Monday, April 2, 2012

Failed blog ideas

Here are some ideas I have had for wallofblog that never got off the ground.

1. Random article song

This was going to take place over two days. Day one, I hit random article in Wikipedia. Publish a snap of the article and promise to write a song about it. Day two, publish the song. I spent ages trying to write a song about a strand of protein abc131 or something. Never really worked.

2. The Return of the Elephant. The Elephant character was a contributor to a now defunct comedy science website I co-created in 2003. He was a fully grown African elephant who had the persona of an old English gentleman and plenty of eccentricities. A couple of months ago, I began to write, what was to be an extract from his autobiography, from his discovery in the African jungle by Dr Livingston, through to working the oil fields of Calafornia with Smedly butler, making his fortune with Nathan Rothschild, his part in the boxer rebellion, his fighting in ww1, working as a cadet on hong kong island up to moving back to London just at the out break of ww2 living with a bird call Trevor and an elderly house keeper. It was totally historically accurate and quite funny but I couldn't make it come together as I wanted it. It was also 2000 words, which is a waste of everybodies time.

4 comments:

  1. If i ever need to add a historical detail to something i'm writing (by which i mean, respond on this blog)i simply type the field of comment into wikipedia, select the choicest morsels of trivia and pepper my paragraph with them. It gives a nice sheen of verisimilitude to whatever bullshit i'm spouting and makes me look clever to anyone who isn't aware of the internet and its uses. If you have notes on the elephant though, i might have a go at that.

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  2. The thing with The Elephant bit was that everything was based on history books I was reading and documentaries I had been watching, it was wikipedia free!

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  3. Is that the Ghosts of empire book? It looks good, thinking of picking it up. Any recommendations on ww1 history books?

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  4. Ghosts of Empire is a great book. I would say read Niall Ferguson's "Empire" first for a great overview of the British empire and then Ghosts of empire which is 6 chapters each telling the story of a different country the english invaded. Really good stuff. Very interesting, its not the obvious ones. For ww1, The pity of war by niall ferguson is great. You may not always agree with his politics but he is a great history writer, very readable but still detailed and interesting stuff.

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