Brazil Olympics

Now that South America has its first ever Olympics Games coming up with Brazil winning the bid for the Games that follow the London Olympics (sorry, Chicago, looks like the awful US immigrations and security folks at airports helped in putting the Committee off a return to America for now) there will have to be more additional events included in Olympics. Since the Games will take place in Brazil there will now be the 100 metres Waxing competition, the Men's and Women's categories in most sports will now be joined by a Transgender category, there will be a Hunt the Escaped British Criminal sport added and Kidnapping and the 500 meter Orphan Pickpocketing Challenge will now be Olympic sports.

The song remains the same

I'd heard from some folks that the new centralised distribution system at my former work had been, frankly, a bit of a dog's breakfast, with a tendency to be unreliable on both general stock and special customer orders (none of which surprised me, I recall a centralised system when the company was part of WH Smith's years back and it too was a bloody mess of a thing), which has, understandably, exasperated staff (and worried publishers), who spoke about it in the Bookseller journal, which is the main trade periodical of the British book trade. So Waterstone's apparently moved to ensure staff couldn't access the Bookseller online, which has had the unfortunate outcome of meaning the story now becomes about a large bookseller gagging staff again when they have anything critical to say.

Sounds a little familiar, doesn't it? In fact the Guardian article name-checks me and my disturbing experience almost five years ago in the coverage of this new story. Again the same large bookseller appears to be condoning censorship, which, regardless of what you think of the rights or wrongs of the original story in the Bookseller, shows some very poor judgement on behalf of senior management, who should have anticipated that the act of gagging staff and blocking access to the main book trade journal in response to negative criticism would then create a second story which reflects badly on them. Some folks never learn...

blowing your own trumpet

In early to work, out late so a little narked; beautiful, golden autumn evening outside so decide to enjoy slow walk home, wander up the Royal Mile, camera in hand, coming across this bloke playing some jazz on his trumpet. Nice autumn evening, cool breeze, cool jazz, nice. Put some coins in his instrument case, took a couple of pics then just settled nearby to listen for a few minutes and enjoy it.

Pythons

I was thinking this morning how as a nation we generally only pause and come together to mark sad occasions like Armistice Day. So to mark the 40th anniversary of the first Monty Python screening I thought what about a moment of National Silliness instead? I encouraged some folks to mass-tweet "he's not the messiah, he's a very naughty boy" at 11am on Twitter (it even got mentioned on radio BBC6) and a bunch joined in for some delightfully pointless silliness. Which is good for us, I'm convinced.

Banning

My friend Pádraig Ó Méalóid had a bit of an upset recently - organisers of the Octocon SF convention contacted him to tell him he was banned from the convention for his 'attitude'. They then take the extremely cowardly route of saying they refuse to explain further what their reasoning is and will not debate it. Now I don't know what their reasons are (since they make vague accusations but refuse to back them up properly), but to say there are reasons and then refuse to give them or to engage in civilised discussion makes me naturally lean to the suspicion that actually they don't have any proper reasons that any independent person would consider serious enough to ban someone from a convention (something I've not heard of happening before, its pretty unprecedented, especially involving a well known member of the SF community). In fact sod being polite, I'd say that whole approach smacks of petty mindedness and childishness - by all means, Octocon organisers, explain properly and I and many others may revise that opinion, but if you won't then I can only assume your being incredibly foolish.

Secondly I've known Pádraig for years; we both wrote extensively in our own spare time for The Alien Online promoting good writing; he's written articles, essays and interviews (most recently a fabulous, in-depth piece with Bryan Talbot which we ran on the Forbidden Planet blog - part 1 here, part 2 here, highly recommended) and run successful conventions. He's supported good reading and good authors and artists for years and as such has gained the respect and friendship of many in the science fiction and comics communities, fans, readers, writers and artists, from new talent to some of the best known names. So for Octocon to take this unprecedented action to someone many of us hold in high esteem (as well as considering a personal friend) without real explanation is not only going to give us a negative impression of them, its going to make quite a few of us rather angry to see him treated in this manner, to say nothing of it smacking of a rather undemocratic and unaccountable approach by evading establishing reasons or proper explanations, which is, frankly, baffling. I await them giving some proper explanation for this to prove they aren't simply being vindictive over minor criticisms. And meantime I won't be encouraging anyone to attend the convention.

Winsor McCay, silent animation

Via Tom at Comics Reporter comes a link to this charming footage of early 20th century pioneer of comics and animation, Winsor McCay; for those not familiar with him, Winsor created the first movie dinosaur, Gertie, back in 1914 - it was imbued with proper character (no doubt thanks to his cartoonist training and skills) which gave it some personality akin to the proper animated cartoons which would follow in the subsequent years. As well as pioneering animation in the dawn days of the then new film medium McCay was a popular comics creator for the newspapers, with his Little Nemo in Slumberland full of beautiful, dreamlike imagery that has remained influential for over a century, cited by creators like Moebius and Gaiman. Its a lovely piece of early cinematic magic.

Setting sun, furling sail...

The sun is declining in the sky, time to ship oars, furl sails for another day, make all ship-shape and Bristol fashion







I could be wrong, but I get the impression that the tide may be out at this point... You can actually walk down the steps right into the wee harbour floor at North Berwick during low tide, although I don't recommend stepping out much further than the base of the stairs as the muddy sand is rather sinky.