this may be totally out there but since i saw the thread "please come out and chat" im thinking that after out screen names we should write whether were from the US or Britian or ect... that way we would know that when the Brits are on the US should technically be sleeping (i think-haven't really worked the math) and vice versa

let me know what u think

signing off,
Panda (American)

hehehe, you don't know this Fforum very well! No one here has "real hours" except for maybe Sarah, Dave and Jon. The rest of us can be found on here at pretty much any hour of the day. And besides, when you go to the chat room, you're supposed to put where you're from in the Profile box.

Understand what you mean though. But if you stay on here long enough, you'll figure out where everyone is from!

AAC (self explanatory!)

And hey! Guess what?



PSD

==========

This is the work of an Italian narco-anarchic collective. Don't bother insulting them, they can't read English anyway.

(also, take a look at the IP address...generally a DEAD giveaway)

It's true, the IP addy usually is a giveway.

Just as with postage stamps, whereby the only country in the world who doesn't include their name on it is the country that developed the idea in the first place, if there's no country code mentioned in the address you can safely assume it's an American one. Otherwise, .IT is Italy, .AU is Australia, .NZ is New Zealand and .DE is Germany for example.

Oh, and .UK is Great Britain, obviously :)

Author: Ptolemy (217.205.174.---)
It's true, the IP addy usually is a giveway.

I thought this rather ironic. :-)

I know, that's why I said "usually" - mine'll show up OK most of the time but it so happens that I'm writing from a restricted network at work at the moment, so it's disguised. Like most others in a smiliar situation I can't get into Chat during those hours anyway so it's largely academic.

Some of our addresses can be inferred from 'The Nextarillion' ----

Congratulations, Dave, on a thoroughly shameless plug for your work of epic fiction, or epic work of fiction, or ramblings about Tolkein, cats and undies.


Totally unconnecting with anything aforementioned: for the last couple of days I've been valiently fighting the urge to do a jigsaw. There's far too many other, sensible things I need to do with my time, and I'm wasting enough unintentionally, that I don't want to take up something that wastes time deliberately. But I really want to do that lovely Literate Cat jigsaw again, and I've got one of the outside of an old-fashioned sweet shop that I like and haven't tried yet......

Don't blame you for wanting to re-do the Literate Cat one. It's gorgeous!

I keep valiantly resisting the temptation to buy more jigsaws. I mean, when would I do them? And how would I keep Their Majesties away from the pieces for long enough?



..........................................................................................

That which does not kill us makes us stranger.
(Llewelyn the dragon, Ozy and Millie)

Sarah

I have a similar problem with the kids. I actually did a jig-saw during the summer (OUR summer. the one that happens over Christmas), but that was the first one for something like 8 years.

I was once given a 3D puzzle for Christmas, of that Cathedral on a French Island. I couldn't do it because so many pieces were missing. : (



---
Those who forget the pasta are doomed to reheat it.

I adore jigsaw puzzles (the 2D kind; never saw the point of 3), but they are incredibly hard on my eyes so I can't let myself do them often. I tend to do them with my mother (we have a puzzle thing, usually crosswords). Last winter we did the Sistine Chapel ceiling. I admit to drooling over the 10,000 piece version of the Garden of Earthly Delights in the game store a few years ago, but, apart from the exorbitant cost of the thing, I had nowhere big enough to do it.

We've already established that no one here is from anywhere near me. But is there anyone else here from my timezone (Pacific)?

I'm in the Pacific, if that counts?

Isn't that a bit wet? How do you get your computer to work?

Re jigsaws, I *must* buy one of those roll up mat things. Hmm. Wonder if there's anywhere in town I can get one. I have Discworld and Buffy jigsaws I've never tried... and a nice LOTR one I've done once, but want to do again and frame.



:--

Do something pretty while you can...

hmmm... jigsaws...interesting topic...

here in the US i don't think we're all that into Jigsaws
....maybe i'm wrong (?)

signing off,
panda

Since we're on the subject of jigsaws and, in other threads, waving pieces of our own writing around for the delight, entertainment and elucidation of our ffellow fforum members, I thought I'd hit you with one of my own humble offerings. As a couple of you know already I'm a historian and music critic (of sorts anyway!) - so here's an example of what I do, a review (published earlier this year) which just happens to take in jigsaws and even ducks along the way. Note by the way that it's written for a largely knowledgable audience...

MALCOLM MORLEY – LOST AND FOUND
(CD on Hux, PO Box 12647, London SE18 8ZF)
Somewhere in the attic I have a much-loved old jigsaw puzzle from the 1950s depicting a pastoral English scene ablaze with autumn colour featuring a distant castle, a passing steam-train and a group of people laughing and chatting amongst themselves and dressed, somewhat incongrously given the lateness of the year, in their summer finery. Memories still linger of being holed up in bed during the mid-70s with some distressing teenage infection, chicken pox or glandular fever or whatever, listening to my favourite new acquistions – albums by Ducks Deluxe, the Neutrons, Snafu, Spooky Tooth, Joe Walsh’s Barnstorm – piecing together the jigsaw and wishing I could be a part of the scene, feel the sun on my face, smell the smoke from the passing locomotive and engage in the inconsequential babble of the people around me. Two characters always particularly fascinated me; a young couple sat slightly apart from the rest, obviously in the first flush of love from the way her hand rested lightly on his arm as she turned her face away to laugh at something he’d said. I’d make up stories in my head of how they’d met and imagine what they were saying to one another. Eventually, tired of even that mild mental stimulation, I’d lay the still unfinished jigsaw aside and rest, selecting a familiar, much-loved record to drift off to: something by Help Yourself or the Ernie Graham album; old friends to hold my hand through the passage to the night.
After Help Yourself split in the late summer of ’73, Malcolm Morley had briefly joined pub-rock avatars Bees Make Honey as a keyboard player before he received the papers notifying him, along with erstwhile Helps bassist Ken Whaley, that the time had come for their compulsory conscription into the ranks of the Man band. Malc’s term lasted lasted just six months but resulted in some key contributions to an album which is still rated amongst Man’s finest, the 1974 collection ‘Rhinos, Winos and Lunatics’. By July 1974 Malcolm was once again bandless, shiftless and wandering, eventually settling into a box-room upstairs at the Hope & Anchor in Islington – the venue at which he shortly afterwards met Plummet Airlines. Malc never officially joined the band, although he did occasionally accompany them on stage, but when in 1976 serendipity offered him the chance to record some of his songs at the newly established Foel Studios, tucked away in splendid isolation amongst the rolling Welsh countryside near Llanfair Careinion, it was to the Plummets he turned to accompany him, augmented by former Brinsley Schwarz singer/guitarist Ian Gomm who had been invited to help set up Foel after the Brinsleys split in 1975.
Much of the material the melancholy maestro wrote for the sessions came off the back of an ill-fated love affair. “I knew instinctively it was never going to work, even though both of us persisted. It was like a self-destruct button… probably the big relationship of my life when I look back, the key one. That level of intensity.” The songs were pure Morley, distilled through the essence of the passing years and pared back to the homespun unaffectedness glimpsed in earlier gems such as ‘To Katherine They Fell’ and ‘She’s My Girl’. ‘Without a Word’ is heart-achingly lovely: amost too painful to listen to, it’s a true romantic’s vision of lost love with Morley’s angst-ridden fingers tugging at the strings of a Spanish guitar like he’s quite literally playing his heart out… “in the cool of of the evening in a country full of leaves / willow sighs, and there’s no-one to walk with you”. ‘Lost and Found’ is a gorgeous McCartney-esque ballad, an obvious choice for a single had it run to a few seconds longer than its epigrammatic 2:17. ‘Grace’ has a childlike daydream quality about it - fittingly, since it was inspired by Help Yourself’s manager John Eichler’s young daughter; the song was originally performed by the Helps in a slightly different style but is recognisably of an earlier, happier period “Hello good morning Miss Grace, I think I remember your face. How does it feel to be loved? To wake in the morning and smile? To open your door, let the wind ruffle you…” The real stand-out of the sessions though was ‘Naked As The Night’, a classic Morley song which stands up against any of the previously released work of this truly gifted and deplorably underrated songwriter. Like ‘Without a Word’ the central theme is once again the break-up of that relationship, everything that he’d poured into it and the gloomy inevitability of it all, “I ain’t complaining after all we’ve been though / what else could you think babe, what else could you do?” - this time performed the Neil Young way: the Islington Cowboy strumming his guitar on a cicada-strewn porch.
One Christmas a decade or so ago, in need of a quick shot of nostalgia as so often happens at that time of year, I unearthed that aforementioned jigsaw puzzle and started to piece it together on the back of one of the boards used to paste up the Terrascope. As it started to take shape I found myself wanting to build up the part around the young couple, as if to establish what had passed between them in the intervening years. With a growing sense of unease, I began to wonder if the piece featuring the figure of the woman was missing, and when the jigsaw was otherwise complete my suspicions were confirmed. She’d gone. Mislaid down the back of the sofa of life.
Trust Malcolm Morley to step in and complete the picture for me. The release of ‘Lost And Found’ – an eerily prescient title given that the tapes have been lost for a quarter of a century and only recently unearthed by Ian Gomm – is better than finding the missing piece of a jigsaw, for it’s a complete story in itself, a full-colour movie contained within a snapshot. And better still, as Nigel Cross notes in his sleevenotes to this Hux Records release, it’s another step back towards the public eye for Malcolm Morley. The release of his recent ‘Aliens’ solo project (reviewed last issue) and working together with his old colleagues towards completing that long-lost unreleased fifth Help Yourself album means that Malc’s at last back doing what he does best: creating timeless, classic music. (P)

Er, that might be easier to read if you left blank lines between each paragraph. Otherwise it looks like one HUGE chunk of text and is liable to cause headaches.



I've got one of those folding boards specially for doing jigaws on. I'm told that the rolling things aren't as good. There's a shop in Meadowhall that sells them (which is where I got mine), and I think that Lakeland Limited
sell them too.

Ok, is it really true about the missing jigsaw piece of did you invent that to fit in with the theme of the piece, infact did you invent the entire jigsaw?

Your enthusiasm for what you're writing about certainly comes through and so even tho I've no idea who you are talking about its still an enjoyable read. I've just scrolled up and read it again and its actually very good - good job you'd done that jigsaw tho or the whole thing would have fallen apart!! smart arse.



Post Edited (07-24-03 21:40)

Yeah, sorry Skiffle - I realised that I'd lost all my formatting only after I'd pasted it in - damn! Sorry for confusing you :(

Thanks, though Holly. Actually that's the greatest compliment of all, knowing that even though you had no idea what the music sounded like - or indeed who any of the musicians or bands involved were - that you still enjoyed the writing. I don't think any critic, writing on any subject, could ask for more than that.

As for the jigsaw, I'm afraid it doesn't even exist - purely conjured up from my imagination, although I have done jigsaws in the past which have evoked similar emotions. Oh, and the boards referred to are literally for pasting up the magazine, not for doing jigsaws on... I have a suspicion we're one of the last magazines in the world to do paste-up by hand rather than on a computer (though oddly enough I am totally computer literate; it's just a foible I suppose). I'm running very low on Cow Gum though if anyone knows where I can find some more?