This Is This

The thing I like about sport is the thing I like about stuff generally.

I like the (it’s a phrase that Vietnamese Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh coined) “inter-are”-ness. Things are what they are because other things are a part of them. Say you grow some chillies in your garden and you cook some vegetables, fry them up with the chilies, stick them in a tortilla and you’ve got a burrito. But without the chilies, it’s a vegetable wrap. So the burrito only exists because of the chilies. And chilies on their own do not a burrito make. They “inter-are”.

Oh, and the chilies wouldn’t have been there if you hadn’t grown them, so you inter-are with the burrito from the moment you grew the plant. You’re wrapped up in the whole burrito thing too. So is the sun and the soil. And the garden centre that sold you the seeds and the girl behind the counter and your car and the guy whose job it is to put the wheels on it before it rolls off the production line. Or even the machine that put the wheels on it. Yep, there are more than just vegetables in your burrito.

So what’s fun about sport, and the World Cup in particular, is that when that goal for Ghana trickles over the line, there are millions of people in Africa going crazy when you’re sitting there thinking “Nice goal. Good for them.” You’re a part of the experience.

I remember being in a marketplace in Gambia a few years back and Senegal were playing someone. Many of the traders had come across from there and people were crouched around radios dotted around the market. Or when my Australian friend Adam celebrated Tim Cahill’s goal against Japan, I was happy for him, because I like to see emerging nations do well in global sport, but also because I knew he has a connection with millions of people also cheering even though it was on the other side of the world where it was the middle of the night. Also, Tim Cahill plays for Everton, which I support and my dad supports and that’s where our family are from, and you can read more about that attachment if you like and what it means to be a fan.

When Beckham scored last weekend, I ran over to the TV and turned down the sound because I wanted to hear people in my neighbourhood cheering while I was watching the fans celebrate in the stadium in Germany.

These connections make our victories sweeter and they cushion our defeats.

When I was watching Wimbledon yesterday, I could hear planes flying over the players, the jet turbine noise picked up by the microphones on the court and then a few minutes later the same plane would fly over my house, and there’s another connection.

It might sound egotistical, but it’s not to do with me. Well it is, but it’s to do with us and our connection to what’s happening.

Have a great weekend.

Blogs are to internet publishing what punk was to popular music.

Bloggers, like pun bands, started of with an idea, and with very little technical ability, they just “had a go” and found that not only could they do it, but people were interested in what they had to say. And like punk, a lot of it was shit.

Then bands started to get signed, just like bloggers started getting syndication deals with commercial websites and newspapers. No one was more surprised than themselves.

The 80’s came and with them a more polished sound. I’m talking your Lionels, your Phils. Maybe even your Whitneys. Header artwork, proper domain names, proprietary email. And that’s where we are now.

You know what I’m thinking?

Blog Aid.

RSS Feed the World.

“Send in your fucking comments.”

Colleague 1: That lady who delivers the fruit, you know the one?

Colleague 2: You mean the Amazonian Goddess?

Colleague 1: Yeah. She’s huge. She’s about eight feet tall.

Me: But she’s in proportion. She’s not lanky or bandy or anything.

Colleague 1: It’s amazing, really.

Colleague 2: I thought I was the only one who noticed that.

Me: And when you see her around, it’s like she’s like a NORMAL sized person standing slightly closer to you than anyone else.

More work conversations

Thanks loads to my friend Iain for putting it together. He rocks in ways many have yet to discover, but it’s good to know his talents, when not being used for a very worthy cause, are at least here.

That is my handwriting and no, I didn’t make it all cartoony and jagged for the artistic value - that is actually how I write. The backdrop is a picture I took and the icons were things I just found lying around which you could loosely call categories, even though I don’t actually classify anything I write into categories.

It’s bugging me that the picture needs to be a few pixels higher, but that’s because I’m out of my depth, as I keep telling you. If anyone knows about Wordpress and CCS, HTML or header templates, please get in touch because I need some help.

It looks good, though - like a proper site.

Just published over there.

Hi, welcome back. Yesterday on This Is This, I asked for the name of the bands or solo artists who recorded songs I own beginning with the word “all”. Since then, I have been literally bombarded by Corsican separatists and I can now reveal the names of the bands.

Answers:
1. All Along The Watchtower
Jimmy Hendrix, but two points for mentioning Bob Dylan and U2

2. All Four Seasons
Sting

3. All Grown Up
Elvis Costello

4. All I Ask
Crowded House

5. All I Have
Caroline Lavelle

6. All I Want
Skunk Anansie

7. All I Really Want
Alanis Morissette

8. All I Want Is You
U2

9. All In Love Is Fair
Stevie Wonder

10. All Lifestyles
Beastie Boys

11. All My Love
Led Zeppelin, but I would have given you Buddy Holly

12. All Of This
Blink 182

13. All The People
Money Mark

14. All The Pictures On The Wall
Paul Weller

15. All The Tea In China
Steps Ahead

16. All The Things She Gave Me
The Waterboys

17. All These Things That I Have Done
The Killers

18. All This I’ve Done For You
Husker Du

19. All You Get From Love Is A Love Song
The Carpenters

20. All You Want
Dido

Scores:
0 to 5 - Music’s not really your strong point is it? More of the outdoorsy type, yeah? I get you. I was like you once - oh yeah. I wasn’t always the faceless blogger you read before you. I made plans. - I had a dream. A dream, you hear me?!?! And now what have I got? Posts. Page after page of them. Witty headlines. Thoughts; maybe the odd gag. And for what exactly? Comments and a few page views. Look at them, damn you! Look at my page views. You made me what I am. Are you happy?!?!?! ARE YOU?!!!

6 to 10 - Respectable - nice going.

11 to 15 - Very impressive. You should probably get out more.

16 or more - Wow! You really are the maestro. And not only that, but when I said “The Maestro” just then, in your head you heard Ad Rock’s voice go: “Yeeeaaahh, you motherfuckers! I am aaaalll that. I see you looking at me saying: ‘How can he be so skinny and live?’ So phat - you know why? ‘Cause I’m … the maestro.” Also, can I have my ipod back?

Hey this was fun. What are some of your favourite songs beginning with “all”?

With most of my music now on the computer, notice at the flick of a button that I do have a lot of songs that begin with the word “all”. So for all y’all, here is a quiz. Guess the band or artist associated with my songs that start with “all”. Answers tomorrow.

1. All Along The Watchtower

2. All Four Seasons

3. All Grown Up

4. All I Ask

5. All I Have

6. All I Want

7. All I Really Want

8. All I Want Is You

9. All In Love Is Fair

10. All Lifestyles

11. All My Love

12. All Of This

13. All The People

14. All The Pictures On The Wall

15. All The Tea In China

16. All The Things She Gave Me

17. All These Things That I Have Done

18. All This I’ve Done For You

19. All You Get From Love Is A Love Song

20. All You Want

Buddup, buddup, buddledee-doo. Bioooowwwwwww!

To: Duty Office
Subject: ITV - Feedback Form
Programme Name: World Cup
Date of Broadcast: 19-June-2006
Time of Broadcast: 8:00 PM
Channel: ITV1
Region: London and South East
How do you receive your TV signal? Freeview

Comments: Dear Sir/Madam,

I am red/green colourblind as are 1 in 200 people in the UK (mostly men). You may be interested to know that although this has not hampered my enjoyment of your excellent World Cup coverage, I am unable to read the graphic you use to show viewers how much extra time has been added on for the half.

This is because (I am told) the graphic is red on dark grey. As both colours appear the same to me, it looks like a grey box when it pops up.

I realise this adds an element of suspense, but can you please use a lighter background or yellow lights?

Regards,
Cliff Jones

Later that day….

Dear Mr Jones

Thank you for your email.  After successful negotiations with the Host Broadcasters, it has been agreed to change the colours on the extra time graphic, which hopefully will greatly improve the service for our colourblind viewers.

Regards
DUTY OFFICER

This goes back to these posts here, here and here as I finally spend blow what’s left of my £25 gift of singles.

Heartbeats - Jose Gonzales
I heard this used on a TV ad, then saw him in an AOL session. I love the gut strings on the guitar and the doubletracked vocals. The nylon makes a nice change from the “quack” of close-mic’ed steel strings and I like his accent. It’s nice and restrained, it has a hook in the melody of the chorus.

Islands In The Stream - Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton
I heard for the first time years the other day on a Bob Harris country documentary on Radio 2 late one night when I was driving to El’s and they were both saying how well their voices go together, and I thought, god they do, like I remembered since I was a kid. They really do, and that’s a great thing when you can find it. Mike Mills and Michael Stipe have it. The Bee Gees had it, Kenny and Dolly have it. Plus, you don’t get many songs with the same title as a Hemingway novel.*

You’re OK - k.d. lang
I love her voice in this song. It’s so controlled and confident and the dynamics of it carry the song, and the rise and fall of emotions. “It’s begun to frighten …me….”

Snake Eyes - Grover Washington Jr
Often overlooked as a jazz musician because of his soft dinner jazz 80’s cheeseball smoothies, this is funky as shit. Still smooth though and he’s a great soloist with a unique tone.

Now’s the Time/Ornithology - Charlie Parker
All but a fraction of the Charlie Parker recordings I own are on tape, so I treated myself to these songs, although it was a tough choice. Did I go for the tortured tenderness of The Gipsy or the notebinges of Scrapple From The Apple? Tough choice, so I went for these, great example of a genius at his finest.

Georgia On My Mind - Stanley Jordan
Take a great song, take it somewhere, make it your own and play your heart out. That ought to be the rule when it comes to doing someone else’s song. Bear in mind that Stanley Jordan was in his early twenties when he recorded this, and that it’s one guy on one guitar, recording this in one take and you have only awesome wonder on which to grasp. Most vertuouso performances are musical wank. There, I said it. But the inventiveness and technical jaw-droppery in this is carried along by soul and affection for the music in this five minute solo piece. And I don’t even like guitar solos. I’ll stop now. I sound like a idiot, but if you ever get a chance to listen to this and tell someone about it, you’ll sound like an idiot too. I’ve seen him live by himself a couple of times and I still don’t know how he does it. I mean, I GET it, in the way I get how a jumbo jet flies and how trees can be a thousand years old, but it’s still a beautiful mystery.

Down To Zero - Joan Armatrading
I used to own a few of Joan Armatrading records in my teens, but I don’t know what I did with them. So with about £3 left, it was hard to know which song to get. Me Myself I? Love And Affection? Weakness In Me? Drop The Pilot? Willow? Down To Zero is probably the best and it’s got that line: “Brand new dandy/first class seat-stealer/walks through the crowd and takes your man./Sends you rushing to the mirror/brush your eyebrows and say/”There’s more beauty in you than anyone.” It’s a beautiful, proud and womanly defiance that makes me understand people more.

* As far as I know there’s only this and For Whom The Bell Tolls by Metallica. Got any others? Did Jimmy Buffet do The Old Man And The Sea? Did Tom Petty sing Farewell to Arms? Let me know.

Things are so fast now that when you are using technology, it’s totally justifiable to say “Slow, isn’t it?” if you can do so comfortably in the time it takes between your asking the machine to do something and it actually delivering what you want.

Well, it’s official. Nine Rooms is live, and it gets more traffic on its first day than the total combined daily views on this site, which has been going for nearly two years.

But that’s good news, because the show is aimed at the audience, whereas this is - well, you know.

Thanks to Mike Riversdale in New Zealand for posting this on his site.

He worked out a way where Netvibes users subscribe to all the Nine Rooms bloggers at once with their own tab. Just click here to get your feed set up and I have add this button to the Nine Rooms navbar on the site.

He also says:

“If you want to import all the Nine Rooms feeds here’s a wee OPML file for ya: http://www.openomy.com/download/mike_riversdale/ninerooms.opml ”

I don’t know how this works, but apparently it does, so I tip my hat (or do the London equivalent of removing one headphone and nodding) to Mike.

Right, I’ll shut up about Nine Rooms now. It’s doing its own thing over there and we’re back here.

The Jeff thing yesterday? I shouldn’t have worried about writing poetry under my own name over the last couple of years, but when I started out I wasn’t sure that having a blog was the right thing to do, let alone write anything on it, so I invented Jeff Nicols, Armenian master of verse. Misleading? Yeah, sorry, but nothing bad came of it. Don’t tell me you bought it, though. OK, a few searches for Jeff Nicols lead people back here, but they weren’t serious, were they?

I saw The Scream down in Woolworths.
The painter’s now driving a bus.
I heard it said Matisse wasn’t dead,
He’s just making a living like us.

I think Chagall’s been retraining.
The art game had made life too hard.
He took a spell learning HTML
while Warhol gets sold by the yard.

I heard he turned to Day Trading
but painted where time would allow.
Though Rousseau saw the wild through the eyes of a child,
he’s got mouths of his own to feed now.

I’d like to be a romantic
sculpting the driftwood I find,
but what good’s the art when your life’s torn apart
by the ways of the classical mind?

 —-

And by the way? There is no Jeff Nicols. Um, rearrange the letters.

You may have heard me muttering about a project on the go over the last few weeks, and now here it is:

Nine Rooms - a blogcom drama
http://www.ninerooms.com

It went live today and it’s a dramatic comedy narrated by its characters though their blog postings. I’ve been planning this for a couple of months and trying to find out if anyone has done anything like this before and amazingly, I don’t think they have.

So I contacted some of the best writers I know and every week we post to our characters’s blogs who follow a plot which rolls out in all kinds of twists and turns over next several months.

Please read it and if you enjoy it like I hope you will then please tell your friends about it.

Apart from this post and this site, my name doesn’t appear on it anywhere so there’s no connection from Nine Rooms back to me, so you can send Nine Rooms round the office or whatever and if you choose not to tell anyone that I created it, then that’s cool with me.

The main thing is that people can read it, follow the story, identify with the characters, post messages, chat about it with their friends - whatever you would do with a sitcom or drama, except it’s blogs.

The writing staff are: Ben Piears who writes Alan Cross, Bonnie Gillespie (in California) who writes Gina Nelson, Paul Gibbins who writes Joey Standton and me directing and writing Claire Goodwin and Nick Stampfer. They are all brilliant and they’re going to make this lots of fun.

You can download a press release as an attatched file here

or

Read Nine Rooms at http://www.ninerooms.com

Of course, this is just a hub, you have to go to the individual characters’ blogs to read it.

Enjoy.

Does anyone else see half a guitar cut down the middle when they look at the shape of the links in my Archives section in the navbar?

Yeah, it is. But anyone who says that is breaking it down to its basic form.

It’s the World Cup, it’s a big deal.

“But it’s just 22 men chasing around an inflated cowhide,” I hear you say.

I agree with you, but it’s the emotion around it that matters more and that makes it a big deal. It’s bigger than the sum of its one part.

The second movement of Bach’s Concerto for Oboe BWV 1059a? That’s twelve notes played in over different order over several octaves on a bunch on different instruments to a set tempo.

Sex? That’s just a physical manifestation of love and the act of procreation.

The Internet? That’s just a bunch of words and pictures on computers.

Medicine? That’s just a bunch of molecules put together in a certain way to help our bodies cope with symptoms and fight of disease.

Yes, yes, yes and yes. But no.

In this case, I break all my own rules, because here you have something that is more about what it means than what it is.

What it is can be very boring and mundane. What it means is another thing.

This ain’t this. This is something else.

What shape do pears turn into when they go completely wrong?

or

Police Discussing A Murder Investigation, Based Around The Lyrics Of Carly Simon’s Timeless Smash “You’re So Vain” 

…
 
Precinct boss Martin Kawalski is sitting in a badly lit office with Officers Jesus Ramirez and Joey Standton.

Chief Kawalski: So let’s go over the evidence again.

Officer Ramirez: From the party?

Chief Kawalski: From the party.

Officer Ramirez: OK.

Chief Kawalski: He walked into the party. Witnesses says (flips through notepad) “like he was walking onto a yacht.”

Officer Standton: Whatever that means.

Officer Ramirez: Can it, Standton.

Chief Kawalski: And we know that his hat was strategically dipped, right?

Officer Ramirez: Only below one eye, Chief.

Chief Kawalski: And his scarf was apricot.

Officer Standton: Probably one of those fruitcake parties, Chief.

Officer Ramirez: Knock it off, Standton.

Chief Kawalski: Mrs Doyle says he had the other eye on the mirror as he watched himself (flips through notepad again) “gavotte”.

Officer Standton: Those sick bastards.

Officer Ramirez: …which is when the murder must have taken place. All the girls dreamt that they’d be his parter - it’s the perfect crime.

Chief Kawalski: Exactly. After that, it gets a little sketchy. He had someone several years ago when she was quite naïve. They were a nice couple, he said he’d never leave, but he gave away everyone he loved, including her, possibly poisoning her drink, telling her it would sober her up, as the couple in the kitchen confirm from their statement.

Officer Ramirez: “Clouds in my coffee.”

Officer Standton: Her dying words…

Officer 1: Exactly. Officer Ramirez, what do we know about his movements immediately after the murder?

Officer Ramirez: He says he went up to Saratoga, where his horse won.

Chief Kawalski: Naturally.

Officer Ramirez: He then flew his Lear Jet up to Nova Scotia.

Officer Standton: Chief, the landing records for Halifax International for two days after the murder show that the suspect’s jet did land there, inbound from New York.

Chief Kawalski: Except there was no total eclipse of the sun on the day of the crime. The total eclipse took place two days before, directly over Martha’s Vineyard.

Officer Ramirez: …Where the party was being held.

Chief Kawalski: And when the everyone was distracted, that’s when he did it.

Officer Ramirez: And he was in the right place they whole time, except when he was with some underground spy or the wife of a close friend.

Officer Standton: Which we can’t prove.

Chief Kawalski: And without that we don’t have a case.

Although this is a contradiction in terms, we know what it means. This is because language is a fluid and organic thing that has little logic and only flimsy rules that can be broken, but only once people smarter than you agree and set new rules.

Access, for example, officially became a verb several years after the techies started using it.

I don’t often hand it to the French, language-wise, but they have one or two bon mots every now and then. In one of the rare examples of them having fewer words than the English, they bring us “amerrissage”.

Landing a plane is and “aterrisage”, meaning literally “going to the ground”, because “terre” means earth or ground. So a landing on water? No problem. Sea in French is “mer” so you get “amerrissage”. Admittedly, you could also have alacissage and arivierissage and even aoceanissage, but you get the idea.

You can’t do that in English. “Landing” - fair enough, but “watering” would be misleading.

Copilot: “Pull up!!!”

Pilot: “I’m trying!”

Copilot: “You’re going to get us all killed!!!!! You’re too low.”

Pilot: “It’s our only hope. I’m heading out to sea.”

Copilot: “To sea?!?!? What for?!!!!”

Pilot: “I’m watering.”

Copilot: “YOU’RE watering? I’ve just shat me pants.”

Just like weather reports, announcements on planes bug me because they put an emphasis on the random words. I think this is to make them sound official, but it goes like this.

“In the unlikely event that the cabin should depressurize, a mask will fall from the ceiling. Simply place this over your mouth and nose and continue to breath normally. For those passengers travelling with children and those in need of assistance, a member of our cabin crew will be able to help you.”

It’s totally random.

“We would like to take this opportunity to thank you for choosing to fly with British Airways today and we wish you a pleasant onward journey.”

Does it give it an air of officialdom? I don’t know.

Maybe it’s reassuring when they are describing landing on water.

Brazil played last night and they were amazing. I watched the match at work because I was there until 10pm, but I got to watch it with the biggest football fan I know, which was a fun.

The World Cup has been on nearly a week and everyone who has been caught up in the event has been waiting to see Brazil. In Glastonbury terms, it’s like the headline act on the Pyramid Stage. Sure, you’ve got your indie favourites that surprise and impress throughout, like the Aussies (go Cahill!!!) (except against England!!!) but come on - I mean - Brazil.

Ronaldo was rubbish, but it was good to see him. It’s like watching a Guns ‘n Roses gig. You want to see Axl, but when he comes out, it’s “OOOOoooookay. Dude. Please.”

Me and colleague were both laughing at the level of skill the Brazilians have. It always looks like Brazil have twice as many people on the pitch as everyone else. Their vocabulary of moves seems limitless but it has it’s own style. They are like a Charlie Parker solo.

I just hope we don’t come up against them, but if we don’t, and we DO win the World Cup, I wouldn’t think we were the greatest team in the world.

I had a dream last night that I was at work and behind my desk I found every umbrella I own. What grounded this in reality is the hot humid weather we’ve been having recently and my tendency to leave my stuff at the office. And the brollies were all there: the one from my old job, the big one from my dad’s old work, the rainbow one, even the kids’ one with the monster horns.

My default position of self-doubt made me assume that I had picked these up day after day on rainy days into London and not brought them home. Thing is, I know it’s going to rain and Wife and Son and Daughter find themselves sans parapluie and when it rains it will be my fault. It will also be my fault that I have all the umbrellas.

What does all this mean? Well, I think we’ll be seeing further mishaps throughout the day with the possibility of scattered thoughts and perhaps some clear thinking later if we’ve lucky, but you might want to not take an brolly with you. Dreamt. Does anyone else pronounce it “drempt”? Drempt. There’s a p in there. Drempt.

Why don’t people eat “steamt” clams?

I beamt from ear to ear (pronounced “bempt”) But it’s “dremPt”, isn’t it?

One of the good things about this new design is it’s slightly more anonymous than the last one, which has it’s advantages.

One of the things about the old site on blogger is that you could either put your name and phtograph in (which looks like “Hey everyone! My site!!! Come and listen to what I have to say! Hey look at me!”), or have a handle and an obscure picture, which looks like you’ve got something to hide. I opted to have my picture on it, which I was never totall and an obscure picture, which looks like you’ve got something to hide. I opted to have my picture on it, which I was never wild about because I already see my face a lot throughout the course of an ordinary day.

I will get together an About page explaining why I have this site, who I am and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but in the meantime, enjoy.

I’ve been making some changes here and there to the template. Thanks to the inspirational greatness of meish.org for pointing me to babystep guides about how to change templates and other Wordpress stuff. I’ve been building this site along the lines of how I read blogs and it goes thus:

Category Pages
I never use them on other sites. Also, so many sections in this site cross over, so I can’t put them into different sections. Also the categories themselves are pretty weak: Music, Jokes, Thoughts, Thought, Writing. My interests aren’t diverse enough to have categories. Category pages are out, which involves stripping that code from all the pages where they appear.

Recent Posts
Why didn’t this template come with this by default? It is conceivable that people who come here don’t stop by every day, so I download a Plug-in and sprinkle a little HTML pixie dust and hey presto, top eight recent comments.

Edit Buttons
My proofing is pretty awful, so things go up on this site with all kinds of errors in them. It’s only when I read them back that I go “That makes no sense”. Even then, that’s no guarantee it will. Having Edit text at the bottom of this page is a countermeasure to publishing style, which can be either willy or nilly, and frequently both. The only thing is, I’m not sure if they appear to everyone or just me. Can someone please get in touch and let me know.

Header Art
This is on the top of my list. I’ve cropped images, I’ve created masks. I have done the tutorials. Can I set the transparency and merge the layers? I can not.

Links
This is a tricky one. Do I link to every site I visit? Some bloggers do that, so their homepage is filled with links of things of interest to them only. I don’t want to see that. If I could care any less I would be caring backwards. Personal favourite sites are what your browser settings are for. Two words guys: Bookmarks. What? OK, one word. Or a hyphen. So I link to things that I think that the readers of this site will want to visit and I’ll link to my favourite bands elsewhere.

At a wedding on Saturday night. 

 Already plural, thanks.

Say you’re holding a glass and you’re talking to someone and you know there’s a table next to you because during the course of your conversation you’ve been checking your surroundings. You have awareness of the things in the room.

Door, window and curtains, bookshelf, CDs on a shelf - check check and check check check, and there’s the table, right there off to your left, slightly below waist height, just within reach.

The conversation flows naturally, your visualization of the table doesn’t put you off because you’re not stupid or anything. But nor do you have supernatural powers.

So why is it then, when someone comes over with a book or something for you to look at, you can put down the glass perfectly on the table without looking? I mean really place it without slamming it down or hovering above the surface too long. And what’s even stranger is that when you go to pick it up again, you can stretch out you hand and know, just know without checking, how far away it is from the end of your fingers.

It’s because we all know our surroundings and our physical place in them. It’s like when you’ve been driving the same a car for a while, you know what size car parking space you can get into, when your passengers aren’t so sure. And you don’t even have confidence about being able to park it - it’s beyond confidence so there’s not even arrogance - you just: know.

What if that could extend to our quality? By that I mean whatever your name for it is. Call it influence, being, soul, being, personality, or whatever. What if you could act, do and say things and just be a certain way and know its place in the world and how everything you did would sit with people.

You would know every limitation and strength, because your self would be that car you know inch by inch. And you would know exactly what you could do, instead of the racing thoughts, anxieties and fears.

And beyond the reaction of others, if you knew yourself that well - knew your every reaction well enough to anticipate it and never tried anything you didn’t like because you knew you weren’t going to like it - life would grow tired very quickly. God, can you imagine if you knew your partners that well? How dull would that be?

Enjoy what you don’t know, right? Reach for the glass on the table, but when you get it inch perfect without looking, don’t be too self-satisfied with knowing your place physically, because too much awareness is too little discovery.

When I was twenty, I was in a band with the world at my feet, as all twenty year olds in bands will know.

We spent summer evenings down at Windsor Old Trout, treading a thin line between sobriety and nervousness before going on stage. The day after seeing Sebadoh play there we were the headline and later that night Kurt Cobain died. Our other guitarist was gutted, but I remember not being moved too much by it. I went back to the venue the next day to get our money.
 
There were lots of long faces and I went up to the manager who was wearing black, sitting with other people also wearing black, all staring into their coffees (black).
 
“Hi,” I said cheerfully, as you do when you have to ask people for money they owe you.
 
“Hello,” he said in a black way.

“I just came to get my money. It went pretty well last night. Thanks a lot, man.”
 
He got up and shuffled over to the bar. “It’s awful, isn’t it?”

“What’s that then?” I asked chipperly.
 
He shot me a polite look of understated shame.

“Kurt? You heard, right?”

“Oh. Right. Yeah. Terrible.”
 
I kind of shook my head in concern, but the moment was gone and to join the mood would be too strained, so I wiped the smile off my face and took the money.
 
Two decades of stupid.

So 10 years after leaving print journalism, I’m back in the press writing about Buddhism and my talk on Vesak at my daughter’s school.

If you’re going to look back, you may as well be moving forward.

The publication is Mandala, which a great magazine the webstie of which you can visit here. The editor was kind enough to mention this site as well.

I’m in the August/September edition which comes out in mid-July and I guess they are going to run it online later. You can get the magazine in the US and the UK, just like this. If you can’t wait that long, it’s a print version of an article I posted last month, which you can find here in the archives. If you’re going to look forward, you may as be moving back.

Also, thanks very much for everyone from Blogmandu who visited this webstie over the last few days (some for the first time) while I delivered probably my worst ever publishing experience, what with the site crashing and the migration and redesign.

Cheers especially author/editor Tom Armstrong who (totally by surprise) turned the spotlight of the weekly Zen Unbound roundup to this site exclusively.

Tom’s brought many good sites into the people’s minds and to be mentioned alongside any of those is one of those rare combinations of being a privilege and a cool thing.

God, this is boring. I have a new feed. It is http://www.thisisthis.org/feed/ I will never move this website again, ever. I promise. Please update your feed readers if you want to. The old one from the blogger site won’t work.

I read a story today about the warmongering US Vice President’s supporters that included the words “Cheney’s hawks” and now I can’t get “I Am The One And Only” out of my head.

Hello, I’m back.

Yeah, needs some work, but here’s the deal: I installed new editing software and logged in. From that moment, I was unable to update my old site, although I kept trying, which lead to it crashing off and on for a couple of days.
 
So my options it was either launch with what I’ve got or have no site at all. 

During the ride I found out tons about web stuff. Windows, for example, doesn’t like PHP, but Linux does. Who knew? I had to get in touch with my hosting company and ask them to make a change and then I reinstalled everything again.

Once that was done, the comments section didn’t work, all my links were gone, the tracking was broken and everything is a little bit rubbish. But it’s my rubbish, and I will make it better as I go along. My old site didn’t let me make many changes, and boy now do I need to. Thanks for coming back and I will keep working making this site better.

I like African music and I’m crazy about this band called Mabulu.

There are several reasons why music from Mozambique could be the best in the world:

1. First of all, Portuguese is a beautiful language to sing in. Listen to Getz and Gilberto’s Desafinado. But hang on, they speak Portuguese in Mozambique.
2. West African trademark jangly guitar riffs
3. Percussion
4. Close harmonies
5. The best music has come from experience and Mozambique’s been through the fucking wash lately

And the best band from Mozambique is Mabulu, which means Mabulu are the best band in the world.

Right?

No. (said like - “duhhhh“) That’s stupid. They are a great band, but you can’t have the greatest band in the world. Art is a form of self expression and it means different things to different people and even different things at different times to those people.

It’s an emotional response and you can’t have that in a competition.

It’s like saying the world’s best kiss, or the best tree in the country.

Get real. Actually, don’t be so real.

Did you know I can’t think of Andy Kershaw without saying the word “Madagascar” in a head in a sharp Yorkshire accent.

Actually the best tree in the country is the one outside the Dorchester on Park Lane in London. If you’re ever down that way, it’s a grand old tree. He (as all trees most probably are) has probably been there since before the hotel and Park Lane were built, but instead of standing there defiantly, it’s a part of the scenery, just like the glass and steel around it and it holds court with grace and strength. It looks out across the trees in Hyde Park and probably reminisces with the other trees about the time when we was all part of the same park before the hotels came. “Still,” he reasons hopefully to the others, “I saw Judi Dench yesterday.”

I might have been a little tough on Rudyard Kipling yesterday. He lost his son in the First World War, and unlike Nemo’s dad, he didn’t find him.

Rudyard used to sit in his house in Kent in the evening and write in his quiet study. When the wind was blowing in the right direction, he could hear the heavy artillery from across the channel, killing other people’s sons.

After the guns fell silent for the last time, he took many trips across to the battered Western Front in the hope of retrieving his son’s body. He never did, but Lieutenant Kipling’s body was finally found and identified in 1992.

Kipling wrote the epitaph on the gravestone of every unidentified soldier as a tribute, and the words, “known unto God” stand etched above every nameless British grave.

http://www.thisisthis.blogspot.com/ the blog is now at http://www.thisisthis.org - of course, you’re here, so you know that, but for everyone looking for the site on a search engine, visit THISISTHIS.ORG

OK, so think I deleted my old blogspot site, and as soon as I did, someone registered http://www.thisisthis.blogspot.com/ and stuck up some commercial site there. Maybe whoever did it wanted to take advantage of my hard earned google rating. I don’t know, but it’s a very cheap trick. So if anyone is linking to http://www.thisisthis.blogspot.com/ and finds it goes to a rubbish site full of ads, then go to http://www.thisisthis.org/ instead, which is here and which I fully own.

I have written to blogger.com in the meantime, but for shit’s sake, really. Is a blogger.com address worth that much that people wait for them to be deleted before creating them seconds later for their own stuff?

I was reading to the kids. I have started reading stories to them now that they are getting older. We’ve had some Roald Dahl, some Roddy Doyle and I thought we’d go for Rudyard Kipling’s Just So Stories.

We were reading How The Leopard Got Its Spots and we’re all really enjoying it and there’s about a page to go.

“But if I’m all this,” said the leopard, “why didn’t you go spotty, too?”

“Oh, plain black’s best for a nigger,” said the Ethiopian.

…

He said nigger.

I said nigger.

Not to my kids, I mean, but just then. What I actually said to my kids was: “Oh, plain black’s best for a - er, person.”

For the record (because it’s a free internet and idiots read this page too) nigger is a term I despise. Nigger is why I won’t read them Huckleberry Finn. Nigger is now going to get me bad searches on this page. And I can’t describe the noun I want to use for the people who will be searching for that word, because that noun, combined with nigger, would get me even worse searches. And don’t give me that move look-back-with-cultural-acceptance bullshit. If it’s wrong it’s wrong. I live in these times. We can study why it’s wrong sometime, but talking animal stories aren’t the place to do it.

Normally things get more liberal instead of less. Lady Chatterly’s Lover wouldn’t cause many an eyelid to bat these days, and no one covers their kids’ eyes when Elvis comes on, but it is so not OK to use the n word.

So is it OK for an old children’s story to say nigger and not Doctor Dre? No. That’s why I can’t listen to some of my records. A word is a word, word?

I used to think I would be all Cool Dad and shit, but I am not.

It turns out I’m quite strict - a lot more than my parents were with me, and the last thing I want to be explaining to his school is how Rudyard Kipling is to blame for a recent misunderstanding in the playground.

I don’t care if he did write Finding Nemo.