Expat@Large

SideBar Quotes from The Early Blog Days.

noreply@blogger.com (expat@large) — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 07:57:00 +0000

Wasn't sure if I had saved these. Looks like I had!

~~~~~~~~

We don't need to see anything out of the ordinary. We already see so much.

Robert Walser

One should, each day, try to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture, and, if it is possible, speak a few reasonable words.

Goethe

We're all fucked. I'm fucked. You're fucked. The whole department is fucked. It's the biggest cock-up ever. We're all completely fucked.

Sir Richard Motteram,British Civil Servant

Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self.

Cyril Connolly

The rule is perfect: in all matters of opinion our adversaries are insane.

Mark Twain

To write is to attempt to know what we would write were we to write.

Marguerite Duras

A writer is a person for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.

Thomas Mann

a) Don't lie if you don't have to.

b)Assume infinite intelligence and zero prior knowledge.

Leo Szilard

...if I can be allowed a mediocre generalization, don't pointless things have a place, too, in this far-from-perfect world? Remove everything pointless from an imperfect life and it'd lose even its imperfection.

Haruki Murakami, Sputnik Sweetheart

The truth is scandalous. But without it, nothing has any worth. An honest and naive vision of the world is already a masterpiece... As you approach the truth, your solitude will increase.

Michel Houellebecq

And if a man lived in obscurity making his friends in that obscurity, obscurity is not uninteresting.

Yevgeny Yevtushenko

My only job is to be talented.

Anton Chekhov

Boredom, of course, like any mighty force, you must respect.

Saul Bellow

He often made great mistakes and arrived at false conclusions, still he had so much genius and knowledge that a great part of his work will always remain true.

Arabella Buckley, (speaking of French naturalist George-Louis LeClerc, Comte de Buffon, Intendant (Administrator) of Les Jardins des Plants, anticipator of Darwin and Lyell)

It is only kings, and the nobility, and those fortunates who dwell in the tropics, where bread grows on trees and clothing is unnecessary, who have reserved seats in this world.

Charles Dudley Warner, (from an address to the Alumni of Hamilton College, NY, 1872)

I may not agree with what you say but to your (?my, someone's) death I will defend your right to say it.

Voltaire

~~~~~~

"Reserved Seats" was going to be the title of something. Something by

E@L

Seating Options

noreply@blogger.com (expat@large) — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 01:48:00 +0000

Many of you may understand that E@L's arse has been through the wringer over the past few years. Lots of surgeries and complications, nothing too lethal or all that life-threatening, but certainly annoying.

Don't worry, E@L is not going to post the photos of his many surgical wounds... Especially not the one where you can look into his perineal incision where his anus used to be, and, with a bright enough torch, see the back of his teeth...

Whatever you do, don't try to picture this in your head, it'll drive you insane with the horror, the horror.

~~~~~~~

One of the issues with lying in bed for any stretch of time, and then not being allowed to exercise too hard, is muscle wasting. E@L's waist to hip ratio has gone exponential over the last 5 years as his old man butt has shrunk and succumbed to gravity. Pants that once were tight are now falling down, and not necessarily due to weight loss and/or shrinkage of his belly despite much less intestine living in there, but thanks to the minimisation of his gluteus maximus.

And for this reason, plus he lives on a hill, he hadn't been riding his bike for most of that recovery time...

~~~~~~~~

This double-bunger seat was purchased when he started doing a little riding in Singapore, 2010 or so. With some buddies, E@L would pedal along East Coast pathway, as far as a burger and beer bar past the airport, at Changi Beach. The Sea-Grill E@L thinks it was/is.

Double-bunger ischial seat.

One of the issue he had with his road bike is the weight that has to placed on your hands. As you are leaning forward all the time, eventually (soonish) you get pins and needles in your fingers, and it just plain hurts your arms after a while. (Unless you are fit and light of body, or wear gel-filled gloves.)

His funny looking seat takes the weight of your back half, but not onto the perineum as a traditional seat with a "nose" does. Instead it goes onto the ischial tuberosities, the bones under your buttocks, and it leaves your perineum and wedding tackle free, with no risk to your prostate or coccyx bones.

The green bits.

E@L has moved this ischial seat this onto his current e-bike (see posts both past and future) and, unlike his old road bike, E@L sits up much straighter. There is much less pressure on his hands (even less with gel-filled gloves) and shoulders but a lot more of his substantial avoirdupois is relying on the bones under those much leaner buttocks, placing more responsibility on those rings of rubber to maintain his stability and comfort.

After nearly 3Mms (3,000kms), riding 5 times a week, those bones are starting to register their annoyance at this. Maybe it's the ischia, or maybe it's the emaciated glutes, but something isn't happy back there. The discomfort kicks in after 20km or so.

So he purchased a seat that came up on his FB feed, one from RockBros that promised the world... It was as wide as the double ring, at 25cm, and had a nose (and a slot to slide your goolies into), but it was much thicker, and therefore, hopefully, more cushioning. The main part of its support was for the ischial regions too, and after one test-ride, at 20kms his bum started to complain, just like it does with the ischial seat. Sigh.

Seat for serious rides (L) -- Allegedly comfy seat (R)

[ignore the red paint, E@L was spraying some furniture on the table last week]

He looked in several of the stores in town, but couldn't see anything more plush and promising of relief than the RockBros one, as all that were in stock were the skinny coccyx bruisers and prostate crushers, width at 17cm or less, targeted at the taints of serious racers!

So E@L has gone to Amazon and purchased an even wider seat, 33cm, hoping it will distribute his weight more evenly across what is left of his butt.

It arrives tomorrow. Report to come.

Meanwhile, have a seat

E@L

So It Goes

noreply@blogger.com (expat@large) — Sun, 25 Jan 2026 10:29:00 +0000

Dept Of Homeland Security keeps redefining the rules for ICE:

~~~~

It is a crime to be a citizen who films or blows whistles and obstructs when ICE are on the streets detaining people who are immigrants here illegally and are criminals guilty of violent crimes or members of gangs or are terrorists.

It is a crime to be a citizen who films or blows whistles and obstructs when ICE are on the streets detaining people who are immigrants here illegally and are criminals guilty of violent crimes or members of gangs.

It is a crime to be a citizen who films or blows whistles and obstructs when ICE are on the streets detaining people who are immigrants here illegally and are criminals guilty of violent crimes.

It is a crime to be a citizen who films or blows whistles and obstructs when ICE are on the streets detaining people who are immigrants here illegally and are criminals.

It is a crime to be a citizen who films or blows whistles and obstructs when ICE are on the streets detaining people who are immigrants here illegally.

It is a crime to be a citizen who films or blows whistles and obstructs when ICE are on the streets detaining people who are immigrants.

It is a crime to be a citizen who films or blows whistles and obstructs when ICE are on the streets detaining people.

It is a crime to be a citizen who films or blows whistles and obstructs when ICE are on the streets.

It is a crime to be a citizen who films or blows whistles and obstructs ICE.

It is a crime to be a citizen who films or blows whistles at ICE.

It is a crime to be a citizen who films ICE.

It is a crime to be a citizen.

~~~~

E@L

The Louise Brooks Hairdo

noreply@blogger.com (expat@large) — Mon, 17 Nov 2025 00:30:00 +0000

The world is funny, life is a shaggy-dog story playing in real-time through a strange loop, and no anti-climatic punchline coming anytime soon. Hmm. Case in point?

~~~~~

E@L’s favourite movie review podcast (pretentiously implying that he listens to, let alone is aware of, more than one) is Kermode and Mayo’s Take. Love it: music and movie trivia and fun boomer banter, movie recommendations, jokes, opinions, and crucially, great emails from listeners…

One of these on the most recent download E@L was listening to this afternoon was a question about naming some once illustrious actors whom no-one remembers these days, presumably due to the vast cultural chasms between generations. Could Mark or Simon name some famous movie people who aren’t any more. Famous that is. Mark quickly brought up the silent movie star Louise Brooks as an example. Once a legend of the silent screen, but now, mostly forgotten. E@L searches his memory to no avail. (Where did he put his small headphones, also none of this avail stuff.*) Mark promised that we would recognise her if we saw her photo, so Simon, who did not recall the name either, Googled and then said, “Yes I do recognise her!” (Or words to that effect.).

E@L wasn’t sure he knew the name either. He wondered if she was in the sister’s big old book of glossy promotional photographs of Hollywood Stars, The Image Makers, and if he would recognise her… but then he got distracted by life, like not driving into the car in front of him as he sips his flat white, etc…

~~~~~~

Cut to the balcony at E@L GHQ later that day, where it’s a bit windy and chilly considering that summer is a hair’s breadth away, but the mosquitoes don’t care, so the gas patio heater is raging and emitting throaty burps of flame as the wind hits it sideways, the smoking mosquito coil is threatening go blow out, the ice in his Disaronno (been to an Italian restaurant, in the mood for an almond digestif) is slowly melting, the solar powered lights still have charge, and E@L is up to page 205 of Thomas Pynchon’s newest, Shadow Ticket.

It’s the depression era, prohibition is about the end, and our gumshoe protagonist, Hicks McTaggart, from Milwaukee is in… Budapest? Vienna? Paris? (fuck it’s hard to keep up with these details in a Pynchon novel) talking to Daphne Airmont, the absconded jazz singing daughter of a business/criminal type, known as “The Al Capone of Cheese”, and she’s the person he’s supposed to bring back to the family mold, I mean fold in Chicago, and she is complaining about her putative fiancé, saying how she’s often “come upon him in the sweaty clutches of some Swing Girl barely into her teens, Louise Brooks hairdo, nighttime makeup in the daylight hours…”

And E@L goes W. T. A. F!

~~~~~~

Twice in one day! Like, SMW** or what!

~~~~~~

Remembering The Image Makers, E@L runs around his tsunduko style library looking for the old book - here it is! Looks like some naughty puppy (Alfie, the family’s cocker spaniel from the 1970’s no doubt) has taken a fancy to some of the pages, but there they are the early days in artistic black and white: actors and those who were once called actresses, with their the soft-focus cheeks, bright eyes either with I-dare-you-to-come-hither stare or a thousand yard stare to left/right (which is my best profile?), the elaborate stage clothing with that daring flash of cleavage or side-boobage that E@L recalls from his teenage years. And there’s the blokes with their chiselled jaws, earnest testosterone fuelled smiles, brylcremed hair, and fuck-you-I’m-famous personae.

But…

No Louise Brooks.

With the same straight fringe flapper bobbed hairdo though, are only Colleen Moore, and Claudette Colbert (though fair haired).

So, following in Simon Mayo’s fingerprints, E@L Googles her….

And yes, he does recognise the Louise Brooks hairdo, the face, the whole impression of her. Black hair. Very short bob, linear fringe.

This:

~~~~~~

E@L has seen her before, surely. Inside whatever part of brain controls trivia, there is an explosion of electricity and a flushing toilet of neurotransmitters across of a network of said neurones, despite what any number of agents might be trying to do to his serotonin, and hey! HEY!

Surely Louise Brooks is The Hat-check Girl in that hilarious 15 sec snippet of Buster Keaton from Seven Chances (1925)… Tight black bob, steely, indifferent but accusing gaze — must be her!

This one:

Watch it on YouTube for a complete giggle...

~~~~~~

Louise Brooks’s life as Hollywood starlet and after was documented in her autobiography, Lulu in Hollywood. And there are a few resources around on the internet, like an interview with Kenneth Tynan in The New Yorker, and extended bio here, and a shorter YouTube bio or two. So I won’t go into it myself. It seems to be an “Oh dear, to fame and riches, to who? and rags, to oh dear (escort girl!), to relative fame again” story. The not quite classic Joseph Campbell mythic cycle, but what is?

~~~~~~~

So E@L watches the Buster Keaton clip one, two more times. It never fails to amuse him. But what tale of forlorn love doesn’t? you ask. Good point.

And then he finds other resources to confirm that the wise, wily, worldly “girl with the black helmet” in Buster’s visual gag really is Louise and…

~~~~~~

Here’s the shaggy dog ending… (“That ain’t my dog. Mine ain’t that shaggy.”)

It WASN’T her in the Keaton clip after all.

Sigh. It was someone else, with the oh-so popular Louise Brooks hairdo. It’s Rosalind Byrne, another forgotten star of the silver*** screen. She’s got a post of her own in someone’s Louise Brooks fan-blog (with further links if you’re interested), probably because of people like E@L who get them mixed up.

~~~~~~

Oh dear. Two out of four references in one day; well, it ain’t great, ain’t even a pass, but considering he was not aware of Louise Brooks or her infamous hairdo it ain’t that bad really, thinks

E@L

~~~~~~

* #CRUNCH#, oh there they are, under the wheels of his office chair.

** Spooky. Mystic. Weird. (Have you forgotten already?)

*** Metallic silver really was used in the reflective screens with the projection technology of early cinema.

Not The Expat That E@L Used To Be.

noreply@blogger.com (expat@large) — Sat, 01 Nov 2025 15:15:00 +0000

Something was missing, and it was this: it was the feeling that I was expressing what I intended to express, and that I had an audience with whom I was in sync, who understood me, got from me what they wanted and what I wanted to give. It was the feeling of belonging.
I hadn’t belonged anywhere for a few years now.

Tracy Thorn: Bedsit Disco Queen. p240. (emfarsis mine)

~~~~~~~

After severalish, smalllish Japanese whiskeys, these are the sentiments that E@L is resonating with at the moment.

Problems with writing stem from…?

E@L doesn’t know. He is aware of a potential audience of 2 to sync with at the maximum.

Is it the 21C schizoid learned distractability of smartphones, and of course the internet in general? Is it the barely subdued anger at the spiralling chaos of the last few years leading up to and including his post-expat suburban life, circumstances dumping him in this unexpected place in what is allegedly his new reality, his new normal…?

And add the righteous anger at the currently even more fucked up than usual actual world itself?

With all these angers, frustrations, regrets, and nostalgia for lost futures spinning into each other how could he think clearly, how could he write about the pernicious banalities of his current life and try to milk a laugh out of them? How could he write about anything now and be the E@L of the old days (when he was funny…)?

The absurd reality of what his life is now like… What he shoulda describe woulda outdo the most imaginative fictions anyone coulda create.

~~~~~~~

E@L sits at the computer on his desk, and can’t face his Scrivener blank pages. There is some magnetic like-poles repulsion from sitting with a writing programme open to, well, to sitting at all, let alone fucking writing anything.

He needs distance, the distance the computer is trying to push him away to... Is this why he rides 30-40kms on his bike when the weather permits? Real or spiritual, emotional, physical, he needs distance from all things. Perhaps take the laptop outside to the table on the balcony. Perhaps this desk is no longer his writing desk. Perhaps he should have another whiskey. Or perhaps another desk…

~~~~~~~

Or (phew, oof, that smell again!?) perhaps he should change his colostomy bag before going to bed and risking a blowout and a Trainspotting worthy bed-linen crisis at 4am.

Ignore all the preceding: all else pales. At the moment, right now, this is the biggest question in the life of

E@L

eRide Like The Wind! (Part 1)

noreply@blogger.com (expat@large) — Sat, 19 Jul 2025 05:57:00 +0000

Exercise is needed badly here: after a few years of troubles, including quite a few hospital stays, pretty much lying in bed for most of several months all up, E@L had transformed himself into the classic ageing former expat. Big belly (OK that was always there), no arse, skinny legs, pants hanging way too low thanks to an even more grossly unhealthy hip/waist ratio.

His good legs were once a feature: an ultrasound scan of his muscular thigh even made into a long lost promotional poster.

Now they are nothing to be proud of: nothing, to be honest, but an embarrassment!

Yep, he should have be following his old but never implemented New Years Resolution of 2013. This the first year after that first “Italian angina incident” which required two stents, a week in St Catherine’s Hospital, two weeks walking around Sienna, still missing 90% of the historical significance of the place, and he had missed the horse race by only a few weeks. This was followed by four, or was it six, weeks in Hamburg with expat ex-Singapore friends - he wasn’t supposed to fly, but hey! (Aside: The 180km/h autobahn run from the airport at Lübeck, where his friend worked, certainly tested the integrity of his refreshed myocardium.)

That NYR involved a big rubber exercise ball, one that he had bought at the request of his part-time flat-mate with a bad back who needed to sit straight at her desk. You could do a variety of exercises with this impressive orb, but his principle goal was 40 (to start) big-ball-supported wall-squats. 20 in the morning that is, and a repeat 20 in the evening. Sad fact: After 13 years with this ball, now repatriated and blown up again (like himself), he calculates that he might be up to maybe 800 reps in toto. Under-utilised, wouldn’t you say?

~~~~~~

E@L recently connected with an old friend, seriously old, same age as himself, and getting older. As with most lost-in-life old friends, they connected at the funeral of another old friend, one who’s not getting any older.

This old friend, Mick, sorry, Michael (“My mother christened me Michael” he would say, just to put people out of step, which he found amusing) had brought his new friend, a mid-priced eBike, down from the country with him. It had fat tyres, an engine in the hub with 5 speeds of assist, 8 gears. Michael, though it seem unlikely to some, must had been sponsored to ride as his aerodynamic lycra top had brand names all over it. He loved his eBike. He rode up around 30kms most days, and sometime further, to the limit of its battery; breezed uphill past struggling Tour-De-France wannabes; tinkled his bell as he shot up behind meandering pedestrians and their dogs; enthusiastically tried to convince E@L to buy one.

~~~~~~

Michael and E@L went camping out at an old surf-spot down the coast (beware of koalas, kangaroos, tiger snakes) with two other old friends — see above re: connection method. The first evening, these four old retired men, sat together outside their varied styles of 3-night accomodation.

Michael had hired camper-van with all mod-cons as he was thinking of his fast approaching grey-nomad years and thought’s he’d try one out.

Wally, who had organised this reunion, kipped out in the back of his small EV, on a foam mattress, old surfer style. He had a marquee thrown out from it which covered tables chairs, a hot-plate, a toaster, tubs of camping things, and even a small bar-fridge! How did all of that come out of his car? Tardis, go eat your multi-dimensional hear out!

Bernie, now that he was retired, had cleared his large work van, a Mercedes (fond of German autos, he once drove a surfie-style VW station-wagon), of all his carpentry stuff to put a foam mattress on a bench in the back. E@L had a two man tent, borrowed from Wally, with a new large-size camp-bed with specs to carry his weight, but not to match the tent’s dimensions, so that it protruded from the tent for half a metre, exposing his feet (or his head, choose one) in the night to those koalas, kangaroos, and tiger snakes.

In the chill of that autumn evening, they sat around two aromatic candles on an upturned bucket, drinking their self-supplied favourite poisons and reminisced about journeys E@L had not been on as he was married at 19 and moved overseas at 40, and hadn’t really seen these friends in 40 years or so. Their stories of Baja California, New Zealand, the desert breaks in South Australia, filled the evening. E@L kept his adventures in Soi Cowboy and Nana Plaza to himself…

And why candles, you ask, and not a roaring open fire, marshmallows, guitars, as old campers might prefer? In this site, adjacent to a large national park, open fires were not permitted except in certified, approved, don’t-start-another-devastating-bushfire-round-here fire-pits, which none of the group owned, or knew to purchase in advance.

But Michael also loved to rave about his eBike.

~~~~~

These friends could not help but notice that E@L was not the greatest paragon of health and vigour in the group. Heart attacks, multiple bowel surgeries, a colostomy, alcoholism (only a social-media drinker, but when isn’t he on FB?), still a large beer-belly despite his success with Ozempic, no arse, skinny legs and all. But they were still friends, old friends, friends enough to suggest that E@L fucking do something about it, and fucking quick! A quick dip in the ocean while they tried to recherchéz les surfing skills perdu, was hardly enough exercise. Maybe, one day you could surf again too, E@L?

And maybe fucking not!

“Get an eBike” was Michael’s strongly enthusiastic suggestion. The others agreed, even though they didn’t have eBikes. Was this some conspiracy, E@L wondered.

Michael had also suggested getting another couple of candles for the next night. While the “warmth” from these two was reasonable[!?], another two $35 aromatic candles would surely do more to keep away the beach-side, clear-skied evening chill. He also suggested that each time one of them went for a piss, that they move the candles around, like stirring wood in a real fire. He had a sense of silly humour that was infectious. But he was serious about the eBike.

~~~~~~

E@L will skip the other hijinks of the trip… OK maybe one thing. On the third and last morning, prior to packing, Michael and he, up earlier than the others, were checking the non-existent surf. They were standing on the sandhill at the edge of the beach, not far from the small cliff at the S-W point of the bay, when suddenly a screaming came across the horizon from the clifftop above their heads, and, so low you could almost reach up to it, with the deafening whine came a military jet, unmarked as to from which air-force it originated… Wow! Deafening, and, you might even say, surprising! The plane banked to follow the curve of the coastline and shot off, up towards Anglesea, until it was too far away to see…

Then we remembered that there was an airshow back in Geelong, and of course some Goose or Maverick was checking out the surf for themselves. We think it was probably an F-16, but what the fuck would we know?

Given the early morning, and the heavy drinking the night before induced brain fog, and with the jet and its scream well gone, it was quite the “Did that actually happen?” moment.

An alarming reality was now only a memory.

~~~~~

But, in conclusion: You’re old man now, or the same age as one, and you’re not an athlete, and you're well behind the eight-ball of “living forever or dying in the attempt” billiards: c’mon, get an eBike and build back those

E@L

thighs!

To Be Continued!

Question

noreply@blogger.com (expat@large) — Tue, 17 Dec 2024 00:04:00 +0000

Should Expat @ Large change his name to Exile @ Home?

Which would you prefer?

E@L

E@H

More Michael Moorcock Than You Can Swing a Runeblade At...

noreply@blogger.com (expat@large) — Mon, 16 Dec 2024 23:59:00 +0000

How many of these (scroll down, but later) magical masterpieces of Swords and of Sorcery have you read?

E@L has x-ed (and reddened) those he has ploughed through (27 is it?), and y-ed (and purpled) those he owns but hasn’t got around to yet, not in this realm anyway. You’ll notice that he has mainly done the pre-1980 novels and stories as he eventually turned away from such childish fun and adventure, thanks to pressing concerns, and became a boring old man at the age of 23. Maybe he overdid the fantasy schtick at the time… Maybe the guilty indulgences stole his S&S soul?

Anyway, E@L temporarily embedded his blade into Moorcock back in 1977/78 at the urging of a fellow unworldly student radiographer (who went on study for a real job as a dentist while E@L hung around on the cusp of unemployment and failure).

They are so easy to read, these slim volumes, and so much fun, at least once you get a delightedly morbid taste for soul-stealing swords and demon infested nether-realms and lots of gruesome and bloody deaths, and those dead who don’t stay dead, but aren’t zombies either, thankfully, as that would be, like, hey, a cliché.

E@L means, hey, if you're 20 years old, working full-time, studying on the evenings, are newly married and with a young baby to focus on, why wouldn’t you retreat into a fantasy world at every opportunity?

You weren’t free to go surfing on a whim anymore, at the drop of an on-shore wind and the rise of a solid swell…

~~~~~~

[Many years later]

So bring on the black mists and the intrigue of the gods and elementals! And get out your guitar and play some Hawkwind songs (if you know any; E@L doesn’t!).

Let’s scour the realm of second-hand bookstores and of charity store like the Salvos or Vinnies, submit ourselves to the fates of heretical churches and their sly fêtes.

Let’s overflow E@L’s already well fucking overflowing bookshelves with the adolescent fantasy dreamworld of Michael Moorcock!

More Moorcock! More Moorcock!

If you’re wondering WTF; E@L is listening to the audiobooks of the Elric saga on his morning walks, and loving them, hence this post.

~~~~~~

E@L considers his poor — perennially on the knife-edge of failing -- performance in his initial career (radiographer, as mentioned) due to being distracted by these stories of eternal champions like Erokosë, Jerry Cornelius, Dorian Hawkmoon, Corum, and, of course, the pale, thin-blooded, reluctant, emperor, Elric of Melniboné (not MEL-kneebone but Mel-NIB-onay) with Stormbringer, his runesword, the stealer of souls!

It was not just the family stuff.

E@L means, hey, like, awesome, right?

~~~~~~~

E@L attributes his poor performance at high school to his being distracted by those surfing whims when it blew off-shore and tide was right and swells were a solid 4-6ft (or lower)…

~~~~~~~

E@L attributes his poor performance at surfing (he was OK, but not a star) to his mother being reluctant/unable to buy more and better surfboards for him. And for him being shit-scared of big waves. He could only afford a decent board when he left school and got a job, but see above re-marriage and progeny and work and study, and guess how well that worked out for him.

Not that he is bitter, twisted, and has his hand on the rune-encrusted obsidian pommel of his otherwordly blade…

No, his hand is on a double G&T.

~~~~~~~

- [ ] The Elric of Melniboné series (1961–2022), including:
                  - [ ] The Dreaming City (1961)
                  - [x] The Stealer of Souls (1963)
                  - [x] Stormbringer (1965, revised 1977)
                  - [x] Elric of Melniboné (1972)
                  - [x] Elric: The Sailor on the Seas of Fate (1976)
                  - [x] The Weird of the White Wolf (1977)
                  - [ ] The Vanishing Tower (1977)
                  - [ ] Elric at the End of Time (1981)
                  - [y] The Fortress of the Pearl (1989)
                  - [y] The Revenge of the Rose (1991)
                  - [y] The Citadel of Forgotten Myths (2022)
- [ ] The Dorian Hawkmoon series (1967–1975), including:
                  - [x] The Jewel in the Skull (1967)
                  - [x] The Mad God's Amulet (1968)
                  - [x] The Sword of the Dawn (1968)
                  - [x] The Runestaff (1969)
                  - [x] Count Brass (1973)
                  - [x] The Champion of Garathorm (1973)
                  - [x] The Quest for Tanelorn (1975)
- [ ] The Erekosë series (1970–1987), including:
                  - [x] The Eternal Champion (1970)
                  - [x] Phoenix in Obsidian, aka The Silver Warriors (1970)
                  - [ ] The Swords of Heaven, the Flowers of Hell (with Howard Chaykin) (1979) (graphic novel)
                  - [ ] The Dragon in the Sword (1987)
- [ ] The Corum series (1971–1974), including:
                  - [x] The Knight of the Swords (1971)
                  - [x] The Queen of the Swords (1971)
                  - [x] The King of the Swords (1971)
                  - [x] The Bull and the Spear (1973)
                  - [x] The Oak and the Ram (1973)
                  - [x] The Sword and the Stallion (1974)
- [x] Behold the Man (1969)
- [x] Breakfast in the Ruins (1972)
- [ ] The Time Dweller (1969)
- [ ] Sailing to Utopia, comprising:
                  - [ ] Flux (1962)
                  - [ ] The Ice Schooner (1966)
                  - [ ] The Black Corridor (1969)
                  - [ ] The Distant Suns (1975)
- [ ] The Wrecks of Time, aka The Rituals of Infinity (1967)
- [ ] The Sundered Worlds, aka The Blood Red Game (1965)
- [ ] The Fireclown, aka The Winds of Limbo (1965)
- [ ] The Twilight Man, aka The Shores of Death (1966)
- [ ] Kane of Old Mars (1998 compilation volume originally published as three books in 1965, 346pp)
- [ ] The Lost Canal (novelette) (2013)
- [ ] The Chinese Agent (1970)
- [ ] The Russian Intelligence (1980)
- [ ] Michael Moorcock's Multiverse (1999) (graphic novel)
- [ ] The Metatemporal Detective (2007) (collection)
- [ ] A Nomad of the Time Streams:
                  - [ ] The Warlord of the Air (1971)
                  - [ ] The Land Leviathan (1974)
                  - [ ] The Steel Tsar (1981)
- [ ] The Dancers at the End of Time sequence (1972–76):
                  - [y] An Alien Heat (1972)
                  - [y] The Hollow Lands (1974)
                  - [ ] The End of All Songs (1976)
- [ ] Legends from the End of Time (1976)
- [ ] The Transformation of Miss Mavis Ming, aka A Messiah at the End of Time (1977)
- [ ] Gloriana (1978)
- [ ] My Experiences in the Third World War (1980)
- [ ] The Opium General and Other Stories (1984)
- [y] Mother London (1988)
- [ ] Casablanca (1989) – short stories
- [y] King of the City (2000)
- [ ] London Bone (2001) – short stories
- [ ] Kaboul (first published in French) (2018
- [ ] The Jerry Cornelius quartet of novels and shorter fiction:
                  - [x] The Final Programme (1969)
                  - [x] A Cure for Cancer (1971)
                  - [x] The English Assassin (1972)
                  - [x] The Condition of Muzak (1977)
                  - [ ] The Cornelius Quartet (1977 compilation volume, 974pp)
                  - [ ] The Adventures of Una Persson and Catherine Cornelius in the 20th Century (1976)
                  - [ ] The Lives and Times of Jerry Cornelius (1976)
                  - [ ] The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle, aka Gold Diggers of 1977 (1980)
                  - [ ] The Entropy Tango (1981)
                  - [ ] The Alchemist's Question (1984)
                  - [ ] A Cornelius Calendar (1993 compilation volume, 554pp)
                  - [ ] The New Nature of the Catastrophe (1993 anthology collecting Jerry Cornelius stories by Moorcock and others, edited by Moorcock and Langdon Jones, 448pp)
                  - [ ] Firing the Cathedral (novella) (2002)
                  - [ ] Phase 1:A Jerry Cornelius Story (novella) (2008)
                  - [ ] Modem Times 2.0 (novella) (2011)
                  - [ ] Pegging the President (novella) (2018)
                  - [ ] The Fracking Factory (novella) (2018)
                  - [ ] The Wokingham Agreement (novelette) (2022)
- [ ] The von Bek sequence:
                  - [ ] The War Hound and the World's Pain (1981)
                  - [ ] The Brothel in Rosenstrasse (1982)
                  - [ ] The City in the Autumn Stars (1986)
- [ ] The Pyat Quartet:
                  - [ ] Byzantium Endures (1981)
                  - [ ] The Laughter of Carthage (1984)
                  - [ ] Jerusalem Commands (1992)
                  - [ ] The Vengeance of Rome (2006)
- [ ] The Second Ether sequence:
                  - [ ] Blood: A Southern Fantasy (1994)
                  - [ ] Fabulous Harbours (1995)
                  - [ ] The War Amongst The Angels (1996)
- [ ] The Elric/Oona Von Bek sequence:
                  - [ ] The Dreamthief's Daughter (2001)
                  - [ ] The Skrayling Tree (2003)
                  - [ ] The White Wolf's Son (2005)
- [ ] Doctor Who:
                  - [ ] The Coming of the Terraphiles (2010)
- [ ] The Sanctuary of the White Friars
                  - [ ] The Whispering Swarm (2015)
                  - [ ] The Woods of Arcady (2023)
                  - [ ] The Wounds of Albion (TBC)

~~~~~~~

Phew! Busy guy that Michael Moorcock!

~~~~~~~

Sigh.

E@L considers his poor history with girlfriends (only JUST plural) and wife (singular) to being obsessed with surfing. And himself. And being obsessed by obscure (to many) books, and to only ever learning four songs on his guitar and playing them on heavy repeat for 50 years yet never remembering the chord changes correctly.

And just being a selfish, ignorant dickhead in relationships, with zip EQ (see previous paragraph for pathetic excuses), and so here he is at 67, still alive despite the best effort of the invidious fates, the anger of the chaotic gods and spirits on this realm and others, only by having used the Mechanical Magic of Modern Medicine to confound his destiny and his malicious DNA, sitting alone on his balcony with a double G&T and an iPad, a thorax marred with multiple scars, a gurgling colostomy bag, and a list of the millions of books he hasn’t read, not to mention the one he hasn’t written.

Pleasant enough, right?

~~~~~~~

But, oh, this post has gone off the rails suddenly, hasn't it?

But like, hey! What more could one expect from that plate of cheese and crackers, that (second) double G&T, and

E@L

There You Are... Not.

noreply@blogger.com (expat@large) — Fri, 29 Nov 2024 00:31:00 +0000

The received wisdom of travel is "wherever you go, there you are.”

The consciousness in a calcium box that you might think(ha!) of as YOU never goes anywhere, not by itself.

The sensations that stimulate it are sort of... arbitrary, dependant on the geolocation of the flesh and bones that support and protect it, that then send electrical impulses to a bunch of cells that create your awareness of externality, when it exists... (The exquisite details of the physical location, the emotions felt in dreams for example, or in hallucinations, don't exist.)

Your senses might be stimulated by views of the 365 chimneys of Chateau Chenonceau, or by the turrets of Neuschwanstein half enveloped in mist as a chilling snow embraces you in the clouds, by the tickle of hungry tropical fish swarming around your feet in the warm waters of Koh Phi Phi, or by the familiar aromas initially and then a burning on the lips and tongue as the plethora of capsaicin rich chilis in your spicy som tam flood in and overload your trigeminal nerve to deliver a Doc Martin kick to the inside of your occiput.

If you believe in physical reality that is. You know the theory of duality, right? Mind/body. Well, let's assume you are not a brain on a box somewhere, and that the world and all its stimuli are predominantly real when you are awake. Places and things surround you.

But are they real? Of course they fucking are. (Or are you only dreaming you are awake, or is this a Man With Two Brains scenario? No! Snap back to reality!)

Your body, the physical YOU and its consciousness, the mental YOU, board a cruise ship, an aeroplane, a train: the coordinates on Google Maps move with both.

Your character, your habits and traits, the moral beliefs that both torment and bring bliss, your education, your memories, they move with you as well. There they are. There you are. YOU. Wherever YOU are, you are the same person in a different location; feeling awe, hunger, satiety, gastronomic discomfort, warmth or cold, moisture, cold, physical pain, maybe, but still come the same patterns of thought, mental and physical reactions, as your body moves here and there. YOU are. You. The YOU you think you know, that your friends and family would recognise in an instant.

All true.

~~~~~~

Until…

You turn from from Soi 4 into Nana Plaza, from Soi 23 or Asoke into Soi Cowboy, through the plush purple curtains on Lockard Rd, or out of the lift straight into the 6th floor bar in Roppongi or Shinjuku…

And YOU are gone. Woosh!

And probably it's a night on the rickety tiles with a YOU that is completely different, and enjoying it immensely with a YOU who once was

E@L

~~~~~~
(Just realised that this is very Clarice Lispector)

No! Yes! No! D’oh!

noreply@blogger.com (expat@large) — Fri, 01 Nov 2024 06:40:00 +0000

D’oh indeed.

E@L’s first work trip was proposed for Monday to Friday next week. The Victorian rep who would be supporting the Sydney apps lady is going to be at a conference in New Zillint.

The work is in Bairnsdale, a 5hr drive away, across Victoria, and a decent hotel needs to be booked. Dr’s had OKed E@L’s travelling that far, so all good. However, until today he had not had confirmation of the demo going ahead… aaaaannnddd… so he presumed it was cancelled or something, so didn’t need to do anything.

On Tuesday this week a letter came from the hospital Outpatients Dept with an appointment scheduled for next Wednesday, when, hmm, he MIGHT be in Bairnsdale! This would be the last Dr’s appointment to follow up on his recent surgery so he really wanted to get it out of the way and move on with life, the universe, everything [the novel?].

And on top of that, the district nurse had made his final appointment with her/them for Thursday!

Um… he again wonders if this trip is going ahead or not? He would might need to change all these appointments and it’s getting close to too late…

It’s Friday now, mid-afternoon. E@L is relaxed [a pint of lager and a burger, $20 special at Carwyn cellars, who could say No?] and reading a book… [Aqua Vita by Clarice Lispector — he’s not sure what is going on, indeed not sure IF anything is going on. She’s writes at a point where the Samuel Beckett of the trilogy and Fernando Pessoa cross paths.]

A phone call: “Are you still OK for next week? Sorry for the last minute call. I’m still heading to NZ, so we will need you. I’ll confirm with the Big Boss!”

“Yep, excellent!” [Some good money coming with his exorbitant rates!]

E@L logs on to Booking-dot-com, tells them Bairnsdale and the dates, and selects some reasonably comfortable mid-range accommodation in this medium sized country town, but waits to press BOOK just in case.

5 mins later an email and Team mtg appointment from the Big Boss: “Demo is Tuesday to Friday next week. Please let’s have a meeting to discuss the demo on Monday.”

Oh shit, the appointments!!

It’s currently Friday afternoon still, but it’s 5 minutes before, if he remembers aright, the Outpatient clinic closes… E@L calls just in time and asks to change the appointment. There is nothing free until the end of the month. OK, whenever is possible, thanks.

E@L hangs up.

E@L’s finger is back to being poised over BOOK for his hotel… aaaaaaaanndd…

E@L’s phone rings: “Hi, mate [not Big Boss obviously], have you booked anything yet, because the demo has been pushed back! Don’t have a date yet…”

E@L sighs. He pulls his finger from his iPad…

It’s now 2 mins after OP has closed….

But E@L calls anyway, thinking for sure it’s too late — Friday, after 4, when he used to work there, phone? Fuggedabartit! — and for 7mins the phone keeps a ringing (not on hold, no robot messages so there is hope eternally and internally springing). Then a welcoming voice answers, springing (Hope fulfilled!) from a live human’s voice-box, yay! Outpatients is not closed after all! and Yes, she is able to change his appointment back to next week as previous.

E@L sighs.

What a run around!

Then a penny drops… If the demo is postponed, that means the local guy whom E@L would have been covering for is back in town and will be available after all.

E@L will not be required.

No big money after all.

Another sigh from

E@L

Speech, Free or Not? Subscribe to Find Out

noreply@blogger.com (expat@large) — Thu, 31 Oct 2024 02:01:00 +0000

[I drafted this ages ago, in May, but forgot to post. It’s looks Sam Harris is becoming my NYT as a source for blog post topics!]

Sam Harris, famous as being one the Four Horsemen of Atheistolypse, is sort of almost detested by the right, because he is not right wing, and because he rails against evil fuckwits like Tucker Carlson, Alex Jones, even Trump himself*, and, more recently, he is viewed suspiciously by the left (maybe as he has criticised the NYT and even the New Yorker), at least in America.

At the risk of being cancelled myself, I admit I do subscribe (in order to get the full episodes) and listen to the occasional podcast from Making Sense. In my opinion he usually does exactly that, as he is prepared to listen to intelligent people with whom he might possibly disagree without losing his temper and at least he claims to be prepared to change his mind. Unlike Joe Rogan, he does not suffer fools gladly, and his guests are more than just other podcasters and influencers.

His current interview with Greg Lukianoff, author of “The Cancel[l]ing Of The American Mind” (please buy), Substack writer, no subscription fees required (no-one blogs anymore: not true, he writes for the FIRE blog - see link below) is fascinating, as it covers most aspects and opinions about free speech; historically with the social medium of the time, the printing press under the Tudors, and also McCarthyism; mainly about free speech as a modern concept in general; what’s happening on university campuses now, and, duh, cancel culture, etc etc; predominantly the American experience, but also comparing the laws, and the variability in interpretation between countries in Europe.

Usually I end totally confused about where my opinion should lie after listening to Making Sense, as everyone on his podcasts sounds so reasonable and rational, as does Mr Lukianoff.

Not that I think I disagree with Lukianoff’s definition of Free Speech, which is basically that all opinions have the right to be heard, in order to make it possible to rationally discredit bad shit or support the good stuff with “the truth”. Inciting illegal actions, or even voicing opinions that trigger illegal actions (I think I got that right), should however be restricted. In other words controversial topics should be allowed to be heard otherwise these opinions will go underground and social media will amplify and intensify them. Not that doesn’t happen anyway, as influencers attack on the ideal of truth and trust in authorities/experts.

Here's a hypothetical they come up with. What if Alex Jones, while still saying the Sandyhook tragedy was a lie, DID NOT give out the details - addresses and names, which he did - of the families of some of the victims, would he still be liable for prosecution?

Ferkucked if I know! I would very much hope so though! He certainly should have been kicked of Twitter or Youtube or whatever, from his very first post on the topic.

~~~~~~~~

But I also remain concerned about Australia, which Wants to Dictate What The World Can Read online, and where Lachlan Murdoch** can sue a small Aussie independent online newspaper for offering an opinion in Lachie’s responsibility in the Dominion voter fraud case in the US. He lost, and had to pay legal costs - do I get my contribution refunded? Libel has to cause “substantial harm” in Australia, so I doubt anything much less $785million would trouble NewsCorp.au. (I drafted this a while ago: Crickey settled.)

And as I’ve mentioned on FB before, I spent 16 years of living in Singapore where, as examples, in my first few years there, truckloads of riot police arrested four silent protestors from the Workers Party standing on the footpath with “More Transparency in Government” or WTTE, on their tee-shirts; where a foreign speaker at a public meeting on free speech was not granted permission to speak by MICA aka the Ministry of Truth; where blogger mrbrown lost his stint at a newspaper for a light hearted piece on the cost of living (“If you want to comment on politics, join a political party”, said the MiniTru - and that worked out well for those silent protestors, right?). At another public session on censorship in Singapore, this one at the 2006 (or was it 2007?) Writers Festival, hosted by mrbrown, I ventured to hope to be anonymous and safe from MiniTru as my sometimes contentious blog*** was hosted in San Francisco, but mrbrown was sceptical and said, “Everyone knows who you are Phillip!”

(Everyone knows mrbrown is Lee Kin Mun.)

~~~~~~~~~

Question is: Would people go to substack instead of here and pay to read, or even read for free, the inexpensive speech of

Phillip aka E@L

*I still recall Harris’s brilliant rant against Trump from a few years ago.

** News Corp eventually dropped the case in embarrassment: "A defamation battle being waged between media heir Lachlan Murdoch and the publisher of online news site Crikey appears to be driven by "ego and hubris", a judge has declared.”

*** The historical posts are mostly gone now, cancelled by a software upgrade. The plan is to restore my back-up to a readable format, but the comments are all over the place in the ascii dump of the SQL database. There are about 250,000 words there, so not an insubstantial effort is required.

Is There Intelligent Life On Earth?

noreply@blogger.com (expat@large) — Thu, 31 Oct 2024 01:49:00 +0000

On my walk this morning I listened to very stimulating discussion about what (philosophically not chemically) it would take for complex life to develop. Sam Harris and guest Sara Irma Walker, also discussed the Fermi Paradox and likelihood of life on other planets, and what it would take to even measure that likelihood in a nearly infinite universe and within the limited time before either the sun goes red giant or Trump wins the coming US election, either of which would destroy all intelligent life on the planet. (In which case, after next week, there will be no-one left to read this near-defunct blog.)

Anyhows... When my eyes and brain weren’t glazed over with the abstract theories and physics jargon, I really enjoyed it.

https://podcasts.apple.com/au/podcast/388-what-is-life/id733163012?i=1000673910025

According to Sam’s guest, the multiverse is crap (my word). The “block universe”, where the past present and future are all "now”, as with the Tralfamadorians in Slaughterhouse Five, and the inky octopi in Arrival, is also crap.

However, she keeps flipping on Yes, there is life and No, no life.

My take on the Fermi Paradox, given that if the earth could be reset to its beginning, there would be way less than fuck-all chance of complex life developing again, and that this current time around, of all the planets in the brain-numbing extent of the universe, over the life of the universe from its the past, before there even was time, and into its future, our earth was the single typewriter where one of those infinite monkeys randomly typed the complete works of Shakespeare. (Prof Brian Cox, not the actor, would agree, I think.) Or then again maybe, like prime numbers, there will always be one more, we just haven’t conceived of it, or indeed constructed it (listen to discussion) yet.

Just we still haven’t constructed a timeless

E@L

OneDownManShip (™)

noreply@blogger.com (expat@large) — Tue, 12 Mar 2024 12:23:00 +0000

All too often, when E@L was telling a story to TBITP* about the outrageous things he, um, had heard about on his last trip to Pattaya, Bruce might cut in and say, "All very good and depraved sir, but let me tell you of my even more intriguing episode. I had taken to chatting up this dwarf, when two ladyboys and their baby elephant..."

Etc...

~~~~~~~

It's called Onedownmanship(™).

~~~~~~~

Getting used to being not quite the reprobate he thought he was is

E@L

* Forgotten so soon? The Boys In The Pub.

Foundation And The Eleusian Mysteries.

noreply@blogger.com (expat@large) — Mon, 08 Jan 2024 11:35:00 +0000

From the Hmm, I Did Not Know That, and The No-one Who Reads My FB Feed Cares So This Goes To The Blog files comes this fascinating connection:

In Series 1 Epsisode 8, "The Missing Piece" of Asimov's Foundation on Apple+, "Brother Day embarks on a journey that no other Cleon has ever attempted." This is a religious ceremony that involves a long arduous walk in the sun without food or water that is deadly for many, called The Great Spiral. Br Day expects to reach a sacred cave, referred to as a womb by a priestess (note the rebirth motif) where salt in the water has some mind-altering property that may grant him a vision of the three goddesses (mother, maiden and ... cleaning lady?) and some enlightening message.

And hopefully some aloe vera for that sunburn.

~~~~~~~

It just so happens that The Eleusian Mysteries of ancient Greece bear a striking resemblance, at least part, to this fictional ritual journey. The Mysteries involved a once in a lifetime experience for the elite of the time and requiring them (people like Marcus Aurelius!) to oversome some harsh trials/tests/etc? and reach a certain underground temple or cave, ritualistically descend into hades and return with the goddesses Persephone and Demeter (daughter and mother).

References to re-birth from a seed (it obviously began as an an agricultural festival), visions, a revelation of spiritual and mental enlightenment, and eventually, as the mysteries evolved, eternal life and maybe even becoming a god. Magic mushrooms or some other psychedelic may very well have been involved, but we don't know as the rites were (the clue is in the name) a Mystery.

Anyone seen Marcus?

E@L couldn't find a correpsondence to this TV show's Great Spiral subplot in the books by polymath Isaac Asimov. Well, research, as in he did a search for "cave" and "goddess" in the seven Foundation ebooks he has, with no result. Maybe the scriptwriters' put it in? Seems unlikely. It must be there. Anyone here read them all?

~~~~~~~~

Anyway, it was an interesting (to E@L) parallel, even though he has probably misread the details in the Wikipedia entry completely as he was drinking a double negronic (negrotonic? Anyway, negroni topped up with tonic) as he drafted this.

~~~~~~~~

No doubt a dunk into reddit or somesuch chat area, even Google, would provide E@L with a wealth of discussion on this obvious, to many, association and several PhD theses have already been submitted on it and Stephen Fry probably explained it on Qi (even though he doesn't do it anymore) or in his latest book, and it is only because E@L lives in isolation from the cultured world (the bars of Bangkok and breweries in Singapore?) that he can claim to claim it as his own discovery.

To be totally honest, the correspondence hit E@L while he was doing his daily constitutional around said culturally isolated home village, sipping his barista-brewed flat white, and listening to a recent Sam Harris podcast on the use of psychedelics in religious ceremonies in the ancient western world, and the blindingly obvious pagan origin of many Christian rituals, natch. The guest describes the Mysteries in as much detail as, even more than, any brain could hold onto, least of all the exploding one of

E@L

From The SMW* Files Of E@L

noreply@blogger.com (expat@large) — Fri, 10 Nov 2023 14:55:00 +0000

E@L has just discovered an excellent book review podcast called Backlisted, where they pull out an overlooked or under-appreciated book from some time back and get experts to go over the tome’s inexplicable and unfortunate desuetude.

~~~~~~

The first one he listened to while he was doing his morning walk yesterday. The topic was M. R. James, the Eton don who wrote “weird” and ghostly tales in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, specifically his Ghost Stories of An Antiquary from 1904.

~~~~~~

The second episode he Iistened to while he was on the road back from No1 son’s place in Melbourne this afternoon. This episode was about Diane Johnson’s 1972 biography, The True History Of The First Mrs Meredith And Other Lesser Lives. George Meredith, the husband in question, being the early Victorian era novelist.

~~~~~~~

After the excellent discussions on the podcasts, E@L bought them both for his Kindle (0.99c for the James) and after dipping an eyeball into both he can heartily recommend them! Johnson’s book is brilliantly entertaining despite what you might think of as a dry topic. It was reissued by NYRB a few years ago, so obviously it is not all THAT overlooked.

Irrelevant.

Look, listen, and learn. Here’s the point:

Kindle Loc 32 of Ghost Stories: “…of a more formidable prosecutor than a termagant wife.”

E@L had to look up termagant when he read it this morning in the first of M.R. James’ stories; easily done on the Kindle: “Harsh-tempered or over-bearing woman.” From the moon wandering (vagant) between three (tri = ter) places: heaven, earth, and hell. E@L can’t recall reading that word in the last few decades, but it was vaguely familiar. Such an obscure and extremely rare word, yeah?

After a spine-tingling (not really) jaunt through a few of James’ quite short spooky stories, E@L thought he should check on the Johnson biography this evening! He found it terrifically witty and clever, and then…

Kindle Loc 361 of The True History: “… was left by his wife, a termagant and too clever by half; she took their little boy Tom…”

~~~~~~
Jaw. Drop. Floor.
~~~~~~

WWWwwwwwwwhat is going on here? Seriously. we mean, WTAF? Guess who's afraid to pick up another book now?

Looking anxiously over his shoulder for a spooky apparition of a possibly termagant Mary Ellen Meredith née Love Peacock creeping in from one of James’ eerie tales is

E@L!

*Spooky. Mystic Weird.

Angiograms Don't Show Demons!

noreply@blogger.com (expat@large) — Mon, 02 Oct 2023 13:55:00 +0000

It's round about the 50th anniversary of The Exorcist (cue Tubular Bells).

What a great movie! Scary etc etc. for sure, but such cinema verité as well! (Probably got that term wrong.) I mean as in superb naturalistic acting and non-intrusive directing, for the most part anyway, not counting, you know, the exorcism part..

However, a great source of amusement to me about this fillum, is that what freaked out my friends more than any guacamole, pea-soup, head-turning, bed-bouncing, etc, were the medical sequences.

As the radiologist stabbed Reagan's carotid artery directly and withdrew the stylet prior to putting in a guide wire, then attaching the tubing with a Luer lock connection to the angiomat injector, blood spurted out very realistically, and then went up the tube very realistically. Did they actually cannulate the poor girl? Probably not. But to my friends this was incredibly distressing and they thought it was most horrible thing they had ever seen! Worse that the rest of the movie, as it was so realistic and the rest was obviously, you know, a horror movie...

But not me, it was just another day at the office.

~~~~~~~~~

I was a young radiography student at the time we were all old enough to see the movie at the drive-in (around 1977? drinking Melbourne Bitter long-necks on the bonnet of the car), and when I was rostered into Room 2, the angiogram suite (hardly a suite! A cramped room full of antiquated public hospital equipment with jerry-built accoutrements to do the job despite that generous Govt funding - a bit like the battered and chipped equipment they used in the film GE I think) we used to perform two, three, four, six, of these procedures on our angiogram days. It also the room we used for barium enemas, etc. But the stabby, bloody bits were just part of the terrritory, as it were, for the brain (as in the movie), but also for the kidneys, the aorta and down the legs etc... (We didn't do cardiac.)

I would occasionally own that pair of hands that are holding Reagan's head still while the needle is being placed... The blood spurting out was a sign the radiologist hadn't missed (always good) so for me that gave a positive feeling, as we could get on with the radiography bit.

However! One issue that has really bugged me since I first saw the movie, and I can't get it out of my head or forgive them 46 years later, is that when they were actually taking the x-rays and the AOT film transport machines were banging away, moving a film up the intensifying screens, then moving it out and placing another one, (we had to load them in a pitch black darkroom, counting the metal slots for each film in the desired sequence) was that...

*Reagan moved her head in the middle of the bloody procedure...!!!*

We she opened her mouth here ^ for a silent scream, she lifted her head as well! I'm sure it was great acting, but it was terrrible patienting!

"Noooooo! You've blurred several of the most important images!! We'll have to do it all again! Oh my God. Open more contrast, Bruce. Sister Zoe, we'll need another guidewire... Now listen! Please! Keep! Your! Twisty-turny Green Vomity Head! Perfectly! Effing! Still! (You stupid demonic bitch!) Phillip, tighten those head straps (until her skull cracks)!"

Sigh. Verisimilitude collapses like Schrodinger's wave function, and the cat is dead after all.

~~~~~~~~~

As an aside, the mechanised display system they used to look at the array of processed films (kachunk, kachunk - the Film-o-matic, or something stupid like that - someone here will know) was a pain to load (it was often done by the - you guessed it - student radiographers i.e. me), and every now and then it broke down, or a film fell down underneath it and was a shit to retrieve...

An another anside: not long after this film was made, radiologists changed to a different approach to cerebral angiography, so that the needles were not longer stabbed into the neck (occasionally causing a dissection of the carotid - never saw one thankfully...). It all moved down to the groin, using the Seldinger technique of placing the needle into the femoral artery (hopefully): remove the stylet: advance guideware up to the aorta: remove the needle: advance a shaped catheter over the guidewire to the root of the aorta: remove the guidewire: attach the Injectomat (hopefully a nice new one) and inject from there for the first bilateral run: put the guidewire back in and reposition (replace?) the catheter into the appropriate carotid near the origin and off you go for the next run... Don't forget to stress the student radiographer out when he goes to processes the films after each run, refill the AOT of whatever the brand name was with the right number of films in the right sequence or Herbert will throw a film cassette at him...

~~~~~~~~~

Ah, back to the movie: the crucifix scene was probably not quite as explicit in the version we first saw (or perhaps I had my hands over my eyes at the truly scary scenes)... but just as a suspense movie, great effects, great score, fantastic acting (the coffee scene with Lee J Cobb and Ellyn Burstyn, brilliantly understated - however Ellen in The Last Picture Show, OMFG, how good was she there?!), and not to forget the accurate medical sequences, The Exorcist is undoubtedly one of the top 10, maybe top 5, top 3? films of all time for

E@L

Absolutely Brillat!

noreply@blogger.com (expat@large) — Tue, 22 Aug 2023 14:03:00 +0000

Someone anticipated my blog many, many moons ago...

~~~~~~~~

"Another reproach which might be levelled against me is that I sometimes let my pen run away with me, and tend to turn garrulous when I have a tale to tell. But is it my fault if I am old? Is it my fault if I am like Ulysses, who had seen the cities and ways of life of many peoples? Am I to be blamed if I include a little of my own biography?"

Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, The Physiology of Taste (Physiologie du goût), 1825.

~~~~~~~~~~

E@L found a Folio Society edition from 2008, in mint condition, in a second-hand store in Geelong for a bargain AUD25.

How that last quote, eh?

'I looked about me and took note of what I saw, and often at the most sumptuous banquets I have been saved from boredom by the pleasure I derived from my observations'

Brilliant Brillat. Worth the money right there.

We are talking (and observing pleasurably) about: recalcitrant toasters in hotel buffet breakfasts; komplex kopi concerns; restaurant capers and caprices.

Much of E@L's blog in an edible nutshell!

~~~~~~~~~

Interesting also that "goût" is essentially, says arrogant anglophone, spelled the same as "gout" (at least you don't have to cut and past the latter from somewhere), so many may mistakenly think of this foody's treat as a treatise on the afflictions associated with improper uric acid metabolism!

Ha! Nuh!

Fortunately, fingers and toes crossed, this is one of the few afflictions that has not (yet) brought low that gallavanting gourmand of the grand guignol that was his former expatriatdom,

E@L

Un-Blocked At Last

noreply@blogger.com (expat@large) — Sun, 21 May 2023 00:25:00 +0000

In case no-one has noticed, I should explain that I am having trouble making a start on any of those writing projects I told myself I’d be doing to soak up the damp hours and soggy days of retirement (enforced, or otherwise)

When someone asked Anthony Burgess if he had ever had writer's block, he shot back, in typical snarky Burgess fashion, “Of course not. I am a writer. I write. Have you ever heard of a cobbler getting cobbler’s block?”

~~~~~~~

Ha.

My paternal great-great-grandfather, Charles Radnell was one of the two cobblers in a small town of Tarnagulla, initially called Sandy Creek, in "The Golden Triangle" of central Victoria in the mid/late 19th century, from the time of rapid development in that area during the great gold rush.

His father (also named Charles) back in Nottingham was a leather-worker and harness-maker, and GGGF Charles presumably picked up the suitable shoe-making skills from him. It seems that after said GGGF Charles passed away in 1890, the tools of the trade; its awls, chisels, punches, edgers and various knives and cutters, and shoe rests or lasts, presumably went to his son (my GGF) William John, the second child with that name. His namesake, the firstborn, died at 10 months while GGGF Charles and GGGM Sarah were living in a tent town, in the goldfields of Llanelly at the height of the Victoran gold rush.

"Diggers" were coming in from all over, including Hong Kong and the provence of Canton. There are several Chinese memorials doing their best to survive the elements in the town's cemetery. Lots of stories which I won't go into here about the struggles of the Chinese in Australia during the gold rush.

For the lucky few, a good living could be made in the many gold strikes in the region, such as the Poverty Reef mine, right in the heart of Tarnagulla, which was still in full stride when GGGF Charles moved into town in 1853. Several of his sons, GGF William John maybe, and his brothers, later worked there. Two of the six brothers, Charles(!) and George, were killed in action in the Great War.

I am guessing this heritage of cobblerdom because I don't know what GGF William John's actual trade was, but when his daughter, my paternal GM, Ethel [daughter of Annie née Titus - aunt of the great Richmond footballer in the then VFL, now AFL, Jack Titus] married my GF, John George Ramm, apparently known as George. [Geo. the Neat Executor of the card, below], the evidence would strongly suggest that he learnt the trade as well. ["Bot. of" - meaning: ???]

There was only one cobbler in town by 1920. That would have GF Geo, who lived there until he passed in 1950.

A young GF John George (Geo.) Facial enhancement by Topaz AI.

Of course, back in the heady rushed days of sudden golden wealth and desperate arduous slog in mud and non-glittering rock, those gold miners needed solid work boots. Their wives needed dress shoes too, maybe with bows on them, for social events at the town's Garibaldi Lodge or, in later days with Geo as bootmaker, at the Masonic hall in nearby Dunolly...

So for a fair part of a century, the Radnells and a Ramm ran the town's cobbler business, unblocked.

~~~~~~~~~~

Aside: The Poverty Reef mine in Tarnagulla was named after Poverty Bay, the New Zealand home of the two prospectors who made the first strike there. And then they made their fortune. Isn't that ironic! Doncha think?

The mine was intermittently operational until quite recently, though it peaked production with 13½ ton(!) of gold in the inital years of 1852-53.

As the seam became exhausted, different methods of gold extraction were tried there, and the first cyanide factory in Australia was built just behind it.

Some locals

~~~~~~~~~

This is the house where my paternal family lived. I guess it is where my father was born. When we were young kids, our widowed mother required respite, so each summer we stayed with my uncle and aunt who still lived there, for two weeks or so. But we weren't to go into the closed front room, the one behind what once might have been a shop window (presuming here), under the recently refurbished awning.

Too much important stuff in there for clumsy children. General uncle and aunt storage, my father's stamp collection for sure, etc... And some of my great-great, and great, and grandfather's work implements.

When we were allowed in, once only I think in the many years we holidayed there, I recall trying to figure what this strange multi-footed steel montrosity was exactly. I doubt that we could have damaged it, however clumsy we were.

(Not GGGF's or GF's but same same.)

A cobbler's last. A block of steel that allowed consistant work from a range of angles. Shoes for men, women, and children, made to order. Neatly executed repairs. And cheap!

If I had one now, I would rub it as a talisman of progress, and getting a move on from this blogger's block would be

E@L

A Week Of Serious Drinking*

noreply@blogger.com (expat@large) — Sat, 20 May 2023 02:42:00 +0000

On Friday evening after work, EvilD called EvilK, E@L, and Bruce and asked if they wanted to go out for drinks...

~~~~~~~~

They went to Lan Kwai Fong and drank a few Carlsbergs and jello-vodka-shots on the street corner there.

Soon it was 1am and LKF was closing down, so they took a taxi to Wanchai, particularly The Wanch, where a criminally awful band was playing. They drank a few Old Speckled Hens, which was on tap, and they pretended to fit in with the awkward Lamma locals.

When the band finished, E@L suggested Mes Amis, a slightly classier place. There they switched to G&Ts until E@L was kicked out for knocking over half the dance floor with his bouncy bouncy interpretation of Fatboy Slim classic.

Right there, right then, they all moved on to one of eight girly bars on Lockart Rd for a laugh or seven, and shared few $250 ladies’ drinks with the girls and bar staff. Bruce grabbed E@L's Charisma Card before he paid for those18 tequila shots for the three women on his arm, and they exited hastily though the heavy red curtain, Bruce with luminous lipstick marks on the front of his jeans.

When the bars and clubs started to shut down around 3am, EvilD said he knew a place where you could get beer - it was where the band from Amazonia goes after their gig. E@L discussed the Hendrix chord with Sammy, the best and shortest lead guitarist in Hong Kong (and Singapore one week a month).

Soon the sun came up to separate the sheep from the goats, which they all toasted with another jug of margaritas!

By 7am the early openers were there for the working girls coming back from their long-times, and for diehards like EvilD, EvilK, E@L and Bruce. With Guinness being on tap, they were well supplied with calories.

They kept drinking like this all Saturday; in Wanchai Irish pubs to watch AFL by themselves, and EPL jammed in a crowd, and to cocktail bars to watch potential tai-tais cadge drinks, and by Saturday evening you could find them dancing on the bar at Carnegies. EvilK suggested some shots of absinthe, which triggered a series of most welcome hallucinations, such as: They were sober enough to have more shots...

Saturday night and Sunday morning were more of the same, right through to Sunday lunch when it was High Tea at the Filipina Bars. They stumbled down various stairs to basement level bars like Uranus II, where off-duty maids went to dance in front of mirrors until their 9pm curfews. A few other expats they knew were there on the pick-up, so a few rounds were shouted until one by one those expats paired off with an amah in time for a quickie before their girl had to get back and cook 5 different suppers for 5 different people, and darn the underpants of the incontinent uncles, then grab a bowl of cold rice before unrolling her blanket under the kitchen table for her 2hr kip, or to wake up in a king-size bed with her boss and his wife.

There was another EPL game Sunday evening so the crew headed to back the Irish bar on the corner where several ladyboys accosted them briefly, and Bruce nodded a shy greeting to the ugliest one. Guinness and Kilkenny were on tap. Sharpeners. Lovely.

Sunday night, once the game was over, they moved to Joe Bananas where the manager greeted EvilD with a huge hug and an insistence that they all have a free bottle of Jack Daniels for the night! Still dancing and sweating it out on the crowded floor at 4am, trying not to spill their JD (third bottle) and diet coke on the floor, they shook themselves to the duff duff beat from the DJ’s extensive collection of duff duff music.

Monday was a holiday, so they had no cause to stop partying, and the cycle repeated itself. Beer here, G&T’s there, with EvilD scoring free shots for them at Dusk ’Til Dawn. Bouncers were high-fiving and fist bumping EvilD, EvilK and Bruce as E@L looked on in awe at how popular his friends were with the staff, the bands, and working girls everywhere they went. So it continued right through until the next morning.

They were too far gone for work on Tuesday, so they all called in sick and stayed out drinking still at various bars.

Wednesday was the same, with a variety of vodkas at a new bar that EvilD remembered, down by the cop-shop, which brought them past Crazy Camel, where Western girls in bikini tops and cut-off jeans danced on the bar and poured free tequila shots into the mouths of customers who, like the crew here did repeatedly, leaned their heads back over the grog-sticky bar.

By Thursday, E@L was feeling a little squeamish, so he said the EvilD, “How about we get a packet of peanuts and some chips?”

EvilD was furious! “What? Listen! Did I invite you out for dinner or to have a drink?!”

~~~~~~~~~~

Punchline stolen from another joke, but the rest is a compendium of something close to a previous reality, which may, or may not, have included the person who was

E@L

~~~~~~~~~~

* Recommended: Hallucinatory, magic unrealism.

From The Archives: Nov 2004: Whom Adjusted The Situation Of My Cheesy Comestibles? (not the original title)

noreply@blogger.com (expat@large) — Tue, 25 Oct 2022 04:15:00 +0000

[E@L was randomly reading stuff on his computer when he found the text version of the archives from his old blog, pre-Blogger, which was lost when there was a change the programming language when he wasn't watching so his free software didn't run anymore... He had already saved the more salacious ones to Evernote, but some, like this one, he had forgotten and hadn't reformatted.

Here for today's Nostaligia Hour is:]

~~~~~~~~~

Business seminar and/or a self-help book I'd like to see:

Who Took A Dump on My Cheese, Spread It Over A Pissed-on Cracker, Made Me Eat It, Then Forced Me To Say I Found It A Challenging And Rewarding Experience?: Coping with Change in the Multi-National Organisation, or Not. A Seminar/Book/AstrologicalGuide for Distraught Marketers, Traumatised Technical Support, Melancholoy Managers and Failed Salesmen.

Coming to an unemployment agency waiting room coffee table near YOU!

~~~~~~~~~

What is it with Big Companies' obsession with all this fucking around with Logos and Mission Statements and Prime Directives and Branding...?

Fucking hell, the only guys making money out of all this change are;

1: printers: redoing your stationery and business cards every other fortnight

2: the logo designer: ditto...

3: the caterers for all those re-branding team meetings and "change" seminars

4: the "trainers" at said seminars.

(I remember one "efficiency" seminar I was forced to attend where the guy in his opening 15 minute speech berated all hospital workers at the time - we were in the early stages of being Jeffed! - for being so inefficient that 30% of our time was wasted in unnecessary and redundant activities! He then started some John Cleese videos and went outside and to lie down in the sun, have a sandwich and a smoke, and stare at the back of his eyelids for two hours. That's about 90% saved time for him. Obviously this was the efficiency we were to aim for! And considering how much the hospital paid him -- sweet! However he never told us what those unnecessary and redundant activites were - x-raying the fractured skulls of motorcycle accident victims who were going to die anyway? [Fucking twat he was. Drove a Beemer. Total Quality Wanker!])

5: the psychologists who deal with the stress and anxiety to intelligent, experienced, mature workers, those who had over the years gradually devised strategies for using the system to its max, and making things work smoothly, keeping things going, staying ahead of problems, anticipating issues... only to have a bloody/bloodless coup in upper management force everybody to try it THEIR way for a change... Until that "change" is revealed as a dismal failure and another coup takes place upstairs and everything changes again... Next narcissistic fucking young gun with their experimental MBA thesis, please...

~~~~~~~~

The assumption that your average consumer wouldn't know if his arse was on fire ignores the presence of all the pain receptors we have under the skin of our buttocks. So why rebrand? Why not just give up and sell your widget cheaper if it's so bad that sales are crap! Consumers distrust change. That why they use credit cards. No noisy heavy change filling up their pockets. No, I mean "change" as in alteration, difference, variation, cheese-moving.

And don't employees hate change? Yes, they do! They all know what it really means. More empty seats in the office, and fewer people in the shout on Friday nights. Bad news, in a word. You see, there's Change (rising tone then falling tone) and then there's Change (low tone.)

Change would be OK if it was sold as "Improvement", but it is not marketed that way. It is just branded as ambiguous "change" and that implies the possibility of the quality of the changed thing going either way. To worse, or to better - who knows? Someone knows. But they don't want to tell you! And that's part of the strategy! Cunning! Indeed! They can always say, later when things go to hell in a handbasket that they had hoped we would all pull together (in a big corporate wank, a mass debate?) to ensure that the change would be for the better. As if they didn't know!

You know that up top, in the head office, there really has to be someone in the organisation who has an idea of what is going down in the marketplace... Well, you can only maintain your sanity in the organisation if you have that belief. Like believing in God helps good people cope with world-wide suffering, cancer in lab mice, the coffee in Starbucks and other existential horrors. Unfortunately in most corporations, this person is most likely the building janitor. Nevermind, God does a lot of minor running repairs as well, like, um, making statues bleed, and um, etc... I am sure there must be other things Alanis has done recently, but I'll save that for another blog (when I want to get kicked off my ISP again...)

Well, yeah, that person, (like every employee) knows that "change" is just a synonym for "mass sackings and profiteering before it all goes belly-up." But they would have trouble getting that past some of the more sensitive board-members and share-holders (for the whom the world was created), so they repackage their personal parachutes as Total 69 Quality Sigma Depowerment or somesuch and surf the boardroom on that wave for a while. Then, as part of the new deal, they alter the company logo so no lawyers, employees or customers can recognize who they are, where they work, or who the product was manufactured by, let alone who for.

Then, lacking any other coherent methodology to improve sales, they do a round of downsizing that boosts the sales/employee ratio [this is a real ratio - even companies like Royal Dutch Philips, for one, put it in their annual reports! see below] and restructure some 3rd world (European) factories with a bull-dozer, all of which jumps the market price up a notch, then they take their share-priced enriched retirements... or would if they could.

(From Philips annual report, 2003.)

So you either improve your sales or sack people - the result is the same. Which is easier?

Well we're not going to take it anymore! We're on to you! We deserve to be more than a cell number in a spread-sheet, a liability on the denominator of our life-worth's equation. We want to know in advance the REAL direction any proposed "change" is going to take our work, our knowledge, our lives, our window desk!

We're going to find out what it really means when you put some fancy Powerpoint 3D semi-transparent graphic of the new reporting structure on the screen and we're not going to take it lying down.

Ah, yes the Better/Worse HIAH ratio!

(Adapted from Philips annual report, 2003)

We certainly won't be lying down at all, as we haven't achieved that level of efficiency yet...

Not even

E@L

Trumpeting A Reunion

noreply@blogger.com (expat@large) — Tue, 25 Oct 2022 00:51:00 +0000

E@L caught up with a bunch of old school friends and some other guys he knew from that end-of-school era when some of my friends were at just starting at the brand new Deakin University. We are talking just shy of 500, sorry, typo, 50 years!

Hey, you, turn the Nostalgia Machine to 11!

We spoke of some common acquaintances from those days (1974-76). A few of those who were my closer friends back in the day seem to have vanished, though E@L knew of one who has passed away, The brother of one others was there, but he also had little idea where the once popular guy had gone. It's sort of sad, but it was good to chat to these two (no names, no pack drill), even though, as we were not that close, it took a few seconds for them to recognise the reconstructed E@L (no wild surfie hair, no flat tummy, not any more).

~~~~~~~~~

And we were at a CHURCH!!! and no, E@L didn't catch fire or get hit by a falling spire that had been struck by lightning as he entered! Hoo wooda thunk!

Why was E@L tempting such the wrath of The First Cause? you ask.

Ah, another one of E@L's high school colleagues was heading up a small fund-raising concert featuring jazzed up versions of classical music such as Bach and Vivaldi, with some contemporary compositions, all in conjunction with the funereal bellowing of the large church organ! Wow!

Turns out the bandleader, trumpeter, arranger, and composer of some the jazz pieces, E@L's said school colleague, Chris Skepper, is one the most sought after trumpet players around, and legend amongst those who know. He was in backing bands for tours by Boney M, and Cilla Black, and has worked with most of the more media-exposed artists such as Paul Grabowski, and other Aussie jazz legends.

~~~~~~~~

For all the way modern jazz trades ex-tempore 8s and 4s, which can get tedious until they get back the main theme (sorry jazz fans), all the musicians were at the top of their instruments' quality tree and the result was of course was great entertainment.

(Not my photos. Sorry Rob, no way of asking you for permission.)

~~~~~~~~

Why did we know about this concert? Next week [last week now, forgot to publish this] there is an even bigger reunion planned, maybe 20 guys from school and surfing heading to Ye Olde Schoole Pubbe, The Gold Diggers Arms in Skeene St, where once upon a time they served you in your college uniform until you threw up in the hallway on the way to the exit... We found Chris on Meta, sorry, Facebook, and he told about this prior engagement and his inability to attend. So we decided to head there as well!

So. No music at the Diggers, no Chris Skepper (his band is playing in Melbourne), just copious beer, and wondering who will remember/recognise

E@L

Anaphylactics

noreply@blogger.com (expat@large) — Fri, 26 Aug 2022 07:39:00 +0000

It's not just E@L.

Of the people (bots?) on his blogroll, only 4 have posted in the last six months. Has E@L lost you all? Are you gone. Have you abandoned him, or have you abandoned writing? Or is it just that E@L is not writing anything for you to read and this has shocked you into Bartlbeyism? Something electifying, stunning, overwhelmingly brilliant/funny/pretentious/dull/sad, and you all cracked it? Reacted badly? Cracked the shits and blocked him?

Was it something he didn't say?

~~~~~~~~~~~

And cheers to those brave souls who stick at it. Those 4 souls slick with perstistence and fortitude. Write, write, write! Pretend E@L is reading. Imagine it. Pretend he is stuck at the computer until 4am like the old days, writing stuff himself, for you Constant Reader. And the Inconstant Many Skimmers. Like E@L himself.

There he is, in his $5,500 a month garret. Type, type, type. But reading, reading, reading as well. Of course! All you lot in his eyeballs. Every night. He was looking for inspiration in your lives. Yep, 4 am, OK 3am. The good old days, when E@L should have been in bed. He needed his sleep then, E@L had lives to save.

But hey, shit happens. Sorry m'am, maybe next time he'll diagnose you properly, if there is a next time, as you know, death. Time's wing'd chariot. The salmon mousse.

[He had given up his illustrious scanning career many years before he started blogging, so that last bit is merely (merely!?) rhetoric.]

~~~~~~~~~~~

Speaking of patients dying, in 1924, a medical student named Louis-Ferdinand Destouches wrote a thesis for his medical degree on Ignaz Philip Semmelweis. It was his (L-F) first known extended piece of writing.

Semmelweis, you may know, or not, was the guy who said to the other doctors, "Hey, guys, if you just fucking-well wash your hands after dissecting rotting corpses in the autopsy room before you start your accouchier's handing of pregnant ladies in the Lying-In ward, definitely, I mean definitely, fewer, if not zero of the straining, huffing, not-pushing-yet ladies in labour could avoid dying of puerpal fever. You know. Toxic shock. An anaphylactoid reaction to having bits of dead people in their birth canals. How hard is to just - Fucking. Wash. Your. Fucking. Hands? Save a life: scrub out those filthy entrails clogged under your nails. <mumbles> You fucking dickheads."

Of course, this last bit didn't make him any friends, maybe someone heard or inferred his mumbled oaths, so once Semmelweis left, the other doctors stopped washing their hands and everyone started dying again. And E@L thinks, like Dr Destouches said, "Dickheads. Murderous fucking dickheads."

In his latter years, Dr Destouches worked in the poorer arrondisements of Paris, treating the poor and indigent, often not getting paid, or being paid in kind rather than cash. He was a physician of Semmelweisian self-sacrifce and altruism.

~~~~~~~~~~

But Dr Destouches is more well-known as Louis-Ferdinand Céline. But you knew that, or you wouldn't be reading this high-falutin' blog, right?

In a rather stunning revelation, the likes of Martin Amis and Clive James have said that they have refused to read any of Céline's novels (and this thesis, presumably), because Céline wrote a couple of searingly anti-semitic diatribes in the 1930's.

Without entering very deeply into the "bad person, great artist" debate, E@L wonders how these Giants Of The World Of Literary Opinion would would even be aware of Céline's Bagatelles Pour Une Massacre, let alone know their content so well as to dismiss the author out of hand.

Such a severe reaction against one of most innovative writers around, one they might have learned from if they weren't so arrogant... Wow! It is a toxic shock of rejection and cancellation, without having at first experienced the stylistic notoriety of Journey To The End Of The Night or Death On The Installment Plan where any anti-semitism is well disguised, if present at all. [E@L wasn't looking for it when he read them.] Kurt Vonnegut Jr said he got a headache when he thought about Céline because he admired the amazing, unprecedented, uncopyable, urgency and immediacy of the writing style [E@L's words], but, yeah, those Bagatelles.

So hey, an anti-semite in pre-war France? How exceptional. Not. Who wooda thunk? Everybody. Did someone mention the Dreyfus Affair? Did someone mention Vichy France and its collaboration in the cruel exportation of Jews to Germany and Poland? [c.f. Bad Faith, by Carmen Callil, about her family's particpation in such a despicable policy. And dozens of other books E@L hasn't read.] Yeah, Dr Destouches had unforgiveably bad opinions, but it was the trend at the time, yeah, and so E@L is wondering if Cancel Culture for Céline nearly a century before twitter is appropriate?

This is not an apology or an excuse, but seriously, Martin, Clive, you are missing out on some unique and wonderful prose.

Moving on. Sigh.

~~~~~~~~~~

E@L's plan, most likely to fizzle in uncunning desuetude, as do the best laid of everyone's, is to finish reading all of Céline's novels this year. Approximately.

Over the ~~years~~ decades, he has read JTTEOTN twice (in different translations), DOTIP, Guignol's Band (finally finished it this year), and a fair chunk of Castle To Castle. He has seven to go, plus a short biography. He lost Hélene Cixous's biography, unread of course, in the Garden Shed Tragedy of 2013 - you an see it in the wheelbarrow in the first photo.

Best of luck with that E@L.

While Amazoning for any "new" and/or unexpected works by Céline, E@L came across a double edition of Mea Culpa, about his trip to communist Russia in the 1930's, and, gold! The Life And Work Of Semmelweis. Shock and delight! A serendipitous treasure! E@L didn't know that a: Mea Culpa existed at all, and that b: the Semmelweis thesis had been translated and published.

E@L starts at the start. The epigram:

I am still lacking a few hatreds.

I am sure they exist.

~~~~~~~~~~~

Then he reads the translator's introduction from 1937...

Right. To the point of this post, the idea before all these digressions. Forgive him, E@L can't keep on track, keep his mind focussed. It's the 45 second culture, it's old age, retirement, FB, the sound bite, instant messaging, blitz chess, wokeism, sleep-inism, tiktok, buzz alarm. Where was I?

In the translator's introduction there is an excerpt from a speech Céline gave in 1933, the year after JTTEOTN was published to outstanding ~~acclaim~~ notoriety, at a meeting about Emile Zola.

Listen, tell me what this reminds you of...

We are completely surrounded by whole countries of stupified anaphylactics, the least shock precipitating them into murderous convulsions that cannot be stopped.

~~~~~~~~~~~~

[Shoddy imitation of Céline's style coming up.]

1933! It's the same as the world today!... No surprise there... People... they ever were and ever will be. Communism, fascism... all over again! It's a polarisation!... a sensitivity... pure tribalism... how easy to take offense... we sharpen our shouting instruments... we listen no more... we're offended... insulted... take that!... punch a Nazi*... I'm all for it!... we're right!... you're misguided!... Propaganda!... it's a tsunami of vitriol...we're drowning in hate...

We react like another opinion is a poison... a stimulant from a foreign agency... it's an immune allergen, and our immune system explodes!... T-cells!... we swell up... we can't breathe... we clutch at the nearest shibboleth... it's a disaster... the end of the world!

It's anaphylaxis! Both sides of the argument... we're not safe... quick with the Epi-pen... the pen of truth... not fake news...

~~~~~~~~~~

Yep. We are all anaphylactics these days. And E@L is not, um, immune.

And of course when we hear the utter bullshit from the self-serving Murdochian (new word!) propaganda machine - in the USA, OMG why aren't we storming Fox News instead of the Capitol building and offering a jute necktie to that fucker, Carlson?

~~~~~~~~~~~

* OK not a great reference when we are trying to speak nicely about someone who was convicted and imprisoned (and later pardoned) for collaboration!

Yep, here's a punch for a Nazi from

E@L

Science Shoots Itself In The Foot Once Again

noreply@blogger.com (expat@large) — Sun, 24 Jul 2022 04:52:00 +0000

[Too big a post for Facebook]

~~~~~

It's obvious that climate change is false because these researchers appeared to have fabricated the evidence for Altzheimers disease.

~~~~~

It's quite possible that years and years of research have been a waste of time, and that the millions and millions of dollars that have been channelled into funding for Altzheimers research have been misspent.

According to research reported in the respected journal Science, crucial images from the landmark paper of 2006 in the respected journal Nature appeared to have been altered to bolster the conclusions of the paper.

It is indeed possible that targeting those now notorious amyloid plaques in the brain by blocking a specific compound molecule, called an oligomer, is an expensive dead-end. Perhaps this is why 99% of the research for pharmacuetical and other treatment of Altzeimers have proven to be failures (e.g. nuns doing crossword puzzles for years) because they have been looking for results that might never have been measureable.

The oligomer they are targetting might not even exist in humans, but only in the transgenic mice of the landmark paper, and those amyloid plaques might be merely incidental to whatever promotes dementia and not its cause after all.

AAANNNNDDDD the principal author of the original paper has just received a 5 year grant of $750k from the National Institue of Health to continue research along the same lines. The NIH honkey who ratified this grant turns out to have been... wait for it... a co-author of that 2006 paper.

~~~~~

I want to point out that science is not at fault here. Scientists are. Possibly. He adds, hoping to avoid a law suit.

~~~~~

Early this year, Schrag raised his doubts with NIH and journals including Nature; two, including Nature last week, have published expressions of concern about papers by Lesné. Schrag’s work, done independently of Vanderbilt and its medical center, implies millions of federal dollars may have been misspent on the research—and much more on related efforts. Some Alzheimer’s experts now suspect Lesné’s studies have misdirected Alzheimer’s research for 16 years.
“The immediate, obvious damage is wasted NIH funding and wasted thinking in the field because people are using these results as a starting point for their own experiments,” says Stanford University neuroscientist Thomas Südhof, a Nobel laureate and expert on Alzheimer’s and related conditions.

~~~~

To say this happens all the time in medicine would not be true, but it does happen a fair bit. There're liveliehood issues, grants, tenure, the kudos of conference invitations, egos... thanks to the publish or perish mentality of academic institutions...

Beyond Andrew Wakefield's bullshit on MMR and autism, I know of two relatively close cases to me in my working life:

1 - self-proclaimed thalidomide exposer (it was actually a widwife working with him) William McBride, was working at our local university. He was struck off for falsifying figures in his research into Debendox. Where are all these fucking rabbits? his researchers fellows eventually started asking. His wife, ironically, was chair of the research ethics committee at my old hospital.

2 - back when I was still working in high-risk obstetrics, we heard of this whizz-kid research obstetrician in England. He had been asked by student at a meeting if it was possible to somehow retrieve a live ectopic pregnancy and replace into the uterus with a successful outcome. A few weeks later he published an article saying that he had done just that. Of course, he hadn't, and he was struck off after one of those present at that meeting brought this to general attention... [I have read of anti-abortion campaigners claiming this imaginary procedure as an actual option for those women with ectopics who would prefer not to die.]

~~~~~~

Enough back to what you're supposed to be working on. You're not too young to write your memoirs anymore,

E@L

No Fool Me, April 1st!

noreply@blogger.com (expat@large) — Fri, 01 Apr 2022 04:28:00 +0000

No joke. April 1st.

Life began at 40 for me, when, this day 24 years ago I started employment in the small (fucking tiny) Hong Kong office of the No2/3 medical ultrasound company in the world (for radiology and obstetrics at the time I think, maybe No 1.), a team I lovingly call The Cosmodemonic Ultrasound Company 1, aka Advanced Technology Laboratories (indistinguishable from magic).

ATL was smallish company, as these things go, from rain-drenched Seattle and as smallish companies go, they liked to party. I was covering North Asia, South Asia with occasional trips to Thailand and Singapore to give product training. Awesome. Many friends made in Hong Kong, Taiwan, India, Singapore, Korea (I could tell the difference between good and not-so-good kimchi), not so much in China at first as I was not a qualified doctor like all the minions there.

Also, as smallish companies go, they went.

Two years later the fun and games came to screeching slow-down when the Big Boss took his $44M payout and ATL were swallowed by The Cosmodemonic Ultrasound Company 2 - aka the dour dutch Philips.

This moderately huge light bulb and sandwich toaster company from Eindhoven wanted to buy their way into a burgeoning health-care market (due to the ageing population - opportunity? yeah baby!). To be fair they were/are world leaders in cardiac catherisation labs, and their general x-ray systems were generally a cut above the others. Something I appreciated 12 years later in Sienna. Our ATL Big Boss had convinced Philips that ATL were an echocardiac (heart) ultrasound specialist company that would sit well with their cardiac angiogram predominance. They soon found out we weren’t (due diligence guys!).

So Philips, with too much money (that that they didn’t waste on salaries I must point out after I lost 40% of my ATL salary: housing allowance mainly), then went for Hewlett-Packard’s excellently structured Medical Ultrasound Division, which itself had just been spun off by CEO Carla Fiorina into a new company called Agilent. *They* were the cardiac ultrasound leaders at the time. Their product development and training team were so well organised and professional it was a joy to be with them in Andover. (One of the trainers later took on my role in HK.)

They ruled cardiac U/S, until a tiny Danish company came up with an innovative wedge technology (cardiac muscle strain measurement) that GE bought and used to shut the door on everyone else some 6 months later. GE also bought from the financially troubled Korean company Medison (who had done all the initial awareness and promotional work), a German technology for obstetric 3D scanning, and that pushed ATL/Philips from the No1 spot in the anxiety and litigation swamped world of fetal imaging and assessment (that was in fact my specialty).

Even the amazing Agilent/Philips 3D cardiac system introduced a year or so after (in the middle of SARS lockdowns) could not compete. Someone should write book on the intrigue here.

Then, 3 & 3/4 years after their takeover, Philips saw fit to allow me to investigate other career options, such as opening a bookstore in Stanley. Yep, they asked to lift my game one day and the next day, literally, sacked me. Moi? Can you imagine any company succeeding without my input as a Marketing Manager? WTF does a Marketing Manager do anyway? I never had time to find out.

Thanks to a key nomination by an old friend (who may or may not have been my line manager in HK and the guy who brought me to HK in the first place) I moved to Singapore into the smaller, not quite family-run Japanese Cosmodemonic Ultrasound Company 3, called Aloka, whose excellent logo, borrowed from Gandhi, was “Science and Humanity”. I loved them for that already, until it was subsequently fucked over by some unmemorable Hallmark Business Logo blandishment.

Thus began a revitalised life of fun, parties, etc, in South East Asia, Africa, the Middle East, Canada. Some brilliant party animals in this company, and many stories that can’t be told outside this blog to non-expats, or non-ex-expats for a plethora of reasons: moral, intellectual, physical, typographical, topographical, graphical, outrage to modestical, ethical, sexualical, libelical, marital suicidical, dubious, apocryphal, and plain spooky mystic weird.

But as smallish companies go, they too went.

The inevitable takeover was by a (surprise surprise as we were thinking it would be Philips) moderately huge behemoth - the Cosmodemonic Ultrasound Company 4, another Japanese company called, let me think, ah yes, Hitachi, who, ironically [cue Alanis Morrisette type pedantry], were selling Philips machines in Japan.

And as largish companies don’t usually go, they kept paying my outrageous salary for many years, until my retirement age approached (see other posts here.) I should add that much of the partying continued but not necessarily at the level I enjoyed with those forever to remain unnamed colleagues of yore.

And the rest, like all the past not suppressed by the winners, became the post-40 laughable history of

E@L

Brief Candles Are Not Necessarily All That Brief.

noreply@blogger.com (expat@large) — Sun, 13 Mar 2022 02:45:00 +0000

Randomly, a YouTube of Sir Ian McKellan giving a masterclass on Macbeth came up, after E@L (should be E@H [Expat At Home] nowadays) had giggled through a typically witty, witterish Kermode and Mayo review of some mediocre horror movie or other. (The Seed, on Shudder.)

E@L has not yet watched the Joel Coen directed version of the Scottish play with Denzel Washington and Frances McDormand, but when he does, E@L will pay particular attention to Denny (as no-one calls him) giving the final soliliquy, the one when Macca (as no-one is stupid enough to call him) has to stare into the abyss...

You know the one:

SEYTON
The queen, my lord, is dead.
MACBETH
She should have died hereafter;
There would have been a time for such a word.
To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

~~~~~~~~~~

Laugh a minute.

McKellan explains wonderfully the imagery of the speech, the pacing, the thought process the actor should go through, etc... as you'd expect. But a certain new fact changed the tenor of the last few lines for E@L who has only studied, ahem, the play twice at high-school (Form 3 and Form 5).

Unplug thine ears and hear this: A "poor player" is what was once, or maybe still is, called in the thespian world, "a poor gentleman". An indifferent actor with a small role, who comes on briefly, overacts for their 15secs in the limelight perhaps, and then exeunts (no alarums), having done not so much. Nothing, in fact. A bit player. A cameo role maybe. A Star Trek redshirt.

Turns the extended stage metaphor into something much more real, more solid.

Two other things.

1; "To-morrow" is hyphenated! Same in other on-line texts. Never noticed. E@L's Royal Shakespeare edition has it un-hyphenated (a hyphenated word!).

2; "Timbre" is pronounced "tombor" accord Sir Ian. Who is E@L to orgoo with thot?

And then...

An excerpt from an old BBC production with Sir Ian himself performing the soliliquy in close-up to the camera, the audience, you and me... Walter Benjamin in the 1930's considered that acting to a camera in close-up "speaks to the eye", and brings out the "compulsive unconscious" of the character. [Just thought he'd mention that, but E@L has no idea what it means either.]

And at "Out, out brief candle," with Sir Ian speaking directly to E@L's eye, there was a tightening in E@L's throat, a slight increase in the output of the lacrymal glands of said eye. This had never happened when his teacher, Jock, read it out at school.

Why would you start to cry, E@L? You've heard the lines umpteen times before. Why?

~~~~~~~~~~

~~~~~~~~~

Dorothea Catherine Goonan (Joey) was born in Colac Hospital (or maybe at the family home?) in 1924. "Dorothy" is on her birth certificate, but she was christened "Dorothea", as was her mother's preference, at St Brendan's Church in Coragulac, just a few hundred yards (similar to meters, just a few inches shorter), across a paddock from said family home.

She married Harry Victor Ramm in St Brendan's Church in1952. Sister-at-home was born in 1955, E@L (as he was yet to become) in 1957.

Dorothea passed away on January 14th 2022. At 97, of old age, relatively peacefully. A Not Brief stage presence, eh? Quite a good innings, a boundary short of the ton plus one. (Boundary: 4 runs. Harry was pretty good cricketer. He made a ton one day, but only made 38 in life. Brief.) Dorothea played golf and lawn bowls. Maybe she pretended to play cricket, with a laugh, in her backyard at the extended family Christmas lunch each year.

Her funeral was at St Brendan's Church, the wake at our cousin's, for whom Joey did most of the "bringing-up" after her sister (his mother) died in 1952 while Dorothea and Harry were on their honeymoon.

~~~~~~~~~~~

M (Dodo), born in 1958, was sexually abused at school, at least once, and in a horrible way. E@L was not yet at that same school at the time, not yet in the same class, and he never heard about it until just recently. He is not going to give details. M became a surfer, like E@L, and often they surfed together at Jan Juc or down the Great Ocean Road at Peterborough, near the 12-ish Apostles. Dodo travelled often to Indonesia to surf at isolated islands. Good on him, E@L is jealous of that. He had a Filipino wife and two kids.

He also passed away in January 2022. He was 63. Brief, these days of free health-care, excellent diagnosis and treatment for many conditions, but not the chronic condition he suffered.

E@L's second funeral in a fortnight. A bunch of friends held an impromptu wake at a pub near the funeral home.

~~~~~~~~~~~

A (Emu) was born 1954/5... He was the elder brother of a good friend(dec) from school, who also surfed. E@L would visit the opulent famiy home after school sometimes. Their father was a tyrant, who once threw a knife at Emu. One New Years Eve we all packed into a friend's Morris Minor and drove all the way to Ballarat for an alleged "great party" with Emu and his sister(dec). Which fizzled as she was in too much of a haze to have organised anything and Emu knew nothing about it. (Or so E@L's dodgy memory has it.)

He passed away in January 2022, probably 67 as well. "Suddenly" usually means heart attack. Briefish.

E@L didn't know about the funeral. The rest of family that E@L knew had also passed away years earlier, both very Brief.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

R was born in 1954. He was the brother of E@L's Best Man. He used to walk with a strut, a proud pigeon, and brag to E@L of his sexual and fistcuff conquests in Melbourne back when teenaged E@L was crashing at their family campsite, conveniently located near a surf beach. He had small hands E@L noted, and wondered how he could pack the power into a punch to win all those fights. He became a greatly loved father and grand-father.

He died in February 2022, of an aggresive oesophageal cancer, aged 67. Nasty. Briefish. [E@L is drawing the line of Brief/Briefish at 65, Not Brief at >80.] E@L attended the wake, the third in a month, and caught up with the remaining family, sisters and brother, for hugs and reminscences. E@L had a lot to do with their parents, had done ultrasound scans of both, in their final Briefish days.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

One of E@L's Singapore based best friend's father was probably born in the 30's or maybe 40's. E@L doesn't know his first name. He suffered from Parkinson's Disease. [ E@L will update all this in a few days.]

He passed away in February 2022. Not sure exactly how old, but over 80, so Not Brief walk.

His funeral is this Friday, up in Sydney. It will be E@L's fourth funeral service in two months.

~~~~~~~~~~~~

Don't ask E@L about 2022, not a great year so far.

Don't ask why he cried again at "and then is heard no more..."

Don't ask this poor fretful player, but keep listening to

E@L