ReaderGift 005 --salsa implicate e-mail

--------I am fortunate enough that now and then circumstances permit that I receive a little e-mail through my appropriate machine. An e-mail is a message wrapped in a gift. What one wouldn't give for an e-mails

---names changed to imagine something bigger than us, where there is no creed, no height differentials, no strange smells, only SALSA DANCERS


"I went to salsa the other evening, and it was pretty good. I very nearly didn’t get there, because the road I would normally have taken turned out to be closed, forcing me to take a scenic detour through unfamiliar territory, but I just got there in time.


The classes were held in the dining area cum function room of a pub, and I was surprised to find that most of the people were dressed for a night out, rather than for an exercise class as I had expected (I was wearing my trusty £6.99 brown cords and a long-sleeved T-shirt, so I was probably rather underdressed). The instructors split us off into two groups, beginners and intermediate, and I joined the other beginners in the corner.


We started off by forming two lines, one of men and one of women, and practising the most basic steps (forwards, backwards, side to side). Once that was done with, the two lines converged as we each picked out a dancing partner. I made a beeline for a very pretty girl wearing a nice dress and lots of make-up and grabbed her round the waist to claim her for my own, but my triumph was short-lived as she quickly showed herself to be stiff and awkward, and seemingly quite unhappy to be there at all.


Luckily, we swapped partners after a couple of minutes, and I was presented with a well-covered middle-aged lady, who was much better to dance with, if less easy on the eye. The instructor stood in the middle of a circle we formed around him, dancing with each of the women in turn and talking through each new move while he demonstrated it. We changed partners again, and I found myself clasping a girl of about my age who seemed almost entirely made up of bosom; I really didn’t know where to look because every time I looked down at her I got an eyeful of heaving feminine chest, which is quite welcome at times but less so when you’re trying to concentrate. But she was soon replaced by another girl, and another, and many others fat and thin and tall and short and pretty and pugilistic.


After forty-five minutes there was a break, and I made conversation with The Bosom while drinking a glass of water. Then we were back into it, doing strange turns that left ones arms all twisted about one’s partner, and which every moment presented the men with the opportunity of dislocating a womanly elbow by clumsiness or design. Each time a new partner appeared we said a cheery hello, exchanged notes on how clumsy we were and how sweaty our hands were getting, before being drilled into the strange undulations required of us.


By the end I was quite weak, and fortified myself with a beer bought for me by The Bosom. It turned out that by day she was a solicitor named "Moloch", and that she and her friend "Serendipitous" had just started coming to classes the previous week. I chatted away to them for half an hour or so and then made my way home, promising to buy "Moloch" a drink the next week, and congratulating myself on having avoided breaking anyone’s toes or putting a hand somewhere inappropriate by mistake. The next day my legs were very tired."

ReaderGift 004 --late photo remiss

this gorgeous postcard of presumbaly now gone sections of olde portsmouth was sent to me a while ago and I just didn't get round to it.

the mary rose is preserved in portsmouth.

as antidote to the "tricorn" and "himalaya restaurant", their gone-ness, and the winding concrete edifice, I embed a lively japanese band Cocco de Kikkories, performing "sports car"

ReaderGift 003 - telescope implicate email

Radio telescopes are interesting things. Some people from this here university are trying to build a part of one, and my boss is handling the contract for its construction. Apparently, they don’t take the form of solitary installations anymore; they are now made up of fields of sensor poles, standing massed like tress, dotted around the globe (though all in the same hemisphere, I think, so that they will all point the same way space-wise), and then connected to a central supercomputer by the magic of fibre-optics. This central computer is then switched on for five or six seconds, during which time it takes in as much information as it can store.

Wired magazine (well, their website) have got a story about “cloud” computers. This cloud idea is meant to be the next big thing. Rather than storing your software and files on your fallible lump of plastic at home, you keep them on some server many miles away and just access them with a simple – and I hope cheap – little computer. I suppose Hotmail and Facebook are examples of this principle, but people are now supposedly coming up with ways of writing documents, making spreadsheets etc from afar.

People with complicated TVs don’t need to own DVDs or videos, they just request permission to view some remotely held recording of a film. Obviously I can’t do that because my TV only shows black and white images of the coronation.

So will anyone actually store information in future, or will it all be held by these networks? And what happens when the network collapses? Much safer to have a DVD on your shelf in such an event, just as it is safer to keep your money in the form of a pile of tenners in the event of stock market collapse.

Ah well. None of this is very new really, but I was struck by seeing three examples of the trend in quick succession. Once everything’s been digitised and we’ve shredded the books to make compost, we’ll find ourselves in a pretty pickle once civilisation collapses. We’ll be like Montag and his chums in Fahrenheit 451, clustering together to remember books that we’ve read. My inner mental memory store of two verses of Prufrock and a couple of my own poems will not stand me in good stead with the other book rememberers; they’ll call me names and steal my lunch money.

The word for camcorder in Anathem is speelycaptor, which I like.

compulsory cat :: ReaderGift

In a wild bonanza of gifting, as at a christian festival, we can report and fully show a cat captured by a gracious reader. Cat came with
"withered/unuseable foot" --

we will always have pain brush :: ReaderGift

A gift from a gracious reader. We can see the improvements already. All contributions are welcome. They exact a price. It will be known in due course.