Haydninvienna (Richard) reads at home with Mrs HaydninVienna

In view of certain recent events about which I have posted elsewhere in the GD, I thought I'd open with some appropriate music, written and played by one of the great musicians of our time:"Going Home" from the soundtrack of the film Local Hero. (I am completely serious about Mark Knopfler as a great musician. Douglas Adams says somewhere that MK can make a Fender Strat sound like a band of angels on a Saturday night whooping it up over a stiff beer after being good all week. I completely agree.)
Here's another performance of the same song, which also has another legendary musician, Hank B Marvin, on it.

My late second wife told me once that she would have this song played at my funeral. These days I might prefer "How Lovely is thy Dwelling Place" from Brahms' German Requiem, but it would be close. Time to find another real concert performance of the Requiem, I think.

I was kind of tempted to bid on some of these these, but nah:

The other day haydninvienna sent me a PM mentioning Amarula liqueur. As my response may interest several of us in the pub, it seemed to me sensible to put said response here.

The Amarula blurb would have you believe that the fruits are collected in the wild by elephants, and sure enough they have a factory in Phalaborwa, only a few km from the boundary of the Kruger Park. But no human could expect to employ wild elephants in the Kruger to collect and hand over their favourite fruits, and survive. So the marulas for Amarula are collected by little old ladies and others in the wild on farms near Phalaborwa. It is technically possible but apparently not economically viable to farm the trees and breed ones with bigger, juicier fruit (the latter was done decades ago, but the trees failed to sell). The factory in Phalaborwa extracts the juice and possibly also roasts the nuts (the kernels are protected by nature's finest fireproof armourplate, which makes them hell to extract and so very expensive). They then pump the juice into tankers and truck it to the Distell winery in Stellenbosch, over 1800 km away, where it is fermented and fortified with raw (brandy) spirit. They then truck it back to Phalaborwa for bottling -- not sure where the cream is added; there are dairy farms at both ends of the journey. Outside Covid lockdown, one can visit the Amarula Lapa at Phalaborwa. The "guided tour" consists of a video, as the action takes place at the other end of the country, but they have/had a shop and quite a decent restaurant specialising in Amarula-themed dishes. Including, believe it or not, good hamburgers with Amarula cream sauce and Amarula milkshakes.

This system works, as marulas start ripening in November, but Stellenbosch grapes really only start in February.

Many of us have a tradition that a bottle of Amarula is an essential part of a visit to the Kruger Park, especially if camping in winter. In our family we have never had the problem of the contents of the bottle going off after return from Kruger -- the lifespan is a good couple of months. But in Richard's circumstances I'd be inclined to save the bottle for homecoming celebrations.

Edited to correct a careless spelling error

>3 hfglen: Thanks for that, Hugh. Interesting about the stuff's lifespan once opened. Maybe we will get to drink all of it

Hugh told me about amarula when I visited in Durban last year, but time didn't permit me to look for a bottle (which I would have had to pack to Australia anyway, and couldn't then have brought back here). I had assumed that at 17% ABV, it wasn't alcoholic enough to keep once opened.

The message I sent to Hugh was this:

Just thought you might like to know that my mate and I finally got to the government grog shop this afternoon. They had Amarula and of course I bought a bottle. But now I see it's only 17% ABV, which means I'll have to drink it quickly and there's only me. Tasting might have to (sic) get back to England so I can at least share it with my wife.

PS to the above. Richard, I hope you got Amarula Cream and not Amarula Gold, the non-dairy version. The cream version is smooth, sweet and delicious. The other is golden in colour, sure enough, but IMHO is rough and harsh, with distinct overtones of paint stripper.

>4 haydninvienna: I wish you both joy of your recent purchase.

Given the titles of this thread, I feel bound to ask: are the reading tastes of Mrs Haydninvienna compatible with yours?

Knopfler is a god.

That is all.

>1 haydninvienna: Thank you for that video. I was unfamiliar with that song.

>7 Bookmarque: No argument here.

>6 -pilgrim-: Occasionally yes, but only occasionally. She tends to read thrillers, although she read and enjoyed The Life of Pi and a couple of Murakamis. “Reads with” perhaps ought to be understood as “reads in company with”.

ETA: >5 hfglen:

>8 clamairy: Unfamiliar!?!?? It's the end title from a film called Local Hero, which rather shamefully I've never seen, but I adore the soundtrack, done by Knopfler. (He did the music for The Princess Bride also, and it's inconceivable that you've never seen that one.)

And >7 Bookmarque: obviously no argument here either.

>9 haydninvienna: Phew! the right brew. Unofficially, it is recognised that the yellow cord from the bottle attached to the driver's side wing mirror of a car in the Kruger Park proclaims that at least one passenger is a member of the SANParks forums on the internet.

>9 haydninvienna: But the real question is why a book on social history is stranded in the middle of your Pratchett collection...

>10 haydninvienna: The Princess Bride is one of our family favorites. Nice pun, there. ;o) I never heard of the movie Local Hero.

How about 'reads in proximity to.'

And here's another one, just because I love the song so: before his hometown crowd and obviously having a wonderful time;
and, in relation to another great song, first recorded with another great musician, James Taylor, a little BBC documentary in which MK appears, in the studio, singing bits of the song.

>12 -pilgrim-: Hey, I never said I was logical about it ...

Pick up the CD Screenplaying and you get The Princess Bride score plus the song in post 1 and another movie - Last Exit to Brooklyn, I think. Great stuff.

The little documentary I linked to above refers to the transit of Venus. Transits occur in pairs, 8 years apart. Mason and Dixon were sent to the Cape Colony to observe the transit of 1761. For the next transit, in 1769, the Royal Society and the government sent another expedition to Tahiti, commanded by Lt James Cook (who had recently distinguished himself at the landing at Quebec). His ship was the Endeavour, and after observing the transit at Tahiti the expedition sailed westward, and found the eastern coast of a continent. "So men write poems in Australia".

Fully agree with Bookmarque about Knopfler. His Sailing to Philadelphia is a favorite of mine.

I enjoyed stumbling across Knopfler talking about guitars.

Thanks to majel-susan and her thread on reading Perelandra, I've just re-read The Descent of the Dove by Charles Williams. My goodness, I hadn't realised how bad my reading slump was: I didn't enter a book read for the whole of June. Brief discussion of the book in majel-susan's thread if you're interested.

I've spent my reading time over the past few days reading Miss Snark the Literary Agent's blog. The blog is no longer being updated but is still enlightening and often very funny. This non-writer thinks there is lots of good information in there. Miss Snark mentions a number of times that she loves LibraryThing and a quick search reveals a profile for MissSnark. I have no idea whether it's still active.

And in other news, pictures are showing up of Comet Neowise in the early morning sky. This one stopped me in my tracks. Here's another. Lots more here as well. GDers in the northern hemisphere ned to go out in the early morning and look.

There was some mention recently on mrslee's thread of Thor Heyerdahl. I remember reading Kon-Tiki back when dinosaurs roamed the earth. Last I heard, the scientific community had decided that his theory about ancient South Americans peopling Polynesia was off base. Now this pops up on Science News: South Americans may have traveled to Polynesia 800 years ago. The article gives Heyerdahl a hat-tip.

>21 haydninvienna: I had forgotten about the comet. All I need now is for the clouds that have been with us for the past couple of weeks to disappear.

>22 haydninvienna: I do love it when an out-of-the-box theory turns out to have demonstrable evidence in favour; thank you for that link.

>21 haydninvienna: Those pictures are wonderful.

And yes, I too have enjoyed Miss Snark.

>21 haydninvienna: I am not great at getting out of bed so early, but apparently in a few day NEOWISE will be visible right after sunset. That I can do!

>22 haydninvienna: Thank you for sharing that. I have been wondering how his theories held up because he is such a slap-dash theorist and not afraid at all to give a conclusive and decisive opinion, unlike many of his professional peers. :)

Last night I was reading about the large stone statues he found in the Marquesas Islands, which look remarkably similar to those found in parts of South America, even portraying animals which were nowhere to be found on the islands, like large cats and caiman. He said that although the "experts" who had never actually been to the islands and seen these things, propounded that they were populated from Asia, he had to believe the evidence before his eyes. Go Thor!

>26 clamairy: NEOWISE has apparently appeared in the evening sky: www.spaceweather.com.

After I posted in a couple of places recently about Miss Snark, The Literary Agent, Marissa_Doyle drew my attention to The Evil Editor. Despite Marissa's doubts, the Evil Editor seems to be going still: latest post is dated 6 July 2020 and no sign of retirement. My goodness though, do people really make a living reading the sort of stuff he blogs about? Working at Macdonalds probably doesn't pay as well, but it might well be pleasanter (and I say that knowing something: Son Who Cooks worked at Hungry Jack's, the Australian equivalent of Burger King, and still has at least one friend who is a manager there). Even if the examples he gives are made up rather than real query letters, they must surely be representative of what a literary agent, or a publisher that accepts direct submissions, receives.

Which leads on to the even more chilling reflection: people really write that stuff.

Good Show Sir is a UK-based website that exists to mock bad SFF book covers. I read it daily but don't often post there. A few days back we had an incident of drive-by trolling, and a couple of the GSS regulars have posted comments about it being one of the seemingly few friendly places on the net. The troll is at comment 16—scroll down to comment 28 and read the last few.

>29 haydninvienna: It is good to know we are not the only enclave of civility on the Net. Are you the "Longterm Lurker" spreading the news of the Green Dragon far and wide?

>30 pgmcc: I am indeed "Longtime_Lurker". I think many of the denizens of Good Show Sir would fit right in in the GD.

>31 haydninvienna: I got that impression from their reaction to the troll.

>3 hfglen: We discovered Amarula a couple of years ago after ordering an Amarula creme brulee at a delightful restaurant in Sarasota. My daughter is a fan.

>28 haydninvienna: There's a good reason slush piles at publishing houses have traditionally been foisted onto interns to wade through. It's also why slush piles are mostly no more, as most publishers now only accept book submissions from literary agents. The wading-through of slush piles now gets done by interns at literary agencies.

If you're enjoying Miss Snark and Evil Editor, this essay by Teresa Nielsen Hayden at Tor is a classic: http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/004641.html

>33 Marissa_Doyle: Wow. I knew about the TNH blog, but had never read that specific page. The list of reasons for rejection is kind of horrifying: is she really saying that only (say) 40% of aspirants "can write passable paragraphs"?

I found this comment (by Charles Stross, who should know) interesting:

... why does rejection hurt people? I suspect a big chunk of the reason is to do with the way people think of writing as an expression of identity. If you write and sell books, you are not someone who writes and sells books for your day job, you are a writer. It's an issue of self-identity. People who write think of themselves as being writers; thus, to have their writing rejected is to question an aspect of their identity.

"Writer" is not my identity. I gave up aspiring to be an author in my early teens, and I'm well aware of the huge difference between being able to construct a good sentence and being able to write a half-decent book. I've been a legislative counsel for almost 30 years now, and there is probably more of my prose out there in the world than of many fiction writers, but of course my name isn't on any of it. I can indeed write a good sentence (I think), and probably a passable paragraph, but original ideas? Forget it.

Also the last sentence of comment #43, by PNH. That was more than 15 years ago but I fear he was right.

Incidentally, I note a familiar name popping up from time to time on Evil Editor!

More on the blog post by Teresa Neilsen Hayden that Marissa_Doyle linked to in #33. (There are more than 800 comments on that post!) I found this one (part of #389) enlightening (as in, shining a whole new light on its topic):

Written stories aren't, really; they're instructions for the reader to use to build a story in their head. They have conventions, compression, styles, all sorts of ways to pack extra info into what is fundamentally an extremely low bandwidth medium. Readers have variable unpacking habits and conventions -- exceedingly variable -- and the effort isn't trivial. (Habitual, for them as to such topics of discusion as here we now engage in much inclined, but not precisely easy.)

The thing past competent writing is engagement; is the story in you such that it is determined to get into the words, and out of the words again? Does it really, really matter to you, not that it get published, but that it get into some other head as a real, live, active cause of emotional response? A thing that could be told again in its turn from out that other living mind?

That's a thing -- unlike competence of writing -- an editor can only detect if their head decodes the particular story in that lively way; what works that way for some people does not work that way for others. If it doesn't work that way for you, you can't approach the story on the page with the conviction that there is a story there, and the -- very limited in number, remember, compared to the things available to publish -- publication slot would got to a story about which the editor would lack the ability to do all the difficult, tricky, time-critical, messy things involved in getting a book published so that it has a chance to find its friends with personal conviction.

>34 haydninvienna: The "passable paragraphs" thing I can will believe. I used to belong to a website or two (not simultaneously!) that acted as online writers' groups. You critique other people's writing, they do the same to yours. I've received some very useful feedback that way - including people reading a scene and getting an emotional response completely different to what I had intended. I have also had some very good partnerships and made friends who are excellent at picking up the grammatical slips that familiarity with your own text makes you blind to.

But, apart from the sensitive souls who did not want to hear anything other than how wonderful their piece was, there were two responses to trying to gently correct really tortured prose:
1. (usually from a non-native English speaker, or someone whose education had halted earlier than they could have wished) gratitude that someone with enough formal training was filling to explain what was going wrong, or

2. "Oh, I can't be bothered to waste time in that sort of stuff, once I've sold it, the editor will fix all that. What did you think of my STORY?"

There seems to be a persistent delusion that the author's brilliant concept is all that matters. Once they have gone through the tedious hassle of putting it on paper in some form, actually making it readable is something that should be done by some drudge or another, whilst they get on with imagining their next stupendous idea, which lesser mortals are incapable of conceiving of!

My reaction:. if you can't be bothered to write it; why do you expect me to be bothered to read it?

>36 -pilgrim-: Two responses to point 2 spring to mind:

1. I'm trying not to. (must find brain bleach)
2. That was meant to be a story? I couldn't find one...

>36 -pilgrim-: 2. "Oh, I can't be bothered to waste time in that sort of stuff, once I've sold it, the editor will fix all that. What did you think of my STORY?"

Technicality is the "easy" part, or maybe not easy, but it's the basic requirement--everybody who wants to be good needs to have it. But it's like my sister says, an artist needs to have substance and style to set them apart. I think, though, that if anyone is going to be serious and actually dedicated to their art, whether writing, painting, music, etc., they should be working towards improving both the technical and conceptual aspects of their work. I personally wouldn't want what I had written to be practically re-written by an editor.

>36 -pilgrim-: >37 Maddz: >38 Majel-Susan: As I said above, I write a lot although it's writing of a very specialised kind. Keeping correct grammar, syntax and spelling is as basic for me as being able to cut a straight saw-kerf is for a carpenter. (My dad was a carpenter: it's harder than you think.) People who disdain syntax, grammar and spelling are simply not learning the basic skills of writing, as much as if a pianist couldn't play a scale. There are people who consider themselves composers because they can hum a tune, which an underling then has to score and arrange so that it's playable. I don't try to write fiction because I don't have the capacity to make a story, but if I did you can be damn' sure that I'd be working my butt off getting the technique down pat. And the technique of telling a good story goes well beyond being able to write a decent sentence. Somebody commented in that TNH thread that they had become impatient with Madeleine L'Engle because High Church moralising became very tiresome when not accompanied by C S Lewis's sense of story (at which I thought of you, Majel-Susan).

Weird coincidence—when I typed the bit about "composers who can hum a tune" I had Charlie Chaplin in mind. The suite from his film music has just come on the radio. The comment wasn't quite fair to him though. He couldn't read music but could play several instruments by ear, and was well and truly capable of telling the "real composer" what he wanted and making sure he got it.

>39 haydninvienna: Somebody commented in that TNH thread that they had become impatient with Madeleine L'Engle because High Church moralising became very tiresome when not accompanied by C S Lewis's sense of story

Oh, I do love C.S. Lewis! I haven't read Madeleine L'Engle yet, but I am planning to read A Wrinkle in Time at some point.

hfglen and I had a small debate a while back about the immediate consequences of a giant meteor impact (here). In one of those coincidences, I was watching a YouTube video this afternoon of the Mythbusters Blowing Stuff Up with thermite, and remembered that Hugh had mentioned another episode where they were firing bullets into water, so I found that episode and watched it. Hugh was correct that the high-velocity bullets (even a very powerful 12.7mm sniper-rifle bullet—heaven help us, you can actually buy those things?)—when fired at an angle simply shattered on impact, but there was a part of the episode where they were firing bullets vertically downwards through water into a block of ballistic gel. Two 9mm pistol bullets penetrated several feet of water vertically (and the ballistic gel also). The best bit was firing a 12-gauge shotgun solid slug downwards—it basically destroyed the water tank, either through the shock wave created when the slug hit the water, or by the muzzle blast from the gun.

It's arguable that the solid slug case most closely resembles the "giant meteor impact" referred to in my original post, since the author of the article was considering the impact of an iron meteoroid similar to the one that created the Vredefort Dome. In relation to that sort of impact, a couple of miles of ocean would simply be irrelevant.

The other part of the coincidence was this article, which adds a little more weight to the charge-sheet against the Chixulub impactor.

>41 haydninvienna: I'm confused. That article appears to corroborate the Chixulub impact theory. Am I missing something? It does say that volcanism might have helped warm things up after the impact.

>42 clamairy: I was confused at first too, but what I think they’re saying is that the meteor impact was sufficient to wipe out the dinosaurs on its own. There was a school of thought that argued that the real cause of all the extinctions was the Deccan Traps volcanism rather than the meteor impact.

>43 haydninvienna: Oh, I got ya. I thought you were implying it was the opposite. I'm in the pro-Chixulub camp myself. LOL

>44 clamairy: just went back and looked at the Wikipedia article. Fascinating and horrifying when you think that this has happened to our home planet not just once but many times.

>45 haydninvienna: I know. Chixulub didn't even result the worst of our extinction events. Let's hope we're not headed for another extinction like the Permian.

Having been an awful slacker this month in terms of reading, I thought I'd better pick up a book and actually read it. The Mystery of Edwin Drood once again didn't work so I went looking for a non-fiction book that I hadn't read and wouldn't make me angry (I have quite a few unread that would make me either angry or depressed or both, and I have no wish to be any more of either.) What I found was The Order of Time by Carlo Rovelli, the Italian physicist whose earlier book Seven Brief Lessons on Physics was an unexpected hit a while back.

The Order of Time is, not surprisingly, about time, and what modern cutting-edge physics has to say about it. He starts from the idea that time, as generally understood, does not exist: "It is like holding a snowflake in your hands: gradually, as you study it, it melts between your fingers and vanishes.". By the end of the book, he has recreated Time, but not quite the time that we generally think of. Time, matter and space have ceased to exist, and I thought irreverently that it was a bit like wondering what the meaning of "is" is. Time and space lost their separate existences even for Einstein, and now all of what we think of as "substance" seems to have diminished into quantum fluctuations. I'm probably not expressing it well.

Well written and excellently translated, of course. I'm not going to say I loved it. More that it was a book that changed how I will look at the universe. Books like that don't fit very well on a like--dislike scale.

This article just popped up in my feed from The Lancet. I don't think we can start dancing in the street yet, but there's progress.

>47 haydninvienna: That book sounds fascinating.

(I think many of us own/buy/borrow books that will make us angry. How does one balance the need to stay well informed with the need to stay sane?)

>48 haydninvienna: Yay!

>47 haydninvienna: "It is like holding a snowflake in your hands: gradually, as you study it, it melts between your fingers and vanishes."

Oh, I like the sound of that! Like poetry.

>49 clamairy: What I did was spend the rest of the afternoon listening to Bach on YouTube. Sane, orderly music.

Has anyone here ever read Arthur C Clarke’s novelisation of 2001: A Space Odyssey? After HAL murders the rest of the crew and Bowman disconnects HAL, Bowman still has months to go to Iapetus (not Jupiter, as in the film). For company, he resorts to the ship’s huge library of recorded music, and starts with opera just for the sake of hearing a human voice, but finds that hearing all the superbly trained but bodiless voices only make his loneliness worse; so he switches to instrumental music, and “finally found peace, as so many others had done, in the abstract architecture of Bach, and the ship flew on through the endless night ringing with the cool music of the harpsichord”. I love that image. Clarke was never a great prose stylist but that image has stuck with me for 50-odd years since I first read the novel.

>50 Majel-Susan: Rovelli is Italian, of course, and doesn't seem to think a physicist should avoid poetry. Each chapter has a quotation from Horace's Odes as an epigraph.

The reference to the Lancet comes about because years ago I subscribed to their email newsletters, which are free. There was a specific reason at the time but I can't now remember what it was. I get both The Lancet and The Lancet Global Health. There's just enough interesting (and non-angering!) content to keep me from unsubscribing. I suppose you could say that these, along with Science News and occasionally Science Daily, are my way of staying informed.

>51 haydninvienna: Yes, but it's been years since I read the book.

Checking the soundtrack album I have - 2001 a space odyssey - they didn't seem to use Bach, but a piece by György Ligeti instead.

>51 haydninvienna: I loved that book. When I eventually saw the film I was somewhat disappointed. I am aware they were written in parallel for issuing at the same time.

Reality Is Not What It Seems: The Journey to Quantum Gravity had the same effect on me.

Your comment on time not being real reminded me of the book Calendar: Humanity's Epic Struggle to Determine a True and Accurate Year by Ewing Duncan. This destroyed the concept of time in a non-Pyhsics based way, unlike Rovelli. "Calendar..." gave the history of man trying to record time and put a framework around it. The history left me with the feeling that Time is not real and that the only real time is the cycle of nature that we have to synchronise with to grow crops, etc... The book left me with the firm idea that Time, as we follow in society rather than as physicists, is purely a human construct ant that it is a set of manacles we lock ourselves into.

Speaking of time, I have just finished work and am taking next week as leave and do not have to worry about time for a little while. Yippee! I am free! I am not a number. I am a free man!

>51 haydninvienna: Time well spent, I'd say.

News flash for anyone interested in Wagner with a Saturday to spare: LA Opera is streaming the whole of the Ring cycle on Saturday 25 July, starting with Das Rheingold at 0800 PDT (I think that would be 4pm in London). Details here.

>53 Maddz: I used to have the LP too. I think there's a couple of Ligeti pieces* on it: (quickly checks IMDB): In fact there's 4. Details here. Plus of course the famous use of the Blue Danube waltz.

And that's just this minute come on KUSC! Alan Chapman, are you looking over my shoulder?

ETA* I understand that Kubrick used the Ligeti pieces without obtaining the rights to them, and Ligeti was not pleased when he found out. Wikipedia notes that Kubrick had commissioned a conventional score from the composer Alex North, but didn't use it and didn't tell North. North didn't find out that his score had been dumped till he saw the film premiere.

>55 pgmcc: I agree with you up to a point, Peter, but once we (the human race) started needing to have 2 or more things happen at the same time. keeping track of some sort of calendar was more or less inevitable. I remember reading that the the ancient Egyptians used to track the rising of the stars so as to know when to expect the annual flooding of the Nile. At the end of the first millennium CE, there were better astronomical observatories in China, the Middle East and central America than would be in Europe for another 500 years, and the observatories were basically for tracking the calendar.

But your mention of freedom reminds me that living in the Middle East provides an example of a calendar that doesn't fit life very well. Eid al-Adha happens at roughly the end of next week, and we are entitled to 4 days' leave, but we can't predict exactly when because of the shifting Islamic lunar months. Eid al-Adha starts on the 10th day of the month of Dhu al-Hijjah, which started this year on 22 July, so we can now predict the start of Eid. Mind you, the Governor of the Central Bank has a certain amount of discretion to shift the dates of the leave, which adds another factor of uncertainty.

>47 haydninvienna: I am not sure what is new here. I remember doing 4 dimensional vector mechanics and part of my undergraduate degree course on Special Relativity. It is very beautiful, very counterintuitive - but it has been known for decades. Surely the nature of the space-time continuum constitutes general knowledge these days? (The concept certainly gets abused enough in SF!)

What am I missing? What is Rovelli bringing to the subject?

>60 -pilgrim-: Ha, thought I'd be hearing from you. Please bear in mind 2 things: Rovelli's book is a popular book, not a textbook; and I Am Not A Physicist, although I dabble in the pop-science and flatter myself sometimes that I understand it a bit. It seems to be all about the long-sought synthesis of general relativity and quantum theory. There are at present 2 schools of thought: string theory and loop gravity. Rovelli is part of the loop-gravity school. What I get from the book is that the Einsteinian block universe no longer works at the quantum scale--this is why the synthesis is necessary. What I understand Rovelli to be saying is that even Einsteinian space-time is an emergent property of a vast sea of quantum fluctuations, just as we are, like everything else that we can see, feel or touch.

And just to change the subject with a jerk before I get even deeper in trouble, a while back we had some chat about the Boeing 747. Qantas has just retired its last one. Story here. The header to that press-release, "Last plane out of Sydney's almost gone", is a line from a song, "Khe Sanh", by the Australian rock band Cold Chisel. (Not going to link to it, but if anyone is curious it's not hard to find on YouTube.) It's evocative for Australian men of my generation, who were of conscriptable age dating the Vietnam war.

Before it left for storage, VH-OEJ drew a vast kangaroo in the sky over the sea near Sydney:



Bless you, Echo Juliet. I'll miss you, even though I don't think I ever flew with you.

Incidentally, British Airways, which had has the largest remaining fleet of 747s, has retired them also.

>62 haydninvienna: That kangaroo is totally cool!

First day of the Eid al-Adha holiday, so I get a 6-day weekend. Spent the morning sorting and tossing old papers ready to leave here. After getting bored with that, looked at my email and found one of those regrettable emails from Amazon, and unusually bought something from it: Things to Make and Do in the Fourth Dimension by Matt Parker (on kindle). He takes a bit too long to actually get onto the fourth dimension but there's some fun along the way, with detours into number theory and infinity. Good fun.

>64 haydninvienna: Regrettable or fortuitous?
Enjoy your holiday! Do you have any plans?

It's sad about 747s. Delta retired theirs a couple years ago and so hubby and I took a ride on one before they were all gone - on the top floor. It was so cool. Passengers love those planes, but still the airlines dump them. Now they're just cargo planes in the US.





I love the kangaroo though. Such a great way to end.

>65 clamairy: More of what I did this morning, and with any luck some reading. The Matt Parker book was an unexpected boon. I bought his Humble Pi a while back and enjoyed it greatly.

>66 Bookmarque: Qantas has been flying 747s since 1971, according to Wikipedia. Echo Juliet was one of 6 747-400ERs, an extra long range model of which Qantas was the only operator. As I said last year, they were magnificent aircraft to fly in, but they are very tired ladies now. And dammit they are ladies. There's a certain elegance of line about the 747 that the A380, comfortable though they are, doesn't have.

I don't think any airline is still operating passenger 747s regularly. Lufthansa still has some but seems to have them in storage until things get back to something like normal. I've flown 747s on BA, Qantas and Thai Airways, and I think I've only been on the upper deck on a BA 747 once:



In BA's business class, half the seats face backwards. Some people dislike this; not me. Get a window seat on the upper deck and (IIRC) you get 4 windows all to yourself.

A day spent reading. Silence: A Christian History by Diarmid MacCulloch. Not going to describe it given its topic, but a worthwhile read, especially on some historical issues around times that the Christian churches have been silent when they should have spoken out.

Now starting Thief of Time, which is, I think, my favourite Discworld (apart from all the others, anyway). Having read the first few pages, I wonder if Pterry ever met Carlo Rovelli. I suspect that they would have understood each other quite well.

First book I have actually bought and held in my hand since forever: the Compact Oxford Hachette French Dictionary. At Doha Festival City with a few minutes to kill and spotted that the Borders store (a franchise, of course) was open. As a regular bookshop it's pretty useless but it has dictionaries, so I just bought the biggest reputable French dictionary they had. Remember I was reading French? It convinced me that I dislike using dictionaries on kindle.

ETA I said in the previous thread that "... thanks to Le Petit Prince, I now know that the fellow who works the points on a railway is un aiguilleur. The word isn't in the Collins French to English (One Way) Pocket Dictionary; I had to rely on the English translation.". The word "aiguilleur" is in the new dictionary.

Crikey, my last post in this thread was almost a week ago. But I've actually read a book: Unorthodox Engineers by Colin Kapp. I happened to notice this morning that there was a collection of these stories available on kindle so I bought it. This was a real blast from the past. Five longish short stories, one of which was in one of the first SFF anthologies I ever read, some 60 years ago: Out of this World 2 (which seems to be fairly rare—only 2 copies on LT). That story, "The Railways Up on Cannis", first published in the British magazine New Worlds in 1959, introduced us to Lieutenant Fritz Van Noon and the Unorthodox Engineers, and how they built a railway on a planet plagued with volcanoes. That one was perhaps a trifle pedestrian (sorry) but things got weirder from there on. Kapp was an electronic engineer himself and it shows. Not much characterisation and the prose is clunky but there are some actual ideas in there, such as a planet with a logically explained form of inorganic evolution.

The tone of the Unorthodox Engineers stories was light but Kapp could do dark as well—I remember a story called "Gottlos" from Analog in 1969, about a super armoured fighting vehicle remotely operated by a human being who was so completely connected to the vehicle that when it was damaged he died as well. It was republished in Analog 8 but seemingly never again.

After the mentions of, and enthusiasm for, Mark Knopfler at the beginning of this thread, I've picked up again on one of the guitar heroes of my youth: Hank B Marvin. Anybody else in the GD remember the Shadows? Never a big self-promoter, it would seem, but a fine musician recognised as an influence by, among others, Mark Knopfler. Marvin and Knopfler have played and recorded together a surprising number of times, and it's eerie how much early Knopfler sounds like middle-period Marvin. Marvin is 78 now but still in surprisingly good shape (on the strength of a BBC documentary made this year in honour of the Shadows' 60th anniversary).

>72 haydninvienna: Another Hank Marvin fan here. (Knopfler not so much.)

>72 haydninvienna: I thought the Shadows were great. I believe I have a CD of their music somewhere. Their appearance every week as the resident band for Cliff Richard was probably an advantage and disadvantage at the same time.

>74 pgmcc: Agreed. I was a great fan of early Cliff, and that was how I first encountered the Shadows. Associating therm with the superlative "Apache" came a little later.

I think the Shadows' big problem was that they got pushed into a rut and failed to develop or move. Look at how the Beatles changed between 1962 and 1968, and reflect on how the Shadows failed to do that. Marvin tried with the derivative group Marvin Welch and Farrar, which seems to have been a critical success but not a commercial one. But the BBC doco was rather fun—they got the 3 surviving "real" Shadows (Marvin, Bruce Welch and Brian Bennett) into Abbey Road studios to play around and talk (plus John Farrar from California). At the time Bennett was 80, and Marvin and Welch both 78. All of them still seem to be doing OK. Inspiringly so, actually.

>76 haydninvienna: Thanks for that link, Richard. You have made my Sunday!

>77 -pilgrim-: You're welcome. But they look pretty good, don't they? And still mates after 60-odd years.

Just to reassure people that I haven't completely reverted to being a teenager. I'm now listening to Henry Purcell's lovely suite of music from his semi-opera King Arthur. It includes the gorgeous aria "Fairest Isle", which I have Barbara Bonney's luscious version of around here somewhere. Oh, and it's on YouTube. From Salzburg, with the late and much lamented Nikolaus Harnoncourt and Concentus Musicus Wien.

ETA I also have Barbara Bonney's purely beautiful rendition of Thomas Campion’s song "Never Weather-Beaten Saile". Poking around in Youtube, I found this version and this version. Audio on the second one isn't great.

From the YouTube notes to the first link:

‘Never Weather-Beaten Sail’ is from Campion's First Book of Ayres containing Divine and Morall Songs (1613). It’s a song that really speaks to our current times of pandemic and racial injustice. The weary pilgrim has been beset by trials and tribulations, and longs for the peace of God to lay the soul to rest in heaven.

During this time of Covid, when creating together in the same room is impossible, making music virtually has been my one saving grace. It keeps me accountable and also keeps my mind busy as I plan what I’m going to sing next! When I was approached by Amy Domingues to collaborate, my answer was an enthusiastic “Yes!”

Kristen Dubenion-Smith, mezzo-soprano
Amy Domingues, treble/tenor/bass viols

C S Lewis referred to Campion as "the seraphic doctor of English prosody".

I love that word, prosody. :o)

That first linked version of "Never Weather-Beaten Saile" is lovely. (I didn't try the second.)

>80 clamairy: The comment is in Lewis's English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, in the course of a brief introduction to the poetry of the 1590s. Reading "Never Weather-Beaten Saile", and then listening to it sung, makes it obvious how much the music adds. Campion was a musician himself (as every educated man was expected to be then). "Never Weather Beaten Saile" is in Two Books of Ayres, probably 1613. In Campion's introduction he says "Ovt of many Songs which, partly at the request of friends, partly for my own recreation, were by mee long since composed, I have now enfranchised a few ... These Ayres were for the most part framed at first for one voyce with the Lute, or Violl, but on occasion, they haue since been filled with more parts, which who so please may vse, who like not may leave." (Yes, I have the book: The Works of Thomas Campion, edited by Percival Vivian.)

Sorry, I'm slightly nuts about Campion. Just by the way, Lewis had obviously heard it sung, since he notes that the triple repetition of "o come quickly" in the sung version is not in the text. I find that interesting because in all of Lewis's vast output I can remember few references to music, and when he does so appreciatively it's almost always to Wagner.

>72 haydninvienna: I remember The Shadows although only after seeing them on the tv (some hosted music show) Did I place the name with the few songs I heard on the radio. The show had about 6 or 7 electric guitarists playing in sync and a friend of mine went nuts and tried to get everyone To buy a guitar so he could start a similar band - during jr. high USA I think. My parents had just bought me a sax so more money on my nonexistent music skills was out of the question.

Been lurking a little & thought I would chip in.

>82 DugsBooks: Welcome to the GD! Chip in as much as you like, but why not join? It's a friendly place.

Just to make sure you don't forget who I took my LT username from, here is something that I defy you to listen to and not smile, by the man himself: Haydn's "Gypsy Rondo" piano trio..
The actual rondo movement begins at about 11.40. Watch the pianist's face—she is obviously having just the best time ever.

>84 haydninvienna: Not just her face -- she's really enjoying playing that!

By the way, where is that hall, with the organ craftily built into a stone (?) wall like that?

>85 hfglen: According to the details under the video, it was at Northbridge Presbyterian Church, Dallas, Texas. The church has a website and there are a few more photos on Google Maps.

Incidentally, in all the fires in California and my continuing fascination with the Boeing 747, has anyone seen this 747 around there? Biggest firebomber in the world, apparently—twenty thousand gallons of water and fire-retardant per trip.

>87 haydninvienna: I think they've shown it on the news several times.

My husband reminded me (with photos) that he recently flew a 747 that still had a bar in the downstairs Business Class section. SO. JEALOUS. He had the flight attendant take a few shots of him sitting at it. Hilarious.

>89 Bookmarque: You're not the only one who is jealous. My goodness, Qatar Airways' A380s have a small lounge at the rear of the business class, but no bar. Which doesn't mean no booze, or at least didn't until the current coronavirus drama.

>89 Bookmarque: I have flown maybe 10 times in my life. On my first or second flight however I flew in a new 747, cheapest seat, that had a spiral staircase with a bar on each level if I am not mistaken {you could look over a rail to the floor below}. It was the last leg of a long flight that I got on and it looked like an hour after a Grateful Dead concert - filled with sleeping people who could not get it together to leave the concert.

I mentioned on my last flight in 2019 cross country the spiral staircase, bar and walking around And several people risked neck injury twisting around to look at me. {We were jammed 100% full in the 2019 flight & me between two guys over 6ft. 2 “ & tipping the scales well over 240 lbs}

>87 haydninvienna: I don't recall seeing that. We have seen aircraft in the past that dump loads of retardant, but more frequently it is helicopters that have huge bags under them to scoop up water in from our river, then go dump it over the fire. The latest fire which is near me hasn't had much air support for fighting it. The conditions have made it too dangerous for the planes and helicopters.

>92 MrsLee: I grieve for California at present. I know about those helicopters, and I know what it's like having your home burning round you. Australians are all too familiar with fire.

Just posted in the September thread, but I thought I'd introduce you to another musician who is ever so slightly different from what you might expect: Awadagin Pratt, playing Mendelssohn at the White House with Joshua Bell and Alisa Weilerstein. If you think classical music is dull, watch Alisa Weilerstein in the last couple of minutes.

Good luck with your job options and with your packing. It sounds like the Apple design is intended to have people give up on the idea of moving their i-Mac and buying another one at their destination.

Safe travel.

Thanks Peter. Actually, I really think that making the stand non-removable was done simply because it was cheaper. There is an option to fit a VESA stand, but it costs more.

In other news, hfglen posted this an hour or so ago. At almost that moment, the periodic email from The Lancet popped up in my email inbox, and it included this book review. I posted a while back about Bregman's book Utopia for Realists. I quote from The Lancet's review:

Bregman ranges widely from economics to education and health care. He is especially scathing about theories of crime and punishment that depend on a hopeless view of human nature. Broken windows' theory, which argued that law enforcement should come down hard on minor infringements to avoid major crimes, is, in Bregman's view, without evidence or virtue. Bregman's vision is of more caring and cooperative societies that draw on and encourage the best in human nature. Pessimism is a self-fulfilling prophecy. His thesis could not be more timely. Again, his reference to Adam Smith is highly relevant: “No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable.”

I've already ordered a copy of Humankind: A Hopeful History—my "it's better than it looks" shelf needs all the help it can get.

At last I've read a book! A real book! Specifically, Chesterton's The Club of Queer Trades. While poking around the net I saw a reference to The Man Who Was Thursday on Project Gutenberg, so I looked to see if The Club ... was there as well, and of course it is. I've read The Man Who ... and the Father Brown stories more than once (each), so I downloaded a copy of The Club ..., and I've already finished reading it.

I've been seeing so many people on LT complaining that they don't seem to have the capacity to read. I've had that problem (and have been complaining about it) for months. Maybe this will fix it.

>97 haydninvienna: I'm glad you found something that you could finish. I hadn't realized you were in a slump. Many of us hit dry spells, for multiple reasons. I would suspect the upcoming move is having some impact on your ability to concentrate. Reading fluff often helps.

>98 clamairy: I seem to be in a bit of a dry spell myself too; I've read some things, just not much. Work has been somewhat manic with extra reporting required and I can't seem to get in the headspace for reading.

Mindless hack and slash computer games, on the other hand... I've been playing a lot of The Enchanted Cave II on the iPad.

Maybe what I need is a book that's strictly factual and has nothing political to to, such as The Book by Keith Houston. I read this in an afternoon. It's a really fascinating look at the history of the book and its predecessors— covering all the arts and crafts that go to make up a book. Papermaking (and the making of papyrus and parchment), printing, binding, illustrating. Except that there's very little about the history of type and typography, except kind of in the interstices., such as Gutenberg's use of punch-cutting, and Aldus Manutius inventing the modern italic type face. It's a good read and I learned a lot from it. One thing that's mildly odd about it is that the hardback (which is what I have) is an actual sewn book. These are rare now because they are expensive even though done by machine. If you look at most recent hardback books, the hard covers are laid onto an ordinary glued book the same as a paperback.

>100 haydninvienna: And you got me right between the eyes...

Another piece of pure serendipity. Poking around on Goodreads and came across this The Scriptlings by Sorin Suciu. It looks weird and funny enough (most of the Goodreads reviews are 3-star or higher; no reviews here yet) to be worth shrining £2 for the kindle version, so I did. With any luck I'll actually read it.

>101 clamairy: And rightly so! It's a good read and full of useful stuff.

Hopefully another factual, non-controversial read, which leapt out at me in the Borders shop in Doha Festival City: On Food and Cooking by Harold McGee. For anyone who doesn't already know this book (not too many, I suspect, among people interested in the topics in the title) it's exactly what the title suggests—a series of essays about food, but concentrating on the science (as the subtitle says). I read it years ago but never got around to buying my own copy. This is the "completely revised and updated" edition from 2004, and it caught my eye among the Gordon Ramsays and Nigella Lawsons and other celebrity cookbooks.

Incidentally, I started The Scriptlings but dropped it about 30 pages in, and I'm not sure I'll go back. I think the author is trying a bit too hard, although the book has some interesting ideas (magic spells have to be in dead languages, such as Latin, Classical Greek or Sumerian; our hero, who knows no Latin, is shown a bit of Latin text and manages to work out that it is a spell (effectively, a computer program) from recurring words and syntax formatting). One gets the feeling that reading P G Wodehouse has had a malign influence: some people try to emulate his style but, as Mark Twain said when his wife tried to cure him of swearing, they have the words but not the tune.

Incidentally, wizards have to adopt a new name, and it has to be "disgusting". The elderly wizard who has a terminal encounter with a spell in the first chapter is Master Dung; the new wizard mentioned above is called Buggeroff (as a result of an unfortunate promise made during an all-night bender); and the female protagonist is called Merkin. I'm not sure if I should add that to the new words thread. I didn't have to look it up, since I knew what it meant courtesy of Dr Strangelove.

>105 haydninvienna: Humour is always a problem - I don't find many books advertised as laugh-out-loud to be funny at all, probably because I don't like humour that tries too hard. I prefer my humour to be understated and witty.

Your synopsis start as sounding interesting, then the scatological references promptly put it firmly in the 'don't bother' pile. Mind you, the dead languages bit is reminiscent of the Rivers of London series which I like a lot and do find funny.

>105 haydninvienna: Consider that a BB graze. I am really, really in need of something light-hearted, and preferably as far away from real life as possible right now. The premise appeals, the "tries too hard" does not.

Will look for it, if reduced price.

>106 Maddz: >107 -pilgrim-: Indeed. It may be relevant that the author's first language is not English—he is Romanian, apparently. I wouldn't have bothered except that the Goodreads reviews are so positive. Now I'm not sure whether Goodreads reviewers have low standards or it was a claque. Either is possible, I suppose. As to the dead languages, weren't all the spells in the Harry Potter books pseudo-Latin?

>108 haydninvienna: I wrote a reply, pressed "post message", and nothing has appeared....

But my shorter test DOES appear!

Rats! It appears there had been some magical intervention to prevent my words of sapient wisdom divulging arcane secrets to the uninitiated.

I must inscribe some protective circles before I try again.

>108 haydninvienna: It's Goodreads, so I would expect low standards and Twitterstorms. One reason I don't do social media (quite apart from things like celeb culture leaving me cold).

If I recall correctly, I believe it was dog-Latin, although not to the standard of:

Caesar adsum iam forte
Pompey ad erat
Caeser sic in omnibus
Pompey sic in at

Or, more appropriate to the setting:

Hic liber est meus
Testis est deus
Si quis furetur
Per collum pendetur
Like this poor creatur

(followed by the successful conclusion of a game of Hangman.)

Bonus points for identifying where the latter is found.

>111 Maddz: You just had to, didn't you?

I recognise it, and it is going to haunt me all day until I remember from where...

>112 -pilgrim-: Think of it as another treasure hunt...

>111 Maddz: I well know about Goodreads reviews, but for the price I reckoned it was worth a shot. Never mind. I've decided to revert to an old faithful, To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis, after lying awake last night considering the ways in which it can be mapped to a kind of SFF version of P G Wodehouse.

As to Caesar adsum iam forte, I remember that line (but not the rest) from Down With Skool. According to Wikipedia, it's all there, which I don't remember. As to your second little verse, Missee Leeby Arthur Ransome—I've never read the books, but it was the first hit on Google. Not going to give the game away for others.

>114 haydninvienna: Thank you. It has been nagging me all day that it was from Arthur Ransome - but I just could not remember the context!

>108 haydninvienna:

And attempting again:

The reasons why a lot of "real" spells - real in the sense that they were being written down by people who either believed that they would work, or had tried to get them to work - are in Latin are twofold:
1. magic was researched by many (such as Isaac Newton), as another branch of science, and Latin was the language of erudite international communication, and therefore the appropriate language in which to record your research
2. others believed that magic works by invoking the aid of supernatural beings - whether divine or infernal - and since the international language of Christian prayer at that time, such beings were addressed in Latin, because it was assumed that Latin was the language which they spoke/understood. (Jewish spells being in Hebrew for the same reason.)

And, of course, that only applies to the Western European tradition. Other cultures had ways of working magic, and their spells were in other languages.

If your fantasy world is powering its magic from invoking supernatural beings, then the rationale for spellcasting in Latin remains valid.

But if, like J.K. Rowling, your magic system is resolutely secular, and modelled on magic as a form of science involving different forces, then there is no reason why Latin should be considered the necessary language.

Yet the idea of Latin for spellcasting IS used in many popular modern series which view magic as an acquirable skill - Harry Dresden and "Rivers of London" both came to mind.

So I was intrigued by the possibility of a "why" behind the need to use dead languages.

>116 -pilgrim-: I suspect the dead languages is because it's the esotericism involved. After all, if anyone can cast spells using natural language, then we start getting imprecision and anarchy.

Whereas using a dead (or very formal) language to cast spells means that there is structure to the spell, and it's making the caster think what the effect will be, and it means that potentially dangerous spells won't be cast by accident.

Although there is the issue of how do you detect potential wizards without a network of 'informants' who report to the local College of Magicians that so-and-so's child is a potential magus. Obviously, if magic runs in families, then the family is aware and makes sure the child is tested at an early age - but that means that wild card magi potentially go undetected.

This may be the reasoning behind universal education - teach everyone the basics, and at the same time test for magery.

>117 Maddz:

Harry Dresden was taught by a relative.

Peter Grant happened to demonstrate potential, by being visited by ba certain supernatural person, and a report of that getting back to the ears of a magical professional. That works is very short of wizards precisely because it recruited through families, and the bloodlines have now been decimated.

Alex Verus was recruited by a guy talent-spotting by hanging around school playgrounds (and it is as sleazy as that sounds).

How are the muggle-born wizards and witches in the Potterverse detected? I am unclear.

In all the versions above, except possibly Rivers of London, magic requires "magical ability" - something that you are either born with, of not. (Lesley's experience suggests that desire+training+strength of will may suffice.)

And in a lot of books, magic is practiced by characters who are not actually human.

Can you think of a current magical series where magic is treated as simply an elected field of study? (i.e. apprentice yourself to a master, and start studying, because that is what you want to do?)

The only examples that I can think of view magic as a "how to contact supernatural beings and ask/compel their assistance" study field.

>118 -pilgrim-: It's not particularly current, but the Patricia C Wrede/C J Stevermer collaborations and stand-alones seem to come close (both are still writing). However, magic seems to run in families in that universe although Kim in the Mairelon books is an orphan with no knowledge of her family. Kate in Sorcery and Cecelia (I think it was Kate not Cecelia) was self-taught - but she had the talent. I seem to recall mention of theoretical magicians in that universe - untalented but deeply grounded in thaumatology, they needed a practising magician to actually cast the spell.

If you think of magic as a talent like any other talent, then yes, anyone can learn the theory, but may not be talented enough to actually do it as a profession. It's a bit like being taught ballet as a young child, as I got older it was apparent that (a) I had the wrong body shape and (b) I wasn't much good at it (unlike my younger sister who was taller and thinner and had more talent). I enjoy watching it and listening to the scores, but no way am I going to be on a stage. Same with singing - I can't carry a tune in a bucket, yet I like grand opera and wince at off-key singers at talent shows.

>119 Maddz:

Yes, there is not going to be a worldview where ANY human being can perform magic, any more than there is one where every human of capable of higher mathematics.

But a determined, but not particularly able student, can still become a competent mathematican through sheer hard work, although not a great one.

The distinction is between works where study will get you nowhere in magic, if you don't also have the necessary genetics, and ones where "talent" in magic is like talent in any other field, it is a natural aptitude that makes it easier to learn.

In magic-practicing societies in our past, when it was a respectable field of study, the view that seemed to dominate was that it was something that anyone COULD learn, although the necessary willpower and dedication meant that only a few individuals would master it.

Those that felt that only certain bloodlines had any chance of succeeding were those that saw magic as a form of divine gift, and held that only members of a "priestly caste" had the necessary right of approach to the deities concerned.

Yet in fiction about magic, the 'genetic' model appears to predominate.

I had wondered whether that was simply an artifact of which books I had encountered, but apparently not.

I suppose traditions about Roma and fortune-telling would be the main 'bloodline' tradition in Western Europe. It is all that comes to mind.

Actually, the book that I started this discussion with (The Scriptlings) sort of offers another view. The junior magician who knows no Latin but can program is chosen to be trained as a wizard because he is completely without magical talent. Sort of like Rincewind but so far no indication that he is an extreme coward. Remains to be seen how his training goes. (I've just remembered vaguely that there was another book or series that treated magic as basically programming, but can recall no more than that.) I suppose though that magic might be like a lot of intellectual skills—some people just "get" it and some don't, like higher mathematics. >119 Maddz: , your example of ballet has that and also the physical skill and body type.

Just to prove what a magpie I am, I've just (I think) acquired a copy of Fitting the Bill: A History of Commonwealth Parliamentary Drafting, an official history published a few years ago by the Office of Parliamentary Counsel in Canberra. To fit with my copy of Prosper the Commonwealth by Sir Robert Garran, the Office's first head. I was given a tip about it by my successor here and apparently there are still copies left (no surprise there, it's unlikely to have made any bestseller list) and OPC is willing to send me one. I notice that the author, Carmel Meiklejohn, also did a book about the history of the Attorney-General's Department, where I used to work.

>121 haydninvienna: I think you may be thinking of the Rick Cook series, Wizardry.

ISTR there are other works with that as a premise: wizardry is like coding. To take that further: anyone can use a pre-compiled program (spell), many people can bolt together a collection of routines (the script-kiddies), but it takes knowledge to build a working routine, and talent to build a decent routine and remember that fools are very ingenious.

What an odd idea, that I should post in my own thread!

We have just had the send-off for my colleague Manuel and me at work. (Manuel is nominally my boss. He is a decent manager. I'm not, and I'm quite happy with him being the boss.) They had, instead of cake, small cupcakes with the "pet names" that we give our sets of rules in icing on the top. I'll post a picture later so you can see what I mean.

My send-off gift was a plaque, some decorative plates, and a stack of books. All of them good choices because I gave them an abbreviated version of my LT wishlist. I'll post the list of titles later as well. The physical books are somewhere in transit at the moment.

All in all, it was much more effusive than I expected. Lots of nice things were said about Manuel and me.

Edited to correct the spelling of my long-time colleague's name! He is Filipino but is an Australian citizen and a good guy all round (and a fine drafter as well). He and I have been colleagues on and off for about 25 years now.

>123 haydninvienna:
That sounds like a lovely send-off. All the current send-offs in our organisation are virtual and just appear as a picture in the company news app. No cup-cakes with icing; no speeches. Just, "Farewell and thanks for all the fish."

Good luck with the move and the pursuit of further work.

It will be nice for you to get home and spend time in company rather than alone in an apartment with scorching temperatures outside. Of course, the scorching temperatures may be replaced by dark mornings and evenings accompanied by drizzle and the occasional gusty wind.

It is a beautiful sunny day here. Cold but sunny. It reminds me of the days when I would return to college after the Summer. It was always sunny and cold with the leaves turning brown. (It was probably lashing rain most of the days when I returned to college, but my mind has decided to only remember only the beautiful days. My mind is very thoughtful that way.)

>123 haydninvienna: So nice to be appreciated! At my workplace it's more like, "Goodbye, don't let the door hit you on the way out."

May your next adventure be a lovely one, whichever country/job you end up in.

>124 pgmcc: >125 MrsLee: Thanks both of you. It was unexpected for the General Manager to praise me specifically on the ground that I told good stories. One hopes she didn't mean by that that I was a useless drafter (FWIW she denied it).

I see I wasn't clear what I actually received. What I got was a nice little scroll, to which the GM specifically drew my attention. (Picture to come.) The book titles are:

Lyrical and Critical Essays by Albert Camus
My Life with Bob by Pamela Paul
Rain: Four Walks in English Weather by Melissa Harrison
Reading Dante by Prue Shaw
The Myth of Sisyphus again by Camus
The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction by Alan Jacobs
The Splendid and the Vile by Erik Larson.

Not a bad haul.

And yes indeed Peter, it will be pleasant to have some company! Even the English weather (which has been doing its autumnal worst for the last few days) will be sort of welcome.

The scroll:



and the cupcakes:

and .

"CTRL", "PINS" and "IMEB" are some of the pet names we use for our rules. The last one's name, in full, is "Insurance Mediation Business Rules 2011 (or IMEB)".

Very nice. They went to some trouble to ensure their farewell was tailored to your interests. That is very gratifying.

That's such a lovely farewell.

Posting from the phone. Sitting in my flat watching four guys pack the last nine years of my life into boxes. Being reminded that it’s always worth paying for people who know what they’re doing. These guys have done in four hours what would have taken me at least four days and giving me a fine show of their craft while doing it. Watching one of them adapt one of their boxes to fit an IKEA archive box was worth the price of the ticket.

>130 haydninvienna: Very smart, glad you got good packers!

>127 haydninvienna: That is a lovely send-off. It shows how much you were valued, and by colleagues who have an understanding of your personality.

>130 haydninvienna: Yet again we have opposite experiences. My professionals left roughly 50% of my furniture damaged in some way or other. And I could not watch everywhere; unpacking I found such horrors as glassware and china stuffed loose into crates, with either no padding, or a sheet of bubble wrap thrown on top. I am dreading having to move again...

Thanks all, for the comments about our send-off. I’ll pass them on to the crowd at the office.

>132 -pilgrim-: Wow. Even at the worst I’ve never had a move as bad as that. Even moving 10,000 miles from Oz to the UK!

>132 -pilgrim-: I knew someone who found the movers had taken some of her husband's tools from the garage and put them in with her wedding gown which ruined the dress of course. Can't fathom what made anyone think that was a good idea.

>134 Taphophile13: Well the tools were manly and IMPORTANT, and so had to be protected, whilst the dress was just an old dress that obviously wasn't going to be worn again, and therefore an ideal piece of old cloth to use to wrap them in.

I shudder at the thought, but I suspect that was the reasoning: an understanding of items that have practical value, without any for the concept of sentimental value.

>135 -pilgrim-: Yes, apparently that's the kind of logic certain people use. When my family moved cross country we did all the packing and moving ourselves. My mother had to get rid of some of her books but my father needed to bring dried out paint cans.

I must admit I've left a lot of bags of (clean) rubbish behind—a lot of it is empty boxes from bits of electronics.

Incidentally, the first of the books on the scroll (>127 haydninvienna: ) has arrived: Rain: Four Walks in English Weather by Melissa Harrison.

Last day yesterday. And of course I get a message at half past five pm that 4 more books have arrived! They will be sent over to the hotel tomorrow morning.

I'm becoming more conscious that Manuel and I did some great work there and it really was appreciated. An excellent lunch at a local restaurant (it's possible to eat and drink in Doha as well as anywhere else I've been, as long as you don't insist on eating pork) and then in the pub in this hotel with Manuel. I really will miss the Regulatory Authority even though I'll still be consulting for them for a while. I shall miss a lot of things about Doha too. It's been educational for me about a part of the world that isn't always seen at its best from places I've lived before.

I wanted to say goodbye specifically to three people outside my own work unit. Ewald, the general manager of the banking supervision unit, South African, gruff, and what hfglen described to me once as an unusual thing, an Afrikaner with a sense of humour; Nurein, the director of banking supervision, Kenyan but of Arab ancestry (and unable to enter the United States because of it--grrr); Hasan, Pakistani, who started at the Regulatory Authority a week before I did. Nurein is small and dark, with a wicked sense of humour; Hasan is rather gently spoken and literary and always cheerful. All three of them very, very good at what they do and absolutely terrific to work with. One of my bestest memories from nine years at the RA was the night that Manuel, Hasan, Nurein and I went to a working mens' cafe in the suburbs to eat grilled lamb chops. So here's white-bread me, Manuel (Australian but Filipino by birth), Hasan and Nurein sitting round a table in this rough cafe in business suits tucking away vast quantities of excellent grilled lamb. The rest of the cafe's customers were, shall we say, not of the social elite and we got the odd look. Son Who Cooks was a bit squiggle-eyed about it, and I'm not sure now whether he was concerned more for my personal safety or the safety of my digestion. But both were fine.

The 4 books, which are now sitting on the coffee table next to me, are:

The Splendid and the Vile by Erik Larson
Reading Dante by Prue Shaw
The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus; and
My Life with Bob by Pamela Paul.

>139 haydninvienna: You obviously have some wonderful memories from your time in Doha, and have developed some good friendships.

I had a similar dining experience in Tunis some years ago. I was only there for less than a week; not nine years. As with you, both digestive and personal safety were fine.

I wish you a safe journey and trust there will be no more mishaps or bureaucratic hitches to hinder the smooth execution of your transfer home.

Thanks Peter. I was kind of dreading the checking in at the airport after the experience one of my colleagues had Australia-bound but it was more or less normal except for being handed a face shield. The airport is very, very quiet though.

I remember being apprehensive flying into Riyadh airport but everything was fine. I grew up being searched so when they only searched my bags I felt I had been short changed.

The experience I had in mind in #142 wasn’t of a search, it was of an extended argument with the check-in agent and various supervisors about whether he had or needed a quarantine exemption from the Australian government. He didn’t have (or need) one since he was expecting to be put into quarantine on arrival. I just got asked to show the copy of the notice that I had given to the UK immigration service the day before. The agent checked the copy, took in my bags, and I was on my way. After unbelting a hefty excess baggage charge, but I was expecting that.

ETA that there’s now another reason for welcoming the arrival of the booze on a flight: it’s a reason to take the bloody mask and face shield off. The mask is nasty but the face shield is much, much worse.

Incidentally, some things are still awesome. I’m posting to LT, drinking a very nice Austrian grüner veltliner, and listening to Emanuel Ax, Leonidas Kavakos and Yo-yo Ma playing Brahms while at 560 mph and 36,000 feet somewhere over Iraq. Go and look up George Carlin’s very funny rant about the miracle of flying.

>145 haydninvienna:

Luxury! Shear luxury!

When I were a lad...

Glad your travels were somewhat smooth. May the "new" frontiers bring happy times as the old ones bring happy memories.

>143 pgmcc: "I grew up being searched" I. Can't. Even. So many thoughts race through my head with those few words. Shows to go how vast a difference in experiences pub members bring to the table with them.

>147 MrsLee: Although I was really too young to remember much about my time in the Middle East (Cairo), I recall isolated bits. One of my nastier memories was having my smallpox booster while we were resident in Cairo. I had to have interesting travel vaccinations at that point in time - IIRC, I also had yellow fever.

Now back in Bicester and connected to everything. I have opened my mail:



and found these:

.

I'll post the list later.

Also, the last 2 books from the "scroll" have arrived in Doha and will be on their way.

>149 haydninvienna: Welcome home! For a second or so I wondered how you managed a row of books suspended in space with no visible means of support :-)

Welcome home!

I am sure it is nice to be home.

Congratulations on the books. They look fascinating.

Wow! That is a nice welcome home! I'm glad you had a safe journey and hope you settle back into a rather chilly UK soon.

>150 hfglen: : See the power of legislative drafting! Ideas suspended in space with no visible means of support!

>151 pgmcc: >152 Sakerfalcon: Thanks people. As of now, I'm connected to the office network and VPN and I even managed to do some real work.

The titles:

Thornton's Legislative Drafting, 5th edition (the single most expensive book I've ever bought)
Simple Flavours by Geoff Slattery
The Goddess of Buttercups and Daisies by Martin Millar
Doubt by Jennifer Michael Hecht
Bridge of Birds by Barry Hughart
Analog Science Fact Reader ed. by Ben Bova
Is Heathcliff A Murderer? by John Sutherland
Humankind: A Hopeful History by Rutger Bregman
Into The Woods by John Yorke (a book for which pgmcc has been scattering BBs around like revellers at a Beirut wedding)
Travel Light by Naomi Mitchison
The Ignorant Schoolmaster by Jacques Rancière
At Home in the World by Tsh Oxenreider
Lincoln: The Biography of a Writer by Fred Kaplan
The Image of the City and other essays by Charles Williams, edited by Anne Ridler
Galileo and the Science Deniers by Mario Livio
The Secret History of the War (volume 1 only so far) by Waverley Root

and one that isn't in the picture, although it was waiting as well:

Fitting the Bill: A History of Commonwealth Parliamentary Drafting by Carmel Meiklejohn.

There's an odd one in there called Tour Book Guide New York. I don't remember ordering this but it arrived in one of the packages. I wonder if that was someone's mistake or maybe a freebie because I ordered the whole of the Secret History and only volume 1 has arrived yet.

>123 haydninvienna: That sounds like a wonderful celebration of your time there.

>139 haydninvienna: Welcome back to Bicester! (Is it home? I thought Oz was home... Or is this one of several?)

(Pretty sure I own Doubt, but I have no idea where it is. ETA: It's on my Kindle!)

>154 clamairy: Home is where I hang my hat, of course! Except I don't wear a hat.

Mrs Haydninvienna and I were talking about this earlier this evening, and agreed that even if we live in England, "you can take the girl (or boy) out of Australia, but you can't take Australia out of the girl (or boy)". Or, as the late Peter Allen put it, "I still call Australia home".

I just had one of those moments. On page 50 of My Life with Bob, Pamela Paul is working in a B Dalton shop when the fatwa is pronounced against Salman Rushdie for The Satanic Verses. I actually bought a copy of it, which I hope I still have, by mail from B Dalton, from Australia. Wasn’t as easy then as it is now—I think I had to get a bank draft or something to pay for it. Never really intended to read it, and never have, but then and now I react badly to anyone in a position of authority telling me what I can and can’t read.

>156 haydninvienna: Interesting. I believe I got mine at a B Dalton's as well, because they were all over the Northeast before Barnes & Noble & Borders boomed. I also never read mine, but I actually intended to.

And just as a footnote to my trip to London, and the discussion about Amarula at the top of the thread, my bottle survived the trip just fine (along with a bottle of Plymouth gin and a jar of powidl from Julius Meinl in Vienna). At Heathrow I walked up to one of the customs guys and said “I have a bottle of gin and a bottle of Amarula. Are you interested?” He just shook his head and I went through the green channel.

I referred above to My Life with Bob, which I finished. I’ve actually read another book! I think “books about books” are a slightly separate genre from “autobiography in the form of a reading journal”, and this is the latter. I enjoyed it. My gosh, for a rather nerdy girl with a bunch of brothers, she has lived a varied life.

I’ve also picked up The Analog Science Fact Reader,and read J E Enever’s essay “Giant Meteor Impact”, which was referred to in the discussion between hfglen and me about the Vredefort Crater. The prose is even more overwrought than I remembered, but the science still seems plausible (and I think the essay was published before the paper in which Walter and Luis Alvarez proposed the hypothesis about the Chixulub crater and its connection with the K-T extinction). Ben Bova’s introduction is amusing in retrospect, telling us that there’s not one word of fiction in the book. Much of it still seems pretty speculative.

Now reading Was Heathcliff a Murderer? by John Sutherland. Great fun. The long quotation from Henry Esmond on pages 95-96 makes me determined to read that book.

Now on to The Image of the City and other Essays, by Charles Williams, edited by Anne Ridler. Ridler was a poet herself and a friend of Williams’s, and in her long introduction we get a view of Williams somewhat different to that of C S Lewis. (Ridler definitely moved in the right circles: her uncle was Humphrey Milford, publisher to Oxford University, she married Vivian Ridler, who became Printer to the University, and she was an editor at Faber & Faber and thus a colleague of T S Eliot.) No more comments yet since I haven’t even finished the introduction. I am now WFHing from England and my days are taken up with how to risk-weight banks’ credit exposures.

>160 haydninvienna: Congratulations on a wonderful send-off and a safe journey "home".

I am glad you are enjoying Sutherland's essays - I have read all his books in that series, and found them wonderful.

I hope you enjoy Bridge of Birds as much as I did - Hughart's "Ancient China that Never Was" sequence are some of my all-time favourite books.

>162 -pilgrim-: Ha! Saw your handle pop up and felt sure you would be commenting about the Williams. It will be a while before I get to Bridge of Birds, I fear. But yes it was a really good send-off, people said nice things and appear to have meant them.

>163 haydninvienna: Well, of course I am looking forward to hearing your thoughts on the Williams. But one hates to be predictable ;-)

>164 -pilgrim-: As I said above, in Anne Ridler’s introductory essay we get a somewhat different view of Charles Williams than we do from C S Lewis. Thinking about why it was different, I decided that Lewis’s view of Williams was ever so faintly patronising, despite Lewis’s obvious affection. They came of course from rather different backgrounds; Lewis’s was solidly middle-class (his father was a solicitor), Lewis had had a brilliant academic career (double First at Oxford) and was an established academic, writer and religious apologist. Williams’s father was in trade, despite Williams’s obvious ability he failed to complete his degree, and he was an editor. For Oxford University Press, but still an editor. So Lewis may have felt that Williams had really done rather well for himself. Anne Ridler, on the other hand, as poet and editor herself, may have been nearer to Williams’s world. She may have liked Williams better for his capabilities than Lewis did, and may have shared Williams’s visionary outlook more than Lewis did. (If there was one modern poet who understood the likes of Blake and Thomas Traherne, it might have been Charles Williams.)
Also, Ridler’s frequent comparison of Williams with Gerard Manley Hopkins made me wonder why on earth I’d never thought of it. It’s a comparison that Lewis, who had little use for most modern poetry, would not have made. Lewis didn’t care for T S Eliot’s poetry, but Eliot seems to have been impressed by Williams’s novels at least. I think Eliot and Williams probably understood each other pretty well, despite the comparison Lewis made between them in Taliessin through Logres to the advantage of Williams. (I just re-read “Little Gidding” from Four Quartets and now I can hear Williams and Eliot talking to each other.)
That’s my thought so far. Now on to the essays.

Still reading The Image of the City, and in an essay entitled "Blake and Wordsworth" have just come upon this:

The Prelude and Jerusalem are poetry and not theology. But to read either—much more to read both—is to become aware in each poem according to its proper mode of a great Form with which in one sense or other England is identified; this Form errs or sins or is deceived; it loses, in itself or in its children, the Emanation or Vision which is its life and becomes lost in a cold world of moral chatter and careful grudge; yet it is, or is to be, restored.

Or, as Lewis puts it in That Hideous Strength:

Dimble was silent for a few minutes, arranging and rearranging the fruit-knife and fruit-fork on his plate.

“It all began,” he said, ”when we discovered that the Arthurian story is mostly true history. There was a moment in the Sixth Century when something that is always trying to break through into this country nearly succeeded. Logres was our name for it—it will do as well as another. And then . . . gradually we began to see all English history in a new way. We discovered the haunting.”

“What haunting?” asked Camilla.

“How something we may call Britain is always haunted by something we may call Logres. Haven’t you noticed that we are two countries? After every Arthur, a Mordred; behind every Milton, a Cromwell: a nation of poets, a nation of shopkeepers; the home of Sidney—and of Cecil Rhodes. Is it any wonder they call us hypocrites? But what they mistake for hypocrisy is really the struggle between Logres and Britain.”

Incidentally, "Dimble" = "Dumbledore"? I wonder if JKR had read That Hideous Strength?

>166 haydninvienna: A lovely day of quotes.

I wonder if you would like The Pendragon Protocol and its sequels? It is story about the archetypes that imbue British folklore, myth - and society.

>168 -pilgrim-: Might be more yet. I'm still reading.

I don't know The Pendragon Protocol but will investigate it.

Here's another quotation (from a review of a book on the liturgy of the Church of England):

I have sometimes wondered why, when the ecclesiastical authorities need something written, they so rarely turn to anyone whose business is writing. I am not offering myself as a candidate, though since it is to be supposed that a bishop administers his diocese better than I possibly could, there would be no particular egotism in supposing that I might be able to write better than a bishop.

I'm finding that reading these essays is increasing my opinion of Williams quite significantly.

And another one. This one because it made me laugh. Williams must have read everything:

He stopped—most fortunately—there. He could not always stop; he was unlike a Byzantine eikon in that.

He has just quoted from Aaron's Rod, by D H Lawrence, in an essay about Lawrence, in the course of which he is comparing Lawrence to Blake and (as so often) to Milton.

ETA "There can be few sentences that can be more urgently recommend to many Christian writers than: 'You want to whoosh off in a nice little love-whoosh and lose yourself.'" (Williams quoting Lawrence.)

Incidentally, has there ever been any other writer on Milton who talks with conviction of the comedy in Paradise Lost?

Now on to Lincoln: The Biography of a Writer. This was kind of a drive-by BB, but it's already yielded one quotation (from Kaplan's foreword):

Lincoln is distinguished from every other President, with the exception of Jefferson, in that we can be certain that he wrote every word to which his name is attached. ...
Lincoln was also the last President whose character and standards in the use of language avoided the distortions and other dishonest uses of language that have done so much to undermine the credibility of national leaders. The ability and commitment to use language honestly and consistently have largely disappeared from our political discourse. ... (But) the challenge of a President himself struggling to find the conjunction between the right words and honest expression, a use of language that respects intellect, truth, and sincerity, has largely been abandoned.

>171 haydninvienna: That is the type of quotation that one finds oneself nodding in agreement after having read it; not because one agrees with what it says about Lincoln, but about what it says in the second half of the last sentence.

Now finished with Lincoln: The Biography of a Writer*. It's an unusual biography, in that the Presidency occupies only about 50 pages out of 300 or so, and his assassination is dealt with in a sentence, but its point is in the title—what was it about Lincoln that made him one of the most memorable speakers among the Presidents? I think Kaplan answers the question pretty well, and he is to be commended for having found something original to say and write about Lincoln. Along the way he manages to demolish a few myths about Lincoln the man: did you know he was fond of crude humour? Kaplan also has quite a bit to say about Lincoln's struggle, as a principled politician, to maintain a coalition of interests without giving way on fundamentals.

Next: Rain: Four Walks in English Weather. Raining is what this bit of English weather has been doing quite a bit of lately.

*Touchstones seem to be down again.

And now done with Rain: Four Walks in English Weather, a short book (basically four little essays and an epilogue), but a charming and lovely one all the same. Also worth it for the delicious vision of George Merryweather and his leech-powered storm prognosticator (Merryweather being a humane man, he arranged the leeches in their 12 jars so that they could see each other and not be lonely), and for the sculptor Peter Randall-Page, who regards granite as the most elemental of all stones, "stuff personified".

Rain has been on my wishlist...and maybe be jumping up a few slots now.

>175 Marissa_Doyle: Recommend it. Harrison has a fine sensitivity to landscape and the life in it. The dog is a nice touch too. And even some poetry!

Woohoo! Self-isolation is done with and I can go forth among the people. In the light drizzle that passes for autumn weather. Coles Books in Bicester is open but with a covid-influenced browsing system:

- .

Of course I rang the bell! And I bought:

• The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern (loved The Night Circus)
• Exactly: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World by Simon Winchester
• Trafalgar by Angélica Gorodischer.

I had Kalpa Imperial by Gorodischer on my wishlist but when I saw Trafalgar in the shop I couldn't remember the title, I just knew I had one of her books on it, so I bought this one. According to the back cover, "Part pulp adventure, part otherworldly meditation, this is the story of Trafalgar Medrano: intergalactic trader and lover of bitter coffee and black cigarettes." Sounds interesting; although I am not a lover of cigarettes of any kind, I don't mind coffee (espresso, but hold the chicory). A propos of which, did you hear the story about the Emperor of Prussia entering a village in Alsace during the Franco-Prussian War in search of coffee? The Emperor says to the innkeeper, "I want a cup of coffee. But first, do you have any chicory?" So the innkeeper brings out a package. "Is that all?" say the Emperor. "Search the house." The search produced a couple more packages. "Is that all?" says the Emperor again. "See what you can borrow from the neighbours." So the hapless innkeeper scurries off and comes back with a few more. Again, the Emperor says "Is that all?" "Your Excellency", says the innkeeper, "I assure you that there is not another gramme of chicory in the whole village!".

So Bismarck takes off his overcoat, settles down in the chair, throws the overcoat over the pile of little blue packages, and says, "Excellent. Now please make me a cup of coffee.".

Trafalgar is on my TBR pile too. I was very excited to see it published in the new Penguin SF imprint.

Again reverting to one of my minor obsessions, the Boeing 747 (see post #62, above), here's a discussion with Mark Vanhoenacker, who wrote a good book called Skyfaring, much of which was about the 747.

I just looked at his website, linked to in the article. Recommended for "anyone who ever loved the thought of flying".

>177 haydninvienna: I'm so envious I could cry. (I do think there is a book store open in the next town, I just haven't been there for months. Too many tourists this time of year.)

I do hope you enjoy The Starless Sea.

>173 haydninvienna: I was looking forward to your review of the Lincoln book, thanks for that, it sounds fascinating. I'm also looking forward to your review of the Galileo book, I've seen some things lately that have said that the conflict between Galileo and the Church isn't always portrayed accurately.

I might have to get a new copy of Bridge of Birds. My memory says I read it, LT says I don't have it.

While poking about on the bookshelves this morning I found The Palm-Wine Drinkard by Amos Tutuloa, with the stub of a Turkish Airlines boarding pass dated 14 December 2017 stuck in it as a bookmark. I decided to finish reading it. Interesting reading it back to back with Into the Woods by John Yorke. The Tutuloa book is not a story; it’s more like the transcription of a very long, very weird dream.

>181 Karlstar: One may not forget the Ancestress.

>174 haydninvienna: I own a copy of Harrison's novel, All Among the Barley, which I gather utilizes the Suffolk landscape rather well.

>177 haydninvienna: I was lukewarm on Kalpa Imperial when I read it, but Trafalgar sounds delightful.

And now for something completely different: a Five Books interview with Stuart Turton (whose The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle I thought was terrific): The Best Murder Mystery Books. One of them is by Terry Pratchett..

ETA another little bit of randomness: I praised The Magician's Book by Laura Miller, and said that the website referred to was defunct, as I did here. I accidentally found it at the Wayback Machine here.

>185 haydninvienna: Not a bad selection - I tend to dislike Sherlock Holmes stories (compared to say, the Father Brown stories of G.K. Chesterton), because I always felt Conan Doyle played the reader false - the Great Detective can solve the puzzles we can't because a lot of pertinent information is withheld until the denouement. I am glad to see that the story chosen is one in which the solution is in plain sight all the time.

And I enjoyed that link, thank you.

Now started Bridge of Birds. Indeed, one will not forget the Ancestress. I’ve already annoyed Mrs H a trifle by inopportune laughter.

I haven’t read either Holmes or Father Brown for years, but it got a bit noticeable in the later Father Brown stories that Chesterton was making a point rather than telling a story. I remember one in particular, I think it was called “The Hammer of God”, where it was pretty obvious that the point lay in contrasting Father Brown’s Catholic humility with the Presbyterian clergyman’s pride, and the puzzle (such as it was) was much less important.

>187 haydninvienna:
Interesting. I remember "The Hammer of God", and didn't read it as a sectarian jibe (but then, I am not, not was then, either Romsn Catholic or Presbyterian; maybe I would feel differently on the subject if I would instinctively identify with one more than the other). There was certainly a moral point made, but I thought it was more about priests/ministers/pastors in general i.e. those who mediate the Word of God to the people must guard against being deluding into identifying themselves with God. The mystery was not that difficult to solve - but that was my point, that in these stories one is given all the necessary clues - but I did think that it was still the central matter. If anything, I thought of this as the counterpoint of the story (whose title I have forgotten) about the man killed by arrow, and that i the purpose of its inclusion was being set up to be the antithesis of that.

Interesting how we can read the same story and have such different reactions as to what Chesterton "meant" by it.

The other reason that I preferred the Fr. Brown stories is that they are kindlier. They never lose sight of sympathy for the victim and their family, and often for the perpetrator. A lot of the Sherlock Holmes stories seem to me to have no real mystery component, but are simply vehicles to indulge in the grotesque and horrible - deformed (and so obviously Wicked?!) perpetrators, hideous maimings, and so on.

And as to Bridge of Birds - that has to be the best bargain bin impulse purchase I have ever made. (There are sequels awaiting you.)

>188 -pilgrim-: I thought I remembered a remark by Father Brown, and it went like this:

... Well, his Scotch religion was made up by men who prayed on hills and high crags, and learnt to look down on the world more than to look up at heaven. Humility is the mother of giants. One sees great things from the valley; only small things from the peak.

I’ve loaded the scales a bit; it’s Father Brown speaking, but of the blacksmith, not of the clergyman. I think the point stands though. Chesterton is giving a small lesson in Christian humility.

I’ve just discovered that the lowest price on Amazon for copies of The Chronicles of Master Li and Number Ten Ox is £75.

>189 haydninvienna: Oh, I agree the discussion of humility was there. I just did not find it sectarian, or displacing the plot.

You may have better luck individually: I can find The Story of the Stone (second hand) and Eight Skilled Gentlemen (new) on Amazon at reasonable prices.

>189 haydninvienna: We got the Subterranean Press ebook edition in a Humble Bundle, but that was back in 2015:

https://subterraneanpress.com/the-chronicles-of-master-li-and-number-ten-ox

It looks like it's now out of print, but you should be able to obtain a print copy from Amazon.com (or if you've got an Amazon.com account, you can get a Kindle edition). The edition available on Amazon.co.uk is different.

A piece of silliness. You might remember that I lurk on Good Show Sir. Inspired by the impending Halloween, I posted this on the most coruscating, scintillating thread ever: (scroll down to post number 167). I finally tried the Cthulhutini. As I said in the GSS thread, Bokrug the detestable water lizard can eat Metafilter user baphomet who invented it.

Finished Bridge of Birds. What a fabulous, beautiful book! Like a combination of Pterry and Kai-Lung, and a few other things here and there. I loved it. Only trouble is, now I have to buy the sequels.

>193 haydninvienna: Glad you enjoyed Bridge of Birds. I'll have to try and pick up a copy for myself, I already have The Story of the Stone.

i have never read bridge of birds should i?

>195 justanotaku: It is written like an old time Chinese fairy tale, with humor. I loved it.

>196 MrsLee: i will attempt to get a copy

>197 justanotaku: If you are in the USA, the kindle omnibus, The Chronicles of Master Li and Number Ten Ox, is currently $7.99.

>198 ScoLgo: The only Kindle versions available in the UK are in German!

And yes, justanotaku, I think you may enjoy it.
Let me add my voice to those saying that it is a wonderful book.

>194 Karlstar: Jim, you mean you never read it?

>195 justanotaku: yes, absolutely. You won’t have any trouble finding a copy, paper or electronic, of the first book. Seems that the second and third might be harder.

>201 haydninvienna: ill check the library

>202 justanotaku: I've also been looking up Bridge of Birds since seeing it in this thread. Apparently, it can be found for free on Open Library, although I rather dislike their online format: https://archive.org/stream/bridgeofbirdsnov00hugh?ref=ol#mode/2up

>193 haydninvienna: The other adventures don't quite meet Bridge of Birds' high standards, but I enjoyed both of them.

Exactly: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World by the prolific Simon Winchester. I should have been enthralled by this, but in fact I found it a bit disappointing. Maybe it’s Winchester’s occasional slightly overheated prose, and maybe the odd editing bug. Good, but could have been better. Having said which, I did enjoy his anecdote about being lent a freebie Rolls-Royce Camargue in Los Angeles. It turned out that the local RR dealer could lend it because the car was essentially unsaleable. Too big, too ugly and too thirsty.

Now started Doubt: A History and on page xxi (still in the introduction) found a reference to "the physicist Galileo Galilee". Oh dear, HarperCollins.

>200 -pilgrim-: Hi, no, I have read it, but for the life of me I can't figure out why I do not own it, since I have book 2. I must have borrowed it from the library. My brain can clearly picture the paperback version, so maybe I had it and loaned it, most likely I borrowed it.

Another bit of serendipity. Last night Mrs H was watching TV and I was reading Doubt in the same room. The film on TV was Made in Manhattan, which I had absolutely no interest in until a snatch of the background music caught my attention. It was a song I recognised, but I couldn't put a name to it. Woman's voice, spare solo guitar. After a bit of online sleuthing, I tracked it down as Eva Cassidy's version of Paul Simon's song "Kathy's Song". I hadn't heard the Simon and Garfunkel version for (at a guess) 40 years?, so it must have made an impression, and I had never heard Eva Cassidy's version before. Eva Cassidy (who died much too young) probably isn't at the centre of my musical interests, but my goodness she was good. Unique, almost. If your musical tastes run to bluesy female singer-songwriters, and you've never heard her, do so now.

Flipping through channels ages ago (12?) I happened on a documentary about her life. Not my kind of music, at all, but as you say: she was very good.
Hadn't it been for the documentary I'd never heard about her.

>209 Busifer: I’ve been a fan of Eva Cassidy for a good while, and one of the musical sort-of-genres that I enjoy is “gutsy women singers”. I count her as gutsy.

And in the course of the evening I’ve finished Doubt: A History. Despite the slightly cringeworthy typo I mentioned in #206, it’s a really good book, with lots of good information, in a warm approachable style. Given its subject I’m not going to say anything else about it, but if you are of a doubting disposition it’s definitely worth a look.

Next up is Spice Notes by Ian Hemphill, which I picked up from the bookshelves more or less at random. The Hemphill family have been in the herb and spice trade in Australia for decades. I’m intending only to dip into this because it’s an encyclopaedic description of all the herbs and spices (and salt, I see). But I note that Hemphill is sound on pesto: basil, garlic, pine nuts, olive oil and Parmesan. Son who Cooks would approve—having been carefully schooled by his dad, and having worked in an Italian restaurant, he is serious about pesto.

>208 haydninvienna: Thank you for that recommendation of Eva Cassidy. I had not heard her before, but I think she will be right up my alley from the snippet I just listened to.

>212 MrsLee: my pleasure!

And here’s another bit of serendipity: an interview with Neil Gaiman, in which he chooses some comfort reading: https://fivebooks.com/best-books/comfort-reads-neil-gaiman/.

One for pgmcc. I'm watching Farthest, which he recommended to me some time ago. Two snippets so far: the comment that at some time in the future the Voyager spacecraft may be the only evidence that we ever existed, and that Voyager 1's second stage had a fuel leak and ran out of fuel early—the third stage compensated but had only three and a half seconds' burning time left when it reached its planned final velocity. So close to "close but not close enough".

>214 haydninvienna: "close but not close enough"

That phrase always reminds me of this meme...



I've been meaning to get around to watching The Farthest. Thanks for the reminder.

>215 ScoLgo: I think your Touchstone is incorrect.

>216 -pilgrim-: Thank you. Should be fixed now.

>217 ScoLgo: Thanks!

>215 ScoLgo: So far, The Farthest is fascinating. I stopped because I was watching it on the laptop and the battery was getting low.

>214 haydninvienna: & >219 haydninvienna:
I am glad you have the chance to watch Farthest and that you are enjoying it.

>214 haydninvienna: >219 haydninvienna: >220 pgmcc: Now finished it. I think I needed this. After a few years that gave plenty of reason to despair of findng any intelligent life on this planet, let alone any other, it gave me some reason to be proud of the human race. We might be pretty stupid at times, but my goodness we can do some great stuff.

>221 haydninvienna: ...and the film was made by an Irish production team.

>222 pgmcc: yes, I did notice that!

Not really a "reading" post but book-related all the same: in the hope that the books from Doha will actually arrive, I went ahead and ordered 8 new Billy bookcases (6 80cm and 2 40cm) from IKEA, plus an appropriate reading chair. I know I can get the Doha collection into 4 80cm ones because that's what they were in in Doha, and the extras should provide enough room for the books that are still in boxes. Deo volente/inshallah, the lot should arrive on Thursday.

I know it's a comedic staple to blather about IKEA stuff being impossible to assemble, but I've never had any problems with them that weren't of my own making. Of course at present there's no assembly service on offer, but the best bit of that was really that they take the empty packaging away. Now I'm going to have to store it and gradually send it out in the fortnightly recycling collection.

>224 haydninvienna: I am surrounded by Billy bookcases.

In terms of assembly, having cut my furniture assembly on MFI the IKEA units are a dawdle. The instructions make sense and I have never had an IKEA unit that was short of parts or screws/nuts/bolts.

Enjoy your new bookcases.

How deep are they? Mine are 28cm but I understand IKEA started to make them with shallower shelves. As someone who has my books two rows deep this would be a disaster. If they were only one row deep there would be no mystery in what I might find.

>225 pgmcc: 28cm. I'm not actually sure now how deep the Doha ones were, but 28com sounds right. I think any shallower and they would be unstable on a carpeted floor (unless you fix them to the wall, which no-one ever does).

I had at least one Billy in Ireland. They stand up to being moved quite well, but they're bulky, which is why my Doha ones got left behind.

>226 haydninvienna: I must be that no-one. You remind me of the spaghetti western, "My Name is Nobody".

I can understand not wanting to transport the billy bookcases.

>224 haydninvienna: A Stanley knife is your friend there. The amount of packaging that has been sliced up into chunks that fit in the blue bin this year has been truly amazing. Normally I'd stuff it into the car and run it to the local household waste recycling centre.

I have even shallower MDF bookcases - mine are 16 cm deep (they were from Homebase or Argos). Unfortunately, standard depth for a bookcase nowadays seems to be a minimum of 20 cm which is too deep for my tastes. I got around the tip hazard by resting the front edge on a length of thin stripwood from B&Q; that tips them backwards enough so they are stable.

My main problem with MDF bookcases is that they aren't really designed to store books in - just tchotchkes. Paul's large Argos bookcase had U-shaped shelves when we reassembled it after we moved. That went along with miscellaneous bookshelves I'd acquired over the years when I took delivery of my solid oak units. I think it ended up at British Heart Foundation. The only old bookcases I kept were white MDF and some solid pine. The white MDF currently in the library will end up at the tip (I cut the plinth off the bases), and the pine will go in the attic - or get put in the spare room.

When we finally stop working in the library (sometime next year by the way things are going), I shall have it professionally re-shelved with solid wood shelving. There's a lot of 'dead' space, and the meter cupboard wants replacing properly. Ideally, I want the meters moved to the porch, but that would take a major rebuild.

>228 Maddz: Way ahead of you on the Stanley knife, and on the strip of wood under the front edge. The Billys I had in Doha bent a little, but the main culprit was my “professional” books, which include some dictionaries. They will be in a different place now anyway. The “library” rooms are 2 small bedrooms, but I work from one of the upstairs bedroom which has a separate small bookcase in it just big enough for the professional library.

>225 pgmcc: When you shelve your books 2 rows deep, how do you organize? Are the 2nd row books copies, duplicates, lower priority or none of the above? I've had to double up on some of my shelves and I'm trying to figure out how to organize. It used to be that the 2nd row was for duplicates and low priority books, but that's not the case any more.

>230 Karlstar: I would like to be that organised. I tend to group books either by author or genre. I have one bookshelf that is primarily for weird/horror* fiction. The books from a particular author will be grouped together with some in front and some behind.

My dedicated collections will be together on a single shelf or adjoining shelves if the exceed the space of one shelf. Such collections include:
- The Swan River Press publications
- John Buhan's books
- Novels by George A. Birmingham
- Books written by Iain Banks and some books written about the books written by Iain Banks
- Books written by Ken MacLeod
- Books written by Graham Green
- Books written by Daneil Pennac
- Books written by Umberto Eco
- etc...

Other bookshelves have books groups by genre or ilk.

My main collections are shelved together

At one point I took photographs of each shelf, two photographs for each shelf; one of the books in the back row and one of the books in the front row. These photographs are a good reference when looking for a given book.

*I do not like gore, so my horror is either cozy horror or psychological horror. Robert Aickman; Gothic; M.R. James; Algernon Blackwood; Edgar Allan Poe; Thomas Ligotti; et al.

I suppose the short answer to your question, "...how do you organize?", is, not very well.

>231 pgmcc: Thanks for the picture idea, that's a good one. My organization method is going to be somewhat similar, partially because of space. My general fiction is usually in a bookcase by itself, and another for gardening and reference and history, though history is now up to 2 bookcases. The gaming related books are in a room of their own. There's the large series/tv adaptation series on top of the bookcase in the living room (Brooks and Jordan) and a shelf (so far) for Tolkien, along with another for special editions. Otherwise, it is alphabetical by author, or will be. I unpacked a little randomly, so over the holidays I plan on alphabetizing the scifi/fantasy.

You people are a great deal more organised than I'm likely to be, for a while at least. The shelves in Doha were basically in column o'blob, as the army used to say, and there's 11 boxes of books in storage here that will come out; they are basically in random order as well. I have no idea even what organising principle I could use, let alone actually doing it.

I'm semi-organised: print SFF, RPGs and board games live in the 'library' (a converted garage) with overspill bookcases in the hall and on the landing. Crime, other fiction, graphic novels, classics and history non-fiction live in the sitting room bookcases. My regency romance novels live in the bedroom (much to Paul's annoyance), and his non-fiction & computing live in the spare room. And naturally, recipe books live in the kitchen!

Within the various rooms, they are (mostly) organised by author name, then series order, and failing series order, by title.

Ebooks live in the cloud - epubs are loaded into Calibre on the old iMac (it's to do with sharing and the OS version) and I back that up to iCloud every so often. My RPG PDFs live in iCloud permanently as there is too many 100 Mb+ files. Currently, I can't back up my ebooks to Google Drive or Dropbox as they would eat all my drive space; although I only have 6Gb loaded on the Forma, there are enough very large graphic novels that more than double the ebook files in the Calibre library.

>234 Maddz: Game manuals and mods are also on shelves of their own, of course!

Given the topic is pervading the recent posts, I will just mention that we have a Billy with doors and an extension shelf arriving between 7am and 11am tomorrow.

Guess what I am doing on Saturday.

Six of my bookcases and the Pöang chair arrived yesterday and I’ve now successfully assembled the chair. (The smaller bookcases are still on the way.) I’ll be assembling bookcases tomorrow too. After buying a Stanley knife in the morning! It happens that we don’t have one, and I don’t want to open all the big boxes by splitting them open by hand.

A book in front of the TV with Mrs H: The Cloudspotter’s Guide. LT tells me I have 2 copies of this. Well, at least now I’ve read it. Interesting stuff, particularly about the really rare clouds like the polar stratospheric clouds and the noctilucent clouds, neither of which I’ve ever seen. Plenty of clouds here at the moment but they have wet stuff falling from them.

Three bookcases now successfully assembled, and even better, they fit in the space I wanted them for.

>239 haydninvienna:
Well done. I am currently moving stuff around to make space for the new bookcase.

There is something so wonderful about new bookcases - even if they aren't mine!!

And even when they are empty! Not for too long, hopefully.

>240 pgmcc: "...to make space for the mew bookcase."

Is this a bookcase for cats to sit on, or a bookcase to store books written by, for, and/or about cats?

>243 YouKneeK: Well spotted. :-)

>242 haydninvienna: Congrats on the new bookcases! It is always exciting to have a home for new books.

Now starting to unpack the boxes of books that haven’t seen the light of day for 15 years ... found a few things already, such as books that I know I have copies of in the Doha collection. But I will definitely need all the bookcases when the Doha lot arrives (inshallah/Deo volente).

And now reading The Pleasures of Reading in an Ideological Age by Robert Alter. My scribble inside the front cover tells me that I bought this on 23 April 1993, and I don’t think I’ve ever actually read it. It’s partly a counterblast to the critical theories of the 1980s and 1990s but having got that out of the way Alter will move on to “the pleasures of literature” and how literature differs from other forms of text. We’ll see how we go.

Couple more odd ones out of the boxes: The Issue at Hand and More Issues at Hand by "William Atheling Jr" (James Blish). These are collections of essays rather than fiction: criticism in the age before SFF became of interest to the lit'ry folk.

Have fun unpacking and shelving your books! I can think of few more enjoyable tasks!

>249 Sakerfalcon: Well, of tasks, there aren't a lot better.

I dug out another oddity: Proverbial Philosophy by Martin Farquhar Tupper. Tupper was once a favourite pop philosopher, a friend of Queen Victoria and others of the great and good, and today he is utterly forgotten. Reading his exceedingly tedious outpourings, I don't regret it. He is very verbose and very, very dull. I wrote a bit about him in my very first thread in the GD: https://www.librarything.com/topic/299776#6749349. That seems to have been the only mention of him on LT outside the puzzle groups.

ETA My copy is dated 1852 and is said to be in the 22nd thousand. Given that it ultimately sold in the hundreds of thousands, that makes it almost a first edition.

> 250 1852! You and pgmcc both are putting me to shame when it comes to having old books in the collection.

>251 Karlstar: Had I been up-to-date with my reviews I would have reviewed The Monk which was published in 1796. My tardiness denied me bragging rights.

Well, if it’s bragging rights: I think I have a copy somewhere of Hudibras, by Samuel Butler, which is pretty old, possibly pre-1800. Never read much of it though.

Somewhere around - I haven't seen it since we moved house - I have a pretty old copy of Culpeper's Herbal (pre-1800). I think it's mixed up with a load of unsorted and uncatalogued non-fiction and reference books which we really ought to go through and cull.

Unpacked another box and found the copy of Hudibras, and have to climb down. There's no date on it but given that it has a sticker from Dymock's in Sydney, it's not likely to be older than late 19th century. Oh well. Mind you, it also came out of the library of the Redemptorist monastery at Galong, which is a small village about 100 km from Canberra.

But the unpacking has produced a cache of Lewisiana, including Light on C S Lewis and The Pilgrim's Regress; and a paperback copy of The Descent of the Dove by Charles Williams.

An interesting day: assembling Billys again and found that a piece of one was incorrectly drilled so that the dowel holes don't line up. Never had a defective bit of IKEA before! IKEA customer service is pretty much MIA at present so we'll see.

Two new books too. The Economist Style Guide and The New Oxford Style Manual. Professional library.

Well, I've read through your history of the move (the packing and unpacking), the farewells and the book buying and it seems you have had an interesting six to eight weeks. I however have been pinged by a number of BB, including Reading Dante and The 7-1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle and reminded of how much I enjoyed Bridge of Birds.

You're a dangerous man.

>257 jillmwo: I try. Not as dangerous as you though.

You mentioned limericks. Something that turned up in the course of the unpacking: A Grossery of Limericks by Isaac Asimov and John Ciardi. It's the second of their collaborations but i don't have the first one. Definitely not for the prudish.

>258 haydninvienna: This one? Lecherous Limericks

Yes, very incorrect in these enlightened days. (About as correct as the university rag mags my sister and I used to collect...)

No, this one: Limericks: Too Gross.

Shelves are now all built and all the books stacked. For the one with the dodgy kick-plate, I just assembled it without the dowels and hoped it would be OK, and i think it will be unless i ever have to move it. Next job is cataloguing. I blazed through about 50 that had barcodes with the LT app on the phone, but there's a lot more that don't have barcodes.

Found a couple more things I was hoping to find.

First, How to Cook a Rogue Elephant by Peter van Rensselaer Livingston, which I referred Hugh to some time ago for Livingston's story about dining at the Durban Club in 1942 in the middle of a war.

Next, jillmwo and -pilgrim- may recall that we had some discussion here of the characters in Zelazny's A Night in the Lonesome October, and one of them was Martin Tupper, whom I referred to above (#250). In the course of the discussion i mentioned a short play in a book I had used as a textbook in high school (1963-64). Subsequent searches led me to believe that the play was "Royal Favour", by Laurence Housman. I found the book! It was Modern Short Plays, edited by Leslie Rees and published in Sydney in 1951. The play was indeed "Royal Favour" and I have just re-read it for the first time in over 50 years. It's a little scene in the reception room of Queen Victoria in 1859, and a number of other worthies appear including Benjamin Disraeli. Lord only knows what I made of it as a teenager, but now I find it raises at least a small smile, not only because of Tupper's unctuousness, but for the shrewd way in which Disraeli avoids Her Majesty's wish to confer an honour on Tupper.

>260 haydninvienna: To have both a book by the author and two works satirising said author is good going.

>255 haydninvienna: The Pilgrim's Regress is perhaps my favourite out of Lewus' overtly theological books.

>250 haydninvienna: etc. I cannot compete with any of you here. It has been a long time since I have had access to my library, and so the books that I have reviewed on LT are all ones that I have acquired or borrowed since I joined.

>246 haydninvienna: I started that pleasure in May, except that the period since I had seen these is more like 27 years. Unfortunately, I had to pause the process, as the dust appears to adversely affect me.

Latest news is that my shipping container may arrive in England on 21 December. We’ll see.

Another bit out of the hoard: Starsailing by Louis Friedman, whom I remember from the days when I was a member of The Planetary Society. It’s once over lightly on the idea of the solar sail, as the technology was in 1988. It hasn’t advanced much. But there’s some déjà vu along the way about the exploration of the solar system before there were rovers on Mars, and before Cassini and New Horizons.

Finally, Mrs H and I were in a coffee shop in Bicester this morning, one of the good kind that provides books. I found a copy of Skyfaring, which I referred to above, and because it’s such a good book and my own copy is in the shipping container (said he, hopefully), I nicked it. Time to read it again. I seem to remember that Mark Vanhoenacker did his commercial flying training at Oxford Aviation Academy, and I see (or more often hear) their Piper Senecas around here pretty often.

Nearly done with Skyfaring. A comment that strikes home at the moment:”It was once said that the British Empire spanned so much of the globe that the sun would never set on it. An Indian-born professor of mine in college, when he found out I was moving to Britain, warned that after a few wintry weeks in the heart of the former empire I might find myself wondering whether the sun had ever risen on it.”. As an expatriate Australian, I know what he means.

I had forgotten how beautifully Mark Vanhoenacker writes about flying at night. I’m not going to quote because I would have to type out the whole chapter. As a reasonably frequent night traveller, I can testify to the truth of the beauty of the night from an aeroplane, and of his description of it.

>263 haydninvienna: Me too. I was seconded from Pretoria to Kew for two years: a great privilege with many enjoyable features, but winter wasn't one of them!

>264 hfglen: just so, Hugh. I used to wonder why people from warm, sunshiny countries used to come to the small, rainy, foggy islands off the north-west coast of Europe, but I still have nothing like a complete answer.

I don’t recall if you add flying to railways as one of your literary enthusiasms, but if you do, Vanhoenacker writes as well about the experience of flying, as distinct from travelling or air combat, as Saint-Exupéry did. There are a few good books about flying—Saint-Ex, Ernest K Gann, and Richard Bach’s first book Stranger to the Ground—and Skyfaring is one of them.

>254 Maddz:. Found my copy of Culpeper's Herbal last night: It's undated, but there is a handwritten note inside mentioning Queen Victoria's Jubilee in 1897, so not as old as I thought. Some Googling brings up an auction record of that book with a date stamp of 1866, and the auction house thinks it's 1840s. Joseph Smith, the publisher, died in 1845, so it could be even older; Google Books has a copy and dates it to 1832.

>265 haydninvienna: IIRC Skyfaring was a BB from me. I have the book, and have read it twice with great and undiminished pleasure. If I ever see one of his, I might try Ernest K. Gann

>267 hfglen: I think you’re right, Hugh, but there was also a very favourable review in the Economist, to which I was a subscriber at the time. I’ve read Gann’s Fate is the Hunter and can testify that it’s good. (Almost worth it for the incident where EKG, as a very new airline pilot in the US before WW2, is flying through a summer storm somewhere over rural New York State when the captain starts striking matches and holding them in front of Gann’s face, to teach him how to cope with distraction.)

As to Richard Bach, I don’t think he ever recovered from Jonathan Livingston Seagull, which I’ve never read, nor wanted to. But his first book Stranger to the Ground, which seems to be out of print, is good. Less soppy metaphysics and more realistic reflection, on a solo night flight in a jet fighter carrying only a bag of documents in its gun bay.

Just a passing thought: a while back I got a DM from an LT member I'd never heard of, asking if my posted picture of the blue-haired "lady" was Dame Edna. Of course it was. I didn't answer the message. This is not me being rude (really). It's just that I'm very reluctant to engage privately on the net (even on LT) with random people I've never heard of. There was nothing to stop the DM from being an ordinary Talk post in the same thread.

So: anybody is free to comment in any way on anything I post (within LT's rules and those of the Pub) but please do it publicly.

>270 haydninvienna: Before you judge the message sender too harshly, I thought that it worth mentioning that I know that some people move to one's personal page if they feel that otherwise they would be guilty of derailing the thread.

A personal message that is set to "private", without further explanation, is, I agree, more odd.

>271 -pilgrim-: Not judging. Just stating a view. As I said, I'm reluctant to engage with people I don't know. This is partly because I well know how hard it is to judge the tone of a written communication.

>272 haydninvienna: I just wanted to allow for a range of interpretations. I did not intend to sound critical, and am certainly not suggesting that there is a particular way that you "ought" to run your LT account.

edited for spelling

>273 -pilgrim-: Fair enough.

And I'll just leave this here: https://www.librarything.com/work/21742617.

Make sure to read the last line. Explains a lot.

>274 haydninvienna: I may have to get that book. Darn it.

Whoops! The link I meant to "just leave" was https://www.sciencenews.org/article/top-10-questions-alien-galactic-federation. Too early and not enough coffee. Not that there's anything wrong with The Stuffed Owl though.

>276 haydninvienna: I think I will return to those maths arguments when I have a functioning brain.

>276 haydninvienna: Haha! Well, your unintentional book bullet scored anyway!

>278 Sakerfalcon: Haha, I like the sounds of The Stuffed Owl, too!

That’s firing BBs when it wasn’t loaded! I’ve just quoted a verse of Sir John Squire’s in Marissa_Doyle’s thread that’s probably in it.

A small acquisition today: Bicester through Time, a little book of pictures of Bicester put together by the Bicester Local History Society. Interesting in ways other than intended. The book has a copyright date of 2013, but the pictures of Sheep Street (the main shopping area in the centre of town) shows some stores that were new then and have already gone. Particularly the M&S store that was right in the middle and has just moved to a greenfield site just out of town. That store has come and gone in the 12 years we’ve lived here.

>276 haydninvienna:

:-) Answer #10 is so plausible.

Of course, the response to question #9 should have been, "An African or a European swallow?"

Here's another one I'll just leave: https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/saved-by-a-whale-s-tail.

>282 haydninvienna: Oh, that is excellent!

>274 haydninvienna: I might have taken a bullet on that one...

>282 haydninvienna: I saw that in the papers when it happened! So cool. I liked Rotterdam when I visited a couple of years ago, and if I return I'll have to check out that metro station and the sculpture.

>285 Sakerfalcon: I've been to Rotterdam a few times but never to Spijkenisse. My main interest there is De Doelen, which I adore. I've seen the St matthew Passion there a couple of times, plus the Turangalila Symphony.

Finally got to hang out with Laura again. I hadn’t seen her since last New Year’s Day. We went in to Oxford for shopping and lunch, although we had to go to a shopping centre food court. Still pleasant enough, since the food court in West Gate has a burger place that has beer.

I bought The Red Notebook And Anathem.

I’ve been reading Dr Bowdler’s Legacy by Noel Perrin. I found this in the books I was unpacking. It’s now 50 years old, I see. Fascinating stuff though, about the long and strange history of the expurgating of literature. In particular, I was absolutely amazed to discover how many expurgated Bibles there have been.

>287 haydninvienna: I will be interested to hear your views on Anathem.

>288 pgmcc: Don’t hold your breath. I’ve seen it described as an SFF The Glass Bead Game, which I read and enjoyed years ago, but there’s a lot ahead of it.

>289 haydninvienna: I have not read The Glass Bead Game but, looking at the description and some of the reviews, there do appear to be a few parallels. Hope you enjoy Anathem when you get around to reading it.

>289 haydninvienna: The Glass Bead Game is hidden somewhere in my tbr mountain.

One of the things I found during the First Great Unpacking: Like, Mad. A very old compilation of articles from the magazine. Chiefly remarkable for reprinting the first publication of the very famous computer scientist Donald Knuth, "The Potrzebie System of Weights and Measures". At the age of sixteen, Knuth worked out a complete system of measures of length, mass and other physical quantities based on (inter alia) the thickness of Mad Magazine number 26. Definitely nerd humour to the ultimate degree.

An appropriate quick read for Christmas morning: Mozart: A Bicentennial Tribute. This was the book that Son Who Cooks scored from the personal effects of his late friend John. Nice short bio of Mozart with lots of illustrations, including a picture of my man Haydn that I haven’t seen before. I learn that the Steffl department store in Vienna, which I have been in a good many times, is actually built on the site of the house in which Mozart died.

A very merry Christmas to you and Mrs H -- and the offspring!

You remind me that when I went to the International Botanical Conference in 2005, I stayed in a B&B just round the corner from the Piaristenkirche, off Alsergasse. In the Piaristen complex was the primary school where Mozart sent his kids -- now duly dignified by the Viennese red-and-white equivalent of a blue plaque.

Happy Christmas all!

Just as well we cooked the turkey yesterday evening - the power went off at 6:30 and wasn’t expected to be restored until midday at the earliest. We’re now in Corby for the next few hours.

>293 haydninvienna: Now that sounds like a perfect book for you. I can appreciate your enjoyment of learning new facts about something you are deeply interested in. Finding a new picture of someone you admire is also great.

Thanks Pete. We did indeed raise a glass to you and Mrs Pete.

With the stuff that Mrs H was able to obtain on her emergency run (for details see the Dumplings and Dollops thread), we have improvised a simple but satisfactory Christmas dinner. The sun is shining although it’s still freezing, and we are now settled comfortably for the afternoon. Best wishes to all, and your offsprings, family, extended family, friends, partners and anyone else who matters to you. This has not actually been too bad a Christmas, all things considered.

And because once I get in this vein I’m hard to stop, I’ll tell the story of Mrs H’s best birthday dinner ever.

We were on a short holiday in Rome and on her birthday we went on a day trip to Naples and the Isle of Capri (which was gorgeous although the bus ride up the hill was tough on Mrs H’s acrophobia). Either we got the timing wrong or the tour company stuffed up, not sure which, but we got back to our hotel about 9 pm without having had any dinner. When we walked into the hotel, I think we must have asked if there was anywhere nearby to eat. I do remember the expression of horror of the woman at the hotel desk when she realised that we were about to go to bed unfed! So she took us into the room that the hotel used for breakfast and bustled about getting us salami, cheese, bread, tomatoes and whatever. Mrs H remembers that years later as her best ever birthday dinner.

I hope you get some of those at least as we all look forward to a better 2021.

>298 PaulCranswick: Thanks Paul, and the same to you. Good to see you back again.

>287 haydninvienna: Honestly, I have to be very careful tip-toeing through here. I have just now ordered Dr. Bowdler's Legacy and I look forward to learning more. Merry Christmas to you and yours, as this holiday season extends forward to Jan 5. And a very Happy New Year.

Three books read in four days—all short, but with almost nothing else in common.

Manners from Heaven by Quentin Crisp: not a companion to Emily Post and will not tell you which fork to use, but will tell you how to manage your life in such a way that you stay reasonably in control but still treat other people with respect. Reminded me somewhat of Edward de Bono’s The Happiness Purpose—based on respecting other people rather than loving them. I think Crisp’s mild disparagement of “Miss Manners” is a trifle misplaced though—I remember her reply to a questioner who wanted to know what was absolutely essential for a successful wedding. Miss Manners’ answer: a bridegroom.

Stardust by John Gribbin: 20 years old now but still seems mostly OK as a popular account of its topic, which is, how did all the elements that make up our bodies get there? Nothing showed how fast the science of astrophysics has progressed than Gribbin’s statement, written in 1999 or thereabouts, that there were now several reliably detected extrasolar planets. As of 2015, the number ran into several thousand. (Wikipedia: “As of 1 December 2020, there are 4,379 confirmed exoplanets in 3,237 systems, with 717 systems having more than one planet.”)

Finally, The Journey to the East by Hermann Hesse. I’m not going to try to do any kind of exegesis of this little book. I’ve had the copy for 30 years and have just got around to reading it. The jacket describes it as a sort of companion to The Glass Bead Game, which I may be reading again soon.

>300 jillmwo: Thanks Jill for the good wishes, and the same to you. Although the author was an academic, Dr Bowdler’s Legacy is not a scholarly work, but it’s very entertaining. It could also lead one to think a bit about what you can’t say or write now.