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Thursday 20 November 2008
Presence Of Malice
The BBC has apologised for posting the lyrics of homophobic (in some cases violently so) songs on the Radio 1 website as part of the promotion for BBC TWO's History of Reggae series. I know it's an old parallel to draw, but if a lyric advocated beating up or setting fire to women, or black people, or Jews I'd dead certain there would never has been an instant's consideration of publishing it. Why on earth is anti-gay violence just somehow accepted as a legitimate part of reggae and rap culture?
Almost Done, But Not Yet Dusted
Chris has this unusually long overlap in which he's moved into his new home, but still has the old one, which on the one hand seemed very useful, because it meant he didn't have to move the stuff that he was definitely moving, sort though the stuff that might go or might get junked, and clean the old place all in a day or so. And it has been useful, but I think we're both at the point now where we just want to be able to lock up the old place and not worry about it any more. We ditched a skipload of stuff today, and we're not done yet....
The Work/Play Balance
Every now and then, I really love my job. How many other people get to read useful, cogent emails from their colleagues that close:
"Anyway, I'll get back to making Barnaby's balls move."?
The Straw Poll
You can imagine the scene at the Blairgowrie ladies coffee morning: "Hello, I'm Jack Straw ... I'm now convinced that provided we can create a subsidiarity watchdog and curb the EU's agricultural protectionism then we should vote yes in the euro referendum, don't you agree?"
Jackie Ashley, in yesterday's Guardian, follows up on Jack Straw's recent (apparent) conversion to the cause of the Euro. Could it be, at last, that we're finally going to be allowed to have The Debate? Lord, I hope so.
The Work/Life Balance
Twice as many employees would apparently work fewer hours than win the lottery, according to a survey carried out by the DTI's Work-Life Balance Campaign, and the number of people working more than sixty hours a week has increased to one in six. I've just seen Ruth Lea of the Institute of Directors being extremely disingenuous about this on the BBC Breakfast News programme, making the entirely unconnected point that flexible working opportunities in the UK are greater than elsewhere in the EU. Biggest shock to me in all this? I didn't even know there was a DTI Work-Life Balance Campaign
Get Your War On
A mixed bag of links:
Hugo Young in The Guardian looks at the American attitude to the possible assault on Iraq, and notes that critics have finally broken cover in the US, and to general astonishment - they're Republicans.
The US wants to learn why it's unpopular. Apparently.
"Convince me. Publish the dossier. If I am going to have dead kids on my conscience, I have to know the alternative was worse." And in The Independent, David Aaronovich writes about being willing to support a war, if it's once demonstrated that there's a real threat to be dealt with.
And in a completely different, horrifying, vein - ITV1 is currently showing a programme called The Campest Men in Britain.
Woefully domestic
Well, having said how busy I seem to have been lately earlier on, this evening I almost feel like I've been back living my own life again. Since I got in I've eaten, put some washing on, brushed the cat, done my weekly posting elsewhere, caught a bit of TV, upgraded the drivers on my DSL modem, cut my hair, had a bath, and am now relaxing and relaxed and ready for bed. This isn't natural.
A hint of Old Media in among the new (because I was an Old Media Tart well before I was a New Media one) - listeners to Radio Four's I'm Sorry, I Haven't A Clue will be familiar with the game called Mornington Crescent, which has been both staple and highlight of the programme for many years. I've certainly enjoyed it with for ages, but I had no idea how huge it is. Try the Google search, or just start here and marvel.
And yes, I am indeed embarking upon one of my occasional flirtations with posting titles. Well spotted.
Insert clever 'headless chicken' allusion here
The last few days have seemed really busy, both at home and especially at work. I've been up to my eyes in documents of one kind or another, those I've been creating, those I've been receiving from clients, those I've been checking on behalf of other people, plus I've had last minute requests for input on projects clients are running with other suppliers, and not-untypical changes requested by other clients, plus lots of lovely end-of-the-month admin. I feel like my head will explode if I have to look at one more document.
So I think I'm off on a run for afternoon teas.
The stuff you find when you clear out an attic....
I've seen more photos from various points in my past than I had any desire to see.
I'd already uncovered books, videos and CDs that I'd forgotten I ever owned, and now I've found more.
I'm seriously thinking of posting a list of stuff up here and saying "Anyone want?" I'll have to do something - I don't have room for it all. I guess that's what charity shops are for.
Elsewhere, I forgot to mention that I had a long conversation with an old schoolfriend last night, another courtesy of Friends Reunited and the first with this particular person in about seventeen years. Andrea, for it is she, used to sit next to me in A Level English, and enlivened those times no end. We've exchanged a few emails in the last few months, and I finally thought to give her my number. So we're going to meet for lunchin a couple of weeks time.
In the interests of fair play, I should point out that, admittedly the better part of two months later, my MP has finally responded to the message I sent him via FaxYourMP regarding the proposed extension to the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act. Beneath a hand-written apology for the delay in replying was a sensible, thoughtful reply that actually addressed the points I raised, rather than just a load of generic platitudes.
So, better late than never, thank you Mr MP, and thank you, too, MP's minion who actually wrote the letter.
Oh, one thing - abraxas has moved to a new home, so by way of saying 'Hi' to Cath in her new place, I'm overruling the regular order, and she's Blog of the Day for the next 24 hours.
I had such good intentions for this evening. My long-term plan was to do a big round of catching-up on the various blogs that make up my People lists and generally let the world know, after a couple of weeks of family events and house-moving assistance, that I was back in circulation.
The reality? I've just finished writing a proposal for work and now I want to unwind with last night's Six Feet Under. Oh well, maybe tomorrow.
Once again, thematic threads come together.
The Parents Television Council has declared its top ten good and bad 'family-friendly' TV series for the year - and it's eye-opening stuff, I can tell you. Buffy, Friends, and Will And Grace all make the top ten 'bad', while in a shock turn of events, arguably the most boring, morally-turgid TV series ever, Touched By An Angel, slips from the top spot in the 'good' list. It's a good job this is an American list, or goodness knows what they'd make of two uniformed policemen kissing before the watershed!
I noticed that yesterday's Sunday Express (or Express on Sunday or whatever it's called) had a headline item about two schoolgirls who had been kicked off a bus because they didn't have the right fare "even at this time of heightened fear about child abductions". Can I just mention that I'm heartily sick of this ongoing campaign the media's got on to make every parent a paranoid lunatic and every child out playing a potential abductee. I've written about this at length elsewhere, so I'm not going to dwell on it again here, but just for the record, child abductions are incredibly rare, and children's murders are many, many times more likely to be commited by family members or carers than by strangers.
Which of course is the truth that the media are really afraid to tell us about.
Two threads that tie together later (which is ironic, as you'll see shortly):
Thread one: Ask any gay man who'se seen the film Beautiful Thing what he thought of it, and I'll put quite a bit of money on the likelihood that at some point he'll break into a broad smile, assuming he didn't start out with one. It's that kind of film - heart-warming, uplifting, and basically, feelgood. (It's likely that lesbians and straight people have similar reactions to it, of course, but I can't speak for them.) For anyone who doesn't know, it's the story of two teenage boys in the exotic surroundings of south-east London's Thamesmead Estate who fall in love one summer. It's how I suspect a lot of us wish our experience of first love had gone: That's certainly a part of my own response to it. I was pretty much in denial through the period in the boys' life the film depicts, and went on to have my first relationship with a rather older man, which meant I never had the experience of sharing that confused and confusing time, nor of slowly growing into the realisation that someone I'd come to know in one way might become something quite different to me. I obviously recommend the film in a big way.
Thread two: I used to be a fairly regular viewer of the TV series The Bill - more than anything because it was such a brilliant example of disciplined writing for television: No scene was ever shown that didn't directly involve one of the police officers, meaning the audience never knew any more than the characters, and the writers didn't have the convenient expository device of discussions between the bad guys. Also, the storylines were constructed tightly within each single episode (or occasional two- or three-parter), and were initiated and concluded within its running time, often running two plots parallel with each other and often tying them together at the end. (See where the irony's coming in?) I got a bit out of the viewing habit when they started making things a bit 'soapier', delving into the characters' private lives and running subplots on over months and months. It just became too much effort to stick with it.
I've vaguely started dipping in and out again recently, as a couple of people have said that it was getting stronger in both character and plots again, and that although ongoing storylines were still the norm, they were being done quite well. I haven't seen enough to judge whether it's as well-done as it used to be, but nevertheless, I've seen enough to get a certain resonance from one of the storylines. I mentioned a couple of days ago that there'd been complaints about a kiss between two male officers, and the way they've presented it is that one established gay character (a sergeant) has quietly been falling in love with an apparently straight new constable (oh the number of times we've all done something similar....). They've worked together and got to know each other, and the sergeant has tried to mask his feelings by means of a rather antagonistic manner. Progressively, they've nevertheless become closer, and ultimately, the sergeant confessed his feelings, and the constable initiated the infamous kiss. According to the press comment, this is the start of a period of confusion for the characters, involving the female officer the constable also has feelings for.
The resonance is a lot to do with some very similar stuff to the Beautiful Thing reactions. It, too (starting to tie the two threads together now) has to do with the development of friendship before the development of a 'relationship'. Like very many gay people, (and I'm not ashamed to say it), pretty well all of my relationships have started when I've met people in bars or clubs. It's a useful shorthand, since in the 'real world', statistically the men you meet are more likely to be straight than gay, so you have to negotiate that first awkwardness before you can even go near the topic of whether there's any mutual interest. Meeting in a gay bar at least saves the palaver of that first stage. But the downside is that you almost never get to know someone that well *before* you're in some form of relationship, and what then frequently happens is that you find you really don't have very much in common beyond some mutual attraction, and that's not the best basis for a long term commitment. I know that straight people who meet in similar circumstances face similar issues, of course, but at least there is that potential for some other kind of acquaintenceship being formed. Not one of the gay men or lesbians I know is in a relationship with someone they got to know as a person before they knew them as a potential partner. So I hope they manage to work things out on The Bill - it might give me and some others a degree of hope. There's a weirdly, unexpectedly romantic part of me that likes the idea of having that happen.
The most ironic thing about all this, by the way (wrapping it all up beautifully in one "you couldn't make it up" package), is that the actor playing the constable, Scott Neal, also played one half of the pair in Beautiful Thing. How's that for tying two threads together?
Today's the second anniversary of me buying the flat. It seems to have flown by - especially when I look at everything I've been thinking of doing around the place and how little I've actually done....
Am I the only one who's noticed the fantastic skies we've been getting over London recently? The combinations of colours and cloud shapes have been really unusual, and very impressive.
Meanwhile, on the ground, in the parts of Middle England that don't seem to have moved on since about 1950, a scene of two male police officers kissing in The Bill has generated 'unpredcedented levels of complaint'. I truly cannot believe that this is an issue in this day and age.
I saw the scene, and had an interesting, very personal, response to it, which I'll go into later in the weekend - I'm having to keep this brief at the moment as I don't have my laptop mains power cable with me.
Happy Bank Holiday Weekend those of you in England and Wales.
That language thing - the language is Chinese.
Most people know the basics about Chinese - that it's spoken by a lot of people, and that there are two (very) broad versions, Mandarin and Cantonese, though it's less well-known that there are also countless local variations. But the particularly interesting thing about Chinese (at least particularly interesting right here right now) is the written version.
Because it is, in fact the written version. Despite all the variations in the spoken language, there's only one written Chinese language: People speaking wildly different spoken versions can nevertheless communicate quite straightforwardly just by writing things down. The individual characters always mean the same, it's just their pronunciation that varies.
It arises from the fact that written Chinese started life as a respresentative (iconographic) language rather than a syllabic one like English, French or Latin. Because the characters were actually taken to represent (albeit abstractly) the thing that they described, their meaning remains implicit no matter how you choose to pronounce them. And, (and here's the really smart thing) the meaning remains implicit over time - quite a lot of time actually. With the obvious exception of newly-coined words, written Chinese today is exactly the same as written Chinese from thousands of years ago. Put a three-thousand-year-old sample of writing in front of a modern Chinese reader and s/he will have no trouble reading it. Put an example of 'English' from even six or seven hundred years ago in front of a modern English speaker and they'd have difficulty with it. Not convinced? Take a look at The Canterbury Tales in their original form.
The downside to this kind of language (which has thousands of individual characters, rather than the dozens of combinable (spoken) syllables or (written) letters that non-representational languages tend to have) is that creating keyboards able to do them justice has traditionally been a nightmare, and also, there's no such thing as alphabetical order. Which could be interesting.
(Credit to Bill Bryson's Mother Tongue for jogging my memory on this stuff.)
I'm a little overdue in recognising the news that Cornish is back from the dead, largely because spotting the news made me all reflective. I flashed back to the seminar in one of the Linguistics components of my degree in which the official 'death' of Cornish was discussed. I remember feeling almightily depressed at the thought that a language can die. I mean, I was obviously aware that countless languages had died over the millenia, but somehow, this was different - this is a language that had been 'declared' dead on a specific date. And I love language so much - not any particular language over another, but the concept of language itself - that I want to see it thrive and grow in all its forms and all its infinite variety. The death of a language equals the diminishment of language itself.
Which reminds me of another language-related point I've been meaning to talk about for a while, but which I'll save for the morning.
The houseguest is here and settled in. And I do mean settled in. Dillon is the cat that gives the lie to all of that "cats don't settle in new places, they try to go back to where they came from" stuff. This is her exactly one and a half minutes after arriving.
I'm about to embark on an evening of packing stuff in boxes ready for Chris's house move, so that should be fun (in a twisted way....), and at the end of the evening, I'll be gaining a houseguest, so the round of home activity continues. More later.
Comic stuff:
Warren Ellis, writer of comics I love such as Planetary, and co-creator of The Authority, has a new series starting next month which looks like a winner - Global Frequency is the name of a secret organisation of one thousand and one individuals with a mission to save the world.
And next month's Green Lantern, from DC, features a story in which one of the regular supporting characters is queer-bashed. The story has received huge media attention all over the place. The online comic community has had some interesting things to say about the topic (just one example).
Polly Toynbee has an interesting column in today's Guardian on the topic of the death penalty, and the way in which public opinion has shifted towards the subject since parliament changed the law in the 60s. However, of more interest to me is the sidenote it contains about the nature of representative democracy. People all too often get the idea in their heads that we live in a democracy, when in fact we don't. We don't take part in the decision-making process ourselves, we elect other people to make the decisions for us. And those people, in whatever sense the word is taken to mean, are our leaders. And leaders should lead. Toynbee rightly gives credit to the courage of those MPs who voted to end capital punishment even against the tide of popular opinion, and lead that opinion, not be slaves to the fear of not being re-elected, or as is increasingly the case these days, slaves to the need to be popular.
Last night I caught up with Monday's Six Feet Under, and once again marvelled at the ingenuity of it all. The scene of Ruth imagining what David gets up to with his lovers was priceless, as was uptight, control-freak David acting all rampant while shagging the hustler on the hood of the car. But how brilliantly juxtaposed was it by the subplot of Frederico having to prepare the baby for burial at the same time as he was worrying about his own unborn child? Beautifully done.
Ongoing familial activity is curtailing my time available for posting here, but life will be returning to something like normal tomorrow, so I'll see you here then with some fascinating new material (it says here)....
For reasons best known to the person who I can only describe as my mother, a group of us have just been to see The Full Monty in the West End. Surprisingly, it's a crackingly good show - solid performances, an actually extremely good score and lyrics, and the book is basically the plot of the film transposed to Buffalo, so it's tried and tested. I did go in full of fear that it would be a bit like going to a Chippendales show - all screaming middle-aged women on office outings. There was a bit of that - but mostly it was tourists and mixed groups like us. Very entertaining.
TV Round-up:
First up - The West Wing 2.22, Two Cathedrals - precisely how quietly radical is this? A scene of the American President denouncing (possibly renouncing) God from the nave of the National Cathedral? I love the way the latter half of this season has distanced the President from his staff - the loyalty and amity that used to be the primary characteristic of the relationship has traded places with the distance and wariness that used to be secondary. I think when you work around the nominally most powerful man in the world, it's going to be inevitable that you feel a degree of separation from him, and I've never really felt that aspect was made enough of. Conversely, seeing the look on the staff's faces when they realised that contrary to expectations, he was going to announce his intention to run again, made for a wonderful moment of reaffirmation to round off what have been quite a grim and at times difficult to watch series of episodes.
And of course, 24, 11:00pm-Midnight followed, and I loved every minute of it. In case people are waiting to see recordings, I'll avoid spoilage, but highlights for me were: Every scene involving Palmer and Sheri, the way that just as you think Terri's hellish day is over she's potentially in danger yet again, Jack's gung-ho scene at the harbour, the hints that something even deeper than anyone ever imagined has been going on all along, and the discovery of the security camera footage. Also, the discovery that happened in the very last scene was the detail that I accidentally found out while I was in the States after the finale had aired there, and which I've steadfastly been avoiding mentioning to anyone. Aren't I good?
Yesterday afternoon, shoppers in my local shopping centre were treated to the entertaining sight of a man walking the length of the centre with four carrier bags that appeared to be trying to escape from him. Yes folks, that man was me, and the four carrier bags contained helium-filled balloons that I was taking to Alison's party. Which was a great do, by the way - Alison is famous for being Never Knowingly Undercatered, and she certainly won't need to cook anything for the rest of the week. Caught up with a few people, inhaled some helium, got home about 1.30am.
So, there's this new comment/opinion/weekly column site called The Weekly that's apparently now ready to be viewed. I daresay it'll change somewhat as it settles in, but you might be interested in checking it out in its early stages.
Things to do in the middle of the night:
Update your virus scanner definitions.
Defragment your hard drive.
Watch the News 24 footage (BBC site's playing up, so no link) of the flooding in mainland Europe and just gawp at the devastation. There's a clip they've been using of a wooden house (that's a full-size, two storey house, not a cabin or anything) being demolished as it was hit by the flow of the water that just stops me in my tracks. In Dresden, they're estimating that the Elbe will reach a peak at thirty-six feet above its usual level.
UPDATE - The BBC site is back so here's some info.
Bald R Us - 'the website for people who believe that God made a few perfect heads, and on the rest He put hair'.
Warm glow from the baldie with the blog.
This evening, Chris, Dave and I took in the Matisse Picasso Exhibition at Tate Modern (along with hordes of others....). It's an interesting exhibition, combining painting, collage and sculpture, and presenting a fascinating snapshot of two artists whose careers and styles developed in tandem, but by no means in parallel. I suspect that I'm like many people in that I felt more familiar with Picasso than Matisse going in, but I learned a huge amount about both. I hadn't known about their close relationship and occasional rivalry. I hadn't known about the way that they fed each other's approaches and techniques, and I wasn't expecting to see so many similarities between the two bodies of work.
I'll confess that I'm not the most tolerant of abstract art, but seeing the kind of quality here, some of the principles started to hit me better than they have before. By taking the most fundamental (even primal) aspects of the subject and magnifying them to an extreme degree, the art unexpectedly becomes a purer distillation than simple representational styles allow. (Look at that - that was me almost sounding like I know what I'm talking about.)
The exhibition ends on Sunday, and the only remaining tickets are for 3am to 6am on Sunday morning, but if you happen to be planning on being up at that hour anyway, I can think of worse ways to pass an insomniac hour. At that time you might also stand a chance of spending a few minutes taking in each piece, rather than being jostled along by the throng.
Clearly it's not my week - someone in one of the buildings near me (difficult to tell which because of the acoustics) is playing extremely loud music. They just started about 15 minutes ago, and after each track there's just enough of a gap to make you think it's over before the next one starts....
UPDATE - thirty minutes later, a plaintive counterpoint is added to the music by a woman who's shouting "Turn the music down" between each track.
Told you - effective immediately.
There are so *many* excellent tracks on the Buffy album it's almost impossible to pick out the best ones, even among the skipping and repeating I've been doing while I've been sorting stuff out here tonight, but here goes:
I Quit - by Hepburn (I know - Britpop at its poppest, but I do love it)
Lucky - by Bif Naked (makes me want their albums)
The Devil You Know - by Face To Face (not me at all, and yet....)
Pain - by Four Star Mary (made me buy their albums)
Teenage FBI - by Guided By Voices (possibly the best thing on the album, except:)
Wild Horses - by The Sundays (it makes me shiver when I listen to it. The sort of track that makes you wish you could create that kind of feeling with just your voice).
I love this album. I love it for its variety; I love it for its quality; and I love it because it's so well assembled that even the tracks that weren't used in the series make me think of Buffy. And that's always a good thing.
Today was Alison's [Classified] birthday, so I'm a little merry....
Anyway, I've mailed my questions about the new project to my guinea pigs, so hopefully I'll soon be able to unleash it on an unsuspecting world. Though that presents an interesting situation: I'd like the new project to stand or fall on its own merits. I feel bad about just linking to it and letting it 'inherit' the (in my eyes) quite surprisingly large readership of this site. So if you suddenly see a link to a new comment site over the next few days, it's possible that it might be my new one. Or maybe I'll just post the link and be done with.
Anyway, I've been doing a round-up of a few sites on what I'm given to understand is my 'Blogroll', and without linking to any particular posting, I'd like to commend to your attention the following (no slight is intended to anyone I miss out - I've been dipping in and out at random):
Blogadoon
enthusiasm
Lara
This Page Intentionally Left Blank - sidenote - I've always loved that phrase. Sidenote 2 - just exactly how cute *is* Clayton?
Squodge
burnt toast
Dave - despite the new survey....
mad musings of me (uk) - can we just say - we love Gert:-)
Now that I've got the donkey work on the new project basically sorted, normal service will be resumed here effective immediately.
Okay - the thing I've been working on:
I've been aware that I've been stagnating a little intellectually. I never seem to have the time to do some digging around on a subject I'm really interested in and formulate a (semi-)cogent viewpoint on it any longer. I haven't for years and years, actually, but I'm feeling the need for some non-work mental stimulation at the moment, so this is the framework I've decided to set myself in order to do something about it.
I've almost got things set up, and I've been working on my first column (which is essentially what this is) over the last week, and now I'm almost ready to go with it. Before I do, I'm looking for a handful of volunteers to look it over. Not specifically with a view to ripping the piece itself to shreds, but more with a view to helping me resolve a couple of questions of manner.
If you'd be interested in helping out, please drop me a line, and as soon as it's ready to go, I'll send you an email with the URL, and the questions I'm interested in your views on. Please don't be offended if you offer and I've already got the people I need - I just want a few opinions, not to have a large discussion that will make me question things I hadn't questioned before :-)
Coming out of the tube this morning, a very sweet young American man who was coming up the escalator behind me asked me if there were any good castles near the station. I must have looked suitably shocked when I responded; "Castles?", as he took a distinct step backwards before explaining that anything old and attractive would do (shut up). So I pointed him in the direction of the river and suggested he take a walk that would bring him to Tate Modern, The Globe Theatre, Southwark Cathedral and then on to Tower Bridge. I felt all paternal, and wanted to take care of him in the big city.
(Actually, on reflection, maybe 'paternal' isn't quite the feeling I'm describing....)
I don't have time for much of a catch-up tonight - I just wanted to mention that last week I added some new links to the People page, and did a complete reshuffle of the order in column two to put some people who're taking a break down at the bottom and shift things around so that the people who were lower down are more prominent for a while. No one should feel slighted, and all of the blogs will appear as blogs of the day in due course.
I've also just added a new comic review over in Opinion.
Tomorrow, or possibly Wednesday, I'll do a proper catch-up, including some hopefully interesting news about a new online project.
I feel exhausted. Apart from a general 'only had three hours sleep' tiredness, I also feel physically shattered - I'd imagine due to the carrying-things-round-superstores-then-up-three-floors extravaganza of the last couple of days. I feel like I can barely open my eyes, let alone move my body around....
Tonight's West Wing on C4 was the penultimate episode of Season Two, 18th and Potomac. They've certainly gone to town on the grim in these closing days, leading up to next week's public revelation of the big Presedential secret. There's something about the conviction with which it's played by all concerned that makes one believe that they're caught up in what are, in their world at least, truly catastrophic (it's not unreasonable to say apolcalyptic) events.
By the way, a few people seemed uncertain about my temporary cat grass fetish on Friday, so I thought I'd demonstrate. Be honest - wouldn't you like to run your fingers through this?.
Busy weekend. I've been helping Chris get stuff sorted out at the new flat. So doing the rounds of carpet places, DIY stores and furniture shops led to making a start on laying the kitchen floor yesterday. Today the hell of Ikea on a Sunday gave way to finshing the floor and doing a few other bits and pieces. I ache in many and various locations, and as always, am of the opinion that saws are actually designed to give you blisters.
Along the way, I managed to take a walk along the river near him and through the ecology park which has been established as part of Greenwich Milennium Village, which is really lovely. It was bright and sunny and there were hundreds of dragonflies zipping about, including some of the biggest I think I've ever seen in the UK. Very nice indeed, and lovely to have it on his doorstep. There's one near me, but it's been let go a bit (and not in a good way).
Regarding the neighbour, it appears he was out. Had been out all night and his stereo had come on this morning as if it was a weekday. I went to leave him a note before I went out for the day myself, and I could feel his door vibrating as I put the note through. The sound was so horribly distorted I don't understand how he can have it like that. It must be like living in one of those insane cars with the mega, mega bass that some strange people cruise around in.
At 7am this morning, my downstairs neighbour started playing music the way he usually plays it at 7am during the week. It's both very loud and very heavy on the bass. On weekdays I don't mind this so much, but I think at the weekend it's a bit much.
So I did the thing that I've avoided doing so far, and went downstairs to ask him to be more considerate. Strangely, he didn't answer the door. Perhaps he couldn't hear me knocking over the music....
I just walked home and not too far from the flat found myself without warning in the middle of a group of (and I know how horribly middle-class this word makes me sound) yobs, who seemed to be kicking the crap alternately out of each other and various items of street furniture in the neighbourhood. Inevitably, I was jostled, and they made a half-hearted attempt to get my bag off me before one of them tripped me, I sprawled, and they got bored with me.
Of course, I was rather shaken by the whole thing, but the thing that shocked me was how angry I was. Not at the hassle they'd given me, but at the damage they'd inflicted on my (and probably their) neighbourhood. I can't understand such random vandalism, and as I walked away, I really wanted to turn around and go back. In my head, I wanted to take them all on and teach them a lesson. I was raging over this damage. I couldn't really have done anything about it, but I'm amazed at how strongly I wished i could.
As it's The Silly Season, I thought I'd reflect on the searches that brought some of you good folk this way in the first week of August. In addition to a few Jade holdovers and a mad rush of people who seem to want to know if Richard Coyle is gay, we had, among others:
jokes about australians - Move along - nothing to see here.
bafta + fair trade - WTF?
attack of the clones inconsistencies - sad, much?
linkslut life - That's me all over.
victoria wood peeing - Some sick puppies out there, aren't there?
g w bush & paedophiles - Nice. English spelling of the P-Word, too, I notice.
i've flown world traveller plus - Well good for you, honey.
Former workmate Toby mailed round this link today, apparently showing global rates of birth and death. I'm not sure of the accuracy of the figures, but the overall trends are certainly true. When did we hit seven billion? And when the hell are we going to slow down and realise our world isn't going to keep sustaining us.
Reminds me that it's been a few months since I linked to the EarthDay Ecological Footprint Calculator. I need slightly fewer Earths to sustain me than I did back in April, but I'm still deeply ashamed.
In anticipation of Dillon's imminent return to the flat, and in an effort to prevent my plants suffering the same fate their predecessors did last time she was in residence, I'm growing some Cat Grass for her. I expected it to take a couple of weeks to show any signs of life, but after about five days, I'm the proud parent of a tub of five or six inch tall grass. It's fabulous. I want to stroke it and run my fingers through it whenever I go past....
Joss Whedon reveals a few more hints about next year's Buffy, including the names of some previous Big Bads who appear to be returning "for a very particular reason".
Have you noticed that lots of sites that do the Blogchalking thing look a bit odd at the moment? The BlogChalk site is down, which means the icons served off it don't show, and the very long blogchalk text is pushing tables and other elements around it out of whack. The number of sites I've read in the last twelve hours or so with their actual content pushed over into a narrow little column is quite high.....
Oh, and in case you haven't spotted it, off the back of all the furore about organisations banning links to their websites (oh for the simpler days when it was only KPMG we had to laugh at), Don't Link to Us! gathers daft linking polices from around the net.
I've been watching the local news footage of the flooding caused by yesterday evening's rain, and all I can say is "Bloody Hell!"
In an alternate universe, in a London where the rain didn't come down like a monsoon this afternoon and consequently flood the tube, I am, at this very moment, sitting in a Leicester Square cinema watching a preview screening of The Sum Of All Fears with Gerard. In our universe, none of those things is true.
Meanwhile, in yet another alternate universe, where the United States is a bastion of freedom and justice, the supreme importance of the Executive understanding that it must be bound by the rules of law is an absolute given. In our universe, none of those things is true.
[Via Metafilter]
One of the world's best-known comic collectors (in the sense of just best-known, as opposed to being best-known as a comic-collector) is selling up. Some lovely stuff in there....
I've been to check out Chris' new flat at Greenwich Millennium Village this evening - very nice; floor to ceiling windows, good-sized balcony, all very open, a view that takes in Greenwich Observatory and The Dome, very acceptable. Once he moves in he'll be living in a building site for a while, but once it's all done, it'll be a brilliant location.
Following up on yesterday's BlogTree posting, in one of those strange twists of genealogy, Dave turns out to be both my parent and my sibling. Aren't there laws about that sort of thing?
Google's gone rather funky today. The new logo (right) is on both .co.uk and .com versions, and Google's name for it is 'warhol'.
Cracking day for The Guardian today - as well as the article I linked earlier:
"Council [house] sales have become a symbol of the meritocracy." (There's that word again.)
Roy Hattersley examines the state of Britain's social housing policy and suggests that things would be better if we had one. He also lays down the gauntlet to John Prescot to do something about it.
"If [Alan] Duncan was gay, then Iain Duncan Smith was positively delighted."
Gary Younge takes on the supposedly more diverse and tolerant Conservative Party and a range of other organisations for whom the appearance of tolerance has taken the place of the reality of it.
"....like a Mr Toad on two wheels."
Leader on the kind of cyclists I was talking about a couple of weeks back.
Elsewhere, I've had a busy evening. Met up with the one and only Rosemary for a couple of drinks, then came back and set up a new adjunct to the site that I'll get going properly later in the week, and still had time to watch Six Feet Under and write this lot up.
Well, as I usually don't jump on every new bandwagon that comes our blogging way, I thought it was time for a change, so I've signed this place up to BlogTree, 'the blog genealogy site'.
The idea is that you register a blog and note which blogs inspired you to create it. This creates a parent-child relationship between your blog and theirs, and also generates sibling relationships with all of the other blogs that share one or more parents. I listed five parents, and so far, I have seven siblings and no children of my own. 1282 blogs are registered so far, and growing all the time. I'll leave a permanent link in the sidebar, but in the meantime - you can see my blog family tree by clicking on the icon above right.
"It seems that sexism has made a comback. Men in their 30s and 40s are extremely aware of what they can and can't say. Those in their 20s are like a throwback to an older, more politically incorrect generation."
The Guardian looks at why WWW stands for World Without Women, and the paucity of women working in new media. One of the observations made is about the 'laddishness' of the industry, an observation I can't help but agree with. I spent two and a half years working in an environment that largely made me feel as if fifty years of feminism had passed it by.
[Courtesy of Charles]
Cracking thunderstorm going on outside. The great thing about when there's no wind and the rain is coming straight down like this is that I can stand on my balcony and not get wet, because the balcony above mine shelters me, but still get the benefit of the cooling air.
That review of Toby Young's book is up in Opinion - others to follow tomorrow, probably (or later today as it now is).
I've been on a nostalgia kick this evening - dug out a bunch of old CDs and chilled. I'm listening to Kate Bush's first album, The Kick Inside, at the moment. The Man With The Child In His Eyes - makes me shiver.
What is it about cold sores?
I've had one all this week. I've been getting them since I was a kid, they're just caused by a virus, there's no shame in having them, but....
.....whenever I do get one (increasingly infrequently, thanks to the wonder of aciclovir), I immediately feel like Quasimodo's ugly brother. I was supposed to be going out for a few drinks this evening, and I just can't face being seen out in a bar. I stand on tube trains and I try to obscure my face (leaning into the arm I'm holding the rail by is a favourite maneouvre). It makes me feel dirty, somehow, as well as ugly, and incredibly insecure....
As you may have noted from the sidebar, I'm currently reading Toby Young's How To Lose Friends And Alienate People. Strictly speaking, I've finished it, but I'm reviewing parts of it before writing up what I thought of it.
In the meantime, one of the points made in the book (which is about his attempts to 'make it' in New York) is of particular interest, I think. Young states that the concept of a meritocracy, which the US is proud to call itself, was originally intended to be seen negatively. His trump card when people dispute this is that his father 'invented' the word[1]. Setting aside for the moment that I'd suggest his father coined, rather than invented, the word, which uses a pre-established word structure that he took advantage of, I was nevertheless fascinated by his argument.
A meritocracy is a negative thing, the argument goes, because, as with almost all societal models, under one, there will be 'haves' and have-nots', and the downside to a meritocracy is that the 'haves' tend to think that they have only as a consequence of their own individual endeavour and application. This creates an immediate sense that anyone who is a have-not is only in that position because they lack application, that they have somehow chosen to be there. This then leads to a situation where opposition to any kind of socialized support is engendered, because people don't deserve support if it's 'their own fault' that they need it.
Conversely, in other, more traditional, models, like an aristocracy and any which lead on from one such as our own, the 'haves' tend to have because of a quirk of history, or genetics. If people didn't have to work for their status or possessions, runs they argument, they tend to feel guilty about what they have, and feel responsible to some degree towards those who happened to have different luck or circumstance. In those models, Noblesse Oblige is a real force in society, and this is a good thing.
I'm curiously persuaded by this argument. Though I'm equally at home with his wider assertion that the US isn't really a meritocracy anyway - using his example, does anyone think that George W was elected (disregarding any issues about the vote itself) soley on the basis of his own merits? Who would the last President have been who might legitimately be able to make that claim?
[1] Michael Young, in his 1958 book, Rise of the Meritocracy.
PS - Young Senior presented a case against the word as used by PM Tony Blair in The Guardian last year. Reading this, I tend to think that Young Junior has expanded upon the original intended definition, and to good effect.
Sad Git Alert:
Tonight I am mostly going to be talking about the Oxford English Dictionary.
How many complete editions of the OED do you reckon there have been in its 118 year history? Lots, I bet.
In fact, there have been two.
The first 'edition' was actually published as a series of fascicles and supplements, which are together regarded as the first version.
The Second Edition, published in 1989, was basically a collected version of the various components of the first, with an additional tranche of 5000 or so new words added.
Work is now underway on a completely new third edition. The first installment of this to be completed, covering the letter M to the word mahurat (it's a Hindu word meaning an auspicious moment to embark upon a particular course or endeavour), contains 1,045 main entries, and was published in March 2000.
Why would a person know this kind of information? It's handy for parties. (Adapted from a bit of West Wing dialogue.)
All this information and more is available from the OUP Oxford English Dictionary site.
Their online resource, Ask Oxford, contains a dictionary, thesaurus, dictionary of quotations and several other sources.
Chris quite rightly pointed out that I misidentified the Harrison Ford's character in Blade Runner in my Minority Report review. Bad me - Deckard, not Decker. As I said to Chris, that'll teach me to write when I'm hot, tired, and irritable.
Early morning news blogging:
News for Asthma sufferers: Too much use of a blue 'Reliever' inhaler puts our lives at risk, apparently. It's a 'sure sign that asthma is out of control', and we should instead all be making more use of 'Preventer' inhalers (the ones that are steroids and increase the risk of late-onset diabetes) in order to regulate our asthma. I wonder how long it'll be before the next study is released telling us the exact opposite. Like the study last week that changes the previous view that in sensible quantities, alcohol can be quite good for you.
I'm actually a bit concerned about the medical establishment's attitude to asthma at the moment anyway. I know three people who've had chest infections recently who have all been told by their GP that the infection has triggered asthma and started prescribing them inhalers without ever really discussing what that would mean for them if it's true, and two of them, once the infection is gone, have not had a single symptom of asthma. It's starting to feel like the easiest thing to tell people these days - standard treatments already established and just one more figure on the growing asthma-sufferers numbers.
Meanwhile, property prices grew by 21% in the year to July, apparently, which while on the one hand good news for we homeowners renders the market more and more inaccessible to first-time buyers and people on low incomes. Growth at this level surely can't be sustainable.
And in the world of the inconsequential, that whole Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? cheating 'scandal' rocks on. I thought this was all resolved yonks ago, but apparently not.