Mock Duck

New Blog

I've been messing around with a new blog. For a sneak preview go here. I still have a lot to do to it and need to add my links etc but just to warn that I may start updating the new one rather than this one from now on if you all want to start checking out that one instead.

Let me know what you think! (Preferably on the new one.)

The Long and the Short of it: part two

Remember my two-sided umbrella invention - to enable a tall person and a short person to share an umbrella in the rain?

Well I've come up with another one.

The Geek is a good foot taller than me. (With the unfortunate effect that most photos of us together make him look like some kind of child abuser, with me barely managing to peek over the bottom of the frame.)

The umbrella situation is the least of our problems.

I always like to sleep with a nice warm body and cold head and feet - preferably poking out the end. Whereas the Geek likes warm feet. Any duvet that covers the whole of him - drowns me, and any duvet I'm happy with leaves him with a length of freezing foot and ankle. Another unrelated problem is that he is just TOTALLY UNREASONABLE and in the night will regularly turn over, taking the entire duvet with him, somehow managing to wedge it under thoroughly under his slumbering body as he does so like some massive vegan sausage roll.

On Dragon's Den a couple presented an idea to cure this problem: a sheet with a line down the middle. The dragons were not impressed and i have to admit, neither was I. Who is going to take any notice of that unless it works like an electric fence - issuing a nasty shock to anyone who dares to stray as much as a toe over onto the wrong side...(not such a bad idea, now I think about it.)

Behold my latest invention: the tall person/short person duvet.

Picture it now. A duvet perfectly designed for...oh someone like me. But with velcro detachable foot warmers at the end for...oh someone like him. Like oven gloves. Or a tea cosy.

Think about it - the market potential must be massive! And the foot-warmers (being detachable) could generate all the profit. They could become fashion items - like handbags and shoes - constantly turning over different designs and new materials. You could have different ones for every day of the week. StarWars footwarmers. Footwarmers in the shape of David Beckham - or Pamela Anderson. Waterproof footwarmers. Footwarmers with hot water bottle attachments. The sky's the limit.

But this doesn't solve the other problem, I hear you cry. Aha -but i have an idea for this also.

As well as the velcro-detachable footwarmers, my specially-designed duvet would have two holes in it - right in the middle, one at the top, one at the bottom, through which would be driven two specially designed stakes.

No-one's sausage-rolling with my duvet. Oh no.

I'm Enjoying...

Watching: The Flight of the Concordes, US presidential debates

The former is the only thing I have ever booked to see in the Edinburgh Fringe and promptly lost the tickets for so I've never seen them live. If anyone hasn't seen it yet please look it out - it's just genius understated stuff about a crap New Zealand band (with songs) plus their painfully upbeat manager.

US Presidential debates. Bizarrely compelling ritual. And great entertainment to boot. What can I say? Obama comes across very impressively. And I've learned that John McCain's a "maverick". Maverick. Maverick. Maverick. And just in case you didn't get that the first time - maver-

Reading: The Wisdom of Whores by Elizabeth Pisani

Ok, this sounds factual miserable and dry. It is anything but (well obviously there are depressing parts but this is still not a miserable read). It has had me riveted for the past couple of weeks. I have taken it on planes and to hotels...I will write more about this for VL at some point but that's my "fun reading " of the moment.

Doing: Playing badminton.

I haven't done this since I was a kid but I've started to go with the Geek's work colleagues. Of course playing against a load of geeks is quite motivating. I immediately feel pumped to the gills with testosterone and start high-fiving and "yeahing" all over the place and generally embarrassing myself. But it's just as fun as it used to be. I wonder why I forget about things I enjoyed as a kid.

Just three things from me to get us started (if anyone is still there after my extended hiatus recently).

What are you enjoying at the moment? (And no penguins or punching please - let's leave that for another day.)

Just to remind...

...I'm still alive.

I can't believe how hectic the last few weeks have been. And they continue hectic - I've been working all day, out for a punching session in the park (I must write about this sometime - it's the best thing) and then back to do more work.

One of the other reasons for my appalling neglect of Mock Duck is that Typepad seems to have gone into some weird comatose state when it takes hours to load a compose page. It's been driving me nuts. It has tried to mediate the annoyance of this with lots of friendly messages along the lines of "Finding Typepad a bit slow? Press this button" - which has precisely no effect whatsoever.

So, What do I have to tell you? Not a lot. SM4A is on Amazon, which I had no idea about until a friend said "oh go on, look, look" and I did the expected "oh no, I couldn't" and "I'm sure it won't be" etc. Anyhow I went into Amazon and typed it in and up it appeared - sandwiched in between various books with bottoms and bondage on the front.  Those of a nervous disposition look away now. You'll have to scroll down a bit. I can't help thinking it looks like a small kid in the playground who has inadvertently strayed into uber-trendy "bad kid" drug-taking glue-sniffing brigade. Quite sweet really.

More bizarrely still is that a couple of very lovely friends have preordered it which is a very  funny thought when, for this past week, the only physical form it has taken is as a sea of papers strewn about my room. It is a strange thought that people I know have bought it already when, in a sense, it doesn't yet exist. Well, of course it does, I know that. And I suppose the sea of papers isn't "it" as such. But- you know. Odd.

I also played badminton with a lot of lovely computer programmers from The Geek's office. Which ended up with me punching the air, high-fivesing and doing floor dives of triumph (or alternatively, throwing racket, having tantrums and storming out on my partners) whilst the very-much-better-behaved menfolk all watched on politely. Which is not really how it should be. As a good feminist I'm always complaining about the over-competitiveness of blokes. I really am a social embarrassment.

Should I talk about the weather? No, I think I shouldn't.

Reading Char's latest post on Musings, I realise my technology is shit. I've no idea how to trace anyone looking at the site, let alone work out how many times a day they are looking at it. I certainly wouldn't complain if anyone wanted to look at Mockduck 4 times a day - hey, you have my blessing! Although I've a horrible feeling it would turn out to be my mum.

What happened to the summer, eh?

Edinburgh Fringe: First Blood

Well it's here.

The Edinburgh Fringe.

The Edinburgh Festival, the book festival, the politics festival are round the corner.

The Jazz Festival already been and gone.

But through it all - the Fringe. Massive, unprogrammed. Thousands of shows. A monster. It's back.

"Are we going to see anything in the Fringe?" the Geek asked for the umpteenth time, causing me to fling a copy of the Fringe programme at his head. (Pretty dangerous in fact as it is something resembling a telephone directory these days.)

"You choose! I can't choose! I can't bear it. Can't BEAR it! How are you suppose to tell? Every time I find something it's booked up. There's people crawling EVERYWHERE. I'll catch a cold. I'll get claustrophobia. You sort it out!"

I used to be a great fan of the Fringe. It was massive and monstrous but you could always find a gem or two in amongst the mess, and - crucially - it was cheap. Not any more. Now it is quite an undertaking to commit to a show - many upwards of £8. You feel less inclined to just try something out when it is so dear and more cheated and angry when it turns out to be rubbish.

Plus, I've seen so much of it all before. University sketch shows where everyone thinks it's terribly funny to act a bit camp. Endless one-man or one-woman shows where the one man or woman involves puts on hundreds of funny voices and plays a variety of "hilarious" characters without much plot or structure. Off the wall theatre shows, endless versions of the classics done by school groups and community groups and...well just lots of groups really.

"The thing is," I said to the Geek. "I want to see something different. But not the usual kind of different."

(The usual kind of different being the sort of show called things like, "I Stalked Roger Moore" or "The Extremely Hilarious and Edifying Story of a Victorian Explorer and his donkey called Bottom")

"I want nothing with innuendo in the title (that rules out about 80% at a stroke, no physical theatre, no impoverished classics or community group Shakespeares, no sketch-shows, no dance, no stand-up - unless we know its going to be very very good - no one man shows, no famous actors doing snippets of roles they've played before,  no wannabes looking for their own tv show, no angsty young people trying to do something "muscular" and "powerful" (which usually boils down to lots of shouting)...In fact, let's play it safe - let's have no actors at all...But no puppets," I add hastily. "I'm just not in the mood."

"Hmm," said the Geek, uncertainly. "How about this?"

So, here we have it. The ultimate different experience. No actors, no play, no puppets.

Wheels of Life from Sharmanka Travelling Circus at The Theatre Workshop in Edinburgh is half an hour long and not too expensive. We had no idea what to expect as we were handed binoculars at the door.

We saw a scene something like this:

These are "kinemats" or mechanical sculptural machines with cogs and wheels and little figures and strange flying contraptions and humanoid-looking robot-type sculptures and beautiful constructions from singer sewing machines and other devices, covered in animal figures - some funny, some friendly, some grotesque - and people and death figures and sex figures and birds and and and...

It is hard to describe how it works. The audience sits there and the lights come on - highlighting a lone figure on a kinemat - often just a tiny detail. Giving a sense of loneliness and isolation. Then the machine start moving - turning the wheels, ringing bells, twisting around. You watch through your binoculars - a weird and powerful idea in itself - like a voyeur. It makes the experience all the more powerful, detailed and - even though shared - private. Then another light will go on and you will suddenly see the dark underbelly of the scene - a death figure, a frightening creature with a flickering tongue. Music is used to incredible effect - folk music and Bach and jazz - making you think of the history of the twentieth century and all it saw. You think of Hieronymus Bosch. You think of the darkness of fairytales, the dark side of childhood, but you also see the beauty of existence and the fun and the humour. It is a show that is a piece of art because it does what art should do: capture the sense of the complexity, the tragedy and the absurdity of human beings and human society: their loneliness, their need of others, the civilised side, the animal side, their capacity for joy, their capacity for horror. Life and death.

All in all it is a deeply moving show.

 I contacted them over the weekend and asked if I could post some pictures, which make give some sense - though not really - of what I am talking about. They said I could, although I should say that these images are have full copyright reserved. More can be seen on Flickr here. And there is more about the fascinating history of the creator of the "kinemats", Eduard Bersudsky, the creation of the Millenium Clock in Edinburgh and the history of the company, which was founded in St Petersburg, on their website.

If anyone ever has a chance to see this, do go. It is like nothing else.

Rain, covers for girls and books for boys

Sorry, I've been monumentally lazy and haven't posted for ages. So much has been raging on the net too - debate about whether thrillers should be included on the Booker list, people up in arms about book covers - whether "chicklit" style covers are being used to misrepresent more "serious" texts...etc.

I was thinking about writing about a couple of those issues but realised, in the fuggy humid heat of the tropical torrential weather we have (most unusually) been experiencing here in Edinburgh, that I have not the energy for all of that. (Apparently there was a partial eclipse this morning but I would never have been able to tell - I was too busy constructing my arc and gathering up my neighbours pets - two-by-two.)

I might as well direct you to Musings from a Muddy Island, which has rather more to say about the covers question than I do. The guardian blogs piece she talks about - and moreover the comments on the Guardian blog - really make for quite interesting and revealing reading. I suppose I do start wondering, with this whole debate, whether it's really a case of misrepresenting "serious" books by "chicklit" covers or whether - for me - it is just a general despair that everything for women has to be blooming pink these days. I mean, when did that start? I'm sure it's a recent phenomenon. Comedy for women, books for women -  that is all excellent in my view. But why must absolutely everything - clothes, books, handbags, folders, stickers - you name it - be so very pink?

(And yes, before anyone points it out, I am aware that my own cover appears to have a strip of pink across the bottom. But it does also have a gimp mask and a penguin so I think that makes up for it. ;)

But the chicklit cover issue aside, there are other cover trends I keep noticing - like the tendency of most photos of the people on covers to look like models. When I looked in a bookshop recently there were a host of covers of bare women's legs on all manner of books.  It's not that any of them aren't good covers in terms of composition or image or anything. It's just that the modelliness of them makes them not look like real people/characters somehow.

Maybe it says more about society's relationship with a nice pair of pins than anything else.

I also saw a book called "What Rhymes with Bastard?" with a picture of a woman with mad green hair on the front. That appealed.

It seems to me that in the cover debate bloggers concentrate more on the covers they don't like rather than the ones they do. Musings seems to be suggesting plain - but I like images. So I shall list a few covers I have liked recently - just the first that come to mind for me. The Elegance of the Hedgehog is a lovely looking book with a nice cover. Although the animal-lover in me would have loved a reference to a hedgehog on it somewhere...although that could have had the danger of turning twee I suppose.  But a nice-looking book. The Needle in the Blood is a fine-looking thing too, in my opinion and Space Captain Smith certainly grabbed my attention with the kind of ultra-detailed illustrated cover that you so rarely see nowadays. Feather Man is also a fine-looking book. Gods Behaving Badly is attractive too. In a more generalised way, I think I quite like retro. Except that probably sounds too much like I know what I'm talking about. So I better shut up quickly. I also liked the old-fashioned thing of finding an old painting to put on the front of classics. Of course I like paintings a lot so maybe that is why, but portraits, for example, can also fit so well with the time and period of the book and makes you better able to imagine the look and dress of the characters...but this is probably very old-fashioned now.

Are there any covers you are particularly drawn to? Is there a common look/theme? Can you tell what it is you like about them/what you associate with them?

Anyway, vague ramblings aside, and on a more serious note, I did want to flag up a really excellent interview with Keith Gray who wrote a book called "The Ostrich Boys". It seems to manage to cover most of the issues of the moment related to boys and young men and it is a very interesting piece. Here's a couple of quotes that particularly struck me:

I believe these are precarious years of adjustment for young men, because plenty seem to be struggling to figure out exactly what being a “man” entails these days.  The iconic male is so different to what he used to be.  No more Jimmy Stewarts, John Waynes or Clint Eastwoods.  But where was the fun in acting so repressed?  Then again, do we really all want to be metro-sexual Beckhams?  Do we really want to be grubby, druggy Pete Dohertys?  Maybe we’ll retreat into ourselves and live vicarious lives inside our computers.

And

...suicide is such an important issue, and an issue that touches so many people.  Just looking at the stats from up here in Scotland is shocking:  Two suicides a day; two out of three of those are male; it’s the leading killer of young men between the ages of 16 and 35.  I’m amazed more people aren’t writing about it.

Eve, who has been consistently covering more boy-related young adult/teen (sorry if I've got that wrong but I've never been quite sure of the difference) has run many interesting reviews lately on everything from knife crime ("The Knife That Killed Me" by Anthony McGowan) to suicide and lack of expression ("The Ostrich Boys") and I realise this is a whole area of books I know little about and I have become quite curious about them. I might have to investigate further.

*Note, I actually wrote this on Friday in case anyone is wondering about my mistimed eclipse.

Meme and none but meme

Charlotte the Duckling (the other one) meme-ed me. If there is such a verb. But I decided to do something a bit different as the meme was a bit boring all about past jobs and whatnot. Which is likely to send anyone reading mine into a snooze.

So. I am going to copy one of Char's other posts that I enjoyed instead. One that said something like "Things I've Learnt Over the Past Year." Followed by lots of deep and meaningful. So here goes (I'll try and base it on hers):

Things I've learnt over the past year

Char says: Acceptance is the key to peace of mind.
I say: First I thought Peace of Mind is the key to Acceptance. Or perhaps Acceptance of Minds is the key to Peace. Or the Acceptance of Peace is the key to having a Mind.

But I think for me its more like: Peace of Mind comes from Not Losing my Keys. But that's just never going to happen.

Char says: The only thing you can change is yourself.
I say: The only thing you can't change is your parents.

Char says: Payday money is better spent on new clothes than a haircut.
I say: Drink! Drink! Girls! Feck!

Char says: Love isn't all you need.
I say: No, the geek wouldn't survive without his vegetarian sandals...

Char says: You can adapt to anything if you really have to.
I say: Though death would come as something of a disappointment.

Char says: Contentment comes from living in the present.
I say: Contentment comes from kite-flying. And eating. And sleeping. And dogs. Is that the same thing? Maybe it is.

Char says: Facebook can get you into trouble at work.
I say: People you hardly remember turn up and throw livestock at you. Why is that fun?

Char says: It's ridiculously easy to lose weight if you eat nothing but vegetables for dinner.
I say: Not true. And I should know - I live with a vegan. Ridiculous amounts of exercise help though.

Char says: I have the most supportive family ever.
I say: Char has the most supportive family ever. (But mine make up for it by demonstrating their love with lots of stimulating shouting, blame, and slagging off.)

Char: There's absolutely no point in comparing yourself to anyone else.
I say: But it's possibly better than comparing yourself to yourself. That way obsessive compulsion lies...

Char says: It's ok to be alone.
I say: Unless you're getting on a bit in which case you see no reason why your offspring don't want to spend all their time with you, doing exactly what you want to do, go on holiday with you, eat exactly what you want to eat, be equally as fascinated by your choice of breathable waterproof walking wear or the exact non-colour of your artificially-aged rustic kitchen tiles...I jest! I jest! I take it back! Honest.

:)

A Good Day

5 Things to Cheer Me Up

I'm having a bad day with various things going wrong and not feeling too well.

Decided I really need to cheer myself up and if anyone wants to join in that would be nice. Add five things that cheer you up.

Things that Cheer Me Up

1. Dogs racing for balls. Everything about them look so happy, I can't help but be cheered.

2. Laughing like a drain with various (very funny) friends. Although last time my friend from Galway came to visit she made me laugh so much we both lost our voices and had to take some deliberate time-out to recover.

3. The Blues Brothers. (In fact, I shall listen to it now.)

4. Sunshine. I think this is a common one for everyone in Edinburgh. I get the winter blues quite badly.

5. The Strike - brilliant comic strip film I watched the other night. A cautionary tale for all budding film-writers everywhere.

Is it working? (Takes pulse). A bit. I might try it again in a minute...

Just to explain

Just to explain about the article underneath. It was originally posted in The Book Bar - Jess Ruston's literary blog quite a while ago. But, sadly, The Book Bar is no more (hopefully to be replaced with something just as interesting) which means me links don't work! So I thought I'd repost it here and then the link at the side could remain.

Of course - it's totally old news so I don't expect you lot to actually read it.

Please feel free to ignore and I'll come up with some genuine new posts soon.