the_elyan | Recent Entries

I discovered yesterday that Hay on Wye literary festival is entirely digital this year, and free (donations welcome, of course).

Link to programme is below - I am trying not to sign up for too much, but there is a lot of good stuff there.

https://www.hayfestival.com/home

For anyone interested who does not do Facebook or Twitter:

I am currently writing a daily blog of very short (c500 words) travel pieces, about places I have been to. The selection is entirely random, based on a bag of the streetmaps I have collected over the years.

Introductory post here - thus far there are 28 actual posts and counting.

https://mymapmemories.wordpress.com/2020/04/14/introduction/

I have arrived here, mainly to keep up with the understandable exodus of people from LJ.

Since I last posted an entry to LJ in January 2011, and that was to explain why I wasn't posting any more, I wouldn't hold your breath in expectation of torrents of new content.

Sorry.

Given my last post lacked somewhat for finesse, I guess I should try to explain a bit more clearly why I haven't written on here for a couple of months, and don't currently intend to again (though one says these things...). It is germane to what follows to issue the usual caveats, which should be taken as read throughout:
i) this is only my opinion, and
ii) where the response is "well, it's alright for you...", then my only answer is "yes, I guess you're right"

( Thoughts on blog posts, and on Facebook )

I am still reading what is on my Default View, and commenting from time to time (though I very rarely comment on things posted to DW, because I find OpenID unreliable and irritating).

And with that, a very Happy New Year to both my remaining readers.

Reclusive Backer Saves Hobbit Films

Following the financial difficulties of MGM, New Line Cinema were described as "delighted" to welcome new financial backing for the two Hobbit films, to be directed by Peter Jackson.

The backer is believed to be a Mr Simon Mordecai Aloysius Unwin Golightly, a reclusive individual living near Esgaroth.

A spokesman for Mr Golightly said "My client is thrilled to be working with the team on this very important, and frequently misunderstood story. Peter Jackson is an outstanding director, and will retain absolute artistic control. However, my client is very keen to make sure that the right messages are taken from the film, and will be taking a very active interest in the storyboarding process. For instance, that whole thing about the hole beneath the left breast is just crap"

The financial director of New Line was unavailable for comment, but was seen by our correspondent in a Wellington pawn-shop, selling a jewel-encrusted broadsword and matching three-handled drinking-cup. Interested parties have also been instructed to watch eBay, searching under description "Arkenstone"

Right - this is a risky one...

This lengthy article about environmentalism, humanity and politics absolutely knocked me sideways. I think it's brilliant, both in conceit and execution, and I urge you to read it.

However, the writer's views on what environmentalism has become, and its relationship to politics (especially of the left) may upset or offend. If so I'm sorry for the upset or offence, but not for the recommendation - I don't agree with everything he says either.

Am disabling comments here - if you have views, feel free to comment in your own journal, or on the article itself.

But please, if you have time, do read it, because I really think it's worth reading, and thinking about.

In an act of devotion to a series above and beyond the call of duty, I am currently watching the second Matrix film. About the only thing to be said for the second film is that it's much better than the third one.

Mind you, it does have one saving grace - Neo and Trinity's sex scene remains one of the funniest things committed to celluloid in the last ten years. You can't define two characters by their enigmatic and detached cool, then show them screwing - it just doesn't work. Plus, those sockets they have all over them must really chafe. Especially if they have any we can't see, around their ... but no, if that was the case, at the moment of orgasm they wouldn't shout out, they'd short out.

Unlikely moments in sci-fi crossover:

"There is no spoon. There is only Zuul."

I just love this little site, which I found at an exhibition in Bexhill at the weekend. It's what a word-processor would really be like if designed for human beings. Click on the various buttons to see what I mean.

Writing this at half nine on a Sunday evening means it will probably go for nothing, but it's in my head, and kind of important.

I spent much of th eweekend in Rye, and specifically the Queens Head, and it was splendid. Given the folks involved, I expected no less, but it really is an excellent pub - good booze, good food, and good people.

What I wanted to say is how awesome it is that my friends have created this wonderful thing out of promising but difficult material, and at the end of a lot of damned hard work, it's there. So much of life, including my own projects, came to naught or half a page of scribbled lines, so to see something so ambitious brought to fruition (even if there is more to do), is great.

Beyond that, of course there is the fact that other people like it - people we've never met, people who were just passing and heard the music, people who fancied a pint. I sat in the bar on Sunday afternoon, and a couple came in who had just hiked from Hastings (about 15 miles), and were ready for a pint. They were there for about three hours, and came away the happiest of campers. That's what a pub should do, and that I know people who have made one makes me very proud and happy.
In some ways it's easier to talk to strangers about this when it's my friends doing rather than my own. Bigging up my own achievements feels wrong, and I hedge them with qualificiations. But when it's my friends, I can say with a whole heart that they have created something wonderful, and that yes, they are awesome.

So - my congratulations to

romauld,

strongtrousers,

libellum,

cyrus_ii, and everyone else involved with the project - I wish you every success.

Ah - I've realised the best way to get myself limbered up for a long night of eection-watching.

"This is Vincent Hanna, coming to you live from Dunny-on-the-Wold..."

Just a quick plug:

If you have the good fortune to find yourself in the West Highlands, anywhere near Fort William, and have the means, I recommend eating (and staying) at the Princes House Hotel, Glenfinnan. I hope it would not be out of place to say that the meal we had there last week was splendid, and that the hotel staff were wonderful to us.

[puts away small trumpet]

A really good sunset isn't a moment in time - it's an unfolding of splendour. The light changes all the time, touching the clouds, setting the horizon aflame. Imagined lands and possibilities live briefly in the sky, then pass back into the shadows. Very rarely - at Land's End, atop the fortressin Arezzo, up the road above Harlech bay - I've seen the whole spectacle. More often I catch a flash of it, out of the corner of my eye, but by the time I find a way between the buildings, it's gone, until the next time.

There is a magic in the light you get when bright sunlight meets stormclouds. The deep, billowing grey of the approaching wall, suspended in the glow of afternoon sunlight. The spire of Norwich Cathedral, caught against a sky like that, is like a golden spike driven into the heavens. And when the rain falls from those clouds, it hits the ground in a shower of sparks, a multitude of rainbows.

It's all about light. Buildings, hills, water, these are all fine things - but it's how the light hits them, the way it changes from minute to minute and season to season, that makes them glorious. Once you realise that, every moment can become a new experience, because though you pass the same things, the light will be different. You can;'t manufacture that moment - it has to fall on you.

[I should, of course, post this at some time other than 10pm on a Sunday night, because then someone might read it. But tomorrow the way I see things will be different, and the day after, different again. If no-one is at the river as my boat floats past, they'll be there for someone else's]

I think old Will missed a few tricks by just limiting his output to the theatre:

( In which we are slightly irreverent )

Here's something interesting I didn't know, about the word "cliché":

"Let’s consider the origin of the word. For 19th-century typesetters, a cliché was a piece of language encountered so often in the course of their work that it had earned its own printing plate - no need to reset the individual letters, just stamp that thing on the page and keep going. So the cliché was an object, and a useful one: a concrete unit of communication that minimized labor and sped things up."

From this article.

An uneven but entertaining collection of wise saws and modern instances

I particularly like "The best things in life aren't things". As someone currently engaged in yet another skirmish in the Clutter War, I can apprecate that.

I wonder if Bat Television carries a crime-fighting adventure serial called Humanbat?

At the first sign of a crime being committed in the bat world, he couldf dash off to his "HumanHouse", and emerge dressed in jeans and a T-shirt. He would defeat the bad guys using such extraordinary skills as "walking", and with gadgets like the "Phone", with which he could make a "call", which would magically tell other bats where the perp was. Also, he could order pizza.

Maybe he could have a sidekick called Doug, or Trevor.

Go cephalopods!

Love the poster...

i) in honour of London's attempts to turn weekend travel into an episode of Knightmare, I would quite like a T-shirt showing all the circulatory systems of the body in a Tube map stylee, with various closures, diversions and explanatory notes. "Owing to unplanned engineering works after a heavy curry, the large instestine will not be stopping at...", and so on.

ii) Simple Simon met a bi man
Going to the fair
Said Simple Simon to the bi man
"BLANK"

An ancillary to the old favourite: "But you'd look sweet upon the seat of a bisexual made for two"

iii) In the Bungle, the mighty Bungle...

It's been a long day...

wondermark provides a curuious tool for naNoWriMo here

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the_elyan

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The Other Book of Ely

(being a romance in the realm of garbage)

Recent Entries

Hay Digital Festival

Travel bites blog

Hello

A more considered farewell

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A real word processor

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Light

Shakespeare and television

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Silly ideas

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May 2020

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