New and Old Toys
Well, it’s all about the iPhone. Oh, and handbells.
Let me see. Where was I? I’ve tweeted and/or forummed* some of this. About twelve hours after Gabriel retired from the field in defeat on Tuesday, I happened to glance down** and saw . . . that my latest small enigmatic black box was registering a phone signal. And, since then, it has—mostly—continued to fly a few tiny bars in the upper left-hand corner. It’s worst indoors, but that’s what landlines were created for, right? To back up your mobile? I managed to ring Peter this morning, waiting for it to cut out the minute he picked up, but—it didn’t. And the speaker-phone option works surprisingly well. Okay, I was surprised. But if I’m not expected to clamp it to my skull so I can listen to my brains frying, I might actually, you know, use it, like, as a phone.***
Raphael and Gabriel did come back yesterday and negotiate with management for better working conditions.† I didn’t want to know the details. But I did demand that they try loading a 2-CD opera before they left me to girn and greet alone.†† So we tried Gluck’s Orfeo, which was the vanguard last time that alerted us to the Walkperson’s treachery. And it . . . promptly loaded three discs of a two disc opera. Which is at least an interesting new approach.††† AAAAAAAUGH.
So let’s talk about handbells for a minute.
Some of you may recall that a fortnight ago I inadvertently stood up poor Titus—and not-so-poor, ratbag, advantage-taking Niall, when I’d thought that Colin was coming to ring handbells, which would mean there were still three of them before I got there. Only Colin wasn’t, so my absence meant that nobody was ringing anything till I finally arrived.‡ Whereupon I was overcome by guilt and shame and Niall immediately whipped out his diary and forced me, in my shocked and weakened state, to agree to ring handbells with one of his Demon Handbell Friends, who happens to live in Frellingham, which is too far away, as I keep saying, when I have said no thanks to repeated applications on the subject.
So last night was the night. And while we had not discussed it I was not entirely surprised when, in the car on our way over, Niall said brightly, okay, we’ll ring a quarter peal first, and then you can get some practise in on other stuff.
A quarter. Of course. Of course we were going to ring a quarter.
And . . . we did. The Demon Handbell Friend—let’s call him James—is actually one of these extremely nice, easy-going, laid-back ringers who just happens to be able to ring anything.‡‡ And while I won’t say I exactly relaxed and enjoyed it,‡‡‡ I will admit that it was a very pretty noise, which isn’t usually the case when Niall and Colin and I are hacking away together: Niall’s a good handbeller, but Colin and I outnumber him. Last night the good ringers outnumbered me. And the truly awful thing is that the experience has made me rather wistful about, oh, learning bob major§ or something. Which would mean coming to one of Niall’s other handbell practises. . . .
No, no, no, no. I have a novel to write and an iPhone to fill up with apps.
* * *
* So, what do you think? Does forummed have one ‘m’ or two? I vote for two, because then Microsoft’s dranglefabbing autocorrect doesn’t change it to ‘formed’.
** Probably from my hunched and heavy-breathing posture over the iTunes Store. Good Golly Miss Molly, a kid in a candy shop doesn’t begin to suggest the instant oversatiation and crazy-mad craving which assaults the new iPhone owner when entering the unhallowed portals of the iTunes Store for the first time. Or even the second or third. Or fourth.^ And we’re not even talking all the other stuff, the you-need-never-do-anything-again-but-keep-your-incredibly-battery-hungry-iPhone-topped-up-who-needs-to-eat stuff. We’re only talking apps. And the big problem with apps is that far too many of them are far too cheap, which provides you no useful barrier against which to brace yourself against the storm-tide of desire.
It all started with Fingerzilla, of course. If I ever go for the digital Olympics, Fingerzilla is my honey. I’m even getting better at the helicopters. I—or possibly Cathy—told you that I was particularly taken by the fact that the little people, when you eat them, scream. Some of them have labels. Some of them are just little tiny people and they run away and you stomp after them, roaring.^^ But sometimes you get a teeny pop-up banner: lawyer, it says. Or banker. Or tax collector. Or stockbroker. I would go for one that says irresponsible dog owner. Or queue barger. Or voter for prop 8. Roarrrrr.
But one can’t stop there.^^^ And Raphael had kept me quiet for a good half an hour months ago, before Peter got ill or the RaspBerry started misbehaving, with a lunatic exercise called Angry Birds.+ This is the dumbest thing I ever saw, I said, eyes riveted to the screen and finger stretching the virtual elastic on the next autodestruct bird-bomb yet again. This is so dumb. It even has dumb sound effects.
I downloaded it right after Fingerzilla. Or rather Gabriel did it for me, because at that point we were still in the early screaming++ stage of iPhone integration. But he was trying to be, I don’t know, adult or something+++, and only downloaded the lite version. It only has three levels!! I had to go back and download the full rich massive 59p version myself later.~
Okay, now, somebody tell me why there are never any instructions~~ to any of these games? We’re all telepathic now? Or maybe everybody but me already has that usb slot in the backs of their necks? Take The Screetch, for example, which is very pretty and rather hypnotic in a Tetris-on-hallucinogens sort of way. And if you read the info page in the iTunes shop carefully, you will learn that you’re supposed to line up three swirly spheres of the same colour and they will explode, and if you explode enough of them you win, and go on to the next level. But . . . but . . . or am I looking for logic where there is none? Shut up, McKinley. Turn on, tune in and drop some spheres.
^ You know I’m strangely short of sleep. . . .
^^ The roars are almost as good as the screams. The roars could be louder though. Hey, this is Fingerzilla, crusher of continents.
^^^ No, really. It’s in the fine print. Read your contract.
+ Raphael said, my two-year-old loves it.
++ Speaking of screaming. I needed to play Fingerzilla.
+++ He really should know me better by now.
~ There’s a cheat app for Angry Birds. In fact there are several. Dear gods. Now I’m getting frightened. Hey, guys, it’s a game.
~~ Except for Plants vs. Zombies. There is a truly excellent ‘help’ screen which reads in its entirety: When the Zombies show up, just sit there and don’t do anything. You win the game when the Zombies get to your houze. –This help section brought to you by the Zombies.
*** Except I hate phones. Okay, scratch that idea.
† One of management’s apparent requirements is WiFi. Sigh. I’ve kept putting off getting the cottage wired, because I sleep there. All those wandering waves are implicated in ME. But it’s increasingly the case that there’s so much of it around that you’re swimming in it anyway—it’s like I wonder how much my initial savage acute phase of ME was aggravated by the fact that at the old house we were surrounded by agrochemicalled farmers’ fields. So having prospectively yielded to the inevitable, last night back at the cottage I turned on the iPhone’s WiFi search . . . and was offered a choice of five networks. Soon it will be six. But I’m going to have a password on mine.
†† The Walkperson not only declined to load more than one CD of any given opera—we tried three, just in case it was a production glitch—without merely overwriting what went before, I also later discovered that it was harbouring nine copies of Beethoven’s ninth symphony.
††† It was, for reasons which escaped all of us, objecting to Che Faro, which is the famous aria that every mezzo-soprano in the universe sings, even me. It decided that this aria was just so special it should have a disc all of its own.
It did, however, agree to load all nine of Beethoven’s symphonies.^
^Well, I think. I admit I haven’t tried playing any of them back yet. . . .
‡ I don’t know why nobody seems to ring minimus—four bells—on handbells. But apparently nobody does.
‡‡ They’re a different species. Homo campana. I’m sure I have more genes in common with chimpanzees.
‡‡‡ You enjoyed that, didn’t you, Niall said firmly, on the way home in the car. Erm, I said. And any of you out there keeping track, yes, Thursday is our usual handbell evening and yes, we rang handbells tonight too. I think I’m probably chiming gently when I move. No, wait, that’s the iPhone.
§ Which is roughly speaking the same pattern as bob minor, but on eight bells. Which means some extra twiddles.
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