Thiefhunters in Paradise

Overheard at the reception desk on the Queen Mary 2:

German gentleman: “Good Afternoon. I have a digital camera with a rechargeable battery——”

Receptionist: “You can get batteries at our camera shop, sir.”

“I have a rechargeable battery, so I don’t need to buy batteries. I just need to charge it——“

“You can use your ship card to charge batteries, sir.”

“Yes, thank you, but what I want to do is use my battery charger in my stateroom, but it’s not working. What is the currency on this ship?”

“We use U.S. dollars, sir.”

“No, the currency to charge my battery with——”

“You can use your ship card in the photo shop to charge batteries.”

Maybe it’s a good idea to change the subject. Too much Barcelona negativity. So how ’bout, instead, I share a sign I saw at Cagliari airport (Sardinia) over the baggage conveyor belt? Faithfully translated from the Italian, with the Italian:

ATTENZIONE AL SEGNALE ACUSTICO LUMINOSO DI PREAVOISO MOVIMENTO MASTRO.
PAY ATTENTION TO THE ACOUSTIC AND LUMINOUS SIGNAL FOREWARNING TAPE MOVEMENT.

Shame I didn’t have a camera handy when I saw it.

I’ve been listening to essays by George Orwell. Terry, a voracious reader, devoured Orwell after Proust and Vidal, and he’s now working on Paul Bowles. I downloaded some Orwell essays here, but I find that when I’m in front of my computer (which is a lot), I’m either working or making use of the internet, rather than reading material safely stowed on my hard drive. I can read those documents any time. Somehow, though, I don’t.

Then I ran across this hint, which makes it a cinch to convert text to an iTunes audiobook. The hint contains a downloadable script that practically installs itself, then shows up under the Mac’s Services menu. (Although this hint is for Leopard only, it can be tweaked for Tiger.) I’m sure my programmer friends are privately chiding me, but I’m glad that someone wrote and provided a script to make the text-to-audiobook conversion dead simple.

With the stories on my iPod, they’re sure to be listened to, and planes are the ideal place. I can only read so many hours in the dry air of airports and airplanes, before my contacts start sticking to my eyeballs. Right after converting a few files, I flew to Ireland.

At first, the pleasure of listening was only about half the pleasure of reading. I expected that for two reasons. First is that I prefer to read good writing, linger over it, reread lovely phrases. But okay, there’s deep-seated pleasure in being read to, too. I’ve listened to a few audio books lately, all read by their authors, and I enjoyed them, though more for their stories than their writing.

Listening to synthesized speech is not the same as being read to by an author. The lauded new Leopard voice Alex is synthesized and, though his diction is not bad, Alex lacks style, grace, sensitivity, timing, mellifluence, drama, and every other quality that makes George Guidall, my sister’s uncle-in-law, an award-winning reader of audiobooks (more than 800 books to his credit). But…

I got used to Alex’s style. And though it’s not like reading, nor the same as being read to, it’s better than osmosis. It’s better than not knowing the texts at all. It’s like the Cliff Notes version, but delivered slowly, a fleeting association to reunite with later. Maybe.

And now, after listening to a few more essays, I’m happy enough with Alex. I found that slowing his speech by about 15% improves the experience. I’ve converted a 13,000-word article on cybercrime to digest on my next flight.

…

Later: The cybercrime article was good, but I didn’t listen to it on a plane. I listened during a 2+ hour taxi ride from the south of England to London. It was too bumpy to read, too much strobe effect from the shade of trees on a rare sunny day. The cybercrime article, from Wired, was an hour and 22 minutes long. Perfect for the drive.

And: My computer suddenly lost all input and output audio devices. After a little troubleshooting, I removed the SpeakToItunesAudiobook.service from my system and all’s well again. If that was not an anomaly, I will just drop the service in when I need it.

Lastly: In his essay “How the Poor Die,” I was delighted to hear Orwell mention Axel Munthe’s The Story of San Michele.  Axel Munthe was a great-grand-uncle of Bob’s, and The Story of San Michele is a great grand-read.

Can anyone tell me what this contraption is? I took this picture through a window in Tsim Sha Tsui, Kowloon, after a dinner at Spring Deer, the famous and fabulous house of Peking duck. What are they doing to those poor women? Does it hurt? Click the picture for a larger view. I saw several shops in the neighborhood with this weird torture unit visible through the window.

Bob gets fan mail, especially from teenage boys who want to do what he does. We used to get a slew of them every time one of Bob’s tv specials was broadcast. Since YouTube, there’s no longer any pattern to when we get them, but they’re basically all the same. After breathless compliments, they entreat Bob to teach them “to do what you do,” they swear they “won’t use it in a bad way,” and they beseech him for a reply.

Bob is touched by the letters, but they sometimes provoke a scoff. Most kids (people?) have no clue how many hours—years—it takes to hone sleight of hand skills. 99% of these kids wouldn’t have the grit or moxie to persevere and fail repeatedly, in front of people. Bob’s job requires arrogance, cockiness, and audacity, of which he has an abundance.

We’re reminded of the odd and innate characteristics that make Bob do what he does, by this recent email:

Dear Bob,

I don’t know if you can recall me from our grammar school in Stockholm, but we were classmates a few years in the end of our school career. I remember a number of situations from school. One was when you tried to avoid a possible test so off you went to our school nurse. As I was sitting close to the window I had to put my school bag in the window as a signal to you if the test was on or not.

I can also recall some situations when Anders Rignell had a small microphone hidden in his hand and he whispered answers to you, as you had a hidden speaker in your ear. You were quite good on short answers!

In addition, we two made our national service in Uppsala together, though not in the same company. None of us were particularly successful, but you enjoyed your evenings entertaining at a restaurant down town. Sometimes also when we were out on night manoeuvres. I still don’t know how you could escape without anyone noticing. After a performance at the restaurant, back you came without anyone making any fuss about it.

One of my sons, just 13, is interested in magic, pickpocketing and that area. He saw a few clips on YouTube where you steal many things from people. When I told him that I knew you from school he was impressed.

Amusing stories from Bob’s school days. I’m not saying that young Bob was devious, conniving, and colluding (Bob would say it that way; but I say if you don’t mean it, don’t say it; Terry would say you’re framing), but his grammar-school-era traits—maybe wily and cunning are better descriptors—served him well as a neophyte pickpocket and blossoming entertainer. More important is fierce tenacity, indefatigability, and a willingness to follow his instincts. Bob unofficially redesigned his school curriculum to serve his unsanctioned educational pursuits. He went AWOL in the military to perform. No doubt to many he was considered a difficult kid, and to some a ne’er-do-well.

Most (not all) of the kids who write Bob have atrocious writing skills, and I’m referring only to the basics: spelling, composition, punctuation. I know they’re used to texting on their phones, but here they are, writing to a stranger, asking for help. Shouldn’t they put their best effort forward? Here’s an example:

Hello I have never wanted to talk to someone I don’t know OK not true I talk to people at my school that I don’t know I do it all the time I am 17 years old. I cant spell so sorry, i don’t think you will ever read this i wanted to ask you how do you get good at pickpocketing with out going out on the street and doing it can i get good at it? i am sorry for taking up your time or who ever is reading this i just wanted some help so if you can get back to me my e-mail is zeusxxx@xxx or greatandallmightybob@xxx the greatandallmightybob is going to be around longer but if you can send it to both. lol i am acting like you are going to get back to me o and don’t think i am going to go out and pickpocket someone i am not going to i just want to know how if you believe that OK thank you for reading this who ever it is sorry for wasting your time bye

For the record, we usually do reply.

In school, I didn’t pay much attention to geography. This pretty much fits the American selfcentric stereotype. I did eventually learn the difference between the Pacific and the Atlantic, though, and came to understand the hierarchy of United Kingdom, Great Britain, and England. When I started to travel, I got interested in maps. I still am. I can’t resist poring over them in airline magazines, and maps stop me whenever I come across them in newspapers. My computer desktop image is a map of the world.

My interest in maps extends further, though maybe not as far as my friend Terry’s, who has actually mapped the potential mutations of the influenza virus (or something like that), except he calls it antigenic cartography.

I also like words. And I especially like when the two come together, as in mapping words. This is done brilliantly at wefeelfine.org, which maps feelings. Specifically, it maps feelings revealed in blogs. You, the user, can specify the feeling you’d like to map, the age, gender, or location of the feeler, the date, and/or the weather the feeler is experiencing. “Mounds,” one way that wefeelfine maps feelings, are wonderful living hills of quivering colorful jelly that recoil from my curser. They tell me that 34,541 bloggers are feeling better now, 7,452 are feeling empty, 383 are queasy, and at the far right of the mound map, 20 are feeling grotesque.

The creators of wefeelfine.org also gave us wordcount.org, to show us our most- and least-used words, and everything in between. No surprise that Figueres is at the end of the scale, the 86,573rd most used word. By great coincidence, my sister Jamie and I spoke of Figueres just a couple of hours before I visited wordcount.org tonight, and looked at the end of the scale. There was Figueres, birthplace of Salvador Dali.

Phylotaxis.com is marvelous, too, from it’s interactive opening page to its culture-meets-science representation of the news. Science stories are represented as perfect squares in an ordered grid. Stories on culture are round, messy, and can’t stay still. Verge back toward science and the round icons begin to behave, grow corners, and try to organize themselves.

On love-lines.com, which maps love and hate, I see that one person, just minutes ago, proclaimed “You all know I like my fics crackish and my pairings even crackier, as fickle as I am with them.” I have no idea what this means. Perhaps it’s pornographic.

Meanwhile, Rome is busy mapping the realtime density of citizens by their mobile phones. Or rather, MIT did the project, which mapped concentrations of urban activity moment to moment, graphically showing (glowing!) as about a million people gathered at Circus Maximus after Italy’s World Cup victory.

Meanwhile, I’ve got a nice world map, on paper, on the inside of my pantry door.