A soap bubble...

We went to a talk on liquids.  It was by a guy who had written a popular science book on the same subject.  He was an entertaining speaker, although overstating his case in the way anyone would to big-up his book...

He made a point that I hadn't been aware of: that the rise of literacy had been fueled by whale hunting — because lighting was the major use of the whale oil, it gave a superior light which people needed to read by...

Whether that is 100% true I do not know, a lot of other things were made from whale products, but it did inspire in me a larger thought.

That period was an economic bubble; people were building progress on an unreal assumption, that the supply of whales went on forever: the bubble would have burst when the whales ran out.

Which never happened, because gas lighting came along before that happened, and then incandescent electric bulbs, fluorescent tubes, LEDs and blah, blah, blah...  the present day!

But...

Buuuu..ut...

The bubble is still there.  It's here, in fact!  And we're all living in it...

---

---

A soap bubble...


...was blown

so long ago,
the wide-eyed, Wonderland-oblivious,
toddler of humanity blew
clumsily through the loop gripped
in one chubby fist

—billions of people will die—

and the soap film hesitantly bulged out
powered by bronze,
steel, the horse collar, crop rotation.
Sailing ships and steam engines
smoothed into the fragile sphere,
as were pickaxes, dynamite, production-lines...
industrial farming, the Haber Process,
internal combustion engines and the fractional distillation
of crude oil...  Fast-breeder reactors...
embedded in the almost imaginary skin
of this bubble we blew,
this quintessentially breakable world
we knew through all our lives,
and implicitly assumed was real

—and billions will start to die—

when it turns out it is not.  We built
a civilisation on stuff we borrowed.  We assumed
that fossil fuel in the ground
was a permanent state:
a natural condition forever.  We thought
fertile topsoil was a given,
and clean water another gift, temperate climate,
fish-filled oceans, the very air...

—billions of people are starting to die—

as our assumptions start to crack along fine lines
and this is a bubble in the purest economic sense
because it actually worked through all the time
during which it seemed to work,
until one day, suddenly, boom!
It's always been a lie.

If this island earth were a spaceship:
power failing, the food limited,
life support pumping dodgy air;
we'd get all of engineering there
and have a meeting to decide
who can be stuffed in lifeboats,
who can be stuffed in freezers, and who
—because engineers are nothing if not completely realistic—
won't reach their destination.
You can try to get that one
before the United Nations, good luck with that!
And not to be a bore, but...

—billions of people will die—

and I don't trust that lot to do much about it.
Although, also, I, with my slightly less than human head on,
—because I have one of those—I say: OK,
billions will die, it is hard to overestimate the size
of disaster facing us, but it's not the end of the world,
it's just the end of the world as we know it
and as long as we don't completely blow it...
and as long as we weather the change
ride the tsunami
take what life remains us, as and where we find it
and not go end-of-days-fucking-crazy
with a Mad Max style weapons stash
and supercharger
on everybody's Christmas list, then...

—for the billions who by chance do not die—

there will be some loss of privileges.
We won't be eating meat;
we won't be mining bitcoin; may not be driving personal cars
but we can hope still to be here
in some form.
We haven't been attempting the impossible
it's not that a planet cannot support an apical species
with a silly headcount.
It's just that we didn't do our homework.
We don't have all the required tech,
have not closed the carbon curve,
balanced the energy budget, or worked out
what happens when ageing plastics want to retire...

...not produced a society that can keep its calm
on pressure-cooker starship Earth...

...but it can be done.  Still, not a comfortable thought,
and it's going to take some time

—during which billions of people will die.

It's not the end of the world,
it's just a soap bubble,
it's the end of the world as we know it:
pop.

QuizShocracy

Alternative Forms of Government
(an occasional series)

Number 4


QuizShocracy


Tony and Linda, you played your Joker but you haven't matched enough policies with the studio audience.  So you're The Opposition for this next round...

Sue and Doug, you got your legislation through Quickfire Questions, and you've banked a small majority which you can take with you when you go home this evening.  You're only two rounds away from a chance of forming a government in "Stuuuf the Chamber!"

Now, however, it's time to Spin the Issues!

(Jangly Music and flashing lights.  Enormous wheel slides in the the side.)

Bob!  What have we got on the wheel tonight?

[Voice over] Well Larry we have a minor scandal about administering healthcare, that's worth fifty votes; the usual tabloid noise about immigration and foreigners, that's only twenty; but Sue and Doug will be hoping to hit our Bonus Topic of a warmongering overseas leader who's invaded one of his neighbours!  There's a whole Two hundred votes hanging on that one!!

Thank you Bob.  Now, are you feeling lucky Doug, Sue?  Yes?  Well come on down and SPIN TO WIN!!!

While we are spinning for Susan and Douglas, let me remind the viewers at home that they can phone in their support.  To support Sue and Doug, just dial 728-555-MAJORITY-1 and try to match get a row of three votes in the grid.  To support Tony and Linda, the opposition, dial 728-555-MAJORITY-2 and guess how next week's celebrities will fill-in the blanks in the proposed amendment.

After the break we'll see how Sue and Doug are doing, and whether they're likely to come back next week to play in the Second House!!!!

Sept 6th - Contrary to previous reports...

Contrary to previous reports...


...the revolution is being televised.
Sue has two leading revolutionaries
on the sofa; and in a while, Tony, our man
in the line of fire, will be reporting from

an ambush, somewhere outside the city.
The revolution is being televised,
remember that you saw it first on Yay-
Today!  The station with the sparkle

and an improvised explosive trap.  Talking
of which, later Wendy will show you how
to do one for yourself and detonate
by phone -- please get permission from whoever

pays the bills.  This evening we'll have live debate
between El Generalissimo himself
and, most secret of the rebel leaders, The Fox,
who's just become the media director

for the revolution... but now here's Bob with today's
civilian damage and casualty news.

NaPoWriMo - 2017 - April 6th - You need to have a plan

You need to have a plan


You need to have a plan and its first part
must say the cutting edge of the state of the art
can't hold a candle to you.  Investors love
that short of thing.  Secondly, say you'll move
the goalposts, redefine the market, break
the paradigm, already have the stake-
holders saluting ducks all in a row
and never show your working.  Although, you know

that faking rumours of a prototype
can rocket-boost the most slothful share price
and drive your competition into fits—
so that is when you sell off all the bits
then make some sort of statement in the press:
how federal regulation caused the mess.

Courtship

A risky proposition,
earlier today

I went to a launch event for Deadly, Delicate by Kate Garrett, who I'd never met before but who is just as interesting in person as she'd seemed via the internet (this is not true of everybody...)

This is a pamphlet of poems centred around the theme of female pirates (with a degree of historical accuracy plus a dollop of poetic imagination; there's a LGBT angle too.)  It's a great pamphlet, and I recommend it.

(If you wanted something more solid, I also recommend Kate's previous book The Density of Salt; I reviewed it in Antiphon and it was one I really enjoyed...)

Anyway...  there was an open-mic aspect to the book launch and I read Girl, Unaccompanied — which I shall post in a week or so — and also The Man who Ate the World which was in retrospect a mistake, because it's quite a complex poem and the pub (poets in a pub, who'd credit it) was quite noisy by then.

I should have read the following.  Hopefully it will mislead you until the very last line.

---

---

Courtship

I need you -- she is blushing, closer now;
this is in the limo, en route to the hotel --
to take me in a hostile way.  Tell me how
you'll own me.  Talk dirty.  Say you'll sell
subsidiaries and drive your staff
to penetrate my org chart, stripping
assets and rationalise the hell from chaff
in the top brass.  Her breath is hot.  She nips
his ear.  Expose me in the press
where my practices aren't up to scratch
then tie me with injunctions.  I confess
that being in legal knots makes my breath catch.
Slap me in jail...  He's eager for the deal.  It's hard
to think.  She has already cloned his credit cards.

---

Originally also published in Antiphon

Going forward

I had an evening out with some people I used to work with...

...who are all still mostly more embroiled with large corporations than I am...

...so I promised one of them I would post this.

---

---

Going forward

The corporation cannot plan
its way out of a paper bag
which—note—is not to say
it doesn't have extensive PowerPoints
to socialise the vision
for the new, division-wide, bag-exit mission
get buy-in from the stakeholders at levels
from CFO to tea lady
and distribute cheap beer and pizza
at revels
that celebrate the dragging of one thousand hapless
employees, kicking and screaming,
into progress, status, overview, coordination,
planning, steering, post-mortem, and kick-off, meetings
at cost of fifty thousand person-hours
or half a million dollars [OpEx]
which is money so well spent
for staying in a paper bag.  Meanwhile

Team Lunchpack—who were spun,
you will recall, from Project Dune and tasked
with building an organisation-wide
flexible container collocation strategy—
have been thinking outside the box,
and now are standing
a touch despondently
outside a cardboard shipping carton,
and wondering where everybody went.

Lister D [writing as Mr Three Eighths]

An engine, earlier today...

I apologise in advance, the diagram to the right is for a far more modern petrol engine.

Before New Year I ran a competition over on Poets' Graves where the idea was to "Adopt a false persona for Christmas" — all the competitors entered anonymously and submitted one or more poems under a pseudonym.  We then had everybody vote for the best poems and best personae; and also a side-competition for people to try and unmask the perpetrators. 

Some of us had two false identities, just to be on the safe side; but I don't think this was really necessary as identifying anonymous poets, even people you know quite well, turns out to be surprisingly difficult... 

So...  this was one of my entries, written under the persona of "Mr Three Eighths," who is a vintage machinery enthusiast and only slightly modelled on a guy I knew at school.

This is a sonnet.  Sonnets seem to be my favourite form when I write a formal poem.  No idea why this is; except they are the most wonderfully compact, deep and rounded form.  I far more often start to write a free verse poem and subsequently discover it is a sonnet, compared to the other way around.

In case you are interested, I came third in the competition.  You can check out all the entries here, at least until we clear that forum out ready for another competition.

---

---

Lister D [writing as Mr Three Eights]

One and one half horse power and stationary
but for the necessary gentle rock
from side to side. Traditional, the case
is painted Brunswick green. Unshockingly
the magneto is the Lucas SR1
found in a sale and lovingly rewound
in three nights and the shed. A later model
fed from its fuel tank that's top mounted;
it also has chain drive. Bring it alive!
Fill the fuel, and top the water to two inches
from the rim. The governor wick and oil holes need
attention... sump, float, greaser and then drive
the flywheel back to reach 'compress'. Clench
the handle-- Ho! Who'd want a Fowler P?

---

Image attribution: "Single-cylinder T-head engine (Autocar Handbook, 13th ed, 1935)" by Andy Dingley (scanner) - Scan from The Autocar (Thirteenth edition, circa 1935) Autocar Handbook, London: Iliffe & Sons.. Licensed under Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.