Not Only A Stiff Upper Lip

Youngest daughter - she who is still cute, and our Last Great Hope for the Future - she's always complaining that there ought to be more british comedies on US television. And I'm always complaining that BBC America (and its DVD division) has singularly failed to deliver us any Harry Enfield, or Fast Show, in all these past nine years. although it has to be said that Enfield has been appearing on BK commercials lately, in the guise of "Doctor Angus" or somesuch, which does not particulary endear him to the Bearded audience. What a waste!

Fortunately, there is the gift of YouTube: and I was at last able to introduce her to the delights of Mr Cholmondley-Warner and his sidekick Grayson:





Now, Cholmondley-Warner and his ilk bring back so many memories to the young Beardie and his black & white television days of old. One of them happily coinciding with yet another of Youngest's current fads:





The presenter in this case was the magnificent Huw Wheldon, a man of tremendous talents and intellect, and a manner with Edolescents that takes me right back to scout camp, and a meeting the Chief Scout himself.

I suppose my favorite line has to be "And what do you want to do when you grow-up, m'boy?"

But that's not who she squealed at while watching: "Ooh he's so cuuuuute!" - just as she does of the puppy. All those old T-shirts of mine: still getting the wear out of them, thirty years later.

Spare him his life from his pork sau-sa-geees

Families can be cruel.

So this is, what, season six of The Sopranos? Seven? There's been a lot of them, anyhow, over just as many years.

So I'm in the kitchen Sunday night, making Belovèd some hot chocolate, singing along to the theme song. And I finally asked, after all those years, "What the hell is a 'Boom Boom' anyway?" And why would you get one in your eye?

LENNY:
My eye! I'm not s'pposed to get boom boom in it!

As I said: merciless.

Almost on a par with the recent realization, after seven years, that those schoolyard monitors the kids were always bitching about were not called "Yard Doodies" after all.

As I'm always telling them: I like my version better.

HUMILIATION UPDATE: my wife did come up with an answer for me, day after. Apparently, when she was a very little girl, her grandma would ask her "You do? Is it a 'boom-boom' you need, or just a tinkle?"

Those days are past, now...

... and autumn leeeee-aves, lie thick and stiiiill!

And sadly Past, too, are those days when this author could understand more than ten percent of this!

I'm so feching oot of it, noo, it isnae real.

Still: Brammer!, as they used to say.

[Tip o' the bunnet tae Shuggy, keeping the old flames alive]


UPDATE: second listening, I'm up to upto ninety percent. Phew: Matter of getting the rythms back. But that's another post altogether.

Hoskins Disease

Lots of speculation about how The Sopranos might end: in a bloodbath; with a whimper; in a simpering bloodbath, maybe, where Tony breaks down in tears and a disgusted Carmela cracks his skull with that heavy-metal esspresso maker Paulie gave them; a Scorcese ending, Goodfellas or Casino or Depahted - your choice of homage.

Of my own two favorite endings to gangster movies, I'd reckon the closing-of-the-door on The Godfather was a non-, er, starter; way too tacky that would be. But the other one - well, it struck me today, it has possibilities: including a setup, and more importantly an obscurity, if indeed an homage there must be?

If you've never seen The Long Good Friday - you know, the one where Bob Hoskins plays a London gangster whose operation is on the brink of a major expansion he's put together "Wiv' our friends from across the pond" but finds instead his best-laid crafties being carefully torn apart by the London-end of the IRA in response to a trivial, if unwitting, double-cross - well, if you've never seen it then you have missed the best ending to any gangster movie evah!

Hoskins thinks he's whupped the Provos, given them a thumping they won't forget and scared them away with tails between legs. But stepping out his "office" one day, he sees his wife - Helen Mirren - being driven away speedily in back of a car, pressing hands and her screaming face to the window. His own limo pulls up and Hoskins jumps in, only to discover that his driver and bodyguard are not, in fact, his cockney-sparra worthies after all, but the very pair of IRA hitmen who've been causing him so much grief. Pierce Brosnan being one of them - looking younger and pimplier even than Bobbo himself.

And so the movie ends with Hoskins' gangster being driven off to his inevitable demise; but it ends squarely focused on Hoskins' face, sat in the back seat of the car, in full knowledge of what has come to pass. And that face - the suppressed rage, ironic recognition, the disgust that Hoskins portrays as his character puts together in his mind just how badly he's been played - that face to my mind trumps Michael Corleone's study door, and every other Gangster movie ending.

This is not at all a prediction. Rather, it is one of those "I knew I should have written that: now nobody will believe me!" preventative posts against the unlikely event that Tony Soprano, at the end of his Last Episode, should find himself sat in the back seat of an SUV with a couple of smiling islamic terrorists for companions, slowly screwing a silencer into the end of a pistol; the same two that, last week, he shopped to the Feds over sandwiches at Satriales.

The Sopranos is ending, at last: terrific show, but its day is well past. Time to go, and for HBO to give us something better, something new.

It's not the only thing that's ending neither: I'm pleased to report that Beardie handed-in his cards last week, and that next Friday - a long-time-coming-but- really-good Friday - will be his last day in his present employment.

He does not expect he'll be whacked in the back seat of his motor, being driven "home" by a pair of grinning project managers. But then, who ever does?

No: he expects to be spending the following two weeks with his larded arse sprawled in his pool, baking in the SoCal sunshine while lazily reading-up on the new work he'll be starting after that.

What's on this tape, sweetie?

I have no doubt that I've bored you with this before, but it is a simple fact that error is a primal force in engineering; and as in electronics, so in Life. Error is a product (well, a sum really) of feedback: you plug something in to your magic box, then feed some fraction of its resultant output back to the input and subtract one from the other. This difference - input minus fedback output - is termed error, because it tells you, in its arcane way, how wrong your output is at the moment, and how to correct it. So, what you really put in to your magic box is not so much your input signal, but rather the error signal: and so long as you do that your box will do its best to correct itself and give you the output you want.

This principle of subtracting output from input and feeding off error is termed Negative Feedback; and from a control point of view, or even from an aesthetic or philosophical point of view, negative feedback is a Very Good Thing.

Its corollary - adding that fraction of output to the input, rather than subtracting - is termed Positive Feedback. And as you might guess, from a control point of view, positive feedback is an evil that needs to be stamped out. Positive feedback, by reinforcing the input ("Hey - you're so gooooood! You're terrific! You are so the Best!") does not lead to happy campers skipping hand-in-hand into the sunset, as we hippies like to muse, but to instability, to continuous oscillation between one extreme and the other. Great for Casio PlinkPlonks or Jimi Hendrix fans, lousy for everyone else.

There is a third option, of course, which is to do nothing: to let the output be whatever the output shall be, and feed nothing back at all. We would term this Open Loop, where you just don't care to fiddle and finagle, whereas the former with its feedback would be Closed Loop.

Now, in the flawed philosophy of R. Fatcnt Beardielaw, feeble instance of the archetype, who in his idiot-savantism knows no better, Life moves through a cascade of controllers that want to be closed, offering all kinds of feedback that one is mostly free to accept, or ignore, or corrupt; but many of which the wider system will act upon regardless. Throwing you in jail, whatnot.

During the early part of our lives we find ourselves deeply embedded within an all-powerful Parental controller. And though there be a huge body of Parental models on the market, we don't get to choose the one we're shot through. They are highly untrained circuits that usually come in pairs, one tough cop (female) and one sap cop (male) - although by no means always, in either measure. Their unstated purpose perhaps best summarized by Larkin, The Poet, who wrote [turn away now, children, turn away]: "They fuck you up, your mum and dad."

Luckily for all of us, beyond a certain point the Parental Circuits kick out and give way. At least they should: if yours have not done so yet, you would be well-advised to counter-turn the bedding screws yourself. Parents fade away and follow their own screwball paths back to earth, where they likely land crushingly on some poor Earlybird Buffet, throwing You on a ballistic trajectory of your own, but - they hope - with a bunch of corrective motors and flying manuals packed handily in your knapsack.

In other words, to belabor the point to dullness, past your eighteenth birthday, they keys to the car are yours; and it's up to you to drive with your eyes open or your eyes closed, or with rosey-tinted shades that are rilly, rilly cool even at night!

Now, he breathes ominously, quite possibly wrenching the works of at least one reader who thought they knew where this was leading, Now: it would kill me to discover that one of my daughters had somehow managed to get herself [un-]wrapped-up in porn, even one of those dumbass bimbette "College Bazoombas Run Wild" thingys that prey on Spring Breakers. Kill me - not in the sense of Hardy Har! Har!, but in the sense of clasp chest and turn toes titsward on the spot.

There's one of those "debate" thingies flowered this week over a suggestion, in a WSJ opinion piece I think, that the law should be changed to prohibit young gels under the age of twenty-one from appearing in porno flicks, specifically of the "Gone Wild" genre; the argument being, I guess, that before twenty-one they're too sweet and innocent and stupid to resist the charms of some leering reprobate millionaire whose magic video camera, when suitably pointed, can persuade all those unsuspecting drunken girlies clothes to fall off. See Yglesias and other suspects for the thread, and I suppose, for my take. Because despite the risk of coronary failure at the heart of the Xenoverse, this writer would most definitely NOT want to see such matters written into Law. Indeed he - he being me - thinks the recourse to Law and Prohibitions at such times is far worse for society at large, and especially for its children or young adults - than would be his [were-they-to-do-it] dumbass daughters getting wasted on tequilas, flashing their whatsits, and never ever EVER being allowed to live it down ad aeternam.

No: they ought to know better; they need to know better; but in the end it must always be up to them to do better. Not the Law. Not even you. As parents you can't watch them all the time, you can't be with them all the time, you can't follow them all the time. And past a certain age you need to Stop, because it just gets creepy if you don't. And later, malign.

Hell, you have those eighteen years: that should be enough. After that, it's their turn.

Neat little trick once your girls are cusping, 'case your asking "But what-what-whaaat can I do to save my little angels, Beardie?", is to stroll with them through the Mall and nod surreptitiously towards some random old guy, or some raggedy-arsed numpty with patchy facial hair, and mutter "That's the kind of guy watchs on-line porn". If you really want to freak them, point at someone who looks like you.

But that's an aside. It really is up to them to live their lives. Which is where we come full circle; we proclaim once again that Trial and Error - not Right First Time! nor any mealy-mouthed Zero Tolerance Of Anything platitude nor any of that Nanny-to-the-Grave handholding - is the driving force of civilization. As in circuits, so in life.

Angry Goldfish

Bloody hell! Looking over the past few posts - well, somebody has to now and then, so the bits don't rot - looking over the past few posts it appears to all the world that I'm stuck in some kind of Apple-bashing rut, like some fat-arsed snidewit with his belly FUPA'ed out his shirt and a finger corking his nostril clockwise?

Where in the three-colored Heck did all that come from? It might well be a pet peeve, but nothing to obsess over. It's like, it's like, put a guy under enough stress for a long enough time, you'll strip him down to some feral geek. Or sumpthin'?

I forget. I'm thinking I had to post something back then, just to move things on, but was completely stuck for something to write about, then along came an Apple commercial.

But I forget.

Today I forgot what "hash-browns" were called - again. Forgot their name last week too, and the week before that. I had to ask my wife - again again - "What are those fried potato thingies called I like from the deli?". Yesterday I forgot my street number. Doctor's assistant had marked the address in my file as WRONG, and I had to think about it. Twice, before being sure it was correct all along. But now, today, I'm not so sure - did it said "5" or did it say "6"?

I forget. I always forget. Been that way for donkeys.

I forget numbers more easily because I hate numbers. I've spent six years doing my utmost to avoid them, while all that time developing measurement equipment. It can be done, oh yes... alls you have to do is the harder stuff underneath, the stuff that makes the beans that can be counted elsewhere. I have, though, just these past two weeks, committed my cell number to memory. But only because of a parallel with my home phone that I hadn't noticed before.

Fat lot of good it's done me though: to remember my cell, I must forget my hoose.

A new job will help. New scene, new people, new field, blessed relief. Been interviewing; waiting to hear, been given a nod as good as a wink, but not yet the Nod. Shouldn't be long. And just in time too - learned last week that I'll be escaping the coming purge. That was not what I wanted to hear at all. I want to be gone, and so it shall be.

Spent last week in Chicago, but without my wife. That was just wrong - all that way, supposedly in desperation to show some progress somewhere, and what we did, day after we got there, we were taken on a boat ride up the river and out Lake Michigan; walked Madison Avenue from Lakeshore to Millenium; spent an hour gazing out the top floors of Hancock; stuffed our faces in the Chop House, and spent the evening in a blues bar listening to live. Now: all of this was great, sure enough, but completely surreal given our predicament. And it was just wrong, in the wrongest way, to be doing all this with people from work, and not with my Belovèd, who hasn't been to Chicago either.

Change is in the air, has to be: and unlike Garth, we do not fear it.

You will of course have realized that I've totally forgotten what I set out to write about.

No... wait... that's what it was. I'll tell you: by some arcane twist of serendipity I discovered a blog this afternoon that is written by a great pal of mine from the old days. A friend I haven't seen since I left. This guy, he's one of those storied people who are legendary in the company of others who know him; the kind of guy we all tell stories about when we're drunk. "Remember that time when P- did this?", or "Wasn't it P- that...?"

Well, there was P- and there was D-, but D- spent a couple of years out here, then went back to work for the same folks as P-. Broke my youngest daughter's heart when he left - she was eight, I think? It was D-, not P-, who walked into a party one time and discovered one of those full-length distorting mirrors, and straightaway shouts "I wonder what my wullie looks like in that", and then found out.

It was P-, though, who spent a year in Boston; who was always flicking the V's at american colleagues because they thought he was just saying "Hullo". It was he who discovered, as only he could, that whereas complimenting a female colleague on her appearance at work was considered sexual harassment, telling her that she looked like shit and her clothes were rubbish did not!

He had the sharpest, most cutting wit of anybody I ever knew; but he could take as good as he got, which made him a Hero.

And that's why I was digging around the old posts - what if he comes to visit! The place is a pigsty! What'll he think I've become, me who always despised those sad-sweatered geeks who collect chip designations like train or bus numbers; who argue the merits of Rev A over Rev B at the water cooler?

Last time I saw him he was single and wild. Now he's married, a father, and a country bloody squire who walks his dog and his sprog. Enduring, by his own account, something of a mid-life crisis; wondering where the years went and what happened to his Cool? Ach, but don't worry son - the dreich passes. It happens to us all. And your pals, don't forget, are all on the same trajectory: the ratios remain the same.

Maybe I'll get away with it?