Category: play

Polopolis

Far, far away from Velocester, if you take the road east from Spindlemarch (with thanks to and ), you come to…

Polopolis

The invisible city of Polopolis is half way, by most compasses, between here and Cathay. It has always been a place for meeting – cultures delicately touch one another there as the moon kisses the water on its river, known by the same name as the city’s marketplace, ‘Il Milione’. Leaders meet there, too, to discuss their affairs of state, knowing that this is a place of the moment and the record books will not judge them here – and that Il Milione will carry their words away if they regret them. So long are these moments that much of the city is populated by these leaders’ descendants.

There are no record books in Polopolis, then: all is talk, and all history is oral. History is made most intensely at Il Milione, the marketplace, where thousands gather every day to trade, negotiate, accuse, reconcile or befriend. There, over there, are lost twins reunited after years at the opposite edges of the city (there are no gates, of course), smiling to discover their wives and children have completely different names; to their right, a carpet maker shows off his craftsmanship, so finely woven in so many colours one cannot tell where each thread begins or ends.

Polopolis has three quarters, known as Niccolo, Maffeo and Marco, though no two estate agents can agree on where exactly their boundaries lie: that fine apartment building you see, with roof tiles the colour of the sky, is championed by one as being in ‘Maffeo borders’, and another ‘where Niccolo and Marco meet’.

Il Milione itself is not one broad channel, but an endless series of bifurcations and rejoinings, sometimes ducking under the houses and at others flaunting itself in ornamental lakes; everywhere there are bridges, and each has its resident mathematician, frowning the long weary hours away as she contemplates the shortest route from one place to another. “We both step and do not step in the same rivers” is the old philosopher’s inscription on the perfect masonry of the arch above the city hall.

I have been to Polopolis myself, and sometimes it feels as if I never left.

Posted on by Andrew Chapman 5

Labels

Hot on the heels of last week’s news about alcohol bearing health warning labels, I’ve come with a system for fast food.

Naturally, labelling is impractical because the packaging isn’t always suitable and is often (a) discarded (b) eaten in confusion or by preference to the moose meat beneath.

So, what we need to do is enforce name changes for the products themselves. Permit me to demonstrate:

– ‘a double cheeseburger and medium fries, please’ becomes ‘a double by-pass and medium angina, please’
– ‘would you like to go large?’ becomes ‘would you like to die young?’

and so on.

This system might well be then applied to cigarettes, too: ‘a packet of Mild Emphysema’, say.

Alcohol is more tricky. Ideally, for example, ‘cider’ would become ‘Students’ Blood’, ‘Fosters’ – ‘Vomit’, ‘Old Peculiar’ – ‘Beardy Huge-Gut’, or some such. The trouble is, these all sound like real ales anyway.

Right, I really must log off the SadDweebyBastard and get on with some work.

Posted on by Andrew Chapman 1

Move over Dave Gorman

I regret to say that I can’t quite recall what started this. (That’s a lie: it was listening to Marty Feldman’s ‘whack’ song again, and then giving it an exciting canardine twist.)

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you: the Google Quack Count. Thus, in terms of numbers of results:

quack = 424,000
quack quack = 220,000
quack quack quack = 225,000 (er, eh?)
quack quack quack quack = 217,000
quack quack quack quack quack = 217,000
quack quack quack quack quack quack = 217,000
quack quack quack quack quack quack quack = 221,000 (huh?)
quack quack quack quack quack quack quack quack = 221,000
quack quack quack quack quack quack quack quack quack = 220,000
quack quack quack quack quack quack quack quack quack quack = 217,000

Alas, Google is limited to 10 elements in the search, so that’s all you can have. So we can’t, er, work out how many quacks it takes to googlewhack. Ahem.

(I think the weird periodicity here may be something to do with the ‘Google dance’ – different Google servers give slightly different results when you access them; and I suppose it suggests anything more than two repetitions is treated as exactly two.)

It’s very gratifying to see the top line in the results of the last one in the list above:

“News results for quack quack quack quack quack quack quack quack quack quack – View today’s top stories”

Click on the link, and it then says:

“Did you mean: quack duck quack duck quack duck quack duck quack quack”

Glorious.

OK, we need to get serious about this. If we want to see the Law of Quack Quotients in play, we’ll have to use quote marks. Thus:

“quack” = 424,000
“quack quack” = 33,000
“quack quack quack” = 7.970
“quack quack quack quack” = 2,170
“quack quack quack quack quack” = 679
“quack quack quack quack quack quack = 1030 (bit of a popular classic, this one, clearly)
“quack quack quack quack quack quack quack” = 607
“quack quack quack quack quack quack quack quack” = 357 (5th hit is ‘I like ducks’*)
“quack quack quack quack quack quack quack quack quack” = 298
“quack quack quack quack quack quack quack quack quack quack” = 246

There does rather seem to be an almost inexhaustible supply of quacks. The top hit in the last in the list, in fact, boasts 504 quacks – it’s at http://www.catharsis.org/index.php?mode=show&section=quack

I’m sure you’ll find it helpful to see the Quack Quotient illustrated graphically:

The second hit from the 10-quack search – known hereafter as q(10) – is here, showing that the webquack is clearly in common currency.

I say ‘hereafter’ – but of course, I must lie down now.

(PS. If you extend ‘quack’ to ‘quaack’ and so on, you do eventually get to just 1 hit: from ‘quaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaack’, in faaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaact. Rather alarmingly, the title of this hit is ‘And you wonder why me and Helen are mad’.)

Posted on by Andrew Chapman 9

Feeling NUM

Further to comments on ‘s LJ, this has got me thinking. Y’see, the beauty, if there is any, in society is that there’s not only a breadth of jobs that need doing, but also a breadth of people willing to do them. Somehow it generally seems to pan out that roughly enough people want to be doctors or firemen or shopkeepers or whatever (yeah, yeah, I know I’m ignoring the whole ‘nobody actually *wants* to clean toilets’ underclass – but what’s the point of writing nonsense if you can’t be blithe and elitist about it?), and so the world turns.

It’s clear, too, that people have different dispositions, whether bookish, fey, stultifying or protuberant, and there’s a reasonably constant level of murderous sentiment in the human populace down the ages. So let’s harness this energy, brothers and sisters, and make something good from it. No, not another raffia basket, but a National Union of Murderers. Let’s just be honest: some people are baaaad. Let’s use bad for good and harness them to kill people we *want* killed – we’d be happy, and they’d feel fulfilled.

I just want to make a better world, you know.

Posted on by Andrew Chapman 3

Iraqi’s pyramid conceals a challenge

Now, *that* was a good weekend.

Part one was the Bristol Beer Festival: notable for large numbers of inevitably rotund beardies and almost no women, except on our table, which was spectacularly even on the gender lines. Much haziness of consciousness, many things called ‘Old Morocco’ (my favourite) and the like, including a *bright green* beer called ‘A Sign of Spring’ – what ho, , , and many splendid others for being there too. Was disappointed that Russian Imperial Stoat had sold out – only to discover in Part Two today that it’s brewed a coupla miles form where I live and is in my favourite local pub. Mmm, beer – and jolly home-made pizza fun at home with six of us afterwards.

Part two failed to follow King Alfred (he was busy cooking), but did involve a pleasant walk, albeit to a shut pub, hence the now traditional ensuing voyage to the home of the Stoat. Walk notable for two incidents in particular:

1. (The Scene: A parked car along a narrow lane contains about 5 Jack Russells barking their heads off.)
HATMANDU: ‘Barky barky barky bark bark.’
A VOICE: ‘Barky barky bark.’

The voice turned out to belong to a middle aged woman rootling around in a hedgerow, who said this with her back still turned to us. At last: an intelligent conversation with a local.

2. We were sunning our four happy, idling selves by the river, playing (1,3)* and generally lazing about in the remarkable warmth, when something off floated towards us. It gradually appeared to be a plank of wood. Fair enough: we’d just been playing pooh sticks, so maybe a competitive villager had decided to pull rank. But no: said plank (not the villager) was inscribed with things such as: ‘SELF PITY’, ‘DOUBT’, ‘FEAR’, ‘LACK OF CONFIDENCE’ and the like – clearly someone has been reading a self-help cognitive therapy book and has let their worries float down the river. While we watched, a brief hailstorm came down, then stopped as soon as we moved on. The plank got stuck in some weeds, so I freed it back into the main current – I hope it works, dammit.

But I do have really bad asthma at the moment, both of my parents are ill, and This Is Tiresome.

Tra la.

*(1,3) – this (copyright ME) is a version of I Spy where you have to come up with a spur-of-the-moment cryptic crossword clue for something in your purview. For example: ‘French bank right between two banks’ for ‘river’ – yes, yes, they don’t have to be very good.

Posted on by Andrew Chapman

More of that nonsense *just in*

Hey, the police have come up with a great new idea. I’m all for it. You see, there’s an enormous amount of crime going on all over the place, and it’s simply a waste of VALUABLE PUBLIC RESOURCES to go round catching the people who actually perpetrated it. So, under a new scheme FUNDED BY AN INSTITUTE, the police are now going to capture (with a large net, I believe) exactly the right number of people, but randomly selected from people at large. Not only will this send their success rates rocketing up to 100%, but it will of course act as a spiffy deterrent. Although criminals might initially be tempted to capitalise upon this opportunity to do bad things and let other people take the rap, SOCIETY AT LARGE will realise that the more crime there is, the more of society will be locked up, and gradually the rates will fall.

(Actually, the POWERS THAT BE could also run a new lottery system based on all this: buy a ticket with someon’es name on it and if they get captured, you win a prize, related to the number of years in prison they have been selected to undertake. But that’s just my humble contribution.)

Posted on by Andrew Chapman 6