Trevanian Tour

I will soon be going on my summer holidays to the south of France. For me this is an opportunity to do a Trevanian tour (pilgrimage!)

Included below is a picture from Google Maps which shows the towns and villages which featured in his two Basque books ("Shibumi" and "The Summer of Katya") and which I intend to visit.

I would like to say thanks to Bjorn who explained some of these locations on this web page.

There is a page on the Trevanian website entitled "View from the château of Etchebar looking southeast". I'd like to take a look at that page now but unfortunately the site seems to be down at the moment. Hopefully it will be up again before I travel.

Trevanian's bio on IMDB indicates that he lived in Garindein so I'll need to add that to the route.

I will definitely being those two books with me on the holiday. I wonder if I'll bring my Kindle too (more Asimov books to read, don't you know).

I'll really looking forward to my tour. And I can't be accused of being a stalker if the man in question passed away back in 2005.

I'll post some pictures here when I get back.

Street Performers 2014

Every year we go to see the Street Performers in Merrion Square and every year I blog about it afterwards.

This year it was not called the "World Championships", probably because there was no competition and no voting!

As always it was a great day out. And once again the weather was kind (we went on Sunday).

The acts we saw were (in this order):

• Dan Raspyni (excellent)
• Yukinko Akira (awful)
• Dream State Circus (very good)
• Rob Roy Collins (ok)

Here's a picture of Dream State Circus, with both of them juggling flaming torches while she stands on his head (what some people will do to make a living!)

Mike Hall's Asteroids

Every few years I get some excuse to re-examine the Java source code for Asteroids by Mike Hall. This time it was preparing some Java lessons for CoderDojo.

Two things have always really impressed me about this Java app:

1. It is SUCH a good reproduction of the original game
2. The code is so nicely done

 Mike Hall has a website called brainjar.com.

As well as writing Asteroids, he also did some great work on Dynamic HTML back in the day, including:

• A really good drop-down menu system
• A really good DHTML scroller

I wonder what Mike is doing these days. The footer of his website says "(c) 1999-2014 by Mike Hall" but to be honest I don't think it has changed much since the early 2000's. And things have moved on quite a bit since then!

Anyway, I would recommend playing the game and reading the Java source code to anyone.

Incident at Twenty-Mile

I was in the St Vincent de Paul charity shop in Malahide village at the weekend, dropping off some old clothes and shoes.

I took a peek at the second-hand books (my son Andrew is looking for the Lord of the Rings books) and I couldn't believe my eyes when I saw a hardback edition of "Incident at Twenty-Mile" by my favourite author, Trevanian!

Now obviously I already had the book at home (I have all of his books) but as I only had the paperback edition I decided that I had to buy it!

So the photo below shows my new acquisition beside my old one.

As I think back on it, I suspect that my first exposure to Trevanian was buying a second-hand copy of "Shibumi" in a shop in Templebar, many, many moons ago.

Anyway, this is a nice excuse for me to re-read the book (if I can take a break from my Asimov books!).

Suffice versus sufficient

I know someone who uses the following phrase: "that will be suffice".

Suffice is a verb which means "be enough or adequate".

So something cannot "be suffice". Instead it can suffice or it can be sufficient.

Surprisingly, a search on Google for "be suffice" returns over 88,000 hits. So this must be a common mistake.

Researching this did lead me to an interesting article on the relatives merits of "suffice to say, suffice it to say or it suffices to say".

Suffice it to say, this article comes down in favour of my preference of the three options.

Flammable versus Inflammable

I mentioned in a recent post that Isaac Asimov may have made some mistakes in predicting the future.

Well when I was reading one of his books I thought I had found an ACTUAL mistake!

He used to work "inflammable" in a context which clearly meant easily set alight.

So doing a little research on the web quickly reveals that these two words mean the same thing.

Apparently the two words have different (but related) origins in Latin. This is explained here.

The image below shows that this has caused some confusion in Springfield also.

So, of course, Mr Asimov was not wrong at all!

Reading The Three Investigators

I mentioned my love of "The Three Investigators" books in previous posts and how I was going to read them to/with my son.

In July 2012 I mentioned that we had finished the first book.

In November 2012 I mentioned that we had finished the first three books.

Well we are now on book 22.

We had to skip a couple that I didn't have, mind you. Here is the list:

• The Secret of Terror Castle (1964, by Robert Arthur)
• The Mystery of the Stuttering Parrot (1964, by Robert Arthur)
• The Mystery of the Whispering Mummy (1965, by Robert Arthur)
• The Mystery of the Green Ghost (1965, by Robert Arthur)
• The Mystery of the Vanishing Treasure (1966, by Robert Arthur)
• The Secret of Skeleton Island (1966, by Robert Arthur)
• The Mystery of the Fiery Eye (1967, by Robert Arthur)
• The Mystery of the Silver Spider (1967, by Robert Arthur)
• The Mystery of the Screaming Clock (1968, by Robert Arthur)
• The Mystery of the Moaning Cave (1968, by William Arden)
• The Mystery of the Talking Skull (1969, by Robert Arthur)
• The Mystery of the Laughing Shadow (1969, by William Arden)
• The Secret of the Crooked Cat (1970, by William Arden)
• The Mystery of the Coughing Dragon (1970, by Nick West)
• The Mystery of the Flaming Footprints (1971, by M. V. Carey)
• The Mystery of the Nervous Lion (1971, by Nick West)
• The Mystery of the Singing Serpent (1972, by M. V. Carey)
• The Mystery of the Shrinking House (1972, by William Arden)
• The Secret of Phantom Lake (1973, by William Arden)
• The Mystery of Monster Mountain (1973, by M. V. Carey)
• The Secret of the Haunted Mirror (1974, by M. V. Carey)
• The Mystery of the Dead Man's Riddle (1974, by William Arden)

The ones we skipped are in red. I intend to go back and infill them soon.

I am still enjoying them (and I think Andrew is too!)

Here is the cover from my edition of book 22:

Swans at Malahide Estuary

We went around Malahide Estuary today to see the swans. And there were lots of them too.

I took this photo of a small group which included a white swan, a black swan, and 3 cygnets.

They were very cute!

Asimov's Foundation Series

I mentioned in a post back in December that I was going to read the 15 books of Isaac Asimov's Foundation series.

Well I have finished 10 books and I am half way through book 11 (the last book of the original trilogy).

I am enjoying the series very much so far.

But I need to point out 3 areas where (IMHO) Asimov's vision of the future is going to prove very erroneous.

The first is the fact that lots of people smoke. Cigarettes and cigars. That can't be true. I never see anyone smoking in Star Trek or Star Wars. It seems unlikely that this will be commonplace thousands of years in the future.

The second is the delivery of messages by canister: people receive important messages delivered to them in canisters which travel through tubes. Now the canisters themselves are very high-tech apparently (they can be keyed to the recipient's DNA to prevent others from accessing the content) but the idea of messages arriving in a physical format seems crazy.

The third is in relation to the importance of microfilm in the future. Asimov mentions this in a number of his books.

So, in summary, Asimov did not see that smoking was something which would (hopefully) die out and he missed the whole area of the Internet and digital storage.

Well, of course, nobody's perfect!

No jail time for Pat Whelan and William McAteer

I wondered in my last post about the criminal convictions for Pat Whelan and William McAteer "if we will finally see someone behind bars for the criminal activities of this rogue bank".

The answer, at least for now, is no.

The judge has decided that it would be “incredibly unjust” for the two men to spend time in prison.

I see no mention of hefty fines either.

All I can see is that the judge will decide at the end of this month on whether or not community service would be appropriate.

So I don't really know what to say. Sean Fitzpatrick was found not guilty, these two men are guilty but not going to jail, David Drumm continues to hide out in the United States.

Justice is not being served.

Ireland's Eye

It's surprising to me that I have mentioned one island off the coast of Ireland (Garinish) without mentioning the two that I see on a regular basis: Lambay Island and Ireland's Eye.

We went out to Ireland's Eye on a boat from Howth a couple of years ago. Unlike Garinish, it's completely wild and desolate but it still makes a nice day trip.

We were in Howth last weekend and I took this picture of the island from the old (East) pier.

Dean Swift Road

I grew up in Dean Swift Road, in Dublin 11.

We were in the area recently and the kids asked me to drive by the house where I grew up. I took this photo of the sign at the top of the road.

Dean Swift is, of course, a reference to the Irish author Jonathan Swift who wrote Gulliver's Travels. Swift became Dean of St Patrick's Cathedral, where he was buried on his death in 1745.

I guess I should have, but I have never read Gulliver's Travels. And, to be frank, it's not on my reading list.

Billboard with amazing 3D writing

I saw this billboard in my local train station in Malahide a while ago. It is advertising the "Newstalk" radio station. I had to stop and take a photo because the the 3D effect on the headline was so good. But it is just a shadow, albeit a very well executed one.