marramgrass

I promised something geeky for today, but that’ll have to wait as I’m still playing with the thing I was going to post about (Google Apps if you’re curious). But that’ll be made up for by the super-geekness of it. I know. You just can’t wait, can you?

Instead, let me offer a little pulpish light relief.

In the midst of a busy spell at work, I’ve been giving my brain some downtime with a nice low-brow whodunnit.

Snow Blind by PJ Tracy is everything you want from a normal crime novel, with imaginative mysteries, pleasing twists and a couple of likable heroes. Unfortunately, you can tell who the killer was fairly early on. That gives it’s own satisfaction, though.

The author is actually a mother-and-daugher writing team who (according to an interview I heard on the radio last year) live hundreds of miles apart and collaborate over the phone. Sounds weird, but seems to work. This is their fourth book under the name PJ Tracy, and all four have been pretty satisfying.

So there you go. I still need to post about the Dresden books, but they’re good enough to merit their own space.

I believe they were turning on the Christmas lights in Belfast tonight, five weeks before Christmas. Since I posted the other day, I’ve been thinking some more about the whole gift-giving thing.

Specifically, I thought about how this time of year, for my family, has been the time of the ‘big’ gift, the thing you’d really like to have but can’t get (or can’t justify getting) for yourself. There’s something cool about that, but at the same time it requires a bit of a pause for thought, and in my pause I remembered a friend from Edinburgh.

This guy did something once that raised a few eyebrows among those who know him. A guitarist, when he decided to concentrate on the acoustic instrument for a while he began to dispose of all his electric gear — guitars, amps, effects. Some got sold on, but some was given away to others. (Full disclosure: I have in my possession a couple of very nice bits of gear he gifted me. I’m still humbled by it.) Any musicians out there will know that putting your kit together can be expensive in terms of cash, of effort and of time, so this was not an insignificant thing for him to do.

I remember some wondering if he had thought it through, and the occasional muttering about these young folks not knowing the value of things, of money, of… whatever.

Then and now, I realised that the opposite was true. He got it exactly. The material value of things, of money, of… is fleeting. This guy was of the opinion that he wasn’t using the gear, and someone else could. He knew that to have the right attitude was to hold on lightly, because at the end of the day it’s just stuff, you know?

Which brings me back to the giving of gifts at Christmas. I say that the extravagant gift-giving is cool not for the “Wahey! Look what I got!” factor, but for the “Wow. Look what you gave.” factor. Only one of the many ways we try to express care and love for each other as we celebrate Christmas in the West, this is maybe where we’re most prone to getting sidetracked by the medium and forgetting the message. Its meaning and beauty is in the sacrifice and intent of the giver.

Now where’ve I heard that before?

On three separate occasions today I was in the car with the radio on. I heard three different experts of varying degree educating interviewers in their chosen field. There was civil servant of some sort, a statistician, and I can’t remember who the other one was.

What did they have in common?

They all sounded uncannily like Bill Nighy. It was class, for he is a dude.

Driving to church this morning, I realised (as in, I idly figured out) that from today it is five weeks and two days until Christmas. Cue the traditional “Aargh! No shopping yet!” panic that must accompany such a revelation, and add a healthy dash of financial anxiety.

For many of us, the giving of gifts is a vital ingredient in the season, and it is backed by a rich symbolism. But, be honest, when was the last time you considered that significance? It’s good to give, yes, but it’s awfully easy to get lost in the lists of hims and hers that we need to come up with a cool/imaginative/thoughtful/significant/affordable/valuable/delete-as-appropriate gift for, and forget the why — be it a celebration joined, an obligation felt or simply an expression of friendship or love, something to say, “You’re important to me.”

In the midst of it all, the joy and the anxiety, I think I’ll be glad of The Mockingbird’s Leap. I hope so.

There’s a post I could write just now, and it would be a stormer. But I think it had best wait until I can moderate the tone of it a little — let’s say I’m a little bit miffed and quite likely to commit something to the unforgetting InterWeb that I could later regret.

Instead, I’ll leave you with this from xkcd (again):

I think it’s time for me to construct a new playlist for the car. Tonight I noticed that I kept skipping songs, and that’s definitely a sign of weariness. Give or take the occasional minor change, this is what I’ve been driving to lately:

1. “Blues Run The Game” by Counting Crows (American Girls EP)
2. “I’m Gonna Be (500 Miles)” by The Proclaimers (Best Of…)
3. “America” by Razorlight (Razorlight)
4. “Days Of Pearly Spencer” by Brian Houston (Days Of Pearly Spencer EP)
5. “Feel Good Inc” by Gorillaz (Demon Days)
6. “A Little Less Conversation” by Elvis Presley/JXL (Elvis By The Presleys)
7. “Rylynn” by Andy McKee (Art Of Motion)
8. “Jump Around” by House Of Pain (House Of Pain)
9. “Mockingbird” by Derek Webb (Mockingbird)
10. “Whiskey Lullaby” by Brad Paisley with Alison Krauss (Mud On The Tires)
11. “Last Night I Nearly Died” by Duke Special (Songs From The Deep Forest)
12. “Sweet Child O’ Mine” by Guns ‘N’ Roses (Appetite For Destruction)
13. “My Immortal” by Evanescence (Fallen)
14. “Run-Around” by Blues Traveler (Four)
15. “(I Just) Died In Your Arms” by Cutting Crew (GTA: Vice City soundtrack)
16. “Basket Case” by Green Day (International Superhits!)
17. “Birdhouse In Your Soul” by They Might Be Giants (Flood)
18. “Africa” by Toto (GTA: Vice City soundtrack)

There are a few favourites there, and a few relatively recent discoveries. All good, to my ears anyway. But now I need to start over…

Back when I was a youth worker, I had a lot of free time during the day when everyone else was working. That brought its challenges, but one of the advantages (and I’ll rank it second only after the 9 a.m. alarm) was that it allowed me to indulge one of my weaknesses: cinema.

I took advantage of our local multiplex’s subscription scheme — a tenner a month for as many showings as you wanted — and took in at least one film most weeks, and often two, three or four. It was great. I don’t really get to do that anymore. These days my time is flexible, but I don’t regularly have an afternoon clear to sit in a darkened room with one or two other people (daytime audiences being generally small) simply for the pleasure of it.

But I’m in the midst of a very busy spell that is scattering my work all over the clock, which allowed me to clear a couple of hours this afternoon to briefly return to my old pattern with another indulgence: daft horror films.

30 Days Of Night is vampires mixed up with a hint of Romero zombie. I’ve been enjoying vampire stories since I discovered Anne Rice as a teenager, but none of the recent films have been great. This one isn’t wonderful, either, but it is a little different.

There’s not much in the way of tension, but in between the fights and blood (it’s pretty graphic) it asks a few questions about attitudes to life and suffering which I wasn’t expecting to find here — mainly through the efficiently drawn vampire characters who are arrogant, confident, hopeless and a little despairing (“No hope. Only pain. Only hunger.”), all at once.

It’s not what you’d call high art, and it’s a typical contemporary ‘horror’ in that there’s way more splatter than scare, but there’s just a little bit of depth here that caught me off guard. Interesting, and I’ll now need to track down the graphic novels it’s drawn from and see what else is there.

There are many elements to my character I’m not proud of. One of them is that I find it difficult to not say “yes” — leading to a ridiculous busyness that seems to even get in the way of itself. The day job keeps me going; the little sidelines are fun but often include missed deadlines; the writing I throw at the world here becomes inane as I discover that all my words get taken up by paid work and when I sit down to write for me (which is all I ever hoped for this site) it’s become a drudge and the best I can do is chuck out a daft pun or another dull post about computers or gadgets; my understanding of ‘important’ gets skewed; relationships suffer…

Of course the other side of it is that I’m privileged in many ways: the people I encounter everyday, the comfort of my life, the opportunities I’m given and the experiences I find. I say “yes” because I can, and that’s not a state to be taken for granted.

But in my busyness, what do I miss?

I’ve been invited to join a group blog at The Mockingbird’s Leap. It’s a short-term thing, and the idea is simple.

beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or sense them. the least we can do is try to be there.

Annie Dillard

Through the season of Advent we commit to seeking to notice the wonder around us, the ‘beauty and grace’ that God showers the world with whether we see it or not — he’s like that. Which will mean lifting my head from the busyness in front of me, looking around and allowing my awareness to breathe.

Hooked up to our house WiFi, I’m posting :-) Or I could just be randomly tootling around the InterWeb. Or even lying here watching Serenity (when experimenting with my first video capable iPod, what better disc to apply HandBrake to?).

Sorry. Just had to share. It’s the most capable mobile Internet thingy I’ve ever had. And the keyboard isn’t nearly as bad as they say. I’m getting quicker already and the autocorrect is scary, but I doubt I’ll work up to any two-thumbed action – my thumbs are a bit too fat!

• Some time in the last month or so, Google Maps has had its satellite imagery of at least some of Belfast updated. Used to be if you looked up close at my parents’ house, it had their old car (now my brother’s and his fiancee’s) in the driveway. The green Mazda has mysteriously disappeared from the image.
• Andy McKee on YouTube. I believe he’s performing at the Waterfront Hall in Belfast even as I type this. I heard him on Radio Ulster this afternoon, but bizarrely my stumbling across his videos was entirely independent of that.
• The iPhone is way cool. Yes, I bought one. Yes, I probably am a mug. But no, probably not as much of a mug as you think.
• Related to that, the customer services people at T-Mobile in the UK are exceedingly pleasant to deal with, even when you’re leaving them. Chatty, but not annoyingly so, good-humoured, efficient. In the eighteen months I was using their service, every interaction I had with them was great. Everything the actual effectiveness of their network wasn’t :-/
• I find it hard to work productively with such a seductively new toy hanging off a USB cable beside me.