& now for something stultifying

After making it through one cycle in a presidential election year, perhaps it’s good to take a bit of time out for R&R.

Or Dull & Boring.

Which are a village in Scotland & a town in Oregon (respectively) that have decided to go viral, maybe generate some income in tee-shirt & other tschochke sales & provoke a few giggles.

Their Facebook page already has 541 likes.

Well, of course it does.

Drunk on writing

Very, very sad news of the death of Ray Bradbury Tuesday. He was 91.

Of course all the headlines refer to him as a science fiction writer, but to me he was much more. He was a writer, a wonderful spinner of tales, a word magician. A lot of his stories were set in the future or on other planets, but at their core, they were quintessentially human fables.

Every few years I haul out my copy of Zen and the Art of Writing and am inspired all over again. Bradbury had a way of making you feel connected. He told the story about writing Fahrenheit 451: he did it in the basement of the UCLA library, where you could rent a typewriter for $.10 per half-hour. It cost him $9.80 and took him nine days.

I met him twice.

Well—perhaps met is too strong a term.

He spoke at a science symposium I attended in high school—we were bussed across LA to a TRW campus to hear all sorts of speakers. I don’t recall exactly what his topic was, but I’ll never forget him telling us about being picked up by Beverley Hills cops for engaging in very suspicious activity: he’d been walking in his neighborhood. At night.

Then again, in the 1980s, he attended a screening of a Chuck Fries film (Terror at London Bridge, if you have to know; starring David Hasselhoff. LA’s a strange place, and the film industry is even stranger). My friend and I saw him after the show and introduced ourselves because, well, he was there, and we could. He was waiting for someone to give him a ride home.

I wanted to smack myself later, because we could have offered to give him a lift; he’d probably have accepted. He was that kind of guy—gentle, generous and amiable.

Here’s the true memorial for Bradbury: go to any publication’s obit for him and trawl through the comments. You won’t find anyone who wasn’t touched by his magic, or who has anything but respect, admiration and affection for him as a writer or a human.

I'll let Ray Bradbury have the last words on this:

"You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you."

Civic duty

We had a primary election yesterday in California, so I walked over to the fire station and cast my ballot.

I was surprised to find candidates besides the one party with which I affiliated myself; in the past, we had a closed primary—you could only vote for candidates from the party which you declared at registration. So that if you said, “It’s none of your damned business what party if any I support,” and registered as non-affiliated, or independent, in the primary election all you got to vote on were judges and ballot measures.

Now, the ballot measures in California are certainly worth the price of admission—I retained my California registration and voted absent ballot for about 15 years after leaving the state, just because of the referenda and initiatives you’d have to decide on. Pretty much every general election you’d find something to do with legalizing marijuana or cracking down on prisons.

Virginia? Snore…

Anyhow, what drew me out yesterday was Proposition 29, a measure to add $1 in tax per pack of cigarettes, to go into a special fund for cancer research. I don’t have much of an opinion on the cancer research, but California has one of the lowest tax imposts on cigarettes, and I think it should be raised. Also, the anti-29 ads funded by Big Tobacco, pissed me off.

We’re still waiting to hear the outcome on that one.

But here’s what struck me: the signs directing me to the polling place were in English, Chinese, Japanese, Korean Hindi, Khmer, Spanish, Tagalog, Thai and Vietnamese. I could have had a ballot in English, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Spanish, Tagalog or Vietnamese.

How do you ever get people to come together when there’s no common ground of language? If there is a common ground, what are we doing printing voting materials—the basic building blocks of our democracy—in seven languages?

Sic transit Venus

We go from one queen to another this week: today you may get a chance to view a celestial phenomenon called the Transit of Venus.

That’s when the planet Venus comes between us & the sun. Evidently not quite the experience of an eclipse, but still…

You’ll want to make the effort to see it, because it won’t come around again on the guitar until 2117. If you’re in the lower 48, it should start around 1800 EDT/1500 PDT. I’m going to try to get out to see it, although wouldn’t you know that—while we go for weeks & weeks without a cloud—it’s probably going to be overcast in the Silicon Valley.

Naturally, you shouldn’t be daft enough to stare directly into the sun. Here’s a trick that a manager of mine in the UK taught me for an eclipse that occurred while I was there: put out a white bowl of water, & you can see the shadow in it. 

It went down a treat for the eclipse; don’t know if it’ll work for this little dot-in-the-sun thing. But it's worth a try.

Ring in the jubilee

Queen Elizabeth II is marking her Diamond Jubilee—60 years on the throne of Great Britain. You can find all sorts of stories about the national celebrations—royal progress down the Thames in a barge, street parties, etc.

But something that is innately British, which will be an integral part of the celebrations this week, is the full peal. Churches throughout Britain (and maybe the Commonwealth) will be ringing full peals in honor of the Queen’s reign.

If you’ve watched any royal wedding, you’ll have caught a bit of change ringing—elaborate patterns of ringing multiple tuned bells in church towers. A full peal lasts for more than three hours.

I know a bit about this because I’ve read Nine Tailors, by Dorothy L. Sayers—a classic Lord Peter Wimsey mystery that revolves around change ringing. But also because a friend of mine has been a ringer since childhood. She’s tower captain (I think) for Holy Trinity Church in Cookham, and I’ve actually had the pleasure of watching her band ring in the tower.

(She also rings for Boyne Hill in Maidenhead, and I’ve watched her ring there, too.)

It’s a fascinating endeavor,and it’s kind of amazing to think that people in towers that are centuries old are ringing their bells for Her Majesty.

But beyond that, I was quite interested to find that the bell foundry that was commissioned to cast the eight bells that accompanied the Queen on her Thames progress yesterday (as well as a bell for the Olympics this summer) is the very same that refurbished Holy Trinity’s eight bells and cast two new ones a few years ago. My friend Marcia managed that whole process. I got her reports and felt I was involved in it kind of third-hand.

(Here's the ceremony with the bishop when the full ring of ten bells was installed.)

So I consider I have a connection (albeit tenuous) to the celebrations this week. Here's a cut from one of the peals, from Canterbury Cathedral:

(Marcia will choke when I mention this: but those fuzzy snake things that the ringers grip are actually called sallies. I'm the only one who calls them fuzzy snakes.)

And here's a clip of the Jubilee bells in action on the Thames:

I don't see the fuzzy snakes.