Fatty the gecko, again

Fatty the Grandis day gecko has been sick. He was in with his new wife, Mrs. F, when he started to go dark and stressed. He was dehydrated and clearly hadn't been eating. He'd had something similar 18 months ago. This time the vet found Coccidia, though neither of us knew whether he'd gotten weak and that cause the Coccidia to increase in numbers, or he'd got Coccidia and that had made him weak. I decided to treat him anyway, and the vet gave me Albon, which he seemed to like and didn't knock him out as badly as I thought it would.

About a week after finishing the course, he started to catch his own mealworms, but I'm continuing to hand-feed him Repashy with a little calcium and occasional Bene Bac. By "hand-feed" I mean he'll literally only lick it off my finger. He won't eat out of a bowl.

Did I mention it's raining?

OC Register has a slide show, which inlcudes pictures of one of the big, showy eucalyptus trees in San Juan Capistrano city center, felled by the storm. This is on Del Obispo, by the Fire Station.

(Mark Edmondson's picture from the OC Register slideshow)

It's bloody raining. Has been for weeks on end.

San Juan Creek is usually just a trickle, a thin stream and some rock pools in a wide, rocky channel.

Not today. Here's a picture at Del Obispo Street bridge, about a mile from the sea.

It smelled powerfully of toilets and bore more than one condom. Tomorrow will not be a good day to surf. 

Come on the women's march instead.

In which I watch UK TV to take my mind off things

So this morning, to get away from it all, I watched the BBC (it was 7:30 pm in England) and they'd given up on the news for one of those cute-puppy-can-bark-national-anthem-underwater type shows. We've just had a man I don't recognize talking about catching fish and being asked to recognize celebrities with last names that recall fish -example: Nicola Sturgeon, an autobiographical film on Gilbert O'Sullivan's first piano, an extremely enthusiastic Sikh man with an impenetrable Scottish accent talking about star cooks and what might have been some kind of cooking competition, and suddenly we're listening to DJ Pete Tong, Jules Buckley (?) and the Heritage Orchestra, giant glockenspiel to the fore, accompanied by what appears to be a cast of a thousand ravers, belting out house music versions of Fat Boy Slim's Right Here, Right Now and Whosit's Insomnia.

Trump features not.

The BBC's London has never looked more European, that sort of Romanian ambiance of very white people[1] playing Chicago dance music with wild abandon, and celebrating fishermen and food.

Shame England's decided to leave Europe. One non-fish related politician a couple of days ago came back with assurances that Trump would look favorably on the tiny rudderless kingdom, but Trump's speech today rather emphasized he's not going to give an inch in trade deals - it's America first all the way. I suppose England could file to become a suburb of Chicago, or Detroit, I forget which type of House Music these two are. 

Then I watched Room 101 and it featured a horse playing a recorder with one nostril (fingering supplied by a handy human) which struck me as hilarious. There was also that guy with the floppy hair that's on all these things - David Mitchell(?) managing to sound British and indignant over things like being thought a lesser person because you couldn't remember the names of the people you were talking to. I read the reviews for Room 101 and they all said it was tired, and dire. I guess my laughter threshold is pretty low today. 

Mood wasn't helped by either episode of East Enders (there's two a day? and it's still going? and it still has Dot Cotton?) which was so unrelentingly grim I felt a compunction to put them all out of their misery, but I didn't have any anthrax handy. 

[1] The Sikh guy is the exception that proves the rule.

Motor Scooters of the Bad Kind

Found this album - Montrose, by Montrose - on my Zune. I can't remember buying it or even putting it on the machine, but since it was there...

It takes me back. I remember listening to Bad Motor Scooter in 1974. Quite a guilty pleasure as I was a total rock snob and Montrose were very much low-rent. Listening again, it's interesting how much they resemble the equally second-side-of-the-Monopoly board Guns 'n' Roses. Rock Candy in particular sounded like it could be on Spaghetti Incident. Maybe it was?

For everyone who thinks Michael Jackson invented bad-meaning-good and those who know better and think it was invented the previous year, in 1987, take a listen to Bad Motor Scooter. No idea why bad meant good in 1974, but it apparently did. Unfortunately for me, as a Brit, and innocent of slang, it really did conjure up getting on a spavined Vespa and trying to ride across the prairies with the ol' parka flapping in the breeze (or lack of breeze as you putter across the continental divide).

The first line is "If you get lonely on your daddy's farm just remember I don't live too far" (which he characterizes as less than a day away). Do rock bands still cater to people who get lonely on their daddy's farm? I don't think so. Maybe all those coffeehaus mandolin-plunkers failing to remember the people on their daddy's farm is the cause of all this Heartland Angst we've heard so much about during this election cycle?

Rock Candy's first line is "You're rock candy baby, you're hot sweet and sticky," one of rock's premier dental caries tracks. Like Bad Motor Scooter, it conjures up a vivid image, but in my case it's not of a horny woman dripping honey, but more like finding a lump in my school blazer pocket and drawing it out to find a clipped bus ticket stuck to a hard candy covered in lint. (Unlike Def Leppard's Pour Some Sugar On Me, which takes me away to a dream place where I've staked the whole band spreadeagled on top of an anthill.)

Very much an American Bad Company, all in all, I think.

Read the room, lady.

The photo is from a Twitter account called Tomsauced.

It reminded me of a time, long ago, when a friend of mine at college attempted suicide - twice. After the second attempt, the hospital asked her to go to group therapy sessions. She went to the first session and was back way early. 

"What happened? Didn't talking it out help?"

"We all sat around on wooden chairs in a circle and the group leader asked to us to think about what we really most wanted in our hearts."

"Go on."

"We thought about it for a minute, and he pointed at the first woman and she said, 'I could really do with a nice cup of tea.'"

Mind you, I've no idea what I would have said if a group leader asked me that question. I can't imagine answering it honestly, or even actually knowing what it was before deciding whether to answer honestly.  "Read the room" sounds like the best policy. 

Sodium Bicarbonate

Funny I saw this meme today because yesterday I realized I knew the answer. I was making scones and got the baking powder out of the pantry and reminisced that up until I was 34, I never knew there was a difference between baking powder and baking soda. 

And then I realized that was it - like most people I'd always wondered how you knew you were a 'grown up' and like most, I didn't feel grown up in my 20s, but by the time I was in my 40s I'd stopped thinking about it. And that must have been the tipping point. 

When you first realize there's a difference between baking powder and baking soda is when you become an adult.

Since I've decided bicarbonate of soda is the secret of life, here's Ivor Cutler singing about his Holy Grail, Bicarbonate of Chicken.

I couldn't find one about the Zen journey and baking powder, so this old chestnut will have to do instead.

At first I thought the wording I remembered

When studying Zen, there is a mountain

While studying Zen, the mountain disappears

After studying Zen, there is a mountain

was a quote from Alan Watts, then realized it must have been D T Suzuki, but when searches on their quotes failed I went with good ol' Donovan's wording for a pinnable meme.

Philip K Dick's A Scanner Darkly is 40 years old

I have always loved this book. The extended comic riffs - like the discussion about the microdot factory and the argument over the bicycle gears - are positively cackle-inducing, and yet the inevitable slow disintegration of the main character is as dark and bleak as all hell. And at the end, perhaps, a faint glimmer of hope, but not for anybody we've seen in the book. To underline that point, it ends with a factual list of the drug-damaged friends of the author, and the book is dedicated to them.

It's also one of the few books where I can recommend the movie version, by Richard Linklater, which is artistically crazy (but it works) and features Robert Downey Jr. in excellent form as the sinister narcissist Barris.

The Quietus reports on the 40th anniversary of A Scanner Darkly : Collapsed Horizon: Philip K Dick's A Scanner Darkly, 40 Years On  by Eli Lee , January 15th

QMS Voldemort

Oh no ominous email received:

It turned out to be a boring article on 'dark data' such as audit trails. 

...ieee that's probably more ominous than thinking Lord QMS Voldemort was on to me

Wall of meat

Post Modernism and Surkov

This is an interesting article from Jacobin but I'd quibble with the following statement: 

"The effect of the fake-news narrative was the opposite of what was intended: now the president-elect can stand behind the podium and throw the accusation right back at none other than CNN, the international symbol of American cromulence. It was an empty concept, just waiting to be recuperated by the far right."

As far as I can tell, it was invented by the far right, with exactly that outcome in mind. Here's a portion of an Adam Curtis documentary discussing Vladislav Surkov, the Russian who invented - or at least weaponized - this postmodernist confusion. 

Posting frequency update

These days I post mostly on Facebook. This is where 'They' (heh heh heh) WANT you to post, but it's inescapable as that's where everybody *is* and that's where you get the reactions.

But Facebook belongs to Whatsisface, and is carefully tailored to ensure there are walls around the product -the writer- to keep readers within Facebook itself. A few break out. I read exactly one person (out of a billion or so FBers) who can encourage me to read his blog, and one more where I'll click the 'read more' button to get the whole post because it's vaguely interesting.

But you can't find those posts again. They belong to Facebook and disappear in the swirl in a few hours. The web, where Google at least gets to index text, is a much better medium if you have something to say that is meaningful for longer than a wedding anniversary, or a birthday.

Accordingly, I'm going to try to put some of those posts here as well. Some will be pretty trivial, but at least I (and you) will be able to find them here in a week, or a month, if it suddenly becomes relevant, or a historical footnote.

Some few of you may then have to suffer through them twice. I hope this will not be too damaging.