Author: Rob

Writer. Film-maker. Cartoonist. Cook. Lover.

A Fable

My mate Kev told me a little story this lunchtime that I thought was worth sharing with you, Readership.

Two guys walk into a village, trailing a big cage on wheels behind them. They gather the inhabitants.

“Right,” the first guy says. “I’m in the market for monkeys. Anyone that can bring me monkeys will get ten quid a head for them.”

“Deal!” say the villagers, and off they scurry. Soon, the two strangers are inundated with monkeys.

“Right,” says the first guy when the cage is filled. “That’s a lot of monkeys. I’d like more, but I appreciate they’re in short supply at the moment. So, if you can find any more, I’ll pay you twenty quid a head.”

“Deal”, say the villagers, and off they scurry. They return, with a much reduced haul.

“Now,” says the guy when he’s jammed the monkeys into his cage. “I’m a fool to myself, but I loves me the monkeys. So, if aaaanyone can find me any more of those adorable little furry primates, I will pay them fifty quid a head.”

“Deal!” say the villagers, and off they scurry. This time, most return empty-handed. A couple have scavenged up some scrawny-looking specimens, but on the whole it looks like the village is out of monkeys.

“What a shame,” says the first guy. “Tell you what. The weekend’s coming up. I’m going to take a day or so to take care of some other bits of business. I’ll leave my assistant with you to finish off the paperwork, and make sure things are straight and even. You never know, you might find some more monkeys in the meantime.”

And off he goes.

“You seem like nice, financially astute people,” says the assistant later that day. “So I want to share an idea with you. How about you buy all your monkeys back from me for oh, I dunno, say 35 quid a head. Then when my boss comes back on Monday, you’ve got a fresh new supply of primates to sell him at fifty quid a pop. You’ll make a fortune!”

“Deal!” say the villagers, and buy back all their monkeys at thirty five quid a head.

“Excellent!” says the assistant. “Now, I just have to confer with my boss about something completely unrelated to this deal, and I’ll be back to conclude our business on Monday with him.”

And off he goes.

And the villagers never see anything of the pair of them again.

And that, my Readership, is how unscrupulous financiers go about shorting stocks.

Seems a lot like a cheap, dodgy con, don’t it?

Further:

Douglas Rushkoff gives more background to the fun and frolics of the financial marketplace. Moreover, he actually uses plain English, and makes sense. Which, these days, is a bit of a godsend.

A Good Day For Writing

The last sunny Sunday of the year, probably, and I have spent the best part of it in the conservatory, and allowing the light to push some particularly black and nasty bits of writing out of me and onto the site.

Firstly, the regular update of Satan’s Schoolgirls has reached Chapter 8, where I go sort of torture porn. Sort of. I’m trying to be subtle, really I are, Readership.  It’s a good chunk of verbiage, that try as I might simply couldn’t break up. Let me know if it’s too much, won’t you?

Secondly, a new short is up in the fiction room. The Murder Room is a short burst of bile that shot out of me pretty much fully formed. It wears it’s heart and it’s influences very clearly on it’s sleeve. I won’t pretend it’s particularly great art, but it’s at the sort of level that I’m happy to hit on a warm sunny Sunday, thinking on the dark days to come.

Autumn, I mean. Nether Gods, I can be over-dramatic sometimes.

Here, have some patented lighten up Rob funnies, courtesy of the fabulous Kate Beaton:

Muxtape out, Blip.Fm in.

Guess it had to happen. Justin of the mighty MP3 streaming service Muxtape has finally called it a day after months of pointless wrangling, negotiations and lobbying with record companies and the RIAA. Such a shame. It was a great service for radio streaming, with a clean, sharp interface and a musically literate community that never ceased to come up with nice surprises. I didn’t tend to build many mixes myself, partially as I don’t have the encyclopaedic music collections of a lot of the good Muxers, and partially cos most of my music tends to be AAC rather than MP3.

I’ve played around with Mixwit for a while (as you can see in one of the earliest posts to X&HT last month) but it can be a bit glitchy. Last.fm is a favourite now and on the iPhone was an absolute gem up until the 2.1 update broke it. Seriously, it’s a way of carrying the whole of your music collection around with you without needing a big storage device. I’ve just started playing with Blip.fm, which seems like a lot of fun. Kind of like Twitter for music. And in fact, you can hook it into Twitter and your Last.fm feed, so you can harangue your followers with your suspect musical tastes. Which sounds like a winner to me. Radio Conojito. Coming in your ears.

Sick Sick Sick

Parry, pre-purge.
Parry, pre-purge.

You’ve got to admire the sheer gall, if you’ll excuse the pun. After Bruce Parry’s Amazon was accoladed to the skies last week, it seemed like the smiley ex-Marine could do no wrong. He’d come up with a perfect bit of telly, thrilling, moving and thoughtful.
So how does he follow up last weeks masterful episode? By spending most of it throwing up, noisily and on camera. I had to turn the show off after half an hour, especially as I was becoming uncomfortably reminded of the bout of food poisoning I’d suffered over the weekend.
Shame, really. I was quite looking forward to seeing Bruce in a dress, which had been promised in the trails. Actually, thinking about it, that might have brought on my own Achuar purging ritual.
You do have to wonder about a tribe that thinks it’s natural and healthy to throw up copiously every single morning. It seems like officially santioned bulimia to me. It was certainly clear that the regime wasn’t doing Bruce any favours. I’m really in no place to comment on the rights and wrongs of other cultures, but I don’t think that’s something I’ll be trying any time soon. It’d ruin the taste of my morning coffee, for one thing.
I wonder how long it’ll take an Internet scamp to edit out everything but the puking and put the unexpurgated highlights up on YouTube? End of the day?

Thieving Bastard

I think theres room for another lock there...
I think there's room for another lock there...

Somewhere, some merciless little shit is building himself a bike, using bits he can scavenge from other cycles. Mine, mostly. So far, he’s taken my front wheel (and had the cheek to leave his battered old wheel in part exchange) and, on Friday, my saddle. I haven’t cycled home standing up since I was about ten and let me tell you, readership, it’s great for the thighs but Nether Gods, can you feel it afterwards.

Now, it’s entirely likely that I’ve just been unlucky and I’m not being targeted at all. But that’s not the way I feel at the moment, and I’m completely paranoid about leaving the bike anywhere, regardless of how well secured I’ve made it. I can’t afford a new saddle until payday anyway, which means I’m stuck with a bus trip in, or walking to the station. Neither option appeals especially.

I just feel a bit hopeless and a bit silly. And a lot angry.

I wonder how hard it would be to hack an AutoTaser for bike use?

That should be the middle finger, Ross…

The Reithian ideal, by which to my mind all British TV should to some level adhere, states that television should “educate and entertain.”
With that in mind, let’s summarize the best that Sky has to offer this autumn.
Ross Kemp sucks the life, danger and interest out of gang life. The campest game show ever returns. Wayne Rooney sucks corporate cock for a jazzed up soccer school. A new season of Lost, the most infuriating show on the planet. And Hairspray, the High School Musical. There are no words I can summon up for this one, but the image of a water buffalo in a tutu defecating moistly into John Travolta’s mouth springs unbidden to mind.
I don’t recieve Sky anymore, and thank the Nether Gods for that. Who in their right mind would willingly pay for that panoply of shite?
Give me darts and fighting any day.

A Day Of Tweaks And Noodling

Off sick today, which is always a bore. I’ve been pretty much stuck upstairs, shuttling between the bedroom and the loo (don’t ask, really, unpretty situation.)

Which leads, of course, to a day of Rob’s favourite pastime, Fannying Around On The Laptop. Listen to the author’s squeals of joy as he archives off 10 gigs worth of ephemera to the external drives! Rejoice with him as he gets Last.fm working along with Growl, and spends the day watching a window pop up on his desktop every time a new song plays! Gasp in near-orgasmic wonder as he … oh, you get the idea. Geeking out is what I do, and it can sometimes be good to have the excuse to do nothing but for a day.

So, concerning the local amenities, I’ve juggled things around eso slightly. There’s now a Last.fm list widget, so that you too can enjoy my musical “tastes”. I prefer to call them eclectic, although the accusation often levelled is “schizophrenic.”

Philistines.

There’s also a Facebook widget, and updates to the blog will now appear as new Notes in my FB profile. Sharp-eyed readers may notice a change to the quote in the header, and really sharp-eyed observers will note I’ve tweaked the logo. Notice I have resisted the temptation to stick a lightning bolt in the middle of it.

There’s been a few updates to the growing pile of juicy content in the writing rooms. Satan’s Schoolgirls will always update on a Sunday, so Chapter 5 has just gone up. I upped a new short story Saint Charlie to the Short Fiction room earlier this week, and I’m rather proud of it. Any updates to the fiction or film room will always be noted in This Week’s Special, the text box to the top right.

A couple of interesting links, because obvs I sent a chunk of time hitting the feeds today.

The guys at scans_daily came up with the goods again, with a wonderful piece by Darko Macan, about a bookshop that has every volume in the world … excpet one. The ending is just heartbreaking.

"Mister Bookseller"

Finally, as a writer, I am by definition a language technician. My chosen language (or rather the one that circumstance and to a certain amount laziness has forced onto me) is one of the most illogical and eccentric on the planet. With a vaudvillian twinkle, Ed Rondthaler takes us through a few of the pitfalls and pratfalls that the English language has in store for us.

(Youtube vid, better quality here)

scans_daily: Star Wars Tales

I seem to be bumping into a Wired interview with Leland Chee at Lucasfilm in my feeds an awful lot today.

Leland is the keeper of the Star Wars archive, and the man with all the information on the ever-expanding SW universe at his fingertips – or more accurately, on a massive Filemaker database called the Holocron, after a Jedi data-storage device.

More importantly, he’s the guy that decides what is and isn’t canon in that universe. Subject to a George Lucas brainfart, of course.

Which makes the discovery of this little gem on LJ so frakkin’ sweeet. Totally uncanon, hugely funny. Star Wars humour can often be clunky at best and downright juvenile at times, so it’s a joy to run up against this strip, which manages to be hilarious, elegantly written and subtly satiric.

Which, much as I hate to say it as a loooong time SW geek, is not praise you can often aim at the franchise itself…

BCAFFF6B-FEC6-46AC-A611-AE34620B61B4.jpg
Designing the Death Star, a task loaded with pitfalls...
via Sore Eyes.