The task was to write anything about the topic "Cocktails & Dreams" for the November 3 meeting
October 28, 2010 Cocktails and dreams. © GregW
It wasn’t the question Geoff had expected.
Why don’t they have any clothes on, or Why are they white, or How come they look so sad, would all have been questions he could have sounded clever about.
They had been dawdling through the Herculaneum and Pompeii statues, him lost in the brilliance of the long dead craftsmen, her, a bored and ignored seven-and-three-quarters year-old niece picking at the frayed stitching of his trouser leg.
Kylie was the mostly likable result of his sister Cheryl’s misadventure in the Pacific Islands. Geoff had agreed to child-mind this afternoon to give her a bit of a break. Its what brothers do, so he had been informed.
The act of being tour guide for this button-nosed munchkin was not chosen as an interesting outing for the little lass, but as an opportunity for Geoff to tick this Leeds museum event off his must-do list before the rare marble figures left town on the rest of their national tour.
Geoff and Kylie were having a break, sitting on one of the padded benches the city had placed a bit away from the statues for comfortable observation and reflection. They both sat hunched a little, one sipping hot black coffee and the other sucking very hard at a blue slushy through a small straw, because the wide one with the scoop on the end was only for little kids.
Geoff knew which battles were best won and which were best left as a life lesson.
“Uncle Geoff?” she whispered,
“Yes?” he answered in a less hushed tone, taking another sip.
Kylie smiled and in a confident voice said “All of the boy’s pricks are broken off. Can we go and find them?”
A cloud of spat coffee preceded Geoff’s “WHAT?” , a word he immediately regretted uttering.
“I want to look for boy’s dicks!” she answered with glee having now gained Geoff’s full attention.
“Cucff, Ka, Gargh,” Geoff spluttered at her calmingly.
“Look for pricks, look for dicks” she was bouncing and singing as Geoff became suddenly aware of how popular this museum was.
“Kyles, sweetie, listen to me”
“Come on Uncle Geoff, lets look for the boy's willies” her strident voice piercing the space.
“They are not here sweetie.” Thinking on the run, he added “They are under hundreds of tons of volcanic ash on the other side of the world.” He hoped this information would give her pause for thought and give him a chance to think of a distraction.
“Oh” she said, the sing song gone from her tone but the dreaded kid question already forming on her lips
“Why?”
Geoff took a second to think, what he needed was a quick re-direction.
“Well, a long time ago" he started slowly, "before a big volcano exploded in Italy, people fought with each other and chased each other away from their homes. When the winners had chased all the people they didn’t like away, well, they didn’t want to see images of the losers everywhere, and sculptures are like pictures arn't they? So they broke off the noses, arms and things and pushed them over” He could see as he spoke she was losing interest.
Job done he thought, but at the same time doubting his sister's parenting.
They returned quietly to their slushy sucking and coffee sipping, although the latter was done with more care.
“But Uncle Geoff?”
“Yeees?”
“If the arms and noses have been stuck back on some girls, why haven’t the dicks been stuck back on the boys?”
“Because nobody could find any of them” was the best answer Geoff could come up with.
Of course he knew this wasn't going to be the end of it. Sure enough, for the rest of the afternoon Geoff endured a relentless toddler interrogation. He was quizzed on the number, the size, ball inclusion, and the frequency of willie smashing, with varying tones of fascination, at embarrassing volumes and in awkward public transport moments, all the way home to mummy.
“Thanks so much for giving me a break” smiled Cheryl as she gathered her progeny from Geoff at their doorstep.
“That's okay, and no, I won’t come in” added Geoff before the question was put. “I am totally buggered. I don’t know how you do it every day. Anyway, I'll see you next week at Dad’s.” he reached over and kissed her goodbye and tussled Kylie’s hair.
“By the way, if I was you I’d brush up on everything you know about the phalluses of statues” he grinned as he walked away down the front path.
Getting home an hour later it was a relief to kick off his shoes, grab a beer and throw himself at the sofa. The beer was a due reward and he kicked up the foot-rest, pulled out his phone and started to scroll through his messages. There was a raft of them and he set about sorting out the work enquiries from the face and tweet crap that he always meant to hide but never got round to.
His third beer opened and all the work emails and messages done, he noticed a vid file from an old Uni mate of his, Keith.
Keith was now a seismologist on the oil rigs and travelled a lot so they didn't keep in touch much but he had sent Geoff an Italian video news article.
“Bugger me, bugger me” was all Geoff could repeat time and time again as the video rolled showing divers off Palermo blowing the sand off hundreds and hundreds of broken off statue penises laying on the sea floor. Keith had annotated some wry comments but Geoff couldn’t believe the coincidence. “Bugger me” he heard himself repeating.
He went to play the vid again to convince himself he did see what he had seen but the door bell rang. Dropping his phone he stumbled to answer the hammering. He was concerned a little now, who pounded on a door like that ? He glanced through the glass and saw a UPS bloke standing with a digital signature box and a vacant look on his face. Oh yeah, UPS men pound on doors like that.
“Got a delivery for you...Sign here” Geoff looked and saw the screen indicating a delivery from Cheryl. Why would she have sent me something today? he was thinking as he awkwardly signed the little plastic screen..
“Okay, where do you want them?” the UPS bloke asked. As Geoff looked up he saw a tipper truck reversing up his drive and jacking it’s load to dump about two tonne of what looked for all the world like thousands of broken-off male genitals right at the front of his door. "STOP IT " he yelled and raced out to vainly grab at the tipping truck. He tripped and as hundreds of stone cocks started to fall on top of him he felt a stream of strangely cold urine run down his legs.
Adrenalin pumping he woke, jumped up and looked down at his trousers. His last beer had spilt in his lap, a puddle of foam rolling over the leather sofa.
Two stupid cock tales , of course it had to be a dream he thought as he grabbed the spilt can and went soggy-legged into the kitchen to get a cloth.
(geddit? cock tales....cocktails , and dreams......oh, never mind)
Friday, October 29, 2010
Thursday, October 14, 2010
Last note from England
September 20, 2010
Task, Write something to do with technology.
© GregW
One final note - For the Record.
Late summer of the year 2047or 49
Thanks for taking the time to read what I fear is the last note from England.
I do hope to be able to explain a few things about what has happened here over the last few years. I am sorry but I have no method of keeping count of the number of those years, a survival existence provides so few diary keeping opportunities. I do know it has been more than ten winter seasons but how many more I can’t say.
It has been some twenty five years since I have actually put any writing implement to paper in order to communicate. It is strange doing it for the first time in so long, especially here in the Data museum in the wasted ruins of the city that was once Leeds.
First, let me get the obvious out of the way, yes, my handwriting is terrible, close to illegible I grant you, and my spelling less than perfect, I am guessing my spelling is poor, I really don’t know after all this time. I only ask you to endure the process of reading it as I am trying to be as neat as possible and voice recognition printing is a thing of the distant past. Oh, would that those days could return.
You will see around you the glass encased examples of leading-edge technology up to and including the year 2035. I have managed to remove the accumulated dust and detritus off this particular cabinet so the latest and smallest mind chips and eye cameras can be viewed through the magnifying lenses.
I guess now I have mentioned these chips and cameras I can say that England was proudly at the cutting edge of this information capture and interface technology prior to ‘The Event’. By the year 2028 more than two thirds of the UK population had joined the BT rollout of proximity networking, all of us had had our mind chips and eye cameras implanted and the rapid decline of hand held communication devices was not lamented.
England was delighted to be finally at the global forefront of something.
Naturally there had been resistance to the technology from the fundamental religious countries like the United Continents of America, New Combined Europe and Pacific China.
They had joined their voices to decry it as, and I can quote from memory, “One more evil initiative of England’s drive towards the un-godding of the planet.”
My guess is that it was really more a human objection to the government networked components being inserted into its citizen’s heads. But personally, I really liked having 50 terabytes of memory and infinite image recognition implanted into my life. I suddenly knew everything I wanted to and I could see anything I wanted as long as I was in range of a network hub, and by 2025 prox networking had reached everywhere in the UK.
The downside was of course that other nations had patchy networks and smaller countries refused to install the costly technology. This meant not many UK residents wanted to travel anymore. Why bother, after all we could download the artworks and architecture, have the atmosphere of a place simulated, order the food and fashions and see the views anytime we wanted, while doing what ever we wanted.
But as you probably know, all that ability ended when the tiny little asteroid landed on Drax.
It was huge news on the day of course, the National Grid lost most of its northern power generation and all the region went into brown-out until the nuclear generators came on-line to catch the load. I do wonder at the billions of pounds we spent on wind generation as we knew that climate change would bring weather and wind speeds outside their operating range. The rotting towers continue to litter the countryside with falling blades. But,,, I digress,,, and I can little afford the time or energy.
Of course you, dear visitor, will know much more than I do about what happened in the rest of the world when it was discovered that the Drax meteorite had bought an electron stabilising virus to earth. As the virus spread so quickly through our national power grid what we saw here was the daily failing of power distribution. Before the communication networks collapsed altogether we did learn our whole country plus Ireland was being isolated from all global interaction as the virus was found electrically contagious.
I do understand therefore that power sharing with Europe had to be cut.
But communication links?
Did they ever prove the virus could be spread by wireless and optical links?
I do wonder if such total panic was the right response.
I mean when the power stopped here, the network stopped, the mind chips and eye cameras stopped, the transport and manufacturing stopped, everything here stopped.
Anyway, as you would know, England was isolated from all world communication and travel. As far as I know, the virus didn’t spread outside the UK. I am hoping the rest of the world continued to exist. There were early attempts by us to travel off shore by boat but as all marine electrical systems were affected, that only left dead reckoning and sail craft. I did hear rumors the first attempts to cross the channel were met by hostile fire and I never heard anything about later attempts. But to be honest with you, after the initial shock, my life was one of protecting my home and fighting off the neighbors who raided my vegetable patch and stole my hens.
Life here has been grim, and I would have presumed there are no witness records of this country’s demise. The young generations had never learned to write. I thought today I’d just have to pretend I was strong and make it through the ruins to this abandoned and forgotten Technology museum in the hope I could leave this one last letter from England.
I know it is a very poor final chapter to the accumulated works of the Great English poets, playwrights and academics, but it is sadly what we are left with.
Regrettably I will not be able to continue my report further as my ability is failing, I know not of what cause, but I do have sufficient energy just to seal this note to the display case and I intend to do that and lay here beneath it with some remaining vanity, hoping my body at least will escape the hungered ravages of the remaining starved population.
Task, Write something to do with technology.
© GregW
One final note - For the Record.
Late summer of the year 2047or 49
Thanks for taking the time to read what I fear is the last note from England.
I do hope to be able to explain a few things about what has happened here over the last few years. I am sorry but I have no method of keeping count of the number of those years, a survival existence provides so few diary keeping opportunities. I do know it has been more than ten winter seasons but how many more I can’t say.
It has been some twenty five years since I have actually put any writing implement to paper in order to communicate. It is strange doing it for the first time in so long, especially here in the Data museum in the wasted ruins of the city that was once Leeds.
First, let me get the obvious out of the way, yes, my handwriting is terrible, close to illegible I grant you, and my spelling less than perfect, I am guessing my spelling is poor, I really don’t know after all this time. I only ask you to endure the process of reading it as I am trying to be as neat as possible and voice recognition printing is a thing of the distant past. Oh, would that those days could return.
You will see around you the glass encased examples of leading-edge technology up to and including the year 2035. I have managed to remove the accumulated dust and detritus off this particular cabinet so the latest and smallest mind chips and eye cameras can be viewed through the magnifying lenses.
I guess now I have mentioned these chips and cameras I can say that England was proudly at the cutting edge of this information capture and interface technology prior to ‘The Event’. By the year 2028 more than two thirds of the UK population had joined the BT rollout of proximity networking, all of us had had our mind chips and eye cameras implanted and the rapid decline of hand held communication devices was not lamented.
England was delighted to be finally at the global forefront of something.
Naturally there had been resistance to the technology from the fundamental religious countries like the United Continents of America, New Combined Europe and Pacific China.
They had joined their voices to decry it as, and I can quote from memory, “One more evil initiative of England’s drive towards the un-godding of the planet.”
My guess is that it was really more a human objection to the government networked components being inserted into its citizen’s heads. But personally, I really liked having 50 terabytes of memory and infinite image recognition implanted into my life. I suddenly knew everything I wanted to and I could see anything I wanted as long as I was in range of a network hub, and by 2025 prox networking had reached everywhere in the UK.
The downside was of course that other nations had patchy networks and smaller countries refused to install the costly technology. This meant not many UK residents wanted to travel anymore. Why bother, after all we could download the artworks and architecture, have the atmosphere of a place simulated, order the food and fashions and see the views anytime we wanted, while doing what ever we wanted.
But as you probably know, all that ability ended when the tiny little asteroid landed on Drax.
It was huge news on the day of course, the National Grid lost most of its northern power generation and all the region went into brown-out until the nuclear generators came on-line to catch the load. I do wonder at the billions of pounds we spent on wind generation as we knew that climate change would bring weather and wind speeds outside their operating range. The rotting towers continue to litter the countryside with falling blades. But,,, I digress,,, and I can little afford the time or energy.
Of course you, dear visitor, will know much more than I do about what happened in the rest of the world when it was discovered that the Drax meteorite had bought an electron stabilising virus to earth. As the virus spread so quickly through our national power grid what we saw here was the daily failing of power distribution. Before the communication networks collapsed altogether we did learn our whole country plus Ireland was being isolated from all global interaction as the virus was found electrically contagious.
I do understand therefore that power sharing with Europe had to be cut.
But communication links?
Did they ever prove the virus could be spread by wireless and optical links?
I do wonder if such total panic was the right response.
I mean when the power stopped here, the network stopped, the mind chips and eye cameras stopped, the transport and manufacturing stopped, everything here stopped.
Anyway, as you would know, England was isolated from all world communication and travel. As far as I know, the virus didn’t spread outside the UK. I am hoping the rest of the world continued to exist. There were early attempts by us to travel off shore by boat but as all marine electrical systems were affected, that only left dead reckoning and sail craft. I did hear rumors the first attempts to cross the channel were met by hostile fire and I never heard anything about later attempts. But to be honest with you, after the initial shock, my life was one of protecting my home and fighting off the neighbors who raided my vegetable patch and stole my hens.
Life here has been grim, and I would have presumed there are no witness records of this country’s demise. The young generations had never learned to write. I thought today I’d just have to pretend I was strong and make it through the ruins to this abandoned and forgotten Technology museum in the hope I could leave this one last letter from England.
I know it is a very poor final chapter to the accumulated works of the Great English poets, playwrights and academics, but it is sadly what we are left with.
Regrettably I will not be able to continue my report further as my ability is failing, I know not of what cause, but I do have sufficient energy just to seal this note to the display case and I intend to do that and lay here beneath it with some remaining vanity, hoping my body at least will escape the hungered ravages of the remaining starved population.
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