As it’s been a week for remembering the dead, I guess this image of the controversial Berlin Holocaust Memorial is sort of appropriate:

Also, this shot visually encapsulates how I was feeling for the bulk of the period since last week’s FPB…

In short, I acquired some sort of nasty plague or another. Felt pretty tired Friday night, so stayed in and read a book. Woke up very late on Saturday with a woolly head and a sense of impending doom, so I sent Shaun my apologies and said I’d not be going to see the gig with him after all, shambled out to do some chores and went back to bed quite early.

From Sunday to Wednesday I managed to average about eight hours awake out of each twenty-four; my sinuses felt like they were packed with freshly poured warm concrete, I had no appetite whatsoever and thinking coherently was a genuine effort^[1].

Thankfully things started to clear down in the later half of Wednesday, and yesterday I was up and about and back to work again, and today I’m feeling comparatively chipper (though still pretty tired). All of which is rather uninteresting, granted, but it’s been included here to explain why I’m not going to have a lot to say about the past week. So…

Writing about music

Boy, am I glad I have other people reviewing for The Dreaded Press. I only yesterday wrote up last Wednesday’s gig…

Album of the week

One of my own reviews went live this week, because it was written last week (my schedule fu is strong). And so I commend unto you Live at Roadburn by Earthless:

… if you find the idea of twenty-minute tunes that consist chiefly of a solid rock rhythm decorated with oodles of super-fast pedal-drenched blues-scale fretboard meanderings a turn off, Earthless are not the droids you are looking for, and you can go about your business.

Right up my street.

Writing about books

I’ve hardly been able to read^[2], so writing has been out of the question.

Freelance

See above; web development requires a degree of coherency that has been sorely lacking.

Futurismic

Managed to scatter out some Futurismic blogging in my awake hours, but they were all a bit waffled and unfocused. Luckily Jonathan’s essay was in early and already set up to post. And hey – we’ve just accepted two new stories, which means we’re a month and a half ahead on fiction (theoretically)!

Books and magazines seen

Some non-fiction goodness: Quantum by Manjit Kumar, which is just the sort of pop-sci / history / biography mash-up I like. It’s also a big thick tome, so hell knows when I’ll have time to attack it…

Also the paperback of Charlie Stross‘ The Clan Corporate, which looks absolutely miniscule – are we seeing a return to the skinny novels of days gone by, or is that too much to hope for?

Coda

So, what else has happened? Not much, all told – although a guy called me up yesterday and took advantage of my tiredness to offer me a replacement for my now-ailing Nokia phone. I remember asking a lot of direct and simply-worded questions, and I’m pretty convinced that the terms and price of my contract aren’t changing as a consequence, so I think I’ll be OK. Also means I have another handset to flog off… a bit of spare cash is always good this time of year, after all.

Missed last week’s gig, but about ten minutes after I post this I’ll be roaring off to Brighton in a friend’s car to catch Russian Circles and These Arms Are Snakes… and by luck, Shaun C Green is celebrating his birthday at the same show. Given the week I’ve had, I doubt I’ll be drinking… but even so it’ll be nice to get out of town and have the cobwebs shaken loose from my brain by some loud music.

But that means I must be away and doing stuff, so I’ll wish you all a good weekend. Take care of yourselves!

[ ¹ - Yeah, yeah, "no change there, then". ]

[ ² - I did try, and the actual reading bit was possible; remembering exactly what I'd read two minutes afterwards wasn't happening, though. ]

I’m gradually getting introduced to all the curators where I work, and having them show me the stuff they’re in charge of. Which means that today I got to see a four-rotor Enigma Machine, complete with the original rotors (and not replacements):

Sorry for the crap cameraphone picture; only thing I had to hand. Enigma Machines aren’t as rare as originally thought, by the way; once the story became better known in recent years, a lot of them appeared out of the woodwork. Apparently Mick Jagger owns one – go figure.

This one’s in pretty good condition – largely because it was assigned to the Norwegian Police, so it didn’t see much heavy action. Still fully functional, if wired up to the right sort of power supply. It’s high time I re-read Cryptonomicon, y’know.

***

Bonus eye candy for the week: what do you do when you’ve just changed jobs and moved to a far lower salary, meaning that you need to keep an eye on your spending habits? Why, you start buying paintings by local artists, of course …

That’s by a chap who I randomly discovered on Flickr, where he goes under the moniker ‘mydogsighs‘. I’d been watching his photostream for a while when that painting turned up, and I just had to have it – it’s so very very me, darling, you know? He’s involved with a lot of interesting emergent art communities on Flickr, too – I sense the beginnings of an interesting article there.

***

Well, this week I have mostly been being ill. Either the virus I got at Eastercon has lasted far longer than I thought it would, or I picked up supplementary bug from work which came in on the tail end of it. Basically I’ve been feeling completely wrung out and exhausted, despite getting about ten or eleven hours sleep a night (nearly twice my usual amount), eating properly (including vitamins) and abstaining from alcohol. And I still feel rubbish now, to be honest – I’m hoping I can shake it off over the weekend.

However, time waits for no man, not even an ill one, and I’ve been keeping busy with words, both reading and writing. To be quite honest, blogging and reading is all that has kept me sane – I don’t deal well with being ill, not in a “give me sympathy for my man-flu” way, but in a “completely frustrated by feeling unable to accomplish anything” way. Nothing winds me up more than circumstances that no one can do anything to change – the irony of which is that I’m a hayfever sufferer. You really don’t want to meet me when the oil seed rape is in full bloom, I assure you.

But hey, work has been coming in. And I mean actual paid jobs that people want me to do for them. The newly-digitised Hub Magazine has emailed and asked me to review Marianne de Pierres’ Dark Space for them – and who’d have thought they read VCTB? Flattered, so I was. Plus, a photographer guy I used to work with on gig reviews a few years back is setting up an agency, and needs some wordy mug to sort out the non-pictorial website content for them. Result! At this rate, I’ll be able to financially support myself freelancing by the time I turn 40 …

***

Let’s see, incoming materials for the week. Magazines:

• Locus Magazine for April 2007,
• Apex Digest #9, and
• F&SF for April 2007 (Gene Wolfe special).

Books, both via SF Site:

• Tony Ballantyne’s Divergence, and
• Ian McDonald’s Brasyl (wh0000t! score!).

And now a new section of FPB that will hopefully become more frequent: outgoing materials, or “stuff by me that has just been or is about to be published somewhere”; the next SF Site update will have my review of the reissue of Vernor Vinge’s first full novel The Witling, and my first few reviews for music site Subba-Cultcha.com should be up by Monday coming. I’ll link ‘em when they’re available, for them what’s interested.

***

So there’s your Friday window into the life of a man who really needs to get out more – I hope you’ve enjoyed peering in. I shall now go forth and engage in a slightly hotter and more chilli-laden iteration of The Friday Curry than usual, in the hopes that a hefty Scoville rating and lots of garlic and cumin will burn the last of this accursed malaise from my body once and for all. Wish me luck! In the meantime, have a good weekend yourselves.

It’s located on a blog, it occurs on Fridays and usually contains plants. Hell knows why they called it Friday Plant Blogging…

Continue reading “Friday Plant Blogging! Spider plant”

In a break from convention, no photos of the household flora this week…instead, I shall take this opportunity to perform some unseemly braggartry about a newly-acquired material possession:

Continue reading “Friday Plant Pushbike Blogging!”

…because I’m too damn fuddled with imported Chinese head-cold to write anything clever tonight. This cartoon found at Pharyngula; original source can be found by clicking through on the image.

Well, I laughed like a b*stard. Back to normal (hopefully) tomorrow.

The New Scientist is running a story about drug-based treatment for ADHD:

THE figures are mind-boggling. Nearly 4 million Americans, most of them children and young adults, are being prescribed amphetamine-like stimulants to treat attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Up to a million more may be taking the drugs illegally.

Continue reading “ADHD drugs overprescribed in US”