Wednesday Quiz (iii.ii) Character Reference

It's that time again, everyone's favourite time, quiz time! In case you've forgotten the rules:

-There shall be 14 more approximately weekly quizzes of 10 questions of equal weight, normally in the form of pictures stolen from the internet.

-Entry is open to all and sundry, provided that they are willing and able to submit their answers to the comments before the next quiz is posted.

-Entrants should solemnly vow to consult no other persons, nor to seek to obtain the answer or information leading to the answer from any source other than their own brain prior to entering their answers.

-Each entrant shall have up to one free point on one question each week provided that they admit their total ignorance of a subject moderately relevant to the question. (If the question is to name a the best response in a chess game, the answer "Pass. I know nothing about the Sicilian Opening" would be acceptable, while "Free pass for me, I'm a Franciscan" would not). Acknowledgement of ignorance will be taken as a declaration of intention to educate oneself on the aforementioned subject.

-The entrant with the highest total score taken from the aggregate of their best ten results for the season shall be declared the winner. This title may not be worth very much.

-Tie-breaks shall be determined by the aggregate of the best best eleven results, or if still tied, twelve results, et cetera.

-The editorship reserves the right to award bonus points for particularly clever or amusing answers, be they right or wrong, up to a total of ten points.

-Disputes on the rules will be entered into with any interested party, but any decision of the editorial team made ex cathedra shall be considered infallable.

With that done, let's get on with the show, which this week is about identification of glyphs, symbols and icons.

1. Which 'artist' once changed his name to this unpronouncable symbol?

2. In some languages, this character is a full blown grapheme, but in English is considered an example of what L?

3. This Mah-Jong tile represents which Chinese numeral?

4. This famous hunk of rock contains the same message in Egyptian Heirogylphics, Demotic script and which other ancient language?

5. What does the "p.p." in this and many other signatures represent?

6. These glyphs are an example of which language?

7. This is the alchemical symbol for which mundane element?

8. What is the name of this prominent religious symbol?

9. This is a picture of the most famous page of which medieval manuscript?

10. What was the "peace symbol" originally designed to represent?

Deposit your answers, in the language of your choice (provided that that language is English), in the comments.

Read: Confederate Vampire Tales

I set myself the goal of reading and reviewing a book a week this year, for some crazy reason, and so far I've read five books (and am thus four books behind) and reviewed, a grand total of none. Thus the reading posts for the next couple of weeks will be double-barrellers while I struggle to clear the backlog.

For some curious reason, the last book that I read last year and the first book that I read this year were both vampire novels set in the American Civil War. Given that I'm neither particularly into vampire novels or war novels, this is a little bit strange, but it does give me a chance to kill two birds with one stone.

Read: Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter - Seth Grahame-Smith

First up, the quasi-biographical Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter, finally the truth about the 16th US president as presented by the author of such classics as Pride & Prejudice & Zombies. How his grandfather and mother were killed by vampires, he became an adept axeman in order to better hunt and kill vampires, how Ann Rutledge was murdered by a vampire...basically, each and every notable event of Lincoln's life was actually inspired by vampires. Why did Lincoln hate slavery? Because it gave the vampires in the South an accessible food supply. There's a lot of vampires in this book. I'm a fan of historical mashup novels like this, and I'm not adverse to vampires, so you'd think that this one would be for me, wouldn't you?

As always when I read a book on an American topic like this one I'm saddened that I and many other Australians are more familiar with the biographies of men like Abraham Lincoln or Thomas Jefferson than the men who shaped my country, but in the moments when I can supress this regret I have to grudgingly admit that this book was a lot of fun, and an interesting way to find out a little more about a man who must have been very interesting, even if in reality his every waking thought wasn't about vampires.

The book itself is suposedly written by Henry, a reformed good-guy vampire of the type so often seen these days that makes those that take their vampire lore seriously shudder (most people that take their vampire lore seriously made me shudder), and it's a nice mix of his prose and entries from "The secret diaries of Abraham Lincoln", in which Honest Abe tells of his adventures in his own words. The device is used well, but the diary entries lose their charm after the first few chapters and quickly become wearing, if not as wearing as the photoshopped pictures sprinkled around the book as evidence of Abe's vampire huntin' ways (which amused me greatly the first few time, then just seemed a weak excuse for a cheap joke).

Page 123:

I cursed aloud most of the ride home. Never in my life had I been so
embarrassed or made such a drunken error. Never had I felt like such a fool. If there was one comforting prospect it was this: soon I would finally be free.

The start, Abe's childhood, his coming of age, and first vampire encounters; and the end, the climax of the war and Lincoln'sassassination by the maddened vampire John Wilkes Booth, are the standout sections. The long central section in which Abe hunts a bunch of vampires and kills them in exciting and extremely gorey ways didn't maintain my interest, but it may have been more accessable to the American audience that is no doubt more familiar with Abraham Lincoln than an Australian that's just picked up snippets here and there, mostly in other fiction.

In short, I wouldn't exactly recommend this book for most, but it gave me a few hours light entertainment on some rainy days at the end of last year, it's well paced and very readable, with the faint feeling of despoiling someone's grave and legacy that is a little bit disturbing to someone thinking of doing much the same thing (though with fewer vampires) to a bunch of dead Italians in the near future. I gave it two decapitated vampire corpses.

Read: Fevre Dream - George R. R. Martin

More satisfying was George R.R. Martin's Fevre Dream, which is devoured with all the eagerness of his blood-frenzied vampires. One of the nice things about one of your favourite authors becoming more popular is the availability of their back-catalogue, and I eagerly snapped this one up when I discovered it while looking for Christmas gifts for my family.

This one also features evil vampires supping on the blood of slaves in the South and building armies of like-minded vampires and thralls, and good vampires (or at least, good vampire) at war with them for the sake of mankind, and has a similar historical setting, but there the similarities end. The story doesn't flow quite as well as his later work, dragging a little in the beginning, and the characterisation is not as good as one comes to expect from Martin, but this is his formative stuff, and there's more than enough here to satisfy me.

What I've always liked about Martin is his ability to set the scene, his stories work well because he drops you in a location and you feel part of it. He can tell a big story, build up to the big reveal, without dropping it on you like an anvil. Well before the vampires appear in this story you're emotionally invested in Abner Marsh, steamboat captain, his dreams and his love of the river, for this could just as easily be a story about steamboats as about vampires. Then he's approached by Joshua, a mysterious stranger with a lot of money, and asked to build the finest boat ever built, covered everywhere with mirrors and running mostly at night...

Page 123:

Marsh did not cotton to Joshua's new friends, he decided in short order that they were as queer as Joshua's old friends, keeping the same night hours and all. Raymond Ortega stuck Marsh as a restless, untrustworthy sort. He was polite
enough in a haughty, indolent fashion, but Marsh got a chill off him.

Yeah, there's a good guy vampire and a bad guy vampire and they fight for control, but the scenes between them, the conflicts of their differing philosophies, are written like a vampire novel should be, pregnant with tension, mysterious, lustful, dark and brooding. Not the best vampire pathos stuff I've ever seen, with not quite enough depth to it, but it's pretty good. Martin was able to take his skill at building conflict in short stories and transfer it here to a full-length novel and it's success spurred him on to greater things.

Well worth reading in it's own right, but perhaps made even more interesting as it, alongside his anthology of short-fiction, shows the building blocks in G.R.R. Martin's career as he worked towards the Song of Ice and Fire series that has made him a household name in recent years. I gave it four hulks of once-magnificent riverboats. And of course, I have a copy I'd happily lend to you if you're keen.

Reading List Progress:
Number of Books read: 8
Australian dividend: 1.045
Science Fiction dividend: 2.5
Fantasy dividend: 3.5
Biography dividend: 1.5
Mystery dividend: 0.5

Probably Next Up: Morris West, Shoes of the Fisherman/The Devil's Advocate/The Salamander
Probably Not Next Up: William Gibson, Neuromancer

Remember, it's your last chance to score points for the last week's quiz. Results will be posted at noon ACDST tomorrow.

Thinking Out Loud

So, once again my papal project has stalled, but each time I get back into it I get a little bit further, and gain I little more confidence in the idea. I still think that Habemus Papas is something that I want to do sometime in the future, but for now there are a few things that need ironing out. It's a strange way to come at telling a story, because I don't really have a story that I want to tell. I've started with a concept, a plot device, I guess, designed to get a lot of popes in one room, but I have no idea what should happen next.

I started off thinking that this would provide lots of gag-a-day strips, little jokes that I find amusing but would be utterly inaccesible to most people, but where do you go with such an idea once you've run out of terrible puns to come out of the mouth of Gregory I or funny situations to put JP II in? And how many long and facetious notes can you write before you either get bored or people notice that you actually don't know very much about popes at all and just spend too much time on wikipedia?

The idea of a big interlocking storyline with many of history's popes being trapped in the modern-day vatican being unwilling or unable to return to their own times seemed to be the way to go, but how to make it happen, or why? I still like this idea, and I think I've engineered a moderately plausible way to pull it all together (ok, I'm not that happy with it, but it's a start), but my primitive cartoonish style is not at all suited to telling that kind of story, since I can't express settings and backgrounds, let alone the subtle facial and body expressions needed for the diverse range of characters.

The characters themselves are probably the biggest issue. With 265 of the guys to choose from (and a few anti-popes and other hangers-on too), how do I choose who I want to have the starring roles, and how to I ensure that they're different enough from each other. I want to give them life and put them in strange situations, but I want them to retain enough of both their place in history and their actual character (as little as we know about it), and that's hard for me. I've never been good at characterisation. The other issue with the characters is that they were all, and some of the are, real people. I want to convey a sympathetic and generous outlook, try and get at them as real people in a tough job, but still be funny and still convey a little of what I am a protestant have to think is the ridiculousness of the whole thing.

Some are easy, the current Pope, Benedict XVI, is a shoe-in, he has to play the role of the tie to the real world, the everyman protagonist through whose eyes we get to see this strange other world populated entirely by pontiffs that I want to introduce. He comes with a serious theological bent, a German efficiency and wry sense of humour, and also with a fun little byplay with side-kick and offsider in the ever-handsome Mnsgr. Ganswein. I'm still not happy with how I draw him, but he's gotta be the man.

JPII, the ludicrously popular and talented at everything Pole whose shadow BXVI is always trying to pull out of, is also a shoe-in. I imagine him as a bit of a jock-pope, matey and super-competent, and expect that he grates on the more rigid Benedict. Sure, they agree on a lot of things, and they are friendly, too, but they don't quite see eye to eye, he's the Lancer to Benedict's Mario. Why cast JPII like this? Because he's way too popular with my generation not to try to mess with, it's a kind of reverse Jar-Jar Binks situation.

JPI has got to be in there too, I see him as the peacemaker, both between the power partnership of BXVI and JPII, and the strait-laced moderate Paul VI and my favourite larrikin pope John XXIII. The world saw so little of him that you can do a lot with his character, and besides, he wrote letters to Pinocchio, he's just too cool to leave out. Of these, Paul wasn't a particularly exciting man, but he served the church and the world faithfully and humbly in the aftermath of Vatican II in an increasingly difficult time, and probably makes a good counter to the dominant personalities of the other four modern popes. So I can't leave any of them out.

Going further back, Pius XII, who served during World War II, Pius XI, the pope of the depression and Benedict XV, of World War I, who together represent the strength of the church and its position in the Europe and the world in difficult times, are all interesting men to me (and Benedict particuarly is fun to draw). Leo XIII, the intellectual reformer and oldest pope in history, is photogenic too, and Pius IX, the pope whose reign saw the end of the Papal States and the beginning of the modern Vatican as we know it today, is surely worth adding to the list of regulars.

So here I have a cast of ten major characters spanning 100 years of fashion and history, and I am reluctant to stop there with such fun options like the old monk Gregory XVI next in the list, and from there it's only a short jump back to the popes of the industrial revolution and renaissance, not to mention all the medieval and ancient guys that I already have such a fondness for...

In other words, this is just the start, and there's plenty more where this one came from, setting, mechanics, dialogue... It's a big job, one I'm utterly unequipped for, and yet for years this idea idea has floated around in head and kept me up at nights. It's time I got this show on the road, preferably before I have yet another pope to add into the mix. That means picking a target to work towards storywise, otherwise I'll get stuck in the soap-opera zone of character interplay and never get anywhere, if indeed I even get there. I'll keep you all posted on how that goes.

Tie of the Week

So the good news for the tie project is that I have been faithfully wearing a new tie each and every week of the five months since our last post in September, some twenty ties. The sad news is that the pile of worn ties is a somewhat overwhelming item to blog about, so I've made an executive decision that the ties that have not yet featured in a post will get sorted back into the fresh ties pile and I can start afresh without a big accusative pile of ties in the corner of the room. Thus, I am glad to present this little number:

This week's decidedly dated neck-decoration is a recent acquisition, coming in a very exciting pile of ties that I look forward to sharing with you in the coming year or so, and which increased my collection from a respectable 53 to a rather impressive 68, meaning that even making the large assumptions that I can keep it going and am somehow prevented from gaining any further ties this project will still be running come Easter 2013.

Tie Number:006
Designation: The Crimson Peacock
Provenance: Ian's Stash, February 2012
Manufacture: Unknown
No. of Comments: 8 (High)
Most Favourable Comment: "Nice! Very retro..."
Least Favourable Comment: "You're not actually wearing that, are you?"
Observations: Oddly enough, the green semi-ovals in a bright orange tie (it doesn't look that bright in the photo, but it's pretty out there) actually work pretty well, in the unlikely circumstance of owning a "Woolworths" green shirt of almost exactly the same shade.

Tune in next week for more Half-Windsor goodness.

Blarch is a Six Letter Word

Well, it appears that I'm incapable of summoning the energy for an ongoing blogging project without badgering other people into doing the same thing, so with a suprisingly minimal amount of badgering and only a moderate amount of foxing, we're getting the band back together and following up our smash hit "Septemblag" with our new peice "Blarch". I'd like to think "Blarch" has a new fresh sound that demonstrates where we're currently at, but I'm the drummer, and drumming is generally just drumming, so expect more of the same from me.

More of the same means more Friday ties, Wednesday Quizzes, Tuesday Book Reviews, and Monday Miscellaneous Papery, joined by some kind of Sports and Gamesey Thursday content and maybe the occasional super exciting thing on weekends too. So if you've been a fan of the general thrust of this here publication in recent times then you're in luck. If you're not keen on more of what I persist in referring to as Thomly Goodness, you're also in luck, because there are other things purported to be happening out in Blarch too...

Ale is getting back into the art, John insists he's going to do some writing, and James says he'll blow up significant parts of the country if he doesn't, and who knows, even Jimmy might get in on the action with a little coding.

And of course, this is your chance, dear reader, to sign up for Blarch and help us all blog our way towards April. Drop me a line in the comments and I'll know to go looking.

The Wednesday Quiz (iii.i) Lords a'Leaping

With the decline and fall of that once-great institution and spiritual blogmother of this here publication, Michael5000's Wednesday Quiz, it is once again up to the antipodes to provide your weekly dose of Quiztime goodness. Thus the editors are proud to announce a new season of quizzes here at the Leaflocker, on a range of topics determined by fancy and if all else fails, trawling of wikipedia. The rules shall be as follows:

-There shall be 15 approximately weekly quizzes of 10 questions of equal weight, normally in the form of pictures stolen from the internet.

-Entry is open to all and sundry, provided that they are willing and able to submit their answers to the comments before the next quiz is posted.

-Entrants should solemnly vow to consult no other persons, nor to seek to obtain the answer or information leading to the answer from any source other than their own brain prior to entering their answers.

-Each entrant shall have up to one free point on one question each week provided that they admit their total ignorance of a subject moderately relevant to the question. (If the question is to name a pictured country in a map of Africa, the answer "Pass. I know nothing about African geography" would be acceptable, while "Free pass for me, I'm a squirrel" would not). Acknowledgement of ignorance will be taken as a declaration of intention to educate oneself on the aforementioned subject.

-The entrant with the highest total score taken from the aggregate of their best ten results for the season shall be declared the winner. This title may not be worth very much.

-Tie-breaks shall be determined by the aggregate of the best best eleven results, or if still tied, twelve results, et cetera.

-The editorship reserves the right to award bonus points for particularly clever or amusing answers, be they right or wrong, up to a total of ten points.

-Disputes on the rules will be entered into with any interested party, but any decision of the editorial team made ex cathedra shall be considered infallable.

With the ground rules set, let's get this show on the road. This week you, the entrant, must attempt to name each of these persons prominent in the field of leaping.

1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
Post your answers below in accordance with your sense of honair.

Guess Who's Back?

...and ready for blogging...


(It's me)