marramgrass

The list of films, either currently in the cinema or soon to be released, that I would very much like to see. Any chance?

• Beowulf
• The Golden Compass
• I Am Legend
• AvP: Requiem
• Sweeney Todd
• Cloverfield

It should be a good couple of months for film.

The Golden Compass will be an interesting one. I’ve heard a fair bit of concern from Christians over it all. Me, I’m looking forward to it. It’s a few years since I read the books, so I’ll have to go for a re-read before I can post sensibly, but I remember being struck by the sheer quality of them. Pullman is certainly writing from a worldview that differs from my own, but every author writes out of their own head. In the interviews I’ve been reading (sorry, linkage escapes me right now), it appears that he’s mellowed somewhat in his tone over the last few years. I will track down the books again, watch the film, dig out some bits I wrote the first time I read the books, then see what I have to say…

Recently I posted about going on a bit of a Gaiman kick. (I still haven’t made it to see Beowulf, which is disappointing, but life gets in the way.)

Anyway. Clicking around the web (as you do), not writing the bits I should be writing (as you don’t), I stumbled across this unusual yet compelling little tale of romance and hero-worship. Warms the cockles, doesn’t it.

While I’m here and feeling ‘literary’, I was in the car on Monday and heard a short story by Michael Morpurgo. I would recommend going and listening to it, but you’ll only be able to find it on that link until Monday, so don’t wait.

A couple of new distractions:

Chain Factor (HT: pix)

Desktop Tower Defence

I accept no responsibility.

• Winter seems to have finally arrived here in Northern Ireland. We had a couple of excellently cold days, and now it’s just wet. That is the true heart of winter in this part of the world. One of the things I miss about Edinburgh is how it could get properly cold, and even snow occasionally.
• In spite of my intentions otherwise, as Christmas gets closer I only seem to get busier. It seems like I could do with it being eight weeks away instead of four. It’s probably about time I learned some time-management. That or employed a ghost-writer, along with a ghost-facilitator, ghost-trainer and ghost-student… Less than four weeks to a wee break is great and terrible both at once. And I’m horrified that the Advent has become a countdown to holiday, at least on some level.
• The iPhone interface is not hugely well-suited to inputting HTML. Finding the < and > symbols takes too many actions, and the auto-correct gets occasionally flummoxed by the tags. Yet strangely it seems quite happy with ‘flummoxed’. Still, it gives me something to do when I’m waiting on my wife and I’ve forgotten my novel.

What is it with me and Google lately?

Just a quick one, here. When posting yesterday I needed to find my old post about jPod, and dredged up from the back of my mind a little bit of Google functionality that I’ve never used but is handy to know about.

To get the “one search engine to rule them all” to search a specific web site, just sart your search string with the name of the site preceded by “site:”. So yesterday I used the search site:marramgrass.org.uk jpod to find my old post.

Not at all exciting, but occasionally quite useful.

I think the world contains more than one Douglas Coupland. Last year I posted about jPod, being very underwhelmed by it. Now I’m reading his most recent, The Gum Thief, and it’s much more enjoyable.

This got me thinking about how consistently inconsistent an author he is. He has this reputation for social and cultural commentary, but even in that he’s a bit hit and miss. I think of myself as a fan, but a fairly critical one.

Case in point: of Coupland’s fiction, some of it is very good indeed, and some of it is decidedly not. Hence the two Douglas Couplands. A can write, B has trouble with it.

Coupland A:

• Life After God
• Microserfs
• Girlfriend In A Coma
• Miss Wyoming
• Hey, Nostradamus!

Coupland B:

• Shampoo Planet
• Eleanor Rigby
• All Families Are Psychotic
• jPod

I’ve excluded Generation X because I wasn’t sure where to put it, but to be honest I was leaning towards Coupland B. At the half-way point, I think The Gum Thief was written by Coupland A.

(Whilst writing this post, for some reason I consistently mis-spelled ‘thief’ as ‘theif’.)

A couple of people have asked me recently, “Why marramgrass?” Over the life of this site that puts me up to the point where I guess I can answer the question.

It’s not very exciting.

The choice of name was down to a combination of factors:

• A word that had stuck in my head since GCSE Geography
• A fairly unusual and reasonably memorable word.
• A word I’d always fancied employing as the name of a band. I’m not in a band.
• The domain name was available (the surprise!).

Now the tag line (”unexpected, and a little spiky”) I find more interesting.

Marram Grass is the stuff that holds sand dunes together at the seaside. When you’re walking through it, it has this uncanny ability to poke through even the heaviest denim jeans and stab you in the calf. This usually makes me jump a little. I pretentiously likened this nature to that of my writing here — or at least what I hoped it would turn out like.

That’s a story I’ve been thinking about telling for four and a half years. Go figure.

I’ve done some tweaking to try and fix an old silly problem with the layout here.

I think it’s all good, but if anything looks broken to you, please leave me a comment and let me know. It’d be handy if you told me what operating system (WinXP, Vista, 98, Mac OS X 10.?, etc) and browser you’re using.

Ta.

Or, “How Google Is Taking Over The World.”

Over the last eight or nine years, I’ve become at home with two artifacts of modern life which are at the same time constant (in certain societies) and fleeting: email addresses and mobile phone numbers.

(more…)

Today’s intended post is -poned, to let me bring you some breaking news. Belfast appears to have been invaded by large yellow directory-like structures, scattered all over the pavements of the city.

I only hope they don’t hatch into papery ‘phone number-crunching monsters that replace us while we sleep…

UPDATE: extra points if you can tell me where I took this picture. You should be able to tell.