Joe The Dough

One of the things we said we were going to do a few months back was actually use the office as an office - i.e. Actually work in the fucker. With my new job I’ve taken some steps to actually making this happen - but to do it properly will require some plumbing jobs from an IT perspective. If I make this list public, it stands a good chance of actually being something I get round to doing. I’m not married to any particular company, brand or action so if you have any better ideas or experiences to share, I’d *really* be interested in hearing them.

1) Bite the bullet and spring for BT to come and put a landline back into the house. Hopefully they’ll do it for free.

2) Get Zen Internet to swoop in and give me some form of obscenely powerful pipe with a static IP

3) Get myself setup with some form of cloud storage so I can sync music and files across locations. Ideally G-Drive - so hurry the fuck up and launch it, Google.

4) Reformat cranky old 300gig warhorse hard drive and use it as a physically present backup drive probably using Time Machine or something automagic. I will rename this drive “Failsworth” as it will be a failover and this is howlingly amusing.*

5) Think about finally and forever throwing away the 5 year old, 1.8 MHz Pentium 3 Shuttle PC that currently powers the office UNLESS networking it and using it as some kind of central music repository turns out to be easier than it sounds.

*All drives and computers in the Saunders household are named after Manchester boroughs - except my new one which is currently named “Serious Callers Only” after one of the ships in Excession.** I may have to change this as I hate inconsistency almost as much as I love a good naming convention.

** Many have expressed surprise at how dorky this is. My reply? Go boil your head.

The footage in the second video above was only uncovered a few days ago - the guy who filmed it donated it to the Space Exploration Archive shortly before his death - and they themselves have released it in the run up to the anniversary of the disaster.

I know its kind of macabre, but I’m fascinated by the two videos considered together.

One is horrifying because of its detached professionalism; that long, awful silence after “Go with throttle up” that leads to the almost comically procedural “”Flight controllers here looking very carefully at the situation.” I think its the helpless inevitability of it; we do this thing, we do that thing, we do another thing - a thing we’ve done a thousand times before - and then, from nowhere and for no reason, disaster.

The other video’s folksy dismay horrifies me equally though. ”That’s trouble of some kind, George.” he says, all Bedford Falls about it; unaware that history is happening around him.

This just happens to have been on my mind recently - and there’s an unpleasant aspect of voyeurism to all of it, so to make up for it, I thought I’d draw your attention to the speech that Ronald Reagan made in the aftermath of the disaster that is possibly unfamiliar to most of us here in the UK. It’s a great example of a beautifully and sensitively written piece of oratory from a man not remember (by history, at least), for that kind of thing.

The speech brilliantly references a beautiful but still relatively obscure poem, High Flight by John Gillespie Magee Jr. which I’ve reproduced below. The last line, for my money, still has the stopping power of a punch to the solar plexus.

Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth

And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;

Sunward I’ve climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth

Of sun-split clouds, — and done a hundred things

You have not dreamed of — wheeled and soared and swung

High in the sunlit silence. Hov’ring there,

I’ve chased the shouting wind along, and flung

My eager craft through footless halls of air… .

Up, up the long, delirious burning blue

I’ve topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace

Where never lark, or ever eagle flew —

And, while with silent, lifting mind I’ve trod

The high untrespassed sanctity of space,

Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.

James Ward recently wrote a blog post about tracking down the owner of a secondhand book in his possession. Its excellent, and worth giving your full attention. But the reason I mention it is that he quotes from Helene Hanff’s 84 Charing Cross Road - which is the book we bought my sister and her husband as a wedding present, and is the starting point of the following semi-literate wankery. The quote goes:

“I wish you hadn’t been so over-courteous about putting the inscription on a card instead of on the flyleaf. It’s the bookseller coming out in you all, you were afraid you’d decrease its value. You would have increased it for the present owner. (And possibly for the future owner. I love inscriptions on flyleaves and notes in margins, I like the comradely sense of turning pages someone else turned, and reading passages some one long gone has called my attention to.)”

And the reason I mention that is that only moments before I read James’ post, I was thinking about Emma C, my first proper girlfriend, and an inveterate margin-note-maker. Like Wooster’s Honoria Glossop, she was trying - I felt at the time - to mould me into something a little less like the adolescent mouth-breathing masturbator I was, and a little more like the rakish and sophisticated polymath that I could have been. (She was a whole school year my senior, and a rakish and sophisticated polymath to boot - which made me *very* happy, though presumably I was something of a worry to her.)

So she’d lend me books, and the books were all very improving and I suffered through all of them. But the remarkable thing is that they’d all have little hand written annotations and comments highlighting significant passages or bits that resonated with what we were doing at the time. Appallingly, horrifyingly, at the time, I hated this tendency of hers; A) Because I interpreted it as a form of passive-aggressive intellectual bullying and B) because she had the most amazing tits I’d ever seen and sitting around reading seemed to be the acme of wasted time.

Reminiscing on this (my wife has been in Shropshire all weekend and I have had nothing better to think about,) I wandered over to the old bookcase and pulled down the copy of Graham Greene’s Monsignor Quixote she gave me. (A book that, despite what I’ve written above, I loved on first reading and continue to love.)

What I’d interpreted as an invasion of my intellectual space; an attempt to drag me to a level of respectability that I was falling all too short of, I now realise was her way of making it seem like we were reading the book together. Akin to the gentle elbow in the cinema I’d give a friend if we were watching Ghostbusters and the bit where Bill Murray collects the mucus was coming up. “This”, she’s saying, “is awesome, and I’m glad that you’re here with me to enjoy it.”

The realisation of this made me feel first guilty, for what kind of person is so selfish as to not appreciate something like that, then it made me glad that at least after 18 years or so I finally got it. (Yes, another blog post wherein I realise I am a schmuck. Deal with it.)

Emma is now as lost to me as its possible to be in the digital world: Our relationship was short and pre-email, she married, I don’t know her second name and I’m no longer in touch with anyone who even knows her. (Except, I think, her younger sister who its possible will see this and pass on my sincerest of regards.)

On first deciding to write this blog, I’d intended just to quote the passage I liked and not tell the above story. Then reading James’ post made me think again. Now having completed it, I’m actually not going to quote it at all, just give you the photo and tell you its on page 49 of the Penguin edition. Truth be told, I can’t tell you why she liked it - or thought that I would - but that’s not the point.

The point, I guess, is that we should all be so lucky to have girlfriends with amazing tits who think enough of you that they’d annotate books just for you. Thanks Emma!

The following is extracted from Chapter Seven of Jeremy Paxman’s (really rather splendid) book “The English”

In 1835, a young Englishman named Alexander Kinglake decided to mature himself between leaving Cambridge and taking up a law career by travelling across the Syrian desert on a camel. He was making for Cairo, accompanied by ‘a brace of pistols and a couple of arab servants’. After several days’ travelling there emerged from the desert three other camels, coming towards him. As they drew nearer it became clear that two of the camels carried riders, while the third was laden with baggage. Nearer still, and he could see that one of the riders wore an English shooting j acket and had a European face. The closer they drew, the more agitated Kinglake became:

As we approached each other, it became with me a question whether we should speak. I thought it likely that the stranger would accost me, and in the event of his doing so, I was quite ready to be as sociable and chatty as I could according to my nature; but still I could not think of anything particular that I had to say to him … I felt no great wish to stop and talk like a morning visitor in the midst of those broad solitudes.

Luckily for Kinglake the man on the other camel was also English, an army officer making his way back to England overland from India. As, at last, the strangers met in the middle of nowhere, ‘we lifted our hands to our caps, and waved our arms in courtesy, we passed each other quite as distantly as if we had passed in Pall Mall’. Not a word was said..

In the end, the inhibitions of England were defeated by the camels of Arabia, which, having passed each other, refused to go any further. The two men turned around and walked their mounts back towards one another.

He was the first to speak; too courteous to address me, as if he admitted the possibility of my wishing to accost him from any feeling of mere sociability or civilian-like love of vain talk, he at once attributed my advances to a laudable wish of acquiring statistical information, and accordingly, when we got within speaking distance, he said, ‘I dare say you wish to know how the Plague is going on at Cairo?’

This has floored me. As I said on Metafilter: The guy crying at 2:33? I know why he’s crying. Its because a part of him has been walking around for his whole life wishing that something as beautiful as this would happen.

I choose to believe you.

OK Go - This Too Shall Pass from OK Go on Vimeo.

citationneeded:

It was nicknamed the “tiddler” on account of its size, and soon became Britain’s least loved coin.^[2]The Treasury had continued to argue that the half penny was important in the fight against inflation (preventing prices from being rounded up),^[2] but by the early 1980s it was practically worthless and its main utility was as a driver of small screws.^{[citation needed]}

Link

(BTW [Citation Needed] is my new favourite blog)

Over on Metafilter, a few people are pointing out their favourite unregarded comments of the year - those comments that people found moved, entertained or touched them without attracting tons of attention.

Amongst all these, user patricio mentioned this comment by KMZ that quotes a piece by E.M Forster in full - mentioning that its hard to find online in its completeness. I liked it a lot, and so am reproducing it here as a kind of a benevolent Stresiand Effect.

OUR GRAVES IN GALLIPOLI

E. M. Forster (1922)

Scene: the summit of Achi Baba, an exposed spot, looking out across the Dardanelles towards Asia and the East. In a crevice between the rocks lie two graves covered by a single heap of stones. No monument marks them, for they escaped notice during the official survey, and the heap of stones has blended into the desolate and austere outline of the hill. The peninsula is turning towards the sun, and as the rays strike Achi Baba the graves begin to speak.

FIRST GRAVE: We are important again upon earth. Each morning men mention us. 
SECOND GRAVE: Yes, after seven years’ silence. 
FIRST GRAVE: Every day some eminent public man now refers to the “sanctity of our graves in Gallipoli.” 
SECOND GRAVE: Why do the eminent men speak of “our” graves, as if they were themselves dead? It is we, not they, who lie on Achi Baba. 
FIRST GRAVE: They say “our” out of geniality and in order to touch the great heart of our nation more quickly. Punch, the great-hearted jester, showed a picture lately in which the Prime Minister of England, Lloyd George, fertile in counsels, is urged to go to war to protect “the sanctity of our graves in Gallipoli.” The elderly artist who designed that picture is not dead and does not mean to die. He hopes to illustrate this war as he did the last, for a sufficient salary. Nevertheless he writes “our” graves, as if he was inside one, and all persons of position now say the same. 
SECOND GRAVE: If they go to war, there will be more graves. 
FIRST GRAVE: That is what they desire. That is what Lloyd George, prudent in counsels, and lion-hearted Churchill, intend. 
SECOND GRAVE: But where will they dig them? 
FIRST GRAVE: There is still room over in Chanak. Also, it is well for a nation that would be great to scatter its graves all over the world. Graves in Ireland, graves in Irak, Russia, Persia, India, each with its inscription from the Bible or Rupert Brooke. When England thinks fit, she can launch an expedition to protect the sanctity of her graves, and can follow that by another expedition to protect the sanctity of the additional graves. That is what Lloyd George, prudent in counsels, and lion-hearted Churchill, have planned. Churchill planned this expedition to Gallipoli, where I was killed. He planned the expedition to Antwerp, where my brother was killed. Then he said that Labour is not fit to govern. Rolling his eyes for fresh worlds, he saw Egypt, and fearing that peace might be established there, he intervened and prevented it. Whatever he undertakes is a success. He is Churchill the Fortunate, ever in office, and clouds of dead heroes attend him. Nothing for schools, nothing for houses, nothing for the life of the body, nothing for the spirit. England cannot spare a penny for anything except her heroes’ graves. 
SECOND GRAVE: Is she really putting herself to so much expense on our account? 
FIRST GRAVE: For us, and for the Freedom of the Straits. That water flowing below us now —- it must be thoroughly free. What freedom is, great men are uncertain, but all agree that the water must be free for all nations; if in peace, then for all nations in peace; if in war, then for all nations in war. 
SECOND GRAVE: So all nations now support England. 
FIRST GRAVE: It is almost inexplicable. England stands alone. Of the dozens of nations into which the globe is divided, not a single one follows her banner, and even her own colonies hang back. 
SECOND GRAVE: Yes… inexplicable. Perhaps she fights for some other reason. 
FIRST GRAVE: Ah, the true reason of a war is never known until all who have fought in it are dead. In a hundred years’ time we shall be told. Meanwhile seek not to inquire. There are rumours that rich men desire to be richer, but we cannot know. 
SECOND GRAVE: If rich men desire more riches, let them fight. It is reasonable to fight for our desires. 
FIRST GRAVE: But they cannot fight. They must not fight. There are too few of them. They would be killed. If a rich man went into the interior of Asia and tried to take more gold or more oil, he might be seriously injured at once. He must persuade poor men, who are numerous, to go there for him. And perhaps this is what Lloyd George, fertile in counsels, has decreed. He has tried to enter Asia by means of the Greeks. It was the Greeks who, seven years ago, failed to join England after they had promised to do so, and our graves in Gallipoli are the result of this. But Churchill the Fortunate, ever in office, ever magnanimous, bore the Greeks no grudge, and he and Lloyd George persuaded their young men to enter Asia. They have mostly been killed there, so English young men must be persuaded instead. A phrase must be thought of, and “the Gallipoli graves” is the handiest. The clergy must wave their Bibles, the old men their newspapers, the old women their knitting, the unmarried girls must wave white feathers, and all must shout, “Gallipoli graves, Gallipoli graves, Gallipoli, Gally Polly, Gally Polly,” until the young men are ashamed and think, What sound can that be but my country’s call? and Chanak receives them. 
SECOND GRAVE: Chanak is to sanctify Gallipoli. 
FIRST GRAVE: It will make our heap of stones for ever England, apparently. 
SECOND GRAVE: It can scarcely do that to my portion of it. I was a Turk. 
FIRST GRAVE: What! A Turk! You a Turk? And I have lain beside you for seven years and never known! 
SECOND GRAVE: How should you have known? What is there to know except that I am your brother? 
FIRST GRAVE: I am yours… 
SECOND GRAVE: All is dead except that . All graves are one. It is their unity that sanctifies them, and some day even the living will learn this. 
FIRST GRAVE: Ah, but why can they not learn it while they are still alive? 
His comrade cannot answer this question. Achi Baba passes beneath the sun, and so long as there is light, warlike preparations can be seen on the opposite coast. Presently all objects enter into their own shadows, and through the general veil thus formed the stars become apparent.

…a film is so bad that you have to slowly and tediously (and hilariously!) take it apart and go through the whole thing in minute (and hilarious!) detail.

(via MeFi)