Ebook reader: progress report

It’s beginning to look more like a book. The MS of Gypsy Scholar, which Jinks and I have sweated over for two years, now resides on my swanky new Sony Portable Reader System alongside War and Peace, The Heart of Darkness and 98 other titles which came as freebies.

As explained, the aim is to read the MS as if I were a reader instead of an editor. I did the transfer yesterday and was ready to go but swimming pool water got into my goggles and left my eyes streaming. Some time this weekend, then.

How good is the machine? For me, optically as good as paper but it supplements rather than replaces books. Electronic things break and if you were in Timbuktu (excellent BBC4 programme last night about the ancient documents found there) you’d need print back-up. But ponder this. Suppose you were going foreign and needed your big 2½ kg dictionary. If it came as an ebook you could load it into the 255 gm Sony and still have room for Hamlet, The Rights of Man, Middlemarch, On the Origin of Species, Jungle Book, the complete Jane Austen, most of Dickens and le tout Ruth Rendell. In all 160 titles.

At the moment I’m spouting the press release; I need to use the thing. I checked title availability by Googling “ebooks” and turned up half a dozen, mainly university, sources. Project Gutenberg offers 27,000 free out-of-copyright titles. Copyrighted titles you pay for. If you want French books try Athena. On verra.

Latest: Just copied and transferred Rousseau's La nouvelle Héloise (via the Athena site) with no problems. Wonder what it's about.

A reward in this life and thereafter

It’s been done before but what the heck. What have these in common: Grazia Deledda, Werner von Heidenstam, Jacinto Benavente? Let’s make it easier. How about: Elfriede Jelinek, Wole Soyinka, Winston Churchill? That’s right. All six won the Nobel Prize for literature and the latter trio won it post-war.

I used to take flak from a physicist who cited the Nob/lits when jeering at the evanescence of literary taste. Whereas, he said, the Nob/physics not only include the names that should be there but also the deserving lesser lights. I sympathise with hard science practitioners who look on bemused as yet another fictional “genius” is popularly lauded then forgotten in months. Where are you now Wislawa Symborska, who took the cheque in 1996?

But let’s not cry too hard for the unsung quantum mechanics. Their tight world hands out prizes which come close to conferring immortality. Do these words mean anything: henry, becquerel, pascal? They are the internationally approved units for measuring inductance, the activity of a radionuclide and pressure/stress. They are also the surnames of three scientific giants.

Oh, it would be nice to get the cheque but just imagine if the scientific community decided that the quality (Chutzpah? Mendacity? Subversiveness?) of blogs would, from now on, be measured in bondens. Ahhh.

PERFECT NAME FOR A TWO-WHEELER (See below). It isn't a bike and it's not British. But nobody has bettered Vespa (means wasp in Italian).

Names that bypassed the experience

Only Avus and, perhaps, Plutarch will find any pork scratchings here. Everyone else can take the afternoon off.

The bike is a Matchless twin, circ. 1960. By then Matchless and AJS bikes were “badge engineered” (ie, identical hardware, different labels, the aim being to preserve two marques dating back several decades). It’s shown here because, to my surprise, a Matchless appears on the cover of the current Radio Times.

I had intended to expatiate on the quaint optimism embodied in this and other bike names of the period. After only a brief reflection I realised that even quaint optimism was a marketing rarity: Velocette, Triumph and possibly Ariel had the right idea but Sunbeam, Royal Enfield and BSA (standing for Birmingham Small Arms!) completely missed the point. Even worse were the excruciatingly dull names relating to human progenitors: Francis Barnett, James and (unforgivable, given its hairy-chested prowess) Vincent-HRD.

Virtually all British bike names, with the exception of Triumph and Norton (both small operations now), have disappeared and choice is limited predominantly to Japanese companies. Ironically the big four (Honda, Yamaha, Kawasaki and Suzuki) all bear the names of their founders yet, because of their foreign-ness, don’t sound quite so tedious. In fact Yamaha, a company that started out making reed organs, and Kawasaki have almost onomatopeiac links with their bike products.

Ducati – the successful Italian manufacturer? Founded by the Ducati brothers.

Time to stop being sentimental?

Here’s an odd literary problem.

For two years I’ve edited a biography. The author and I are now satisfied the manuscript is factually and stylistically acceptable. There remains one final task: to read the MS as if for the first time. To assess it as a reader would.

The author has done this but I’ve held back, doubting my objectivity. Every sentence is so damn familiar. I decided I needed to avoid the computer screen. I could print the MS and read the paper - a horrible waste of consumables. Or I could download to an ebook reader. This technology has greatly improved: the text looks like print on paper not dancing electric dots, you “turn” the pages, a battery charge provides 7000 page turns and the system operates in strong sunlight. A Sony reader costs £220 but I can see subsequent uses.

I asked a super-techno friend who said: “Personally I wouldn't touch a dedicated ebook reader, though it's a case of I haven't tried it because I don't like it. If you want to read (the MS) afresh, print it out, preferably double-sided, cut it to book size and put it in an A5 size folder.” A quick trawl of my PC doesn’t immediately reveal how you print double-sided. A manual solution would be extremely tedious.

I’m on shaky ground. Most, if not all, of this blog’s respondents are passionately and emotionally attached to books. As I am. But once I was attached to my typewriter and here I am initiating streams of electrons. The last holiday on facility-less Karpathos meant that the weightiest part of our luggage consisted of books. An ebook reader can contain 160. Hmmm.

Gather ye rosebuds while ye may

Paying autoroute tolls in France is a pain. Not because of the amounts, for these roads deliver good value; rather the interface ergonomics. The guichet is on the wrong side of the car (Hey, I know I’m foreign but I’m keeping France’s economy afloat), the ticket carries no way of predicting what’s to be paid, and I’m always a’feared younger daughter will drop the change.

There’s a much better system for the Severn Bridge and no doubt elsewhere in Britain. You’re told well in advance what you have to pay and when you arrive you toss the sum into a plastic hopper. It works well! And there’s this extra anthropomorphic pleasure, imagining this huge conceptual (Can’t stop using that adjective.) mouth swallowing and then digesting the coins.

An enlightened Highways Agency should decorate the hopper with painted teeth and a moustache

THE CURSE STRIKES 09.20 today. Sorting through the contents of the underpants drawer I pull out a white pair carrying a scene from a Loony Tunes cartoon, a joky Christmas table present more than a decade ago. Mrs Bonden: “It’s time those were thrown away.” BB: the usual rejoinder; why discard anything that’s still doing a job?

09. 45, on the way to Tesco for The Observer. That horrible feeling of insecurity as the elastic goes and the pants slide uselessly down my thighs. Underneath my trousers I hasten to add.

Question Can underpants be inveigled into failure?

Til a' the seas gang dry, my love

When L.P. Hartley wrote, “The past is another country. They do things differently there.” he cleverly avoided suggesting whether the things done were better or worse. An admirable aide mémoire for those of us well stricken in years since it hints we should be careful about recalling Golden Eras. Often, the Golden Era is now.

This jazzy device is our kitchen scale and I had intended it to be the basis for a quite different post. But the word scale took me back in time, reminding me of earlier versions of such weighing systems and the effect they had on the general populace.

No one under the age of fifty can possibly imagine how long it took to buy necessities in, say, 1951 . You didn’t serve yourself, you stood in a queue and listened to inordinate chat as white-aproned men behind the counter cut lumps of cheese, poured out bags of sugar and dug into barrels of dried peas then carefully weighed out the amounts. Weighed – that is – by putting the produce in one pan and weights in the other.

Groceries were beautifully tricked out with wooden drawers, hanging reels of string and a beguiling combination of smells. An environment destined straight for the heritage museum. And thank goodness. Using a grocery gave me plenty of time to reflect that the adult capacity for conversation was infinite. Those scales which helped drag out the process now grace the window-bottoms (West Riding phrase) of houses in south-east England. The Golden Age of Weighing? Yes, if you like weighing. Otherwise there’s always our streamlined little number.

Wanna look stupid? No need for a carrot nose

On telly young men in North Face anoraks screech about Britain’s snowfall using rhetoric and sometimes the vocabulary employed in last week’s financial crisis. Contrapuntally, other young men, much more chic, are saying how much better Moscow and Calgary are at coping with their snow. A pointless match null weather story since no local authority south of Inverness is prepared to invest in a fleet of rarely used bulldozers or a Ben Nevis of salt. Or is it grit?

Temperate Dorking, discommoded for all of forty-eight hours, must bite on the bullet and suffer. In Pittsburgh, where I dwelt for a year or two, things were different. The snow was thicker and the Democrat Machine knew what to do about that. What it couldn’t compensate for were the street gradients in the southern suburbs. Steep? Wow!

Locals carried sacks of cement in the already overhanging trunks (ie, boots) of their Chevvy Impalas. Thus when the car’s back end slid sideways in the slush the pendulum effect became uncontrollable. Me? I bought studded rear tyres for my Volvo 122S and smugly sailed up all those forbidding ski-slopes. So smug that I drove out that evening deliberately searching for the most vertiginous thoroughfares.

America knows how to punish smugness. What I hadn’t realised was that those rear wheels would play virtually no role at all when I started descending and needed to brake. The front wheels locked and the Volvo became a Flexible Flyer. Sweatily I guided the car to the roadside and allowed the kerb, graunching against the tyres, to bring things to a halt. At that point I would have been available for a screeching interview about snowy roads.

You can't argue with an orthodontist

Dentists accept being questioned because they can suppress the unanswerable. I asked mine how many Brits-per-year died in the dentist’s chair given that many sit there bathed in fear. She said something diplomatic but forestalled a follow-up question by filling my mouth with her fingers, the scritchy thing, the sucky tube and a pint of saliva.

As she pursued her scratching it occurred to me my teeth were taking a lot of punishment. But they are designed for it. The enamel is rated 5 on the Mohs hardness scale while iron is rated 4 to 5.

Dental surgeries are technology treasure troves. Take the chair; it's complex, so what does it cost? Here’s a funny thing. The Denttek BT ML 4800 DE with its “three powerful motors” has two prices €3594 and €4277. The first for the trade, the second for consumers! Aimed at true enthusiasts who like to rehearse their visits to the dentist.

But the chair seems a bargain compared with “The 2007-2012 Outlook for Dental Burs, Disks, Abrasive Points, Diamond Points, Wheels, and Other Tools for Use with Dental Hand Pieces in Japan.” A paperback, priced to go at £326.70, it reminds us that dental care costs a fortune in Britain. I asked my dentist why she didn’t sell advertising space on the light which looms over the prone patient. This produced a snigger and the brief removal of the sucky tube. Imminent drowning puts an end to investigative journalism.