Th' inkwell

Goodbye.

2005-02-24T19:46:00.000Z

Anyone who knows me personally or who has read this blog for a while probably won't find it too much of a shock to know that I'm going to stop blogging.

After baring my soul online to all and sundry for ... how long has it been now, 10 months? ... I've decided that I've really had quite enough - as is well evidenced by the dearth of posts in the last month. For varying reasons, I just don't have the desire to continue Th'inkwell anymore.

Will I be back? I really don't think so.

Did I enjoy it? Yes.

What did it bring me? Something unbelieveably precious and a wealth of friends that I would have otherwise never met.

What did I learn? How to write unselfconsciously.

What will I be doing with my life from now on? I will be embarking on new adventures that you'll all just have to imagine.

Will I miss this? Occasionally, I think I'll see or hear something that I will be tempted to share with the world. The temptation will pass.

What is my parting pearl of wisdom? That we spend our lives choosing goals and chasing them. Sometimes they're the right goals, sometimes they're the wrong ones. Maturity is unabashedly admitting when you were wrong and changing course if needs be. Life is too brutally short and wondrously beautiful to do anything else.

Best wishes to all my regular readers for the future - may you always obtain what you desire.

M

Politically correct

2005-02-15T14:04:00.000Z

I used to hate the term 'politics'. I would decry the fact that I just 'didn't do politics' every single time someone tried to help me see that there was a smarter way to get what I wanted done done.

Age and experience seems to have somewhat mellowed me, though.

It seems that I needed to learn that ramming your head against a brick wall isn't always the way to go if you want to get to the other side of that wall. If you turn slightly, you might just find that the brick wall is finite and you can go around it. You get to your goal and you don't need stitches. Makes life just that much better.

Bit of life advice from someone at the rather sage age of 26 here :)

So when I came across this, I realised I had happened upon one of the smarter and deeper lists of wisdom around.

Well worth a look...and an application I think...to so many facets of life.

To me, it's something that I can apply to management - as I'm really not a believer in forcing people to do things. In the end, you see, you *can't* force a human being to think and that's really the most important facet of what anyone does in any job - be it manual or conceptual.

'Politics', to me then, is a somewhat redefined term. It just means getting to the end goal (a good, worthwhile, virtuous...you name it...end goal) with the full realisation that getting anything significant done in life means getting other human beings involved, engaged, motivated and incentivised to help you out. Doesn't need to be anything shady or slimy to it. Understanding human psychology, in fact, and applying that knowledge just makes the journey to that goal smoother for everyone.

*leans back in a large, black leather chair...stroking a persian cat and smoking a cigar*

Yep. That was a most satisfying thinkling.

Now, back to work.

M

...and dances with the daffodils

2005-02-14T12:49:00.000Z

I came to London in Spring, so this is my third the city. Spring in London to me will always mean daffodils - everywhere - wild in clumps of riotous yellow, defiantly beautiful in the tired greyness that is the defining colour of this metropolis.

Here and there are patches of different colours...Chelsea, where I am now, is dazzlingly white - bright new spring sunlight reflecting off freshly painted walls. Some of the outer suburbs...the terraces...seem brown from the endless rows of houses that share walls and facades and a street in seceeding monotony.

The moment one steps outside London, of course, everything is green...the lush English countryside positively invades everything man-made that is tentatively placed in it's bosom...vines and creepers and grasses waging endless wars with masonry and cement.

I love the seasons. I love seeing them. They hurry me along and remind me that another handful of months of my life have gone by. They act as an anchor to memories of a year, two years ago when the streets and the sky looked the same and my life, my frame of mind, my expectations were so different.

Spring is traditionally a time of renewal, reinvigoration and respite after the brutality of winter. This spring, I'm reminded of all the things London can give and all the things it can take away - swiftly, without feeling or favour. In that way, the city is as brutal as nature itself. It makes me realise more than ever the importance of shelter and home to us fragile humans.

M

Universal thoughts

2005-02-03T11:35:00.000Z

I've recently been attending the Dana Centre's science lectures/debates/Q&A sessions/dinners and I have to say that for the most part I'm impressed by the caliber of speakers they attract and the evident intelligence of the audience by the questions (and often challenges) posed.

So when the Dana Centre - "...a collaboration between the BA (British Association for the Advancement of Science), the European Dana Alliance for the Brain and the Science Museum."

...introduces an event with:

"The human brain is the most complex structure in the universe."

You've really got to wonder why they let marketing people out of their feng-shui cubbyholes to write anything on the site and publicly make asses of themselves and the Centre. Surely no-one with any scientific training wrote this.

The. Most. Complex. Structure. In. The. Universe.

Presupposing:

* That we know of every structure, every -thing- in the universe. ( A universe, by the way, that we currently don't even have a very good idea of the size and shape of)
* That we have a classification system that can encompass all the elements of all the things in the universe and come up with a single, absolute answer.

How arrogant. How embarrassing.

Science, to my mind anyway, has always been more about the process of questioning than of answering. Answers seem to be the byproduct of active, vigorous, unrepentant and fearless questioning. It's in the field of asking 'What if?' and 'Why?' that science excels.

So any scientist that can comprehensively say that we know it all and - frankly - the most complex thing out there - in a universe we already know is filled with fascinating things like mysterious dark matter, wandering black holes, billowing dust clouds where suns are 'born', twin stars where one 'feeds' off the other in a slow and beautiful dance of death, planets with such extreme conditions that it's difficult for the human mind to -grasp- the terrain - is the squishy stuff in our skulls...worries me. Does it mean that he's satisfied to stop questioning?

Sure, the brain is amazing and complex and a minor miracle considering the fact that humans use the organ in such a unique capacity (look at our cities, community structures, interrelationships, art, science) compared to the other creatures on this planet. But really - THE most complex thing in the UNIVERSE?

Sorry, even -I- can make the judgement call here and say 'Not bloody likely'.

Or at least I hope it's not. How sad it would be to reach out to the stars and come to the conclusion - umpteen generations from now - that there was nothing more interesting, fascinating or complex out there than one of our internal organs.

M

Is : Was : Could Be : Should Be

2005-01-30T02:05:00.000Z

We humans are incredibly complex creatures when looked at as individuals - yet similar enough when looked at as an aggregated group to make some broad generalisations.

In my new MD role (ahhhhh ... yeeeessss ... NOW we understand why she's been too busy to post), I have a pretty far-ranging job spec - including ensuring that communication channels are established and working in a company. This means a lot of listening in to conversations and seeing where they're going wrong and WHY. You could say that a good part of my job is to eavesdrop - but I promise it's done for the forces of good.

Now, there was a rather interesting conversation going on a couple of days ago - it was actually during a lunch break and it wasn't really about work, but it's dynamics were such a perfect illustration of what can go really, really wrong in human interaction that I found myself thinking about it for a long time afterward.

Two people were talking about something. They didn't have opposing views on the topic, yet they almost had an argument about it. How?

Well, I have a theory and the theory comes about from a story...

:: IS

A while ago I came across a person who insisted on communicating in a completely one-dimensional way. No matter where a conversation went on any topic, he would always bring it back to how things were right now. So, for example, I would talk about the kind of political system I would like to see in Australia one day and he would keep coming back to what was in force at the time. I would talk about a business and what kind of strategy I saw for it in the future and he would keep reminding me what was in place at the moment. I would talk about the weekend, hoping for great weather - and he would look outside and comment on the current clouds - I think you all get the picture.

He couldn't actually fantasize, imagine or extrapolate to some future date and talk to me about something that wasn't concrete reality today.

He was so exceptional, so very consistently one-dimensional in his mode of communication, in fact, that I gave his mode a name ('Is'), and started to notice those times when other people did the same thing. Others (thankfully) didn't stay in just one mode, so I was able to differentiate four different modes in common conversation.

:: WAS

Some - especially those inclined toward an enjoyment of things historical - can consistently bring the conversation back to what 'was'. They have an absolute wealth of knowledge (usually detailed, including dates and names) of everything that has preceeded a certain event or time and are more than willing to share it at every opportunity. They add depth to any discussion by helping people understand what has come before to shape the reality of today.

:: COULD BE

This is the mode of thought and communication reserved for dreaming about something that isn't concrete reality now. Some people are really quite wonderful at imagining worlds, places, events and things that haven't happened and describing them in breathtaking detail. This is the mode of communication used by thinkers, philosophers, inventors and those politicians that still remember what they're paid for.

:: SHOULD BE

Moralizers are characterised by diverting to this mode of communication often. Everything comes back to what 'should be' according to their particular credo, code or belief system. I have to admit that I've been guilty of this one myself, especially when talking about philosophical or political matters.

So what happened during that lunch break that has anything to do with this? Simple - one person was in 'is' mode and the other was in 'should be'. The topic around which this conversation is centered isn't even important....the dynamic is all that matters:

Could be: You know, I was thinking - wouldn't it be wonderful if...[x]...??
Is: You can't do that.
Could be: What?
Is: You just can't, the necessary technology isn't available.
Could be: Yes, but it will be one day.
Is: But it's not available now.
Could be: Sure, I know that, but it would just be so cool...
Is: (technical reason for current impossibility)
Could be: That doesn't matter!
Is: Sure it does - it makes it impossible.

...ad nauseum (well, actually ad finitum luncheon).

Cue slighly growly end to conversation - for no particular reason other than the two people don't see they're just coming at the same idea from two different places and with two very different needs from the conversation. 'Is' just wants a confirmation that they're right, where 'could be' wants someone to bounce ideas off and perhaps a small pat on the head for thinking of them in the first place. (And before the comments go up - this is just a cartoon-like extrapolation of the gist of this conversation - both these people are highly, highly intelligent and express themselves rather more eloquently.)

I'm not sure if I'm right - there may be a better way of dividing up modes of communiation - but I've not yet found a better tool for understanding some of the pettier, sillier arguments that people have.

In the end, I think it's healthy (and SO much more interesting) for a person to be able to smoothly and frequently switch between these modes when conversing. In fact, I do wonder if it's one of the ways to consciously become a more interesting person and a far better communicator. Certainly, understanding these modes has helped me to avoid silly disputes over - quite literally - nothing.

I realise that this isn't my usual posting fare, but it's what's taking up a lot of my thought processes once more and I'll keep sharing it in a general manner in the hope that some people find it interesting.

M

Proof of life

2005-01-19T11:25:00.000Z

So why aren't I posting?

Well, let's just say that I'm currently redefining the term 'busy' in the English language...BUT...blogging will soon become a part of my job for one of the business projects I'm involved in so you'll all be getting a fix.

I think that the tone here will change somewhat to reflect what I'm doing more of - which is business. I encourage all of you to not to just cherry pick and skip to posts that involve me talking about how pretty flowers are - the mechanics and psychology behind business are very much parallel to other things we do in life...learning about the way things work in the world that gets you your products and services can be a valuable lesson in human psychology, organisation and politics.

Anyhow...enough of that...too abstract by far for now.

Cheers! (Yes, I've been Anglicized)

M

Still

2005-01-09T04:21:00.000Z

A cold wind played its way across grass and ruffled taller bracken near the lake's edge. Lending it's bluster to the placid water's surface, the wind stirred a tempest, varnish-thin, that - for all it's fury - could not disturb the stillness below.

It did not touch the trees. They feigned death with the skill that comes of a lifetime's practice and nothing of this earth could wake them now from their winter's slumber.

I walked toward this tableau, across a plain of grass, gently shedding my awareness of the world of concrete and machine. Leaving it behind me like a cloak to be retrieved on my return journey.

Something ahead of me drew me forward, as it had always done. A gentle pull at my breastbone urged me, coaxed me onward. The world to all sides, the things that I could not see, falling away into insignificance - it's sights gone once they passed the periphery of my vision, it's noises ebbing away to nothing.

The lake offers me something every time I surrender to it. Contours that will not change their course in my lifetime obligingly don new cladding at the behest of each season, reminding me of the swift passage of time since I arrived here.

The changes fascinate me - a child of more tropical climes - and I greet small outcrops of trees, remembered glades and favorite curves of water as old friends - superficially different yet familiar in fundamentals - pleasingly grown since the last time we met.

What the lake and it's surrounding forest will choose to impart is never known to me beforehand. I venture there alone with no expectation beyond immediate sensory enjoyment and in this I am never dissappointed. Yet, on recollection, each visit is tinged with an emotion. A realisation or a reflection that stands out in comparison to others.

And so it was that this time it was to death that my mind turned. Not a morbid reflection or a sadness but a strangely calm acceptance of it's place in the order of things and the realisation that it can strike in one of two ways.

Suddenly, terribly and tragically - as we all have had ample proof of this Christmas period.

And it can come slowly...encroaching inevitably to engulf something we once treasured. It is this type that I was thinking of at the lake, bare trees around me, water dark and sluggish. It's the kind of death that bears down like winter, announcing it's intent for anyone willing to listen. I came to believe that when something dies in this way we should consider ourselves fortunate that there is time and opportunity to ensure nothing is unsaid and undone, that we can prepare ourselves as best as we can for the inevitable. And since it is inevitable, perhaps accept the grief with more grace than we could otherwise bear.

The sun seems to tire early in the evenings these days and I knew that to stay here for too long would quickly become dangerous. Taking one last look, I was struck by the stillness that engulfed everything around me, despite the wind. It was like the stillness of the lake - deep at the core and unmovable - but waiting for something to move it. It seemed to stretch itself out toward me and quiet me as few other things can.

I smiled as I imagined the riot of colours and growth, the movement and exuberance that spring would bring once again to this ground and it gave me the strength to wait out the winter in hope.

M

Nostrapoleon

2005-01-04T01:45:00.000Z

Why Rory is one of the best bloggers out there:

BECAUSE HE'S INTERESTING AND FUNNY AT THE SAME TIME.

You can get just interesting - sites that waffle on about the speckled markings of the Rare Madagascan Sea Twerp.

You can also get just funny - German slapstick. (I didn't say VERY funny, just, you know - funny.)

But combine the two and you suddenly have an educational ride deep into the psyche of a geek that leaves you giggling. What more do you want? (No, not yet, popcorn is something he's considering for Q3 2006)

M

2 0 0 5

2005-01-04T01:16:00.000Z

Nose. Grindstone. Touching. Skin being whittled off.

Start of another year of work tomorrow (well, today, as I stay up way too late these days).

I'm also sleeping in my own bed tonight, which means that I will actually be posting things on here more often...I've spent almost every night for the last 1.5 weeks away from home.

I must need the view from my study window in order to blog with any regularity or clarity. Who knows. I've also been very distracted with life, the universe and everything for a little while - which certainly made things interesting for me but deathly dull for you lot.

2005 promises to be - all things that might be about to happen and have already happened - the most interesting, challenging and rewarding year of my life. I don't know what this means for the blog, although knowing me, the busier I am the more time I find in my day to do things.

Is it too late to wish you all a wonderful New Year? I think not. I'll leave conformism to those who care about other's opinions overly much.

To everyone reading - may your New Year bring you everything you desire commensurate to the amount of effort you put into attaining it. Sorry, free lunches are being handed out in another universe.

To those who know I do already - I love you. It just bears repeating.

M

Cocoa nut

2004-12-29T16:23:00.000Z

Not all chocolate is created equal.

Once you get past the Cadbury's stage of your life, venture into Lindt territory and rest a little in the fertile dale that is Green & Blacks (replete with a river of it's heavenly hot chocolate) it is very difficult to go back to the sweet paste that most people consume with relish.

So it is that my concept of what real chocolate is has progressed once again. Last night, with a twinkle in her eye, Adriana fed me a selection of things from L'artisan du Chocolat. You could almost sense the swish of a devil's tail in her composure as the blade of a sharp little knife crackled through crisp top layers of beautifully hand-painted couture chocolate and slid it's way through ganache that was the epitome of decadent. She split them into four (Adriana, Perry, M and I), we took them and let the pieces rest on our tongues, warming the chocolate to reveal it's flavour. We made noises that are usually not acceptable in polite society, compared notes on our experience and cleansed our palettes with ice cold water to prepare them for the next round.

Now, this chocolatier has been described to me in various ways - from guilty murmurs about how very good it feels to taste the chocolate to descriptions of refined ladies abandoning all constraint to speak to a stranger about salted caramel to wide-eyed and passionate speeches stating that this is the best chocolate in the world (from someone who has travelled widely, this is no faint praise).

Each tablet we sampled was completely, completely different to the next. The complexity of flavours was simply stunning as was the idea behind each, the range of things that chocolate can taste like that melds into the richness of 70% cocoa without clashing with it in any way.

So what did I try? Only a few of the range available (descriptions taken from site):

You start with single plantation chocolates - they are the least complex and give you a single flavour to concentrate on:

Madagascar 64%: made with the most distinctive criollo beans , intense red fruit notes reminiscent of the best wines.

Dominican Republic 70%: single plantation chocolate from Samana low in acidity with exceptionally long taste and spicy notes of liquorice and tobacco.

You then move to those which are a blend of different plantation's beans - we skipped to the last stage, to the infused ganaches.....starting with the softest and moving to those that are far more robust.

Verbena: infusion of a herb from the vervain family with notes of vanilla and lemon.

Earl grey tea: distinctive bergamote flavour released in waves by this classical tea.

Tobacco: (on request only) a taste experience suggested by Heston blumenthal- the talented chef of the Fat Duck in Bray. First the pipe tobacco flavours of caramel, coffee and vanilla; then a tickle on the throat and the buzz of the tobacco released.

Jasmine Tea: a subtle and fragrant tea infused with fresh jasmine flowers, made with the best Jasmine tea we have ever come across, a tea that has 5 times its weight of Jasmine flowers.

Green cardamon: traditionally used in Bedouin coffee, cardamon pods bring all their force and comfort to this fresh ganache.

Oh, and of course the Salted Caramels - made by adding sel de guerande to a milk chocolate caramel to cut its sweet aftertaste. They. Are. Just. Incredible.

My favorite? The Jasmine Tea - I was breathing jasmine as I was tasting it and it reminded me of earlier in the day at Roja Dove's Haute Parfumerie on the fifth floor of Harrods.

It is a perfumerie unlike any other - usually reserved for appointments only in order to consult with the expert staff (£50 per hour or £200 per hour with Roja Dove himself) to choose a fragrance that suits you, your lifestyle and your skin.

The place itself is tucked away from view and is a study in the discovery of luxury. A beautiful curved room of of black lacquered walls and furnishings, of silk, mirrors, glass and crystal lit softly and carefully to make key bottles of perfume look like a suspended jewels. The carpet is soft, the room silent and surprisingly lightly scented considering the potency of the perfumes held there. These are not the perfumes found on the retail floor of the department store - these are the real thing, made with the finest ingredients in the world...some taking years to mature to the perfect point to harvest.

Adriana and I had wandered in at an opportune moment and spent a good half hour with an expert perfumer who told us about the three layers of fragrance in perfumes, how and where to wear them on the body, the time it takes to make each ingredient and all kinds of other things that left the two of us girlishly wide-eyed with wonder. He then went through and found a perfume for each of us - mine was Guerlain's Samsara...which smells like fresh-cut jasmine and spring.

What a wonderful day for all the senses. This is what holidays are all about.

M

Oplatek

2004-12-24T23:52:00.000Z

It is so very easy to be cynical around Christmas time - to be inundated with tinny carols and gaudily orchestrated lights and to be frustrated with uncharacteristic crowds.

Around this time of year, so many people try to write about *the* meaning of Christmas, when I tend to think there are many different meanings for many different people.

Families differ so much that where one person may consider a certain dish to 'make' Christmas, another may love the smell of a baking pie, or scrunched and discarded wrapping paper strewn across the floor, the sound of carols or the sight of so many people around a heavily laden table.

So let me share with you one of the things that always made Christmas such a different time of year for me.

I am half Russian and half Polish by birth and the Poles celebrate Christmas Eve far more than Christmas Day. This is the night that the family feasts and opens up presents after returning from midnight mass.

One of the elements of the feast is a tradition that I consider beautiful, still relevant and always poignant. It is the breaking and sharing of the 'oplatek' or wafer.

Similar to a communion wafer, the oplatek is usually rectangular and features intricate artwork pressed into it's almost transparent thinness.

At a certain point in the evening, the hosts will indicate that it is time to start the tradition. Each person has their own oplatek and turns to the person nearest to them, so that the room is split into pairs.

One person will offer their oplatek to the other, who will break off a small portion and hold it as the first person starts to talk.

And what is it that you say at this point? Some learned-by-rote incantation penned by another? No. These must be your words and they must be from the heart.

You must look the person in the eye and tell them how much you value them - and why. You talk about their traits and how much they mean to you. You tell them you love them (where appropriate). You wish for them the things that you know they wish for themselves in the next year. As you do this, they eat the piece of wafer they broke off. The roles are reversed before moving through the room and forming these kinds of partnerships with everyone else present.

When it's done with people that you know well, it can be such a tremendous experience. I've been in tears more than once, and have seen others cry with the simple joy (and sometimes the surprise) that comes from hearing the things said.

In this way, once a year you take a moment to look a person you know in the eye and tell them that their existence enriches your life, that they are a good and worthwhile human being and that you honestly wish them to achieve everything they strive for.

That, then, is the meaning of Christmas for me.

Sadly, it's not a tradition I've been able to do every year - but it is something that I know travels with me and that I love to participate in when the opportunity arises.

The West has it's equivalent in gift-giving, I know. We try to express those things we feel and think by choosing a token of our affection and wrapping it like a sweet confection for the ones we love.

That's why buying gifts this week was so lovely. For hours, I was able to peruse stores with only the thought of pleasing those I was buying for. I got to remember each in turn and think of what it was that essentialised them as a person - what they desired, what they needed, what they already had and what they loved.

Then I was able to choose something that - to me - said 'I was thinking, specifically, of *you* and valued you enough to buy this gift.'

If you ask me, I'll tell you that we are missing out on quite a bit by simply using tokens where words can communicate so much more eloquently and completely what we feel. But it's not something that we are taught to do and it's so much easier to hand someone a wrapped box than to look them in the eye and say "Your presence in my life makes me so happy." I suppose it's the decline of a certain spirit and bravery that we once had.

So there, to me, is what Christmas was always about. Not the food or the presents or the carols, but those few precious moments of confession with family and friends and the glowing contentment of sitting around a table afterward - to talk, to eat, to drink - and to do it all in the momentary yet solid assurance that you are truly surrounded by people who love you and that you love in return.

This year finds me away from many people I love. To those, I say that no matter how futile it seems at the time - I *do* wish for your presence with me at the Christmas table.

May you all have the Christmas you desire - the kind that stands as the final garnish of another year and that refreshes you for the year to come.

Monica

We wish you a creepy Christmas

2004-12-23T01:25:00.000Z

What do you give the person who has everything this Christmas?

How about weasel spit?

The best part of typing that last sentence was knowing you all thought I was just being facetious.

May I present you with Weasel Coffee - "Picked and Regurgitated by a Weasel"

And where did I find that tasty little image? Why, I took it myself not a few hours ago at Selfridges.

Let me entice you by typing out what was written on the back of the packet.

"This is possibly one of the strangest coffees to be found on the planet! This coffee hails from the remote interior of Vietnam. It comes from a strange natural phenomenon."

You know, here I was thinking that some marketing types had just asked a lab to genetically engineer the wierdest freak-ass animal imaginable - replete with some sort of bulimic reaction to coffee beans. But no, it's natural. Read on.

"Wild Weasels roam the coffee plantations and eat the ripe coffee cherries, but rather than digest them the Weasel regurgitates them and vomits them up!"

What, it regurgitates them AND vomits them up? Both? Amazing. Please note the gratuitous use of exclamation marks here. Someone is too excited about the beauty and simplicity of the Wild Retching Weasel of Vietnam for their own good.

"Due to the fact that the cherries have been in the Weasel's gastric juices, it seems to dramatically alter the flavour of the beans once roasted. This coffee is collected by locals and roasted at very high temperatures in tin pans over an open fire. It is then ground and made into an espresso style drink, in Vietnam it is commonly consumed by adding a shot of condensed milk to the brew."

Mmmmm!

Now that's just going to hit the spot after pudding and custard, isn't it?

Now, if your loved one doesn't drink coffee, there are a whole load of other things that you can make them blissfully happy with this Christmas, namely:

Snake Vodka.

Giant Hornet Honey.

...and Scorpion Pops.

Go on, you know you want to :)

M

McConflict

2004-12-20T04:42:00.001Z

I occasionally head out of the house to a McDonald's in the centre of my village (Gosh, the Brits are funny about those things...I live a half hour from the Square Mile - nary a cow in sight - yet a part of my suburb is considered to be 'The Village of (my suburb)'). I go there for a change of scenery, sometimes for an hour just to break out of routine. I write or read, I take work with me most of the time.

Last night, I went because I knew I needed to write a blog post. One in particular I had been wanting to write was wriggling and flapping around the neck of my conscience like the proverbial albatross.

Settling down with the only thing I can guiltlessly justify from Grease Central - coffee - I pulled out pen and paper, winced at the first bitter mouthful and sat back for a moment's reflection.

"And so this is Christmas... And what have you done?"

...warbled the piped music that only a moment ago had been urging me to do something unmentionable to my ho.

"Another year over... And a new one just begun."

Well no, not really. That happens at New Year. You know - when the pain from a temporary onset of seasonal gout is somewhat mitigated by the anaesthetic qualities of Smirnoff in all its possible incarnations.

The music continued until the Junior Slaves Chorus from World Vision's Nabucco Centre chimed in:

"War is over... If you want it
War is over ... Now (ow, ow, ow)"

Desparate to distract myself from the lukewarm engine degreaser doing it's darndest to rid my throat of any natural mucous lining, I thought about the chorus for a while.

Specifically about war - what it is and why we should be constantly so desparate to stop it at any cost.

What is war, then? I suppose the official definition is overt conflict between two nation states regarding some issue or other. Then again, we had the Cold War which was anything bar overt. It was to war what Enid Wharton's 'Age of Innocence' is to the graphic romance novel - constant promises and tension, all bluster and no follow-through. Nowadays we're engaged in a War on Terror - where a loose confederation of governments is fighting an even looser confederation of assorted scum.

If I were to boil it down then, the central tenet I see is a conflict - irrespetive of it's physial expression. Furthermore it is almost always a conflict of ideas.

Given that there are some great ideas in the world, some not-so-very-great and some downright evil - and that all have the potential to significantly impact our lives - is it so very bad that humans are occasionally tempted to fight over them?

Sure, you're not always going to have a clear cut battle of Good V Evil. Communism and Nazism scrapping it out over Poland was simply a case of two totalitarian warlord states engaged in a monumental pissing contest.

At other times - WWI, WWII, Vietnam, The Cold War and our current War on Terror - it's clearer to see which side should win for the happiness of mankind.

I'm not saying that the protagonists. are 'Good' good and 'Bad' bad - it's never all that clear-cut. I've recently happened to read a little ancient Greek history. What was made painfully clear was that the good guys did some dastardly things in order to win and that the bad guys could be decent, valiant and damned worthy opponents.

Life, then, is not so much Gandalf V Sauron as it is Aragorn V Boromir. This doesn't mean the battle is futile because the characters aren't cartoonishly simple, it means that it is sometimes more important to look at the principles being fought for than at the players fighting for them.

So what does this McNavelGazing mean in today's world?

That Bush isn't perfect - I wouldn't call him heroic. That Blair can be a complete toad (and is, most of the time) . That Howard won't be featured in a Scorcese film anytime soon. That they may have made mistakes and it is possible (although I don't think all that probable) that they misled their citizens into war. But that all this detail doesn't really matter.

What matters, then?

Wht matters is that they've actively decided to fight. To go to W. A. R. despite enormously loud protestations from a minority of short sighted and publicity-seeking loons.

What matters is that they've pulled back from the usual concerns and historical scope of the politician (2-4 years) and had a good, long look at what's going on in the world.

What matters is that they've realised the need for war and committed to it - in the very unpopular and very necessary long term.

So..."War is over if you want it"?

No. War is over when war is over. I honestly don't think that war will ever be over between various factions in the human race - unless a larger, external foe suddenly appears brandishing tentacles, pasty green skin and laser cannons.

Then - like the uneasy and pragmatic Pan-hellenic alliance of old - ancient enemies will stand warily shoulder to shoulder to fight off a more immediate menace to survival.

And I have absolutely no doubt, even then - when the history of human fortune and folly is treble the current volume and full of almost comically repeated mistakes - some schmuck somewhere will compose a Christmas song:

"And so this is Kwanzaa
And what have you done?
Another Standard Annual Period is over
And a new one just begun

Intergalactic conflict is over
If you want it
Intergalatic confict is over
Now (ow, ow, ow)"

To be sung as cities are rendered to dust by an enemy that should just be 'engaged in negotiations and understood' rather than aimed for and shot at. *snort*

M

(Cross posted to A Western Heart)

I'll be back

2004-12-16T13:17:00.000Z

Apologies for the latest dearth of posts - the things I've had on my mind aren't bloggable or in any way remotely interesting to you wonderful audience critters.

Shall be rectified in the next 24 hours. Don't go away, just help yourself at the bar fridge *points* ... and mingle. No biting.

M

What were they thinking?

2004-12-11T01:42:00.000Z

I love finding strange things on my computer when hunting for more mundane things.

This time, I was looking for some photographs and I came across something I took at IKEA months ago. I really need to get myself a phone with an in-built camera. Life is just so sweetly ludicrous sometimes.

Anyway, the woodland scene cum children's bedroom...

It's as if we've caught these animals in a moment of self-discovery.

Imagine it - a quiet forest somewhere, a lovely dappled glade, no sound but the breeze through the trees and a gentle rustle steadily becoming louder.

Suddenly - out of nowhere - a team of marketing trolls leaps upon the innocent animals in the glade and affixes cheap, fluffy nylon tails to their behinds.

We see them in the first moment of realisation that something isn't Quite Right.

I'm honestly just glad that we can't see the faces that the creatures on the curtain are making:

I just want to know how it got past management.

M

Invisible

2004-12-10T23:59:00.000Z

This wasn't what I had expected – surely everyone could see. They should be staring at the hair that looks a little wrong, a little askew, a little fake.

They should be staring at me because I look like a whore or a lunatic. No-one else dresses like this.

I felt exceptionally self-conscious but for some reason no-one else would play along with my fevered imagination of the way the world would react to me in a wig.

I had purchased my dark, burgundy-tinted wig on a whim when last in Malaysia and hadn't really used it before. Cleaning out a cupboard here in London one day I came across it in it's professional little packet with it's foreign little accoutrements and a plan hatched in my mind that I was sure would toy with C's psyche in a most satisfactory manner.

Instead, once I had launched it, it seemed to be backfiring and was toying with mine.

You see, C's world is one made up of passion for history, books and her friends. These three things - in equal measure - define the C I know and give her unique strength of character as well as providing three targets for never-ending fun. In this case, I would trigger her passion for the wellbeing of her friends.

She had recommended a hairdresser to me, a hairdressing school, actually, for one of the better known and more fashionable salon chains. Her recent haircut had been wonderful, if slightly on the cutting-edge side of things.

I decided that I would put on the wig, take a photo with the digital camera and email it to her at work with an 'Oh my GOD, I went to those people you recommended and look what they've DONE!' message. I would explain that I had been talked into having my hair dyed as well as cut short. I took the shot, crafted the email and – just for dramatic effect – posted another image with the same kind of message on her online forum.

It worked. Within minutes, I received a frantic SMS from her – demanding to know if this was true, demanding details, consoling, detailing her shock.

I had hit one of the rawest of nerves. If all women have a natural maternal instinct to protect their young, C's has been rerouted to protect her set of friends.

We agreed to meet at M's office after work so that I could – in the manner of all women - recount exactly what had happened again and again, twittering at the tiniest detail and remembered eyebrow twitch of the hairdresser.

This was essential to get to the bottom of What Went Wrong.

I, for one, wondered how long I would be able to pull the charade off and how long it would take for her to notice that the hair wasn't real. I also hoped that I wouldn't get pummelled or excommunicated from the League of Extraordinary Friends once she realised what I had done.

So there I was late in the afternoon on my way to the city in one of the ubiquitous tube carriages that can lull me into a stupor like nothing else. I feel comfortable on the tube, the comfort that comes with a high level of predictability.

This time, though, I could feel the wig tight on my skull; sliding up miniscule millimetres with every step, every movement. I could feel the pins against my scalp, the foreign, cold hair brushing against my face and a dark fringe obscuring my sight, driving me mad with the desire to sweep it away. I had the urge to constantly pull the wig down...down because I could have sworn that the whole thing was perched like a dark octopus on top of my own, voluminous, pinned back tresses.

Now, stepping onto the tube felt so very different - my senses were heightened. I was very much alert to other's reactions. I was different, they had to see it.

Couldn’t they see it?

I felt that I was positively radiating differentness and strangeness. Every time someone's glance flicked in my direction, I was ready to see recognition of my attempted deviousness flicker across their features.

I had expected surreptitious stares as well as open ones. I had expected women to see through the disguise immediately and men to take a little longer to discern what was wrong.

But I didn’t receive anything of the sort.

In fact, I was disconcertingly invisible.

I didn't understand. Not only was I not receiving the level of eye contact I was used to on a normal basis – I was receiving less.

I stepped off the train and into a large crowd of commuters, many of them walking in the opposite direction. Again, less eye contact than normal.

Oh god…did I actually look like one of those people that you make a concerted effort to avoid eye contact with? One of those men whose clothing is kept together with safety pins or the women with the bulging-eyeballed look of the loon?

No, I didn’t. I caught my reflection in a store window and looked like anyone else.

Anyone else other than me, that is.

Suddenly, though, I understood. I recalled how the world had changed for C when she dyed her own very dark hair to a platinum blonde a few years ago. Crowds became a mass of men giving her attention, nightclubs were awash with admirers and co-workers who had seen her as part of the furniture suddenly discovered a rather attractive woman in the vicinity. C hated it. She felt cheap, she felt she was getting all this new attention only because of the colour of her hair.

I hadn't realised until that moment exactly how much eye contact I got as a blonde. That my hair makes me somewhat of a beacon in a crowd, even if only for one swift look from almost every stranger, male or female. This eye contact with people who walked past, this 'normal' facet of crowd interaction is what I was missing now. Far from making me an object of curiosity, the wig was hiding the very thing in me that caused my standard level of attracted curiosity. Fascinating.

I began to wonder how the world looked to redheads and women with jet-black hair. What it felt like to walk around as a man. What it was like to be black in this city. To be taller. To be short. To be thin. I wished then, and still do now, that I could wave a magic wand and try each – even if only for a few hours.

So the stunt I pulled, thinking that I would remain amused, detached and cleanly aloof, left me fundamentally changed. So much for pulling the strings and watching someone else dance.

Claire, by the way, only had a few seconds of speechless shock before my own nervousness and guilty conscience undid the elaborate caper. She was still looking at me, getting used to her first sight of my new look…when I automatically reached up for the thousandth time that hour to tug the hair down and accidentally gave the game away. Madame Bond I am not.

M

What's your weakness?

2004-12-10T13:44:00.000Z

The lovely Diane asked a pertinent question and one I’m asked quite often when people find out about my shameful HR past. I found that my answer was long…so I’ve made it into a post.

Diane asked:

“What the hell is the "right" answer to the "What are your weaknesses?" question?

Should I lie and say:"I push myself too hard." or some bullshit like that

Or should I be honest and say:"I am lazy. So incredibly lazy that I would be happy to spend my life lying in bed reading. I only work because I don't want to starve"

or

"I can be a real ding-bat sometimes. I work constantly to remember details, and I am notorious for not remembering where I've left things."

My answer:

Diane - you know, it's just a bullshit question to be honest.

I've had to work with jerks who think they're real pros at drawing information out of people, at playing 'mind games'. It's a little sad to see them work their movie-derived arsenal on some poor sod who isn't quite sure what he's being asked for.

I mean, *really*, what kind of a surprise is a question that comes up at parties as a stock standard joke? :)

On the practical side, though, the safest bet is to 'play the game' and find a strength that you can present as a weakness - as in your first example.

If you really want to ace an interview, simply put yourself in the interviewer's position.

A couple of days before the meeting, sit down and think about what the company will be thinking. If you were in the position of the line manager - what would *you* ask the interviewee in regards to skills necessary? It's really, really predictable most of the time.

Then think about your views on things like:

* How to work well in a team (You know, communication, delegation etc.)
* Conflict resolution techniques with team members
* Personal time management / organisational skills

And some fluffy shite about your personal life ambitions. Something like "I'd like to die at my desk from overwork" might be overdoing it a tad - just a hint.

Then remember to make eye contact with everyone on the panel - but fractionally more with the person who asked the question, control what your hands do (DON'T fidget with your clothes, papers, pen or wring your hands, be aware of your body), don't slouch, don't tap your foot or twitch your leg if your legs are crossed, smile - but not like a hyena - just enough to help the assessors warm to you, answer your questions carefully and ALWAYS check if you've given them the info they wanted if you're not sure, don't offer more than you're asked - there lies the road to info that can unseat you, don't wear anything too sexually alluring or something that makes you look like your grandmother, don't wear a joke tie - ever, strike a balance between confident and enthusiastic - too much either way and you'll either be seen as too cocky or too naive, I'm sure there are other things, just can't think of them now.

Oh yeah, NEVER EVER EVER EVER relax until you're out of the goddamned building. I can't tell you how many interviewees develop a sudden case of Stockholm syndrome and confess stuff the minute they perceive the 'formal' interview is over. The interview is NEVER over, smile at the receptionist on the way out - you never know if she'll be talking to the panel about the rude git that scowled at her.

Oh yes, and know your shit re: the technical requirements of the job.

This advice is for dealing with the usual idiots that hire. If I were interviewing you, these things would be really cursory and you'd end up sweating as I delved into your childhood and asked you all about your co-workers at your last position. Then I'd give you a few hypothetical scenarios that don't actually have clear-cut answers and ask you to take me through your thought process as you consider them. Then we'd talk about the hobbies you have and why you like them – all kinds of things that don’t seem to have anything to do with the job – I’d be looking at you as a person, that ‘attitude’ thing I mentioned in those posts. Then someone technical on the panel would lightly grill you on both sides for technical knowledge. Then we would pour you out of the room and take on the next victim.

Sorry about the swearing, once I start it's hard to stop. :)

M

(You know, I read this and realised that people might begin to be a little frightened of me, especially my London friends who read this blog. Rest assured that I don't consciously x-ray you with all my questioning - I'm just a naturally curious person who doesn't take things people say at face value. So I ask questions. And note down the answers on a little sheet of paper. And then score you at the end of the night. Nothing strange about that at all.)

Sewing it all together

2004-12-08T15:33:00.000Z

I've done something rather unusual today and posted a really (really) long essay.

Here are the links to each individual section, I do recommend reading the Introduction first so that you have some idea of what the hell I'm blathering about.

Stitches in Time - Introduction
Stitches in Time - PART I
Stitches in Time - PART II
Stitches in Time - PART III

M

UPDATE - There have been a couple of comments about my statement that the interview is solely for the benefit of the employer, not the employee.

I've thought about it and both of you are absolutely right - it's there for both parties. I guess I was working in places that were so very PC and afraid of interviewees claiming an unfair process (Yes, it happens - especially in government. You then need to conduct a full investigation and audit of each step in the hire.) that there was a definite slant toward the interview being there to appease all interviewee expectations at the sacrifice of it's usability to the employer.

As I said - it was written a while ago and was in reaction to severe frustration at work.

Thanks for pointing out my error guys - much appreciated.

M

Stitches in Time - PART III

2004-12-08T15:32:00.000Z

The Template and The Bar

You have interviewed six people for a particular post. None particularly caught your eye as being superb, but there was a clear ranking as to which were the best candidates. Which do you choose?

I’ll give you a hint – it’s not the best of that bunch. You don’t take anyone on in that scenario.

What I like to do with a panel before we start any interview is give them a grilling of my own. I ask them to imagine the candidate they want. Imagine how that ideal candidate would answer their questions. How confident, empathetic, understanding, knowledgeable or charismatic they would be. Even what kinds of clothes they would be wearing and how they would be groomed. This is then the yardstick – or template – by which I ask them to measure each interviewee. Sometimes – where interviews last for days – I re-focus the panel and go through the exercise again so that that image, that template, isn’t blurred.

I like to think of the template as a bar. It is the minimum standard at which a candidate has to be in order to be seriously considered for the role. In any given interviewing session, it is possible for all interviewees to be over the bar, only some interviewees to be over the bar or no interviewees at all to be over the bar. In the last case, don’t be afraid to re-advertise, it is the smartest strategic decision in the long run.

It is only those interviewees that make it ‘over the bar’ that should then be ranked against each-other. This may seem self-evident, but too often, interviewees are simply ranked against each other, not the ideal template. A panel, or lone interviewer, can then be struck with information overload and begin to make the hiring decision on arbitrary information that differentiates the candidates.

The benefit of the template and bar are then twofold:

Stops ‘the best of a bad bunch’ being hired.

Eases the final decision by giving one more step at which candidates are sifted out.

The Commitment

Am I asking for too much commitment of time and resources? How important a decision is this hire?

Say that it’s a £20,000 per year role – that’s junior administrative pay. The average stay in your company is six years. You’re making a £120,000 decision. Puts it in a different perspective, doesn’t it?

What are the usual procedures in your company to purchase something at that cost? What level of management usually signs it off?

Place recruitment in the perspective that it deserves and make the commitment to doing it right now.

Other Benefits

Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to re-hire everyone in your organisation this way? In the current legislative climate, every poor hire is a serious liability for several reasons. Not only do they not give value in return for their salary in one way or another, they are very difficult to dismiss. Poor staff are also organisational morale and change-killers. People who are not happy at work are generally voluble about this fact, gossiping with workers, mulling over losses and bitching about management without having the impetus to get up and change whatever it is that’s annoying them so much.

I propose that hiring excellent people can be an antidote for some organisational problems. Positive, proactive people can and DO change the organisation around them – just as negative people can poison the organisation around them. As long as positive people are actively supported in the work they do and for the attitude they display, they can act as empowered and trusted agents of change dispersed throughout the organisation.

I cannot emphasise enough how important it is to hire the best that you possibly can. People are what make the organisation work – whether they manage or execute, they are all important and have serious impact in every facet of the value chain. Organisations that realise, capitalise and leverage this have become leaders in their fields.

Stitches in Time - PART II

2004-12-08T15:31:00.000Z

The Tests/Scenarios

Hours of question and answer sessions are tedious for the interviewers as well as the interviewees.

Questions are also not the best way to test whether or not someone has the character attributes you are looking for. Anyone can say that they are a ‘team player’ or ‘enthusiastic’ – not everyone can pull off their best behaviour 1.5 hours into a group exercise under time pressure with everyone else also vying for attention from the assessors.

Group sessions usually consist of 10-15 candidates being presented with a series of group and individual exercises, group presentations and – commonly – a hypothetical scenario within which they must develop a framework to team-based decision making on the fly – sort out differences of opinion and make decisions under a strict time pressure.

Group sessions require the right room set-up as well as a high personnel count in order to keep the system running smoothly and ensure that each person in the group session is being observed. These sessions are most effective in weeding out candidates for formal interview from large groups of people – essentially a relatively time-effective way of getting through many people.

I won’t elaborate on or describe the exercises that can be done in group sessions as there is quite a lot of literature out there that covers this topic in depth and with useable examples.

What I will do is insist on the importance of using high-quality assessors in this exercise, tempting though it will be to beef up the numbers with people who merely have the time to be there on the day such as admin staff.

Assessment in the group session is a tough and multitasking activity. It is at once important to understand the logic behind each person’s arguments as well as judging how the communication was phrased, body language and effectiveness of contribution to the group (i.e.: are we looking for leaders or team players in this group scenario? Different things will be valued).

Whilst this is happening it is important to see the group dynamic as a whole – how do others, in turn receive this person’s contribution? Occasionally groups splinter and 2 or more people talk at once, compounding the observational problem. You really do want your assessors to be on the ball and experienced in essentialising observations of human behaviour.

The Interview Team & Observation

Anyone can ask interview questions and write down the candidate’s responses. That’s not the point of good interview technique. By the time a candidate has come to an interview, you should already be fairly confident that their technical abilities are up-to-scratch.

What a professional interviewer should look for is the way in which questions are answered and the way in which a person speaks in general, i.e.
* Has the question been answered at all? – Sometimes interviewees don’t actually get what it is they are being asked and will go off on a tangent. This is a good indicator of their listening and comprehension skills. An excellent candidate will check with the interviewer whether or not they’ve given the interviewer the information they require – after every difficult or ambiguous question. It can be as simple as ‘Does that answer your question?’

* Is the answer or their speech structured well? – Sometimes people will give me all the information I need but do it in such a roundabout manner that I will strain to catch their point. Being able to organise information mentally before dissemination is an important skill in many organisations. Look for a beginning, a middle and an end to any answer (where appropriate).

* Do they know how to answer a question or make a point? – There is a class of interviewee I call ‘The Waffler’ – they will ramble on and on (and on) to answer a question. Occasionally I see wafflers that have also missed the point of the question and end up giving me a diatribe on the benefits of bonsai pruning when I’m simply asking them a question about time organisation skills. This isn’t someone you want to hire in a position requiring good communication skills.

* (Interview only) Does what you are being told add up? Contradictions are serious red flags. Ensure you have glanced – even briefly – at the candidate’s CV a few minutes before you speak to them at the interview.

* Does the person show any enthusiasm? Are they personable? Are they quiet and methodical? Do they come across as ebullient or subdued? – Match this to the template of the ideal candidate you’re looking for.

- In group sessions

Group sessions will shed light on different aspects of candidate’s interactions with others as well as problem solving skills. Assessing a group session should be a draining exercise, the primary role of the assessors is to see how the problem was solved (methods, language, leadership, group dynamics) rather than the answer to the problem given.

If you are looking for a leader, take note of who contributes to the group discussion, ensures consensus, listens to the contributions of others, draws information/opinions out of the quieter participants, organises the time of the group, structures a framework for solving the problem or volunteers to time-keep or scribe. This doesn’t necessarily have to be the loudest person in the group or even one person – you will likely find different people exhibiting a few of the traits each.

If you are looking for a team member, take note of interaction with the group, listening to the contributions of others, a clear understanding of the task given, effective and reasoned contribution to the group discussion and any leadership type behaviour exhibited.

It is imperative that you choose excellent people to assess the group, preferably people who have interviewed before. It is very easy when assessing to get caught up in what the group is discussing rather than how it is going about its task. Group sessions can be confusing – many people are talking at once, it is important to note body language and aside-interaction as well as formal contribution.

The assessors must then essentialise their opinion on each candidate at the decision briefing to reach a consensus decision themselves. Ensure that your assessors are mature individuals who are able to make tough decisions quickly under pressure and won’t be influenced by the opinions of other assessors.

- In Panels

I used to think that an interview panel was simply a beaurocratic solution to the problem of political correctness in hiring. In the public service, panels are gender and race balanced as a matter of course – a lot of diddling about to ensure that no-one can accuse them of anything ‘improper’.

Silly though a panel may seem, it actually does have a beneficial side-effect which I discovered first hand.

Good interview technique requires a phenomenal amount of concentration in order to be able to capture everything necessary and write down one’s impressions. It is almost impossible to be able to be always alert, especially when one is looking down and writing. Other interviewers in the room are able to observe at the same time and hopefully they have managed to observe what you have not – and vice-versa.

Individual experience and opinion will vary – you will have a wide swathe of thoughts about each applicant. I’ve been amazed a few times with other’s pithy observations of things that I have missed and have been very glad there was another trusted pair of eyes and ears there with me. It is for this last reason – trust – that it is important that it is the very best people that are present at interviews, not just whoever was available on the day.

Stitches in Time - PART I

2004-12-08T15:29:00.000Z

Abstract – Why it’s important to take the time at sifting and interview stage to ensure that you get the right person for the job. How to go about a hire in a methodical manner. Why this is so important to the health of a company.

A lot of lip service goes into companies’ recruitment strategies. “Excellence” “The best people” “Strategic fit” “Ongoing development” “Rigorous selection”. To which I say: “Garbage!”

Garbage because these statements are mere puffery to make the shareholders feel better about who is employed, not because these kinds of hiring goals are incorrect. In the mad rush to appease bottom line and results-focused managers, HR goes through the motions of a recruitment without providing the expert advice which is really necessary to get the best person into the role. HR, in short, is not fully utilised in its originating and strongest capacity.

The best practice process for a hire is lengthy and expensive, requiring commitment from many different people in the organisation. Some organisations will carefully hire management levels but haphazardly hire administrative and support staff, others will promote internally without any process at all. Those who have read my other articles and who are familiar with my general outlook on business know that I like to strip as much unnecessary procedure out of any given task as I can. This is one of the rare times when I will advise to have MORE rather than less process. Not for the generally given reasons of ‘fairness’ or to ensure that the business’ backside is covered from appeal or unions – but simply because this is one of the most important things that a business does alongside its core process.

Businesses are made of products and people, in service businesses these two aren’t even distinct. The outcomes of hiring (whether in the short or long term) impact directly upon output, bottom line results, culture and overall excellence. The more complex your hiring process is, the more likely you will sieve out those that you want from those that don’t belong. In the long term, it is far better to spend time and money on a recruitment drive than later have to cope with a problem employee which will take even more time (thanks to business-unfriendly legislation) and effort to get rid of. Invest now for less headaches and expense later.

What, then, does a good recruitment involve? Let’s go back to defining what recruitment IS. Recruitment is the selection of a person to fill a role within a company. Implicitly, then, we need to know exactly what the role is and what kind of a person we want – then we see how closely we can match the two to have a solution to our staffing problem. We also have to decide how we will go about this. Common sense though this is, the implementation of this solution involves many disparate steps.

The role

Organisations must realise that an administrator is not an administrator is not an administrator. The same goes for managers, salespeople, cleaners, receptionists, process workers and any other role you care to name. The core function itself may be similar across sites or departments, but the people that the new hire must interact with will be different as well as the smaller jobs or responsibilities they will have in each separate locaton. HR often tries to save time by standardising Job Descriptions and interview questions. Don’t give into the temptation of taking either of these on without having a very thorough look through them to ensure that they are an EXACT fit to what you want. Fight HR if you need to – better now than when there’s already a person in place drawing your attention to the fact that what you’ve just asked them to do is not actually in their Job Description.

Take the time to sit down and really think about what this person will be doing, what kinds of skills they will HAVE to have on day one and which skills you can train in on-the-job. Decide on a title, decide on a remuneration – and don’t be stingy – you get what you pay for.
Don’t just do this with higher level and managerial positions. Any manager relies heavily on administrative and other support staff to make his or her ideas a concretised reality. Good support staff are essential for the efficient running of a business.

The person

There are two things you are looking for in every new hire. Skills and attitude.

I’ve talked about skills above. Don’t be fooled into thinking this is a 50/50 split - here’s why.

Let me give you a scenario. You have hired someone with fantastic attitude but not enough skills to complete the job. You are faced with training them using any courses at your disposal as well as staff time to explain your systems. They are calm in accepting your assessment of their skill gap and easily commit to changing this. Their can-do attitude helps them learn quickly and apply that learning to their task. Their cheerful demeanour helps smooth the impact of any mistakes they have made on fellow staff. Your problem will be solved relatively quickly. If their role needs to undergo a change, there will be relatively little problem in selling this to them – in fact, they will probably help to develop the role to better serve the company.

Scenario two is the flipside of this. You have hired someone of startling technical competence but whose attitude needs a lot of work. In their first week, they have offended half your office and alienated the other half with their superiority complex. You approach them with your observations of their shortcomings and they react with anger and denial. You know that changing this innate character flaw will be an uphill and time-consuming battle. In the meantime, they produce excellent work within the parameters of their job but you can already imagine their vehemence if what they were asked to do changed even slightly.

Which would you prefer? Is skills and attitude really an equal trade-off? You can now see why I say ‘no’.

This is not to say that it is impossible to change the second type of person, but why give yourself that kind of grief if you can get things right in the first place?

This is why if I am to make any mistake at all in a hire, I would prefer overestimating someone’s skills rather than being mistaken as to their character.

On the practical side, when people are answering questions, take note of how they speak of their previous employer and co-workers, how they express the reasons for any failures they have had, what their attitude toward further learning is, how they speak to you, whether or not they make eye contact with everyone on the panel, what their body language is like, how they’ve chosen to dress, who on the panel they address when answering questions, how comfortable they are with a question out of left field, how they respond to a change of pace and formality in the interview etc. You need to take a lot of things into account before you get your ‘gut’ instinct about a person.

The Team

It’s all well and good to throw up the old bromides of ‘excellence’, ‘teamwork’, ‘dynamism’, ‘friendliness’, ‘leadership’ – but what do these mean in the context of where your new hire will work?

Will they need to be assertive in a team made up of strong individuals or will they need to take a leadership role in a team of people who can rarely come to a quick decision? Are you hiring people to bring a ‘breath of fresh air’ into the team or are you hiring someone to fit a role, a slot, EXACTLY without making too many waves in the process?

All of these considerations highlight my previous point of not taking a stock standard Job Description on – you simply won’t be selecting for the correct team fit if you don’t decide what kind of personality you want beforehand.

Make note of what kind of person you want and ensure that it is the focus of one or two formal interview questions.

The Questions

So we finally come to the questions to be asked. My take on this is that it is important to grill the interviewee for as long as it takes (why not make an interview 1.5 or 2 hours? Why the rush?) to ensure that you have covered all bases. Much more important than sparing yourself (or them) the ordeal of a tough interview process. It’s vital to end up with as complete a picture of each candidate as possible.

Standard HR will tell you to ask the same questions of each person to ensure ‘fairness’ – I prescribe the same process for an entirely different reason. In the end, an interview is there for the employer, not for the employee. It is a fact-finding mission, not an exercise in political correctness. So find facts – logically and systematically.

If you were comparing 5 brands of washers, you would probably set up a spreadsheet in order to track each washer’s size, cost, noise level, energy efficiency, water usage and aesthetic design. You would be, essentially, asking the same ‘questions’ of every model so that you could make an informed judgement as to the ranking of each against the key criteria.

Transfer this to an interview situation. By analysing the job itself you have determined what you need skills-wise, by analysing the team and the company you have determined what you need personality-wise. Why not ensure that you have asked each candidate the same questions so that when you come to the end of face to face interviews, you have a complete set of data to made decisions from?

Of course, this doesn’t mean that you can’t ask for clarification on a point or delve deeper where you think there’s something interesting to be discovered.

Questions should be split between technical-style queries into the person’s competence in the field and more personally probing questions to see how the person has coped with or would cope with hypothetical scenarios.

You also have the choice of including a few ‘old chestnuts’ such as “What are your weaknesses?” and “Why should we choose you for the role?”

There are many books out there with sample interview questions that you can reference for the personality probing questions. Technical questions should be easy to write, a line manager will be able to determine what is needed in that area.

Above all, don’t include trick questions. An interview situation is a nerve wracking experience and the candidate will be taking everything you say literally, not reading shades of meaning into it. Like cryptic crossword clues that are obvious in hindsight, trick interview questions are merely a harder way to get to the end result – not necessarily a better way.

I also like to send the line manager the completed list of questions and ask them to write model answers in point form for me. This has a three-fold effect.

Firstly, I am a Human Resources person – I really don’t know what a good answer to a technical question looks like. The model answers help me to more confidently assess the interviewee’s skills competence in their field.

Secondly, this focuses the panel in comparing each interviewee against a template ‘model answer’ rather than just against the last interviewee or the group being interviewed. It also prevents each panel member from having their own idea of what an ideal candidate’s answers will look like. Keep your panel working off the same page.

Lastly, it helps the panel easily assess if the interviewee’s answer is on track very, very quickly and if they’ve covered all the points that should be covered in such an answer.

Stitches in Time - Introduction

2004-12-08T15:22:00.000Z

People often ask me what I do professionally. The answer is - I was in HR and no longer work there. Inevitably, I'm asked why I left and it's sometimes hard to fully explain the extent to which logic and rationality are missing from HR departments.

The reason I left HR was that I have definite ideas about HR's role in a company - and I don't think that that role is as the joy-killing thought police. One of the important roles of HR is in hiring, an area that is one of the most neglected in every company I have ever worked in.

So today, when looking for another document on my computer, I came across something I wrote when I was at my last contract. Something I had been trying to say and to implement there and which was routinely ignored.

It's in three parts as it was essentially an essay that I wrote on a longish train journey north to try and mitigate the fact that no-one seemed to be listening to me. I also wanted to clarify my thoughts and essentialise my experience in the field of slotting people into jobs. Either way, I had a need to write it down - a precursor to blogging, methinks.

I thought I would share it with you - who knows, you may learn something interesting.

M

Bears repeating

2004-12-07T15:02:00.000Z

The 2004 Weblog awards are on and I was rather surprised (although very pleasantly) that this blog has been shortlisted for the 'Best UK Blog' - so thank you to my anonymous fairy blogmothers who made that happen.

Two things, therefore, need to be done.

A campaign speech, of course. But first I wanted to reproduce a comment I made on the site regarding all this controversy about the nomination/selection process. It seems some people aren't particularly happy about who was shortlisted and are really acting like jerks about it.

I'm not going to be apologetic for being on the list because there's no conspiracy that put me there in the first place. So far as I know, there has been no behind-the-scenes string-pulling and friendship-using. In fact, I was the one who told a couple of the Samizdata crew that they were up for the award themselves - days after the selection list went up.

So here's my comment, repeated, because I thought it was pertinent:

"Why is there so much goddamned bitterness about this? We're not exactly talking about cash prizes and bikini babes draped over expensive, high performance cars. We're talking about a little bit of extra traffic for a couple of weeks.

If the blogs are, indeed, shite then that traffic spike won't last beyond that boost.

Disliking the list because you dislike the politics or don't actually read those blogs is one thing.
Resorting to disparaging the authors of those blogs ("Disturbing-out-of-touch-with-reality-extremists") is a little juvenile. I'm one of the bloggers on that list - nominated without my knowledge and then shortlisted without my knowledge or input.

Don't like the competition? Do the most American thing in the world, get out there and run your own competition instead of doing the very French thing and whining about the unfairness of it all."

Right, now that that unpleasantness is over and done with, let's get on with the fun part - ~~me making promises I have no intention of keeping past the inaugurtion~~ my campaign spiel.

On to the next post.

M

_____

***Campaign Speech - DRAFT - Not To Be Released. ***

My fellow bloggers, readers and even those unpleasant lurking assholes who do nothing bar leave nasty comments all over the 'net,

I think it's important to remember why we're doing this in the first place - why we blog. We blog for ~~money~~ ~~power~~ ~~revenge~~ ~~babes~~ ~~something to do on the lonely nights when even the dog won't spend time with us~~ ~~the pleasure of striking fear into the hearts of lizards like Dan Rather~~ the fun of it.

We are a ~~rare~~ increasingly common breed of people who have some desire to ~~stir the pot~~ have our say in the world. By publishing our thoughts online, we hope to provoke thought and ~~unmitigated violence~~ rational discussion on topics close to us. Some of us just like to ~~waffle on about crap that no-one else cares about~~ muse on different topics or describe our lives - and that's just fine too.

Fine because, in the end, blogs are ~~irrelevant~~ a 'pull' rather than ~~'flush'~~ 'push' medium. If people don't agree with or like some blogs, they just ~~disparage them and slander the author any way they can~~ ignore them and go read something they like - casting their vote with their readership and loyalty.

So here's the deal with these awards and what I promise.

I promise absolutely nothing.

Nothing will change on this blog if I win or lose or come in somewhere in the middle. I have loyal readers, some of which have become close friends, which I would lose if I were to suddenly decide to engineer this thing toward the sole end of popularity. I enjoy writing the things I do on here, in the style which I choose to do it in, at the pace which I've chosen and with the quirks, irregularities and annoyances which probably means that I have and will always have a limited audence.

So be it.

So to those that have come to this blog because you clicked through from Wizbang's awards - welcome. There are a lot of archives here and my writing doesn't tend to be too topical, so it's worth a read even if it's months old.

To those of my readers who genuinely think that mine is the best blog listed under that category - please vote for me. If you think mine's no good - may I suggest you take a look at Samizdata. My standing at the end of the awards won't make me cry but some support is, of course, nice.

To those who weren't nominated this year, ~~tough~~ well, there's always next year. You could always do what I did and ~~sleep with all the guys making the decisions to shortlist~~ completely ignore the awards and have them sneak up on you in a pleasant way.

In any case, let's keep our focus on what's really important in the blogosphere ~~fisking anyone within range~~ - writing.

M

A reminder

2004-12-07T14:28:00.000Z

It's no secret that I love Jack Vettriano's art and no secret that only a handful of things are keeping me living in London - the accessibility of great art, of educational gallery talks and other presentations, work/business opportunties, the proximity to Europe and the ability to mix with some truly exceptional people (thank you again, Perry, for the lovely Christmas party).

And so emails from C with cultural events are always welcome in moments when I am trying to remember what the hell I'm doing here on these grey, grey not-quite-proper-winter-but-chilly-and-nasty days.

So -

Jack Vettriano will be signing copies of Anthony Quinn's 'Jack Vettriano', which is essentially a book that will supersede the excellent 'Lovers and Other Strangers'. His eminence will be at the Pan Bookshop in Chelsea, London on the 9th of December at 7.30pm for anyone wishing to purchase a copy and have it signed.

Merry Christmas to me :)

M

A winter's tale

2004-12-05T05:33:00.000Z

I know that winter has descended on London, yet some part of me revolts against the idea.

Winter, you see, comes with a certain smell about it - the smell of real cold.

It's not something I've ever been able to whittle down to its constituent components. If you asked me to be logical about it, I would tell you it smells like wood long burnt and cooled, like smoke, like faint, cool embers, like concrete and bitumen and more than a little like metal if metal were a living thing.

Real cold takes your breath away.

In Warsaw, I would pad down the institutional green-and-grey painted stairs in my apartment block - boots fur-lined, bulky sweater under bulkier coat, gloves and hat and scarf and bag all adding to make my profile more yeti than human. I marched through cloyingly warm centrally heated air into the antechamber of the entrance hall, hurrying to work. Here, the two doors to the outside formed an airlock between the false summer inside and the very real winter waiting beyond.

The first thing I would feel was the mild sting of the suddenly freezing air against any exposed skin. The light, already bright in the cloudless morning, would reflect off the snow covering every surface and dazzle me into a state of clarity and alertness. My first breath would always catch, lungs protesting such a rude and sudden change of atmosphere. That first fight for breath was what marked the start of every winter morning that I knew.

I thought I knew the feeling of real cold until I travelled to a small village on the Russian border where my father grew up and where the bulk of my extended family still lived. Disembarking from the train to a deserted platform, I made my way out of the station laden with a basket of gifts for innumerable and interchangeable cousins that I still can't name with any great accuracy.

I stood in the street, small pricks of cold on my face dissolving the fantasy of gentle, kind snow and I breathed in deeply. Cold. Pure cold. From the moment I had stepped off that train it had been seeping it's way into the cracks between layers of clothing. It whispered against my cheeks, where the skin was taking longer and longer to regenerate warmth between each frigid kiss.

I looked around for some lee that would protect me from the wind without obscuring me from view. I was to be plucked from the snow and delivered to the family by an uncle, there to be gawped at and prodded and asked friendly questions and outright quizzed on any topic that they chose like a sideshow attraction or an oddity of some sort. They didn't get to see many Australians - if any at all - and my function was to be congenial and informative and entertaining for a few days. I was resigned to the time I would spend with them, knowing that what I wanted most was to sate my hunger for new landscapes and experiences.

I found a bus shelter a little way off and sat down to wait. The cold, though, the wretched fascinating cold didn't abate - it just crept up more slowly to chill me in a way I had never thought possible.

It seemed that I was there forever and it seemed for all the world that I was completely alone. No car drove by, no human came into view, no animal stirred and no branch of any tree moved an inch.

Leaves and garbage and the thousand incidental things that usually move to give the landscape some life were preternaturally still. The only thing animated was the snow - falling at a slight angle, at a constant rate and as silent as a rain of cotton wool.

I was trapped in a painting with one perpetually repeating, moving element. So quiet that it seemed I had lost all sense of sound. So cold that only one sense began to matter.

The coat, gloves, scarf and hat that had been perfectly adequate for the metropolis of Warsaw were laughably useless here. The muscles of my arms and legs had locked in a clench that would only move from the shudders emanating from my very core. To blink I drew two chilled sheaths over my eyes.

I waited, playing a game of dare, seeing how long I could stand the discomfort before seeking relief or walking across the town in a blind search for my family. Every minute that I stood there was a miniscule win against an invisible foe.

The car did arrive eventually, as did the apologetic uncle. I thawed gently in the passenger seat, half listening to him, looking out the window with a new appreciation for the power of nature.

In the ensuing days, I would use any excuse to go outside and any tactic for it to be by myself. No errand was too small to run for my grandmother and no distance too large to traverse on foot.

I came to look forward to my encounters with the cold and noticed myself change the moment I stepped outside. I would smile at the frozen landscape, my heart light, triggered by that first raw breath and the smell of winter. It made me feel inexplicably alive, as has real cold every time I've encountered it since.

M

Nom de plume

2004-12-02T23:12:00.000Z

I remember quite clearly the decisions that brought me to starting this blog. I remember doodling on a notepad to come up with a name and sifting through some pretty hideous colour combinations to choose a template I liked. I remember wondering if anyone would actually read what I had to say.

I also remember making a very important decision - whether or not to blog anonymously.

There have been times, especially lately, when I've had more than a passing wish that my legal name weren't right there next to my actual mugshot.

There are so many things I'd absolutely love to write about that I can't because they've been told to me in confidence, because there are large companies or known names involved, because I'm privy to something that I just shouldn't be privy to (although it's been buzzing around my head like a trapped blowfly), because I would love to vent a scathing criticism of an acquaintances's behavior but know that many of my friends read this blog and could very easily figure out who I'm referring to. Sometimes I know a regular reader of this blog would instantly recognise themselves in a scenario and be rather upset.

In short, this isn't a diary or a forgiving blank page that will absorb everything I want to say, take away my frustration or let me rant and rave at leisure with no criticism or repercussions.

Today I had lunch with someone who has that freedom and I have to admit it made me a little jealous.

She's Russian, although fluent in English and had recently started a new job here in England. Overwhelmed with impressions, she sat down and wrote a couple of essays about her experiences at work. I know that those experiences aren't particularly positive and don't paint her co-workers or the way things run in this country in the rosiest light. I also know that this is well deserved. We both know that she would be fired if her writing became publicly associated with her name.

She sent the essays in to a widely circulated Russian newspaper and they liked them so much that they published them as columns.

The considerable interest that her writing generated has prompted the newspaper to commission a book from her - one that will be distributed to Russian speakers not only in the Federation, but (more importantly and profitably) to the millions in Europe and America.

Her eyes sparkled as she described some of the things she had written about already and some of the things to come - as well as the general outline of the book. Based on her experiences in this particular profession (no, I don't think I can tell you which profession, sorry), it looks at the instition she works in from the perspective of the clients and the providers of the service. It will be a work of fiction but the characters will be very much grounded in the people she observes daily.

Suddenly, she tells me, going to work is a completely different experience. She is acutely aware of everything around her. Mundane details are now a backdrop that needs to be remembered and described. The frustrations and tantrums are just more fodder for the story. She doesn't particularly care that she's paid a pittance. Work, she says, has become fun.

I started to imagine all the things I'd actually like to write about on here but have censored, and I came to realise how very different this blog would have been had I decided on anonymity from the beginning.

I'm not sorry for my decision - I've met some phenomenal people by freely giving out my identity. It just drives home to me once again how much communication is tailored to the audiences in our lives.

M

Your number's up

2004-11-30T10:52:00.000Z

As soon as I saw this article about soccer hooligans using mobile phones as weapons, my mind started to second-guess the legislative repercussions in the near future.

Would they ban mobile phones at stadiums? At large gatherings? Would one have to be over a certain age to own a mobile phone? Would one have to obtain a government license to own or use a mobile device? Would people with criminal records be banned from owning a handset? Would mobile phone companies be forced to engineer phones in a certain way to get rid of sharp edges or aerials?

Ludicrous? Perhaps not so much in today's Western societies.

In the example of the mobile-phone-as-projectile above, the logical answer is simply to treat the assault of one person by another using a mobile in the same way as you would treat that assault were it inflicted with a baton, a cricket bat, a hammer, a fist or a stuffed badger. The medium doesn't matter, the law deals with the results - and the results are physical injury.

The focus, though, will undoubtedly be on the mobile phones themselves and I think it's because we're preoccupied with preventing crimes rather than solving them or punishing criminals. We 'prevent' crimes by creating a whole new category of crime - the crime of the precursor.

Under the dubous logic of precursor to crime laws, a perfectly legal action is suddenly rendered illegal because of it's statistical correlation to the initiation of a particular type of legitimate crime.

Thus handguns are illegal in the UK and Australia because of their association with violent death, knives are illegal to carry in public because of their association with gangs and street violence, shuriken are illegal because they're...sharp and knife-like, drugs are illegal because drug addicts are associated with theft and so on down the line until you have patently silly things like hooded tops being illegal in some London suburbs because chavs choose them as a fashion accessory.

What these laws blatantly ignore is the fact that none of these precursors is actually a real crime in and of itself. Owning and carrying a gun doesn't kill someone - choosing to use it in a certain way does. Drug use is self-harm, the decision to mug someone for more money to feed the habit stands alone as a separate action. Wearing a hooded top does not constitute any kind of force against another human being.

Yet participating in a precursor to a crime (a presumed precursor, actually, as the ties aren't always made in a statistically rigorous manner) nets you the same kind of criminal record as perpetrating a crime against another human would. Clearly, this isn't the correct function of the law.

The increasing problem with precursor to crime laws is that new precursors are guessed at constantly. Once-normal actions suddenly become illegal in a desparate and misguided bid to 'rid' society of crime - as if that is actually an attainable goal.

So my guess at the kinds of legislation that might be attached to mobile phones really aren't that absurd when placed in this light. A mobile phone is a potential weapon, owning and carrying one could be the precursor to some violent act. By the logic of banning or controlling the precursor, we should ban or regulate the ownership of mobile phones.

What is obvious after a little thought is that the extent of these laws has no limit. Their encroachment on civil liberties is done under the auspices of protecting us from legitimate crime - so they effectively have a carte blanche to multiply and grow, building into whole new lists of permissible and not permissible behavior.

When you take the reach of these laws to their natural conclusion, you eventually see the possibility for absurd legislation.

Take, for example, the 'fact' that owning and carrying a weapon is a natural precursor to an assault.

Let me list all the things that can be used as weapons and that you'll likely find on your person any given day:

A pen
An umbrella/walking stick
A bunch of keys
A book
A handbag/briefcase
A necklace
A tie
A hair stick
A ring that isn't flush to the fingers
A hot drink
A rolled up magazine
A can of deodorant under pressure
A mirror that can be broken into shards
A pair of sunglasses
A stilletto or fairly thin heel

This list is by no means exhaustive, it's just what I could quickly think of when considering the things I carry around and I know Matthew has on his person in public. It doesn't include any of the multitude of things that you can pick up from your environment and use.

How can these everyday things harm anyone?

Quite simply - a weapon is only an extension of the human body, something that gives leverage to an attack. Someone who has rudimentary skills in objects more traditionally considered to be weapons will be quick to spot the same properties in everyday objects.

Should we then ban those everyday objects listed? Should we not allow any person in our society to walk around with any sharp, pointed, heavy, edged or solid object? Should we also outlaw the training and learning of martial arts so that ordinary objects aren't viewed as potential weapons?

No, absolutely not. That would be completely absurd and the fact that it could conceivably be actioned under current legislative logic shows the underlying fault in the very logic behind a lot of legislation.

Weapons can (and I think, should) be carried for personal protection. Laws designed to disarm criminals only result in disarming the law-abiding poulace who genuinely fear a criminal record. Your average violent criminal, posessed of a record started in his early teens isn't going to be overly concerned about a charge for posessing an illegal weapon in public. He knows how to work the system, the charge isn't going to add much to an already blotchy record and he's unlikely to be employed or employable in the first place - one of the reasons that most of us don't want to have any run-ins with the law to our name.

Owning and carrying a weapon is not a legitimate crime. Using it in anything other than reasonable self defense is.

It's quite obvious that we need to repeal the current crop of precursor crimes and severely strengthen another area of law. We need to have zero tolerance for theft, assault, rape, murder - anything that is the actual manifestation of somone's initiation of force or fraud.

We also need to ensure that people can defend their person and property from criminal action without fearing legal repercussions either from the state or from criminals suing for injuries and damages.

Then it won't matter what kind of tool someone uses to perpetrate the crime - only the actual crime committed will matter - if a crime is committed at all, given that the populace will be armed and ready to defend themselves.

So looking back at the article on soccer hooligans using mobile phones - we can see that the use of handsets is only a curious bit of trivia in a piece of news about basic assault. It shows, more than anything else, the amazing pace of technology in that a device that was once prohibitively expensive and fragile is now expendable enough to lob at someone you don't like.

M

(Cross posted to A Western Heart)

The postman always thinks twice

2004-11-30T09:35:00.000Z

M and I happened to be downstairs in the hallway this morning at the same time as the postman called. I now have a unique insight into why the postal system doesn't actually work on this soggy shard in the Atlantic.

We watch him approach through the smoky glass. We both expect the doorbell to ring - the doorbell that would allow someone not three feet away to be alerted to his presence at the door.

*soft knock*

What the? So this is why parcels never get delivered unless I spot postmen coming up the drive. There's a great, big doorbell on the doorframe. Big. Unmissable. I swallow my initial indignation and open the door.

*package thrust at me*

He doesn't even look me in the eye, just pushes it toward me. It's not for me, it's for C. It could equally be for the couple downstairs. Or, probably, for the people next door.

*he walks off*

I spot something on the parcel and call out for him to come back.

"What's this?" I say, pointing to the great, hollering-danger-orange sticker that says 'ID Recorded'

A heavily accented "I don't know."

"What do you mean you don't know?"

"I don't know."

"It says 'ID Recorded' - did you record my ID? You didn't ask for my ID. You didn't even ask who I was."

*He trudges back, grasps the other end of the parcel and starts to pull it toward him.*

"What are you doing?"

"I can get you to sign for it if you want."

"No, no, I don't...that's not the point." A tug of war ensues. I win. "I want to know what this (pointing to sticker) means - does it mean that you're supposed to have recorded my ID?"

"Umm...it's from overseas."

"Yeeeees" By now I'm thinking it's more than a language barrier he and I have between us. It's reality barrier. "But the sticker says ID recorded. I want to know if someone paid extra to ensure that you took a signature before delivering this package."

"They usually have a red sticker over here." *points to other corner of package* "Then I usually record a signature."

"Sure, yeah. But what does THIS sticker over here mean?" I know full well that these stickers are from the Royal Mail. I've seen them on internal mail and parcels before.

"I don't know but it's from overseas."

"What difference does that make? Tell me what the sticker means."

"I don't know."

"What do you mean you don't know? Who on earth is supposed to know?"

He looks at me angrily, I'm not playing by the rules. "What does this mean?"

"It probably means you're not doing your job."

"What?" He raises his voice. "I don't have time for this!" He turns on his heel and marches away.

He doesn't have time for this? Are we discussing sporting results? Is there something I'm missing in this whole conversation?

Matthew by now is holding onto one of my arms, no doubt concerned that I may leap out at this man's throat.

I eye the postman, haughtily sauntering his way up the next driveway, studiously avoiding any eye contact with me. No doubt saving his energy to help bring his ponderous intellect to bear on another insurmountable problem.

I can't help thinking that he's right now planning jihad against anything coming in to this address. Considering the fact that most parcels don't get delivered and credit cards routinely go missing I have no idea how on earth he could make the service any worse. With any luck, the dimwit will stop delivering the 1001 pizza and curry restaurant flyers that seem to form a second rug in the hallway by the end of the day.

M

Zoomquilt

2004-11-29T14:52:00.000Z

A brief reprise before the essayic storm to come tonight. Take the time to enjoy something masterful - Zoomquilt.

Sooper dooper secret

2004-11-28T22:01:00.000Z

Just outside my tube station for the last week:

Mmhmm.

'Covert' - "Not openly practiced, avowed, engaged in, accumulated, or shown" - according to dictionary.com which seems to be staffed by more intelligent people than my local Met bureau.

In these politically correct times, I wouldn't be surprised if every known criminal also got a letter in the mail. The letter, of course, would be written in non-confrontational language especially pitched to the target demographic. Something like:

"Deer Kriminal,

I is riting 2 tell youse that we r currantly undagoing a ongoing criminal catchment proces in yor area. Therez no were 2 hide - exept, u no - where there iz no signs like.

From

Detective Inspector Dibble"

*sigh*

Why do we even pretend that the police try to catch criminals nowadays?

M

Update: What better time to introduce a new link on my sidebar - one that should have been included long ago, since M and I have both been visiting his site daily for quite a while.

If you snorted with indignant laughter (or any other kind of laughter, I'm not fussy) at the above photograph, then you'll certainly enjoy what The Policeman's Blog has to say about the daily realities of policing in the UK.

Truly Incredible

2004-11-26T12:43:00.000Z

I went to see the new Disney/Pixar creation 'The Incredibles' this afternoon and came away happier than I have from a movie in a long time.

So right now I'd love to tell you all about it - and why you should go see it. The danger, of course, in reviewing any piece of art that has some element of plot or suspense is that my revealing too much does the art a disservice. How to sound like I actually thought about it rather than coming out with something as bland as: "It's just good, trust me."?

I've come to the conclusion that there must a school to train reviewers. Somewhere that teaches people how to convey opinions on things without ever revealing to the audience what those things actually are. Thinking on this for a while, I realised that these people could quite easily be political speech writers if they got tired of seeing bad movies and reading bad books.

It's not so much of a problem with every kind of reviewer, though. A restaurant critic isn't going to spoil your night by revealing that cos lettuce was used or that "...the ambugue frittata coils were in a grou-grou sauce with bruised pichmelons and a light sprinkling of galanta seeds."*

*No, none of these things actually exist, but they sound like they should. In fact, they probably will when some chef decides he’s tired of calling his signature dish 'bangers and mash'.

So what to tell you of the movie?

More Bond than Bambi, its great, it's fast, it's fun. It's a knuckle-gnawing ride through someone's fantastic imagination. And it's funny - in a clever way.

What's more, it's a breath of fresh air. These superheroes are...well...heroic - believe it or not. They're not your run-of-the-mill schmuck making do in a horrible situation - they're geuninely better at something than the people around them. Much, much better. Unapologetically better.

Add to this that the writers have managed to create well-rounded characters for the main 'cast' and all supporting characters, that the one-liners and visual gags keep coming at a consistent pace throughout the film and that there is an attention to detail which is just stunning...and you have yourself a nice little bit of entertainment for an evening.

So it's just good, trust me.

M

Home Truths

2004-11-25T01:13:00.000Z

The most difficult thing about writing this post was to hold myself back from swearing.

It seems that someone is genuinely concerned about the way in which US Marines are treating furniture in people's homes after seeing some photographs of entrenched soldiers.

To wit:

"If soldiers are in need of rest and they have access to a residence, is it appropriate to sleep on a couch as opposed to the floor?

Is it appropriate to sleep on a bed as opposed to a couch?

Is it appropriate to get in the bed, or just sleep on top of it?

Is it appropriate to use the pillows or not?

And, if it's deemed appropriate to use someone's bed, is there any protocol as to whether one should remove one's boots first?"

I'll tell you what's goddamned appropriate. Anything - ANYTHING - that is necessary to win. It's appropriate to blow craters in the city, it's appropriate to reduce walls to cement dust, it's appropriate to storm mosques and schools, hospitals and private homes - in fact, anywhere a murdering group of thugs is hiding - and kill or subdue them, in that order. If the building happens to sustain damage, it's one of the costs of victory.

I sometimes wonder if people forget what the military is, what it creates with the cadets that walk into boot camps by the thousand every year.

Soldiers are trained, honed killers. They are drilled in the use of tactics, equipment and machinery designed to be the most effective means of eliminating the lives of other human beings. That's the hard (and increasingly unpalatable to our neutered populace) truth.

And here's the rub: the better they are, the freer you will be.

The standards of 'better' in this profession are really quite awesome. Here's what these men are capable of (from a letter home by a US soldier):

"I will end with a couple of stories of individual heroism that you may not have heard yet. I was told about both of these incidents shortly after they occurred. No doubt some of the facts will change slightly but I am confident that the meat is correct.

The first is a Marine from 3/5. His name is Corporal Yeager (Chuck Yeager's grandson). As the Marines cleared and apartment building, they got to the top floor and the point man kicked in the door. As he did so, an enemy grenade and a burst of gunfire came out. The explosion and enemy fire took off the point man's leg. He was then immediately shot in the arm as he lay in the doorway. Corporal Yeager tossed a grenade in the room and ran into the doorway and into the enemy fire in order to pull his buddy back to cover. As he was dragging the wounded Marine to cover, his own grenade came back through the doorway. Without pausing, he reached down and threw the grenade back through the door while he heaved his buddy to safety. The grenade went off inside the room and Cpl Yeager threw another in. He immediately entered the room following the second explosion. He gunned down three enemy all within three feet of where he stood and then let fly a third grenade as he backed out of the room to complete the evacuation of the wounded Marine. You have to understand that a grenade goes off within 5 seconds of having the pin pulled. Marines usually let them 'cook off' for a second or two before tossing them in. Therefore, this entire episode took place in less than 30 seconds.

The second example comes from 3/1. Cpl Mitchell is a squad leader. He was wounded as his squad was clearing a house when some enemy threw pineapple grenades down on top of them. As he was getting triaged, the doctor told him that he had been shot through the arm. Cpl Mitchell told the doctor that he had actually been shot 'a couple of days ago' and had given himself self aide on the wound. When the doctor got on him about not coming off the line, he firmly told the doctor that he was a squad leader and did not have time to get treated as his men were still fighting. There are a number of Marines who have been wounded multiple times but refuse to leave their fellow Marines."

They don't have the TIME to think about whether it's 'appropriate' to lie on a couch. They've probably just gone without sleep for days and have been running through swarms of bullets and shrapnel to get to a point where they can rest for a couple of hours. They have their priorities - among them the regeneration of their bodies so that they can continue to fight tomorrow. Consideration for someone's cushions doesn't and SHOULDN'T come into the calculation of whether it's a good time and place to lie down.

Something important to think about here is who these residences belonged to before the soldiers walked in. As I see it, there are likely to be two distinct groups of owners who should take away two distinctly different messages from slightly mussed rugs.

There are the Iraqis who are being saved by these very troops from an intolerable regime. If that's the case, then these men are your liberators. Consider a footprint on the couch to be the price you pay for their services - goodness knows you're fortunate that some American miles away is actually bearing the real hard-dollar costs of this operation.

There are also the Iraqis who were sympathetic to the ousted regime. If it's a residence belonging to an enemy, then I'd say welcome to one facet of having your ass kicked to oblivion. Somehow, I think upholstery is going to be the least of your future worries.

In the end, we have to decide what we want. Do we want effective soldiers - humans who have been honed to kill, to push themselves to limits that most of us can't even fathom and to survive? Or do we want over-cautious, politically correct, neutered men who wouldn't survive a moment of actual wartime soldiering?

These men and women are rare in our society already - they are people of courageous and unfailing action. Every time we impose some arbitrary rule of engagement or criticise them for doing something that is instinctual and right, we instill some degree of hesitation to their actions, not to mention cast doubt as to the honour of what they are doing. I can't imagine a worse disservice to people who are right now - as we sit and read or write blogs - fighting for our freedom.

M

(Cross posted to A Western Heart)

Update: The Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiller gets the point too and posts up a Times Online article lambasting journalists for portraying our troops in such a bad light.

Everybody was Bujin fighting

2004-11-24T03:36:00.000Z

I found a link to some great photos from that Bujinkan seminar I went to some months back and thought I'd share some of them with a little commentary. Click on each for a larger version.

Here's the official photo, to give you some idea how many people were there:

Ahhh....the luxury of an entire hall covered in soft matting and lots of room to wave your sword around in. Bliss. Sword work is actually my favorite part of Bujinkan, it feels very natural and I can pick things up with ease...unfortunately. Unfortunately because it's really of less use than the hand to hand stuff we do and learning to fight against things like knives and batons. People just don't walk around with a cutlass on their belt like they used to in the good old days.

You can see me on the left side of the photo right against the stage, I have a green belt on and my sword is sticking straight up in the air. I'm highlighted by a sunbeam because...you know...I'm just naturally angelic:

An integral part of Bujin is balance...ensuring that you have it and your opponent loses it asap. Swords are multi-use weapons and can easily be used as a long lever rather than just a cutting edge.

In this example, the attacker (orange shirt) would have had his strike somehow rendered ineffective...probably by Ed Lomax (black shirt) simply moving out of the range of the blade and then coming back in while the attacker was finishing off his swing. Ed then moves in to wedge his sword behind the leading arm of the attacker and in front of his thigh. The attacker now cannot turn back toward Ed, so can't use his own sword.

I don't actually remember what Ed did at this point to make the attacker drop his sword. Let's just presume it was nasty and sudden.

Ed now uses the leverage he has to push the attacker off balance by stepping forward. Note the attacker's hands are ineffective because he can't turn and he can't kick at Ed with the near leg because to do so would likely mean him losing his balance altogether. Best he can do is continue on the turn that Ed is urging him on, present his back and move away...not the best strategy when the person behind you has a sharp Japanese sword.

This would have ended with a mat-kissing session for the attacker in some way.

A sword, though, needs to be OUT to be useful. You can use it as a lever (above) when it's still in it's scabbard, but you can't do much with it when it's still on your belt.

In this case, the attacker is holding his sword, getting ready to unsheath it and trim Ed's haircut by...oh...5 inches.

Ed isn't armed, so he has two choices to get out of the reach of the sword. He can retreat, which is a rather short term option unless he has somewhere to run to - fast. Once that sword is unsheathed it gives the attacker a couple of feet of extra sharp reach and the decided advantage.

Ed also has a different option - to step in. This is surprisingly effective in cases where the attacker is relying on some distance or superior reach to make their weapon or their hands most effective. I've foiled M's plans (he's 6'5, I'm 5'11) more than once by simply stepping in very, very close and punching/pushing/whatever from there. He loses the advantage of his greater wingspan.

Anyway, here Ed is choosing to step in. It's important to do this BEFORE the sword is unsheathed, for obvious reasons.

The guy with the red hair sitting far forward on the mat on the left, by the way is M...or as I have begun calling him lately 'The Ginger Ninja'. I'm standing at the far left of the photograph...concentrating...

Ed does something rather smart...and unexpected. He simply stops the attacker from unsheathing his sword. Now look at Ed's advantage here - he's stepped in, he's probably unsettled the attacker and definitely disrupted his plans. Ed also has a hand free, where the attacker has both hands engaged.

More getting-to-know-the-mat-intimately action would have followed after this one.

Serious though the topic was, we did goof around a bit. There was a lot of love in the room.

And this is my favorite photo by far. The seminar was made up of classes from all around the country. Halfway through the first day, we had a lunch break. Some people wandered off, some stayed. Most of my class stayed...and stayed together. We weren't really talking, we just gathered loosely, sat and reflected a little then - one by one - a few of us lay down and slept in a corner of the hall. The others sat off the edge of the picture and ate lunch.

Afterward, someone from another class came up to me and said:

"That was really nice"

"What?"

"The way you guys all slept in the one corner...it sort of shows...that you trust each other, you know? It's like your class gives off this great vibe."

And in a way, it dawned on me that we did. Kidding aside, we all trained hard every week and did things that could be dangrous. There had to be some trust - trust that when that fist was coming for you, it would stop just in time, trust that when someone's arm is around your neck, they will have the control necessary not to squeeze too hard, trust that when someone is twisting your arm to throw you to the ground, they're not going to do it with the speed and strength that would snap a bone. With an art as effective as Bujin, it's just too easy to hurt your partner if you're not conscientious. Every. Single. Time.

So I like that photo. It encapsulates to me how lucky I am to be training with those guys - most of the regular class is made up of black belts or guys who are within a couple of grades of it. It's always an honour to be there.

M

From scratch

2004-11-24T03:05:00.000Z

20 minutes. I swear to you – that’s all it took to cook a healthy dinner for three from scratch.

I’m telling you this because I’m sick to death of people who say that they don’t have time to cook. I’m nauseated by people whinging in the press about the difficulties of eating healthily in a modern world…yada, yada, yada. I’m fed up with the health Nazis deciding that it’s time to legislate food and whack taxes on things the state determines is ‘naughty’ to consume because we’re evidently too stupid to make a meal for ourselves.

Garbage.

If you can’t look in the fridge and the pantry without getting some idea of a meal you can create then guess what? You can’t cook.

No, really. You can’t. You have pretty much no idea of the kinds of things that can be reasonably combined to create something that is edible and nutritious.

If you can’t just walk into your kitchen and apply your mind, your dexterity and (probably) a bit of heat to some raw ingredients then you’re missing a rather vital skill.

And that’s just fine. Cooking is a learned skill – like typing or knitting or driving or pretty much anything else you care to name that humans have mastered. No-one is born with some innate idea of what to do with a frypan and an egg. These things are usually gleaned from watching parents but increasingly from media outlets foaming with excitement about some new celebrity chef and THEIR take on lamb roast.

(Roast. All celeb chefs do roast, it’s some unwritten rule. If you’re going to change the world of cooking, you must somehow start with roast, one of the easiest things in the world to make apart from soup. Take ingredients. Prep ingredients…might involve stuffing garlic shards into flesh of meat *gasp - the ingenuity!*…Tumble ingredients onto oven tray. Stick in oven. If you’re feeling particularly precious – baste at intervals. Pull out. Let meat rest. Carve. If you look nice for the camera and add a sprig of rosemary to your concoction you’ll likely be crowned the Next Big Thing and end up rehashing everyone else’s recipes with one ingredient modified in your bestselling book. Me? Cynical? Get outta here!)

You probably also don’t have a well stocked kitchen, which comes with the territory of not knowing how to cook. If you don’t know what to do with flour, spices, legumes, raw vegetables and herbs then you’re not going to buy them. If you don’t have them at home you’re likely not going to experiment with them. Bit of a vicious circle that one.

I love to cook, it’s no secret. What’s also not a secret is the amount of foul things I’ve made along the way when I was just learning. It’s a miracle that M survived the early married years considering the fact that I had a penchant for reducing otherwise serviceable ingredients into something that even a starving dog would have second thoughts about.

I burned, I over salted, I over sugared, I fell in love with certain ingredients and started including them in everything, I undercooked, I created lumpy sauces and custards that could be used as FX in B grade horror flicks, I skipped steps in recipes by accident and ruined things terribly.

But.

I also learned and knowledge compounded on knowledge so that now I know the basic tenets of cooking and can do something with almost any given ingredient – if I generally know it’s properties, how it tastes, how it reacts to heat and cold, what group of spices it will react best with. I’ve learned how to chop and slice properly. I’ve battled with slimy fish and their stubborn-to-remove scales. I’ve sworn at Google when holding a weird Asian vegetable picked up out of curiosity at a market…trying to figure out what the hell to do with it.

It’s because I’ve never considered myself to be a great cook that I keep experimenting and adding to that knowledge base.

Anyhow, coming back to all that ‘don’t have time’ nonsense. Nonsense. You don’t have the skill.

Besides, if something is important enough to you, you’ll find the time.

20 minutes is all it took to make this:

It's stupidly healthy and really nice to boot. I had to stop M and C from eating it standing at the kitchen workbench and shoo them into the lounge.

Lamb pan fried in extra virgin olive oil with mint (Pan. Heat. Oil. Lamb. Watch. Flip. Watch. Remove. Cut slices at an angle if you love your guests. Take frozen mint – fresh seasonal mint which you’ve placed into the freezer for just such a time – and chop repeatedly until you have a mush that you can spread on the lamb. Don’t use the stuff in jars – this is much fresher and tastier, the only difference between it and fresh mint is the consistency as freezing has broken the cellular walls of the plant material.)

Steamed broccoli, steamed potato (If you can’t figure out how to use a steamer, I’m taking away your right to walk around in society. You’re a danger.)

Nuked sweet potato (Microwave. 3 minutes)

Sauteed mushrooms (A little bit of water into the frypan once the lamb is finished…swish round to pick up the residue and allow to boil…throw in chopped mushrooms. Wait till they’re, you know, cooked.)

Sauteed spinach with roasted sesame seeds and Maldon sea salt (Roasting nuts and seeds can be tricky – because they’re devious for the most part. They’ll do nothing…absolutely nothing…then, suddenly, they’ll be black and your smoke alarm will go off. Watch them like they’re a street urchin within sniffing distance of your wallet. Remove from heat when you can smell the roasting seed and when there is a hint of brown. As for the spinach? A little olive oil…heat…spinach…and it’ll be wilted – therefore done – before you can say “Geez, I wonder how long spina….” The salt? The important thing here is that it’s the wonderful little pyramid-shaped crystals of sea salt, not just factory-churned NaCl. Instructions? Sprinkle sparingly.)

Dessert? We didn't have any but if you want something really nice and *really* simple to make...

Take some very, very creamy greek yogurt. Drizzle honey on top. Roast some almond slivers (just like the sesame seeds...watch 'em...and don't be stingy, they taste glorious and add great texture) and sprinkle them on top. Voila.

And that, my darling blog readers is it.

Really, if I didn’t have a book in one hand, I could have shaved a good 5-7 minutes off. But who’s counting?

M

I'll ask for no more than an hour...

2004-11-23T19:19:00.000Z

...of your time to read:

'History' by Bill Whittle of Eject! Eject! Eject!

I don't think I'll be indebted to you once you're done.

M

Commentariat

2004-11-22T17:19:00.000Z

I've been asked for my views on comments and comments policies. Alright, let me quickly post about that and blog policies in general since it's something I've been meaning to do for a while. This may as well stand as the current policy on this blog until/unless I feel the overwhelming desire to figure out how to make a pretty box pop up with some purpose-written policy on demand.

I think my views can be summarised in the following few points:

* A blog is private property. The only rules are those set by the owner of the blog and as such they are the ultimate arbiter in any disagreements, whether they be right or wrong in the matter.

*Some blogs are hosted on other people's servers or with free software that comes with conditions. *looks around* In such cases, the blog owner may themselves be subject to restrictions. Anything outside those explicit restrictions are fair game for the whims of the blogger.

* A blog doesn't need to have comments to be a 'proper' blog. They're a courtesy enabled by the blog owner, not a 'right' that the world at large has over a blog.

* Comments are - by and large - in existence to discuss the same topic as the post that they're attached to, not just some public megaphone. As such, spam should justly be deleted as should commenters that stray too far from the topic or from reality in general.

* An interesting point that was brought up at the ASI's Democracy and the Blogosphere event was that of libel/slander. If a blogger believes that someone is being libellous or slandering another, the comment should be deleted - for the protection of the blogger, if naught else. I think that this really has to be considered in context, though, as some bloggers wouldn't know a libellous statement if it came up and bit them on the ~~ass~~ thigh. The law probably hasn't caught up in providing us with precedents to work from (has it? anyone?)...so it's best to be on the safe side, remembering that a blog is still a public forum (albeit privately owned).

* If you don't like it, go elsewhere. Preferrably somewhere far, far away where they still spear and sauté the more annoying people in the village.

_____

There are a few people that have put these points in a different (usually more witty) way in their general policies:

Andy, Lead Simiant over at World Wide Rant has a rather long and frightening policy that reveals a lot about his psyche as well as the site in general.

Mike, Anger Management Consultant at Cold Fury has a lovely statement:

"While I enjoy and heartily encourage comments, even ones which disagree with my own opinions, please note that I can and will delete comments and ban IP's capriciously and utterly at my own whim. This is not a debate club, and I am under no obligation whatsoever to host insults, slander, and/or total bullshit. Complaining about it is futile. If this injures your delicate sensibilities too severely, click on the link to CWI Hosting on the main page and get your own damned website. It's not all that expensive, it's not all that difficult, and then you can say whatever you like."

Perry, Overlord of Samizdata opines:

"Samizdata.net editors are God and God moves in mysterious ways. If you have an article, comment, rant or smart-arse rejoinder that you would like to contribute to Samizdata.net, e-mail it to us and we might publish it suitably edited. Or not."

...and, most succinctly, Mike - Supreme Leader of A Western Heart states:

"Note: If the editors consider your remarks to be unworthy, they will delete them."

I think everyone now gets their drift and mine.

M

Pavlov's ducks

2004-11-22T13:10:00.000Z

I took the camera on my run the other day, just to see what I would capture. All it taught me was that you can plan all you like in life, but you can't faithfully predict what will happen.

I was running along a footpath by a lake. The other side of the water sports one of those massive old castles-cum-stately homes with sprawling swan-infested lawns, turrets, flying buttresses, towers...in short everything that you might need to defend yourself if dragons were to suddenly infest the piddly little hills around London or if we were to expect a Norman invasion wielding trebuchets and archers. It's now used as a crown court and really can be a very pretty building from some angles, in some light, if you have a penchant for that kind of thing...and if you squint.

So my plan was to take a photo of the building. I stopped and pulled the camera out of it's case, pressed the 'on' button and looked up to judge my shot.

Suddenly from below, I heard an almighty, braying, drawn-out 'Honk!'.

It was a swan the size of a small car and it evidently thought that I needed some critical direction. Out of the corner of my eye, I discerned other movement. As my gaze travelled up the length of the lake to my right, I saw all manner of ducks, geese and swans suddenly - as if on cue - turn toward me and start paddling as quickly as their little webbed stilts would let them.

It was a formiddable force and it knew it wanted one thing - complete dominance and control of any baked goods I may have with me.

Unfortunately for them, I don't run with bread rolls. I don't even eat them.

Not waiting to find what would happen if this battallion were suddenly dissappointed, I took my shot - of them instead of the building - and ran off...toward them down the footpath, passing them as they glided to a stop and followed me with deadly, beady little black eyes.

It was a narrow escape.

M

What Every Man or Woman Should Be Able to Do

2004-11-21T15:51:00.000Z

I subscribe to a very small set of rather good email lists. Most of them are from professionals doing something very much against the grain in their respective fields. You can learn a lot from the troublemakers - they're usually the ones who bother to think rather than just follow.

Anyhow, the following message popped into my Inbox the other day and I thought it was just brilliant:

Dear Monica,

'Every man should be able to save his own life. He should be able to swim far enough, run fast and long enough to save his life in case of emergency and necessity.'

The quote mentioned above comes from Earle E. Liederman, a renowned fitness pioneer back in the days of Charles Atlas.

Anyway, in order to 'save his your own life' - as well as the life of a loved one, Liederman did NOT advocate bodybuilding. Or powerlifting.

Much of Liedermans' life-saving method evolved around the development of 'strength-endurance' with bodyweight calisthenics.

Recently, in Dr. Al Sears - Health Confidential for Men - a newsletter I HIGHLY reccommend, he said:

'I've seen patients transform their bodies through the power of calisthenics. You too, can see improvements in your appearance and in your stamina. And, by doing regular calisthenics, you will be lowering your risk of injury and building muscle that has been 'trained for function.'

Let's face it, big gigantic muscles may impress some people, but there is nothing more impressive than having the functional strength-endurance to do things with ease - including saving someone's life. Yours included.

Liederman's life-saving prescription is not very far off from my own. He wrote that you should ...

* Be able to swim at least half a mile or more;
* Be able to run at top speed two hundred yards or more;
* Be able to jump over obstacles higher than your waist;
* Be in condition to pull your body upward by the
strength of your arms, until your chin touches your hands,
at least 15 to 20 times;
* Be able to dip between parallel bars or between
two chairs at least 25 times or more.

'If a man can accomplish these things,' Liederman said, 'he need have no fear concerning the safety of his life should he be forced into an emergency from which he alone may be able to save himself.'

All for now.

Kick butt - take names!

Matt Furey

I had stumbled across his ad and read a short description of how he came to his techniques...a lot of what he said made sense as I had abandoned weight training years ago myself. I found that I was gaining a lot of muscle very quickly (NOT nice on a girl) and it wasn't really functional - I wasn't more flexible or limber or graceful...just stronger in isolated incidents and certain movements. So I've subscribed to his email list in order to get a better idea of what he offers, interesting so far. We'll see.

I still like that email, though, and thought I would share it - it most definitely embodies the third of the latin words I use in my title - 'Sententia' which is a way of thought, an opinion, a meaning...but with (or for) a purpose. Rather important, methinks.

M

Canadian Prime Minister Announces ‘Adopt A Leftie Scheme’

2004-11-21T04:53:00.000Z

In a bid to mitigate the effects of the massive migration of American Leftists following the recent election, Canadian Prime Minister, Paul Martin has launched the ‘Adopt a Leftie Scheme’

“Of course we’re glad to welcome fellow French-ass-kissing liberal wieners. We do so with open arms and pouty lips. It’s just our way.”

Fears are mounting on the local labour market as businesses come to grips with what it will mean to have so many actors join the workforce.

“We just don’t have the infrastructure to deal with the influx. There are only so many waitressing jobs in the country. Many will go without.” Said a Toronto McDonald’s franchise owner.

The PM has conceded that this could be a massive humanitarian disaster if not planned out on a federal level. Tanning lotion, tooth whitener and mirrors have already been air lifted into Quebec and other supplies are on their way. “We’re waiting on mineral water at the moment. It’s a tense time.”

The scheme to Adopt A Leftie is the brainchild of Mr Arnold Coif, Minister of Grooming, Deportment, Funny Little Accents On Top Of Letters and Other Odd Jobs. He realized early on that it was important to integrate the new arrivals into the existing community.

“No one wants to take out the trash one morning and find Janeane Garofalo sqatting beside the bins. Or worse, Michael Moore sleeping on a park bench.

Many of these people are professional actors. This means that they have no personality of their own; they are an empty shell waiting to be filled with someone’s orders. The Kerry campaign fulfilled that need perfectly for a while, but it seems that the election loss has un-coupled these actors from their ‘host’ and they are drifting north in search of redder pastures.”

Families will be encouraged to take an American Leftie into their home. To bathe, feed and quarter them for as long as it takes for them to find a job or decide that the lattes just aren’t up to scratch and migrate south again. State funding is available to mitigate the costs.

Monica White, Toronto

(Yeah, I'm on a 'funnies' jag. Feel sorry for C who has had to endure some of the worst attempts at different accents EVER and terribly lewd asides to almost every sentence she's uttered. My evil knows no bounds.)

M

United Ninnies

2004-11-19T15:09:00.000Z

France's most eminent toad-in-residence, President Jacques Chirac thinks that the UN should be the only body in the world allowed to go to war. 'Allowed', of course, by ... ummm ... the UN.

Here's how I envisage it'll look:

USA: We've got to invade Iran. They're pointing nukes at Manhattan and making gibbering noises from behind those beards again.

UK: Sounds like a plan...

Australia: Count us in.

Israel: Absolutely. We'll just be over there, unpacking the crates of semi-automatic pretties.

Syria: *cough* Well, actually we don't think it's such a good idea.

Germany: We can't commit ourselves to anything that may in any way endanger our new international image of daffodil-chewing peaceniks. Bunny shaped marshmallow anyone?

Zimbabwe: Hegemony! Oppression! Invasion! What? No, no, don't look at ME, I'm talking about the West.

China: What's in it for us?

Afghanistan: Infidels will never walk the holy lands of Iran! (blah, blah, blah...'Allah'...blah...blah..'blood will flow through the streets'...blah...'revenge'...'Islamic brotherhood')

Taiwan: I wonder if someone could please ask the delegate from China to stop pressing on my windpipe quite so hard...I...I can't really breathe....

Cuba: No, no. Don't think so. Unless you want to let us replace these junkheap cars with new ones anytime soon. You lift the embargo and we *might* let you defend yourselves.

Congo: Nope

Switzerland: Don't give a toss either way, mate.

Indonesia: I don't think so.

Taiwan: Umm, guys? *cough* This is getting a little frightening...

Pakistan: No.

Russia: Maybe....maybe. We'll have to talk.

Malaysia: Not on my watch.

France: Well, in light of overwhelming international opinion...I don't think we'll be able to condone such an action. You'll have to take your risk with those Iranians and their ire. On second thoughts, Germany, we *will* have a few of those marshmallows after all...looks like there'll be a lovely, toasty fireball in the near future.

(Taiwan slowly expires in a corner when no-one's looking)

(Cross posted to A Western Heart)

Democracy and the Blogosphere

2004-11-19T02:37:00.000Z

A couple of nights ago, I attended the Adam Smith Institute's 'Democracy and the Blogosphere' event.

Almost more interesting than attending the event itself was waking up to the blog posts of others who had been there and reading what they thought of the whole debate. Interesting because none of us seem to have taken the same thing away - which tells me that the net was flung a little too widely in respect to the topic of the evening.

Asking someone to succinctly describe how blogs will affect democracy really is a tough call. Blogs, after all, are just tools of communication...of dissemmination of ideas. It’s akin to asking someone in the 15th century to opine on the impact the printing press would have on the world. The obvious answer to us is: "massive and fundamental", but historical events are much clearer in hindsight than when we're living through them.

So the tangents the discussion went on that night were rather wild. Some of the panellists mused as to why on earth people blog in the first place. Two of the speakers were professional journalists and bloggers who seemed somewhat amazed that people do all this blogging and writing for FREE...their own blogs being either a distraction from real work or somewhere to display things that they couldn't get past mainstream media (MSM) editors. They missed the point that most people don't actually have the same powerful avenues for self-expression as they do and that blogging is enjoyable and profitable in ways that aren't usually measured in a state-issued currency.

One of the speakers talked about how effective blogs had been as a tool in communicating and refining e-government strategies to the public. If you ever want to see discomfort shimmy across a room, invite someone who just loves to improve and refine bureaucracy to the distinctly anti-big-government Adam Smith Institute.

One thing, though, became clear to me - none of us was really talking about the same thing when we said 'blog', as the term is so damned generic. There were such disparate bloggers in the room...government bloggers, political bloggers, apolitical bloggers, gastronomic bloggers, musing bloggers, business bloggers, bloggers like me...that we all brought different terms of reference in with us. It's no wonder the discussion devolved to talking about something we all had in common - censorship in comments sections and a strong comments policy.

The question of the influence of blogging on democracy is not unanswerable, though. It just takes a little stepping back and looking at the concept of what a democracy is and what blogging is from a macro viewpoint. So I’m going to try my hand at it in this post.

Democracy.

Any government developed with democratic or (classical) liberal ideas in mind is still heavily reliant on it’s constituents to uphold the tenets on which its power is based.

Take a look at America - founded on freedom, for a long time the greatest nation on earth, wonderful constitution - yet it is the nation that instituted anti-trust laws, that has a nationalized health system, that allowed someone like Janet Reno to act in a manner patently unaligned with its core principles.

I've a feeling that the founding fathers would gasp in horror at some of the things that the state they created has implemented. This is because these men had a firm grasp of the ideas upon which a good government should be based. They codified these ideas in a document and written law – which is, unfortunately, an imperfect device of communication.

It's because law has two facets, it’s 'letter' (literal translation) and its 'spirit' (fundamental meaning). The former can be circumvented by interpretation and reinterpretation of the words used, the latter is immutable - if you can find it and understand it from the words employed.

If the populace doesn't understand the spirit behind a document such as the American constitution, then it won't support the politicians that uphold that spirit or those ideas. If the populace doesn't value freedom more than it does security, then it will not revolt at freedoms taken away. If it doesn't understand the long term implications or the philosophical roots of government policy, then it will not question what is being done by those in power. It is the lack of check and balance from the populace that slowly erodes adherence to the principles of good government.

And here's where I think the point has to be made - democracy isn't a cure-all system for any nation state. It isn't a structure that will rigidly coerce people into a certain mode of thought and behavior. Zimbabwe, ostensibly a democracy, has a president and a parliament after all, yet look at what is happening and what the democratic structure is allowing. Democracy isn't a straitjacket, rather, it is a mirror of society and its ideas, its moralities and its current obsessions. Each populace under democracy, then, has the government that it deserves.

The Blogosphere.

So where does blogging come into all this?

A mature and freedom-embracing democracy requires an educated population, since it is the aggregated opinion of the populace that is enforced in the actions of parliament. This is where I think that blogging steps in to fill a current void in a most interesting way.

I’m going to go out on a limb and state that most people's formal education stops when they are no longer corralled in the penitentiaries created for children by our schooling system. It's no wonder really, as - unless you have a particular passion for knowledge of certain topics - most non-fiction books are a harder slog than fiction or entertainment.

Let's also state that it will be political and musing blogging that will affect democracy. Butterfly effect or no, something that an IBM employee writes about chip manufacturing isn't going to rock the boat come election time. By 'political blogging', I mean blogs that are predominantly focused on world events and their reportage with some analysis. By 'musing blogging' I mean those blogs that discuss, at length, ideas and their roots as well as their impact on the world today.

What you often see in the better blogs is professionals, scholars and well-read, opinionated, eloquent and intelligent people distilling their knowledge into bite sized pieces on a certain topic. These small essays, analyses or opinion pieces are embedded with hyperlinks to primary sources or sources for further information and reading. So blogs can make certain topics easy to read, easy to understand and easy to expand upon should the reader be interested and willing. In other words, they can make complex, non-fiction subjects accessible.

This really hinges on the internet being a legitimatized source of information, though. I remember that the trend to research assignments online started when I was in high school. By the time I was at University, it was expected that some proportion of research was from online sources – to the extent that referencing for just such sources was formalized and standardized. The internet is slowly being recognized as a repository of valuable information.

The advantage that blogs have over static web pages is not just the easygoing tone with which information is imparted and shared – but the conversations that strike up around expressed opinions. Blogs that choose to enable comments add a new dimension to their information dissemination – they become a node for a discussion. The best discussions are the thorough critiques of the post and subsequent defensive arguments by the author or likeminded readers. These discussions can either be reaction to simple political blog reportage, to a blog’s analysis of a situation or to an opinion piece or essay.

Someone coming to such a post can receive a fast and thorough education on a particular topic and then may be able to use hyperlinks (or, let's face it, Google) to conduct further reading at his leisure.

I’ve heard Perry de Havilland of Samizata.net state a few times that one of the great rewards of his blog is the occasional email from someone stating that Samizdata has helped them clarify and crystallize their views.

I don't suggest, by any means, that blogs can replace more formal means of education - but perhaps they can take up a role somewhere between 'nothing' and 'college' for people with some mild interest in a topic.

The other feature of blogs is their tapping into the natural human desire to feel that one isn’t alone in one's opinions. Let's face it – it's nice to meet likeminded people and read their screeds - it's an affirmation, occasionally, that you're not entirely mad to hold some of your views.

And then there is the wonderful-to-see blog phenomenon of fact checking the MSM. What I wouldn't give to be a fly on the wall when Dan Rather hears the word 'blog' nowadays.

So given these features – the dissemination of ideas and education of some readers, the sense of community and not being alone in holding a view and the check and balance of a too-long-complacent MSM – how do blogs influence democracy?

Where the twain shall meet.

Well, I think all three interact in an interesting way to change the dynamics of the populace in democracy.

No longer isolated, individuals can affirm that their views are held by others. Empowered to question a once unquestionable media, the populace is free to throw off the MSM's perception of what popular opinion is and ascertain it for themselves. Presented with a rich source of information, analysis and opinion, individuals are beginning to educate themselves – however little – about topics of importance or interest.

I believe that this may help to create a more informed and intelligent voter in the democratic system, one which is less likely to be swayed by propaganda and misinformation because all information presented by the parties will be subjected to the most rigorous review and critique online...which can only be a good thing.

Sure - much of this is mere speculation on my part. I don't think we've seen the full extent of the influence of blogs yet and it's a little early in the game to be making sweeping suppositions. (Like...say...the suppositions I've just made :) )

...but if you asked me to comment about the influence of blogging on democracy, the above would still be my best guess.

M

Amen, Sean

2004-11-17T16:20:00.000Z

"Even before Mike Tomlinson reported on examination reform,everyone agreed, and competed at agreeing, that British stateeducation was a mess. Schools all over the country are turning out generations of innumerate, semi-literate proles. They have become places notable for bullying, truancy in its various shades, drugs, unwise sex, the occasional murder, and apervasive contempt for achievement.

Yes, there are those whose job it is to disagree with this proposition. Naturally enough, there are the teachers and educational bureaucrats; and thereare the relevant Ministers, who every summer put their names on news releases lauding the latest set of examination results. But everyone knows they are talking nonsense.

If examination results were an indicator of excellence, we should be living in a nationof Shakespeares and Newtons. In fact, grade inflation and a continuous debasement of the whole examinations system have made the results largely worthless. We can no more make people educated by giving them pretty certificates than we can make them rich by giving them bags of forged banknotes. State education is a mess...."

So read an email from Dr Sean Gabb that tweaked my attention this afternoon. Follow this link to the rest of the essay, a thought-provoking argument for the abolition of state education.

M

Nothing says 'Kwality' quite like a knife fight

2004-11-16T15:52:00.000Z

You can dress it up in bling, you can quarter it in mansions, you can teach it the value of separating individual words with slices of silence but scum - in the end - will always be scum.

Or, should I say, "You can take the rapper out of the knife-wielding, drug-ridden, violence-soaked neighbourhood, but..."

Am I generalising? Yes, very much so.

Should the patina of shame be cast on everyone in that room or industry? No.

All I'm saying is that you don't often hear of concealed shanks at the Cannes Classical Awards.

M

B.O.H.I.C.A

2004-11-16T15:23:00.000Z

Overheard on the Tube recently:

Woman 1: "They're celebrating Eid at Thomas' school and I've got to make these biscuits..."

Woman 2: "What?"

Woman 1: "Eid"

Woman 2: "What's that?"

Woman 1: "Just some celebration or other...the kids have to make food and bring it in, it has to be vegetarian and...oh...all kinds of rules about it."

Woman 2: "Are you baking them tonight?"

Woman 1: "Mmmmm, I think so. Shouldn't be too bad, I've got the vegetable shortening and bits and pieces already."

Woman 2: "Don't you just love it when they do special things at school? They get so excited! What are they doing for Christmas this year?"

Woman 1: "Oh, nothing much...keeping it really low-key. You know...[whispers] the war and all..."

Eh? What? WHAT? Sweet jesus, woman, do you actually think before opening that trap of yours?

I suppose I shouldn't really be angry at her, she's probably never really stepped back to take a macro view of what's happening around her. This celebration of another culture's religious holiday whilst suppressing your culture's symbols must just seem like another natural extension of political correctness and multiculturalism. Another step forward. Another olive branch or appeasement or humble pulling back of the all-encompassing hegemony of Western thought in the West.

Whenever I see this kind of self-immolation, I tend to think of Edmund J. Pankau and one of his favorite phrases.

I saw him speak at a seminar once and we chatted for a while afterward. The man is very warm, friendly and gregarious in the way that only Texans can pull off with any impunity. On stage, he had spoken about fraud and fraud prevention, professional investigation techniques and tracing money flows across geographic and political boundaries - fascinating stuff. His expertise is in finding the rascals who pilfer large sums of cash and make a run for it, using the various tax havens and covers available to assist in wiping their trail clean.

When describing what it's like to be the victim of such crime, or what it's like to deal with dishonest, shady people, he employs one word incessantly: "B.O.H.I.C.A!" (pronounced 'bowheeka')

Smiling somewhat nastily, he explains what it stands for - "Bend Over, Here It Comes Again".

Indeed.

Those women have no idea, I'm sure, that they were being Bohica-ed (that word is such a natural part of my vocabulary nowadays...). By rights, they should have stormed down to the school and demanded that it either remove ALL religious references in teaching or, at the very least, refer to British culture's norms just as often as those of a foreign culture's.

This creeping spread of an incompatible foreign culture's memes in our schools and government institutions and simultaneous removal of all positive reinforcement of Western thought has got to stop before little Thomas grows up insisting that his wife walk two steps behind him and wear a veil.

M

(Cross posted to A Western Heart)

Waterstones

2004-11-16T05:33:00.000Z

For many years now, I have slowly refined my ideas of what my ideal home would look like. Over time, wings have been built and torn down, colours have changed, the thing has very much aesthetically matured from the typical, boxy, monstrous hulk of a mansion perched on large, flat lawn that every child draws.

Now it isn’t so much a building as a graceful accent nestled carefully into a stunning landscape. Its position is designed primarily to afford me the one luxury that few others realize is a prize – complete, controlled solitude. Large panes of glass admit the varying views from all sides; close quartered forest behind and sweeping vistas to the front. Inside, high paneled ceilings mirror the beautiful wooden floor and solid, simple wooden furniture. Subtle lighting and carefully chosen materials would complete the spaces of the rooms – softening but not cluttering them. Although the rooms would be large and airy, there wouldn’t be many of them. This isn’t a place designed for the needs of guests.

Through all the changes that this place has undergone in my mind’s eye, two things have remained constant.

One is a professionally appointed kitchen in gleaming stainless steel and glowing wood. Every fixture robust, functional and beautifully designed to be a joy to touch and use. Every gadget known to man would be easily accessible and placed carefully to fit into the multitasking workflow of creating several dishes at once. Cooking, after all, is where I learnt to visualize several concurrent streams of activity and plan each one’s commencement so as to time them for perfect convergence at completion. When it works, it’s a wonderful feeling.

I also know from painful experience that no matter how much time, effort and money you use to make the lounge room perfect, everyone will converge around the kitchen. Like groupies to a backstage area, they watch food preparation and talk over stealthily pilfered ingredients around the table.

The other thing that I want is a library.

I’ve always had only the vaguest idea of what the library will look like as I’ve never had a room devoted solely to the pleasures of reading, reflection and learning…the idea is terribly tempting. There would also be a writing desk next to a window…perfection.

So I was amazed that the idea of my home, my library, was acutely brought to mind the moment I stepped into the Waterstones near Goodge St station today. The first thing I noticed was a seeming fog of heavy silence in front of me – the kind afforded by carpet and wooden bookshelves brimming with sound-dampening tomes.

(Most Waterstones outlets are the stock-standard, cheerful, brightly lit, gargantuan megastores that have come to dominate the marketplace. The one I frequent most often is in the heart of the city and tremendously large, with it’s own bar as well as cafe. Unfortunately, it has all the atmosphere of an exceptionally flammable Starbucks. It’s functional but sterile.)

The sounds of the street cut out suddenly as the door swung back on its hinges. I turned left as it seemed as good an option as any other and padded silently down a corridor made narrow and dark by the abundance of shelving. This was unusual. A cursory glance told me that here one didn’t have to wade through venal chick-lit of the Candace Bushnell mould to find something to engage the mind. Bargain tables held gems like the compendium of Alastair Cook’s ‘Letter to America’. I felt immediately at home. Slightly different biology would have had me issuing an audible purr.

I had reserved some books this morning and they were waiting for me somewhere in this labyrinth – but I soon found that the staff weren’t going to take my hand and help me. They would be efficient and courteous but would give me directions to follow on my own in a no-nonsense clipped tone. Where did I remember this treatment from?

Ascending the stairs and asking after my reserved books at a new counter, I was given more curt, succinct instructions. I had to make my way up two more floors and had been pointed to the elevators. Choosing to take the stairs instead, I looked at them more closely and was met with a curious sight – I noticed that the carpet and banister of the stairs were of a very old style, slightly tatty but kept impeccably clean. Damn, did this remind me of somewhere.

Two more floors up and another counter looked a likely source of further instructions. “Classics are over there. Ask at the desk.” A brief smile, a nod to the right, a resumption of duties.

How very different to my encounter to a Waterstones Customer Service Limpet a few weeks ago in another store who just wouldn’t leave me alone when I asked for directions to a few books. I had literally asked her to *point* me in the right direction. Instead, she followed me to the shelf and insisted on searching…muttering…scouring… completely ineffectively may I add, as I found all three books first. Then she had the audacity to pry the books out of my hands, turn to march back to her counter and pointedly begin an interrogation into why I was buying those particular kinds of books. I remember a brief flicker - “None of your fucking business.” - crossing my mind as I smiled and lied: “School assignment.” There was no particular reason for buying the books, of course. I’m not studying – I just like to keep my mind active.

Anyone who buys non-fiction books, of course, has to have some sort of overriding immediate reason for it. If you buy Spice Racks for Dummies you’re starting a DIY project. If you buy Practical Pansy Pruning, they’ve pretty much got your weekend plans sussed out. If you buy Descartes … errr….yes.

Back at the curious Waterstones I now found myself in, I had hunted down my reserved books and paid for them. Wandering around the floor a little, I smiled devilishly as I passed by the ‘Philosophers A-Z’ section and the lyrics of Monty Python’s Philosopher’s Song immediately came to mind. I suppressed a chuckle and walked over to query a staffer who was on her knees, looking at something in a box.

“Excuse me”

A slight, unintelligible noise.

Clearing my throat, louder this time. “Excuse me.”

“I heard you. Just a minute.”

I was taken aback. Not offended – rather comfortable actually – this is the kind of communication I like.

She straightened up and dealt with my query very efficiently. She even knew about the obscure author I was seeking. Fascinating.

That’s when it hit me. What this was just like. Uni.

It almost felt odd to see cash registers here as this place was so much more like a Uni library than a commercial bookstore.

And what’s more, I liked it.

Descending the stairs again, I lingered on the other floors a little.

‘Classical’ had been populated by slightly artsy types who couldn’t quite help modifying their clothing or body in some way so that they could be ‘different’ (just like all their other ‘different’ friends).

Now, I surveyed suits cruising the aisles of an extensive legal area. Slicked hair, cufflinks, assurance. One in particular stood out – I’ve always found that a bespoke suit sits in a certain way that isn’t duplicable with off-the-rack fashions. He had cufflinks, manicured nails and an impeccably matched shirt and tie. Yes, it took a little while to ascertain those details. No, I’m not going to apologise. I walked on and descended more stairs, taking me to vastly different intellectual climes.

Downstairs, I walked past books on pure mathematics and saw a very pale hand tracing its way across spines of books, as if their titles were written in Braille. He had an oversized wooly sweater on and was terribly close to the books. I conjured a wild image of him finding the one he wanted through a combination of touch and smell. I must have looked at him for that fraction of a second that’s over the societally acceptable norm. He turned and…for the life of me…looked scared. Pale grey eyes blinked at me and I slid past as quickly as I could. I left the store amusing myself by spinning what I imagined his life to be like. It involved a laboratory with no windows, chalkboards, a long-suffering girlfriend and a personal obsession with an unsolvable equation of some renown.

So now I know what I want my library to be like – quiet, not too light and to be bursting at the seams with tomes on very disparate topics. As for the human accessories to the scene? I don’t think so.

M

Dropped into the warzone...

2004-11-16T04:29:00.000Z

There's something rather perverse about that little 'Next Blog' button. Based on my stats, I've surmised that once every 24 hours, my blog is on the rota to be flung at a few strangers pressing it. I can imagine that those would be some of my most diverse visitors, since other links to this blog are from like-minded blogs and sites.

So I had to snort when I saw that someone was directed to me from the 'Come to Jesus' blog. Must've been fun.

M

The Emperor's New Committee

2004-11-16T03:23:00.000Z

The funny thing about international organisations like the UN is that they rely on the global equivalent of the polite society's unwritten rule set to keep their power and influence. If their struggles for that power weren't so damned annoying, I would consider them cute.

By 'funny' and 'cute' I mean the same kind of cute that a pink satin bow on the ear of a dog mauling your foot would be cute. (And funny as in the noise it would make after your baseball bat connected with it) .

Essentially, the UN is only significant if enough influential world governments decide that it's significant. Like the unpopular kid at school tagging along after the fashionable group ('in' the crowd because he's temporarily tolerated), one slip up and he's back to eating lunch alone. I've a feeling that not supporting the US and Britain in the recent war was the UN's latest - and, hopefully, fatal - slip-up.

When some of the most powerful governments in the world turn their backs on the yipping and snorting 'resolutions' that the UN passes, it really signals the beginning of the end of anyone else taking the whole body seriously. Which is why this makes me smile and tingle slightly in the Retributive Justice Gland. (Thanks for the post Sherry...it felt so good...)

It seems that the UN doesn't like countries ignoring the UN. The UN is, apparently, in a huff over this whole issue and will stomp it's foot rather savagely if certain people don't turn around right now and start to listen again. The UN is serious on this one, folks. Angry memos will start to fly if there is no immediate satisfaction. A bureaurat* may even use an exclamation mark in a press release. Tremble.

(*The 'c' is missing for a reason.)

Not that anyone who includes Communist China in their Security Council as well as Cuba and Iran amongst it's membership should be taken very seriously in the first place.

I suggest that the Anglosphere cancel their subcriptions of Kofi's Kultural Digest and move to form their own association, if one is so very necessary to ensure we don't run around killing each other haphazardly and clubbing baby seals for kicks on Japanese game shows. Then invite others to the party if they demonstrably hold similar enough views to be considered friends and allies.

It's a technique my father (a teacher) used when his school mandated that kicking individual troublemakers out of the class was 'unfair' and 'traumatic'. He left the individual troublemakers at their desks and moved the rest of the class to a neighbouring room. Sometimes you've just got to tweak the system a little to get the right thing done.

M

(Cross posted to A Western Heart)

A Eulogy to Reason

2004-11-14T06:02:00.000Z

or

"Western Leaders Issue an Open Invitation for Islamic Extremists to Slaughter their Citizens"

No, really.

I noticed this CNN story about the reactions of different world leaders to Yasser Arafat’s death. Small snippets of official statements of reaction.

(Yes, I realize that this is a Thursday news story, but I’ve been rather absorbed in one thing or another in the intervening days – it’s still relevant – stop being such a ‘fresh news’ snob.) :)

Reading through these statements, I was utterly horrified by the leaders of the free world essentially giving terrorists carte blanche – a goddamned invitation – to keep doing exactly what they’ve been doing for years, namely kill and maim in the name of their cause.

The usual suspects from the Coalition of the Killing had their say – this I was expecting.

Hamas official Sami Abu Zuhri - "The Islamic Resistance Movement Hamas mourns with pride… An icon of our struggle and a great Palestinian symbol."

Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono - "…a hero to us all. He was the ultimate embodiment of decades of the just struggle of a nation for its undeniable rights to self-determination. A figure much loved and respected not only by Palestinians but also many in the world over, including Indonesia."

Malaysian Foreign Minister Syed Hamid Albar - "a great leader who dedicated his life to defend the rights of his fellow Palestinians."

THIS, though, is what most shocked me. These people are ostensibly on our side, yet they choose to use the slipperiest diplo-speak to avoid any condemnation of the man that has terrorized the world for decades. They praised him…actually praised his ideals and invited his surviving compatriots to KEEP GOING.

French President Jacques Chirac - called Arafat "a man of courage and conviction who has incarnated, for 40 years, the fight of Palestinians for the recognition of their national rights. May this loss unite all Palestinians. By remaining united they will continue to be faithful to Yasser Arafat's memory and will uphold the ideal to which he devoted his life.”

The ideal to which this monstrosity devoted his life was the annihilation of anyone who didn’t agree with his particular methots to grab power. The means of this devotion was violence, terror, murder, torture…. Surely it can’t be possible that the President of France is telling these people to continue in the way they always have, using the same means?

U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan - "For nearly four decades, he expressed and symbolized in his person the national aspirations of the Palestinian people."

‘Symbolized in his person’, eh? The man was a mass murderer, a religious bigot, a racist. Is this, then, what Palestine stands for? Is this the kind of Palestine that you would be quite happy to embrace as an international neighbour?

Former U.S. President Bill Clinton - "However others viewed him, the Palestinians saw him as the father of their nation"

Ever willing to press his lips to the ass of someone else’s cause, Clinton proves that it is important to respect the opinion of the supporters of one’s deadly enemy. It is wise to remember that the way those ‘others viewed’ Arafat was with utter horror, abject fear or extreme hostility - likely because he had instigated some form of violence against them.

Those ‘others’, incidentally, were America and it’s allies – one has to ask where Clinton’s sympathies actually lay during the time of his Presidency if he so easily identifies with the views of the Palestinian people now.

The Vatican - "He was a leader of great charisma who loved his people and sought to lead them towards national independence.”

Let me just finish that sentence: “…by any means necessary using techniques that are decidedly un-Christian.” A smack on the wrist and 20 Hail Mary’s for the acolyte who scrawled that one.

South African President Thabo Mbeki - "History will record that President Arafat epitomized that rare breed of leaders whose lives were defined by the unflinching sacrifices they made in the noble and just cause of the struggle of their peoples."

Sacrifice is something that one gives of ONESELF, all I seem to recall is the repeated and bloody sacrifices of everyone around the safely coddled Mr Arafat.

It is unbelievable that a country’s leader can officially label Arafat’s struggle ‘noble’ and ‘just’ without expecting to be barred from membership of any international body and fear of having his IMF loans cancelled.

Thankfully, there was a little sanity in the mix. Also, predictably, most of it was from the country who has it’s citizens regularly de-limbed by terrorists.

Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon - "I hope that the new Palestinian leadership ... will understand that the advancement of the relations ... depends first and foremost on them stopping terror."

Israeli Justice Minister Yosef Lapid - "Arafat missed the opportunity to have peace in the Middle East and a Palestinian state and chose terror as a weapon, not only against Israel but against Western civilization. He was the godfather of al Qaeda and of bin Laden."

Israeli Finance Minister Benjamin Netanyahu - "The tragedy was that Arafat, who had the power and prestige to move his people to peace, instead moved them and us into a terrible war of terror that cost thousands of lives, Israelis and Palestinians alike.

"This is the man who also pioneered international terrorism, the art of hijacking planes, ships, kidnapping and seizing of hostages and you name it. Which gave birth, of course, to other terrorist groups who emulated him, including al Qaeda."

Israel keeps its eye on the ball…probably because ‘the ball’ is grenade-shaped more often than not. The way that some in the west have reacted to Arafat’s death is just nauseating. He didn’t deserve a state funeral so much as a pine coffin and a pit filled with said coffin in the middle of the night.

M

(Cross posted to A Western Heart)

Bridget Jones: No Reason At All

2004-11-11T03:11:00.000Z

I hate Bridget Jones.

Unequivocally, without reserve, I loathe the wench.

I don't think I would have really cared too much for her, wouldn't have paid much attention to the first film and certainly wouldn't have seen it had it not been for it's marketing strategy.

You see, apparently the author of Bridget Jones' Diary was influenced by Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice. This fact was touted in the usual marketing mantra that accompanies any major film release.

I saw the film and walked out thinking...influenced by P&P?

How? Where?

Was she sitting near a copy of the book when she wrote hers? Did she glimpse the spine on a bookshelf during a critical moment of plot formation? Did she have a flashback to a forced read of P&P in grade school?

If she was somehow influenced, she completely missed the actual point the story was making by a mile. She took some of the surface plot elements - a central female character and two love interests where "One has got all the goodness, and the other all the appearance of it." She then completely failed to produce the one thing that gives Austen's P&P it's charm and opportunity for incisive dialogue and social commentary - an INTELLIGENT, COMPETENT heroine.

Bridget Jones is a bumbling, useless, pouting, perpetually confused shmuck. The scene I hate most is the one in which the girl is completely tongue-tied at a party. She can't gather her thoughts together to form ONE COGENT SENTENCE in a time of need.

Throughout the film, one simply wonders what on earth it is, exactly, that the two men (literally) fight over. They're just seen to like her. Just like that. She's a walking disaster, she doesn't know how to dress, she doesn't know how to stand up for herself, she's unutterably silly, she can't even cook a basic meal - yet somehow these two sucessful men throw themselves at her feet with professions of undying love (or lust, as the case may be).

Pah.

Elizabeth Bennet would run rings around her in almost any endeavour you could choose to name that doesn't involve modern technology. Bring Lizzie's temperament to the modern day and it would be embarrassing to have the two in the same room together.

I'm a hero/ine snob. I like them to be people I can look up to, admire, enjoy watching/reading about.

Bridget I wouldn't hire to bring me coffee in the mornings.

If I want to watch Bridget I can switch on Big Brother and find the sulky one.

You can transplant Colin Firth over from the excellent BBC production of P&P, you can call him 'Darcy' and give him some measure of arrogance but that a semblance to P&P does not make.

And now they've made another, a sequel in which Bridget...having happily gained the affections of the better man decides to dally with the cad. Why? WHY? Oh, you know why - because she's a mindless bint.

*sigh*

Leicester square was ablaze with light last night when M and I walked out of the movie we had gone to see. We could hear the high-pitched screaming normally associated with atrocity or celebrity. When I saw that it was the Bridget Jones: Edge of Reason premiere, I couldn't decide which, but was leaning toward the former.

M

Cleaning House

2004-11-10T13:39:00.000Z

A little over a year ago, I stood looking through this portal in Portsmouth, trying to imagine what was going through the minds of those who would have been in the very same spot on the 5th of August 1620. They were the passengers and crew of the Mayflower, about to embark on a perilous journey across unfathomable tracts of ocean to start a new life because the repercussions of expressing their particular beliefs in England had become intolerable. That bluff was probably the last of England that they saw when they set sail.

I wondered at the kind of people who would do something so drastic for their convictions and wondered at the kinds of ideas that they had planted when forming their new society. Ideas about about hard work, taking risks and taking a stand against tyrrany rather than being broken by it.

Well, we all know what happened to the country that they colonized - it went on to become the most powerful nation on earth. For a long time the only bastion of freedom and a sanctuary for the best and brightest of Europe when life here became intolerable in other ways.

Today, it seems that America is undergoing a little house cleaning as those who lost an election by forgetting the tenets on which their nation was built are murmuring about leaving for England, Europe and the very French-influenced Canada.

I welcome the news - not because I really cherish the thought of more of their like over here, but because this country is a cesspit of left-leaning thinking already and they would blend right in.

Most of the talented and hardworking people I know are either here for a temporary stay or already have their eyes on America or Australia as an escape from the gradual devolution of this society into socialism. Some plan to stay in the belief that things will one day be better - I sincerely hope they're right but personally doubt it very much. If those with classical liberal leanings continue to leave and those with collectivist views begin to pour in, the very nature of a democracy will dictate the government being one that favours left-wing policy.

If that does happen, if this country continues to crumble, then I'll be glad that it's around the ears of those who most ardently advocate the ideas leading to that demise.

So perhaps all those who despise being American should choose a day on which to launch the mass exodus for other shores so that we can mark it as the day that America Cleaned House. Good riddance.

M

(Cross posted to A Western Heart)

Mindless Perfection

2004-11-10T04:38:00.000Z

Don’t think.

“Don’t think.”

Can you imagine a worse torture?

“Don’t think about it, Monica.”

I try. I do the move.

He notices I fail to stop thinking.

How did he know? I think about it. Must be the way my brow furrows when I’m unhappy with my performance. I make a mental note to leave my face a blank next time around.

I step toward my training partner for another run through, visualizing the series of moves I need to set in motion. There is movement on the periphery of my vision.

He’s already seen something he doesn’t like and has moved close enough for me to sense that he wants my attention. I turn.

“Monica, just....” He trails off, scrutinizing me with a somewhat pained expression. It’s a look that he gives me every once in a while, a very long look. As if he’s trying to figure me out and it’s not going particularly smoothly. “You and I both, mate.” I think to myself just before he resumes speaking.

“...just stop analyzing.” He implores. “Do the move. Trust your body. You know this stuff, just react.”

I think about it. I try to bring a tool to bear other than analysis. What is there? A blank. Frustration. Try again.

It’s as if the cogs of my mind are whirring furiously, having been sent on a mission to retrieve some piece of data. The familiar sensation of a stream of results - the jumble of good, bad and obscure - isn’t coming back, though. Instead, there is nothing. A cold, uncomfortable, unfamiliar nothing.

Maybe this is it. Maybe this is how he wants me to approach training, awful and naked though it feels.

I look toward my partner, making eye contact, sizing him up again. What will his reach be? Is he heavy? Muscle-bound? Fast? I’m cheating – I already know how he moves. I nod my head slightly, indicating that I’m ready when he is.

He comes at me, a solid punch for the jaw – the first in a series of moves that I am to react to in a specific way.

My usual habit is to break everything I’m supposed to do into small components (like lego pieces) and to remember the sequence methodically, mechanically. This takes a lot of effort, which is why I must usually look like I’m calculating pi to 17 decimal places rather than avoiding a fistful of pain.

Now I’m not allowed to do that. I can’t analyze, partition and synthesize. I have to....to what? I still didn’t have a clue and he’s still coming right for me.

I stood there until the last second, willing myself to react naturally rather than from rote before years of training kicked in to at least make me get my head the hell out of the way.

I had also raised my arm in a block – but nothing else, no countermove. I certainly wasn’t ready for the kick coming my way.

Damn.

Who do you trust?

That was last week. The 1.5 hour journey home was a study in frustration, sulking, anger, mortification, introspection and – finally – sheer bloodymindedness that I would find whatever this damned Nirvanic state of no-thought-training was, even if I had to install a Temporary Lobotomy switch on my forehead to do it. Something told me that this was important.

M, sage as always and cryptic as Yoda when he wants to annoy me hovered around for days saying things like “Ahhh, but walking – you don’t actively think about how to do that anymore, do you?”

Right...so there are stages of learning. The mechanical, memorize-parts-and-put-them-together and then that wonderful, seemingly-miraculous moment when you find yourself just doing something without thinking about it – the point at which you trust your new ability.

I thought about all the skills that I had acquired over years and tried to remember that tipping point from belabored rote to effortless integration. I realised something very strange - that I naturally separated new skills into ‘physical’ and ‘mental’.

Mental tasks, I implicitly trusted myself with. I’ve always been confident in walking into any situation, any disparate job or role and picking it up quickly with minimal effort – usually to the amusement or chagrin of people around me, depending on the work environment involved. I also ‘intuit’ information as I learn – extrapolating high level concepts from basics early on. I trust myself with new information quickly, I trust that it’s integrated enough to rely on without explicitly checking against its minutiae every time I use it.

Physical tasks, on the other hand, I implicitly didn't trust myself to get right. I didn’t even trust myself when I was actually getting it right. I can type at 80wpm easily but if I pay attention to the fact that I’m doing it...I lose it for a while. I used to get better at the range when I was tired, I would run around the stage setup and not think at all...just engage targets as I saw them, as I peered in a window or as I kicked a door open – two perfect little holes near the centre. When I went around refreshed, I would routinely kill no-shoots. Too much energy to think, to size up the shot, to unnecessarily override my reflexes and second-guess myself into a bad shot.

The physical is also where I ‘chop’ instructions and memorize...rote learning. The only time M and I routinely argued was in Salsa lessons. I memorized steps and needed to get them exactly right. I would stop at any mistake and insist on starting again, where M would be doing the right thing and just flowing with the music, taking mistakes in his stride, doing generally the right move and refining from there. It’s a miracle he didn’t strangle me.

So this was the key, then. Not switching off the mind altogether, but switching it to automatic pilot, trusting that the information was in there and would be duly retrieved at the appropriate time.

Hrmm. Good theory, it was time to test it out.

Switching off.

What a difference.

I had resolved to take everything in uncritically, to take it in at the macro level and to implement it without analyzing it. This, I found, was excruciatingly difficult to master, I would waver between it and my normal state.

“You’re thinking again.”

I wince. “I know.”

“Stop it.”

I nod. “I will.”

At first, I would abstract too broadly and miss the detail that made the move The Move and not just some random movement. I narrowed the detail a little.

Not perfect yet, but workable.

Two very interesting things emerged from this shift in focus.

The first was that I was seeing flows, vectors and centers of gravity rather than move one, move two, move three, move four... I could see the purpose and genius behind these countermeasures to attack. I could also finally see the thing that I had always been told about this art – that it uses the way the human body naturally moves, bends, folds and falls in order to achieve control. It’s not pretty or flashy, but it’s subtle and superbly effective.

He came up to me at one point and asked if I was alright. I know I wasn’t behaving normally and was almost crosseyed from the effort of staying in this mode. I was quiet. I don’t think he was used to not seeing either my furrowed brow or my dimples for an hour solid.

The second was that I could finally sort out what I knew and what I didn’t. If it wasn’t stored properly in the cache, it just didn’t come out or came out as ineffective fluff. I wasn’t using a fresh demonstration to boost my knowledge levels temporarily in order to just get through a few practice rounds – I was finding my weaknesses and working on them whilst reinforcing and practicing my strengths.

I was working on one of those things that evidently weren’t stored properly. I was twisting and folding my training partner’s wrist/forearm and he was refusing to go down. I pushed his body around a fraction in a few different directions, testing his stability. Aha...I felt it. I pivoted to the left and pulled him along with me, deepening the stretch of his wrist to the point where he would move anywhere to avoid the pain. He folded and went down.

As I was looking down at my training partner, still holding onto his arm and contemplating a kick to the ribs, I felt a light tap on the crown of my head.

He was standing there with a smile on his face and a training sword in his hand.

“Why the long face?”

I panicked. “I wasn’t thinking, I swear! I was just concentrating very hard on not thinking.”

“Smile.”

“What?!?”

“Smile. Now I want you to enjoy it.”

It never ends.

M

IRC-ed

2004-11-07T05:45:00.000Z

I woke this morning with the distinct impression that I had visited a recently burned-out building in the night, knelt down and licked the carpet. Fears of being a freaky somnambulist soon evaporated as I realised the reason for the taste in my mouth - I had had a cigar the night before.

Now, since I'm not a smoker and only indulge in cigars once every....oh.... 6 to 12 months, the cells in my body have time to recover, detox, spawn new cells, die, regrow, lose the collective memory of The Day The Smoke Came and be generally unprepared for the evident havoc that a cigar wreaks on them. Then they panic and lose all faith in my ability to govern them. The fact that this particular cigar was accompanied by a horrendous amount of 190 proof* liquor when M and I went out late that night to let off our own fireworks didn't help matters either.

*(this is a correction, I originally had it as 98% proof. What I drank was 95% alcohol. This may explain a lot of things.)

So what does Monica do one one of the handful of occasions in her life that she is properly drunk?

She sits down at her computer and fires up an irc client, that's what.

I am a party ANIMAL, folks. Just let me loose on all those skulking 14 year olds and dirty old men typing one handed.

I actually had a look at some of the conversations today and realised a couple of interesting things.

* I don't actually compose sentences differently when I'm drunk. I don't talk about different things or change my world view. My vocabulary is exactly the same. I jsut slu r my typping. Physical coordination goes out the door. It's the equivalent of typing with baseball mitts on.

* Social niceties have never been my thing, even though I can simper and murmur platitudes with the best of them. In fact, the more I care for you the more direct I'll be. Last night, I loved EVERYONE.

[poor sod who will remain un-nicked] asl?

[Monica__] 26/f/london - you?

[poor sod who will remain un-nicked] 19/m/calif

[poor sod who will remain un-nicked] so, you got a bf?

[Monica__] married

[poor sod who will remain un-nicked] you want a lover?

[poor sod who will remain un-nicked] *wink*

[Monica__] a 19 yearold llover? Yo;ve got to be kidding. Do tou think I run a school of unstruction for inexperienced children?*

*Note: 'instruction' posed me with some problems where the more difficult to type 'inexperienced' was a breeze. Wonky, wonky brain.

[poor sod who will remain un-nicked] awwww, come on why not ?

[Monica__] Because when not biusy boring me in bed you would like'ly abuse me with speeech. A mere 10 muinutes of which would drive meinto a stupor from the sheer despondency of getting anything of value or interest from yor conveaarsation..

[Monica__] also - Disd I mention the 'married" bit?

[poor sod who will remain un-nicked] so yu wanna be my lover?

[Monica__] nNot very bright , are you?

This continued for a while until I completely forgot about him amidst the torrent of other conversation windows from people just itching to be insulted by me. I did my best.

Anyway, this wasn't meant to be a post showing how utterly geeky I can be, it's a post to explain why my Guy Fawkes fireworks piece is a day late. It's because I couldn't edit the damn thing in my state, if I had it would likely have been about 'Guuy FAwks' and 'firw orks' - and no-one wants to see that.

M

Outlook

2004-11-07T04:37:00.000Z

The first explosions of the day startled me on my run. Drawing me out of the usual contemplative state, I felt the urge to scan the pieces of sky between houses and trees for their source and their reward - brief, brilliant showers of light.

Later, I welcomed M home to the intermittent, muffled sounds of the festivities outside. We ate and spoke for a long time, meandering between topics. Lying on the bed, I watched him succumb to sleep early - too tired to resist the softness and warmth despite the mounting noise outside. My breathing gradually matched and I found myself mesmerised by the ceiling's reflections of the outside sky. Staccato blasts picked up pace dramatically until one noticed the silence between them more acutely than the abrupt sounds themselves. I snuck out of the bedroom as quietly as I could, knowing I had to go outside and watch.

Pulling my favorite scarf high around my neck, I opened the door, stepping out onto my street and the silent, swirling, heavy mix of fog and smoke. The street itself was eerily empty, sulphur lights tinting everything the colour of a yellowed sepia photograph. Above, swathes of cloud briefly lit up on the horizon as fireworks too far away to hear rent themselves to pieces in a ghostly, flickering flash. The sound of a hundred explosions followed me as I walked - some softened by their distance, others sharp and crackling with nearness.

I headed to the bridge, my footsteps soft and silent on damp Autumn leaves, my face cold and upturned, ready to catch the smallest glimpse of fire. Surprised, yet selfishly pleased that the bridge was devoid of other spectators, I climbed the stairs and saw for the first time the sources of the noise. I reached the platform and pressed my body against cool metal railing, facing the few glass office buildings of the city and the mass of urban sprawl between the centre and my home.

I looked up and around, the sky was a bracelet of twinkling gems appearing and dissappering, set in various colours and intensities. Arcs of pure light suddenly sparkled, danced and some chased each-other like sprites before falling and disappearing forever, their sound and light rushing toward me in disjointed succession.

I've always enjoyed fireworks, but fell deeply in love years ago during the annual Perth skyshow that is put on by local radio stations to celebrate Australia Day. Barges filled with some of the world's most expensive shells are tethered to the middle of the wide bulge in the Swan river around which much of the city is built. Thousands of people crowd around the banks, all tuned into the same radio station which plays a soundtrack coordinated to the event. To say it's spectacular is an understatement. The fact that we take it for granted every year is why I love Australia and it's abundant, jubilantly enjoyed wealth so much.

The particular year I remember had a strong wind blowing some of the fireworks toward the city side, where I had managed to find a spot mere metres from the water. I stood with my legs planted wide, hands in my pockets and head tilted straight up, savouring the feeling of wanting to run and duck from fireworks that seemed to be exploding too close to me. The experience was decliciously frightening, I could feel the vibrations of shells exploding against my chest and a cold ash falling, brushing my face and neck ever so softly. I can remember the feeling now if I close my eyes - being enveloped by the experience, the sound, the light, the music and the simple, pure joy.

Today I stood on the bridge, my heart light, enjoying the challenge of trying to take in numerous displays at once. I would watch rockets ascend, struggle against gravity, then flare into glorious colours and shapes on cue. Some spent much energy rising beautifully in showers of sparks and ended their life in a brief burst of light. Others rose silently, almost imperceptibly, then ruptured in a thunderous boom to release concentric sparks into the night. I realised that when I detected a shell rising in the distance, I would stop breathing in anticipation of it's blast.

360 degrees of possibility and no warning where the next dazzling explosion would come from. I caught sight of one that proved to be spectacular and almost directly overhead. Looking up, I took in the sight of the glimmering gold and violet star with the guileless absorption of a child. I smiled at the sky and for a moment thought that I must look rather silly, standing on a bridge alone, grinning at nothing.

Unbidden, a name came to mind - John C. Dvorak. I wondered what he would make of this - of someone unashamedly abandoning themselves to enjoying something. I decided it likely that my behavior would receive a scathing review in his juvenile manner, as does almost every other enjoyment of others'.

I came across his writing only a couple of weeks ago. Reading 'The Zeros vs The Ones', I quickly developed a dislike for this man that surprised even me. How could one forgive anyone for the following sentiments:

"I used to think that everyone was entitled to his opinion, but no longer." and "I'm not suggesting that because most opinions stink they should be censored in order for us all to think a certain way." - Not being entitled to air one's opinion is censorship, John.

"...the Internet will prove to be the undoing of society and civilization as we know it." - Not the undoing, a major part in the evolution that society has been endlessly engaged in since we first started living in huddles around campfires.

"If it were up to me, I'd shut down the Net tomorrow" - Needless to say, I'm very glad that very little in the world is up to Dvorak.

What a sad, sad old man. I was irresistibly drawn to the rest of his writing and found that, if at all possible, my opinion of him decreased further. Whether it be musings about home computers, disruptive technology, networking, software, ISP's or Podcasting, most of his articles just seemed to be a lot of whining about minor inconveniences and latching onto single, isloated problems for the sake of having something negative to say. There were times when his facts seemed distorted and his thread of reasoning terribly tenuous in it's bid to paint the most cynical picture possible.

I do realise that it's important to question new developments in technology, to be thorough and honest in assessments, to be careful as an investor not to be caught in the hype - but he does it with such lack of grace, such thinly-veiled hostility and sneering toward those who embrace the new development with joy that all I can feel in turn is pity. Pity for him in his impotent rage against a world that is seemingly moving too fast for him to play catch up with comfort.

You see, it's also important - and downright enjoyable - to revel in the neatness, coolness, speed, beauty and functionality that new developments bring. Just being able to immerse yourself in the idea, the potentiality and the sudden possibilities that are now open. To click on a button and suddenly hear the voice of someone on the other side of the planet, to select a song from hundreds on a tiny device and have it play perfectly and crisply in your ear as you sit on train, to click your mouse and send a communication to one person or to hundreds with the same ease. To suspend calculating judgement for just a moment to revel in something. To stand on a bridge looking up at the sky with a big grin on your face because the experience just feels so good.

I feel sorry that the man can't seem to muster up any enthusiasm for technology in a time when we are being inundated with developments from various sources. Then again, maybe I'm missing something. Perhaps it's very sophisticated to pretend to be unmoved, perhaps it's a sign of discernment to be uniformly disparaging and cuttingly cruel. Maybe that's the way to get a contract to write tech pieces that are different to everyone else's.

There's something about that kind of sophistication, though, that leaves me cold. Unfashionable though it may be, I can't see the joy in looking at something only to criticise.

I stood on the bridge for a long time, until my nose and cheeks stung from the cold and the fireworks dwindled to sporadic displays too far away to interest me. It didn't take me long to dismiss Dvorak and his approach - there were too many good things in the world that mitigated his words and made his views seem laughably impotent.

M

(Cross-posted to A Western Heart)

NB: for you Aussies and Americans, I live in London - I'm describing Guy Fawkes night here which happened on Friday.

Meditate this

2004-11-05T06:04:00.000Z

Tolerance is most definitely a two way street. I don't think some Islamists have quite got the hang of it yet. We'll tolerate your poor fashion sense, you tolerate others doing things you don't like...such as meditating, for example.

Today, Muslim extremists* again attacked a Buddhist temple in Thailand, this time killing one of the soldiers stationed to protect it.

A Buddhist temple.

When was the last time you saw a Buddhist with an uzi? A Buddhist's idea of an aggressive recruitment drive is to get a few orange-bedecked friends together with a tambourine and a drum to meander down a main street, chanting. Sometimes the REALLY zealous ones will opt for a megaphone. One hell of a pressure sales tactic for you. Real soul-snatchers and virgin-tempters, those monks.

Honestly, if Muslim extremists want to attack competing nutty cults to gain market share, why not go for the ones with a big budget, with glitzy ads, with serious ideas of world domination?

Why not march into Scientology's Celebrity Centre for a little you-audit-me-I-behead-you fun?

Because Scientologists have lawyers. Because Scienos - out of touch with our reality though they are - don't take shit from anyone. That's why.

I'd wager that the day after any attacks on Scientologists or Scientology's interests there would no longer *be* a Middle East...just a large, slightly smoky, very new lake and a lawsuit that would make the recent tobacco-company-hunts seem like searches for loose change behind the sofa.

Perhaps Tom Cruise should run for President.

M

* Not yet entirely confirmed. Could have been REALLY annoyed beggars with AK's. You never know.

Hopalong Monnie

2004-11-05T01:29:00.000Z

Thank you all for your well wishes here and via email for my ankle to recover. It did. Today.

I got tired of the hop-walking, so decided to just walk normally. The ankle protested for a while then fell in line like a good body part. I then got tired of the no-shoe thing and put some on. Later, I disobeyed M's orders and walked to the store to get something. Late tonight, I was caught outside without a jacket and it was COLD. So I ran home. See? I'm all cured.

I know that there's listening to your body and letting it heal naturally and that there's imposing your will mercilessly on it to get what you want. I just haven't learnt which to use when.

M

There was movement at the station...

2004-11-04T14:44:00.000Z

'Falluja' is more than an abstraction - it is this kind of reality. It's too easy to play armchair (or in my case, office chair) philosopher and waffle on about international relations. Hot air distills down through the media, the pundits, the politicians, through the intricate gears in the machine of the state and results in action. It's most immediate effects are felt and seen at the front lines where men listen to bullets fly overhead and wait for orders to deal with an enemy they can see, sense and are itching to engage.

So all I have to say about Thursday's action is: about bloody time.

M

Sock it to me

2004-11-04T08:02:00.000Z

Yesterday my socks tried to kill me. No...really...I'm not just in post-vicariously-won-election-instability here, these bastards carried out a coordinated attack that has rendered me with one very, very sprained ankle.

They're no ordinary socks, though. They were purchased from a woman at a market in Poland. What she lacked in teeth she more than made up for in cackling zeal and determination. She was small, she was old, she had a back as curved as a sickle and a scarf tied around her head in a style last fashionable around the time of the October Revolution.

She was also determined that M's feet would fit into her inverted-sheep slippers. They were a little like the ubiquitous (and inexplicably fashionable) ugg boot, but smaller and more...rural. Yes, rural, I think that that's what those patterns were. Either that or just incredibly goddamned putrid. We weren't going for pretty, though, we were going for FUNCTIONAL which, as everyone knows, is only matched by pretty by companies like Apple...NOT by old women in Eastern European stalls.

Thing is, M is 6'5 and has feet to match. This woman, though, would simply not accept the fact that his feet came outside the statistical norm that was her universe. His feet WOULD fit into one of her slippers, even if she had to weld two of the wretched things together with a blowtorch to make it possible.

We tried reasoning with her - I in my fluent Polish, M in his fluent I-have-no-idea-what-you're-saying-but-if-you-think-my-feet-will-fit-into-those-pixie-slippers-you've-just-handed-me,-you've-got-another-fucking-thought-coming look.

She gestured to a chair with a gnarled hand in a manner so imperious for one of her dimunitive stature that M simply couldn't resist. He stooped into her little stall and folded himself into a tiny chair in the manner of a giraffe seating itself in a Mini. She handed him slipper after slipper, tutting and clicking her tongue. None, of course, fit. She said they would stretch. I translated. M gave me a pained look, saying his toes had already retracted into his foot in order to pull on the last pair, he was damned if he was going to try and STAND UP wearing them. I bit my lip to suppress a giggle and translated the pertinent parts back*.

*Note - professional interpreters only translate verbatim when they're doing a simultaneous translation. Otherwise they work hard at making both sides to a conversation look a jackload less silly. This requires a working knowledge of both cultures, both languages, understanding the point of the communication, having a firm grasp of who you're working for and the ability not to snort a suppressed giggle at a sensitive moment. I always had a problem with the last item on the laundry list, so preferred to switch my conscious mind off and just do simultaneous. Yes, I can be a lazy soddette.

She turned to me with a bit of a faraway look in her eyes. The kind that people who live in the middle of nowhere and are used to looking at distant mountains have. Not a bad thing to posess, overall - it can lend an air of mystery, you know? But I was looking for a little more *clarity* in the relationship at that point and adding mystery to what was already a grizzled, leathery question mark wearing a headscarf wasn't a good thing.

She decided that it was M's feet. Shoes simply WERE NOT MADE in his size. Period.

M, in the meantime had peeled the last slippers off using a crowbar and a bottle of baby oil. He was now buysing himself with tying up the laces of the shoes he had started out in, oblivious to the fact that she had just determined this act to be metaphysically impossible.

So we did what any self-respecting Westerners do when faced with a slightly mad old woman. We bought socks from her.

If uggs look like you've got inverted sheep on the end of your legs, then slipping these socks on is like strapping a pair of mathematicians to your feet. The kind that have beards, wander around in homemade sweaters, aren't afraid of socks and sandals being in immediate proximity to each-other and think about numbers...a lot.

The socks are hand-knitted up in the mountains, suitably prickly, itchy and as ugly as a newborn. They're also in a state of colour-flux between olive green and dark grey. I say colour-flux because surely there can't be an official colour this ugly. Pantone just wouldn't allow it.

Anywhere, where were we? Yesterday, that's right.

So yesterday I decide to grace the little deflated balls of woven fluff with my feet. Lucky sods if you ask me.

I had just come back from the city and didn't take my stockings ('tights' for those who speak Americanese) off, I just slipped the socks on top...that was my mistake, I gave them a chance to strike.

Sensing the delicious lack of friction between themselves and my stockinged feet, they hunkered down and waited until I was at the top of the stairs, rushing to the kitchen to check on some boiling milk.

All that M and C heard was the thump of a foot coming down hard to stop me from falling. I felt and heard the soft crunching of muscles and tendons pulled as my other foot landed in a funny curled position and took a lot of my weight. It's not designed to land in that position and hold that amount of weight.

The dialogue that ensued was rather predictable.

{Expletive!}

"Are you alright!?!?!"

{Expletive} {Expletive} *sharp intake of breath* {Expletive involving parentage and fornication} ... "I'm fine!" I yell as the kind of pain birth is usually associated with climbs up my leg and takes my breath away.

"Are you sure?"

...and here's what I was later criticized for:

"Yes!"

How could I be sitting there in so much pain, yet say that I was alright?

You see, to me, the litmus test for the first 'are you alright?' is:

'If I were alone right now, would I be in trouble?' In other words, is something broken or am I bleeding in pretty little pumping arcs across the walls? Do I need hospitalisation? Do I need converting to a faith quickly? Do I need to pick out a casket?

If the answer is 'no' to this little self-directed query, then I'm technically alright. I can take care of myself and apply first aid alone, albeit slowly. I can go and lick my wounds. I can curl up somewhere and heal, hoping that no-one will notice my blunder.

Of course, it's far better to have someone around to help and I was grateful to hear the thumping of two sets of feet coming toward me.

Two faces looking down. I'm scrunched up in the corridor, knees to my chest, clutching one ankle and making noises that might, in retrospect, be considered a little embarrasing. I'm still having trouble breathing as my diaphragm refuses to relax. Frankly, I'm surprised at the amount of pain given my usual high threshold of tolerance. I'm *really* hoping I haven't misjudged things and broken my ankle.

"Oh my god" says C, "She's pale."

I manage to hiss "Ice" before going back to staring into space and clutching at my ankle.

M rushes to the freezer and promptly hands me a bag filled with tiny frozen penguins, dolphins and long, thin ice cubes that always bob out of your drink and threaten to take one of your eyeballs out. I usually hate those ice cubes. Right now, I'm forming a deep bond with them.

Having done everything they possibly can, M and C look down at me for a little while. Then the inevitable starts. C breaks out into a grin.

"Dag."

"Shut up."

"How could you fall down the stairs?"

"I just...did."

"Yes, but...how? I wish I had seen it."

I don't know what it's like to have siblings when younger, but I'm willing to bet that this feeling of wanting to kick someone really, really hard is a part of the experience.

So I start telling them that it was the evil pair of socks. I point out the whole slipperiness-when-paired-with-stockings-issue. No sympathy.

"You wore them with stockings?"

"Yes."

"Idiot."

Like she's got a pair of hand knitted mountain-man socks that she is careful to avoid pairing with stockings ALL THE TIME.

I maintain that the socks leapt out at the appropriate moment and made me lose my traction. It had *nothing* to do with my running down the stairs way too fast and not paying attention. Nothing.

M

Free(ish) speech

2004-11-03T13:41:00.000Z

The family of Theo Van Gogh asked that attendees of his wake held at Dam Square, Amsterdam, make as much noise as possible rather than stay silent - they wanted to make a point that free speech will not be quieted.

I agree with their sentiments, but personally wonder how much freedom of speech we have already allowed to be taken away.

You see, the most likely motive for Van Gogh's murder is that he recently made a documentary critical of Islam, linking the Muslim faith to physical abuse. Understandably, some people were offended.

Instead of publicly and privately refuting Van Gogh's rationale, instead of suing him (if there were grounds) for slander, instead of using any of the tools available in a free society to fight what amounted to nothing more than the promulgation of an idea, someone decided to shoot him, stab him twice and slit his throat.

I don't think I really need to go into why this is such a horrid piece of news, anyone with half a mind already knows the answer.

I have another point to make.

We have, in our own society, recently seen someone make a blatant piece of slanted, biased, factually incorrect propaganda marketed as a documentary. I'd wager that that piece of celluloid tripe infuriated a lot of people with the power and desire to see this certain individual as dead as Van Gogh - but we all know he's still alive, well and waddling around the Western world peddling his venomous views.

Yes, he is an idiot, and a dangerous one, but there's nothing we can or should do to quiet him - we are civilised.

As Westerners we are taught to question authority and to accept other's criticism in turn. This has recently backfired when many in authority haven't had the tools to defend their actions and views against increasingly rabid media mavens and academics. This isn't a fault of Western society as a construct, merely one of the burdens that must be carried if we want freedom.

Islam, conversely, doesn't allow criticism or free thought. There is only adherence or blasphemy - we're talking about a religion, after all, which is a set of unquestionable, dogmatic beliefs. Those who are more diplomatically inclined will try to draw distinctions between fundamentalist adherence and it's more casual, contemporary counterpart. Unfortunately, the same doctrine is at the root of both, meaning that there is the potential for the same kind of thinking and action from all adherents.

This is what we're fighting. A society, nation and government where freedoms of all kinds that we take for granted are abrogated on a daily basis because of the foundation on which that society is built. We're fighting the kind of society that covers women in drapes, that doesn't allow them to work or vote. We're fighting the kind of society that produces people who kill dissenting filmmakers rather than gritting their teeth and dealing with a foreign point of view.

In a battle of competing ideologies, I think it's very important to have a very clear delineation of who 'us' and 'them' is, since it's often not race or geographical area but behavior and it's determinants that is the dividing factor. It's also important to ensure that we do not compromise or take on any of the characteristics of the enemy.

Unfortunately, I think we already have.

We're already conceding to a curtailment of free speech by allowing things like political correctness to spread, unchecked, through our schools, companies and government institutuions. Pressure groups are able to influence what we can and cannot legitimately, publicly say. Don't be fooled into thinking that PC is anything but mandatory, legislated self-censorship according to other's fragility of ego and arbitrary belief systems. Political correctness and freedom are not, and can never be, bedfellows.

This is why I was so disenchanted with the last sentence in this report of Van Gogh's murder:

"In The Hague, police arrested some 20 people for inciting hatred and shouting discriminatory and racist chants."

How very ironic that the death of a man sparked by speaking his unpopular views should be marred by arrests of people...speaking their unpopular views.

These arrests for the public airing of societally unacceptable ideas worry me. How much longer will it be before the illegality of public, verbal discrimination and/or racism will be extended to the kind of censorship that is rife in the very societies we are battling? How much longer until this post I wrote about the practice of veiling in Muslim societies is deemed illegal?

One of the things that freedom guarantees us is the right to be wrong, to state views that may not be grounded in the strongest of rationale and to make value judgements based on any criteria we deem fit. If I wish to think ill of someone because of their race, I am an idiot - not a criminal. If I wish to express that belief to them verbally, I should have every right to, even though it reflects extremely poorly on me and may be unpleasant for them. The law is not there to make life nicer, it's there to make life possible.

There are many ways to lose the war we're engaged in, not all of which involve an invading force with tanks and generals. The battle can be just as easily lost at home if we morph into their kind of society by simply not defending the ways and beliefs of our own. In the end, we won't have to shoot our filmmakers, they won't be allowed to make anything controversial in the first place.

The best way to honour Theo Van Gogh is to reinstate completely free speech - COMPLETELY FREE. By this I mean the obliteration of all censorship, of laws pertaining to inciting violence (I take issue with that one here) and to laws instituting various tenets of political correctness in our working lives.

Sound dangerous? Take a look around, you're on the internet and on a blog that isn't censored by any government body. You're a few clicks away from other blogs with some damned radical views. These have been around for years now and the world somehow keeps turning - in fact, I think we're better informed than ever.

M

(Cross-posted to A Western Heart)

(NB: Editing - Mis-spell of Van Gogh's name corrected)

Teetering

2004-11-02T04:44:00.000Z

He fell with a most satisfying “Whump!” to the floor.

Suddenly, a familiar voice behind me sounded. “Gently, GENTLY woman! The whole point is that you can do it with your fingertips, barely touching him. THAT’S what this exercise is about. I KNOW you can do it using your strength, now use his body to do the same thing.”

Walking to my end of the room, he faces one of the black belts. The black belt’s arms reach out for the instructor’s shirt, hands grabbing the material. The instructor presses the fingers of each hand into the assailant’s elbows from underneath, invisibly shifting his weight to one leg, tugging the student off balance. I know he’s doing this because I can see the student suddenly unsteady on his feet, uncertain. I know how it feels to be that student, how unbelievably light the touch is, how the floor suddenly shifts and refuses to bear your weight...all from the gentlest, lightest touch directed at the right area.

One elbow is directed across the body and down, the other across the body in the other direction, upwards towards the head. A push no harder than that to close a well-oiled drawer on the upper elbow. The student is now wobbling on one leg, his head pointed at the floor, the other leg in the air because his spine is locked and contorted in a twist that starts at his triceps, moves through his shoulders to his trapezoids and down the length of his back in a spasm that renders him rigid and supremely maneuverable.

The instructor see-saws him between standing somewhat solidly and facing an imminent conference between his face and the mat. He is controlling a fully grown man with his fingertips and the kind of force a child could exert without difficulty.

He looks at me. “This is all it will take.” - blowing a puff of air out between his lips - “To make him fall. Use his body against him.”

And that’s all it will seemingly take tomorrow – a puff of air – for America to remain standing upright or to tumble toward a disastrous leadership under John Kerry.

America had to let itself get into this kind of a predicament in the first place, though.

Just like the student had to first have his balance compromised, America had to have the basis of it’s free society questioned. Since the massacre on September 11th four years ago, various groups have been pulling and twisting, manipulating and pushing in an effort to topple President Bush’s government.

These moves ranged from the subtlest shifts left in some news coverage to the outright bludgeoning efforts of Michael Moore, certain outspoken celebrities and the world’s press (most notably, Britain’s). Bolstered by this kind of sentiment radiating from the very heart of the country that it reviles, Europe and its leaders joined the fray, yapping and frothing like small dogs sensing an easy victory at the ankles of a stricken giant.

Scandals of various proportions have erupted in the interim and been absorbed into the ever-shifting mass of public opinion. Bin Laden himself has made a Halloween appearance and reminded us that we are actually at war with something other than ourselves.

His speech, most interestingly, made use of every anti-Bush propaganda piece and news story printed in the last few years. It was as if Osama had pre-ordered the Fahrenheit 9-11 DVD and attended the DNC, taking fevered verbatim notes to prepare his Great Psychological Attack on the West. How wretched that our popular (and heavily, safely, properly, appropriately regulated) media were the source for most of the bilious enmity spouted by the man who would have us all subservient to his whims or dead.

Thankfully, the man’s English is awkward and speechwriting staff severely underpaid. If the pen is mightier than the sword, then all I can say about Bin Laden’s clumsy prose is that it was written with the kind of chewed-up plastic Bic that one finds in the gutter and is afraid to pick up. It merely served to remind the West that it was dealing with a fundamentalist madman. It strengthened the resolve of those who still see foreign nutters as a threat rather than a friend one hasn’t won over to the intricacies of milky tea and scones with jam.

So we find ourselves now on the eve of an election whilst embroiled in a very new kind of conflict that doesn’t seem to want to contain itself neatly within geographical boundaries nor contain it’s supporters in one geopolitical group.

If war requires unusual fortitude and certainty in the face of detractors – war with an enemy that is both without and within takes a special kind of leadership. Most notably, one that keeps its eye on exactly who the enemy is.

I don’t agree with Bush on many things – his views on stem cell research strike me as barbaric – but of the two men that are serious contenders to lead the West’s most powerful nation, he is the one that has my best wishes for victory. He has them because I can see that he has not lost sight of the terrific burden facing the office of President in the term to come - he can see the enemy and he knows he has to fight them consistently, ruthlessly and unapologetically.

A breath, though. A handful of votes. A statistical hiccup. This is all that stands between an America that will achieve this and an America that won’t. All because of the unchallenged machinations of a few that have forgotten what America stood for in the first place.

It reminds me of the words of a young American man being teased by two smarmy girls on the tube the other day for his accent and for being proud of his country.

“There was a time when you British were proud of your country, but you lost it.”

I’m afraid that if Kerry wins, Americans will be well on their way to losing it too.

M

(Cross-posted to A Western Heart.)

Gourmet ghoul

2004-10-30T14:57:00.000Z

I don't like to brag, but....

Well, actually, I do like to brag. I'm going to the best Halloween party in London. Why? Well, dahhlinks, it's being catered by the Gastrobloggette herself.

Have a look at the food. And the desserts.

This woman makes me hungry every time I go near her blog. I've been hankering for a cheesy hot dog for days.

On a serious note, though, I really do love to read her blog because she and her contributors are such wonderful, wonderful cooks. Most importantly, they have diverse styles and approaches to food as well as each bringing the cuisine and habits of a different culture to bear on their recipes.

Cooking is a great skill and a pleasure. I love to experiment...to have a look at what's on hand and see how I can combine the flavours and textures. This is only possible because of years of successes, failures and horrid mistakes. I now know what you can and can't do with egg, how to treat chocolate, how much salt to add just by sight, when to use vanilla essence, extract, sugar or pod and how to add milk to something hot without it curdling. I know which flavours can be happily combined to build on each-other and which provide a wonderful contrast to each-other.

Cooking for others is a great experience too - I love to make things for M and he does for me. Coming home to the smell of something wonderful bubbling away on the stove or crisping in the oven is a delight.

And, of course, the eating. Mmmmmm.....the eating.

Knowing how to cook well also heightens one's appreciation for other's cooking. You know how much effort has gone into the dish, you appreciate what a complex flavour has been created. You become picky as well as highly complimentary at restaurants.

I firmly believe that there is no-one who 'just can't cook'. We're not born with an innate ability to drive cars, program computers or grow plants either - they're all learned, refined skills.

I would keep going with this post, but I have to get my costume on and run. Be assured, it's nothing like this.

M

Be still, my beating...

2004-10-29T14:06:00.000Z

I received a very flattering email from Michael Jericho the other day. The flattery came with an invitation. Compliment-whore than I can be, I accepted and I'm pleased to say that I will be cross posting some of the things you read here onto A Western Heart.

I'm really no good at describing things succinctly. If you're curious about A Western Heart, go have a peek yourself. I think the writing and the political analysis is rather fresh and an easy, logical read, but don't take my word for it as I'm all biased now.

M

Helpless

2004-10-29T01:24:00.000Z

So we're not supposed to protect ourselves from an assault on our person or property.

Nor should we really expect the police to protect us from the same.

What, then, is left as a course of action for a person who would just like to get along with their lives?

I'm not talking about celebrities, or businesspeople, or the wealthy or the exceptionally fortunate. I'm talking about Joe Average who has a 9-5, a wife, 2.3 kids, a car that he wishes was just a little sexier and a front lawn that requires inordinate amounts of attention to look good.

What is the point of planning a life, of acquiring property, of using the word 'mine' when the justice system has as good as said someone else has the right to walk up and prise it out of your hands at their discretion?

The 'right to' do so, of course, only implicitly. The 'right to' because you aren't allowed to forcibly stop that person from doing it and because those to whom you have given the power to act on your behalf - the police - are too undermanned and shackled by beaurocracy to do it for you.

Humans need property to survive. It's in our nature - at it's most basic it is the food held in the hand of the savage and the animal skin keeping him warm.

We've thankfully progressed somewhat from that most basic of subsistence survival models (although if you listen closely to some in the environmental movement, they would like nothing more than for us to regress right back to it). We now have lamb cutlets and Italian leather coats, DVD players and iPods, Hondas and Segways. These are simply an enhancement of that basic hunk of food and that animal skin - even though they're not all *strictly* necessary for our basic survival, they are simply an extended version of the same idea of property.

The protection of this property, of our lives and of the freedom to enjoy both is, theoretically, the cornerstone of our political and legal system. Something's rather rotten in the state of Denmark when a citizen can't act out the rights he is given in theory to protect all three against anyone threatening to take them away.

M

Management by hint

2004-10-28T18:12:00.000Z

I like all my commenters equally.

Except for those that don't follow the really simple instructions to use the comment system 'below'...meaning below the instruction. Those commenters, I like less.

Oh, and those that leave really intelligent comments. I like those more.

Otherwise, it's a pretty even spread of love.

Purrfect pets

2004-10-28T11:37:00.000Z

Run.

They're going to eat your children, make you break out in hives, ruin the habitat of the squish-faced-woodland-finch and eventually mutate into super-beings that can command your remote control. Really.

But first, they're going to sucker you in by being cute and stopping you from sneezing.

I'm talking about all that GM stuff, and it's a conspiracy, folks.

FIRST they give us things we want, all the things that will make our lives easier and better. All the things that we will be willing to part with money for because of their life-enhancing properties.

THEN one of the GM company bosses will take all those profits and will buy a leather high-backed chair, a ludicrously long conference table, an eye patch and will begin plans to Take Over The World.

I've seen it happen in numerous ~~movies~~ documentaries.

You have been warned.

M

Democratizing the 'sphere

2004-10-27T18:07:00.000Z

I'm liking the Adam Smith Institute's blog more and more as they get used to the format and find their voice in the medium. It's a great source of news snippets as well as a quick, concise and prescient analysis of the impact of that news.

So it's only natural that they should host a seminar on 'Democracy and The Blogosphere' when so many others have tried (and dismally failed) to discuss the issue in an intelligent and well-researched manner. This time, though, the Big Blog Company bunch are involved - halleluljah for expertise. Here's the rundown:

"Much hype surrounds the internet's self-publishing phenomenon known as blogging. Many claim that the blogosphere - the community of millions of blogs - is the key to reinvigorating the political process. Some believe that, using blogs, politicians will better serve their constituents, the disaffected will become involved in politics, and public confidence in the ability of government to solve society's problems will skyrocket.

There are also those who fiercely believe that, if only MPs would all start blogging, public debate would be dramatically revitalised. Is this wishful thinking in the age of spin doctors and party whips? Would more conversation with the public encourage our MPs to follow better policies, or lead to governance by opinion poll?

Does the blogosphere really strengthen the political progress, or is it more anti-Establishment than the Establishment would like to believe? Should the unprecedented ability of citizens to spread criticism of the state, its actions and its employees be cause for governmental alarm? Can our political process withstand such scrutiny? And is the blogosphere the big, equality-driving democracy so many claim that it is, or is it really a meritocracy, where the most interesting, compelling, and worthwhile ideas rise to the top?"

I won't encourage people to attend because those that should attend have some natural interest and don't need encouragement. I just want you to know it's there. And that there's champagne.

M

Unconstitutional

2004-10-27T17:03:00.000Z

Many people need SOMETHING...some seam-free prescriptive document by which to live their lives to the letter.

Many choose the bible as a comprehensive set of rules. Others consider themselves atheists...but are just as rigidly bound by another piece of writing.

The American Constitution is held up, by radical constitutionalists and those Libertarians who came to the flock without doing much background research, as the be-all and end-all in terms of How Things Should Be Done.

To listen to them is to think that this scrap of paper materialized some few hundred years ago from nowhere to be implemented with immediate and complete success.

The truth of the tale, as anyone who cares to give it much thought will tell you, is that it was written by a bunch of pretty clued up guys. A handful of men gathered together to decide on the rules that a fledgling nation state would play by and the only thing that they had to guide them was their judgment...and their philosophy – whether it be based on a god, the writings of dead Greeks or on Locke et al’s.

The Constitution is simply a SYMBOL of a set of moral philosophies as those ideas pertain to a government.

That’s it.

And it’s quite brilliant, actually. These guys took a bit of a stab in the dark and – for the most part – got it right.

The problem is when you base your entire idea of the way the world should work on that teensy little laundry list of Do’s and Don’ts. It’s not going to make you sound like anything other than a raving loon if you need to prop every argument you have on The Constitution.

“Taxes? No! Bad, bad, bad....except for luxury taxes on tobacco and alcohol...”

“Life, liberty and property? I THINK they’re good ideas, let me just look them up...”

"Coffee or tea? Lemme just pull out my copy of...."

(Yes, yes, the last is a JOKE. I don't need 20 emails telling me that there isn't a constitutional amendment on refreshments.)

Badnarik is a nice guy, I’m sure. Very brave to be the frontman for the Libertarian Party in America. Very brave.

I’d recommend that the man expand his reading list somewhat so that every question he is fielded doesn’t come back to 'It's in the Constitution' or ‘It’s not in the Constitution.’* Or that he doesn't argue both for adherence to it and it's abolition at the same time.*

*Via A Stitch in Haste, via VodkaPundit, via my RSS reader - credit where credit's due, people.

It just makes him sound like a born-again parchment worshipper and I don’t really think America needs another religious nutter for President.*

*No, of course it doesn't mean I endorse Kerry over Bush. As I said in an email to a friend that asked recently: "Bush, even though he's an angry-sky-god-worshipping, anti-science conservative. It's like asking: 'Would madam like to be strangled to death or shot this evening?' You choose the least painful."

This post isn't about trashing Badnarik, though, it's about seemingly-simple prescriptive solutions to problems and issues that are too complex to simply gloss over. It's also about the one thing that I froth about regularly on here - stripping back politicies, ideas, media articles, blog posts or metacontexts (Perry, I can't get rid of that word from my vocabulary, you should be proud) to their rawest, originating ideas and having a good, hard, long look.

The Constitution is a wonderful document, don't get me wrong (oh, OK, get me wrong - it keeps things interesting), but it's the ideas that spawned such a document that get me excited. If we understand those ideas, then the Constitution can not only be better utilized in word and in spirit, but perhaps we can use those ideas and come up with something that better expresses them to serve us.

M

R & R

2004-10-26T23:47:00.000Z

M took a day off yesterday and, as is the tradition when he does things like that, I packed a picnic and we walked to the lake.

The heath-like area we walk through to get to the lake was beautiful in a sparse way, when nature repeats patterns that are pleasing to the human eye. Dry, wheat-coloured grass shimmied in the wind and every stalk arched in the same direction, giving the illusion of a thousand stationary ripples, clumps of hair brushed by the breeze. Below the waving dry stalks was a still-lush dark green grass, only visible when underfoot. The illusion was one of walking on an ever-shifting green oasis in amongst a sea of parched straw.

We sat down at our favorite bluff and unpacked hot scrambled eggs and bacon, french bread and cheese, juice and steaming Model-Tea (you can have it any way you like, as long as it's white with sugar) from the thermos. We ate and talked, we observed geese honking and flying overhead - wisely leaving the country for warmer climes in the winter.

I noticed the way the light coloured Matthew's hair, made it so much brighter than normal. I've always loved the colour of his hair - every individual strand is a different colour...white, ash, yellow, copper, brown, black...and they come together to create the most extraordinarly rich auburn hair I've ever seen.

Beginning to feel the bite of the wind, we retreated to the more sheltered forrest area where phase two of gorging ourselves on sweeter things took place.

Matthew selected a likely spot and set up camp while I played around with the camera and the wonderfully bright slanting light.

I pulled out my laptop and...

...what? What are you looking at me like that for? What do you mean you don't pack your laptop for a picnic? Luddite.

Anyway, I read Cluetrain to Matthew as he busily munched food with all the fervour of a geek who hasn't consumed anything in the last 30 minutes. He loved Cluetrain...of course.

A man walking a dog happened upon us and started chuckling.

"It's quite an extraordinary pastoral scene you two have going there."

Quite right. There we were, rugged against the wind and cold...scarves, gloves and coats on. Nestled into the mossy roots of a massive tree, hugging each other and mugs of steaming tea...and me reading about management theory from a wafer-thin silver laptop.

I love being a geek-by-association :)

M

Get a clue

2004-10-26T01:14:00.000Z

A Story

There are a few things that I clearly remember from childhood - when the blur of past time seems to slow and sharpen like a pause in a frantic microfiche search and it's possible to immerse oneself in a memory.

Darryl Hull is sitting on my left and is animatedly describing something he did at work to my parents. His booming voice fills the room and his hands, skin soft and buttery-yellow like his hair, make expressive movements to punctuate the story. I'm just a kid, bright but not expected to fully understand what it is he's talking about.

If only he knew how his story changed my life.

He had been engaged by a company to find out why production errors were so high. He was also asked to get rid of a bottleneck that the company had found in it's operations. He went along and toured the facilities, talking to a guide as he filed from room to room, learning about what the company did and how, about the company's culture and it's history, about the way things were done and what was expected of people working there. Walking into a certain area and observing the workflow, he realised he had found it - the place where both the bottleneck and the errors occurred.

He pauses in his story, his eyes sparkling with the enjoyment of talking about an elegant solution to a complex problem. He isn't looking at me, hasn't noticed that I've scarcely taken a breath for the last few minutes. For some reason, this seems like the most interesting story I've ever heard - and it doesn't even have robots in it.

"And then I saw it, I saw *why* all of this was happening. It was between two departments, one of which simply carried on the production work of the previous department. One was wholly reliant on the other for it's input. You see, there was a wall between these two departments - just a flimsy one, not load bearing. It was soundproof, though, and only had a small window and a door in it - that damned door was always kept closed!"

He stopped again, waiting...waiting for my parents to get it. They didn't, it wasn't instinctual to them, this wasn't their profession. I, on the other hand, felt something strange. I remember seeing a flash of something that I can only describe as a dam or a log blocking the flow of a river which was overlaid onto my imagined picture of these two departments. The log was where that wall was and I felt uncomfortable.

"So I told them to get rid of that wall. Just scrap it." He takes a swig of his drink. "Of course, they thought I was crazy, but they did it anyway."

What happened in that company? Well, suddenly those two departments could talk to each other...actually talk...not just about work but just shooting the breeze and comparing notes on the weekend's cricket game. They could do it without opening that damned door, they could just raise their voice a little and talk to someone who basically didn't exist the previous week...someone in Another Department*. The conversation did turn to work occasionally and it turned out that feedback from the 'receiving' department changed what the 'giving' department sent over...it was better, it was right. The bottleneck and the errors were gone. The world took a collective breath. Birds twittered in the trees. We were safe.

(*Anyone who hasn't worked somewhere uber-corporate won't understand that people from Other Departments are usually viewed with suspicion by people in Your Department. The accountants are considered boring drunkards, IT as surly prats, administrative staff as an easy lay and HR as the untouchables. Christmas parties can look like organisational charts from above as department people sit together and rehash the year's cubicle conversation. )

Anyhow, at this point all I wanted to know was: "What is this?" What was his profession? It truly struck me as the most interesting occupation in the world, now that my ideas of being a surgeon had been neatly quashed. There were appeals to my rationality ('It takes years of study, hard study before you make any money.'), femininity ('It's a man's profession, you're always going to find yourself discriminated against.') and propriety ('It's digging around in people's guts, it's sick, foul-smelling, work, it's people dying, it's unsociable hours.'). Perhaps it's one of those things that was never really meant to be, perhaps I didn't really love it enough. I mean, do you think Michaelangelo would have been put off had his parents told him he'd get dusty from all that unsociable marble-chipping?

Either way, something had to replace my voracious appetite for any medical/scientific data and my habit of performing surgery on any meat product that my mother happened to leave on the draining board in the kitchen. (Fish skulls would get the royal treatment and I became expert at pulling apart eyeballs and examining pieces without making too much of a mess of the subject matter.)

Intellectual Apprenticeship

My passion was then and there transferred to this - whatever it was. I first had to find out what on earth his profession was called as it wasn't on the 'usual suspects' list of doctor/lawyer/accountant.

It seemed to be all about observing things, thinking about things and fixing things. It was about looking at things from the macro view. It was about walking into an ailing organisation and healing it. It was a lot like surgery but the patient was a business. I was hooked.

I did what all good chidren do (for once) and sought out the advice of my elders - I asked "How do I get there? How do I get to do this?"

Careers week at school was a little confusing as I couldn't find what I wanted to do on The List of professions. All of the options open to me as a small human were supposed to be contained on this one, all-encompassing, all-knowing list. (Government schools blow in ways unimagined.) Unfortunately, telling a teacher that I wanted to be 'Darryl Hull' would have had me referred to the school psychologist.

So I went to University to study Commerce. It seemed to be the right direction - I was studying anatomy, the anatomy of businesses that I would heal. I chose the most prestigious University in my state - all sandstone buildings and sprawling, manicured gardens and brass plaques and mentions in academic journals and treating undergrads (who brought in all the money) like slime because postgrads (who brought in all the prestige) were higher beings and taking itself very, very seriously.

And I waited.

Through hours of lectures on double-entry bookkeeping and Capital Asset Pricing Models.

Through tutorials with wanky marketing-types that would froth and bleat about 'branding' and 'eyeballs'.

Through heated arguments with my Workplace Law lecturer about why the hell every incident is considered the company's fault.

I waited to be taught how to heal, I waited for all of these disparate disciplines to be finally sown together into something resembling a going concern rather than discreet departments that just carried on despite each-other. I waited to be mesmerised again as I was in Darryl Hull's lounge room.

My discontent grew with every passing week, every month. I changed my major from Accounting/Finance to straight Management in a bid to study more of the holistic subjects that I thought would get me to my goal. I had figured out by this time that what I wanted to do was called Change Management and I spent every spare moment in the library reading the Harvard Business Review cases and studies when I should have been memorizing the 6 most common organisational structures or the 4 main things that constitute a marketing push.

Finally, I got to study the unit that was supposed to be all about Change Management. I was early for the first lecture and sat in the front row, giddy with excitement. I imagined case studies and real-world examples, anecdotes and recommendations for dealing with certain common problems. I expected to learn and to love it.

What I did NOT expect were the dreaded PowerPoint Slides of Intellectual Death (+2 resistance against alertness) and the same shapes, models and lists to memorise as in any other courses. By the third lecture I found my attention wandering and I began to think I had made a big, big mistake in my choice of career.

The tutorials, though, kept me thinking that I hadn't. Tutes consisted of case studies, lengthy ones that were supposed to be read beforehand and preliminarily analysed before bringing our paltry observations to the room and laying them on the Altar of Naivette to be scrutinised by the tutor. Sometimes, we would get into groups and 'role play' or discuss the case.

The problems here were twofold.

Firstly, I don't play well with children not of my choosing, so this group thinking thing didn't work for me.

I also generally knew the answers the minute that I skimmed the case. I didn't know how or why exactly - but the correct course of action seemed to come to me as easily as the answer to 1+1 - and I really didn't need to brainstorm or 'role play' with a bunch of list-memorising morons to come to my conclusions.

The answer, most of the time, was communication. Getting rid of the 'information silos' as Jack Welch called them. Getting rid of little factions and fiefdoms built on unique departmental knowledge.

Of course, there were other things that could be fixed - like implicit inducements to incorrect behavior through poorly constructed remuneration, for example - but *dang* did getting the right information to the right people have a lot to do with the quality of their decision making that in turn would ensure the success of the company.

Good internal communication also helped to ease the inevitable friction that poor communication, misinformation or gossip threw up in a large company.

Get Rid of That Wall

So I embarked on my career, usually in Human Resource departments (yes, I have the scars to prove I did my time) and I found that - almost without exception - these people were not the type to give a damn about the organisation as a whole.

They saw the workplace as an org chart to be filled with warm bodies, as resources to be passionlessly managed and moved around physically and emotionally without any reference to their humanity, as annoying complaints to be dealt with, as 'sensitive issues' to get all warm and fuzzy over.

People were foolish, rash, un-PC and there to be controlled like unruly children. We would try to filter and sanitise information as much as we could so that these children didn't hurt themselves or our organisation overly much in their everyday activities.

To be fair, I was working in the zombie-filled corridors of government, but still, aren't they supposed to be the sweet, loving ones that care about people over profit?

I covertly worked within the system to do the things I thought should be done in the ways I though they should be accomplished. I handed out unvarnished truths and didn't call a spade 'a lever-like garden implement'. I endeared myself to those managers who got the fact that we were there to get things done and made dire enemies of those who thought we were there to each create ourselves a corporate nest, line it with bullshit, secure it with sandbags and hunker down until retirement or promotion.

I was always trying to get rid of that damn wall. Through office furiture arrangement, by setting up committees (don't shoot, please), by emailing people, by giving out my mobile number and saying "Just call me...tell me how your day has been, tell me about life, whatever, I don't care, just don't ever think you're annoying me with a phone call."

I was honest about how busy I was. I remember a contract where, within a week of starting, it was decided that I and my lone counterpart were to be the point of contact for all Human Resource and Payroll queries in the company. I was hired as a 'Consultant'. I'm not a Payroll professional, by the way and it's a completely different discipline - like asking a footballer to play rugby because they're both sports played with a ball on a field. No, I don't know why it was dumped on us either.

Staff spanning England, Scotland and Wales were split into two groups and given our email addresses. Well, you can imagine that when the electronic shit hit the fan, there wasn't anywhere left for me to hide. I would sometimes sit and just watch emails coming into my inbox, filling the screen with unread messages like a game of tetris gone terribly wrong.

Taking a quick look at how much there was to be done and how little time there was to the next payroll cycle, I made an executive decision to communicate with my 'customers'. I sent out emails essentially saying;

"Hey all - I'm that new HR Consultant you've probably heard about. You've sent me loads of emails and I'm utterly snowed under with problems, all of which can't be solved for this pay cycle. Could the people who whose query is really, really urgent (ie: won't be able to pay the rent or buy food if I don't fix it this month) please send me a quick email and tell me so that I can prioritise them. I *will* get around to you all and think it'll take a few pay cycles to get everything done. Thanks for your patience, guys, I hope to actually meet all of you one of these days."

I hadn't demolished the wall, but I had certainly opened the door so that I could holler into the next room. I received a few emails saying "Me! Me! Fix my problem!" and I did. I received a few from asses who evidently thought that this was an easy system to screw over, simply give the woman a sob story and you'll get to the top of the list. I fixed those too, there weren't that many. I taught myself payroll slowly and painfully, I worked my way down the newly prioritised list and got it done.

It seemed to work. People who would otherwise be fuming about how the new HR person wasn't getting their query fixed realised that she was getting to it as fast as she could. I emailed people when I started working on their query, gave them a date by which I anticipated it's completion and always sent an apologetic email if it looked like I was running over the estimated time.

Most importantly, I had told the truth and had made some friends. People from strange offices far, far away said: "Hey, when are you going to haul your ass down here to visit us? You sound really cool."

I was happy with the result and shared the insight with my manager while we were at a large lunch with a load of other people. Her response?

"Yes, I heard about that. I never want you to do it again. Who are *you* to tell people that their problems may not be as important as someone else's? As for how busy you are - no-one wants to know. If you're going to send emails out to a lot of people, make sure you run them by me in future."

I was stunned. I didn't know whether to be embarrassed or furious, so I just felt numb and confused. Wasn't I hired as someone who was there to help employees? Wasn't part of that help talking to them like fellow human beings?

I didn't realise then that what I had done was to peel away the very cool, corporate persona that HR in this company had erected. We were the untouchables that would swoop down to hurt you if you uttered a sexist joke. We were the mysterious gatekeepers for hiring and firing. We conferred with executives and had just as much power to search their computer for nasties as anyone else's. We didn't have a sense of humour, we didn't fraternise with the natives and we most certainly didn't care if we weren't perceived as doing a good enough job.

Memories of every workplace are littered with those kinds of examples. With the most logical, straightforward solutions being abandoned for something that would tread on less toes, give out less information, present a more 'corporate' face, kiss the right ass.

I ended up thinking that I must be a little crazy, that there must be something wrong with my reasoning and my beliefs. It became very, very tiring to be always butting my head against indifference, hostility, politics and entrenched entropy.

Perhaps these people were right. After all, they're the ones being promoted and I'm the loon that no-one 'important' talks to in the cafeteria.

Cluetrain Vindication

Today I read half of the Cluetrain Manifesto and it was like sitting in Darryl Hull's lounge room again.

The descriptions of problems were clear and the solutions so eloquently, beautifully, instinctually simple and right that the only effort in reading was not to be distracted by anything else.

I dearly wished that I had read this earlier...I dearly wished that it had been written many years ago when I was just starting my degree. I would have had some sort of reference to go back to when the entire world was telling me that the things I thought were wrong and naive, that politicking and lies were the only way to survive, that obfuscation was superior to clarity and honesty and that customers were complete idiots to be fed a message that even we - as students and as practitioners - found insulting to utter.

I wish I had had it when I was working in those horrid companies. I would have understood and laughed at their stupidity rather than timidly tapped my superiors on the shoulder, offering suggestions for change and believing that I must be too young and inexperienced to be right in the face of so much opposition.

Cluetrain should be mandatory reading for university students in many disciplines - but, of course, it won't be - as it directly challenges the authoritative voice that teaches at those institutions.

It should be mandatory reading in any corporation that wishes to remain profitable in the years to come - but, again, it won't be - as it directly challenges the authority of many executives.

It will be read by many, understood by some, implemented by few - and those who implement it will be the ones to 'somehow' survive the great upheavals that are already beginning to shatter Business As Usual in Western society.

M

Packed it in

2004-10-21T18:07:00.000Z

As promised, a light post to follow up the last one which was full of deep philosophical meanings and a couple of really in-depth charts.

_____

A few years ago, I opened a box of goods that had been mailed to us and exclaimed in delight. Reaching into the box, I pulled out a handful of packaging material and took a tentative bite...

You see, that packaging material looked just like chrupki - my favorite snack when living in Poland. Chrupki are simply an extruded, baked pulp of corn and water. They don't really sound appetizing, I know, and to people who absolutely demand flavour from their food - they aren't. It's the texture that I found utterly addictive.

Once I ascertained that it was (probably) the same stuff, I dove into that box and sat there contentedly munching packing pellets for several minutes before I noticed the way M was looking at me.

For the first time ever I had received a look that unequivocally said "Oh. My. God. You are stark, raving bonkers."

I hadn't bothered explaining what I was doing to the poor man and as far as he was concerned, his wife was sitting at a table calmly eating toxic packaging material right from the box.

I explained it to him and the look was only slightly downgraded to "I know you do these kinds of crazy things, and I know you have your reasons, but man can you be weird sometimes." This was fine - it's a look I was used to.

Anyhow, this time around in Poland, I sought out and bought a great, big bag of the things. M had one and exclaimed that it was like eating tissue paper. "Precisely" I said, "Crunchy, though, aren't they?". I got that slightly downgraded look.

After a couple of days of feasting on cardboard-flavoured pellets, I actually took a good look at the packet and almost shot the one I had in my mouth across the room. There, on the back, above the ingredients, was a picture of two children. Below it was written "My children eat this too." It was signed by the guy who owned the company who produced the things.

I understand the intent. He wanted to say "I'm a loving father who wants the best for his kids. I think these things are safe/nutritious/good enough for my children. You can feed these to your kids too, knowing that they won't grow tentacles by age 7 from eating my product."

As you can see, the whole thing hinges on him loving these children, wanting the best for them, treating them well. Which doesn't hang at all with the haircut of the eldest, does it? To me, that kind of coif just screams abuse of one sort or another.

How do you get that kind of hair on a kid? Do you show a hairdresser this:

...and tell him to wing it?

Hair like this doesn't just happen, it requires hairspray, maintenance and planning.

Just an observation, albeit a personal one. I'm now checking for tentacles on a weekly basis.

M

A tale of two spectrums

2004-10-21T02:33:00.000Z

I suppose I could invoke Godwin’s Law, but that seems a little too easy and there are so many other things I could point to that make Todd lose the argument.

My disagreement with Todd began in the comments section of the previous post. I was just going to let it lie, but when I got a certain email from him this afternoon, I thought that it might be worth taking a little time out to properly address his statements.

_____

I’ve seen the cycle before and never fail to be amazed by the lack of grace that some people on the other side of the political spectrum exhibit, especially if they accidentally mistake you for one of their own and – for a brief, shining moment – are actually nice to you. Todd and I had been exchanging emails complimenting each other’s writing styles for the last couple of days, life was rather peachy.

Then Todd suddenly realised that he and I might not agree with each other politically. The cycle had begun.

First, there’s ‘Anger’ at accidentally being suckered into civility:

“I should have guessed from the hair-do that you’d turn out to be a right-wing bean counting nut-job.”

As I told him in a follow up comment – he should have guessed by my writing. He did mention that he read my blog ‘all the time’.

I do absolutely nothing to hide my ideas. As the old saying goes – I wear my heart on my sleeve. One better, actually, as I wear an American dollar sign around my neck...I wore it when I worked in government, I wore it when I worked in a factory, I wear it when I walk into parties of people I know are openly hostile against Americans.

I also have this little blog here which is only censored for language – because I care about what goes up. Sometimes (like right now) I’ll just write off-the-cuff because the material is light. Sometimes I’ll take days to write a post because I want it to be just right, because I’ll want to make my thinking as clear and unambiguous as possible. I don’t censor for political ideas, I don’t blunt my message, I don’t couch the things I think in language that will soften the very real impact that they should make.

In other words, the only way I could make who I am and what I believe more obvious would be to have a neon sign installed above my head. That’s not going to happen, though, because the general populace is intelligent enough to figure these things out rather quickly from other cues.

Anyhow, the next stage in the cycle is ‘Throwing Up Buzzwords As Evidence’. Pretty much anything will do, although if it’s fresh and topical it’ll be a more likely candidate. Bear in mind that an actual, cogent presentation of a case isn’t necessary. The mere existence of said event/buzzword is proof enough that capitalism is out to ruin us all and boil our children down for soap:

“Now, from the people who brought you the marvelous efficiencies of private enterprise, we bring you the Enron show, brought to you in part by the Savings and Loan debacle.”

My answer to that is lengthy and can be found in the ‘Thinklings’ of the previous post. Suffice it to say that I rebuked it as best I could and admitted where I had insufficient information to make a comment.

Evidently, everything was moving along according to the script because the ‘Patronizing and Belittling Condescension’ kicked in. This phase is triggered when it looks like (horror of horrors) the person on my end of the political spectrum is quite willing and able to enter into a rational point-by-point discussion rather than merely fling mud and exchange insults:

“Darling, I wasn’t using the Enron case as an exception, I was using it as the rule. Private enterprise has as its goal profits, not efficiency. The two only rarely go hand in hand outside macroeconomics classrooms. Neither, however, benefit public libraries. The only thing that justifies your argument is the cute little pout you get when you proclaim its virtues.”

Again, my (lengthy) answer is in ‘Thinklings’ in the last post.

Before I posted my answer, however, Godwin reared his ugly head and I received this email:

“Sorry Nazi Girl, I'm not going to comment on your site anymore, even though I know you're dying to lead people over to it. You'll just have to go back to playing GI Joe.Have fun in California, Todd”

Todd lives in a parallel universe where I play with children’s toys, where his commenting on my blog (leaving a link to his blog) somehow drives traffic to me, where I live in California and where I am a Nazi.

Fascinating. Bloody predictable really as it’s the last phase of the cycle – 'Implying Fascism', but still fascinating in its scope and execution.

It’s this last comment that pushed me from casually watching the proceedings to taking more immediate action. I’m a little tired of being called a Nazi or a fascist. It’s insulting, tiring to hear again and again and so terribly, blatantly and evidently wrong that I’m amazed at people with a seemingly comprehensive education espousing the view.

Let’s do a lesson in Politics 101. Just one lesson I promise, then back to my usual lighthearted nothings about fashion and what Britney’s going to do with her life.

Please click on each image for a larger version.

The Spectrum

Right, this one’s pretty self-explanatory. That there’s a spectrum. Note the important feature of very different things being at each end. Keep it in mind, it'll come in handy later.

This is what I was taught at school. Bear in mind that my teacher was an idiot. He used to talk about the spectrum as a strip that looped back in on itself as Communism and Fascism shared some similar traits. No kidding? Like being almost identical, perhaps?

This is not the kind of spectrum that will have women swooning over you when you start talking about politics. I warn you now – he probably died alone in an apartment full of cats and inaccurate history books.

...after all, that’s what this is all about, isn’t it? Picking up at a soiree. Don’t tell me I never do anything for you.

This little diagram makes so much more sense. It’s a spectrum – one thing on one side and a very different thing on the other.

Note the numbers, here’s an explanation:

1 – Where we’re told we are
2 – Where we actually are
3 – Where we’re headed for

The Fighting Thing

Yes, yes, the Communists and the Nazis fought. They disliked each other. They threw propaganda, tanks, men, threats and bullets at each other – it’s a matter of historical record. This DOES NOT MEAN THAT THEY ARE IDEOLOGICAL OPPOSITES.

To help illustrate this, let’s look at an analogy – two mafia dons battling for territory. They will throw propaganda, grenades, men, threats and bullets at each other. This doesn’t mean that because one is a bloodthirsty murderer, the other must be a yoga-practicing, wheatgrass-juice-gargling, Kerry-voting peacenik. They’re both just barbarian dictators fighting over territory and the ensuing riches that they can extract from them.

Right. Got that?

So coming back to the whole Communist-is-the-opposite-of-Fascist idea, the fact that they didn’t particularly like each other or that they fought each other isn’t grounds for saying that they are opposites. They fought for power over territory – usually Poland, because that’s what Poland is there for.

In fact, anyone who actually paid attention during History lessons at school (I didn’t really. Neither did my teacher, who used to practice his golf swing in the corner while we copied down the notes the previous class had had from their teacher and that were still on the blackboard.) will recall that Nazi stands for National Socialist Party. Yes, socialist. Socialist as in the central idea behind Communism.

I just know that there was a collective gasp of realization out there in the blogosphere from that one.

Bringing it all Together

Now – the last stage – synthesis of all these ideas.

I talk about freedom from government intervention, I talk about individualism, I talk about productivity and business, I talk about hair product. All of these, I think you will agree, firmly belong at the Capitalist end of the spectrum. Far, far away from anything requiring goose-stepping and jodhpurs.

I most certainly don’t talk about the South of Poland or large ovens or how very pretty it would be if we were all blonde.

Silliness aside (*pushes entire post to the side with the aid of a small bulldozer*), stating that anyone who doesn’t believe in state redistribution of riches is a Nazi is quite ignorant. It blatantly ignores the fundamental philosophy behind Fascism as well as that behind Communism, it shows that you are either unwilling or incapable of discussing politics at an adult level and...well...it invokes Godwin’s law for chrissakes.

M

Sake and storage

2004-10-20T13:33:00.000Z

People love to harp on about what they think governments should provide. From libraries to education to computers to just about anything you can think of. If someone needs it, then the state should step in and vaporize it from thin air for them.

There are many reasons that this is just plain wrong (think 'theft' and you'd be on the right track), but one of the reasons that captures the imagination most is this - when a government provides something it has absolutely no incentive to make it innovative, interesting, beautiful...heck, even economical. I mean, what are the state serfs who dole out alms going to get if they give a better service? Less foul-tasting coffee? A discount on Dilbert calendars? Special vests with knife-foiling-plating on the back? Nope - in the end, unless they're oily, butt-kissing little turds, they're going to get sweet, sweet nada for doing a better job.

It's the market - full of nutjobs like entrepreneurs - that provides innovation and flavour to our everyday lives. Companies, in a bid to attract customers (you see, when you DON'T have a government monopoly, you have to do something pretty exciting to get people to use your service), will create wild things. Colourful computers with shitty little round one-button mice. Toasters in a variety of migraine-inducing colours. Vacuum cleaners that don't use dustbags. Sushi specs. Sushi USB flash memory units.

Yup. Sushi USBs. Via Gastroblog (it's food, ok, symbolised food):

Can you see the Creative Service Steering Committee of the Department Of Very Small Storage Devices *ever* coming up with something like this?

No, neither do I.

In fact, if USB storage devices were only supplied by government departments, I'd be willing to bet that you'd need a wheelbarrow to cart one around and a PhD to figure out how to work the bloody thing as well as a fully registered Connections Operator to help you plug it into your computer.

It's because the government *cannot*, by it's very nature, distribute (let's not taint the word 'sell') anything bar bog-standard products that have basic, tested, functionality. They have to cater to the broadest set of people possible - cutting swathes across generations, genders, races, socioeconomic levels and tastes.

They can't take risks (and shouldn't) so they don't. That's why anything provided by the government is grey, boxy, barely-functional and about as exciting as a date with a trainspotter.

And consider this - if the government's product is shite, there is very little responsibility taken. Someone may be fired, some reshuffling of titles may happen. In the end, it's not like they'll go out of business, not with millions of people being forced to pay them irrespective of the kind of service they provide. They fail, money keeps rolling in.

A business, on the other hand, that takes a risk and fails miserably goes *out* of business pretty quickly. Money only comes in if they provide something of value at the right price. This is why they are willing to take a risk on something a little off-the-wall - what if it works? What if they can quickly create and control a completely new section of the market?

I have no idea if those little sushi USB thingies will make it. I hope they do - it'll make the world a more colourful place.

M

_____

Update: Note to self - Read Perry Metzger's blog more often. He'll probably have written what you want to write in a lovely, concise, lucid form, ie:

"When examining a proposed government action, we must be especially skeptical, since there is no mechanism that will act as a check on poor performance. In the free market, companies that fail to meet their customer's needs go bankrupt, but governments are funded by taxation and have no such limitation."

Last chance

2004-10-19T23:18:00.000Z

When I’m not concentrating on the world around me – when my thoughts are focused within – I know that all emotion leaves my face and it becomes hard, like a statue. It’s not a particularly nasty look, just cold and aloof. I’ve heard it called ‘imperious’.

Walking up the steps of the train platform this afternoon, a thousand things were going through my mind. The sharp click of my heels on the concrete, the cold satin lining of my long black coat brushing past the exposed parts of my legs and the glorious faux-fur* collar softly nestled against my neck and chin faintly registered in my conscious mind. Internally, I was dividing some number by 6.5 to calculate an exchange rate. That was my entire world – platform, body, thoughts – nothing else mattered, everyone else there was just a moving object whose speed and direction was to be gauged and whose trajectory was to be avoided.

Suddenly, I registered a smile. Well, not so much ‘registered’ as ‘became aware of’. Registration would come later, too late as it turned out.

Seated against the wall was a gentleman, his suit grey and his hair beginning to turn the same colour. His grooming was immaculate and the crows feet in his tanned skin deeply wrinkled as he looked over to me with a lovely, genuine smile.

Now, in London, as I’m sure is the case in the larger cities of the world a smile from a stranger is about as rare as a beggar saying “Hey, let me shout you a drink.”

I’m not talking about the salacious, appraising-someone-from-head-to-toe-and-leaving-a-slime-trail look either, those are far too common. I’m talking about the kind of smile that says “Hello there, nice day, isn’t it?”

And here’s where my recalcitrant visage comes into play – I was so deep in thought that I must have given him what amounted to a snooty or dirty look. By the time I snapped out of it and smiled back, he had turned away, his face had fallen in evident embarrassment – he was mortified.

I sat down on the bench next to him, 2 minutes remained until the next train in our direction and I did my best to rectify what must have seemed a terrible – if unintentional – snub.

He resolutely wouldn’t look at me. When the train came, he walked a few paces to ensure that we weren’t in the same carriage. I felt awful and wondered, as the train clattered on its way, what would have happened had I smiled back – would I have a new acquaintance? He certainly must be extraordinary in some way to remain so openly, cheerfully civil in a society where one ‘keeps to oneself’ in public.

I’ll never know – I do know that. My father once saw a beautiful woman on a train and didn’t have the courage to do anything about it. He returned to the same station at the same time for days on end and never saw her again. I’m sure that same rule applies here.

In life, sometimes we are only given one chance to act and no matter how we kick or scream or beat our chests to the gods, this fact remains. I, for one, know that I’m going to be a little more forthcoming with my grin in the future.

M

* Faux not because I don’t believe in gutting animals for warmth – but because I can’t afford something made of mink. Yet.

_____

Update: I wrote the above over coffee whilst waiting to go somewhere else today. On the way home, after drinks with M and a friend in the city, I sat in a separate part of the carriage from M for lack of seats.

In the flurry to sit down, I noticed a smile. My second random smile for the day and its owner happened to be sitting right across the aisle – looking straight at me.

I looked down, flustered. I saw my briefcase. Remembering that the above post was scrawled in my diary and that that diary was in my briefcase, I realised I had the chance to rectify this morning’s mistake – or at least mitigate it a little.

It felt strange, though, this smile-at-a-stranger-on-demand business. I’m not really an accomplished flirt, I’m just comfortable around people and he was most obviously looking up at me from his newspaper periodically, waiting to catch my eye. I hoped most sincerely that I wasn’t blushing.

I looked at his lap and noticed something strange about his paper. The letters were a little weird...weirdly familiar...just like...and suddenly the paper moved. He was holding it up for me, the right way around, grinning. He had nice blue eyes, I noticed, and an easy smile.

The paper was in Polish, which gave me the excuse to say hello in that language. He was startled and we started to chat.

We spoke through the entire journey in Polish, much to the amazement of fellow passengers who saw that we had been strangers just a few moments ago. We chatted about Poland and London, about work and about our backgrounds. We got up at the same station and took the same exit. It was really nice – it made me wonder anew at what I could have learnt from my first smile for the day.

M

In the dead of night

2004-10-19T23:00:00.000Z

"After the protests, they instituted a police state. Soon after, that very night in fact if my memory serves me well, they began rounding up everyone who had anything to do with the Solidarity movement or who had protested and started sending them to jail. There were camps along the Russian border - one for men, one for women. They were held for a long time and questioned." He looked at me wearily. "Of course, you can imagine how the Russians 'questioned' them. Their lives were effectively over from that point because although they were allowed to return, they were not permitted to work."

"There were no funerals because there were 'officially' no dead. Parents, husbands, wives, children would get a knock on the door in the middle of the night and be shown a sealed black plastic bag containing someone they loved and had no idea was dead. The burial was that night - hasty, surreptitious, frightening."

This isn't some figment of my imagination or a Tom Clancy novel, people, this is what I heard one week ago from my godfather in Poland. It is living memory and testament to what happens when citizens allow or encourage their state to get out of control.

I know that I must sound like a broken record when I speak about how much I hate the European Union but it's because, more than anything, I'm afraid of it and it's seemingly insatiable power lust. If the EU - with it's courts and it's parliament and it's mandate to assimilate all - continues to do things like this then there will simply be no way for it to be kept in check.

All things have their basic principles, behaviors and urges that are innate to the creature's nature. A bureaucracy has the natural tendency to grow, to expand in scope and power and bring everything and everyone into line with it's policies. It's what the creature does and to hate it is like hating a shark for eating a human - pointless. To state that a bureaucracy has been tamed, in turn, is to slip a leash around a shark's neck and pretend that it's a pet rather than a vicious animal barely contained by circumstance.

There have been a few examples of the state being kept in check - most notably the American Constitution which worked very well for a fair while, allowing that country to be prosperous and free. Of course, over time, the effectiveness of the document has been curtailed as the insidious nature of the bureaucracy there wormed it's way into the cracks and destroyed entire swathes of civil liberties and freedoms afforded by that very document - evident if one reads the document in spirit as well as in word.

The state is a dangerous animal that, left unchecked, preys on citizens' lives, livelihoods and freedoms. This little court ruling signals that the animal doesn't particularly wish to bend to the will or requirements of a master...and that is dangerous indeed.

M

Running commentary

2004-10-19T22:15:00.000Z

You will notice two sets of comments on this site. This is not an accident. Really.

I have a plan.

Enetation was giving me some trouble as well as being blocked at M's workplace. It is not a good thing for a husband to be annoyed at the blog for any reason - especially since the blog vortex seems to take up so much of his wife's time already.

I also wanted to implement trackback because...it seemed like a good idea (I'm full of these today, aren't I?)

I have decided to leave Enetationon for a while longer so that some of the wonderful comments I've received don't just vaporize. I'd ask you, though, NOT TO USE THE REGULAR COMMENT AREA ANYMORE.

Please use the 'Thinklings' instead. Because they're cuter. And because it's the WAY FORWARD. I'd throw a swooshy logo on but I just don't have the skill.

M

Twang

2004-10-19T11:46:00.000Z

Egads...he sounds so...American.

It's the reaction I've had a couple of times this week when listening to people on the other side of the pond.

First there was the Skype experiment with a longtime American friend of mine - Frode Odegard. We downloaded the program and fiddled with buttons until sound came out...then, much to my surprise* an American-accented voice was saying: "Monica, can you hear me?"

* I don't really know why, we've spoken on the phone before, a long time ago.

Why, yes, yes I could - but who was this? Frode grew up in Sweden and understands Monty Python. He should have well-rounded vowels. Who was this guy pronouncing his 'r's all funny?

Then there's the new section that Rory has on Neopoleon.com with sound feeds of interesting anecdotes. I dutifully clicked the link and my speakers sprang to life, Rory's introduction sounding through my study in...in American.

I'm so used to reading Frode's emails and to reading Rory's words, applying the little voice in my mind (which is British-accented according to Aussies and Aussie-accented according to Brits, so some amalgam of the two, I suppose) that hearing what the two of them actually sound like was a shock. It was all wrong.

It'll be interesting to travel to the States one of these days - I have so many friends and acquaintances that I keep in touch with through my blog, email and postcards that I imagine it will be a trip of double-takes and me giving funny looks to people the moment that they open their mouths.

M

Love unrequited

2004-10-19T09:59:00.000Z

Living in London and coming into daily contact with people who read The Guardian and actually agree with most of it's puerile drivel, it was a breath of fresh air to read the responses from Americans to a campaign The Guardian had the audacity to run in Ohio.

Essentially, they asked Brits to write to undecided voters in that state and tell them how to vote.

I kid you not. 11,000 addresses were requested and, presumably 5,000 letters were sent (I am working on the general ratio of productivity here which runs at a little under 50%).

The responses varied, from ankle-grabbing thanks wafting over from California to some choice words from just about everyone else telling the British populace to butt the hell out of the election. The whole gamut of 'stay the hell out' responses were written, including:

Creative threats:

"Consider this: stay out of American electoral politics. Unless you would like a company of US Navy Seals - Republican to a man - to descend upon the offices of the Guardian, bag the lot of you, and transport you to Guantanamo Bay, where you can share quarters with some lonely Taliban shepherd boys. "

Disdain (and a good point):

"I don't give a rat's ass if our election is going to have an effect on your worthless little life. I really don't. If you want to have a meaningful election in your crappy little island full of shitty food and yellow teeth, then maybe you should try not to sell your sovereignty out to Brussels and Berlin."

A history lesson:

"Keep your noses out of our business. As I recall we kicked your asses out of our country back in 1776."

A good idea:

"Gentle folks at the Guardian,In your plea to get your non-American readers to write to voters in Clark County, Iowa, you are correct that events in the US have had, and will have, effects on world events. For example, we have pulled your chestnuts out of the fire in two world wars that were occasioned by European diplomacy. Maybe you'd like a vote in which American president will oversee the next rescue. The next time you have elections in Great Britain, I shall endeavour to send names of your citizens to people in France, Iraq, India, the United Arab Emirates, Botswana, Pakistan, China and Argentina so that they may attempt to influence your election. It's only fair that everybody in the world should have a say in the selection of the prime minister."

And of course, biting sarcasm:

"My dear, beloved Brits,

I understand the Guardian is sponsoring a service where British citizens write to Americans to advise them on how to vote. Thank heavens! I was adrift in a sea of confusion and you are my beacon of hope!

Feel free to respond to this email with your advice. Please keep in mind that I am something of an anglophile, so this is not confrontational. Please remember, too, that I am merely an American. That means I am not very bright. It means I have no culture or sense of history. It also means that I am barely literate, so please don't use big, fancy words.
Set me straight, folks!

Dayton, Ohio"

Evidently, a lot of the letter writers didn't pay much heed to letter-writing-instruction 72b:

"Explain why you think they should pay the slightest bit of attention to what you think about their election. Remember, charm will be far more effective than hectoring."

Why you think they should pay attention to what you think. Because, of course, if you think it old chap - it must be right.

No amount of 'charm' will mask the fact that The Guardian has overstepped the bounds of decency here. Is it really the role of a newspaper to send out electoral roll details from another country and urge readers to send voting instructions to private citizens?

M

* Via Tech Central Station

Required: one babelfish, may be used

2004-10-18T14:52:00.000Z

HSBC has been running their 'We know how to do business anywhere in the world and can help you so that you don't get yourself into trouble, you neophyte globetrotting wheeler-dealer. Just to prove this, we will show you the difference between a football, a mousetrap and a handshake in 3 different countries.' advertising campaign for some time now.

This week, I realised I may need their help.

Coming back from holiday to read my business email account, I received something that made me realise business communication can be a tricky business in and of itself.

Before I left, I had sent out some email 'feelers' for printing quotes. Fearing that my written Polish may not be ... err ... polished enough for a detailed technical email, I had my father help me compose something that (I thought) was entirely unambiguous, descriptive and (most, most, most importantly) obsequious enough to get a decent reply. In a country where the standard terms of address are the third person 'lady' and 'sir' - as in "Would lady terribly mind if I took this seat?" it's rather important to ensure that formalities are out of the way correctly to start a relationship off on the right foot. I'm fine in social situations and had some interesting political discussions whilst I was there, but talking about lithography is a little beyond me.

Anyhow, I got back to an interesting range of quotes. They fell into roughly two bands quite far apart on the price scale - making me think that there was something in the original communication that wasn't as clear as it could have been. I started to send clarifying emails to check on the lower quotes as I was sure printing couldn't cost that little.

This is when The Email came in and it went something like this:

"Dear Lady Monica,

The price of printing has no correlation at all to the run that you require. The job that you sent will cost 72 million USD. This is before tax and includes delivery.

May a thousand roses bloom in the garden of your Summer's day, you sweet angel of heaven (alright, not exactly those words, but stomach-churningly close)
Mr Printer"

Rrrrrrright. For 72 million USD, I would expect that each page was hand delivered by a different, handsome, besuited man who could engage me in witty yet challenging conversation over dinner. He would then give me a back rub or other such service and leave to make room for the next page - and man.

It's the only way I could justify paying that much for a run of approx. 1000 copies.

Bear in mind that this was the ONLY printer that asked for a PDF sample of the work and therefore gleaned that it was to be in English. I wonder if he really thinks the streets are paved with gold over here.

He still hasn't sent a reply to my 'Umm, I think we may have miscommunicated....' email either. I shall wait and see.

In the meantime, if someone has a used babelfish that they could lend me, it would be much appreciated.

M

Th' inkwell Quote of the Day

2004-10-18T13:15:00.000Z

Looking up a business site, I found this. How curious. It seems I can't stop blogging today.

"For all their inspiring morality, nowhere in the gospels is intelligence praised as a virtue" - Marilyn Manson

Food for thought

2004-10-18T11:10:00.000Z

I've meant to see Super Size Me for a while now, simply because I'm rather interested in food and diet in general. The reviews of the film seemed favourable and to describe a balanced and interesting view put forth by the director, who subjected himself to a McDonald's-only diet for a month with horrendous results for his health.

Now I see that* the documentary may, indeed, be of the Michael Moore mould rather than the honest scientific experiment I thought it was.

It'll be interesting to see how long it takes for people to completely mistrust anything that comes out of Big Media's and Big Cinema's mouth, just like they would have done for the Internet years ago. Nowadays, it seems that the web based editorials, news and writing I visit bend over backward to substantiate facts or at least to try and ensure that what they are writing has been researched in some way. Supersizecon, indeed, uses good old fashioned science and critical thinking (remember those from school way back when it was still taught?) to critique 'Super Size Me'. There is no solid reputation to lean on, in fact, there is only a poor reputation to overcome.

The things I see on TV or read in newspapers, conversely, tend to still have an 'it's here so it's true' aura about them. There's only so long you can cruise on the goodwill of an old reputation, though.

M

* Hat tip to AnarCapLib.

Surrender monkeys unite!

2004-10-18T10:13:00.000Z

Yes, well, this isn't usually a 'looky here!' reactionary blog as I tend to do far too much one-liner sniping in my day-to-day life as it is, but I couldn't resist this one.

I somehow came across this bunch of complete lunatics on my perusal of the web today. I could possibly forgive them for their stupidity as most seem to be angry-sky-god worshippers in their spare time, but really people - this doesn't just take the cake - it takes it, burns it, crumbles it, mixes it with excrement and smears it on the face of the family of anyone who has been kidnapped and beheaded over the last x months.

Wishing for 'world peace' is lovely, as is wishing for a new Ferrari or for Michael Moore to just go away. Something very important to impart here is that wishing for something does almost as much* as praying for it - naught.

Obtaining a Ferrari requires either hard work or long legs and the ability to lie through your teeth when saying the words 'I do' to someone with a trust fund. Dispatching the world of Michael Moore requires rigorous thinking, unwavering correction of his misapplied 'facts' and a triple-chocolate-chocolate-chip muffin spiked with Bromethalin.**

And world peace requires the willingness and the ability to defend oneself if some sand-burrowing religious fundamentalist bastard decides that the world, in turn, would be better off without you. 'Peace' means lack of overt conflict, not one side rolling over to expose a belly as yellow as a spring chicken. Simply touting 'world peace' on little cardboard signs in the hope of appeasing said bastard won't do anything at all - it'll simply send the message that you're completely ready to be bundled up in primitive robes and to have all of your freedoms taken away in the name of Angry Sky God Allah.

What I think these people don't realise is that morally surrendering to what is undeniably a ruthless and bloody campaign of terror is not a Good Thing. These people aren't like your priests - they don't just hand out Hail Marys or deep thought as penance for your sins - they will sanction the mutilation or murder of you or your family for any transgression against their entirely arbitrary and useless moral code.*** These are Bad People, not just brothers-in-spirit who happen to have dark beards.

Anyway, take a good look at these people**** and join me in thinking that without state help, Darwinism would have taken them far, far earlier due to sheer stupidity.

M

* Praying for something actually does a little more than wishing. VERY little more - it gives you kudos with the shaman of your particular denomination.

** I'm not suggesting anything of the like be attempted. It would be immoral, unpardonable and would pose the world (once again) with this kind of problem.

*** A little like your arbitrary and useless moral code but stricter and with more provision for keeping your woman in line.

**** Not too good a look, you may go blind.

_____

Update: It seems that the trend to wave around silly placards to appease the "Iraquis" has spread to the right. We must stop this meme before it starts being a subject in the new school curriculum: 'Surrendery 101'

Hat tip to the ever vigilant VodkaPundit

Train of thought

2004-10-17T23:59:00.000Z

I could travel on intercity trains forever – the rapidly shifting foreground scenery framed by the languidly moving horizon, staccato clicks of wheels on tracks regulating my breathing and soothing my usually too-rapid thoughts down to the perfect pace for reflection.

The first time I fell in love with long train journeys was years ago when I lived in Warsaw. The actual process of traveling had never held any pleasure for me until then – long car journeys were nauseating, buses doubly so. Short train rides in cities merely the daily-bustle way of shuttling oneself to new coordinates and airplane rides sickeningly frightening to someone who used to get vertigo just standing on a chair.*

(* No, not anymore, not by a long shot. Cured myself in the only way I know how – ‘head butting’ it as M likes to call it. Just kept clenching my teeth and doing all the things that a normal person does (climb ladders, change light bulbs, climb trees, get on planes without squeezing the arm rests to a soft pulp). It got easier and easier – to the point where the only thing that makes me uncomfortable about airplane travel is the fact that I’m not in control of the vehicle and I don’t know the ability of the person who is, which is an entirely different issue. )

I would deal with all these things for the stimulus of a new location; I considered it the price that one paid for travel. For the most part, I still do.

My first European intercity train journey, then, was a revelation. I was to travel across Poland on an overnight train and had splurged on an entire first class cabin all to myself for the night. At that time in Poland, of course, the expense was as much for security as it was for luxury – ‘luxury’ being a relative term in each country and at each period in time.

The money bought me a little cabin with two beds, a bathroom, a table by the window and the most wonderful array of miniaturized amenities that I immediately pushed, prodded, twisted, turned, unlocked, broke, fixed and generally played with until I felt the train lurch away from the platform to begin it’s journey north.

I sat down by the window to look out at the suburbs of Warsaw streaming past and had the most extraordinary sensation. Looking back into the cabin, I surveyed it with a newly proprietorial air. It was the first time in my life that I had hired living quarters to myself in my name, with money I had earned. Sure, I had lived in a dorm room at Warsaw University for a while – but that had been arranged by my parents. I was currently living with an old widow in the centre of the city and I felt very much an intruder in her home – a shrine of sorts to the time when she lost her husband, some 30 years earlier. Back in Australia, I had always lived with my parents.

This, then, this little place 2 meters by 3 streaking through space on two silver tracks was to be mine and mine alone for the next 7 hours. I sat up a little straighter and studied the changing landscape outside, mistress of the warmth and seeming splendor of my own small domain.

As the night descended, the window changed from a chameleon of colour and shape to become a pane of inky blackness holding only my trembling reflection. My thoughts followed suit – seemingly without when scenery could distract them from their pondering, they turned within and at once solidified into startling clarity. Mesmerised by occasional strings of light signifying yet another small village and station, I began to allow my mind free reign to ponder the things I had been experiencing in my first few months as a teenage expatriate. I didn’t sleep that night at all for thinking and disembarked with a strangely light feeling in my chest amid the leaden feeling of tiredness in my body.

Perhaps something changed in me right then, or I take a small piece of that night with me every time I board for a long journey, but rarely are my thoughts as lucid, enjoyable and beautifully reflective as when on a train. This is, funnily enough, only true when I am traveling alone.

This afternoon, we traveled back from Stratford-upon-Avon by train and I snuck away from the raucousness of our group to another, empty, carriage carrying paper and pen with me but secretly knowing that I wouldn’t write all that much.

I sat down alone, in a berth of four seats, right by the window. Facing backward, the scenery unfolded quickly but lingered for a long time, surrounding me in gently rolling hills of the most perfect green imaginable. Hedgerows that divided the green carpet into fields shot past the pane and sheep seemed to be scattered with mathematical precision to cover enclosures evenly and consistently.

The landscape was beautiful, small villages raised the flags of roofs and spires, whitewashed walls and tended gardens to signal their existence before disappearing from view almost as rapidly as they had appeared.

I hastily began to scratch out this post before the regular clicking of the wheels had its usual effect on me. The rhythm became part of my breathing and my pulse, then moved to slow and discipline my mind to a steady pace. I became aware of the fact that my pen was resting on the page and that I had no more desire to write – only to look out the window and to think.

So I thought of the performance of Hamlet the night before and silently recited some of my favorite lines, I recalled that every time I see or read Hamlet I take something else away – last night was no exception, I thought of our time in Poland and how easy it was to be with M in almost any circumstance, I thought of discovering Berlin and being so moved by the impassioned speeches made by a guide in a walking tour that M and I were silent for an hour after it finished – just walking around the city, comfortable in each-other’s silence, I thought of the tasks I have set for myself in the next month and wondered what I would think of my own performance at the tasks a month hence, I started framing the essence of another post. I went through so much so easily that it felt like a meditation and a relaxation of the mind through rapid, easy thought.

I don’t know how long I was in that state – it could have been minutes or an hour – I didn’t ask when I walked back into the other carriage. Frankly, I didn’t care. My holiday was over, the train ride cementing the memories and clearing my mind to face another week, another month or year before I next have the opportunity to gaze out of a grubby train window and slip into this intoxicated state.

I think I’d like to take the Trans Siberian one day, across the country where I was born and where so much of my ancestor’s history lies buried. I imagine myself alone in a small cabin, light outside slowly dying as the train’s sleek body streaks across endless plains. A dark window will reflect my older but no less prone to mischief visage back to me, triggering untold thoughts, introspections and memories of a life that I, here in the present day, am yet to make.

M

Administrative post

2004-10-15T19:03:00.000Z

To everyone who has sent me personal emails over the last couple of weeks...thank you so much, I really appreciate the communication. I'm not ignoring you, I'm just trying to concentrate on work at the moment, considering the fact that I was ill for weeks prior to my holiday and just thinking about how behind I am on things that I'm supposed to do makes me panic and need tea which gives me a caffeine buzz which in turn makes me panic even more. It's a vicious, milky cycle.

Please be patient if you wrote me something that deserves a long reply - you'll get one as soon as either:

a) I figure out how to insert a 25th hour (and a 26th...why stop at one?) in my day.
b) My schedule frees up a little.

This weekend sees me at Stratford-upon-Avon for the season finale of Hamlet from the Royal Shakespeare Company. Yummy. Culture, men in tights (no, no, not the movie...actual men in actual body-hugging tights), English spoken beautifully, one of Shakespeare's better speeches, a two hour train ride through English greenness and the company of some loud, raucous Australians that will no doubt draw out my own Aussie drawl.

We've hired out an entire Inn for the weekend and have decided that this kind of situation requires some sort of pact ensuring debauchery. As such, there are plans afoot to crash the after-party of the play. My role is as the 'responsible yet sexy' female in the group that will do all the talking whilst my compatriots titter behind me batting eyelids and ensuring that chosen outfits appear to best advantage. I'm not sure exactly what I'm going to say, as 'Hello, we'd like to come in, please.' is a little too obvious and I've not been trained in the not-so-subtle art of bouncer-massage as practiced by this island's inhabitants in places like Ibiza.

I've considered trying to pretend that we're a specially trained team of crack assault beauticians who will be on hand in case any paparazzi turn up or that we're actually the 'adult entertainment' for the night.

Both can, technically, be true.

Between the lot of us, I'm sure we could give a decent manicure and will be packing an entire department store's worth of emergency re-masking supplies just in case...ummm. Yes, well, I'm not one of those females that wears all the foundations or powders or blushers so I have no idea of the elaborate rituals that go on in the bathrooms, but I DO know that my girls will have enough to paint on an entirely new face for someone.

As for the other, well, we're also adults. And entertaining.

You see, I'd not consider actually lying to the bouncer. Oh, no.

M

Th' inkwell

2004-10-15T14:37:00.000Z

Perhaps it's time I explained the name of the blog. It seems that every time I see it being linked to on blogrolls, it has a new name:

Thinkwell
th-inkwell
Th'inkwell
Th'ink well
Th' Inkwell

Quite natural, I suppose, considering the fact that it's in capital letters in the banner and it's a bit of a tricky one to start with.

This is actually the correct way of writing it in lower case:

Th' inkwell

Th' is ye olde englishe for 'the'.

The entire title is a play on words...

If you read it literally, with the olde englishe, it means 'the inkwell' - the object you can see on the right of the screen either beautifully ornamenting the page or completely screwing with the look of the page - depending on your screen size, browser, etc.

An inkwell is, of course, a tool for writers and a symbol of the written word. A blown glass inkwell and glass pen also happen to be two of my favorite posessions. Writing with the pen is just wonderful and the pleasure I obtain from using it generally translates into the kind of writing I love.

If you read the title out loud, however, you can hear 'think well' - which is what I'd surreptitiously love to help people to do in the posts where I delve into philosophy, politics and general world-class navel gazing.

M

London calling

2004-10-15T14:03:00.000Z

A comedy of errors by London Life Company Limited
BB - Big Bank
MW - Monica White

BB: Hello Big Bank, Vijay Speaking

MW: Hi - can you please put me through to the My Suburb branch?

BB: Sorry madam, I have to go through a security check with you. Can you give me your sort code, please?

MW: Sure - 12-34-56

BB: Can you give me your name?

MW: Monica White

BB: Can you give me your date of birth?

MW: 01/01/1901

BB: Can you give me your blood type, the first three letters of your third canary's name and what colour the eyes on the boy you liked in 6th grade were?

MW: Information duly given

BB: Can I have the first, third, ninth and sixty-second digits of your security code?

MW: 42, 42, 42, 42

BB: And can I just hear you blow air out of your left nostril for our sound verification check...

MW: *honk*

(The clink of the submachine guns being lowered is audible)

BB: What can I do for you today, Mrs White?

MW: As I said, I'd like to speak to someone in My Suburb's branch

BB: So you'd like me to put you through to Regent Street?

MW: No - I'd like you to put me through to My Suburb's branch

BB: That sort code refers to a Regent Street account

MW: Yes, I know it does, but I'd like to speak to My Suburb's branch

BB: Madam, your account is at Regent Street

MW: That's correct. However I had a new credit card sent to My Suburb's branch and I'd like to see if it's there waiting for me

BB: (Uncertain) Alright...I'll just put you through...

....muzak....muzak....muzak....

BB: I'm sorry Mrs White, the lines are busy

MW: Well...can you just give me the direct number so that I don't have to call Bombay every time I want to speak to someone 5 minutes walk away?

BB: I'm afraid I can't

MW: Why not?

BB: Because I don't know the number

MW: What?

BB: I don't know the number myself, madam

MW: So how do you put me through?

BB: It's an internal number

MW: So you have no idea how to call the branch from an outside line? You don't have a list of phone numbers there?

BB: No madam - but I can try to put you through to the Regent Street branch

(Regent Street, for those of you not familiar with London, is the very heart of the city - half an hour's journey from my door)

MW: And why would I want to speak to Regent Street?

BB: Because your account is held there, madam

MW: Yes, that's right. And I suppose they could somehow tell me if the card is sitting in My Suburb's branch office?

BB: I'm not sure madam, would you like me to put you through?

MW: No, no thanks - I'm not so terribly desparate for conversation that I'll call one of your branches pointlessly. How can I speak to someone at My Suburb?

BB: I will send an urgent message to them to call you - may I have your number please?

MW: You mean you don't have it?

BB: I'm sorry madam?

MW: After that rigorous security check delving into 5 generations of my family on my mother's side - meaning you have THAT information at your disposal, you're telling me that you don't have my TELEPHONE NUMBER stored on your systems?

BB: Yes madam

MW: *sigh*

...I really don't know what else to say...

M

Dehumanizing humanity

2004-10-14T11:16:00.000Z

- A single mother with two children.

- A 19 year old boy with AIDS who has attempted suicide twice, conducting AIDS research.

- A businessman that employs 200 staff.

- An 80 year old retiree.

They all need a life saving operation, but only one operation is available on the NHS. All bar the businessman have a hefty discount for the operation. Who should live and who should die?

This is a decision that I would firmly class as a ‘lifeboat scenario’ – something that is so out of the ordinary that there’s no point in extrapolating daily-life meaning from it. It’s also a decision that no human should want to or have to make in their lifetime.

Yet in our system, it’s made every day by the public health professionals doling out scarce care according to ‘need’ and other arbitrary criteria.

And today, it was a decision that had to be made by a class of 7-th graders in a new subject in the UK called ‘Citizenship’.

My father happened to be looking in on the class and was utterly horrified by what he saw and heard. This is a man who had grown up in, lived through and escaped Communism itself. Every day as a teacher in the UK he is more and more concerned by what he sees taught to children – it is all too familiar.

So what did the children decide? One group chose the mother, until they received clarifying information telling them that she was actually an alcoholic and the state had removed the children from her care. She was then demoted to the group who would certainly die.

Now, let’s look at that – according to this value judgment, she only has worth as a human being when she is there to take care of other humans, not as an individual, flawed though she is.

The retiree wasn’t even considered – what could she offer to society? She had already had her ‘fair share’ of life and was only a drain on the public purse.

The businessman was also not chosen by any group. His life was measured by the number of dependants that his existence supported, in this case 200 people would lose their jobs if he were to die.

The correct choice, according to the teacher (who happens to also be the teacher of religion at the school) was the boy with AIDS.

...suddenly, out of nowhere, a small voice piped up.

‘Why save the AIDS patient?’ Said the voice ‘He’s already tried to kill himself twice, he’s just a nutcase.’

‘Anyway’, it went on, ‘Why not let the businessman pay for his operation and use the money to give an operation to one of the others – that way, you could have two operations instead of one.’

The voice belonged to a small boy in the class who happened to not only have the mind to consider alternatives and the values to make a judgment but who had the courage to contradict a teacher’s moral edict.

These kinds of children aren’t particularly welcome in an education system crafted for students who merely imbibe and passionlessly regurgitate information. He was about to be taught his first lesson in the dangers of thinking differently from the herd.

The teacher apparently whirled around to face the boy and launch into a speech designed to humiliate and upbraid him. After all – how could the boy say such a thing? The fact that the businessman can pay for the operation shouldn’t mean that he gets one, he’s no better than the others just because he can pay. The boy was clearly WRONG.

The businessman indeed is no better if you measure virtue by how far down one has fallen in life or how much of a burden one carries on behalf of the all-powerful ‘society’. He would be low down on the list solely because he has done something in his life to ensure that he has the power to act for himself at a time like this – he has created and retained wealth.

The fact that the boy had had the nous to find a way for two people to have an operation instead of one was ignored. He had stepped outside the parameters of the exercise – which was one of moral judgment. He was there to learn about citizenship, which meant he was there to learn about the state and the way the state thinks. He was to step into the shoes of our all-powerful government and do what our government is there, apparently, to do – to choose who will live and who will die.

In this system, we must give up our earnings – earnings that we could use to make life saving, life extending and life enriching decisions for ourselves – to the state. We are told that we will be taken care of – that we will be given education, roads, protection and health care as and when we need it. Instead, the state then doles out health, education and protection according to some soul-crushing scale of individual pathos or a demonic gauge of how much a person can ‘give back’ to society. We rarely get back – measure for measure – what we put in. Rigorous thinking applied to this process of centralized garnering and redistribution will reveal the obvious – that it is in no way fair, equitable or moral.

Rigorous thinking, however, requires a rigorous education. And if there’s one thing that the state does NOT provide, it is an education designed to stimulate or stretch the mind of the small humans in its care.

Instead, they are taught imbecilic levels of mathematics, are made to read state sanctioned, politically correct tomes about people with ‘social issues’ and are philosophically shaped by citizenship classes that teach them to think like bureaucrats. It isn't even necessary to obtain a score over 50% to pass some subjects anymore.

These children will not only lack the tools to critically assess the current political and economic status-quo, they will lack the desire to see it change from anything other than the course it is headed on.

We are creating a generation of children who will only see individual humans in terms of what they give to the society/state or what they take away from the same. Humans can then be allowed to live or eliminated, healed or left to perish, fed or starved according to this ‘societal benefit’ measure. This is utterly horrendous and contrary to any philosophy that holds human beings as self-determining, free individuals.

The natural culmination of this kind of thinking is socialism in one form or another and the only defense against it is philosophical. With a populace already coaxed into this mode of thought, though, an October revolution won’t be necessary – there will be nothing to overthrow and no-one to fight once these state educated children grow up.

M

Never toy with English weather

2004-10-14T11:15:00.000Z

This morning, as M was leaving the house, I asked him if he wanted to take an umbrella with him. He scoffed and said something to the effect of ‘For England’s pathetic little drizzle? Naaaah*’

We giggled about the benign weather over here and called it a few emasculating names – this was our mistake.

M is from Brisbane you see, where the tropical raindrops can give you a concussion as you run down the road trying to avoid being completely soaked. When it rains in Brisbane, the heavens open up in a veritable tsunami of dampness that can obscure the view, fill the gutters and wash away small domestic animals. M thinks the rain here is a joke.

So I walked to the local store to replenish a few supplies once he left, thinking that I could handle anything that came along just wearing a couple of t-shirts and a pair of his khaki pants (yes, I love to borrow his clothing...it’s a wife thing).

As I was paying for the groceries, I heard an ominous sound...the wind was howling so loud that everything in the store stopped.

Then the rain started.

Not the usual kind of rain that seems to drift down apologetically, trying to avoid people if at all possible (it’s terribly rude to drench people, you know). It was the kind of rain that I remembered from Australia and it was battering against glass and plastic, making a terrible racket and making me realise I had severely underestimated conditions outside.

I did what any self-respecting woman does in such circumstances, I swore profusely and got on with life.

Walking outside, I was accosted by a wall of cold air and tiny droplets knocked off the larger ones as they tried to hit everything in sight and deconstruct the world. Well, there was nothing to wait for, I took a deep breath and began walking home.

Halfway there I was already squelching in wet sneakers. The last leg to the front door was all but swum before fumbling with a wet key and a wet lock as freezing droplets of water wormed their way down the back of my shirt and made their way excruciatingly slowly down my skin.

By this time I was shivering and probably looked like the kind of cat you bring home and dry in front of a fire before coaxing it to drink warm milk and checking it for any known diseases. A glimpse in the hallway mirror confirmed my suspicions of severe bedraggledness.

Now, I’m not superstitious and don’t believe in fate or destiny or luck or any such silliness...but dammit did I have a feeling that I was taught a lesson this morning.

M

*Naaah = ‘No’ in Aussielish. It’s a particular sound that I’ve only heard from fellow islanders.

Das ist der parken

2004-10-13T13:11:00.000Z

All hail Matthew and Monica White, Grand Fuzzballs of the Clan of Epic Hair.

I have so many different thoughts to condense about my travels that I don't really know where to start. I tried to post more often but between the 0.00000000003 meg internet connection at the Polish hotel (aha! so THAT's where they were...) and the post that was obliterated accidentally at Schoenefeld airport last night, it didn't work out - so I'll just whet your appetites with a little photo of the two M's. (Hint: the taller one isn't me, it's my geek)

This park is right between the Reichstag and the Brandenburg Gate. It's VERY early in the morning, terribly cold, utterly lovely and we're off to climb the roof of the Reichstag before all those darned tourists clog it :)

M

Shopping in the City

2004-10-09T19:25:00.000Z

Another day in a new city, another light post. Won't tell you where I am just yet, suffice it to say that I was here when I was young too...in fact, I was christened here (much good it did my dark, atheistic soul, but still...it's a bit of history).

I've spent the day eating heart-attack-inducing food (they seem to think everything should either be fried or coated in fat and sugar here...just in case one needs to hand-plow a field after lunch and 3000 more calories might come in handy, no doubt) and shopping.

Shopping here is just like shopping in London, but cheaper and the people don't speak English. In fact, the language is very, very different. So different, that if Wheel of Fortune were translated over then 'buying a vowel' would be entirely futile - instead, the winner would be the person with the presence of mind to buy the 's' or the 'z'.

Shopping here is just like London (and the entire world) for another reason. Humanity doesn't seem to have grasped a certain important concept yet as it applies to women like me.

When I walk into a shoe store and ask if they have shoes in my size (think flippers). First, they look down at my feet to check that the number I said was correct. Now, let's think about this - would I REALLY lie about my shoe size? Would I REALLY be mistaken? What am I trying to do, surreptitiously sneak out of the store in shoes two sizes too big...and if I am, what the hell is it anyone's business why? Sell me the freakin' leather boats and count the profits, you buffoon.

Once they ascertain that I'm not on a covert operation to do something Highly Irregular, they usually take me over to a sad little display in the corner featuring everything your grandma ever coveted...in 1932. Sometimes there are even slippers in a lovely turkish rug pattern for those hot nights out at the club.

They point out the 'lovely flat shoes'. I ask if they have any heels - the higher the better. Stilettos would be good. No matter the country, the reaction is the same, they look at me as if I've completely lost my mind. They ask to make sure...I want HEELS? I want to be TALLER?

Now, I may be 189cm, but that a sideshow freak does not make. I'm just tall - and actually, bar a few situations in life (airplanes, buses, trains, trams, small cars, buying jeans, buying shoes, dating insecure men, walking into historical buildings with low ceilings, sleeping in beds in Asia) it's actually pretty nice. It's handy to see over heads in crowds, when clothes DO fit they look nice, I'm not physically frail or afraid and when someone REALLY pisses me off, I can walk up very close, fold my arms and glare most effectively.

Thing is, I'm not so tall that a couple more inches would make me snag power lines on the street or keel over and kill people in a strong wind. Besides, am I supposed to wear flat shoes with a skirt? But no...the shoe industry has decided that I have quite enough height, thank you very much, and in fact I shouldn't have anything to emphasise these long legs of mine...there's...ummm....enough of them too.

I once resorted to buying shoes in a store for transvestites. I won't tell you the language I used when I paid a ridiculous amount for shoes with a bright pink feather boa around the ankle. I resorted to paying a small fortune for a pair of boots in Berlin the other day (yes, with heels - halleluljah) and still felt somewhat of a freak for the experience.

The other thing that seems to have passed commerce and industry by is the fact that women with cleavage would like to have, well, cleavage. What I mean by this is that women with little in the 'front' department have acres of lacy nothings to choose from that can push, mash, pull, mould, shape and otherwise convince their natural endowments to form a nice cleavage somewhere between the shoulder blades. If there's nothing to coerce, then the chest can simply be strapped on for the evening.

Why is it, then, that if there's something to sling in the...err...sling...then it has to be about as sexy as scaffolding? This, funnily enough, is only true for the better quality lingerie labels. The cheaper, last-about-a-minute labels don't have the same problem, they'll give you something that will push your chest up so high that you can't actually form whole words as your chin keeps hitting cleavage.

Ahh well. My apologies for the rant, will go away and write a post about this city. In the meantime - can anyone guess where I am?

M

***Ack - correction, 179cm, not 189 - so not that tall after all:)

Berlin

2004-10-07T23:18:00.000Z

It's been 23 years since I was in this city last and had someone told me (or, more likely, my parents) the circumstances under which I would stand here today, they would not have believed a word. I was then 3 years old and the citizen of a Soviet empire that looked too frighteningly solid to ever crumble.

My future was to be simple and secure. I would never starve, exactly, nor want for shelter or a minimum of functional clothing. I would be provided with as much state-approved (and therefore heavily censored) education as I wished. When that was done, I would opt for some profession or other with the state - the only employer in existence, of course - then settle down with some nice Soviet boy whereupon I could produce a few more healthy workers. We would be allocated housing according to our needs and status within society or the party.

I would be given everything that a human would need to subsist but not more. Nor was there a point in wanting more as there was no way to achieve it honestly - to attain a better life, I could become a party apparatchik or a devious underhanded swindler (same thing, really, when you think about it) - working hard or harder than anyone else or taking a business risk was pointless as there was no reward for it at all.

Risk was, theoretically, taken out of my life and the price exacted was my freedom. Freedom of association, location, thought, profession, achievement and attainment of self-determined goals - all the things that make life worth living. This life was determined for me without my consent and I could not make the choice to leave as an adult, I was very much a chattel of the state.

Berlin, then, to me existed only as half a city. The other side - West Berlin - was surrounded by a wall, by barbed wire, by sentries with machine guns, by land mines, by anti-tank ditches and by a psychological barrier that was at least as formiddable as all these put together. The last may not have yet been formed in my young mind but would eventually be there as potently restrictive in me as in the rest of the population - my free education would have seen to that.

23 years ago, I would have been shot dead for what I did today.

This morning light was crisp and golden as I walked along Unter den Linden toward the Brandenburg Gate. Leaves were falling and lay curled in an even spread amongst the trees on the way, breaking the otherwise pristine neatness of the streets. I held the hand of my Australian husband and spoke fluent, unbroken English with him. In his pocket were two passports - his and mine - both Australian.

We passed under the Gate which had once separated East and West Berlin - and walked through it to the west - unhindered, unquestioned and free to pursue any kind of life that our talent, drive, discipline and fortune would allow.

My life wasn't supposed to look like this, but it does. Berlin wasn't supposed to be this free, but it is. The next time you hear a 'futurologist' or learned professor discussing the future as if it's already been determined, stating what will and will not happen, what kind of technologies we can and cannot possibly have, what kind of political systems are stable and which are not - remember the Berlin wall and the fact that by their reckoning I should be in a tractor factory somewhere in Smolensk, third child on the way to my nice Soviet husband in our nice Soviet flat...

How metaphysically potent are you?

2004-10-03T23:33:00.000Z

What an interesting post. I really like the way this woman thinks.

This post may contain traces of nuts

2004-10-03T20:37:00.000Z

If there is one guaranteed way of making someone dislike you, it is to tell them that you don’t think their job should exist and that the one thing keeping them alive (correct food labeling) shouldn’t be compulsory. It was this week when C’s closest friend from Australia – K the physicist – was on the receiving end of exactly those sentiments.

It was quite evident from snatches of conversation over a few days that we came from opposite ends of the political spectrum even though we got along very well on a personal level. It was also evident that we had to talk about politics at some time as I don’t just let small things in conversation go. I use my favorite weapon in the world – the word ‘why’.

We were bumbling around the kitchen after M and C had left for their respective offices one morning and we had decided to make porridge. This alone conveys the ill state of my being at the time because at any other point in my life I would shudder at the mere thought of a hot bowl of slimy, quivery, bodily-fluid-like stuff. That day I thought it sounded nice.

We had two types of porridge oats – the ones that have simply been flattened by rollers and the ones that have been put through an office shredder. The latter, I believe, are considered to be ‘quick-cooking’ oats. They’re for the kind of people that think the difference between taking 10 minutes to cook something and taking 7 minutes to cook something justifies the invention and use of an entirely different product. I say if your morning routine so desperately needs 3 minutes shaved off it in order for the rest of your day to fall into place you have some rather deep-seated problems with organization.

Either way, the flattened-but-otherwise-structurally-sound oats had the warning ‘produced in a factory that utilizes nut products’ on the ingredients list. One of those warnings that is the butt of jokes at parties and usually an indicator of the litigiousness of our society. It wasn’t really something I had ever paid attention to as a serious dietary consideration.

Unfortunately, K has the kind of allergy to peanuts that you don’t want to have. The kind that suddenly, viciously, kills you. My allergies to foods are a complete joke when you consider I only end up lethargic or curled up in a ball of whimpering pain for a while after eating the wrong foods. She ends up either very, very ill or very, very dead. She reads those food labels and the nut ones are damned important to her.

So it was interesting to hear her vent her frustration at the company that produced the oats. Her reasoning was that she should at least be able to eat whole foods…otherwise what’s left?

And she used the one word that’s pretty much guaranteed to start a political and philosophical tirade from me – ‘should’. When people say something ‘should’ happen or ‘should’ be done or ‘should’ be available, somewhere deep, deep inside that statement is the fact that our overreaching government is going to be the one to instigate, enforce and monitor whatever that thing is.

What would it mean for the rolled oat company to produce those oats to her specifications? Having worked in a food production factory as a student, I know that it’s damn hard to clean things like conveyor belts and food preparation areas (to the standards required for K’s particular affliction) between all products. It’s certainly possible, but expensive in terms of time and manpower. It’s also completely unnecessary for the majority of the company’s customers to be satisfied with the quality of the product.

So instead of using her economic power (and that of those others afflicted by the same condition) to either switch to another manufacturer or create a manufacturer of her (their) own, she believes that it is her right to use coercive political power – backed by the force of the courts, the police and the military – to force the manufacturer to change their production process to suit her. This is nothing short of thuggery dressed in a suit. Yet it’s something that we are taught is part of the natural ‘process’ of living in a society.

The company, of course, could also build a separate manufacturing plant for all non-nut-related products. But, really, why should it? Who is going to pay? Will K put up the millions of dollars for the new plant or for the extra processing time? I seriously doubt it. In reality, if the company is forced to do this kind of thing, they will pass on the costs to their consumers – ALL their consumers. This means that people like me (and most of you) who have absolutely no need for this extra feature in our oats must have it and must pay for it. We are, in effect, paying for someone else’s problem not because we choose to but because we have to – it would be illegal for an oat company to only cater to our level of requirement.

If a law came into effect tomorrow coercing manufacturers of ‘whole’ foods to produce everything without peanut contamination I doubt that there would be civil unrest on the streets. Yet it would represent another horrendous encroachment of government onto the personal freedoms of its citizens to trade freely.

How is this possible? How could it be that in a seemingly civilized, free society this kind of thing can quite easily happen?

Well, I (unsurprisingly) have a theory. I think that we have simply allowed two ideas to proliferate unchecked and they are coming back to bite us – quite unceremoniously – on the backside; the idea that a company isn’t just there to make a profit and the idea that a company should not be allowed to discriminate against customers on any basis. Let me address the impact of each idea in turn.

Companies exist to make money. To produce that lately so-very-dirty word – profit. I had noticed that as far back as the beginning of my business degree, companies had to justify their existence in terms ‘wider’ than the profit motive. That their *reson d’etre* had to be some ‘noble’ goal and that profit was the dirty little secret at the core of every enterprise to be shunned and ashamed of.

In reality, what responsibility does a company have other than returning maximum returns to investors? Only that in striving toward this primary goal they should not commit any acts of fraud or use force. If they’d like to make the world a better place for being there or produce the best products or make a great workplace for their employees – great – but never at the cost of all the profit to be made. If doing these things is in the long term interests of the company and give a short term loss, so be it, as long as the decision is one made by the company and not by some outside party – interested or not.

The absurd idea that is the ‘stakeholder’ rather than the ‘shareholder’ should be the topic of another post as it deserves attention all of its own. Suffice it to say that no-one else has a claim to the running of the company other than its owners - not employees outside their contracted responsibilities, not unions, not activists, not ‘communities’ and certainly not governments acting on anyone’s behalf.

But in allowing for the ‘fact’ that a company should not only be concerned with the profit motive, we have taken away a company’s moral right to pursue maximum returns. We have also taken away an important argument against the aforementioned kinds of process-changing laws. A company can no longer stand strong and state that they refuse to do something because it would impinge on their right to profitability – they don’t have a right to profitability anymore.

In taking away the profit motive, a company is only really left with the delivery of its goods and services as a reason for its existence. This is quite dangerous ground as some therefore claim that it is the company’s responsibility to provide those goods and services to all, merely because of its ability to do so. The argument, then, that the oat company MUST provide oats suitable for K because it is responsible for delivering oats to ‘our’ community/society comes about. The company becomes a veritable slave to the citizenry of a country and their needs or whims.

My second point is that a company should be able to choose who it trades with. Discrimination? Absolutely. As much as it is a right of any human to associate and trade with whomever they wish – whether that decision has been made on rational grounds or not – it should be the right of any company to do the same.

So it follows that it should be the right of the oat company to decide that trading with K is simply far too much trouble for the profit that trade with her gives, that most of their customers have far less demands on them for the money received and that they ONLY wish to trade with those ordinary customers.

But that right has been taken away. The right to discriminate, defined correctly as ‘making a clear distinction’ with whom you would like to trade is no longer available to companies. Discrimination instead is now synonymous with bigotry and oppression instead of an individual’s right to free association.

K’s affliction is a burden of hers, an unfortunate quirk of her own body and something that she has to deal with, pay for and live with for the rest of her life. Just as a cancer patient’s burden is their own, as a bankrupt’s failure is theirs and a paraplegic’s misfortune theirs.

To assist anyone in this situation where that person is loved and respected enough to deserve that assistance is laudable. It is a credit to the person that others take such an interest in their welfare. However to force complete strangers to modify their businesses to be less profitable, to change their lives and practices, to use inoffensive language or to give up their own property, time and money for this other person is, quite simply, criminal.

We now live in a society where the burdens of others become our own burdens by virtue of belonging to the same geopolitical territory. We have no choice as to whom we help as help has been promised to all – irrespective of character or deservedness. Our job is only to work and to pay or to take, to exist as a burden to the system or as a contributor – never as an individual independent of the government mandated cycle of benevolence. The shackles of slavery have never been quite so intangible.

(Despite this conversation, curiously enough, K and I got along very well. Perhaps because we had the mutual enemy of C to tease and were kept busy by C organising a large party for her friends on Friday night.)

M

Home flown

2004-10-03T20:33:00.000Z

I love airports. Most people will cite horrid food, queues, overpriced shops and (lately) cavity searches as reasons for hating every moment, but I can’t.

Since childhood, airports have been places with a particular aura of anticipation about them. Everyone moves with a kind of nervous, excited purpose. Every group of people has at least one person returning from or departing for an adventure of some sort.

It is a place of beginnings and endings – I love to observe people to figure out where they are going and why...if it’s a business trip or one of pleasure...if they’re going away or coming home...if they’re looking forward to the journey or not. I like to guess nationalities and relationships in groups. I like to look at the airlines and imagine destinations and lives so very different from my own.

It’s a little mental holiday – a place so far outside of the everyday that it makes me think in a different way. It’s a bubble of ‘otherness’ that seems to keep the world outside in limbo for a little while as everything in the bubble teems and pulses to the dictates of airline schedules ferrying people to exotic-sounding places. It reminds me of going places myself and of beginnings and endings I’ve made in my own life.

So it was today at Heathrow, waving goodbye to K the physicist that the general air of adventure swept the cobwebs of blog ennui away.

It made me think of home.* Here then, within reach, were the means to go back to Australia – to a hot summer, endless beaches and snorkeling amongst colourful darting little fish. To wide empty roads where I routinely pushed cars and the law to the limit and wildlife that seems to have taken Darwinism to heart. I knew I had the means to leave and I knew that I didn’t want to – not just yet.

*Technically Australia, although these days ‘home’ means ‘wherever the lease is’.

Writing this on the tube ride home, I was gradually reintroduced to London, like wading back into water after a respite on shore. The relative orderliness of the airport gave way to the clattering, rumbling, constantly delayed tube. The quiet carriage of clean but crushed tourists laden with bags and contraptions in turn gave way to creatures more native to the city on a Saturday night. Acton Town saw ‘A Rough’* of newly arrived Aussies out for a good time. Earl’s Court added ‘An Arrogance’ of South Africans to the ethanol-soaked fray and we had the usual problems trying to get off the train at Holborn.

*I love to make up collective nouns for things. At the airport C, J and I discussed collective nouns for the lovely native Plummy Accented Englishman. C finally came up with the winner – ‘A Cardigan’.

London produces a startling amount of people who seem to think that a train carriage has the same properties as the TARDIS. It is therefore possible to push oneself onto a train that is completely full without letting the people gasping for air out first. This elicits colourful language, pushing and fisticuffs from people otherwise gently benign. I used my elbows and a carefully aimed glare to get us out and onto the heaving platform. It helped that the men happily leering down at us for half an hour got a shock when I stood up to tower over them and garner them aside. We squeezed through the crowd of rude comments, grasping hands and various smells. We had arrived in the city.

A switch to another line saw us on completely familiar ground. We were face to face with a 50 year old man clad almost entirely in PVC and within earshot of a pair of excessively pierced, tattooed, chained and Anthrax t-shirted men trying to outdo each other with stories of people de-limbed by trains or gutted in bloody and painful ways.

We walked home from the station in an all-too-familiar light drizzle which I found to be expected and rather refreshing. Past rows of tall, thin houses stuck together in long terraces which no longer seemed strange, past too many cars in the street, past red telephone boxes and red double-decker buses to my own little house. When I walked in, I realised that I really could do with a nice, hot cup of tea and a few hours blogging. I was home.

Static - redux

2004-09-26T19:29:00.000Z

The nurse popped a little slide with a droplet of my blood into the machine and pressed a button. The machine, in turn, whirred a little and beeped most cheerfully. When she looked at the readout, she visibly blanched.

Apparently, iron in the blood is supposed to be between ‘x’ and ‘y’. Mine was ‘x’ minus ‘a lot’. She wasn’t happy and I got a stern lecture about taking care of myself. Then she did something else painful and (typically) undignified leaving me wondering why it was that I had just paid so much money for the pleasure of her company. (Of course, I had paid privately because – short of losing my tongue and being accidentally rushed to a public hospital in Britain before I can give other instructions – I had chosen a private clinic where washing hands is still a common practice.)

It was a routine test to be taken before a little surgery I had on Thursday. Since then, I’ve been recovering from the (always hideous) effects of anesthetics on me with the help of tonnes of vitamin/mineral pills, a quarter of a cow and veritable fields of spinach and kale. I feel better than I have in two months. I even feel like posting again.

You see, I had recently been feeling more than a little tired. I had no idea what it was and had it down to ageing – although why I should age about 10 years in the space of 5 weeks was beyond me. I went from being able to run a few miles with only a little temporary whining at the end to not being able to walk up stairs without puffing like I had never done exercise before.

Baffled, I did what I usually do to a problem – I met the darned thing head on and decided that perhaps I was becoming unfit. So I would work harder. The harder I worked, though, the worse I felt. I put it down to laziness and…yeah…worked harder.

As you may have guessed, my particular personality type is useful for things like leading garrisons of troops into war or coordinating a change throughout a company. Unleashed onto things like personal care or small children, it can become a hindrance.

Matthew enjoys giving practical advice then chuckling from the sidelines when I vehemently ignore it just because the idea wasn’t mine. Eventually, I have to swallow my pride, ask him for some assistance in scooping my battered body off the floor, limp over to somewhere where I can lick my wounds and promise to take his advice. He looks down at me with crinkles in the corners of his eyes in a most infuriating ‘You’re so darned cute when you’re angry!’ look. Sometimes, he even says it. No punishment could be worse.

So I’m happy that I figured it out all by my (almost) self.

Now, instead of barely having enough energy to crawl through a day and contemplating writing a post with about as much pleasure as I would pulling out my own toenails, I have other problems at hand.

I have too much energy and I’ve been ordered to ‘take it easy’ by the doctor. Matthew knows this and is enforcing it with raised eyebrows, lectures and stern warnings.

The only place I can unleash energy, therefore, is work and here. Actual posts of value here we come:)

M

We interrupt the white noise to state...

2004-09-22T12:00:00.000Z

Try as I might, I can't quite convince life to throw things at me in a steady stream of interruptions that can be slotted neatly into a schedule.

Some scheduled things - like sitting down, reflecting over something, writing it down in a coherent manner, fretting over the wording and order, walking away to get a cup of tea, coming back and deciding it's just garbage and it would be better to finish off an older piece of writing, working on that, remembering that I'm supposed to be cutting down on tea, reading it over for the nth time and deciding that it's just damned near good enough - in other words, posting here, have been put on a back burner to simmer.

I did, however, go and see an advance screening of the new Jet Li film 'Hero' a couple of days ago and have a lot to say about it - so stay tuned into White Noise Station and you'll hear all about it soon.

M

A question of service

2004-09-19T22:46:00.000Z

What would you expect upon joining the army?

Well, if you believe the recruitment advertisements of Australia’s armed services several years ago – a nice steady job in carpentry (rebuilding schools and hospitals in war torn parts of Asia), playing with fancy, blinking gadgets or ‘being a leader’ (don’t ask). Nowhere in the recruitment drive were a few key facts mentioned:

- There may be a war
- You may be shipped out to war
- You may need to kill
- You may die

There seemed to be the overall message that you would help your country ‘be prepared’ – but be prepared for what? A khaki and bronzed skin shortage, judging by the soldiers beaming out of the still shots.

Now, I don’t know how recruitment is run in the US or UK, but I’d guess it’s along the same lines as Australia’s government – “Join, it’ll be fun.”

Perhaps this is why it comes as such a great shock to western nations when their soldiers die in a war – it’s just not something to be expected, considering that our fittest and finest are simply busy ‘preparing themselves’ for ‘something’ in an occupational health and safety approved environment. Perhaps it’s why we have protests and why a silly woman heckled Barbara Bush last week.

Her heart wrenching story? Her son was in the army. America went to war. He was sent to Iraq. He was killed in the line of duty.

This is sad, bordering on tragic in this day and age of low infantry loss in times of conflict – but not something out of the range of reasonable expectation for a man diffusing bombs in the middle of a war zone.

Spontaneous combustion, sprouting a pair or wings or starting to convulse and speak in tongues springs to mind as terribly unexpected for a soldier in Iraq. Injury or death, sadly, no.

In order to realise exactly how preposterous this mother’s claims (that Bush killed her son) are, one only need to look to the fact that at some point in time, her son had in front of him a stack of forms to join the US army.

With full cognizance of the fact that he may be sent out to do some pretty dangerous things in the course of his military career, he signed them. If he wasn’t aware of this possibility, then I can only guess he was particularly dim, evading the issue or brought up in an isolation chamber.

I simply can’t imagine that there were boxes he could check on the application forms akin to:

- Full service.
- Service only during times of peace, thank you.

So why the outcry that soldiers are being killed in Iraq? Besides the fact that it’s an unpopular war in some quarters, I’d venture one of two guesses.

One is that these men signed up in far more peaceful times when a career in the army was just another moderately paying job with good prospects of education and furtherment, not to mention a great chance to play with some very nice toys.

The other is that most of us – growing up in the cotton wool surrounds of these paternalistic governments of ours – have forgotten what it means to take a risk AND LOSE.

If we lose our jobs we have social security, social housing, child benefits and food stamps. If we fall ill, we have ‘free’ medical care (I put the free in inverted commas because, of course, someone somewhere is paying for that medical care, often unwillingly). If we can’t afford basic education, the state steps in to foot the bill.

Where does failure land us these days? On a comfortable cushion of state supplied alms – certainly not cold, starving or dead. So where is the abject dread of failure? The knowledge that not to move forward is to die slowly and to move forward means taking chances with their inherent downside risks?

When looking at the downside risks of military service, how many recruits and their families did not take seriously the possibility of death? Certainly the chances of misfortune are greater in service than in other careers – even during training, let alone in a hostile country. I really wonder if the idea of the government as protective and coddling guardian extended in these people’s mind’s to the realm of war. “Nothing bad will happen – ‘they’ just wouldn’t let it happen!”

Nevertheless, mistaken or not, adults signed up to be soldiers.

I remember seeing Michael Moore being interviewed during the Democractic convention. He seemed to revel in the idea that he had caught his interviewer out by asking him whether he would send his own child to Iraq. The interviewer, of course, stated that this would be solely the child’s decision. Michael would take none of it and asked the same question again and again, thinking he had caught the interviewer out at some guilty admission.

Michael is living in the wrong decade, if not the wrong century. People willingly sign themselves up for military service in America these days. Conscription is (thankfully) a thing of the past and children are no longer chattels only doing their parent’s bidding.

In the same way that Michael couldn’t see that the interviewer’s children would have to make the decision to undertake military service for themselves, the protesting mother couldn’t see that her son undertook the decision for himself. She sees her son as merely a man going about his business at work – suddenly being shipped out to a dangerous foreign country for no fathomable reason.

Bush isn’t a murderer – he is a President in a political system allowing him to wield the power of an army at will. The army is made of voluntary recruits who have signed the daily determination of lives away for a certain period of time to their military leaders and to the government. Bush isn’t choosing random strangers off the street to go into Iraq and diffuse bombs, he is using soldiers who have pledged their allegiance and service to him. If they didn’t take that pledge seriously enough at the outset, they have made a serious error of judgment.

Signing up for the army is a gamble. It’s possible to serve well, with distinction, to make a career, to rise in rank – it’s also possible to lose at the gamble and pay the highest price a human being can. I’d say that one of the few things that make the gamble worthwhile is to respect your government and your leaders so that you take the risk for a cause that you believe in. It’s no wonder then, given the leaders we have, that I won’t be joining the army any time soon.

M

Dunny Quest

2004-09-15T17:26:00.000Z

In a bold move, Starbucks London have this week installed their first Baldur’sBint(TM) toilets.

Girls wishing to use the facilities are faced with three choices of cubicle, each somehow incomplete. They must solve the dilemma to use the loo.

“It’s not that we don’t keep the ladies room to a certain standard” Jonathan Anders, 31, manager of the Oxford St store says “It’s that we want to present our customers with a logic puzzle as yet another unique attraction to the chain. I mean – how long is Wi-Fi going to give us differentiation in the market?”

A customer interviewed at the store agreed wholeheartedly. “Oh, it was just great!” gushed Monica White, 26 “There was some pressure at the beginning – but once I figured out I had to take the paper from the only cubicle that had any (but didn’t have a seat) and take it to the only cubicle that had a seat AND a functioning lock – the whole thing just solved itself.”

When asked if it wasn’t a tad annoying, she shook her head vehemently “Not at all, it’s really an appropriate diversion to host in a store that dispenses caffeine. I mean, everyone knows that it’s a diuretic – so it spurs you on that much more to get the answer in the minimum time.”

Apparently, a new attraction is already in the works. Talks have been held with MacGyver to develop something new and even more challenging.

Jason Binks, 47, Senior Waterworks Development Director at Starbucks International gives us the overall concept. “There will be no functioning facilities at all. The customer will walk into the booth which has a paperclip and a soggy match on a stand – they will have to construct the entire bathroom themselves, including the hand drier/blower machine which won’t work. We expect it to be a tremendous success and a welcome addition to the brand.”

I think we’re all busting to try it.

_____

Alright, so on a serious note, I’m severely unimpressed.

You really would have thought that a highly procedurised chain such as Starbucks could train its dead-eyed drones to do things to American standards – alas and alack, even my Soyaccino didn’t have any chocolate sprinkly stuff on the foam (gasp! the inhumanity!) and the place could have done with a good clean.

Someone disabuse me of my idea that everything works as it *should* in America – before I build a raft and paddle over there for good.

M