One year

my relaunched newsletter is a year old

Dear dedicated reader,

Last year, on the eve of St. Brigid’s Day (31 January), I relaunched my newsletter. Here’s my original post, along with information about the Irish goddess/saint who is celebrated at this time of the year. We have a freshly-minted public holiday now to honour her (technically, it’s the first Monday of February), so this forthcoming weekend will be three days long for many workers.

And as I celebrate my toddling newsletter there are tiny green shoots emerging from the hardened winter soil.

For those of us in the northern hemisphere it remains a time when a deep stillness weighs upon the land, and despite an extra thirty minutes daylight, there is little other sign of movement. The earliest indicator of the forthcoming spring is the welcome upsurge of snowdrops.

I took the above photo last Saturday in a church garden that produces a splendid crop of the pearl-hued buds every year. Even though it was a grey, chilly afternoon, these beauties lifted my spirits.

Ted Hughes wrote the below poem in 1960, but it remains resonant. Despite the intervening sixty-plus years, and all the changes wrought upon us by technology, it’s comforting to remember that the seasons continue to wheel and every January the snowdrops return.

Snowdrop

Now is the globe shrunk tight
Round the mouse’s dulled wintering heart.
Weasel and crow, as if moulded in brass,
Move through an outer darkness
Not in their right minds,
With the other deaths. She, too, pursues her ends,
Brutal as the stars of this month,
Her pale head heavy as metal.

It might be another month before our heads feel less leaden, but a hopeful glimmer indicates the path out of darkness.

Modified version of ‘Rising Sun’, an optical slide from 1780.

Today didn’t go as planned.

I’m attending to this newsletter much later than expected due to having to tackle a problem that could have impacted my email delivery in a couple of days. I won’t bore you with the details¹, but it caused me considerable irritation and much investigation on the part of Martin. While both of us are geeks, Martin is an engineer with decades of experience at making machines and software bend to his will. When it gets super technical, I step out of his way. Yet, even he has his limits.

There are days when you wake up expecting to meet your schedule’s demands in an efficient manner, but it devolves into a maddening game of Whac-a-Mole. By the end of it your nerves are frazzled and you are shouting curses at the sight of every new rodent peeking out of its burrow to waylay your plans. The only gratification is slamming the hammer upon its head when you defeat the problem.

If you are lucky, by the end of the game you witness a quiet landscape… so you can turn your attention back to your previous line-up of chores.

It’s easy to say: ‘go with the flow, man’, ‘accept the situation and focus on solutions’ — but that’s not the smartest thing to advise someone who has a maniacal gleam in their eyes and is wielding a hammer in clenched hands.

Because I’m always wondering about the genesis of things I discovered the above short clip with inventor Aaron Fechter about the creation of the American version of the arcade game Whac-A-Mole — which was copied in 1977 from the Japanese game, Mogura Taiji (Mole Buster), which was invented in 1975 by Kazuo Yamada of TOGO.

Who knew that such a simple game was the result of espionage?

And this leads me to remember that 2 February is Groundhog Day, which is observed in both the USA and Canada. The theory goes that if the groundhog peeps from its burrow on that fateful morning and sees its own shadow it will retreat in surprise, and signal another six weeks of wintery weather.

The most famous prognosticator is Punxsutawney Phil, the groundhog in Pennsylvania. The annual event has developed into a fun festival for the town, made more famous by the 1993 film, Groundhog Day.² The theme of being stuck in a repeated chain of events until released by a genuine emotional shift is a situation we all understand. We want the torture to end, but often things don’t change until we experience the hard-won revelation.³ Preferably without the car crash…

The time-loop concept is not even original to Groundhog Day, with the first version being used in Repeat Performance (1947).⁴ The fact this storyline is being constantly recycled is a weird meta-commentary about human dynamics and perhaps a sign that we are stuck in warping cycles. If I examine the films listed on Wikipedia, I note that time loop movies have become increasingly popular, especially in the 21st century. There are often multiple films featuring this plot device produced every year, and there have only been five years since 2000 in which one wasn’t released.⁵

During this weekend of omens and portents I’ll be attending the Waterford International Comic Arts Festival (WICAF) in Ireland for its inaugural event. It’s the brainchild of artist / director / musician Paul Bolger and the team behind Waterford Comics. The aim is to showcase the glorious inventiveness of comic books / graphic novels / cartooning as an art form. There's a reason it's called the 9th Art in France. We’ll be digging in to examine its incredible versatility.

Come along and get wise to comics!

1. This has to do with Google’s implementation of extra email validation which will be in force on 1 February — St. Brigid’s Day. It probably won’t affect most users, except I was using a work-around for my primary email address. As with many unexpected overhauls of how you do things, the long-term prospects are positive, but short-term I have to leave behind familiar systems.

2. Directed by Harold Ramis from his screenplay with Danny Rubin, starring Bill Murray, Andie MacDowell, and Chris Elliott.

3. ‘Don’t drive angry,’ often comes to mind when I’m in a car… it always makes me chuckle—and I take my foot off the accelerator.

4. Directed by Alfred L. Werker from a screenplay by Walter Bullock, starring Louis Hayward and Joan Leslie.

5. Including Repeat Performance and Groundhog Day (1947 - 1993), there were ten films made using some version of this plot device. From 1996 - 2023 there have been at least sixty.