Destroy All Onions!

India is a place that I haven’t seen enough of, and don’t know enough about. But at least I’m lucky enough to have been there twice. And let’s face it, you could spend a lifetime exploring India and not see it all – it’s a big place!

“The Elephant, the Tiger and the Cellphone” has been sitting on my bookshelf for far too long (since my last trip to India in fact), but I finally got into reading it this year, and I am really glad that I did. Shashi Tharoor is a former UN diplomat, so he knows India, having grown up and spent much of his life there, but he also has enough of an outsider’s view that he doesn’t assume too much knowledge of the country for the international reader like me.

The book is a series of fairly short and easy to read essays on all of the major subjects of Indian life – politics, religion, history, economics, and of source cricket. What is clear is that the writer has his own opinions on Indian life, and although he loves his country and is very proud of it, he is honest about the good and bad of India in the 21st century. Although this is a forward-looking book, some of my favourite parts were about Indian history – the campaign for independance and the people who led it, the pain of partition, and the politics since then. I’ve always known a little about Gandhi, but not so much about Nehru and others, and I think my next non-fiction reading might be to find out more about them.

If the book has a central message, I think it’s the great diversity of India. When I was there, I was astonished by the profusion of languages as I travelled around, and wondered how a country could stay bound together without a single common language. But perhaps that question says more about me than India;  we struggle with division in Northern Ireland, even though it’s not that big and there aren’t that many of us. And Scotland isn’t much better these days…

His answer to that question is that India is at its best when it embraces the diversity that spans languages, religions, castes, ethnic types – pretty much everything. India is proud of its democracy, the massive exercise that ensures that votes are gathered from every corner of the country, and rightly so. And it’s proud of its secular society, where prime ministers, politicians, cricketers, and celebrities come from all of the different faiths.

India will be the most populous nation on earth before too long, and with its combination of science and technological leadership, and a massive diaspora of Indians all over the world, it’s a culture that we need to take notice of.

I really enjoyed this book, and it makes me want to find out more about a country that I have even greater respect for now.

Tonight I got to see and hear Van Morrison live at the Odyssey.  What a great night 🙂

He hasn’t changed since the last time I saw him – he still has no interest in talking (the only words he said all night were to thank the audience, and to get the audience to applaud the band). But he lets his music do the talking for him. As I remember from before, he leads his band all the way – waving at them, pointing, talking to them, directing the music. And he loses himself in it too, the head nodding, and applauding some of the solos.

But what made this concert special was that he doesn’t have a new album to sell this time round. So instead of new songs the audience doesn’t know, this was mainly old songs that we did know. But not as we know them. His band included a trombone and saxaphone, plus a part time trumpet and keyboard player (an odd combo I thought). So it went from having the feel of a jazz quartet when he joined in on his sax, to a solid horn section backing up the rest of the band (acoustic guitar, electric guitar, bass, drums and more percussion) with brass stabs. As always, the arrangements were really good, with some really subtle details on muted trumpet and tinkly piano. He started with a great, really fresh version of brown eyed girl with very jazzy horns. My immediate thought was “Wow – he’s still got it. Michael Buble or Jamie Cullum could be singing that arrangement”. And I was really pleased about that, because Van is getting on a bit, but he can still do it. Other classics were Gloria, Tupelo Honey, Moondance, Sometimes we cray, and Have I told you lately. And others I can’t think of right now. All of them reworked and sounding fresh, and unpredictably performed by Van himself, when he gets stuck on a line or a word and uses his voice as an instrument, repeating whatever it is again and again. He’s also very unsentimental with his own songs – a lot of them end very suddenly, with no gradual run down at all.

I’ve got no pictures, because they would have been awful from my phone, because the staff were telling peopple off for taking them, and because I know Van hates that sort of thing. I fully expect to have sore neck in the morning from sitting at an angle for two and a half hours. But I don’t care. I still thank Van Morrison is great.

(And his daughter was pretty good too as a support act – she can sing!)

PS: Double Usefulness also enjoyed the gig, and you can read his review here. It’s probably better than mine ; )

Hello internet! Only me. My Christmas and New Year break is nearing its end, and I could have blogged about a number of things, but never really got round to it. Anyway, here’s the short summary of the last couple of weeks.

• I’ve never watched less of the Christmas TV! Spent quite a bit of time with my wee nephew Mason, who was more entertaining than most things on tv, despite the fact that he’s only a few months old. Or perhaps because. Many photographs taken (some will make it to facebook).
• And much of the tv I did catch was on iplayer on my android tablet (Which worked very nicely).
• Was able to go out walking in the Mournes with the church walking group at the end of the year. About 8 miles, ending at Maud’s on the sea-front, which was an excellent ending. It was a wet day, but never miserable.
• Got out cycling on New Years Day and again the day after. Only 10 miles each, but better than not getting out at all. On the Sunday I got wet, on the Monday I got cold, but at least not both together.
• Went to a spin class for the first time, with my sister to her gym. Think of it as a cross between line dancing and cycling, with the same struggle to stay in rhythm with the music, to hear the instructions, and the hope that the music will somehow improve, but on a half-bike instead of dancing. It wasn’t actually that bad, and I went back again, so I did that twice!
• Bought and installed Skyrim for my PC. At level 6 right now, with my first dragon killed. Looking like a pretty good game so far.
• I unexpectedly ordered my next car today, for July when the lease runs out on my current one. That’s a very long way away, so I’m surprised to have got it all sorted out so quickly!
• Read an excellent book (on my kindle) – The Prefect by Alastair Reynolds. A bit of a prequel to the Revelation Space series, but a good standalone story in its own right.
• Since there was no snow, I did manage to catch up with a few folks, which is always good. Though as usual, not quite all of the people I had hoped to see. But some is better than none!

And those are roughly the highlights of the past couple of weeks.

Wired had a couple of articles in the past few days on the books that geeks should have read, here and here. Lists of books are obviously very subjective, but I did like these lists:

The first one is:

• Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Dungeon Master’s Guide, Gary Gygax (1979)
  Okay, I don’t think I ever had a copy of the original 1st edition DMG, but I have certainly read through it, and its many successors through to the current 4th edition. I love how Wired describe it as a book for building worlds. But be warned that much of the charm of the first edition was the crazy tables for all sorts of things, which are handled in the modern editions in a much less entertaining way.
• The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams (1979)
  An absolute classic, as a book, a radio series, or on tv. Really can’t be recommended highly enough – he really was a comic genius. Up until last week, I had the tv series on my iphone, for emergency watching in boring situations, since it couldn’t fail to cheer me up.
• Watchmen, Alan Moore (1986 to 1987)
  Yes, it’s unpleasant in places, and the whole Curse of the Black Ship thing is a bit random, but as a study in humanity it’s a rich and interesting book, which happens to be told in pictures as well as words. Though I do feel that the conclusion of the film actually improved on the original.
• Gödel, Escher, Bach, Douglas Hofstadter (1979)
  The first one on the list that I haven’t read. Though I did search for it on ebay last month, so there is some kind of intention to read it sometime. All I know is that it was a course text at Queens for the History and Philosophy of Science, wchi has always both attracted and repelled me…
• Ender’s Game, Orson Scott Card (1985)
  I read this a lot of years ago, and I remember it as a gripping and surprising book. I also remember that the sequels were very different, and a bit disappointing.
• Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson (1992)
  Another one that I haven’t read – possibly next on my reading list.
• The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien (1954 to 1955)
  The one, the only, the classic. I remember reading it as a young teenager, and getting a bit bogged down in the middle book, but it is a great set of books, with an important message – little people are important!
• The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, Edward Tufte (1992)
  I’ve never even heard of this. Wired make it sound interesting, but I worry that it would only lead to fancy powerpoint slides. The one I am least likely to read.
• Neuromancer, William Gibson (1984)
  Again, one I haven’t read. I’ve heard of it, and I suppose I the right time to have read it was 20 years ago when it wasn’t at all dated. I rather suspect it will have aged a bit, in a way that he Lord of Rings hasn’t 😉

And that’s all for the first list. Will get the second tomorrow perhaps.

Today, Indians celebrate Diwali, the festival of lights. I remember this day a couple of years ago when I was working in the US. We were out driving, and it had got dark. We were on a big American road, with long columns of tail-lights in front of us, a stream of headlights beside us, and forests of neon on either side of the road. It wasn’t a celebration, but there were a lot of lights, and when you thought of it in that way, it was beautiful.

This year I enjoyed Diwali again, as we had a very quiet day in work. When India is off, there’s a lot fewer people working in the world 😉

Happy Diwali!

On holiday, I brought a couple of actual physical books, printed on paper with me. One of them was How to live safely in a science fictional universe, which has a great concept, and a lot of wit and charm in the early parts. As it goes on, it becomes melancholy, but remains engaging, and ends in hope.

Alan (who I borrowed the book from) has already reviewed it here, so I won’t go through the whole thing, but I did want to talk about a few paragraphs from the end of chapter 8 that I found really intriguing. I’ve been putting this off for weeks, as it involves so much typing, but here goes:

“A typical customer gets into a machine that can literally take her whenever she’d like to go. Do you want to know what the first stop usually is? Take a guess. Don’t guess. You already know: the unhappiest day of her life.

Other people are just looking for the weird. They want to turn their lives into something unrecognizable. I see a lot of men end up as their own uncles. Super-easy to avoid, totally dumb move. See it all the time. No need to go into details, but it obviously involves a time machine and you know what with you know who. General rule is you want to avoid having sex with anyone unless you are sure they aren’t family. One guy I know ended up as his own sister.

But mostly, people aren’t like that. They don’t want trouble, they just don’t know what else to do. I see a lot of regular offenders. People who can’t stop trying to hurt themselves. People who can’t stop doing stupid things because of their stupid hearts.

My vocational training was in the basics of closed time-like curves, but what they should have taught me was how that relates to people’s regrets and mistakes, the loves of their lives that they let get away.

I’ve prevented suicides. I’ve watched people fall apart, marriages break up in slow motion, over and over and over again.

I’ve seen pretty much everything that can go wrong, the various and mysterious problems in contemporary time travel. You work in this business long enough and you know what you really do for a living. This is self-consciousness. I work in the self-consciousness industry.”

I hope I’ve done that justice by keeping it fairly typo-free. I think it’s a great bit of writing. The time travel in the book has its limits (as time travel nearly always does) – you can’t make changes, so there’s no point going back to try and kill Hitler (though it makes a pretty good Doctor Who episode, obviously), and I don’t think you can go forward either.

But even with those limits, I don’t want to believe that the author is correct. With all of the past to experience, all of the great events of history, the highs and lows of the human race, I can’t believe I would want to go back to the lowlights of my own life. And yet, given enough time, perhaps the lure of our own life would be inescapable. Not the first destination, but maybe an inevitable one, sooner or later. I don’t know. But I think it’s a great bit of writing.

The last time I was in Tenerife, I had a bit  of a disagreement with a local montain. The mountain was called Guaza, and it lived at the edge of Los Christianos. It’s still there, and when we saw each other this time around, I felt it was time for a rematch.

Last time, I had quite innocently tried to climb it, and it hid the path and got me lost on its rocky sides. It then filled my arm with cactus jags, and I had to go to the first aid hut on the beach to try and get them extracted by a professional with tweezers. I had a sore arm for a few days (fortunately they didn’t contain anything poisonous), but needless to say my pride was also badly wounded.

So it was kind of inevitable that I would have another go this time. And today I had a very nice walk over the hill and round the coast to Las Galletas. I googled it up and found that there is a route, and that it is about 9 miles long and should take 4 hours. I also discovered that people who organise walks don’t do it in the summer when it is too hot. But summoning up the courage of my church’s kamikaze walking group, who never turn down any challenge, I bought a couple of litres of lemon tea, put on my emergency hat (as my face is a little sunburned already from yesterday) and headed off. And I had a lovely walk. I listened to a month’s worth of Friday night comedy from Radio 4, saw the lighthouse, and got the bus back from Las Galletas. According to my ever faithful Runkeeper, I walked 8.6 miles in 3:40 or thereabouts
I am all pleased 🙂

Hello again internet. I’m on holiday again. The last time I was on holiday this blog turned into a kind of weird survival story, but not this time. Well, not so far anyway. Though I did have a bit of a turn in the local church on Sunday when a siren kept going  and I wondered if it might be a tsunami warning. Fortunately it was just a police car, but I am sometimes surprised by unexpected thoughts of natural disasters. Perhaps I shouldn’t be. Perhaps it’s perfectly normal.

Anyway, I’m here in Tenerife on holiday, and all is well. The hotel is clean, comfortable and well-equipped. The food is good, the wi-fi is very slow, but it is there. I’ve used the gym a few times, and it’s been grand.

My kindle has been splendid, and I read my first Agatha Christie book the other day, which was very good. I plan on a PG Wodehouse soon. My iPhone has done the job too, tracking my cycling, and providing music in the bathroom. I found an excellent use for the bidet, which acts as an excellent resonator for listening to Pink Floyd in the shower. And I’ve enjoyed watching ripped DVDs on my android on the balcony. Yes, I have too many toys.

So, one week down, and another week to go. I’m having fun. Hope you’re having fun wherever you are too.

Went cycling again today, my third day with my hired mountain bike. There are 2 problems with cycling in Tenerife; well the south of the island anyway. The first is that the island is just one big volcano, with a peak in the middle (and crater) which slopes down to the sea. And no, it hasn’t erupted in a long time. It’s safe, thanks for asking. The second problem is that the one big volcano is surrounded by lots of smaller cones. So it’s just mountains and hills everywhere. If you start at a beach resort, i.e. at sea level, then pretty much every direction except along the coast involves going up.
Today I cycled to Arona, which is only something like 7 miles away, but it was literally 7 miles uphill all the way there, and then 7 miles downhill all the way back. The freewheeling down was fantastic, but the uphill was a slow hot grind. But I didn’t melt, and neither did the bike, but I’ll not be doing it again tomorrow.
Oh and by the way, the bike is a Specialised. It’s got great big balloon tyres like a moon buggy, and quite dodgy gears, but it’s not bad.

Two things wound me up today.

The first was the stupidity of politicians and others who were complaining about the police response to the rioting in London and elsewhere.  Many of them seemed to be wilfully ignorant of the fact that policemen are human beings, and not expendable. Of course they didn’t wade into massive crowds to arrest people – they would have been killed. Literally killed. It’s not acceptable for politicians sitting in the comfort of the house of commons to berate the police with such a naive attitude to the safety of the police. They did not sign up for this! It is unprecedented, and it’s not their fault.

The second, completely unrelated story, came from Wired this morning. I am appalled at the principle of this, of urging shopkeepers to wilfully destroy their competitor’s comics. I know it’s a small thing in a troubled world, but it just irks me that perfectly good comics should be destroyed like that. I’m not even a reader of comics! But it’s so wasteful – a classic example of how it’s acceptable that greed should overcome all common sense. Marvel really should be ashamed.