What I’m Blogging

It’s the birthday of crime novelist Ruth Rendell, born in London (1930). One of the most celebrated mystery novelists of all time, she’s best known for her mystery novels featuring Chief Inspector Reginald Wexford. But she also writes novels under the pseudonym Barbara Vine, and some critics consider these books to be her best work. Her parents had a difficult marriage, and Rendell spent a lot of time alone when she was a kid. She started writing in her teens, and she was remarkably ambitious. She managed to write an entire novel in verse about a first-century British queen when she was just 15 years old. As a young woman, she began writing dark, literary short stories, but she couldn’t get anything published.

Then, just for fun, she decided to write a detective novel. She had no intention of publishing it, but when a publisher turned down another novel and asked her if she had anything else, she decided to see what he thought of the detective story. He loved it. And that was From Doon with Death (1964), the novel that introduced Inspector Wexford. But while most of her Wexford novels are relatively straightforward mysteries, Rendell has also written books that examine how ordinary people could become murderers.

Rendell has averaged about two novels every year for most of her career. Her routine is to write every morning for five hours, and then she always eats the exact same lunch: bread, cheese, salad, and fruit. She also likes to move a lot. Since her writing career began, she’s lived in 18 different houses, entirely by choice. She said, “It’s a kind of hobby, I suppose. … I like the whole business of [moving]. And I love the first night in the new place.” Her most recent book is End in Tears (2006).

From the Writer’s Almanac by Garrison Keillor
Available by e-mail daily.
Further mysterious reading available at Amazon.com

It’s been fun Microsoft. From the heady days of Windows 3.1, through the rock star arrival of Windows 95, 98, Me, 2000, and XP (Home and Pro). We’ve had some times haven’t we? Remember when there were 20 diskettes for an install? But sadly all good things must come to an end.

…cash in my wallet…

You see, old friend, we’ve come along way together, but I just can’t go down this new road with you. I just can’t bring myself to put aside my completely serviceable laptop to take in this new “Vista” with you. You always seem to want more; more memory, more horsepower, more money. Well I just don’t have it. Now don’t get all upset… and no I’m not going to get one of those Apples either. Even though all the cool kids want one, they just want more too…

You go ahead into your bright future… I’m just going to stay here with what I have, my new penguin friend Linux, my old trusty laptop, and my cash in my wallet.

There’s a saying in the IT world, “The install expands to fill all available time” and my recent work experience bears evidence to the truth of the maxim. My particular install is absorbing all time around it. I’m expecting a call any moment from some institute of advanced quantum physics as there must be a rip in the space time continuum as a result.

…some ten days have passed by in the process…

It would seem to be a simple thing; install server, load OS, load application. It isn’t. The open source version of the application works on one OS, but the released version of the application doesn’t. Reboot, reformat repeat… several times.

You fiddle with it, you tweak it, and you finally get the damn thing running. It’s almost a shame to let the users at it, because you know they are just going to break it. But oh well what can one do? Then you look up from your desk, and realize that some ten days have passed by in the process. Bloody hell! How did that happen?

Time to reintegrate into what ever is left of my life…

Waiting for Spring

OK. It’s official. Winter needs to go away. Now. I know I lamented the lack of snow over the December holiday season. I know it’s a stereotypical Canadian thing to have winter. But it’s been so freaking cold for so freaking long that I’m saying “Uncle.”

The groundhog said it was coming soon. I say not soon enough. Spring or global warming, whichever comes first. OK by me.

I‘ve been meme’d. Tammi wants me to take out a contract on myself. My first thought was to invite myself to dinner, and during the conversation I’d excuse myself and go to the bathroom. There I would retrieve a cleverly hidden a revolver, placed by me earlier… imagine the surprise on my face when I returned to the table with that! It would be a good clean hit, and I’d never be expecting it. It worked in The Godfather.

…a contract of a less terminal sort…

Then I thought, maybe it’s not that kind of contract….

On closer inspection, it seems to be a contract of a less terminal sort. It seems to be a contract of putting your life’s “ducks in a row” so to speak. Less exciting than a gangland hit for sure, but certainly less messy. OK here goes.

If you get this far… consider yourself tagged to do the same

…I never Saw a Purple Cow…

It’s the birthday of humorist and novelist (Frank) Gelett Burgess, born in Boston, Massachusetts (1866). He wrote more than 35 books of fiction and nonfiction, as well as several plays, including the satirical book Are You a Bromide? (1897). But he is best known for a short poem he published in the first issue of a humor magazine called Lark. It reads, “I never Saw a Purple Cow; / I never Hope to See One; / But I can Tell you, Anyhow, / I’d rather See than Be One.” The fame of the poem followed him for a long time, and years later he wrote, “Ah, yes, I wrote the Purple Cow; / I’m sorry now I wrote it; / But I can tell you, Anyhow, / I’ll Kill you if you Quote it.”

Gelett Burgess said, “If in the last few years you haven’t discarded a major opinion or acquired a new one, check your pulse. You may be dead”.

Supper Down the Pub

There’s nothing better that “Supper down the pub”. It’s happy, cheery, and harkens back to a time when even urban dwellers were social. Friends, pints and a scotch egg served over chips. What’s better than that?

It’s the birthday of Robert Burns, born in Alloway, Scotland (1759). Today, he is Scotland’s national poet, although he started writing poetry to impress women. He later said, “My heart was completely tinder, and eternally lighted up by some Goddess or other.”

…writing poems about the daily struggles of ordinary people…

As he got older, he watched how hard his father struggled to make a living as a farmer, suffering through bad weather and bad seed. Some years, his father had almost nothing to show for an entire year of backbreaking effort, and he died when Burns was 25 years old.

So Burns began to branch out from love poems to writing poems about the daily struggles of ordinary people. He was inspired by the traditional Scottish folk ballades his mother had sung him as a child, and he wrote in Scottish dialect rather than formal English.

And those poems made his name when he published them in his collection Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect, which came out on the last day in July 1786. Word spread that he had written in the language of common people about common people, and farmers and maids began to save up their money to buy copies.

Burns spent much of the rest of his life traveling around the countryside collecting and rewriting the lyrics of folk songs for an anthology called The Scots Musical Museum. Because he considered the songs to be the property of all people, he refused to be paid for his work, and even for some of the most famous songs attributed to him, such as “Auld Lang Syne,” he claimed only to have made corrections and additions.