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Nature

RSPB Big Garden Birdwatch 2009

My list for the RSPB Big Garden Birdwatch:

Blue tit 3
Great tit 2
Long-tailed tit 2

Chaffinch 2

Robin 2
Dunnock 1

Magpie 1
Carrion crow 4

Green woodpecker 1

Town pigeon 4
Woodpigeon 2

Sparrowhawk 1

Which is basically pretty rubbish — it was very quiet today — but is livened up by a couple of decent species: sparrowhawk, which is increasingly common around here but by no means something I see in the garden often, and green woodpecker, which it turns out I have seen once before on a BGBW, but was still pleasing.

Most ridiculous gap on that list: blackbird. I mean, come on. Almost as surprising, no ring-necked parakeet.

Lots of possibles that didn’t show: wren, goldcrest, goldfinch, nuthatch, coal tit, great-spotted woodpecker.  The garden has been weirdly short of birds for the past two or three years, though. We used to have lots of starlings: I’ve seen about two this year. Same with greenfinches. There used to be lots more chaffinches. I haven’t seen siskin this year.

I don’t know why this is true, but it’s faintly depressing. Ho-hum.

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Other

A weird letter

A couple of days ago, this peculiar typewritten envelope was put through the door:

The ALL CAPS typewritten envelope reeks of ‘political nutjob’ and the red cross in the corner, for those of you who don’t know, is the English flag — the cross of St George, in fact — which during major football tournaments can be passed off as support for the England football team, but at other times tends to be a sign of racist views.

So I thought I had a pretty good idea of what the letter was going to be about, but in fact it was odder than that. For one thing, notice that the envelope starts with a poem of sorts:

HOUSE BY HOUSE AND STREET BY STREET THE MESSAGE MUST NOW GO
PASSED TO YOU BY FACT IN PRINT OF WHAT THE ELDERS KNOW,
REALITY OF OUR PRESENT PLIGHT RESULTING FROM PAST YEARS,
OF THIS NEW LOW THE CONSEQUENCE OF RICH REWARDED PEERS,
THERE IS NO CHOICE FOR ANSWER THEN FOR WHAT IS TO BE DONE,
OUR NATION IN PRIORITIES MUST VOTE IN VOICE AS ONE

Inside, we find 5½ photocopied pages stapled together, all still typewritten all-caps. From now on I’m going to start using lower-case , though, because  it’s easier to read. The writer introduces himself/herself:

Dear reader,
I introduce myself as a person who has lived in London for over 78 years since birth,
I have children, grand children, also great grandchildren,
I know of pre war years, fear free streets, open front doors and when life was simply happy for all.
I also know of the war years, and the Blitz,
also death from the skies, for like many others I was here, I also know of post war years and the happiness and joy of realising I had not died like many others in the bombings of London.
So in fact like many others I had great fear at the front of my life, my youth was taken from me,
but now in my old age once again like many others fear is deep within my final years, when my mind should be calm before I am called,
leaving behind my descendants and an England on a path to destruction,
many young as well as the majority of the old have curfew fear,
no we dont go out after dark its not safe, wrong places at wrong times,
it dousnt look very good does it.

Which is actually kind of moving. But what surprised me was the proposed solution: write to the Queen, and ask her to abolish political parties, let her know directly what your concerns are, so that she can abolish the corrupt political system that has brought us 86 years of Con/Lab government. Apparently that’s ‘the only solution to prevent the revolution that will destroy the England that you stand upon.’ Although frankly, a mass grass-roots movement to completely overthrow our political system doesn’t seem like a way to avoid revolution.

The whole thing is long and rambling and repeats itself; but the other bit that stands out is about getting police back on the streets:

As is well known there are few crime preventers upon the streets.
Ref, =coppers with legs=
Even few of those are without fear,
Why.
Because they have no means of protecting their own lives let alone the general public.
Few criminally intent go alone,
more often than not the minimum is two but the norm is about four =++,
the first thing that must be done is to reintroduce our preventers,
yes you have it, the bloke in blue with legs,
it can be done you know,
but he must be given the tools for the job.
The rapid fire sleeper dart pistol capable of a multi knock down,
not straight away of course, but who is going to kill a copper if they have a dart in their arse and sleepie byes follows a little later,
it is an ugly solution to an ugly problem but its the only one to deal with todays primitivity,
deaths will occur in instances of dart dose and alcohol combinations also drugs.
In these instances the arresting officer will be exonerated following coronas report.
In the light of the approaching recession these problems must be taken up before further degeneration takes place.
The following is a must. Stop and search vehicles for knives and guns.
Instant custodial sentence for those caught in possession, no trials.

I don’t why I’m sharing this with you really; it’s just an interesting thing. You can see the whole letter on Flickr here if you want.

Categories
Culture

Caribbean Reading Challenge: my list

My list for Scavella’s Caribbean Reading Challenge. I actually haven’t really decided on most of the books for my list yet, but I thought it would be useful to have a single place to put them anyway. So here we go:

  1. The President, Miguel Angel Asturias (Guatemala)
  2. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Díaz (Dominican Republic)
  3. Annie John, Jamaica Kincaid (Antigua)
  4. Masters of the Dew, Jacques Roumain (Haiti)
  5. Beka Lamb, Zee Edgell (Belize)
  6. ???
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Culture

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz

I really enjoyed this one; it’s lively, full of energy. Funny. It’s written in a colloquial style, sprinkled with slang, bits of Spanish and SF references.

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is a novel about a Dominican family in New Jersey. Oscar himself, obese and nerdy, was born in New York, but the book interleaves his story with the family history; his mother’s life in the Dominican Republic, then further back again to tell the story of her parents. It is, among other things, about the immigrant experience, about being a Dominican in New Jersey but always slightly an outsider in the DR. And what it means to be Dominican anyway if you can’t live up to the stereotype, if you are in fact a fat nerd. And the sections about his family before they left the DR, there are other things: life under dictatorship and so on. 

Glancing over the Goodreads reviews, they seem to mainly trend towards OMG this is teh best novel EVAR with a sprinkling of people who are irritated by one or other of the books quirks: the heavy use of Spanglish, the footnotes, the multiple narrators, the fact that the book is only partly about what the title says it’s about. One of the people in my mother’s book group  apparently disliked it because he likes books to start at the beginning and then go in a straight line to the end.

You probably have a pretty good idea before you start what your tolerance is like for that kind of thing; personally the non-linear narrative and the various narrative voices don’t bother me at all, and while I’m not a big fan of footnotes in novels they weren’t especially irritating in this book. The Spanglish/Spanish was more of a problem for me personally because I don’t know any Spanish, and while a combination of context and the remnants of the French and Latin I learned in school were enough to deduce what some words meant, whole sentences were generally beyond me. I’m certainly not suggesting that he shouldn’t have used the Spanish, and it added to my enjoyment more than it spoiled it, but I was probably missing out on a lot of what was going on. Caveat emptor.

I wouldn’t go quite as far as best book EVAR either; I don’t think it’s even the best novel I’ve read this year, and I’ve only read two. But I did thoroughly enjoy it. Here’s an extract:

It seemed to Oscar that from the moment Maritza dumped him—Shazam!—his life started going down the tubes. Over the next couple of years he grew fatter and fatter. Early adolescence hit him especially hard, scrambling his face into nothing you could call cute, splotching his face with zits, making him self-conscious, and his interest—in Genres!—which nobody had said boo about before, suddenly became synonymous with being a loser with a capital L. Couldn’t make friends for the life of him, too dorky, too shy, and (if the kids from his neighbourhood are to be believed) too weird (had a habit of using big words he had memorised only the day before). He no longer went anywhere near the girls because at best they ignored him, at worst they shrieked and called him gordo asqueroso! He forgot the perrito, forgot the pride he felt when women in the family had called him hombre. Did not kiss another girl for a long long time. As though almost everything he had in the girl department had burned up in that one fucking week.

Not that his “girlfriends” fared much better. It seemed that whatever bad no-love karma hit Oscar hit them too. By seventh grade Olga had grown huge and scary, a troll gene in her somewhere, started drinking 151 straight out the bottle and was finally taken out of school because she had a habit of screaming NATAS! in the middle of the homeroom. Even her breasts, when they finally emerged, were floppy and terrifying. Once on the bus Olga had called Oscar a cake eater, and he’d almost said, Look who’s talking, puerca, but he was afraid that she would rear back and trample him; his cool-index, already low, couldn’t have survived that kind of paliza, would have put him on par with the handicapped kids and with Joe Locorotundo, who was famous for masturbating in public.

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz is my book from the Dominican Republic for the Read The World challenge, and is my second book for the Caribbean Reading Challenge.

» The photographs, Thanksgiving In Paterson, NJ and Desfile y Festival Dominicano de New Jersey, are both © remolacha.net and used under a Creative Commons by-nc licence.

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