Symbolic Forest

Back in the mists of time, I wrote about Jakob Nielsen‘s top ten blog design mistakes. Including: not having your own domain name. My response: there are several sites I read and respect that do do this, but if you want to be completely sure you control your own reputation, you need to control your domain name too.

One thing I didn’t consider, though, is that the people who host your site can, if they want, control what you put on it. Filter out things they don’t like. You could, for example, do what News Corporation subsidiary Myspace have been caught doing: censor links to video-hosting sites, presumably because these sites will soon become News Corp’s competitors when Myspace introduces its own video-hosting service. You might think you can say anything you like on the internet – but if you’re a Myspace user, that apparently doesn’t apply.

Keyword noise: blogging, censorship, Jakob Nielsen, Myspace, News Corporation, Rupert Murdoch, usability, web design.

Talking of ghost stories, I dreamed an interesting one a few nights ago. I liked it so much, in fact, that I rather fancy working it up into a proper story.

No doubt the plot is one that’s been covered many times before; but there aren’t really very many ghost-story plots that haven’t been well worked-over. The way it came out in my dream – which was of someone telling the story, rather than of the story itself – it was a version of one of the most frequently-used plots of all, the Disappearing Fellow-Traveller.^* However, it was, well, rather inverted. I don’t want to say any more, because I don’t want to spoil it for you if I ever do manage to finish it.

* At least one classic story of the Disappearing Fellow-Traveller genre made it, in a retold version, into an anthology of supposedly true ghost stories. I can’t remember many details at all about it; but it concerned someone who got chatting to a fellow-traveller in a railway carriage, and found that the stranger was a friend of the people the traveller was going to visit. On mentioning him at the destination, of course, he turned out to have died some time earlier. I really should work this up and look up the names of the writers and books involved. I’ve got a feeling the “true” book was Railway Ghosts And Phantoms by W B Herbert, but I’m not at all sure.

Update, 22^nd August 2020: Unsurprisingly, I didn’t do anything with the story idea and now have no memory at all of what it was about. I have a nagging feeling the story I talk about in the footnote was by E Nesbit but I haven’t yet tracked it down.

Keyword noise: ghost stories, literature, story, synopsis, writing.

If you’re not just a regular reader, but the sort of regular reader who reads all the comments too, then you’ll have noticed that Colleague M dropped by the site the other day to let me know that her sister Lydia had been asking for its address. “I think she’ll be upset,” said M, though, “to find you haven’t written about her for some time.”

Well, I originally wrote about Lydia because of her haunting problems, and as they seem to have gone away recently, I haven’t written about them for a month or so. I forgot to mention, though, that I did have a Plan.

As I’ve mentioned before, The Mother has been heavily into genealogy recently, and as part of that she has subscriptions to all sorts of websites, including ones which let you search 19th-century census data. Lydia’s friendly psychic investigator had told her that her ghosts were from the 19th century.^* Furthermore, she’d also told Lydia their first names. So, my cunning plan was: get The Mother to look up who actually lived in Lydia’s house back then, to see if we had a match. If not, well, censuses are only held once per decade, so it doesn’t necessarily mean the psychic was wrong; but if we did have a match then that would be very impressive.

Unfortunately, the plan fell through, when Mother found that back in those days, the houses in Lydia’s street weren’t actually numbered. Bugger. Given that I only had a couple of first names to go on, she didn’t really fancy trawling through census returns for the whole street. After all, it’s a fairly long street. And, if we did find a match, it wouldn’t really be particularly good evidence anyway, given that we couldn’t firmly link them to Lydia’s house. All-in-all, I was a bit disappointed, which is why I haven’t mentioned it earlier. But I thought I would. Just in case you’re reading, Lydia.

* they couldn’t really be any older if they’d actually lived in her Victorian-built house

Keyword noise: census, Colleague M, genealogy, ghosts, psychic, history, research.

Lots of controversy in the news at the moment about George Galloway, the far-left MP currently competing on Big Brother. The Guardian tried hard to find out who was dealing with constituents’ issues whilst George is busy being on the telly,^* but could only get hold of his PR agent, who said she couldn’t really help.

Given that whilst he’s on Big Brother he can’t really be carrying out his day job of attending to Parliamentary business, I wondered if there’s anything in the parliamentary rules that specifically says you have to be available and contactable. The MPs’ Code of Conduct says:

Holders of public office should not place themselves under any financial or other obligation to outside individuals or organisations that might influence them in the performance of their official duties.

However, I’m not sure if this covers Mr Galloway’s antics. For one thing, although I’d think he could hardly be carrying out any official duties at the moment, “prevent” is hardly the same as “influence”. Moreover, this isn’t actually a rule. It’s merely a General Principle, which “will be taken into consideration when any complaint is received of breaches of the provisions in other sections of the Code.”

The only rule in the Code which might be cover “going on a game show for up to three weeks” is “bringing the House into disrepute”. Which, of course, is a catch-all clause which could cover virtually anything; it’s entirely down to the Standards and Privileges Committee‘s opinion. It seems that, as far as the letter of the law is concerned, there’s no problem with what Galloway is doing.^**

* and is out of contact with the outside world, of course.

** and I have no idea of who to complain to if there was.

Keyword noise: Big Brother, George Galloway, parliament, representation, television, reality tv.

Event of the day: the annual Haxey Hood game, somewhere near the top of the list of vaguely-pagan rural traditions which are largely just an excuse for a drunken mud-wrestle. Information here, here and here.

Keyword noise: Axholme, custom, folk, folk custom, football, Haxey, Haxey Hood Game, Lincolnshire, North Lincolnshire, tradition, village football.

I can’t help but feel slightly sickened at pre-obituaries – the endless news reports on the life and actions of famous people who are dangerously ill. It didn’t seem too bad during the slow death of George Best,^* but the coverage of Ariel Sharon’s stroke has been terrible. As I’m writing Sharon is in a coma, but definitely alive; but for the past day or so every news report I’ve heard has been about how Middle-Eastern politics will change after he is gone – or, even worse, what his impact on history has been. These really are just obituary reports under another name.

(yes, I know they have a partial excuse that he’s almost certainly retiring – but even so, I still don’t think it’s right)

* or maybe it was just drowned out in my mind by the volume of post-death tributes

Keyword noise: Ariel Sharon, George Best, celebrities, death, jumping the gun, obituary.

Almost anyone you ask will tell you: they hate the sound of their own voice. I have a similar relationship with my own face.

This is at the top of my mind, because I received an email today, with a couple of photos of myself in it.^* They look horrible, I have to say. No fault of the photographer, just that I look terrible anyway.

The common connection with the sound of your own voice is that just as you rarely hear your own voice as other people do, you rarely see your own face that way either. When I see myself in the mirror in the morning, it somehow doesn’t register, because it doesn’t look anywhere near as bad in my mind as it does in photographs. I’m convinced I’m not the only person who thinks this way, though. I’m sure there are relatively few people who are pleased with the appearance of their own face.

It makes me wonder about artists: specifically, artists who produce a lot of self-portraiture. What drives them to do it? Is it a narcissistic obsession with their own appearance? Or, as I’d prefer to think, is it instead more the reverse, an obsession with controlling their appearance because they’re never satisfied with it.

* And lots of other people too, of course – from when we all went out on Boxing Day.

Keyword noise: art, artists, narcissism, portrait, self-portrait.

At the office, the main conversation-starter today was: “so, what did you do on New Year’s Eve?” I felt slightly sheepish having to say: “um, I was ill.” It might only have been a cold, but even so the headache and constant sneezing were enough to send me to bed well before midnight.

At least, staying in, I avoided being beaten up, glassed, stabbed, shot, etc. New Year’s Eve in our local town was so … well, active, that it made the national press. As I get scared at the slightest sign of any sort of violence, I’m rather glad that I was nowhere near any of it.

Keyword noise: drinking, Grimsby, New Years Eve, Hogmanay, Lincolnshire, North East Lincolnshire, violence.

Following on from last Wednesday’s post, here are some more photos by Sergei Prokudin-Gorskii, reassembled in colour form to go on my computer desktop.

These aren’t exactly the versions I made for my desktop. There didn’t seem to be much point. I seem to have an unusually-shaped monitor,^* so wallpaper files that are useful to me probably wouldn’t be much good to any of you. Moreover, Prokudin-Gorskii’s originals aren’t a suitable shape to fit any sort of computer monitor at all.

In any case, none of these photos are in perfect shape. Most have imperfections, which come out as brightly-coloured blotches in the final version, making all the human subjects look like paint-factory workers. There tends to be a faded band at the top and bottom of each shot, which, when coloured, gives you a red fade at the bottom of the picture and a blue fade at the top. Re-cropping each picture helps avoid the worst damage on each.

I have no idea what most of these pictures are, but I still love playing with them and looking at them. I find the Prokudin-Gorskii pictures fascinating, as you can probably tell.

* Unless my calculator is being flaky or I’ve got some maths wrong, it appears to have a 5:4 aspect ratio.

Keyword noise: 1910s, desktop background, history, Imperial Russia, photography, Prokudin-Gorskii, Russia, Tsarist Russia, Library Of Congress.

Well, this year has started with sneezing fits and blocked sinuses. I have an awful cold, the sort that makes me feel as if my brain has been packed in grey cotton-wool.

Someone at work once told me she didn’t believe in New Year’s Resolutions. “If you want to do something,” she said, “you should just go out and do it, and never mind what the date is.” Regardless of that, though, this is what I’m going to do this year:

• Get this site running on WordPress 2^*
• Update the site every day, if it’s practicable
• Lose weight^**
• Spend more time with friends, especially ones I haven’t seen for years
• Try not to worry so much about the impression other people have of me Make an effort to meet more people – if it results in meaningful relationships, either friend or lover, then so much the better^***
• Take up writing again

* It’s important to have at least one resolution that has a definite chance of happening. So, I made sure to put one in that I should have knocked off by the end of the month.

** As I don’t know how much I weigh – and have no intention of finding out – this one might be tricky. I’ve definitely started putting a bit of flab on in the past few months, though.

*** I’m still not giving you the address of my online personal ad, though.

Keyword noise: 2006, new year, resolutions.