2012

Murphy’s Law

| mlatimerridley

Latimer’s week read like Murphy’s Law.

Latimer: A series of unfortunate events leads me to writing this entry. It’s basically a more somber version of Ridley’s.

Firstly, the number one thing you need to understand is my laptop is not a thing. It is actually an extension of myself; and so, I am currently suffering from phantom limb syndrome, because said extension has been removed from my person.

I should preface what comes below by stating emphatically  I am a laptop addict. That’s a fact. And even though, I will often say this in a joking manner, I am in fact deadly serious. It’s not as insidious as a blatant addiction to say, alcohol or drugs, but actually it’s just as real. The scary thing, and the thing I often ignore, because it’s not something I like to dwell on, is that I am in fact addicted to my laptop and the internet. However, I think this is an expected addiction of the modern age (you can tell I’ve had a lot of time to dwell on it, in light of being separated from my laptop). The edge has been taken off by virtue of the fact that I own a smart-phone and therefore have an internet-based outlet.

The whole event started on Monday night.

I tried to turn on my laptop and it wouldn’t start. I tried again, and again and again. But my beloved was having none of it. I wasn’t as concerned as I expected I would be. Usually such an event is followed by nervous lip and finger biting, and heart palpitations (this, is what my naïve mind assumes is a very, very, very mild form of withdrawl symptoms!).

When things happen to my laptop, on this scale, my find is filled with white noise… a blankness as if someone has stuffed cotton wool into my brain, leaving me to float in a cloud of despair.

This despair was present but at very low, semi-undetectable, levels. I was able to breathe and knew there was nothing I could do. So I stopped trying and decided I would go to the ‘IT crowd’ in my college the next day and see what they could do.

I slept well that night. I was in the ‘acceptance of powerlessness’ stage!

The next day I handed it over to the IT crowd. That was like walking into a wondrous world I didn’t understand- the world of hope for the uninitiated! I know what technology can give me, but when it fails (as badly as it had) I’m lost, baffled, confuddled. It was like I was a child, handing over my laptop to God, going; ‘Pluh-ezz Mister, can you fix it?’

I left it with them and went to work. As I muddled around the lab, time ticked by and I thought; ‘this is not good’. Picture me, staring into space, pouring acid into beakers, a dazed expression on my face; ‘Pluh-ezz’.

The more time that passed, the more I slowly came to terms with the fact that I would be laptop-less for a while. I back-up my file regularly (I cannot stress the importance of this!), most recently that weekend, so I wasn’t getting as worried as I would have otherwise. I use my laptop for work; it has lots of project data on it. So, this is very serious!

To add injury to insult, my lab-based machinery broke down at a critical point in my experiment! I couldn’t help but laugh (though inside a tiny part of me died- this is not the first time this has happened either and it always seems to happen when I really need it to work- Murphy’s Law in play).

The whole day got me thinking on the importance of technology.

We need it for everything nowadays.

I need it for my work. I need it in so many ways to look at data and very importantly to find information. It’s like a giant library. Old school scientists used to talk about how ‘in my day I had to go through catalogues and mark out all the papers I wanted to read, then go to the library and get them to order the papers for me! It could take months!’ whereas today you go online and have access to everything and anything in seconds. If you are sitting somewhere and someone asks a mundane question, you can just google it and find the answer.

I started writing a blog post on a piece of paper- full of misspellings and so on. Holding the pen like it was an alien tool, staring at it, ‘how does one write?’.

It got me thinking on my, our, dependence on technology and how your vast world shrinks to a tiny spec in its absence.

As I wrote my blog post, I slowly realized; ‘if I don’t have a laptop, how the hell does this even get out there? Who’s going to read this?’  

And more and more the world shrank around me.

And you know what else- I lost that bloody piece of paper! My words and thoughts were gone. Much like my laptop.

The long and short of it is this; my laptop is gone for good (that was something I did not expect on Monday!). Amazing how surprising a week can be!

I don’t know how it happened or why, but there it is. My hard-drive is possibly salvageable but I don’t know yet. I’ve lost some things that weren’t backed up, little parts of myself that I’ll forget until I wonder about them and realize they aren’t there anymore. My laptop was like a second brain or something; Cyber Latimer, my me-bot.

It will be replaced by another laptop that will subsequently also become a part of me. My data will, possibly, be transferred (that’s something I’ll let you know about)… but I am left thinking I have become something of a cyborg in my later years. I remember getting my first laptop and not knowing what to do with it (I hardly used it at all- and another fact is I’ve only ever had two laptops in my life, the first was secondhand).

I remember going on the internet for the first time thinking, ‘what the hell can I use this for? It’s boring I don’t see the point’

And I remember when I didn’t have any of these things. When I had to go to the encyclopedia, which never changed or updated, and had been written in the 80s, to find out things; then Encarta was the new big thing (God, what ever happened to damn Encarta? It was a big thing when I was a kid. All those expensive CDs that would tell you everything… and eventually nothing)… Ah, that was when the world was small.

Did you see in the Olympic Opening ceremony this year when Sir Tim Berners-Lee (who invented the internet) appeared near the giant house?… when he sent that message out into the crowd; This (the internet) is for everyone….? It gave me chills. It was fantastic.

The world’s great, free, web of connection; the thing that I now use to connect to you all, people I don’t know, people I’ve never seen before, but people who I now speak to; who I now share my thoughts with.

Being disconnected from it (in a proper sense without my laptop) for a few days made me think how much it connected me to things.

Ridley wrote an entry and posted it; while I was writing on a scrap of paper thinking; ‘how am I going to post this anyways? Who’s going to ever read this?’ No one as it turns out because I lost it.

But the point is, I felt powerless.

Of course, I’m writing this now, so you’ve realized that I have other methods of connection. I’m writing on my family’s laptop. But it’s like being in someone else’s house; I could fly around my own desktop and files like flying around my own mind. This is a disjointed, confusing environment.

My old baby is gone; the only one that was with me from her first days! My first real laptop that had only ever belonged to me; she’s gone.

We watched so many things together; we learned so much, we wrote so much, all together, me and cyber-me. I really will miss her.

I only hope her consciousness can be saved!

Gold! Always Believe in Your Soul!

| mlatimerridley

Ridley: I’ve been wrapped up in the Olympics the last little while. I have to say London has absolutely out done itself. Britain should be so proud!

Now of events, I’ve been watching the rowers, the swimmers, the runners and of course, the boxers. I just spend the time marvelling at their athletic feats while I snack on crisps and lull on the couch.

One thing I have noticed; the games really bring out the patriot in you, don’t they? So many countries and the people within them surely think this? There is absolutely nothing like watching one of your Olympians stepping up to the podium. 

At the moment, here in Ireland, there is one person’s name on all our lips, Katie Taylor. While I’ll be the first to say we have fantastic sports people, Katie really is the woman of the hour. When she received her gold medal around her neck, there wasn’t a dry eye in the stadium or in the country.

Shivers shot through me to hear our nations song, ‘Aran na bhFiann’ song by thousands in a completely different country, there were so many of us there it was a like a GAA (football or hurling) final in Dublin!  (Or the Euros in Poland this year!)

For the week or so of her three big fights, the country, the people of Ireland forgot their worries and joined together. We speculated, we hoped, we debated and we prayed for a great result. We all love to support our teams and our people. We get behind our heroes and we cheer them on. Even now, one of our most popular songs that we sing at nearly every event harks back to the 1990s during the World Cup in Italy when our football team got through and played in them. Their coach was Jack Charlton and the song: ‘We’re all part of Jackie’s Army’.

Granted we didn’t win the World Cup of course, but it’s all part of the craic to be involved somehow, to get swept up in the tension, the fun and the ‘what if’. I remember it well, I would have only been nine or ten, but we watched every one of the matches with our team playing on a small fuzzy television. We did it while wearing knitted Ireland scarves and floppy green top hats! It’s this absolute support that we show any sport or person, no matter if you’ve never watched or followed it before, that really makes me proud to be Irish.

During Katie’s final match yesterday, 1.5 million people tuned in to watch it. Some business closed for it, others brought televisions and radios in to watch or hear it in work. In Bray, Katie’s home town thousands turned out to watch it on the big screens there. I loved this video of them all going mad and celebrating at the result.

The ESB (electricity company) has said the demand for electricity dropped by 6% for the duration of the match (and then jumped back up afterwards, as we all turned on the kettle for a cuppa, no doubt! Haha.)

Everything stopped when that first bell rang, the streets and roads were empty. Seriously. Total silence descended over the country as people watched the fight, and when she won, the screaming and the singing and the hollering began. Life restarted again, people flooded the streets, cars were back in traffic jams and all anyone could talk about was, ‘did you see the fight?’

(Here’s a brilliant video of Thai Tims singing about Katie, so cute and fantastic that a country so far away has people celebrating her. The tune is originally ‘The Wild Rover.’)

Even if you weren’t a fan of boxing before this, you’d end up at least being a fan of Katie Taylor’s, who is unbelievably hard working, modest and generous in her praise to her fellow fighters. She’s done more than win the country’s first gold medal, she’s given it’s people hope and happiness. To cap it all off, the summer seems to have come at last! We’ve had absolutely fantastic weather the last two days to coincide with the win. People are wandering round laughing, smiling and getting sunburned. For this weekend at least, we’re all glancing at each other with raised eyebrows and saying, ‘Recession? What recession!’

Long may it last!

The 47 ronin

| mlatimerridley

In the damp wet of Ireland’s ‘rainy season’ (a.k.a. summer), Latimer thinks back on ancient Japan. She exchanges her wetsuit for some samurai swag and sets off on a journey through Japan’s shogun past…

Latimer: Modern Japan is fantastic. Don’t get me wrong, I love it. It’s fun; it looks crazy, but it does leave me thinking, ‘that’s intense… sort of unreal’.

The Japanese past is sometimes hard to find in Tokyo.

But find it you must, because it’s full of fantastic stories waiting to be told!

We were on a pilgrimage of sorts that day. We wanted to find the temple of the 47 ronin- otherwise known as Sengakuji!

My Dad was the one that told me the story of the 47 ronin (master-less samurai). I’m not sure how or why he came to know the story; but he told it to me in his ‘every single detail’ manner…

The story begins in the age of the shogunate… I will attempt to set the scene… actually I may have to leave it to your imagination because my historical knowledge is firmly European. I could tell you to imagine a castle, a wild windswept hill; rough spun tunics and broad swords… but I won’t because I’d be wrong, your picture would be wrong and we’d all be looking at Braveheart and that’s not right! We are going to the orient after all….

The shogunate age was the golden age of the samurai and their masters. The samurai were a noble class and they followed a strict code called bushido. This was all about honour. Honour and respect; that was key to the samurai- you could lose your honour very easily back then it seemed. We use the term perhaps a little dismissively today- but back then, to them, it meant something…

Asano Takuminokami was the Feudal lord of Ako. He was asked by the shogunate to entertain vistors to Edo (the old name for Tokyo). Asano asked his loyal advisor Kira Kozukenosuke for directions on how best to do this. Apparently Kira didn’t like Asano and ‘with malice’ disgraced his honour as a samurai (bad mouthed him basically. This was a major no-no in bushido!). Asano decided to put Kira in his place for insulting him. He drew his katana (sword) and managed to cut Kira on the forehead- but not kill him (ah fiddlesticks!).

It was strictly forbidden to draw your sword in Edo castle. There was also a law that stated ‘equal punishment for quarrels’ so both men were expected to be punished. Now the story gets foggy here, but for some reason Kira got off the hook and only Asano was punished. He was forced to commit seppuku (samurai suicide, not to be too graphic but it involved a knife to the stomach and then your stomach on the floor- grim). Anyway, Asano was forced to commit seppuku in the garden of another lord’s house. This was bad, because seppuku outside was for felons not a lord like Asano. And as if that wasn’t bad enough- his family were stripped of their titles and forced off of their estate!

Asano died and Kira got away scot free! Oh… that’s the perfect start to a story of revenge if ever I head one! The loyal samurai of Asano, the Ako Gishi (47 of them), pleaded against this indignity and demanded the reinstatement of the Asano house.

They were denied. And so began two years of plotting…

They set their plan of revenge in motion on December 14th 1702. They attacked and killed Kira at his residence. Apparently they pleaded with Kira, treating him with respect, to die as a true samurai should (commit seppuku and die with honour). The leader of the 47 samurai, Oishi…

… offered Kira Asano’s dagger (the one he had used to killed himself). Kira trembled before them, but would not kill himself. So, they did it for him (dishonourable) then cut off his head, taking it to Asano’s grave in Sengakuji.

One of the 47, named Terasaka Kichiemon, was ordered to go to Ako to report that revenge had been taken.

Strangely now, the 46 remaining ronin didn’t run. To run would be dishonourable. They turned themselves in to the shogunate straightaway.

They were sentenced to seppuku the following February 4th and buried in Sengakuji with Asano. In a strange twist, Terasaka Kichiemon was pardoned by the shogunate when he returned from Ako. Some reported it was due to his young age. Terasaka Kichiemon lived to be an old man; he died in his 80s and was buried next to his comrades.

And after hundreds of years, myself and Ridley found ourselves at the 47 ronin’s graves in Sengakuji.

It was one of the quietest places we had been in Tokyo. Tucked away from the bustling modern world (though that world did overlook the small temple).

When we got there, it felt like we’d finally found ancient Edo, beyond the lights and noise of Tokyo, behind the modern facade.

The story of the 47 ronin is one of the most popular stories in Japan, because it reminds them of loyalty (Chu) and justice (Gi).

There were no tourists there. The place was serene. It had history. It had a story. I’m in two minds about the samurai notion of honour. It’s an extreme version that I don’t understand to be honest. Then there’s the loyalty part, which is somehow easier to connect with. These men sacrificed their lives to avenge their master. There is something very powerful about that level of conviction.

It was amazing to finally see the place; amazing how such an old story, from so far away, could have found its way through time and tide to us. We were very touched and awed! (Thanks to my Dad for telling us about it!)

Year of the Dragon

| mlatimerridley

(Ridley) It’s the Year of the Dragon! It’s also the Year of M. Latimer Ridley (there were solemn determined nods on New Years eve to back this up I’ll have you know.)

We said 2011 would be our year and sort of the year before that (see the date this blog began on and then was abandoned for months to rust in the tall grasses, that’ll give you an idea…) It’s disappointing that while we tried things to make the year ours-submitted to publishers and competitions-we’ve not been the lucky chosen ones.

But I truly believe this is our year, 2012!

Mainly for two reasons.

One, I’m a little obsessed with dragons, so being the Chinese year that it is, to me that’s A Sign!

I did a school project around….10 years ago now (wow, how time flies and I get old!) I’ve loved dragons since then. I do honestly think it stemmed a little from the Harry Potter fourth book, though I won’t credit it for everything. I liked Flight of Dragons long before J.K put pen to paper! And I loved the song, Puff the Magic Dragon as a child. Though it was the art project that started the obsession properly, I do remember asking myself how I’d get away with doing something ‘harry pottery’, without it being too obvious. So I picked dragons. I made a dragon poster, a dragon mirror and a dragon sculpture. As you can see, after the project was over and submitted, I still hadn’t gotten dragons out of my system so I ended up painting a dragon wall mural around my window. It took around 3 tubes of red acrylic to finish. I still love it.

Also painted on my wall is the poem, Road not Taken by Robert Frost. It’s a poem that speaks quite strongly to me of taking paths that aren’t the most conventional, to throw off the shackles of ‘what’s expected of you’ and do what you love. Make your dreams come true. If you won’t do it, there isn’t anyone else going to do it for you, they’ve their own wishes to make true.

This is where the second reason for believing this is our year comes in. I think I’ve really reached that ‘Ah ha’ moment. I’ve come to realise that you need to get out there and do things for yourself. Nothing in life just happens, there’s no secret magic wave of a wand and suddenly you’re published or famous or rich or unconditionally happy or whatever it is you’re after.

The question is, why do we have to wait on someone else to totally make our dreams come true, why does it have to be an all or nothing thing? Couldn’t we get out there and begin to make it all happen for ourselves? So that ‘Ah ha’ moment, is where I also realise we can actually do this and why the hell not!?

So in ten years time, don’t find yourself disappointed by the things you didn’t do, what is stopping you? Always remember, we’re on this earth to live.

So go live.