Marc Bolan at home, playing Suneye (video), London Rock (video)

 The first blockbuster T. Rex record was "Hot Love," released in the UK on 12th of February, 1971. 

That date neatly marks the demarcation between me being a child, about whom I can remember very little, and being a teen. "Ride a White Swan" was released in October 1970, not charting until January 1971, but to me, the two weeks between Swan moving down the charts and "Hot Love's" release were the difference between ancient history and things that happened to me personally. 

As my infatuation with T. Rex grew, I worked my way through the back catalogue as money allowed. The Tyrannosaurus Rex albums - My People, Prophets, Unicorn and Beard of Stars instantly became favorites. The prior T. Rex album - the eponymously named T. Rex - took a little longer to gel with me. I preferred the early acoustic tracks over Marc Bolan's burgeoning electric guitar workouts.  The direction had been obvious from the last track on Beard, "Elemental Child." In fact, if I'd had any ability to browse singles in those days, I would have heard it much earlier on "King of the Rumbling Spires," released as a single in 1969.  (But there was no chance of that.)

Something changed between T. Rex (the album) and "Hot Love." Marc Bolan made a quantum leap from the worked-over-many-times fey Hobbitesque boogie of "Woodland Bop" or the harder but still ovine ambiance of "One Inch Rock." He simultaneously avoided the hamfisted-Hendrix sound of "Elemental Child" and the crosslegged chirpiness of "Woodland Bop" and landed a solid gold slab of 1971 pop.

I was intensely interested in T. Rex by that point, and bought all the magazines and weeklies I could afford to read more about Marc's life.  I would have been overjoyed to see the little clip above, of Marc Bolan at home playing a few seconds of "Suneye," from T. Rex (the album). Seeing it today, after all these years, takes me back to the magazine-collecting years. In fact, I AM overjoyed to see it. What a talent, and what a sad loss that he died so young. 

The clip is from the documentary London Rock, released in 1970. By the magic of the interwebs, it is available on YouTube. I hope it stays up as the whole thing is a time capsule of the era when British rock got over its love affair with Blues and started to branch out.

Thank you to MrDomin099 Stone for uploading this precious glimpse into the past. 

International Talk Like a Pirate Day, September 19th

Ahoy, Matey! 

September 19th is International Talk Like a Pirate Day.

Arrrr!

Founded last century by John Baur and Mark Summers, ITLAPD was first disseminated to us scurvy landlubbers by Dave Barry in 2002.

Taking part is pretty simple. You sprinkle your speech at will with Pirateisms on September 19th. You don't have to dress up or get on a boat unless you want to. 

Sixteen men on a dead man's chest! 

Yo ho ho and a bottle of milk!

Dragon Fruit ready for harvesting

 

Dragon Fruit looking good. I'll pick them today. The top left, dark variety is a Zamorano and the the pink/red ones are Delight. The first one flowered on the 1st August, so it's been 46 days - I might have left it two days too long. (As they ripen, the fruits start to be wiggleable, like a kid's loose tooth, get softer and redder, and may get a split in the dark area where the flower used to be attached.)

I don't want to whinge too much, but it's about time! They've been a lot of work. I've spent all day today repotting and staking the cuttings to get ready for fall, about the fourth of fifth full day this year. They grow like weeds, and it's important to keep them pruned or they branch out everywhere. (The rootstock should only have to support one stem until the cactus is old enough to flower, when you can let it branch out.)

The ones at the back (common or garden Lowe's or Home Depot variety) grew well but didn't flower this year so I have to make a decision whether to discard them and plant the cuttings of the varieties that did flower or leave them another year to see.

Delight is supposedly delicious while people mostly just describe Zamorano as average. I'll do a taste test in the next few days.

I owe a lot to Richard at Grafting Dragon Fruit. Not that we've ever met, but his videos are so informative and he's so cheerful and enthusiastic it really makes me want to succeed!

I'm in me mum's car (broom broom) redux

 In 2014 I posted a short video of a person in their mum's car (brum, brum). It was a mildly popular, shortlived meme that I just loved for some reason.  (The original write up is here.)

I'm always happy to find out what people are doing years  down the line. Where's Star Wars Kid now? What happened to the little girl with the teeth looking nonplussed in the car? Have any of the people in the Distracted Boyfriend Meme gotten married to each other yet? 

Anyway, we found out what happened to the person in their mum's car.  He came out as a transgender man, and it made the Daily Mail. 

Tristan Simmonds, who was formally known as Trish, won thousands of fans in the 2014 with a skit where he drove his mother's car on the now defunct social media platform, saying: 'I'm in my mum's car, broom broom.'

Since then, the viral star, from Huddersfield, has been updating followers with news about their life - and came out as a trans man in 2021.

In a video shared on Youtube, he explained that he had first come out to his parents in a letter followed by an emotional conversation and that they were supportive of his decision. 

Thought you ought to know.  

Nine Dioptres (short story) now available for Kindle readers

Art by Emma Howitt for IZ Digital "Nine Dioptres".

Gareth Jelley of IZ Digital has kindly made available an EPUB version of Nine Dioptres for those of us who prefer to read on our Kindle.  To download the file, click the green button below. 

For people without Kindles, or who prefer not to press strange buttons on the internet, the story is also available to read at IZ Digital's website at the link below.  

Nine Dioptres

‘I can’t see that far,’ said Aminah, and bit her lip. Why admit that to the stranger? Suddenly overcome with self-pity, tears came to her eyes. Nuada waited until the black-robed figure was ready.

When Aminah spoke, it was with a sob: ‘I’m going blind, Nuada. Every day I see less and less!’

Nuada led her below. ‘Wait here. I can help you,’ she said, and got her bag. She took out her left eye and fitted a microeye into the socket. She peered into Aminah’s eyes, one after the other. Then she sat back, calculating something. ‘You aren’t going blind. It’s just myopia, which is easily corrected with lenses.’

‘I couldn’t wear a machine on my face,’ wailed Aminah.

September 11, 2001

Today’s the anniversary of 9/11. It took place in 2001, long enough ago that students entering the university system this past couple of years were not even born when it took place. It’s starting to fade in living memory and become history, that peculiar domain where historians shuffle facts around until they appear to form a pattern, and then write a book about how that pattern is a thing, a fact in itself, and how this new reified thing was inevitable.

Since the attacks on the World Trade Center – and the other attacks that day – took place in a world with a nascent internet, the process of pattern-making started early. It was one of the first events to be promptly evaluated for slotting into pre-existing patterns, and the conspiracy takes started early. Within minutes, in fact. President Kennedy’s assassination may have spawned more, longer and more elaborate theories but they took a while to grow legs, while 9/11 had its conspiracy theorists firing up the ol’ modems* and spinning their ‘findings’ before the literal dust literally settled.

Photo from Wikimedia Commons (no photographer credit) https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4e/World-Trade-Center_9-11.jpg

 
I’m not going to rehearse those theories as it’s a futile task. It only adds to the churn. All I’ll say is that within 50 years we’ll get the World Trade Center Deniers who will present plenty of evidence that the WTC buildings never existed and the whole shebang was fabricated to bring the US into open conflicts in the Middle East. Today, thousands of Chat GPT (and similar) queries are generating millions of words of text and hundreds of thousands of pictures, which when put together will cast doubt on anything seen on the internet. There’ll be no such thing as verifiable, original footage.

Maybe that will be the last nail in the coffin of the pattern-matchers – if any and all takes can be fabricated, it will become difficult to wend a path through facts to find any spurious patterns in the data. We’ll just have to see.

On 9/11/2001, as I got ready for work in California, I switched on the TV. I didn’t normally do that, and I have no idea why I did that day. California is three hours ahead of New York. I turned on the cable news to hear a newscaster solemnly intone, “Smoke is rising from the North Tower. The South Tower collapsed minutes ago**.”

I looked at the live picture on the screen and tried to work out what those words could possibly mean. The only two towers I could think of were in the book of the same name by J R R Tolkien. But the picture was not of Middle Earth. It was a city, shrouded in smoke. The announcer talked some more and it eventually penetrated my foggy mind that a World Trade Center building had collapsed – and now another one was on fire. A few minutes later, The North Tower collapsed in a horrific blossom of crushed concrete dust. There was consternation onscreen.

I glanced at the clock. It was 7:30 AM, and I needed to get to work. No one knew what had happened. It’s hard to describe the lack of further information. Today, almost all of us have a high-quality video camera in our pockets. You can’t have a mild row in a suburban street without half-a-dozen bystanders flipping phones out of their pants and recording every detail. Each one can be uploaded to a service and available to watch within minutes. But only 22 years ago, it was a rare occurrence for someone to have both a video camera and the presence of mind to point it at a source of danger rather than leg it out of there as fast as possible. Photos of the planes hitting the towers and the plumes of flame started to come in but still, nothing about it made sense. How could two jets hit two buildings in Manhattan? And something hit the Pentagon building! All aircraft were ordered to land by the FAA!

I’m not sure if I heard about the crash of Flight 93 before I left for work. I know I didn’t see until later the footage of George W Bush reading to a class of schoolkids when an aide whispered something to him and a look I’ve never seen before came over his face. He stayed with the children for a few minutes, apparently not wishing to cause panic, before being hustled to safety.

Once at work you start going about your business, of course. Everyone had a theory, but everyone had work to do. Even so, we would continually drift away from our desks and go to the conference rooms, which had TVs fitted for audio-visual presentations. Our company was (and is) a huge firm performing blood tests on patients all over the US. Vast numbers of vials of blood were shipped around the country from where they were collected to where they could be tested. 

It’s a minor thing among all the horrors that happened on 9/11 (and subsequently) but with all air traffic grounded, we had to find alternate means of getting specimens to the laboratories. Most tests are routine, in the sense that you would be extremely pissed to be told you had to have a second blood draw because your prior specimen didn’t make it to the lab before it denatured, but you wouldn’t suffer a major setback. But other tests are irreplaceable. The “before” samples taken before an operation or cancer treatment saved to be matched with “after” samples. Chemotherapy levels after dosing. Prenatal tests taken from chorionic villi. Drug levels for such things as Gabapentin. Cerebrospinal fluids, bone marrow samples. You don't want either of those done twice.

The logistics departments moved heaven and earth to get everything they could stabilized, if possible, and shifted onto trains and trucks.

One batch of a few hundred specimens could not be recovered and all had to be redrawn. That insulated crate was in the hold of Flight 175 when the plane hit the South Tower. Strange to think that when history is being written and some bright spark has an idea about 9/11, they’ll call for DNA testing of the few preserved pieces of the WTC*** and they might find evidence of a bunch of people who were never in the towers or on the planes, present only as samples in glass vials. 

That could cause a few new conspiracy theories.

 

*All right, it wasn’t that long ago. Many people had cable internet and/or T1 lines, whatever they were.

**That’s from memory, not an exact quote.

*** Most of the rubble was rushed to a landfill, which is more grist for the conspiracy mill. The landfill was called Fresh Kills.

Sunless and Nine Diopters (short stories) available at IZ Digital

A reminder that you can read two of my stories, Sunless and Nine Diopters, at Gareth Jelley's remarkable IZ Digital, the webzine companion to Interzone magazine. 

Full disclosure: It's actually "Nine Dioptres" but you're unlikely to die from reading half a dozen words spelled in British English. 

Sunless

Tomey placed his feet carefully on the network of life support tubing, grabbing at handholds as he moved from the cable side of the Rambler’s hull to the outward side. The ship slid upwards, cables screeching.

Soon, the ground vehicles were no longer visible. To the west, green veins of copper ore shot through the orange rock of the treeless Lono Hills. The mangled ground formed a circle near the foot of the funicular, the green, white and yellow squares of farms filled the horizon to the east, and to the south the garden-roofed skyscrapers of the city flourished like a jungle streaked with black crevasses. The cold, hard metal of a liquid oxygen pipe burned Tomey’s hands, and he switched his grip, cursing under his breath.

Nine Dioptres

‘I can’t see that far,’ said Aminah, and bit her lip. Why admit that to the stranger? Suddenly overcome with self-pity, tears came to her eyes. Nuada waited until the black-robed figure was ready.

When Aminah spoke, it was with a sob: ‘I’m going blind, Nuada. Every day I see less and less!’

Nuada led her below. ‘Wait here. I can help you,’ she said, and got her bag. She took out her left eye and fitted a microeye into the socket. She peered into Aminah’s eyes, one after the other. Then she sat back, calculating something. ‘You aren’t going blind. It’s just myopia, which is easily corrected with lenses.’

‘I couldn’t wear a machine on my face,’ wailed Aminah.

 

Cochineal and Prickly Pear

This is less showy than most of my garden photos, but even more botanically interesting. I planted a prickly pear cactus pad a year or so ago and it's growing. It's rooted and has put out new little cactus pads.
It's also growing a bunch of fur-covered insects!
Oh no!
But look - the insects are Cochineal. That's right, they're red food coloring. The red food coloring that is labeled cochineal is made from ground-up opuntia-eating beetles.
I am not planning on making my own food dye, however. The beetle-fur is pretty gross and my finger was stained for hours!

I had not realized it was marketed under any name except cochineal, but Wikipedia says it is also called Carmine and has food dye numbers where approved: "Specific code names for the pigment include natural red 4, C.I. 75470, or E120."

So if you're vegan, watch out for those dyes.

Queen of the Night, queen of the storm

Just over a year ago, a neighbor gave me a cutting of her Queen of the Night cactus. It's an epiphyte, which is to say that it doesn't root in the ground, but spreads out in an attempt to anchor itself in tree branches in (South American) jungles. Its Latin name is Epiphyllum oxypetalum.

The plant flowers just once in summer and is unlikely to bear fruit as it needs a nearby relative for pollination. (Since it's a cutting of my neighbor's, it's genetically identical, and hers, alas, won't do it.) But what a show it puts on for those one or two nights!

The plant is about two meters across at its widest part, for scale.

The flower, like the Dragon Fruits I've mentioned elsewhere, has male and female parts. The many yellow heads on long filaments are anthers, covered with pollen. The structure at the front that looks like a starfish or spider is the stigma, the part that receives pollen. Behind the stigma is a tube called a style, and that leads to the ovule, where the fruit will form. Pollen is deposited on the stigma and grows all the way down to the ovule to fertilize the fruit. 

The reason why everything is soaking is that the photos were taken during Tropical Storm Hilary. It doesn't normally rain three inches in a day in August in Southern California. I don't know why the plant decided to flower on the only day it has ever been indoors, sheltering. I had to take it back out into the storm so they could fully open. 

Khachaturian chilling

 Khachaturian is my Jackson's Chameleon. 

No, they don't change color to match the background. He is cool-looking, though. 

Dragon Fruit plants are bearing...uh, fruit.

 The Dragon Fruit plants both set fruit. Here they are just a few days after pollination. 

I guess the difficulty now is keeping the squirrels, birds and rats from taking the first bites. 

Dragon Fruit plants are starting to pay off.

My Dragon Fruit plants started blooming in August. They flower at night and are closing by the morning. Many are self-fertile, assuming there's something around (like me with a paintbrush) to get the pollen from the male parts transferred to the female parts. Some are self-sterile, and need something (e.g. me) to get pollen from a different species before they'll set fruit. The issue is, of course, that you can't control which plants flower when, so you don't always have a choice.

The flower at the top left is a Zamorano, a Honduran H polyrhizus cross purchased early 2022.  

The others are Delight, H. undatus X H. guatemalensis also purchased as a cutting in early 2022.

There were arguments online about whether either of these were self-fertile. I moved pollen between all these flowers and most of them set fruit. 

Here is a photo of them fully open, with a man's hand for size comparison. The wooden posts are five foot tall 4x4" fenceposts with jute sackcloth around them. Dragon fruit climb trees in the wild and put roots into the sacking to hold on. The plants are in 15-gallon pots of well-draining soil. 

My day geckos

 A couple of lizards in my home brood. Grandis Day Geckos, Phelsuma grandis. (Formerly Phelsuma madagascariensis grandis.)  Unlike the average gecko in a pet shop, day geckos are awake during the day (hence the name) and so are fun to watch. You can't put one on your shoulder and go out to show off. In fact, even if you open the cage you risk losing them. They are nervous and incredibly fast. As pets they are more like exotic orchids. 

Below, Mr. F, the grandis day gecko. He was 28 years old in July. No, they don't usually live this long.

Below, Baby grandis day gecko, born on 7th July 2023.

Mr F is not the dad. He's a bit past it. The baby's dad is a beautiful high crimson grandis called Legs.  He's hard to photograph because he's skittish. Maybe later. 

Arnold (documentary, Netflix)

The new Netflix docuseries about Arnold Schwarzenegger, "Arnold" has a lot going on. It's difficult to believe that one man could have done so much, but listening to Arnie's philosophy as he's interviewed today, at 75, you can see how he managed to push himself to get it all done. 

One thing that stood out to me is almost the first scene, a couple of minutes in. Arnold, at 22, wins the Mr. World championship, the career breakthrough that led to a string of bodybuilding titles. 

That's him (from Muscle Builder, reprinted at the Joe Weider website.) Incredible size--he weighed 230lbs. There are (nowadays) much bigger bodybuilders with much better cuts (and much better steroid regimes, it should be said), but this photo was taken when he was 22.  Talk about genetically gifted. I don't know how it's even possible for someone to grow this much by that age. Building muscle takes time as well as hard work. 

From the same webpage, here's Arnold in a line-up with Sergio Oliva (R) and Reg Park (L) at that Mr. World. 

Arnold is 22, Reg is 42 and Sergio is 29.  I can just about believe a man could get to Sergio's size approximately 17 years after puberty, but to get to Arnold's size after 10?

Anyway, there's about three hours more of the documentary after this, Arnold going from (sorry, I'm going to say it...) strength to strength. Jimmy Page once said that he (Jimmy) had followed Crowley's precepts, which he described as first determining your true will, then "forge ahead like a steam train."  In Arnold's case I guess he was built like a steam train and carried on from there. 

(I also watched the Arnie vehicle "FUBAR" which is also new on Netflix. Although Arnie is his usual lovable self, the series is barely watchable. If you're interested to see how many cliches and tropes it's possible to throw against the wall and see what sticks and then pick up the ones that didn't stick and use them as well, you can watch it with a cliche bingo card. If that's not your thing, watch something else.)

Nine Dioptres (short story) now available from IZ Digital

My short story Nine Dioptres has been published in IZ Digital, joining Sunless (April 2023) and a story in 2021 in the print magazine, Interzone. 

Nine Dioptres is the story of a family of bargees moored along the the River Thames, at Tilbury Enterprise Zone. A visitor asks Aminah to smuggle her south across the river. But the bargees shun modern electronic devices, and there's something strange about the visitor that makes Aminah hesitate to help her. 

"The town to the north, Tilbury, had died in Aminah’s grandmother’s day, razed, ploughed and planted with Poppier. Her grandmother had told her of the souk on the north bank, where thousands of young women, hardly covered at all, haggled for fine leatherwork and embroidery. In those days, before the border was enforced, the young people crossed the bridges in cars and set up street stalls selling knock-off iPhones and MacBooks, outlawed today as instruments of Satan. Aminah’s mother, Jyutsna Begum, still lived with her grandmother on the water under Lizabeth Bridge. Their cutter’s engine had, of course, been sold for scrap many years before.

Illustration by Emma Howitt for IZ Digital

 

Background to the story

For those interested in the genesis of the story: Even today, London has enterprise zones between Canvey Island and Dagenham, and the government is eager to develop the zones as Freeports, or Free Trade Zones, in which excise taxes are not applicable until goods are moved out of the zone and into the UK proper. Although inside the UK physically, the zones are outside it for certain purposes. 

In the story, the people living in the freeports, including on the river, cannot enter London without a passport. The sea level has risen, causing some population changes in the area (and a lot of new marshland) but a second, much larger Thames Barrier at Southend keeps floods from London proper.