A Welsh Born Icon

The sacred and profane

2008-10-12T08:00:00.000+01:00

I am not I; thou art not he or she; they are not they.

I checked out the new Brideshead Revisited movie, in spite of lukewarm reviews and was pleasantly surprised to find it reasonably true to the book. That is to say - ahem - divine grace being the sovereign favour of God for humankind — especially in regard to salvation — irrespective of actions ("deeds"), earned worth, or proven goodness; the errant quartet of His Lordship, Julia, Sebasatian, and even Charles are saved. Changing the plot to have Julia bowl up in Venice, or having Sebastian and Charles swap saliva are comparatively trivial in comparison, though I was bemused as to why the actor playing Bridey chose to model his performance on Groucho Marx.

(Hayley Atwell as Julia made me feel very old as she was a pupil at Sion Manning when Jane was on the staff there. I've probably seen her on stage in school plays though (cries of shame) I can't remember her at all.)

Who?

2008-10-11T00:10:00.002+01:00

French novelist Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio has won the Nobel Prize for Literature. I've never heard of him.

Ted Giola has compiled "The Nobel Prize in Literature from an Alternative Universe".

Imagine a world in which such honors are exempt from pettiness, politics and tokenism. Imagine a Nobel Prize in which the contributions of Proust, Kafka, Nabokov and Joyce are not forgotten. Imagine a Nobel Prize in Literature in which genre writers have a chance. Imagine a Nobel Prize in Literature that doesn't bend over backward to exclude native born U.S. writers (only three honored during the last 52 years!).

Let's start arguing:

Year	Actual Winner	Alternative
2008	Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio	Don DeLillo
2007	Doris Lessing	J.K. Rowling
2006	Orhan Pamuk	Philip Roth
2005	Harold Pinter	Milan Kundera
2004	Elfriede Jelinek	John Updike
2003	J. M. Coetzee	Mario Vargas Llosa
2002	Imre Kertész	John le Carré
2001	V. S. Naipaul	V. S. Naipaul
2000	Gao Xingjian	Haruki Murakami
1999	Günter Grass	Tom Stoppard
1998	José Saramago	Roberto Bolaño
1997	Dario Fo	Hunter Thompson
1996	Wislawa Szymborska	Stanisław Lem
1995	Seamus Heaney	Isaiah Berlin
1994	Kenzaburo Oe	Stephen Sondheim
1993	Toni Morrison	Ralph Ellison
1992	Derek Walcott	Bob Dylan
1991	Nadine Gordimer	Muriel Spark
1990	Octavio Paz	Octavio Paz
1989	Camilo José Cela	Theodor Seuss Geisel
1988	Naguib Mahfouz	Salman Rushdie
1987	Joseph Brodsky	Ray Bradbury, Robert Heinlein
1986	Wole Soyinka	Eugene Ionesco
1985	Claude Simon	Philip Larkin
1984	Jaroslav Seifert	Italo Calvino
1983	William Golding	Graham Greene
1982	Gabriel García Márquez	Gabriel García Márquez
1981	Elias Canetti	Elias Canetti
1980	Czeslaw Milosz	Czeslaw Milosz
1979	Odysseus Elytis	Philip K. Dick
1978	Isaac Bashevis Singer	Isaac Bashevis Singer
1977	Vicente Aleixandre	Tennessee Williams
1976	Saul Bellow	Saul Bellow
1975	Eugenio Montale	Eugenio Montale
1974	Eyvind Johnson, Harry Martinson	John Lennon, Paul McCartney
1973	Patrick White	Lionel Trilling
1972	Heinrich Böll	J.R.R. Tolkein
1971	Pablo Neruda	Pablo Neruda
1970	Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn	Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
1969	Samuel Beckett	Samuel Beckett
1968	Yasunari Kawabata	Yukio Mishima
1967	Miguel Angel Asturias	Vladimir Nabokov
1966	Shmuel Yosef Agnon, Nelly Sachs	Agatha Christie, Jorge Luis Borges
1965	Mikhail Sholokhov	Jack Kerouac
1964	Jean-Paul Sartre	Jean-Paul Sartre
1963	Giorgios Seferis	Giorgios Seferis
1962	John Steinbeck	John Steinbeck
1961	Ivo Andric	William Carlos Willaims
1960	Saint-John Perse	Ian Fleming
1959	Salvatore Quasimodo	Cole Porter
1958	Boris Pasternak	E. M. Forster
1957	Albert Camus	Albert Camus
1956	Juan Ramón Jiménez	Raymond Chandler
1955	Halldòr Laxness	Bertolt Brecht
1954	Ernest Hemingway	Ernest Hemingway
1953	Winston Churchill	Wallace Stevens
1952	François Mauriac	Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
1951	Pär Lagerkvist	Dorothy Parker
1950	Bertrand Russell	Ludwig Wittgenstein
1949	William Faulkner	William Faulkner
1948	T.S. Eliot	T.S. Eliot
1947	André Gide	André Gide
1946	Hermann Hesse	Hermann Broch
1945	Gabriela Mistral	George Orwell
1944	Johannes V. Jensen	W. H. Auden
1939	Frans Eemil Sillanpää	Robert Musil
1938	Pearl Buck	Virginia Woolf
1937	Roger Martin du Gard	James Joyce
1936	Eugene O'Neill	Eugene O'Neill
1934	Luigi Pirandello	Luigi Pirandello
1933	Ivan Bunin	Stefan Zweig
1932	John Galsworthy	Zane Grey
1931	Erik Axel Karlfeldt	G. K. Chesterton
1930	Sinclair Lewis	F. Scott Fitzgerald
1929	Thomas Mann	Thomas Mann
1928	Sigrid Undset	Edith Wharton
1927	Henri Bergson	Constantine P. Cavafy
1926	Grazia Deledda	Arthur Conan Doyle
1925	George Bernard Shaw	George Bernard Shaw
1924	Wladyslaw Reymont	Miguel de Unamuno
1923	William Butler Yeats	William Butler Yeats
1922	Jacinto Benavente	Franz Kafka
1921	Anatole France	Marcel Proust
1920	Knut Hamsun	Rainer Maria Rilke
1919	Carl Spitteler	Thomas Hardy
1917	Karl Gjellerup, Henrik Pontoppidan	Joseph Conrad
1916	Verner von Heidenstam	Sigmund Freud
1915	Romain Rolland	Guillaume Apollinaire
1913	Rabindranath Tagore	George Trakl
1912	Gerhart Hauptmann	William Dean Howells
1911	Maurice Maeterlinck	Henry James
1910	Paul Heyse	W.S. Gilbert
1909	Selma Lagerlöf	August Strindberg
1908	Rudolf Eucken	John Millington Synge
1907	Rudyard Kipling	Rudyard Kipling
1906	Giosuè Carducci	Mark Twain
1905	Henryk Sienkiewicz	Henrik Ibsen
1904	Frédéric Mistral, José Echegaray	Jules Verne
1903	Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson	Anton Chekhov
1902	Theodor Mommsen	George Meredith
1901	Sully Prudhomme	Leo Tolstoy

Blood River

2008-10-10T08:00:00.000+01:00

DR Congo is on on my mind, as inspired by MacKenna's posting I'm reading Tim Butchers's Blood River.

Things are getting desperate again in the East, on the border with Rwanda. See this BBC report including quotes from Alan Doss, Rod's boss.

I wonder if I'd even notice if I didn't know someone involved. I was barely aware of "Africa's World War" when it was going on there. (Did it ever really stop?)

That ignorance is quite an indictment of me.

The Phoenix

2008-10-09T09:39:00.004+01:00

Wimbledon Bookfest 2008 is running this week, but what with one thing and another I've only been able to get along to one event; Leo Hollis last night on his book (deep breath now) The Phoenix: St. Paul's Cathedral And The Men Who Made Modern London.

I bought a copy for £20, but got him to write "IOU £20" as the dedication when he signed it, thus making the deal neutral.

Perhaps with innovations like that, I should be advising the Chancellor on his £500 billion bank bailout scheme?

Come to think about it, even though I've actually got a postgraduate degree specialising in international finance, I do find myself tempted to shout out "double or quits" whenever a talking head on the TV spouts one of these extraordinary figures.

The New Etiquette

2008-10-08T08:00:00.000+01:00

Dear Miss Manners,

In these days of near ubiquitous body art, what are the rules on reading another man's tattoos in the locker room?

ALVY: 'Cause I don't like to get naked in front of another man, you know-it's, uh ...

ANNIE: (Laughing) Oh, I see, I see.

ALVY: You know, I don't like to show my body to a man of my gender-

ANNIE: Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah, I see. I guess-

ALVY: 'cause, uh, you never know what's gonna happen.

What is most appropriate; peripheral vision, a glance, or a frank stare? What about spelling mistakes, or grammatical errors? Is it impolite to point them out?

Yours,

Perplexed: Virgin Active.

And all be turn'd to barnacles, or to apes

2008-10-07T07:45:00.003+01:00

From a terrific Times review:

Many points are so beautifully made in this excellent spoof of a Hollywood memoir that it is honestly hard to know where to start. But one could usefully begin with Cheeta's incisive contribution to the “infinite number of monkeys” theory of probability. It's all very well hypothesising about those monkeys and typewriters, he says: isn't it time for human beings to look around? “You've had a million humans, at least, writing away for much longer than a thousand years, and only one of them ever managed to produce the Complete Works of Shakespeare. Only one! Well, well, what's the big deal?”
..............................
What we have here is a showbiz memoir from a star whose gilded cage was no metaphor; who views the great days of Hollywood in zoological terms. It's a brilliant idea. Naturally, as befits the memoir genre, Cheeta defines himself as an actor (“I'm a comedian, not an intellec- tual”). Naturally, too, modesty does not prevent him from pointing out that, in his great middle-period work on the Tarzan pictures, he was a pioneer of “simian thespianism”. How much of his success in films was down to him being an animal? Cheeta will accept it's as much as 10%; the rest, however, was talent. In common with every other showbiz memoirist, he claims never to read his reviews; he then quotes them extensively. He mentions several times that he never won an effing Oscar. He will recall a great star such as Rex Harrison by first calling him “that marvellous light comedian”, then getting down to the more interesting truth (“universally despised, impotent, alcoholic”), before coming properly out with it: “an absolutely irredeemable c*** who tried to murder me”. And, like many another stellar memoirist, he can't resist a vicious sideswipe at a fellow thesp. “For three decades I think I ‘phoned it in' a bit,” he confesses. “It happens to actors. Look at De Niro.”.

Straight in to the top five in my reading list goes Me Cheeta: The Autobiography

What I talk about ....

2008-10-06T07:46:00.004+01:00

I read and finished Haruki Murakami's What I Talk About When I Talk About Running yesterday on the train to and from a Muay Thai promotion. I picked the book up as an offshoot the idiot-participatory-martial-arts strand of my recent reading, and was very glad that I did. It reminded me, with its deceptively simple but artful voice, of Kurt Vonnegut's non-fiction; and I revere Kurt Vonnegut's non-fiction.

Pleasure indeed to stumble on an author with a twenty year back catalogue for me to work my way through.

Reach

2008-10-05T09:36:00.006+01:00

I contacted Urban Freeflow after we saw them at the Thames Festival, to see if we couldn't organise a lesson for the bomber and some chums as a birthday treat. Fate played the straight man, so here he is trying to run up a wall yesterday under the supervision of UF's Cali while his mates look on.

Cali was a real gent; a pleasure to deal with setting the thing up then really great with the kids on the day (which can be harder than it looks).

Good memories. Here's his show reel.

Thinking out loud

2008-10-04T08:00:00.000+01:00

Nearly two years after I begged for it, Amazon have announced that "starting later this Fall, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) will offer you the ability to run Microsoft Windows Server or Microsoft SQL Server".

Potentially this is hugely attractive. The One Show has about seven million viewers. When the film about our auction system gets broadcast later this month, our servers are going to get absolutely hammered for a few days. I've got enough bandwidth for the job, but at the moment I'm scrabbling around trying to get hold of extra hardware to rent for the demand spike.

As I understand it (a cursory understanding at best), EC2 works by creating virtual instances of servers. You can boot new and destroy old instances instantly. I wonder how Microsoft's server scaling will map onto this environment?

You pay for the services (monthly in arrears) in instance hours; 40cents for a Large Instance (7.5 GB of memory, 4 EC2 Compute Units (2 virtual cores with 2 EC2 Compute Units each), 850 GB of instance storage, 64-bit platform) for example. Microsoft licenses will be more obviously.

Data transfer is $0.100 per GB – all data transfer in, and 0.170 per GB – first 10 TB / month data transfer out.

Persistent storage is in Amazon S3.

I may have got some of this wrong, and there may be US versus Europe wrinkles I'm missing but a watching brief is definitely in order.

Ian Blair Forced Out

2008-10-03T07:52:00.005+01:00

Infuriatingly obscure note to self:
Speaking of skiing companions, I have to pay for the me and the bomber to join Bondy's 2009 jaunt by 25th of this month.

Update: Joe Kinnear for Commissioner

Here's how to run an old-school press conference :

Joe Kinnear: Which one is Simon Bird (Daily Mirror journalist)?

Bird: Me.

JK: You're a c---.

Bird: Thank you

JK: Which one his [Niall] Hickman (Daily Express)? You are out of order. Absolutely f------ out of order. If you do it again, I am telling you you can f--- off and go to another ground. I will not come and stand for that f----- crap. No f------ way, lies.

F---, you're saying I turned up and they f----- off.

Bird: No Joe, have you read it, it doesn't actually say that. Have you read it?

JK: I've f----- read it, I've read it.

Bird: It doesn't say that. Have you read it?

JK: You are trying to f------ undermine my position already.

Bird: Have you read it, it doesn't say that. I knew you knew they were having a day off.

JK: F--- off. F--- off. It's your last f------ chance.

Genius.

Every day in every way

2008-10-02T08:00:00.001+01:00

I've now got my little linux AAA1 driving an external monitor at a decent resolution and running a variety of remote access software. This means that I can plug it in at work and access all my other machines from it. I've also managed to replace the cut-down front end that Acer load on the machine with the more useful complete Xfce desktop.

Next vague tasks are Microsoft interoperability tasks are network access to files (SAMBA?) and PPTP VPN access.

As a University College Swansea graduate myself, I have been delighted to find out that Alan Cox and the Swansea University Computer Society played no small part in the evolution of this operating system.

He sorted out the networking. Only connect.

Louie Knight

2008-10-01T07:00:00.001+01:00

I finished reading "Last Tango in Aberystwyth" last night, and will now pass it on to The Profit Burglar who attended University College Aberystwyth back in the day.

The book had lain unread in my house for a long time, but I think I'm hooked on Louie Knight mysteries now. ("Last Tango" is the second book in the series. Poignantly, I remember sending the first to David when he was in hospital. He didn't come out, which may explain volume 2's forlorn languishing on my bookshelves. I bet I got it for him.)

The next installment will be out in 2009:

Hughesovka? Sure, private detective Louie Knight had heard the stories, he'd heard about the legendary replica of Aberystwyth built in the Ukraine by some crazy nineteenth-century Czar. But he didn't believe it. He thought it was all phooey, just a land for dreamers and romantics where every house was an ice cream castle in the air. But all that changed when the museum curator of the fabled Shangri-la turned up in his office with a wild and crazy tale of love, death, madness and betrayal. Forced to swallow his scepticism, Louie is soon adrift in the neon-drenched wilderness of Aberystwyth Prom, pursued by snuff philatelists and a renegade spinning wheel salesman, and clutching two most unlikely talismans - a ticket to Hughesovka and a Russian cosmonaut's sock.Aberystwyth's only private eye and his sidekick Calamity Jane return as they swap the train to Dovey Junction for the Orient Express and try to unravel a murder mystery that is bizarre, even by their own exceptional standards.

I'll stand by you

2008-09-30T00:01:00.002+01:00

Extraordinary how potent cheap music is.

Up to a point Sir Noel, but today is the New Ninja Bomber's eighth birthday and there is no better delineation of what I feel for him than what the world knows as a Girls Aloud hit single:

Hey, why d'you look so sad?
Tears are in your eyes
Come on and come to me now
Don't be ashamed to cry
Let me see you through
'Cause I've seen the dark side too

When the night falls on you
And you don't know what to do
Nothing you confess
Could make me you love you less

I'll stand by you
I'll stand by you
Won't let nobody hurt you
I'll stand by you

So if you're mad, get mad
Don't hold it all inside
Come on and talk to me now
Hey, what you got to hide?
I get angry too
Well I'm a lot like you

When you're standing at the crossroads
And don't know which path to choose
Let me come along
'Cause even if you're wrong

I'll stand by you
I'll stand by you
Won't let nobody hurt you
I'll stand by you

Take me in, into your darkest hour
And I'll never desert you
I'll stand by you

And when he night falls on you
And you're feeling all alone
You won't be on your own

I'll stand by you
I'll stand by you
Won't let nobody hurt you
I'll stand by you.

Shell Games

2008-09-29T08:01:00.004+01:00

[user@localhost home]$ cd ..
[user@localhost /]$ cd usr/bin
[user@localhost bin]$ rdesktop
rdesktop: A Remote Desktop Protocol client.
Version 1.5.0. Copyright (C) 1999-2005 Matt Chapman.
See http://www.rdesktop.org/ for more information.

Usage: rdesktop [options] server[:port]
-u: user name
-d: domain
-s: shell
-c: working directory

You guessed it. I've had to go back to a command line interface to make any progress with linux on the AAA1. This, as much as anything is because the Live Update feature always seems to take the GUI back to the factory setting every time an update is downloaded.

My geek gene - though recessive or dormant - is still there.

Fecking Hull!

2008-09-28T07:56:00.002+01:00

The Bomber turns 8 this week, and I was lucky enough to get a couple of tickets for the Emirates as an early present, so we took ourselves along, and joined the throng. Arsenal were sitting pretty at the top of the table, and had knocked six past Sheffield in the week so confidence was high ...... and yet it was not to be.

Hull won two one, inflicting only the second ever home defeat in a competitive match for the Gunners at the Emirates.

Ben certainly had a thorough tutorial in the manly art of swearing as the tension rose through the second half, confiding, "the man behind is spitting in my hair when he shouts".

I'm sure it was character building.

A Belter

2008-09-27T07:34:00.005+01:00

Six months after it was shown in the US, and with the DVD already out over the pond, David Mamet's Redbelt has got a limited release in the UK.

Wimbledon being part of this limited release, I went along to see it yesterday.

Our beleaguered protagonist's struggles put me in mind of a Chandler quote, "down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid".

Sondra Terry: You think it was noble? The code of the warrior. You think it's noble?
Mike Terry: No, I think it's correct.

No Drugs, No Guns, No Slippers

2008-09-26T06:00:00.001+01:00

I went to Manila once. It was like something out of the Wild West, everyone was packing heat. The Philippines is (are?) overwhelmingly Catholic and I have a vivid memory of an open air Mass in a park where most of the congregation appeared to be armed to the hilt.

I also treasure a sign outside a nightclub explaining its admittance policy: "no drugs, no guns, no slippers". Though we have drugs and guns in London we seem largely to have escaped the slipper menace, not that that is any reason for complacency.

All of which is a round about way of leading up to the fact that we went to Josephine's Filipino restaurant this week for pork, chicken, rice, noodles and vegetables.

Follow the links for our real and imaginary destinations as we eat our way around the world in London.

Airing Our Laundry

2008-09-25T11:16:00.010+01:00

Chris: Please sir can I be let off reading "Daniel Martin"?

Myself: That my boy is a matter for you and your conscience. Looking through your records for this term, I also notice that you have asked to be excused "A Fighter's Heart". Very well, from my authorised list I assign you "Alexander the Great" by Robin Lane Fox. As homework, however, I expect an essay at http://grumunkin.blogspot.com/ on the rewards of the biography of a man who, among other things, introduced crucifixion and decimation across his empire. In particular, why should that be less disturbing than the tale of a comparatively guileless working stiff who merely trains for Muay thai in Bangkok, Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu in Rio, boxing in Oakland and MMA in Iowa?

Prodnose: It must be tremendously interesting to be a schoolmaster, to watch boys grow up and help them along; to see their characters develop and what they become when they leave school and the world gets hold of them. I don't see how you could ever get old in a world that's always young.

Myself: Silence! Silence! I'll have no more of it!

Prodnose: No more silence, sir?

Myself: I shall state silences more competently than ever a better man spangled the butterflies of vertigo.

Daniel Martin

2008-09-24T07:00:00.011+01:00

As I opened my latest Amazon parcel today, I realised that - although I finished it some little time ago - I hadn't recorded my opinion of the 700 page Daniel Martin on the blog. Suffice to say I didn't like it. Mostly I imagine, as I did not share the eponymous character's high opinion of his own aesthetic sensibility. He seemed rather a tawdry figure to me.

I've adapted the book for the attention span of the MTV generation below. I don't think I've missed much out, for all that Daniel sits around interminably feeling condemned to pursue emotional dead ends:

Jane: Uggh, that woman in the reeds is like totally drowned.
Daniel: Gross!
later
Jane: I'm still like totally freaked out. D'you wanna like ... hook up?
Daniel: But I'm like with your sister and your like with my friend, Anthony. Isn't that a bit like gross? Um, alright, I s'pose.
25 years later.
Jane: I'm calling 'cause Anthony's got like cancer and wants to see you?
Daniel: What 'cause me 'n you got jiggy back in the day? Gimme a break! These days I pimp movie stars.
He flies to London never the less
Barney: Dan, remember when you totally nailed Jane in College dude? Now I'm totally nailing your daughter!
Daniel: Gross!
Anthony kills himself conveniently
Daniel: Jane, now Tony's dead do you fancy coming to Egypt you old tart? I gotta - you know - write like a screenplay exorcising the ghost of Imperialism and all that lot.
Jane: Sounds lame. Um, alright but no funny business.
They cruise down the Nile.
Daniel: Everyone except us is like a total loser man. Germans, Arabs, Russians, even the Yanks; everyone they're all total losers.
Jane: They can't help it, they didn't go to Oxford.
Daniel: Like that's my fault! Makes me think we oughta like ... hook up again? I'll tell that slapper in LA to sod off.
Jane: Um, alright, I s'pose. Whatevaaaah.
They live happily ever after

Bryn

2008-09-23T07:06:00.003+01:00

Brinley ("Bryn") Newton-John was born in the New Market Tavern in the Hayes, Cardiff where his mum worked behind the bar.

He went to Cambridge, where he married Nobel Physics laureate Max Born's daughter with whom he had a daughter called Olivia Newton John, was an MI5 officer on the Enigma project at Bletchley Park and the officer who took Rudolph Hess into custody during World War II. The family emigrated in 1954 to Melbourne, Australia where he worked as a Professor of German and became the Master of Ormond College at the University of Melbourne.

That is quite a story arc. I must catch up with this BBC show.

Mal Aware

2008-09-22T07:00:00.002+01:00

I may be a Linux novice, but I'm a Microsoft Systems Engineer who knows his way around Windows pretty thoroughly, and I'm always happy to help friends and acquaintances out with PC problems.

This weekend I was removing Antivirus XP 2008 using Malwarebytes' Anti-Malware for someone who had clicked unwisely in an email message.

The good people at bleepingcomputer.com tell us that:

Antivirus XP 2008 is a new rogue anti-spyware program that is advertised through Trojans and other malware. It is advertised in the form of fake security alerts and warnings on web sites that state you are infected with malware or are being attacked in some manner. When you click on these ads, it will automatically download the installer for Antivirus XP 2008 and install it on your machine. In some cases, this program is installed without any intervention at all from you.

Once installed, AntivirusXP 2008 will scan your computer and display a variety of security risks found on your computer that can only be removed if you purchase a license of the software. These risks, though, are all fake and are only being displayed to scare you into thinking you are infected and thus purchase their software. Another tactic that AntivirusXP 2008, and the accompanied malware, uses is to change your desktop background to be a message stating you are infected, popups and fake alerts stating your computer is being attacked, and a fake Internet Explorer page that states Google has found your computer to be infected.

Whoever us behind AntivirusXP 2008 is a monumental scumbag. People should go to prison for this sort of thing. It causes real distress to folk who aren't IT specialists.

Malwarebytes Anti-Malware is available as a free download and its what I used to kill AntivirusXP in this case. It hoses the infection away completely then politely and discreetly asks you to consider purchasing the professional version. This is model citizenship on the internet. I respect and praise the people behind it as much as I hate and despise the people who write malware in the first place, so I'm throwing this post out as an expression of goodwill to them,

Panache

2008-09-21T07:00:00.007+01:00

I've had a long standing project in the back of my mind to translate Cyrano de Bergerac into English in heroic couplets. I took a first swing at it yesterday, starting at the end, and so:

Que dites-vous? C'est inutile? Je le sais!
Mais on ne se bat pas dans l'espoir du succès!
Non! non! C'est bien plus beau lorsque c'est inutile!
Qu'est-ce que c'est tous ceux-là? Vous êtes mille?
Ah je vous reconnais, tous mes vieux ennemis!
Le Mensonge? Tiens, tiens! Ha! Ha! Les Compromis!
Les Préjugés, les Lâchetés! Que je pactise?
Jamais, jamais! Ah! te voilà, toi, la Sottise!
Je sais bien qu'à la fin vous me mettrez à bas;
N'importe: je me bats ! je me bats ! je me bats!
Oui, vous m'arrachez tout, le laurier et la rose!
Arrachez ! Il y a malgré vous quelque chose
Que j'emporte, et ce soir, quand j'entrerai chez Dieu,
Mon salut balaiera largement le seuil bleu,
Quelque chose que sans un pli, sans une tache,
J'emporte malgré vous, et c'est. . . mon panache.

becomes

What now? It is not practical I know.
To cast a loaded dice for one more throw.
No, no; a beautiful, a hopeless stand
What is this horde? I shall not stay my hand.
I know you now, old foes, old enemies!
Dissembling, Prejudice and Treacheries!
Deception! Here's my sword's point, ask no truce.
I fight and will die fighting. No excuse.
Take what you will, you send me to repose.
Am I the prize, the laurel and the rose?
You've done your worst and yet I still retain,
Respect you cannot strip me of or stain.
And when I leave tonight to meet my Lord
May heaven's azure vault be my reward.
All I leave behind on earth is ash.
Despite you all I kept, and keep still my .... panache!

It was an interesting exercise. Google language tools did the grunt work on a literal translation but I had to loosen it up quite a bit to render 12 syllable French lines into rhyming iambic pentameter, including nicking a line from Joan Armatrading as I don't know what "the laurel and the rose" signifies.

I finish with an alexandrine to doff my cap to the original.

Bringing It All Back Home

2008-09-20T09:00:00.002+01:00

There was a party downstairs last night as Tess - who introduced the Bomber to art - is shutting up shop and leaving the Mills. I gave her a copy of Bringing It All Back Home, as a going away present, track 2 seeming curiously apposite; Egyptian ring wearin', paint slingin', globe trottin' vagabond that she is.

She's got everything she needs,
She's an artist, she don't look back.
She can take the dark out of the nighttime
And paint the daytime black.

You will start out standing
Proud to steal her anything she sees.
But you will wind up peeking through her keyhole
Down upon your knees.

She never stumbles,
She's got no place to fall.
She's nobody's child,
The Law can't touch her at all.

She wears an Egyptian ring
That sparkles before she speaks.
She's a hypnotist collector,
You are a walking antique.

Bow down to her on Sunday,
Salute her when her birthday comes.
For Halloween give her a trumpet
And for Christmas, buy her a drum

One

2008-09-19T07:26:00.001+01:00

I am off to Brighton this morning as BBC's The One Show is filming a report on our auction system for broadcast about a month from now.

It's all good.

Where's your head at?

2008-09-18T06:30:00.003+01:00

Chris phoned me and Rob emailed me about the Aspire One. I've also been asked about it numerous times when pecking the keyboard in a public place with wi-fi connectivity.

So where are we at? Here's what I wrote to Rob ten days ago:

I am very happy with my Linux box. It is small enough to throw in a gym bag and take everywhere (note that there is no CD or DVD drive). I am using it to educate myself on Linux. Though there is a good range of applications, the box is pretty much tied down when it arrives. I've really had to get my head under the bonnet even to get the chance to play around with it. I'm not even sure if I can do drive mapping to Windows on it yet. I'll get there but it will take a while.

My advice to you would be that Windows (and your experience with it) is worth the extra forty odd quid when getting kitted out and I do recommend that hardware.

I still agree. You add applications like so, but though I've installed an RDP client to access Terminal Server I can't find it to run. Similarly I'm bemused as to how to set up a VPN connection. I've got a VNC client working but that is just by downloading and running an executable.

Next job: setting the resolution for an external monitor.

(While I remember I have installed a printer connected to a Vista box over a Windows network as well; Samba was involved.)