Weird

Send Three and Fourpence

~ Cheryl ~ 8 Comments

It is amazing what rumors tend to fly around at conventions. This evening in the bar I was reliably informed that the 2009 WFC would be in San Diego. That probably came from the fact that the Ontells are starting to put together a San Diego bid, which I guess will end up in 2011 or 2012. Of course all Californian cities are alike to folks from the East Coast.

Also I was informed that the 2008 Worldcon in Denver had lost its hotel space and was going to have to move dates. This story allegedly came from someone who claimed to be a “con runner”. Well, I called Kevin, and there’s nothing on SMOFs, so I think this one is entirely urban legend.

Unfortunately the writers and editors who make up the bulk of the WFC attendance have no means of telling fact from fiction, which is why I’m posting stuff.

(For the benefit of those of you who don’t understand the title, this is an urban legend from the trenches in WWI. Supposedly a senior officer sent out a message saying “Send reinforcements, we are going to advance”, but by the time the message reached its destination it had morphed to, “Send three and fourpence, we are doing to a dance.” “Three and fourpence”, of course, refers to three shillings and four pence in old British currency.)

IKEA Deadly

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

Well, so says The Guardian anyway. And why is this so, because so much of it is poorly assembled and in danger of falling apart. And that is because…

“Bravado shoulders aside logic, especially among men,” says the survey, which finds that 67% of male flatpack buyers fail to read the instructions.

Well gee, who would have thought it.

Still Not in Kansas

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

During the Second World War us Brits (well, my ancestors, I’m not that old) did a lot of work preparing the country for a potential German invasion. One of the things we did was put up incorrect road signs so that bally Jerry would get lost trying to find his way through the twisty roads of the British countryside.

Our American friends seem to have learned from this. Kevin and I are in Kansas City. He’s here for SMOFcon, and I’m here to collect two more states. I’m hoping that I eventually be able to say that I am in Kansas, Toto, but for now I’m not, because Kansas City is in Missouri.

I’m assuming that things like this were done to confuse Communist spies because there are a lot of them spread about the country, most of which have been around for some time. Washington the city is not in Washington the state; West Texas is in California; and New Mexico is not in Mexico. However, it occurs to me that with the current concern about Muslim terrorists more could be done with this sort of tactic. Here are some suggestions.
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Halloween Stuff

~ Cheryl

First of all, you should check out Pagan Prattle’s annual collection of loony Christian Halloween scare stories from the world’s media. I note in passing that black cats are probably in much more danger from Christians who mistake them for demons than from Satanists.

Still, if you do want a ripping yarn about Satanic sacrifice, try Mike Carey’s new Felix Castor novel, Vicious Circle. (And yes, it does have Juliet the succubus in it.)

For Halloween music, you might check out the classic neo-pagan acid folk album, First Utterance, by Comus, which is now available again as part of a band retrospective.

On the other hand, if you just want something strangely and amusingly horrible…

As I have probably said before, my good friend Marc Gascoigne is a connoisseur of bad Christmas records. But his knowledge of weird stuff extends well beyond Christmas. Recently he introduced me to Señor Coconut y su Conjunto. That’s actually German electronica maestro, Uwe Schmidt, and a bunch of his Chilean friends. These days they do some good Latino electronica, but they are also responsible for el baile aleman (the German album), a Latino version of Kraftwerk’s Autobahn. Some parts of that are very listenable. I rather like their version of “Showroom Dummies”. But the mariachi band version of “Autobahn”, which manages to use Kraftwerk’s tunes to conjure images of a donkey cart lumbering along a dirt track, is one of those songs where you can’t quite tell if your reaction is collapsing with laughter, collapsing in hysterics, or having your mind reamed by arcane knowledge that man was never meant to know.

Happy Samhain everyone.

Parliamentary Piracy

~ Cheryl

Arr, me hearties! Speak Like a Pirate Day it do be. But did you consider that part of being piractical might be to wander down to your local debating forum and engage in recreational parliamentary practice? I thought not. Neither did I. And yet, so the nice filks at Wordsmith tell us, the word “filibuster” originally meant a pirate. The origins are in the Spanish word, “filibustero” with related words in French (“flibustier”) and Dutch (“vrijbuiter”), which of course finally gets us back to “freebooter”. More details here, but read it today because that page gets updated every day.

Arrr!

Yer Be Pirates!

~ Cheryl

The very wonderful folks who run the Word-a-Day service from wordsmith.org have handed over this week’s word collection to the Talk Like a Pirate folks. In introducing his stint as a wordsmith, John Baur muses on the nature of the pirate accent:

I’ve often heard people talk about pirates’ “cockney accents.” Wrong! The stereotypical pirate has a Cornish accent, based on the performance of Long John Silver by actor Robert Newton in the 1950 Disney version of “Treasure Island”. He was from Cornwall, and his over-the-top performance and native accent are the reason people think that’s what a pirate sounded like. Of course, pirates came from all nationalities. But the pop culture image is firmly embedded, and Robert Newton is the reason why.

A Cornish accent isn’t that far from a Somerset accent, so hopefully my piractical speech will be reasonably authentic. Arr!