George Carlin no longer saying seven words you can’t say on television

I’m sure he wouldn’t take offense to that.

To the man whose album Occupation: Foole I can rattle off by heart simply because at the age of 12 I listened to it so much and who died Sunday in Los Angeles of heart failure: we’ll miss you.

On a long ride in my brother Gordon’s pick-up truck between Calgary and North Battleford, Saskatchewan in the summer of 2005 the hours became shorter and the laughs louder with every single track on the George Carlin MP3s he’d downloaded and burned onto CD.

Who says downloading is draining off artists’ sales? I was so happy to hear George Carlin again, I went out and bought two of his books when I got back to Vancouver: Brain Droppings and Napalm and Silly Putty. Still laugh when I take them off the shelf for another look.

Not his most famous routine, but a good one:

Things I’ve still not written

Another post about blogging. Sorry, Bruce.

I look at all I’ve written over the past year and a half and can’t complain about not being able to post regularly. Still there’s so much more I’ve wanted to post, but haven’t been able to get around to it.

I wanted to post:

• At least one write-up of our trip to Mallorca last October, though I could write six. Yes, Mallorca, that German-package-tourist-hell-on-rollerblades. Know what? It was wonderful. Really, it was a great trip. Maybe photos and a few captions will have to do.
• A supplementary page to A Month in South Africa and Lesotho, because we’ve actually done two months there, but three years apart. The page with photos and write-up is of our more recent trip. The first trip was very different, but still worth writing about.
• An obituary, a eulogy, a letter I wish I’d written while he was alive to a special person and old friend from Quebec who died back in November, 2007. I got the news three weeks too late to even send something to be read out at his funeral.
• Another one involving death, this time someone who interviewed and rejected me for a job as reporter at the South China Morning Post in 1994 when I first arrived in Hong Kong. I found out only a few months ago he’d died in 2000, an apparent suicide in London.
• More on Paris. It was a very multi-layered, multi-textured encounter; a reunion, a look back, a look ahead, a language lesson, a mini second honeymoon.
• A tragically hilarious account of a trip to Bucharest for work in early April, just before booking off sick for more than a week.
• A follow-up to a post in January where I promised to later post some translated excerpts of a book I read in French and whose English translation won’t be out until September. A lot of readers said they were looking forward to it. I’ve read the book, but still have to deliver on the follow-up.

Those are just the ones I can name.

I have another two dozen drafts sitting in the queue, waiting for some more bone, blood and flesh. They’re like scraps of paper, really. Sometimes I wish they weren’t stacked up in such a straight, orderly line, because it takes away from the experimental feel to it.

Are two dozen drafts a lot or a few?  Blogging guru Lorelle says you should write your drafts and then publish right away so that your ideas don’t go stale. I think she has a point. The problem with letting things sit around in draft mode is there is no longer any urgency. I can write them anytime, so that’s when they get written: Whenever.

Or maybe I’m just lazy and have been taking the easy way out. Looking over that list, I know that each one of them would be a time-consuming challenge. The eulogy has to have just the right tone. The South Africa and Mallorca travel write-ups involve all that photo sorting and uploading. The Hong Kong/London suicide story might take a couple of telephone calls to sort out an unanswered question or two.

And besides, it’s summer.  Who wants to blog?

A few signs bloggers are taking themselves much too seriously

• Targetting fitness tips to bloggers as if the breed were something special and the advice didn’t apply to the rest of the real world. All together now! Climb those stairs, say hello to Mom, put on shades and suncream, go outside, breathe deeply…
• Nutrition advice for bloggers as per above.
• Worrying about what happens to your blog after you die. Guess what? You won’t care.
• Wait a minute. Maybe you will. I first heard of this via Raincoaster, who pointed out that no matter how successful a blogger you are, there will always be someone out there with more readers and a more loyal following. Even if the blogger died more than six months ago. Not to make light of suicide - far from it - but where do the desperation that drives you that far end, and the obsession to blog forever, overlap? Think about it. If you want to, you can write hundreds of entries, time-posting them so that they publish on the dates and times you choose in the future. After you die, but before pre-paying your hosting fees, if you have them. I don’t know… I think it would make responding to comments a bit of a problem.
• Reading too much into one executive’s move a while back from dusty, crusty old CBS News to shiny, new, hip and happening news blog The Huffington Post. I’d be willing to bet they simply offered her a shitload more money.
• Writing a diary about your blogging habits. Don’t millions already consider their blog to be a diary? I guess it would look something like this: Dear offline diary. Woke up, scratched privates, logged on, blogged. Went offline, wrote this. Went back online, wrote some more. Went offline, wrote a bit more about what I wrote online. Went online… The really obsessives could start a new blog which tracks the offline diary which tracks their main blog.
• Getting bummed out about your blog and generally not having fun. The writer says he has people come to him “…feeling despondent (about) their underperforming blogs.” Lighten up, already! Everyone goes through a slump now and then. When in doubt, go out.
• Like me. I was going to list ten, but have to stop here.
• © 2008 lettershometoyou

:: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: ::

Black and white and shades of decay

A while back I took the little red-haired girl into downtown Hamburg, stopping on the way to finally explore this huge, hulking mass of concrete about a mile west of the city centre. We must have ridden by it a hundred times already in the ten years we’ve lived here, but never went for a look inside.

It was built during the war and used to be a bunker. It’s one of many scattered throughout the city, most of which are now painted over and dressed up to blend so easily into the surrounding streets, you can go by them every day without noticing what it was originally built for. But this one is not only so much bigger than the others, it sits alone at the edge of a huge empty lot. You can’t miss it.

It was designed both for air raid flak defenses and as a bomb shelter for residents, completely self-contained with its own water, power generation and sewage removal systems.

Local legend has it that the British occupation forces wanted to level it after the war, but gave up after a few attempts to crack the two-metre-thick walls. Others say the concrete didn’t actually set to its hardest state until the 1970s - four decades after its construction - a claim I can neither verify nor refute, and neither can they, I bet.

Today it’s stuffed full of music stores stuffed with all kinds of musical instruments, but I liked just walking around inside, poking into corners and opening doors we probably shouldn’t have, wondering what it must have been like to scurry like rats into bunkers like these from a hail of bombs that over two nights in the middle of summer 1943 killed 50-thousand people in this city alone.

I wanted to climb up to the top of the staircase to see if we could go out onto the roof, but my daughter was having none of it. I could tell what was bugging her. It was kind of creepy walking through creaky old metal doorways, down dimly lit corridors and up spiral staircases of cold, bare concrete, and I wasn’t helping matters much with my off-track mutterings of the folly of man, the use of fear and demonisation of the enemy in preparation for war, how some people rightly or wrongly compare what’s happening in the United States of America today with what happened in Germany before things got really crazy, how some people today speak of Muslims - yes, the boys and girls sitting beside her in school - the way Hitler used to talk about the Jews, the concept of forced labour and its use in building the structure we were standing in, another enduring reminder of the extreme lengths human beings are willing to go in the pursuit of killing each other.

All she wanted to do that day was to hang out in the sunshine near the lake, and here I was dragging her through a bunker giving a rambling political science and history lesson. I can’t wait to take her down south near Munich to Dachau, and try to explain the unexplainable.

© 2008 lettershometoyou

PS: For a fabulous collection of b&w photographs of old industrial sites and urban decay, visit telefunker, a photoblogger from Belgium.

The French Anne Frank? A new holocaust diary is published

Amazing story and a book recommendation in one, so I thought I’d pass it along.

It’s about the diary of a young Jewish girl living in a major European city during the Nazi occupation of her country. Described as beautifully written and quite personal, it details her life and that of her family members leading up to their deportation to the death camps.

Stop me if you’ve heard this before. Anne Frank, right?

No, it’s Hélène Berr, the diary of whom has become an instant best-seller after its recent publication in France nearly 65 years after her death in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.

Comparisons to Anne Frank are inevitable. But while Frank detailed a life spent in hiding from the Nazis in her Amsterdam home, Berr tells a story of everyday life under the German occupation in Paris.

Before being sent away to die along with most of the rest of her family, she gave it to the family cook, who passed it along to Berr’s fiancé, who eventually gave it to Berr’s niece. After an editor noticed a group of girls gathered around a display case trying to read the diary at a Paris holocaust exhibition, the niece was approached with the idea of publishing, but it took another five years to come out in book form.

The book sold more than 26,000 copies in its first three days of sale in France. Rights had already been sold in 15 countries before the French publication, but an English translation is slated to come out only in September. I can’t wait that long, so I’m going to pick it up at Amazon.fr and hope to translate an extract or two over the coming weeks.

© 2008 lettershometoyou

Polar bear cub Knut’s cousin killed in New Year Riot

Definitely Not The Daily News freelance reporter Daisy Confuse spent most of New Year’s Eve in a Hamburg bunker in an effort to keep from getting shot, emerging shortly before midnight into what appeared to be a war zone. We salute her work in filing this story despite the most difficult of circumstances.

by Daisy Confuse

Hamburg (DNTN) A cousin of Berlin Zoo polar bear sensation Knut has been found dead this morning, an apparent victim of German New Year’s Eve mayhem.

“He must have been shot through the chest with a stray rocket,” said Hamburg police spokesman Helmut Askew. “There was no point in even trying to revive the poor bastard. He was done for.”

The loveable Knut’s brown yet still cuddly cuz fell victim to a New Year tradition in Germany, which consists of setting alight an entire year’s pent-up environmental hypocrisy in an orgy of fire, smoke, noxious fumes, noise and filth. Efforts to convince Germans that polluting their neighbourhoods with toxic waste which eventually seeps into groundwater and fouls lakes, streams and rivers have fallen on deaf ears.

“Just fuck off, OK?” said one reveller three minutes before midnight. “I spent €300 on this overpriced crap, and I’ll be damned if anyone tells me I can’t have a little fun and help make this place look like the aftermath of…uhh…. World War Two.”

Germans spend hundreds of millions of euros every New Year on fireworks, firecrackers, screamers, sparklers, twirlers and various other items that go whizz-bang and make the kiddies go ooh-ahh. News reports of idiots shooting off their fingers or losing an eyeball are as traditional as waking up with a hangover. In addition to the human cost, taxpayers foot the bill for city workers to come out on overtime to sweep up the debris, but they never get it all. After the ice melts, for example, the garbage stays in lakes forever.

In a telephone interview from his pen at the Berlin Zoo, Knut said he was saddened by the death of his cousin, but added he took solace in knowing his fake furball friend died for a good cause.

“If this brought fun to someone, and some profit to someone else, what’s the problem?” he said.

Asked if he was going to be able to attend the funeral, Knut said he had other plans.

“Contact my agent,” he said, harfing down a dead fish. “I’m going to be in a movie soon, so I’m brushing up on my lines. I really don’t have the time for stuff like that.”

The editors and writers of Definitely Not The Daily News would like to wish you a Happy New Year anyway.

© 2008 lettershometoyou

:: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: ::

Norman Mailer: the song comes to an end.

If you’re looking for the definitive obituary on Norman Mailer, the great American voice which fell silent today, I’m sure there will be no shortage over the days ahead.

What I can tell you is this. If you’re looking for a book that will grip you with its story-telling, overwhelm you with its depth of research, and dazzle you with its clarity of style, read The Executioner’s Song.

I was a teenager in the mid-seventies when the trial of Gary Gilmore played itself out in the newspapers. With the years to come spread out endlessly before me and the thought of my own death impossible, I couldn’t comprehend how anyone - even a murderer - could come to the conclusion that his life wasn’t worth living. Gilmore asked the State to execute him, and the State carried out his wishes.

But when the book came out in 1979, I was doing other things and never read it. It won Mailer one of his two Pulitzer prizes. I still didn’t read it. The story was old, I’d heard what it was all about second-hand, my curiosity into the turmoil of the condemned man’s psyche had waned.

But upon seeing the movie In Cold Blood - based on another book I’d never read - I was ordering the book on Amazon and up popped the suggestion to buy The Executioner’s Song. I don’t usually fall for advertising pitches and abhor pop-ups like everyone else, but I thought: now or never.

Forget that it’s nearly 30 years old. Forget that it runs to more than a thousand pages. From the moment I picked it up the day it arrived, I was hooked.

It’s so good, I’m going to read it again.

© 2007 lettershometoyou

A spammer dying for my business

As of five minutes ago, the WordPress resident spam-zapper Askimet has managed to filter 3,122 spam comments from my in-box. It does a pretty good job, but then again it can’t be that difficult to recognise strings of words lacking in vowels followed by a hundred links to the usual crap nobody in his right mind would ever think of buying.

But in their relentless pursuit to stay one step ahead of the delete button, spammers are getting wiser, if not better at spelling and grammar. They’re obviously mining blogs for categories and tags, targetting their message to suit the content. Consider this comment from Sky66, which I copy here as it came in. It’s on a post entitled Talking about death (and life) with a nine-year-old. I’d almost forgotten I’d written it, it’s been so long. For those of you pressed for time, it’s about a conversation I had with my daughter about death, what happens to your body after you die, as well as sex and adoption:

Recently a friend of mine passed away, and we offered her son a cremation urn. It was a perfect white marble vase style urn, and exactly what this woman reflected to us. Many people touched the urn and had a special connection to her through it. She was a good woman, good friend, and a knowledgeable and active member of our mountain side community. I will miss our walks in the morning with my dogs.
We were glad to memorialize our friend through the urn we choose. Cremation urns provide the special opportunity to give a loved one a special resting place just as unique as they were in life.India’s hindus cremate as well, but scatter in the their loved ones cremains in their sacred rivers. For urns for your loved one, to go: Cremation Urns

Thanks for the offer Sky66, but even though my will states that I’m to be cremated, I’d rather have my body dragged through the streets of Bangalore, set upon by wild dogs and torn to shreds in a frenzied display of public desecration than allow so much as a speck of my decomposing dandruff to touch one of your cheap-ass jugs. Perhaps you should do what most people tell spammers to do: DIE. Then get yourself cremated and poured into a jar. For added effect at the funeral, you can have a DVD highlight film of the slimy slug-trail you called a life beamed across a wide-screen TV at the front of the church. The eyes of the no-doubt thousands of hair-pulling, breast-beating celebrants mourners will follow the words on the screen much like your website’s creepy bot which, after delivering her robotic blah-blah, follows the mouse with her eyes. Have a nice day.

© 2007 lettershometoyou