Break a Leg!

The other day I posted a couple of limericks here relating to the Rugby World Cup.

Just while I'm in limerick mode, a friend tweeted me that typical good luck greeting - Break a Leg! - in regard to The Mousetrap.   It's a very peculiar thing to say to anyone, let alone an actor - the last thing an actor wants is more drama!   So here's my response, limerick-wise:

When supporters say Break a leg,

Actors feel they’ve got egg

On their faces and

Go through their paces and

Hope it won’t be on one peg. 

For anyone who's interested in following up the possible origin of this peculiar expression, check out the page focused on it in the Glossary of Technical Theatre Terms. 

Monday the Rabbi Took Off

Finished another Harry Kemelman yesterday: Monday the Rabbi Took Off.  It’s one I started to re-read a while ago and didn’t get into at the time.  It’s a big long-winded compared to the Tuesday book in the series, which I read earlier in the month and enjoyed.   

In Monday the Rabbi literally takes off to Israel, leaving behind the usual group of disgruntled board members trying to decide whether they want him back or not.  We have this subplot going on throughout, but the main story takes place in Israel with a couple of bombings and two deaths and a lot of stuff about what it’s like to be an Israeli in the homeland, and what it means to be religious there and so on.   The murder is solved a bit perfunctorily right near the end, but the victim isn’t really a major character and so you feel a bit disconnected from that part of the story.  There are several other elements to it that make it all a bit like too much story for one book.  It’s still an interesting read, and gives insights into the feelings of Jews in and out of Israel, and perhaps that’s what the book is more about: Kemelman trying to 'write out' his own feelings about how he stands as a Jew in the time the book was written....

Teach the Teacher

We all know that scene in the movie (any medical movie - take your pick) where the consultant sweeps in with his retinue of newbies in tow, barely nods at the bewildered patient, (who's wondering what all this attention is about), snaps his or her finger at one of the students and in a disdainful voice dares that shivering student to say what Mr Smith/Jones/Bulkoski has wrong with him, and why, and what he's going to do about it. 

It was one of the ongoing features of that long-running TV series, Scrubs, a programme we endured more often than we wished to, since our younger son seem to find it extraordinarily funny.   Screenwriters think it's something audiences can get no end of enjoyment out of.   It ain't so funny if you've actually been a patient in the real-life equivalent, of course.

Which is why there need to be courses for medical people, especially now that they're no longer automatically assumed to be God.   A teach the teacher course (also known as a train the trainer course) is a way of teaching doctors how to teach trainee doctors (it may possibly go wider than that).  

The teaching the teacher course is only one of a number of courses available to the medical profession.  You can go on a consultant interview course (for when you're planning to leave that nasty hospital where you're not appreciated by those in management, and where they blame you for everything from the superbug that's hit the wards to the dust on the tops of the pictures - those funded by the hospital Art Fund). 

It's possible, of course, that you may actually be to blame for the superbug, in which case you'd be wise to go on a medical teaching course and bring your knowledge up to date.  As for the dust on the pictures, try a medical management course where your skills at handling the Dust Management Team will be honed. 

Whatever the course you go for, it can only improve your skills in the medical field.   With the extraordinary number of complications that can arise in that area, it's wise to keep on top of things!

Rehearsing The Mousetrap

Rehearsals for Agatha Christie's The Mousetrap continue apace...the two late additions to the cast (the young man who stepped in to take over the role of Sergeant Trotter - Sam Irwin - and myself - replacing an actor who fell ill) are making great strides at catching up with the rest of the actors, who've been rehearsing for five or six weeks. 

The cast have rehearsed in a variety of venues, and on Tuesday have their first night in the theatre for a technical rehearsal...the set is being built that day too, and painted, so it may be an interesting occasion for all concerned!

Today (Sunday) we had a photo shoot down at the Railway Station, using some of the ready-made 'sets', and wandered around in our costumes, which entertained - and bewildered - some of the tourists.  

Five more days to opening.   Phew!

RWC Limericks

A couple of other tweeters and I have considered writing some poetry relating to the current Famous Game that is receiving endless attention here in New Zealand at the moment (first quarter of an hour of the news tonight dedicated entirely to it, as well as all the normal sports news from half way through the News).  

Here are a couple of limericks written, it must be admitted, with a little speed.... 

There once was a Rugby World Cup

That made many sane people fed up,

With the constant insistence

And petty persistence

On every dread detail close up.

There once was a very small game

That somehow acquired worldwide fame,

In spite of its shallowness

It gained status All Hallowness

Making most other games seem quite lame.

politico

I just came across a news website called Politico.com. Fascinating stuff if you're into US politics in a big way - and by 'big way' I mean a really, really big way.   Every jot and tittle is covered until your brain is soaked in the stuff.  It's like being in New Zealand during the Rugby World Cup; supposedly nothing else goes on in people's minds except the awful game (and of course, I mean 'awful' in the old sense: awe-ful - don't I?)  Talking of which, though I hadn't intended to, the USA beat Russia yesterday; bit ironic, huh?

Anyway, back to Politico.com.  It's the online version of a real newspaper which has a relatively small circulation of 32,000, according to Wikipedia.   However, that's bolstered more than a little by the 6.7 million (unique) visitors the online version gets each month.   It kind of doesn't matter that the paper version is so small, when you add those two together.  

Politico focuses on the backstories, rather than the big headlines - according to its mission statement - and they aim to make their stories just as interesting as talking with the reporter over a sandwich or a beer.   Amongst of heap of stories floating around their site, I found this line: post-Sept. 11 veterans suffer a 23 percent unemployment rate. “After a decade of war, it’s time to focus on nation-building here at home. And our veterans, especially our 9/11 generation veterans, have the skills and the dedication to help lead ... 

There's a great deal about veterans on the site; it's plainly a big issue in the US, but not one that has hit our newspapers here with any great impact.  Our involvement has been so minimal, comparatively speaking, in the so-called war on terror, that we can practically count our lost soldiers on one (maybe two) hands.  Not so in the States, where thousands of men and women have died fighting a war that, IMHO, should never have been.  But it was, and now the US is facing the consequences of that.  There are sites where you can find information on a Military VA Loan for instance (I'm assuming VA stands for something like Veterans' Association, but I could be wrong). and the need to get veterans back on their feet is obviously very high on everyone's priority list, including Obama's.   Veterans can get home loans with no down payment, for instance, and the maximum loan you can go for is a whopping (by NZ standards) $US719,000.   That's some loan, but hopefully the Vets are getting enough in payments to cover that sort of mortgage.  

From where I sit (and I'm not likely to be alone in not understanding the full ins and outs of the current American monetary crises) it's hard to appreciate everything that's going on in the US economy.  (It's always been hard, mind you, not helped by the overly involved system that's evolved over there.)   For me it becomes a big clutter - even seven seasons of West Wing didn't help greatly.  I guess the way to understand it better would be to focus on something like the Vets and their situation.  I'm not sure that I'm going to be able to focus like that, but at least, when you're faced with a major issue, breaking it down in some way helps!

Archer's Goon

Continuing on with my Diana Wynne Jones phase, but having put aside the Dalemark series, of which I read the first and began the second only to find them all a bit gloomy, I've just finished Archer's Goon.  This is a neatly plotted story with a major red herring running through it for about the first two-thirds.   It also has a superb character in the concisely-spoken Goon.   It's hard to convey the way he speaks in an extract, so I'm not going to try.  Suffice to say he's one of Wynne Jones' more delightful and quirky creations. 

The Sykes are a fairly straightforward family into which the Goon suddenly interposes himself, his long legs seeming to take up most of the kitchen where he insists on sitting until Quentin (the family father) produces his 'two thousand'.   The two thousand aren't pounds or dollars, but words, and why they've been requested is a mystery that takes most of the book to solve.   Quentin's been producing them every few months after a bout of writer's block several years ago, but the words have nothing to do with writer's block. 

The other members of the family are Howard, who seems a straightforward boy on the surface but is anything but, as we eventually discover; Awful, his sister, nicknamed thus because of her propensity to scream very loudly when anything upsets her, and a young layd with an enjoyment of nastiness; and Catriona, the mother, who is the only one initially who can put the Goon in his place.   There's also Fifi, the student who's staying with them.   Fifi's role in the story seems minor at first, but she's the catalyst for some rather serious stuff later.

When I say 'serious' however, it's not to imply that this is a serious book.  It's as good-humoured and witty as Howl's Flying Castle, though equally full of strange and scary people.  Wynne Jones obviously had a thoroughly enjoyable time writing this book, and it shows through on every page.   (She doesn't seem to have had quite so enjoyable a time in working with a scriptwriter on the television version, but admitted that scriptwriting is not her field.  There's a very detailed writing-up of the television series which points out its high and low points - and gives away all the plot.  Don't read it before you've read the book.)

Rabbi Small

It's a long time since I first read any of Harry Kemelman's books featuring Rabbi Small.  We've had a few of the series on our shelves for years, but not the whole set of seven.   I see that the whole series is available on Kindle at very reasonable prices,which could be dangerous!  (In fact there are five more books featuring Rabbi Small, which don't form part of the original series.)

The one I've just re-read, and which I'd pretty much forgotten (except for the bust of Homer and how it came into the story) is Tuesday the Rabbi Saw Red.   Rabbi Small seems a meek youngish man, but looks are deceiving.  He has an excellent and very sharp brain.  He also has a fairly obstreperous congregation of Jewish business people, who slip and slide in their support of him, and who seem more concerned with things of the world than things of the spirit.   Although in this book Rabbi Small makes a good case for Judaism being all about care of this world and this in it.

One of the features of these books is that they're not just about an ingeniously crafted murder mystery, though that's always part of the story.   It's the way in which we get a picture from the inside of what it means to be a Jew in the modern world (well, the world of the 60s/70s, that is - these books have been around for quite a while now), and how the Jewish mind thinks.  This book gives the Rabbi several opportunities for discussion with a class of students, some of whom are Jews, some not, and this allows the reader to see beyond the usual view of what makes a Jew.   But the Jewish way of thinking comes through in a number of other more subtle scenes, and through the sharply-drawn characters, major and minor.

The book doesn't inhabit an entirely Jewish world: it mostly takes place in a University that has decided that leaving out 'Christian' from its name gives it the opportunity to take in students from a wider background.  Thus there's something of a Jewish/Christian debate shuffling around in the background, but equally there are discussions about what it means to run a University these days: is it a place for the students to learn or merely get credits?   Is it a place for the teachers to teach or merely push themselves up the academic ladder.   The Rabbi's insistence on truth in the midst of all these discussions often gets him into hot water, but he has some strong friends who know what he's like, and doesn't lack for support.

The 'New' Music

Just listening again to some of the tracks from the Resound series that are available for downloading via the Concert programme.   The composers include Jack Body and Jack Spiers, Eve de Castro Robinson, Ross Harris, and others.

It's an interesting thing - to my mind - that there's a kind of uniformity of expression amongst many of these composers: the extreme angularity of vocal lines, for instance; anything that smacks of melody has to avoided at all costs.  The setting of words that never highlights them but merely uses them as sounds.  The dissonant chords that waft in and out in a random fashion.  The fiddly bits on wind and brass instruments that don't seem to connect with the rest of the piece: flutes fluttering without focus, trumpets butting in with little edgy moments.   Long sustained chords that go nowhere.  Instruments used for a few bars and then forgotten.   Rhythmless movement. 

And at the end, an audience that isn't really sure that the piece is finished. 

What surprises me is that there's so little parody of this kind of music - or perhaps the music is already a parody of itself?

To be fair, some of the music I've downloaded off this site, even where it's off the wall, is actually music, in that it knows where it's going, enjoys setting words, uses electronic elements intelligently (and musically), and has rhythm.  Father's telescope, by Kit Powell, with its surreal text, is a lot of fun, for instance.  Nelson Wattie is the baritone stretching up to notes that seem curiously out of reach, and Barry Empson is the 'actor', speaking lines in and out of the music.  

Norton report on cybercrime

A new report from Norton - the people who do online security - says cybercrime is costing New Zealanders $256 million in cash costs and $300 million in lost time.  They claim that 72% of New Zealanders reported having been victims of cybercrime.  At one point the figures are noted as 'extrapolated' costs - big figures worked out from little ones, in other words.   The way these figures came about are towards the end of the report. 

One of the more curious statements is: Cybercrime victims are twice as likely to have been a victim of crime in the physical world than non-cybercrime victims.  I guess there's something to back this up somewhere in the report, but I missed it. 

The report was based on information from almost 20,000 online interviews.   These took place not just in New Zealand, but around the world.  How many people were interviewed in New Zealand, then?  

 

You can see the actual report here - it's quite comprehensive, and laid out as a long strip of information sliding from right to left.   There are animations scattered throughout which are supposed to explain more, but some of them seemed to add to the lack of real statistical information.   

If you read through the report, you find that where the costs are coming from seems to be more the cost of time spent in fighting cybercrime, rather than loss of money via stolen credit cards and the like.  Statements like at $388bn, cybercrime is more than 100 times the annual expenditure of UNICEF ($3.65 billion) are placed throughout the report.  

My suspicion throughout this report is that it's a glossy way of advertising Norton's products.  While these may be worth having (as any security online is worth having), this rather takes away from the value of the report.   According to Norton there are 1 million victims of cybercrime a day: the crimes listed are malware and viruses, scams and phishing.   Yes, all very annoying, but hardly about to bring the globe down around our ears. There are finally some definitions of what 'cybercrime' is, in the context of the report, way towards the end.

Catching up on HitTail after a spell

It's quite a while since I checked out HitTail's results for this blog - I used to do it regularly (partly for something to write about), but I notice that they've got results going back to March this year which I've never looked at.

That's okay, we'll sort that in due course.

Meantime, I also checked the search words that people have used that bring them to my site.   Amazingly athlete's hand continues to do well - it's at the top.   One little post from I don't when - and a joke post at that - and this is the result.   Crazy.

The second in line is a bit of a newbie to me: googleads.g.doubleclick.net.  I looked at that and wondered what the heck it was, since it seems an odd thing for someone to enter in Google's search box.   Anyway, doing exactly that, I find that it comes up with an explanation from Google's help desk itself.   I began to read the explanation, got bogged down a couple of sentences in, and let my brain say, Pooh, don't get that - too difficult to understand without concentration. 

Another curiosity keeps coming up on the list - it's currently third in line: Zirka circus.   The post I did on this in 2010, has obviously drawn some people over and over.  Zirka circus is a NZ-based group, with mostly an Asian cast.   Some very good stuff in it too.

Surprise, surprise, my own name comes up fourth on the list.   Wow, I must look for myself an awful lot, or else there are a lot of other Mike Crowl's out there doing the same thing.   (One was a headmaster at a high school in the States who got himself into strife, being accused of harrassing his staff.  He resigned, and I haven't caught up with what happened subsequently.)   In Google.co.nz, by the way, this blog comes up first if you enter Mike Crowl as a search term.

Zirka Circus review gets fifth place, and The Great Divorce notes sixth.   This latter search term has been one of the tops for a long time, although you won't ever find any 'notes' on C S Lewis' The Great Divorce on my blog.   It's just the fact that the blog title has 'notes' in it that makes the difference!

Nintendo jewellery and Brent Stavig make seventh and eighth - again two items that have earned pride of place on this blog for their regular appearances (mostly because I keep writing about them because they keep turning up on HitTail - it's a bit of a Catch 22).

James Berardinelli and Frederick Buechner marriage are the last two in the top ten.   I haven't mentioned Berardinelli for a long time: he's the film reviewer who has hundreds of reviews on imdb.com - not ibdm.com as I first typed: they have a site too, and it's also about movies.  Cunning!

People must look for the quote on marriage by Buechner and find it on my site.   Guess it's a helpful thing to use at your wedding...

The hundreds of other search terms that make it onto my list are often repeats of the above ones in some form or other, and all the old favourites are still there.   Before I go I just need to mention some of the 'keywords' that have sent people to the blog; some quite intriguing ones...top heavy body builder, armwrestling my wife, [like that one] skinny ties versus normal ties, where to buy cigars in Dunedin, drugs corner cut off of credit card [what?].

It has to be said that if you went looking for any of these in an Encyclopedia it's doubtful you'd find them.   Good old Google!

Google Cup

Nice one, Google! One of the few enjoyable things to come out of the RWC.  

17.7.26

I've only just discovered that there's a page called Google Doodles, and all these creations can be seen there, including the latest World Cup one, which was a fine example of the craft. 

A role in The Mousetrap

Well, the last couple of days have had added to them the need to learn lines for The Mousetrap, which opens around the 24th of this month (or 24th inst, as a character in the play would put it).   For those who haven't caught up with what's happened, a person had to drop out of the cast due to illness, just last weekend, and so I've taken over his (thankfully fairly small) role.   The character is Paravicini, who may or may not be a fraud, and who - as he hints more than once - isn't quite what he appears. 

To my amazement you can get a 52-page study guide to The Mousetrap.   Crikey...the script is only 69 pages long as it is!  Let's hope they don't give away the denouement - it's traditional to ask the audience before the play starts not to do so.   The study guide has things like Historical context, critical essays and overview, and much more.   Two interesting points from the historical context: Food is in such short supply in England that 53,000 horses were consumed for food in the previous year to feed a population that now exceeds fifty million people. And in London, a four-day smog kills more than four thousand people.

Makes you glad to be living in 2011, doesn't it?   The characters mention ration books in the play, and there are several other lines that have had to be elucidated for younger members of the cast - and such a discussion has reminded those who lived in the UK in the fifties of some of the privations they and their families went through. 

The other interesting thing about reading the script for the first time, is the way Christie's wit shines through it: the rather dour photo that appears of many of her book covers doesn't indicate just how much fun she can be as a writer (I've found one that shows her warmer side better).   Some of her books are more humorous than not, and certainly The Mousetrap has some very funny lines. 

Blogging with a new interface

Blogger (under Google's management these days) has just updated its interface, for the first time in a while.  The last time it did it, I went back to the old interface, because the new one was a bit of a pain.   This post is by way of a test, to see what happens when you try some of the features.
Well, firstly it's saving like billyo.  Ever couple of seconds the save button up the top is flicking on and off, presumably keeping tabs on what I'm writing.
I'm just looking to see what's new...there's something called a 'jump break' which does this...

Couple of keywords

Just a quick follow up on my previous post: in regard to which keywords have caused people to find their way to my blog the following two are top equal:

	37	15.35%	the graveyard book
	37	15.35%	chrissy popadic

The Graveyard Book is by Neil Gaiman, and the post only appeared early this month. Chrissy Popadic comes from Boise, and is a fairly popular sports person. However, look her up on Google, and I don't come within a cooey of being the first person on the search results.

Curious.

Blog stats

Every so often it's worth checking out one of the systems that keeps track of the stats relating to this blog. Here are the top pages with the number of times they've been accessed over the last short period of time....notice the dates the posts were published; the third top one goes back to 2007...Boise also happens to be the place my future daughter-in-law comes from. Wonder if there's a connection?
I'm glad to see that Grimhilda! has made it well up the list, though I'm not sure why she should be behind 'skinny ties' or Frederick Buechner on marriage.
The meaning of Winnie the Pooh is just behind Grimhilda! - curiously enough, the beginning of the Pooh post is a spoof on literary criticism, rather than something serious.
The other item that intrigues me here is the one on the Zirka circus: this has been a popular post since the time it first appeared. Don't ask me why!

	108	mikecrowlsscribblepad.blogspot.com/
	53	mikecrowlsscribblepad.blogspot.com/2011/08/graveyard-book.html
	43	mikecrowlsscribblepad.blogspot.com/2007/01/more-on-boise.html
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	7	mikecrowlsscribblepad.blogspot.com/2007/07/james-berardinelli.html
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	4	mikecrowlsscribblepad.blogspot.com/p/geocitiesathensforum4657.html

Within Landscape

My wife and I have just been to an exhibition at the Otago Art Society's Gallery in the Railway Station. It was put on by a group called NOTUS, (which doesn't stand for North Otago against the United States, as the person opening the exhibition suggested it might - it seems to have been named after the mythological word for the South Wind). The exhibition's theme was Within Landscape, and required the participants to produce hanging works that were two or three metres long and about a metre wide. How they interpreted the theme was up to them.

The members of NOTUS are all women who work mostly in textiles. This exhibition is a prime example of the high level of talent amongst these women.

We were invited by a friend who's one of the members of the group. She had two works in it, one consisting of a vibrant material that changed hue every time you (or it) moved; on this she'd embroidered some words by John O'Donohue, a Catholic spiritual writer. The other work consisted of four joined panels depicting in a somewhat abstract way the journey of a river near where she grew up.

There were some other interesting approaches to the theme: one consisted of hundreds of used teabags (without the tea) sewn on lengths of cotton and hanging in a great cascade from near the ceiling down to the floor. The work is so fragile it's unlikely to survive being removed from where it's presently situated. (My wife made a joke to some of the women standing around looking at the work: she wondered why these used teabags hadn't been sent to overseas missionaries. The joke didn't go - you have to have been amongst the sort of people who thought that sending used teabags to missionaries was a humorous - and ironic - idea.)

Another work used plastic bags and some other detritus - the plastic bags were hung in macrame, and then gradually spilled onto the floor.

Two works by a woman whose first name was Di Lightfoot consisted in each case of four panels clipped together. One work had begun as sketches of various members of the group and other friends done in a continuous line - these were then sewn over on a machine, and textured background added in. Very time-consuming. The other was all vibrant colour on one side and the kind of 'shadow' colour on the other. (That was a feature of all these works: you could walk around both sides and get a totally different impression.) These were very appealing: they were all domestic scenes, though in only one case was there an actual human presence: two feet slung up on a desk protuded into the picture. (This was the best of the four on this panel, in my opinion.) Again everything was sewn, and in addition a wide variety of fabrics were included in the panels.

I won't go into detail about the other hangings, although there were some fine works there. As at any exhibition, only certain items stay with you clearly, or aspects of them: such as the frog leaping after the dragonfly on one hanging (duplicated entirely on the other side in the same colours), or the bright white Greek monastery (?) at the very top of a panel, or the three lovely hangings by Lenore Whyte (I remember her name because she used to be a customer of mine) with dozens of words taken from the letters of 'landscape' printed in some way onto them.

The panoramic view of the Dunedin Railway is by Antilived.

Further learning

I was just reading this morning about one Polybius (in a book entitled Jesus and the Eyewitnesses) how he, along with many ancient writers, regarding the written word as less instructive than an eyewitness account, or reading a manual less helpful than a teacher speaking about his subject.

Certainly that's still often the best way of learning: face to face with a teacher (a teacher, mind you, rather than a lecturer). Just to be disagree with my own argument, however, both the varsity courses I've done in the last couple of years have been primarily online, and both of them were perfectly satisfactory in that form. For me.

However, to contradict myself again, I note that there are online degree programs in music available. I'm struggling a little to understand how that could work satisfactorily, music being such a hands-on art, to me. I think Polybius and I would be on the same wavelength with this one. Of course, the theory of music on its own is teachable away from an instrument (up to a point), but music is much more than theory. I guess you can focus on the history, or on form and so on, and these could be done reasonably satisfactorily online - probably more than satisfactorily. Nevertheless, I think music is something that needs to be taught face to face.

I have been wrong before...

There are online Courses on everything under the sun, these days - art, art history, film, photography, fine arts (another subject that sounds less doable online) - the list goes on. If you click on this link - http://nces.ed.gov/collegenavigator/ -you can find out more about what's available, whetting your appetite for more learning, slavering over the possibilities.

Having been brought up in a family environment where learning per se wasn't highly regarded I used to be of the school (pardon the pun) that thought learning for the sake of learning was a pointless exercise. Now, after having been around the world for a little time, I'm much more of the opinion that learning for the sheer enjoyment of it is something we humans thrive on. Too many of us fail to get our teeth into something new as we get on in life, just because it means work, or taking up time from other things, or...whatever your excuse is. Some of us even think: what's the point of learning more? I'll be dead soon enough.

Yup, you will, and possibly sooner than you imagine. But I think the ability to learn is a God-given gift, and something we should all grasp while we can...

Cart and Cwidder

Carrying on with my Diana Wynne Jones reading phase, I finished the first (as in first published) of the Dalemark Quartet series last night. Like most of Jones' series, these books weren't written consecutively, but over a period of years. In this case, some twenty years. The one I've just read comes second in chronological order, but was the first written. Taking into account the fact that C S Lewis also wrote some Narnia series 'out of chronological order' I don't think this matters much, and for me it's better to read the books as they were produced, since this is how the author initially conceived them.

That aside, this is a different kind of story to the more magical ones that I've read previously (the 3 in the Howl's Castle series, and Black Maria.) There is magic in it - the climax is brought about by it, in fact - but in general this is mostly more of adventure yarn than a magical story. Like the other Jones books, it delves into human nature and personality more than many children's stories - into the 'why' of how people behave, and whether that's always for the best.

Here the main character is named Moril: he's a boy of about ten or eleven, the third and youngest child of a couple of travelling performers. The father is the showman, full of bluff and stories and the old songs; the mother is quieter, but not at all a wallflower, and extraordinarily decisive when the chance is there to be seized. The older brother is a composer of 'new' songs, but more retiring in his demeanour - or so it seems. And the sister - the middle child - takes after her father: capable of facing an audience and having them eat out of her hand but not so good when it comes to saving her skin, or that of her younger brother.

The family is travelling in their cart (something like a covered wagon) with all their worldly goods, which include some very valuable musical instruments - the cwidder of the title is one such. Incidentally, cwidder seems to be a made-up word (as several of the words in the book are), though it has a kind of Welsh ring about it, especially in regard to the spelling. Jones tells us, in the glossary, that it's similar to a lute, but with some features of the acoustic guitar. (Her glossary appears to be authoritative, but is as much fiction as the rest of the book.)

Though it isn't obvious to the two younger children, there is more going on at each performance by the family as they come to each town - and after - than meets the eye. The consequences of all this provide a nasty shock for the reader about a third of the way through the book. Not long after, the three children - along with a fourth who's been picked up by the father earlier on - are on their own. Their struggles to get to the North (the 'safe' part of the country) from the dangerous South, and to provide for themselves, form the remainder of the book.

Moril matures considerably during the course of the book: he's a dreamer, but instead of that being a disadvantage, his father knows that it's a gift. Moril still has to discover how it's a gift, and playing the large cwidder is part of that discovery. Part of Jones' skill as a writer is to show that while Moril uses his gift for the benefit of those he's with, and to save the people of the North from an invasion, he doesn't use his gift truthfully. On page 167 Moril realises the following: If you stood up and told the truth in the wrong way, it was not true any longer, though it might be as powerful as ever. It's to Moril's credit that he not only learns from his exhilerating but wrongly handled experience, but understands that he is still immature, and needs someone to keep teaching him.

This book takes a little longer to grab hold of you, compared to the others I've read. It seems too down-to-earth at first, and not fantastical enough - and there's less of Jones' wit and humour. It'll be interesting to see what the rest of the Quartet is like (though they'll have to wait, as I'm now reading another book that was recommended to me by the same people who enthused about Jones - The Theif, by Megan Whalen Turner.)

Single parents are brilliant...Often!

Today I received a tweet from someone called Alison (she goes under the name of @plus2point4 on Twitter). It was retweeted to me by someone I follow.

Anyway, she's promoting a website called Single Parents are Brilliant. It's in reaction to the British Prime Minister, David Cameron, basically laying the blame for the recent riots in the UK on people who've been brought up by single parents.

Now I guess what he's saying is that boys (in particular) who come from fatherless households (or households where the male isn't their father, and isn't married to their mother) are likely to be the young men in society who get into trouble. To an extent, I don't disagree with this view. I believe that society is in a dangerous place in terms of bringing up heaps of young men without a father in sight. The same thing is happening in New Zealand, and is a cause for alarm here too.

However, what's happened is that Cameron seems to have lumped all young people who've been brought up by single parents under the same grouping, and this is what's got people like Alison hot under the collar. When I first saw the tweet, which basically consisted of: Today we are launching the new campaign to show the world how BRILLIANT Single Parents are, I was at first inclined to lean towards Cameron's point of view.

But then, of course, I had to stop and think: I was brought up by a single mum! (It was a long time ago, admittedly, so I've a kind of right not to have thought about it straight away!). My father and mother split up when I was three - my understanding is that my mother thought he would follow her after she left him, but he didn't. My mother was fortunate to have had the support of her own parents, who welcomed her back into the family home - even though she herself felt she'd made something of a failure of her marriage. It wasn't the done thing to walk out of a marriage in those days (I'm talking about the late forties.)

Suffice to say, here I am, 60 plus years later, and as sane as most men. I think the help of other family members made a big difference, but that doesn't change the fact that I grew up essentially fatherless. (We never had any communication after he and my mother broke up.) The lack of a father hit me emotionally when I was in my mid-twenties; until then I'd sailed along without it seeming to be much of a problem. I guess I dealt with it by writing about it - and eventually marrying someone who was also brought up by a solo mother! We declared that we would hang on in there so that our children wouldn't have to go through the same emotional ups and downs we had experienced. And we have.

I was also fortunate, when I was living in London in my twenties, to be asked to do a bit of 'fathering' for a boy who was himself being brought up by a single mum. Luckily this boy and I got on like a house on fire, and we're still in touch today. He's now a happily married man, doing a high-powered job.

So, yes, I have to agree that single parents can be brilliant. Sure there will be some disasters - it's the nature of life on this planet. But there's no simple box into which all single parents can be slotted - many make a really good job of parenting. Some do struggle. And a host of other factors come into play, just as they do in any walk of life.

So, Mr Cameron, it seems you might need to find some other 'reason' for why the riots happened in your country....

Surveys and lending

I started to do an online survey today relating to getting loans online, and gave up: the questions became increasingly ridiculous, and I couldn't be bothered. I started doing online surveys when I was out of work in 2006, having been assured time and again that these surveys would bring heaps of money. I am so naive it's not funny. But when you're feeling rather desperate after giving up a reasonably paid job, anything seems possible.

I have had some benefits from them - one in particular is getting a couple of cinema tickets every so often as a result of doing the surveys. But that's about it; the other amounts that turn up are pretty minimal. You'd have to be doing surveys all day long, and I'm already crazy enough without contemplating such a way of spending my time.

Anyway back to getting loans online: a lot of these kinds of loan are of payday loan type, where you can get money lent to you using something like your car as collateral. Not a terribly good idea, especially if something happens to your car. Borrowing money is something we've all had to do at times, and there are plenty of opportunities for the unwary to get themselves into hot water these days. If you're going to borrow money, go to a place that can be trusted, has a good reputation and won't fleece you silly.

There are more than enough of these around; the loan mightn't happen instantly, but neither will it cost you an arm and a leg, items that most of us can do with, rather than without.

Eliot App

Now here's a bit of a surprise....of all the enhanced ebook apps for iPad you might think people would download in quantity, The Waste Land by T S Eliot isn't perhaps one of them. Yet the app made its money back for the publishers (Faber Digital) in just six weeks. That must have been something of a surprise.

So, apart from Eliot's elliptical poem, what else do you get on this app?

* a film of actress Fiona Shaw reading the entire poem (this was specially filmed for the app).

* audio recordings of the poem by T. S. Eliot, Ted Hughes, Alec Guinness and Viggo Mortensen.

* interactive notes explaining many of the poem's references.

* more than 35 experts on video talking about their perspective on the poem.

The video below is from The Guardian, and has people explaining how this piece came to be available for the iPad.

Men Briefly Explained

Would you guess from the following blurb on Amazon what kind of a book this was?

Men Briefly Explained explores all aspects of contemporary manhood, the humourous [sic] and not so humourous [sic-ker], where men are in relation to women and to society in general. Thought provoking, impertinent, irreverent, witty, startling, this collection will have you mesmerised from start to finish.

Well, if you didn't guess, or didn't already know, it's a book of poetry, by Tim Jones, the New Zealand poet, but at first I thought it was something else, like perhaps a sociological (but humourous - sic-kest] overview of men and their way of life. Perhaps Amazon is a little wary of promoting.....poetry.

Anyway, I bought it via Kindle this afternoon, and had a first draft read (as you might call it). Lots of great stuff in there (can I say that about a book of poems?), thought-provoking, emotional, with reminders of the way things were - and the usual tongue-in-cheek pairing of real people in the wrong places (Baxter and Curnow, the two highly-regarded NZ poets, turning up as lead singers of 60s rock band).

Name-dropping slot. Tim and I have had occasional correspondence on the Net, and (sometimes) read each other's blogs. We've even met face to face (it still happens in the real world), when I went to a Sunny Side Up rehearsal about a month or more ago and found he was there with a relative or friend (can't remember which).

Concerts & Grimhilda

Must be the season for concerts. This Saturday I'm playing for a couple of singers at Claire Barton's Farewell Concert in the Town Hall. Probably the last time I played on that stage would have been when Claire was in Opera Alive, the young singers' group that I accompanied for about seven years.

The last time I sang there, on the other hand, was about a fortnight ago, when Sunny Side Up performed some numbers at the RSA choir concert. And a few days after that we had the Heavenly Choirs concert in Knox Church.

The weekend after this one, I'm playing for a bunch of singers at St Peter's Church in Hillside Rd; this time it's a fundraiser for a little girl called Daryl Ann. And then beyond that there are several more concerts, major and minor, over the period leading up to Christmas. Anyone would think I was retired and had nothing else to do.

But talking of other things to do, this afternoon, I got together with the person who collaborated on the script of Grimhilda! to nut out things like finding funding and thinking about auditions and rehearsal rooms and contacting a variety of people about this, that and the next, and looking at a budget and...well, suffice to say that after three hours we were both exhausted with it all.

It would help if people would ring you back straight away when you miss them on the first call, instead of having to ring them again...and again...or email them and still not get an answer to something that is probably quite straightforward. But becomes a thing you have to remember to do again when you miss them the first time around.

Incidentally, in the concert I'm playing at on the 27th, I'm presenting a selection of music from Grimhilda! - her first public airing. Should be interesting...(so be there!)