Flying to Florida

Well, it looks as though the Brits are now buying up large less in the typical European holiday spots, and going further abroad; further, as in Florida. Yes, Florida in the States, that wonderful long peninsula that stretches down from the southern east coast like a fat finger.
I’d forgotten, until I was reading up a little on Florida, about the Florida Keys. Key West is one of them, and I thought it was also the name of a highly romantic, swash-buckling kind of movie that I saw as a child, and haven’t forgotten. But it isn’t. I thought it was a movie by Cecil B de Mille. But it wasn’t.
Anyway, all that aside, property in Florida is becoming the preferred option for lots of Brits, it seems. Brits with some cash to spare, that is, as these wonderful beach front properties aren’t quite going for a song. Still, unless you’re retiring there, you could always rent your condominium out to other fellow Brits who want a taste of the long stretches of beach, and the wonderful, warm weather. (Just don’t tell them that Florida also gets a lot more lightning than most places in the US. Still, lightning, as they say, never strikes twice, so they should safe enough!).
Condominium always strikes me (since we’re talking about strikes) as a most odd word – even odder that we should have it in the language when most people chop it down to condo. And now there’s another portmanteau word: dockominium, which is the water-based version of a condominium. However, rather than owning an apartment in a building, one owns a boat slip on the water.

A docko? Hmm, it doesn’t quite have the ring of a condo.
You’re going to ask me where the word, condominium, first came from, aren’t you? I’m going to tell you, anyway, since I was curious enough to look it up. According to the Online Entymology Dictionary, it dates from around 1714, and was apparently coined in Germany from com- "together" + dominum "right of ownership." It remained as a word in politics and international law until the sense of "privately owned apartment" arose in American English as a special use of the legal term, in 1962. The abbreviated form ‘condo’ was first recorded 1964.
There you go. All you wanted to know.
Disclosure statement

Fellows and Sellers

I went to the formal introduction of the Otago University’s three new ‘Fellows’ the other evening after work. It was held in the Hocken Library foyer, and the nibbles were very good.
We were invited because one of the Fellows is an old friend of mine – and my wife works with his wife. The three Fellows are the Burns Fellow, the Mozart Fellow and the Frances Hodgkins Fellow. My friend is the Mozart Fellow, which means he gets a year’s time associated with the University in which he can be relieved of working to deadlines, finding new work, creating music he may not want to create and so forth. He can spend the year thinking about what he’d like to do, compositions that don’t require to be for something.
Anyway, while we were there we met another old acquaintance, also a musician, who, during the course of our conversation mentioned that his twenty-something son sells on Trade Me, full-time, and ‘is rather tight-lipped about how much he makes.’ The indication was that the son was doing very well, selling imported CDs. I’d like to know who he is, so I could check him out, but it’s not easy to find who people are on Trade Me, since we all go under usernames.
I’ve been selling secondhand books on Trade Me for the last five or six months, as I’ve probably mentioned before. I’ve done reasonably well, but would hardly call it making any sort of living. It’s a hobby at this point. To sell on Trade Me you need to focus on some part of the market where you can buy small so you can sell big. Plainly imported CDs are one area, and in the book on successful selling on Trade Me the author talks about a young man who set out to become a millionaire on Trade Me, in spite of lacking any start-up assistance from Work and Income. He sells a lot of hand-held technology and the like. He has become a millionaire, and he basically imports at a fraction of the cost and sells at prices below the usual NZ retail. Obviously, if I was to take up Trade Me as a job, as some people have done, I’d need to get into a market rather more ‘with it’ than secondhand books. Which would mean throwing aside all I know of books, and starting afresh. Guess it’s never too late to learn…but!

Lenten

We’ll be coming up to Lent soon, that forty-day period still observed by the Catholics and Anglicans when a sense that we need to change the pace of life and reflect more on who we are, spiritually, and where we’re going. I was brought up as a Catholic, in the days when things were rather tougher, especially in Lent. While there was no definite rule about what you should give up during the time, you were made to feel that if it wasn’t something very particular you might as well be damned from that point on. Things have gone to the other extreme now, and I suspect many Catholics and Anglicans barely notice that Lent is passing.
I was reminded about this in regard to the following quote, which I picked out the Star Weekender – it was published on the 24th Feb, 1985, and was attributed to the Rev Dean Robert Mills, then Dean of St Paul’s Cathedral, in Dunedin. Lent must have been early that year.
"Have you been dieting since Wednesday, or walking to work instead of taking the car? Maybe you’ve stopped buying Golden Kiwi tickets. These little forms of self-denial are often practised by people over Lent."

Bargain Bin at The Warehouse

The Warehouse has a marvellously eclectic range of DVDs for sale. Most of them, as you’d expect, are the top-runners in the scene, and go at the top price. But alongside these they sell, particularly in their bargain bins, dozens of DVDs that you’d never find in a hundred years anywhere else. (Well, I expect you wouldn’t have found them over the last hundred years, anyway, given the age of the DVD as a piece of technology.)
When I get a half hour to spare, I like to fish amongst the randomly-binned DVDs to see if I can turn anything interesting up. The other day I came across the following:
The Lady Vanishes, one of Hitchcock’s most delightful suspense pieces, with a marvellous cast, and Hitchcock’s black humour that predates the classic Cary Grant/Hitchcock combinations. I've seen this at least three times previously, so haven't watched this particular copy yet; just added it to my growing Hitchcock on DVD collection.
The Dresser, with Tom Courtenay and Albert Finney – I’m yet to watch this, but I suspect that the performances will be top-notch.
The Vicious Circle (also known as The Circle) with John Mills. This is a murder mystery/suspense thriller piece, written by Francis Durbridge, who relies on adding something out of left field in almost every scene in order to keep the thing humming along. It’s absurd, but fairly watchable, though John Mills never quite looks at home as a Harley St specialist. Wilfred Hyde White, as always, plays Wilfred Hyde White.
And lastly, Timelock (also known as Time Lock), which was made in 1957. The packaging for this is a bit of a failure under the Fair Trades Act: it lists Sean Connery in large letters, as though he was the star. In fact, he has something like three or four lines somewhere in the middle of the piece, is a relatively unimportant character, and makes little real impression. That’s no mean feat, given the nature of this movie. It’s directed by Gerald Thomas, who went on to direct some thirty or more Carry On movies. His direction is bland in the extreme, and in a piece where tension is required, he manages to elicit almost none. His cast, taking their cue from the director, play the whole thing in such an off-hand way that you have to wonder whether they’d all decided the thing wasn’t worth the candle, and they’d get it over and done with as quickly as possible. As an amateur reviewer on IMDB says, even the child who gets stuck in a time vault at the bank and is the cause of all the fuss is awful: he has no acting ability whatsoever. Fortunately he has very little to do, and he does most of it early in the piece, and is then seen no more until the end, when he has to play virtually dead.

The piece is set in Canada, by the way. The only shot in the movie that actually shows Canada is the opening one; the remainder was shot in England, with some US actors involved.

PayPerPost goes for Gold!

Back on the PayPerPost tack again. I haven’t had time to go on their site for a few days, because my evenings have been a bit booked up, but I see now that almost every ‘opportunity’ is in colour, which means that you just can’t take it. The few that remain uncoloured are in such a minority that it’s a wonder you can find them. I said a few posts back that they’d gone upwardly postile, (as opposed to mobile) and things have got worse. There are even complaints on their site’s blog about the issue, but the problem doesn’t appear to be getting heard by PPP. At the same time as they’ve been chopping out the little fellows, they’ve been promoting something called Postie.con on their site, which, since I don’t often read their blog, I haven’t really caught up with. But a few of their bloggers have said that instead of playing around with Postie.con, they ought to be fixing the things that do need to be fixed, like the speed of their site, which would hardly give a snail a run for its money.
One blogger wrote that she can no longer make any money at PPP and that all the changes are terrible. I have to agree. She adds that even with a Google ranking of 4 or 5 she can only write about ‘high interest payday loans that loans destroy poor people, or silly online dating sites, and I will not blog bout those on my site.’ She also questions the idea that a 300-word post should require a Google ranking of 7 (does Amazon get a 7?) when it only pays US$6. She asks, ‘Why would anyone waste their time writing 300 words for $6 on a high ranking blog?’
I can only agree, yet PPP seems oblivious to all this. They’re plainly going for gold with their blog marketing, telling us that the new segmentation system awards bloggers with high traffic blogs. Well, big deal, that’s no news.
They say that we could make $1000 for a single sponsored post! Hmm, I haven’t seen any $1000 opportunities, but again, what sort of traffic would a blog need to gain that much money for a single post? Come on, PPP, let’s get real.
Disclosure statement

Reading at the tea-table

I finished John Wain’s book on Shakespeare yesterday, reading it often in the midst of the noise of arguments at the lunch table, or in the middle discussions about roads and drains and electricity. There’s nothing wrong with these discussions, mind, and a lot of them are very interesting to someone who’s world hasn’t really collided with roads and drains and electricity except in the way the world of most of us collides with them. There’s also a lot of discussion of people and places in Dunedin, from a different perspective. Dunedin is big enough to be interesting and still small enough for everyone to know pretty much everyone else of any consequence. So names get bandied about the morning and afternoon tea tables in a way that’s been unfamiliar to me for a long time. And these discussions are even more interesting when I actually do know something of the people involved.
And then there are the opinions on everything and anything that’s going. Some of these are surprisingly at odds with the media’s opinion, and sometimes they add extra facts that open up cans of worms. And then there are the stories, which the better storytellers seem to have an endless fund of. It’s certainly a different atmosphere to the one I’ve been used to for my last somewhat sheltered seventeen years.
Having finished Mr Wain’s book, I’m now reading my way through The Bravest Man, by Jenefer Haig. (Yes, she does spell her name that way.)
It’s a book which not only collates the four Gospels together in a way that gives them a real chronology, fitting the various stories and incidents into their appropriate places – as far as anyone can – but it also offers a kind of running commentary to give us some history and background to the stories. It’s well done, and apart from some typos and proof-reading errors, is a reasonable publication.
Apparently – and I only vaguely remember this – Mrs Haig, who lives in Oamaru, brought an earlier version of her book to my attention some time back, when I was in the shop, and I told it was too expensive for the kind of market she was aiming at. And, I think, it was too big.
Anyway, she’s now dealt with both those issues (such influence I have never ceases to surprise me!) and brought it down to about 80 pages. It’s very readable, and I think would be very good for anyone who was just starting into the Gospels. Certainly it makes the hard work of putting it together seem easy.

Marketing without Money

When I ran OC Books, one of the biggest issues I used to find with direct marketing, was getting the suppliers to back you up with stock. Because we often advertised books that were a little off the mainstream of Christian publishing, the suppliers shook in their shoes – or so it seemed – at the thought of holding more than a few copies of the titles we wanted to promote. Yet they knew that almost invariably, if I ordered books for our email direct marketing, we would usually do quite well with them.
Who can blame them? And who am I to preach on marketing, direct, indirect or out in left field?
While I was managing the shop I sometimes felt as though I’d read every book on marketing there is to read. I hadn’t, of course, since books on marketing are like weeds: the more you read them, the more there are to read. But I did learn a few things over the years, and put a lot of the things I learnt into practice. The actual approaches worked; it was just having enough money to take the approaches that was the issue.
We tried everything: different signage, giving away things, radio advertising (a real fizzer – for us, anyway – and expensive). Of course we tried direct marketing, which turned into email marketing as time went on, and that was pretty successful overall. We just needed more customers – and getting those was always the biggest issue, since there were several other Christian bookshops similar to ours that were fighting for the same few people.
We got ourselves in the newspapers several times, for free…and I still shudder at some of the pictures the reporters published alongside their articles. It seemed as though we were fated to have awful pictures sitting next to the text. There was one in particular which embarrasses me to this day, of a couple leaning over the counter, she wearing some long pink knitted thing that became the sole source of attention in the photo. The fact that the interior of our shop was in the background was neither here nor there.
I even contemplated tv advertising once, since Channel 9 here in Dunedin was offering it at a reasonable rate. And I do mean reasonable. I’d never considered telly ads before, but this was certainly tempting. But I was rather put off (apart from, as usual, having too little cash to spare) by the awful ad they did for the University Bookshop, which seemed to have nothing to do with books, had a strange sexual component, and must have been aimed at weirdo bookreaders. And anyway, did I really want an ad for OC Books appearing in the ad breaks for Cow TV?

More from John Wain

I find John Wain’s understanding of the Christian background to Shakespeare’s plays very good – almost to the point where I wonder if Wain isn’t a Christian himself. I’ve just seen on Wikipedia this note: "Wain's tutor at Oxford had been C.S. Lewis. He encountered, but did not feel he belonged to, Lewis's literary circle, the Inklings. Wain took literature as seriously as the Inklings did, and believed as they did in the primacy of literature as communication, but as a modern realist writer he shared neither their conservative social beliefs nor their propensity for fantasy."
That may account for more than a little!


I found another interesting section in his book on Shakespeare that I’ve been quoting from. He’s talking about King Lear, at this point.

‘All this titanic expenditure of effort and suffering to teach two stupid old men how to love? Yes: and rightly; for the colossal extravagance of means, the cosmic excess of upheaval and waste, celebrates the range and importance of the nature of man. At such time, even the supreme powers of the universe (whatever and wherever they may be) humble themselves before man, and bow to him, for

Upon such sacrifices, my Cordelia,
The gods themselves throw incense.

That line reminds me of another, in Love’s Labours Lost, where the character is talking about the effect of women on men:

And when Love speaks, the voice of all the gods
Makes heaven drowsy with the harmony.

There’s something in Shakespeare’s view of human beings that indicates he feels ‘the gods’ are often in awe of these two-pronged creations.

Drawing of Lear by Boardman Robinson

A couple of bitzer quotes

I quote I found in something called, More Real People. The date is 16th Feb, 1985, and I have no longer have any idea what More Real People was.

Water bed for sale. Reason for selling: husband and wife drifting apart.

And something one of Concert FM’s announcers said the other morning, when explaining that a composer used a pseudonym when composing.

‘Pseudonym – that’s French for nom-de-plume.’

Knowing this announcer, I’m sure he was throwing this line in to see who was really listening.

Under the Bed

My mother died recently. She was never the sort of person to have things like life insurance, and, because she lived with us for the last 22 years, she had no need of house or car insurance (she gave her car away one day to a young man who had his eye on it!). Furthermore, she believed in the principle of sowing riches in heaven, and we are still getting what she rather ironically called, ‘begging letters’, from the large number of the charities she had donated to, in small amounts, for many years.
She kept telling us she was giving us all her money while she was alive, and that there wouldn’t be any inheritance. We were happy with that: she was one of the most generous people I’ve known.
However, we discovered, after she died, that she had quite a large sum of money under the bed (literally in a drawer under the bed), the sort of amount most people don’t believe in keeping lying around. And on top of that, her bank account had more than enough in it to pay for her funeral, something she always said would be the case. We were very grateful that the money was there. We could have covered the costs, but it would have reduced the money we had considerably. Funerals, even for little old ladies who would sooner not have one at all (!), don’t come cheap.
We were fortunate too, I guess, that she didn’t have a long spell of sickness before she died. Covering those sort of medical costs can quickly reduce the income – especially as I’ve only got back into full-time work after being unemployed for around six months.
Insurance portal online – normally known as the rather more mouth-filling insuranceportalonline.com – is one of those sites where you can get quotes for the three basic types of insurance, life, house and car. It’s a nicely laid-out site, with good, clear guidelines to what insurance is and isn’t, and, apart from one typo (‘frequent asked questions’) on the bottom of every page, is easy to follow. They don’t do medical insurance, but that’s okay. They’ll have enough on their plate doing the other three!
I don’t know whether it was their site, or my browser, but on their frequent asked questions page, the text suddenly changes from the normal small size they use to a different font (the equivalent of moving from Times New Roman to Ariel in a different point) and the lines are sitting partly on top of each other. An eye-catching effect, but probably not an intended one!
Disclosure statement Mike Crowl also writes here

One thing leads to another...

Things on the Net lead from one thing to another. I was looking at a post on myLot (yup, that’s the way it’s written) and in the course of one of their forum discussions came across a link to a site where there was some discussion of other places you get paid for posting. I went to the site, clicked on the link, and clicked, and clicked, and a lovely blank column between two columns with advertising came up. Finally I emailed the owner of the blog and mentioned that there seemed to be a problem. Since then, she and I have had an ongoing conversation about blogs and paid posts and such, and she’s been very helpful.
She fixed the link, apparently, because next day it was back to normal, and one of the sites she mentions as being worth a look is blogsvertise, which runs things in a slightly different way to PayPerPost, but seems a bit more friendly. Well, my email friend says they are on her site, and she’s in the know, having used them.
blogsvertise, which I’ve now had to add to my spellchecker, doesn’t have the same sort of discriminatory process that PayPerPost seems to be indulging in at present. That’s nice – it joins Blogitive in my books as being a place I’d prefer to deal with. Not that I’ve give up PPP completely, as one of my most recent posts suggests, but if they keep on going with their current policies, we may have to part company.
In the meantime, here I am trying yet another approach to making money on the Net, and waiting for some results from my new acquaintances at blogsvertise.

More on the job

I meant to say, in the post I did on the place I’m working at, at present, that for some of the staff a good deal of the day is spent running (not literally) back and forth between the two buildings. This is probably about a 100 metre walk from where I work, along the road to the corner and down at right angles, but several of us indulge in this form of exercise several times a day. When, as a temp, I was in the job I was originally employed for, I spent more time wandering back and forth. It gave me some fresh air, gave me something to do to fill in the not-always-filled time, and gave me contact with a different set of faces. In my current status, I’m not able to leave the office quite so much, but there are still excuses for getting over there, such as when one of the other staff says, ‘Are you going over to H St?’ and I say Yes, because why should I not?
I’m not getting the normal exercise I’ve had for years in my other jobs, where I was able to walk to work. With this job starting at 8, it takes quite some effort to get away by 7.30, and it’s further away than my other jobs were. I may yet start to gear myself up to getting up early enough to do this, but after some months of not having to get up quite so early as in the past, I’ve got out of the habit.
By the way, I mentioned the ANZ man in yesterday’s post. For those who don’t know what I was referring to, this is the link.

Who cut the corner off?

The Royal Bank of Scotland has something they call the ‘mint’ card – it’s basically a form of credit card. I’ve checked out their site and can’t quite see why they’ve called it a mint card, but maybe I’ve missed something. (You’d think it had something to do with the Royal Mint). There are two odd things about the mint card: one is that it’s the first credit card to have a corner cut off it. Okay, you say, that’s interesting. (Yes, I thought so too!) This certainly makes it stand out a bit from the rest, but to me a far more interesting thing is that they’re offering a no interest deal up till December 2007 if you transfer your balance from another credit card. That’s pretty good. (There’s no interest, but there is a 2.9% charge on the balance, which is a little odd - number two ‘odd’ in fact).
The third odd, then, is that amongst their question and answers on the site (this in particular is related to the mint gift card – more about that in a minute) we have the question:
Why is there no chip on a MINT Gift Card? And the answer, which I find odd, is:
There is no need for a chip or pin to use a MINT Gift Card. Instead, the Card is neatly equipped with a magnetic strip, which means purchases will always need to be signed for.
‘Neatly equipped with a magnetic strip?’ But credit card producers have been working against this very form of identification for ages, and here in New Zealand, most people now use a pin as identification with credit cards. It’s almost invariably a lot safer than a signature. Oh, dear, Great Britain continues to remain behind the times when it comes to technology.
It always used to amaze me when US students or young travellers came into my former shop that they would proffer for payment a credit card without any signature at all on it! As far as I was aware, in NZ it’s illegal to offer a card with no signature, quite apart from the obvious possibility that the person proffering the card may not be it’s legal owner. They would happily tell me that they never signed the card in case it got stolen, which was a piece of illogic I could never get my head around, and then they would show me a student ID from back home, which was okay, but still begged the question of why their credit card wasn’t signed.
Back to the mint card. The mint gift card is a kind of credit card with cash already on it; the only thing is that when you’ve spent all the money on it, there ain’t no more. No credit limit you can then hook into. Aunty Sally sends you a mint card with £50 on it, and you gleefully go out and buy that new toy you’ve had your eye on, assuming that when you spend rather more than the £50, the credit will somehow link into Aunty Sally’s account, and she’ll pay the bill. No such luck. Once that card has run out of cash, you pay the bill.
The better deal here, I think, is the ‘no interest’ one. If I were in Scotland, which I am not, I might even take it up myself. (It’s a better deal than ANZ were offering some while ago, which I’ve also written about.)

Disclosure statement

Where I work

Continued from one of my other blogs...

On into another foyer (the old driveway, where stuff is stored higgeldy-piggeldy) and into another section, with a meeting room on the left, and open-plan offices on the right. (We’re now in the newer single-storey section). The people in this section seem somewhat exposed, after all the glassed-in parts. And finally to a tea-room down the end. There’s another on the first floor of our offices: when they play table tennis up there in the lunch hour there’s a lot of noise comes through the ceiling. If we go in the opposite direction from our offices we have the overall manager, and then another foyer and then a hole cut in the wall leading into another section where there are some new offices created out of who knows what – and another lot of men’s toilets. Which I only discovered the other day. These are new, and only half-completed. This whole section is under construction, but work seems to have ceased on it before Christmas, and never got going again. This is just one section of the company. The rest is along to the corner and down the road in a much bigger building with offices and workshops galore, all mingling into each other. The IT and accounting people are upstairs, and the workshops, with ceilings higher than cathedrals’, are obviously downstairs, along with more offices. It all has an air of being cobbled together as best as could be managed in a hurry. The IT and accounting people are all in workstations, but rather like a child would put together a series of blocks. Nothing seems to have much order up there. Between the two buildings is a stainless steel company, and the workers there seem to consist of a few old grizzled men (stained from the steel, I suspect) and a bunch of youths, gangly and skinny and full of wide smiles and noisy jokes and Coca Cola and huge sandwiches being stuffed into their mouths as they sit out on the pavement at lunchtime. There’s no nightlife in this part of town. 4.30 is going home time for more than half the workers, and the place is shut up by six, I’d think. It’s a great area to teach the kids to drive, especially on the weekends – as we did with ours. The streets are very wide, and there’s little likelihood of hitting anything. Then there’s the smell. A bit of wind from the harbour (which is only a couple of blocks away from where I work) and the fishy smell enlivens the area thoroughly. Add to that the paint smells, and the manufacturing welding type smells and old car smells (there’s a big broken-apart car yard just along the road) and the general air of things just being dumped and left in yards all over, and it’s an interesting part of town…

John Wain

John Wain's book, The Living World of Shakespeare: a Playgoer's Guide, is full of quotable moments, but like all such books, remembering where the moments are without making a note in the pressure of reading is a bit of a task.

Anyway, here from page 39 of Papermac edition:

...the dispossed king is a powerful symbol, for deep down every man thinks of himself as a dispossessed king.

and from page 75:

...the deep heart of courtship...is of course, self-knowledge. The reason why young people so frequently select the wrong partner is because they hold mistaken views about their own characters. The first essential for a lasting love of someone else is a sound assessment of one's own identity. Only when we see clearly what we have to give, and what we need from others, can be begin to be happy a deux.

I believe what Wain is saying here, but I suspect that for most of us this self-knowledge only comes after we've lived with someone for a long time, rather than during a period of courtship, where the passion of love tends to blur the edges of anything the other person actually is.

The joys of cellphones

There was a time when I wouldn’t have bothered with a cellphone. I’ve probably mentioned this before, in fact. My wife seems to be forever buying herself a new one, on the other hand, and I don’t know how many she’s gone through since the craze started. There was the one she dropped in the toilet, for instance, plus the others that just decided to die on her. Cellphones don’t seem blessed with longevity, to my way of thinking. I suspect they have an inbuilt use-by-date, so that the companies can sell you the next and most exciting kind. The last one my wife had took photos, and she was forever snapping something or other – until it died. To her considerable distress, I must add, since she was forced to downgrade, due to lack of finances, and be content – if that was the word for the occasion! – with the same cheap model as mine. At least now we can help each other out if something mysterious occurs; and that too, seems a feature of cellphones. You can work your way through the booklet until you’re blue in the face, but some unknown facet of the phone’s capability will suddenly come to the fore and do something you didn’t expect: like turn the sound off, for instance.
We’ve nearly always used the pre-paid approach - although not every other member of the family has, sometimes to their joy and sometimes to their distress. I’m yet to be convinced that there’s any better way, and I see that a site called Wirefly recommends the prepaid phonetoo, for good reasons. They encourage us on their site to buy as you go, which I assume is similar to the system available here: you pay some money down, and then use it up. (Usually it’s a minimum of twenty dollars, but every so often the company gets generous and gives you a free top-up.) the credit card approach to having a cellphone, where you are charged after the event, seems fraught with peril to me, particularly since cellphone companies here are forever encouraging you to text until your thumbs fall off. Personally I don’t always find the thumb the best digit to tackle the tiny keys on a cellphone with: my are too stubby, for some reason. And if cellphones get any smaller, not even my little finger will be of use!

I've just discovered there are such things as self-sterilising cellphones. There's one Korean phone that attacks pathogens and promotes deodorisation by using a single nanometer-thick coating of silver particles. Hmmm, have you noticed your cellphone smelling?

Disclosure statement

Adam Bede

‘It’s the silliest lie a sensible man like you ever believed, to say a woman makes a house comfortable. It’s a story got up, because the women are there, and something must be found for ‘em to do. I tell you there isn’t a thing under the sun that needs to be done at all, but what a man can do better than a woman, unless it’s bearing children, and they do that in a poor make-shift way: it had better ha’ been left to the men. I tell you, a woman ‘ull bake you a pie every week of her life, and never come to see that the hotter th’oven, the shorter the time. I tell you, a woman ‘ull make your porridge every day for twenty years, and never think of measuring the proportion between the meal and the milk – a little more or less, she’ll think, doesn’t signify. The porridge will be awk’ard now and then: if it’s wrong, it’s summat in the meal, or it’s summat in the milk, or it’s summat in the water.
‘Look at me! I make my own bread, and there’s no difference between one batch and another from year’s end to year’s end: but if I’d got any other woman beside Vixen [the dog] in the house, I must pray to the Lord every baking to give me patience if the bread turned out heavy. And as for cleanliness, my house is cleaner than any house on the Common, though the half of ‘em swarm with women. Will Baker’s lad comes to help me in a morning and we get as much cleaning done in one hour without any fuss, as a woman ‘ud get done in three, and all the while be sending buckets of water after your ankles, and let the fender and the fire irons stand in the middle of the floor half the day, for you to break you shins against them.
‘Don’t tell me about God having made such creatures to be companions for us! I don’t say but He might make Eve to be a companion to Adam in paradise – there was no cooking to be spoilt there, and no other woman to cackle with and make mischief, though you see what mischief she did as soon as she’d an opportunity. But it’s an impious, unscriptural opinion to say a woman’s a blessing to a man now; you might as well say adders and wasps, and foxes and wild beasts, are a blessing, when they’re only the evils that belong to this state o’ probation, which it’s lawful for a man to keep as clear of as he can in this life, hoping to get quit of ‘em in another.’
Bartle Massey in Adam Bede by George Eliot, chapter 21. An interesting viewpoint from a known feminist...

More on PayPerPost

Well, in spite of my griping a bit about PayPerPost (I've got it rightly written this time) in my last post I have to admit they’re on the ball, offering new approaches to making money from their site. There have been two new features recently, one the typical referral program (you can see a link to this over to the left) and the other something a bit more novel.
In this second approach, any other blogger reading this blog can do a review of any of my posts– not just the blog ads ones - and get paid for it. If you click on the badge at the bottom of this post, and sign up with PayPerPost (it costs you nothing, unlike some other blogging sites), you get a special ‘opportunity’. Opportunities are what you work from on the PayPerPost site, where you’re offered a certain sum of money to talk about a particular site. This opportunity will pay you US$7.50 for the joy of ‘reviewing’ one of my posts. I don’t know what US$7.50 is currently in NZ dollars – yes, I do: it’s $10.75. It’s not going to buy the weekly groceries, but these payments do add up over time. (Some of the big-time bloggers on PayPerPost have earned several thousand US dollars over time.) And if you enjoy writing anyway, why not get involved?
If there isn’t a ‘badge’ at the bottom of this post, it’ll be over at the side again. Blogger doesn’t always like me adding bits of html to my posts!

Payperpost

Well, Payperpost, which was earning me quite a nice little bit extra over the last few weeks has gone high-class. Now it’s practically impossible to get an interesting opportunity because all the best ones require blogs that have Google rankings of 2 or 3 or more. As far as I can tell, my blog, which is read by a select few, has a Google ranking of 0. !!
There are still some opportunities: mortgage refinancing, and various other financial posts, but I’ve done several of those already, and I’m not sure that I want to do any more. Still if it makes a couple of dollars it’s possibly worth it.
Payperpost has come under fire from bloggers all over who claim that it undermines their integrity. As the Tui ads say, ‘Yeah, right.’ Bloggers and integrity, for the most part, live in two different worlds. Of course, my integrity is another matter. Perhaps I don’t have any, if I’m prepared to use posts on my blog as pseudo-ads; or do I mean pseudo-ads as posts? (That’s what some bloggers would say, especially the ones who aren’t making any money out of Payperpost). Anyway, I’ve found it quite a challenge to have to write posts on subjects I know very little about, and have to do some research on. Being required to do no more than 100 words in some cases is a breeze. I usually do quite a bit more, because I get carried away and 100 words is nothing to the average writer.
But Payperpost of late has proved that it’s no longer aiming for the low-status blogger, like me. And Blogitive, which was a very reliable source of income for doing the same sorts of things, has dried up completely. As has Bloggingads. In each case, with no explanation. Obviously it’s a difficult market, and maybe Payperpost is hogging all the goodies. There was another crowd starting up, but I wasn’t so sure that their approach was as money-making, as marketing - and I've had enough of marketing.

An Old Captivity

Back in 1940, Nevil Shute, gradually becoming a much-acclaimed writer, published a book called, An Old Captivity. It was republished in 1967, and again in 1969. I have a copy of the 1969 edition, which I picked up at some fair with the intent to sell it off to Trade Me. (The book is again in print, by the way.)
Being short of something to read one day in the couple of months before Christmas I started into it. Full of detail about seaplanes and the flying of them (at least as far as things pertained to that period), the landing of them, the navigating of them, the full-on workload of maintaining them, and the not inconsiderable fact – which no doubt led to the demise of seaplanes commercially – that virtually everything has to be done on the water: refuelling, maintenance, cleaning up, removing bits of engines and so forth. Only occasionally is the thing pulled up on land, and then you get the feeling that this isn’t quite infra dig.
There’s not a mention of the War in spite of the time it was written. It’s strung together with three major characters who remain as bland throughout the book as they mostly are at the beginning; and told in an off-hand way with no suspense and nothing in the way of plot.

It’s a romance for a man who likes seaplanes. Consequently the romance side of it is barely worked on, and is summarily dismissed at the end.

More than three-quarters of the way through the book, after lots of flying time (described in detail – and certainly Shute knew his stuff), the main character, the pilot, has a long dream (he’s unconscious for three days). In it he sees himself in a period more than a thousand years previously, when the Vikings ruled and took slaves (from Scotland, in this case) and sailed the world, and discovered America. In the dream he falls in love with the only female slave of any consequence, and the two of them are about to escape when…he wakes up. The book ends some twenty pages later (!) having introduced a fantasy element into an otherwise very down-to-earth book (if you can describe a book about flying in such a way).

I only stuck with this book because I had read quite a bit of it, always waiting for something to happen, and thought Shute might finally have a surprise up his sleeve. Nope. It’s more like he wanted to describe what it was like to fly a seaplane, in detail, and tacked a story on to it. Somewhere along the line he realised he hadn’t really given his readers much to go on, so he bunged in a dream sequence. Having done that, he polished the thing off.

It runs to nearly 300 pages, and I’ve learnt heaps about flying seaplanes, if ever I should need this information. I’ve learnt nothing about what Shute thought about love and romance, and if I was a beginning writer, I’d know nothing about building a plot, producing suspense, or rounding out characters. Shute had written six novels before An Old Captivity, none of them as well known as later efforts. He was working on military projects for the War when the book was written, which may have distracted him a little.

There’s a very good summary of his life and work on Wikipedia, as there so often is these days!