Backblog Conclusions

Just to sum up:

• I posted things, most of which were no good
• I didn't like them, and am not proud of them
• I promoted a couple of them, but got embarrassed
• Doing this didn't spur me on to start writing again
• So I guess this is the end of the blog. Goodbye.

Idiot

I like The Idiot.

But enough about [YOUR NAME HERE]!

No, but seriously, folks..

I like the book The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoevsky. Maybe you've heard of it?

For Christmas, I got a DVD of Akira Kurosawa's film adaptation from 1951.

It's pretty faithful, but apparently there was loads of stuff cut out of it, so it's a bit choppy. This version is 165 minutes long, but the original version was 265 minutes. That's pretty long. A minute for every day of a madman's year.

The original version is lost in a warehouse somewhere.

I liked this version, though. He seemed to 'get' the characters, which is the main thing.

Toshiro Mifune is in it. You might remember him from a billion other Kurosawa films. He's great.

Anyway, there's a scene in the film where Mifune looks incredible. I think the film is set in contemporary Japan, but I can't work out what he's wearing.

I have a theory that Kurosawa, or Mifune, or the wardrobe department, had a weird premonition of all male pop culture icons of second half of the twentieth century and amalgamated them into one bloke.

He's wearing a dressing gown - I'm not sure if it's a normal kimono - and his hair is all quiffed-up.

He looks like ALL of the following:
Elvis Presley
Clint Eastwood (who ended up pretty much playing Mifune in A Fistful of Dollars - a remake of Yojimbo)
Arnold Schwarzenegger
Wolverine (who's pretty entrenched in Japanese culture)
Harrison Ford
Bruce Lee
Al Pacino
John Travolta
James Bond (who loves dressing gowns)
Tom Selleck
Sylvester Stallone

And this is 1951, remember.

I think Mifune was an early choice to play Obi-Wan Kenobi (George Lucas loved him), so he has that going for him too.

Pretty impressive.

Anyway, here's a picture:

Yes, maybe I oversold it. It's possible. But it seemed like an interesting insight.

I have too much insight. And there's no hope insight. I think that's the saying.

There's no hope in sight.

There's no hope in insight.

There's no hope in insight in sight.

There's no hope in sight of insight inside.

***

The word "insight" looks weird to me now.

(in)sigh(t)

Drip drip drip

“Tell him what you said,” said Nick, grinning.
“About what?” Asked Jordan.
“About Walter!”
“Oh!” Jordan grinned too, looked at me, and then licked his lips before continuing. “We were talking about Walter, right? And how boring he is, yeah? So boring. And I was like, ‘hanging out with him is so bad you might as well call it Chinese Walter Torture!’”
I didn’t say anything.
“Get it? Like Chinese Water Torture.”
I got it.
“I got it,” I said. “ But it’s a bit racist.”
“How is it racist?” Asked Jordan, aghast.
“Yeah, how is it racist?” Asked Nick, another ghast.
“Chinese Walter Torture,” I said.
“What?” Said Nick. “His name is Walter. He is Chinese. Talking to him is torture. Fact, fact, fact.”

“He’s Japanese,”I said.

“Yeah, well…” Jordan convulsed, bemused.
“Yeah, well,” Nick picked up the baton. “There’s no such thing as Japanese Water Torture. It wouldn’t make sense.”

“How do you know?” I asked, and we spent the next minute googling “Japanese Water Torture” and the next three minutes regretting it.

“Walter’s dad’s in the Triads,” said Jordan, out of the blue.
“No he isn’t,” I said.
“He is,” said Jordan.
“Even if he was – and he isn’t – Triads is Japanese. If anything, his dad’s in the Yakuza.”
“Now who’s being racist?” Said Nick, for what turned out to be the first of a dozen times that day. We never agreed on now who was being racist, but he really wanted it to be me.
“He’s got tattoos,” said Nick. “Walter’s dad, I mean.”
“So has my mum,” I said, “ and she isn’t in the Yakuza.” Both true statements.

“Walter isn’t a very Japanese name,” said Nick.
“It’s not his real name,” said Jordan. “His real name’s Toshihiro or Toshihiri or something. Walter’s just his Western name. They got it from Walter White in Breaking Bad. His dad loves Breaking Bad. He’s obsessed with it. Walter’s sister’s called Jesse. And his dog’s called Barking Bad.”

“You know, it actually doesn’t sound like Walter is that boring,” I said.

They seemed to agree and we all went out to buy ham.

Caspar David Friedrichie Rich

I was going to do a photoshop of the Caspar David Friedrich painting Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, with a young ghost looking out at the mountains.

It would have the following caption:

'Caspar David Friedrichie Rich'.

It would be a play on Caspar David Freidrich and the cartoon character Richie Rich.

But then I realised that Richie Rich wasn't a ghost, no matter what the Simpsons might say:

Somehow, probably because of this Simpsons joke, I'd conflated the ghost and the rich boy.

I must have been further confused that the painter's name contained both Caspar and Rich. My brain had mixed it all up.

It's confusing.

I think the whole thing is muddied beyond repair. Of course, I could do a couple of things.

I could Photoshop the ghost onto the painting and put something like 'Caspar David Friedrich the Friendly Ghost' (or just 'Caspar the Friendly Ghost' for the intelligentsia).

Or I could Photoshop the wealthy child onto the painting and do the original 'Caspar David Friedrichie Rich'. But is Richie Rich recognizable enough from behind to make that obvious?

I really don't want to google "Richie Rich from behind" to check. Especially not at work.

It's a shame, because it seemed like such a perfect comedy idea at the time.

Oh well.

Also, I don't have Photoshop.

Vab

Vab is probably a word now, isn't it?

People probably use the word 'vab'. I don't know if they do, but they probably do.

I haven't seen it anyway, but it's the kind of thing that happens these days. People saying 'vab'.

I don't know what it might mean. I could check Urban Dictionary, but I'm not going to. It doesn't matter. All that matters is that we're living at a time when people are saying 'vab'.

It's pretty widespread now (I imagine), so soon it will penetrate mainstream culture. It will appear in the titles of Guardian thinkpieces and there will be a thing on the BBC News website - in the top ten most read stories - about 'vab' and how it's taking off. Then it will die out.

It's like 'on fleek'. Remember that? It lasted about three weeks from conception until it was put out of its misery by your aunt saying it in Whittard's.

The same thing will happen with 'vab' - a thing young people are currently saying.

I'm not judging it. I'm not saying people are wrong to say 'vab'. I'm just saying that they're saying it.

If you analyse trends, or even just pay some attention to the world around you, you can predict what's going to happen to a high degree of accuracy. You can say X is going to fall out of favour, Y is going to reach critical mass, Z is going to say 'vab'.

In this case, I'm not predicting the future - I'm just aware of how the present is going. I followed the thread. I used to know what people are saying, so now, even though I don't listen to anyone, I can be reasonably sure that people are saying 'vab', even though I've never heard it or even thought about it before about ten minutes ago.

Wool

My uncle sold mittens and was defensive about it.

“What do you need the individual fingers for?” He asked, often. He was always taking shots at traditional gloves.

On day, I felt like I might as well respond to this question, even though I didn’t really care. I half-heartedly suggested “Chopsticks?”

He did a little confused laugh, as though he’d never heard of anything so stupid.

“If you’re eating food with chopsticks, the temperature of the dish would keep your hands warm anyway. Why would you need the mittens?”

“What about sushi?” I asked, getting a bit more into it.

He wasn’t so quick with his comeback this time. Eventually, he said: “On the rare occasion where you happen to be in a situation where your hands are cold enough to justify mittens, and you happen to be eating sushi, then you can just use a fork.”

“Tell that to the Japanese,” I said. I’d clearly won.

It wasn’t just mittens, though. He’d started to expand his range into scarves. But with a twist. Literally.

Möbius scarves, they were called. He was really proud of the idea, and he could barely wait to tell me, even though I’d never previously shown any enthusiasm for his business, and mostly just shot down his mitten theories.

They were scarves in the style of Möbius strips. I think he’s only just found out about Möbius strips and was getting carried away. 

“So it’s not really a scarf?” I said.

“Yes, it’s a scarf,” he said. “It’s just one continuous loop of scarf.”

“One continuous loop,” I repeated (fully aware of how annoyed he was getting). “So it’s essentially a baggy snood? It’s essentially a baggy snood.”

He made a face and started winding wool. His assistant, Vida, was standing nearby. “Have you heard about these Möbius scarves?” I asked her. “It’s essentially just a baggy snood.” She shrugged.

I turned back to my uncle. “It’s essentially just a baggy snood.”

“Shut up!” He snapped. “Stop saying it’s essentially just a baggy snood.”

“But it is essentially…”

He slammed his hand down on the table. “What are you even talking about?!”

We were all quiet for a couple of minutes. Vida pretended she had to go to the toilet just to get away from us both.

After a while, things had thawed, and he was back on track with his sales pitch. “I’m thinking of something very specific for the Möbius scarf. Specific, but lucrative.”

“What’s that?” I felt bad for shutting him down before, so I thought I’d hear him out.

“You know those half and half football scarves they have now? It’s like one end is in the colours of one team, and the other is their opponents’? Like, if it’s Arsenal-Tottenham, it’s half red and half white? You know those scarves?”

“You mean, those universally derided scarves that everyone hates?”

“Someone’s buying ‘em,” he said, with a smile. He’d won that one.

“Anyway,” he continued, “ the genius of the Möbius scarf is that instead of one team at each end of the scarf, you can have one team on each side of the scarf!”

I’d tried my best to be encouraging, but this was the last straw.

“Geoff,” I said (his name was Geoff), “in your exhaustive research – which I assume you always undertake before a major product launch – surely you must have learned that a defining, if not the defining, feature of a Möbius strip is it only has ONE SIDE.”

He looked blank. Vida walked back in, read the atmosphere of the room, and went straight back out to the toilet again.

“What do you mean?” Said Geoff.

“If you put Arsenal on one side of the scarf, it’ll go all the way around,” I said.

He looked blank again.

“Where are you going to put Tottenham?”

He stood there for a few seconds, and then mimed holding what looked like a baggy snood. 

“On the other side,” he said.

Remember around 2012, snoods were in, like, the top five things people talked about that year? It’s crazy to think that now. With all the horrors of 2017, snoods wouldn’t crack the top hundred. We didn’t know how lucky we were.

Humphrey Cobb to thank

Eyes Wide Shut is a pretty rubbish name for a film, isn't it?

It's like something I'd name a blog post. Just a mildly interesting turn of phrase.

It doesn't even have anything to do with the plot of the film. No, it doesn't, Stanley. No, it doesn't.

It should have been called Sydney Pollack's Day Out.

*Googles Sydney Pollack*

*checks spelling*

*checks he was in Eyes Wide Shut*

*closes tab*

*nods and smiles*

In fact, that's what it should have been called.

Nods and Smiles.

Stanley Kubrick's Nods and Smiles.

Stanley Kubrick's divisive swansong: Nods and Smiles.

It reflects the themes of the film just as much as Eyes Wide Shut. Especially the nods.

Eyes Wide Shut... jeez.

Eyes Wide Shut UP, more like!

Ha! Good one, me.

You can't shut something wide.

Doors can be wide open, they can't be wide shut.

Legal cases can be blown wide open by a new, crucial, piece of evidence. They can't be blown wide shut.

And you can't shut something narrow either. Even the negation is incorrect.

He had such a good track record with film titles up until then, too.

The Killing has a killing in it. I assume. I haven't seen that one.

Paths of Glory had a bitter irony to it, but I think we have Humphrey Cobb to thank for that (he wrote the novel on which it was based).

Spartacus had Spartacus in it.

Lolita had Lolita in it.

Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb had Dr Strangelove and some jokes in it.

2001: A Space Odyssey is probably Clarke's work.

A Clockwork Orange has a clockwork orange in it, in the extended cut that's just been released, partially filmed at a now-citrussy Beaverbrooks.

Barry Lyndon has Barry Lyndon is it.

[What? Yes, I am going to do them all. Yes, I know I've already made my point. Yes, I know I didn't include Killer's Kiss for some reason.]

The Shining has the shining in it.

Full Metal Jacket probably refers to some kind of jacket in the film. I haven't seen it for a while.

But Eyes Wide Shut does not have eyes that are wide shut in it because, as I said, that's not a thing.

And the sort-of-Kubrick A.I. Artificial Intelligence is almost giving us too much information, but that's probably on Spielberg.

I suppose he was probably ill, so he can't really be blamed for such complete artistic failure. The title of the film, I mean. Not the film itself. Which was only a partial artistic failure.

***

I'm not going to publish this. I'm just going to throw it on the pile of draft blogs that is slowly accumulating. I'm happy to include weak stand-up from the year 2000.

And then, when I have enough of a backlog, and the banks of my river are about to burst, I'll drop the whole lot of them onto an unsuspecting public, like a... uh... baker, who.... hasn't baked bread for a long time, and then suddenly reveals that he has been baking bread all along, and here it is everyone! And sorry that most of it is stale now. It's probably not good to eat - it's been sitting in the larder for months and months. And - what's that? Who am I? Oh, you've forgotten who I am? Because I've been gone for so long. I see. I'm the baker. Hmm? No, not a professional baker, no. I used to bake for fun. I was quite prolific. I'd do a farmhouse loaf here, and a Chelsea bun there; a massive baguette one week and a crouton the next. Did they taste good? I thought so, yes. Did anyone eat the stuff I made? No, almost no-one.

Almost no-one.

Anyway, here's three hundred kilos of mouldy baps.

It's in a big heap on your lawn. Sorry, I didn't have any bags.

And now the dump-truck's driving away.

I'll wave and see if he can come back...

No, he didn't see me.

...

...

...

See you later.

***

That's how it will go.

Options

Two students, looking through course documentation, choosing classes:

Jim: OMG, look! There's a class on bras! I'm doing that one! Should be fun, IF YOU KNOW WHAT I MEAN. I've always been interested in bras, IF YOU KNOW WHAT I MEAN.

Kev: There's a class on bras? Where?

Jim points to a course heading.

Kev: What are you talking about?

Jim: Bras.

Kev. Yeah. No. I mean, that's not a course on bras. It's a course on CObras. The snakes.

Jim: What?

Jim looks more closely.

Jim: Oh. I thought it was bras.

Kev: You can read. What did you think the C and the O were about?

Jim: I thought they were a winking face emoji. You know, like... "bras" *wink*. Or *wink* bras. Because they know it's rude.

Kev: Why would they put an emoji in the course name? Anyway, a C can't be a winking eye. There's no vertical winking. 

Jim: Isn't there? *winks*

Kev: It's a shame. I bet a course on bras would be pretty interesting. It could be mainly a fashion thing, but they could also get into bras as a political/ social symbols. Like burning bras and stuff. I think the history of the bra would be an interesting topic. 

Jim: Yeah, it's a shame. I suppose it would be unlikely for them to run a course on bras here at Sheffield Reptile College.

Kev: Yeah.

Jim: Not sure if I'll sign up for cobras. After all, I'm already doing that course on pythons.

Kev: How's that going?

Jim: I don't like it. I only signed up by accident. I thought it was a class on pylons.

Kev: Oh. Did you think the TH was, what, some kind of wonky waffle emoticon?

Jim: Mmmmmmmmmmaybe.... *waffles*

Ovum

I've started another one. I wanted to call it Ovum, but I don't know why. Sometimes a title just calls to you, like Lord Beckon (which is a title in the aristocratic sense, and also beckoning might be calling, except usually beckoning is a gesture, so maybe it should have been Lord Hail or Baron Getoverhere or something a bit closer to the thing I intended to evoke).

Yeah, I'll post this one, I'm sure.

***

I wish Blogger would stop telling me that Google prevented a suspicious attempt to sign in to my account using my password.

I mean, they did. It was suspicious and not me. I'm glad they caught it. But I've already gone and changed my password, and my phone number. And they're still reminding me about it. I have thoroughly reviewed my activity. What else can I do?

Every time I log on here (which is more often than you might care), it's up there: a narrow red reminder of a past violation, like blood on the sheet.

Ugh. That was disgusting imagery, especially in the current climate of people yammering on about bed linen.

Review Activity Now would be a good name for this post. It could be ambiguous because I'm also reviewing the activity of writing this. I'm always reviewing that activity. And actively reviewing the review. But the post is called Ovum, so we'll have to chalk this up to experience and down to the blackboard shop for a refund.

I wonder if posting about this will only encourage the password fraudsters.

Well go ahead. If you can guess my password, you deserve access to the several dozen draft blog posts that aren't good enough to publish, my slotted spoon-based Google+ account and my inflammatory search history.

My new password is unguessable, with a lot of special characters and upper and lower case letters and five numbers. You've have to be bloody Judd Hirsch to figure it out.  Or Judd Nelson. Or Ashley Judd.

Which was the Judd that was good at guessing passwords again? Oh yeah, there isn't one. It was a trademark Headscissors non-sequitur, the likes of which we have not seen these many years.

Do your worst, hackers!

I'm off to check my emails.

paulfung@gmail.com
j0HnnyVaugh@nONtheB1GBREAKFA$TthatONEtime!123

Tell Him Something Pretty

I just finished a rewatch of Deadwood. 'Tell Him Something Pretty' is the title of the final episode.

I like that title, so I thought I'd write a blog post called 'Tell Him Something Pretty' even though I don't want to write about anyone telling anyone else something pretty, and I don't want to write about Deadwood.

I may have figured out why writing this blog is so difficult. It's because I'm writing not for its own sake, but because I want to go back in time. I want to go back to the time in my life when I did write blog posts, and I can't. It's like fighting against the current. That's why I keep writing these and not posting them (see a lack of hyperlink here for examples of previous unpublished posts). As I type, I have a momentary sense of treading water, but I can't go backwards.

Trying to write has the futility of those anxiety dreams I have all the time. I had one recently where I was trying to fill the dishwasher, but every time I thought I was close, more dirty crockery would appear, and I'd have to reorganise things. Even with my superior dishwasher organising skills, it was impossible to finish.

I haven't yet dreamt about writing a blog post that I'm unable to post. Maybe it will happen tonight.

Of course, I could just post this. I could just post the other ones. I could post a story I've already written: just a basic copy and paste job.

I could... but I can't.

Because of the reason up there. The one about not being able to go back in time.

I need to convince myself to travel forward in time, not backwards. I may not be able to go back to blog-writing times in the past, but I could travel into a future where I write. That's a journey I can make. I can get carried along by the current instead of fighting it, I can relax and I can float, I can catch my sleeve on a fountain pen, I can dash my head on the rocks of stream metaphors somewhere round the bend in two-thousand-and-god-damned-nineteen-or-some-shit.

But I don't want to hurl myself into the future. Donald Trump is President there. I can barely even bring myself to write it. Donald Trump is President there. And Brexit. And... everything else. Things genuinely are much worse now, right? It's not just a subjective thing, is it? You know I hate it when people imbue their own times with MAJOR SIGNIFICANCE just because they're alive. I don't think I'm doing that. It just is that bad.

It's no wonder I want to go back in time. Even treading water is better than going forward. Even trying to tread water is better than going forward.

***

OK - I just went to get lunch, and I was mulling it over. Maybe the world isn't that much worse. I put my pessimism down to two things: Twitter and Southampton Football Club.

Twitter

I don't have any friends. You might think that would be the headline of this issue, but I'm going with Twitter. I don't have any friends, so my only real view of the outside world comes from Twitter. And maybe it's just the people I follow, but Twitter mainly gives me the despair of current events, and the negativity of reactions to said events, and the further negativity of reactions to said reactions.

***

[Contemporary Edit: I never finished this. What a shame. It was so interesting and original. If only we could hear more about why Twitter is bad. Alas...]

It Gets Better (Not life. That doesn't get better. I'm talking about the blog.)

There was always doubt, but I stayed ahead of it. The words came, and the doubt followed. But the doubt was never strong enough to justify deletion. Well, maybe sometimes. But it was rare.

But I got slower, and the doubt got stronger. The doubt and the words were neck and neck. Sometimes the words won, sometimes the doubt. Sometimes the neck.

But now it's not even a contest. The doubt is way ahead, and the words are ess ell oh doubleyou.

The doubt is a mile in the lead, and it's laminating the track. My crayons have no purchase, they just squeak feebly as I stumble.

So now there are no words. There aren't even any gifs or embedded videos. It's not even about the words. It's about confidence.

The doubt is the undisputed champion. So undisputed that this whole thing, which you would think would be so long as to be undeletable, will never see the light of day.

And in the past, when I wrote with similar skepticism, I would end up posting it anyway. And in the back of my mind, I knew I'd post it.

But I'm not going to post this. There's no question about it.

Even though I'm essentially goading myself into posting it, I'm not going to.

I suppose certainty is a kind of comfort.

***

[Contemporary Edit: Now I am posting this. Certainty has been yanked off me like so many stolen blankets.]

The Backblog Project

What if I kept writing this blog, every day, for over a year but didn't post anything?

Can you imagine?

Well, I haven't been doing that.

But (and it's a medium but) I have done about ten.

They're sitting there in Draft, rattling their prison bars, yanking their rusty chains, gnawing at, like, some kind of warden or whatever. They want out. Soon, my pretties. Soon.

These are an assortment of posts deemed unpublishable for a number of reasons. Some are inflammatory. Some were written at a time when I felt incapable of dealing with the praise they would inevitably generate. Some were all ready to go when I was called into the kitchen to rescue a burning cake.

The only thing they have in common is that they're not of sufficient quality to publish.

Not on their own, anyway.

But if I put them all out there, as part of an overarching project, these insufficient crumbs will form a lumpen scone that just about passes muster.

I'm going to try to publish a post a day for ten days. I'll seem quite prolific.

Prolificacy (or prolificy, or prolificness) is all a matter of timescales. If you cram a couple of good things into a single second, you can claim to be prolific. But if those good things are spread over four point two billion years, people will make fun of your sporadic output.

One man's 'Terrence Malick' is another man's 'Terrence Malick from 2011 onwards'.

I think I just explained explained what the word 'prolific' means. What a waste of time!

At the moment, it says (11) next to the Draft posts. That's because of this one. This is also a draft.

Wouldn't it be funny if I didn't post this one either? Imagine if this one was thrown into jail cell to join the others, crammed in, American-style, never to see the light of day.

How ironic that would be!

But no. I will post this one. This is up-to-the minute. By means of proof, to show you how current this is, I can tell you that...

*checks newspaper headline*

print isn't dead.