Of course a monstrous fable

This is the best thing I have ever learnt

several_bees — Wed, 17 Nov 2010 12:22:57 GMT

Here is a thing I have just found out:

Books all have an ISBN. (This isn't something I've just found out, I knew that already).

They also have an EAN, which stands for International Article Number (originally "European Article Number", hence the abbreviation). My understanding of this bit isn't completely clear, but I think a book's EAN is its barcode number, and it has some of the same numbers as the ISBN but with extra little bits so that it can work as a barcode. (This is something I've just found out, but it isn't the interesting bit. The interesting bit is coming.)

There's a bit of an EAN that shows what country it's from.

When the EAN is for a book, the bit of the number that shows what country it's from says: Bookland.

This is not strictly speaking true any more, apparently the system changed in 2007 in a way that meant EANs can say 978 and mean "hey this is a book" rather than "hey this is an object and it's definitely from a country that we just made up". But if you grab a book nearby, one published before 2007, and look at the number on the back, that number says: this is an object, it comes from a place, and that place is Bookland.

How did I not know this? I don't know much about barcodes and EANs and ISANs and ISSNs and all the rest of it (I didn't know that EANs, ISANs or ISSNs even existed, until this morning). I admire them, certainly. miss_newham lets her secret barcode knowledge slip, occasionally, and I always think "yes, barcodes are pretty great!". But all the same, this is the single greatest fact in the world, and I only just found it out.

There's also a Musicland, for sheet music.

Things that I have done

several_bees — Wed, 15 Sep 2010 12:59:23 GMT

Hey, here are some internet things that I have been involved in!

• Balloons, Spies, Asparagus and Other Wandsworth Stories: some odd things that have happened in Wandsworth over the past thousand years. There are balloons, spies, and asparagus, and also dogs and floods and grumpy monarchs. If you're in the UK and interested in strange history, do please fill out the quiz: I will then send to you, on a postcard, through the mail, the Wandsworth story pseudoscientifically calculated to most fit your interests.

• Playmakers: a cheerful 35-minute documentary about pervasive games, made by thinkpublic. There's a pile of people talking, and some people playing, and an ongoing thread about me and Alex (of Hide&Seek) designing a game. It has actual production values! And that bouncy cheerful boop-ba-boop music that all cheerful documentaries use whenever people do stuff.

• Their Questions Answered: answers to the rhetorical questions posed each week by people who have written in to the Letters page of the Guardian Weekend Magazine.

Not Very Flat It Turns Out

several_bees — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 10:50:04 GMT

The only thing I knew about Norfolk, before I visited, was that exchange in Private Lives: "Very flat, Norfolk." / "Don't be unpleasant." I was going to spend three days in a place noted primarily for its flatness! I was pretty excited.

But it turns out, Norfolk isn't really all that flat. It's flattish! There are flat bits. There are no obvious mountains. But there are slopes, and undulations, and a couple of undeniable hills. This is a bit disappointing! If you're interested mostly in things that are very flat, I can't wholeheartedly recommend Norfolk.

If you're interested in things other than extreme flatness, though, there's plenty to choose from, and it's all very good:

• For the first day, I thought there were no young people in Norwich all, but there are! They're all gathered in one place: outside the Forum, one of those big glass millennium buildings, where they sit on the steps like pigeons with angular haircuts.

• Norwich is super-fond of superlatives. There's not a plaque in the place that doesn't claim to mark the somethingest something, no matter how specific those somethings have to be: "oldest pub" or "first provincial newspaper" or "one of the most interesting streets in the country" or "one of the best sprung dancefloors in the county" or "largest six-day a week open-air market in Europe".

• They have cleverly segregated all their generic high-street shops (for when you want to quickly buy a swimming costume, having left yours at home) from all their interesting shops (for when you want to look at overpriced bunting, books, board games, chocolate, and giant moomins, or drink coffee accompanied by cheerful 1950s music).

• There are so many churches! There is a church on pretty much every block. I can't imagine what they did with all these churches, before half of them turned into art galleries and cafes. Church crawls? Giant games of sanctuary-themed hide and seek?

• The sea in Cromer has undertow! I'd forgotten about undertow.

Hide&Seek Weekender

several_bees — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 11:59:40 GMT

Hey, you know how I occasionally post saying "hey you know those games things I organise, there was another one, it was great"? This time I'm actually posting in advance!

In a week - from 9 to 11 July - the 2010 Hide&Seek Weekender will be taking place at the National Theatre (we're based mostly in the Olivier foyer). Yes, that's the actual National Theatre, the one on the South Bank, that is a theatre, and is national.

You should come! And tell other people to come! For the following reasons:
1. It will be pretty brilliant!
2. It's free
3. No, really, it will be amazing. We have 35 games, everything from "sit around a table arguing" to "run around the South Bank frantically and hide from enemies". Iphone games, cutting-out-pieces-of-paper games, flag design games, games with blindfolds, games with a band playing a waltz, games from theatre companies and game designers and choreographers and musicians and journalists and, oh, pretty much everything really. Mostly for adults, but some stuff kids and families can do.
4. And imagine how sad all the designers would be if there was nobody to play the games - their little faces! Their tear-filled eyes as they blink bravely!

(If you're around on the Friday night and up for being incredibly useful, as well as having fun, kevandotorg and I are running a game called Visible Cities on the Friday night, about travelling between different versions of London - say, underwater London, desert London. We need people to man checkpoints for travelling between Londons and/or to chase and terrify the innocent wide-eyed players, so if you're up for either of those, let me know. I can pay you back with stupid amounts of cake - comment or email to holly@hideandseek.net.)

There is a Facebook event here! The schedule, in case you've lost the link from the top of the page, is here!

My goodness 35 games is a lot, though. If you talk to me any time between now and the 11th, don't expect me to make too much sense...

several_bees — Fri, 11 Jun 2010 11:50:39 GMT

Oh, things! They do keep happening, and I never seem to write them down.

I'm now working most days in Farringdon, which is a pretty great place! Our offices are on Hatton Wall, and "we" are Hide&Seek, and I heartily recommend the "Who We Are" page because the picture of me is excellent. If you, like me, work in or near Farringdon, maybe we could meet up for lunch some time?

I turned 29, which was also pretty great! miss_newham hung bunting around the living room, Kevan made a cake, and people gave me various presents including an excellent cheese grater, a fluffy cushion with bee stripes, and a book of fantastically bad lateral thinking puzzles. We also played some walkie-talkie games in the park, but they would probably have gone better if the trees of Battersea Park hadn't decided to celebrate by putting every single little bit of their pollen and tree-fluff into the air all at once.

Kevan and I went to the Freemasons museum, as part of the ongoing boring-museums-of-London quest. It was entirely bemusing! Half of the plaques assume you already know an awful lot about Freemasonry, and the other half are keen to tell you either (a) that they can't tell you something because it's secret, or (b) that Freemasons totally don't ever use goats in their initiation ceremonies and will people please shut up about the goats because there aren't any WHY CAN'T YOU UNDERSTAND THERE ARE NO GOATS. There were, however, three silver elephant-shaped Masonic cigar-lighters.

Jo had an exciting Eurovision party with scorecards and everything, and: oh, that's what Eurovision is like, then! I very much liked the one where the woman was wearing a tutu and the man with the violin was on a spinning giant record player, and they did that thing where they're momentarily silent and everything hangs in the air like a ball and then the music starts again approximately six hundred times.

But all that's in the distant past now, because since it happened I have been to New York. As I seem to be listing things that are pretty great: about 80% of the things I did in New York! But perhaps I'll make that a separate list.

Spring! Games, gardens and chocolate.

several_bees — Tue, 06 Apr 2010 15:54:56 GMT

Spring! It's nice. Here are some nice things about spring so far, though I see that miss_newham has covered most of them already...

GAMES AT THE V&A

You know the V&A Lates, where once a month the V&A is open late in the evening and different things happen? March's Late was themed around games, I curated it with Lizzie from the V&A, and gosh, that was good fun. We got four and a half thousand people (!), which was fifteen hundred more than we'd expected, so it was pretty busy - sorry if you came and didn't get to play anything! But, but, a giant pass the parcel filled with feathers and paper cranes and moustaches! Works of art recreated using huge brightly-coloured cardboard shapes! Fifty two-foot balloons with LEDs in them, and a scavenger hunt where people tried to win string in order to make their balloon fly highest! Football penalty shots as taken by someone viewing themselves in the third person via a camera streaming video into visors! A stealth forty-person choir! And, oh, lots of other things.

The night before I dreamt that all the games had been cancelled and replaced with an interactive art installation named Plieby, which was a pair of pliers with a face that you could talk to; but fortunately that turned out not to be the case.

GARDENS

Our garden is getting pretty ridiculous, all daffodils and chirping tiny birds. On Sunday there was a squirrel eating spaghetti, and a wren. Between them my housemates have covered pots with wire, and sown bulbs, and planted potatoes and strawberries and kept them safe from predators, and made early-morning trips to Homebase, and chosen flowers that will attract cheery bees, and learnt how to prepare raisins for picky blackbirds, and mashed up moss with buttermilk and painted it on the walls of the shed (apparently it will stop looking like bird poo soon). My entire contribution to the increasing loveliness has consisted of going "hey, let's paint some more terracotta pots", which have since been filled (by Kevan) with lilacs (bought and tended by Jo).

EASTER

On Easter Sunday we had:

Egg-rolling, which we didn't really know the rules to, and there aren't technically many big hills in Battersea Park, but still! It all worked out in the end, except the bit where I came last.
A contest where we tried to eat hot cross buns as they dangled from strings, as suggested to us by archive footage of Hackney during the Silver Jubilee. I won this one, getting my bun down to a mere thirteen grams before it fell from the string! There is no documentary evidence of this, however, as it turns out that pretty much the most unflattering way to take a picture of someone is to do it while they're involved in a bun-from-a-string competition.

We also watched Easter Parade, with Fred Astaire and Judy Garland, which its cover claims is "the happiest musical ever made". In actual fact (SPOILERS!) it is not the happiest musical ever made, but on the plus side, it is one of those musicals where all the songs were written for completely different musicals and they've been jammed together apparently at random - in this case, 17 songs, in fact, which in a 99 minute movie leaves relatively little time to explain who anyone is, why they're singing at all, what they want, etc. This means we get situations like:

FRED is trying to buy presents for his girlfriend, as it is EASTER and apparently that's what you do at easter. He goes into a shop to buy a rabbit, but oh no! A small boy has just grabbed the last rabbit! Fortunately there are a lot of drums in the shop, allowing Fred to sing that he is "Drum Crazy" until the small boy is distracted by the drums, and Fred runs off with the rabbit.
JUDY has left a shop, but oh no, it's raining! Fortunately SECONDARY MALE LEAD is nearby, and falls for her instantly based on her hat, and there's an umbrella nearby which he grabs, allowing him to sing that he is "A Fella With An Umbrella" while walking Judy to her next appointment.
Also every now and again it's arbitrarily EASTER again, so that they can keep singing "Easter Parade".

Also: Kew, a puzzling artwork made from crisp packets, and a tubewalk through the suburbiest place I think I have ever been, where I just missed seeing a man carrying a pig. So, yes, well done so far spring, and the lilacs aren't even out yet.

The London Borough Motto Awards

several_bees — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 12:26:34 GMT

Welcome to the London Borough Motto Awards! There's a lot to get through, so let's get started.

The award for smuggest motto goes, perhaps unsurprisingly, to Kensington and Chelsea, with What a good thing it is to live together in unity.

The award for daftest motto that is, okay, slightly endearing in its enthusiastic brashness goes—again perhaps unsurprisingly!—to Shoreditch, with More Light, More Power. Well done Shoreditch, even though you're not actually a borough! Not quite sure what you mean there, but I'm sure it makes sense to someone!

The award for Borough whose motto most dramatically increased in ambition when that borough became a London borough rather than a county borough goes to Croydon, for its switch from May We Grow In Health to Let Us Strive After Perfection. Nice work, Croydon.

The award for motto that seriously makes no sense, what? goes to Barnet, with Willingness Rids Way (which is from a speech in Henry VI Part 3, so presumably Barnet is trying to woo kerrypolka and the_alchemist, but I'm pretty sure there are some lines they could have chosen which would, say, actually have made any sense at all).

The award for Borough whose residents are most likely to be cannibals in an episode of the Twilight Zone goes to Bromley, with Serving the People.

The award for Most cheery motto with an edge of desperation goes to Waltham Forest, with Fellowship is Life. Don't worry, Waltham Forest, it's all going to be okay.

The award for Most embarrassing wore-the-same-dress-to-the-party motto clash had a field of exceptionally strong candidates, for example...
Islington: We Serve. Wandsworth: We Serve.
Harrow: The good of the people is the highest law. Lewisham: The welfare of the people is the highest law.
...so in the end the judges decided to give the award to the mottos that sounded most like a series of dance steps. Congratulations Brent, Hillingon and Hounslow!
Brent: Forward Together. Hillingon: Forward. Hounslow: Let us go forward together.

Now we get to the two big awards of the afternoon. I'm delighted to announce that the winner of the prize for motto that sounds most like it belongs to a totalitarian government in a piece of 1980s dystopian fiction goes to Redbridge, with In Unity Progress!

Of course "progress" tends to sound dystopic by nature, and that makes it all the more impressive that the winner for most charming motto is Newham, with Progress With The People. Well done Newham! It was a close-fought battle, with Tower Hamlets' cheerful From Great Things To Greater coming in a close second.

The full list of mottos:
BARKING AND DAGENHAM: By the grace of god, let us be judged by our deeds (Dei Gratia Probemur Rebus)
BARNET: Willingness Rids Way
BEXLEY: Boldly and Rightly
BRENT: Forward Together
BROMLEY: Serving the People
CAMDEN: Not for self, but for all (Non Sibi Sed Toti)
CROYDON: Let us strive after perfection (Ad Summa Nitamur)
EALING: Progress with Unity
ENFIELD: By Industry Ever Stronger
GREENWICH: We Govern By Serving
HACKNEY: Being fair is what makes us strong (Justitia turris nostra)
HAMMERSMITH AND FULHAM: Judge By Our Labour
HARINGEY: Progress By Humanity
HARROW: The good of the people is the highest law (Salus Populi Suprema Lex)
HAVERING: Liberty
HILLINGDON: Forward
HOUNSLOW: Let us go forward together (Juncti Progrediamur)
ISLINGTON: We Serve
KENSINGTON AND CHELSEA: What a good thing it is to dwell together in unity (Quam Bonum In Unum Habitare)
KINGSTON-UPON-THAMES: No apparent motto
LAMBETH: Let us be judged by our acts (Spectemur Agendo)
LEWISHAM: The Welfare of the People is the Highest Law
MERTON: Stand Fast In Honour And Strength
NEWHAM: Progress With The People
REDBRIDGE: In Unity Progress
RICHMOND-UPON-THAMES: No apparent motto
SHOREDITCH [not a borough]: More Light, More Power
SOUTHWARK: United To Serve
SUTTON: Through difficulties serve God in faith (Per Ardua In Fide Servite Deo)
TOWER HAMLETS: From Great Things To Greater
WALTHAM FOREST: Fellowship Is Life
WANDSWORTH: We Serve
WESTMINSTER: O Lord, watch over the City (Custodi Civitatem Domine)

Hey ho, nobody home, yet will I be merry

several_bees — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 17:17:59 GMT

ADVANTAGES OF HAVING HOUSEMATES

People to play games with
Shared washing up
Greater likelihood that someone will notice when the squirrels are doing something comical outside
The potplants get watered
The potplants exist at all, for that matter
When your brown sugar runs out unexpectedly, there's a good chance that there will be some more brown sugar in the house
Sometimes said housemates will gather around a piece of knitting and frown at it while looking perplexed [NOTE: may not be applicable to all models of housemate]

DISADVANTAGES OF HAVING HOUSEMATES

When you're not used to being home alone, and the house is suddenly empty for a day, the natural response is to eat two large packets of mini-eggs, drink a litre of coca-cola, dance around the house to 1930s showtunes, and see if you can still do headstands (answer: well it depends on how stringently you define headstand, doesn't it). It turns out—and it may be that this comes as a surprise to nobody except me!—that this can make you feel really rather queasy.

Sherburm Blodgett update

several_bees — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 17:28:31 GMT

In my last post, I mentioned the "revolving shuttle machine" patented by Sherburm Blodgett, as discussed in an informative A4 sheet from the Sewing Machine Museum. However, doubts were raised in comments about Mr Blodgett; perhaps his name was not Sherburm but Sherburn? Google, after all, knew nothing about Sherburm, and had at least a couple of results for Sherburn.

I've now looked for relevant patents, and though I couldn't find the revolving shuttle machine, I can confirm that a Mr Sherburne C. Blodgett is the holder of a patent for "improving hemming and cording of umbrella covers".

That seems pretty conclusive. However, a search also shows one other patent belonging to Mr Blodgett: a patent for an eating implement, specifically an improved fork. For precisely how it's better, I turn you over to Mr Blodgett:

My improvement consists in constructing the ordinary fork so that the interstices of a portion of the fork between the tines shall be filled up by a metallic surface or web. By such a fork many articles of food can be more conveniently eaten than with the spoon which is now required; at the same time the tines of the fork can be made smaller and the whole fork rendered lighter without diminishing its strength.

So, basically, a spork. Now, I am as bored and irritated as anyone by society's now-thankfully-dormant conviction that SPORK, along with SPATULA and FISH, is an intrinsically hilarious pairing of word and concept that can act as a punchline to any joke (why did the chicken cross the road? SPORK HA HA HA). But Blodgett's protospork patent predates any known about by Wikipedia by twenty years, and also he's named Sherburne C. Blodgett for goodness' sake. This feels like a pretty significant discovery in sillywordsology.

The Sewing Machine Museum

several_bees — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 10:01:45 GMT

Perhaps because I talk louder than either of them, Kevan and miss_newham continue to indulge me in my conviction that we should go to pretty much every museum in London, the nicher the better. This weekend it was the first Saturday of the month, and we all know what that means: the Sewing Machine Museum in Balham was open between 2pm and 5pm!

Now, the Greenwich Fan Museum is widely treated as a punchline to "what shall we do today?", but I've been, and: it's pretty great! There's a diagram with all the different parts of a fan, there's informative cards about peculiar fan-involving jobs that no longer exist, and there are two or three special exhibitions a year. When I went the special exhibition included one fan with eyeholes in it (for spying and flirting); and another with a branching dialogue, written half on each side, so the fan-wielder and her companion would always have something to say.

The Sewing Machine Museum, on the other hand, contains:

Approximately 600 domestic sewing machines, largely indistinguishable to the human eye (one of them has a small sign noting that it was owned by Queen Victoria's daughter).
Many vases and small china objects (eg a Charlie Chaplin figurine, who to be fair is wearing clothes which were presumably sewn at some point so perhaps it's thematically appropriate after all).
Seventy or so industrial sewing machines for different specialised purposes, labelled "zig-zag edging", "shirt sleeve inserts", "parachutes/corsets", etc.
A "History of the Sewing Machine" A4 sheet with sentences including "Most importantly, John Bachelder patented the vertical, straight reciprocating pointed needle with eye and a yielding presser foot mechanism" and "Also Sherburm Blodgett patented the revolving shuttle machine". Sherburm Blodgett!
A huge stack of April 2000 copies of the Journal of the International Sewing Machine Collectors' Society. You're allowed to take one away with you! Best metaphor: "the millennium has been and gone and the world, like the sewing machine, keeps on turning". Best slice of sewing machine history: "Not only did she look stunning as the Statue of Liberty, she was also the only contestant who combined her costume with sewing-machine interest. Remember it was Singer's French bride, the one he ran away from America with, who was reputed to be the model for the Statue of Liberty". Best typo: "At age 91, Louise Schlatter does not think twice about puking the pedal to the metal - that is, the foot pedal to her old sewing machine".

It's kind-of brilliant and I highly recommend it and am very glad we went, but it is certainly the case that—at least for people who don't know anything about sewing machines, a group which includes (for example) me and Kevan and Jo—it's incredibly dull. I have therefore been set the challenge of locating a more boring museum in London. Any suggestions?

Birds

several_bees — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 13:39:41 GMT

Today I went in search of a sleeping pelican, as sleeping pelicans are pretty much the best thing ever: great big pelican lumps, heads turned backwards and beaks buried in feathers, and then they wake up and gradually unfold, swivelling out and blinking open their glaring peevish eyes.

I didn't find a sleeping pelican, but I did find a great big waking pelican as it landed clumsily on water, and then immediately started gliding on graceful patrol as if it would never ever splash. Also, a pile of five sleeping ducklings watched over by an alert parent duck; ten black swans twisting their necks around and digging in the grass; many parrots; more ducklings; starlings in a palm tree; and forty tiny brown sparrows in the dirt, flapping it around and blending in so well that they were barely visible except for the movement of their wings.

And then I came across a few copies of this sign:

Oh, Australia, I thought: you and your alarmist warnings. I understand it, I do; I too mention the deadly spiders and don't dwell on the fact that it's twenty years since they successfully killed anyone. If we're going to have all these theoretically perilous creatures around, we should at least get to alarm people with them. Do not throw anything at magpie-lark; it may attack more vigorously.

And then I came across this additional sign:

Hm, I thought. There are half a dozen of the big signs up, and they still feel the need to put up extra laminated sheets? "Travel in a group"? "Walk quickly away from the area. Do not run"? And the little picture in the corner, all security-camera watch-out-for-this-dangerous-criminal. Gosh. Still, I've never been swooped, I'm sure there's no need for alarm.

Then I walked up to the Festival Centre, where a tiny magpie-lark sat on top of a work of public art. Staring. And it flapped, and I jumped in fear and put my arms over my head and ducked.

No, it didn't attack me. Of course it didn't attack me. It was probably a baby itself rather than a protective parent, and even if not, it was clearly nowhere near a nest; you'd have to be a really dedicated magpie-lark to raise your young on the peak of an Otto Hajek environmental sculpture. The point of this story, such as it is, isn't that I was swooped at: it's that I feared, for a moment, that I would be, and then five seconds later I felt very sad and foreign and like I'd been away from Adelaide far too long and would never really get the hang of it again.

Fortunately, ten minutes later I saw a UK-style pigeon and was confused by how weird it looked without a proper Australian spike on its head. So that was okay.

Adelaide, still

several_bees — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 11:14:11 GMT

More things about Adelaide that I'd forgotten:

Hard rubbish week - the special week when garbage trucks will pick up sofas and bookshelves and tree-branches and broken-spring folding beds and what-have-you. Within a few minutes walk of where I am now, I could pick up an artist's palette on wheels or any one of three different basketball hoops. (It's a rare piece of hard rubbish that makes it to the rubbish truck; anything halfway useable gets thrown into the back of a passing car.)

Jacaranda trees, which are astonishing: gnarled angry-looking bare trees line whole roads and then pop out thousands of purple flowers overnight, all startling and visible from the air; and then a week later the flowers fall off and the footpaths are caked with the things for two or three very bright days. For most of the rest of the year the trees just look irritable and shed big awkward seed-pods, so good timing on the visit, me.

Visible horizons.

Fruchocs.

The reason I automatically withdraw £40, £80 or £110 from ATMs rather than £50 or £100: Australian ATMs stock 20s and 50s, so it's important to withdraw an amount that guarantees you some useful 20s instead of just awkwardly-large 50s.

Things about London that never seemed quite right, and for which Adelaide provides me with the obviously correct alternative:

Tile-roofed houses are just a bit too quaint and storybook; corrugated iron is correct.

London birds twitter and sing, but birds should squawk and trill and make creaky, cross plumbing noises, and swoop more, and go skwaaark or brrrrip-brrrrip a lot.

A thing about Adelaide that I don't think I'd noticed properly:

It is really hot and dry here. And this isn't a brief aberration during summer; it's constant, lurking, even when it rains.

Which I did know, of course! South Australia is the "dryest state in the dryest continent", as small Adelaidean children are constantly reminded whenever they leave a tap on. But I didn't notice, I think, what that means about how people relate to their environment.

Everyone is surprisingly aware of the approaching weather; it doesn't hurt that the four-day forecast is pretty much accurate, instead of England's zany work of near-future speculative fiction. Meetings are planned around the very hot days (43 celsius, last Thursday). People with gardens, which is to say most people, seem to know what time the sun sets, because you're only allowed to water between sunset and sunrise. Sprinklers are forbidden at any time. Since I left, a new fire alert system has come into place, with three levels of fire warning: these are Severe, Extreme, and Catastrophic.

This is why, of course, I find it so alarming that in London you're allowed to buy fireworks, at will, just like that. I assume, at some level, that I am still in the Adelaide Hills and things could suddenly burn down at any time, that all schoolchildren are drilled on what to do in case of a bushfire (as far as I can remember, it's "hang blankets on windows, put buckets of water behind the blankets, hide under tables", but it's been a while, so if a bushfire comes to Battersea don't rely on me to know what to do).

Things I had forgotten about Adelaide

several_bees — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 13:07:13 GMT

Fences made, for some reason, from dry twigs.

Despite this, a heightened awareness of fire hazards.

So many front yards thick with oleanders. Hard matte leaves, pink and white flowers, and fretful warnings from parents. There was a boy who touched an oleander and didn't wash his hands before lunch, and he DIED. Oleanders are bright and hardy, which outweighs the fear of death.

Drive-through alcohol shops.

The sea, you can go in it and it's comfortable, warm patches and cool ones, take your pick. It's not "fine once you get used to it"; it's just wonderful, straight away.

There is a shopping centre called Big Crow.

There are licorice bullets. These are small, hard-chewy, bullet-shaped pieces of licorice coated in (usually dark) chocolate. Rest of the world, please sort out your failure to stock these.

People do actually say "no worries", all the time.

Sometimes it's really hot. When this happens, people with cars have to get up every couple of hours to move the car into a new patch of shade.

"Daring? Well yes, I suppose it was daring."

several_bees — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 22:32:17 GMT

This week's best thing ever: recordings of suffragettes going back to 1937.

The Holly-and-kerrypolka Society of Feminists Who Suddenly Feel Bad About Not Fighting The Patriarchy With Airships particularly recommends:

Muriel Matters, who sounds wonderfully as if she's reading out a children's book to a class of eager five-year-olds. It was quite a little airship, eighty feet long, and written in large letters on the gas bag were three words: VOTES FOR WOMEN. Below this was suspended an extremely fragile rigging.

Lilian Lenton, whose specialty was escaping when under house arrest: Well, I set fire to a lot of buildings...

Elizabeth Dean, crossly pointing out that not all suffragettes were middle-class: It didn't take me long to realise that the vote was just one thing, and not very much.

Keeping warm in winter

several_bees — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 22:49:41 GMT

From Oliver Goldsmith's letters:

A Dutch lady burns nothing about her phlegmatic admirer but his tobacco. You must know, Sir, every woman carries in her hand a stove with coals in it, which, when she sits, she snugs under her petticoats; and at this chimney dozing Strephon lights his pipe.

And from Francis Grose's Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue:

SOOTERKIN. A joke upon the Dutch women, supposing that, by their constant use of stoves, which they place under their petticoats, they breed a kind of small animal in their bodies, called a sooterkin, of the size of a mouse, which when mature slips out.

Some foot-stoves. In use in paintings (last two links from a consideration of the footstove in Vermeer's The Milkmaid).

It is coming up to the half of the year where I need to wear tights or stockings or the like, and therefore have itchy legs; perhaps voluminous petticoats and a foot-stove would be a good solution.

I know this is not technically your fault but

several_bees — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 15:57:19 GMT

Why did nobody tell me about Black Hearts in Battersea?

So okay, it's a children's book set in alternate-history London - written 1965, set around 1825. There is Battersea Castle, built for ludicrous fake-historical reasons. There's a Battersea crest ("two squirrels respecting each other, vert., and az., eating mince pies"). There is a tunnel. There are art lessons. There are people who refuse to go to the opera without company and a board-game to play. There are wolves and snow in Battersea Park, there is a climactic scene featuring a hot air balloon. This book is full of so much stuff that I like that I can't even tell whether it's any good.

It's very confusing to read, because I am pretty sure I never encountered it when small, but also that if I had then I would attribute some of my most abiding obsessions to its influence.

EDIT: APPARENTLY IN THE PREQUEL THE MAIN CHARACTER KEEPS BEES. WHAT.

EDIT 2: Also one of the sequels is apparently about a quest for rare games.

Things that should be large: another list, a thousand years later

several_bees — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 15:03:27 GMT

Squirrel tails. Bumblebee bottoms. The eyelashes of llamas.
The individual nodules of a raspberry.
Balloons, soup-bowls, swept piles of autumn leaves. Towels.
Fried breakfasts. Birthday cakes.
Clock faces. The difference between low and high tide. To-read lists. Parcels. Geese.
Cheerleader pom-poms.
Toasters, light switches, computer monitors.
Chalk. London.

Reading Jan to June 2009: non-fiction

several_bees — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 11:58:06 GMT

Brief reviews of non-fiction that I remember reading in the first half of the year.

Sei Shonagon (trans. Ivan Morris): The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon.

This is so great. It's really, really good. Certainly one of my favourite books so far this year. It's a pile of thoughts and notes written by a woman in late-900s Japan; and it's also, pretty much, a livejournal, full of personal anecdotes and lists:

THINGS THAT SHOULD BE LARGE

Priests. Fruit. Houses. Provision bags. Inksticks for inkstones.
Men's eyes: when they are too narrow, they look feminine. On the other hand, if they were as large as metal bowls, I should find them rather frightening.
Round braziers. Winter cherries. Pine trees. The petals of yellow roses.
Horses as well as oxen should be large.

("Rolled dyeing, uneven shading, and all other forms of dappled dying. #thingsoneisinahurrytoseeorhear")

TH White: The Age of Scandal.

Gahhhh. This is a gossipy collection of discursive essays on the late eighteenth century, and there's a lot of interesting anecdotes and fragments: snail tea! A man who does his makeup in the morning by walking through clouds of powder in four different colours, puffed into the air in four different rooms! Hot air balloon duels!

At the same time, though, White is constantly going on about how dreadful it is that class barriers are breaking down and England is now (as of 1950) DOOMED and blah blah blah. He opens the book with a story about how he went to have dinner with a couple of masters of colleges in Cambridge, and they both had to help with the washing up, which he holds out as evidence that England as a worthwhile nation has come to an end.

So, yes. Depends how tolerant and/or obnoxiously classist you are. I think I would have had real trouble reading this if I were English, but as it is I felt dissociated enough from it that I could mostly look at him as quaint and peculiar rather than infuriating.

(I'm not sure why I find it so much more annoying than Sei Shonagon, who is extremely obsessed by rank. Perhaps just that she is more distant from me in time and space; perhaps that she is acting in concert with her times rather than holding her opinions despite the world's disagreement.)

Simon Singh: The Code Book.

A popular history of codes. Also a source for my story on quantum baking. Singh is a personable writer and the subject is interesting and seems well-covered (not that I'd know).

Simon Barnes: The Meaning of Sport

I am not very interested in sport, which seems a flaw, given that one of the problems that comes up repeatedly in pervasive game design is "how do you make a game lots of people will want to watch? Is that even a good idea?", and sport has, y'know, solved that one pretty comprehensively.

This collection of very short essays about Barnes and his experiences at many different sporting events does not satisfactorily explain the meaning of sport, nor does it really try to. But it was interesting as a collection of moments of "here are some of the sorts of things that people who like sport find appealing about it".

David Foster Wallace: A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again

I don't know, I really like collections of essays! And I feel I ought to enjoy these: lots of tangents, eclectic subjects, ostentatious cleverness. But, no.

Why not? Well, at one point, Wallace reviews a book and complains that it's too obviously a rejigged thesis: it sets out its argument and then supports it. He finds this dull. And that's, perhaps, the crux of why I don't get along with his writing: I like arguments that tell me what they're doing, I like clear structure.

I also like people who are pleased and excited about things, or angry about them, more than I like arms-length detached-irony examination. But I guess his handling of long sentences is virtuosic or whatever.

Iona and Peter Opie: Children's Games in Street and Playground.

This is fantastic - a compendium of street games as collected by way of interviews with thousands of British schoolchildren in the 50s and 60s. Recently reissued. Brilliant detached-anthropologist tone when reporting small schoolboys talking about their favourite knife-flipping game ("good for recess or other short breaks"). Iona Opie is still around and, as of 2005, living in a house in Hampshire with 50 hens.

Keith Johnstone: Impro.

This is a weird, weird book. Some genuinely useful stuff (about, in particular, how it gets more difficult to accomplish things as soon as you're expecting to do them cleverly, and ways to break out of that); and some very peculiar sections about masks and teaching masks (possibly Masks?) to speak English and how to avoid making them violent.

Since we solved "why are YA books better?" on Tuesday, today's question is: what books about sport should I read? Non-fiction and fiction are both fine, and it is very safe to assume that whatever you might mention, I will not have read it, unless perhaps the sport takes place in a futuristic dystopia where the only way out of the underclass is to play... FOR YOUR LIFE. I currently have C.L.R. James, Beyond a Boundary on my to-read list, so maybe steering away from more cricket?

Books to halfway through the year: YA

several_bees — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 14:40:11 GMT

Every six months or so, I realise that hey, reading is great!, and I decide to keep track of books as I finish them. Last time it happened was January this year, which of course means I posted one entry about it and am now seven months behind.

But! I've been suddenly overcome with the desire to catch up. So: today, YA I remember reading in the first six months of this year. Tomorrow, non-fiction. Thursday, adult fiction. And then, presumably, another "oops, forgot about this" post sometime between December 2009 and February 2010 - put it on your calendars now!

Ellen Kushner: The Privilege of the Sword.

This is great! In some ways it's yer classic reluctant-hero "what, a girl becoming a master swordsman? It's called swordsMAN for a reason, missy!" YA novel. But the heroine is seen more a curiosity than a hideous weird thing, which is a nice change; and the adults have actual motivations! There's also a lot more politics and gay sex than is usual.

It's sort-of a sequel to Kushner's Swordspoint, which is also great but was an appalling influence on me when I was 18 and writing a very long, very very awful fantasy-novel-without-magic, or as it's also known "historical fiction for people who don't like research", or as it's also also known "seriously the most hideously embarrassing and hilariously transparent mishmash of Diana Wynne Jones, Robin Hood, Tom Stoppard, Ellen Kushner, Christopher Isherwood and Raymond Chandler ever written, also there was a character named Dalthig, yes, really, SHUT UP OKAY".

Speaking of Diana Wynne Jones: Charmed Life, The Lives of Christopher Chant, The Merlin Conspiracy, Fire and Hemlock, Conrad's Fate.

I had read these before (except Conrad's Fate), but forgotten the details of most of them. They're excellent.

Jones's books feel to me quite a lot like Muriel Spark's, but with more children, magic and elegant dressing-gowns. As with Spark, there's a very consistent atmosphere, and no real sense of a driving plot, just some people doing stuff. Some of the people are nice and some of them aren't; and even the nice ones don't always behave well. Suddenly it stops, or there's some sort of great big ending and nobody is really sure what happened. Everyone shrugs and gets on with things.

(The other thing they feel like is the setting for a game, and a lot of them explicitly include games as plot elements.)

Philip Reeve: can't remember the name but it has MOVING CITIES that EAT OTHER CITIES.

Obviously moving cities that eat other cities are great, but I've forgotten most of this except for the inclusion of the underused name Hester.

Scott Westerfeld: Extras.

More charming adventures in THE FUTURE featuring politics and hoverboards and science to change people's BRAINS and so on. Then more ADVENTURE and HOVERBOARDS just for good luck.

Anyway, the question is, why are YA books better than books for adults? I don't mean that they're always better, or that the best novels in the world are all YA, or even that most of my own favourite novels are YA. I suppose I mean, approximately, that I would much rather be trapped in a room for a week with 100 random YA novels than with 100 random novels for adults; or that I'm more likely to keep reading them late into the night and through travel-sickness on the bus.

Is it that they're easier to read and I'm lazy? Both these things are undoubtedly true. Is it that, outside the adult section, crime and science fiction and history and literary fiction and all the other genres sit next to each other, and writers (and individual works) are more likely to jump between them? Is it that they're shorter, the extraneous sentences and boring characters excised? Do they just involve more adventures and games and all those things that are fun?

How I spent my weekend

several_bees — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 11:37:39 GMT

How I spent my weekend (photo by digitaldust):

Proper summary to follow in due course.

Hide&Seek Weekender next, er, weekend. Free! Games! London! Delight!

several_bees — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 11:52:11 GMT

So most of you have probably heard me go on about the Sandpit, which I curate. It's a monthly night for games-and-other-random-stuff. There's running around games, and games from theatre companies, and games of treachery and betrayal, and games where people wear bouncy head-boppers and pretend to be bees, and games where people make enormous pictures, and all sorts really.

From 31 July to 2 August we're holding the Hide&Seek Weekender at the Southbank Centre. It's going to be something like an ENORMOUS SANDPIT running all weekend long, made out of the best games of the last year (plus a few we've dragged in from elsewhere). There will be

400 badges
100 potatoes
50 soft toys
35 games
12 giant wooden spirographs
8 lasers
6 oddly-shaped parcels
5 huge inflatable game pieces
3 enormous floor-to-ceiling screens
2 walkie-talkies
1 bingo-ball contraption
1 grand piano
And more! Obviously; it'd be a pretty weird event if it was constructed entirely from things on this list

So, you should come! It's at the Southbank Centre, it's all free, and it should be lovely, and lots of fun. More details of individual games are available on the programme.

This is what it looked like last year:

The stag is captured.

Smugglers try to get a blackboard past the border guards into the Hayward Gallery.

Rival swarms of bees hunt for pollen.

People build a collaborative, and variably reliable, map of London.

People play Werewolf. Somehow, people always play Werewolf.

Cards are traded from hand to hand.

Grandmother's footsteps are followed.

Yes, this is my actual job. I'm not sure how it happened either. It's pretty great!

WARNING Mango et al: contains positive sentiments about summer

several_bees — Sat, 11 Jul 2009 20:47:10 GMT

Summer: not as scary as I thought!

In other news, you know what's pretty great? Summer!

This is surprising to me! Summer is supposed to be a nightmare: three months of misery and rashes and sunburn, of staying up till six in the morning in order to get to the fruit and veg shop before it's too hot to breathe outside, of giving up on baking and possibly eating in favour of lying around looking pathetic and crying out for ice-cubes. But it turns out, the English climate differs significantly from the Australian climate! This shouldn't surprise me, especially as it's part of why I moved, but it's taken a while to really sink in.

This is my third year in London, and for the first two I never quite trusted summer: sure, it seemed pleasant enough, but here I was in a country without air conditioning, and who could tell when the weather might turn on me? But three summers in, and following a "heat wave" that would be known in Adelaide as "oh, thank goodness, the heat wave's over", I think I'm ready to accept that actually, I find summer here pretty enjoyable.

It's a cultivated enjoyment - I have to maintain it through the careful application of fans, summer dresses, ice-cream, water-pistols, excessive raspberries, time for lounging around in the garden, and time for wandering around at night and sitting on famous London landmarks while reading books intended for 12-year-olds. But these are sacrifices I'm willing to make.

Festivals: might they, too, be less terrifying than I think?

I am still, however, very nervous about that hallmark of an English summer, the "festival". Not the sort of festival where you go to a big mixed arts venue made out of concrete, wander along a riverbank or lakeside terrace, drink some slightly overpriced coffee, and wonder whether to go for the production of A Doll's House on motorbikes, Edward II on fire, or Coppélia on stilts. The other sort, where you go and stay in a tent in a field.

I am going to one of these, specifically Latitude, as part of my work with Hide&Seek, in order to run some games there. I'm quite scared by this prospect, because it's in a TENT, in a FIELD, for DAYS, and apparently it's going to be either muddy outside or hot in the tent (it's not clear whether this means England hot or real hot). Also I don't usually like live music, and there is no way to get back early, and it turns out there's a huge list of things I need (mattress of some description! Wellington boots! Long socks! Apparently you're supposed to take special toilet paper? I'm not sure in what way its specialness manifests).

But if summer can be nice, approached in the correct and slightly careful manner, maybe festivals can be too?

So, er, is anyone else going? If you are, you should come and play our games, or at least reassure me that it will all be very pleasant and that you will come and say hello to me! I'm told I will probably enjoy it. At the very least, I enjoy its website's dual conviction that I shouldn't bring ANYTHING MADE OF GLASS AT ALL and that it is VERY IMPORTANT TO BRING A BOTTLE OPENER.

Probably don't actually jump in!

several_bees — Sat, 11 Jul 2009 19:28:19 GMT

Hey, just in case anyone's desperate for updates on movies starring members of the High School Musical cast which are not themselves part of the HSM world: don't bother with Jump In!.

It's kinda okay! And the premise, at least, is charming. High School Musical, you may remember from my previous repeated posts on the subject, features a boy whose father, a basketball coach and ex-champion, desperately wants his son to follow in his footsteps. His son, however, is torn: he loves basketball, but he also wants... to SIIIIIING.

Jump In! features a boy whose father, a boxing coach and ex-champion, desperately wants his son to follow in his footsteps. His son, however, is torn: he loves boxing, but he also wants... to jump rope competitively for a double-dutch team.

(Clearly this bespeaks a desperate attempt to keep remaking the same movie with as few changes as possible ("lead male has aw~~ful~~esome hair"), which is great because it will, as joranj helped me deduce, inevitably lead to a movie starring Hat Guy from HSM, whose father, a spear-hunting coach and ex-champion, desperately wants his son to follow in his footsteps. His son, however, is torn: he loves spear-hunting, but he also wants to join his next-door-neighour's synchronised swimming team. There will be a huge swimming spears-versus-sparkles water-dance number.)

Anyway, Jump In!. Jump In!, it turns out, isn't very good, though it does deliver on its implicit promise of lengthy jump-rope dance sequences, which are mostly pretty great, except for this one move that they keep doing despite the fact that it looks very very clearly like wheelbarrow-position jump-rope sex. To be fair there are probably only so many ways for two people to jump up and down repeatedly in close contact with each other that don't involve looking a bit inappropriate for the playground.

So this newfangled "telephone" thing

several_bees — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 11:15:21 GMT

Hey! It turns out my telephone is actually capable of making phone calls to numbers that aren't in its directory! It has taken me two and a half years to realise this: apparently it involves pressing the little button with a picture of a telephone on it. Thanks, random person who borrowed my phone and explained this to me!

The fact that I've only just realised this means I have a directory filled with two and a half years' worth of mysterious numbers belonging to people named, among the five Alexes, three Amandas and three Matthews:
6 [no idea who this is; I don't think I know any cylons, but then, I suppose the point about cylons is that I wouldn't]
Aha [no idea; I do not think I know any Norwegian pop bands]
captain [no idea]
copper [no idea]
curry! [actually I'm pretty sure this one is the local curry takeaway]
espiougog [I guess this is a predictive text malfunction?]
fictional [no idea]
ryman
ryman2
rymans [these are, I now recall, all the result of a long, boring, stationery-hunting day]
sky [no idea]
spy [no idea; I don't think I know any spies, but then, I suppose the point about spies is much the same as the point about cylons above]
swarm [no idea; I am pretty sure I do not know any swarms]

Brighton! It's pretty great

several_bees — Sun, 10 May 2009 09:54:00 GMT

REASONS I SHOULD MOVE TO BRIGHTON

1. The sea
2. It is quite a lot cheaper than London
3. There are those bungee trampoline things, which I've never tried but they look pretty great
4. The stone beaches are still, after many visits, funny to me
5. Its scones seem generally better than London scones
6. Half-price entry for residents to museum exhibitions!
7. The turquoise metalwork near the sea goes really well with my spring coat
8. It remains willing at all times to wallow unapologetically in Brighton stereotypes, thus:

REASONS I SHOULDN'T MOVE TO BRIGHTON

1. Most of my friends are in London
2. As is my lovely job
3. I would replace my "overcome by desire to move to Brighton every time I visit" problem with a new but strangely familiar "overcome by desire to move to London every time I visit" problem