Text 117, 184 rader
Skriven 2004-09-19 10:56:02 av Bob Lawrence
     Kommentar till en text av Robert Bull
Ärende: Fantastic fantasy!
==========================
BL> That only applies to the losers, and no one cares about the
BL> losers or they wouldn't do it. Did Dubya and his bureaucrats
BL> give a moment's thought to the Iraqi people?

RB> There was plenty of rheoric about the good of the "Iraqi
RB> people..."

 Rhetoric, yes! - and as much PR as any decent human being could
stomach, including a "lovely little Iraqi kid" with his legs blown off
being "cared for" in the US and A. How sick is that? Is it just me?
You blow the poor kid's legs off and make it a Media event? My one
hope is that they didn;t blow the legs off on purpose.

RB> Blair and co. are trying to bring in a law allowing them to
RB> lock up people with certain kinds of mental health problems
RB> -before- they commit any crimes...

 Hitler, eat your heart out. But what can you expect of a government
that would ban fox hunting? Now they'll have to *poison* the buggers
like we do in Oz (we poison the foxes, not the fox hunters).

RB> Hmmm, they get to stay for five years, and end up glowing in
RB> the dark? Weird way to run things...

 Maggie would be proud of John W. Howard.

RB> A few years ago Iceland was getting hot and strong on
RB> terrorism, to the sheer disbelief of tourists...

 ROFL!!!

BL> I've always had a soft spot for those little round bombs with a
BL> wick.

RB> Son't those hark back to the hayday of anarchists in Victorian
RB> times? 

 Yes! With wild black beards and big hats... something like the
photograph of Pterry on the back of his books.

RB> I don't know what you put in place of democracy, though.
RB> Whatever system you have, wannabe alpha males are always going
RB> to kick, lie and steal their way to the top.

 That's the problem. We need a way to swap the bad representatives
around, peacefully. I wonder what would happen if we rewote conspiracy
law to outlaw political parties. The sytem would need an executive
(President or King), and that would be a real mess to elect without
political Parties, but the French do it.

BL> 1. night driving is different. You need to know where to look
BL> because you don't see much and you get less time to react when
BL> a dick on a bike without lights suddenly appears. A new driver
BL> does not react instinctively because he's still training his
BL> autonomic sytem.

RB> I'm not sure how far you have to train people. Too many
RB> cyclists here are too stupid to use lights, but surely you can
RB> only train drivers to react to a reasonable degree of stupidy,
RB> not toweringly suicidal stupidity. 

 I agree entirely. You can teach anyone the mechanics of driving, and
show them a few tricks, but what you call "stupidity" is something
else. Some people have no idea of survival or danger.

RB> Over here, white vans are a fashion statement. A cabaret duo
RB> called Kit and the Widow have a song about White Van Man, who's
RB> supposed to be able to moon lady motorists out the window while
RB> steering with his feet... 

 That's quite a trick. I used to roll cigarettes and steer with my
knee, but I never actually had a need to hang my bum out the window.

BL> ROFL! I take it Mr Sucharitkul was in favour?

RB> In that series he was in favour of destroying utopias because
RB> they were regarded as invariably deeply corrupt - like the one
RB> that turned out to be populated by servocorpses.

 What an interesting idea! I'm not sure I agree that a Utopia is
necessarily corrupt. The closest I can get to a *real* Utopia is
a hippy commune that usually ends up boring, bogged down in rules to
force a fair share of work.

RB> I haven't read many 19th century novels, but, I have a lasting
RB> respect for Dickens' A TALE OF TWO CITIES, because it was one
RB> of hardly any books that withstood being used as a "set book"
RB> for exams.

 I was always disappointed by the "far better thing" speech. Dickens
could have done better...

 I've never had a problem with the "set book" syndrome. OTOH, I
rarely read books twice anyway.

RB> In his book THE CHILD THAT BOOKS BUILT - A MEMOIR OF READING
RB> AND CHILDHOOD Francis Spufford wrote that at the end of
RB> childhood a common way of moving on to adult books is to read
RB> "classic" 19th century novels. He himself didn't take that
RB> route, moving instead to SF.

 I missed that stage entirely. I was still a child at sixteen when I
left school (I even played with model aeroplanes on the sly), I had
been through the 19th and 20th Century "good" writers already, and my
move to adult coincided with working for a living, and Uni. My rite of
passage was steered by text books and technical magazines.

RB> I tend to get lost in very long sentences, but, I think you
RB> need to get in the right frame of mind and have plenty of time.

 If you get lost, it's just a bad writer. There are many writers who
concentrate on being a smartarse first, all prose and nothing else, I
chuck those books straight out the window. To me, the *first* and
essential responsibility of an author is to communicate. The good ones
have you charging down his sentences reading every word, squeezing the
last skerrick of meaning from them because it is such a delight top
be paert of someone else's reality. The bad ones lose you, bored and
no longer interested. The mediocre majority force me to speed-read and
skip ahead to avoid boredom, screaming inside for a good editor...

RB> There have been periods when style seemed more than content.
RB> Text books shouldn't be so impenetrable, though. I tended to
RB> assume that if I didn't understand what they said, I just
RB> wasn't bright enough :-/ 

 Acht! It is the *responsibility* of the author to communicate. Why
else write? The early Microsoft books were wonderful.. jsut read it
thorugh, maybe once mroe, and then do it. Their latest "help" files
are an insult! It's just junk! I'm not geting much less bright, so I
blame the author. They no longer care if anyone understand or not, so
I no don't care either. Yo, ho, ho, and a bottle of rum...

BL> Oh! Of course. Unlucky you is facing a European autumn while
BL> I've just dumped the doona and have begun to wear shorts again,
BL> as an Oz

RB> What's a doona?

 It's what the Swedes call a quilt... a bed cover stuffed with
feathers or frizzed-polyester.

RB> BTW, I had to take my mother to Eastbourne for her holiday, and
RB> bring her back again yesterday, a 300 mile round trip, a -lot-
RB> of driving by my standards.

 I've driven that far to go to a party... and come back afterwards. I
used to drive Mum to my brother's on the Gold Coast - 600 miles, one
way. Australia is really spread out.

RB> Yesterday I drove most of the way there and then stopped off at
RB> the Long Man of Wilmington, one of those giant figures marked
RB> on a hillside.

 Weird...

RB> There's a small car park with a nice grass picnic area, ideal
RB> for munching your sandwiches. Three small boys were playing
RB> cricket, which rather surprised me given the all-pervasiveness
RB> of soccer. None of them looked like they would potentially
RB> cause the Aussies of the future much bother - but, when one of
RB> them started knocking his wickets into the ground with his bat,
RB> I had this immediate flash of Prince Sameth and his schoolboy
RB> cricket team nailing down the Dead in LIRAEL :-) 

 (grin) Good writing transfers actual images... I often wonder if
what I see is the same as what the author saw when he wrote it.

 Soccer is very popular here with kids. It's Spring, and they're
converting the ovals from soccer and rugby, to a cricket pitch in the
middle. In Summer, surfing/swimming is most popular (not competition,
which is all-year indoors), but Cricket would be next. Of course,
drinking beer (and cheap chilled whites) is also a national sport in
Oz.

Regards,
Bob
     
   
      

 

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