Heide and Iain's newsletter - Bombs, dogs and 5-clicks-to-Jesus
Published: Sat, 05/23/20
Heide and Iain’s Newsletter
Comedy fiction and general silliness
Iain: Hi , I've just been asking Heide if she thinks MI5 or the police or whatever watch what we do on the internet.
Heide: Um. What have you been doing?
Iain: Nothing weird. Well, nothing weirder than normal. It’s just that twice this week, I’ve looked up how to make explosives.
Heide: And things are okay at home?
Iain: For writing research! We’re working on two things at the moment where there are explosives and I thought the writing needed a bit of, you know, verisimilitude. Firstly, we were writing book 4 in the Clovenhoof “Isolation Chronicles”.
Heide: The fireworks scene.
Iain: Right. The fireworks scene. If Jeremy Clovenhoof is going to make some fireworks at home, I felt it important to find out how he would do that. And — you know what? — there are websites that show you how to do this. I can’t believe it. I got all my information from https://www.skylighter.com/pages/free-homemade-fireworks-projects-and-pyrotechnic-formulas
Heide: But we’re not recommending anyone actually give it a go, are we?
Iain: Er, no.
Heide: Because I’m picturing stuff like this happening…
Iain: And then I was writing a scene for Oddjobs 5 for which I wanted to know if you could carry a bomb in rucksack that would be big enough to demolish a tower block.
Heide: That’s quite a specific question.
Iain: Yes.
Heide: That’s a sort of… terrorist-y type question.
Iain: It is. Hence my concerns regarding MI5. And most of the results I found were a bit terrorist-y or about nuclear bombs in suitcases.
Heide: You can’t fit a nuclear bomb in a suitcase, can you?
Iain: Not really but apparently it was a bit of a goal on both sides during the Cold War. And then I started reading about big bombs, like there were these real things called Earthquake Bombs and then, after that, I went down a bit of rabbit hole on Wikipedia.
Heide: I’ve done that. You read one article and then click on a link and then on another.
Iain: What’s the weirdest thing you’ve ever found yourself reading about on the internet?
Heide: Not a day goes by without me reading about something that would brand me a weirdo in most social circles. We wanted to watch something from Youtube on the family telly recently, so I logged in with my account. It was horrific to see my history and favourites up on the big screen. There should be a health warning for stuff like that.
Iain: I’m afraid to ask. What have you been watching?
Heide: It seems that mostly it’s videos of people restoring broken old tools and machines. I had no idea that I’d watched that many. They are delightful and soothing. Anyway, we were talking about weird searches weren’t we. Actually, I think that you and I often search for the same things while we’re working on a book. At some point, someone’s going to unleash an AI on the data that Google holds
about everyone’s searches and the two of us will be flagged as a terrorist cell, no doubt about it.
Iain: We don’t act on any of this stuff though, we just have our characters do the things.
Heide: Well, you say that but I am very suggestible. If I go down an interesting rabbit hole it often ends with me going and doing something in the real world. I recently spent some time looking at a site that overlays historical maps on the real world ones (http://maps.warwickshire.gov.uk/rightsofway/) and saw what I thought was an old footpath I hadn’t explored. I am just back from a fairly exhausting walk with the dog, and I can confirm that a navigable path no longer exists through the impenetrable woods that we eventually penetrated.
Iain: Your whole family suffers along with you then, even the dog?
Heide: All dogs love adventures. They're always up for fun.
Iain: Speaking of fun and internet research things, there’s a game called the Wiki Game or Wikipedia Race in which players have to get from one randomly selected article to another in the fewest number of clicks, only by clicking links within the Wikipedia article.
Heide: Right. There’s that variant called 5-Clicks-to-Jesus where you have to try to get from any random Wikipedia article to the Jesus entry. Five clicks is considered par.
Iain: So, someone should be able to get from the Clovenhoof Wikipedia entry to Jesus in less than five clicks?
Heide: Actually, I think that would be very easy, except for that fact that neither we nor our Clovenhoof books have a Wikipedia page.
Iain: That’s shocking. Someone ought to sort that out.
