Chickens of the world unite

As far as I can search nobody has published this pun* I improvisationally invented many years ago, when I was one of a group of trainees in a factory, and we spotted a tray full of sunny side up eggs in the cafeteria. So here it is:


Chickens of the world unite; you have nothing to lose but your yolks!


* The closest I could find was: Eggheads of the world unite etc.

Green Gables Island

I recently came across an old piece I wrote for a class on travel writing I took I think about 15 years ago. It's written with a magazine audience in mind, which is why it reads a little impersonal. The trip itself was taken in the mid 1980s but I think little of my description is outdated. My instructor's comments are below the piece.


What do Anne of Green Gables and the Cajuns of Louisiana have in common? The answer lies in a jewel of an island nested off the coast of New Brunswick.


Prince Edward Island is Canada's smallest province A half-hour ferry ride across the Northumberland Strait and you are transported to another age. The air feels softer, your cares distant. One of the first things you will notice is the bright red soil of the exposed cliff faces. The brilliant colouration comes from the rust in the soft sandstone.


The French Arcadians were some of the first settlers and made good use of the fertile soil. Unfortunately they became victims in a larger drama played between the superpowers of that age, England and France. After France lost the Battle of Louisbourg in 1758, the Arcadians were forcibly repatriated. Some went to Louisiana and became the Cajuns, a corruption of Arcadian. Still others risked their lives and fled to the woods. They not only survived but thrived. Today one islander in seven is an Arcadian and a descendant of those stubborn refugees.


If you come in the right season you may come across an Arcadian festival. They were having one at Abram-Village while I was there. Dancers whirled to the beat of Arcadian folk songs, while stalls offered enticing culinary delicacies. Nearby, contestants were demonstrating traditional feats such as wood chopping and the horse team pull. Every other family is named Arsenault. That's how small a group of families the original settlers were. Their language is a linguistic snapshot of 17th century French.


Wandering out of the fairgrounds you are likely to come across a small crafts shop or artisanat. On display was an antique quilt with an intriguing story. Back in the 1930s, the artist, an Arcadian housewife, saw a plane in the sky for the first time in her life. It made such an impression on her that she recorded her impressions with quiltwork.


On the other side of the island, near Cavendish, is Green Gables. This is the house Lucy Maud Montgomery lived in with her cousins. Lucy was the creator of that spirited character, Anne of Green Gables, so beloved by children all over the world. Her heroine is based in no small part upon herself. A short distance from the house is a serene, wooded walk where Lucy must have spent many a happy hour as a child, listening to the babbling brook and the sounds of nature.


During your drive around the island you will come across blandishments to stop and indulge in an all you can eat lobster feast. Give in to temptation once. You will be shown to a buffet table groaning with hearty side dishes. A short while later, your pièce de résistance arrives, a lobster boiled as red as the soil of the island. After the dinner, as the twilight ferry bears you towards Nova Scotia, perhaps you will understand why the Arcadians were as reluctant as you are to leave.


My instructor commented that I had used a couple of hackneyed phrases: jewel of an island, and babbling brook. I notice that I had a chance to make the account a bit more personal when writing about the aeroplane quilt, instead of being an anonymous reporter, but missed it. I also see now that I used impression twice in one sentence. And looking up Montgomery's biography reveals that her days in Cavendish were mostly lonely and her imaginative mind provided companions so my description was a bit inaccurate.

Writing a blog is hard

For me that is. An entry can take a couple of hours.


The reason is that most of my blogs are travelogues, generated from old travel diaries. First of all I have to decipher my own handwriting. Ok, that's my problem. Actually that doesn't take too long except for the odd word or two.


In the case of old diaries I have to dredge up the memories associated with the events recorded. I have to ask myself, was what I remembered plausible and consistent with the record? Why did I phrase things a certain way? I'm a stickler for accuracy, you see. But this phase is good to shed light on the details.


Then I have to find les mots justes to entertain the reader. This is the fun part. I have to avoid cliches, and overuse of certain words. I have to make the tenses consistent. I have get the tone right. And sometimes I have to check that a word means what I intended. This is good practice for a writer actually, to truly understand the meanings of words.


Then I have to add background information and hyperlinks. I must make sure that I spell names correctly. I must present the correct facts and not guesswork. Wikipedia is my friend here. I learn quite a few facts in this phase, long after the journey has been completed. It's humbling to discover that sometimes what I took to be the case was somewhat in error, or not the whole story.


In the case of my opinions, I have to be fair-minded and label my prejudices as such. It's not a matter of political correctness. Part of the spice of life is comprehending how there can be so many aspects to everything.


Finally I have to proofread and correct minor mistakes like mismatch of case, tense or number. Or poor phrasing with misdirected referents. Sometimes this correction continues even after publishing.


Sometimes I forget to include an anecdote and have to go back to amend the entry.


I have to insert pictures at appropriate places. It's kind of fun to look for the good shots in my collection. I often wish I had taken more shots so as to have more candidates.


And of course, I like telling jokes and playing with words. And playing with readers' expectations.


All in all it's an enjoyable way to spend a couple of hours.


So, if you would like to enjoy some of my travel blogs, follow the links from this page.

Glue stick and lip balm stick

Hmm, just noticed that a glue stick looks like a lip balm stick, except larger. Looks like an accident waiting to happen. Wonder if I can use the idea in a story. :)

Travessia

I recently got hold of the lyrics of the Milton Nascimento classic song Travessia (Bridges). One thing I have noticed often is how the lyrics of Brazilian songs change going from Portuguese to English. It says something about the Brazilian and the US world views.


The Portuguese lyrics of Travessia by Fernando Brant speak of loss, and determination to survive. The last stanza goes:



Vou querer amar de novo e se não der não vou sofrer / Já não sonho, hoje faço com meu braço o meu viver (I will want to love again and if not, I will not suffer / No longer a dream, today I build my life with my arms)

However, the English lyrics (of the same ending, by Gene Lees) are about a wanderer and a searcher, and more optimistic:

And I call across to tell her where I believe the bridge must lie / and I'll find it yes, I'll find it if I search until I die

But sometimes it goes the other way. Manha de Carnaval from Black Orpheus became A Day in the Life of a Fool where the singer berates him/herself for losing a lover. In the original, it simply speaks of the beauty of the morning, music and love.

Flex fuel vehicles

A recent issue of a motorists association newsletter mentioned trials of flex fuel vehicles using E85 from household waste in Australia. This reminded me that on my recent trip to Brazil I had been given a ride in a flex fuel car but had not mentioned this in the blog. The driver explained to me that it could burn any mix of alcohol or petrol, the engine simply adapted. Brazil is in the forefront of this technology as it has been substituting alcohol from sugar cane since 1976 and has worked on generations of flex fuel vehicles. It is in a good position to do this due to its large amount of arable land and abundant sunshine, as well as a large internal market.


Those Wikipedia articles are quite detailed and would make good reading.

Two Santana classics

I had a gift voucher for a music download site and after buying a main album I had a couple of dollars left so I picked two instrumentals I love from the Santana body of work: Incident at Neshabur and Europa.


Incident at Neshabur comes from Abraxas, what I regard the best of classic Santana albums. The cover painting is very psychedelic. The nomenclature of the album is steeped in intrigue. The album title is taken a line from Hermann Hesse's novel Demian. Toussaint L'Ouverture, one of the tracks, was also the leader of the first successful slave revolt in Haiti. And I was sorely puzzled over what incident happened at Neshabur. This was pre-Internet, so it took me many years to discover that Neshabur, or Nishapur, was a great city in Persia, now Iran. Still that didn't explain what incident happened there. Recently I came across this article in KeyboardMag that had a bit more detail about Alberto Gianquinto, the co-composer with Carlos Santana of and the blues pianist in that piece. The album was released at the tail end of the heady days of flower power and Gianquinto was making some kind of political statement, but nobody was sure what, they just thought it was a cool name.


As for the piece itself, it is extraordinary the changes of pace and metre it goes through. It starts off as a hard-driving jam by guitar, bongo, electric organ and piano. It's a showpiece for the guitarist where he gets to employ distortion and sustain but also delicately pluck notes. But the pianist also gets to carry a lovely melody towards the end. For some reason, when listening to the second half, I have always had a mental image of a cavernous room in dim crimson light while the sustained notes resonate through the room, and as the piece progresses towards its gentle finish, you could hear a pin drop as the audience is rapt in silent appreciation. I have lost track of the number of times I've listened to it on headphones in the dark.


As for Europa from the Amigos album, the name comes from the Greek myth of course, because of the secondary title Earth's Cry Heaven's Smile, but I don't think any overt statement was intended, it is just a very lyrical showpiece for electric guitar. It has an amazing prolonged sustain towards the end.

The Feng Shui Detective

I'm reading this series of detective novels by Nury Vittachi. It's not high literature but I find it entertaining.


The stories are actually more comedy than mystery. C.F.Wong, the Feng Shui master, is a veritable scrooge and always looking for ways to earn more consulting fees, all the time penning fables of Eastern wisdom, which provide interludes to the tale, for his magnum opus. He is neatly set off against a teenage intern, Joyce McQuinnie, foisted upon him by a regular client. She is British-Australian but speaks a language called Teenager where Whatever means yes, and As if means no. So the stage is set for the hilarious clash of opposites: East versus West, age versus youth, tradition versus modernity.


The stories are set in Asia, locations such as Hong Kong, Singapore, Shanghai, with excursions to cities like Sydney. Nury Vittachi lives in Hong Kong, and was a magazine contributor for many years so the behaviour of his colourful characters (we meet some members of The Union of Industrial Mystics), his depiction of the locations, the descriptions of the street food, and the rendering of the patois—snippets of Cantonese, Malay, etc., are spot on. I can't vouch for the Feng Shui bits, but the terminology sounds realistic.


C.F. Wong's observation that there should be more destruction, in the sense of discarding of acquisitions, in the later half of life so that one would move from the material to the spiritual, and end life gloriously unencumbered, appeals to me. I suspect that he was giving voice to a piece of the author's philosophy there.

Removing sticker residue

I bought a CD yesterday and found that the security sticker on the opening was old and left behind gum residue when peeled off the box. I applied a trick that I have used before to remove the residue.


Cut off a length of sticky tape, hold it sticky side out with a finger and press it down on the residue. Lift the tape sharply off the surface. The action is small, not sweeping. Hopefully some of the residue should have come off onto the tape. You may need to hold it to the light at a particular angle to see what remains. By repeating this action many times the gum should gradually transfer from the surface to the sticky tape.


This also works for removing price sticker residue from the backs of glossy books.


Sometimes you can even use the just removed sticker to remove its own residue with the same procedure.

The Life of Pi

Yes, that Man Booker Prize winning novel by Yann Martel. Yes, from 2002, and yes I'm somewhat slow in getting to read it.


No, I'm sorry, it didn't do it for me. The first part about Pi's childhood is amusing enough, as is the last part where he's recovering in a Mexican hospital and talking very nonchalantly with the Japanese insurance investigators while depleting them of cookies (baked ones, that is). The problem is that the novel sagged in the middle part. An account of a boy shipwrecked for 227 days in the Pacific in a lifeboat with only a wild Bengal tiger for a companion is hardly an exciting premise, no matter how much magic realism you sprinkle into the tale, and how many allusions to spiritual themes there are. Pi was observant of ritual in the lifeboat but that only added to the tedium. I'm sorry, I sped read through this part.


Martel seems to be the kind of novelist that likes to dazzle you with a recitation of 25 different flowers and that sort of thing. Ok, so I'm envious of writers who can do that, but it's also that I prefer concision. My favourite writer in that department is Bruce Chatwin who said that he learnt the art of maximising the effect of words from writing descriptions of auction lots while at Sotheby's.


Apparently it's going to be a 3D film directed by Ang Lee. We'll see if the story improves in translation to the screen. There's no truth to the rumour that the film will be entitled Eat Drink Boy Tiger.

Help, how do I get out of this song?

I got another book of sheet music the other day and was learning to play How Deep Is Your Love. Only oldies will remember this was sung by the Bee Gees in that Ur-Disco Film, Saturday Night Fever. It's quite a catchy tune actually. But when I started playing it, I couldn't find an appropriate final bar. I decided to investigate why it was taking me around in circles.

The structure of the song looks like a normal A-B-C-B-D, where A is the opening, B is the main section, C is the bridge, and D is the coda. Uh wrong, there is no D, after B, here's what happens: while a Gibb brother is singing how deep is your love, his brother starts singing how deep is your love a 13th down, always taking you into C. So that's why I got stuck in a loop of B-C ad infinitum.

How to solve this? Well in the soundtrack album, they simply fade out the second time on the bridge. In fact the sheet suggests an alternative start to the second bridge consisting of few tacit bars while progressing through the chords Ab Eb Gm7 Ab followed dal segno and fade. I can't do that so I devised my own ending. I play Ab on the arpeggiator and then tack on Eb6 to give it a chord of finality and halt.

I suspect this looping is what allows some dance songs to keep going until the band or the dancers tire of it. It sounded like the same trick I heard in Northeastern Brazil dance music.

Now I have to master that song and stop it running around in my head!

Hetty Kate and Sam Lemann

I just listened to a rendition of that old Italian hit Quando, Quando, Quando that was so melodious that I just had to hit repeat a few times. It was sung by Melbourne-based jazz chanteuse Hetty Kate, accompanied by guitarist Sam Lemann, with help from Leigh Barker and Andy Baylor. Hetty has the clearest "little girl voice" and diction that I've heard for a while. But her improvisations on the melody are also very much her own. Sam's playing is also fantastic. You should have no difficulty finding Hetty Kate by a web search. You lucky Melburnians. I hope she brings her group to Sydney some day.

Spiraling out of control

Why is it that a debacle is usually described in the press as "spiraling out of control"? Given the chaotic nature of events one would think "lurching out of control" or "staggering out of control" might be more apt. Spiraling just sounds too orderly.


I surmise that one reason is that spiraling implies some kind of malevolent impelling force that keeps the object out of reach of the players, thus absolving them of any fault in causing the problem. The mental imagery is also more attractive: the object's trajectory is making people dizzy trying to track it.


Another reason is obvious to anybody who has seen a runaway firework that has been imparted circular momentum; it traces a corkscrew-like path. The images that come to me are from the closing scenes of Koyaanisqatsi where the camera tracks in slow motion the debris of an Atlas-Centaur rocket explosion. But then "corkscrewing out of control" sounds all wrong, and one might even suspect the protagonists of too much drinking. And of course the language mafia would come after you for inventing yet another verb from a noun.

Moses invents the roman numerals

Joking aside, visitors to Manly will recognise this tribute to the Ukranian immigrant John Suchomlin who arrived in Australia in 1911 and from the mid-20s began sculpting in sand on Manly beach. Many of his works are depicted in postcards from that era.
His name is uncommon so a search will easily find material on his extraordinary life such as these: Wishing Well Shelter and Sandman.

Sailor goes in circles

In the quirky section of the news was this story about a sailor going in circles around the Isle of Sheppey. It seems he was trying to travel from Medway to Southampton by following the coast of England and keeping the coast to his right, and with no navigational equipment. He ended up doing laps around the Isle of Sheppey in the Thames estuary until his fuel ran out and he had to be rescued.

After I had finished chuckling over the news, I wondered about the geography of the incident. How could he not have realised that he was circling an island? How did he enter the loop in the first place? If you look up Sheppey in Wikipedia and look at a map you will see that it's a 97 sq km island separated from the main island of Britain by a narrow channel on the Thames estuary side. So it would have been obvious going out that it is a channel not to be entered. Or perhaps, the channel entrance was not visible. However on the other end of the channel near Whitstable, the channel opens up broadly to sea. So it was not obvious to him that he was entering the channel.

He would have passed under A249 bridge though and it should have been obvious on the second round that he was going in circles. Or even before then, when passing Sheerness for the second time.

Incidentally I recognised the name Sheerness. It's where the ferry from the Vlissingen on the Hook of Holland deposited me the first time I visited the UK. Obviously this was in the days before the Chunnel. Wikipedia shows that there is no such service now.

Puppy Hills

The other day a friend texted me to meet at Puppy Hills. The message ended abruptly there. I thought for a moment and realised what had happened. Puppy is a textonym of Surry in T9 predictive text. My friend had tried to correct it and had hit the send key instead.


That gave me an idea for a crime thriller premise. The murder victim manages to send off a last SMS mentioning Puppy Hills. The savvy PI works out that Surry Hills was meant and this clue moves the story forwards. If any crime fiction author is reading this, you're welcome to this idea. <grin>


PS: There is another textonym for puppy which is not a word you use in polite company. If you can't figure it out, don't worry, stay innocent.

You know you are spending too much time on computers when...

You're reading a book and you want to type Ctrl-+.

How to make your own passport photos

This tip applies to Australia. You may be able to adapt these instructions for your country.


The reason I did my own passport photos was because a photo shop will charge you several dollars for a set of photos. You can get digital prints made for less than $0.20. That's a tremendous savings factor.


First of all, acquaint yourself with the requirements for Australian passport photos. Keep these guidelines in mind. Your photo will be rejected if you do not adhere to the guidelines.


Get the best digital camera available to you. A good lens is more important than lots of megapixels. Pose in front of a neutral coloured wall and have a friend take a selection of photos of you, to have a better chance of getting a good shot. It's best if the photos are taken from mid-distance, using optical zoom to centre on your face, to avoid wide-angle distortion.


A normal 15cm x 10cm print can hold 8 photos of 37.5mm x 50mm, so that is the target size. The aspect ratio is 3:4.


In the following I assume a computer with GIMP, NetPBM and JPEG tools (e.g. Linux). If you have some other operating system, you'll have to adapt the instructions for the tools available to you. Upload the photos and pick the best shot. If none of the shots are suitable, go back and redo the shoot.


When you have a good picture, open it in GIMP. Make any necessary adjustments in the contrast and brightness. Select an aspect ratio of 3:4 or 0.75 in the crop tool and select the head region so that the head height is between 0.64 and 0.72 (32mm to 36mm in the final photo). This comes from the guidelines.


Make a note of the size of the cropped region, then save it in PPM format. Say it's is called mugshot.ppm and the size is 1500 pixels by 2000 pixels. The following shell pipeline replicates it to make a 4x2 matrix, i.e. 6000 pixels by 4000 pixels, then scales it down by half so that the printing machine doesn't think the camera has 24 megapixels, in case it cannot handle such a high resolution, and finally compresses the PPM to JPEG.

pnmtile 6000 4000 mugshot.ppm | pamscale 0.5 | cjpeg > mugshot-4x2.jpg

Now take that JPEG to your photo shop in the usual way (USB flash key, CD-RW, upload) and have it printed. You can then slice the photo matrix with a rotary cutter if you have one, or with care, a pair of scissors.

Jane Asher

While watching an old episode of The Saint (more on that later) the teenage daughter of The Invisible Millionaire caught my eye. From the credits I learnt that she was Jane Asher. I've seen that name before, I said to myself. A search confirmed it: she was once Paul McCartney's girlfriend, and is a well-known actress and writer today. And the years have been kind to her looks. Coincidentally I've just learnt to play And I Love Her and it turns out that this Lennon-McCartney song was inspired by her. I had the sheet music for this before but only recently got a version in F, which is a doddle to play compared to the original key of E. (I'm not good enough and don't have the time to transpose the key.)


So that was my interesting coincidence for that week.

Alteratist at work

No, not anywhere near a parliament or an advertising agency.

Alterati? Analogous to graffiti.

The Last Station

I went to an advance screening of The Last Station today. The subject matter is the last days of Leo Tolstoy. During this period there was a great struggle between Chertkov, the chief Tolstoyan, who wanted Tolstoy to waive copyright on his novels so that everybody could read and benefit morally from his works, and Sofia, his wife, who wanted to protect the family inheritance. Tolstoy took to being a wandering ascetic to escape the intolerable atmosphere at home. He died in Astapovo railway station after a short illness.


A few things caught my notice. The title, from the 1990 same-titled biographical novel by Jay Parini, is almost certainly a play on the phrase Stations of the Cross, as by then Tolstoy had become almost saintly in the eyes of the peasants he supported. It's a novel, not history, so some events in the story are imagined, such as the romance between secretary Valentin and Masha. And it's coincidental that Helen Mirren is Russian on her father's side.


As for the film, the cinematography is faultless; the German/Russian co-production values are like those of a Merchant-Ivory period drama; even the actors speak like English folk. It's meant to be a tale of emotion versus doctrine, and James (Atonement) McAvoy is amusing as the naïve Valentin Bulgakov caught in the tug-of-war, but somehow the story's ideas are less developed than one would like. Still the scenes around the death of the literary giant are tear-jerkers.

John Buchan's The Power-House

I've been entertaining myself reading a reprint of John Buchan's adventure/mystery novel The Power-House which was originally published in Blackwood's Magazine in 1913. You can see from the even lengths of the chapters and the titles chosen that it was published as a serial.


Buchan's most famous hero of course is Richard Hannay of The 39 Steps. In The Power-House, the hero, barrister Leithen, is cerebral and not active like Hannay, though there are some fisticuff scenes. All the action takes place in London, except for reports from Bokhara of the man Leithen is trying to save.

The style is interesting: a lot of things are hinted at rather than stated. You never quite fathom the concrete goal the villains are after. It's political domination, but details are not provided. And Leithen apparently is able to avail himself of all sorts of connections from the British Empire. All roads, it seems, lead to London. Remember that this was the eve of WWI, after which many things were broken and never the same again. It is very much a novel of its age. Still, Buchan's prose withstands the passage of time well.


Incidentally Buchan had an extraordinary life to witness his biography.


Wikipedia: The Power-House has a link to an electronic version.