Yesterday's Men

Historians are the vanguard of the past. They serve as the shockwave front as the future tries to understand its past; they have auxiliaries such as chroniclers and journalists, but their task is the great strategic one.

Historians are Yesterday's Men, those who serve the ever increasing and diminishing vision and tapestry of the past. And slowly, slowly, I am becoming one of them, one with the past, one with a past.

I am halfway to the enormous silence, at the very least. Even if I enter it tomorrow, yesterday I would have thought it a longer way away. And so I sit, contemplating the accumulation of history faster than any grass can grow.

Forty Is Gone

"Forty years on, afar and asunder..." begins that rather sober school song of a rather famous school. As each person I know crosses that boundary and heads towards 41 — yet another prime of their lives — I am reminded of that song.

When one's younger brother — ally, pest, co-conspirator, friend — crosses that mark into 41-hood, one is stricken (and surprised to find oneself stricken) by an odd sensation. So much of life has passed by! The halfway mark, if strength for the other half exists.

And so one dreams of misty England. Heh.

Hillsong

I'm over the hill but fear not the valley
I'm all round the street but not up the alley

And that is the way I think of my life. I've reached another prime. My many-coloured life prisms around me, shards of gold and blue and red. I am happy because I have a little hill. I can see enough to be a watchman, but not so much that I would see only little things. Everything looks both small and large from where I am.

This year has been a good year. I have to thank the old young people who have kept in touch. The people who live nearby, the people who live a bit further away, the people who have meals with me and who have made so many of my days.

I've met with even older people, who are still in my memory yet young. They've aged well, which is to say that if they weren't to expose my agedness, they'd not expose their own. I have not many regrets, although to have none would be great.

I am a happy man. This too is the blessing of God.

Over The Hill

I'm still charging over the top, in many ways. I'm over the point that people call 40, and into the ages beyond. I remember that I once described my life in terms of decades: my first, second, third and fourth decades are all here.

The funny thing about my post on the fourth decade is that I actually thought, almost exactly two years ago, that my last place of regular work would be a more permanent abode than most; barely seven months later, I left it. I was made to charge over the hill, in a manner of speaking.

This present age is a strange one, symbolically. If one becomes an adult at 21, what then can one say about 42? Is it an answer to a question? An answer to a question that is unknown? A symbol of life, the universe and everything? A cross-product of sixes and sevens? I don't know. But I'm strangely warmed by the hundred or so people who this day spent some time to make a link between their busy lives and the life of a person who for some of them was almost a stranger, and who for some of them (hopefully) played a useful or cheerful part in those lives.

Well, stranger things have happened. And I'm still a happy person. Very.

A Note On Birthdays

So what happens if the calendar changes so that it no longer has the same months or days as it used to have? What happens to your birthday?

In 1582, the Julian calendar was superseded by the Gregorian calendar, in yet another attempt to rectify calendar drift. At one fell swoop, Pope Gregory XIII added a 10-day correction and gave us the modern solar calendar — the one we use to this day.

Why was it so contentious? Gregory, not one to do things slowly or by halves, decided to do the correction all at once. That meant the last day of the Julian calendar was Thursday 4 Oct 1582, and the first day of the Gregorian calendar was Friday 15 Oct 1582. The days 5 Oct-14 Oct 1582 were gone forever.

So what happened to those people with birthdays which fell during those missing days? Well, there were riots and mass uprisings of course, with people clamouring to be given back the ten missing days of their lives. Somehow, a lot of people thought they'd been cheated of ten days. If you could think that, it shouldn't have been too hard to think that your lifespan had also been extended ten days, but no... human nature is infallibly bent and few thought of that point of view.

The Romans, during the time when the Julian calendar added more than a hundred days in one year, had been more sanguine. Some changed their birthdays, some kept their old ones in some abstruse mathematical conversion, some decided to go without a birthday, and some just set their birthday to be the first day of the year (on the principle that every year should have at least one day).

The Chinese are a little like that. Today is Man's Birthday, the seventh day of the Chinese calendar. Whoever doesn't have a birthday can have one today, and whoever already has one can adopt a spare one. Seems like a good idea to me! Happy birthday, everyone!

Not Checking

Yes, I'm not going to check the time or the date. The practice of this blog has never to been to unduly glamorize this particular date in any given year. I shall let the shock pass for a while before attempting a proper post.

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Today I was thinking of the German word verschlagen. This is an interesting word to me because it is actually pretty... versatile. The root schlag- is where we get the good old English words 'slug' = 'to hit', 'slog' = 'to hit many times', 'slag' = 'to hit until pieces fly off', 'slack' = 'the state of having hit or been hit until pieces have flown off', 'slay' = 'to hit until slack', 'slaughter' = 'to hit until very slack or plurally slack', and 'sly' = 'to be very good at hitting (without being hit back)' (= German schlagfertig). It is pretty amusing to me that 'slogger' and 'slacker' should come from the same thing in the end, not to mention that it is the same thing as 'slayer' and 'slugger'.

Take that, you friends! *grin*

Birthday Cake

Today I am supposed to buy a birthday cake for a little dinner party that a few of us are having. It's the gazelle's birthday treat too. For those of you who know about the infamous spreadsheet, I will be remembering the contents of that spreadsheet through most of tonight. It will be one of those nights.

I have just recovered from one of those remorseless fevers that brings the ague to the bones and makes the head to throb for at least 18 hours. Every joint clamoured for attention and every little pulse brought dramatic realignment of aches and pains. It has been a terrible 24 hours. I woke up this morning with the fever broken; I suspect that yesterday's excitement and concomitant stress had a lot to do with my state.

But I am reasonably good for now. I will survive. Tonight, strangely enough, will be a stress of a different kind. What cake shall I buy? I think it should be something with a small amount of thin dark chocolate in it, for elegance. It must have something creative about it, for style. It must be unusual. It must be flavourful. It must be a cake for the memories. Haha.

Prime Cuts

Family dinners are sometimes full of eccentricity. I have a family which puns all the time; it drives non-members and honorary members crazy once in a while. Last night though, the announcement that my siblings and I would be observing a rare occasion – the fact that we'd all be having prime birthdays (i.e., birthdays celebrating a prime number of years lived) in the same year – met with silence as people either tried to work it out or failed.

I have a sister who is ten years younger and a brother who is four years younger. If I were x years old, you'd be looking for a set of positive integers {x, x-4, x-10} such that these three numbers were all prime. The interesting thing about this set, of course, is that it seems impossible to prove how many sets there are which will meet the requirement.

Fortunately (as some people would say, God being one of them), we are not immortal and hence there is a limited range of possible solutions in the real world. And the real world offers at least one other benefit; many of you already know approximately how old I am and are thus able to narrow the search down considerably.

This is an example of reducing complicated problems to simple ones, a useful (but not always applicable) skill. Sometimes, life favours us with problems that are obviously and/or immediately reducible; sometimes, it doesn't. All I know is that we're glad we're in the primes of our lives.

Brotherhood

Tomorrow, my baby brother turns 37. It will be one of those rare years that both our ages are prime numbers, but that's beside the point. The point is that he's grown up, but he's still my younger brother, and I feel an abiding affection for him. I don't feel responsible for him, but I feel proud of him, happy that he's around, grateful for 37 years of sibling rivalry and togetherness.

Sometimes, it isn't so. Brother does turn against brother, although this is not one of the three fractious relationships that Jesus mentions. But the blessings of a dynamic and happy brotherhood are significant. In Psalm 133, unity in brotherhood is linked to eternal life.

I'm always sad when I see brothers who don't get along. Behind such an unhappy state, you will find ambition, greed, inadequacy, and the other myriad human failings, just as in any other relationship. Being brothers doesn't protect you from such things. There were periods of time as long as 5 years when my brother and I were happy not to be anywhere near each other. Those days are gone, and I am glad for that. Happy birthday, my brother!

Candles

Heh. Some time ago, we bought a lovely Quentin Blake birthday card for our elder niece. She's a sharp one, she is; I remember several occasions on which she managed to outwit her father and her uncles, who are not exactly brainless.

You can imagine my horror in the wee hours of the morning, as I was writing in that card, when I discovered that the birthday cake portrayed in the card (three times!) had only five candles. And she will be seven this year.

Hrrrm. With that finely-tuned aesthetic creativity that comes free with a boat-load of desperation, this uncle sketched in an extra two perfectly good and difficult-to-detect little candles on each instance of that cake. I figure it is a win-win proposition. If the niece fails to detect the ringers, so far, so good. If she does, she should appreciate that Uncle Autolycus actually bothered to draw such excellent candles. I hope.

The theme for this month, I suspect, will be 'The Audacity of Hope'.

Interesting Convo...

Besides the fact that Neil Gaiman's new movie Stardust is out on a particularly auspicious day, I have had a very good day today. On this equinoctial day, the Butterfly hit eighteen in the shade and the Godfather to his everlasting regret missed the moment. He has been forgiven but will have to stump out for a Bentley by the twenty-first (birthday, not day of March) - this something that he contemplates in silence and possibly vows of poverty.

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Then again, listening to favourite group Mannheim Steamroller, I ignored the Godfather for a while when I came across a very appropriate (considering I was on MSN) track. Here it is.

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Convoy - by C W McCall

[on the CB]
Uh, breaker one-nine. This here's the Rubber Duck
You gotta copy on me Pig-Pen, c'mon?
...
Uh, yeah 10-4 Pig-Pen, fer sure, fer sure
By golly it's clean clear to Flag-town, c'mon?
...
Aw yeah, that's a big 10-4 there Pig-Pen, yeah
we definitely got the front door good buddy,
Mercy sakes alive, looks like we got us a convoy.

Was the dark of the moon on the sixth of June
In a Kenworth pullin' logs
Cabover Pete with a reefer on
An' a Jimmy haulin' hogs

We's headin' fer bear on I-one-oh
'Bout a mile out a' Shaky-town
I sez Pig-Pen, this here's th' Rubber Duck
An' I'm about to put the hammer on down

Cause we got a little ol' convoy, rockin' through the night
Yeah, we got a little ol' convoy, ain't she a beautiful sight?
Come on an' join our convoy, ain't nothin' gonna git in our way
We gonna roll this truckin' convoy 'cross the U.S.A.
Convoy, convoy…

Uh, breaker Pig-Pen, this here's th' Duck
an' a-you wanna back off with them hogs?
...
10-4, 'bout five mile or so, 10 roger
Them hogs is gittin' in-tense up here.

By the time we got into Tulsa town
We had eighty-five trucks in all
But they's a road-block up on the clover-leaf
An' them bears was wall to wall

Yeah, them smokies as thick as bugs on a bumper
They even had a bear in the air
I sez, callin' all trucks, this here's the Duck
We about to go a-huntin' some bear

Cause we got a great big convoy, rockin' through the night
Yeah, we got a great big convoy, ain't she a beautiful sight?
Come on an' join our convoy, ain't nothin' gonna get in our way
We gonna roll this truckin' convoy 'cross the U.S.A.
Convoy, convoy…

Uh, you wanna gimme a 10-9 on that Pig-Pen?
...
Uh, nega-tory Pig-Pen, yer still too close
Yeah, them hogs is startin' to close up my sinuses
Mercy sakes you better back off another ten

Well we rolled up Interstate forty-four
Like a rocket sled on rails
We tore up all our swindle sheets
And left 'em settin' on the scales

By the time we hit that Chi-town
Them bears was a-gittin' smart
They'd brought up some reinforcements
From the Illinois National Guard

There was armored cars and tanks and jeeps
An' rigs of every size
Them chicken coops was full o' bears
And choppers filled the skies

Well we shot the line and we went for broke
With a thousand screamin' trucks
And eleven long-haired Friends o' Jesus
In a chartreuse micro-bus

Uh, Rubber Duck to Sod Buster
Come on there, yeah, 10-4 Sod Buster
Listen, you wanna put that micro-bus in
behind that suicide jockey?
Yeah, he's haulin' dynamite and he
needs all the help he can git

Well we laid a strip for the Jersey shore
And prepared to cross the line
I could see the bridge was lined with bears
But I didn't have a doggone dime

I sez Pig-Pen, this here's the Rubber Duck
We just ain't-a gonna pay no toll
So we crashed the gate doin' ninety-eight
I sez let them truckers roll, 10-4

Cause we got a mighty convoy, rockin' through the night
Yeah, we got a mighty convoy, ain't she a beautiful sight?
Come on an' join our convoy, ain't nothin' gonna git in our way
We gonna roll this truckin' convoy 'cross the U.S.A.
Convoy, convoy…

Uh, 10-4 Pig-Pen, what's yer 20? …Omaha?
Well they ought know what to do
with them hogs out there fer sure
Well, mercy sakes, good buddy, we gonna back on outta here
so keep the bugs off your glass
and the bears off your… tail
and we'll catch you on the flip-flop
This here's the Rubber Duck on the side…
we gone...
bye-bye…

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Heh. We ain't gonna pay no toll! Great stuff.