Ever since BBC4 broadcasted a night of Queen documentaries and music a few weeks ago this song has been playing through my head, for obvious reasons. It also made me want to listen to more Queen again; I’ve always liked the band, even when it was still a bit declasse to admit to this. So why not have a listen/look at their complete 1986 Wembley concert while I’m gone?
Archives for 2012
Sandra’s going home
Tomorrow I will spent the whole day travelling to Plymouth together with my parents, to bring Sandra to her final resting place. She wanted her ashes to be scattered at one of her favourite places in the city, which her sons and me will do sometimes this weekend. It’s a strange feeling to be this close to letting her go, but it is the last thing I can do for her. Hopefully this will be a bit of (ugh) closure as well.
Practically speaking, because going by plane was not an option (expensive, much too much of a hassle, fscking airlines nickling and diming you to death), we’re going by train. First leg is from Amsterdam to Brussel, then onto London, mad dash on the Underground and then the train to Plymouth, which takes about as long as getting from Amsterdam to London.
The Dutch trains will be alright, unless the railways find yet another way to derail (pun not intended) traffic around Schiphol, the international train a doddle, but I’m dreading the souped up metro style cattle cars the British call trains. Most of my experiences with them have been dreadful: overcrowded, slow, far too many far too loud completely irrelevant tannoy messages, prone to endless delays, claustrophobic. Oh well, when in doubt, crank up the volume on the mp3 player and try to sleep.
Ten years of Eschaton and all I got were these lousy wankers
Time flies when you’re having fun: Eschaton is ten years old today. I must’ve been one of the first people to put Atrios on the blogroll back then, having barely been blogging for a month myself; no idea how I even found him — probably via Avedon? Back then the closest thing to a liberal (let alone leftwing) voice in the American blogosphere was Andy Sullivan, he who accused the “liberal elites in their coastal enclaves” of treason while the bodies were still falling out of the WTC. The only real progressive bloggers were people like Avedon and other science fiction fans, small voices lost in a wilderness of howling rightwing insanity.
And then came Atrios and he quickly became a focal point for all those people disgusted with these wingnuts and warbloggers, inspiring quite a few others to start blogging while, certainly in these first critical years, he himself was also very good at promoting new, interesting bloggers. For better or worse, he was crucial in the establishment of the liberal blogosphere, in providing pushback against the insanity of both the warbloggers and the wankers in the socalled professional press.
To celebrate, he has put together a list of the Ten Greatest Wankers of the Decade, a veritable treasure trove of assholes and douchecopters:
- Ten: Megan “2×4” McArdle
- Nine: Richard “the liberal voice in the Washington Post” Cohen
- Eight: Diane “The Dixie Chicks are traitors” Sawyer
- Seven: Jonah “Liberal Fascism” Goldberg
- Six: Lord “you peasants better know your place” Saletan
- Five: Mark “Very Important Wanker” Halperin
- Four: Joe “as the one true Democrat my job is to oppose anything Democrats are for” Klein
- Three: Andrew “The Bell Curve is too valid scientific research” Sullivan
- Two: Fred “Dumb, rightwing and hateful? Here’s your publishing contract” Hiatt
- One: Who else could it be?
Some are more active these days than other, many other worthwhile candidates were skipped (where are Glenn Reynolds or Anne Coulter?), but this parade of horrors is still a sadly accurate view of a decade that’s been more bad than good.
Pointless fetishm of obsolete technology
This essay is the first piece of writing I’ve done by hand, start to finish, since 5th grade, 1992. I drafted it using a Uniball Signo pen and black notebook while sitting at my desk. I edited it in the same way. When it came time to enter the essay into the computer so that it could appear on this website, I typed it in almost exactly as I’d put it down on paper.
[…]
Overall I think there’s greater variance in the quality of the writing I produce by hand. The good stuff I write is cleaner, more honest, less stylized, more well-considered. The bad stuff is more obvious, more ponderous, more self-involved, maybe weirder. In fact, this is definitely one of the weirdest pieces I’ve ever written. Writing on the computer drives my writing towards some average value — I think/write/delete/think/write until I have something that’s decent but maybe less vibrant than the ideas as they were conceived in my head.
What annoyed me is not so much the fact that this guy has rediscovered writing in with pen and paper, but the unconscious elitism behind it. Reading between the lines you can see the idea being pushed that writing longhand is more natural and simpler than writing on a computer, but in fact more people find it easier to use a pc to write: just look at the explosion of writing on the internet.
In contrast, writing in longhand is hard work physically cramps your hand, is less easy to edit, less easy to share, in short less accessible for most people. It’s no wonder most people didn’t bother with it after school until the computer and internet came along and made it easy to share your thoughts. This democratisation of writing is a good thing and I hate to see some hipster quest for authenticity endanger it.
Nescio
Because the MeFi thread about the Dutch writer Nescio reminded me of the song de Nits did about him and because it is now going through my head, I thought it would be nice to subject everybody else with it as well.
Nescio has just recieved his first English translation, roughly a century after he wrote the first of his most famous stories, the Uitvreter/Titaantjes/Dichtertje trilogy.
De Nits were a Dutch pop/art rock band, who had a couple of hits with Nescio, In The Dutch Mountains and J.O.S. Days and who share some of the same melancholy that Nescio specialised in in his stories.