Madeleine’s Hippy Hippy Slice

Tomorrow morning Madeleine is admitted to the Royal for a much needed replacement hip operation.

This goes some way to explaining the lack of wonderfully exciting posts about trips and events we might have gone to; as her mobility decreased and her pain increased, non-essential trips, etc. have fallen by the wayside.

This also means that our Festival & Fringe expeditions will probably be greatly curtailed this year as recovery can take quite a long time.
We will make it along to some events, though, I’m sure!

And in the meantime the garden’s getting more attention than usual this year!

Paint, Paint, Paint

Some of Madeleine’s studio down at Coburg House in Leith needs painted prior to an Artists’ Studio Open Day later this summer and this week is pretty much the only time spare to do it, so this’ll be the 3rd evening in a row spent rushing down there after work to put a coat of paint on. Some of the walls are ok, but  some is plain wood-coloured board and some is very black board, both of which need a lot of white paint to look good, and match the rest.

The good thing is that it doesn’t take too long, and then we can go round to the nearby pub and sit outside on a bench with a pint or two!
It also means that no gardening is getting done this week, apart from some minor watering… Still a huge pile of lopped branches to deal with, but a lot more light is reaching parts of the garden than has done for years!

Big Red Writer’s Bloc

After a fairly quick exit for the shop yesterday, I met Madeleine at a fairly new cafe called something like The Tea Tray, where the old Web 13 internet cafe used to be.

Good, plain food, nice coffee, then off around the corner to what used to be Lawson’s Timber Yard – now known as the Big Red Door and run by a performing arts charity/collective called te POOKa…

Inside, it’s a large open space on the ground floor, with a small bar at one end,  a low stage in the middle, and some sofas and tables & chairs filling the rest of the space. The event we had come to see was a ‘best of’ selection by members of Writer’s Bloc, which was being recorded for future use as podcasts, etc.
It started a bit late, but no matter; it was all good fun and continued until after 12.00 – almost 4 hours of story-telling, and drinking gooseberry beer! Which was very nice.

Performers!

We recognised a lot of the pieces from previous shows, but there were a few we didn’t recognise, including various micro-stories which had first appeared on Twitter, etc.

The house dog was friendly, almost too friendly, sometimes sharing the stage with the performers, and Stef’s puppy was quite active, too!

Tonight? Probably back to gardening, if it’s dry enough; there’s a lot of branches to be disposed of somehow, as I’ve recently lopped off heaps to let more light through on to the grass, etc. And I’m trying to re-invent a completely overgrown flowerbed (or nettle patch as it has been until a few days ago!)

Son of the Tree – Jack Vance

Son of the Tree – Jack Vance

Originally uploaded by miketransreal

I’ve just blasted through Son of the Tree, a fairly early Jack Vance novel.
I quite enjoyed it – it’s only 120 pages long, or so, and originally appeared in the early 1950s in a pulp magazine – although it’s not really that good. Druids on a distant planet worship a giant tree. They think neighbouring planets would appreciate the opportunity to do likewise!
Into the mix comes our Earthan protagonist, looking for the man who stole his girl from him back on Earth. He becomes aircar chauffeur to a highly-ranked Druid and embroiled in a plot which isn’t unravelled until right at the end, in confrontation and disaster! But he gets the girl! Well, no, not that one, a different one…
It’s one of only a couple of Vance’s books that Underwood Miller didn’t publish in hardback; looking at the cover, I wish they had! Covers like this may explain why he never became as famous as he perhaps should have!

Quack!

Quack!

Originally uploaded by miketransreal

No sign of them using semaphore, but still very cute!
This was on the Water of Leith, just above the Dean Village last Sunday.

A stroll around some of the Dean Village then down the riverside walk to Stockbridge, coffee and a muffin and a bus home. Once Madeleine recovers from her upcoming hip operation in July, we may get further afield and do slightly more strenuous things!

Star Trek the movie was pretty good; lots of references for the knowledgeable, but not so many that they bogged the story down. By the end the ‘classic’ flight deck crew had been assembled, so it’s all ready for a re-imaginging of the original five year mission in subsequent films!
Wasn’t really convinced by the Romulan ship though, I’m afraid.

World Tapir Day, 2009

Raffles at the Zoo

Originally uploaded by miketransreal

Sadly, we couldn’t get along to the zoo today, but we did visit it yesterday, which is close enough!
This is the 2nd Annual World Tapir Day and hopefully our official WTD coasters will be waiting for us when we get home this evening…
Transreal’s sponsorship of the Edinburgh tapirs was also renewed, with effect from today!

May have to have a pint of Guinness tonight to celebrate; it’s black & white, just like Raffles and other Malayan tapirs!

Next year it’s on a Tuesday.

The Zombies at the ABC, Glasgow

The Zombies, with new guitarist

Originally uploaded by miketransreal

The Zombies were great!
I had never heard Oracle & Odessey in it’s entirety, so this was the ideal way to do so!
The first set wasn’t officially the Zombies, rather it was Rod Argent & Colin Blunstone’s touring band and they played the big hits, etc. that weren’t on the lp, and highlights from their solo careers. What Becomes of the Broken Hearted and Hold Your Head Up, Woman, for instance!
Good stuff!

The 2nd set consisted of the (more or less) original lineup of The Zombies playing the complete Oracle & Odessey lp in order, with a couple of other songs as encores at the end.

Brilliant stuff, with any number from 2* to 13** people playing or singing on stage, depending on the song. And Blunstone, especially, looked like he was having a great time! And his voice was still great.

*Blunstone & guitarist, and also Argent & bass player

**Colin Blunstone, Rod Argent, original bass player, original drummer, replacement guitarist (but officially a Zombie, I think), synth player (from the Brian Wilson band!), touring band drummer now on percussion, touring band bassist (played with the Kinks for 20 years) now on backing vocals, female backing vocalist, and 4 piece brass section! =13

And because it started fairly early, it finished just in time for me to get the 22.30 train home for a relatively early night!

edit: There are another couple of pictures, with brief comments, on my Flickr page, btw.

Some Books by & about J. G. Ballard

Some Books by & about J. G. Ballard

Originally uploaded by miketransreal

So J. G. Ballard has died.
Not unexpected, but still very sad.
The first novel I remember reading of his was The Drought, or maybe The Wind From Nowhere (which should be in the picture, but must have been misplaced on my bookshelves). Strange post-disaster chronicles, concentrating as much on people’s obsessions and how they felt, than about responding to their changed circumstances in appropriate (for mainstream sf) ways…
I was also reading other ‘new wave’ authors who were following in his footsteps, looking into crystaline pools in metal salt marches like M. John Harrison or brooding on the futility of trying re-ignite humanities dreams like Mark S. Geston. Michael Moorcock and his doomed heroes… the strange introspective novels of Barry Malzberg…
Ballard was there before them all, creating strange new landscapes – dare I mention empty swimming pools! – and broken characters who acted out their hopes an dreams.
Some great novels and short stories, also some lesser work in his later years which seemed unable to break new territory, although it remained very readable, as he set stories against the harsh light of the French Riviera or the repetitive landscapes of modern suburbia.
From the early 80s on, he wrote quite widely about his early wartime life (his article in Foundation 24 was, I think, the first major autobiographical piece, later expanded into Empire of the Sun) and his life in the 50s & 60s in The Kindness of Women (with the accompanying press stories of inaccuracies and divergences from the facts).
Despite this, he revisited many of the same events again in his autobiography Miracles of Life: Shanghai to Shepperton, his most recent and, I believe, final book, written after his terminal illness had been diagnosed…

He’ll be missed.

[ this replaces a very similar post made yesterday, because I wanted to change the picture and it wouldn't work otherwise... ]

Sunny Weekend…

Saturday evening was Madeleine’s aunt Sylvia’s Seventieth Birthday, so the occasion was celebrated in a private dining room at the Sheraton.

Drink, buffet, cake, etc.  -who could complain!?
Flickr photo

Sunday was nice and sunny, so we went down to Madeleine’s studio and rearranged it, with some new shelving, etc. Still some different tables etc. needed to replace the existing hodge-podge, but that’s for another day! After that, we actually got some sun, having a very late brunch at a nearby Turkish cafe called Cafe Truva. Meze for 2, very nice, and filling!
Then up to the National Galleries to squeeze in a second look at a couple of small exhibitions, only to discover that they both finished last week! Grr! Took a quick look at the new art replacing them – some of it was very good, but I resisted (fairly easily) giving much thought to a little piece I liked a lot which was only (!) £300…  Up to the Meadows and Peter’s Yard, where we sat and had icecream – vanilla & blueberry for me, hazlenut & raspberry (or maybe strawberry) for Madeleine.
Then home for a quiet evening…

Science Festival, 2009

So the Science Festival has finished for another year…

Madeleine’s mini-film fest of math-y films was a success and I also enjoyed the other events I got along to…

The first one was Asimo the humanoid robot at the McEwan Hall – plenty of pictures from other people on Flickr  – who is very small and needs a lot of preparatory programming to do very much! But he can keep his balance and make allowances for various things as he achieves his objective, which is pretty impressive.

Other events included a talk about the Royal Observatory’s key collection of astronomy books, the mathematics of juggling (with demonstration), some of the math behind Pixar productions (especially the creation of realistically crumpling clothes, etc. for the characters in Ratatouille) and a panel discussing the future of the human body, with Stelarc (who has a serious ‘mad scientist’ laugh!) and Martin Ware.

Yes, Martin Ware of Heaven 17; he’s heavily into sonics and sound of all sorts and had a seemingly endless supply of useful anecdotes, usually featuring somebody he was working with on some sort of project…

Excellent discussion, even if the only sf mentioned was in a question from the floor by somebody who mentioned Brave New World and The Cyberiad.

We also got out to the Museum of Flight at East Fortune and saw some of their new exhibits (opening to coincide with the EISF), but time was short (we had spent far too long in the morning enjoying the Easter weather) and we may have to go back soon.
Main disappointment was the almost complete lack of airship souvenirs and memorabilia – they have excellent airship exhibits, etc. but only a postcard of the R34 if you want a memento. If you’re into Concorde, however, any amount of stuff is filling the racks…

I should send them a list of ideas for books and toys, etc. I know about…