John Gushue . . . Dot Dot Dot

A note from Stephen Fry to QEII

No wonder something like this gets retweeted 4,500 times or so. 

 

Thanks, Your Majesty, for the Royal Assent. You soon won't be the only married queen in Britain. Hurrah, hurray hurroo! #EqualMarriage

— Stephen Fry (@stephenfry) July 17, 2013

Incuriosity

"Information is all around us, now more than ever before in human history. You barely have to stir or incommode yourself to find things out. The only reason people do not know much is because they do not care to know. They are incurious. Incuriosity is the oddest and most foolish failing there is."
- Stephen Fry  

The joy of swearing, with Stephen Fry

Stephen Fry speaks up for the cursers, noting (rather correctly, I feel) that those who say that swearing is a sign of a poor vocabulary happen to have a poor vocabulary themselves. 

Needless to say, this is not meant for children or playing aloud in a workplace. Unless everyone's into cursing. 

Kate Bush with Stephen Fry, 50 Words for Snow

This is one of the songs that isn't going on the annual family Christmas CD. Why? Well, it's more than a bit long, I'm told. 

It's from the brand-new Kate Bush album, also called 50 Words for Snow. You don't get to use the phrase "brand-new Kate Bush album" very often, and it's actually her second this year, after a reworking of her catalogue (Director's Cut) that was released this spring. 

This is most definitely not a Christmas record, but it's great listening for this time of year. It's not about Christmas, but it is about winter, and particularly snow. It has a rich, complex sound, and while it's not something you'll want to play at, say, an office party (although I'd love to imagine the office where it would fit in!) I wonder what it would do for a snowed-in weekend morning. 

The title track features Stephen Fry, in the guise of a character of (I think) a Siberian scientist, listing 50 words for snow, with Bush chanting back at him. Once again, it shows that Bush (whose talent for audio manipulation and sampling was many years ahead of her time) is sonically in her own league. 

 

50 Words For Snow - Kate Bush Ft. Stephen Fry from John Vallis on Vimeo.

Getting somewhat older

"I don't need you to remind me of my age. I have a bladder to do that for me."
- Stephen Fry 

Stephen Fry and a tongue twister

I'm hoping that Fry's Planet Word, a BBC series featuring Stephen Fry talking about language, will appear over on this side of the Atlantic. Here's a preview. As much as I always enjoy listening to Fry talking about anything, I got a particular charge out of him waltzing through a tongue twister that would have stopped me around the sixth syllable. 

Where to find original ideas

"An original idea. That can’t be too hard. The library must be full of them."
- Stephen Fry

The animated words of Stephen Fry

I love this. Very clever; it's great to listen to Fry carrying on about his love of words and language, but this raises things. 

Emma Thompson, on rattling Stephen Fry's cage

From QI. [If it helps, Fry and Thompson met at Cambridge, and performed together in a show that was so good it sparked two television productions. Neither was a huge hit, but they were on their way.]

Fry and Laurie Reunited

A special is nice, but I would prefer to see something like, Oh, A Middle-Aged Bit of Fry and Laurie. I learned plenty in Stephen Fry's latest memoir about how the two began writing together as Cambridge students, and landed an agent (via Emma Thompson) before they were capped-and-gowned.

The reunion special aired last year. If you poke around, you can find it on YouTube (like here).

Stephen Fry for Red Nose Day

Red Nose Day, the key day in Comic Relief's biennal fundraiser, is Friday. "Do something funny for money" is the tagline this year's assault on poverty, particularly in developing countries. Here's Stephen Fry's pitch.

Stephen Fry, cocaine ... and crosswords

I finished reading The Fry Chronicles, Stephen Fry's second autobiography, earlier this afternoon. I might write more about it elsewhere, but I was struck by how it ended. Not to give anything away, but the book basically covers Fry's 20s, and ends as he celebrates his 30th birthday.

"Back in London some weeks later," he writes, "an actor friend asked me if I fancied a line." Unaware of he meant, Fry describes the effects of the drug, but adds, "The tragedy and farce of that drama are the material for another book."

We'll have to wait to read it, although I noticed this new report from London's Sun tabloid:

STEPHEN Fry has admitted to "15 years of chronic cocaine taking" - but said he used to indulge in crosswords instead of partying while high.

The QI presenter said the Class A drug was a "wonderful drug to calm me down" and admitted it took him ages to stop taking it.

In an interview, to air on Sky Arts show In Confidence in June, he said: "There were 15 years of pretty chronic cocaine taking.

"In my most hyper frames of mind, I found it was a wonderful drug to take to calm me down.

"I tended to take it alone at home and play word games, mind spinning. I'd do very difficult crosswords, I would spend hours on these."

 

 

 

Accents

"I shouldn't be saying this, high treason really, but I sometimes wonder if Americans aren't fooled by our accent into detecting a brilliance that may not really be there."
- Stephen Fry, as quoted in this BBC piece on accents

Stephen Fry's new book comes any way you want it (including in, um, book format)

Stephen Fry writes a lot about himself, but I don't complain. He fictionalized his youth for The Liar then told it straight (no pun intended) in Moab Is My Washpot. The next book is done and will avail of multiple technologies. From The Telegraph:

WIth a Stephen Fy game, you throw dictionaries, of course

It's called Quantum of Torrents. Ha.

Stephen Fry on the iPad

Stephen Fry, actor, novelist and legendary early adopter (particularly with regard to Apple) attended the launch of the iPad on Wednesday. You can read his thoughts here.

This section, though, resonated, as he laid out in detail how the "meh" chorus of the non-impressed (you know who you are) is very similar to the launch of another Apple product.

I know there will be many who have already taken one look and pronounced it to be nothing but a large iPhone and something of a disappointment. I have heard these voices before. In June 2007 when the iPhone was launched I collected a long list of “not impressed”, “meh”, “big deal”, “style over substance”, “it’s all hype”, “my HTC TyTN can do more”, “what a disappointment”, “majorly underwhelmed” and similar reactions. They can hug to themselves the excuse that the first release of iPhone was 2G, closed to developers and without GPS, cut and paste and many other features that have since been incorporated. Neither they, nor I, nor anyone, predicted the “game-changing” effect the phone would so rapidly have as it evolved into a 3G, third-party app rich, compass and GPS enabled market leader. Even if it had proved a commercial and business disaster instead of an astounding success, iPhone would remain the most significant release of its generation because of its effect on the smartphone habitat. Does anybody seriously believe that Android, Nokia, Samsung, Palm, BlackBerry and a dozen others would since have produced the product line they have without the 100,000 volt taser shot up the jacksie that the iPhone delivered to the entire market?

So there. :)

Five-fact Friday

British author and actor Stephen Fry remains one of the most influential people on Twitter. This week, he told a convention in London that he advises a website in advance that hes's going to recommend them, lest they crash. Fry, a notorious early-adopter of technology since the early 1980s, commented, "If I do recommend a site it has to be capable of something like 1,000 hits a second ... It's like a DOS (denial of service attack) on people's servers and it's terrible." As of this morning, Fry's Twitter account had just over 990,000 followers.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, which launched earlier this week, seems set to top sales records for videogames. In its first 24 hours on the market, the game sold 4.7 million copies - which works out to about 3,264 copies per minute.

John Hodgman, who plays PC in Apple's long-running "I'm a Mac" campaign, is in fact a longtime Mac user himself. The author and Daily Show contributor nonetheless gets accolades from Windows types. In an interview this week, he told the Miami Herald, "The flip side is I am also approached by people who use PCs, and to them I'm a folk hero. . . . I'm a little sheepish about it. I want to ask, `You understand who's paying for these ads, right?' ''

Nitrous oxide had been known for more than 70 years to make people giddy and foolish at parties before anyone thought about it as an anasthetic. A dentist at a party in Connecticut in 1844 observed that a man who suffered a gash on his leg was literally feeling no pain. 

Watch out, jellyfish: researchers working on a dive in the Red Sea found evidence that coral consume jellyfish. Their findings are published in the journal Coral Reefs. Mmmm ... jellyfish.

A T-shirt for those who happen to know Stephen Fry (on Twitter, anyway)

I laughed when I saw this Twitter-themed shirt. And while I'm delighted that the actor-comedian-writer-TV host is a Twitter celebrity, I'll admit that I'm not among those that Mr. Fry follows. Oh well. As seen here.