The Horse and His Boy

        

Next beyond her [Luna]

Mercury marches; –

madcap rover,

Patron of pilf’rers.

Pert quicksilver

His gaze begets,

goblin mineral,

Merry multitude

of meeting selves,

Same but sundered.

From the soul’s darkness,

With wreathèd wand,

words he marshals,

Guides and gathers them –

gay bellwether

Of flocking fancies.

His flint has struck

The spark of speech

from spirit’s tinder,

Lord of language!

He leads forever

The spangle and splendour,

sport that mingles

Sound with senses,

in subtle pattern,

Words in wedlock,

and wedding also

Of thing with thought.

        

The Tao of bullshit

For some reason a lot of the traffic to this ’ere blog lately seems to be coming from a video advertising The Tao of Badass, a book by someone called Josh Pellicer. He starts out doing the RSA Animate thing of hand-drawing cartoons to illustrate what he’s talking about, but halfway through he seems to have got bored with that and switched to (badly-punctuated) text in the middle of a blank white window. This is far from the only way that Pellicer’s video is a waste of space, so I’m not linking it here. You can Google it if you must. How exactly Pellicer is sending pageviews my way I don’t know, because there’s no link to Very Rarely Stable on the video page. Either it’s on a message board which you have to sign up, presumably having bought the book, to see, or it’s some kind of spambot. Spamming people’s blog traffic stats doesn’t strike me as a terribly effective way to sell a product, but hey.
Josh Pellicer is a man on a mission. A mission to (make money by pretending he’ll) help guys get laid. You can tell it’s dodgy right from the get-go, because there are no controls on the video. You can’t stop it, pause it, or even change the volume. You can only watch. That tells you straight away, same as a telemarketer’s pitch, that this person can’t afford to let you stop and think before you commit to what he’s selling. At the beginning the voice-over tells you the video will be taken down after 24 hours. I’ve now seen it three times, weeks apart – no, I only sat right through it once, but I’d say that’s a pretty good gauge of the quality of what Pellicer has to hand out.