Ludlum revisited …

Certain comments by people who read my last entry on Ludlum and his latest, "The Janson Directive", as well as my own perceptions on further reading the book have impelled me to write this further rant :p Laurie’s comment made me realize that I was misleading both the reader and myself when I said that the mis-portrayal of Sri Lanka was one of my concerns .. I realized I wasn’t being honest there. Yes, the mis-portrayal of Sri Lanka did tie into the problem I had with the plot for the book, but it was again concerned with the whole fact that Ludlum decided to take an existing scenario which would have served his purposes just as well and to convert it totally into a plot which would (once again) vilify Muslims. I am a Muslim, I don’t believe that one should kill anybody whether they bey of your own faith or of a different faith to justify your views and I neither does Islam preach that. In fact, Islam preaches tolerance for all religions, all races. Unfortunately, people always tend to pervert something good to their own uses and still claim that they are following the original … I would think that people can see this difference but unfortunately most people in the world can’t since they prefer to be told what they should think and so, their perceptions are moulded by what they see on the news, hear on the radio or read in a book. Which is where I have a problem with Ludlum because he has subscribed to every stereotypical anti-Muslim image he can come up with and I really don’t think he needed to here – he could have taken a different route by talking about the actual terrorist threat in Sri Lanka or moved the locale to his fictional land of Anura but kept the rest of the details the same – he borrows heavily enough from Sri Lanka for the rest of his stuff to say that he couldn’t have done that.

For instance, he refers to Cinnamon Gardens where Janson lives with his wife in Anura – this is actually an area Colombo. Then there are all the described terrorist attacks – the killing of the country’s leader by a suicide bomber (the only thing changed was the title – Prime Minister instead of President), the bombing of the World Trade Center building (renamed to International Trade Center) and even the descriptions of the terrorists with cyanide capsules in a chain around their necks – all of these are identical to what really happened in Sri Lanka. So why does he have to go and make the terrorists themselves Muslims? Is there any logic to it at all except to cash in on the existing paranoia about Muslims? Is this the way a responsible writer should behave? I don’t know .. maybe hatred and money rule in this world and there isn’t any responsibility any longer.

There are other details – such as the bombing of the American Embassy in Anura by the terrorists .. that never happened in Sri Lanka but that should really get the fires of hatred stoked shouldn’t it? After all, aren’t American lives sacrosanct? Then there are the other subtle digs – the terrorist leader has sex with an American woman and then performs prayer using her pillow-slip as a prayer mat. How low can you go? If the leader is a devout Muslim, he wouldn’t be praying immediately after sex – because there are certain rules about prayer and you cannot perform prayer just after sex … And why a pillow-slip? You mean he couldn’t find anything at all bigger than that to perform his prayers on? But then again, I guess Ludlum isn’t really interested in details – just the shock value. And of course, the terrorist leader (Caliph as he is known) has a superstition about bandicoot rats – even though he was educated at an American College mind you.

Am I being really thin skinned here? Am I protesting only because I’m a Muslim myself? I don’t know .. I usually don’t like to talk about Islam and the general perception by Muslims that Islam itself is being vilified because I think that’s a bit too paranoid. But then again, when I see something like Ludlum’s novel – especially since it would have been released soon after 9/11, I can’t but think that there is something to all that after all. I am not objective enough to judge but this is what occurred to me as I read further. Oh yes, Johan mentioned that he’s Dutch .. just had to clarify that the comment about the Dutch in the previous entry was an ironic reference to the way Ludlum might have reasoned it :p And here some history might be useful – the Dutch did rule Sri Lanka for a while but it was actually the British who ruled Sri Lanka for over a hundred years and from whom we finally gained independence in 1948 – but in "The Janson Directive" there is no mention of the British – it’s the Dutch governor who gets assassinated … I found that kind of interesting .. Anyway, my rants notwithstanding, you should make up your own mind :p

Rants and writings …

Yes, it’s been quite a while :p I’ve switched hosts, moved servers and at the same time been so swamped by real-life events that I haven’t had much time to write here or to do much maintenance except for the bare minimum on the site. I might not have written this entry either except for the fact that I’d just gotten up in irritation after reading what caused this entry to emerge and then sat down at the computer to do something else. But be that as it may, here is my rant :p

I’ve been reading Robert Ludlum for close to twenty years now and I’ve always enjoyed his work. I started with "The Bourne Identity" and was almost immediately hooked and have since then read all of his books in print (except for the last few in his collaborative "Covert One" series …) and have almost all of them in my collection. I just started reading his latest – "The Janson Directive" and I must say that the prologue left me less than impresed .. in fact, in full rant mode :p This probably is due to the fact that Ludlum struck pretty close to home in many fronts but still, I just am not amused by the tack he’s taken. The opening is about a terrorist attack in a fictitious island in the Indian Ocean close to Sri Lanka. However, what irks me is that he’s modeled this island after Sri Lanka but has made certain changes which irk me. In Sri Lanka, there is an ongoing ethnic conflict between the Tamils and the Sinhalese but what does Ludlum do but put the conflict in his story between Hindus and Muslims and of course, the Muslims are the terrorists .. is that because "everybody" knows that Muslims are terrorists or is that because that would sell more books? I don’t know …

Then of course, Ludlum decides to move Adam’s Peak which is in Sri Lanka, to his fictitious island and call it Adam’s Hill but with the same kind of history and here of course, he mentions Tamils and Buddhists as being part of the island’s population – though they never get mentioned anywhere else in the prologue. Then there is the whole matter of this bogus island’s history – it had been ruled by the Dutch (not the British mind you since the Brits might still object to how things go in the book – but the Dutch are safe enough to vilify I assume ..) up to fifty years ago and the Dutch governor at that time had been shot by an independence fighter. And I will not even go into the usage of the word "kurakkan" (which is actually a Sinhalese word used to describe a kind of grain grown in Sri Lanka) to mean root crops .. though I guess I just did.

I know, all of this might seem trivial things to anybody who is not from the area and who probably isn’t a Muslim but it all points to a certain type of mindset and a certain form of vilification by "established" authors. I am from Sri Lanka, I love my country and don’t want it to be used by some idiot somewhere to model his fantasy playground upon. If he wants to do it, then let him use the truth but then again, I guess that would be too much to bear … Ah well, yes, I know .. I get upset at trivialities perhaps .. but that’s just me :p

The founts of wisdom …

Ayn Rand’s "The Fountainhead" is giving me a lot to think of and also has provided some insights into myself, the world around me and the way I look at the world. It sometimes surprises me immensely to see my own philosophies reflected in somebody else’s writings and to hear something that I felt only as a gut-feeling expounded upon and explained so that I myself can come to understand the why’s and whereto’s of my own feelings and reactions. I finished reading a chapter yesterday which was a revelation, an epiphany in its own way though there was nothing new in what I read – just the way it was presented.

I’ve always been an individualist – I don’t believe in doing something a certain way just because the rest of the world does it that way. I always want a logical reason for doing something a certain way and it doesn’t matter to me that people have been doing it that way from time immemorial, if it doesn’t make sense to me, then I don’t do it that way. I don’t want to make money so that I can lord it over other people, I don’t help others so that I can feel superior to them – everything I do, I do because *I* want to. I know that a lot of people don’t like me going against the grain (including my own parents) but put that down to simple dislike of that which is unusual – out of the norm. However, Ayn Rand puts a new spin on it – she proposes (and I won’t quote her words here but rather, try to put things in my own words the way I understood it – for my own clarification) that people who lie, cheat, ruin and destroy others (all of this on the sly of course) just to be famous or to be accepted/admired by others are selfless because they put others before their own self – that years of dinning into our collective consciousness about altruism and selflessness has resulted in this. That these people are willing to put their own self through the tortures of knowing how despicable they really are just so that others will see them as kind, honourable and altruistic. She also states that a truly selfish man (or woman) cannot be affected by the admiration or approval of others because it doesn’t matter to them at all – that anything they do is purely out of their own selfish desire to please themselves. So I guess that does make me a really selfish person – and in a funny way, it makes sense too :p

But the strangest thing was that I’d been thinking about the very same thing in a different light earlier on in the day (before I read that particular chapter in the book). I was thinking about my friend Robin, he’d bought a new notebook computer and he was going around showing it to everybody and while thinking back upon that and how I probably hadn’t seemed very interested (because a notebook is a notebook – you can see how well it performs but after that I really can’t admire it like a work of art :p), I was reminded of the time I got the P800 and how he went around showing my phone to everybody when I couldn’t care less if anybody saw it or not – because I bought the phone because I wanted it .. not to show it to others or to impress others. Now don’t misunderstand me, yes, I’d show it to a few people that I really liked (if I knew that they were geeky enough to enjoy it :p) but I really don’t buy things or do things to show it off to other people – only because *I* want it. And this too ties in neatly with what Ayn Rand had to say.

Of course, I kept on thinking along the same lines and realized that this might apply to me in another sense too – I mean relationship-wise. All of my relationships so far have not really worked for me (and no, I’m not going to launch into another one of my rambles about how I perceive love and how I don’t think that love the way I think of it might not exist .. so keep on reading <vbg>) and I suddenly realized that this too might have something to do with the same philosophy that Ayn Rand describes. Would I find happiness with somebody who wants the approval of the world or at least, can’t stand upon her own mental feet as far as what she wants is concerned? Because I would always be the kind of person who was frowned upon by society and if my partner wanted the approbation of those around us, she’d never find it and neither she nor I would truly be happy in such a relationship. And if she wanted just to please me, I’d get irritated after a while because I’d want to know what she really wanted and not see a reflection of what I wanted in her. Again, I’ve dimly known this and have always looked for somebody who was like me – somebody who understood themselves completely and wanted to live life first and foremost for themselves. However, I’d again understood this only instinctively – not as a reasoned thought arrived at after due consideration …

All of this actually leads to something else I mentioned a day or two ago – about "who writes the script" and whether life is actually a series of concerted scenes in a drama where you are just a player. My life has a tendency to be cyclical – certain things happen in a certain order and I see that they are happening again in exactly the same mini-sequence that they always seem to, and I’m beginning to think that maybe this insight that "The Fountainhead" has suddenly shown me might be what I need to break out of the cycle and find a new direction .. or maybe I just think too much :p

The interesting, irritating interview …

I attended the interview that I was talking about yesterday and found that there was almost nobody there that I did recognize – I still am not sure whether that was a good thing or a bad thing :p Of course, that also dispelled my first paranoid theories that it might be some kind of a test/trap to see what I would do :p The guy who interviewed me turned out to be somebody that I didn’t remember but he seemed to remember me from the few visits that I’d paid to the old sister company’s offices. But I digress ..

The interview started off well enough but I realized that it wasn’t going to go well when the guy started asking me theoretical questions off a piece of paper :p Now, I respect people who are truly knowledgeable but when somebody thinks that they have the right to gauge how much you know based on some questions and answers that somebody else provided, I get irritated. Yes, I have a bit of a superiority complex – or something :p Anyway, I answered a few of the more general questions and then he started getting specific about syntax and exact methods to be used by specific objects/components. I immediately told him that I wouldn’t know the answers to any of that since I usually code with the help open and that since I work with several languages on any given day, I don’t bother to remember the specifics for any language.

What I didn’t tell him was the fact that I’ve also followed Holmes’ words in Conan Doyle’s "A Study in Scarlet" – "I consider that a man’s brain is originally like a little empty attic, you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things, so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it." I am not sure how long ago I’ve read those particular words (and no, I didn’t remember them verbatim just now, I looked it up in my copy of "The Complete Illustrated Sherlock Holmes" :p) and have followed them to a great extent – only thing is that I treat my mind more like a living room with interchangeable furniture :p When a new guest comes in for a longish stay, I put in furniture that suits him but for a casual visitor, I don’t deign to change the furniture at all :p

But I’ve rambled on again – the interviewer didn’t take too kindly to what I said and said how "everybody" codes in several languages and since .NET has multiple languages and they are all similar, I should be able to answer his question. Of course, what he didn’t take note of was the fact that I’ve worked mainly with only one .NET language – C# and that all the languages that I’d been working on recently (which I’d told him about earlier) were not .NET languages. So I told him plainly that if he wanted somebody who’d been spoonfed on the syntax and theory of .NET, he was wasting his time with me but if he wanted somebody who would do the job well and deliver on time, then I was the guy he was looking for. Of course, this being Sri Lanka and everybody being a little bit self-important (is that the case everywhere else? I’m not sure – I’ve found people willing to listen to reason a bit more in other places even when their ego has been bruised …), I don’t think he took that kindly (but I might be being unfair to him – I don’t read people correctly at times …) and I think his opinion of me would be either "bluffer" or "know-it-all-good-for-nothing" :p

There was more along the same vein – he told me that my methods would not work in a corporate environment, I told him that I’d already worked for a multinational with branches in over eight countries of the world and that they found me to be faster in coding on a new development environment after two months than consultants who’d be developing for the same environment for years – which incidentally is the truth .. that company hired me at a substantial salary increase from my then employer :p But this gets to be boring and repetitive since it was all in the same thread. I did tell him as I was leaving that I understood where he came from because he has to gauge my abilities based on what he knows and it is difficult to know whether I’m truly capable or not but I told him to ask some of my clients/former employers if he has any doubts. He gave me the usual bromide of "we’ll call you …" etc. But what do I think? I think I’ll never hear from them again :p

Rand’s Brand :p

I was unable to make the entry about "The Fountainhead" today in the morning as promised yesterday (mostly due to me getting so busy that I found I had no time for blogging in the morning – but more on that at my other blog <g> and so I will move on …) so here is that entry – delayed maybe by about twelve hours but still finally here :p

I’ve had Ayn Rand’s "The Fountainhead" in my library for close to ten years now I think. I bought the book because of the blurb on the back cover which claimed that it was a great love story – or in the words of the cover itself "The Fountainhead is about ambition, power, gold and love – a love so firm that it triumphed like the hero’s massive stone towers over slander, separation, jealousy and the cruel assaults of those who sought to destroy it". Me being the utter romantic that I am, could you fault me for buying the book? :p Of course, once I did get home with it and got ready to read it, I read the blurb on the inside cover and this talked about Ayn Rand’s philosophy of "objectivism" which the book called enlightened self-interest. This seemed like such an oxymoron – it was like saying positive selfishness – that I didn’t feel like reading the book after all. So, I put the book down, then took it up again but again put it down and so on till a few weeks ago when I decided to give fantasy and SF a rest for a bit and read something new … and turned to "The Fountainhead".

The book captured my imagination with almost the first chapter – I liked the character of the protagonist – Howard Roark – immensely. Like most of the protagonists I really like, I could see bits of myself in him. In fact, in this case I went so far as to see a lot of myself in him and a little bit of myself in his opposite, Peter Keating. At the same, time, I could see the same mixture reversed in Robin – one of my closest friends 🙂 Not that that explains anything to anybody but this kind of brought home to me how real two of the very first characters you meet in the book are. Some of the other characters have captivated me just as much – probably because all of them are so complex … their motivation is not so cut-and-dried as would appear with most characters in books but instead extremely complicated and in some instances entirely hidden from the reader till later on since you don’t get a glimpse into their mind but just a front-row seat to their actions 🙂

I could probably go on and on about the book and even spoil the story for somebody who might actually want to read it … but I won’t :p Because for one thing, I haven’t finished reading it and so don’t know how I myself feel about the book as a whole but for another, I’d like you to read it if all I’ve said so far does arouses your curiosity 🙂 So go on, take a look at the book (which I realized just a little while ago had been written as far back as 1947 :p) and see what you think – if you enjoy complex characters and some fine storytelling, you might just enjoy the book …

Welcome back, Kotter :p

He’s alive!! Yep, I finally come out of hibernation/hiding 🙂 One of my favourite quotes from Stephen King is something to the effect that time is a pony – that it sometimes trots, sometimes canters and sometimes gallop … These days, the pony seems to be galloping full tilt as far as I’m concerned since I just don’t seem to even notice the passage of time. I thought it was maybe a couple of weeks since I’d last written here and while it is essentially so, it seems to me that I’d effectively stopped updating on a daily basis much earlier than that. I’d thought that I had nothing to write about (at least that’s the justification I used to give myself whenever I happened to think about it ..) but when I decided that I was going to start updating this page regularly, I suddenly had stuff flowing through my mind without any conscious volition and I had enough for not one entry but maybe two or three :p

So what’s been happening? I’ve been busy with a lot of stuff and I won’t bore people to tears by reiterating all of the work and coding related stuff since I’ve already made an entry on my development blog about all that 🙂 Let me just take a moment to say that I do hate project proposals – I love writing but I can’t seem to think of project proposals as writing … they are just too dry for my taste. It’s a good thing that I intend to cut and paste from old proposals for most of the work I need to do :p
In fact, things have been so busy that I haven’t had the time to really do the stuff I enjoy – except for coding (and reading) of course 🙂 I bought around ten DVD’s on one of my DVD buying sprees week before last and how many have I watched so far? One! And this is I who manage to watch at least three or four movies a day when I’m not busy that we’re talking about. Ah well … I guess I’ll eventually watch all of them since most of them seemed pretty good and these aren’t movies that I had watched before and wanted to add to my collection but rather ones that I hadn’t seen before – some I’d heard about or seen the trailers and some I hadn’t heard of at all 🙂

While no movie watching is going on, I do seem to be reading at a rate. The book I’m currently reading is Ayn Rand’s "The Fountainhead" – the characters and the story has just got me spellbound and I’m usually unable to put the book down even to go to sleep. I’ve stayed up till 1:00am on weekends (that’s very unusual for me since I usually am in bed promptly by 10:00pm give or take an hour) because I wanted to know more. It’s probably going to be a long ramble if I were to launch into a discussion about the book though and so I think I will save that for my next entry and stop for now and give my fingers a rest :p

This and that

This week has turned out to be fairly hectic and I suddenly find myself unable to write here even though I had quite a few thoughts swirling around in my head that needed to be written down. Of course, none of those will go into this post since each one of them were a long entry in their own right and this was simply to be an update of the events of the last few days in a few simple paragraphs (or so I hope :p) I’ve been coding again and that keeps me busy and at the same time, my workload at work has started to pick up too. I was hoping that my boss would ignore me and find somebody else to groom as his aide now that Robin is leaving but it looks as if I’m destined to get at least some of that work – even though I have a feeling that he’ll get somebody else to be his aide since I just don’t fit the profile and have too stiff a back to do much butt-kissing :p

In the mean time, a couple of my friends who used to work for the company that I work for now are down from Canada and so we had a sort of informal get together of old friends from the company and those who still work here who knew them. There were only like six or seven of us but it was a nice evening since we got to catch up and to talk about all the stuff that had happened in the past. While we might be glamorizing how much fun it used to be – it still was nice to go back down memory lane and remember all the people that we used to know and all the crazy stuff that we used to do. One outcome of the meeting was a suggestion that we should set up a site where all the people who worked for the company (as well as those who currently work there) could keep in touch. I volunteered to do that and yesterday morning got on the job as soon as I got to work. A couple of hours later, I had what is called The YA*TV Bunch (sorry, no link since the site is only for employees :p) and people started signing up almost immediately.

Robin was one of the first members to sign up since he works with me and sits right next to me. Now Robin and I come from the old BBS days in Sri Lanka when we used to have all these guys on a single electronic bulletin board system insulting each other, pretending to be girls, starting flame-wars and what not. We even used to have multiple logins so that we could start a fight with somebody and then both support them and oppose them :p Robin seemed to go right back into that mode since he started making posts right, left and centre and stirring things up 🙂 I think by the end of the day we had around 11 articles on the board and all had been made by Robin (or by somebody else on whose behalf Robin made the posts :p) or myself. Hopefully, that gets the others involved too but you never know – some people just don’t like to put anything down in righting where other people known to them might see it :p

I completed "The Way of the Pilgrim" yesterday evening and while the book as a whole made me think a lot, the ending seemed to be a bit too rushed and somewhat incomplete. And it was kind of irritating (though certainly true-to-life) to have all of humanity joining together against the aliens through most of the book and then find them all reverting old patterns of being at each other’s throats in the last chapter when the aliens are ready to withdraw – I would hope that they’d have learnt something from all that they went through but us being human, I’d guess that probably wouldn’t happen. The story does end with a bit of a question as to whether we lie to ourselves about who we are or whether it’s the aliens who will not face the truth about themselves. This does tie in with an earlier post where I mentioned how people don’t seem to realize who they are or what they want and I might want to go into that in more detail at another time but for the moment, I think I’ve written enough 🙂

Of rants and reasoning …

Yesterdays non-rant about people saying something and doing something else seems to have touched a few nerves since I received several responses to that in one form or another :p But it actually was that – a non-rant. I wasn’t going to let other people’s actions upset my equilibrium and I was simply stating something that was going through my mind at that particular time – so no reason for anybody to be alarmed, offended, irritated etc :p

However, reading Gordon R. Dickson’s "Way of the Pilgrim" later on during the evening, a paragraph from the book struck me as being relevant to this particular situation. In this particular situation, the earth has been conquered by aliens and the protagonist is trying to understand the alien mindset. In the process, he says that aliens and humans see each other as distorted reflections of themselves in a mirror. He goes on to explain that what he meant was that the aliens and humans can’t really understand each other since they think in totally different ways and yet, they can’t help trying to equate the other’s actions with the way they’d do something and so come up with a distorted picture of themselves to explain the actions of the other. I’m not sure that I explained that properly here but anyway, it made sense to me and what is more, I realized that this holds true even in human-human interactions.

We don’t really understand what drives other people and so we attribute certain things to them in order to understand their actions – only thing is, that is probably a distorted picture of that person since we can never be certain of correctly identifying what drives the other person. For example, there is the case of something that happened at my grandfather’s funeral – this incidentally, is one of the reasons I hate going for any family gathering :p I had bought a new cellular phone recently and by Sri Lankan standards it’s pretty expensive since it’s a Sony Ericsson P800 and it’s one of the latest in the market. My Dad had commented on this to one of my uncles and while my parents berated me for spending so much on the phone, I wouldn’t be surprised that when they spoke to my uncle about it if they hadn’t said it with a touch of pride – hinting that I could *afford* to spend so much money on a new phone … and of course, they would have mentioned the price of the phone.

Anyway, my uncle comes up to me later and asks me if I had my phone with me and I thought that he simply wanted to take a call and told him that I was out of range since I was. He says never mind and takes me over to his son-in-law and a few others and introduces me to them. Then he casually says that my father had told him that I bought a new phone and asks me if he can see it and then says that he doesn’t know much about this stuff and passes the phone on to his son-in-law. Naturally, the price of the phone gets discussed at this point too. I thought at that point that my uncle was simply trying to impress his son-in-law and his relatives with the fact that his nephew had such a good phone (or could afford one) – they do that kind of thing here in Sri Lanka :p But when I told my parents about the incident later, they said that it wasn’t so at all – that my uncle had simply doubted the price that my Dad had quoted (which was the price that I actually paid) and wanted to make sure that my Dad wasn’t lying by getting his son-in-law and the others to verify the price because my uncle trusted his son-in-law more than anybody else (my parents’ opinion, not mine).

My point here is that I thought of my uncle’s actions in one way and my parents looked at it a different way – each one of us basing our opinion of a person (my uncle in this instance) on how we’d interacted with him, how we thought of him and our own ways of looking at things. I really have no idea who is right about the real motives of my uncle – maybe none of us are. But I’d still prefer to think of my uncle the way I’d thought of him since to me that’s a less negative picture – there is this Disney TV movie which I forget where the central character says something along the lines of "if you look for the good in people you will find it" and I’d like to believe that. Maybe I wear rose-tinted glasses but heck, it’s better than looking at everybody and wondering what they might do to you … though sometimes it’s hard not to do that too :p

Of death and Dickson …

They have a saying here in Sri Lanka that death comes in threes and the funny things is that I was thinking about this last week when the husband of my mother’s cousin passed away just two days after my grandfather passed away. And guess what? The third death in the family has appeared as well – this time it’s a relative/contemporary of my Dad’s and my parents have gone to the funeral. Since I never knew the last two people, I didn’t go to either funeral but it does make me think as to whether there just might be some truth in all these old sayings – such as "death comes in threes" …

I’m reading Gordon R. Dickson’s "Way of the Pilgrim" at the moment. I feel as if Gordon R. Dickson really understands me from the way he writes about his protagonists – some of the things he comments on are so uncannily similar to the way I am or the way I think. I’ve noticed this with several of Dickson’s later novels including the later books of the Childe cycle. I’d probably try to contact Dickson himself since I wonder if he just writes his characters this way or if he actually thought this way but unfortunately, he passed away several years ago. It still is strange though – the way his protagonist looks at the world, the way he seems so separated from the rest of humanity and even some of his philosophies and actions just seem to strike a chord within me. Ah well .. maybe I’ve just been reading too much Dickson lately :p

Speaking of people and their actions, I’m tempted to launch into a rant about why people say something and do something else or berate you for doing something and then go ahead and do the same thing themselves with not a word or hint of apology but I guess that’s just another example of the irrationality of people. So I will save my breath and go do something constructive … like code :p

Of etymologies and footnotes …

I started the previous entry (about the poem and the story idea) yesterday but got side-tracked and could not complete the entry till today. However, after I’d published the entry, I suddenly remembered how I’d gotten started on the poem in the first place and while it is by no means an important thing, it might make an interesting footnote if I ever were to write the story and since I probably would have forgotten all about it by then, I decided to jot it down here :p

I was trying to figure out the word to describe somebody who hated both men and women for some reason and was trying to work my way forward from misogynist and androgynist. I thought the latter was the opposite of misogynist because of the prefix andro- though I’ve later come to see that I’m probably in error there though I can’t verify for sure at the moment due to the fact that I am at home right now and don’t have access to my biggest research tool – the Internet :p Anyway, I was amused for a bit by the fact that homogenist wasn’t the term I was looking for (I later realized that the word I was actually looking for was misanthrope :p) and dallied a bit with other prefixes like duo- and bi- (which in my mind became bio for some strange reason – probably to create biogynist which would be similar to duogynist <g>) and so on.

Somewhere along the way though, I went back to androgynist but began working with the andro- prefix. From andro- it was just a step to android and this in turn led to me thinking about the story title of "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" and from that was born the poem 🙂 Incidentally, I remember thinking of other similar/strange story titles at that time like "Overdrawn at the Memory Banks" (again Philip K. Dick’s I thought at first but turned out to be by John Varley – "We Can Remember it for you Wholesale" is the Philip K. Dick story that I was thinking of …) and "’Repent Harlequin!’ Said the Ticktockman". The latter story for some reason left me with a very strong impression of a strangely restricted world (even though I don’t even remember the story anymore) and it gives me a sense of a "New Wave" writer – I’m tempted to say almost Moorcock-esque but that’s not who I’m thinking of … – not that any of this has anything to do with what I started out to write about but all of these were things that passed through my mind at that point and so maybe has some relevance :p (Oh yeah, J. G. Ballard was the "New Wave" writer I was thinking of though I’m not even sure if he’s really "New Wave" :p)

Update: I realized later that I was working with the wrong prefix in looking at androgynist as the antonym of misogynist (talk about clueless :p) and then as soon as I figured that, I hit upon the correct antonym – misandry :p