things move around

While Lucretius was right about some things:

• Atoms are in constant motion (2.62)
• There are other worlds than Earth (2.1048)
• Centaurs never existed (5.878)
• Thunder comes after lightning because sound is slower than light (6.164)

…and wrong about others:

• Atoms move faster than light (2.142)
• Images are caused by films thrown off from the surface of things (4.26)
• Erotic movements are undesirable for women (4.1263)
• The moon and sun as perceived by us are actual size (5.564)

…he was spot on about one thing in particular:

• tantum religio potuit suadere malorum (1.101)

Actually I still think centaurs might have existed.

It won’t be the Olympics without the Bulagrian weightlifting team. Every four years I scour the schedules specifically to see them in action - especially the women - so this news makes me very sad. As is the Bulgarian Weightlifting Federation:

“The work has become meaningless and the tears that were to be shed in front of the national flag are replaced by tears of helplessness.”

I spent Saturday out of doors, labouring - not in the giving birth sense of the word, but in the horny-handed son of toil, labor omnia vincit sense. Although my labour wasn’t especially hard, it was sufficient to inflict an assortment of aches on my thumbs, shoulders and my left flank, close to where my kidney supposedly is. I’m not into DIY, but I don’t mind getting stuck in with honking great prybars, hefting timber, creosoting, things of that nature. I agree with whoever it was that said every creative act is first an act of destruction, although that sounds a little bit marxist. Ah, it was Picasso. I’d like to see him wielding a six-foot prybar, fuelled by sausages and cider.

I’ve chosen my top 10 quotations of Leif Segerstam:

• Was this a conspiration to read my beat?
• Just play in your box until you come to the climax… so that we hear the clappering.
• The winds can rehearse the length of the teedle-eedle-boom.
• Something is satelliting out of the control of the beated music.
• How about talking about the spot where someone composes the registration number of his car.
• Tonnmeister, are you heavy enough in the Glockenbox?
• The non-metric pulsator on the podium.
• Use parabolic crescendi… they are more animalic.
• We get a plankton plasmatic flimmer.
• We still have a pleep.

What are your favourites?

Dialogue can be delightful if dramatically or comically stylized or artistically blended with descriptive prose; in other words, if it is a feature of style and structure in a given work. If not, then it is nothing but automatic typewriting, formless speeches filling page after page, over which the eye skims like a flying saucer over the Dust Bowl.

- Nabokov, answering the question Why do you so dislike dialogue in fiction?

I don’t understand why so many authors fill their books with screeds of unartistic direlogue. I’m surrounded by dialogue all the time; when I read a book I hope to hear people talk differently, if they talk at all.

• Wear my MP3 player in a thunderstorm.
• Use lash-extending mascara if I wear contact lenses.
• Skimp on bananas if I happen to be a refuelling athlete.
• Eschew turkey, milk, tofu or peanut butter if I want to have healthy sleep.
• Assume that a “sugar-free” product is free of sweeteners other than sucrose or table sugar.
• Take an extra 20 minutes sleep in the morning at the expense of a 20-minute PM “power nap”.
• Suppress good belly-laughs (no mention is made of bad or simply average belly-laughs).
• Eat a meal without first drinking a glass of water to reduce my appetite.
• Leave my pedometer at home, if I want to walk on average 2,000 extra steps per day, according to “studies”.
• Eat a watermelon without washing it thoroughly, since the skin of watermelons can harbour salmonella - a leading cause of food-borne illness.

If ever this kind of nanny-corporatism gets too much for me and I decide to end it all in a grand act of individual rebellion, now I know to find myself a thunderstorm, avoid turkey, milk, tofu and peanut butter, sleep in for 20 minutes, eat an unwashed and purportedly sugar-free watermelon (without first drinking a glass of water), give all my bananas to charity, put on my MP3 player, lash-extending mascara and contact lenses, and, suppressing a good belly-laugh, go out for a walk (leaving my pedometer at home).

Rampant Uzbeks see off Singapore in 7-3 thriller

Rampant Uzbeks

Rampant Uzbeks

The Uzbeks are rampant!

If I had a coat of arms it would certainly feature an Uzbek rampant.