Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

“… the secret of the Great Stories is that they
have no secrets. The Great Stories are the ones you have heard and want to hear again. The ones you can enter anywhere and inhabit comfortably. They don’t deceive you with thrills and trick endings. They don’t surprise you with the unforeseen. They are as familiar as the house you live in. Or the smell of your lover’s skin. You know how they end, yet you listen as though you don’t… In the Great stories you know who lives, who dies, who finds love, who doesn’t. And yet you want to know again”- Arundhati Roi, The God of Small Things.

I went to go and see Watchmen last weekend. I love the graphic novel and I was waiting for the movie to come out for some months now. I was actually expecting it to come out in July so the March release caught me by surprise.

The accuracy with which most of the graphic novel was captured and translated onto the silver screen is remarkable. I browsed through the graphic novel the day before going to see the movie to refresh the story in my mind and I was pleasantly surprised to see that the movie used the panels in the graphic novel as scenes and they barely changed the dialogue – which just goes to show how good Watchmen is as a graphic novel.

After seeing Watchmen (which I'm going to go and see again on Wednesday) I started thinking about the movies I like. I rarely go to the movies to see a movie whose story I don't know. All the movies I watch are based on books I've read or comic books whose plots I know. I like familiar stories, they have to be comfortable enough for me to jump right into them and know what's happening. I'm the sort of person who reads the same books over and over again because I like the way they are written, I've fallen deeply in love with the characters (and plan to name my children after them) and because the stories make me weep. I'm currently reading Terry Goodkind's Confessor and I had to hold back my tears on the bus this morning because I was so impressed by the strength of Richard Rahl's spirit. When I was reading Stephen King's The Waste Lands I came across one of the most beautiful sentences I have ever read (which I don't recall now) and I stopped and reread it for fifteen minutes.

All the lovers of stories, whether they are about wizards and dragons or superheroes, go to the movies to see them in a new light without wanting the essence of them to change.

Who watches the watchmen? The fans of books, comics and video games. We are the watchers of movies based on our favourite stories. We go see a movie based on the Watchmen graphic novel to see if they can capture that epic feeling we experienced when we were reading it at 3 in the morning. Once in a while something like the Watchmen movie comes along and makes us happy to be those shadowy figures behind the scenes that keep a protective eye over the watchmen as they keep the streets safe.

The World Is Too Much with Charlie

The world is too much with us; late and soon

- William Wordsworth

I have always suspected that I am a materialistic person but things have finally spun out of control. I want, want, want and I want some more! My latest 'want', I'm proud to say, is actually a desperate need in disguise.

This post is aimed at anyone in this wide world, and even worlds parallel to this one, who feels the need to grant a poor African pseudo-kid the one sensible object of all his desires (drum roll): an Amazon Kindle 2 .



As a certified bookworm I need to have this space-age piece of technology. I'm always lugging books around and this tends to disturb a lot of people on the bus. I'm a skinny dude with the upper arm strength of a Keibler Elf and I'm a bit of a lummox - thus I'm always dropping heavy books on fellow commuters' toes and falling on them. If a very kind person bought me a Kindle 2 this would not happen and many toes would be spared.

Er...: Laughing Men Co.

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Phew! This has been one of those weeks where a lot of things seem to happen and when you take the time to think about it you realise that you were just going around wasting a lot of energy doing almost nothing. I ran up stairs and down stairs for reasons that make no sense to me and I walked around with lots of useless books in my bag and hands for most of the week feeling very productive and now I can't even remember where those books came from. The first week of varsity is like drinking too much at some party and having a vague memory of how all that vomit got on your shoes the following day. I have scraps of paper lying everywhere and I have no clue where most of them came from. I'll use my super sleuth skills later to solve this case, I'm just too damn lazy right now.

The highlight of this week is the company I'm starting when I acquire a heap of money in the near future. I met an old high school acquaintance yesterday and just to bore the nonsense out of him I decided to tell him about Laughing Men Co., which is going to be the biggest, wealthiest and least profitable company in the world. We're going to convince (at gunpoint of course) the top ten people on the Forbes list to give us all their money. We will then proceed to build an empire that will be the second home of the world's strongest, fastest, tallest and most intelligent men and women. With the skill of these insanely talented people at our disposal we will find devious ways in which to lose money. Laughing Men Co. will be headed by a board of 13 directors (me being at the head of the table) in a room enveloped by Cuban cigar smoke. The directors will all wear expensive Armani suits that cost more than the house I currently live in and no one will know what their faces look like because they'll all be wearing black hoods. From their ivory tower the directors will laugh, giggle like little girls and snicker as the company loses vast sums of money. We (by which I mean my 12-year old sister and I) made some advanced calculations and with the capital at our disposal Laughing Men Co. will be around for almost a century before our money runs out. I'll be dead by then so I won't care that lives have been ruined by 13 crazy, laughing people in a room.

P.S. If you've just wasted two minutes of your life reading this post I'm sad to say that there is 99.999999% chance that you will never get them back... unless the Chuckling Time Machine that Laughing Men Co. plans to build in the future actually works.

“The critics say that epics have died out
With Agamemnon and the goat-nursed gods;
I’ll not believe it”- Elizabeth Barrett Browning

What our age lacks is the passion older civilizations seem to have had. Kierkegaard said of the modern age (he was speaking in a religious context) that you can hardly call its inhabitants sinners; they (i.e. us) are lukewarm beings whose sins are of the vague and wretched sort. The older civilizations really sinned! They murdered, they stole and they lusted in the proper sense of the words. These terms hardly qualify in describing the modern human being. In a time when love just means being nice to other people passion is almost dead. Look at the stories we tell on TV, they’re getting sillier every year. As a kid I watched lots of TV because they had good cartoons on, shows like Darkwing Duck, Bikermice from Mars and Captain Planet. I see that they’re barely showing cartoons on children’s shows anymore, all they go on about is the presenters and what they get up to. Apparently we’re the most intelligent beings on the planet and yet we waste our lives away talking about the cellulite on some celebrity’s thigh. Did you see how lumpy Jennifer Smith’s thighs are? They have pics of it in Warm Magazine. WTF?! Douglas Adams is right, it’s mice that actually run the show and dolphins are second in command.

It’s not all doom and gloom though. Like the lovely Mrs Browning I believe that the spirit of old is not dead yet. It is locked away in some cupboard and it’s still fairly easy to get hold of the Golden Key with which to open that forgotten cupboard. That Golden Key is, believe it or not, literature. Stories have always been the favourite art form of human beings all over the planet because they are an ingenious way of preserving a society’s wisdom and even more importantly, they are entertaining.

The epics have not died out my friends; they’re on shelves in your local bookstores and libraries. If you’ve never heard of those places just look around for dusty looking people and they’ll gladly show you the way.

Totally Out of the Loop

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There’s been a disturbing trend amongst many of my friends of late; they all seem to be surprised that I’m out of the loop when it comes to current affairs or social conventions. Let me just say this: I watch very little TV and the little I do watch I rarely remember because after 15 minutes whatever’s on TV just fades into the background and I start thinking about whether or not dwarvish women should enter into some of Faerie’s beauty contests. I live my whole life in a box – it’s a sad, sad existence I know but it suits me just fine.

To all of my friends who get exasperated because I don’t know the name of some celebrity whom even people in Timbuktu know about and because I have no idea what happens in some movie that’s apparently a classic and everyone in the universe watches it twice a year, please bear with me. When you talk to me always assume that I have no clue what you’re on about, go as far as thinking of me as an alien visiting the planet for the first time. I’m surprised that so many people talk to me in the first place! It’s a miracle I thank God for.

This little post is just to remind you guys that Charlie is a freak who has no idea how the world works. All I know is that there seems to be some sort of activity everywhere and that the Dark Tower still stands. I’m not good at real life and that’s why I just don’t participate in it.

Thank you.

Amazingly enough, Lady Leigh and Sleuth know this and they are the only people who seem to be able to roll with it.

The Change We Need

"What you know you can't explain, but you feel it. You've felt it your entire life, that there's something wrong with the world. You don't know what it is, but it's there, like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad." - Morpheus, The Matrix

Yesterday was a monumental day in the history of our planet – the inauguration of Barak Obama as the 44th president of the US of A and the formatting of my hard drive. President Obama promises to be a breath of fresh air in the world's polluted political landscape and my hard drive just needed some spring cleaning. Whether you like it or not, the US is the nation that we all look up to as the standard of wealth and prosperity. As the guiding light of the world the US is always under the scrutiny of critics and when they become a fallen people the world is catapulted into doom and gloom.

Yesterday Obama promised the American population the change (for the better) that they need and my PC seemed to think that it too needed a certain change, a fresh installation of Windows XP. I was trying to install the Windows 7 Beta and I forgot to back up some of my data, only to have W7 crash halfway through the installation. I did what any person who is unhealthily attached to their PC would do, I cried. It would have been better if I'd been dumped by a girl. Luckily, though, I'm of the same stock as the lovely (and somewhat imaginary) Mrs Lorrie Tock, I'm an indefatigable optimist. I'm always cheerful, come crashing PCs or gun toting clowns – the latter being quite disturbing and potentially fatal.

As the world watched and listened in awe as President Obama delivered his inauguration speech promising Americans (and the world to a lesser extent) the change that we need I was installing Windows XP onto my PC and giving it the change it so desperately needed.

I wish President Obama a wonderful and successful term in office and may his bright vision inspire each and every one of us to become better human beings.

P.S. Remember kids, change is an important and necessary part of life – especially when it comes to things like underwear.

P.P.S. Is it just me or does Obama sound a little like Morpheus?

"I believe it is our fate to be here. It is our destiny. I believe this night holds, for each and every one of us, the very meaning of our lives. This is a war and we are soldiers. What if tomorrow the war could be over? Isn't that worth fighting for? Isn't that worth dying for?" - Morpheus, The Matrix

From the Elder Days to the Dark Tower

I had a sense of eucatasptrophe (what Tolkien calls the good catastrophe) this morning as I was reading Wolves of the Calla. It happens when Roland, Eddie, Susannah, Jake and Oy go todash (courtesy of Black Thirteen) and land up (in a manner of speaking) in New York. They go visit the rose that might be a doorway to the Dark Tower or the Tower itself. When they see the rose there is a sound of many voices singing:

“Here is yes. Here is you may. Here is the good turn, the fortunate meeting, the fever that broke just before dawn and left your blood calm. Here is the wish that came true and the understanding eye. Here is the kindness that you were given and thus learned to pass on. Here is the sanity and clarity you thought were lost. Here, everything is all right.”

Every age has its great stories: The Iliad, The Odyssey, The Aeneid, Beowulf, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Hamlet, The Divine Comedy, Alice in Wonderland, and many other tales besides. In terms of sheer epic scope J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle-Earth legendarium stands head and shoulders above any other work of the 20th Century and that mantle has been passed down to Stephen King I think. I’ve read many fantasy books where the blurb compares the story to The Lord of the Rings but they all just don’t live up to that high standard. SK does not try to create an epic story of a world gone but rather he writes about a world that’s moving on, a world that’s dying . . . our world. Tolkien starts his story when the world is yet new and already evil has entered into it and stops in a time where the world has forgotten the beauty of old and the power of Elves and Men has declined. SK’s epic story starts with a lone gunslinger, the last of his kind, following the Dark Man across the desert. The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed. Roland is the last true hero of a world on the edge of oblivion. At the centre of SK’s epic story is the Dark Tower which holds all worlds together and what I love about SK’s corpus is that all of his work is somehow connected to the Dark Tower, all his books are interconnected. In SK’s universe everything means, when things are said it’s best to pay attention because ka is at work.

What I love about good stories is the storyness of them; their text-ure, that warm feeling they give you as a reader. Great stories are an echo of life, not the humdrum everyday sort of thing but the sort of life where anything might happen at any time. In a way stories are more real than ‘real’ life. In books people get killed and it causes the reader real grief, in real life people die every day and we don’t give a damn. We turn on the news and we think, Conflict in the Middle-East, I’m so bored by this. Stories give us our humanity back so that we may care about people dying in senseless conflicts and maybe even do something about it. In The God of Small Things Arundhati Roy says:

“… the secret of the Great Stories is that they have no secrets. The Great Stories are the ones you have heard and want to hear again. The ones you can enter anywhere and inhabit comfortably. They don’t deceive you with thrills and trick endings. They don’t surprise you with the unforeseen. They are as familiar as the house you live in. Or the smell of your lover’s skin. You know how they end, yet you listen as though you don’t… In the Great stories you know who lives, who dies, who finds love, who doesn’t. And yet you want to know again.”

The stories Tolkien and SK write are like that, you never grow tired of them because they don’t try to trick you into liking them – they simply reveal certain truths about the human condition. The theme of these stories, like Christianity . . . like life, is eucatastrophe – the good turn. No matter how dark things become they remind us that there is light and beauty forever beyond the reach of the dark cloud as Sam realised when he spotted the lone star from the slag heaps of Mordor.

If you want great stories that deal with a magical world of old, read Tolkien. If you’re looking for something more modern but just as epic, read SK.

There's Life After the Party

My sneaky plan for this festive season was to fly under the radar and not be noticed but, alas, that didn't work. I had my hiding corner all kitted out with everything comfy or edible lying around the house so I can read the days away. My corner was discovered and I was immediately dragged, kicking, biting and screaming, to the nearest pub where I now have my own honorary table and beer mug. After a week of drinking beer and eating pub food I'm super tired. I left the pub this morning and waved goodbye to my pub friends and the waitress I had a minor crush on. I got home and went straight to bed and prayed, thanking God that I'm still here on this blue ball called Earth :)

I had a good time at the pub but I have to go back to being a bibliophile.

A prosperous new year to everyone on Earth, Mars, Oogle Google or wherever you are :) God bless.

Christmas According to Dickens

A Christmas Carol

"I have always thought of Christmas time as a good time. A kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time. The only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely."

"I will honour Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year."

Doing Stupid Things

Doing stupid things is a funny business, funny (and annoying sometimes) to those around you and funny to you in retrospect. I’m sitting here and thinking of my total failure at successful romantic relationships with the opposite sex over the years. It all started when I was a pip-squeak and I decided to ask the hottest girl in the neighbourhood (no, not the sexy sixteen-year-old in flat number 103 but rather the beautiful twelve-year-old in flat number 4) to be my valentine. You see I thought I was a smart kid and I reasoned that if she said yes to being my valentine it was inevitable that she would be my girlfriend. The good news is that she said yes and the bad news is that I had no idea what to do with her now that she was my valentine. The whole affair was very awkward and I ended up writing her a letter proclaiming the extent of my love and thus started a chain of folly that I’ve been trailing around with me for many years. In the letter I said things like I’d jump down from the jungle gym for her, not thinking that she’d actually take me up on it. Seriously! That R Kelly dude sang about crossing oceans for some girl and I bet she never took him up on it. I jumped down the jungle gym and learned that I wouldn’t die in the process. The relationship was still awkward though.

The lesson I learned: don’t just want things, know why you want them.

Fast forward to my High School years and my letter-accompanied stupidity just became worse because I was an avid reader by then and what better way to get girls than to write them letters with quotes from Hearts in Atlantis I thought. I could never work out what was going wrong for the life of me! Were the girls stupid or something? I spat more game in my letters than the most charming guys in school and all they said was that’s nice.

The whole mess was really silly but I wouldn’t change it for the world because stupid things make super cool memories.

Dating aside I’ve done lots of stupid things over the years such as playing with fire and burning stuff like curtains and carpets; shoplifting (I stole a Game Boy at Reggie’s once and I’m secretly proud of that); stealing a gangster’s chips (don’t ask); drinking punch that consisted of vodka, whiskey, beer, wine, brandy and some other suspect beverages at a house party, breaking into what looked like an abandoned house and breaking all the windows only to find that a friend of my mom’s lives there and the list just goes on and on.

I’m comforted by the fact that stupid people are virtually indestructible; God loves us so much that He gives us a ridiculously long lifespan. It must be a punishment for smart people, putting them on a planet crowded with stupid people to annoy the cheese out of them.