Eight Hundred

The river at the bottom of the valley is very close to flooding. Ignoring the possible effects for a moment, it's amazing to see a small-ish river swollen to several times its normal size, full of muddy brown water, and flowing swiftly from its unknown regions upstream to its ultimate destiny in meeting the sea. It's so close to flooding that it might soon splosh all over the tiny footpath commonly used to make a shortcut over to the Pontyates Post Office. This means nothing to the non-locals out there, but it is definitely an uncommon occurrence. Water is the most overwhelming manifestation of nature, the only one which is always obviously dynamic and in motion. The earth beneath us is apparently quiescent for most of our lives, and wind or air pressure only imposes itself upon us at certain times, but rivers and seas are always in motion and working away.

Just as that swollen river has flowed down from upstream regions, and is heading to the sea, the Quirky Muffin is now flowing under its eight hundredth bridge. Eight hundred posts will be in the bag at the close of this text, and we will have reached another landmark. What have these past eight hundredth posts meant? Almost nothing! However, there have been maybe two Very Important Posts, a daft assortment of serial stories, and piles and piles of book, television, film, and even radio reviews. Yes, Old Time Radio has found itself once again, and it's nice to have it back from time to time. It's a shame it was ever shunted aside by the then-new phenomenon of television and growing cynicism in the world, but the thing they call progress never can be denied. It seems that the price of every advance is a loss of cultural innocence... That can't be true, can it? Can it? Is it even true of tin openers or door stops?

Eight hundred posts of extemporisation, attempts to redress infamies dumped unfairly on underrated (but not necessarily great) attempts at entertainment, and made up on the spot serial stories. At the moment, the spine of the Quirky Muffin is a story entitled 'The Ninja Of Health', which has now taken over as the prime serial. Once 'The Ninja Of Health' concludes, the problematic story 'The Glove' will have to vie with 'Wordspace: Phase II' and 'Diary Of A Laundry Robot' for the status of Predominant Story Serial. Good grief, all of those three will need a decent amount of work to go any further, and there is still 'Triangles: Phase II' waiting to be started too! There will be lots of story work before we ever get to anything new! All this, and we still have Groucho season to come. Yes, all four of the prime Paramount Marx Brothers films, at least two of the Goulart private eye novels, and his comeback audience performance in the 1970s. You have to have mini-seasons to keep blogs going for this long. Perhaps after Groucho season, we'll break into some other run of posts, maybe about the 'Peanuts' films?

Eight hundred posts in the bag, and now we only have two hundred to go to reach one thousand. Everyone, please close your eyes and whistle. It will make it all go far more easily...

O.

Before The Invention Of Breakfast Cereal

A long time ago, before the invention of breakfast cereal, primitive mankind used to spend its nights in primitive holes and caves, bereft of culture and diversion apart from hunting and procreation. Back in those pre-sophisticated times, there was little conversation due to a lack of language, but eventually something must have happened. Maybe it was music, or play acting, but the entertainment we know about is cave painting. At some point back in the distant past, someone found some pigments and started scraping pictures on a cave wall, starting mankind off on the first steps to abstraction. Yes, sticks had been used to make pictures in the ground, but they tended to go away.

Think about it a little, and let the awesomeness sink in. A cave dweller, who had barely discovered fire and the rudiments of food scavenging, suddenly dipped his finger in some soot, blood or other tint and started scraping it across a wall to make a picture. It's pretty amazing. Pictures, the foundations of the first writing systems, being stuck on a wall or scraped in the ground with a stick. Now, here in the twenty-first century, we use brushes, pencils, computers, pens, sprays and even mosaic tiles, but we're ultimately doing the same thing. Those ancient people invented a wonderful thing, but did they ever know it? Did the first composer realise what they had done either?

What would you, the imagined reader of this blog post, daub onto a cave wall if you had the chance? Would it be an old red London bus, or the Starship Enterprise? Would it be a rough painted sketch of your sweetheart or your favourite sports team's crest? It could be anything! I think I would start with the Superman shield, or an attempt at the famous Groucho face, before giving up and doodling lighthouses, which are my default and solitary competent drawings. Everything else is difficult, but a lighthouse on a rocky outcrop can always be done. It may actually be time to start breaking out the sketchpads and experimenting again. Christmas is coming, after all, with its endless expanses of free time. Already, the tutoring is dwindling to holiday levels, and OU revision taking over.

Hmmm... reverting to cave painting for a moment... how do children start to illustrate usually? It's remarkable similar, isn't it?

O.

Seven Hundred And Ninety Eight

We're only two steps away from the Quirky Muffin's eight hundredth post, and there are absolutely no plans whatsoever for that momentous landmark. Nothing. We will just have to make do with the standard summary and plan for the next hundred posts, unless some miracle progress occurs in the next few days. It would have been nice to get that joined-up version of 'Oneiromancy' sorted out, but it will come soon enough. Maybe Christmas will be the time to get it done, with the slackening in teaching that ensues.

It's December, and it seems like the whole world is going Christmas crazy. Songs are blaring out of the shops, trees are up in students' houses, and the world --

No, it's just not working. The writing power isn't on tap, replaced instead by a big ball of majestic galactic knitting wool. Seeing and helping so many people in a week can be very draining, and three hours in one day is almost crippling. It's amazing that any words are making it into this text coherently at all. It might as well as be in badly translated Greek. An episode of 'The Mentalist' is playing to one side, rather brilliantly, and thoughts are scattered everywhere, like socks from a young child's drawer thrown in anger.

It is possible to write in a state of disarray, though, if you lean into the curve. For example, you could start whittering on about the perils of too much sleep, or the things you're currently reading. Oooh, there's something! Robert E Howard's Conan stories are rather amazing. Delving into 'The Conan Chronicles', you clearly detect something entirely original, both then and now. These are prototypal tales, and you can tell. It's a sensation that you get when you read the 'Sherlock Holmes' stories, or Dashiell Hammett, or even Jules Verne and the short prose of Woody Allen. More on this later.

Now, the work is done. Seven hundred and ninety eight posts... What a bizarre occurrence...

O.

Story: The Ninja of Health, XX

( Part XIX , XXI )

The Woman's first sight when she regained consciousness was a blurry blue ball. Recovering further she saw red, yellow and green balls too stretching into the near distance. Was she in some play school version of the afterlife? No, that was the roof of their chapel above them.

"Well done, milady. I was wondering how long it would take!" A wise and familiar voice said to her from above her line of sight.

"Ken! Oh, blast..."

"Oh, don't move too much yet please. You're pretty bruised, stiff and dehydrated. I've been giving you water for a day, but you might still be groggy." The face behind the voice could be seen now. That wise old face from the training school.

"How long? What about..."

"He is doing well. I brought you up first because you were showing signs of distress. We will be safe here now. The visitor will not return." Ken seemed very tired, but jubilation could be detected.

The Woman looked around a bit more vigorously. The whole chapel was knee deep in plastic balls, arranged in spirals, bubbles and sparkles of colour, radiating around her to the walls. "Good grief! You still have to use ball pools?!"

"We never did manage to succeed with anything else. There's something about the airlock in each ball that augments permittivity in the Pattern Field, which--"

"Not now, Ken. Help me up, please." Wincing, our lady protagonist struggled with the balls. "They even go into the corridor..."

"Yes, I filled the whole chapel. It was the only way. Hopefully, it should be easier to revive your partner and the Oracle with two of us to focus." Ken led her into the side rooms, where the Man and the Oracle lay in cradles of plastic balls.

"They're very pale." She commented tensely.

"You were asleep for five days. You were very pale too."

"Five days!"

"Yes, I was very concerned. However, it will be well now, and the sanctity of this place is now assured once again."

"All with ball pools?" Incredulity coloured the Lady's voice.

"Yes, all with ball pools. Let's get to work. We need to wake these two before the next shipment arrives."

They got to work.

To be continued...

Well, It's An Idea...

Buying gifts for people is nice. Yes, Christmas is really a religious holiday but why not throw gifts at people throughout December anyway, even if you're not of the required faith? Why not? The buying is nice, the note and letter writing are pretty good, and the wrapping and packaging is pretty tedious. The worst part by far is the trip to the Post Office and paying the postage. That's the killer, especially when you end up spending more on the postage than the gifts! (If that's not evidence of a tightly budgeted Christmas, then what is?! Or of miserliness, of course...)

The tradition here in Quirky Muffin land is to distribute books wildly to people at Christmas, whether they want them or not, with the scope depending on the budget available. Yes, given enough money, books would fly out to every inhabitant of the Earth. Books are brilliant. If everyone read a book a month, the world would improve dramatically, even if some of the books were scandalous and diabolical! Can there be any doubt about that? It's a serious question. Is it true?

The argument against the proposition would be that people would just read books they agreed with and never challenge their ideas or grow, and it's a potent one. However, arguments that revolve around the mythical 'people' can be exploded by considering the individuals. Some individuals would automatically try out new things and become just that bit more learned, and maybe pass on the habit to others. There would be generation advances. We're not talking about a global population of geniuses here, just a greater tendency toward absorbing knowledge. It's a good thought problem, if only people could be coaxed into reading things not on tiny screens, and picking up some tomes instead. Yes, I'm talking about you, lovers of pictures of cats in fezzes. You know who you are... (Only kidding, folks!)

It's good to be choosy about the words to use: 'learned' instead of 'intelligent', 'individuals' instead of 'people', 'knowledge' instead of 'information'. The words used here mean different things. 'Information' is an essentially meaningless term, but 'knowledge' implies an appreciation and understanding of what has been learned. 'Learned' reflects acquired skills and knowledge, but 'intelligent' indicates a base skill. 'People' have no defining characteristics, only averages, while individuals have sets of all kinds of qualities. We need to think more about the words we use.

Is that enough patronising and pontificating for today? Sometimes the words just flow this way.

O.

Film: 'Paper Planes' (2015)

This was a quietly awesome little movie, a gem in the rough. It falls into the category of 'things I cry to' pretty easily, but also into that of 'movies that don't quite do what you expect'. As soon as you see that the main character's father is grieving, you get a set idea of how it's all going to work out in your head, but in reality it runs just a little differently. After all, this is a film about paper planes...

Who would have known that there was a World Junior Paper Plane Championship? Who would ever have thought that happened? Apparently, it does, and in the movie the finals were in the most obvious country of Japan, home of papercraft. There's even a little sequence where the contestants, including our main character Dylan, twelve year old plane prodigy from a little dustbowl town in Australia, get the traditional process shown to them in a Japanese garden.

This post is definitely rolling out in a non-linear fashion, isn't it? 'Paper Planes' is about Dylan, who is recovering from his mother's death and simultaneously worrying about his father's extended grieving. A chance encounter with a student teacher leads him into completing in a regional paper plane championship, which then cascades finally into the World Championship in Tokyo. Yes, there's a bad boy competitor, and the dad does finally begin to emerge from his cocoon, but there's also a crazy grandpa who breaks all kinds of rules, his oddball school friend, and the girl Japanese national champion who becomes Dylan's friend through it all. None of it quite goes as expected, and when it does it does so efficiently and simply.

The child acting is decent, and improves over the course of the movie, but the real strength is in the simplicity and composition of the two layers of narrative. Why do some films work, and others don't? It's hard to say. Is this success related to the elegantly simple Australian style at work? Maybe. Ultimately, for me, it's more to do with telling a story uncynically and viewing the world in an honestly charming way. No-one flies over the top, not even the roguish war veteran grandfather. Well, maybe he does fly out into ham land a little, but it fits. His most telling interlude is handled very nicely indeed.

This could have been a gooey and sentimental mess, but it works well. It could have taken the grieving storyline and made us squirm awkwardly at times, but it doesn't. The paper plane aspects lifts the movie into being something slightly new, and that's always welcome. It's a good film, and an instant DVD purchase. It's also at times rather funny, and has some pretty good music.

Paper planes? Who would have thought it?

O.

Brainstorming 'The Ninja Of Health'

Okay, let's brainstorm a little. There are a couple of stealth medics in the town of Toddlingham, operating out of a little disused (deconsecrated?) chapel. They were trained by a bloke called Ken (origins unknown but he has visited Scandinavia at the very least), and are in tune with some kind of underlying Pattern (capital P intentional) of the Universe. The two health ninjas are in all likelihood a couple, breaking several narrative rules or tropes in the process. An invisible force has landed, emerging from an egg Mork-style, and is spreading illness injury around while carrying out its unknown plans. It even knocked out the local Oracle of the health ninjas, who had warped a tablecloth into a helpful vision!

What next? What could be next? What act of blue sky thinking could save this bizarre cavalcade of events? What will happen when the two ninjas wake from their imposed hibernation? Was it even a good idea to put them to sleep? When will the Oracle ever wake up? What's it all about, darn it?! Is the warped prophetic tablecloth, which idea seems better every time I write it, the clue to some treasure hunt that will save the day? Is the Entity being bad just for the sake of being bad or is it out there with ulterior motives? If the latter, then what might they be? World domination? Is it looking for the secret of French doilies? Could it be stranded, or an infant, a la Trelane from'The Squire Of Gothos'? Is a benign assessment taking place, or a semi-benign one, given that nothing lethal or even very serious has happened yet, apart from the crash into the allotment. Hmm, there's a dangling threat, the allotment. It had flown clear out of mind. Yes, there could be repercussions at the allotments... And witnesses...

It feels like there's something there, and it's something good. No, it's probably not related to macaroni, but very few things are. Logically, since our protagonists are largely reactive instead of proactive due to a lack of information, that status quo must be resolved one way or another in order to progress the story. There must another inciting incident, a further twang to the string, for something to happen. The problem is in making it happen without invoking 'deus ex machina' in a most blatant way. Maybe the newly arrived Ken is the key to it all.

On the other hand, there is still that tablecloth to consider. What of the cloth? A map? A recipe? A photo? A psychological visualisation? It is true that sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, as Freud might have said, so maybe it's just a screwy tablecloth? Maybe it's a promo for an interplanetary charitable foundation seeking funds? Aha! Perhaps that alien is a fundraiser run amok? How's that for lateral (or an absence of) thinking? Interplanetary fundraisers running amuck! You know, that's not too bad, but maybe it's an entirely different story.

A lot hinges on the motivation of the antagonist, that mysterious thing from Out There. Is it like the Tweedy Lady from 'Oneiromancy'? Was it in exile in that space egg, in retreat, or journeying to the Earth on purpose? Is the tablecloth linked directly to it's nature, or just to something in its future? What on Earth can our health ninjas do without developing a supernatural ability? Oh, Ken, you had better have some new information in that backpack or yours, as you enter the grand scheme of things!

We will have to resume with Ken, but to what end? When next we rejoin 'The Ninja of Health', someone will have to wake up... Will it be one or both of our heroes, or will it be the Creature? Maybe it's asleep and having a nightmare?

Once again, more questions than answers.

O.