Atari Co Founder Dies

History. So few of us ever get to truly make history, to stamp your foot on the world and its generations, and leave it with something that will keep your name alive forever. Atari Co founder Ted Dabney did just that, and as a longtime player of videogames, I was saddened to hear of his death over the weekend. I only hope he knew how happy he made kids like myself.
You don't have to have played videogames to recognise Atari and its famous logo. Its a genuine icon from the 1980s. And while not everyone is a games fan, I would wager everyone has played Pong. Come now, you know you have.
Ted Dabney helped lay the foundations for one of the greatest, most varied artistic mediums on the planet. A real legend among pretenders and the memories of kids like me, keep our inner child alive as we run from the humble Pong to the current generation of videogames.


Ted Dabney, a pioneer, visionary.

Rest In Peace sir,
you made millions happy xXx

To Bethena

I missed your love and kindness,
your soul of souls,
but beauty with its assorted delinquents and trinkets
never fades or wilts,
and 'tho I nest amongst adders in the dawn
I am at the gentle mercy of you always.
Those eyes, that smile,
a face which had all the answers
and hangs forever, a portrait in my chest.
Oh to have known you darling Bethena!
To have held your hand
and walked with you, both poets on fire,
a furious blaze all together smothering the page.

I gaze into your eyes, those chessnut pools
and know what might have been
is happening now in the emerald garden
where your delicate touch is freezing the furies.
Bethena! Gone before your time
but time itself will be your tribute
as those you Love remember you,
and this ode, testament of your inspiration
which reshaped the horizons of a distant hand.
Oh to have known you!
But content am I to know that you live on,
triumphed over crocodiles
and sending Love in butterflies...

©Steven Francis poems 2010

Remembering you today, 12 years on x

The Despicable SaVile

Fixer of fiends

Look at his face up there, mocking us from beyond the grave with those long bird-like features and hollow eyes like two black onyx of vileness. (Or in other pictures his eyes a hellish glow, brought to life by red tinted glasses.) SaVile the Despicable, the Despicable SaVile. Now that the truth is seeping out from the sewer of entertainment, this creep has been exposed for the foul specimen he really was. A modern day bogeyman who belongs in a pit of evil where unimaginable beasts roam, leaving their souls at the door.
Police are currently investigating 300 offenses against children by this ManVulture and I wouldnt be suprised if there were many many more. (There are investigations being made over others too but this post is only about the Despicable SaVile.) To me, with his white straight edged hair, he looked like a nasty wraith with dead skin, a sinister creature to be avoided at all costs. Although a more accurate comparison would be to Baba Yaga the cruel hag of Slavic folklore who kidnaps and eats children, and has a hut that stands on chicken legs. Both were loners (their disgusting habits forced solitude) whose carcass bodies were topped with white straw hair and of course both preyed on innocent children. But while the Despicable SaVile owned no shack built on chicken legs (however much his ghoulish appearance indicated he could have), he did have a lonely cottage stuck in the wilds of Scotland which would have made the perfect lair for this heartless predator. Baba Yaga loved to feast on young, pearly flesh and the Despicable SaVile hinted he would have liked to as well, just take a peek at the photo below and the quote on his tee shirt. A quote by the ogre himself. Yes my dear readers, these two hellions were two rotten peas in a pod.
He may be one year dead now but I get the feeling the monster is with us still and not just grinning eerily from pages of tabloid newspapers either. A thing so foul is hard to die and should you find yourself walking alone at night through dark skeletal woods or on thick, foggy hills have a care! The Despicable SaVile might be close with dread fingers and cigar stained fangs ready to pounce and take you as another victim. The chains of death will struggle to contain a thing so evil, a thing so SaVile. The wicked Gein of our time, a terrible Krueger-like celebrity, clad in tacky gold, disguising his perverted lusts by offering a hand to charities.



Fear the creature

Yes let us never forget that charity was badly hurt and decieved by this skinny shard of darkness. A true scholar of the devil, able to hoodwink unsuspecting good causes (including hospitals and childrens homes) in order to gain access to the most vulnerable in society. Hideous bastard, may he now rest in agony under the rocky wing of hell. No sympathy should ever meet his fallen soul, and as his tombstone lies in broken pieces in a forgotten landfill so should our memories of him.
Indeed it is cast iron certainty that the memory of the Despicable SaVile is in ruins (understatement of the year) and he will and should be remembered only with revulsion and hate.
Rightly so. The man was an abomination and however much good he may have done for charities up and down the country can never excuse him of his sick crimes. Why should it? The feeding of a hungry kitten with my left hand will not undo the pain I inflict by strangling another cat with my right. There exists no savings bank to collect good deeds in order to be able to 'spend' them on doing bad.
The Despicable Savile was a ghoul and it is obvious now that any good he did was not done out of the goodness of his soul but rather driven by an insatiable need to do bad. This is what the unspeakable do.
There are other even more disturbing tales attached to this man but because they wander into the realms of necrophilia and this is a family blog (as newspapers are fond of saying) we will not be mentioning those. Suffice to say they only seal SaVile's reputation as a perfect monster, the stuff of nightmare.
So there you have it. The 1970/80s: a golden age of television, a time incidentally I grew up with, now forever tarnished with stories of perverted deeds by the rotten Despicable SaVile.


Legacy of hate

Death At Arms Length

For most people, owning a Blackberry (or any other similar device) is a cool thing. The ability to make telephone calls has long become secondary to everything else these things can do. Take pictures, make video recording, play your entire record collection, surf the webby, games. You name it, and there is a good chance your Blackberry can do it. (Im personally looking forward to the time it can mix drinks).
But to a poet/writer like myself, they can be nightmares. Little slabs of beastly gadgetry, able to cause frustration and terror with the mere flicker of a light. You see I use mine to store notes and ideas for poems/stories and while it undoubtedly looks cooler than carrying a notepad around, I do worry about the thing erasing said notes. Times were hard in 1595 when Shakespeare was creating his wonderul works but at least he wasn't bothered about losing his sonnets to a technological glitch.


The Bards reaction to the Blackberry

I have at this very moment eight poems on my phone having not had a chance to write them down on 'hard copy'. Thirty minutes ago the word 'Reset' appeared on the screen and much to my horror it suddenly switched itself off before going into 'system start up' like Blackberries do when you perform a battery pull. I thought I had lost my work and for the five loooong minutes it took to come back on, I fretted like a coop of a headless chooks on amphetamine (thats good fretting for you). When these are precious lines for poems, and you think you might never see them again, I wonder if owning a Blackberry is worth it.
Fortunately nothing got deleted and my work is intact but the damage is done. The seed of doubt has nestled happily in my brain and is determined not to budge. A new notepad is on the shopping list.

** The 'death' in the title is a tad overly dramatic but it does describe the fear of losing unsaved works pretty accurately.