We’re totally restructuring the site.  But at the same time we’re updating with the odd post.  We plan to have the whole thing together the last week of June or the first week of July.  Thanks for your patience.

Born in Shanghai in 1930 James Graham Ballard lived the life of a rich expat’s son until the Japanese invaded 1941. He lived in an internment camp for three years. He told fellow writer, Ian Sinclair, that he spent the first twenty years trying to forget the experience and the next twenty years trying to remember.

His recollections resulted in the remarkable work, Empire of the Sun, which describes the war from a child’s point of view. This book was highly respected and as a result he was recognised as a leading writer in mainstream fiction. The book was turned into and interesting film by Steven Spielberg.

However, his main work was as a writer of generally disturbing science fiction. His second novel,
The Drowned World about people living in skyscrapers in a flooded world, establishing Ballard as a notable figure in the fledgling New Wave movement.

There followed a number of novels all predicting disaster, including the novel  The Burning World; and a world being destroyed by crystals in The Crystal World.

The death of his wife in 1964 intensified Ballard’s dark writing. His collection of disturbing short stories, with titles such as ‘Plans for the Assassination of Jacqueline Kennedy’, ‘Love and Napalm: Export USA’ and ‘Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan’ meant the book,The Atrocity Exhibition, was very controversial and illustrated Ballard’s growing obsession of the growing fragmented society. The book established him as a literary writer.

The Atrocity Exhibition and Crash, about a group of people who get sexual pleasure from car crashes caused quite a media and political storm.

His later work, such as Super-Cannes, about a group of of workers, who have affluent lives go out to fight and kill to alleviate their boredom; High-rise, about the affluent inhabitants of a luxury block of flats gradually descend into groups attacking enemy floors; Concrete Island, about a man crashing on a gigantic motorway exchange and being trapped on a virtual concrete island, unable to cross the motorway traffic.

All in all a great, if pessimistic writer.

He is well respected today with most of his novels high up in the Amazon sales list.

Links
Daily Telegraph Obituary
Wikipedia
BBC Obituary
Google list of blogs writing an obituary
Amazon: List of J G Ballard Books

The Wire has started me talking differerently.

‘Yo honkey’ to white friends.

Matercopulater means person – can be acknowledgement or hostile.

me motor – father’s car
G&T – mind altering drugs
me posse – the boys down at the cricket club.
cool – mother has switched on the air conditioning

No Street cred but Culde cred (as in cul de sac)

Two of the four cows outside the Hampton Hill Farmer’s Market.

Had a cup of tea and a lovely cake at the excellent cafe they have there.

The market has a really good variety of foods, including a baker, fish monger, butcher, wine seller and a cheese bar. They have of course a great variety of organic fruit and vegetables.

I’ve probably been watching too much TV, but when I saw this van and noted that it worked for Rentokil, the UK’s biggest disposer of mice, rats, cockroaches and other nasties, then my first thought was that they must be rented out to kill, well the wives and girlfriends of men with a problem.

I assume that this is not the case.

Damian McBride, media controller, for Gordon Brown has had to resign as he wrote a number of emails, suggesting slurs on prominent Tories, for a proposed political blog called Red Rag. This was to counter the right wing blog, Guido Fawkes, which consistently attacked Gordon Brown and the govenment.

Unfortunately, copies of the emails ended up at Guidos. These were then passed on the newspapers and the resulting scandal looks like putting the final nail in the coffin ending Godon Brown’s chances of winning the next election.

The emails were sent in January this year. They were nasty, suggesting sexual deviation and attacked a number of prominent Tories. However these suggestions were never followed through.

In one sense this is very trivial as I know in the past I have entertained very nasty thoughts of managers I have worked with. Though fortunately these were stated over a beer, many beers, not in text and in those days no one had a phone that could record what we were saying.

Guido and the Tories have a strategy of using the ‘dog whistle‘ tactic. Every day, every week, every month put out bad info about your target. Get a negative twist on anything they say, or do, or don’t do.

It worked Labour panicked. Instead of trying to aim body political blows on Cameron and his cronies on policy, or their ‘achievements’, such as an ‘improved rail service’ run of capitalist lines, Draper and McBride speculated on fighting in Guido territory setting up the Red Rag blog. Once the news broke the Tories played their cards marvellously.

Indignation, threats of legal action, heavyweights in every radio and TV station. Why was Gordon smearing them when he should be worrying about the economy?

Then the pressure for Gordon to apologise. If he did he was obviously involved. If he didn’t he was obviously not in control of his office.

(Apparently this was more important then sorting out the economy or they would have let Gordon get on with it.)

Then there is the question of how did the emails get leaked.

Did Guido have them for a long time and then decide to release them at an opportune time? I doubt it.

Has Draper’s emails been hacked? By right wing groups or out of control secret service personnel? Possibly?

Or did someone of the Blairite tendency leak them? Stronger possibility.

What is clear is that the Labour Party machine has lost its ability to deal with media problems.

The obvious strategy for Gordon Brown, when asked for an apology was a two word reply. The second word being ‘OFF’

The government is doing all it can to destroy life long learning in Britain. They are now taking mega-millions from universities from students who want to retrain or change career and older people wanting to broaden their mind.

The government has made as a priority the education of all young people. In theory this looks goods.

However, bear in mind that the average Education Minister is only in post for around 18 months. This means that they have only a short time to develop initiatives before they go on to the next job. It is also a job that makes it easy to get headlines.

So they are doing that by having one initiative after another. Ed Balls, the current minister, is using his position to promote himself to become leader of the Labour Party, (allegedly, we have to say in the UK to avoid being sued). One of the most annoying is the payment of £40 per week to some 16 and 17 year olds. It is targeted on youngsters who would not normally attend college, that is those with poor qualifications. Consequently there is now much more disruption in theses calsses.

To pay for these initiatives the government has being running down adult education. In my local centre around twelve of fifty employees were made redundant. Around 25% of the courses were cut and the fees went up.

At the same time the centre was having to recruit 16-19 year olds on courses, such as Access, (training for university entrance), where previously all the students on the course had to be over 21. So a centre that was for adults now has groups of displace young people, who have not managed to stay on at school or get a place in one of the numerous, local colleges, with numerous courses aimed at this age group. It is now not pleasant being in the centre in the daytime. Last time I was there a group were having a discussion, at shouting level, on farting. This will drive away the majority of adults.

It has been estimated, by the government, that around half a million place will be lost for adults. The current figure is at least a million and each year the situation gets worse.

Adult education serves a number of useful purposes including

• helping people train for jobs
• helps people retrain for different careers
• boosts women returners
• helps people, such as the unemployed, avoid social isolation
• helps people with depression 
• gives older people an interest

In a lot of these cases the government subisdy is refunded in improved job prospects, leading to a better salary, therefore more taxes paid, and the economy being stimulated.  

It also helps get the unemployed and those on health benefits to build the confidence to return to work, which cuts down the level of social benefits being paid out.  

Education also helps the isolated and the depressed, which in turn means less social support and I suspect less health problems.  

 The government, the civil servants are really short sighted in taking away money from adult education to fund what will be short term projects.

I visited the Nation Trust property Claremont. Just west of London.

The black swans were swimming quite close to the side of the lake.

Also spring is definitely in the air. The smell of the foliage after a couple of days of rain was really strong. It felt great to be alive.

The whole place is becoming green. Even the hedge, that looked as if it had died, going up to the the folly showed signs of revival.

The sign about where the toilets is headed ‘For Your Convenience’. I will send it to Private Eye.

Traffic was quite bad coming home. I think there’s rugby at Twickenham and so we got stuck in their jam.

Was annoyed as two cars aggressively blocked a poor learner driver trying to move into the centre lane.

You can freely download books from Mark Twain, Charles Dickens, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Jules Verne, Kafka, Tolstoy, Jane Austin, Oscar Wilde, Victor Hugo and thousands more from Project Gutenberg. In addition you can also download a wide variety of non-fiction including seminal books on History, Mathematics, Architecture, Sex, Business as well as most of the Greek and Roman classics.

Project Gutenberg is the world’s first and largest single collection of free electronic books.  It was founded in 1971 by Michael Hart, who given a large amount of free computing time, decided to use the computing power to store the text of books that were out of copyright.  Effectively Michael’s Etext is the forerunner of computing ebooks.  It was decided  that the books were to be stored in Plain Vanilla ASCII, (American Standard Code for Information Interchange), a format which meant that the books could be read on virtually any computer in existence.

The project has gone from strength to strength and now stores over 28,000 books itself and over 100,000 free books in related projects.  The philosphy of  Gutenberg is simply:

• should cost so little that no one will really care how much they cost
• should so easily used that no one should ever have to care about how to use, read, quote and search them

The aim is to eventually convert  a high proportion of out of copyright books to be stored for free access.

The front page on all the Gutenberg books states: “This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org.”

Users therefore have the right to read the books, modify the text, to convert the books to other formats and they can also republish and sell the books. In fact many of the publishers selling series of books, both in print and in ebook form, of literature, business and classics originate from Gutenberg. List of available books.

Most of the work in the project is done by volunteers from proof reading, identifying books out of copyright, burning CDs and DVDs and fund raising. Distributed Proof Readers checking one page at a time are particularly useful.

What’s my name going to be?
The Seventh Sanctum is a brilliant site. OK I’ll say it again the Seventh Sanctum is a brilliant site: for writers wanting to generate a new character name, generate a new character with distinctive traits or generate a new setting.

Ah I see your getting the message. Yes all this site does is generate. But when this site generates – it generates well. In all there are fifteen different generator categories, with well over fifty different generators. These range from obvious, such as name generators, to the unusual, such as the Science Fiction Government Generator or the Wacky Gadget Generator.

The site has been developed by the very admirable Steven Savage. He is clearly a serious gamer as many of the generators are clearly fantasy orientated. So in his section Darkness and Evil we have a Dark Elf Namer, the Evil Animal Minion Generator, an Evil Deity Generator and a Dark Ritual Generator.

The majority of generators give the option of one answer, five answers, ten answers and more.

All are easy to use. As an example the Quick Name Generator demonstrates.

Results from the Science Fiction Government Generator
Confederacy of Constellations
Economic Brotherhood of Worlds
Government of Territories
Royal Monarchy of Stars
State of Planets

Results from Wacky Gadget Generator
Electromagnetic Joker-o-meter
Gyroscopic Knitting Electrochip
Iso 900-compliant Bullet Expresso
Irritant Internet-enabled Rhymer
Modified Computop-hat

Word of Warning
This site is highly addictive. Use it only when necessary or as a reward for writing your daily quota.

Develop your own generator
In the library Steven has very generously left the framework for writing your own generator. His most recent work is in php and anyone with a little programming skill could quickly generate their own generating engine.