Take The Hard Road

I would love to be able to say that I always the high hard road, that my ethics are unbending and that everything is always squeaky clean. Of course I'm human, and none of us can say that we always do the righter thing no matter what. You'll have to trust me when I say I end up bowing to my splendid conscience in the end on almost all occasions. Or you can distrust me, a stranger on the Internet. That might be wiser.

Why write about this? I have no idea, but it could be connected to the fact that I'm currently spending a bit of time learning Greek and it's hard. Teaching yourself a language - and I'm really only barely beginning - is hard. It's a hard road, and to do it successfully you have to take that high and hard road. You have to start off and learn the alphabet, dig deep and read the grammar books and finally just try to write in that language. It's so hard as to be ridiculous but at the same time it's challenging.

It's strange that doing things right is almost always so much harder than doing things the cheating way. You would think that every so often there would be some circumstance that is easier in the short term to do right. Sometimes, somehow, for some reason. If anyone has any examples I would be very pleased to read about them. There must be some! Even my villainous and fictional alter ego 'Clomp von Clomp' occasionally does things the right way, just to insure that the scheme doesn't blow up immediately. It will blow up, though, just after a dramatic pause for the best effect. Oh, I love Clompie, even if he is a sick and twisted omnipotent blue being of dubious poker skills.

I remember what brought on this piece now. Someone accused me - ME! - of having integrity. Of course they're wrong but these kinds of impressions seem to stick, and integrity is several steps on from relentlessly being called 'nice'. Sigh and double sigh. So that's why I started frothing on in such a pretentious way. Pretentious is really the only way to segue nicely from maths mode to reality, and I was deep in Maths mode to begin. It's actually really interesting that second language mode has the same problems as maths mode. Have you ever tried to write a meaningful passage in a second language you're still learning? It's like trying to stretch wood or melt a concept. Impossible! Of course at some point the language becomes familiar enough to make it possible but it takes years.

The hard road often takes years... But the view is awesome...

O.

PS Coming up we have items on: 'The Murder of Roger Ackroyd', 'Real Steel', the problems of a Batman/Superman movie, and the reason why 'Plan 9 From Outer Space' isn't completely terrible.