ONE LETTER PLACE NAMES (# 74,894)
Today I came across a place called Os, near Bergen in Norway.
What brevity I thought, to name a place so succinctly.
But this is longwinded for Norway – they have 7 villages called A (with a small circular accent above the A, a symbol I can’t find in my WordPress deck) as well as several farms called O.
Talking of O, Devon has a river by the same name, while the river D runs through Oregon.
E is both a mountain at Hokkaido in Japan, and allegedly a river in the highlands of Scotland.
Panama claims to have a place called U.
Which leaves us with Y, a commune in the Somme, France and similarly a settlement in Alaska.
Given the Sarah Palin association, I know which one I’d rather hook up with.
THOR & THE CARPENTER’S PENCIL (# 74,895)
His writing was so surgical, it could change the climate. It wasn’t apparent to the watching world who was behind this godly stunt, but tucked away in his Nordic shed with a carpenter’s pencil down its last half inch, he wrote the words that brought rain to the Sudan and cold fronts back to the Arctic. His wife cussed his weather meddling and his dog would bite the table leg every time he hit the semi colon key, not that this had an adverse effect on matters, but it gave the reader time to rest.
His days with his graphite divining wand were numbered. Things came to a head that morning the seasons were abolished. Over half the world’s species who had adapted to a warmer planet were wiped out overnight. People awoke to one omnipresent temperate condition sponsored by Uniqlo. Birds by the million gave evidence as he stood trial in The Hague for weather crimes. The case collapsed when the judge suffered heatstroke.
CHARMTH (# 74,896)
Exaggeration is one thing. Double exaggeration is another. It forms the spine of most good comedy, the laugh behind the laugh that makes you cry or gag on your own breath. Sometimes you’re not too sure why you’re doubled up but you don’t care because it feels fucking fantastic. There’s a word for this. Charmth. It’s the bit in the middle between their wit and your appreciation of it. You started off as strangers and now you’re lying back with a post-coital-like grin on your chops without so much as a kiss leaving or landing on your lips.
Sigh here.
Now, eek out the charmth within your fingertip radius and all that’s good in the world will run to the top of the nearest hill and whistle the Rocky theme tune.
STARTLESSNESS (# 74,897)
If there is such a word (and there is such a feeling) then this word died at birth today.
Or perhaps less pessimistically, it went into a coma with its first breath of life.
Or maybe super optimistically, it spontaneously combusts with every beat of its heart, only to instantaneously reincarnate in the very same form.
Startlessness exists, no it burgeons, in rural life.It is both the nemesis and blood-brother of restlessness, who is welded to the city, for better, for worse.
Startlessness does not judge.
Startlessness is the single most common condition active in mankind today. It will account for our species within 120 years unless we treat it and beat it out of human nature. How? Simple. Stop the stopping and start the starting. If we can become addicted to starting things for rest of our lives, we will live half a generation longer. Allied to that, we’ll reproduce at a pace that is sustainable using a matrix that if drawn here, might fall into the wrong hands and account for us all by Friday.
Don’t know about you, but I’m not ready for that yet.
DO NOT READ (# 74,898)
There comes a time, a point in your life, probably in the second half, when devoting time to reading a novel is time that is stolen from the very act of living. It is a prelude to dying, an accelerated journey to death, a pointlessness even though it should be life-enhancing, life-affirming.
Books have a lot to answer for.
MOTH IN A DARK ROOM TYPES THIS MESSAGE (# 74,899)
I can’t recall the film, but it went something like this.
Moth 1: Stay away from the light.
Moth 2: I can’t help it, it’s so beaudiful.
Moth 2 is electrocuted.
Moth 1 leaves the world of movies and ends up here tonight, at midnight exactly, in an oak barn deep in the backwaters of Devon. My screen isn’t the florescent death-wish that accounted for his friend, but it’s the same instinct – the one light in a dark room. Now he’s gone, off to sleep and he’s taking this screen with him, a comfort blanket that gives a new feeling to the word ‘comfort’.
O’BAMA (# 74,900)
The search for the lost apostrophe.
Wow.
What a line.
If he achieves nothing else with his presidency of (possibly) the most powerful nation on earth, in my book Barack will have achieved greatness with this one-liner after a pint of Guinness in Ireland today, at the almost untraceable birthplace of his great, very-great, uber-great grandfather.
Tell me people of Germany, is Angela this funny?
And Sarkosy fans and Putinites, do your leaders make you laugh with them, not at them.
If so, please send your stand-up scriptwriters to 10 Downing Street, London, SW1A 2AA.
THE ONLY BOOKS THAT MAKE MONEY ARE ABOUT FOOD & KIDS (# 74,901)
I heard this today from a good friend.
There’s a lot of truth in it and a fair amount of sadness too.
Why don’t manuals sell the way they used to – is it because we’ve lost the patience to fix things?
Will anyone ever publish a set of encyclopedias again when wikipedia simply rapes it of its intellect?
Is their a Bible or Koran out there waiting to rewrite the future?
Is there an ounce of courage left in mainstream publishing?
Is everything in publishing governed by what’s gone before?
Has publishing eaten itself?
Is it too late for it to rescue its soul from the bile?
What if Frantzen had a billion bastard clones?
All these answers and more can be found at your nearest Amazon depot.
HYPERSUPERINJUNCTION (# 74,902)
As the plague of common-as-muck injunctions blur into one, we are seeing the rise of its super-rare cousin, the super-injunction, superseding it.
Whatever next?
Why not leap straight to hyperultraextrasuperinjunctions and be done with it?
It seems to me that the language of superlatives is to blame. We’ve lost the ability to use short simple words in an order that is easy to read yet sinks in deep. Is it the fault of legal people. Well, maybe not. They have their tongues tied behind their backs to remix metaphors. Hang on, I’ve caught the disease now. Help! Save me from this grandiloquent guff.
Walk the dog.
Breathe.
Better.
Time for bed.
Night.
Night.
THE SECOND COMING OF WHIGGISM (# 74,903)
Dear Coalition
If you cast your minds back to 1688, you will recall the whiggery movement that stood to subordinate Parliament, the crown and the upper classes, which in turn gave rise to the Liberal party in the mid C19th. Within this calendar year, mark my words, there will a renaissance of extraordinary force from both within your cosy twosome. These insurgents do not yet know who they are, but by God they will.
Run for cover when the time comes. You have been warned.