Calligraphic Black

I'VE BEEN LOOKING for the "blackest fountain pen ink". There are pages and pages of online reviews for brands not available in London. Who are Noodlers? Should I have heard of them? I've never seen their products anywhere...

The standard ink here in the UK would be Parker Quink. But it's nowhere near dark enough. They should call it Quink Dark Grey. I used to use this stuff called Higgins Eternal, but it's eternally even lighter mid-grey than Quink, and certainly not proper black.

The one I'm using now is called Lamy black, but it's still too washy for my exacting taste. I want my writing/artwork to look "like a void in the universe" as someone else put it.

Why is it that rollerball and gel ink pens write so much darker? Is it that because for a throw-away pen they can use a more intense formulation that would clog a fountain pen over time? Who knows. Actually, does anyone really care?

WELL ANYWAY, I'm learning (my own style of) calligraphy, you see. Very slowly. I mean, I  wish I could be as artistic as this (I'm getting in this direction):

or even this (by JRR Tolkien):

But I'm not quite there yet. One day soon I want to learn "real" calligraphy. Did you know you can get work calligraphing lawyers' deeds? I'm serious. For that I'm gonna need really ultra-black lawyerly cosmic ink, y'know the type fraudsters cannot wash off. I used to have an india ink pen, which was really for doodling and drawing, not writing: that produced fantastically black scribbles, but I heard you can literally wipe it clean from parchment and vellum. Not very fraud-proof! Is that true?

I'd also like to learn Japanese and Chinese calligraphy. When my set of TEN books is finished (not just one book ~ ten) and I've got paid however much you get for writing bestsellers these days, then I intend to invest in the Rosetta Stone Japanese course, but you'd need to write a bestseller or ten to afford it. The complete course costs £279 ($449.35)

VIDEO: ISN'T THIS FANTASTIC?

BARBER'S ADAGIO FOR STRINGS

SUNG BY THE CHOIR OF TRINITY COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE

VISUALS BY NASA

DEBS THIS IS FOR YOU

O, and last but not least; THIS is what a real Tolkien manuscript looks like (the one on Saturday's post was by God knows who, but it wasn't JRR Tolkien!)

Isn't it beautiful.

Ukh and that's another thing. I have to learn how to do proper pen-&-ink drawings to illustrate all TEN VOLUMES of my kiddies' book. If I end up publishing it myself. Even if I do get a real publisher, I want them to agree to let me print up limited fine editions myself. So I'm STILL going to have to learn to draw. Wish me luck because I only have a talent for abstract art, not the real stuff. (I would be make a good interior designer of mosques.)

Illustrated: Noodler's ink bottle by Geeky Girl at her blog; homespun calligraphy in black Quink; dwarfish runes on MS by Tolkien, another Tolkien manuscript; mosque design...

Meet the Parrotlet

DESCRIBED as "a big bird in a little birdie's body", parrotlets (pronounced "parolet") are so new to the pet trade their full lifespan is not even known! The same size and price as a budgie: in the UK they sell for around £35 ($56.89) though in the USA they regularly fetch prices up to $280 (£172.78). The blue ones are particularly charming...

MY SUPPORT WORKER came round yesterday. I didn't feel he was amazingly helpful. he kept asking my plans for 2013; but I have no concrete plans, only hopes: I hope to get better. Last year he gave me a prospectus for Birkbeck College, which offers a double-honours degree part-time in German and Japanese. But my attention-span is all over the place: sometimes fine but sometimes like that morning I couldn't remember what I'd thought and what I'd actually said, so I had no idea whether I was repeating myself! My head was babbling so. I got more and more agitated as the day wore on. So I have decided to sort out my chi ~ you know, my energy balance. I know of a long-established and very reputable Chinese medicine centre in Niel's Yard, Covent Garden so I'm going there.

I would imagine Chinese therapies could do a lot to improve one's powers of focus. That's if mine really do need improving: I mean, aren't the genuises of academia famously scatterbrained?

I tried calming myself with television but the programming was atrocious. All I remember was a photo-shoot on old Dallas featuring an old-age pensioner lingerie model with massive bazookas arguing with Clayton and Miss Ellie over a murder. I was wishing for in-depth documentaries on chirpy parrots on some channel somewhere, but of course no luck. I tried and tried to think on higher things like feathery chirping parrotlets and not negative ones, but without parrots to look at, I was fighting a losing battle.

I went out and got terrible stomach-ache diarrhoea, so I bumbled back again, where my bad spirits magically evaporated. I went to bed at seven where finally I got my wish: as I lay down my weary head a wondrous dream enveloped me of lovebirds, parrotlets and lorikeets all chirping cheerily away...! How amazing!


TALKING PARROTLET



7 WELL-BEHAVED BIRDIES ON ONE PERCH
Aren't these cute!
The parrotlet is the little blue one.



**************************************************************************************************************************

James Bond, the Queen, Cleopatra, Fukushima, and a Dash of Hypomania

I'M AMAZED that Her Majesty consented to appear for real ~ yes it really is her ~ in this James Bond clip that was part of the opening ceremony for the 2012 London Olympic Games.

You know it was an ambition of mine for years to actually go and see the Olympics in person. Especially gymnastics or diving.

But they bodged the ticket allocations so badly that most people who wanted to go never even got the chance. Because I don't even have a credit card I would never have been in the running. Which is quite ridiculous...

Cleopatra is playing [I scribbled this down last night]. A very good film but very longwinded at over four hours ~ cut down, the audio commentary informs me, from over six. How anybody endured this in the cinema is anyone's guess. But at least in those days you could have a fag on the whole time.

Elizabeth Taylor got the princely sum of a million dollars and Richard Burton a half million in this $42 million spectacular, which is still, in inflation-adjusted terms the most expensive film ever made.

The commentary says you need to multiply by four or five to get today's prices. But 1960s Sterling requires about fifteen times multiplication to be even halfway close.

Did you know when Elizabeth went through her final divorce, from construction worker Larry Fortensky in 1996, her total assets were valued at over $400 million, with over $200 million in the bank!

She made more money from perfume than all her movies combined. The multiple hundred millions stemmed from her marriages, art investments, her $100 million jewellery collection plus numerous business interests.

Cleopatra, by the way, had barely a drop of Egyptian blood in her veins ~ the woman was GREEK. She was fluent in seven languages and, as the film says, would, if she had been a man, have been considered an intellectual.

Talking about nuclear [yesterday] by the way (and I don't know what possessed me to put up and watch the attack section of The Day After) the site of the word's most recent nuclear reactor catastrophe in Japan, Fukushima 福島 means, irony of ironies, "Good Luck Island"~!

WAS I hypomanic yesterday? I could well have been. I notice the post I wrote swerved back and forth ~ especially into Chinese characters. It's true I was unusually chirpy, which is the most typical sign of the condition. Before flying into the foulest of bad moods when the computer repeatedly refused to function fast enough. (Extreme impatience is another hypomanic characteristic. The faster you go, the slower the rest of the world seems. Add this to irritability and you get hyper-impatience.)

I ended up staying up very late last night (not sleeping is a hallmark of the condition), until the medication zonked me in the early hours. Then I slept a good eight hours (sleeping six hours or less is more typical of hypomania). Only rising at 1:30pm ~ a most disrespectable time. And my body was acheing all over, another sign that I had been hyper. Plus I felt this diffuse sense of anxiety, which can also be associated with hypomania. All this is only "important" in that I like to have some sense of where I am going with my mood. It gives at least some feeling of control over the uncontrollable.

Last time I saw my GP for a quetiapine (Seroquel) refill, she suggested changing it to olanzapine (Zyprexa) but mentioned the new drug is notorious for weight gain. Which I really don't want. I associate gaining weight with running out of control, something I really don't like to do. I never got addicted to heroin in a quest for oblivion, as you might expect. No, paradoxically, the stuff made me feel far more in control than ever before and THAT among other things was its chief attraction to me.

So I'm most certainly NOT hypomanic any more... Who knows where we go from here...?


FILM SPECIAL:
JAMES BOND ESCORTS THE QUEEN TO THE OLYMPIC GAMES...




SPECIALLY FOR YOU, BEV, HERE ARE SOME MYSTICAL SYMBOLS...
❤ ♡ ❤ ღ★ ☆ ✰♩ ♪ ♫ ♬☮ ☯ ☢ ✔ ➝✚ ✞ ☨ ╬❤ ♡ ❤ ღ★ ☆ ✰♩ ♪ ♫ ♬☮ ☯ ☢ ✔ ➝✚ ✞ ☨ ╬❤ ♡ ❤ ღ★ ☆ ✰♩ ♪ ♫ ♬☮ ☯ ☢ ✔ ➝✚ ✞ ☨ ╬❤ ♡ ❤ ღ★ ☆ ✰♩ ♪ ♫ ♬☮ ☯ ☢ ✔ ➝✚ ✞ ☨ ╬❤ ♡ ❤ ღ★ ☆ ✰♩ ♪ ♫ ♬☮ ☯ ☢ ✔ ➝✚ ✞ ☨ ╬❤ ♡ ❤ ღ★ ☆ ✰♩ ♪ ♫ ♬☮ ☯ ☢ ✔ ➝✚ ✞ ☨ ╬❤ ♡ ❤ ღ★ ☆ ✰♩ ♪ ♫ ♬☮ ☯ ☢ ✔ ➝✚ ✞ ☨ ╬❤ ♡ ❤ ღ★ ☆ ✰♩ ♪ ♫ ♬☮ ☯ ☢ ✔ ➝✚ ✞ ☨ ╬❤ ♡ ❤ ღ★ ☆ ✰♩ ♪ ♫ ♬☮ ☯ ☢ ✔ ➝✚ ✞ ☨ ╬❤ ♡ ❤ ღ★ ☆ ✰♩ ♪ ♫ ♬☮ ☯ ☢ ✔ ➝✚ ✞ ☨ ╬❤ ♡ ❤ ღ★ ☆ ✰♩ ♪ ♫ ♬☮ ☯ ☢ ✔ ➝✚ ✞ ☨ ╬❤ ♡ ❤ ღ★ ☆ ✰♩ ♪ ♫ ♬☮ ☯ ☢ ✔ ➝✚ ✞ ☨ ╬❤ ♡ ❤ ღ★ ☆ ✰♩ ♪ ♫ ♬☮ ☯ ☢ ✔ ➝✚ ✞ ☨ ╬❤ ♡ ❤ ღ★ ☆ ✰♩ ♪ ♫ ♬☮ ☯ ☢ ✔ ➝✚ ✞ ☨ ╬❤ ♡ ❤ ღ★ ☆ ✰♩ ♪ ♫ ♬☮ ☯ ☢ ✔ ➝✚ ✞ ☨ ╬❤ ♡ ❤ ღ★ ☆ ✰♩ ♪ ♫ ♬☮ ☯ ☢ ✔ ➝✚ ✞ ☨ ╬❤ ♡ ❤ ღ★ ☆ ✰♩ ♪ ♫ ♬☮ ☯ ☢ ✔ ➝✚ ✞ ☨ ╬❤ ♡ ❤ ღ★ ☆ ✰♩ ♪ ♫ ♬☮ ☯ ☢ ✔ ➝✚ ✞ ☨ ╬❤ ♡ ❤ ღ★ ☆ ✰♩ ♪ ♫ ♬☮ ☯ ☢ ✔ ➝✚ ✞ ☨ ╬❤ ♡ ❤ ღ★ ☆ ✰♩ ♪ ♫ ♬☮ ☯ ☢ ✔ ➝✚ ✞ ☨ ╬❤ ♡ ❤ ღ★ ☆ ✰♩ ♪ ♫ ♬☮ ☯ ☢ ✔ ➝✚ ✞ ☨ ╬❤ ♡ ❤ ღ★ ☆ ✰♩ ♪ ♫ ♬☮ ☯ ☢ ✔ ➝✚ ✞ ☨ ╬❤ ♡ ❤ ღ★ ☆ ✰♩ ♪ ♫ ♬☮ ☯ ☢ ✔ ➝✚ ✞ ☨ ╬❤ ♡ ❤ ღ★ ☆ ✰♩ ♪ ♫ ♬☮ ☯ ☢ ✔ ➝✚ ✞ ☨ ╬❤ ♡ ❤ ღ★ ☆ ✰♩ ♪ ♫ ♬☮ ☯ ☢ ✔ ➝✚ ✞ ☨ ╬❤ ♡ ❤ ღ★ ☆ ✰♩ ♪ ♫ ♬☮ ☯ ☢ ✔ ➝✚ ✞ ☨ ╬❤ ♡ ❤ ღ★ ☆ ✰♩ ♪ ♫ ♬☮ ☯ ☢ ✔ ➝✚ ✞ ☨ ╬❤ ♡ ❤ ღ★ ☆ ✰♩ ♪ ♫ ♬☮ ☯ ☢ ✔ ➝✚ ✞ ☨ ╬❤ ♡ ❤ ღ★ ☆ ✰♩ ♪ ♫ ♬☮ ☯ ☢ ✔ ➝✚ ✞ ☨ ╬❤ ♡ ❤ ღ★ ☆ ✰♩ ♪ ♫ ♬☮ ☯ ☢ ✔ ➝✚ ✞ ☨ ╬

MADONNA: GIRL GONE WILD (2012)
I thought, aged 54, she'd outgrown all this raunchy imagery... apparently not...





❤ ♡ ❤ ღ★ ☆ ✰♩ ♪ ♫ ♬☮ ☯ ☢ ✔ ➝✚ ✞ ☨ ╬❤ ♡ ❤ ღ★ ☆ ✰♩ ♪ ♫ ♬☮ ☯ ☢ ✔ ➝✚ ✞ ☨ ╬❤ ♡

Manic in the Night

I STARTED CYCLING in an antidrug meeting yesterday. In case that brings to mind imagery of me circling the group on a bike, that's not what I mean. I got the expression from Anna Grace,

who's also bipolar. I mean my mood became exuberant and hyper and I became very talkative and went shopping for DVDs. That's how I ended up with five Orbital albums for the bargain price of £16. I didn't really think I was anything more than very slightly hypomanic.

Night fell, however, and my mood went shooting up. I found myself doodling sentences in Japanese till past four a.m. At one point I got very jittery and anxious, so I went down the shop for a cyder. Glugging it back I managed to relax, which is just as well, because I continued going up higher and higher. By five a.m. I felt exactly as if I'd just got home from a night clubbing on Es and whizz and that the drugs were still going full-on.

Of course I had no luck sleeping. Lying in bed helped me relax, but sleep was nowhere on the horizon. Eventually I did end up conking out intermittently. I had to get up at eleven to pay my friend Pinky £40 she needed back today. My mood has gone down a bit, but it hasn't switched poles. I was very jittery earlier, but now I just feel weird. It's five to three and fatigue has caught up with me. It's too early to sleep and too late to do much with the day.

Has everyone been watching the Olympics? I should be very excited about them, being as they're going on in this fine metropolis. I heard they had twenty-four Mary Poppins aerialists at the opening ceremony. Was it any good? Did we put China's Spectacular to shame? I've yet to connect the satellite dish to my television. It seems a cable TV installer cut the wires, so I need to reconnect them. The hole in the wall through which they trail is big enough for a baby mouse to set up home.

I don't know whether I need to see a doctor: I felt really ill this afternoon. Physically done in.

I know I was manic last night because when I walked to the shop I felt like someone ws pushing me all the way there, like when you have a strong wind backing you up from behind...

Well I'd better go; I'm really tired now.

Take care Everyone...


Illustrated: Olympic cycling; Olympic Mary Poppinses; "Rapid Cycling and Mixed States as 'Waves'"

*******

MUSICAL BREAK

CANCER RESEARCH FEATURING EVA CASSIDY: FIELDS OF GOLD
This is the only TV advert that's ever made me cry...




EVA CASSIDY: FIELDS OF GOLD




Diagnostic & Statistical Manual: Psychiatry’s Deadliest Scam
I found out about this from Madinsanecrazy's blog. But she didn't post the video up, saying it wouldn't fit for some reason. Maybe it's something to do with Wordpress..?

  *

Learning Japanese ... again...

THE URGE to be able to read, speak and write fluent Japanese has hit me again. I've always wanted to speak Japanese, since my mid-teens. Despite poor progress (in life as much as any foreign language) I never gave up on this goal, and it's one thing I want to achieve before I die...

So I phoned the Waterstones booksellers branch that serves the School of Oriental and African Studies in town and checked whether Teach Yourself: Complete Japanese was available. He said no, they only had Fast Track Japanese. If I wanted to make an order, I'd have to come in, hand over the cash, then wait however long it takes (three days to three weeks depending on availability and obscurity). So I told him I'd check that my local WH Smiths couldn't order it in for me.

An ordinary bookseller can order in any title in print in any language. WH Smiths, however, only order from a shortlist of titles they actually stock. So I seriously doubted they'd be able to help me. Imagine my shock when I entered the store not only to find Complete Japanese (1 book; 2 CDs) on the shelf, but that it was discounted £10 cheaper than the £39.99 recommended retail price. In American money I paid $45 for my linguistic distraction from the lure of the Devil's Drug Heroin!

Oh yeah, and a ghost tried to enter my head through my right eye last night. That's what happens when you're overexposed to computers. You hear voices and the ghouls try to get you. I'm very upset with my Seroquel for not protecting me from psychic apparitions. Also I'm still prone to extreme bad moods. Quetiapine is meant to even out the moods. But it doesn't. All it does is stop me going manic. It doesn't appear to defend against depression at all. Doesn't stop psychic voices coming into my head. Which don't bother me, except that I know that they're considered a sign of madness by the big bad world I live in. The only good thing about quetiapine is the lovely drowsy feeling it induces 1-2 hours after popping the pills. Then you get really nice sleep. But over time immunity develops to most of most drugs' effects. My friend Pinky is on four times my dose and it barely touches the sides with her. She's on clonazepam (Klonipin) for anxiety and zopiclone for sleep ~ on top of maximum dose Seroquel for paranoid psychosis. Seroquel, the drug that knocked me sideways the first weeks I was on it.

Well that's boring old me for another day. If anyone else has seen a ghost recently,








DO TELL, WITH FULL DETAILS, IF YOU PLEASE... 
PS: Seroquel and quetiapine are the same thing!
 
 
 



*******  
There's more to Trisch Li than manic episodes. This is my favourite video of hers...  




~~~~~~~~~  BEACH BIRDS ~~~~~~~