Lightbulbs

Yesterday was E-Day, apparently.

It’s nothing to do with chemical stimulants, European integration, electronic communications, islands in Orkney or the Yorkshire dialect (though no doubt someone has conceived days for all of those things).

Rather, E-Day is about saving energy. Quite why we’re only encouraged to do it one day a year is beyond me.

But anyway. Switching lights off seems to be one of the main themes of the day, and so I thought it would be appropriate to observe E-Day (albeit a day late) with a round of your best lightbulb jokes.

For starters…

How many Church of Scotland Elders does it take to change a lightbulb?
Change!?

How many pedants does it take to change a lightbulb?
None, surely you replace it.

How many Freudian analysts dos it take to change a lightbulb?
Two - one to screw in the lightbulb and the other to hold the peni… I mean ladder.

How many dyslexics does it take to change a lightblub?

How many folk singers does it take to change a lightbulb?
Twenty - one to change the lightbulb and the others to sit in a circle and sing a song about how good the old one was.

I’m sure there’s more.

Season 4 so far

I’ve now seen the first four episodes of Lost season 4.

After a tense build up to an amazing cliff-hanger at the end of season 3, season 4 has been a roller-coaster.  Gone is the slow, edge-of-the-seat and often agonising pace at which the plot and characters developed and the tension grew in much of season 2 and 3, and in comes a much more thrilling and exciting action tone.

Not to say that it’s delivering all the answers - while some amazing things happen in the early season 4 episodes, they still throw up yet more questions, and only tease us with possible outcomes rather than reveal any in full.  There are still a full two seasons to come, so I guess things will not be fully explained even by the end of the current season.

However, it is still gripping - my jaw dropped more than once during the four episodes, as the new challenges facing the survivors lead to unexpected divisions and behaviour.  Some of the characters that I had down as the reliable and dependable group members have seemingly begun to crack or change as pressures mount, and it’s hard to predict what might happen between now and the end of the season.

It really is the best thing on telly at the moment.

Mind you, I don’t have a TV and this is the only thing I watch, so that’s not a hard conclusion for me to reach.

Jon Hopkins

Niall emailed me the other day to recommend an album - Opalescent by Jon Hopkins.

Hailing from London, Hopkins is a maker of classical electronica, and Opalescent is simply beautiful - sublime, chilled music that is complex without being cluttered, and has a soft, floaty, almost ethereal and angelic sort of air about it. I bought it on iTunes the other day, and liked it so much I immediately bought his second album Contact Note and an EP called, originally, EP 1.

His music is a wee bit like Ulrich Schnauss, but brighter and lighter. There’s a very soundtracky feel to it, too - as you listen you can imagine some tracks fitting in with Lord of the Rings, others with Blade Runner or The Matrix - and some of his stuff has apparently been used in a number of TV shows and adverts.

Overall, I’m very glad to have discovered him. It’s perfect easy weekend listening.

Talking of weekends, mine is about to conclude with a trip to Aberdeen, where I will be doing an overnight in advance of a day in Cupar. Thankfully its my only trip of what will nevertheless be a very busy week.

Books

I know how disappointed you’ll have been that my last post wasn’t actually about books, so here’s one to satisfy your literary inclinations.

JJ has “tagged” me in one of those circular “meme” thingies. I don’t normally go in for them, but seeing as she asked so nicely… my task is to:

1) Pick up the nearest book (of at least 123 pages).
2) Open the book to page 123.
3) Find the fifth sentence.
4) Post the next three sentences.
5) Tag five people.

The sentences are:

An extensive representation of the famous posters that marked the beginning of an entirely new art form is also here, vicious caricatures of the pretensions of those days. The palais was dedicated to the Belle Epoque painter in 1922, following his death in 1901. Centuries of intermarriage and a form of dwarfism are believed to be the cause of Lautrec’s physical suffering, but what colors [sic] and characters he produced!

This is taken from the entry on Toulose-Lautrec Museum in Albi, France, in 1,000 Places To See Before You Die. And no, I’m not planning on visiting them all post-mullet mission.  Especially if intermarriage and dwarfism are common features.

Consider yourself “tagged” if you choose.

Talking of books, I haven’t yet reported back on what I read while in New Zealand last month.

I was a bit of an idiot and didn’t leave with a pile of books to see me through the trip. However, I managed to pick up this in London, which I’d been meaning to buy for ages. It didn’t last long, and so I bought the sequel in Brisbane. That also didn’t last long. They are both very funny, entertaining, insightful, brutal and occasionally heart-warming stories about life in the oil industry.

Then when I got to New Zealand, I was browsing through a bookshop and this leapt out at me.  Not normally a fan of fantasy novels, I was surprised that Terry Brooks’ “Armageddon’s Children” caught my eye.  But it seemed different - a bit more gritty, human and set in a post-apocalyptic near future, rather than being some stupid story about a bunch of elves written by someone who clearly thinks he’s Tolkien.

This story was gripping, with interesting characters, action and ideas.  There were a handful of plotlines all concerning the survival of the human race against forces corrupted by pollution, poisoning, nuclear radiation, and a generous dose of good old fashioned evil.  The remnants of the world we know - names, places, things - made for a hauntingly imaginable backdrop.  Though it wasn’t exactly an easy read, it was a nice bit of mindless escapism which fitted in perfectly for my holiday mode.

However, things were ruined a little when the author introduced another plotline later on about, yes you’ve guessed it, a bunch of elves, which made the story much less gritty and a whole lot more stupid.

That said, it ended on a spectacular cliff-hanger, so I’ll probably buy the sequel.  But I won’t be dabbling in the wider “universe” of Shannara, a whole pile of books about elves and stuff, to which Armaggedon’s Children forms an early prequel.

I finished it before I left New Zealand, so on my last few days in Wellington I bought myself the full five books of the Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the first three of which I read years ago and have wanted to re-read for ages.  I’m still reading it, and have just started book four.  It’s best described so far as mostly harmless, but with a very 1980s sense of humour.  I’ll maybe write more about it once I’ve finished.

Well done if you’ve made it to the end of this rather dull post.  Happy Friday.

Borders

Europe’s newest independent country was born the other day.

Not Scotland, sadly, but Kosova or Kosovo, depending on who you talk to.  And also, whether it is actually now independent also depends on who you talk to.  Some will recognise the new country, others won’t.  And as is reported here, here and here, “independence” is going to cause as many problems in that corner of Europe as it solves.

Having visited Kosova (I’ll call it what the majority of Kosovans call it) twice and the Balkans as a whole three times, I’m fascinated by the politics and history of the area, and the Kosovan issue is complex and probably quite irresolvable in the short to medium term, and so it will be interesting to see how the situation at the moment shapes up.

I’d reflect more about my experiences there, but it’s a busy week.  Maybe I’ll come back to it another day.

And in other news, the “Berwick question” has been opened again.

The borders they are a-changing.

And apologies if you saw the title of this blog and expected a discussion about bookstores.

Radovan Karadžić

Last night, for some reason I will probably never figure out, I had a dream that Radovan Karadžić was hiding in my attic.

Which is immensely bizarre, as I don’t even have an attic.

A man walks into a bar…

I know I should write some sort of sublime, thought-provoking and intellectual blog this evening (well, it would make a change if nothing else), but at the end of a busy week I frankly don’t have the oomph.

And nothing interesting has happened this last couple of days, apart from a very pretty drive to Skye and a long journey to Dundee.

So instead, let me tell you a great joke I heard the other day:

A cosine wave walks into a bar, and orders a pint. The barman says “sorry, we don’t cater for functions.”

And in case you think I am going to head off into the inaccessible cul-de-sac of maths jokes, let me instead tell you what is probably my favourite bar joke:

Descartes walks into his local pub. The barman looks up and says “Ah, good evening Rene, will it be the usual tonight?” Descartes pauses for a moment. “Er, no”, he says, “I think not.” And he disappears.

Let’s have your bar jokes, to lighten the mood this weekend.

In between travels

I was in Cupar and Dundee the last couple of days, and then I’m in Skye and Dundee again later on in the week.

Dundee is beginning to - slightly - grow on me.  On a bright sunny day its Victorian city centre buildings look grand, and its array of sculptures around the shopping precinct are interesting curiousities.

The city of jute, jam and journalism does have its fair share of ugliness, though, and there’s been a lot of ongoing regeneration of late to tackle this.

That can’t have been too difficult, I imagine, as Dundee couldn’t really have got any uglier.

I took a few photos from the last couple of days, some from the train south towards Dundee which was quite moody and atmospheric in the thick North Sea mist.

Thankfully, however, Inverness today is looking… well, sunny.

Stunned Mullet

There’s a pub in Palmerston North, a town on New Zealand’s North Island, called the Stunned Mullet.

I heard about it while on my travels last month, although because it’s not an actual place and thus not on the list, I didn’t make time to visit it.

All I managed in my hectic schedule was to pass through Palmerston North on a bus, but had there been a bit more time it might have been nice to stop, have a drink there and take the obligatory photo.

However, one of my friends in New Zealand emailed me the other day to say that they’d recently visited the town and passed the Stunned Mullet. They attached a photo they took.

“It appeared to be quite a boring pub,” my friend wrote, “but it was a Sunday morning and apparently Palmy is a place to be on a Saturday night, so maybe it is less stunned than it looked.”

So it’s nice to know what the Stunned Mullet looks like, at least from the outside.

Besides its fish-inspired pub, there was another amusing story that people told me about Palmy.

Apparently, some years ago, John Cleese commented that Palmerston North was the sort of place you would go if you felt suicidal but didn’t quite have enough courage to go through with it.

As an act of revenge, the town named its rubbish dump after him.

The problem with Forres

I was in Elgin today, the last trip in what has been a very busy week.

Only 45 minutes away from Inverness, I always feel somewhat cheated after that journey - I am so much more used to longer train journeys (Edinburgh is over three hours, for instance) that it seems less satisfying, less like a proper train trip, when I get off at Elgin.

“What, you call this a train journey?” I feel like saying. “It can’t be - I’m not bored witless, my laptop’s not run out of battery, and I can still feel my bum!”

And as anyone who has ever done the line east of Inverness will know, the automated on-board voice has a bit of a problem with Forres. It seems to overlook it at every opportunity: “This train is for Aberdeen. This train will call at Nairn, Elgin, Huntly…” and no Forres after Nairn.

You feel like there’s some sinister going on after Nairn, when the voice pipes up “We are now approaching.” But my favourite, which always raises a chuckle among fellow passengers, is “The next stop is please mind the gap when alighting from this train.”

Presumably it’s a technical fault, but it’s been like that on all the trains on that route for a long, long time. I guess Scotrail must have it in for Forres.

I can’t pass any judgement on the home of the can-cans myself, never having stopped there in all my years of travelling that line or the A96. And if I wanted to, I guess the glitch would make me miss the stop…