Zombie Pirate Ninja Monkey

Adventure Breeds Adventure

If you learn languages, it is easier to learn more languages.  In fact, if you learn, it is easier to learn.  People who become comfortable with what they know, with their surroundings, with their ritual de lo habitual find themselves in a self-reinforcing cycle of stultification and suffocation that I have feared for decades.

Anyway, the relevant, specific element that just struck me is to do with music.  Not that long ago, I was terribly depressed at the thought that I might have heard all the songs I would ever truly love.  Laughable, I know, but I had an iPod with thousands of tracks, and had spent dozens of hours finding tracks I knew I wanted.  I seemed to possess an unimaginably large number of songs - far more than even in my 12" single-collecting days.  And add to this that my friends all had their comfortable tastes and favourite genres, outside which they rarely stepped.  Even the ostensibly adventurous ones did their exploring within lands that were distinctly of the past.

Now this sounds corny, but it took the death of John Peel to change that.  There, I thought, was a man who didn't remain still or compromise.  And I started buying albums by bands I'd never heard.  I listened to more XFM and watched more of MTV2's 120 Minutes Taster.  I tried out random playlists on yahoo messenger, and recommendations on services I bought music from.

And oh, but it worked.  I think the last time that I was this into music, this experimental... the last time that I was this open to new listening experiences, to musical adventure was probably when I was 17 or 18, when I learned the first tranche of bands that influenced me (The Smiths, The Cure, The Sisters of Mercy, The Fields of the Nephilim, Public Enemy and so on).

The Boards of Canada have given me Dayvan Cowboy: a beautiful piece of psychedelic trippiness that provokes a real, emotional response in me.  French-Canadians Buck 65 offer Devil's Eyes, a mixture of hip-hop, jazz and rock.  Sigur Ros give me the haunting, driving Glosoli.  And the whole of Takk... if it comes to that.  I could go on and on: The Secret Machines, Be Your Own Pet, Thrice, Panic! At The Disco, Serena Maneesh, White Rose Movement, The Futureheads, The Young Knives, Arcade Fire, The Killers, Colder, Plan B, Felix da Housecat, Hot Chip, The Ataris, Hoobastank...

This week the Raconteurs released their first album.  Next week it is Tom Delonge's new band, Angels and Airwaves.  I have the first already and I really cannot wait until the second.  I am excited as once I was for Strangeways.

Even in this small, safe way, by choosing the riskier option, by trying something new, my life has become measurably better.

But I still hate Coldplay.  May I never change in that.  If I do, tears of bubbling pitch will stream down my face, and my dark work will begin.  I will open one of my six mouths and sing the song that ends the Earth.

Ouch

I had to write a couple of pages longhand yesterday, without the help of a word processor.  Well, I didn't have to, but Times New Roman seemed overly impersonal for the rather tricky subject material.  It struck me very soon that I don't do this writing thing very often any more.  Like, as in pen and paper.  My hand was in cramp by the end of two sides.  My writing was illegible from years of desuetude.  It was, realistically, impossible to correct the bits I was unhappy with without starting from scratch: something I particularly disliked as, when I write, it is a cycle of corrections and iterations that can be seen on this site if you catch posts early in their life.  Such was my real, physical discomfort that I realised, after sealing the envelope, that I had numbered a sequence of four "points" 1, 2, 3, 5.  I have reason to believe that the recipient will call it part of a fibonacci series.  Then I even sent it to the wrong address.  Like, a completely different streetname.

It doesn't help that I have previously broken the fourth and fifth metacarpals (not to be confused with the terribly fashionable metatarsals in my foot, though I've done one of them, too) on my right hand a couple of times, on both occasions throwing incompetent punches in rugby games.

I think I should give up on handwriting things now.  I maintain real, ongoing correspondences on a more-or-less regular basis with about a dozen people, of whom only one really appreciates paper as opposed to email.  Even she prefers printed rather than handwritten.  Even I like sending emails best because of the immediacy of pressing "Send" as opposed to getting a stamp, stealing an envelope from work and then finding a postbox (if I procrastinate a day I will do so for a month).  And if you get emails from me (and a great many people do, on one occasion or another), here is a little thing you might not have known: I like emails because I can bcc myself on everything I send.  I have a complete copy of my correspondence, scattered across half a dozen hard drives and in a couple of large boxes, since about 1990.

Anyway, my writing was always horrible, and I switched to an all-capitals style at eighteen just so that people had a chance of reading it (my father, who stuck with cursive script, has writing that would stun a doctor into awed reverence of its degeneracy.  Horrible stuff that looks like an oscilloscope of a particularly faint heartbeat.  I always pitied his secretaries).  Anything more than 1000 words and I think I might well prove incapable of continuing.  If I keep studying for this third degree, I am bound to run into an exam sooner or later, and that is going to hurt.

Interview From Hell

I love this one: a story on the BBC's own website about Mr Guy Goma, who turned up at the BBC for a job interview for a data cleansing position and was asked, in reception, if he was Guy Kewney (Kewney being nigh unto a bearded god to me since I first read his Personal Computer World news pages in about 1982 or 1983).  On saying that he was, he was shown to his interview.  Which, unfortunately, was not the one for the job, but was a live interview on the BBC News 24 channel on the Apple Computers vs Apple Music legal case.

Apparently Mr Goma was confused as to the interviewer's line of questioning.  At least he didn't lie about working for both companies and then criticise his previous employer, which is how most job interviews go.

The link above has a video of the (mercifully short) interview.