Foreign Devil

 OBODY COULD HAVE predicted what happened; least of all last of all me? It had everything weighted against it, coulda bet your house against it: congenital scots allergy to batting games <-check->, which remind us of most-hated cricket, Game of Empire; the compulsive naming and counting of everything <-check-> so bizarre and confounding to aliens of wizened intellect and a deep-seated loathing of numerical precision and anything vaguely statisticy; the ranks of welfare billionaires <-check-> steeped in city taxes who'll charge you ten bucks for a packet of peanuts; the allness of the all that's gone before <-check->, the lore and the mythology so familiar, so intimately held, but of which you hold no part at all; the sport of it <-check->, and a man long-bored and disenchanted, even of his favorites?

It happened by stealth, really: a side-effect of an immigrant's Duty - or of any foreign visitor, for that matter - to sample everything of value to his adopted culture. Which is to say, anything his adopted country holds in high esteem. I must go to a Ball Game!, said me, savoring the term "ball game", made familiar by a thousand movies, all seeming to feature Walter Matthau, but never yet directly experienced - Go to a ball game, sing the song, and eat yourself a Dodger Dog!

It helped that we had very good seats - three rows back from first base that first season, then four rows back from home plate the next - and a generous employer with season tickets? That we sat in such seats, and for free - how cruel that must appear to lifelong followers and fans up there four tiers, in the clouds? Best seats saved for the ignorant, the merely curious, for sales guys and their marks? I would have been happy to sit anywhere, but it happens I sat near the front at the back, if you see what I mean, down at the field where the players are life-size and the colors most keen.

I had few expectations of my first visit - I had no real interest in the game after all, and both television coverage and Sports Bars count as strikes against it - but, but... ah but: being there is different. You may argue that attendance live and in-person at any sporting event might enamour one of it? But I answer No, quietly, for not even following my father chase Nicklaus and Trevino and Player and others round Gleneagles Open one year could endear me to golf as a spectator sport? And not even laying one rare sunny day lazily supping of beer with my friends, as one ought, could cheer-up cricket in my eyes? So no, it doesn't always work that way. It is easy to observe any game played live, and take away home with you naught but a tired behind?

In sum:

• I had no idea what they were doing, or what was occuring;
  
• I couldn't make sense of the scoreboard;
  
• I didn't even know all the words, 'till my blessèd wife pointed to fifty-foot scriptage.
  
• But I loved it. Every damned minute. Stayed to the end of the ninth. We - "We" - beat the Diamondbacks that day.
  

"Here it is. This is a simple game. You throw the ball, you
hit the ball, you catch the ball. You got that?!"
- Bull Durham

That is such a lie: let us forget, for an instant, the two-hundred page rulebook of this "simple game", and set aside the elaborate scoring and counting of errors and whatnots on the official dual-row multi-column scoreboard that is just begging for trouble, you ask me? Set that aside and Forgive me, please, for remarking: it is not permitted for sports to be simple in America. It just cannot happen. No matter how simple or trivial the rules of a sport, its devotees and commentators will contrive to complicate it? They will enhance it, expand it, enmesh it in numbers, befog it with names for every event, real or potential - knuckleball, curveball, breaking ball, slider, change-up, four-seam two-seam split-finger fastball - Just THROW the damned thing already! I could list for you now, now I can two years on, a hundred different names of things without breaking sweat. All of them most of them betchya counted and tabulated by somebody for every game or for every player. That whole metasphere of jargon and statistics, intimately familiar it seems to every wee american boy, is horrendously daunting to the foreigner. This was intimated many, many years ago - before I first married, even - when Channel 4 introduced NFL American Football to british audiences on a weekly basis? I still do not know what a feching "shotgun" is? But football is childsplay for the novice when compared to baseball. Really.

My wife - my Goddess of the flashing eyes, bless her - she knows the ins and outs! She knew and knows every answer to the penumbra of stupid baseball questions I have pestered her with. What's that do? Why'd that happen? Why'd he walk? Why wizzat a Double? She knows all of this because she made it her business, as a young lass, to learn baseball that she could better oppose her sister, who was at that time (still is, I think?) an avid Dodgers fan on account of some boyfriend or other? My wife was a Yankee, that being her idea of a Dodgers most-hated enemy at that time. Today she would probably be a Giant if that were still her reasoning - although I discovered last season she still has a soft spot for Yankees? But we're all Dodgers now, on account of two reasons: first, I'm new, obviously, but strongly of the opinion that one ought support one's local team come hell or high water? An old scottish failing, I know, but a good one. The LA Dodgers - or, the Brooklyn Dodgers of Los Angeles as they prefer to be known - these are my local team, closer by some fifty miles than the Angels. Secondly, it's Dodger tickets we are given. Could be Kings or Lakers tickets, too, but I'm still afraid of basketball.

And so it's the Dodgers. Oor team.

I like the stadium, I confess - but I haven't seen it renovated yet - and I kinda sorta like the team? The only player I know by sight is Gagné, little frenchie winner that he is, and only one or two others by reputation or association? So I'm not big on the who's-who of my team. Besides, they change the rosters like nobody's business - who, I ask, is supposed to be able to keep up with that? But the Dodgers Organization, the corporate conglomeroso - they can go shaft themselves! They make it very difficult for honest folks to give them the time of day? Dodger Stadium is Rip-off City, but then again, what concession-fueled plaza isn't?

And, to my very great disappointment after much prospective hype, I discovered that Dodger Dogs are rubbish. Just another concession-stand hot dog. Meh. My wife had built them up as fabled in my mind before our first visit - and perhaps they were one time something other, something inspiring? But those days are clearly in the past. Just another foil-wrapped lukewarm hot dog. Nothing special. This has led me to wonder, to ponder stroked-chin, whether there might not be some universal human condition at work here? Might it be that I misread the Dodger Dog story? That Dodger Dogs were never, after all, supposed to be a cut above the rest? That they were instead to Dodger fans as Greasy Pies and Bovril are to scottish soccer fans? We love them, we worship them, because they are so foul? It's part of the fitba' experience: mutton pies never dressed as lamb - mostly sheeps heid I expect - and peppered beefy Bovril, a kind of thick beef jus, drunk as tea, whose consistency in the jar is rather like mollases? I don't think we're allowed Bovril in this country? Probably, like haggis, considered unfit for human consumption or somesuch? Anyway: Dodger Dogs == Pies & Bovril.

Watching a sport played live may be thrilling, but I never expected to find myself watching a game on television? Hitherto, in our house, my wife or myself will change channel the instant a baseball game appears. Until late in last year's season that is - before the play-offs. One evening stretched vacant on the couch, I uttered "Switch it back! I was watching that!" to my shocked remote-controlling belovèd. Completely involuntary: I had no idea that I was watching it, really, until she switched over?

But that was that. "I was watching that!" Out to Target that very night and bought myself a computer game, too, that I could better get to grips with the monster. I love computer games, therefore I now love baseball.

And now, like any other moron, I'll watch baseball on the telly when I can. Not often these days, I admit, but the urge, the willingness, is there.

True to form - now following the story of every other team I've ever supported - I mention the Dodgers winning streak, they begin to lose disastrously.

That's my fault, Dodger fans. And we have ticket for next week.


* * * * *


Finally, as is traditional here in the Xenoverse, I will point you to other blogs that suddenly had the urge to write about the same subject as me, but didn't take all week to write the post:

• Norm, in Washington, takes time to watch the Nationals while calmly tearing apart some ridiculous dictator-loving lefties, give us all a bad name;
  
• Turns-out Sullivan and Karl Rove were there too. What a geek. Here in LA we see real celebs, if not perhaps this week entirely...
  
• TP - but then, he's always writing about baseball;
  
• A ton of others, all propelled and energized by the new Washington team.
  

I will...

I will write soon, I will, I will.
I promise you I will?
But in the never-ending crisis
That is Work, my work,
A crunch-time rush-time panic-time
Scream that has ran for twenty-odd years
Is rattling and shivering the timbers
Of my skull and I am sick of it
To death of it;
I'm forty-bloody-two but Still
The thump and whump of bone on taut-fit skin
Hits harder faster quicker louder
While the lollipuddled fat man squatting in the aisle,
Fat and sweaty and slimey with grease,
Hars and cackles through rucketed teeth:
Ramming Speed! Ramming Speed! Ramming Speed Ho!
Ramming Speed! Ramming Speed! Ramming Speed HO!

I will write soon I promise you I will:
I have something in the oven even now?
One line an hour it creeps,
But a hundred more written in code,
Jamming Speed! Jamming Speed! Jamming Speed Ho!

Still there?

 ANTING AND RAVING, that's all I feel fit for today. Haven't had a break or a decent night's sleep for weeks and it's beginning to tell. I'm sure if I kicked one of the children - maybe the eldest, the one that I raised eighteen years, it seems, just so he could now work Fast Food - maybe that would help me feel better? Or maybe one of the younger cleverer ones, too lazy to do any school work or even, sometimes, to attend at all? Maybe slapping one of them about the head with a stick would make me feel just a little bit Dandier?

But Noooo... your stinking "Society", she would object! She would throw poor me in the pokey, instead of Them!!? Why did you have to die, John Belushi? I would have sold you my childrens, if only you'd asked?

It isn't just them - that's unfair - they're just icing on the poopy cake. It's everything: kids, work, people, the world. 'Sick of the lot of you.

Where have I been? Did you hear that the pope had died? Jeebus!, but where have I been? They elected another one, too: I posted a prediction to my belovèd that read: Papa Ratzi, the Former Nazi! and it came so very very close to what they wrote next day? You can always rely on The Sun, but I thought the Daily Express' "Der Panzerkardinal" was funnier. Tittering still. Or I would be, if I weren't so feching crabbit!

Bless me Father, for I have sinned...
It has been two weeks since my last posting, Father...

And then, week or so earlier - decades ago of blogtime I know, but, whatevs - shock of my bloody life, there was!

Sat stuporific in the early morning after a long long night of hard coding. Crumpled in the comfy chair, smoking, soaking coffee, listening half-arsed off and on to local news on the local Fox affiliate. Not paying any particular attention. The Obnoxious Gillian Show for goodness' sake - the very, very last place on earthly television I'd expect to hear of scandal at a scottish soccer match? Whatwhat? - whitwizat? Alarum. Surprise. Being the local Fox affiliate, of course, meant they only teased the story, never quite managed to tell it. Dig around the web; look to my trusty Scotsman:

Hearts say sorry for fans who booed Pope tribute

MARTIN PATIENCE

HEARTS football club have apologised for the behaviour of some of their fans who booed and jeered a silent tribute to Pope John Paul II.

The incident occurred before the start of yesterday’s Tennent’s Scottish Cup semi-final between Celtic and Hearts at Hampden Park in Glasgow.

Both teams had agreed to a minute’s silence before kick-off but the tribute was marred by booing from a section of the Edinburgh support. As a result, the referee cut the minute’s silence to 24 seconds.

Phil Anderton, Hearts’ chief executive, condemned the behaviour...

That's it? That's all? That's News here in sunny California?

So they booed a dead pope? Meh. They boo the live ones too.

Remember smiling to myself late last year when Tony Pierce claimed Yankees v. RedSox was "simply the greatest rivalry in all of sport."

P'tah! - says I - 'guy knows zip from rivalry! Far as I can tell, Yankees-RedSox began for real in 1920 or thereabouts and seems to be all about Baseball? Seriously - it's about the feching Baseball, nothing more?

Pleh. 1920 is, like, yesterday in british terms. And nobody honestly cares about the game? The game was always never more than a front. British sporting rivalries - Scotland v. England, or Celtic v. Rangers - they've been running for centuries, since long before there were sports; they keep alive in present times the ancient wars, immortal rifts, that can not be allowed to heal? The hatred between Glasgow Celtic and Glasgow Rangers soccer teams - the "Old Firm" - or their pale-shadowed wannabee Edinburgh counterparts Hearts and Hibs, who can no more break free of the "local derby" taint than Britney can of the trailer park - these have nothing to do with football! It's the Wars of Religion - it's the Reformation: Catholic vs. Protestant; catholic Celtic versus protestant Rangers; Fenian bastards vs. Proddy dogs; Republican irish vs. Loyalist ulstermen; Old Pretender vs. William of Orange; Papists vs. freeborn Presbyterians. Nothing to do with football. Betchya five bucks, look on any scottish schoolboy's jotter you'll find hidden there somewhere FTP or FTQ? Depends which foot he kicks with? That's "F**k The Pope", and "F**k the Queen", case you hadn't figured?

Used to be, my primary school, you couldn't borrow an eraser from a classmate unless you supported Celtic?

But hey - Hearts fans made it to Good Day LA. That's the Big Time, right enough. Here in America, on the other hand, nothing could be farther from reality than catholic versus protestant anything. Quite the reverse: the caffies and the proddies love each other to death here, are all, Let's hold hands! and Kissee kissee and, like, We are all one happy fambly: baptists and papists join hands and poke fingers together, at likes of me. They'll be overjoyed, out there in Bob Jones county - where Ian Paisley, can-you-believe-it, went to school - they'll be so happy in their ministries to have heard the new pope promise to Unify all the christian faiths? Won't they? It hardly falls to me to point out - lapsed-catholic, turned-prod, jew-married secular libruhl that I am - that that's what a pope would say, isn't it? He is, after all, the head of the One True Holy Catholic And Apostolic Church, isn't he?

He wants you back, he does.

Heh heh - even when I break a smile, these days, it's nasty? Told you I was in a foul mood. It's better that I just shut up again, go back to my work. Dream about Baseball, and Dodgers triumphant. That'll work, won't it?

Symbolic Gestures

My boy turned eighteen today. In anticipation of this event, we surreptitiously packed a suitcase for him while he was out at rehearsals last night - he has a leading role in a school production - using clothes of his we found scattered around his bedroom floor, knowing that he'd never in a lifetime notice they were missing; then later, at the stroke of midnight, my wife and I burst into his room and hauled him bodily downstairs, out the front door, down the driveway, and dropped him at the curb. We walked back to the house hand-in-hand, and casually locked the door behind us. We let him back in some minutes later - of course we did! - but our point had been made: we've promised them all that this would happen when the time came, and so it came to be.

For his part, he plans today to buy himself a pack of smokes, a lotto ticket, and some porn.

<sniffle>
    Happy birthday, kiddo.
</sniffle>

Apologies

I'm sorry - I don't know when I'll be able to post next? I'm afraid I'm not some tenured law professor who can afford to spend his days cruisin' the internets and leaving fly-speckle links on his blog all the time: I'm a working stiff, like most of you? I'm so busy right now that I can't allow the distraction of browsing my favorite sites, let alone of writing something new of my own. I don't even have a filler link for you today.

I'll be back when I'm back: most likely when the pressure gasket blows and I need to think about something else up front, so that the back of my mind - the working part - can untie my coding knots on its own?

But I suppose now that I'm here, and now that it's almost five o'clock (as if that meant anything) after a gruesome night that ended at eight this morning and began again at twelve, perhaps I have time for two quick suggestions?

God forgive that I should dare step back in time and revisit earlier posts - Not on a blog, for Goodness sakes! It can't be done! It mustn't! - but that's exactly what I'm going to do, because I haven't had time to find anything new yada-yada-yada...

1. Six Degrees of Blogximity - we decided the whole "Six Degrees" thing was a misnomer because the purpose in this case is to visit new places, not to try to connect two bloggers together. So here is a variation you can try: beginning at a blog of your choice, follow a blogroll chain - from blogroll One through blogroll Two, Three, and so on - and see how deep you can travel without hitting a blogroll link to Instapundit or Kos?
   
2. Blogoroscopes - cast your mind back to the Reverse Astrologizer - a gimmick that guesses your star sign from the answers you give to some questions? I wrote at the time that, if it works and can correctly guess your star sign, it is basing its conclusion on faulty data - namely, what you think of yourself. Thus if you think you're great, like me, then you end up a Libra. Ta-da!
   
   The fun thing to do, then, is answer the questions on behalf of somebody else, and see what turns up? Pick a blogger - you read their sites all the time and form a picture of them in your mind. See if you're right!
   

That's more than enough exclamation points for one post. I would ask you all to leave the results of your travels in comments, but instead I must officially discourage you from doing so. Do not leave comments. Asking for comments is asking for trouble - there are few enough of you that visit here as it is, and fewer still who ever leave me notes. If I were to ask you to leave comments, but none of you did, well - that would just make me look bad.

'Later.

Friday Link Love

T'S FRIDAY, and despite murderous pressure of work, that still means, always means, that it's Playtime of the Blogs. Today is the day we look to our movie links to find-out which terrific new movies we will not be able to watch at a theater this weekend, and more importantly, to discover which new DVD's are being released so we can at least watch something together on Saturday Night that will not cost us the $100 it usually does to take the five blossoming parasites to the movies?

Today is also the day when we somehow must take time out of our busy employment schedules to cruise the links; to chop some new jungly pathways towards the undiscovered interior of the web? Thus we nascent Magellans or Mercators, pilots all, follow the rutters and charts of our fellow navigators. I suspect that many of us, readers and writers, have some kind of Friday method, some deep-scan algorithm that we prefer to follow as we play "Googly" on our lonesome, some stepwise methodology for discovering new and interesting links without recourse to Google itself?

My own method, it happens, was unfortunately codified some months ago by the otherwise estimable Norman Geras: he called it "Six Degrees of Blogximity". Huff! Puff! Now, when I follow that plan, which was my plan too, dammit, I have to acknowledge that it's His, not mine! I am but Scott of the Antarctic to his cheater Amundsen. I'm just going out... I may be some time...

I would not normally blog about my Friday Webwändern but bloody Blogger has been down for the past two days so I'm determined to write something-anything while I can?

Part, the First

We'll begin with DarkoV at Verging on Pertinence, who is presently suffering an enchantment of Iceland, but who earned his Discoverer badge when he led us to here - to the Museum of Harmony and the Golden Ration (dammit! DAMMIT! - I can not be the only one, surely, to always type "ration" when he means "ratio", can I? Especially - especially - when the correct word is "Section">) Not to mention that he linked me this week, so I owe him reciprocation.

Anyway, for today's Six Degrees of Newdom - where entries are selected solely on the Name of the Blog, which must be somehow sound interesting to me since I always judge a book by its cover - today's six degrees proceed as follows:

1. From Me. But you don't need that link.
   
2. To DarkoV, whose messy book piles so closely resemble my own;
   
3. To Hiding in Plain Sight, who has video of commando bell ringers;
   
4. To Stregoneria, who has discovered that compassion is an evolutionary trait;
   
5. To Lady Poverty, who offers a "Gentleman's guide to Career, Romance, and Nation Building". See for yourself;
   
6. To A Troublemaker's Handbook, for Unions in a Unionless world. I used to be a member of a Union, so we have that in common?
   

Disclaimer: I had no idea where I was walking. Somewhere the likes of me would be eaten, I'm thinking?

I was tempted to follow The Manolo Speaks of The Shoes but have instead chosen to forward that link to my Beloved, who shares the Manolo's passion.

Part, the Second

For my own contribution towards The Illumination of my Readers I offer some links on nautical navigation. I used to know this stuff, back when I was designing Periscope and Ships Bridge simulators:

• The Rules of the Road, of which I had to pay particular attention to the use of lanterns and "symbols" for signalling, and the rules of buoyage. Did you know, for example, that America, being America, just had to reverse the direction of buoyage? A Port-hand buoy ("stay to port of me!"), bright red, will be stationed to Port on your way out of port, not in to port as it is in civilized countries? Bloody Yanks - insufferable! Like it isn't enough that they have to drive on the wrong side of the road in their cars...
  
• Fixing your Position - how to use a compass, a chart, and a parallel ruler to triangulate your position at sea. I used to love doing this... made me feel so Piloty... but beware - when you are preparing a visual representation of a coastline and harbour that "must be recognisable to a pilot familiar with the area" that does not mean that you'll get away with an, er, impressionist rendering of it? No: it means that the bastards will expect your display to include Old Archie's Caravan which is usually parked up a hill on the side of the Gare Loch, or Missus Bertram's Sweetie Shoppe on the way into Portsmouth Harbour?
  
• Finally, my favorite Nautical Cove. Remember: Keep a weather-eye out for a seafarin' man with one leg!
  

Enjoy! And there'll be no tippin' me the spot for my choices!

Erection!

GAINST MY BITTER JUDGEMENT, and despite last year's horrorshow - I remain an incorrigible, capital-F sucker for elections. Call me a democrat with any size 'D' if you will - I can't help myself? And though I've complained before - and promise to do so again - that I cannot yet vote here where I live - No Taxation Without Representation is our battle whine here in the Xenoverse, remember - I remain fully entitled to vote there: back in Blighty, where Tony Blair has this week called a general election.

I have, however, chosen not to exercise that right: I don't believe it proper to be casting expatriator votes for a government and country I left away behind me?

Sigh no more, ladies, sigh no more:
Men were deceivers ever.
One foot in sea and one on shore,
To one thing constant, never.

But this year, this british general election, I'm given pause to think again. Just this once, I'm feeling a little... what? What the hairy hell is that? Sssh: Regret?

Why? Whhhhyyyyyyyyyyy???

Very few of you will likely have heard of his principal opponent - the Rt. Hon. Michael Howard MP, QC Blah Blah - but expats of a certain age and lineage, whose formative hippy years were spent under the crushing hoof of The Mad Cow: we are not so lucky. We know Who He Is alright: he was at one time Number Two in her pantheon of toadies, beaten in cringing smarminess only by the arch-slither Kenneth Baker, who you won't have heard of either? Perhaps if I tell you that while Michael Howard was serving as Home Secretary (Major, not Thatcher), and therefore in charge of Her Majesty's Prisons amongst other things, that his deputy Ann Widdecombe, who herself led one of Thatcher's Harridan Squadrons, famously said of her boss that "There is something of the night in him" you may begin to appreciate what a piece of work he is? But really, you'd have to listen to him speaking, if only for a minute, for a proper sense of recoil? We who remember, shudder. I swear... it is his ugly voice that I'll forever fear! sang sensational Alex in another time, but all the best songs are timeless.

How to explain? You know, sometimes the imagination forms its own caricature of people? Like that guy I used to work with - call him "Bog Brush", as we all did after that time I misheard his given name as "Andrex" - who was so cruel, so sneering and arrogant in his everyday demeanor? Who gave the word demeanor substance? The vision I formed of him was of someone who could stand on the lip of a trench and callously unload his Schmeiser into it? An outrageous and ridiculous exagerration I know, but that's what appeared, though I never asked for it? It conjured itself as involuntarily reaction to his giving me the creeps. And once there, lodged?

The image, the cartoon, that I hold in my head of Michael Howard is quite different: it is a picture of an eighteenth century fop, a dandy, stood at the bars of a gaol with perfumed 'kerchief held to his nose to disguise the awful stench; but tittering, and poking some lowly prisoner there with a stick? The unfortunate is likely some gypsy dragged there by the Mob - for Michael Howard always favors some kind of race card or other in his hand, and is particularly fond of gypsies. After all, everyone is still allowed to hate the gypsies, aren't they?

Michael Howard gives me the willies.

But there's more to this year's general election than Michael effing Howard. Another reason I'm tempted to vote is that this time, when my man Blair wins - the only man of mine who has ever won - it will be to win his Third term. If I'm not mistaken, the Labour Party has never won a third term? Ever. I fancy I'd like to play my tiny part in that, as I did with his first. He may have taken one hell of a beating over Iraq, that's true, but he's taken it bottoms-up-trousers-down like a man. When he faces Question Time whether in parliament or on television or on the bloody streets, he faces his hostile audience squarely. He doesn't pack the town halls with miserable squealers; neither does he require them to sign any Loyalty oaths, nor will they be kicked to the curb by a bouncer for wearing LibDem woolly sweaters? I like Blair - admittedly from the distant Xenoverse it must be said - for many reasons, but chiefly I think because when he addresses the Outside World in his Statesman hat, he really does make W. look like an imbecile by comparison? Doesn't mean it's true - I try not to misunderestimate the Bush - but Blair makes it sound like it's true.

It is also the case this year, I hear, that fat and indolent british voters like me are to be encouraged to vote from their sofas, by postal ballot, if they cannae be arsed walking just down the street to the Polling Place? There is indeed a controversy brewing - for in Britain postal ballots are being viewed as untrustworthy, electoral anthrax, a written invitation to abuse? It's one thing to let your crippled Granny vote that way, but quite another to encourage the general punters to do so? Visions abound of mass-campaign Stoppers squatting in fetid attics across the country, stuffing phoney ballots into envelopes; or of stern-faced immigrant Fathers taking the franchise rights of their wives and daughters unto themselves? Here in America, on the other hand, I don't remember there being any such shenanigans in Oregon, a state where everybody votes by post? Did I miss something?

Fourthly, finally I suppose, there is the looming truth that, barring some unforseen disaster, this will be my very last chance to vote as a Briton. By Friday May 6th that part of my life will be definitively over. No: I won't succomb to the urge for a final indulgence. If everything goes to plan, the next time I vote will be November 2008, just down the road here, in sunny California.

Then sigh not so, but let them go,
And be you blithe and bonny,
Converting all your sounds of woe
Into Hey nonny, nonny.

Sniffle.

*   I apologise for the title, but I can't help myself: I'm as much a sucker for Engrish as I am for growling puns. I also apologise for my lack of posting this week: I blame that squarely on an overactive Work gland. Oh, and Blogger has been a total bitch! Just saying is all, not complaining: You get what you pay for.

Where There's Muck...

T THE BEGINNING of the present school year, to my enduring delight, Youngest Daughter - the only one of our children who yet retains some measure of her earlier cuteness - took up the Learning of the Trombone, both in school and out.

Bless her little cotton socks, says puff-chested me, She's marching in her old man's footsteps!

About the only thing I've ever missed of my schooldays was learning to play an instrument and playing it in the band. In my four-year High School career I played brass - cornet, french horn, euphonium, and ultimately, finally, best: bass. I was the band's tuba player. We'd practise at lunchtime - we each received passes that allowed us to jump the line to lunch, though to use them could result in a kicking later-on behind the techy block, depending on who was skipped over - and we'd play before visiting dignitaries or tour primary schools, churches, and hospitals. Those were the sit-down concerts, filled with light classics and lighter broadway: Rosamundes and Desert Songs; Fausts and Light Cavalrys; pieces of Symphonies finished and not; Poets, Peasants, Lohengrins and something about a happy clappy blacksmith*? How we pled with our Head of Music, we heavy brass, we oomphers and barroomphers: Give us the Eighteen Twelve! we cried, Give us the 'Ride of the Valkyries'! - for nothing was beyond us, not us? Her response, when it came - and may she forever rot - was to press us into the hated choir: If you will not sing then you do not love music, and you have no place in this band. Band was one thing, but choir was another - it called into question our manhoods. It meant that we, who propped Saturdays for the school rugby team, had to boost our school bus profiles: to smoke more, and more boldly; to sit at the very back with the hardmen and bullies; to champion ourselves at the Running of the Gauntlet by walking, walking not running, the aisle between the ranks of two sidewise-facing benches at the back, from where a dozen boys kick ferociously inward like a crazed centipede trying to rip its own stomach apart? To toughen ourselves, in short, in the eyes of our peers. Her real offence, which became apparent only later, was to force upon an innocent christmas audience grown used to the dull bloodless hymning of the catholic mass, a most lumpen, sullen, and menacing Halleuia Chorus? Ha. Le-YOU-YAH How they shuddered in their seats.

But. We were a band, not an orchestra, and a Military Band at that - which meant that we had brass and woodwind in our band, and that we fought all the time. Concerts, though fun, are by their nature static: but we were a band, by God, and bands are made for marching. Marching in parades up and down the High Streets, leading bands of skipping children, like sloven Pied Pipers, down the rainy streets. All the mining villages - and there were many - held an annual Gala where families would parade through the village, then picnic and cavort in a park for the afternoon.

Ours was nothing like the marching bands of america, where garish pom-pommed uniforms wiggle and jiggle and strut retentively - why do you do that to your kiddies? No: ours was more of a clumping sort of marching band. And though we did indeed play one or two Sousa marches on occasion, we really didn't need to. We were a british clumping marching band who played our own beloved marches - most of them written by Kenneth Alford, a much neglected figure on these alien shores - though I'll bet most of you have whistled 'Colonel Bogey' one time or another? He also wrote 'The Thin Red Line' which, if any of you can remember The Ipcress File, makes an appearance in the park when two spies are quietly plotting in front of a bandstand? I tried to find you a sample of it, but that proved to be impossible.

Now: here's a pretty thing, if you'll forgive yet another diversion, for what is the Xenoverse if it does not confuse us? I can understand that movies made in Hollywood about WWII are yanko-centric: heck, half the movies ever made in Britain are about Tommy bravely fighting The Hun, where americans, if they turn-up at all, are always late to the show and steal all our glory and all our wummin? That's one thing. But why do Hollywood movies feel the need to purloin other people's heroics, too? Lord knows there were more than enough of the genuine article to celebrate? But why do you need to be the ones to have stolen an Enigma machine from a U-boat too? Or why are there sixty pages on Google dedicated to a movie called "The Thin Red Line" that is all about US Marines fighting in the Pacific and not at all about the Argylls at the Battle of Balaclava? Now, if anyone deserves an hundred movies made about their heroics it is surely those Marines (did you know, incidentally, that Lee Marvin was one of them? For real - shot in the butt-tocks, too!) But call it something else, wontchya? Sheesh - imagine if a British movie were made about the RAF bombing Hiroshima just because Leonard Cheshire VC was there as observer? Ptah!

Dammit: now I'm running out of steam and I've lost my thread. Hate when that happens, and it happens every day... start out nipping through the room for a new pack of smokes, next thing you know I'm three streets south chasing the cat because it has a nasty cut on its behind ripped by that big fat thing from across the road in a fight in the backyard the other night and I wasn't supposed to let the bugger out while I was emptying the trash that was overflowing the kitchen because those bloody kids forgot to empty it again and though I shouted What About All Your Other Chores!! at the void in exasperation all I heard was chirrup of crickets so I stomped off muttering and swearing and tore the bag out of the bin by myself then dumped it on the doorstep when the cat escaped between my legs nearly tripping me chasing it away down the street and all the while forgetting about the bloody cigarettes...

Ach but daughter - that's it, Daughter! She's learning to play trombone: not for band but for orchestra - which she will be allowed to join when she can play well enough? I'm glad of that, reaaaally I am, because, as I've said, nobody's child ought be dressed in that gaudy trickanery, least of all mine. She's too smart and too cynical for that. But the wider point of learning to play an orchestral instrument and to play it with others in a band or an orchestra, the hidden goodness that seaps out of it, is exposure to classical and other orchestrated music. An opening of the ears to it and a staked interest in it that - for me at least - has subverted my listening ever since? Never stopped me from loving other kinds of music, quite the opposite really, but it did manipulate my tastes towards the fuller, more elaborate kinds of music, and left me open to everything. Everything but Country, that is.


* Can't remember what the happy smithy thingy was called, but pretty sure it wasn't Handel's "Harmonious Blacksmith"? Wawtah mewsic an' foiahworks, that was yer 'Andel squire?

All suggestions greatly appreciated.
- Fcb