Bumble

There's a nettle patch in the garden I let grow a bit; only this spring I let it get a bit out of hand so when I cleared it out, I found two bumble bee hives. It's not the first time I found bumble bees nesting in the garden, one winter a few years ago I dug into the ground, only to hear a sound that I couldn't quite make out, I looked to the sky to see where the aeroplane was but found only empty sky. Empty sky a first that was, soon it was full of bumble bees, bumble bees in the winter I thought, what going on? Then the penny dropped, loud buzzing noise -- bees, oops, I looked down to the hole in the ground, to find it seething with slightly upset bees. I got out of there pretty sharpish.

One slight problem when relaying the bees in the garden story, is that I encounter some incredulity.  Apparently the received wisdom states that bumble bees don't over winter in numbers and that it's only queens that survive. Well what can I say, it happened, attribute to my account what credibility you see fit.

My tip for hosting bees in the garden, is to build a loose compost heap with twigs and the fibrous stems of plants. Alternatively let the nettles, and mint get a bit wild, the network of roots, loosens the soil and lets the bees create voids more easily.

I'm not the only person with bees in the garden, a neighbour has them nesting in holes on the edge of her lawn. They're not bumble bees though, they look more waspish.

Is this the funniest video on YT?

Oh yeah it's a broad sword, it's called broad because it's broader that a sword that isn't as broad. I don't about you but I was laughing my knuts off while watching this. Highlights of this monologue include: '... a term that was far more common for this type of sword was simply sword' and a referral to another video titled, Were all swords just called sword? If those don't crack your ribs wait till you get to the bit about Scottish broad swords, you'll need a trip to hospital to recover.

Ten thousand views, that's pretty impressive and look at the glowing endorsements in the comments. I'm not quite sure why this video appeared in my to view list but I'm glad it did, it's nice example of inside the fish bowl perspective. To illustrate let me tell you about this colleague, Terry (a different Terry). Terry was a train spotter and he came out with this term peculiar to that fraternity one day, chuff nuts, which I like to spell as chuffnutz. A chuffnut defined within the train spotting community, would be an individual with a particularly ardent preoccupation with the hobby and often focused on steam engines.  I tried to explain to Terry, that to a non train spotters, all train spotters are chuffnutz, alas he couldn't see it. Likewise if you call a bird spotter a twitcher, you will get a response that goes something like: 'Oh no that's just those people with Kangols and gunner's mittens who hang upside town from the branches in trees to catch sight of the Lesser Spotted Thrumpty Bunting'.

To anyone outside the bowl, everything in the bowl is a fish.

The Dick problem

There's an interesting review of Heinlein's Stranger in Strange Land on Amazon, it's starts off with something like: not a bad book even if it is badly written. Which, you know, struck me as kinda odd, because how do you make such a statement so unselfconsciously, without any citation or providing any explanation, that is: it's badly written because...

I think it likely the person who wrote that review, was acquiescing to received opinion on Heinlein's merit as a writer, which in case you're not aware can be quite disparaging. Now this is where I have a problem, Heinlein's a pretty decent writer, bordering on brilliant when he's not in pulp mode and although it's been a very long time since I read Stranger in a Strange Land, that particular work is the seminal cross-over from science fiction into mainstream literature. So where does this quite widely held opinion that he's crap come from? Well my answer to that conundrum would be that it's a question of reputation, he's reputed to be a bad author by some quite influential opinion, there's a particular culprit I have in mind as the chief progenitor of that notion. This person would be a pretty decent writer himself, with a large following amongst science fiction readers but he never had the mainstream impact that Heinlein managed to attain. He never wrote the cult work and he didn't achieve Heinlein's broader influence, that incidentally, is not constrained to Stranger... but can be attributed to his work on projects like the film Destination Moon.

So a motive emerges, one that is not particularly edifying, that of professional jealously, which is why I've not identified the author in question. The usual response to that notion is one of incredulity, authors like the person in question are not that petty, they're nobler with lofty ideals. Oh yeah really, well history is not on your side with that argument because the examples of such motivation are numerous; the one I'll cite here is Giovanni Baglione's critique of Caravaggio and the disinformation following from it that still persists today.

So the Dick problem, how is that relevant? Well it refers to Philip K. Dick. Dick has, what I would call, an ascendant reputation. Plaudits abound in relation to Dick and an his works, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, The Man in the High Castle. The question I ask in this regard is, have you ever tried to read one of those books? If you did, did you think they were well written? Did the pages and pages of bald exposition seem well crafted, what about that omni-cognitive third person narrative, with its flawless insight, did that dazzle you? I'm guessing that you probably haven't read them or at least, like me, you didn't finish them. In truth, Dick is not a particularly engaging author or skilled at rendering narrative. Prose-wise, he's like a lot of folk from his background, centred on stream of consciousness, a consciousness that seems largely spiked by the use of pharmaceuticals. In that regard, he's playing catchup with James Joyce.

Now that doesn't mean Dick is a bad author, it just means he's difficult to read but the question arises, would that guy on Amazon describe a book by Dick as badly written?  I'm thinking no he wouldn't, he either couldn't bring himself to highlight the terrible narrative structure, the terrible prose, the awful plodding exposition, or he wouldn't have the critical faculty to make those observations. So what makes a book either well or badly written? Is it the actual words on the page, or the reputation of author? That's not such a facetious question as it might seem because perception is formed by opinion much more than it is by reality in certain circumstances. Personally, it's a question I can't resolve easily, because all creative works reside within their cultural context. It's their relevance to that culture, the recognition of them that derives from that context, that makes a creative work notable.

A really really bad day

So you've heard the news about the animated version of Batman Killing Joke and you're a little incredulous that anything could surpass Snyder's Batman and Robin in it's level of rubbishness? Well don't be, it really is that bad, it's so bad, that even after watching it, you're left doubting your own senses. There's the extra bit of course, which takes up a full half hour and bit of the, just over one hour, sixteen minutes running time. And my god, is the added material awful, it's not just tedious, it's a travesty, a festering appendix begging the immediate attention of a rusty scalpel blade. It not just that I'm afraid though, when it came to the actual Killing Joke part of the animated Killing Joke film, you know the bit that actually deals with the story from the book and not something spawned from the mind of a juvenile after they've awakened from a wet dream, is wholly inept. They couldn't even get the most basic elements right, those visual mnemonics that link the flashbacks are missing or unrecognisable; how does that happen for flip's sake?

Something went badly wrong here, the prologue embodied in the new material is so badly plotted and scripted, it's almost as if it's a case deliberate sabotage. I don't just mean the editorial interference, which is just so woefully evident and completely undermines Alan Moore's narrative but the execution is like an episode of Scooby Do or something you read on the back of a chewing gum card. No one writes that bad, not unless they're an underpaid scribe chained to a desk in the cellar, who only gets to see daylight once a year.

The iconoclasm is unrelenting, they don't even leave the ending alone, there's that little respect for the source material. Those responsible for this catastrophe should beg the forgiveness of everyone who ever bought a copy of The Killing Joke, just before being stripped naked and beaten with birch twigs that have stood marinating in chilly for a year.

Vroom

Seems like he's having fun, except the old Panda was a bit of handful, not just on corners but with any kind of steering. How can I put this I wonder, how about chronic under-steer in all conditions? The example I had was a bit of an earlier model, so I suppose they might've made some improvements but mine was very fatiguing to drive. You'd be bouncing the steering wheel back and forth to avoid the snap after a corner, which would make the car roll back and forth like a drunken girl scout, ugh. If you did get caught out and found yourself with a snap on your hands, you needed to be really quick to get it sorted, otherwise you'd be on the roof or wrapped round a lamp post.

The Peugeot 205 is the car notorious for the same problem and I do have a friend who found herself travelling down the motorway on the roof after she took avoiding action, when she was cut up by another diver. I'm told the sparks were quite spectacular, I think I'd have been quite spooked in such a circumstance. One quite maligned small car that didn't manifest the same problem was the Austin Metro, which would steer quite sweetly but that hydrolastic suspension, well it was quite firm shall we say, in fact it wasn't much more than a scaled up skateboard.

Game of Throbs

So they ditched the nudey and umpty bumpty, not quite as quickly and as completely as the notorious Stargate SG1 but for the most part it's gone. The incidents that remain seem a bit like, cue the naked ladies, but it was always a bit incongruous. I can't quite get over how soapy the whole thing feels, you find yourself engaged in a story line, to find it ditched for four episodes; by the time it resurfaces, it's a case of, oh yeah I forgot Jake Plod was about to be eaten by snowmen.

There's something that's been bothering me though, something that no one else seems to have noticed but was apparent right from the first episode, here's the opening title music.

Here's the opening title from another show.

You might notice that the second clip is not consistent with the details on the continuity board.

Chunky lady fest

You know the kind of winsome willowy chick that is supposed to be the ideal of physical beauty? Well they're nice but there's just something about chunky ladies and did you ever meet a winsome willowy chick that wasn't a total bore? Okay  I know Lee Meriwether seems like fun but what are the chances of bumping into her?

I'm not sure what the current scene is like but this is a video from a few years ago, reminds me of a night out on the pull from my youth when the girls were getting a bit competitive. In fact it's so evocative, i can almost hear the conversation, 'I'm going for the one in the purple--if she's still concious after they've finished'.

'Na, you've no chance while she's still awake'.

Crikey man, this is a long wrestling match, those ladies are working really hard, I hope they get paid well.