Lloyd Shepherd

I keep a tumblr at lloydshep.tumblr.com called A Pound of Obscure. Here’s the last week’s posts from it.

• My daughter’s taking RS GCSE tomorrow. Should I show her this?
  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  My daughter’s taking RS GCSE tomorrow. Should I show her this?

• The Oxford English Dictionary is currently soliciting public help in tracking down “a mysterious, possibly pornographic, 19th-century book from which a number of its quotations are derived.”:oupacademic:

  Meanderings of Memory by Nightlark, from which 51 words in the OED are thought to be sourced, is nowhere to be found

  Would you like to join our team of intrepid researchers? We post select OED Appeals on Tumblr each Sunday and you can find the full archive of appeals on the OED site.

• “There were several factors contributing to this outburst”
  “There were several factors contributing to this outburst, but part of it was the appearance of residual shreds of feeling, artifacts from a time when sights and sounds and Leonardo–the Baz Luhrmann trifecta–went straight into the viscera. (You had better hope you don’t spend your teen years taking in total garbage, because that’s formative garbage.) When I read San Francisco Chronicle critic Mick LaSalle opine recently that Romeo Juliet was “too contemptible even to be called a desecration,” I know that he never lay in virginal bed with headphones and discman, listened to Thom Yorke utter the eternal invitation “I’ll be waiting, with a gun and a pack of sandwiches,” and just felt so much.” - A lovely essay on teenage influences. The Millions : You Can’t Repeat the Past, Old Sport: On Leo, Baz, Gatsby, and Me
• bbcradio3
  bbcradio3:

  John Mortimer, creator of Rumpole of the Bailey and many other eccentric creatures of the legal (and not-so-legal) professions, had his first dramatic work broadcast on this day in 1957 – on the Third Programme, of course. It was a radio play called ‘The Dock Brief’ and the cast included David Kossoff (left) as Fowle and Michael Hordern as Morgenhall. The production won a Prix Italia. The pic is a production still from the TV version, made a few months later with the same cast.

• European Stereotypes, by country (via Stereotyping in Europe)
  European Stereotypes, by country (via Stereotyping in Europe)

I keep a tumblr at lloydshep.tumblr.com called A Pound of Obscure. Here’s the last week’s posts from it.

• “We’re getting closer and closer to the point where we don’t have enough bees in this country”
  ““We’re getting closer and closer to the point where we don’t have enough bees in this country to meet pollination demands,” said entomologist Dennis vanEngelstorp of the University of Maryland, who led the survey documenting the declines.”- One-Third of U.S. Honeybee Colonies Died Last Winter, Threatening Food Supply | Wired Science | Wired.com

• Two Dutch guys having simulated contractions. Eye-opening.
  Two Dutch guys having simulated contractions. Eye-opening. (by Pluumke)

• The video of that extraordinary Soderbergh keynote
  The video of that extraordinary Soderbergh keynote, State of Cinema: Steven Soderbergh (by San Francisco Film Society)

• Authors’ Club Best First Novel Award Shortlist Readings @ Foyles:

  Come and hear me reading from The English Monster, together with some Real Proper Writers: Kerry Hudson, Ros Barber and Patrick Flanery. It’s free, but you need to book.

• “When I was coming up, making an independent film and trying to reach an audience”
  “When I was coming up, making an independent film and trying to reach an audience I thought was like, trying to hit a thrown baseball. This is like trying to hit a thrown baseball – but with another thrown baseball. That’s why I’m spending so much time talking to you about the business and the money, because this is the force that is pushing cinema out of mainstream movies. I’ve been in meetings where I can feel it slipping away, where I can feel that the ideas I’m tossing out, they’re too scary or too weird, and I can feel the thing. I can tell: It’s not going to happen, I’m not going to be able to convince them to do this the way I think it should be done. I want to jump up on the table and scream, “Do you know how lucky we are to be doing this? Do you understand that the only way to repay that karmic debt is to make something good, is to make something ambitious, something beautiful, something memorable?” But I didn’t do that. I just sat there, and I smiled.”- There’s so much amazing stuff in Steven Soderbergh’s State Of Cinema Talk that I could have picked pretty much anything he said. Go and read it if you care about any artform that has a commercial spine – not just movies.

I keep a tumblr at lloydshep.tumblr.com called A Pound of Obscure. Here’s the last week’s posts from it.

• Britain enters the Drone Business, from home soil
  Britain enters the Drone Business, from home soil, for the first time. Wired salivates. (via For the First Time, Brits Launch Drone Strike From Home | Danger Room | Wired.com)

• London Environs 1832 – David Rumsey Historical Map overlaid on Google

  Beautiful – David Ramsey’s extraordinary map collection, overlaid onto Google Maps. Here’s London in 1832.

• collectivehistory
  collectivehistory:

  In August 1961, two young girls speak with their grandparents in East Germany over a barbed wire fence, a barricade which later became the Berlin Wall (U.S. Department of State)

  One of those photos that’s as much a short story as a picture.

• “Consider this; the range of good guys has expanded”
  “Consider this; the range of good guys has expanded, but not the bad. We now have investigators from all over the world, from Deon Meyer’s South African detective to William Ryan’s Moscow cop. There are Maasai warriors and Thai Buddhists solving murders, and a complete timeline of historical sleuths, not to mention cases being cracked by Oscar Wilde and Josephine Tey. With such a variety of crime-solvers to choose from, it’s a little mystifying to realise that our available choice of villains seems to have shrunk.”- Whatever Happened To The Art Of The Con? « Christopher Fowler’s Blog

• lifeHappy birthday, Willie Nelson. Happy Birthday, that man.
  
• “Can you imagine Oscar Wilde on Twitter?”
  “Can you imagine Oscar Wilde on Twitter? Holy shit, that dude would’ve had, like, four million followers, and every tweet would’ve been essential. Every tweet would’ve been the best part of your day.”- Interview: “NOS4A2” Author Joe Hill Talks the War on Christmas, Mark Twain’s Twitter, and Movie Adaptations | Complex

• Would-Be Pirates Get a Taste of Delicious, Delicious Irony…
  (via Would-Be Pirates Get a Taste of Delicious, Delicious Irony | Game|Life | Wired.com)

• Ghostly Plane Wrecks Found in Remote, Exotic Locations
  (via Ghostly Plane Wrecks Found in Remote, Exotic Locations | Raw File | Wired.com)

• “The key to understanding this is that the anti-Keynesian position is, in essence, political”
  “The key to understanding this is that the anti-Keynesian position is, in essence, political. It’s driven by hostility to active government policy and, in many cases, hostility to any intellectual approach that might make room for government policy. Too many influential people just don’t want to believe that we’re facing the kind of economic crisis we are actually facing.” - Knaves, Fools, and Me (Meta) – NYTimes
• “After learning my flight was detained 4 hours,
• 
  

  After learning my flight was detained 4 hours,

  I heard the announcement:
  If anyone in the vicinity of gate 4-A understands any Arabic,
  Please come to the gate immediately.

  Well—one pauses these days. Gate 4-A was my own gate. I went there.
  An older woman in full traditional Palestinian dress,
  Just like my grandma wore, was crumpled to the floor, wailing loudly.
  Help, said the flight service person. Talk to her. What is her
  Problem? we told her the flight was going to be four hours late and she
  Did this.

  I put my arm around her and spoke to her haltingly.
  Shu dow-a, shu- biduck habibti, stani stani schway, min fadlick,
  Sho bit se-wee?

  The minute she heard any words she knew—however poorly used—
  She stopped crying.

  She thought our flight had been canceled entirely.
  She needed to be in El Paso for some major medical treatment the
  Following day. I said no, no, we’re fine, you’ll get there, just late,

  Who is picking you up? Let’s call him and tell him.
  We called her son and I spoke with him in English.
  I told him I would stay with his mother till we got on the plane and
  Would ride next to her—Southwest.

  She talked to him. Then we called her other sons just for the fun of it.

  Then we called my dad and he and she spoke for a while in Arabic and
  Found out of course they had ten shared friends.

  Then I thought just for the heck of it why not call some Palestinian
  Poets I know and let them chat with her. This all took up about 2 hours.

  She was laughing a lot by then. Telling about her life. Answering
  Questions.

  She had pulled a sack of homemade mamool cookies—little powdered
  Sugar crumbly mounds stuffed with dates and nuts—out of her bag—
  And was offering them to all the women at the gate.

  To my amazement, not a single woman declined one. It was like a
  Sacrament. The traveler from Argentina, the traveler from California,
  The lovely woman from Laredo—we were all covered with the same
  Powdered sugar. And smiling. There are no better cookies.

  And then the airline broke out the free beverages from huge coolers—
  Non-alcoholic—and the two little girls for our flight, one African
  American, one Mexican American—ran around serving us all apple juice
  And lemonade and they were covered with powdered sugar too.

  And I noticed my new best friend—by now we were holding hands—
  Had a potted plant poking out of her bag, some medicinal thing,

  With green furry leaves. Such an old country traveling tradition. Always
  Carry a plant. Always stay rooted to somewhere.

  And I looked around that gate of late and weary ones and thought,
  This is the world I want to live in. The shared world.

  Not a single person in this gate—once the crying of confusion stopped
  —has seemed apprehensive about any other person.

  They took the cookies. I wanted to hug all those other women too.
  This can still happen anywhere.

  Not everything is lost.

  ”

  - Naomi Shihab Nye (b. 1952), “Wandering Around an Albuquerque Airport Terminal.” I think this poem may be making the rounds, this week, but that’s as it should be.  (via oliviacirce)

• Obama: Still a class act.
  Obama: Still a class act. President Obama at 2013 White House Correspondents’ Dinner (C-SPAN) (by CSPAN)

I keep a tumblr at lloydshep.tumblr.com called A Pound of Obscure. Here’s the last week’s posts from it.

• 2000adonline: Some superb art for this month’s Forum…
  2000adonline:

  Some superb art for this month’s Forum Competition(Apr’13):Bad Company,which has Mark “Chilly” Chillcott hitting the mark once again with his fabulous Muppet/2000AD mash-ups!

  • Sam the Eagle as Kano
  • Zoot the sax player as Shrike
  • Animal as Dogbreath(of course!)

  “You’re In Bad Company….Yaayyyy!!!”

• “You have to put in the time. In addition to creating/building, you have to build the platform.”

  - What It Takes: Louis C.K.: Give It A Minute

• abandonedography: Abandoned railroad by 小巨人看世界
  abandonedography: Abandoned railroad by 小巨人看世界

• “Professor Henry Brubaker of the Institute for Studies”
  “Professor Henry Brubaker of the Institute for Studies said: “In an age where literally everything has to be arch, knowing, witty or retro, Iron Maiden fans somehow still don’t give a fuck. “They just like their thing for what it is, their hairy backs aren’t a statement and when they wear double denim with a bumbag it’s in no way ironic. “The rest of us will never achieve that level of enjoyment of anything, because our stupid aspirations have made us into dicks.”” - Iron Maiden fans somehow immune to self-consciousness epidemic
• Sharing the responsibility

  There’s a big fuss online today about an unreleased Hyundai ad which some agency shot, which shows a guy trying to kill himself in his car, but failing to do so because of Hyundai’s super-low emissions. Obnoxious, clearly. Hyundai are saying the ad was only a creative sketch, and was never intended for release. A lot of other people are saying ‘well, yeah, Hyundai, but you signed off the test’. In other words, the people who paid for it are getting it in the neck.

  Fair enough. But when I see something like this, I always wonder about the ‘talent’ involved. The actor playing the guy in the car. The person operating the camera. The director. When I hear the educated tones of a nice lady offering me PPI insurance on a robo-call, I always think ‘you must have known what sort of people you were recording this for.’ When a talented copywriter produces something obfuscatory about a radiator or a luxury holiday, I always wonder ‘what did that do to you, doing that?’

  It probably didn’t do anything. There’s a long tradition that the talent is immune from the intent, and a job’s a job, darling. But if you take money to do something which makes you uneasy, what does that make you? And if it doesn’t make you uneasy, what does that say about your state of mind?

  Easy for me to say, of course. And a job IS a job.

• “The Singh case”
  “The Singh case illustrates an important point about liberty. People imagine that freedom comes in revolutions and bills of rights. But sometimes revolutions turn authoritarian and bills of rights turn out not to be worth the paper they are written on – as article 10 of the Human Rights Act shows. More often, change comes when bloody-minded individuals refuse to accept the commonsense advice to “move on and let it be,” square their shoulders and fight back.”- Nick Cohen on: Simon Singh: Let us now praise a bloody-minded hero » Spectator Blogs

• My guitar teacher’s new single
  My sickeningly talented guitar teacher’s new single, with his band The Mustangs – Yours Sincerely (by MustangsUK .) Get some mellow Brit Blues in your life….

• “Cheerfulness, unaffected cheerfulness”
  “Cheerfulness, unaffected cheerfulness, a sincere desire to please and be pleased, unchecked by any efforts to shine, are the qualities you must bring with you into society, if you wish to succeed in conversation. … a light and airy equanimity of temper,—that spirit which never rises to boisterousness, and never sinks to immovable dullness; that moves gracefully from “grave to gay, from serious to serene,” and by mere manner gives proof of a feeling heart and generous mind.”- The art of conversation, 1866 (via explore-blog)

• Memento Mori from the 1520s (via Retronaut – Memento Mori)
  Memento Mori from the 1520s (via Retronaut – Memento Mori)

  As a friend on Facebook pointed out, this puts Damien Hirst and his tattered like to shame. Who made this? What was their name? How did they learn their craft? And what else did they make?

• “The paradox at the heart of music recommendation engines”
  “The paradox at the heart of all music recommendation engines is that as soon as a recommendation process is blunt enough to be performed by a machine it’s no longer sharp enough to be much use to a human being. Similarly, as soon as a process is mass enough to make money for a company it’s too mass to be of much benefit to an individual. As soon is it’s insistent and mechanical enough for somebody to claim it as a success it’s so insistent and mechanical that you want to turn it off.”- David Hepworth’s Notebook: Everybody likes recommending. Nobody likes being recommended to.

I keep a tumblr at lloydshep.tumblr.com called A Pound of Obscure. Here’s today’s posts from it.

• The astonishing tale of Brian Donald Hume
  The astonishing tale of Brian Donald Hume (that’s him in the picture), Stan ‘The Spiv’ Setty, the Warren Street used car trade, and London crime in the 1940s. From the always excellent Another Nickel In The Machine (via Warren Street and the Murder of Stan ‘The Spiv’ Setty)

• ‘The Umbrella Man’ – NYTimes.com

  A cautionary tale about evidence, conspiracy and ‘sinister facts’.

• The Yahoo Weather app
  The Yahoo Weather app is everything they’re saying. Download it now. Yahoo is back. I really want those words to be true.

I keep a tumblr at lloydshep.tumblr.com called A Pound of Obscure. Here’s today’s posts from it.

• This is where I’m off to tonight
  This is where I’m off to tonight, for dinner with a bunch of fine fellows who have the same taste in food, wine and talking utter bollocks. It’s nice to pretend to be a part of the Establishment, even if you’re only a tourist.

  (via The Garrick Club – A History.)

• An old picture 
  An old picture on Tumblr that I just found, with a nice quote. I like it.

• I like the austere black-and-white Penguin Modern Classics
  

  

  

  

  

  I like the austere black-and-white Penguin Modern Classics versions – but these are amazing.

  toomuchhorrorfiction: Shirley Jackson paperbacks, Popular Popular Library, 1970s

• Lots of love for the NZ parliament
  Lots of love for the NZ parliament today, but this is my favourite bit: a barnstormer from Maurice Williamson, and his  ’big gay rainbow across my electorate’ (by nzheraldtv)

I keep at tumblr at lloydshep.tumblr.com called A Pound of Obscure. Here’s today’s posts from it.

• If I had to choose one band to go and see in situ
  I think if I had to choose one band to go and see in situ and at the height of their powers, I might well choose Blondie. Can’t think why….

• New dates for appearances in April and May

  A couple of new dates for things I’ll be showing my face at in May:

  Thursday 25th April: Rainham Library Rob Ryan and I will be talking about our new books from 7.30 pm. All the details are here.

  May 1: an evening of readings at the Working Men’s College Library The theme of the evening is Monsters. The address is 44 Crowndale Road London NW1 1TR (nearest tubes: Camden, Mornington Crescent), and it starts at 7.00pm. The event’s free; to reserve a seat please email lucyjpop@gmail.com.

  I’ll be reading and talking about The English Monster. Also appearing are Amanda Craig (reading from A Private Place, her novel about school bullying, and Hearts and Minds, about London’s migrant workers); Suzi Feay (reading from The Holy Innocents, a cycle of 12 poems about the life of Gilles de Rais, vastly wealthy marshall of France, companion in arms of Joan of Arc, warrior, devout Catholic, necromancer and serial killer); Emran Mian (reading from his debut novel, The Banker’s Daughter, a tense thriller, set in Lahore, Beirut and London, that charts the rise and fall of a banker and explores the moral ambiguities of our money-dominated world); and Meike Ziervogel (reading from Magda, her debut novel based on the life of Magda Goebbel).

  There will be a cash bar!

• From the Sea to the Land Beyond: The performance | The Space

  I watched this last night, and it’s amazing. Beautifully edited and selected, with haunting and just-right music from British Sea Power. It captures exactly my own sadness, pride, fear, excitement and love of the sea around the British Isles.