November 19, 2006

Boil Water Advisory

For days we have been on a city-wide boil water advisory after a significant storm last Wednesday, which put trees down and turned off the lights. Naturally everyone largely overreacted and got terribly excited about acquiring the last litre bottle of boiled water on the shop shelves. Curiously unnecessary since they only told us to turn on the kettle. I observed several advantages to the boil water advisory: First a distinct lack of that dreadful slurping noise one is accustomed to hearing in your left ear at the cinema. Yep no soda drinks sold in the cinema. Gracias. The unmentionable multinational coffee chain have had some service interruptions!  Maybe now they’ll think twice and pay those Ethiopian coffee farmers the 23 cents per kilo they deserve rather than the 8 cents that is further impoverishing them.

See this film for more on the farmers: http://blackgoldmovie.com/

 Also, http://www.guardian.co.uk/frontpage/story/0,,1931675,00.html

And finally an increase in charming notices pinned up in public places such as one yesterday at a deli that read  “we are washing all our fruit and vegetables with bottled water.” It’s quite the irony that the water supply would not have been interrupted if we weren’t tinkering so violently with the entire weather system with all these green house gases. When you think about it if people weren’t driving these ridiculous gas guzzler cars, they’d be able to turn on the tap with confidence. So there’s this interesting warm arse = no clean water conundrum. There’s no telling them, as my mother would say.

November 16, 2006

The ice rink: a smudge from every decade

So there I was admiring the way ice rinks can gather and maintain a smudge from every decade without having to bid any of it goodbye.  The reason I was able to deduce such an astonishing conclusion was I was freezing my arse off in the bleachers,  while my six-year-old puffin was zipping and twisting between grown, middle, and diddy men, women, children, pushchairs (indeed you can take your baby skating in the stroller, literally ice rinks adapt to every decade’s needs), wheelchairs. Somewhere out there was his father. Yours truly has only ever tried it twice, to little success and such intense discomfort in the foot region that I’m not tempted to repeat it. It’s perishing up there in the stands, with an electric heat strip hanging down in three spots, with no real heat ever reaching the top of your head. I was struck by how ice rinks refuse to cover up their age, so the hokey looking polar bear complete with woolly hat and ice hockey stick painted on the wall probably arrived in the 1970’s say. Then there’s the bunting flags which openly declare which season the various teams obtained them and finally the unapologetic soundtrack of Boney M bouncing the foot of the Grand-dad beside me, with mp3 player in his ears (Boney M overruled whatever was going on in the ears), and thermos at the ready, while his grandson skates alone below.

So out I meander to try warm the bloodflow at the desk and the woman explains she learnt to skate in this rink at age three and attended the preschool in the same building and oh, they’re ripping it down to build a fancy new one because of the impending Olympics. Drat and damnation I had been so uplifted at the prospect of revisiting the 1970’s, 80’s every Sunday and concluded the only other place which records the decades so proudly and incidentally in its walls is the outdoor swimming pool, which they’ve been threatening to destroy for two years. I wonder if the Boney M tapes will go into the same mush, when the bulldozers plough through the poor polar bear.

November 10, 2006

O’Yawn moment: Literary partnerships…

In a week of noting how celebrity divorces can now seemingly usurp elections, it’s time for this blog’s first o’yawn moment.

 Lust and literature is a heady mixture, and the women writers of the 20th century who married poets and novelists often came unstuck in both life and art.

http://enjoyment.independent.co.uk/books/features/article1956989.ece

Clearly it makes far more sense to make your hay romantically in the strict marital sense with someone who actually has a job with paycheck, or cheap airline tickets, or discount on groceries, or expertise in laying pipes. The sensible thing would be to then procure the affections on the side of your literary love-a-duck, ensuring you are sufficiently absent when they are moaning about their latest tome and removing their toenails procrastinating etc. Turn up just as they have that revved, fresh, got a few good hours work done today, would you like a boiled egg glow.

When selecting partners of any extraction bottom line: make absolute sure they can cook a good egg. A good egg can cure the most irksome traits and inconveniences.

 Possibly the best partner for a writer is actually the leg of a table.

November 6, 2006

Radio 3 Misunderstood Perhaps?

Just caught a glimpse of this on the paper:

Changes to BBC Radio 3’s schedule that will come into force early next year were revealed yesterday, amid rumours that the station is planning to reduce its output of live music.

Radio 3’s controller, Roger Wright, insisted that he was not planning to significantly increase the number of shows that rely on excerpts from concerts rather than the complete programme. “That’s rubbish,” he said. “We’re doing full concerts. We are not going to do excerpts, we’re going to do concerts.” The rumours, he said “come from a complete misunderstanding of what we do, leave alone what we are going to do”.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/frontpage/story/0,,1940568,00.html

 I haven’t the foggiest notion whether they are understood or otherwise but it reminded me of the wonderful Beethoven experience they did some time back where we could download these less well known symphonies.

That put me onto Radio Three and some of its delights.  The only trouble is the archive’s a bit dodgy, especially with the night? arts programme. You can get all excited about some interview last week, only to discover there’s no possible way you can hear it again.

I’m woefully uneducated about classical music, unless an abstract fondness for the cello counts, but it and Irish language broadcasting are the two things I can listen to when scribbling. I suspect only a vague grasp on what’s happening in both cases is the reason why.

Anyway here are my two leading comforters: “respect” as Mr G would say: http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio3/ agus http://www.rte.ie/rnag/