Hergest Ridge

Many folks are quick to admire with vigour and detail at par with the particularity of a nuclear reactor blueprint. Personally, I find such admiration a tad bit, shall we say, radioactive? Yes, I think radioactive is a good description for it all makes me a bit morbific.

Having moved away from eastern Europe and the relative vicinity of Chernobyl, I am avoiding the nuclear kind of radioactivity fairly well, thank you. It’s this other kind of radioactivity that is consistently and constantly challenging my well being.

Most of my symptoms have root in the absolutism and assumptions which often accompany deep admiration. In the presence of admiration, absolutism and assumptions are often present and inseparable. They become quite evident when the claim “she always takes care of the needy” is made – the assumption being that even when the person is seen by none, their behaviour remains unaltered and noble, while the “always” absolute clenches the prize for “let’s run our nails down the blackboard.”

What I am trying to say is that maybe if we cease putting others on high pedestals, we’d better understand the importance of ordinary folks doing good things. If we stopped believing in supermen (and women!), we’d sooner roll up our sleeves and do the hard work ourselves without waiting for heroes to come around.

And with a little less admiration, we can have better relationships with more realistic expectations. Fewer people believing the best on imaginary or inflated grounds means less damage when someone does a dance with something pointy and dangerous. Surely something this chancy will cause less damage when we’re all standing on solid ground.

“We shall abolish the orgasm.” That’s one of the goals of the Party in Orwell’s Ninteen Eighty-Four. “There will be no loyalty, except loyalty towards the Party. There will be no love, except the love of Big Brother.”

Of course, many have succeeded at abolishing the orgasm through various forms of genital mutilation. Hundreds of millions more – perhaps billions – suffer from tremendous guilt at thinking about, discussing or pursuing an orgasm. Many more are able to enjoy the sexual experience only under rare and unlikely to occur circumstances – all of this thanks to religion. God is the in details, you know, and when it comes to sex, and orgasms, and pleasure, there are a lot of details.

As long as humanity prefers a bad explanation over no answer at all, I have to side with the “religion will always be there” camp with which Orwell associated himself with.

There are many good reasons for discussing Orwell and his works anytime, but today there is additional one: Orwell’s initial entry in his diary celebrates its 70th anniversary this August 9th. It, along with the entries that followed, are being made available online starting today, each to be published at orwelldiaries.wordpress.com exactly 70 years after its conception.

The Chansons Françaises official videos tend to be very creative in comparison to any other language I’ve seen. Here is another quick sample of what I’ve found thus far.

I’m tone deaf and the first to admit it. There are hints that with some practice, I could reach a point where I might be able to hold a tune and an audience, too. (By audience, I mean the casual friend within earshot.)

Over the weekend I persistently put in a request with my Rock Band for Maps by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs – to no avail. While I was sure I could rock out the guitar chords, no one was confident to do the same on the mic. Finally I got my request in, right around the time the mic was passed to me, and the guitar taken away. Actually, it happened all at once and probably only to shut me up.

I did not get booed off the stage, but came close despite the Easy difficulty setting. My only saving grace appears to have come from increasing the decibels that rolled out of my belly like a Harley on a train track. (This in response to a spell like chant “Louder, louder” audible from the guitarists and drummer.)

While I was sure that mumbling would reduce the noise pollution area – one akin to an oil slick in the aquamarine Caribbean paradise – the game did not appreciate my method. Not until I got louder did the pulsing red suck-o-meter turn a friendlier shade of yellow.

I doubt that my singing was any better loud than it was quiet, and am instead convinced that the game is designed to give extra credit for confidence as calculated by the decibel levels of the vocals. If that’s true, this just might be the most realistic game factor of Rock Band. Not that something has to be realistic for it to be enjoyable…

As a member of the masculine gender, I have an above average affection for cutesy things. It may be a result of having grown up in a home with three generations of women, the only other male being an occasional visitor, a tiger striped cat named Jello (which I suspect counts diddly squat in terms of evening out the gender ratio.)

Combining the afore confessed with my strong preference for tea during the fall through spring months, I can almost be forgiven for dedicating an entire post to Gisele Jaquenod’s Birdie Says website. If you think me less for doing so, then I suspect I do not wish to be friends with you. But just in case you’re a fine individual after all, spare me some reprieve on the grounds that Birdie Says is an excellent website in terms of content and design – a rare combination indeed, and of much interest to a webdesigner such as myself.

On Miss Jaquenod’s website, the hostess makes available for download several WordPress themes, as well as a few other things I recommend you see and read for yourself. And while it’s too warm for a hot cup of tea, iced tea will do very nicely right about now.