You Can Never Be Too Careful

I am surprised this packet of thread doesn’t warn that it may contain nuts, and is 100% fat free.

Long time no write

It has been a while since I have been able to find the time to write anything, or perhaps since I had the motivation to write anything. It has left me wondering whether the blog has already passed into history, to be replace with the more immediate social network sites like Facebook and Twitter. I hope not. Don’t get me wrong, firing off a witty comment or eavesdropping on stranger’s conversations and photographs is fun enough. But hardly a fair exchange for a well-considered, well-written blog.

This train of thought is partially motivated by the last entry in one of my favourite blogs – Barista.  David has been such a reliable supplier of interesting anecdotes, stories and thoughtful articles, that I have felt quite bereft since he declared that he might be abandoning his blog – at least for the moment.

That then started a trawl through the various blogs I have bookmarked over the last couple of years. A surprising number of them have either been discontinued or neglected. Perhaps it’s not just me. It does take a fair effort to write a blog, especially if one is diligent with the hyperlinks, and it is hard to keep up the desire.

Mind you, as long as people continue to fill the web with little joys like this, it is worth having a blog to pass them on.

http://kontraband.com/videos/9269/Morphing-Maidens
Apparently I can’t post videos at the moment.

Reine, Reine Gueux E’veille

A joke entry in this week’s Guardian Weekly ‘Notes and Queries’ column , the motto of the French navy – “a l’eau, c’est l’heure”, reminded my of a book that I had forgotten about for the last 30 years which makes similar use of homophones.

The so-called, d’Antin Manuscript entitled Mots D’Heures: Gousses, Rames was published in the late 60’s and purports to be a set of ancient French poems.

 

The one I best remember went -

Et qui rit des curés d’Oc?, De Meuses raines, houp! de cloques.

The first time I read them, I laboriously tried to understand the French, until it was pointed out that I should read them out loud. Then the penny dropped.

Hickory dickory dock, the mouse ran up the clock.

Another well-know one is –

Un petit d’un petit, S’étonne aux Halles, Un petit d’un petit, Ah! Degrés te fallent

Each poem is accompanied but a straight-faced translation of the French.  “Et qui rit des curés d’Oc? De Meuses raines, houp! de cloques.” is translated as “he who laughs at the curés of Oc will have frogs leap at him from the Meuse river”.

The whole thing is a wonderfully witty read, as I have rediscovered this week.

D’Antin is in fact one time architect and later Hollywood actor Luis van Rooten. Mexican born Van Rooten was a master of languages and accents and found films roles that made use of this skill. 

How cynical can you get?

Although the main use of the Internet would seem to be for the distribution of erotica and pornography  (apart from its other use as a means of pirating copyright material), I have not been in the habit of writing about it. But as this blog is dedicated to the quest for the absurd and the odd, I cannot refrain from passing comment on this hilarious find – courtesy of Reuters (Shannon Stapleton).

 

This is from the tryouts for the Lingerie Football League. Yes that’s right. An American football competition between teams such as the Dallas Desire and the San Diego Seduction.

I suppose it is one way of livening up such a dull game. The exercise is so cynical that it does make me laugh though.

Little People

For some reason which I now don’t fully remember, I took a series of photographs back in the early 70’s of a tiny toy man I had found on the ground. I must have thought it amusing to record him in different situations.

 

So what a delight to find that someone is doing for real.

Photographer and website designer Vincent Bousserez has taken a series of photographs called Plastic Life. 

 

Some of these have been used in magazines including Esquire, Geez and Le Figaro.

More of Vincent Bousserez work can be found either via his flickr pages or on the galerie Bailly site.

Cryptic crosswords

As a parent, there are some things you pass onto your children with pleasure and pride. (Let’s forget the ones that are not such proud legacies). One of my joys which they have all inherited is the love of cryptic crosswords. We often do them together or discuss various clue over the telephone. I have extolled the virtues of global roaming on the mobile phone using one daughter’s request for help with a clue via an SMS while I was overseas as an example.

There have been many occasions when one or other of them have complained about the apparent age of the setters and the opacity of some of the older references in the clues. They do now know what a toff, swell or cove is but only after bitterly complaining about the ancient language.

How is someone in their twenties or thirties expected to associate Bob with hope let alone a shilling or Mae West with a life-jacket?  I am surprised at some that I can recognise from before my era, but another generation on it is a different presumption. There is nothing wrong with expanding one’s store of knowledge, useless or otherwise, from a crossword but some of these obsolete words really need to be retired from the crossword lexicon. 

Clearly I am not alone in this thought. A puzzle setter John Pidgeon wrote in a recent article in the Guardian 

” .. I enjoyed the erudite world into which crosswords drew me. Greek mythology, opera, literature, language, history, concealed in a coded formula that was a challenge to crack: learning made fun. Almost half a century later, however, setters are still marooned in a pre-1960s world. Recent crosswords have clued Alan Ladd and Leslie Caron, whose acting careers peaked in the 1950s, and Leslie Charteris, who created The Saint in 1928.”

He finishes

“..it is apparent that unless the crossword nudges itself into the 21st century and updates its references to connect with younger solvers, it will become as endangered a pastime as morris dancing.”

Couldn’t have said it better myself.

The whole article is at http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/feb/02/crossword-puzzles

Her Morning Elegance

Just because I like it.  Lovely animation.

From the album ‘The Opposite Side of the Sea” by Israeli born Oren Lavie who seems to be living in Berlin.

Slack

Long time no write. As the tagline says “cyberslacking is the thief of time”. (yes Terry, I did derive that from the old saying about procrastination) There must be a web equivalent of the couch potato – maybe a desk potato. It really is easier to read than to write. I have heard it said by others that the writer’s main task is to avoid writing. I guess I have been following that advice.

I could have also used a tagline that said “the world is littered with good intentions”, because any number of weird and wonderful websites has prompted the though that they would be a good subject for a posting. Blame work, blame holidays, blame the heat (currently 42°C). Or blame the fact that the weird and wonderful has become so commonplace that it is harder to find the truly laughworthy.

One email of note though. I am used to getting spam either selling fake watches or asking me to accept huge donations of dead people’s money, but this one struck me as singularly odd.

 

新しいメールアドレスをお知らせします   
新しいメールアドレス： preciosmassaccent@yahoo.co.jp

From Precious,

I need your help to transfer the money my late father left for me in the bank Cote d’ Ivoire (Abidjan in African) before he died.I want to invest the money and continue my study. the money is ($25M)how much will you take from the money as your commission of helping us. Precious.

- precious

That’s it. I can’t say it is either clever or convincing. It sort of assumes that you know about the scam in the first place and thus don’t need either the sob story or the mechanism explained. And then there is the Japanese address!

How The Other Half Lives

It can often be a struggle to come to terms with something you admire produced by someone you don’t. This is my problem with the work of Jacob Riis.

Embracing the newly developed field of flash photography, Riis documented the slums of New York in the 1880’s in a series of both candid and posed images which were published in a book he wrote called How The Other Half Lives.

 

The photographs and drawings based on photographs reveal the appalling conditions that the poor, particularly the immigrant poor, lived in in the USA in the 19th century.

     

    

Riis called for better housing and sanitation, but interestingly thought that this should be funded by private benefactors rather than governments. In fact he encouraged the then Commissioner of Police – Teddy Roosevelt – to shut down the publicly run poor-houses. Perhaps improving them might have been more appropriate!

Despite his worthy place in the history of photojournalism and his clear concern for the plight of the poor, he also displayed some very unpleasant racist views in his writing. Consider the following quotes.

Of the Jews -  “Money is their God. Life itself is of little value compared with even the leanest bank account.”  

Of the Chinese – “…the Chinese are in no sense a desirable element of the population, that they serve no useful purpose here …”

Of the Italians – “With all his conspicuous faults, the swarthy Italian immigrant has his redeeming traits.”

And so on.

Yes they were the prevailing views of some people at the time, but nonetheless that attitude does lessen my regard for him.

Doing The Rounds

The following cartoon has been doing the rounds for a while and I thought it worth putting up here. Unsubtle but clever.

I don’t like to post things unattributed , so I have spent some time trying to find the source. Unless the artist has chosen to be anonymous, I would always prefer to credit them. In this case, I have not been able to find who is responsible. To my eyes it has a French or Belgian look about it, but that may just be because it reminds me of TinTin or Asterix style of cartooning.

I suppose it is possible that it is the work of a Chinese cartoonist who for obvious reasons doesn’t want to put their name to it, but I suspect not.