"The test of true brilliance is the ability to conceive total simplicity."


The incarnate malevolent hordes of Beelzebub, as embodied by our erstwhile landlady, have fired their return broadside. It came in the form of a quote, written eight months ago, for considerably more than our whole rental deposit. So much for repair of damaged doorframes (fair enough), so much for a hole in a wall (fair enough), and... SO-O-O-O-O much for replacement of thirty square metres of flooring.

This is where I started to feel we were in for a protracted fight. The quote doesn't carry any legal weight, of course, but it's hard to interpret what they mean by it. They could send us actual bills by now—they've certainly fixed everything they want to, since that Gorgon of a landlady is much too houseproud to do otherwise. If we were really liable for the damage then they could prove it and we'd pay it. Yet they're not sending us whatever bills they have, only a meaningless quote for damage we're pretty sure we didn't do and certainly didn't agree with the landlord on the formal handover document.

Exactly what game are they playing here? Do they actually hold us liable for that sum, and that's the nearest document they had to show us the scale? Or (as Aki suspects) are they just flashing big numbers so we'll get scared and abandon our deposit? Whatever they're doing, it means they're digging in and they're not going to let the money go without a struggle.

Our lawyer, bless him, seems to be getting a feel for the dramatis personae and to be taking our side morally as well as professionally. He grinned like a fox and said, "We should ask them where the bill is, just to make them sweat," but then he dismissed the matter, closed the folder and casually delivered a solution so elegant, economical and just plain horrible that it would have brought a smile to Machiavelli himself.

"You've got personal liability insurance," he said. "Just send the bill to them."

... uh huh.

I actually feel a little bit sorry for the insurance company. They don't know what they're up against yet: they've been pitted against their equal and opposite harridan. But that's not our problem. All we have to do is kick back and watch from a safe distance, then catch whatever money falls out and spend it on beer. Is it not a beautiful plan? Is our lawyer not worth his salt?

STRANGE ATTRACTOR
METTLE
Big Blue Records/Music For Speakers

A glorious but peculiar record, this, featuring Van Hoorn of Legendary Pink Dots and Van Kruysdijk of Sonar Lodge (who I’ll confess I have never even heard) with a whole bunch of supporting friends/guests, creating something roughly akin to a cooler, jazzier modern equivalent of Portishead. That’s the easiest comparison, being hypnotic, arty without massive pretence, and strangely involving.

( Read more... )

http://www.myspace.com/attractor
http://www.myspace.com/sonarlodge
http://www.myspace.com/thelegendarypinkdots

We've made some additions and improvements to Notes!

The Notes feature has been added to two action-taking pages:

• You can now add a Note directly on the Add a friend page - handy if you'd like to mark down where you met them or another name you know them by!
• On the Ban and unban users page (under Account -> Privacy) you can now add a Note, including to a group of users all banned at the same time (so that next year you won't need to ask yourself "hey, why did I ban these guys?")

Other changes:

• When you're viewing your existing Notes they're grayed out; click in a field to activate it to change the text (this page can be found from the header by using Profile -> Manage Notes)
• Changes to editing:
  • When you're going to create a new Note but one already exists, you'll get a warning that you're editing an existing Note
  • You can now delete a note from the "Edit note" pop-up in the hover menu
  • You can now delete notes for multiple selected users on the Manage notes page
  • When you change Notes on "Ban|unban users" page, they can be edited and saved with "Save Changes" button

Wheeeee!

Enjoy.

The good bits tend to get captured in photos...

( Piccies behind the clickies... )

Saw a strange show last night called The Children Who Fought Hitler, on BBC 4, about the Memorial School in Ypres where British children whose parents lived in Belgium and France attended and were taught the lessons being taught in British schools. The info on the TV implied that when the Nazis invaded the children had fought, but that would have been a bit too bizarre. No, when the time came the school was simply evacuated, but it covered the activities of three of the kids from this school. One guy had already left shortly before the Nazis invaded, joined the RAF at 16 and was flying by 18, another had to remain in Belgium and was running the local resistance group by the time he was 16. The most interesting story was that of Elaine Madden.

She ended up being parachuted back into Belgium as a secret agent, where she successfully carried transmitters and evaded capture, finishing the war helping liberate concentration camps, but it was her escape that was interesting. Her family decided she’d get her back to England, so they tried Calais, which must have been a bit of a shock as it had been bombed to fuck. (“I will never forget seeing just a head lying in the gutter.”) They had to keep moving, eventually meeting some English soldiers who making for Dunkirk. They weren’t allowed to carry any civilians but one old guy didn’t like the idea of leaving an English girl behind, especially with German troops already in nearby fields, so they made these two wear helmets and long coats and pretend to be soldiers.

Next time you see an old movie where the troops are waiting on the beaches for their chance of getting into the little boats, it’s a bizarre fact that on one of the wooden piers, being targeted by dive bombers, where larger groups waited to get onto the bigger boats, two of the soldiers escaping by that route were a 17 year old girl and her auntie.

Scratch that. Squat got busted. Not by the cops, but when I went in last night there were people there and one of them claimed to be the owner and was freaking the fuck out, threatened to call the cops, and almost kicked my dog a couple of times. I did my best to de-escalate the situation, told him to calm down, apologized, asked to let me have my stuff and he'd never see me again, and he acquiesced. So, boo for no more squat (I still have my doubts that it was the owner, but I'm not going to fight somebody over an abandoned house no matter who they are), but yay for not dealing with cops and not losing a perfectly good sleeping bag. I also managed to get my friend's bag and after a 2 hour stakeout of the place managed to catch him before he wandered into the same trap I did. I spent the night in my car.

Today, I'll hang around the library for a while, then wander over to People's Park for food not bombs and perhaps tonight we can find a new squat. :) Hopefully one a little less nice.

Watched a movie called Food Inc (link goes to youtube, they have the whole thing on here, but who knows how long it'll be up). It's a great primer about the industry that produces our food. It covers just about every major aspect of it, from the fact that only a handful of companies produce all of the grain, to factory farms, monsanto's patented life, and the lobbyists' power to defang the very organizations meant to protect us, as workers, consumers, and people that would like to live in a clean environment. Also apparently they're trying to make it libel/slander to cause "financial loss" by saying that agribusiness sucks, or that there are health and safety issues that aren't being addressed. Fuck you, agribusiness.

I learned some new things I'd not known previously, and do have a few critiques - mostly about their fawning over organics without bringing up the fact that these very same conglomerates have lobbied to alter the word organic to include many things we wouldn't consider such, and about how little they focused on local issues, given the huge outpouring of energy needed to truck things around. I also didn't like that they showed the slaughtering at the small country farm, but somehow neglected to show the cattle flailing around and mooing as their throats are slit that occurs at the large processing plants. The movie also neglected to mention that to produce one pound of beef, it takes some 400+ gallons of water and a whole hell of a lot of grain. But still, overall, it's a good basic primer and it's very watchable, something that I can't say for a lot of documentaries I've seen in this vein.

All night I dreamed about dying. Every time—I was shot once, bleeding out; another time, I had some kind of wasting illness—I woke up instead of never opening my eyes again, but whenever I fell back into the dream, there was a different death to go through. Some of the circumstances, waterspouts, unmoored islands, shell-like crusts of uninhabited buildings in the middle of cities where I've lived, might have made intriguing story material if I hadn't been distracted by the endless iterations of mortality, none of them opera-clean. Today fails auspices.

One, I'm reading at the IAF Interfictions 2 reading tomorrow, 7:30 pm at The Lily Pad in Cambridge, MA. You all are coming, right? Because there's musical accompaniment and possibly an accordion. And Brian Francis Slattery (ZOMG.) Also my last trip to Boston for awhile as I burrow, sick of travel and with a novel due at the end of January (I don't even want to talk about it.)

Two, I'm working on a trailer for Under in the Mere, and searching for music. I want something appropriate to Arthuriana without going full McKennitt, melancholic, probably, but not necessarily un-modern. Any musicians out there want to get some exposure by letting me use one of their tracks? The Palimpsest trailer got over 20,000 views...

Any suggestions of other musicians must be people who are contactable and at all likely to give me permission. Bands I have to contact through MySpace and are on tour, probably not.

Lastly, I am NOT getting sick. I swear.

Holding an edge of
thunder against all darkness
is not that easy

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No, I don't know what it means either.

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For those of you who wish to be included in tomorrow's burning of burdens, intentions, and the like, don't forget to comment here. All comments to that post are screened. If you'd like to make an anonymous comment, you can do so here, now, and also tomorrow to the One Card Draw. Just mention that it's for the fire. :)

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I still haven't figured out actively what I'm supposed to be writing next. Oops. I'm going to open the file, reread what I wrote yesterday, and then go watch Craig Ferguson. Hopefully by the time the episode is over and I've eaten, I'll have figured it out. Wish me luck.

 A unique offering on Gunbroker - the 1907 Austrian Roth-Steyr 8mm pistol.

Widely thought-of as the realization of the Flash Gordon ray gun.
The auction says it was carried by Austrian Dragoon units.


The term 'Dragoon' brings to mind cavalry with lance and sword, quite 19th century and before.
World War 1 brought all that strategy to a bloody end.