Author: JP

Of Spelvins and Plinges: Another Sunday ramble

Sean brought this to my attention, the blog-published story of Lorem Ipsum. Most of you have probably seen it as the standard filler text in sample templates from Microsoft PowerPoint. I’d seen it used in journalistic circles as filler for “to be completed” sections of dummied-up versions of magazines, but my sparse knowledge of it predated the web. So thank you Sean.

The way my mind works, the Lorem Ipsum reference took me back to Calcutta’s quiz league of the 1970s. I remember being asked who George Spelvin was; it wasn’t long after that when we were asked what the English equivalent of Spelvin was.

So, for those of you who hadn’t heard it before, here are the links to George Spelvin and Walter Plinge. I believe there used to be an equivalent for airline staff deadheading, but the use of fictional names in that context fell away for obvious reasons.

Of bottlenose dolphins and false killer whales

Sean asked how on earth I came across Wholphin. [For those who are interested, a wholphin is the name given to the offspring of bottlenose dolphins and false killer whales, as in this story here.]

In addition, Wholphin is a DVD magazine of unseen films. And part of the McSweeney’s stable, including the books, McSweeney’s magazine and The Believer.

Where else would I find dialogues like this:


EXCLUSIVE!
LEAKED EXCERPTS FROM
A SCREENPLAY WRITTEN
BY MY GRANDPARENTS IN
AN ATTEMPT TO CASH IN
ON THE SUPERHERO-
MOVIE CRAZE.

BY AARON SPIEWAK

– – – –

INT. CONDO OF JUSTICE—DAY

(GENIUS MAN and CLASSY LADY are receiving top-secret e-mails from the PRESIDENT, when disaster strikes. A strange noise, then the screen turns black.)

GENIUS MAN: It’s Mr. Internet. He’s locked us out of American Online’s Internets … again!

CLASSY LADY: Blast! If we don’t stop him, he’ll soon gain control of the world’s children, while they’re surfing the World Wide Web!

GENIUS MAN: Off to Mr. Internet’s lair, on Microsoft Computer Island! To the GeniusMobile!

CLASSY LADY: The GeniusMobile has been sounding funny. Did you get it checked like I asked?

GENIUS MAN: I was doing our taxes. I’ll get to it this week. (Grabs keys.)

CLASSY LADY: Remember your glasses this time. You almost ran over Sadie Zuckerman last Friday.

GENIUS MAN: That was because it was about to rain and you were talking to me. (Pats his shirt.) Where are those glasses?

I’ve been a McSweeney’s fan for a long time.  And of Wholphin from its inception.

After a day at Lord’s: mutterings about cricket

I was at the cricket today, with my son and some friends at Lord’s. Saw some fine attacking bowling (mainly by England) and some indifferent batting (mainly by India), leaving the match largely in England’s favour. A few early wickets tomorrow could change things, but I would expect this to be England’s game unless they collapsed before tea tomorrow. Maybe a part of me wanted to be there to see Tendulkar score his first Lord’s ton, on what is likely to be his last Test there; maybe a part of me wanted to be there to see Ganguly score his second century at Lord’s, or Dravid making up for his debut “failure” (I had the privilege of watching him when he scored on debut in 1996, when Dravid fell agonisingly short of matching Ganguly).

It was not to be. It was England’s day, a day with some significant rain-caused interruptions. A day when I could watch and marvel at the ingenuity and dedication of the ground staff at Lord’s, as they used a plethora of contraptions to ensure that the show went on.

The ground staff appeared to make one mistake. The new-fangled anti-rain equipment requires drainage holes to be opened up on the playing surface; there seem to be four such holes on either side of the square, at about leg-umpire depth. Each hole resembles a golf hole, although the diameter is closer to the water-sprinkler heads one sees adjacent to golf greens.

By accident or design, the holes on the Mound Stand side of the pitch were left uncovered when play resumed after tea. An I thought to myself, I wonder what would happen if a ball went down one of those holes. There aren’t any rules to cater for that. And that reminded me of one of the crassest abuse of the rules cricket has ever seen, the notorious Trevor Chappell underarm ball. In case you haven’t seen it, here it is courtesy YouTube. [And on my VodPod in my sidebar as always].

Talking about rules that don’t exist, I remember entering one of those light-hearted weekend competitions in the FT many years ago. It was a time when Test cricket was in the doldrums, and the mandarins-that-be were wailing and gnashing their teeth as they watched the one-day games remain packed. And so someone in the FT asked the question “If you could introduce one new rule, or amend an existing rule, to bring the fans back to Test cricket, what would it be?” or words to that effect.

My entry was simple. Introduce a new rule. Henceforth, a batsman is not allowed to have faced more than six dot balls in succession, he must score off the seventh. In addition, he must score a boundary within every 24-ball sequence. If he fails to do either, he is given out for “Abusing the audience”.  [I guess there weren’t that many entries, because I won the competition, receiving a wonderful bottle of bubbly as well as a book, I think it was the controversial Wolpert Nehru.]

Musing about being a Calcuttan

A quote from Simon and Rupert Winchester’s Calcutta: A Brief History

The burgeoning wealth and importance of Calcutta during the nineteenth century meant that gradually it began to move beyond its colonial roots for the first time, and started to become a city that blended the influences of both East and West. The Bengal Renaissance, as it is known, is central to the pride Bengalis feel about their city, and a litany of names, most unfamiliar in the West, are known to everyone in Calcutta. Social reformers, educationalists, poets and nationalists became, and remain, household names in Calcutta, in a manner unknown in most other major cities of the world, but which seems entirely natural in Calcutta, high-minded as it is.

One of the drivers of the new attention to matters social and spiritual was the growth of printing. Bengalis have long been addicted to the adda, a group gossip and discussion session that can last for hours, and the printing press and periodicals allowed more Bengalis to participate in virtual addas. Around the bookshops that sprang around Dwarkanath Tagore’s  Hindu College a culture began to grow that, not content with having addas, began to talk to greater numbers of people, through pamphlets and periodicals. All of the great names of the Bengal Renaissance used periodicals for both polemical and creative writing. Between 1818 and 1867 there were some 220 different periodicals published in Calcutta, mainly in Bengali, freely discussing politics, culture and spirituality.

Markets. Conversations. Interest in education and social matters. Using technology to scale up into virtual conversations. In and around bookshops. Based on journalism and pamplets. You can see why I got interested in blogs.

Blogs are addas. On a digital scale. Without the caffeine and nicotine.

Of librarians, preachers and 911 operators….

If I wanted to know the most common human FAQs, I’d ask librarians, preachers and 911 operators.

So said Lee Rainie, Director of the Pew Internet & American Life Project, to the assembled masses of the Reference User and Services Association, American Library Association. You can find a copy of his full speech here. [Strangely enough, I quoted from his speech last year as well.]

His talk was entitled Public Policy and the Future of the Internet; in it, fairly early on, he asserts the importance of the Three Is (Internet, Intellectual Property and Identity) more eloquently than I’ve been able to manage, which only goes to show. He says:

I want to highlight three major areas of policy ferment that will play out in the coming decade.

The first policy debate involves what kind of internet we have – from an architectural and deployment standpoint.

The second involves what kind of information policies we have – basically I am treferring to the kind of rules we develop about information property such as copyright, patents and trademarks.

And the third involves what kind of policies and norms we develop about our online identities – that is, the policies we construct about online privacy, anonymity and surveillance.

Read the whole thing, it’s worth it. While not expressly taking an extreme “side” on much of the debate, he lays out the issues dispassionately and accurately, and places it all in a framework that will help us conclude the debates and arguments. IMHO anyway.

I also liked the way he ended the session, providing 10 reasons why the future can belong to librarians. While I’m not a librarian, my interest in information and its management, distribution and access is such that I feel like I can vicariously belong.

I will comment in more detail later.