Has It Been A Year Already?

Damn...

I had a phone call this afternoon, from a young lady who said she was calling on behalf of somebody called Online PC Care about the problems I was having with my PC.

I enquired as to the nature of her call and asked how she obtained my phone number, at which point she hung up.

Curiously, a colleague of mine reported last week that he had had a similar call, only the individual had suggested they were associated with Microsoft. He strung out the call for a few minutes before deciding it was a scam of some sort, made his excuses and hung up.

I did a bit of Googling after my caller departed, and found that this is something that has been encountered in the UK, Ireland and Australia, the originators using the names 'Online PC Care' or 'Online PC Doctors' or similar.

I'm sure I don't have to remind bloggers and the tech-savvy to be wary of this kind of thing, but it might be worth warning family members and friends who may not be as aware in case they get calls like this one.

As you were...

What? Has It Really Been That Long? Er...

I blame Facebook.

170 different privacy settings - W, as they say, TF is up with that???

I opened an account last month, having finally succumbed to peer pressure, and have spent the intervening time tweaking settings so that I don't accidentally leave any personal information in the hands of potential enemies.

And then there's the games - I've been playing Mahjongg and that Scrabble thing where they put in words that don't exist so you never get past the second round and Kingdoms of Camelot (fail) and other things so insidiously addictive that I've come to believe the whole thing is a creation of Lex Luthor or the League of Super-Criminals or something to keep me distracted as they go about their various misdeeds like setting fire to the Sun and such.


Then, right? Then they go and change all the privacy stuff so I have to review the whole thing all over again...


Evil, I tell you - just plain evil...

And Now, For Paul, This:...*

*May one do that? I mean, add an ellipsis after a question mark? Answers on a postcard or comment to the usual address...

I Love This Show...

For any of you who may be unaware, there's a show on Disney called Phineas & Ferb, regarding the adventures of two (step)brothers who use their imaginations to fill in the long days of summer vacation, to the annoyance of their sister Candace and the occasional frustration of Perry, their pet platypus.

It starts like this:



and is well worth a look...

Where Are They Now?...

Anybody who has seen John Cusack in Grosse Pointe Blank will understand how I felt about the prospect of attending my 30-year high school reunion last week.

To wit: "I just honestly don't know what I have in common with those people anymore... or with anyone, really. I mean, they'll all have husbands and wives and children and houses and dogs, and, you know, they'll have made themselves a part of something, and they can talk about what they do. And what am I going to say? "I killed the president of Paraguay with a fork. How have you been?" I just think it'll be depressing."

Okay, so maybe I didn't think it would be that bad, but a certain amount of trepidation was very much the carte du jour.

But, in my idiom*, I went. And it wasn't so bad after all.

The reunion was organised by the Templogue College Past Pupils Union, and was aimed at a number of graduating years, but as the 30-year men, we were the so-called 'feature year'. I half expected we'd have to lecture the younger lads on life and such, because our former teachers were not averse to putting one on the spot from time to time, but it was not the case, and we spent an enjoyable evening catching up.

One of the lads has made a successful career as an artist, and he trotted out a bunch of statistics about how a group such as ours might be demographically divided; x% married, x% divorced, x% gay, x% in prison, x% dead, etc.

And while I can think of one or two individuals from my year who could perhaps have been expected to end up behind bars, I guess it was that last statistic that got us thinking - at least three of our graduating class are no longer with us. Gary died as a result of a brain aneurysm while on holiday; Eoin was tragically killed in a fall; and our friend Finbar fell victim to, we believe, an inoperable brain tumour barely two years ago. Some of the lads hadn't heard about Finny - it came as something of a shock.

It's a sobering thing to be faced with the prospect of mortality - in school we have our lives ahead of us, every day's another day and summer's just around the corner. I guess thirty years on, you have to just stop for a minute and look around at what your life's become.

That being said, everyone enthused about their kids, moaned about their bosses, laughed about past sporting successes and sang the school song, and we resolved to get back together more regularly.


I can live with that.

*Mightiest of Men

And Now - Ms. Julie London...

Content Is More Important Than Packaging...

Really.

It is...

On My Bedside Table (if I had one)...

...would be a large pile of books, some read, some in progress, some waiting.

Since, however, I don't have such an item of furniture, books tend to get piled (well, neatly stacked) on shelves or the floor until I can get to them.

Recent additions to the library include The One From The Other, a novel of post-war German private eye Bernie Gunther, in which Philip Kerr's eponymous hero finds himself involved in a missing persons case where the client wants the subject to stay missing; Faceless Killers, the first of Henning Mankell's Wallander series, in which the detective is introduced in the investigation of a brutal murder on a remote farm in Sweden; and Stieg Larsson's The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, the first in his so-called Millennium Trilogy, a locked-room mystery set on an island and introducing the unlikely pairing of Mikael Blomkvist, journalist, and Lisbeth Salander, the titular character, a young woman with a troubled past who finds herself assisting Blomkvist with solving a forty-year-old murder.

I've long been a fan of Philip Kerr's Bernie Gunther series, following the adventures of the Weimar-era homicide detective in Berlin's KriminalPolizei or KRIPO, striving to do his job while the Nazis begin their rise to power. Forced to quit the police, he becomes the hotel detective at the famous Adlon Hotel, before finding himself back in uniform and co-opted into the SS. Choosing a combat assignment on the Russian Front rather than continue in his police battalion, Gunther survives the war and life as a POW under the Russians and returns to Germany, trying (and failing) to run a hotel with his wife in (of all places) the town of Dachau before giving up and returning to his old trade as a detective, this time in Munich.

Kerr weaves fiction and history deftly, evoking the realities of pre- and post-war Germany while crafting solid, almost Chandler-esque detective fiction. Actual historical figures move through the stories, among them some of the most evil characters of the era, and Kerr effortlessly conveys Gunther's distaste for Nazism and its proponents, while painting a portrait of a proud society destroying itself from within and the struggle to rebuild.

In Kurt Wallander, Henning Mankell gives us another character in the archetypal mould of the divorced detective, complete with problems that only his work keeps at bay. The difference, of course, is that the stories are set in Sweden, and thus while character types are familiar, the locales and customs may not be, certainly to readers used to skyscrapers, high-speed pursuits and 9mm automatics. Having recently seen episodes of both of the series produced lately that feature the character, with Kenneth Branagh in the English-language version and Krister Henriksson in the Swedish-language drama, I was sufficiently interested to go in search of the first novel, and I wasn't disappointed.

The late Stieg Larsson wrote three novels featuring Lisbeth Salander, and I've just finished the first. There is a Swedish-language movie version on release at the moment which I'd like to see, and I understand a Hollywood adaptation is in the works. (My casting suggestion would include Natalie Portman as Salander, with Stellan Skarsgaard as Martin Vanger and nobody but Max von Sydow as Henrik Vanger.) The book follows Salander and Blomkvist as, hired by octogenarian industrialist Henrik Vanger, they investigate the disappearance, forty years earlier, of his niece, Harriet, from the family home on an island from which the only bridge was blocked. Along the way they uncover family secrets and intrigue, and are met with resistance by those intent on keeping the truth hidden. Intermixed with this story are the personal lives and backgrounds of the two protagonists, who both grow as sympathetic, three-dimensional characters long before the end of the novel. Excellent stuff.

I'm about to begin book two, The Girl Who Played With Fire, which finds Salander on the hook for murder...

I Seem To Have Discovered Portishead...

If you, like me, are one of those people who aren't quite in tune with what's musically popular (job pressures, you understand), you'll understand the feeling that comes with realising what all the young people were so enthused about a couple of years ago.


Portishead is one of those examples of how I knew the music but not the band, and it was only out of a search for a track from the movie Tank Girl (featuring the lovely Lori Petty) that I discovered the artists behind the song "Roads".


This is Ms. Beth Gibbons singing it:




There's something incredibly moving about what, in essence, is a simple, unadorned lyric, soulfully delivered, albeit (in this instance) with the backing of a full concert orchestra.

And thanks to Amazon, I now have some cool stuff to catch up on...

And on we go.

The Anti-Midas Touch...

We all remember the story of King Midas, how everything he touched turned to gold, and how, in popular parlance, 'The Midas Touch' is used to refer to the ability of a gifted individual to bring success to any venture to which he or she turns their hand.

This week has felt like I have the Anti-Midas Touch, where everything I put my hand to either broke down, malfunctioned, fell over or otherwise went to pieces.

I'd have only myself to blame if it weren't for the fact that I was at no time acting outside of my expertise or intellectual comfort zone and had done a reasonable amount of planning and preparation for some important tasks during the week.

Song of the day for last Friday was this:


Next week I have brainwashing, dentistry, and troubleshooting...