Schadenfreude, Baby!

As I've mentioned elsewhere (and even elsethere), I'm into neologisms in a big way. When I get bored, I make up a new word. Last week I wasn't bored, but someone invited me to make up a new word all the same. That's never happened before.

The author Laura Lee invited me to take part in a neologism contest on her blog. She's written a book called Schadenfreude, Baby! and as 'schadenfreude' is one of my all-time favourite German words, I thought I'd give it a go. Schadenfreude, in case you don't already know, is usually defined as deriving pleasure from the misfortune of others. See, I told you it was a great word. Once you know what it means you'll wonder how you ever got by without it. According to Laura:

'The kind of Schadenfreude many of us have been feeling in the wake of the financial crisis has a different quality and character than the celebrity downfall gazing of a year ago. It's darker, blacker and angrier. Over at Psych Central John Grohol is talking about his emotions: "I find a strange melancholic amusement to learn that many of these investment banks’ CEOs and boards of directors — people being paid millions of dollars every year to purportedly know what their own companies are doing and how they make money — didn’t have a clue as to how deep their companies were into questionable financial practices."

'I'm looking for suggestions for a new word that encapsulates this "melancholic amusement"- Schadenfreude tinged with a touch of sadness and foreboding.'

The word I came up with to describe this strange mix of emotions was:

SADENFREUDE, noun

An emotion that combines joy in another's misfortune tempered only by the overriding sense that the misfortune is going to have some serious and sad consequences.

See what I did there? I created a new word by amputating two letters from a preexisting one. Nifty, eh?


Believe it or not, I won the contest.

Thanks for the good news, Laura. I look forward to reading your book.

Les Ross vs Hardeep Singh Kohli

Today's random ideomotor response generator is a BBC Radio WM interview between legendary local radio jock Les Ross & writer/broadcaster Hardeep Singh Kohli.

Your toes will curl.



From Tom Watson via Birmingham: It's Not Shit

Paradox on the Buses

I'm perversely tempted to take part in the indefatigable Jon (Birmingham: It's Not Shit) Bounds' demented-yet-delightful bus-based social experiment, 11-11-11:

On the 11th of November let’s create a modern ritual, a post-millennial cultural cult.

Eleven hours on the eleven bus — join us.

The rules:

• Get on the 11C at 11am (or as near as dammit) on 11/11.
• Get off the 11C at 10pm — 11 hours later — (or as near as dammit) on 11/11.
• You can get on and off the bus as many times as you like (don’t spend more than an hour off bus).
• Document your journey; photos, film, writing, cross-stitch, knitting, amigurumi, poetry, blog, twitter, however you like.
• Meet up with others as mad as you, if you want.

I'm up for a bit of that. I quite like the idea of donating some bandwidth-by-proxy to such a bold, civic-minded endeavour, particularly when it’s a public transport-based collective metamedia travelogue. It'd make me feel like a walking, talking, head-on collision between Bill Bryson, Marshall McLuhan and, perhaps, Reg Varney.

More importantly, though, it'd give me plenty of potentially juicy things to write about on here. Not only is the Number 11 the longest urban bus route in Europe, but every time I've been on it I've witnessed something odd, weird or mad as a bungee-jumping bishop in a ballgown. They don’t call it an "Out-Patient Ward on Wheels" for nothing.

All this talk of buses reminds me of several things.

For the sake of clarity, brevity and sanity, however, I’ll narrow it down to one. Long ago and far away (which, by my calendar, makes it approximately August 1996) I witnessed a Hofstadter Strange Loop in action on the Number 45. Being a part-time philosopher and half-arsed science geek - which I define as someone who read about CERN and the Large Hadron Collider before Dan Brown wrote about it in Angels and Demons (which, of course, I don’t plan to read) - I had a basic grasp what a Hofstadter Strange Loop was. For the sake of clarity, brevity and charity, however, I’ll just say that a Hofstadter Strange Loop is a sort of elaborate definition of a paradox. You can find a proper definition on Wikipedia, but for me its best summed up by the art of MC Escher or that memorable line from the 80s video classic The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the Eighth Dimension:

“Wherever you go, there you are…”

Indeed. Anyway, while I had a reasonably firm grasp of what a Hofstadter Strange Loop was, I never knew what one looked like. I certainly didn’t expect it to resemble a grumpy old fart with a tartan shopping trolley.

Cut to: one sunny Saturday afternoon in 1996. There I was, sitting on the lower deck of a number 45, heading home from somewhere I can't remember and reading a book I can’t recall when the bus got itself stuck in a traffic jam along the Pershore Road. It was a particularly vicious and stubbornly viscous strain of traffic jam, even by the standards of the Pershore Road. I didn't mind, though: it was a pretty good book.

Sitting in front of me was a grumpy old man with a Tartan shopping trolley who spoke in a Birmingham accent that was so strong that you could be forgiven for thinking it was a bad parody of a Birmingham accent. I couldn't be forgiven for thinking this, of course, as I've written so many bad parodies over the years' that I wouldn't get away with it. A fairer description would be to say that the old man spoke in that rarest strain of the Brummie accent, the raw, unrefined, undiluted Brummie accent that these days only exists amongst scattered pockets of traditionalists and in certain parts of the BBC Radio WM schedule.

As the traffic jam slowly eased its way into a terminal case of entropic paralysis, the man and his trolley huffed, puffed and fumed with increasing bile and volume. I tried to ignore them, but it wasn't easy. These things rarely are.

Eventually he stood up and marched over to the bus driver: "Ooroyt, mucka – what’s gooin’on with the traffic, then?" he asked. “It’s a bloody disgrace, that’s what it is – a bloody disgrace!”

The driver explained that some Reclaim the Streets protesters were exercising their democratic right to park their derrieres on the tarmac up ahead.

The old man seemed to explode with rage. Innocent bystanders were maimed by shards of herbal cough drops. The shopping trolley spewed its contents out in sympathy. “Bloody protesters?” he roared, “bloody protesters? You mean to say we’re stuck here on accounta bunch a BLOODY PROTESTERS?” He was disgusted. He was outraged. He was possibly vitriolic with fury. You could feel his vile, but I wouldn’t recommend it.

“I’m sick of these bloody bastard protesters”, he continued, now addressing the entire lower deck of the bus. “Bunch of arf-soaked, scruffy, workshy bastards with nothing better to do, the lot of ‘em. If they’re not out saving the whale or banning the bomb or getting there knickers in a twist they’re holding things up for the rest of us.”

"That sort of thing should be against the law," he said. "People shouldn't be allowed to protest."

I looked up from my book, but decided to say nothing.

Paul Newman, 1925-2008

Sad news in the papers this morning. Paul Newman was that rare combination - a monumental movie icon, a brilliant character actor and - to the best of my knowledge - a thoroughly decent human being. This was, after all, a Hollywood A-Lister who remained happily married to the same woman for over 50 years. I always loved that line he used when a Playboy reporter asked him if he'd ever been tempted to stray. "Why go out for hamburger," said Newman, "when you can have steak at home?"

Many of his films have become cinematic classics and many of his performances contain moments that have burned their way into several generations worth of collective imaginations. The egg-eating contest from Cool Hand Luke springs to mind, as does the beautiful, fatal freeze frame from Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. My favourite Newman moment, though, comes from The Sting, which Philip French mentioned and, unless I'm mistaken, misquoted in this morning's Observer. While sizing up an opponent, Redford's Hooker turns to Newman's Gondorff and says: "He's not as tough as he thinks."

Newman replies: "Neither are we."

Moby Dickheads

From Variety:

Universal Pictures has made a splashy preemptive buy of "Moby Dick", a reimagining of the Herman Mellville whale tale that Timur Bekmambetov ("Wanted") will direct.

Studio paid high six figures to Adam Cooper and Bill Collage to pen the screenplay.

The writers revere Melville’s original text, but their graphic novel-style version will change the structure. Gone is the first-person narration by the young seaman Ishmael, who observes how Ahab’s obsession with killing the great white whale overwhelms his good judgment as captain.

This change will allow them to depict the whale’s decimation of other ships prior to its encounter with Ahab’s Pequod, and Ahab will be depicted more as a charismatic leader than a brooding obsessive.

"Our vision isn’t your grandfather’s ‘Moby Dick,’ " Cooper said. "This is an opportunity to take a timeless classic and capitalize on the advances in visual effects to tell what at its core is an action-adventure revenge story." ( My italics)

Roadkill

I was sitting at my desk today, doing some work and trying to mind my own business. Some colleagues sitting across from me were talking about Roman roads. I don't know why, they just were.

Against my better judgement, I decided to elbow my way into their conversation: "Is that Roman roads you're talking about?" I asked, rhetorically. "Do you know that substantial parts of one of Birmingham's major 'A' roads - the A38 - follow the course of a famous Roman road? Between Worcester and Birmingham - and again between Lichfield and Derby - the A38 follows a route built by Roman invaders over two thousand years ago."

There was a pause. I did that to prime them for the punchline:

"Of course, back in those days the Romans didn't call it the A38. They called it the A XXXVIII."

The sudden outbreak of silence distracted everyone.

I heard from my very good friend and former small-press comics collaborator Phil Walsh at the weekend. It had been way, way too long since we'd last had a chat, but we more than made up for lost time by having an impassioned natter on the blower about films, comics, books and a veritable plethora of other shared obsessions. It was very therapeutic for me and probably did Phil the world of good, too, but our respective girlfriends are probably still scratching their respective heads in bemusement. So it goes.

Anyway, after chewing on the geekazoid gristle and lancing a multitude of fanboy boils it was time to move on to proper, grown-up subjects. I was reminded that I hadn't been to see Phil and Beth's baby boy Alfie yet, so I plan to do something about that as soon as goddamn possible. Phil also told me that he and Beth are planning to get married next year.

They've asked me to be Best Man.

I can't begin to explain what an honour this is.