More anger and thoughts on iBurst

If you like your kicks this way, then hold onto something.

Open letter to iBurst

Check it.

Wolfram Alpha and unladen swallows

Wolfram Alpha today struggled to compute an age-old puzzle regarding unladen African swallows and airspeed velocities. Clip. But was able to provide the details for an unladen European swallow. Clop. Are these birds strangers to our shores?

Today you’re Linton Kwesi Johnson, tomorrow you’re Clinton who?

No chance, but thus the said man said, explaining his constant touring as making hay while the sun shines.

It’s 7 years old, but here’s a great inter-overview with him by Maya Jaggi at The Gaurdian (May 2002). Check it.

A gracious friend offered me a ticket to his show on Friday, May Day; I had initially toyed with going, but it’s open air (I think), and it’s Cape Town in May. The weather might play a role. Besides, if it’s Denis Bovell’s band, you want that shit indoors, so that the bass reverberates off walls into your gut.

Anyhoo, I had to decline the ticket as I had then already made alternative plans.

I’ve been listening to LKJ quite a bit lately, especially ‘Reggae fi Radni’ (about Walter Rodney, for the uninitiated) and ‘Reggae fi Dada’ (about his dad’s passing). The latter remains one of my favourites. Some of the lines could so easily be about Cape Town:

Mi nevvah have no time when mi reach
fi see no sunny beach when mi reach.
Jus people a-live in shack
people livin’ back-to-back
‘mongst cackroach and rat
‘mongst dirt an disease
subject to terrorist attack
political intrigue
constant grief
and no sign of relief.

…

Wolfram/Alpha is coming…

Always Delicious: The Kitchen

The Kitchen

(Karen Dudley)

111 Sir Lowry Road, Woodstock

021-462 2201

JUST BACK from a quick lunch at The Kitchen, caterer Karen Dudley’s new kitchen-cum-lunch-bar. Well known for her catering business, Wonderful Food, she has finally opened a place of business from which she now conducts the catering, but also sells food to the hungry passerby.

Lunch items consist of sandwiches at ZAR25.00 (made to order), a take-away salad at ZAR25.00, and a lunch plate which costs between ZAR40.00 and ZAR45.00. Items change based on what is available and what’s cooking on that particular day. Today’s sandwiches were bacon & avocado, roast chicken, melanzane & feta, honey-mustard sausage, among others. A range of fixings, from pickle to harissa, is included.

Antonio Carlucci on language

The first thing I look at is the menu; if they can’t write a menu without a mistake then the food won’t be any good.

– Antonio Carlucci, The Guardian, 5 February 2009

Born to the blues

My basic instinct is toward melancholia — a state I must nourish. In fostering my essential nature, I’m trying to live according to what I see as my deep calling. Granted, it’s difficult at times to hold hard to this vocation, this labor in the fields of sadness. But I realize somewhere in the core of my bones that I was born to the blues.

Thus Eric G. Wilson in his book, Against Happiness: In Praise of Melancholy (2008, Farrar, Straus & Giroux). In an essay adapted from the book and published at The Chronicle of Higher Education, he considers the mass quest for happiness in America as, ironically, a death wish because he believes that the escape from melancholia is also an escape from a fuller life, “a wanton forgetting of an essential part of a full life”. “[T]his rabid focus on exuberance,” he says, “leads to half-lives, to bland existences, to wastelands of mechanistic behavior” (“In Praise of Melancholy”).

Furthermore:

Right now, if the statistics are correct, about 15 percent of Americans are not happy. Soon, perhaps, with the help of psychopharmaceuticals, melancholics will become unknown. That would be an unparalleled tragedy, equivalent in scope to the annihilation of the sperm whale or the golden eagle. With no more melancholics, we would live in a world in which everyone simply accepted the status quo, in which everyone would simply be content with the given. This would constitute a nightmare worthy of Philip K. Dick, a police state of Pollyannas, a flatland that offers nothing new under the sun. Why are we pushing toward such a hellish condition?

The answer is simple: fear. Most hide behind a smile because they are afraid of facing the world’s complexity, its vagueness, its terrible beauties. If we stay safely ensconced behind our painted grins, then we won’t have to encounter the insecurities attendant upon dwelling in possibility, those anxious moments when one doesn’t know this from that, when one could suddenly become almost anything at all. Even though this anxiety, usually over death, is in the end exhilarating, a call to be creative, it is in the beginning rather horrifying, a feeling of hovering in an unpredictable abyss. Most of us habitually flee from that state of mind, try to lose ourselves in distraction and good cheer. We don inauthenticity as a mask, a disguise to protect us from the abyss.

Read “In Praise of Melancholy”, which also considers the place of melancholia in the life and work of John Keats.

Eric G. Wilson’s homepage.

Coming across like a Michael Moore rant, here’s Garrison Keillor’s folkish review of Wilson’s book at The New York Times.

Groundwork Wordled

from Wordle

Update: Archive extended

I have been cleaning up some folders and came across some youthful miscellaneous pieces I thought I’d add to my archive.

There’s a trio of articles on, respectively, coffee, fish and chips, and samoosas that I wrote for Student Life in 1997 (now called SL). And there’s one on smoking, published at the now defunct World Online (Tiscali, South Africa). The Student Life articles never appeared online, while the World Online piece has disappeared, obviously due to databases suffering the vagaries of time and corporate acquisition (see http://worldonline.co.za).