A leading question

Took the day off to go shopping for birthday pressies (had two people to buy for: one sorted, one not so much). I quickly abandoned shopping and went to see Blood Diamond. There were 5 other people in the cinema - luckily there was one party of four, so the usual radius of 12 rows free around each individual/group still held. Because a person needs her space. And the ticket guy asked if I had a student card. Bless...

Anyway, my point is that is was fabulous to see Djimon Hounsou in a proper meaty role, rather than getting to play, you know, Lara Croft's little helper. I wonder what the rationale is for nominating him in the category of supporting actor rather than lead: the two roles seemed pretty equally weighed. Are there rules for distinguishing supporting roles from leading; is it like boats and ships?

I wonder...

Pictures paint words conjure pictures

I came across this picture series. It relates a woman's fabulous story, or a fabulous woman's story; actually both.

Esther Krinitz was just into her teens when nazis occupied her village. She was resourceful from the outset (Jewish girl goes into the nazi camp to get toothache treated). When the time came, she refused to go the labour camp with her family, and snuck herself and her younger sister off. Her mother's last words to her were 'Maybe you will live'. The family friend who was paid to keep them turned them out almost immediately, and they were left to fend for themselves. And fend they did, pretty miraculously.

Lawrence Kasden made a short film about her, which is chapter four of the piece on Fora TV. In it she talks through some of her embroideries. She's a great storyteller, both in words and pictures.


Holocaust Survivor Esther Krinitz on FORA.tv

Hearts and flowers

Weeks ago the Christmas shop displays were replaced by Valentine displays; it was one smooth overnight transition.

I've mostly been ignoring the little bears and hearts, but they seep in to your consciousness like osmosis. Which led me to Chaucer. I like to read The Parliament of Fowls at this time of year - it's the earliest recorded association of Valentine's Day with lurve (probably written 1380s. And while I'm inside parentheses, two other tangents: reading Parliament gears me up for the whole April-Canterbury Tales connection, and it has one of the coolest opening lines ever: "The life so short, the craft so long to learn...").

Anyhoo, this morning I tripped over a Dublin connection. It turns out Saint Valentine lives in Dublin.

Okay when I say 'lives' what I actually mean is that his relics, or some of them, reside there. And there's a little vial tinged with his blood. And they're all in a Carmelite Church which is officially on Whitefriars Street but the entrance is on Aungier Street these days (they swapped ends of the church, moved the altar and all).

A famous guy called Spratt (John not Jack) was preaching in Rome in 1835 and the pope gave him the relics of Saint Valentine because as we all know, nothing says 'thank you' like human remains. They were displayed in the Carmelite church, but after his death they were put into storage because no-one really cared (this is pre-Hallmark). In the 1960s the relics were dusted off and now they have their own little shrine.

So there you go. Medieval poetry, bones of third-century saints, and a little bloody vial - all working to counteract the saccharine of the season.

Onwards and upwards

Well hasn’t everyone been busy this month:

1) No more googlebombs. Their time it seems, is past. If you google ‘failure’ it no longer leads to the US President's website. That made a lot of people smile.

2) A team of scientists in UCLA and Nottingham managed to weave a Solomon’s Knot out of molecules. It’s a symbol that seems to have been around for thousands of years. The molecular version is two nanometers high - pretty incredible, even if no-one’s quite sure of the practical applications yet.

3) And two Brazilian scientists, after two years’ work, have succeeded in making artificial ball lightning. Er, very small artificial ball lightning. Lightning that they let run all over a floor covered in wires.

Now if that isn’t asking for trouble…

What's in a name?

This reads 'Orlaith' according to a little seal stone stamp from Hong Kong. I guess it's in Cantonese, or maybe Mandarin...

My brother explained to Mister Stampmaker how my name was pronounced versus how it was spelled, so who knows what he finally decided on carving. It probably reads "Orla-with-a-t whoever heard of such crazy names golden-haired princess indeed..."

This is the result when the stamp is used with the accompanying dinky pot of semi-solid ink. I also tried it with my Mont Blanc ink but it was, ahem, not entirely successful.

Off to scrub my hands some more...

Camp America

The image of summer camp has really been established by the US. You say 'summer camp' to a non-American and they'd probably think:

• Fat camp
• Group of American teenagers being killed in a variety of ways in a schlock horror film

Well there's a third type: Jesus Camp.



Bush even makes an appearance, with his characteristic panache.

At the camp, I wonder if you get to do canoeing and orienteering as well, or is it just, you know, all the kooky stuff...

Lost for words

Via language log, I came across an interesting interview with linguist David Harrison.

It turns out there are 7000 languages on the planet; one one dies off every fortnight.

Apparently it's down to the kids. Children are little barometers of what is cool/valued, and if they sense their community thinks more highly of one language than another, they opt for the 'better' one. (Total tangent: it reminded me of that UK study where children were shown a series of photos of kids and asked who would they like to be friends with. Everyone - irrespective of ethnicity - wanted to be friends with the pasty white kid. Little barometers indeed...)

One point that Harrison made was that most knowledge about the local environments and ecosystems of the planet are held within these very local languages. As the words die so does all of that accumulated wisdom.

Western science often misses out by not talking to the neighbourhood folk, going off on its own to 'discover' a species of plant or animal. I was talking with the Codebreakers recently: they lived in Madagascar in the 1960s, and the Life on Earth crew came to film there. Apparently David Attenborough made a big deal about catching a glimpse of one super rare something-or-other. The locals found it hysterical, as there were thousands of the creatures about a mile away.

No-one disabused him of his notions.

Silver linings

Here is a 'chromed' version of today's seascape.

Yep, I'm getting into Photoshop Elements.

Automatic Writing

There's a snippet of 'Gilt' on my site now. I can't publish the whole etext, but I've put up what I can.

Returning to the subject of dolls, I came across the perfect doll for the book via Jonathan Carroll's site. In brief:

• it's called The Writer
• it's from the 1770s
• it was one of three automatons made by fancy watch/mechanical bird maker Jaquet Droz
• there's debate over whether it should be considered an android or not
• it can be programmed to write up to 40 characters
• apparently the inventor used to get it to write 'Cogito ergo sum' to slag off Descartes
• its head and eyes follow the text as it writes. Creepy.
  
  
  
  The Jaquet Droz business is now owned by Swatch.

Mellow day

It occurred to me that one year ago, my weekends were filled with doing touch-up work to my house, sorting through home and garage, and tidying an 80-foot garden - preparing for sale.

I was pretty exhausted most of the time.

This is more fun :)

There's no site like home

It's Friday already? How on earth did that happen?

On reflection, I have spent an inordinate amount of time this week playing at learning html, cascading style sheets and the intricacies of photoshop elements. I got a domain for myself (courtesy of my brother - thanks Sean!), and have been trying to figure out the programming thereof. Pretty steep learning curve.

Anyhoo, I have got to put it to one side for the weekend and concentrate on the writing - when I write it actually goes very well; I'm just easily distracted - oh look a butterfly...

So, the site is at www.orlaithosullivan.com. There isn't really anything there yet, unless you love reading 'lorem ipsum dolor'. Baby steps :)

There'll be a grand announcement when content arrives.

And in other news, I made purple soup today. Yum!

Sweet Sixteen

I am actually getting some work done today, so for your viewing pleasure here are a couple of treaty links I was sent:

A Lord of the Rings smorgasbord. Some marketing mogul has got to be designing a kit around this already: an activity that all the family can take part in, and then eat.

This is striking in an entirely different way. A scary-at-times kinda way...

Word play

I got absolutely no writing done yesterday. Unless you count playing with the magnetic words that arrived in the post. Sara you absolutely rule!

I was intending to keep the nativity magnets up until the start of February (in the Middle Ages that's when Christmas officially ended). However, now that they have so many words to play with, they may summer on the appliance also. I imagine it's the next best thing to the Hamptons.

A step up

Aaah the good old CardioMax 708 Stepper Stair Climber. I suspect they don't sell too many of these in Madeira.

On walks I stop regularly to look at the purdy flowers. Not that I'm trying to cover up my wheezing; I just appreciate the treasury of local fauna and flora...

That Monday feeling

Feel fluey today.

Curling up in front of Murder, She Wrote helps a little.

Amazon.com Recommendations Understand Area Woman Better Than Husband

Dolly Mixture

Spent too much time this weekend reading about dolls. Just to be clear, I am not now nor have I ever been a doll person. As a child my favourite toy was a farm set, and even then at the start of playtime I killed off the little Mr & Mrs Farmer figures (by squidging ketchup on them) so that the animals could have the run of the place.

Like I said, not a doll person.

But there's a scene in the book I'm working on with lots of dolls, so I've been reading. And reading. One doll really caught my attention: made by the Ojibwa tribe in America. When a child died, they sometimes made a doll to represent the dead. It could have the actual hair of the child. The idea was that by caring for the figure, a mother could assist her child’s passage into the next world.

I found it amazing. Death is so closed-off nowadays - you can imagine how freaked out & clueless an office is when a grieving parent comes back to work. The Ojibwa custom suggests a more humane environment - to accept a parent bearing a symbol of their child and their grief.

So it turns out I'm not totally anti-doll. It's just that given the choice, I'd rather have a bunch of animals to play with.

PS - and it was a stunning day. Hence the photo of the last few minutes of sunshine.

PPS - and I made red soup. Pretty scrummy :)

Movie Madness

As a Dubliner, going to the cinema in Madeira takes getting used to. There's just no-one there. I know that Dublin has the highest cinema-going population in Yurp, but it really is remarkable how empty cinemas are here (I was going to say 'desolate' but that might suggest I didn't enjoy the emptiness).

Went to see Night at the Museum. The opening credits do for Copperplate Gothic what Seven's credits did for crazy scratchy writing - they're just scrummy; all neat and chiselled with little shadows that they cast on the actual film. Excellent job. But I digress - for there were only two other people in the theatre. Which is a busy afternoon, by Madeiran standards.

This evening I saw Perfume, which is well-adapted and filled with much gorgeous french bedlinen and many dilated pupils as the cast inhales deeply. There were about six other people at that screening.

The largest audience I've seen had about thirty members. That was for The Lake House, whose plot was not so much woven as crocheted. Maybe people here just have one dodgy experience and then never go back to the cinema...

Anyhoo, with popcorn for lunch and popcorn for dinner, I think the time has come to switch to vodka and tonics.

Health regime

I've finally got the New Year detox bug:

1) I made soup. A greeny-type soup that looks super healthy.
2) I've come to a decision about alcohol. No more coffee liqueur with my morning coffee. I'm holding firm to that.

Further to point 2): Except on weekends of course. It's allowed then.

Hey I don't make the rules; I just follow them like everybody else.

FBI call

The Madeiran equivalent of the FBI have just left - wheels still turning from the money laundering scam. They checked through the emails, and then went to

www.samspade.org

Who knew? So they traced the IP address to Nigeria and then they spoke together for a while. They said 'Interpol' a lot.

We had to wait for Landlady to get the original envelope (posted from Norway, containing a Spanish cheque), and passed the time talking about bits of arty stuff around the place. They liked my laptop wallpaper, which is the view from where I sit and write on a nice day.

It's been lashing rain for a couple of hours and water four-inches-deep is running down the street. I can see the tree outside the terrace, but all else is snowy white - no sea or sky visible. So today's picture is my wallpaper instead. Please note this bears no resemblance to the reality of the day.

Optical Illusions

Getting stuck back into writing now after quite a break. Off on something of a tangent this morning - I was reading up on medieval Islamic mathematicians, about a guy called Alhazen (well, he's actually called Abu 'Ali al-Hasan bin al-Hasan bin al-Haytham but that proved a smidge unwieldy for Westerners).

Anyhoo, he was born in the tenth century, and is thought of as the father of optics and a great mathematician, engineer and astronomer (the first mention of a camera obscura seems to come from him). My favourite part of his life was when Caliph al-Hakim hired him to figure out a method of regulating the waters of the Nile. Apparently Alhazen realised that:

a) it was impossible

b) if the Caliph was told, he might get angry. And you wouldn't like him when he's angry.

So instead he faked madness. For years. Until the Caliph was safely dead and buried. Then he resumed all his clever brainy work.

I think it would have made a good subplot to the original Star Trek. Instead of Scotty proclaiming 'Ye cannae change the laws of physics!', he'd just be found rocking in a corner of the engineering lab.

Indeed, it may be a useful approach for many a modern workplace...