The four-word post...

Happy New Year everyone!

You're wasting your time if...

...you go to a book-shop looking for obscure/old music

I've just gone to the biggest Borders store in the region, and guess how many different Steely Dan albums they had? Two. Two!

If you want to sell music in a book-shop, you could at least do it properly...

(Plus they didn't have any ELO albums. I mean, honestly!)

Climate Change is BAD

If you spotted the pun in the above title, then award yourself a coconut. In fact, award yourself two; I'm feeling generous today. If you don't get it, then let me explain:

Every year, bloggers get together and write about a particular issue such as poverty or animal rights. All their posts are published on one day: Blog Action Day, also know as BAD (see, you get it now, don't you?). This year, the topic for discussion is climate change, which, as we all know, is a terrible thing.

But what to do? Cutting personal greenhouse gas emissions is pretty difficult, and cutting corporate emissions is no walk in the park either. Renewable energy is still at a relatively embryonic stage (although it's getting better by the second, I have to say), people don't trust nuclear fission, and nuclear fusion is still the domain of theoretical physicists. And even if we did stop emitting carbon dioxide and cutting down rainforests and generally having a good time at the planet's expense, would it work? Perhaps not. Some people, in particular James Lovelock (of Gaia hypothesis fame), believe that no matter what we do, climate change is inevitable. So should we prepare the tinned food stockpiles and buy some real estate in the Arctic now, before it's too late? Should we sit it out in our icy bunkers, waiting for the Earth to start behaving itself again? Bear in mind that, according to Lovelock, it could be another 100,000 years before everything calms down. That's a lot of tinned food.

So maybe it's not time to give up the battle just yet, unless you like living off baked beans and tins of sardines. Keep on recycling and being energy efficient and who knows? Maybe you'll save the planet after all. But if you stop trying, then we're all screwed. And, as I'm sure you can imagine, knowing you're screwed is not a nice feeling.

And besides, even if it does all go pear-shaped, you can at least take comfort in the knowledge that you gave it your best shot. 'Cause it ain't the winning that matters, it's the taking part.

N.B. The above post was published on the 15th of October, but was in fact written on the 3rd. It is therefore possible that I have changed my environmental policy since writing this post, and that it no longer properly represents my views on climate change. Fat chance of that happening, though.

Forwards to the Past 2: The Long Awaited Sequel

Well, you've borne with me, and for that I'm very grateful. And so, as a belated (and somewhat unconventional) sign of my gratitude, I'm going to write another post. Hurrah!

We left off, if I remember correctly, with me about to tell you about P. G. Wodehouse, and quite right too. He was, arguably, one of the greatest comic writers in the United Kingdom, if not the world. The fact that his plotlines were wildly improbable and bewilderingly elaborate was irrelevant, because you knew that no matter what happened, his characters would end up doing the strangest - and funniest - things in order to get themselves out of the sticky situations they inevitably found themselves in. Then, just when you thought everything was going to go horribly wrong, some cool, calm, level-headed person (usually a butler) would step in and sort the whole thing out without anybody noticing. It has to be read to be believed, honestly it does.

I'm at something of a loss as to how to describe Mr. Wodehouse's comic genius further, so rather than ramble blindly onwards for another paragraph or so I think I'll stop this post here. That'll give me some time to think about what I'm going to talk about next.

Renovation. Sorry!

I'm working on a new layout for my blog. Please bear with me for the time being. :-)

Forwards to the Past

Thirty days hath September, April...

June?

I think it's June, and Wikipedia backs me up on this fact, so I'm probably right (for once). Which means it's only been six days since I last posted, which might or might not be a record (don't you just love Heisenberg?)

Schoolchild mnemonics and uncertainty principles aside, however, I find myself gradually, yet noticeably, slipping backwards in time. Not, I hasten to add, in any sense literally, but I do get the feeling that my brain, which started off fairly normally in the 90s and should, by all rights, have steadily worked its way into the third millennium, is instead floating gently in the opposite direction.

To tell the truth, it's not quite as clear cut as that. I might have got to the 70s before the 80s, or the 20s before the 50s, and at times I might have caught up with the present day or even the future. It's more of a generalised anachronistic lifestyle than anything else. But anyway, back to the point.

Firstly, there was the prog rock. And the jazz-rock, the symphonic rock and all the other types of rock. The sort of stuff that was big in the 60s, 70s and 80s, and that my parents listened to during their childhood. Not only that, but they listened to it during my childhood too. As a result, I spent a fair slice of my formative years listening to the likes of Steely Dan and The Electric Light Orchestra. For a long time, I thought that Step by Step by The Alan Parsons Project* was a highly successful song (which it should have been, of course). And the love of musical genres past hasn't left me yet. The most recent piece of music on my laptop (excluding the stuff that Microsoft very kindly put on there for me, and all the CDs of I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue) dates from 1985,** and is, in my humble opinion, absolutely brilliant.

Secondly, there's P. G. Wodehouse, light-hearted comedy writer extraordinaire, but I'll come to him in a later post, lest I bore you rigid. For the time being, therefore, goodbye.

* Anyone who's watched Austin Powers should be chuckling to themselves at this point.

** Well actually, the most recent is from 2008, but it's a re-release of an album from 1980 so it doesn't count.

A Serial Offence

Ha ha!

I suppose you thought I'd gone for good, didn't you? Don't try and deny it. You thought I'd been struck by an incurable bout of apathy, or that I'd succumbed to apricot withdrawal symptoms and snuffed it. Luckily for me, nothing of the sort has happened. Suffice it to say that, for some time, I have been engaged with other matters such as schoolwork, exams and the like.

But this is beside the point. So far beside the point that you can barely see it. So far beside that if it were any further beside, it would reach the end of the universe and start coming back, in which case it wouldn't be further beside, so in fact it can't be any further beside, if you see what I mean, which you probably don't, because I know I don't. So, in any case, it's irrelevant, insignificant and unimportant. What is relevant, significant and important, however, is that I haven't yet written anything that isn't either self-referential or gibberish, so I'd best get on and write something interesting.

[Brief pause as Jake tries to think of something interesting.]

Well, there was the 'debate' over whether serious authors ever write series of books. It all kicked off when my mother put forward the suggestion that writing a series of books was largely the domain of the children's author. Us being the sort of family that we are, this was immediately contested. My dad and I reeled off a number of writers, most of them sci-fi authors and all of them male:

Terry Pratchett!
Frank Herbert!
Arthur C. Clarke!
P. G. Wodehouse!

Ok, so P. G. Wodehouse wasn't a sci-fi author, and strictly speaking Terry Pratchett is a fantasy author, and to be honest the Discworld series can be read in pretty much any order you like and it still makes sense, but you get the gist of it.

This led mum to conclude that the only adult authors who wrote books in series of any sort were men, and, let's face it, slightly unusual ones at that.

Not so. A little hunting in the bookcase revealed Anne of Green Gables, the first of a series of books written by Lucy Maud Montgomery, and The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency, the first of a series by Alexander McCall Smith who, although a man, isn't really that strange. And as for the Harry Potter series...

Conclusion? There's nothing wrong with writing books in series, although it helps if you like technology. Or fairies. Or possibly both.

Just Say No

Okay, I think I've just reached the bounds of normal, sane behaviour. Everything strange I've ever done up to this point pretty much pales into insignificance compared with what's happening now. Fact is, I'm addicted...

...but not to something believable or reasonable, oh no. Not drugs, not alcohol, not smoking: nothing near as predictable as that. You promise not to laugh if I tell you?

Apricots.

All right, you can laugh now. Yes, it's utterly ridiculous. But oddly enough, it's true. I find myself in the unusual position that if I haven't had a dried apricot in a while, I start craving them. Worse than that: I start needing them. It's as though an apricot-shaped hole suddenly develops in me.

Am I crazy? Or am I just one of many who suffer insatiable appetites for otherwise mundane objects? If there are others, are they crazy as well? Are you one of these people, and do you consider yourself crazy? Answers on a postcard! (Or preferably a comment, given the speed (or lack thereof) of the postal service.)