Alan At Large - Musings Of A Grasshopper Mind

09:06 pm: Harpo The Bastard Cat
Harpo The Bastard Cat, looking ever so cute, sat on the floor and stared at me appealingly.

"Can I get on your lap?" he asked. "Please, please, pretty please with knobs on?"

His big, soulful eyes looked up at me in desperate hope.

"Of course you can," I said and patted my lap encouragingly.

He jumped up, turned round a couple of times to get comfortable, twitched his bottom, raised his tail and peed all over me. Then he jumped down and ran away sniggering 

02:42 pm: What is this thing called science fiction?
Some friends of mine are currently embroiled in a debate about whether or not a particular work belongs to the SF/Fantasy genre. Indeed, some of them are trying to define just how much of it is SF or Fantasy -- 50%, 60% or only 30%?

It's all utter nonsense. People have been trying to define the genre for 83 years and the debate is just as sterile now as it was back then.

Consider this:

There's an advert on TV for a kitchen cleaner. The advert shows an immaculately dressed young woman casually wiping a cloth over grease and yucky bits supposedly baked on to an oven surface. The cloth skims lightly over the crud, leaving the areas where it has wiped fresh and gleaming. The young lady never breaks into a sweat and gets not an atom of muck on her. As anybody who has ever tried to clean an oven knows, this never happens in real life. Lots of scrubbing is required; it's a filthy, horrible job. The advert is obviously fantasy of the highest order. I think I'll nominate it for an award.

Oh -- and what about that very famous, multi-award winning SF film and book "Dune" by Frank Herbert?

Well, it's clear to me that "Dune" is not even tangentially SF and it should never have been considered for an award. The Fremen are obviously only thinly disguised Arabs and the desert world of Dune is itself simply a metaphor for the Middle East. Indeed, Paul Muad D'Ib himself is quite obviously a symbol for the house of Ib'n Saud (the similarity of the spelling gives it all away). Given his position as the leader of a revolutionary movement (some might call him a terrorist, others a freedom fighter) it is obvious that Paul is being equated with Osama bin Laden, himself a member of the house of Saud. "Dune" therefore, is nothing but a commentary on the politics and religions of the Middle East as they intersect with their Western equivalents. All the so-called science fictional trappings are merely allegorical and metaphorical literary devices designed to shore up this structure.

So there's absolutely nothing science fictional about "Dune". Let's start a movement to have its awards stripped from it...

See how easy the game is, and how futile the arguments of definition are?

Margaret Atwood has written several novels that many people consider to be science fiction. She herself denies that vehemently. She knows exactly what science fiction is. According to her, it's stories about talking squids in outer space and since there are no talking squids in her novels then her novels cannot possibly be science fiction. Actually, I really like her definition. Since I don't recall ever reading anything with talking squids from outer space in it, it becomes clear to me that there are actually no proper science fiction stories anywhere! We are still waiting for the first one to be written.

Or look at it another way. Science fiction stories can take place before the universe even existed or after it has been destroyed and at any time and place in the middle. That thing we call mainstream literature takes place inside a very narrow band within this spectrum. Therefore ALL literature can be considered to be science fiction and the so-called main stream is just a special (and not very important) case of it.

Given that these kinds of arguments are so easy to construct and so hard to refute it seems to me that the discussion curently going on among my friends is doomed to failure.

How many SF stories can dance on the head of a pin?

02:30 pm: There's a bar I drink at which has a "guest beer" every month. Anyone ordering the guest beer has to fill in a form which goes into a draw. If you win the draw, your prize is that you get to choose the next guest beer.

So I ordered some, and the man behind the bar plucked a form off a pile of several hundred and asked me to fill in my name and mobile phone number so that I could go into the draw. I took the form and studied it closely.

"Name?" it asked me.

Aha! The hard questions first! I filled in my name.

"Moblie number?" asked the form, somewhat smugly I thought.

Moblie number? I haven't got one of those.

Methinks the staff must have been drinking the guest beer when they proof read the form...

12:20 am: Election Results
Bugger!

03:04 pm: Elections
Well I've voted. And I got a sticker on my shirt to prove it. My electoral vote is largely wasted since I live in the Ohariu electorate and therefore Peter Dunne's hair will romp away with the seat. But that's OK -- a friend of mine is standing for one of the minor parties so I voted for her, and I was very pleased to have the chance to do so.

And as for the party vote; I gave it to Labour of course. There really isn't any other realistic choice.

09:47 pm: Melamine
What I want to know is just how do the Chinese manage to dissolve whiteboards in milk?

08:42 pm: Harpo
Harpo The Cat knows that spring has sprung, the grass is riz. He wonders where the birdies is. The little birds is on the wing. Gee, that's absurd! The little wings is on the bird.

Actually they are more likely to be in Harpo's tummy along with the all rest of the bird. Harpo has caught spring fever. He's fighting everything in sight, and eating most of it as well. He bounces like Tigger and never, ever gets tired.

Robin, watching him gambolling, said:

"He needs an injection of winter to calm him down a bit. Perhaps we ought to put him in the fridge."

04:46 pm: Science Fiction?
ipredict is a web site that, in its own words, "allows users to trade on their predictions with real money over a variety of political and business events".

In other words, it's a delphic oracle that works in exactly the manner predicted by John Brunner in his novel Shockwave Rider.

I'm continually astonished at just how prescient that novel has turned out to be -- I wish Brunner could have lived to see it.

12:08 am: How Not To Run A Science Fiction Convention
For almost 10 days now I've been trying to pay money to an SF convention and failing miserably. First I had to find their web site, which was a google and a half in itself. Then I clicked on the link marked "Registration" and got a "404 - Page Not Found" error.

I sent an email to a friend who was associated with the convention and explained the situation. He promised to get in touch with the con organiser on my behalf. After three days of silence, he said that he had been unable to get any response and was starting to think that his email address for the organiser was wrong.

I made a guess about the probable email address of the organiser and sent an email off into the wild blue yonder. Wonder of wonders, it worked and I got a reply. I went back to the web site and the "Registration" link worked now. Unfortunately, when I clicked on the link to download a registration form that I could print out and send off with some money, I discovered that the document it linked to was for a convention that had taken place ten years previously (yes, really) and the dates and prices and the hotel details were therefore all utterly incorrect.

The web site said that the organiser was willing to supply bank account details so that I could pay by internet banking. I asked for the details. The organiser promised to send them once he had updated his password so that he could log on again and cut and paste the account number. He claimed that he didn't trust his typing skills sufficiently to type the account information directly into an email. It took him two days and two email reminders before he eventually sent me the details.

I transferred the money as soon as I received the information and I emailed him a request for acknowledgement of receipt of the money and confirmation of my membership.

At the time of writing this blog entry, I am still waiting to have my payment receipted. The money has been in his account for more than 12 hours now (assuming he gave me the right account details, which I am starting to think is a big assumption!), but he is still maintaining a deafening silence.

Rule number one of any business is that you should make it easy for people to pay you money and you should make it a priority to acknowledge receipt of the money. Currently it is almost impossible to pay this convention money. I wonder how many memberships they have lost because of this?

There are several other links on the convention's web site that don't work. If you are interested in the guests of honour and click on the link marked "Guests" you get a "404 - Page Not Found" error. If you want to know what will happen at the convention and click on the "Events" link, you get a "404 - Page Not Found" error. If you want to find information about the hotel where the convention will be held and click on the "Hotel" link you get a "404 - Page Not Found" error.

None of this inspires confidence.

08:15 am: I think it's wonderful that yet again the Undie 500 students have forced the riot squads out to control them. That's what students are supposed to do, damnit!

But I think it's sad that the whole thing was all about drinking and yahooism. Why couldn't it have been about politics like it was when I was a student? Why couldn't it have been about something important?

Don't students have a political and social conscience any more?

08:46 pm: I have ordered some books from Amazon. Nothing strange about that; I do it all the time. But here's the strange thing:

I have received confirmatory emails that all the books I've ordered have been despatched; generally the day after I ordered them -- Amazon is good like that.

The books that were despatched three weeks ago have not yet arrived.

The books that were despatched two weeks ago have not yet arrived.

The books that were despatched one week ago arrived yesterday.

Weird, eh?

07:50 am: Politicians -- who'd have them?
Working With David is Michael Bassett's account of his life as a Minister in David Lange's Labour government. It's a curate's egg of a book. On the one hand it is a blatant attempt to justify every decision the cabinet ever made and to gloss over every policy failure; on the other hand it is an autohagiography designed to paint Michael Bassett himself as an omniscient genius; and on the gripping hand it blames the final collapse of the government directly on David Lange who Bassett describes as an utterly disorganised, dysfunctional, priapic alcoholic whose only strength lay in his wit. None of these statements are completely true, but none are completely false either so it is not surprising that the book fails to convince, though it is not without its moments of interest.

Bassett does himself no favours. He presents the wisdom of hindsight as his thinking at the time and vast swathes of the book are tediously dull as he re-fights twenty year old political battles of no current interest to anyone in order to make himself look good. But he doesn't look good at all; instead he comes across as cold and utterly unfeeling. He welcomed both the bombing of the Rainbow Warrior and the earthquake in the Bay of Plenty because they took the attention of the press away from the quarrels that were breaking up the government. He seems not to have noticed the very human tragedies that lay behind both these incidents. Michael Bassett doesn't care about people, he cares only about winning the political infighting. The man is a robot, completely lacking in humanity. Time after time after time he fails to realise that the policies he argues about will ultimately have an effect on the lives of real people. He can't see that far out of the beehive. He can only see the winning and the losing in the game of government itself. It's almost as though, to Michael Bassett, government is its own justification.

By contrast, David Lange was overflowing with humanity, David Lange was full of feeling for his fellow men. David Lange was a warm man, not a cold fish. Bassett reserves his most bitter condemnations of Lange for those moments when Lange acted like a person rather than a politician. It is obvious from the tone of the book that Bassett regards these human frailties as unforgivable. He is particularly scathing of Lange's habit of going home in the evening with a video to watch or a novel to read. Why? Aren't politicians allowed to leave the job at the office sometimes when they go home? Obviously not.

Michael Bassett sets out to bury Caesar, not to praise him. Like Mark Anthony before him, he claims that the evil that men do live after them and the good is oft interred with their bones. But unlike Mark Anthony, Bassett is too stupid to realise that such orations are more likely to have the opposite effect to that intended. I was supposed to come away from this book disliking David Lange. I was supposed to come away from this book with the realisation that he had feet of clay. But instead I gained the realisation that David Lange was a person just like other people, and that he had frailties just like you and me. I came away from this book liking and respecting David Lange. The intention of the book was to tear him down. For me it failed in that hatchet job; it built him up instead.

But the book succeeded brilliantly in making me dislike Michael Bassett.

12:50 am: Jerry Cornelius
I have no idea why it suddenly occurred to me to post this, but Michael Moorcock has been in my thoughts lately. He was always a favourite (Una Persson -- calling Una Persson), and his self-referential novels have amused me for forty years or more. I always found him amiable on the few occasions that we drank together in miscellaneous bars (cheers) and I treasure his autographs and his music and his wonderful, wonderful books (Jerry -- are you listening? Is your mother masturbating?). The sword and sorcery Elric rubbish will probably be what he is remembered for, and that's a shame for there is so much more to his oevre than than that triviality. The Jerry Cornelius novels are perhaps his most (un)approachable works (for small values of (un)approachable, let's face it, they won awards but they are extremely odd). They are my favourites (the nice dream, not the nasty dream). Leave it out Jerry -- that's so last century. Prague is too easy these days...

His Pyat sequence will probably be the books that will earn him undying fame. And his wicked, wicked sense of humour of course. I can't read a Moorcock novel without laughing, even at the serious ones. Perhaps I know him too well. Or perhaps he meant it that way. "I fuck with their minds," he once said to me of his readers after we had too many beers together in a long forgotten bar. I've enjoyed all those mindfucks -- not quite as good as the real thing, but close.

I find it even more hilarious that his son is an accountant. How can a drug-addled novelist, rock and roll singer, surrealist, raconteur, piss-artist, and freak show dingbat with only one foot have a son who is an accountant? Of course he can. Don't be silly. He's Michael Moorcock; he can do anything.

I love Moorcock's books. He's the definitive 20th century novelist. (And the 21st as well). Nobody does it better. On my list of favourites, he's number one.

08:29 pm: Content Management
I've recently been put in charge of a web site. Because I'm basically lazy, and because computers are much better at doing boring, repetitive tasks than I am, I decided to  automate as much of the routine maintenance as I could. I am building the thing on a Linux box and writing linux/unix shell scripts is something that is second nature to me (I've been solving boring problems this way for about 2000 years), so I've scripted almost all the routine operations on the site to such an extent that pretty much everything now takes only a few seconds (or, in the more extreme cases, minutes) to do. The scripts do the bulk of the grunt work. I just watch them do it.

Bugger me! I've written a Content Management System (CMS).

It turned out to be so much easier than I imagined it would be. Why do people pay umpteen zillions of dollars for this kind of thing? It's a pretty trivial exercise, once you pin down the basic operations.

I think content management systems are a con(tent) trick.

Or maybe I'm just a geek with too much time on his hands...

07:55 am: Olympic Torch
So the Olympic Torch has reached America and the American police are gearing themselves up for protests. The plight of the Tibetan people and China's human rights record are striking a chord and people are taking to the streets. I find this highly ironic, given that America's recent descent into extreme fascism has meant that their own human rights record is now one of the worst on the planet. Why don't demonstrators take to the American streets to protest about that? Probably because the American powers that be don't mind when criticisms are made of other countries, but they get very irate when anyone tries to criticize their own home grown social institutions. Anyone protesting about American policies will quickly find themselves being beaten up, imprisoned and perhaps even sent to the gulags that America keeps in various out of the way places around the world.

Pot, kettle, black.

It seems that not only is America a police state these days, it's also a very hypocritical one.

06:28 pm: Sound
Over the years I've owned, quite literally, dozens of computers. Every single one of them (with two honourable exceptions) has had a faulty sound card. One duff channel on either play back or recording. The only exceptions to the rule have been a PC that was built for me to order and the Asus Eee that I recently bought. All the rest, laptops and desktops without number, have stuffed sound.

Why?

What's so hard about getting it right?

07:44 pm: Mouse
Last night Porgy, the Cat Who Cost As Much As A Car, the cat who at one time we thought would never walk again after he broke both his back legs, caught a mouse and spent the traditional half an hour or so torturing it in the garden. We were ever so proud of him.

Today Harpo brought a mouse inside. He took it straight into the bath, let it go, and then jumped out of the bath and went outside again. He seemed to think he'd done his duty by dropping the mouse in the tub. Now it was my problem. The mouse scuttled around the bath for a while trying to climb up the sides and escape, but it couldn't get a grip and kept sliding back down into the tub. Eventually I managed to rescue it and I let it go it outside.

Not a cat in sight anywhere. Where are they when you need them?

01:21 pm: Robin's Insides
As many of you know, Robin had her appendix removed in early January.  I have no idea if you have ever seen an appendix; but if you are curious as to what they look like, now is your chance to find out. The results of Robin's recent operation are available in glorious technicolour and ickyscope at:

http://tyke.net.nz/appendix

If any of you are at all squeamish about these things, I suggest you avoid clicking on the link.

08:57 pm: Earthsea
Over Christmas we watched Tales Of Earthsea, a Japanese animation of a story loosely based on Le Guinn's novels. It wasn't bad, though the plot moved glacially slowly (as these things so often do). However I simply couldn't take it seriously -- all the major characters suffered from auto-extruding-hair syndrome, something that seems to be endemic in Japanese animations. When they are sad they hang their heads and their (extremely long) hair hangs down and obscures their faces. When they perk up their hair becomes short and we can see their faces again, smiling and pert and pretty. It never fails to induce massive giggles in me, and utterly ruins the story-spell.

OK -- I admit it. I'm a philistine.

08:44 pm: Sir Ed
Edmund Hillary died today and everybody is posting stuff about him. So why should I be any different? I never met him, but I wrote to him once. I'd read somewhere that he was an SF fan and since I was helping to run a con that year I wrote and asked him if he'd be willing to open it for us. It wasn't hard to find his address; he was in the phone book.

By return of post I got a lovely letter from him. He regretted that he could not open our convention; he would be in Nepal when it was running. He wished us all the very best of luck and thanked us for thinking of him.

He was a nice man, a courteous man. It was good that he was so polite and so thoughtful to a total stranger who had written to him out of the blue. I've been an Edmund Hillary fan ever since and I was deeply sorry to hear of his death.