Will Knott

Nothing to do with Google Wave (due out tomorrow in a wider beta than before) but a bow wave. Or a stern wave. Not sure how the name works.

Taken on the speedboat part of the Cork Photowalk (and yes it was fun).

There is only one advantage to joining a Photowalk late, you join by a different route, and you have slightly different photographs from everyone else. Thanks for setting everything up Donncha!

And this is the sunniest photograph I have (the full set is viewable here) of the overcast day.

A Sunflower snapped outside a florist on a side street between South Mall and Oliver Plunkett Street as I made my way to the Boardwalk.

We all have to make sacrifices due to the economic climate he thought guiltily seeing the lost goat posters on the lamp posts.

Essentially this is a one line short story (I’ve tweeted it already) that came to mind after listening to Regulars by Frank Oreto on Pseudopod.

Pseudopod is a podcast series specialising on new short story form horror stories. However this one could have fitted in my lapsed “SouthQuays.com” project.

The plan for South Quays has changed in detail, but it was going to be a fiction blog based on the lives of people on the South Quays of an un-named Irish city. Originally the stories were going to be based on a “house of negotiable favour” as the term itself comes from a polite Victorian term for something frowned upon (i.e. he moored himself to her south quay) and I came across the term in “The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters“. Neo-Victorian fiction I know, I can only assume the author reused the term as it sounds right.

But it moved in my head at least from a single perspective to a wider one. In the last fifteen years Ireland has changed, and the landscape changed with it. But people, on the whole, don’t. The lives lived on the turn of most centuries are similar in loves and needs.

But things have changed.

The hermit no longer needs to be in a cave on the mountain. He can be in an apartment, sealed off from the outside world and living alone. His body found years after his death due to complaints about the smell from neighbours or unpaid bills calling the bailiff around to find the corpse.

People still fall in love and get married, but the details of the courtship and the wedding has changed. Also instead of boy meets girl, boy meets boy is also acceptable.

Immigrants have always come to the country, now their reasons have changed. And emigrants leave (again) and farewells take place.

Which is a better fit than the stories generated by the Wondermark Electro-Plasmic Hydrocephalic Genre-Fiction Cenerator 2000 (also available in automated form).

I’m looking in to getting it going again either this weekend or next weekend. Since I have to do a new Wordpress install (I borked the last one after moving servers) I could make it an multi-user version if anyone wants to join me on the South Quays.

take care,
Will Knott

An exam of “Epicness” proposed by TheChrisD includes the following question…

Encompassing standard distribution and chaos theory, calculate the following:

1. The probability that there will be ten green bottles sitting on any given wall.
2. If and when one green bottle will accidentally fall.

For the context of this question, you may substitute: fat sausages sizzling in a pan, one of which goes pop, another of which goes bang; bottles of beer on a wall, one of which is taken down and passed around.

The problem in answering this question lies with the substitution… as none of these three scenarios have equal probability, also location has a bearing on the matter…

1. The probability that there will be ten green bottles sitting on any given wall.
Usually 0. The only occasion when I have seen this occur is then 10 green bottles were cemented on to the top of the wall. Then broken leaving jagged edges to reduce climbing.

Oddly the person who put them there did not break them, see below.

2. If and when one green bottle will accidentally fall.
Again depending on circumstance.
a) 0 if cemented
b) 0.02 in calm weather conditions or indoors left alone
c) 0.4 in rough weather conditions, but this is dependent on shelter and location and what the wall is constructed of. This probability remains high in a poorly constructed shack, and high in a well constructed building during a tropical storm
d) 0.99 (or 99%) should a cat try out weaving or passing the bottles. 100% if the cat in question is of the LOL variety.

However looking at the substitutions…
1) 10 fat sausages sizzling in a pan
Depends on location (and chef/cook craving). If you are craving sausages, then a pack of 6 or 12 will be purchased. In the case of a pack of 6, the probability is indeed 0, as its impossible. In the case of a pack of 12, the probability rises, but is dependent on  a frying pan able to hold 10. In the case of grilling sausages, again the probability falls to 0.
2) one of which goes pop, another of which goes bang
Depends on quality of the meat and oil used. In practice sausages never go “bang” or “pop” but a sizzle, the intensity of which depends on the level of “cookness” on the downward facing part of the sausage. What happen is that water added to the hot oil makes the noise. Should the sausages be of very low quality then the probability of them making either noise increases. In the case of cooking sausages, the water boils off the surface quickly and goes crisp, while the steam passes through the sausage cooking the inside.

There is a science of cooking. I want more lab time.

and

1)10 bottles of beer on a wall
The likelihood of this occurring outside of a party/BBQ situation is very low. The number 10 is also problematic. Usually bottles are sold in packs of 6, or “slabs” or crates (depending on commercial or retail sale) of either 10 or 24 (12 in the case of pint bottles (my barman days rear their heads on occasions)). So 10 on a wall does not occur on a regular basis.

Should the first condition occur

2) one of which is taken down and passed around.
is 100% in the following situation.
If the wall is a boundary wall, if the opposite side contains under legal drinking age kids who want it, if the wall is slightly shorter than the maximum reach of the tallest member of the aforementioned kids. Then its 100%

Should the bottle be cemented to the wall, an attempt will be made to take them down and pass them around, but the cementing will ensure that they are not removed.

Then the probability of the bottles being stoned / smashed by insulted kids (or indeed winos, this isn’t and ageist argument) is high.
However, in this case, none of the bottles “did accidentally fall”, but stone kicked up by passing trucks will be the alibi used by the kids.

And there will be no green bottles left siting on the wall.

“We’re going over next week, and we’re going to see all the sights. You know. The Empire State, Radio City, Ground Zero, all the sights”

Overheard outside a bank in Clondalkin.

Is it just me, or is the idea of Ground Zero being a tourist destination just something that leaves a nasty taste in you mouth too?

When my grandmother died the family decided to sell her house. At the back of a wardrobe they found an old photograph slowly fading away. The photo was scanned and restored and copies, both electronic and physical were handed around the family. That photo was a family portrait taken in 1910. Thanks to the release of the 1911 census data I am currently looking at the signature of my great-grandmother and the rest of the family in that shot.

By the way, we have no record as to who took the photo almost 100 years ago.
Well almost. My great-grandfather died between the taking of the photo and the census, however it is my great-grandmother who is the head of the household and not her brother-in-law who is also in the house.

Staring at her signature suddenly made that photo come to life. You see, with the exception of the baby on her knee (my grandfather) I never met the people in the photo, however I can see element of her in my aunts and cousins. Seeing how the family changed. How they lived after that photo made this old image come to life.

A similar reaction happened when I tracked down the other side of the family. Something my father must have done, and some day I’ll figure out where he put his archives of the Knott family back to the 12th Century. Seeing proof of life of my own bloodline means I’m seeing elements of my history I never thought of.

Having said that, while the documents make my past more real, I know my history. I knew that my mum’s side were blacksmiths (the long disused forge was later converted to a kitchen, and I used to play with the inbuilt bellows) and I knew that dad’s side were farmers. However both houses have changed in the course of my lifetime. One renovated (twice, the forge is now the living room of the new owners home) and one destroyed. For the next generation, this will be the main record of the family past.

The families were very different. One one side was a widow shortly after 11 years of marriage, working as a seamstress raising the three surviving children of the seven who survived childbirth (no record of those stillborn) while the Knott’s raised nine of nine born alive and after 33 years of marriage were in the house with two adult sons (interestingly listed as being “domestics”, a category presumed for females). Yet despite their differences, the cursive style of writing are amazingly similar. That and the fact that every over the age of four was listed as being able to read and write.

You know the swooping style of the Coca-Cola logo or the Arthur Guinness signature? Well those swoops are there for every capital letter. The expansive swirls of the lead in and lead out “W” of Will and widow. The two families were many miles apart, but the learned writing style is nearly the same throughout the country. Redmum has reproduced her ancestor’s census form and you can see the writing style there. I’m not reproducing mine. I’m keeping some
secrets. After all a census search for “William Knott” shows quite a few results spread through the country. But even checking out the neighbours show fingerprints of a writing style which died out a long time ago here.

I would put money on the guess that I’m related, somehow, to all of them.

Something else of interest is that neither side admitted to being able to speak Irish. Was it a political thing then?

Imagine the LOL cat in 50 years time