What's in a Name

Archie Leach famously became Cary Grant; Marion Mitchell Morrison became John Wayne; Norma Jean Baker became Marylin Monroe, all quite reasonable choices, I'd say. And who could argue with Georgios Kyriacos Panayiotou’s choice of George Michael? I’m not so sure about Vincent Damon Furnier, though, who chose the moniker Alice Cooper, or Simon John Ritchie who chose Sid Vicious.

In Germany, the State controls the names of citizens. I’m told names of newborns must be chosen from a list of acceptable, government sanctioned names. So there’ll be no Fifi Trixibelles or Brooklyns or Moon Units being christened there in the foreseeable future.

Some surnames are just unfortunate. I mean, how can anyone with the surname Tuck ever become a friar? Mr and Mrs Brown may never choose the name Charlie; the Potters must steer clear of Harry; people called Curtin have a duty to avoid the names Annette or Antoinette; and Mr and Mrs Dover can't use names like Han, Eileen and Ben. Andrew Hore plays hooker for the New Zealand All Blacks. Now, I’m not saying the Hores (or Hoares) of this world shouldn’t play rugby, but surely common sense would dictate steering clear of the number 2 position. The surname Brick precludes a whole raft of possible career choices, just as surely as anyone with the surname Part must never join the army.

Some first names should be avoided. If you want your child to grow up to be a builder, for example, don’t call him Bob. For a prospective postman, the name Pat is a no-no. Mike for a sound engineer, Bill for an accountant. And what about Fred the fed, Jim the weightlifter, Don the professor? Norman is another unfortunate name. What chance does someone called Norman have of ever being promoted to the position of foreman? Not gonna happen. And, of course, the name Will should be quietly forgotten. I mean, who wants to be the number one target when the shooting starts?

As always, the last word goes to Mother Nature and some of the names she chose for her offspring. Take the hippopotamus or the platypus, the axolotl, the gnu and our old friend the aardvark. I ask you, would the panda have been as cuddly as it is or the crocodile as nasty if their names had been reversed? And while we’re on the subject of dangerous animals, surely the bi-polar bear must be the worst of all!

Evolution is supposed to make life enhancing choices, but even natural selection can get it wrong. How counterproductive the name of the fur seal, or the ivory elephant, and don’t even get me started on the edible frog!

And Another Thing

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams is my favourite book, the one that I would have to take with me to that desert island. If I could take all five books in the trilogy, I would. When Douglas died in May, 2001 we lost a great contemporary philosopher, a literary treasure, and a comic genius.

Yesterday, I bought a copy of Eoin Colfer’s And Another Thing, the sixth and final book in the trilogy.

I read it in one day.

Fair do's, Eoin, you did a cracking job.

The first thing that struck me was that you must have switched off MS-Word’s spell checker. Otherwise, the manuscript would have looked like the Book of Kells while you were writing it. Second, I was flabbergasted at how quickly you churned it out. In the time it took you to write the book and Penguin Books to publish it, I would have located my glasses, arranged my pencils in a neat row and put the kettle on.

Far from attempting to replicate Douglas’s voice, I was glad to see that you injected your own literary juices into the mix. Those characters who inhabited the earlier books are still there with all their original quirkes, and you have added a few new characters, notably, Hillman Hunter the Oirishman and Wowbagger the green alien with a problem.

I spotted a passing reference to a character in Adams’s Long Dark Teatime of the Soul, as well as Lovecraft’s The Call of Cthulhu and Philip K. Dick’s Blade Runner. I wonder how many references to other Science Fiction works I missed. I’d be willing to bet that the Sci-Fi community will have endless fun searching for these, but then I never won a bet in my life.

I found only three typos: on pages 28, 126 and 128. I expect you left them in there deliberately, for people like me.

So, well done, Mr Colfer, and thank you. Hopefully, they’ll let me out soon, and if I ever do end up on a desert island, maybe they'll let me take six books.

An Open Letter to Richard Dawkins

Dear Richard Dawkins,

I have just finished reading your latest book, The Greatest Show on Earth, and I am driven to write you this open letter, even though I have no expectation that you will ever read it.

I have read all of your books (in order!) apart from A Devil’s Chaplain, which I am half way through. I discovered your books principally because of your inspired title The Blind Watchmaker. It seems to me the label "non-fiction" is an inadequate description of your books. We need a new word, without the negative connotation.

I have an ancient degree in Mathematics, but I think I must admit to being one of those people identified by Medawar as ‘educated far beyond their capacity to undertake analytical thought’. The distillation of all that I have learned from your wondrous books amounts to a jumble of half-remembered and barely understood, but amazing, facts about evolution and the planet that we share. I have gathered your main messages, of course, about how evolution has worked over the Aeons, how destructive are the religious memes in all their varieties, what a genius Charles Darwin was and how much you enjoyed the company of Douglas Adams.

I too loved Douglas Adams. I knew him only through his writings, but I rejoice in his unique talent. I include this only as an amusing aside, but you and I are linked by a chain of acquaintances. My first cousin’s wife is Eoin Colfer’s sister-in-law, and as I’m sure you must know, Eoin has been commissioned by his literary agent (whom he shared with Douglas Adams) to write the sixth book in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series.

As for The Greatest Show on Earth, it left me with a few questions, some of which follow:

1 How on earth did physicists calculate the 49 billion year half-life of Rubidium-87?
2 How can we account for the persistence of the Cystic Fibrosis gene and others that shorten an individual’s life?
3 What happens where Malthus and Darwin meet? Or why are there so many of us on the planet, and when will the human population stop increasing?
4 What do you think of the idea that the application of human thought is an evolutionary force in its own right? That perhaps our technology (e.g. Genetic Engineering) might gazump natural selection?
5 To what extent do random genetic mutations arise from cosmic rays? The Coelacanth lives in the depths of the ocean, shielded from cosmic rays; does that explain why it has evolved so little?
6 What tells us that the DNA bases are processed in threes? (I think I missed a lecture somewhere). I can see that the four base pairs could be used to create a 64-letter alphabet, but how does that translate into biology?
7 I assume that Darwin was unaware that plants and animals share a common ancestor. Is this correct?
8 If we are here simply to pass on our genes, why do we live so long? Why don’t we mate and die like butterflies?

If I had a quibble it would be on the miserable size of the index to each of your books.

In conclusion, let me say how much I envy you. I envy the field that you work in, so rich in variety and wonder; I envy your erudition, your facility with language; and I envy the time you spent with Douglas.

Yours truly,


JB Toner

A Book List

I’ve been reading a lot lately. In an effort to understand more about writing, I’ve been tackling thrillers, modern and retro. Since my last posting here, I’ve read (1) Child 44 by Tom Rob Smith, (2) The Hackman Blues and (3) Priest by Ken Bruen, (4) Allan Guthrie’s Two Way Split, (5) The Interpretation of Murder by Jed Rubenfeld, (6) James Patterson’s Along Came a Spider, (7) Last Train to Liguria by Christine Dwyer Hickey, (8) Echo Burning by Lee Child, all of the above topped off by (9) Mystery Man by Colin Bateman.

I don’t do book reviews, but can’t resist a word or two in passing about these:
(1) A brilliant debut novel, but I had a major problem with his attempt at omniscient point-of-view which came across to me simply as head-hopping; his use of italics for dialogue gave me a headache; and why leave out chapter numbers?
(2) and (3) Hard-hitting ‘Noir’ detective stuff. Interesting style. Everything is subsumed in ‘Voice’ and character interaction. No room for scene-setting and exposition. Sort of stream-of-consciousness on speed.
(4) Another ‘Noir’ book. An adventurous attempt at an original story presentation that, sadly, didn’t work for me.
(5) Far two long and long-winded for me. Could have used a good editor.
(6) Patterson’s first Alex Cross book. I was looking for the magic ingredient that made this a bestseller. Not sure I found it.
(7) An atmospheric book about Italy. Far too long. This book should have been cut by at least 30%. The ending, when the story finally gets moving, is enjoyable.
(8) Not really my cup of tea. Good writing style, story quite contrived and formulaic.
(9) Brilliant! I love Colin Bateman. Humour to die for. I want to read more of his books.

I’ve also recently read Writing the Breakout Novel by Donald Maass

My ‘to read’ list now includes: Alan Furst, John Le Carre, David Baldacci, Tom Bradby, Fred Vargas, Ken Follett, and, in an attempt to brush up on some of the classics that I should have read years ago: The Great Gatsby, Shogun, Moby Dick, Lolita.

The Sequel

Hey, I'm writing again.

Four days so far, averaging 750 words per day.

Not a lot, you say? I know, but I'm in no great hurry. And I still have a lot of other things to do (housework (ugh) and DIY (double ugh)).

I'm in heaven, listening to "Paranoid" by the Jonas Brothers.

Next week I'm going to be really busy - the US Open Golf Championship starts Thursday in New York.

DIY

I’ve had a new porch added at the front of the house. After the job was completed, I was left with a few small DIY jobs.

The painting for instance.

So far, I have painted the new exterior walls with two coats of brilliant white external emulsion. The door I have trimmed with matt black as required by the colour scheme of the house. It looks great, but unfortunately it doesn’t match the rest of the house which was brilliant white with matt back trim when it was last painted about eighteen years ago, and is now a murky cream and grey with rusty streaks on the downpipes. I suppose I really should repaint the rest of the house. It’s a detached house, by the way, two storeys.

The interior of the new porch had to be painted as well, of course. In total, the painting took one and a half tubs of interior and exterior emulsion and one litre each of matt black masonry paint and white interior and exterior gloss paint, as well as a small can of wood stain (antique pine), nine assorted brushes, a bottle of white spirit and several days. The kitchen looks like a battlefield.

Our front door has been moved outward and re-hung; I am told that this door is warped which explains why it doesn’t quite fit in its new position. We now have a new internal door of knotty pine which I have named Conan the Barbarian (well hung). Of course I had to varnish it (on both sides) with a wood stain to match the rest of the internal doors. This turned out to be a mind-blowingly tedious job, as the door consists of fifteen small glass panes held in place by wooden spars and 120 moulded slips. I still have to give this door its second coat, having spent a day scraping wood stain off the glass panes with a razor blade.

A box of laminate should have been enough to cover the floor of the new porch, and it probably would have been if I’d had the right tools. That’s all I’m going to say on that subject.

I was left with the simple task of constructing a step between the porch and the hall, and this task has taken a full week of measuring, cutting, planing, gluing and screwing, unscrewing, ungluing, remeasuring, recutting, replaning, whittling, padding, fitting, gluing and screwing. It’s still not quite right, but it’s as right as it’s ever going to be.

I know some people find DIY relaxing, but after two weeks of it, I need a break. I prefer PSETDI (Pay Someone Else To Do IT) or better still, FSKETDIFF (Find Someone Kind Enough To Do It For Free).

Clothes Maketh the Man

I used to work for a big pharmaceutical company, the sort of company that was so big it could never be taken over – or so everybody said. About twenty years after I left, it merged with an even bigger company, and the company I worked for vanished.

The next four years were spent with a tobacco company, which eventually went the way of a lot of tobacco companies. After that, I spent six months with a small software company, which went belly-up, then eighteen months with a small consultancy that folded. The next four years were with one of the big four consulting firms; I left just before they merged with one of their rivals.

My last job was with a shipping company. That one capsized and sank too, a couple of years after I left.

At this point you could be forgiven for thinking that I was a sort of Jonah, with countless corporations – large and small – floundering in my wake.

It could be the way I dress. I mean, it must be.

Years ago I went to a chemist shop (drug store) to buy my wife a hot water bottle. Imagine my consternation when the man behind the counter immediately responded, “This is the cheapest one we have, sir.”

Many years later, when I visited an estate agency (realtor) looking to buy a second home, the estate agent took one look at me and said, “We’ve nothing in your price range, sir.”

If I have a choice, I will always dress for comfort rather than style, and I’m not really the best shape for that. I mean, if I was shaped like Pierce Brosnan or Sylvester Stallone, I might get away with it. But I’m sort of a cross between Danny De Vito and Oliver Hardy. Picture an oversized garden gnome disguised as a scarecrow. That’s me.

My favourite jacket is battered brown leather with a broken zip (zipper). Actually the broken zip is a convenient excuse; in reality it’s years since I’ve been slim enough to get the jacket closed. And pants are a big problem these days. Have you ever tried shopping for a 40 inch waist with a 31 inch inside leg? Well forget it; that’s a combination that you won’t find in any shop (store). Believe me, I’ve tried. My options are to buy something that fits around the waist, chop six inches off the legs, and live with my bottom in a tent, or buy a child’s pants and give up breathing.

I stopped wearing ties (neckties) about fifteen years ago when the last company I worked for went bust. No tie means I don’t need a shirt with a collar, so I wear T-shirts almost all the time. If I need to dress up – if I’m planning a trip to the supermarket or something – I wear a sports shirt, which has a collar, but won’t take a tie. I mean, who wears a tie nowadays anyway?

Weddings and funerals are a problem, of course – and job interviews. People frown if you turn up at a wedding or a funeral in a T-shirt. Can’t think why.

By the way, if you’re going to an interview for a job that you don’t really want, take a tip from me and leave your tie in the wardrobe (closet). It works every time. My last interview was with the Civil Service (Feds). No tie. They turned me down. It’s just as well, really. I mean, let’s face it, the last thing the country needs at the moment is a Jonah like me working for the government.