Subliminal Donkey

The "Best-Seller" Mill

On the best seller stands today it is all too common to see “franchised” books, riding on the name of a well known writer but in fact written by piece-workers. I can just see it now… Tom Clancy’s literary sweat-shop, big whiteboards with book-formulae scrawled across them to remind the writers of their goal. The opening chapter section, where a boat explodes off Knossos, or a plane impacts above Kathmandu, or a train derails outside Lahore, the oval-office chapter in which tough guys from the alphabet spaghetti school of US secret departments argue over jurisdiction, the assorted heroes section, where a tough ex-special forces guy is blackmailed back out of retirement at the president’s personal behest, thus missing his daughter’s seventh birthday party….
And the deals department. Where James Patterson, and Steven King’s guys come in to trade completed chapters- “Anybody got one where the good guys escape the erupting volcano in a helicopter flown by a one-eyed alcoholic midget nun?”.
I see my future.
I shall become a wholesaler of paragraphs.

Absconding, Absolution, and a Bridge.

I absconded from the jobs I should have been doing on saturday morning.. I had a few groceries to buy, and that could have been done within moments of home, but I lost control of the vehicle I was driving and before I knew what was happening it had taken me out of town, onto the narrow lanes between the fields. At that point, well, I gave up, I could have yelled at it to turn around, and go home, but I just gave in, and sat back to see where it would take me.

Nobody explained this to me, I've always had manual cars, but when you get an automatic, well, it seems they just decide for themselves...

So before I knew it I was about ten miles from home, in Wetherby.  And in Wetherby there are a lot of places to buy books, and books are to me what shoes are to women. I can't help myself.

So I bought a few books. No, only a reasonable number, no more than I could carry in a large shoulder-bag...

Then I was feeling a little hungry, so I dropped in to the Wetherby Whaler fish'n'chip shop, for chips, scraps, curry-sauce, onion-rings and a barm-cake, and down the road to the river-path.  The river was carrying last week's storm water, and was quite busy, so I left it to do its job, and sat on a bench, browsing my new books, and eating.

Not a bad place to pause.

The bridge has seen a fair bit of history. One of britain's major north-south routes passes here. Nowadays, the main highway bypasses the town to the east, but for a couple of thousand years, if you were travelling from London to Scotland or vice-versa, you'd cross the river Wharfe here. The Roman legions did.  The Emperor Constantine did.

There were other crossings, of course, roman forts abounded, but this route, this route became known as "The Great North Road". Yes, there are other Great North roads in the world, in America, Canada, Australia, New  Zealand, Zimbabwe, but all of them are subsequent to this one.

Back in the early 1200s, Wetherby had become a stopping place, a little town. There was already a weir on the river, and a mill, milling corn. (not maize, we didn't have maize back then)

There was no bridge. You had to get in there and wade. Not too difficult in a dry summer, maybe, but not so good the rest of the year. Both north and south of the river there would have been inns, because you might just have to spend the night, or a few days, or weeks, waiting for the river crossing to be passable. 

Back in 1233, the Archbishop of York, Walter de Grey, decided there ought to be a bridge there. But who'd pay for such a costly edifice? not the church, it had to be the people, the travellers,  the noblemen, the merchants. They all had a vested interest in the crossing, and a bridge would secure the little town's fortunes, in much the same way as cities these days look to airports to ensure trade and income. 

Some money was raised, but not enough, until wily Archbishop Walter came up with the great idea that anybody paying over a certain amount could apply to Walter to have all his sins up to date forgiven, expunged, forgotten. After that the money came rolling in, stone quarries either side of the river rang to the sound of hammers and wedges, and a handsome bridge arose.

Surely, though, I hear you say, not that bridge there? I mean, it looks old, but not that old?

Well, yes and no. What you see here is quite young. After a flood damaged the original  bridge, it was repaired and the roadway widened, from ten, to twenty feet wide, in 1773. There's some more recently repaired stone-facing since.

Then in 1826 the bridge was widened again, this time on the downstream side.  You can also see where the original rise and fall of the roadway was levelled out, and a newer parapet made.
Still, if you go down to the water, and look carefully....

You can still see Walter de Grey's first bridge, tucked into the centre of the current edifice.

Normally, this is a quiet riverside stroll, with people sitting on the benches to watch the world go by, a quiet route from the riverside car park to the town centre. However, as it often does, the river has reclaimed the nothernmost arch for a while. but here it's peaceful enough for the ducks, finding shelter from the rushing river in the next arch over.

Oh. I fibbed. The car's not really automatic. It was me doing the running-away all the time.

I watched a film, I read a book,and I'm out of step with the critics.

Life, on a scale of stresses, one to six, where one is not very much stress, and six is absolutely too much....  currently the stress reading is at about fifteen, the safety gauge is screwed down tight, and steam is leaking at the seams. Healthwise, not so good either, and my doctor says "Avoid stress", then laughs, because she's stressed too.

My mother's condition is going rapidly downhill,  and I regularly get calls from the alarm monitoring centre, and drop everything, rush over to find she's fallen, can't get up.

She seems to be getting good at whacking her head on some random hard object as she goes too. She won't eat enough, so she gets weaker, then her balance gets worse.... it's all a downward spiral. Her memory is falling apart faster and faster. My brother has at last stepped up to take a bit of the load, and my sister's just been and stayed a week with her, which gave me several nights of uninterrupted sleep. Until the five a.m. ambulance call.

So it's nice to just do nothing. I picked up Audrey Niffenegger's second novel "Her Fearful Symmetry" (first one was "The Time Traveller's Wife") in a secondhand bookstore this morning, and enjoyed the luxury of sitting down to read, with nobody demanding my time. Well, there's always something else I really ought to be doing, but today I sat down to read, and read I did, until I ran out of book, 485 pages later, I enjoyed it.  I even recommend it. The Amazonites tend to give it a bit of a poor grade. Well, to hell with them, I say. It entertained me for about three whole hours, so it can't be all bad.

If you read "The Time Traveller's Wife", you'd know it wasn't likely to be a simple, straightforward, single-string story.  And story it is, that's all, it doesn't need to be overanalysed and searched for hidden allegory. Just a story. With a ghost.

I'll rate it as five stars.

P.s. (a later addition). I wanted to link to the book, so, of course, I ended up reading reviews. now, reviews always interest me, because I contrast them with my own experience. I didn't link to the publisher's or the author's blurb, because, hey, what's a publisher going to say about a product it's trying to sell? Or what's an author going to say?

So that leads us to Amazon and other sites where reviewers can say good or bad.

Now, my problem, if I try to tell you how I felt about the book, is that I can't do that without perhaps  revealing things you need to find out for yourself.

Elsewhere, I recently read someone's thoughts on movie trailers. How in the past, a trailer's purpose was to intrigue you with glimpses and hints, so you just had to see the movie and find out what it was about, but now, the trailer seems to be a pastiche of all the  major scenes, the best and the brightest, so when you go see the movie... there's nothing left. You've already seen the bits that are exciting, and so it feels as if you're just sitting through the b-grade stuff that wasn't good enough for the trailer.

That's how it can be with book reviews too.

Here's the spoiler: twins, ghosts, and a cemetery. So there.

It seem that readers and reviewers are complaining that parts of the plot were far-fetched and hard to believe. What a surprise. The author's previous book was called "The Time Traveller's Wife". Even if you have not read it, nor seen the movie, you can not buy the current tome without being exposed to the blurb about its predecessor.

So if you expect "Her Fearful Symmetry" to be thoroughly true to everyday reality, then I'd say you're pretty stupid. People  complain about characters' behaviour, about the various denouements, say "Well that's unlikely, people just wouldn't really do that." Well, in my experience, people in real life do all sorts of bizarre things that seem illogical and make no sense. That's actually not magic reality, it's real life. Sometimes people will do unpredicted things, and there will be no explanation. That's just how it is. Why then must we expect an author to explain everything, to leave us sure of the reasons for each character's actions?

Why should we expect a tidy ending? Do we really need an Agatha Christie-like scene at the end where all the characters are gathered together in the drawing-room of a country house, and a some detective genius walks us through all the clues we should have picked up earlier in the book, and explains why each character behaved in the way they did? Do we need a happy ending?

I'll say, for my part, that I write, in my mind, as I read books, alternative scenarios. This book was no exception. I'd have liked characters to behave differently, make different decisions. I'd like to be able to step in there, part way along, and nudge things in a different direction. But this was Audrey Niffenegger's book, not mine, she gets to call the shots, and I read them and have to accept her direction. If I want a book where all the characters behave in a way I like, where the plot develops as I wish, I'll have to write it myself.

Until then, I'm reading other people's stories, and should respect their choices. I can like or dislike it, but I have no right to say "She should have....".

Just like I read blogs. Even my favourite bloggers post things I won't like, and I'll post things my readers won't like.

If you don't like it, spit it out, go get something else.

I also watched The Social Network. Now that was a waste of my time. I'm still no wiser as to Facebook's

I assume the people involved in making it thought the movie to be a worthy task.

IMDB gives it 8.2 out of ten stars. The reviews there make me wonder if I watched the same thing. To me it was just a collage of cliched scenes that we've all seen before in oh so many other movies, put together to tell another story we've heard before, student geek gets dotcom idea, abuses friendships on the way, picks up sharks and sucker fish, ends up rich but sad.

Thought provoking? No. Emotionally charged? No. A visual treat? No. Great drama? No.

I also spent a while watching a river today, watching brown floodwater slide over a weir, and roil in chaos. That time was better used.

If you watched this movie and judged your time and money well spent, please do tell me why.

The Cars Your Grandparents Eagerly Awaited

I really want that second car. It'll be available by 1964!

This is from the thoroughly excellent and highly entertaining Paleofuture Blog. Go there to find out more of the tomorrows of yesterday.
I want the future, dammit.
Because the cost of coal for my steam-dirigible, frankly, is bankrupting me. The sooner the practical oil-fuelled automobile is developed, the better.

Tales of Gotham City

The office called me.
"We just had a call from *****-******, and they've got a bat in their office. Can you get there pretty quick and catch it?"

My immediate response was to say "Don't be silly".
I told them to look up bats, and the handling thereof, on the interwebs,  and then call the correct, properly trained and equipped people.
I've caught and ejected all manner of unwanted visitors before... rat, mice, pigeons, a sparrowhawk, various stray dogs and cats, but never, to date, a bat. What I do know about bats is that they're more than a little likely to bite, if cornered, they bite easily through leather gloves, and a bite from a bat is to be treated as potentially rabid. The treatment for anybody even suspected to have been exposed to rabies is no joke.

The notes we found said "If the bat has come into physical contact with a human, or is found in a room where a person has been asleep, the bat should be captured and handed over to the government veterinary officer for investigation."
Full face shield, cut resistant sleeves, stout leather gloves...
So, this time,  I turned down the opportunity for adventure, left the batmobile in the batcave, and let the RSPCA sent a bat-trained guy out to catch it.
I was still sent out to find out how it got in... that was easy. The office muppets had left a window open overnight.

Adventures in Steam-Hop

Deep in **it!

It's been a **itty week, I'm still struggling, health-wise, from after-effects of flu, and other troubles. I've had an over-active immune system all my life, asthma and eczema. Something or other, possibly the flu, has triggered the eczema, which means I itch all over at the moment. And for the last month or so too. I see my consultant dermatologist in two weeks time, and my general practitioner is being a bit cautious. I should invoke my free pass to see the consultant earlier, but I'm trying not to cry wolf too often. I'm eating antibiotics that I think are probably designed for horses, judging by the size of the capsule, and applying scarily strong steroid creams. It's not really working, kinda holding it back a bit. I think a seven-day dosage of oral prednisolone would get it under control, but my doc's not receptive to that idea. I'll call the specialist tomorrow and see if i can get a blood test before my appointment, which will increase my chances of getting some sort of solution on the second of february.
All this means not much sleep, not much sleep means weakened response to imfection, it goes in circles.
So. a shitty week? Yes.   My mother's diagnosis with Alzheimers has led to her getting a better alarm monitoring system. But she keeps fiddling with the wristband emergency call button. Twice last week she's knocked it off her bedside table, and the monitoring centre sees that as her having fallen, so they call me and I crawl out of bed at two in the morning, drive the couple of miles there, and find her fast asleep, no emergency at all. Last week there was an emergency, she did fall, and had 24 hours in hospital.
Yesterday, I got the call in the early afternoon. She'd pushed the alarm button, and the monitoring nurses couldn't understand what she was saying, so I raced up there to find her.... asleep.
When i asked her about the alarm call, she had no recollection  of it. Nor of the phone by her bed ringing as I tried to get through to her.
So I called her surgery's out of hours service, got a nurse who took me through a many-questioned checklist, and the conclusion was that she was confused, but showing no obvious symptoms of stroke or heart trouble, no obvious fall injuries.
So they sent a doctor out, and six  hours after the original incident she was on her way to hospital.
Luckily, my brother went along with her, so I managed to get a bit of sleep. Today? well, I've been told to ring back, early afternoon.
And my phone's dead. Luckily, I have a spare. But, whilst talking to the doctor last night, the display went blank, and the phone quit. But it wouldn't charge, and when I eventually had it connected via usb to the computer, it would appear to start up, but had no display. I connected to the manufacturer's site, downloaded the diagnostics package and the software repair/re-install package. But it's still dead.
So tomorrow I have to get a replacement organised, I have it insured via the service company, so that should not be a problem.
Maybe I've bashed it just too many times.
Earlier in the week, the shit was deep. Tuesday. A tenant called to say smelly water was coming up out of a manhole on the car-park.
And it was. Very smelly. I had to lift eight other manholes, mostly heavy  cast-iron ones, to figure out where that comes from and runs to. We have a drainage plan, not to scale, and fifty years or more old, showing all sorts of buildings and settling tanks all over the yard, which are no longer there. I instigated, about ten years ago, an underground survey, cameras and radio-tracing of the active drains. Unfortunately, our directors have filed that very expensive document under "lost", so the only way to do it is to lift covers and try sticking drain rods into anything that seems to go in the right direction.
Having done that, the rods go so far, and are getting stopped by something solid, like bricks, or a collapsed pipe. We call up the big vacuum tanker, but they send a little pressure-jetting tanker, which, surprise surprise, huffs and puffs and fails to blow the house down. The driver for the big blue tanker is on another job, and the only other guy licenced to drive it is on a ski slope in austria.
 So we book the big blue one for the following morning, eight thirty. We're used to it not arriving on time, but at ten, when we ask where it is, we're told it's stuck. In the middle of the road junction outside the fire-station. Run out of diesel.
And restarting a truck when it's run dry is not quite as simple as chucking a gallon in and turning the key until it fires. Eventually, just as I was leaving for my eagerly awaited chicken in black bean sauce lunch at the chinese cafe, my phone rings... The tanker's just arriving at gate 3. Wonderful.  First job is the  suction side. I won't post the pictures of what was in the six-foot deep chamber under that manhole lid. It wasn't pretty. Or sweet-smelling.
Then there's the big jetter, to pull debris out of the pipe, both up and downsteam. A couple of bricks, a few bits of concrete. Where they've come from is anybody's guess until we can get the crawler camera into the pipes.
Wash down the yard, jet both legs of pipe until running clear, job done.
Have a wash, go to cafe.

Whilst the brick debris in the 9" drain was probably the locus of the blockage it wasn't the cause. The cause is the person or persons who are flushing disposable cloth wipes. They're what snagged on the brick and caused a plug of fibre cloths to form in the pipe, thus blocking it totally, causing a six foot deep chamber to overflow, causing a couple of hundred yards of pipe to fill, causing drains elsewhere to overflow and stink.
Next week I'll be tracking back to find the culprit.
Ignore the label that says "flushable". If it's stronger than wet toilet paper, it shouldn't enter the drains. ever.
As a test, take a couple of sheets of toilet paper, put them in water, stir. See? They break up into pulp almost immediately. Now try that with a "flushable" wipe.
Most people think that pretty much anything that flushes out of sight is gone forever. Now look at that tanker. Imagine how much that tanker, a backup van, and three men, charged at a minimum of one half day will cost.
Plus the best part of a day of my time, plus I'll need to set a new manhole lid and frame, as we broke it trying to get it out.

We also had raw sewage pouring down the yard and out of the gate onto the road for 24 hours, some of that sewage entered a little stream that runs through peoples gardens.
And all that's only a little bit of my week.

Update: visited the old lady in hospital, she's in a better state today, knows what day it is, where she is, and what's happening. She was happily chatting to the similarly aged lady in the next bed, the nurses tell me they're bullying her a bit to get her to drink more, as dehydration is partly suspected.
A CT scan is booked tomorrow to check out the lymphoma, hopefully that will say it's defeated. They'll also be looking for any evidence of a mini-stroke.

Also got my phone replacement sorted, a new one will be delivered to my work address between 9 a.m. and 1p.m.

Good thing I've got a spare though.