Asod’s Fables
The Pilot and the Soldier
There was a plane flying high over the jungle. On board the plane was a pilot, six crew members and a hundred and ten passengers. On the passengers the crew depended for their livelihood and on the passengers the crew fawned. The passengers had paid a lot of money for their seats and the pilot always tried to please all of the passengers all of the time, even if this was patently impossible.
Now the pilot not only tried to please each and every passenger all the time, but he also tried to please the owner of the airline. The owner had drummed it into the pilot that the first purpose of an airline, or any business for that matter, is to make money.
So it chanced on that fateful day that the pilot had been so busy making certain that his passengers were all happy with the service they received, and that his airline was making the maximum possible profit that he had overlooked the relatively important task of filling the plane’s fuel tanks with fuel.
As a natural consequence of not being able to run on air, and without a filling station for miles, the engines stopped working and the pilot, his crew and his fawned-upon passengers found themselves making an unscheduled stop in the middle of the jungle.
As the plane came down in the trees, the pilot noticed that the jungle was unusually infested with all manner of wild and dangerous beasts. There were countless tigers, leopards, crocodiles and poisonous snakes staring hungrily up at them as the plane crashed down among them into the thick canopy of trees.
Now the pilot was a very good pilot. He was as experienced at being a pilot as he was at making a profit for his company and he could fly a plane as well as he could please the most obstreperous passenger. And because he was a very good pilot, he managed to land the plane in the wild animal infested jungle without injuring a single passenger or member of the crew.
The plane did not fare as well as its passengers. Its wings were torn off, much as a child might tear off the wings of a captive fly. Its body was ripped open like a tin of sardines. The sardines, in the shape of the passengers, were left gazing out of the gaping side of the plane at hoards of wild beasts. The beasts were advancing slowly amongst the trees. Not a few of the passengers were a little disappointed that the beasts were not rescue workers coming to render aid but were hungry carnivores attracted to an easy meal.
The pilot, being a good pilot, and being firmly in command, began to give his orders. A case of guns and ammunition were pulled from the hold. A chest of maps, compasses and sundry survival equipment was also produced. The pilot handed out the guns and ammunition to the crew and reassured the passengers that there was nothing whatever to be alarmed about and that normal service would be resumed as soon as possible.
The crew, most of whose experience of weaponry was inadequate for the situation, fumbled with the guns and spilled their bullets onto the floor. Only one of them, a quiet, dependable man who had never been anything other than the perfect crew member, quickly loaded his gun, cocked the firing mechanism and began shooting the advancing carnivores, scattering the ones that escaped a bullet in panic.
“What on earth are you doing?” demanded the pilot.
“Don’t worry,” said the man with the gun. “I used to be a soldier. I’m fully trained in the use of guns like these. I can show everyone how to use them if you like. I can also use the maps, the compasses and the survival to help us escape from this jungle safely.”
The pilot shook his head and frowned. “That’s bad practice for a member of the crew,” he said. “You’re not to do that again.”
“But I know what I’m doing,” said the soldier.
“Yes, but we don’t,” said the pilot, waving a hand at the other crew members. “We need to start slowly, make sure that we are consistent in our approach.”
“Consistent?” said the soldier.
“Of course,” said the pilot. “We can’t all be geniuses with guns like you. But you can try not to be better than the rest of us, until we all learn how to shoot.”
“So if I see a tiger, I can’t shoot it?” asked the soldier.
“You can shoot at it,” said the pilot. “One shot only, and make sure you miss like the rest of us would. That way the passengers will see that we are all acting together. This is no place for skilled mavericks like yourself.”
“If you don’t need someone skilled now, you never will,” said the soldier.
“It’s my plane and I’m the captain,” said the pilot. “I’m in charge and you will do what I say. Shooting all the bullets in one go is bad practice.”
“Why?” asked the soldier.
“Because I say so,” said the pilot, trying to appear as forceful as possible.
“That’s madness,” said the soldier.
“It may be madness,” said the pilot, “but it’s company policy. I’ve been to the management meetings and I know what the policy is. You don’t.”
“It’s getting dark,” said the passengers.
Night came as it had always done since before the jungle was there and long before the animals had seen a larder of fresh meat drop from the sky into their midst.
In the morning, after the screaming had been replaced by the song of the morning birds, all the animals were sleeping off a heavy meal. Only the pilot’s hat and a tattered uniform remained as a testament to his limitless authority.
A few days later the soldier found himself in a small town on the coast from where he could catch a steamer back to civilisation. He had used the skills he had to save himself from the fate of the hundred and sixteen packed lunches he had left back in the jungle.
The moral of the story is, always make full use of the skills of others and never try to make them conform to the lowest denominator of incompetence. That way everyone benefits.
Tags: airline, alarms, asod, bad, being a pilot, crew members, crocodiles, dangerous beasts, fables, fateful day, filling station, fuel s, fuel tanks, handful, happiness, jungle, learning, leopards, livelihood, member of the crew, money, natural consequence, naturalness, poisonous snakes, saving, soldier, tank, thick canopy, tigers, time, wild animal, wings, work
Asod’s Fables
The Grasshopper and the Ant
One day a young grasshopper was lazily sunning himself under the bright spring sun, trying out his newly discovered musical talents. A column of ants chanced to pass nearby, each labouring under an enormous seed many times its own weight.
“Look at you!” said a little ant, pausing for a moment. “Lazy good-for-nothing! Is that all you intend to do all spring long? Sun yourself and play that infernal racket?”
“Yes,” said the grasshopper. “And all summer, too.”
“And what will you do when the winter comes?” mocked the little ant.
“I’ll worry about that when the time comes,” sang the grasshopper. He stretched a toe to bring his leg into tune and played a merry marching piece that might have been enjoyed by the passing ants if they had not been passing so urgently by.
The following day the column of ants again passed the grasshopper and the same conversation with the little ant took place, as it did throughout the entire spring and well into summer.
One day in late September the middle-aged grasshopper was playing one of his more accomplished pieces which involved both legs, both wing cases and the bringing together of both antenna for dramatic effect, when the column of ants trudged wearily past. They were dragging with some effort the last seeds of summer. Some were so worn out by the toils of the spring and summer that they could barely carry themselves let alone the heavy burdens that weighed them down. Others were noticeable by their absence.
The little ant dropped his burden and glowered up at the grasshopper. “Still tossing it off, I see,” he croaked.
“That’s a vicious rumour,” laughed the grasshopper. “I haven’t done that for months, not since I was a young lad. But I am still enjoying my life to the full, if that’s what you mean.”
“Wait till winter,” cautioned the little ant, and the other ants who had been listening chorused, “Yes, wait till winter comes.”
“Got no choice but to wait for it,” said the grasshopper. “But remember, it comes to all of us in the end.”
As sagaciously predicted by the grasshopper winter duly arrived. The first snows of winter came, then the second and third. Soon the snow was falling steadily and pretty soon most of the grass and all of the few remaining seeds were hidden beneath a crisp carpet of snow.
“Where are you going little ant?” enquired the elderly grasshopper. He was sitting on one of the few blades of grass which yet brought a touch of colour to the otherwise featureless landscape. He no longer felt the hunger of his youth and he was too old even to so much as nibble the leaf. Instead he was watching the sun begin to set for the last time with a deep sense of contentment.
The little ant seemed hardly to notice he was there. It staggered robotically, its legs chilled almost to a standstill by a lifetime of toil and the encroaching cold.
“And where are all your little friends?” said the grasshopper.
The little ant looked up at him and his antenna twitched convulsively. “Dead!” he whispered. “Dead and replaced by the New Ones. And to think we worked so hard all spring and all summer, and for what? So that a new generation could come and take our places and throw us into the dust!”
“And your wonderful queen?” enquired the grasshopper. “Where is your wonderful queen?”
“Oh, she’s just dandy,” said the little ant bitterly. “Snug as a bug in her palace, she is. And she’s still being waited on hand and foot by poor fools like me. Living the life of Riley, she is. And the bitch never once had the decency to mention that us workers only live a year if we’re lucky and the drudgery don’t kill us off first. Seems to me it’s ‘plenty more where you came from’, as far as she’s concerned.”
“That’s bosses for you,” said the grasshopper. “Poor little misguided ant.”
“And what of you?” asked the little ant, sensing that the grasshopper might truly be feeling pity for him.
“I’m dying too,” said the grasshopper. “But I’ve no regrets. I’ve enjoyed a wonderful life. And I know that next spring my children will come into the world and they too will understand the importance of living for the moment and of enjoying life to the full.”
“Mind if I rest here a while?” gasped the little ant. “I don’t think I can go on another step, and I’d sure like to hear at least one tune before it’s too late.”
The grasshopper smiled down sadly at the little ant. Then, gathering the last of his strength, he brought to bear all he had learnt in a lifetime of practice and began to play.
The little ant thought it was the most glorious thing that he had ever heard, and even the sun seemed to pause to listen a while before it bled itself into the snowy horizon. The final darkness followed and descended like a comfortable blanket over the aged grasshopper and the exhausted little ant.
Moral: Non est, crede mihi, sapientis dicere ‘Vivam’: Sera nimis vita est crastina: vive hodie.
“Believe me, wise men don’t say ‘I shall live to do that’: Tomorrow’s life’s too late; live today.”
Martial 40-104 ac
Tags: absence, antenna, ants, asod, bright spring, burdens, dramatic effect, fables, grasshopper, handful, labouring, lad, late september, laziness, legs, life, musical talents, rumour, seeds, spring and summer, spring sun, time, wing cases, work, young lad
First published in the magazine, Invaluable, in 2002
Curse of the Mummy
by
R.I.Chalmers
Around four-and-a-half thousand years ago the great pharaoh, Khufu’s mummified body and a fabulous collection of his most valued possessions were sealed up in the Great Pyramid at Giza. Watching its construction, Khufu must have been satisfied that such a fortress of limestone and granite would keep the grave robbers at bay for all eternity. He could never have foreseen that his tomb would end up ransacked, that his possessions would be lost forever, and that his final resting place would be in a jar in an apothecary’s shop.
Khufu’s fate shows that if the potential rewards are great enough no building can hope to keep the criminal at bay. An ingenious criminal will always find a way in to a building, however secure it may appear to be. Yet Khufu and his treasures might have remained intact if as much thought had gone into keeping the thieves in as out.
Provided that the rewards are likely to justify the effort involved, today’s burglar, like his ancient Egyptian counterpart, will first identify the quickest, easiest and safest route into a building. In a third of burglaries he will get in through a rear window. Windows are often the weakest point in the house, and the back of the house offers the best protection from prying eyes.
His biggest fear is of getting caught. Every second he is in the house he runs the risk of discovery, so his escape route is his lifeline. Provided he can get his head through, the burglar can easily worm his way through any opened window, but with an angry householder snapping at his heels a small transom window will prove his Nemesis. He needs a bigger hole to scurry out of and the most suitable exit will be either the front or the back door.
With most householders now security conscious securing an escape route should be the burglar’s greatest challenge. Millions of pounds of government money has gone into making the public aware of the benefits of good quality locks on doors and windows. The Home Office recommends a five-lever mortice deadlock kitemarked to at least BS3621 on both front and back doors, along with bolts top and bottom fixed with good, strong screws and fastenings. For front doors it also recommends an automatic deadlock that can be locked from the outside. The government literature also recommends fitting laminated glass to windows and doors, and key-operated window locks.
The advice is sound. A burglar is unlikely to risk attracting attention by smashing a large pane of glass. He will be prepared, however, to smash a smaller pane of glass in a window in order to reach through to slip the latch. Window locks provide the window with multiple locking points that prevent the window being prised open or opened from the inside. Mortice locks and deadlocks make formidable obstacles for those without the keys.
Even if the determined burglar does manage to get inside a house where the householder has followed sensible crime-prevention advice he will be faced with the difficult problem of getting back out with anything larger than an ornament or two. Even if he has free run of the house while his courage holds, and can search all the cupboards, cabinets and drawers for items of value, if sensible precautions have been taken small valuables will be hidden away in a floor safe or other secure place. Larger valuables such as electrical items and furnishings are less conveniently hidden away, but however bigheaded the burglar may be he will never persuade a grandfather clock to squeeze through a small kitchen window.
Fortunately for the burglar the bolts on the inside of the door are useless once he is inside, and the best mortice lock is worthless if all he has to do is to turn the key in the lock. And as he passes your state-of-the-art computer system through the window to his mate in the garden he no doubt gives thanks to St Gates, the patron saint of windows, that an unlocked window-lock offers a similar level of security as a paper safe.
Despite government advice, in two out of ten burglaries an unlocked door or window means that the burglar does not even have to use force to get in. More alarming is that once inside, the burglar often has no trouble at all in getting back out by a door or a larger window. All too often the police attend the scene of a burglary to find that the burglar who has struggled to squeeze through a small window has simply walked out through a door. The door will often have a key in the lock, “in case there’s a fire”, or a simple latch lock that was lazily pulled to behind the busy householder. Occasionally the unwitting occupant will have even provided the burglar with a getaway vehicle in the form of a car in the drive and the keys on the kitchen table.
Non of us have the resources to build ourselves a pyramid, nor would we choose to live in the dark, suffocating confines of such a building that perfect security would require. However, all of us can ensure that the burglar leaves with nothing more than a sense of frustration simply by making it as difficult to get out of the house as it was to get inside.
Keys nesting in a basket in the kitchen attract a burglar like nestlings attract a cat, while keys impaled on hooks behind the door prove efficient traitors. Sheath keys in their locks and you stab at the very heart of your home security. Spare keys should be deposited with family or good neighbours, or should be hidden out of harm’s way along with any other small potential pickings.
The Great Pyramid’s six million tons of stone make it the most massive building ever constructed. Its purpose was to protect Khufu and his possessions and it failed. Yet our modest homes, frail in comparison, can far more successfully guard our assets if the right precautions are taken. Allow a burglar access to your house keys and your household security becomes as effective as the medicine made from Khufu’s mummy.
© R.I.Chalmers 2002
Tags: alarms, apothecary, burglar, burglaries, burglary, chalmers, clock, computing, criminals, curse of the mummy, deadlock, egyptian counterpart, escape route, fabulous collection, final resting place, fitness, fixes, gardener, government money, grave robbers, great pharaoh khufu, great pharaoh, greatest challenge, home, householder, keys, lifeline, locks, money, nestling, police, possessions, potential, prevention, protection, prying eyes, pyramid at giza, rear window, security, transom window
I know what a whale feels like. I don’t mean that I’m immensely fat and try to avoid Japanese tourists wherever possible. What I mean is that I have just been eating camarones. Camarones are small shrimps. I say small, but they are actually tiny, and their tininess, and the fact that I was dropping them into my mouth by the thousand, made me think of whales. Whales eat krill, and camarones remind me very much of krill.
Shrimp, or prawns, come in a wide range of sizes here in Spain. You have giant things as big as your hand and you have the tiny camarónes at the other end of the scale. To show you what I mean, I took a photo of a standard sized Spanish prawn from my refrigerator next to a Camarón and my finger for scale.
You can see that the standard Spanish prawn is rather a handsome beast, and as succulent and delicious as a succulent and delicious thing that has just visited a salon dedicated to making things as succulent and delicious as possible.
The camarón, on the other hand, seems somewhat pathetic and about a succulent and delicious as school dinner gravy.
A friend of mine does not like camerones because she believes that they devour the corpses of dead people and animals that happen to end up in the sea. For my part, this does not bother me. I am not adverse to drinking a bottle or two of chilled Perrier water, which gets its flavour, if legend is correct, by percolating through old plague pits before emerging from the Perrier spring.
I thought about my friend’s reasons for not liking camarones and decided that as I was about to eat the corpses of many thousands of dead animals I was not too far removed from them myself and so bought a quarter of a kilo. The cost was 2 Euros. The haul was immense.
As you can see from this photograph, you do get a lot of camarones in a pound. To give a sense of scale, I took a photograph with a ruler in the foreground. The markings are in millimetres.
You eat these tiny shrimp by the handful. The texture is like crunching on soft-bodied ants, but the flavour is exquisite. If you can steel yourself against the natural squeamishness of having to chew down on heads, bodies, eyes, and other bits, a mouthful of camarones is a seafood-lover’s delight.
If you are lucky enough to visit Spain, look out for camarones. You will find them freshly cooked like in the photos above, or in an small fried pancake called a “Tortilla de camarón”. These tortillas are a great way for the squeamish to eat camarones. The camarones are buried in a pancake of flour, parsley and garlic, and you would never notice their eyes staring mournfully up at you from your plate. Their eyes are so small anyway that it is hard to imagine anyone noticing them.
A delicious plate of Tortilla de camarónes
A traditional recipe for this dish
Half a pound of live camarones. If you can’t find them in your local supermarket, try inventing a machine that will shrink anything you point it at (like the one in “Honey I Shrunk the Kids”) and point it at fifty pounds of king prawns. If the Camarón turns out to be a bloke with a beard, you’ve got the wrong kind. He’s a popular Spanish flamenco singer. See below for details.
Half a pound of semolina flour, or chickpea flour will do just as well. Both are pretty much impossible to get where you are anyway.
Half a pound of finely chopped onions, and I mean finely chopped. Non of your wishy-washy diced stuff.
2oz of fresh parsley
Water to make the dough
Extra virgin olive oil for frying not drizzling!
Salt - extra virgin Mahatma Gandhi sea salt. This will make the camarones feel more at home.
Dump the flour in a bowl and little by little mix in the water to make a slightly liquid dough. Throw in some salt to taste.
Throw the live camarones into the mix with the onion and parsley. Leave it for an hour.
Spoon tortilla-sized plops of dough into the extra virgin olive oil and fry them on both sides (obviously! Why am I even telling you this?) until golden (not black and carbonised)
Eat them. Tell your friends about this great website.
If you really do know what a whale feels like because you are a little bit fatter than you would like to be, please look at the following. You might find a way to feel like yourself again.
DANGER! This is the wrong type of camarón for your recipe:
This is the right type:
Translation? Sorry! A picture says a thousand words, so switch off your speakers and watch the film. There are thousands of pictures and millions of words.
Tags: corpses, dead animals, fat, flamenco, flavour, foreground, gravy, handful, handsome beast, japanese tourists, kilo, Lifestyle, perrier water, pits, plague, prawn, prawns, recipe, refrigerator, ruler, Spain, Spanish, succulent, tiny shrimp, translation, weight loss, whale
Over the past few weeks I have been experiencing problems with IE7 and Dreamweaver. IE7 would take an age to open and Dreamweaver CS3 was taking up to a minute to open the site manager dialogue. Dreamweaver CS3 was also having great problems when trying to connect to the MySQL database when updating pages.
I tried all manner of solutions but none worked. Then I did a deep search of the web and discovered that the answer was devastatingly simple and very annoying - SKYPE!
I had Skype set up to open with Windows. Not any more. Skype is a great product, which helps me keep in touch with my family back in the UK. However, as I rarely answer the phone anyway, let alone Skype calls, I now only open it when I want to make a call.
I also discovered that there was a setting in Skype that was responsible for the problems I was experiencing. The solution was as follows.
- Open Skype and go to the tools setting on the toolbar.
- Go to Options.
- In the Options dialogue got to Advanced
- In Advanced, click on the Connection icon
- Near the top of the page there is a check box that says: Use port 80 or 443 as alternatives for incoming connections. Uncheck this.
- Click Save
- Exit Skype
- Restart Skype
Your problems should now be solved.
My system is an acer 5520 with a Turion64 dual core processor, 2GB RAM. I am using Dreamwever CS3 version 9, build 3481 and IE7.
Since the “fix” I have not had any more problems and my productivity has increased thanks to the new found speed of the software.
Tags: acer 5520, computing, connection icon, databases, dialogue, Dreamweaver, dual core processor, fixes, IE7, incoming connections, mysql database, productivity, saving, Skype, software, work
