Read All About It


A very strange news day today. We now have three times as many stars in the universe as we thought we had yesterday. All red dwarfs though, so we won’t be able to see them. So as we sit outside this evening gazing heavenwards, we can feel smug at a 300% gain in our viewing quota and enjoy the Emperor's new clothes whilst we can.

Ratcheting up in strangeness is the discovery that some bacteria in California have evolved with Arsenic substituted for Phosphorus in their DNA. With larger atoms, I suppose that this makes them heavyweights amongst the microbe community. It suggests an interesting plot line for a murder mystery where the victim is poisoned with water containing these. Presumably, they can survive in normal water and, if so, the perpetrator could be well away before the deed was discovered. Great novel fodder.

Scaling the heights to the pinnacle of bizarre today brings us to a Los Angeles auction house. They are putting Lee Harvey Oswald’s original pine casket up for sale. It is apparently in a fine state of rot and missing only one handle. It is expected to go for between $60k and $100k. For you youngsters out there, the story goes back to 1981 when conspiracy theories were rife. He was dug up to check he was still there and then sent back in a fine new box for his trouble.

This is where my imagination begins to have problems. Who was hanging on to the original box and what were they doing with it? It not the sort of thing that you would want to store your ‘Work in Progress’ files in, or even those with your ‘Dead Projects’ in, now is it? 

Well, I know that those of us who have messy offices can loose papers for a while. I once lost a laptop for eighteen months in mine, through filing it in a box-file labeled ‘computing’ to avoid it being stolen when I went on vacation, and then having such a good time that I forgot where I put it. But loosing a box for twenty-nine years is an achievement way out of my league. I take my hat off to them.

Rant


When I read the news, I am usually disappointed. Today I’m angry. The feeding frenzy is at its full height since WikiLeaks casually tossed in all those juicy tidbits for the voracious and insatiable piranhas of the tabloid press, just so that we can enjoy sleaze-by-proxy with our morning toast and coffee. Some individuals in far countries may end up dead, in jail and tortured, but by using the Orwellian Newspeak of the last two decades in referring to them as collateral damage, we can sanitize any guilt at the damage done. End of rant.

Words and their etymology are a source of endlessly entertainment. I find that I’m drawn to neophiliac as I do like change, and I wonder if there is a common root to Hippocratic oath and hypocrisy but I’d better not mention this when I’m in for more Botox.

Back to Work


Now that the serial ‘Larry and the Bear’ has finished, I am getting back to the slog of the revision of ‘Left Field’. I’m finding the process quite difficult as I start to read and forget to be critical, or I focus on being critical and get deep into the weeds of placing a comma in just the right spot. The idea of placing it where a natural pause for breath when reading may seem natural enough, but can cause a wild panic when you find that you could pause at two different places and get quite different emotional effects. Then it’s ‘Oh Dear, which would be better?’ The solution? – cut the whole sentence and write it differently, but then, it’s not as good as it was in the first place, so back round the circle to square one, or two, or three, or maybe I’ve just lost count.

This is where using ‘The Cloud’ sounds like a wonderful idea as it is possible, or so the advertisements claim, to have documents available to multiple people who can work on them simultaneously. If the ‘multiple people’ are your critique group, you should be able to get round the circle of indecision faster than you can get round the Circle Line on the London Tube.

Perhaps I should look for another conflict/crisis topic so that I can start a new serial. Then the novel could go back on the shelf to mature a little longer. That way I could put off decisions until the end of the year and have a ready made New Year resolution – to get on with it. Hmm, I think good sense will probably prevail and I’ll bring the resolution forward.