Sunday Night Music Club

I am not a penguin

So I coped (although I use that term loosely) perfectly well with a trip to Hamleys yesterday. For those whose knowledge of central London toy shops is limited, Hamleys is a  big......well, you're probably a step ahead of me already.

It's MASSIVE.  And full of bouncy, hyperactive employees who blow bubbles on you and throw boomerangs around your head and jump out from behind shelves and try and scare you with lion puppets.  Which is enormously exciting and entertaining if you're a small child; slightly unnerving if you are an adult (those puppets are more realistic than you might think.) It's all harmless fun though, and it's nice to see that the Health and Safety scaremongers haven't stepped in with cries of "careful, someone will lose an eye!" or "what if  little Sally is allergic to bubbles?" or similar. Yet.

What *has* caused more than a bit of a fuss at Hamleys recently is the company's decision to bring  live animals into the store.  There were some reindeer on display earlier in the week - actual , live, reindeer - and they would have been joined by some penguins making a one-off special appearance next Monday. 

To cut a long story short, a wildlife photographer heard about the reindeer and was outraged; he contacted an experienced social media campaigner who used a combination of twitter and facebook to encourage thousands of people to put pressure on the Hamleys management.  As a result the penguin event has been cancelled, and the reindeer have been removed.

I'm not sure how I feel about this, to be honest.  Something - and I can't quite put my finger on what it is - makes me feel slightly uncomfortable.  It's not about the penguins (or the reindeer); I entirely agree that Hamleys is hardly the best environment for them.  It's more about the speed and force with which everything happened.

There's a difference between challenging a company's behaviour and gathering together a gang of people to make them do something about it.  I don't want to use the term "bullying", but.......  The whole chain of events is a good illustration of the power of social media.  Here that power was used for good, but (and it feels incredibly naff to be quoting Spiderman at this point) the phrase with great power comes great responsibility keeps running through my head.  There's a fine line between awareness raising and rabble-rousing.

 I can't emhasise enough, I'm not suggesting that the latter is what happened here.  Although there was some fairly emotive language being used in tweets and blog posts during the campaign, the more I read, particularly posts like this one, the more confident I feel that the people heading up the campaign were, in fact, acting extremely responsibly; their actions seem for the most part to be well-considered and very reasonable.  But there's a tiny part of me which can't help think but what if they hadn't been?  That's the bit which worries me a little, I suppose.

Anyway. I bet you'd quite like to see some penguins now.  Here is a whole parcel of them  courtesty of the Edinburgh Zoo penguin-cam:

You can go here to see them in realtime.  Don't expect to get much work done for the rest of the day if you click that link.

These aren't just any old penguins, by the way.  One of them, an Emperor penguin called Nils Olav, has been knighted.  Yes, KNIGHTED.  From, er, Wikipedia:

 Nils was visited by the Norwegian King's Guard on the 15 August 2008 and awarded a knighthood. The honour was approved by the king of Norway, King Harald V.  During the ceremony a crowd of several hundred people joined the 130 guardsmen at the zoo to hear a citation from King Harald the Fifth of Norway read out, which described Nils as a penguin "in every way qualified to receive the honour and dignity of knighthood"

He's the one who looks like this:

Rosa Parks

It's Rosa Parks day.  On December 1st, 1955 she refused to give up her seat on the bus, earning a place in history books as a pioneer of the US civil rights movement in the process.

The picture on the right is a diagram of the bus showing where she sat.  Under the system of segregation which was in place on Montgomery buses at the time white people sat in the front seats and then filled rows towards the back.  Black people filled the bus from the back seats forwards, often having to pay the driver and then walk around to the back of the bus to use a separate door.  Once the bus was full, the front row of black people were expected to stand up for any new white customers who boarded.  Rosa Parks refused, so the bus-driver had her arrested.

Sometimes drivers would take money from black customers and then drive away before they had time to walk around to the back of the bus to board. This had happened to Rosa Parks several years earlier.  The bus-driver who left her standing in the rain that day? Same guy.

From her autobiography:

People always say that I didn't give up my seat because I was tired, but that isn't true. I was not tired physically, or no more tired than I usually was at the end of a working day. I was not old, although some people have an image of me as being old then. I was forty-two. No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in.

History like you've never seen it

For reasons which are no longer important, I recently found myself trying to remember whether St Thomas Aquinas was for or against free will.
It got me thinking:  If only someone could sum up the key points of St Thomas Aquinas's world view and set them to some sort of music....like, oh, I don't know, an iconic 80s pop classic, maybe.  

Well, OK, it's not exactly what I ended up thinking.  But even so, just imagine my joy when I found this early today:   





The good news is, that there is a whole channel on of these clips on YouTube.  Are you a  bit rusty on the French Revolution?  Here's some Lady Gaga.  Or maybe you need to know how to make an Egyptian mummy, in which case Green Day can help you out.

And look! Look! They have even done THE CANTERBURY TALES!!



It is a brilliant idea.  I am slowly making my way through all 47 of them, and am particularly looking forward to the story of Beowulf to the tune of 99 Luftballoons.  The Justin Timberlake / Sexyback take on William the Conqueror, also.

They can only read the thoughts you put down, carefully and with great love, on the page

IT'S OVER.  IT'S FINALLY OVER. 

I finished NaNoWriMo today.  By finished, I mean I wrote my 50,000th word, then wrote a few more to take me to the end of the scene I was in the middle of, then closed the document I've been working on all month with a massive sigh of relief.

It's been hard this year - really hard. And there is still plenty of work to be done. The story is nowhere near finished (except in my head) and it's full of holes where I skipped past bits which were too difficult or boring or scary to write. The parts I *did* write are full of spelling mistakes, cliches, strings of words which make no sense at all and clunky, cringe-inducing dialogue.  I'm going to have to do some serious editing before I'm happy to start showing it to people, and can't even begin to imagine how may re-writes it will take to turn what I have so far into something which could possibly be described as a novel.   I imagine very few of the 50,193 words I wrote this month will eventually make the final cut, but at least they're written down.  Which means, in NaNoWriMo terms, I have FINISHED.

As much as I love NaNoWriMo, I have to admit I'm glad it's over. Sacrificing quality for quantity has served a purpose this month, but I can't wait to start working at a slower pace again, and on a smaller scale.  Tinkering with stories - changing things, trying new ideas out, crafting and polishing sentences until they are just right - is one of my favourite parts of the  process.  It's sort of like a writer's version of pottering about in the garden shed, I suppose.  I've missed it.  I'm looking forward to mucking about with words again, and trying to get them right, safe in the knowledge that I can delete phrases and sentences - whole paragraphs even! - without having to worry about the detrimental effect on my word count. 

It will be nice to actually *like* something I've written again, too.  It has been a while.  I hate the fact that the few blog posts I have mananged to squeeze out in November have been rushed and error-filled and poorly constructed; my excuse is I've been wanting to get back to my NaNoWriMo story which is, of course, also rushed and error-filled and poorly constructed. (Is that irony? I'm too tired to tell.)

This comes from a  NaNoWriMo pep-talk penned by writer and McSweeny's founder Dave Eggers.  He's explaining what he loves about NaNoWriMo:

Knowing there are thousands of others out there trying to do the same, who are using this ridiculous deadline as cattle-prod and shame deterrent, means goddamnit, you better do it now because you know how to write, and you have fingers, and you have this one life, and during this one life, you should put your words down, and make your voice heard, and then let others hear your voice. And the only way any of that's going to happen is if you actually do it. People can't read the thoughts in your head. They can only read the thoughts you put down, carefully and with great love, on the page. So you have to do it, goddamnit. You have to do it, and you can step back and be happy. You can step back and relax. You can step back and feel something like pride.

He's quite right, of course (goddamnit). 

 Then of course you'll have to revise it ten or twenty times, but let's not talk about that yet.

Away

I'm not yet, but I will be from tomorrow, and I'm not going to be in front of a computer between now and then.*

Back Monday; have a lovely weekend. Stay warm.


* Normally at this point I'd say "so there will be no blog action for the next few days", or words to that effect, but given that NaNoWriMo has turned my November into No-No-Blog-Mo(nth), that just feels wrong. There probably wouldn't have been much blog action any way this weekend, but at least now you know it's because I'm too busy drinking champagne and shopping at the French Christmas markets and not because I'm sitting in front of a computer screen, swearing a lot and wondering what kind of IDIOT would ever think that trying to write 50,000 words might be a fun way to spend November.

2005: Australian man threatens to shoot down chopper with tomato-bazooka*.

I *love* the Today in History web gadget.  Especially today.

 

On a less violent note, today also saw the world's first jukebox unveiled, the debut of Life Magazine, Dr Who being broadcast on TV for the first time, and the invention of the horse-shoe making machine. 

 

If it happens to be your birthday, you share it with Otto the Great, Alfonso the Wise, and John Wallis, who invented the infinity symbol. (If you're not as wise as Alfonso, that's the one which looks like a sideways number eight.)  Also Harpo Marx (from the Marx Brothers),  and Maxwell Caulfield (from Grease 2, also known as The Worst Movie Sequel Of All Time) and a bunch of musicians, namely Bruce Hornsby, a rapper called Tha Dogg Pound and Ken Block.  Ken Block is the lead sister of Sister Hazel, who are a band you might (probably) have never heard of, but probably (might) have heard, because loads of their songs are used in films and TV shows.
 
I really, really like Sister Hazel.  Their music is great, which would be reason enough to like them, but I also heard them interviewed on a podcast once, and they just seemed like such nice blokes. Other great things about them: their hard-core fans are known as "Hazel-nuts"; they named themselves after a nun who runs a homeless shelter; they have a great song about a starfish, as per the video below. What's not to love?

By the way, if you arrived here because you are off to Tall Tales at the Peckham Literary Festival tonight, and followed that link in the program, then hello. You're in for a real treat. 

 

 

*The tomato-bazooka was home-made, apparently; the man was so irritated by the noise being made by a helicopter flying over his house that he rang Air Services Australia and threatened to shoot it down.  "Fruit is hardly a weapon of mass terror", said his solicitor.