2013 salvaged from the End of Days - what a week!

I've never been one for the big build-up to New Year's Eve and the massive comedown when it suddenly becomes January 1st, signalling the return to school (when younger) or work. All over for another year, and all the excitement and adrenaline of December 31st suddenly gets converted into early January blues (if not actual depression!). 

The whole new year's resolution thing seems similarly doomed as the very End of Days itself. Amidst all the joie de vivre and party planning around the last days and nights of the year, it's seemingly very easy to decide to quit this and start doing that, and grand announcements of how different 2013 is going to be from 2012 - all washed down with copious amounts of champagne or other liquids, of course. The hangover itself making a major contribution to the "down" of New Year's Day. 

This in and of itself is part of what contributes to the early January blues, I feel. We excitedly "commit" to changing our ways and dropping bad habits, at a time when we are actually overdoing them even more than usual. We tell the world, and the world is delighted to hear our resolution, and then suddenly we are dumped into freezing white January Monday mornings on the way to work, missing our crutches even more than predicted due to the aforementioned overindulgence in them. Generally speaking, consequently the resolution is not long for this world. 

It's a recipe for failure, if not the actual disaster that the End of Days was predicted to be. I prefer to really enjoy the pre-Christmas period and the festivities around the Christmas/Boxing Day landmarks, but then slowly get back to normal by around December 30th. A good time to get one's head around the fact that the new year is coming, getting off the sofa again, maybe getting out and about, and starting to get electricity pumping into the laptop again and thinking about things. 

There's no harm in trying to improve oneself of course, but I think unrealistic total changes in habits are unlikely to be realized. Stating that one is going to do this less and do more of that might be a better way to tackle the beast. Unless the previous year was a real disaster, and you did alright, then even some moderate (and doable) tweaking can only lead to an even better year in 2013. 

To each their own, of course, but for me this morning, Sunday December 30th, going for a run or walk on the frozen white hill in the photo above is the perfect way to blow off the cobwebs and stir up a real looking forward to and optimism for 2013. All the craziness and forced happiness of December 31st will come and go in the blink of an eye, but this scene and many others like it are mine for months to come!  

Being out and about in such pristine perfection freshens one up, inside and out, and the lack of any build-up for the last day of the year simply helps the transition, even making the arrival of January 1st seem positively exciting, not depressing. I will of course make some planned improvements to my own schedule and habits, but they represent positive changes that are realistic and I can live with them.  

We are very close to 2013. Another year, and for that one has to try to be grateful. Frankly, every year that one is healthy enough to jump out of bed and go to work should be something to celebrate, even on miserable mornings in January or February. Most other possibilities are far less attractive, and if one is unfortunate enough to end up in one of them, one truly learns how wonderful it is to be healthy and be able to go to work. 

My major resolution? To not care at all about New Year's Eve or any similar forced date-related outpourings of synthetic joy, but rather, to do my best to feel that almost every day in 2013 is yet another mini-Christmas day. It's amazing what having a positive outlook can do for one's basic enjoyment of this living experience, and how little a negative outlook does for anything.

Having said all that, now I feel ready to dig into new work and life challenges, and January 1st, 2013 is going to be a day that I will be delighted to see arrive. But we are not there yet, so I can partake of a particularly pleasing Parisian seasonal dark roast blend that I received, and maybe I can allow myself one of those triple chocolate croissants on the side! I won't be overindulging on Monday night, so this is a perfectly acceptable treat! ;) - Kevin Mc

Festive Christmas thoughts!

This morning I was dozily watching yet another rerun of Woody Allen's classic tale of "Hannah and her Sisters", a 1986 story of the interactions and complications among an extended family group over a period of two years. Nothing much caught my attention that hadn't previously, until we got to the section where Mickey, Woody's character, believes he has some sort of brain tumor. 

Woody Allen writes and depicts the obsessive-compulsive hypochondriac type very well, and I couldn't help but laugh as he sat in the chair thinking he was hearing that he had a massive brain tumor that was causing hearing loss in one ear, while the physician was set to deliver good news that there was nothing in fact wrong with him. 

There was something utterly fantastic about the way he skipped out of the old New York building housing the doctors's office, with trumpets blaring, and bursting with a renewed joy at the world in general - it's a scene that brings out the same feeling in probably all of us, where you can feel the closing door in front of him suddenly reopened for a second chance at life. Ecstasy!

Ironically, this replenished fountain of joy empties rather quickly, and Mickey descends into a period of existential angst over the futility of our apparently meaningless existence. To have been staring into the blackness, the void, but then to have been rescued by the blinding light of life itself, suddenly turned things inside out and the very consideration of an early death only served to underline the fact that death is waiting - whether today or in ten years. So what's the point?

I couldn't help but feel kinship with that artistic statement. I think it's very true that we just live, for at least the first 40-45 years. If we are very lucky, we don't even have that much death in older relatives to face until around that time. So we just live as if it is all one delicious never-ending adventure, and because there are so many people so much older than us, well, we are still the future. The world is ours!

But by living with the wrong assumption that one was dying, even if it was erroneous and got corrected in short order, seemingly served as the best reminder that life is finite and there's nothing that can be done about it. In Mickey, this caused him to question his whole life, his work, his position relative to the entire revolving globe, and suddenly it was all rendered more or less meaningless. A second chance at life had merely served as a newsflash that an end was still coming. 

I think it takes a few decades to be able to realize that it is all, well, rather meaningless. Sort of. All of the things we fuss over, all the warnings we listen to when growing up, doing the sensible things, following the sensible path etc. can suddenly seem like futile choices when in deep consideration of the Grim Reaper and death's descending darkness. Who cares whether I became a rich, unhappy accountant or a poor, free-as-a-bird sculptor if life is not forever and it is supposed to be about enjoying your time as much as possible? Doing the sensible thing and setting up for an eternity of financial security would only matter if it had to last forever, right?!

With some time, Mickey eventually realizes that while it is all somewhat meaningless, because of that, one has no choice but to enjoy one's time - life is there to be enjoyed for what it is: life. For some who want to enjoy life's pleasures and the things that money can buy, well there is work and career that facilitate that. For others who don't desire a regular life, there are other pursuits that provide a degree more of an internal reward rather than a financial one. The key thing is doing what makes you happy, I think. ;)

Naturally, the problem with such analyses is that they tend to come more or less halfway through the show. By the time one gets four decades into the big show, the die is more or less cast, and even upon the light bulb going on with the realization that one wanted to be a contemporary dancer - it's too late! Maybe that's why it is appropriately called the "midlife crisis"?! It takes us half a life to get to a suitable level of experience and maturity to be able to conclude that this is not the life we want to spend the next half-life living. Now that sure is a crisis! 

Even if one has been relatively happy, unquestionably one readdresses it all upon any real contemplation of death. Death renders it all kind of futile. We are born, we grow, we live, and then we die. So who cares if I leave my miserable job and go travelling for two years or write a screenplay; what difference will it make when I am lying cold on a slab? If we knew for sure that we were going to be dead in less than ten years wouldn't that change the way we choose to live now?

I think that there's the rub. If we are so happy doing our thing in the first half of life with nary a scant consideration of death, why shouldn't we live the second half more or less in the same mind frame, but perhaps with just a little more urgency for getting certain things done? But to live well, we essentially have to live with a mindset that believes tomorrow is another day and it is coming. Otherwise, all of the rules go out the window, and we begin to degenerate because we are focused on the ending, not the living. 

Thus, we need to remember that death is going to come to call, one terrible day. But in all likelihood, in normal situations, it is decades away, so we should skip down the steps of healthy life each day, and dance along the streets to the office, bursting with joy. However, when you watch people in the city on any winter Monday morning, it is a rare sight indeed. Everyone seems more or less miserable. Work serves only to facilitate life, not to make it a happy experience. So is that the secret?!

I think it surely is. For most of us, we have to work to live (well). When one does look around, it truly does appear that the happiest people on the planet are those who love to work, and love what they work at. They get the best of both worlds! They seriously enjoy their Monday-to-Friday lives, and consequently they tend to be successful at making the money that facilitates the rest of their living. They theoretically will face death with less regret, because they enjoyed both sides of what is contemporary life. Providing that they did find a healthy balance, of course. 

Well, I could ramble on, but I just wanted to say a few words on Woody Allen and Hannah and her Sisters, and clearly, Woody got me going! I guess that means he really got to me, and I am sure that is precisely what he wanted to do - to make us think. Or at least share some of his pain! Life is a glorious thing, with little other meaning than what we do make of it while we are alive and each of us is challenged to find our way in the confusing maze of life. All so that we end up in the center of it all, having found our very own hidden comfort zone among the complexity.

Speaking of challenges, I think it's time for me to see how well I can empty a massive plate of roast golden turkey, pink ham, warm stuffing, roast potatoes, mashed potatoes, Brussels sprouts, carrots and mixed pickles, all covered in lashings of hot thick gravy! That's part of Christmas and it sure is one of the great pleasures in being among the living. Well, until I collapse onto the sofa afterwards, anyway! ;) - Kevin Mc

A little retrospective inspired by the EU XMAS tree

Here we are once again, hurtling towards Christmas day and a whirlwind of seasonal festivities that will whisk us into 2013 in what seems like barely the blink of an eye! Most of us are now home (or away for the holidays) and work is done for this year, so it's an excellent time for some stocktaking and setting of new goals for the new year.

We officially kicked off this thing called EU just following our own such stocktaking at the end of 2011, and after setting some fundamental targets off we went into the EU adventure. Back in January of this year, after we settled on the name of our self-publishing enterprise, I got to work on preparing our first website which was online in very early February. Shortly thereafter we established EU on Facebook with our own page, and the story began to be told. 

I was putting the finishing touches to A QUIET RESIGNATION around this time, and as first time publishers, we had no idea what to do about a cover for the book. But Cristina C got busy during March and April and got down to some serious idea drafts which were wonderfully realized by our 3D graphic artist, Pablo Donato. You can see those covers in the montage at the top of this blog, and we loved them all. Some were more elaborate than others, but the first one that I saw was the simple ball and chain on the grey background and for a few reasons it just spoke volumes to me. Sometimes less is more, and in this case that's what I felt and so the choice was easy.

While Cris was busy handling all of that, I decided that we couldn't exist without having some form of blog forum for ourselves and after a bit of analysis, I came up with what now is firmly established as the EU blog. This was kicked off in mid-April, 2012, and as of today we have put up some 120 blog posts on a wide variety of contemporary topics, and we are pretty pleased with that level of production! The blog is being read in over 20 countries in the world, and it's always fascinating to see new countries popping up, such as Bangladesh and Taiwan in recent days. A big thanks to all of our readers who make this blog so worth the effort!

Inevitably, Twitter came up next and we set Cris up with her very own and first ever Twitter account which was fun to watch, for me. From very tentative and inexperienced (with social media) beginnings, she quickly amassed some serious followers (thousands) and is now using Twitter regularly and loving every minute of it. It's a great place for EU to get a feel for what's happening out there, and a very cool way to interact with people who publish for a living, including big brands such as Harper Collins, Penguin and Random House, among others. EU had to be there, and we sure are.

Now, books! Isn't that what all this is supposed to be about?! Well, A QUIET RESIGNATION was our first effort and once we were done with the cover and formatting, this book was published in early spring of this year. It was a very rewarding experience to let it go and get it out there, and I am delighted to say that the response has been very good with some people even taking the time to get in touch and leave comments about it - that truly makes it all worthwhile. It isn't closing in on the New York Times bestseller list anytime soon (I just knew that there should have been more sex in there! ;) but that's okay by us. It is still only a baby tree, and we are more than fine with it needing time to grow and expand all the way up to reaching its full potential some day. These things take time. 

While all of the stuff happening around AQR was going on, I was using any free time that I had to rework another story that I had gotten onto paper (make that virtual paper on a screen!) - I am of course referring to THE MOLECULES. This is a very different type of book from AQR, but doesn't that make life interesting? I have no ambition to be known as a writer who only writes in this genre or that one - I prefer to be free to write whatever is on my mind. Book #3 is going to be even more different again, as it will touch on human evolution, the paranormal, alien life and the putative human soul. This one should be a blast to write!

AQR was initially available on our website but was moved to Amazon-Kindle in June of this year. THE MOLECULES was finally formalized and it was published directly onto the Kindle portal around October. This was our second book published in several months and really ticked the boxes for reaching targets in what was a very productive year of work. Not least given the fact that we are still a part-time affair, with both myself and Cris being paid to do totally different types of work. It's science by day, and art by night, and that heady mix has kept the adrenaline pumping and the passion level high for all of 2012. 

It was also a tough year in that the boisterous EU office manager, Cristina's beloved Oslo (pictured above) left us, but not without leaving behind all sorts of memories and images that will line the EU hallways for as long as we are still alive and well. He won't be forgotten, and that pic of him with Cris is part of our blog's branding now, so he still runs the show! The king of cats, Sonic (at the foot of the tree above), is also dealing with the aging process and has had some health hiccups that appeared out of the blue mid-December, after 14 incredibly healthy years. But he's also a fighter, and if the amount of turkey and giblets in thick gravy (and seafood snack treats) that he wolfs down is any indication, then he's not going anywhere anytime soon.

That's more or less a summary of our rather wonderful and adventurous 2012. Oh, I almost forgot, yes of course, I designed a newer cooler website for EU and this was released to a lot of positive feedback in November. We are still brand new, we're EU, and we've only just got started. Who knows what 2013 will bring, and our upcoming AGM will be addressing our new goals and milestones for 2013, and obviously marketing of our two books is likely to be top of the list. Along with me trying desperately to find the time to get a serious draft of book #3, which isn't going to be easy! But I will predict that 2013 is going to another biggie, with the EU brand strengthening and growing. 

To all of our Twitter followers, to our Facebook people, to our blog readers, and especially to all those who bought and read either/both of the two EU books, we want to say an enormous thanks for the support. It makes all the difference to know that people are watching and reading. We are incredibly grateful to all of you for making 2012 such an amazing year in retrospect for us, and would like to take this opportunity to wish all of you an amazingly peaceful and joyful holiday season, and a remarkable 2013.

It's Saturday, December 22nd, so I think we can allow some smoked salmon bagels by a crackling fire with a huge mug of my new fave robust dark roast all the way from Florence, Italy. Thanks to all, and remember, keep the faith! ;) - Kevin Mc

Time will show that Time got it wrong!

This blog, in quite typical fashion, refuses to conform with what the (often) self-appointed judges and supposed cultural leaders say and do. We have a mind of our own which is not tainted by what fashions or societal mores dictate, and we are extremely proud of that. We are EU, after all!

That is why we refuse to post yet another pic of a man who gets way too much unmerited praise and press as it is, and choose without hesitation to post the photo of a young woman who clearly has a mind of her own, and one which is not going to be dictated to - by anybody.

This is of course Malala Yousafzai, the young Pakistani schoolgirl who was targeted by the Taliban in a wave of military strikes in the Swat valley, aimed at governmental institutions and including girls schools, which naturally represent a threat to the misogynistic males of the Taliban. At an event in Peshawar in September, 2008, the eleven-year-old girl gave a speech entitled "How dare the Taliban take away my basic right to an education". 

To say that it was a courageous move would be gross understatement. Writing under a pseudonym for obvious reasons, Malala started a blog in 2009 and continued to be outspoken about girl's rights to an education in Pakistan, and about women's rights more generally. 

"All I want is an education and I am afraid of no one."

Those are very brave words when surrounded by men who think of grown women as second class citizens, never mind an eleven-year-old schoolgirl. Malala's father clearly doesn't agree, and he showed that by putting her name on the family register after her birth: a right reserved exclusively for only male children. 

After a battle for control of the Swat valley in 2009, the Pakistani army declared victory and amidst a renewed sense of security, it was revealed that the mysterious blogger was in fact Malala Yousafzai. Immediately, those cowards in the Taliban began to issue threats against her and her family. But she had begun to attract serious attention and in late 2011, Archbishop Desmond Tutu nominated her for the International Children's Peace Prize for which she became a runner-up. 

Having become well known by then, at the very end of 2011 she won Pakistan's Youth Peace Prize which has since been renamed after her, and suddenly she became a national and international figure. But that brought increased exposure and led to one of the most disgusting and disgustingly cowardly terrorist acts by the Taliban, who sent an armed gunman into a school bus to shoot her and people sitting near her.

She was seriously injured by a bullet that entered just behind an eye, and after treatment in Pakistan she was moved to Birmingham, England, whereupon the story became truly viral. She later came out of a medically-induced coma and began what will be a very slow process to recovery. But she has already began communicating and offering support to others in her homeland who have been threatened by the Taliban. 

This month, in a very touching move, Pakistan’s President Asif Ali Zardari announced a new $10 million education fund in her name, which will remind everyone of her courageous fight for her right to learn. She is an inspiration not only for girl's rights everywhere, particularly in places where girls are looked down upon, but also more generally for women's rights everywhere around the globe. 

Quite how Barack Obama is considered to be a more appropriate Time Magazine "Person of the Year" is beyond this writer. Don't worry, I am not going to go into some (albeit well deserved) rant about his totally inadequate first four years, but there seems to be some sort of inverse favoritism when it comes to this guy. He was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize in 2009 - for what precisely?! For being elected? He moved into office in 2009, so yes, he got the prize for his tough move into the White House. Redecoration is hard, y'all!

Now, once again, after spending more money than God's banker was prepared to loan him, he managed to get a disillusioned public to elect him again, essentially based on the premise: "let's go for the best of the two bad choices". One of the reasons that Time Magazine chose to anoint him for the second time in four years is that he was the first incumbent since 1940 to get reelected with unemployment above 7.5%. I don't find that to be anything inspirational, whatsoever. I imagine that the tens of millions still out of work and out of their homes would concur. 

Under his watch, Americans suffered increasingly, and he seemed to be like a deer in the headlights, unable to do anything other than give the same tired old rhetorical excuses and promises of "change". If he got voted back in, it had one helluva lot more to do with who he was running against, Mitt Romney, than what he had done. It was a default vote for the safer (but weak leader) choice. It's nothing to give prizes over, at all. 

It reeks of political brown nosing by Time, who seem to salivate over him getting out of bed in the morning and showing up in the oval office as some kind of holy ritual. Or perhaps being that kind of magazine, it all comes down to sales, and the face of ol' B.O. on the front is gonna shift way more units off the shelves than some relatively unknown girl's face from Pakistan. But it is supposed to be person of the year, not American of the year. Shame on Time Magazine!

As far as we are concerned, Malala Yousafzai stands so far above Obama as the choice for Person of the Year that there is no comparison. He got his feet wet during Sandy, and was praised for it - it is ridiculous. This schoolgirl made a massive move and achieved enormous impact due to her own courage and defense of women's rights in a way that simply overshadows more or less anything that Obama did (or didn't) do in 2012. 

He runs around in armored cars with an army of secret service and police surrounding him - this girl got shot in an attempted murder on a school bus, for speaking her mind. All because of what she believed in, and what she believed in is what we all know to be the right thing.  I think he should do the right thing, and hand it over to her - God knows she did more to deserve it, and God knows he doesn't need any more salivatory praise. 

As far as EU is concerned, the Person of the Year for 2012 is Malala Yousafzai. We simply don't care what Time thinks, and we know that we are not alone in that sentiment because a poll taken on NBC's Today show demonstrated that the public agrees with us. Well, of course they do! ;)  - EU

How many more times? It's not gun control - it's guns totally out of control!

Pictured above is a sombre President Obama, speaking at a Newtown, Connecticut high school following the shooting rampage at Sandy Hook elementary school where 20 children and 6 adult educators were slaughtered. 

Let me be very clear from the get-go: although it somehow helps to ease the pain a little that a sitting President comes to share his "grief" (in quotation marks because it cannot possibly be compared to that of the parents/family of those shot), it is most certainly politicians and all their back room dealing and two-faced attitudes to issues such as gun control that have allowed the escalation of mass shootings in the USA and even more recently in Canada. 

They stand out at podiums bleating on about how tragic this massacre was, or that one, while an entire Congress has been running scared of the NRA and the power they wield, for years. Every time that gun control comes up during a general election, it is side-stepped by politicians because of the potential to lose their jobs if the NRA turns against them. Congressmen and women are extremely reticent to put party needs above their individual states, and the second amendment right to bear arms is so entrenched in society that to some it is untouchable.

Put quite simply, until the politics and careerism is taken out of gun control, nothing is going to change. Obama can put on a long face all he wants, as can all of the other usual faces and players, but saying "we need to do something" or "we need to change" is about as meaningful to me as his "hope and change" rhetoric was during 2008-2012. It's like ice cream for tonsilitis - it feels good, but doesn't achieve anything until the tonsils are cut out. He is not running for a third term, so he can afford to become unpopular (his nightmare) while rallying the troops (no pun intended) and actually trying to really get something done about this fiasco. 

The NRA has forcefully put down any attempt to change gun control laws, and the politicians who want (re)elected bend over for them, every time. Is there one politician in the land who is going to put the lives of the next 20 children at risk above his/her own job, and take on the NRA in Congress? Even if it cost them their seat in the next election? The bottom line is that they are all in it together, and are primarily always concerned with their power and their career and their life, first, and some more children being massacred beside their school desks, second. Until someone puts children's (or any victim's) lives first, nothing will change.

You always hear the arguments as to why it is impossible to do anything - and the arguments can be strong. There are an estimated 300 million guns already circulating in the USA: this is an absolutely terrifying statistic. A gun for everyone in the land! I read a recent comment stating that the great majority of owners are male, and that this is part of the problem, but ironically, the three guns used by the psycho in Sandy Nook school belonged to his mother. Who he also shot, by the way. It doesn't matter who owns them, it matters that they are present and accessible in the home!

One of the major arguments is always some bleating about how Americans have the constitutional right to protect themselves in their homes. What I would like to know is what are the statistics of shootings that occur in homes, via a father/mother protecting their children from an invader, versus how many unlawful shootings occur on the streets or in public places. I am pretty certain the latter hugely outnumbers the former, underlining the fact that guns create problems, they don't solve them.

Where there is a will, there is most definitely a way. Look at Australia. They decided to do something about their problems with guns, whereby PM John Howard took on the gun lobbies in 1996, and instigated legislation and a buy-back of some 640,000 guns (about one fifth, I believe) in a countrywide disarmament move. And? There have been no shooting massacres since. Additionally, firearm-mediated homicide and suicides both were reduced by around 60%. These are staggeringly positive results, and America needs to examine what was done there - if they have the you-know-what to take on the NRA and gun lobbyists. 

Canada does not have the same level of problem as the USA but it has seen an escalation in gun-related murders and mass shootings in recent years, and the total fiasco that was the gun registry did nothing positive - it actually increased the feeling that there was nothing to worry about, especially if you already owned guns prior to the fiasco. There will be a price to pay one day down the road, and everyone knows it, but again, politics and personal positions come before worrying about some school children that might be shot at some point in the future. It's shameful. 

Politicians needs to be made accountable. By whom? By us, that's who! People need to make it clear that they are no longer going to vote for the more experienced politician who might also happen to be under the wing of the NRA, but rather, instead, they are prepared to take a risk on some new 30-year-old, simply because he will fight for gun control from day one in office. In the end it is not the NRA who guarantees their jobs, it is the electorate. If the electorate spoke firmly enough, people might worry about the NRA a little less.

But of course, one cannot invoke the electorate without simultaneously saying that we are also therefore part of the problem, by helping to elect politicians (Obama included) who either pretend to be for gun control in public, or who are for it but refuse to step up when they get the job because of unpopularity in the party. Gun control is continuously neglected and the only question of relevance is how many more massacres is it going to take until there is a paradigm shift in attitudes towards it? 

One cannot help but wonder what the difference would be, if any, after a high level politician lost a child at the hands of some murderer at an elementary school? Would it suddenly garner greater attention or would they find themselves sort of sidelined in their new efforts for change, once a month had passed? Going from collective sympathy to suddenly being a pariah, because they are always hammering on about gun control now, just because they happened to lose someone. I am sure Congress can be a very lonely place when you don't toe the party line, but that is what is going to be needed to effect change - some people are going to have to grow the courage to stand up and refuse to take it anymore. 

It's a rather bleak topic for a lovely, snowy Monday morning but you know, unless we talk about it and make our opinions heard, and keep making them heard, well, nothing is ever going to change. Politicians need to realize that we are no longer going to give them a pass and elect them, unless they fully back gun control reform, and do something about it in office, and institutions such as the NRA need to have their power base and wings clipped, or held in check. Congress needs to stop running scared of the NRA and grow a pair. If the electorate and politicians can share a vision and work together (what a strange sounding concept!) then change will always be possible. 

That's my take on the subject, and I am sure we will read and hear many more opinions in the coming days. But let's keep the day positive, and on that note, I think it's time for a large mug of dark roast and a smoked salmon-poached egg bagel. Even my cat's ears will perk up from bed when he hears the wrapper to the salmon opening, and he will race down for his part of the treat. Not bad for a Monday morning, he will no doubt purr! ;) - Kevin Mc

[Update: No shocker at all that speaking on behalf of the President and the White House, Jay Carney today asked people to tamper expectations on gun law reform, "reminding" everyone that it is a complex problem which will need serious contemplation and discussion. "There are obstacles to action coming from a variety of places." Uh huh. As if that is something that we were not acutely aware of many years ago, already. There has been more than enough time for even the Obama administration to address this issue with action, not more words of rhetoric. The usual excuses, the usual calls for patience, the usual appeals for calm, and all the while nothing seems to change, ever. How completely predictable.]

Does the tree make the book, or can the book make the tree?!

 

What might at first seem like an unusual idea is actually a rather good one - a Christmas tree made of books! Given that the classic Christmas tree signals the season of giving gifts and (hopefully) giving thanks, well, what could be more of a treasure trove than a tree literally crammed with inspirational goodies?

Yes, I mean it, truly inspirational "goodies"! Somehow today, unless "goodies" means something sickeningly sweet and fattening, or some new electronic plaything, then it's frowned upon as anything but "goodies" and just the word "book" can induce a yawn. I don't know how this happened but it no doubt has something to do with "books" and "school" being largely synonymous. Yawn. ;)

This is a problem, and one that needs addressing. Don't get me wrong; I am not saying that as a kid I would have jumped into the present pile to the books first, ahead of my beloved chemistry sets or musical gifts - of course not. I wasn't a classically bookish type. But it is also true that once some chocolate had been eaten, and some shiny new toy had been clunked around for a while, the gifts that often endured the longest were the books. They often induced the first silence observed for weeks, and parents surely appreciated (deserved!) that.

Unlike almost any other form of gift, a book can transport one off into a parallel universe, make us forget the clock and the TV and the world, and literally give us a breather, all the while performing some form of extracurricular education. I think it is good for us to switch off the chatter in our own heads, and let someone else take us by the hand and lead us down the road of their choice. It's a bit like dreaming, where we switch off and just drift off into one adventure or another, and awake refreshed afterwards. 

I also don't agree that to some books can just be boring, and deserve a bored yawn when the wrapping paper comes off to reveal only a book. Why? Well, because everyone loves something! Whether it's history and world wars, or music, or art, or fashion, or cooking, or science, or technology or adventure and global travel, well, someone has written a book on it. If your kid loves sci-fi movies then for sure he/she can be persuaded to read a 400 page story of a future world where platinum-clad androids invade the earth and rule our world. If he/she loves wizards and magic, then, ehmm, I think someone has probably written a book about that too!

The key thing is to read more, irrespective of the actual content. While one might have trouble persuading kids that they also should read this amazing novel that Mom or Dad read recently and loves, why not choose a book that spoke to you when you were a kid instead? Young people can't usually be expected to enjoy books that seem brilliant to us today, due to the large divide in age, experience and outlook. So think back to something that blew your mind when you were a teenager, and throw that into the stocking and see what happens!

The key is simply to continue to give them what they want, but just make sure to throw two or three books in each year, and see if a spark appears. If it does, fan the flames and let it spread into a full-blown forest fire. Every book can be an adventure that lasts for weeks (or longer) and that alone makes them some of the best value for money out there. 

There's nothing quite like that feeling when you are in the middle of a great book and you actually can't wait to get home and get stuck into it again. Further, there's also a very unique feeling when a book you want to go on forever suddenly comes down to the last several pages, and you find yourself spreading them out and dragging them out because you don't want it to end. That's a sure sign that the writer did his job!

Now of course, there's an irony to the "tree" above being made of books, not least because it is the tree that created the physical part of the book, but moreover due to the fact that books are becoming more and more of a virtual thing. I am not going to get into the pros and cons of that situation as it is more appropriate for another blog on that subject alone, but it is relevant to this post in another way.

So yes, we are living in a truly digital age and that may apparently make it even more of a challenge to get kids excited about the sight of a book, but guess what? If they are typical kids then they all have electronic devices that can double as e-readers, if they don't actually own a Kindle or similar item already. So in that case, it doesn't have to be a hard copy of a book under the tree, it can be an online in-store credit that allows them to download three books of their choice directly onto their device. 

It's all books, it's all reading, and that can only be a good thing. To be virtually off into some new world inside your own head to the exclusion of this world, while almost always simultaneously receiving some subliminal form of further education (even if it's just in terms of expression in written form) is such a rewarding gift. 

So give a book to someone for Christmas this year, and hand them a whole new world to dive into where they can forget about this world for a while. It's fantastically therapeutic and one comes out the other end enriched, and ready to start on a whole new adventure, once more. Hmm, speaking of therapy, I think it's definitely time for some San Francisco ultimate dark roast blended with dark chocolate milk! ;) - Kevin Mc

12 days to Christmas on 12-12-12!

Here we are, a mere 12 days to Christmas on the legendary date of 12-12-12, or for some others, a mere hop, skip and a jump from Tribulation and the very End of Days! Take the first 12 and invert it on itself and it  becomes 21-12-12 which as we all know signals the end of the Mayan calendar and of our entire history! We all do know that, right?!

Nostradamus was a wily sort, and he probably saw fit to foresee the end of it all without letting us enjoy one last period of "festivity" i.e. a few more weeks of rampant materialism and consumerism that have typified the human existence in recent times. That's awful, it's all coming to an end before we can spend all of our money and gorge ourselves and indulge in all sorts of debauchery before the show is closed down? A disgrace!

To some, that "festivity" is in fact a modern day version of Tribulation! The unquenchable thirst for more and more possessions and an undeniable desire to ram as much food and drink as a body can hold into one until one is literally quite ready to explode. For many, by the time it gets to January 2nd, it does feel like the end of the world in one big, bloated, global hangover and depression. 

Well, you know, the end sure would solve a lot of the world's problems if indeed, as predicted, the evil anti-trinity comprising the Devil, the Anti-Christ and the False Prophet was to come to the fore commencing unholy Tribulation and overseeing the flaming destruction of the newly rebuilt Templemount which will signal the very End of Days itself. No more worries about world wars or the mortgage!

But here's the rub - it isn't going to happen. As massively interesting as the story is, well, apart from some coincidental world events implying that the period of peace and tranquility is coming to an end, there is zero indication that the world is at so critical a stage that it's all about to end. Christmas will be saved, at least for one more year. The cash registers are not programmed to stop ringing incessantly, just yet. 

Though it is an entirely subjective human phenomenon to feel that even while it may not all last forever, the end is far from nigh, for us. We always imagine that the end will be experienced by others, and not by us. But that's precisely what those about to be sucked into the void will also think, as the lights go out. It's not that different from feeling that it's others who get cancer, not us, and others who get shot in the increasingly frequent shooting rampages at shopping malls, but not us. 

But alas, we are not going to get out of the world's troubles so easily, in 2012 at least. As fascinating as the Quatrains of Nostradamus surely are, the train is going to be a-rolling for a while yet. However, with the instability that continues to rock the world from the middle east, or North Korea who just fired a rocket into the air, well, one could imagine a form of Tribulation erupting via some nuclear version of WWIII that could very well signal the end of normality, if not the End of Days itself.  

Nevertheless, these are matters that the governments and politicians need to address on a daily basis, while the populus gets to shop-till-it-drops, and gorge itself as if there will be no tomorrow, for the next two or three weeks. Isn't that what it's all about? A feeding frenzy in case none of us gets to see a new year, even when we know we will? Let's go people!

I much prefer the viewpoint that every day alive and healthy is some form of Christmas day, in case the end is nigh and out of the blue. Life is too complex an affair that it will all end in a nicely programmed fashion which we can arrange for and prepare for,, around Christmas. It will much more likely slap us in the head when we might least expect it, so take every day as the gift it surely is, and rejoice. Get out of bed in a positive fashion, and try and make the most of each coming day.

Having said that, as much as it's great to be alive and well, I shall now retire to my secret passageway behind the library shelves, and open up my copies of the Quatrains to delight in the fascinating predictions leading up to Tribulation and the End of Days. Nothing like apocalypse and armageddon to get the adrenaline pumping, especially if I can have that imported special blend dark roast from Argentina to go with it. If you are gonna go, you may as well go in style, n'est-ce pas?! - Kevin Mc

Whither winter?! Or is it withering in winter?!

Well, well, it appears that it's that time of year again. Given that we are hurtling towards mid-December, I suppose it's not that surprising but somehow the later it comes the bigger shock it seems to cause! I could swear I heard a collective groan from the metropolis this morning.

Personally speaking, I think that there's something great about a city like Montreal that truly does have four seasons that can be relied on (most of the time!) and enjoyed to the full. But of course, the one season that seems to divide people the most is old man winter. The beautiful but cold white blanket does not bring any comfort to many.

For some the sight this morning is very much that of a winter wonderland adventure playground arriving once more, and for others it is an ugly, chill-inducing sight that even makes them wish they were unemployed and could stay home for the day. Hell, no, stay home still spring!

Unquestionably it is a major issue for the elderly and I can understand totally how it affects them and their ability to get out and about, but for the rest of us, well, we don't have that excuse - yet. It's human nature to only compare our situation with what seems "normal" and to complain. Until this morning, "normal" was dry pavements, a temperature sitting just around zero, and little to no snow, rain or anything else. Beside that, this morning's white welcome probably was hardly heavenly to most commuters this morning. 

But we can often see things very differently when we either are able to transport ourselves into a less fortunate someone's normality, or remember a particularly unpleasant and difficult time in our lives. So, compared to someone who is in one of the local hospitals with cancer or Alzheimer's disease, who also does not have to face the wet misery of this morning, we are in clover. We are the cat who got the cream. Or if one remembers a time when our own regular life was kicked to the side by illness, either of ourselves or a family member, well, a cold Monday morning is but a triviality. 

I suppose it's one of the total ironies of human nature and all the things in life that are taken for granted that makes us groan at some little inconvenience that a kid staring out the window of a hospital bed is crying over. We are groaning because we have to go out in it and the kid is crying because he can't - unable to get up and go out in it. 

Although it's easy to come up with hypotheticals to imagine, it's harder to get people to use them as motivational tools to put a smile on their faces. But one must! It's just cold air. And wet snow. Some mess under your feet. Brain surgery it ain't! Isn't half the fun of coming home to a warm, cosy fire in the dark of winter the mess we have to go through to get there? The reverse might not be quite so true in terms of heading out into that mess to get to the office, but would not having a job or the capacity to get one be better?

It's winter, and it comes around like summer does, and there's nothing to do about it except to get out in it and attack life as if it was mid-July, not mid-December. We are so fortunate to be able to live as healthy individuals that we are not truly celebrating that freedom unless we do our best to remind ourselves of that and kick our own backsides every day, if possible. 

Besides, what fun would summer be if it was still 21 degrees today?! Hell, spring wouldn't feel anything special at all without a real winter. Those first few days of trickling water, warming sunshine, birds chirping and yes, even the classic spring aroma of poop thawing out in the sewers below the city streets, well, they are all magical due to having survived another few months of pure white hell (for some) or heaven (for others).

Yes, yes, I know this all might sound rather disingenuous coming from a writer! We being the rather fortunate species that seems to be allowed to cocoon at home on such days, near a crackling fire and with a pot of robust San Francisco dark roast on the desk. But, I am a man who practices what he preaches, and on that note I am off to ascend into the wintery, watery, windy icefall and deathzone of our very own Mont Royal.

Just imagine how much warmer and cosy it will seem afterwards, and how much better that dark roast is going to taste, and frankly, simply how much more alive I will feel after doing so - that is what makes facing such challenges well worth the effort. Now, if only that cursed telephone would ring so that I could make it an excuse to not go out after all! ;) - Kevin Mc

Molecular machine mayhem!

"Into the Unknown was exceptional. Nothing could touch it. It had all the elements that a healthy young scientist’s mind could want; scientific things while also inducing magnificent, scary fears of science being used to take over the world. My favorite episode of all time was the ground-breaking “Something in the Cellar”: a masterpiece. 

It had science, and death, and the supernatural, and ghosts, and computers, and robotic voices, and electrical current, all wrapped up in a big old dark and frightening Victorian house; one with a cellar. A working cellar, yes! The second I saw the episode title in the Radio Times, it had me hooked: Something in the Cellar. I knew it was going to be something juicy in the cellar, and I was not wrong. 

The hero was a certain reclusive genius professor, whose name was Monty if I remember correctly. Played to perfection by an Irish actor who I am sure was Milo O’Shea. I can see his face now, and it has to be Milo O’Shea! The professor was building a supercomputer in the cellar that could translate languages and even had a vocal output, as well as a print out of its emissions. This seems amazingly ordinary by today’s standards, but was fantasy land back then. 

It started out legitimately enough, but it became clear as the machine was being improved along the way, that it had begun to develop a personality, and a mind of its own. Without prompting it started working its way through the alphabet, spouting words that began with an “A” all day long, getting to the “B”s and on and on. Rambling on as Monty worked on it, sorting out the glitches that were commonplace with constructing a supercomputer from scratch in those days, when computers hadn't been born yet. I was fascinated by the various flashing lights, the grey metallic boxes and consoles, knobs and buttons and switches, wires all over the place, metal frames holding it all in place, and cathode ray monitor screens showing the “brainwaves”, and the printer beside, and a microphone.

God, I wanted one. Even if we didn't have a cellar. There I was, legs not long enough to reach the carpet while sitting on the sofa, the lights out for special effect, staring at the TV screen like I had found the missing link. You could have dropped a bomb onto the back garden and it would not have gotten me to look away.

Lo and behold, it was Monty’s possessive (but dead) mother who was the personality behind the computer’s spouting. Somehow, perhaps using electromagnetic energy, her dead spirit had infiltrated the computers, via the electrical wiring maybe, entering its very core, and had become at one with it. The high voltage passing through the machine fed her control and made her even more powerful, it seemed. 

Her possessiveness became rampant, refusing to allow any of Professor Monty’s assistants to be near, she wanted her son all to herself. When his research assistant was trying to repair the “D circuit” she used electromagnetic forces to stick a metal screwdriver into his arm. Along with a nice flash of electric discharge for good measure. She particularly didn't like Monty’s housekeeper, who was bumped off in an incredible display of the machine’s ever-increasing powers. An electrical discharge was passed through the entire house when Monty was out one afternoon, and the mother’s form appeared in a closet where the housekeeper was working, and racing away from it, into the bathroom, she touched a metal tap, and the circuit was closed, passing thousands of volts through her body, killing her. Monty eventually realized it was his mother, as the voice also became more female in nature, and addressed him directly:

“Mum’s been lonesome, on her ownsome, I want to talk to you……”

Monty did his best to put an end to the beastly creation he had constructed, but the machine could emit electrical discharges, and every attempt to turn off the current lead to a bright flash of thousands of volts, to ward off the attacker. Monty even went to the main power supply to thwart it there, but again, a huge electric arcing prevented him from getting to it. Things had come to a climax, and suddenly, while trying to do something, Monty was entangled in wiring and electrodes controlled by the machine, brought close in to the metal framing surging with high voltage, he was powerless to resist . Monty was gone, and suddenly on the monitor, there was the image of his mother’s face, coupled with the audio output:

“Just the two of us, forever, and ever, and ever,  and ever..…”

Repeating over and over, as the ominous theme music faded into play.

It was bone-chillingly real and bone-chillingly scary. The sitting room was dark and I was enraptured, completely. There were no VCRs in those days, which is a shame. I would have watched that over and over. I would today also!. I went up to bed with my head full of it. Would it be possible for an otherworldly presence, presumably using some energy form to manifest itself, to use that energy to tap into another high energy source, and join it, and even feed off it? 

Could dead spirits come back to the living using sensitive equipment as their vehicle, and take over the world? Surely the Devil would have an interest in this if it was possible. He would put his best resources onto it, right away. I couldn't sleep, my eyes full of flashing lights, my ears hearing the whirring and coming-to-life of machines in the basement, machines with a mind of their own, and of evil intent. Sparks and electric current passing through all the metal contacts in the house. Some Godforsaken entity down in the basement that had now taken hold of our house, and we would never be allowed out into the real world ever again.

I suppose at some point, with weary eyes, the voice of reason told me that we didn't have a basement, so, we couldn't be controlled by a machine down there. And I doubted that the fridge or the oven were sophisticated enough to take on a life of their own. Definitely not the old washing machine, which I had heard my Mum say was on its last legs. This ruled out the possibility of it finding the strength to ascend the stairs in the middle of the night, and wrap its electrical cord around my neck, strangling me to death. Then descending once again, and sliding back in under the counter so as not to be suspected in the morning.

For sure, on its last legs it would bang loudly going back down the stairs, step-by-step, and my Dad would rush out and grab it. So  the weary eyes finally closed, and off I went into dreamland, where new nightmares were sure to be waiting for me, in some dank cellar or another. My head was ringing with forever, and ever, and ever, and ever......"

[Excerpted from THE MOLECULES by Kevin Mc, now available on Amazon-Kindle]

A little insight into quiet resignation!

"Out of the chrysalis didst the butterfly emerge. From a rather vague, apparently functionless and motionless pupal shell, doth a butterfly eclose. Out of seeming blandness doth a magnificent creature emerge; an array of colors, all wafer-thin gossamer wings dusted in a fine powdered silk. A beautiful sight. An awe-inspiring rebirth. The most magnificent metamorphosis imaginable. 

Thus didst the artist also emerge. A previously imprisoned creature, until all of the biochemical triggers fire in sequence, the chemical information present therein being translated into changes, apparently drastic physical and phenotypic changes at that. In a more evolved and higher order organism, such as the human, naturally the brain is also heavily impacted. A neural rewiring of the network, exchanging synapses, disconnecting those neurons from these ones, and patch them in over here, why don’t you? 

Just like the newly formed butterfly exiting the pupa to new-found freedom and billowing fresh air, there is a period of “adjustment”. One could be forgiven for thinking the poor creature is in total shock at it’s new outlook on the world, but biology is rarely that unsophisticated. It is function, not folly, my friends. The butterfly needs to sit there awhile, so that its wings can harden in fresh air, to allow take off of the maiden flight. 

So it was with my good self, upon the realization that my life, my purpose, were similarly altered. I suddenly had you, Charlie Springbank, in my sights, and there was no letting go of you, this time. Upon sitting on the branch for long enough, in awe and wonder at my new challenge, my wings had sufficiently stiffened to facilitate forward movement. So it was that I conceptualized The Masterwork.

Let me be most clear, dear boy. Whilst it came to me in a vision, I had no intention of falling into the traps that others do. I never was nor ever would be or become a serial criminal. God, no. Life’s too short dear boy, and I had much work to do. But it just so happened that for a certain period you became my life’s work, and that’s all there was to it. What better way to make you pay for your sins, than to come at you where you live and work, and at your work? 

Find a method of attack that impacts your daily life in such a way that you cannot escape it. Many people walk out the door of a sunny morning, breathe a sigh of relief, because at least they have work, and a nice office to escape to each day. But what if I came up with an approach that hit you in the stomach, every day, in your chic office, at work? Hit ya hard enough, and on a regular enough basis, that coming home to quaint old Beacon Hill was but small comfort. Especially if the news was blaring on incessantly about it, and the wife would rattle on about when are y’all gonna get off your backsides and do something about it? Daddy-in-law starting to breathe down your neck, because His Highness, Lord Mayor, was starting to crack some heads of his own. The Chief of Police and The Mayor both scowling at you, when you dare to show up at some society function, when you should be at HQ, busting your ass. Irrespective of your acceptance into certain circles due to the wife’s family connections. Yes, this was the idea of The Masterwork. So it was conceived and designed, to pristine perfection. But the proof is in the execution, isn't it old fruit?

While I recognized that I might rapidly ascend my very own ladder, into stratospheric levels of stardom, I was forced to consider methodology most carefully. There wasn't any point in becoming an incarcerated star. The job only partially completed. This had to be avoided at all cost. Not least as I had zero intention of giving up even one hour of my own freedom due to the pursuit and deconstruction of yours. This was to be a win-win for me, and a lose-lose for you. Anything less than this and I would be unable to call it The Masterwork. Fast forward the tape, moron, and yes, it is today considered by one and all as The Masterwork."

[Excerpted from A QUIET RESIGNATION by Kevin Mc, out now on Amazon-Kindle]

Stop watching the clock, and check out the hourglass instead!

         

Where does the time go? It's a question we hear almost every day, particularly at this time of year! Somehow, from mid-November onward the clock just seems to go into overdrive and before we know it, we are crawling out of bed on a freezing morning in early January unable to believe that it's another year and the holidays are over. Again. 

It might have something to do with either the "time flies when you're having fun" adage or how suddenly all of our free time is taken up with dinners, parties, shopping and preparations for the festive period, or both. But in each case it seems that when we are not aware of time, either due to being buried in tasks or having a great time on holiday, the tick-tocks seem to accelerate. 

Another way of looking at it might be that time passes normally when we are productively busy or having a grand old time, but it actually  slows down when we are miserable or bored, to add insult to injury! You only have to think of how a typical day at work goes by when you are just in love with your job, compared to when you hate it. I don't mean that you love it because you are earning a great salary for doing very little - that's something else entirely. 

So when busy in one form or another, hopefully being productive, the time just flies by. When unhappy or bored out of one's mind, it passes by slower than a garden snail. Now, the question is: in terms of not feeling that life is just passing us by and barely getting to notice it flying away, is it better to be in the camp for whom it whizzes by or the one for which every day feels like a small lifetime?

In the end it all comes down to personality, I guess. Some people do not like the hole they dug for themselves, where they  never seem to get any of that "time" for themselves, and five years race by in the blink of an eye. Even though they may be superficially very successful and apparently happy, one day they hit 75-years-old and wish it could have been different. On the contrary, many people refuse early on to have life "compromised" by the over-the-top demands of a big job, settle for less, and usually earn less, but have considerably more free time. The important point of course, is what exactly do they do with that time?

That is a decision we all get to make for ourselves, and while some prefer to crash out on the sofa to watch TV for 3-4 hours, others choose to go to the gym or pursue some other interest in their life. It's often the people who apparently "have it all" or somehow manage to "do it all" that inspire us the most, even while acknowledging right away that we are not like that. But you know, the only major differences between such people and ourselves is a combination of drive and commitment.

When one is truly driven to do something or to achieve something, then that's half the battle. The commitment part requires the signing of a contract with oneself for implementation of a course of action, and then committing a portion of free time to getting a little bit of it done, and often. In fact, it seems to me that one major trait that many super-productive types have in common is a capacity to use (free) time very productively. They may agree that 5-10 pm is "free" time but would not agree that it is "dead" time. And if time does seem to race by because they are doing so many things, well, if it's borne out of passion and leads to real achievements or tangible "product" then I don't imagine that they regret it.

It is amazing how an effort of even an hour per day can begin to pile up over hundreds of days into something concrete and rewarding. It's a question of not seeing it as a loss of one's time, but rather a very satisfying use of one's time. If it's a passion, then it's use and not loss of time! In the case of writing a book, which naturally is a case that applies directly to myself, well, if I had seen struggling over the blank page as a complete loss of my time, then nothing would have ever been finished. Perhaps it might never even have been started! 

The young can be forgiven for not truly appreciating their time, because they feel (understandably) that they have so much of it ahead of them. But for mature people, the completely finite quantity of time available to us in this mortal coil begins to tick-tock louder in our ears, sooner or later. We can look back at time we may have "wasted" and regret it, but that's often simply part of growing up and growing older. It's human nature to just see today as one small unit package of time, with so many still left ahead of us t that there's no need to have a crisis over it. However, the clock is still ticking, and there will be plenty of time for the sitting around later on in life,  and less need for it now!

I think it's important to remember not only that it could all end tomorrow, accidentally or due to unforeseen health issues, but moreover that the 24-hour clock of single days can be distracting to some extent. Rather than seeing time clockwise in the picture at left above, it can be enlightening to think of it as an hourglass in the image on the right. The hourglass of life. The grains of sand started tumbling down from the second we were born, and we are hurtling towards the situation pictured in the first hourglass, where the last grain has fallen. 

This imagery helps me to see time and life quite differently, but maybe that's just me?! So if I am sitting around tonight doing nothing, moaning about the TV choices, at 7:30 pm on the clock, well, that's okay, it's just another Tuesday evening. Right? However, if you stick my own individual hourglass of my time beside the TV and I have to stare at where the sands are, and how much remains in the top chamber vs. what is lying in the bottom one - well, that might be enough to get me screaming in panic off the warm sofa and even out at -20 Celsius to run up the icefall into the deathzone! And then back onto the computer once home again. 

Time is our most precious commodity, and our human nature seems to be willing to not fuss over it due to how much of it we get, but I am pretty certain that that's not how we feel towards the end. I think the pipe and slippers by the fire will be fine for the introspection probably involved in later life, but until that time arrives, we must keep an eye on that relentless hourglass as a driving force to get us out of our funk and up from our chairs, and onto doing something productive that reflects the preciousness of our time! 

As an amusing anecdote related to my own viewpoint on time, I refuse to use a classical alarm clock. There's nothing more shocking than being woken from a deep sleep by jarring bells or a digital screech on repeat, so I prefer to use my own voice. My clock comes with a mini-disc onto which I can record my own soothing, stress-free entry into the world of the living each morning - but don't worry, I haven't gone soft on myself! It usually consists of a "Boom! Come on, son, wakey wakey, shift that butt and get it out onto the deathzone, now, boy!". Even the cat jumps and runs from that one, after sniffing the clock to clarify that it's not me! ;) Kevin Mc

Snail mail, perhaps, but still smarter 70 years later!

David Martin, 74, made a fascinating discovery of something as old as himself when he recently opened an unused fireplace during renovations at his home in Surrey, England. Among what were the clear remains of what appeared to be a pigeon, there was this intriguing little red canister attached to the bird's leg. 

It became evident that the remains were of a dead carrier pigeon, of which the British forces used around 250,000 during WWII to relay important information to and from the battlegrounds. It is believed that this particular pigeon was on its way back from Normandy, probably en route to General Montgomery whose headquarters were not far away. The bird is thought to have stopped to rest on the chimney and perhaps become incapacitated by fumes, falling to it's death in the chimney. 

The message was apparently sent by an airman sergeant and was destined for "X02" which it seems was the code for British bomber command in Buckinghamshire, England. The message contains a series (27) of five letter (or number) combinations, along with some unique identifiers. It has since been forwarded to Bletchley Park's codebreaking headquarters and has also been examined by analysts at the British Intelligence Agency. 

Remarkably, even the sharpest minds of 2012 appear to be incapable of deciphering this code from 70 years ago! But it might not be that surprising because the whole idea in the first place was to effectively render such codes "unbreakable". Teasing out the actual message would require the appropriate codebooks and knowledge of the "one-time pad" encryption system, wherein only the sender and the recipient would have the key needed to read the message.

In all likelihood both the necessary codebooks and the one-time pad were destroyed after a certain period which means that we may never learn what was in this message that might shed some light onto a very historic moment in history. But it's late arrival at close to its destination serves as a reminder of earlier times and what remarkable jobs the oft-maligned pigeon did for us all (not just the British) during a very delicate time in this world. 

It also makes me smile that with all of our computers and technological advances since then, the experts and spies of Britain are today unable to decode something that was sent 70 years ago - so good luck to anyone who was trying to decode such messages back then! You can be sure the message contains something that was critical to the times in which it was sent and there is a huge desire by all involved to know what it said. 

I hope that some codebreaker, somewhere, does manage to crack it, if only to complete the incredible journey of this one faithful carrier pigeon and all the others who served so well alongside it. I daresay that I know of a certain former four star general and ex-CIA Director who might wish he had been smart enough to use such "technology" in recent communications, rather than the supposedly more efficient current version: email! ;) - Kevin Mc

Lightning did strike twice - now it's time for #3!

This shelf at home is beginning to look a lot more interesting, now that my second novel has been printed and exists in a physical sense as well as in the virtual new world of digital publishing. Without a doubt, even though we at Evergreen Umbrella are huge proponents of the brave new world of self-publishing and digital media, there is nothing quite like the feel of a crisp new book in one's hands!

It's exactly the same with recorded music. No matter how easy it becomes to just download music (that has been paid for!) onto an electronic device, nothing truly beats having the actual CD in your hands. It's the same reason why even people who could record anything they wanted onto cassettes still went out and bought prerecorded cassettes: they wanted the item as a piece for their collection. 

Times have changed and we must move with them, even if for some things we have to be dragged kicking and screaming into the modern era. There is just never going to be the same effect when someone opens up a smart TV or other device and says, "look at my DVD collection", or "here's my CD library" and you see an electronic menu on a screen to choose from. Nothing can compare with bookshelves lined floor to ceiling with books of all shapes, sizes and colors, or shelves filled with more than a thousand CD cases. 

I am the first to admit that reading a book on a device will probably never truly replace the experience of reading a story printed on paper with a cool cover package. There is something very romantic about an actual book and how it can not only transport us off into another world for various periods, or in the best cases actually change our lives. An electronic reader just can't have the same tactile experience and warmth of a real book.

But this is the digital age, and there are huge benefits that come with it in terms of keeping costs down and allowing all of us to write our own stories without having to face the silence from the gatekeepers (i.e. the dreaded literary agent) to whose attention (or lack thereof!) we used to send our manuscripts. One can now read new authors for as low as 99 cents (or in some cases, totally free) per "book" and new authors can now get their work out there and available in the marketplace without basically spending a penny. Furthermore, they don't wait around impatiently anymore for responses to queries that never come, or come with the usual generic aloof rejections.

Of course, marketing then becomes the true "rate-limiting step" for unknown authors moving forward. But that's just another hat that needs to be put on once a book is finished and is released, and people need to get busy on various social media sites and their own websites and blogs. No, it's not easy, but neither is it brain surgery! In fact, the very people who refused to listen to skeptical family/friends (You are going to write a book?! Will that last as long as your claim that you were going to renovate the basement?!) or even the little negative voice in their own heads, are the very people to roll their sleeves up and get on with it!

Many of us are individuals who have succeeded in other professional areas of our lives and careers, yet still felt driven enough to face the dreaded blank page and transform a set of ideas racing around our head into a (hopefully) coherent story on paper. It's far from an easy process, which is why so many start out full of enthusiasm yet end up putting it back down quite soon after beginning, just like a guitar.  Those who push through and accept that days of amazing progress often come alongside days of almost hopelessness are the ones who have it in them to be a writer, irrespective of what the publishing world says about them. 

One of the key challenges about being a self-published author has got much less to do with writing of the book itself, and more the writing on various social media to actually promote the book. But in some ways, who better to understand the placement of your work and how you want it presented to the world than yourself?! As people who ran the marathon of writing a novel, we are not the type to walk away from a subsequent challenge, and as we have to do it all and be a jack-of-all-trades, well, we just do it! 

It takes time, yes, especially if you are not familiar with social media use for business/marketing, but a grossly intellectual affair it isn't! Compared to writing a novel, social media is like going outside, kicking a ball around and chatting with some people. So get to your computer, set up a Facebook business page, get onto Twitter, create your own stunning website and hell, go all the way, and set up your very own blog!  A major reason we want to write a book is because we have a voice and we want that voice to be heard - so given that it's assumed that you've got something of interest to say, well, say it! Speak up! Speak out! Share it! 

Personally speaking, I am delighted to see both A QUIET RESIGNATION and THE MOLECULES on my brickwork shelf, and it's particularly enjoyable because so many probably thought I was dreaming, and it would never happen. But it did, and now that these two books are published the focus switches to what will become book #3, while remembering that I found a way to be an active scientist and writer simultaneously twice before, so now I just have to do it all again!

People have been asking already, so I will let slip what is the working title of book #3 - for now it's "IN SEARCH OF SOME SOUL". Ironically, I have a feeling that I am going to have to dig pretty deep to excavate this one out of me, and I hope that my soul remains intact afterwards! ;) - Kevin Mc