her seat

If an unaccompanied lady is sitting next to you, it is important that you help her be seated by pulling her chair out for her and gently pushing it back into place, with the lady seated of course.

[Editor’s note – don’t even think about what just crossed your mind. Don’t entertain the idea for even one second of playing the missing chair trick, as she plonks her curvaceous behind onto empty space.]

Take my seat

If a lady arrives at the table and there are no available seats, you should stand up and offer your seat to her.

Is this yours?

If a woman drops something, a gentleman (yourself of course) should pick it up and return the object to her.

Stand at attention

Always stand when a lady enters or exits the room. This rule has been somewhat relaxed, so you can stand upon entrance but remain seated upon exit. Nonetheless, if you can do both, you should.

[Editor’s note – why stop there? Every time she gets up to go to the toilet or to get a cup of tea, stand up for her and head her off at the door, which you can now open, replete with obsequious grin.]

Take my arm, I beg of you

When escorting a lady (that you know) to and from social events, you should offer her your arm. This is a little more intimate, but serves well when walking on uneven ground -- especially if she's wearing heels.

[Editor’s note – keeps you upright too when you’ve had one over the limit.]

Can I get you something?

This is one that most guys already do, but helps complete the gentleman in all of us nevertheless. When at social events, make sure to ask the lady if you can get her something to drink (or eat, depending on the event). Show her that you care about her comfort and needs.

[Editor’s note – I don’t go to social events so I save a lot of money that way.]

[James Higham’s disclaimer- the editor’s notes above have been written by an impostor whilst I was caught up in a bit of Valentine’s bondage. Now I’m free, I can assure you she’s been soundly spanked.]


Conclusion

[The real James Higham’s conclusion]

Gentle reader, even if you feel that chivalry and it’s handmaiden, etiquette, are not for you, give them a try anyway. They can grow on you and the bit of light you bring into a lady’s world compensates for any deficiencies in your sexual propensities.

No, I mean that it’s a very good thing to do and makes everyone happy.

That’s what I was trying to say.

Happy Valentine’s weekend for next year.

1776

Originally posted at my blog Buckeye Toughts.

A friend sent me this today. Now, it is a bit dated since it was written last November, a few days before the election. Now couple it with what VA has written of late. We're heading into a dangerous area. Believe me when I say a revolution would be horrible, it would be unfathomable. I am trying to think as a I write this post what it would be like and I know I am fooling myself. It would be devastating, horrible, and many more things. Now granted I don't think Barry by himself or the Democrat-controlled Congress would be the tipping point. Their actions, like the stimulus bill, would be a starting point. I don't want to guess where it would end and/or what would touch it off. Lest you all forget, revolutions don't need to be violent. I still hope there is time for our great republic to recover four years from now. However, I've never felt so much fear as now. What scares me most about Barry is that on a true political scale from Left being Socialist/Communist and Right being Conservative, he is true Left. The Democrats, generally have been a Center party but in the last election they really moved to the Left and the Republicans have started shifting towards the Center. Remembering Spain how PP plays the Center and seeing how neither party will take the necessary steps to save Spain only resonates with me as I see we are heading down the same path as Spain. At the same time, as my friend said, I'm comforted. We aren't alone in America! Should the unthinkable, horrible hour come, I will fight for her. Will you?

PS: The looming threat of the NAU is another factor. I've kind of lulled myself into not worrying too much but reading the first linked article again woke me up again, screaming (figuratively, of course ;-) ). I just hope if there is a revolution, that it is not violent. That would be...I can't even put into words the fear or anger I'd have at such a moment.

[when in china] do valentines

The Beijing Happy Valley theme park said it would offer a free ticket to ladies who came with their partners and arrange special activities for lovers during the Valentine's Day weekend. Even blood donation centers were offering special gifts to donors. The Changsha Blood Center in central Hunan Province said they would present roses and movie tickets to lovers who donate blood on Feb. 14, a tradition they have followed for the past four years.

Isn't that nice? What are you doing for Valentine's Day?

Me, I'm getting depressed. I had some cards from Russia and want that lady in my arms now but what can I do [sound of violins]? Where's the English rose of my life? I see her in ASDA and Morrison's but she's spoken for, methinks.

Maybe she'd like a ride on my 12 speed bike with me? Maybe her name's Daisy? Maybe I'm making it all up.

[thrilling thursday] your caption please

food poisoning] you feeling all right just now

Just had a peanut butter sandwich earlier and now I read this:

The peanut-related recall has renewed calls for increased oversight of the nation's foodmakers, and even regulators are saying they need to change procedures to better protect the public.

Uh-huh. Wonder how we're doing for food hygiene:

Around 80,000 people in the UK report food poisoning each year.

Oops.

[good news week] hope the recession continues

We have a Morrisons just down from us. There's an ASDA too so I'm going down there on my bike to check them out:

Wm Morrison Supermarkets is cutting the price on 4,000 products as grocers step up the battle to attract shoppers hit by the economic downturn.

[chutzpah] just about sums it up

You have to admire their Chutzpah:

Ex-bank chiefs say sorry for mistakes

Former bankers blamed for taking RBS and HBOS to the brink of collapse offer public apologies for their actions.

[fireball] run when it comes at you

Let's face it - I'm not getting much blogging done. What was a slowdown has almost become a hiatus but I do plan to be back. The issue is not things to blog about.

The novels I'm revamping don't mean a lot to most readers but they do to me and I've almost finished the 2nd one, which needed to be virtually rewritten. It does seem more exciting now. The 3rd is going to be tough because it involves combining all the remaining bits and pieces into a smooth narrative which you could still stand reading after the first two.

Anyway, enough on that.

I see they have their annual fires in Oz. Every country has its traditional trouble - California its tremors, Britain the wrong snow, Australia its bushfires. This particular lot of fires seem bad, even by Australian standards:

The fire that dropped from the sky on Saturday plunged us into a new reality. Environmental conditions had changed drastically before our eyes, but the advice to the community had remained the same. Even on Saturday the urgent words were streaming out of the radio: Be safe! Stay inside!

Had the fireballs come as far as our place our hoses and pumps and cotton clothes and every other piece of paraphernalia we had accumulated (such as wet mops and buckets and a bath full of water) would have counted for nothing.

If you've never been close to one of these, they are not nice. As the article points out, when that thing comes your way, all the nice little things like damping the gutters, staying inside and all that - you still get consumed in a fireball. People did.

And what did I walk home to from the shop last evening? Mist. British mist!

Would you be sad or glad?

Would you be sad or glad?

Upon reading the Exclusive: Thatchers to emigrate

Or, perhaps mad? :-)

[family life] when tempers fray

Bulgarian police arrested Thursday the man who shocked the nation by decapitating his two children and seriously injuring five relatives by setting the family house on fire.

The 29-year old man, apparently distraught by feuding with his in- laws, killed and decapitated his two sons, aged five and eight, in a street in the village of Osikovo in southwestern Bulgaria on Wednesday night.

The mother of the killed children, 30, was still listed in a critical condition.

And here was I bemoaning not having a family. If that's family life, then I'm out of here.

[blogger] an interesting organization

Dear oh dear. Wonder if he'd like me as a character reference in his appeal to Blogger?

[one of us] and one who will never be one of us

When Kim Philby was finally sprung in the 60s, there was widespread incredulity that he had betrayed his land and his people but even more incredulity that he had betrayed his class.

This latter was the one in which he remains unforgiven.

Difficult to know why the pointers to him doing this weren’t noted by more people. His family background and then his education at Cambridge, the past and present communist hotbed of intellectual England, the times in which he lived and his actions in distancing himself from his past – these all pointed to the possibility of his being a bit suspect, to say the least.

In the end, the phrase which was more often than not used about him was that he had been ‘one of us’.

This post is not about him nor about anyone even half interesting like him. It’s about me, so skip it if the topic is a bore.

Two years ago, one blogger described me as an anachronism from a long forgotten era and that epithet sits nicely. Look, mine was no more nor less than a typical white English, nominally Church of England upbringing or more specifically, Yorkshire upbringing but if you were to meet me today, you’d detect no Yorkshireman in me, either by accent or in attitude, except in a certain curmudgeonly dourness on occasions but that could equally be put down to age and my father, around whom I voyaged.

The fly in the ointment is the Australian connection. There are anomalies everywhere with me. For a start, my mother’s side is Protestant Irish and yet her family name is from the deep south of Ireland, County Cork and is spelt in the Catholic manner. My father was straight Yorkshire, living between the city of the mills and ‘oop on’t moor’ and he couldn’t stand Australians, so he really did well for me, di’n he, eh? Shades of Johnny Cash’s Boy named Sue.

I suspect I have Jewish blood somewhere but nothing in our genealogy suggests that.

In Australia, there were four main classes in those days: the colonial Australians themselves - the vast majority, then a smaller educated class, with family ties to the land or to the old country – the Macarthurs are the type of family I’m thinking of, then a class of English expats who settled in certain areas and finally the new immigrants from Europe and the older Chinese brigade. Oh … and in the outback were the aborigines. Sorry … koori.

Being one of the English expats and also, to an extent, of the educated class by upbringing, your humble blogger was a hybrid. Enough of my formative years were spent out there to develop a ‘twang’, also exacerbated by rhinitis, to make me acceptable to the French and I have ties to France too.

So, Australians always consider me a Pom, from my la-di-da manner of speaking; the Brits are divided on the issue. The uncritical place me as a convict but the shrewd can’t quite place it – I often get, ‘South African, yes?’

In Russia, it was even more weird. Drivers who gave me a lift placed me according to their own education level and exposure to the west, together with my level of Russian on that particular day.

On a bad day, I was asked, ‘Amerikanetz, da?’ through a range up to the highest level I ever achieved: ‘Pribaltica, da?’ This meant that they thought I was from either Latvia, Estonia or Lithuania.

Only about a dozen times did someone phone and take me as Russian, then get annoyed when I didn’t understand what she wanted.

In one way, this was high praise for my Russian speech but from the Russian point of view, Pribaltica was a derogatory comment – I was someone bastardizing their language, one step above Chukcha. When they found out I was British, their attitudes changed for the better, of course.

The most common assumption was that I was Yugoslav, which ties in with my first life partner who was Serbian and a wild beauty at that. She was the type you’d die for [and very nearly did] and I had no defences. On that score, I also had an attachment to a Ukrainian girl and maybe that explains how I slipped into the Russian lifestyle so quickly and why, even today, Olga Kurylenko makes the heart skip a beat [but you’d be hard pressed, in my opinion, to go past an English rose].

Yesterday, in ASDA, I saw a lady with that particular leather jacket and that particular manner and a jawline I recognized immediately but up here, she’s more likely to be Polish, whom I don’t know.

The Americans have always been onside with me and vice-versa. Maybe I think like an American or am educated in their history and culture. I spent every year in America in the 90s and in Canada too, on the strength of a certain lady I was enamoured of, a Vancouver lass.

The Americans are ultra-friendly to most people anyway but still, the point stands – I’ve always been made to feel accepted in America, which is more than I can say for my homeland. Two days ago, I was told I was not a Brit but I’m used to that now.

So, coming back to Philby - there was a man who spoke in a distinctive manner, whose background was impeccable, who also, to many, ‘betrayed his class’. With me, I’ve never been accepted in the first place by any nation or by any class as ‘one of us’.

Sometimes I see myself as the Flying Dutchman, doomed to rove the world eternally, [violin out at this point, maestro and play a mournful strain], forever suspected as pulling a fast one on the locals, wherever they happen to be, due to huge background gaps and therefore my credibility as ‘one of us’.

Let’s just say that, on occasions, it makes me sigh.

By the way, yesterday I joined the ranks of the ratepayers. Bloody outrageous too – over £1000. Does that count?

I said to the council lady, when asked to state my ethnicity, ‘I really must apologize, you know. I’m from a social grouping discriminated against these days – the ageing, white, British male. I’m afraid I can’t even claim to be homosexual [although I did try it out when I was a boy scout], disabled, nonCofE or even riff-raff. Sorry.’

Actually, I didn’t say that at all.

Well, maybe a bit.

Well, most of it, really.

Anyway, she laughed and we plan to meet up again soon.

[adventure holidays] have you considered africa

Modern ladders enable you to disembark from your aircraft.

Tired, jaded, prone to that old ennui? You need a holiday, my friend.

That’s why Nigerian spammer Susan Morgan and Ukrainian mail order bride specialist Boris Goodenough have combined with Higham Surprise Vacations to offer you the trip of your life. Whether fighting off muggers in Kinshasa or succumbing to yellow fever in Tanzania, we offer you a holiday you’ll never forget, a final journey to exotic lands, unspoilt by tourism.

Here is a sampler:

Cape Verde

The Republic of Cape Verde consists of several rugged volcanic islands off the West Coast of Africa. The climate is warm and dry. Evidence of immunization against yellow fever is required and medical facilities in Cape Verde are extremely limited. Some petty theft is common.

The next step up in excitement:

Guinea-Bissau

All official Americans have departed the country. Portuguese is the official language; French is also widely spoken. Visitors arriving without visas via land or air have been turned back.

Medicines often are not available; malaria and other tropical diseases are common. Petty thievery and pickpocketing are increasingly common, particularly at the airport, in markets and at public gatherings and thieves have sometimes pose as officials and steal bags and other personal items.

Fund transfers between banks are frequently difficult and time-consuming to accomplish. Taking pesos out of the country is prohibited. Travelers may have difficulty finding public phones and receiving international calls. Telephone services are expensive.

However, if living on the edge is your thing, try:

The Democratic Republic of the Congo

Dramatic deterioration of the physical infrastructure of the country, insecurity and an increase in looting and murder in Kinshasa’s streets, occasional official hostility to U.S. citizens and nationals of European countries; periodic shortages of basic needs such as gasoline; chronic shortages of medicine and supplies for some basic medical care; hyperinflation and corruption.

In some urban areas, malnutrition and starvation are acute.

Medicine is in short supply. Most intercity roads are difficult or impassable in the rainy season. Government permission is required for travel outside Kinshasa. Armed groups operate in parts of the DRC outside government control and provide pillaging, vehicle thefts, carjackings, extrajudicial settling of differences and ethnic tensions. Travelers in these areas run the risk of attack or detention.

Book today with us. Leave travellers cheques or credit card details with the washroom attendant, Victoria station between the hours of 8 p.m. and midnight and we’ll mail you your tickets, transfers, insurance and accommodation stubs.

Be sure to have left an adequate will with loved ones before

[burma] and the forgotten monks

Any one remember them? Have you thought where they might be at the moment - the monks who protested?

[wordless wednesday] captions please

They're chefs, by the way.

[austerity] and the right balance

In a long forgotten post, I might have mentioned a boarding house master who lived what looked like an austere existence and I can remember thinking at the time that it was a miserable existence.

It wasn’t though; he wasn’t miserable. Let me describe it.

He was in a small room of maybe eight feet by ten, with one cell like window which was so placed that it caught the morning sun. On the wooden slatted floor was one good quality rug and in one corner near the window, a comfortable chair.

In the diagonally opposite corner was his writing table. Underneath that table was one shallow drawer and in that drawer were his securities which he one day showed me, for some reason. They came to a substantial amount.

Outside the room, under the stairs, was a cupboard and in this cupboard was his fold-up bed and a railing with his few clothes hanging from it.

His meals were taken in the school dining room.

He was a creature of habit and did his boarding house duties, went for his walks, retired to do his correspondence then went to bed.

Every second weekend he went to an Ibis hotel in a nearby village and explored the markets there, to what purpose, I have no idea, as there was nothing to show for it in his room.

Yes, you say but where were his pleasures, where was the nooky? Well, I can’t comment on that. In these austere days of mine, it’s not hard to admire him for having an existence he was obviously happy in.

Some people have four televisions, the same number of computers, all manner of clothing and bits and bobs in the hall cupboard and dotted all over the place. Are they used? Are they necessary? Then why were they bought?

In the kitchen here is no fridge and I’m not sure I want one now. The powdered milk has turned out fine, there are all manner of grains and fresh vegetables, in small quantities, to cook up. The meat and rolls can be bought daily.

When they’re finished, I bicycle up to get more. I’m either going to have to buy this ten speed bike or pay my friend rental soon. I was going to get a car but now I’m not so sure. A moped was going for a reasonable price the other day and that at least gets you into a nearby town, which the bike doesn’t.

Back in the kitchen, there are two small ‘hanging’ cupboards and under bench space for other things. I was looking at the white, four of everything crockery and thinking I really wouldn’t want any more than that – it would just clutter up the place.

What has possibly been passing through some of your minds is that that may be all well and good but what if there was a family? Well yes, that alters the whole thing.

What has possibly been passing through some of your minds is that this is a selfish, misanthropic existence. Guilty, I’m afraid. An austere existence like this would drive you out of your tree after a while but there are some good principles in it though:

1. Have, as I think Oscar Wilde said, only that in your house which is either beautiful or useful plus a Macintosh laptop. I’d add that it should have been useful within the past month.

2. Marshall your total resources and income, thrash out, over a coffee, how it is to be apportioned, percentage wise, stick to it and never borrow against your assets, except in a maximum three month period.

3. Tailor your lifestyle round your means, not your aspirations. As your means improve, so does your lifestyle gradually expand.

[just for interest] is it getting warm

[mystic quiz] know your stonehenge

Supply the number in each case:

1. ___ upright stones or sarsens.

2. Each sarsen is over ___ feet tall and weighs ___ tons.

3. There are ___ lintels weighing ___ tons each.

4. The ___-year cycle of eclipses can be found by decoding Stonehenge.

5. Giraldus Cambrensis was a historian of the ___th century, who wrote a book titled The History and Topography of Ireland and ascribed the engineering of Stonehenge to Merlin.

Answers

30, 10, 26, 30, 6, 56, 12

Further reading at World-Mysteries.com

[dark energy] and the complexity of space

In 2001, Ray Villard, of spacedotcom, wrote of:

A strange repulsive force of "dark energy" pervad[ing] every nook and cranny of the universe, push[ing] against the master force of gravity.While gravity gently binds planets, stars and galaxies together, dark energy tugs on the fabric of time and space, pushing galaxies apart ever faster and faster into the farthest reaches of the universe.

The Hubble Deep Field image containing the farthest supernova suggested that that a decelerating universe holds galaxies relatively close together and objects in them would have appeared brighter because they would be closer.

The comment I liked the most about this was:

"This starts to look incredibly ugly and complicated," says Mario Livio of the Space Telescope Science Institute. "I even wonder if we are we asking right questions."

Or this one:

"Dark energy is something we have no clue as to what is causing it, and it doesn't fit into current physics theories, and they have to develop new approaches to explain it," said Perlmutter, an astrophysicist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. "That's exciting. It's rare that we get to do this."

Yep, when you don’t have a clue what you’re talking about, you can wax lyrical, like Morris Aizenman, a senior science associate with the National Science Foundation, who was so moved by the finding that he likened it to a Keats poem about Cortez' first sighting of the Pacific Ocean.

So is the universe accelerating or decelerating? Who knows? Supernovae observations published in 1998 suggested space is expanding faster today than long ago. And is the universe three-dimensional or is it flat? The simple answer is that scientists don’t know.

It’s not scientists who appear to be the arrogant ones. It is mankind who places science on a pedestal and wilfully misunderstands what it is about. Science is seeking answers, it is not G-d.

So in the knowledge that we don’t really know anything, except on the plane we currently perceive from, who would be so arrogantly blinkered as to suggest that there might just be a great cosmic force we can refer to under the moniker “G-d”?

Who knows, there might be such a power after all.

[to where] add your caption

[snow] and the ebbing of dull care

Did you have the snow? It might sound a stupid question but with no daily news input here, I can only assume you did.

What is it about snow that makes it almost as important as the touch of a woman or sailing a boat, skiing down a mountain or walking through the forest? When it’s with you, it’s so soothing, so restful, so fulfilling and dull care fades away, in a fairytale landscape.

Also, like a good woman, snow can inspire you to heights, stir the creative urge and lead you to achieve great things.

So the theory goes.

[cunning plan] and winnie the pooh

Winnie the Pooh, whom I resemble in many ways, spoke of his “cunning plan” and why should I be any different?

At this moment, a BT line and therefore an internet connection, are four weeks down the track. For now, the alternative is to use the library in a nearby town [not the best but better than nothing] and occasionally to ride a few kilometres across to where my friend lives [laptop in my backpack and cricked back allowing] to check emails, check post comments, post articles and to visit.

One thing this enforced austerity teaches you is the principle of delayed gratification, a principle I should have thought was an admirable one in this era of envy and avarice and these days of contraction of the household budget.

To those who care and with apologies to a different Winnie, this is not the end nor even the beginning of the end [hand crosses to his heart]:

“It is a mistake to try to look too far ahead. The chain of destiny can only be grasped one link at a time. Courage is going from failure to failure without losing enthusiasm. Remember, courage is rightly esteemed the first of human qualities, because it is the quality that guarantees all others.

We will fight this pernicious enemy, this economic depression, on the beaches, on the landing fields …”

[won’t get fooled again] or will we

The essential difference between the last world war and the one they’re currently leading us into is the consciousness of the people.

People largely accepted that WW2 was Hitler’s doing and that we were the innocent, in grave danger of being overrun by the murderous savages. Therefore we were willing to sign on and throw ourselves in the path of crossfire for G-d, Queen [King - thanks, dearieme] and country.

At the other end of the spectrum, the communists were steadfastly trotting out Marx’s impossible theorem, with its clandestine underlying agenda of the same enslavement that Hitler was hell bent on. Class war was convenient because it promoted, in one fell swoop:

1. the politics of envy;
2. diminution of the family in favour of the state;
3. removal of incentive and initiative;
4. creation of the preconditions for enslavement.

So it didn’t matter which way it happened, on either side of politics – the common man was for the chop. He’d been nicely set up.

IG Farben is a good example of how the people behind the governments they influence have no morality or patriotism whatsoever:

In 1930, Standard Oil announced that it had purchased an alcohol monopoly in Germany, a deal which had been set up by I.G. Farben. After Hitler came to power, John D. Rockefeller assigned his personal press agent, Ivy Lee, to Hitler to serve as a full- time adviser on the rearmament of Germany, a necessary step for setting up World War II.

Standard Oil then built large refineries in Germany for the Nazis and continued to supply them with oil during World War II. In the 1930s Standard Oil was receiving in payment from Germany large shipments of musical instruments and ships which had been built in German yards. I.G. officials, seeing the handwriting on the wall, began a close association with Adolf Hitler, supplying much needed funds and political influence.

The success of the I.G. Farben cartel had aroused the interest of other industrialists. Henry Ford was favorably impressed and set up a German branch of Ford Motor Company. Forty per cent of the stock was purchased by I.G. Farben. I.G. Farben then established an American subsidiary, called American I.G., in cooperation with Standard Oil of New Jersey. Its directors included Walter Teagle, president of Standard Oil, Paul Warburg of Kuhn Loeb & Company and Edsel Ford, representing the Ford interests.

John Foster Dulles, for the law firm, Sullivan and Cromwell, became the attorney for I.G., frequently traveling between New York and Berlin on cartel business. His law partner, Arthur Dean, is now director of the $40 million Teagle Foundation which was set up before Teagle's death.

Business is business but mothers’ sons lying in blood and mud for no good reason is another question. There is no justification for war whatsoever except to enrich the military industrial cartels. To say it’s to protect freedom is so disingenuous as to be labelled evil.

There are ample tools through trade and diplomacy to offset any war – I’ve seen this at first hand – and the only reason a dictator remains in power and devastates a country is because of the collusion of outside elements for whom it is politically expedient.

The internet is a great medium for exposing and detailing the criminality of those who purportedly ‘lead’ us. Prior to WW2, there were no doubt people who had tumbled to the truth but of course, they had no outlet for expression. Now we have that but has the populace as a whole, woken up? Have they hell.

The average householder today is preoccupied with holding on to his mortgage and his job, trying to come to terms with his credit debt and putting the right refuse in the right bins, before paying homage, at the palaces of shopping, to the new god Consumerism.

Is he going to refuse to go off and fight those naughty terrorist infidels which the MSM insists are hell bent on reducing us to a condition of religious enslavement and slit throats? If he’s told that it is patriotic to be dictated to by the ruthless shells above and women are sent with white feathers to harangue any who won’t swallow this pap, he’ll meekly fall in line, won’t he?

The greatest crime of the soulless elite is that it takes a truth, e.g. that there is climate change and Gorizes it into an untruth or else it takes universal human weaknesses – ambition, lust for power and sex, envy, pride and the desire to be loved and find inner peace – then perverts and bastardizes them into a twisted parody, in a spirit of deep cynicism and sound business principles.

An example is the ‘poverty industry’:

The Rockefeller Foundation created a number of spin-off groups, which now plague the nation with a host of ills, one of them being the Social Science Research Council, which single-handedly spawned the nationwide “poverty industry,” a business which expends some $130 billion a year of taxpayer funds while grossing some $6 billion income for its practitioners.

The money, which would amply feed and house all of the nation's “poor,” is dissipated through a vast administrative network which awards generous concessions to a host of parasitic “consultants”.

Anything these people touch turns to dirt and human misery is exploited for its possibilities of revenue. Ditto your government.

Now, will “the people” wake up to this before the next war arrives, using the internet to discover what is really going down? What percentage, even with this wonderful tool, are ever going to wake up?

[copyright] and the nastiness of litigation

An issue has arisen which needs to be raised with fellow bloggers.

At Bloghounds, we don't have copyright problems at this time but we might have if we don't act now. What has brought all this on is that a friend's friend has been sent a demand for thousands of pounds because she used an image some time ago which is now owned by someone else.

The implications for both my personal blog here and for many of your blogs are clear. My blog, nourishing obscurity, is a heavily image-intensive blog, as everyone knows and I have tried to use images from either Wiki or where I reasonably thought, from checks, that they were able to be used legally at that time. Sometimes I've had to do deeper checks.

Now the thing which should worry you here is not that many images are copyright and that there are implications for then using them without paying royalties - everyone knows that. The thing you should worry about is, for example, if you have an image up on, say, a post on California from 2006. At the time, that image was able to be used but now another company has bought it and are able to send you a letter that you have been using a copyright image.

Even if you immediately remove said image, their angle is that you have used it in the past.

That this is going on is just plain wrong - I mean, not letting you have a reasonable time to remove it stems largely from our current financial climate when people's incomes are under threat and the more unscrupulous are looking around for ways to produce new revenue.

What a society we're living in.