REVIEW OF THE YEAR

Newspapers and TV are awash with this stuff, as one would expect. The best title of a song I heard all year is this:

SHARKS ATE MY WAHINE

A slow-ish tempo instrumental, with a beautiful slide guitar that sounds kind of Hawaiian. How's that for a title?

CROSSWORD THINGS

Sailor/s - it isn't AS (fool!). That'd be an AB or RN
Pole - nothing to do with being Polish (du-uuh). That'll be N/S/E/W
Thus - SO
Pound - L (note, no 'B')
River - DEE/CAN/EXE (most common), WYE/URE
Father - POP/PA/DAD

All extremely logical, really. (Until you try to put it into practice).

DESERT ISLAND DISCS

Pass the Dutchie Musical Youth
Wuthering Heights Kate Bush
Fragments of Fear Johnny Harris
Take Me With You Mark Eric
Walking in Space Quincy Jones
The Diary of Horace Wimp ELO
The Song of the Blackbird RSPB archive*
Harvest Neil Young
All This is That The Beach Boys
Like a Rolling Stone Bob Dylan

*if only one piece of music then the Blackbird recording

Luxury: A canvas lilo (those that are blue one side, red on the other)
Book: The Complete Works of Shakespeare

CROSSWORDS

A (short-lived, presumably) experiment and resolution for 2006: whenever I learn more about crypic crosswords I shall do more than think, "That's something to commit to memory" and then instantly forget all about it.

Rather, I'll record it here in the hope that the process of recalling and typing will lodge the information in my brain for longer than ten minutes. This must only occur when I actually encounter the convention in a crossword, otherwise no real learning will take place. Fruitless to learn the stuff in isolation from real crosswords (ie, in a "how to do it" book) otherwise it won't stick. Spent a pleasant afternoon in the pub with friends tackling the Guardian crossword and was frustrated by my ability to solve only three or four of the clues, as usual.

Thus:

Home Counties - SE (for South East)
Light - a synonym for "clue". The setter referring back to the clue.
Swiss/Switzerland - CH
Sheep - ewe/s, usually
Periodical - mag

and

Factor - a noun for "agent" or "estate agent"
Decoct - vb; to extract by boiling
Loach - a fish


That'll do for now.

BOOK BROWSING

I was looking through a pile of US hardback books. I picked up a couple that had semi-appealing titles. The first was Weep No More My Brother:

"Set in the rural South, Sterling Watson's WNMMB is a stark, brilliantly told story of a young man who believes he can redeem himself only by avenging the death of the brother he loved. When Farel Odum comes to a North Florida state prison as a teacher, he does so with the intention of seeking the death of an inmate who ten years before had murdered his older brother Charles in cold blood. It was Charles whom Farel adored and in whose shadow he had willingly lived... (and so on and so forth in the same vein)...

This blurb was in the front cover. On the back cover is the author's biography:

Sterling Watson was born in Kansas in 1947, where his father was attending the University Law School. His mother was a Mormon girl born and raised in Moab, Utah. Mr Watson has a BA in literature from Florida Presbyterian College and an MA in English with an emphasis on creative writing from the University of Florida. He has taught almost continuously since leaving college - including a stint at a Florida state prison...

So, his work of fiction is a thinly disguised autobiography. You can imagine how bad it is.

The same applies to And My Shoes Keep Walking Back to You:

AMSKWBTY follows sexy Sarah Jean Pixlie as she catapults from struggling back-up singer to blazing star on the country music scene... No matter what befalls her, she pours her irreverant, savvy soul into the lyrics of the songs she writes.

Surprise, surprise, the author of this work is "A singer and songwriter living in San Fransciso".

Why do publishing houses print this stuff? Also, while I'm sure neither writer gave up their day job, is it possible that their respective novels earnt them much additional income? I'd love to know.

TIME

There are different indices of time according to which part of the planet we reside in. Everyone know this. Right now, in England, we're in Greenwich Mean Time. I often wonder how much trouble it causes flight schedulers when the clocks move forwards and backwards from (British) Summer Time to GMT. Most countries observe daily saving time - Russia follows it and changes its clocks on the same weekend that we do. Some other countries save their hour on a different weekend, however, while a few places don't bother with it at all. I used to have to change all the digital clocks on the trading floor of a brokerage - unfortunately, they were all interconnected. It wasn't my favourite task... Brazil, I recall, makes its changes on a different weekend to the majority of countries. It must surely be a far more complex operation for flight timetablers and air-traffic controllers though.

I suppose more people must be familiar with the acronyms because of the rise of email and the way many services are hosted in the US. Some programmes are set to Eastern Standard Time, others are in Mountain Standard Time, etc.

What I love, though, is the existence of something called UT - 'Universal Time'. An astrologer told me this a few months ago. If all the world's astrologers want to observe, say, something to do with Saturn's rings (assuming the hemisphere doesn't affect its visibility), the phenomena is described in terms of Universal Time. Luckily for us, this is the same as GMT. There is some confusion about the exact distinction between the two and it's something incredily complicated concerning physics. (Roughly speaking, GMT is more concerned with the Sun's motion while UT considers the earth's crust. I think.) It amounts to the same thing, in practice.

But doesn't Universal Time sound less like a measure for people in different places on earth and more like a standard for beings in different parts of the universe? Thus, if there's something exciting happening in deep space, earthlings, martians, and any other extra terrestrial critters can all synchronise their watches and take to their telescopes at the same time.

OVERHEARD

A woman looking at a birthday card and asking her boyfriend his opinion. This was in an overpriced London shop selling greetings cards and candles - NOT the natural habitat of the British male...

- "What about this one?"
- "It doesn't matter. I don't care. I don't even like her."

MISREAD IN A BAR

It was late; I was tired. The sign appeared to say:
"On sale here: a selection of beer, urine and spirits".

Admittedly there's not always a great deal of difference...