Fleeting, Smothered Gorgonian Bluntness

It's an addictive little game, isn't it? Blogging is the inept's way of saying to a largely unheeding world that they, as Francis Schaeffer put it, are there and are not silent.
Being alone in a foreign country causes one to seek cybercompanionship more than perhaps the simpler but more responsible pleasures of wife and family. Peeking into the world of cybernet curtains, behind which sit fat naked men claiming to be fourteen year old girls from Ipswich, postings on boards that probably few read and the fertility of overfevered imagination whiles away many a twilight. Also, posts are probably so lacking in interest to anyone but their authors that viruses spread their infection elsewhere. This caught my eye, from the guru of bloggers, Robert Scoble & Shel Israel .. An Excerpt from Naked Conversations: Bloggings's Six Pillars: There are six key differences between blogging and any other communications channel. You can find any of them elsewhere. These are the Six Pillars of Blogging:
1.Publishable.Anyone can publish a blog.You can do it cheaply and post often. Each posting is instantly available worldwide.
2.Findable. Through search engines, people will find blogs by subject, by author, or both. The more you post, the more findable you become.
3.Social. The blogosphere is one big conversation. Interesting topical conversations move from site to site, linking to each other. Through blogs, people with shared interests build relationships unrestricted by geographic borders.
4.Viral. Information often spreads faster through blogs than via a newsservice. No form of viral marketing matches the speed and efficiency of a blog.
5.Syndicatable. By clicking on an icon, you can get free "home delivery" of RSS- enabled blogs into your e-mail software. RSS lets you know when a blog you subscribe to is updated, saving you search time. This process is considerably more efficient than the last- generation method of visiting one page of one web site at a time looking for changes.
6.Linkable. Because each blog can link to all others, every blogger has access to the tens of millions of people who visit the blogosphere every day.
The seventh is a variation on my own theme:
7. We all hate total brain dumps. We're still metaphorically in our high chair, being fed information in small gobbets with entertaining subplots 'here comes the airplane.....' taking more if we wish after we've digested what we've received so far.

So far, so good. I rather think I'm going to put together a blog of an entirely different water next time. Perhaps something educational, with all sorts of weird overtones to trap the unwary....
The title? Oh, that's an anagram of "Blogging: hours of endless entertainment." Tee hee

Penguins

I am speechless with quite unjustifiable self-admiration. My tiny, frail laptop with an Internet connection no more secure than a line of wet string, has managed to download a fully functional CD bootable version of Linux, which is rather like learning about computing from scratch all over again. It's amazing how one's thinking becomes a resonant image of Windows and you behave as that nice Mr Gates has taught you, it's only when you get out into the fresh air of open source that you realise what you've been missing. There are some quirky litle glitches but at least with a modicum of UNIX nous, most problems are transparent and not difficult to solve. It's faster, cleverer and more intuitive than I could have imagined, and, best of all it is, like advice, free of charge

Desert, mostly

Kuwait. A long, thin drinkawater of a country, approximately one-third the size of Wales. Most of the inhabitants are coastal, and Kuwait City to the Saudi border is one long suburban sprawl. A car seems to be essential, preferably huge, 4WD with a highly efficient air conditioner, but in the interim, taxis will have to do. The bus service is cheaper, but less regular. The 120kph freeway limit is, remarkably, adhered to with some rigour, most cars and all the taxis having audible speed limiters. This of course is the Holy Month of Ramadan, let joy be unconfined. I though a colleague was joking when she told me that the police will arrest anyone caught smoking in public, apparently not. Spending the rest of Ramadan in a Kuwaiti jail isn't tempting, thus I have to be more self-controlled than usual, which is hard for me.
The Month of Ramadan is also when it is believed the Holy Quran "was sent down from heaven, a guidance unto men, a declaration of direction, and a means of Salvation". Excellent.
Ramadan is a time when Muslims are supposed to concentrate on their faith and spend less time on the concerns of their everyday lives. It is a time of worship and contemplation, or so I am told...
One is not allowed to eat or drink during the daylight hours. Smoking and sexual relations are also forbidden during fasting. At the end of the day the fast is broken with prayer and a meal called the iftar. In the evening following the iftar it is customary for Muslims to go out visiting family and friends, which is why you can never get a parking space in the mall. According to the Quran:
One may eat and drink at any time during the night "until you can plainly distinguish a white thread from a black thread by the daylight: then keep the fast until night"
The good that is acquired through the fast can be destroyed by five things -
the telling of a lie
slander
denouncing someone behind his back
a false oath
greed or covetousness
All very fine. Doesn't help that everyone's blood sugar is lowered thus bad temper is commonplace., so roll on 24th October, and Eid. The towers in the image are quite spectacular when seen close up..

Komboloi

The next few days are likely to be interesting. Work, like Bunyan's puddles, has dried up, thus I am once again casting what little bread I have upon rapidly shrinking wetland.
Philippians 4:19 notwithstanding, one is sometimes tempted to ask the question 'how?' And yet, so many times, usually at the last moment (please someone buy the guy a watch) the remarkable fact remains that as a believer, I am able to wait in confidence simply because God is committed to providing.
It has been said that worry is a form of atheism, saying, "It all depends on me." Worry is a warning light that we doubt the love of God. Put more properly, we doubt the unconditional love of God. H'm. The image is of Greek worry beads (Komboloi) but the idea originated thousands of years ago in the prayer beads of many cultures and traditions...Hindu, Christian and Moslem. Today they are used for their comforting effect....helping smokers to quit, the anxious to breathe more deeply, the very pregnant to be patient...and people like me, I suppose.
Perhaps I should get some, counting being soothing, whether hours, days or beads.

Letters from School Revisited

Amazing, the power of youth to interest, elevate, amuse and otherwise brighten one's day. I am sitting in an English class, top set, usually taught by the Head of English, a woman whom the French might call 'formidable'. I have met one or two of them before, and by-and-large, as the Hitch-Hiker's Guide profoundly remarks, are 'mostly harmless'. One of them, when asked his name, replied 'Vladimir Putin', which I thought enterprising.
A gaggle of girls is 'working together'. This in reality means extensive magpie chatter, interspersed with a furtive look in my direction to see if I am paying attention. A few, a very few, are taking the task seriously, and have produced reams, emailspeak and creative spelling notwithstanding. The fashion for alternative and temporary tattooing is highly developed here and red hieroglyph is evident on a few female forearms. Some boys are stretching the bounds of my patience. This I think is the perfectly legitimate, albeit irritating habit of the young bullocks pushing against the fence. Sometimes, I wish it were electrified.

I realised last Friday why I could never teach in the UK again. Having been sent to a 'challenging' school, a euphemism for behaviour so ungovernable that one is torn between zookeeping and babyminding, in an area whose remote claim to notoriety is the high percentage of incestuous relationships in the peninsula. Within a few minutes, it rapidly became clear that shouting and imprecation only amused the population, neither intimidating them nor creating an environment where fragments of knowledge might be acquired. I therefore remained Stoic, my wa undented, allowing the mayhem to subside to an unchallenging murmur. Lao-Tzu would have been proud, in a similar way that, as in the Christian monasteries, a code of order and internal discipline is maintained regardless of external circumstances. Taoist quietism is an attitude imposed by social circumstances, by the Movement of Heaven, and remains for each to appreciate when it is the time to "withdraw" or to "advance". Strategic withdrawal seemed appropriate. The image is of my old school, and at the time when the lithograph was first created, floggings were commonplace and detentions involved copying Georgics out. Sic transit..

Flower of Scotland

One's friends do lead interesting lives. An impending wedding in a Scottish castle for a friend's sister is awaited with childish clapping of hands, the thought of skirted-beclad, champagne-swilling English disporting themselves on rain-sodden hillsides, nostalgically recalling 'prima nocte' has a certain colonial feel about it. It should, of course, be remembered that while the toffs on horses were murmuring 'tally ho' on the sidelines; in front of the guns it was the bampots in bagpipes and kilts in there doing the bayoneting and spilling foreign guts on alien fields for the glory of the Empire. Additionally, the Scottish preoccupation with engineering of real gravitas rewarded the world with properly surfaced roads, battleships of behemoth proportions and the steam engine. Oh, yes, and they inventit the tellie..

Blarney, or what you will

It's alarming to reflect on the fact that the veneer of urbane sophistication is frequently tissue-thin to the point of transparency. Had a phone call from a friend who probably knew me better than anyone else in the world with an offer to visit southwest Ireland over the summer, which caused a metaphorically gleeful clapping of the hands. In my precarious condition, such offers are not just rare but their serendipitous value is priceless.
Mark Twain once wrote: 'I have seen all the foreign countries I want to except heaven and hell and I have only a vague curiosity about one of those.'
Ireland clearly wasn't on his list. The sheer joie de vivre of its citizenry, together with some of the greatest authors and poets this part of the planet has ever seen, also the strong possibility of myself having Irish antecedents, have persuaded me to overlook an unwholesomely damp climate. I imagine my ancestors, gritty Celts all, bestriding the hills with the braggadocio of a proud, unconquered race. Well, not since 1690, at any rate. This homespun image of a Bantry village dwelling gives little indication that the Atlantic water lapping its borders is probably freezing. Never mind. I must take care not to fall in.