Bear With, Bear With... Back.

And Bonjour again!

With less than a week until Dr Who graces our screens once more, summer must really be in its autumn years.  Needless to say, then, that my holidaying is over.  Having spent a week in Brittany, and about 2 days at sea, I'm back with fresh photos and exciting stories.   So, sit back, relax, and enjoy a yarn or two about my time away with three of the most cerebral people you're ever likely to meet.

 

A comment I take back instantly.

No matter how wonderful a holiday turns out to be, it doesn't necessarily have a perfect beginning.  We took an overnight ferry from Plymouth to Brittany, and drifted off to sea in our cabin somewhere in the English Chanel - something new for everyone.  At 6 o'clock the next morning, we were woken by gentle, but curiously intrusive, guitar music, and an announcement that we were only an hour away from land.  The instruction to leave our cabins was cued to perfection, being given midway through my shower, so we packed quickly and disembarked, all tired and still slightly shampooed.  Oh, and in true holiday spirit, it was raining.  

Arriving at our chalet in Saint Laurent, typical excitement was replaced with exhaustion and relief as we slumped down to the sound of raindrops on the roof.  Needless to say, we went to bed pretty sharpish.  By the morning (when we up this had almost gone), things had taken quite a different turn. The clouds had parted, the sun was shining, and we got to appreciate for the first time the incredible view of the bay we had.

Now there's a view you can chew a croissant to.

From there on in, things seemed much nicer for all.  With a new-found confidence in our prospects, we did what any self-respecting Britons would do on holiday, and pottered about.  After exploring the local beaches for a few days, and wondering what to do, we decided to walk to Concarneau, the next town over.  We could see it from the beach near us, and had been told it was only a short walk away.  Our hearts set on crepes for lunch, we headed off.

Now, it's true that it isn't all that far of a walk from Saint Laurent to Concarneau... provided you're walking on the road.  Instead, we were taking the more winding, yet infinitely more senic footpaths around two or three peninsulas.  Whilst this made for some excellent photo opportunities, it didn't exactly agree with the footwear of certain members of the party.

 

"See?  It's only around the corner!"

We made it, though, and got a two course crepe dinner and a taxi ride for our efforts.  It also made us aware of the Blue Nets Festival that would be starting just before we left - but more on that in another post I have planned.  For the moment, we were enjoying the two sides of Concarneau - the quiet, local side (where we had our crepes), and the tourist based centre, focused around the old Norman walls.  As you'd expect, it was absolutely heaving with people, but not without good reason.  The area was full of period buildings, converted into streets of shops.  While it's true that many of them were gimmicky and naff, a few treats were dotted about.  For example, we stumbled upon a chocolate shop with an impressive range of sculptures - goodness knows how they stopped them from melting in that heat.

Because some things are just inherently more awesome than others

We visited other little towns like this over the week - Vannes, Quimper, but Concarneau stands out the most.  Probably because of the walk and the festival, but also because it has, to my mind, contained the tourist infestation to only a region of itself, leaving a working port and livelihood for the residents, unlike so many similar regions of the world.

Of course, walks weren't all we did out there.  For starters, there was the consumption of a near-impossible quantity of cheese, bread and wine, of which my tastebuds and I have no regrets.  The noticable lack of a television, however, meant that everyone, even my darling sister, was reading in the evening.  A pleasant experience, to be sure, and one I tried to make the most of.  So, without further ado, I present a one sentence summary of the things what I read:

           - The Very Short Introduction to Literary Theory:  Dense but insightful, with usefully clear structure.

           - Moab is my Washpot: Hilarious and heartbreakingly honest - you couldn't ask more of it.

           - The Symposium:  Modern philosophers should write in Plato's fictive structure - it makes it so much more enjoyable

           - The Atrocity Exhibition: Comic yet tragic, structured yet insane.

           - Never Let Me Go: One of the saddest and most enjoyable books I've read in a long time.

As I say, a week is a long time.

In order to get the ferry home, we had to travel to Saint Malo and stay overnight there, once again finding ourselves in the midst of a port town that benefits from a tourist industry, much like Concarneau.  Though we weren't there long, we had dinner in a shop run entirely by the loveliest old lady ever, and had a fantastic walk on the beach.  Particularly interesting were the thousands of tree trunks lined up on the shore as a tidal defence.  Having seen footage like this, however, you can see why they're there.

 

They're not just pretty photo opportunities, you know.

I realise this isn't the most fluent summary of my time in Brittany, but there are good reasons for that.  1) You'd probably be really bored by the time I was through, and 2) I'm saving some stuff for a more thoughtout post, arriving soon.  In the meantime, I'll be putting some more pictures up under "Things of the Now".  I hope you enjoy them, and check back for more soon!

TTFN!

Au Revoir!

What ho, chums!

I know I haven't posted anything for a week or so, and I'm sorry.  That's on top of the fact that tomorrow, I head off from Portsmouth for a week or so in "sunny" Brittany!  Pictures to follow, I assure you.  So, there'll be nothing new here for the next 10 days or so, but never fear, for plenty is lined up for the moment I return.

See you all soon!

"Rioting in the streets?  Pft.  That's so 1789 - 1799..." - Charles de Gaulle on the London Riots

Happy Birthday: Why I Should Have Been Born a Day Later

Yesterday was my birthday.  I'm 19 now, which is all well and good, and I got lots of lovely clothes and things.  Some time ago, I looked up who I share the Special Day with, to see if I had some kind of tenuous connection to any celebrities.  It might not surprise you to find out that the reasonable odds of someone famous being born on that one of three hundred and sixty five days paid off.  So, happy birthday Terry Wogan and John C. McGinley.

That, friends, is my future.

Don't get me wrong, Wogan and Cox are pretty good people to share a birthday with, and I have nothing against them.  The thing is, I happened to find out who was born the day after me, and who I could so nearly claim to be birthday buddies with.  The list is so good, I'm actually going to do a countdown.

4.  Knut Hamsun: 1859 - 1952

He's a Norwegian Author, famous for the novel Hunger.  He'd be 142 today.  I have to confess that I've never read anything by him, but he's a Nobel Prize winner, so he's automatically on my 'to read' list.  You might not understand why I'm riled about not quite sharing a birthday with a novelist whose books I haven't read.  Then again, you probably haven't seen a picture of him, have you?

Above: The embodiment of badassery

Look at him.  Just look at him!  That's a photo from 1890, the year he published Hunger.  That's a look not many people can pull off, but by God he's doing a magnificent job right there.  Mind you, I wonder what he did when he wanted to look at something by his feet...

3.  Louis Armstrong: 1901 - 1971

Pops himself was almost a birthday buddy.  That's a big'un, that is.  There's an interesting story behind Satchmo's birthday, actually.  Never having a copy of his own birth certificate, Louis always believed his mother's account (I would, too.  Of all the people, you'd think she'd be the one to know when Baby Armstrong was born...).  According to her, Louis was born on American Independence Day, July 4th, at the turn of the century 1900.

It's strange that Ms. Armstrong could be so far out in remembering the date of her own son's birth, but there you go.  I suppose it's quite a bit more poetic, and Louis bought into it his whole life.  It wasn't until a few years after his death that a baptism certificate was found, revealing the truth for the first time.  So although Louis'd be 110 today, he'd think he was 111. 

But is that the face of a man who cares?  No.  No it is not.

2.  Barack Obama: 1961 - Present

Happy 50th, Obama!  This particular birthday should be a bit better known than the others, and all the more reason to find its tantalising proximity to my own so infuriating.  I don't think I haveto go into much detail on how cool this would be, so instead I'll leave a little video to make myself feel better.  It's done by Adam Buxton, a very brilliant man:

1.  Percy Bysshe Shelley: 1792 - 1822

I've already listed the President of America, arguably the most influential musician ever, and a man with impeccable sartorial tastes.  Who could possibly be better to share a birthday with?  Percy Shelley, that's who.

And he's got that sartorial thing going, too

This is a pretty personal gripe here, because not only would I share Shelley's birthday if I'd been born but one day later, but I'd also be exactly 200 years younger.  That basically means there's a chance his poetic soul would have leap into my body, and I would have taken credit for the next Ozymandias, or something.  Gah!  Not only that, but he came from Horsham, which is where I'm from.  I would have been first choice for the soul-hijacking scam!  But can I make any claim to birthday buddyism?  Nope, I'm just another sucker who's got a 199 year and 364 day birth difference between themselves and a dead poet.  Such is life.

As things go, I don't share a birthday with any of these people.  It's a silly thing to care about, I know, and normally I wouldn't.  It's just the fact that they all happen to have bunched together on one day so close to my own... and I could have joined their special club.  Instead, I'm left to sit at the door with Sir Terry, catching a whiff of Obama's cupcakes as they waft through an open window near by.

It won't last, he'll cut it.  Ah, satire...

TTFN!

By the way, that Obama cupcake picture comes courtesy of Choconancy1.

It's All Greek to Me!

When one is terminally unemployed, it seems wise to find interesting and practical ways to fill one's time.  Develop a new skill, say, or do something to help get that next interview.  I already volunteer at Oxfam, and I have great fun doing it.  However, I felt as though something was missing in my time-usage.  Something important that I couldn't quite put my finger on.  And then it hit me: I wasn't transcribing any Ancient Greek.

Fortuately, the fine fellows and females of Oxford University have been able to fill just such a gap.  Recently, they launched ancientlives.org, a website onto which they uploaded  tons of recently discovered Greek texts.  In terms of thousands of years old text, that's about as hot off the press as you can get.  I'm not sure I'm getting across the giddiness I get at the idea that these texts are previously untranslated.

Pictured:  My idea of a "fun night in"

There is, of course, a rather significant snag - I can't speak a word of Greek, ancient or otherwise.  Any other time, this would make me quite the usless drudge in a project dedicated to translating the stuff, but not here.  See, the researchers have created a special interface wherein all you have to do is identify the symbols, and the pattern you create gets entered into a database somewhere in the ether, which proper Greek-speaking researchers can access later on.

I hope that gives you some scale of the project - there are so many of these texts that the researchers are asking for volunteers who don't even understand the things to help them.  This is an entirely original idea on their part, but I still feel like I might be making some kind of a difference in joining in.

 

I might not understand it, but I can still enjoy it, dammit!

 Ok, so I can see that the appeal of trudging through all this unreadable text might not be instantly apparent to some of you, but here's some news.  Some of the texts found with the ones online have already been translated.  Amongst them are new poems by Sappho, and fragments of unknown Sophocles plays.  Even more amazing, a new story about Jesus has been discovered, written in 300 AD.  Just to clarify, that doesn't happen every other day.  Whilst there'll doubtless be lots of shopping lists and bills in the mix, maybe there's an undiscovered treasure.  If there is, someone's got to find it, and who wants to pass up that chance?

 

Shopping list?  It's clearly a lost Aescylus monologue about groceries!

This project's going to be around for a while, it seems.  If it goes well, the people behind it have promised to release another 200,000 or so texts on to the site.  Two hundred thousand.  That's a lot.  I don't know about you, but even if I can't understand it in its current form, it'd be pretty exciting to be a part of such a monumental undertaking.  This looks set to be the Classics' equivalent of the public submissions to the first OED: a little messy at first, but fundamentally changing the way things are done.  Who knows?  Maybe we'll see more projects like this in the future.  I, for one, look forward to the prospect!

TTFN!