Then I was standing in the kitchen, and there was a huge long line of coffee cups on the bench. Every coffee cup was different from every other: some were big clunky mugs, others were delicate china things on saucers. Each cup held a different quantity of coffee: some were spilling over, some contained nothing but dregs, and every gradation in between was represented in some cup. Some of the coffees were freshly brewed and piping hot, while others had clearly been made days ago and were perfectly cool.

I went along the line of cups, staring down into each one in turn. As I went, each coffee cup communicated to me one of my friend’s criticisms of my story.

The end.

“Ode to Oma”, a Geek’s Lament …

A wake, sleeping Oma,
To thank your devices,
Saving us from vices
Of grievous file destructions
And heinous interruptions.
Though made to RAID,
Spin down in shade.
Your life is run,
Your race is won.
Now time is right,
In dead, dark night,
For you to slumber,
Devoid of number.

“The quick temporary hack to fix a problem always becomes the permanent solution, so get the quick temporary hack right.”

I had another good example of this recently. A while back my colleague Pete got sick of having to type

telnet ienabler.canterbury.ac.nz 259

all the time, so he wrote a temporary script called “zz” to do (just) this. Other people (me) started to use it, and now I get annoyed when working on a system that doesn’t have it, and I have to recreate it everywhere I go

Sir Ian McKellen has been touring with his production of Waiting For Godot, and I was lucky enough to see the performance last night. The word is that the tour was originally planned to terminate in Australia, but Sir Ian insisted that if they were coming to this part of the world they had to include New Zealand, as he had become very fond of the place while filming The Lord of the Rings.

Whatever the truth of the matter I’m exceedingly grateful that they came to little ol’ Christchurch, as the production was just amazing. My parents came down from Tasman for a couple of nights to enable them to see the show. Dad had seen the play before – 50 years ago at university!

I had heard of the play of course: of how nothing much happens. How can a play in which nothing much happens possibly be interesting? Let alone be an Important Play? I still don’t actually know – but it can. I was just stunned by how great the show was. As I said to my father afterwards, “I don’t know what that was, but whatever that was it was the best one of those I’ve ever seen.”

Sir Ian was, predictably, brilliant, but the three other men in the troupe held their own.

One thing about the production didn’t really work. The play is supposed to be set in a deserted country lane, but this production moved it into an abandoned theatre. The effect was very cool – in the Isaac Theatre Royal the real private boxes where matched by corresponding private boxes in the set – BUT it didn’t make much sense, as the play calls for people to happen past, and there are lots of scenes where the characters look up to see the sky.

But this mattered not – and when you think about it, it was no more baffling than any of the other strange stuff going on in the play.

What an amazing experience.

One of my all-time favourite TV shows is Time Team. I saw the Piercebridge episode last night. It was one of the best ever, but I was filled with unanswered questions, and shouting at the TV didn’t seem to help.

The dig was centered on the remains of three ancient bridges over the River Tees. The three sets of remains were within a couple of hundred metres of each other. Two sets were actually in the river, while the third was high-and-dry, well clear of the current course of the river. They explained this as due to the course of the river changing over the centuries, coupled with the bridges being built at different times. However, the earlier bridges are sited in the river, while the later bridge is on dry land. How can this be? Did the river drift away from the line it followed when the first two bridges were constructed, and then drift back again centuries after the last bridge was constructed?

Two local divers had recovered thousands of votive offerings from the river over twenty years, all found within a small (four metre) area. All of the items were just sitting on the bottom of the river, covered in nothing more than a layer of slime. The Time Team eventually concluded (based, it seemed to me, on scant evidence) that the offerings had been placed on a small island in the river, that had been washed away. But how is it possible that thousands of items have stayed within four metres of each through 1800 years of shifting rivers and disappearing islands? The landscapes man talked about the regular river inundations, with boulders constantly being washed downstream to crash against the bridges, necessitating regular bridge rebuilds. Again, how did the offerings stay put through 1800 years of that? Why have they not been pulverised to dust or at least scattered along hundreds of kms of river, or been left underground by the shifting river?

(Note that I’m not saying that their interpretation is wrong, just that I wished that they’d addressed these seemingly obvious problems with their interpretation.)

Another matter that exercised me was the matter of archaeological ethics. They sawed multiple large chunks off the ancient timbers embedded in the river to try and get dendro dates. Of course all archaeology is destruction, but no-one even raised the question of whether it was acceptable to cause such damage to the site. I’m not saying that they were necessarily wrong to take the samples (I wanted to know the dates as much as anyone), but the very fact that they never for a moment even raised the issue of how much damage is acceptable is worrying.

Ripley and Helen organized a second informal meeting of SpecFicNZ members (the first being held after Elizabeth Knox’s talk) at Cafe NG today. Nine of us were there, and it was a good fun couple of hours with good coffee and good food, and lots of writerly conversation. We’ve decided to make it a regular thing.

He was, as expected, very, very, very funny. What I didn’t expect was the degree of interaction with the audience. It started in the first few minutes, when someone shouted “Get in behind!” from the audience, a phrase Bailey wasn’t familiar with and spent some time riffing on. (“I’ve only been on stage five minutes, already it’s the strangest gig ever.”)

A little later he picked up a guitar for the first of his numerous musical numbers, and someone shouted, “Play the banjo!” Bailey spent a few minutes looking about the stage for the non-existent banjo, before stepping through the effects on his amp to try and find a banjo setting, pausing to play with the sitar setting along the way. When he found that he did indeed have a banjo setting, he challenged the audience to a duel with the famous “duelling banjos” riff.

A while later still came the most surreal moment of the show when he brought forth an instrument that I thought was a balalaika, and asked the audience to identify it. (“I’m not going on until you get it right. It’s your time you’re wasting.”) Lute? No. Balalaika? No. Lyre? No. Then someone shouted out, “Is it something Dianetics related?” Bailey, somewhat nonplussed, said yes, and that in fact what he was holding was the spaceship that the Thetans travelled to earth in a trillion years ago. He declared this suggestion to be the strangest heckle he’d ever received. (Eventually he gave in and told us that the instrument was an Iranian oud, an instrument with eleven strings and no frets. He then started to play some Country&Western on it, making it Country&Eastern.)

His stand-up routines were invariably hilarious, and included some really quite savage attacks against what he saw as talentless and/or vacuous writers, singers, and other famous people. His solution to the problem of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill was to plug the hole with Dan Brown novels.

Some of his routines had a decided erudite edge to them, such as his analysis of many different painted renditions of the Incredulity of Saint Thomas. Unfortunately our seats were located such that the screen he projected things onto was so foreshortened that we couldn’t get more than a sense of what was being shown.

One of his songs consisted of references to the acronyms used in online discussion, culminating with a new one of his own: ROTFLYSST (Rolling On The Floor Laughing Yet Somehow Still Typing).

Probably his funniest routine came right at the end when he talked about how crass the London Olympics opening ceremony would be, with giant pies that flipped open revealing dancing girls covered in gravy and mushy peas, and a robot queen whose head flipped open to fire corgies into the air.

A brilliant and funny evening from a brilliant and funny man.