Clusterbook #1

Clusterbook #1 from Lucy Foley on Vimeo.

This is a project I have going on over at my other home, Clusterflock, where I have made a bookclub, and the first book we are discussing is one written by another of our tribe, Daryl Scroggins. A bunch of us have read it, talked about it, and are now opening the floor to anyone who has read it and wants to talk about it, to come and talk about it some more in the comments area.

We're going to make the post a feature on sunday, so if you have read Daryl Scroggins' book This Is Not The Way We Came In, then you might want to come on over and chat on sunday. We'd be delighted to have you.

Boney M, Belfast

This song was roaring through the charts at the brutal height of the troubles in Northern Ireland, by a band originally from Monsterrat and Jamaica, who were then based in West Germany. It would be easy to wonder how this didn't actually end the troubles once and for all in a rainbow coalition of glitter and sequins, but really, the mind boggles at how a 15 year old living on either side of the Peace Line would have processed the information on their tellies, watching this video in Belfast in 1977.

And weird too, because this band came from West Germany, which had its own Wall at the time. I suppose it was easier for them to sing about Belfast than Berlin, but only goes to show that disco and raw politics don't blend incredibly well. I do think they meant well and their outfits - not to mention lipgloss - are fucking incredible.

The song was originally called "Londonderry". I guess they chose "Belfast" because it was less partisan, but you know, Londonderry probably had more of a ring to it, rhyming wise.

Wombat: a journey

I have just heard about a creature in Australia that would appear to be currently extinct (ahem) known as (ahem) the prodigiously girthed mega-wombat.

I am googling the mega wombat and finding 26 year old Seattle men. However, apparently there are models of the mega wombat in Sydney N.H. Museum. Here you can find a picture of the head of a common wombat. This is what the common wombat does when it is cranky, apparently. It would be hard to be aggravated by this, I think.

If you scroll down to the second item on this page, you will find a cute picture of wombat-human love, and also a story of a WOMBAT THE SIZE OF A CAR WHAT LIVED A LONG TIME AGO.

This is an artist's impression of a female mega wombat and her young, which is not cute but truly, awesome.

I don't know what you think about this, but I find it kind of mixed message, frankly. Many layered. Please don't get mixed up and barbecue your wombat.

Alright, it's time for you to meet Jody, the cutest thing that ever lived. Check her out scratching at the end. I try to keep this blog clear of excessive cute, but you know, when you do it, you've got to do it right.

Eamon

There is another reason for turning the volume down on one of your facebook friends. It is because their status updates and comments and links and posts drive you crazy and you don't understand it but they make you feel tired, just to read them.

One such is a man I met in a garden in New York, on my last day in the city in 2003, until I returned almost four years later. He turned out to be my third cousin. Pretty remarkably closely related, his father and my grandmother were first cousins. This kind of detail matters to me, a lot. I have found a long-lost cousin in remarkable circumstances, in every place I have lived in, now.

My cousin in Denmark I had not met since we were both 2, in Limerick. I met him again when I performed at an arts festival in Denmark. As I left the stage, and the venue, he came running after me, shouting, "Lucy come back! It's your cousin, Brian!" He said I hadn't changed much since I was 2. He recognised me. Fucking Nora (Nora was the name of a grandaunt to both of us).

And this one in New York, we met in a garden, as I said, in the east village. He started talking to me, asking about where in Ireland I was from. His surname and my grandmother's were the same, and they came from the same place. That was an epiphany, a kinship made in the city, a sign to return. I have made some overtures toward contact, facebook being one of them. But he doesn't seem able to say hello. It is easier, I suppose, to click 'confirm' on a friend request in your inbox, from the safety of the distance of your familiar computer, than to meet the unknown yet blood related, in another human being.

He is a rocknroll musician and I think he is probably very lonely.

This is a video of a fox who has clearly fallen in love with this trampoline

There's been some talk of animals on trampolines lately over on my other home, clusterflock, which sent me in search of this. I think you will understand it was worth the quest.

We come in peace

Michael Bosanko's light paintings.

Bosanko is a photographer who uses long exposures, coloured torches and deserted landscapes to literally paint with light, on his Canon digital. It's great to see something made with the potential of all those squiggly lined images you invariably get when you shoot flashless at night, especially with digital.

The Facebook Post

I'm up to 15 people I've turned the volume down on, but do not want to unfriend, on facebook. I've muted them for different reasons. Some because I think it's just plain weird to be getting daily feeds about banalities from lives of people I don't know very well/am not hugely interested in, but there are also some I've detuned because they endlessly post soppy/sentimental status messages, and there are a couple of people I have initiated some kind of direct communication with, who haven't responded, so it seems weird to keep hearing about them in an exclusively passive way.

Kind of like that friend you had once with whom you used to have Very Long Phonecalls, where they talked Endlessly about their personal life, family, thoughts, random passing bullshit, and never really thought to ask you how you were, or allow any space between the inhalations to listen. But the cutesy messages probably bother me more. You know? It's like living in a world where people are really really tired all the time, but they think that if they are 'positive' about everything, that some of the bad shit will go away. I can't dig it.

And then there are the people who treat facebook like it is their personal sitcom and everybody is there to be their canned laughter. That's alright though, I mean facebook is not exactly Tolstoy.

I've only ever unfriended one person on facebook, in the 10 months I've had a profile on it. That was a dude who was always acting out his relationship on facebook. You know the sort of thing? Like the whole relationship was this fantasic fantasy of amazingness that had to be validated and posted about in a plethora of ways, daily. Mwa mwa my gorgeous darling girlfriend who I love love love mwa mwa so much every day I see you I think how gorgeous you are and you are the light of my life kind of thing. Nasty. I tried turning the volume down on him, but he still showed up in my feed. It was just a drag. It's also a lot to do with how many people you've friended. The fewer, the more they feature individually. You can also turn volume up on people. I haven't done that yet.

But the main thing about facebook is my vibe with it. I just can't seem to get enthusiastic about their status messages, which is reasonable enough when you get even slightly meta about it, but you know, I seem happy to ramble on on Twitter when the mood takes me. See, the thing is that the mood does take me on Twitter. It's just more of a conversation, an interaction. It's actually moderately interesting, sometimes. Though I'm still in Twitter for the potential rather than the actual yet, and I've been tweeting for a year now. But it's more chilled, more fun, less shouty.

But let's be honest. The whole thing is, of course, a load of bollocks.

Female title options in London

I bought some tickets for various shows in London a couple of weeks ago, and they all had a variety of interesting title options, you know, the mr/mrs/miss genre of name prefixes, but this list from the ENO (the opera) set my imagination on fire a bit.

Tickets for the Very Reverend Lucytakesoff, please.

Mushroom Love

More pics on the theme of kissing. It was a photo competition at the guardian, and as usual they picked the predictable cliche as the winner. I think this one should have won. It's the most fun of the bunch, but these mushrooms made my heart sing.

Falling in love at 76 and 77

A brief story of two people who found love together late in life.

Within a week he made the 245-mile round trip from his home in Perth up to me in the Highlands for our first date. He's such a romantic that he'd arranged for a big bouquet of flowers to arrive before him. When I saw him I felt I'd known him all my life. He had lost an eye and part of his leg in the Korean war, but he's a fine man. Instead, I was worried he wouldn't find me attractive. As soon as I opened the door to him, I said, "If you don't like me, I'd rather you just said so now and turned away", but he didn't. As we talked, we knew we were meant for each other.

Stuart's very different from my first husband - he's half bald, but he reminds me that he once was a young thing with a full head of hair. It's strange looking at pictures of each other when we were younger. We wish we'd met earlier, but at least we've met each other now.

It is Valentine's day

and I have been wombatted. Also, dogloved. Oh. ♥

Tar on a wet path

Kiss The Frog Only If You Really Mean It

An article about the science and alchemy of kissing:

In a recent study, Fisher's team used a medical scanning technique called functional magnetic resonance imaging to scan the brains of 49 men and women who said they were deeply in love. Of the volunteers, 17 had just fallen in love, 15 had been rejected and 17 said they were still in love after an average of 21 years of marriage. They concluded that romantic love can become long-term "if you kiss the right person", Fisher said.

A London Quintet

Hey baby, let's devolve together

Lucy, half a million years ago. Go on, you'd have wanted to evolve with me, wouldn't you?

This is a variation on the high school prom picture site that was doing the rounds 6 months ago. It's quite fun. You upload a photo of yourself, and watch yourself devolve (using a somewhat primitive reimaging system but it's fun enough for your next five minutes) and find out how you looked up to 3.7 million years ago. Funnily enough, the 500,000 year old species that was used to inspire the above photo was found in Heidelberg, Germany, which is the native home of Oliver, my friend the species historian, whose specialism is the homos throughout time. His facebook profile image features him holding a skull of a pre-homo sapiens human from a Long Time Ago.

Happy 200th Birthday, Charles Darwin!

Advice of the day

Lucy and Tar: a selves-portrait

We talk to ourselves in public

I do, do you? I talk to myself much as I talk to a lover or sister or close friend, about the issues of the day. I've always done it, since earliest childhood. I had my first imaginary friend at 2, her name was Ebony and she was black. In fact, I think she was the only black girl in all of Ireland at the time, imaginary or not. I had various imaginary and living human friends throughout my childhood at different times. But through the whole time, and still, I have always talked to myself. I would be talking to myself now if I wasn't writing this. Though I often talk to myself while I am writing. I break off to talk to myself. It is something very deep in me. Like a cup of tea. Deeper. It is an intimacy, a confidence, a trust, a fun thing. I tell myself jokes and jive, and I think over Difficult Subjects, and I consider out loud the ideas and inspirations that come. And when I get a song in the middle of the night, like I did last night, I sing it out loud.

I am aware that I am probably viewed very differently to an older person, when I walk along the street, yapping away. I suppose there is nothing to be done about that, except to enjoy it while I'm young. I love the fact that I don't really care about how I am perceived, though sometimes it feels like a kind of intrusion.

Do you do this too? Does any of this sound familiar to you? I would LOVE to hear from you. I mean, it's not something that would be meaningful really in itself, to have a roomful of people who talk to themselves out loud in public and private and anywhere they feel like it, because we'd most likely get on with talking to each other. But you know, there would be a kind of kinship.

The murder of Timmy Tiptoes so that Squirrel Nutkin can live off the fat of the land.

They're killing grey squirrels in southern Scotland, and they think they can soften the reality of it by changing a vowel and using an alternate consonant. They call it a 'cull'. It is an effort to increase the red squirrel population in the area. The grey squirrels apparently carry some kind of squirrelpox virus, which has no effect on them but kills off red squirrels.

Naturalists and landowners are joining forces today in a drive to effectively wipe out the grey squirrel from northern Scotland. It is believed to be the largest cull of a mammal yet seen in the UK, with many tens of thousands of grey squirrels expected to be trapped and killed under the government-sponsored project and shot on sight, legally, by landowners.

I was followed around Kew Gardens in London for a whole day by a pair of red squirrels. It was my birthday and I spent it jiving with some squirrels, feeding them brazil nuts, until we met a peacock who felt he deserved them better. He didn't get any. His wife snatched my last brazil nut out of my hand and swallowed it down while I learned something about practicality and the distractions of prettiness. I also got a very sore thumb from chipping at the nuts with my thumbnail. Brazil nuts are hard.

I think it is a terrible pity that humans are intervening in the natural wild profligacy of our friend, personally known to me as the Brooklyn Squirrel. I wonder if Tate and Thea have heard about this? They live in London now. They would HAPPILY make the journey north to help in any way they could to save the noble red squirrels from the pestilent grey one. Um, and then they will HAPPILY eat the red one too, because, uh, you never know.

But really, what are they using: baseball bats? Is this like a baby seal thing? I hear there's a shoot on sight policy. Shooting squirrels? Don't they see how this will be hijacked as a license to vent violent energies without fear of chastisement? Is this why they are really doing it?

And what will be done with the meat?

Stoatdancing

This is being framed in a "When Good Stoats Go Bad" kind of way, but to me it looks like a slinky creature having fun in the snow. Pity I can't embed it, BBC also uploaded it to youtube but disabled embedding, even though they put their logo all over the video.

Apparently the chica can go like this for 15 minutes at a time.

I saw a fox behaving in like manner on Tuesday night in Camden town, London, on Mornington Street, by the bridge. She ducked into a garden when she felt herself being looked at. The second fox I saw in London. The first was on Monday night, sniffing around for food and exploring the snow, in the garden of the house I was staying in, also in Camden.

Um, did you get the Simple Minds reference in the title? Now look again.