Deep in the heart of a forest, a flower grew.  Even as the thicket encroached upon its leaves and petals, stubbornly she grew there, her petals basking the forest floor in their beauty.

Yet, as that flower grew taller and taller, she found the thicket above her, pushing down on her, restricting her growth.  She struggled to push through, but each time, the thicket seemed just as dense as before, so that finally, after much effort, she gave up.  Her stem started to bend as she leaned forward to find another path to the rays of sunshine she so desperately needed to live.  Her lean diminished her beauty, but not enough to prevent her bloom showering the forest floor, giving her a child, which began its life nearby.  She accepted her place in life and tended to her child’s safety and nutrition.

One of these children blossomed into a strong, bright flower and outgrew all his siblings.  From time to time, his mother would remind him that he could not grow forever, that one day he would reach the thicket, upon which he would have to stop.  Here, she would indicate the stoop in her stem, the crinkle in her leaves.  He saw his mother from a different angle, though.  He saw that were she to push a little harder, she might break through the thicket branches, which were only a few inches thick.  With a few pushes in the right places, she might push them aside forever and grow to her full height.

But try as he might to encourage her, she had long ago believed it to be impossible and had grown forward too far.  And this was how she died in the end, bent over and crippled.  Her child vowed not to repeat her mistake – he would push through any branches to reach the sun that stood in his way.  Unknown to him, he grew under a large branch of a tree above.  As he grew taller and taller, he found the branch above him, pushing down on him, restricting his growth.  Though he pushed, the branch seemed impervious to all of his efforts against it.  He looks upon the wasting shell of his mother, curled over and hunched with new eyes.  He saw her struggle in his.

Yet in that recognition, he realized that in her struggle had been a solution, one which she had given up the search for.  Seeing how she died, he decided it would be better for him to struggle and try all his life, than be bent over and only live half a life.  So he pushes some more.  He meets a girl flower, who is swept up in his vision.  While all the flowers around her had accepted their limitations, he had shown a resolve she had never seen.  Together, they pushed against the heavy branch.  The days and weeks went by and each day they pushed harder.  Though lightning did strike other trees in the area, it had not struck this one.  Together, they looked at each other and realized they might spend their whole lives to no avail.

The girl was the first to break, weeping bitter tears of frustration.  The boy stopped pushing for a moment and grew that little bit closer to her, that he may lend her comfort.  She, feeling safer in his presence, grew that bit closer to him.  They put aside the branch and for the first time in so many days, enjoyed their time together.  They opened their petals to the light from the suns rays that little bit more, stretched their leaves and allowed the summer rains to wash them clean.  Bees danced in their blossom, sending messages back and forth between each other all day.  And together, they grew closer.

One day they were enjoying the gentle push of the breeze while soaking in the light when the girl flower looked over her head.  There was no branch!  She alerted the boy who looked up to see a radiant blue sky staring back at him.  As time had passed and their love had blossomed, they had grown closer to each other and away from the branch that had been above them.  They looked at each other and saw their bright future in the sun together.

A couple and their son happen by the flowers one day, and stop when the wife notices the two flowers which had so romantically grown around one another.
”Oh look at these flowers!” she remarked, clasping her hands to her face.  “They are in love, just like mommy and daddy.”

The child rolled his eyes and ran to the tree nearby to climb it.  He had gone no higher than the first branch, the branch that had troubled the flowers for so long, when his father instructed him to go no higher.  The boy was quick to complain.
”But Dad, I can climb to the top!”
”Those branches are not safe!” his father said.
”They are too!” replied the boy.
This exchange continued for a while until, after a spirited point, the boy’s weight broke the branch and both tumbled to the ground, missing the flowers by inches.  The father, feeling vindicated, repeated his point to the child and promptly comforted the boy, feeling the lesson had been learnt.  But as the boy nursed the pain in his backside, he felt the urge to right the wrong this tree had done him and to one day return to climb to the top.

The mother, on the other hand, had been greatly concerned as the branch narrowly missed the flowers she had been marveling at.  She threw a look of scorn toward him.
”You nearly damaged these beautiful flowers, please be more careful!”
The child shrugged, his face still creased in pain.
”They’re just flowers.”
”They’re not just flowers, they’re flowers in love,” she spoke to him slowly.  “And you must always protect true love.”
For the second time, the child rolled his eyes, while the father’s widened.  An idea had struck him.  After his wife walked the child ahead, he ripped up the entwined flowers from the ground and placed them in his coat.  As his wife seemed to love the flowers so much, she would surely appreciate being given them as a gift, he thought merrily as he returned to his family.  He was, then, quite surprised when his wife’s reaction was one of anger.  It seemed to him there was no pleasing some women.

And as the flowers felt their world uprooted and life slip slowly away from them, they stared at each other, remembering the life they had shared, hoping their children would find their own version of destiny and to not be defeated by the struggle.

And once again the wife was moved by the flowers’ gentle grace, even in death.  Seeing the love they shared reminded her of the love she and her husband had shared those many years.  She forgave him his transgression and smiled.  The husband, puzzling at the mysterious currents of his wife’s mood, was relieved to be back in the favor of such a beautiful, complex creature.  He stood slightly taller that day and all the days after that, and together, they grew closer.

Popularity: 1% [?]

Coffee, we need to talk.  I have loved you for some time now.  It started about five years ago, first with instant, then with percolated and finally, as our love grew deeper, the espresso.  We have shared so many moments together as we sat there, me drinking you, you being drunk, both of us watching the world rush by.  You’ve been there in the mornings, tucked me in at night.  I took barista courses, bought fancy equipment, all in the aim of providing us with a good life together.  And it worked!  You got better and better, richer and smoother.  Our parties stretched the night and greeted the morning.  But then I learned you were leading a double life.

Had I known that while making me feel perkier in the morning, you were elevating my cortisol levels I might not have let you into my life.  But there you were, whispering sweet nothings in my ear, wafting your delicious smell up my nostrils and all the while stimulating my adrenal gland, causing all kinds of havoc.

What’s that you say?  You were just messing around?  It was harmless?  Ha!  Stop lying to me.  I’m so tired of your seductive lies.  I know what you were up to now.  The wool has been pulled from my eyes and I’ll have no part of  your shenanigans any more!  Cortisol isn’t just some harmless fun.  Blood pressure, fertility issues, memory.  Oh you have some nasty friends, Coffee.

I knew something was wrong when I saw Fat.  At first, I didn’t really know why it had shown up.  I didn’t invite it to the party and quite frankly I usually don’t allow those types in.  I run, I swim, I keep fit.  But everywhere I went, there was Fat, still hanging around like it knew me.  I knew for sure that I hadn’t invited it myself, so I started asking around.  Had someone else let it in while I wasn’t looking?  I did a little further digging and it all became clear to me.  While my good friend Coffee was keeping me happy and distracted, a whole host of undesirable characters were slipping in the back door.

If not for the fat, I may not have noticed.  But it’s always sitting there on my stomach like an ugly fat blob, staring at me and grunting “What?”  When the two of you get together that fat bastard seems even more content, swelling up and jiggling all over the place.  If it was just you and me, I might be able to stomach the other issues, such decalcifying my bones, thinning my skin and toxifying my brain.  But you just had to fatten me up.  And if there’s one thing to spoil a good substance party, it’s a fat bastard at the center of it who JUST WON’T LEAVE.

So goodbye Coffee.  I’ll admit, it was fun while it lasted.  But now that I know what you’ve been up to, well, it just leaves a bitter taste.

Refs:
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1608/is_9_19/ai_106652961/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cortisol#Factors_affecting_cortisol_levels
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2249754/?tool=pmcentrez
Image: http://theobservationsubway.blogspot.com/2008/08/at-coffee-shop.html

Popularity: unranked [?]

In the process of every artist’s life, he or she must ultimately come to terms with his or her own self.  When we create a world in our art, we do so by grasping the world around us.  It’s why the artist is observant.  He looks at things that others don’t notice and reflects it back to show the others what they were missing.  Some skip this step entirely and go straight to the next, harder step which is to look within.  When an artist is able to do both, he or she has stepped out of existence for a moment to depict, with clarity, the inner and outer truths of our lives.

Every artist must pass through both challenges. How accurate they can be at then displaying the result depends on their technical skills. But technical skills will not suffice unless the artist has revealed something of our human potential. Nobody would be pleased if, after all the buildup, the joke your friend has been telling you for the past hour has a lousy punchline. The artist must use their technical skills to reveal an unknown truth or to illuminate a known one. This is the artist’s struggle.

Popularity: 1% [?]

In a world where anything is possible, Ricky Gervais finds a way to make it look miserable.

Fans of The Office will, at one point in their lives, have had a debate with another fan about which version of the show is better, the original UK production starring it’s creator, Ricky Gervais, or it’s American off-spring starring the rubber-faced and very talented Steve Carell.  The correct answer is of course the UK one, though having admitted that one can then comfortably admit to finding the US version also good.  Gervais’ David Brent was a sharper critique of the boss everyone knows who thinks he knows everything.  Carell’s performance of Michael Scott is much more comical and warm, a jester instead of a jerk.  To like the US version of The Office is to seem shallow, as though avoiding the confronting nature of the UK version’s dark comedy.

I completely disagree.  Why?  Because Ricky Gervais is a very ordinary actor who has all the subtlety of a brick.

One day, historians will unearth records from the 21st century and stumble across a bunch of DVDs starring people like Ricky Gervais and Seth Rogen and be genuinely perplexed at how these two could be in so many movies.  How did so much time elapse before humanity was able to collectively pull itself out of it’s slumber and get them off camera?

It’s not that Gervais is not brilliant in his own way.  He has a knack for finding something funny and exploiting it.  Just ask Karl Pilkington.  But this skill in coming across funny ideas or things has unfortunately led to him acting those out for us, when someone else would do a far better job.  Ricky Gervais is David Brent.  He’s the boss who doesn’t know when to back off.  Sure, his comic sense is far better.  But for all intents and purposes he is the arrogant, self-important jerk who always insists that he is more brilliant than anyone else in the room.  He seems to have half of Hollywood convinced, as they show up in cameo after cameo, from Edward Norton to Phillip Seymour Hoffman.  They are the shining jewels of interest in this movie, actors whose job it is to act.  The tragedy is that they surround a not very likable writer/director whose own ego won’t let anyone else be the star.

The idea of this movie, if it isn’t already blindingly obvious, is that the movie takes place in a world where people cannot lie.  Not cannot as in forbidden, but cannot as in inconceivable.  Even though this concept is not difficult to grasp and is already spelled out in the title, it is further explained in a tedious opening narration, full of ad-lib about waiting for the credits to finish, then a thorough drilling of what the movie was about and what the viewer should “look out for”.  Not only is it a painfully tedious and lazy way to introduce a movie, but it’s also arrogant and smug at the same time.   It was the kind of thing that belonged on the DVD extras for the intellectually impaired, not as actual introduction to a movie.  ”But wait!” someone cries.  ”Don’t you see?”  He’s doing that to show us what a life without lies would be like.  He’s being clever.  Yes, and if your IQ is less than 90 I’m sure it was very useful.

Aside from his general unsuitability for leading man, the problem with Gervais’ everyman is that he’s just not very likable.  In Lying, he plays Mark, a tubby writer who lives a relatively shitty life, gets no respect and is informed of these truths constantly, ad nauseam throughout the entire movie.  If Ricky Gervais relishes in flaunting conventions, then perhaps he has been successful.  The usual plot of a romantic comedy is to portray a lovable loser who finally finds courage in order to get the girl.  In this movie, the loser is not lovable.  He’s just a loser.  He loses, we shrug.  He wins, we shrug.  There is a certain fascinating in watching a fly try to exit an open door.  It’s a similar feeling watching a lying, miserable, fat sack of shit try to bag a beautiful girl, yet by the end of the movie you are almost gunning for Rob Lowe because damn he’s just so good looking!

I may be wrong about Ricky Gervais.  There may be a whole other way of seeing this movie.  There is, for example, the genuine comedy of the concept of a world in which people just say what’s on their minds.  From the waiter who tries to hit on the date, to the frank discussions of the chances of getting to home base.  There’s also the satirical take on religion, though again the trademark Gervais brick of subtlety spoils a lot of the satire it sets up.  But maybe this is more than a simple romantic comedy.  Maybe this is an autobiography.

Gervais, a pudgy, uninteresting little man has found a way to make us pay attention to him.  It’s all based on a lie and this movie is his confession.  Perhaps his brilliance is in convincing Hollywood’s A-list to join in his charade, which helps to convince everyone else that he really does deserve to be there in the spotlight.  But without the success of Steve Carell in the US office, without the huge names that appeared every week in Extras, without Steve Merchant’s sharp wit or Karl Pilkington’s ravings, there wouldn’t be much reason to watch Ricky Gervais.

But that’s all beside the point.  He has recruited a plethora of famous and funny people who, with their very presence lend Gervais a kind of charm.  It may not last for very much longer, but it worked for this movie, if only just.

***

Popularity: 1% [?]

For some bizarre and strange reason, I have not posted the latest (and greatest) Unshow episodes.  I have neglected to inform you, my loyal and gentle reader, that The Unshow has entered a new phase, that of The Unshow International.  It is a new form of the Unshow which sees Keith and myself communicating via webcam, while carrying on our respective affairs in America for Keith and whatever country I happen to be in at the time.

To this date, Keith and I have put out two full episodes of International and a further two mini-episodes called Polling Data and Ebay.  Here they are, in the full glory of their chronological order.

The Unshow International 1
http://theunsite.com/theunshow/videos/ui1.flv

The Unshow International 2
http://theunsite.com/theunshow/videos/ui2.flv

The Unshow: Polling Data
http://theunsite.com/theunshow/videos/pollingdata.f4v

The Unshow: Ebay
http://theunsite.com/theunshow/videos/ebay.f4v

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Problem: My laptop, after an incomplete hibernation, left me with a blinking cursor and me cursing when all the usual tricks didn’t work.

Solution: After Googling, doodling and racking my brain, I finally just thought like a computer.  As a result, I’m typing away again.

This Toshiba Satellite M200 has been pretty good until now.  I’ve had it for almost 2 years and apart from overheating on warm days, it’s been a pretty solid machine.  I do lots of video editing on it and the speed at which it renders is quite impressive for a tiny laptop.

However, impressed I was not when, during a long night of tapping out a script, my battery died.  It made a feeble attempt to go to sleep just prior to this, but as the battery gave out it’s last squirt of power, Windows wrote about all the lovely things I had been typing and how it wanted to remember them later, but then all went black.

My natural recourse was to plug in the power.  That I did.  I saw a flash screen for Phoenix Labs, as one might see while the computer wakes up.  No boot options or suggestions to hit the Delete key.  Then a black screen, a flashing cursor and nothing happening in the hard drive department.  No worries, I thought.  Corrupted restore file is the problem.  I’ll just shut off the power and hold the button a really long time.  This is how I show my laptop I really mean business.

After that didn’t work, I still wasn’t worried.  I’ll take out the battery.  If things get serious and button pushing doesn’t work, start the strategic withdrawal phase.  Know that this phase, once started, could lead to the computer’s destruction, as each increasingly integral component is taken out and yet the game goes on.  Battery comes out easily.  Goes back in seconds later.  There, the hardware will be power starved, not remember anything and the system will reboot from scratch.  But after another boot, there is that damn black screen and cursor, blinking at me as though taunting me.  Off, on, off, on, you don’t treat me well… on, off, on, off,  you suck at computers.

Here was I, trying to work this out in a civilized way.  I push a button here, I push a button there, computer works.  We don’t have to create a scene.  We don’t want anyone to get hurt.  But you made me pull out your battery because you still didn’t work after I had tried so hard to be polite.  And now we’ve already crossed over to the dark side.  Now I have a taste for this game of torture.  What will it take for you to work for me?

I took out, then replaced the RAM.  Blink, blink, ha, ha.
I pulled out the hard drive, plugged it back in.  No, no, blinked the screen.
I inserted said hard drive into a portable unit and checked to see it was working.  All was well.
I racked the internet, which told me to hold the power button for a minute, run boot disks (obviously no boot menu so can’t boot), change Windows power options (hello, not booting!) or update my BIOS.  The cursor actually found the last one quite amusing.  Blink, blink, go ahead and try, it said.

I have no idea where the nearest Toshiba shop is.  I really didn’t want to have to find out.  I had to come up with another solution.  I spend a good part of my day sitting in front of my computer and if that vast stretch of time is gone I might start reading books or doing something productive.  As you can see, I desperately needed a solution.

Toshiba laptop, turns on.  What happens?  What would I do if I were that laptop.  The first thing I do of a morning is check to see that I’ve got all my bits.  Legs, arms, face, dick, balls, OK.  It really is all a man needs to be a man.  Everything else is extraneous.  Sure, I’ll put a T-shirt on and may even wear pants, but first I’m checking to make sure I have some legs to put in those pants.  So, if I’m a computer waking up from a deep sleep, I think I’ll be checking to see that my parts are all cool.  If they are, then move on to the hard disk boot sequence and let Windows do the rest.

I’m going to pause here to mention that my approach to problem solving my computer is to FBM.  First blame Microsoft.  There’s no passion there.  It’s all for show.  I guess companies are a lot like their founders.  In this case, bland.  That’s how I see Microsoft.  I’m going to have a little rant about my phone with its Microsoft Windows Mobile operating system in the very near future, I can feel it.  When a problem arises, I assume that it’s a Windows fault.  For example, when going to sleep, have a tag to say not complete.  When the session saving has finished, change that tag to finished. When the system boots up, if session saving tag reads finished, restore it.  If it reads not finished, do a fresh boot.  Simple.

So in my mind, it’s the point after the system check that everything goes wrong.  So I try to make the security check fail.  I pull out the hard disk again, but this time leave it out.  I turn on the computer.  The now-familiar Phoenix logo flashes, the little blue bar down the bottom fills, then…

Black screen, flashing cursor.  Its blinks seem slower this time, as though it was an effort to blink them out.  It says, “you got me”.  Suddenly, a bunch of white writing appears.  Hardware failure!  Blah, blah, blah!  I reset the computer, plug in the hard drive and voila! We’re back to standard boot-up.

The whole process from start to finish took almost 2 days.   I am most unsettled when Google can’t solve my problems.  It has become like a big brother to me and when it doesn’t come through, I’m left vulnerable, having to use my own brain for a change.  But my brain proved that it is still working and that it, with the help of a little Microsoft distrust, could still save me from a life of productivity.

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