Creative to the Last
The past week has brought its usual crop of Coronial autopsies, most of which were, to put it bluntly, mundane; most death is, of course. It's something we'd rather not do and so we don't plan for it, put no thought into it. Why should we? It's something that is done to us rather than by us. Only those who are contemplating suicide have the opportunity for input into the process, yet even here, few take advantage. The vast majority of such deaths are by pills or hanging (incidentally and completely anecdotally, since the government decided to limit paracetamol sales, the number of deaths by pills has gone down and the number of deaths by hanging has gone up); I suspect the reason for this is that a) they are easy to achieve, and b) they are relatively quick.
There are a few individuals, though, who decide that their exit is going to be...different. These are frequently middle-aged and slightly older, usually men, and usually quite intelligent. Not for them the triteness of pharmaceuticals or rope, oh no. For these people, a statement has to be made.
The most unusual and (in many ways) the most spectacular, was the gentleman who tied one end of his tow-rope around the trunk of a tree, then threaded the other end through the back of his Landrover; he then sat in the driver's seat, tied it around his neck and set off at high speed... I have actually tried to use this in a short story but it's just so strange I haven't managed it.
Another case involved a man who having placed his Zimmer frame by a nice hot bath, then connected it to the main grid, got in the bath and...well, you can imagine, I'm sure.
And I well remember the soul who opted to jump off a high bridge over a railway; he was so keen on success that, presumably fearful that the fall of about thirty metres would not kill him he did so just as the last train to Paddington was coming along. That was not so much an autopsy, more a carvery.
Keith McCarthy on Sunday, December 11th 2005 @ 01:40 PM GMT [link]
New Free Sex
Ask any marketing guru and they'll tell you: there are 3 words that sell stuff. One is "new". One is "free". And one is "sex".
At present, I'm reading an email murder mystery called "The Daughters of Freya". The cult in the book certainly seems to subscribe to the innovative idea of giving away sex in order to heal the world and achieve lasting peace.
The book itself is also innovative, it that it is published as a series of emails that appear in your inbox over the course of the day for weeks. It's not free, but at US$4.99, it's not exactly unaffordable.
I can't tell you how good the book is - I don't know. I certainly wait in suspence for every instalment. But if I had the book in front of me as a whole, would it hold interest? I'll never know.
Yvonne Eve Walus on Sunday, December 11th 2005 @ 07:43 AM GMT [link]
Sunday, December 4th 2005
The truth about fingerprints - at last!
You know, it's never made sense to me, the fact that no two people in the world can have identical fingerprints. I mean, yes, the chances are microscopic, but it is just possible that Murphy's law makes two identical thumbs somewhere out t here. Just because the possibilities are astronomical for the combinations of loops, whorls and arches, it doesn't mean that they can't repeat, ever.
A quick analogy: If we write a computer program that spits out numbers between 1 and 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 - is it absolutely impossible that the number 8 comes up more than once?
Anyway, a lovely New Scientist article is suggesting that fingerprinting is not as exact a science as we all grew up to believe. And even though it doesn't cite the argument I used above, it still offers important insights into the process of fingerprint matching and what can go wrong.
Have a look at the article: www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg18725174.500.
Yvonne Eve Walus on Sunday, December 4th 2005 @ 10:23 AM GMT [link]
Friday, December 2nd 2005
Speakers' Club Update
Hi Everyone
My fellow CWA members might remember my article Standing on your Hind Legs in November's Red Herrings magazine; I thought some of you might like to know how much help joining a Speakers' Club is giving me on with the speechifying front.
It's certainly giving me plenty of practise! So far, I've done three Table Topics events, in which you have to give an off the cuff speech a bare two seconds after the evening's Toastmaster tells you the subject. I ought to correct what I said in my article about the length. Table Topics speeches are only of two minutes duration, not three or four. I thought I ought to correct this information in case I scared off any potential new members.
Anyway, yippee, I won the TT cup on two out of the three occasions I had to give an impromptu speech. Pretty amazing for someone who never wins anything.
I gave my Ice Breaker prepared speech on Wednesday. This is a talk of four to six minutes duration, in which you are required to introduce yourself and tell the other members something about yourself. I told them about my writing life. Entitled My Life of Crime, my speech explained how I got started as a crime writer and my achievements so far. Another Yippee. Clearly, it went down well as I won the Best Speech cup.
I could definitely get to like public speaking. For a girl who had only ever won an extremely ugly coffee set before, to win three events out of four is some improvement. So, yes, I can definitely recommend that other writers join a Speakers' Club.
Geraldine Evans on Friday, December 2nd 2005 @ 11:44 AM GMT [link]
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