One Hundred & Twenty-Sixth : Towards a Distributed Labour Model

One Hundred & Twenty-Sixth : Towards a Distributed Labour Model: "I got to work the other day slightly out of breath, my first actions being to ask two of my colleagues to do me a favour. One was asked to make some photocopies of something for me, the other being asked to go downstairs and get a projector and laptop.

Yes, I had a presentation to do and was completely unprepared for it. The estimate time taken for the remaining tasks was clearly more than the time I had and so I was trying to get assistance where I could.

As pathetic as this behaviour was, it is not particularly new. I'd like to be able to say that this is due to some marked decline in my efficiency or abilities generally but this isn't the case. In fact, I remember quite well a similar incident about twelve years ago.

I had a piece of history work to hand in and of course, it was almost entirely un-started on the day it was due in. My plan, such as it was, was to do as much as humanly possible in the hour or so before the lesson and hand that in. And once again, I called upon the labour of my acquaintances to get it done. One I asked to help do the conclusion. Another had to make up some references. The third was a little dimmer than the others and so couldn't necessarily be trusted with any prose. So I asked him to do the front cover. A title and the finest most appropriate clipart Corel Draw had to offer. What could go wrong?

And after the hour, I gathered together the various sections and stapled them together. It was that point I glanced at my title page. The Soviet flag was proudly displayed at the centre of the page, as requested. The title, just above the flag, read :

Joseph Starling : A Report

My heart sank. What this went to show is that, as the old saying goes, if you want something done properly, you should do it yourself.

Of course, as sayings go that's utter bollocks. If I choose to fly across the Atlantic then I'd quite like the commercial aircraft I fly in to be built properly, but that doesn't mean I should spend my weekends building my own 747. Or, on a more day-to-day level my journey to work doesn't mean I should learn to drive my own bus.

Because of course, we don't do things ourselves. We're often best placed paying someone else to worry about things (designing jets, driving buses). And of course, to an extent this is what we do. I can't drive a bus particularly well, so I rely on a bunch of people to build, clean or drive the bus for me to get to work. And in exchange I give them money.

And this is more or less how most relationships in the modern economy work. There's someone whose a specialist in (say) bus driving who sells his labour to someone like me who is a specialist, in erm...well, whatever I'm good at. The classic division of labour.

And this is fine and good, to an extent. The problem is (and one that I'm fond of going on about) that this division (rather than distribution) of labour tends to have some side effects. Having experts in certain areas is brilliant in the sense it means we don't all have to know / do everything but it also means that in most economies people spend seven or eight hours a day doing roughly the same thing. Sure, most decent employers will try to diversify their employees workload, blah blah blah but basically a lot of us will be bored a lot of the
time. And this is of course what we do find.

The problem with this, ignoring any ethical issues, is that people aren't very good at doing the same sorts of tasks for seven hours. In particular for boring types of work like date entry or crap like that. And so people rebel. They don't necessarily overthrow the bourgeoisie but they do waste a hell of a lot of time. And so people surf the web. They make unnecessary amounts of coffee. They walk around the building talking to people about their grandkids. Hell, the guy who sits opposite me actually falls asleep most afternoons. How's that for fighting the power?

So, there's some problems with the current way things are done. Is there anything better? Well, maybe. For some things.

The most obvious example in recent years of this sort of thing is being Wikipedia. I'm sure I've waxed lyrical about Wiki before, but I'm happy to repeat myself by saying it's one of the best sites on the internet.

Yes, of course it has problems. Yes, I am aware of the criticisms. And they're probably even formally correct but that doesn't mean it's not a terribly useful site and in a 'proof of the pudding' sort of sense, that's pretty much the only measure that's worth anything at all by my terms.

But I don't want to mount a defence of Wikipedia here - arguments on that subject are rather passé and there are more eloquent defenders of Wiki out there than I could hope to be. I'm more interested in how this could apply to the world of work.

In one way, I've already tried it. You see, when I first started where I currently work I was a call centre monkey. The job consisted of :

1. Taking phone calls.
2. Nothing else.

One of the most popular call subjects (and this gives you an idea of how boring this job was) was simply passing the person through.

'Hi, I'm phoning for Jim Smith?'
'Ok, I'll pass you through now, who shall I say is calling?'
'Liz Davies.'
'Great. And he'll know what it's about?'
'Yes. Just put me through will you?'
'OK.'

Of course you'd get through to this git Jim who would have no idea what you were talking about and you'd be involved in a bizarre set of mind games of interrogating who the fuck this bitch was and why exactly she was bothering us. Now, I personally hate talking on the phone and when I started on the phone I was so nervous I could barely speak in a coherent tone. Eventually though, you start to level up and approach a kind of Zen. Or at least, a form of mental and verbal judo where someone's rage is used against them.

But to perform this mental martial art one needs equipment. And one of the most important things is an accurate phone list. So when the next idiot phones for Jim you immediately have the number ready to connect. Simple enough.

Except for the fact we didn't have one. Or the one we did have was totally out of date, paper based, different for each person, etc, etc.

So I made my own phone list. I'll save you the six paragraphs I had originally planned on writing on how awesome this thing was, suffice to say IT WAS AWESOME.

The important thing about its awesomicity that I want you appreciate is that anyone could edit any entry. (Yeah OK, this was four years ago and that seemed like an amazing idea at the time. I'm sure if it was now I'd have put in a Web 2.0 social networking system where anorexic girls could trade self-harm scar photos via badly rendered non-standards complaint HTML). And in a single stroke a new paradigm was born (well, obviously not but I was earning £5 an hour at this point so I took the glory where I could find it). And about half a million hits later, it still stands as the best source of phone information for our officers.

The point of all this tedious self-aggrandisement is despite this, people still (on a weekly basis) try to raise the idea of making it so only one specific person can update it. Because people cling to the idea of divided labour because they fear, exactly as with Wiki or even my stupid school history report that some idiot will input the wrong information. The fact it was wrong to start with doesn't matter.

But the point is can we apply the Wiki philosophy to boring work problems generally? Well, I was going to go on at some (additional) length about this but then the other day I saw this, which gives across what I'm talking about better than I ever could :

The Google Image Labeller.

Have a go. It's a rather simplistic 'game' where you have to type in a word when shown a picture. Your partner (some random internetter) does the same thing and when you match the same word you move onto the next one.

Now, the net result of all this is that Google, for free, are building up a (relatively accurate) array of words associated with an individual picture. Which in turn will make their image search more accurate, which is quite a difficult thing to achieve traditionally. Now, this is the sort of thing that makes me rather over excited. A task which is quite difficult and boring to do (you could hire a temp to do this sort of thing for you, but even if we're presuming someone could do two hundred pictures an hour, then even at current US minimum wage levels Google would still be shelling out hundreds of thousands of dollars). If one uses a little imagination, you could easily imagine the applications of
something like this being applied to business problems more generally.

We could begin to imagine a world where we might eventually get to be fishermen in the morning and critics in the afternoon, if only because we help to contribute to the IMDB's reviews in the evening. Or something.

Outside of this, I have been doing the following :

1. Dissertation
As most of you may be aware, I was given a year extension in the sense that I failed to do a single line of this last year. And up until 358 days into this year extension I still had failed to write a single line. I couldn't even think of a title, or even a general subject.

And just as I had given up all hope, I got into bed, and decided to open a copy of my favourite text editor. And suddenly, inspiration hit me and nine thousand words poured from fingers over the course of the next seven hours.

This was all of course under the influence of a sizable amount of stimulants. So much so that when I came back to read my proudly written nine thousand words I realised it was, for the most part, utter utter drivel (even by my lowly standards). Imagine all the worst practice I engage upon here (irrelevant diversions, numerous run-on sentences, incorrect grammar, poor phrasing, repetitive vocabulary, etc) but magnified millions of times, as if subjected to some sort of mutating gamma radiation.

Still, when I was pouring over the various crimes against, well, thought itself that I had committed I realised it's a lot easier to edit 9000 words of drivel into something semi-coherent than it is to write 9000 coherent words from scratch. So I kept the speed induced nonsense and peppered it with references and handed it in. It was incredibly poor and if it gets more than 15-20% then I will have lost faith in the university system entirely. But at least it's done now and a sizable weight has been lifted from my shoulders.

I get my mark in October. I shall let you know how it goes.

2. Lambeth County Court
...is a lovely place. You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy. And this is just the civil court. Although they did have a guy in chains walk through the reception at one point. Presumably the CSA don't muck around if you miss payments...

Anyway, the court thing went reasonably well. Well, except for the bit where possession was granted to Halifax in 28 days. But the judge was quite nice about it and it'll probably be sorted out. Eventually.

3. More medical trials!
I have, thanks to sexyebany now preliminarily signed up for another medical trial in Cambridge. This time it's much less intense, only a few sessions but could prove interesting. I shall post full details closer to the time, but I get a brain scan given to me as part of the process which can only be a good thing.

Hope you're all well."

One Hundred and Thirty-Second : 2006: A Year in Review

 

 

Sent to you by D via Google Reader:

 

 

One Hundred and Thirty-Second : 2006: A Year in Review

via "Les Confessions" by dante.fs@gmail.com on 26/12/06

I came quite close to completing one of those quiz circular things, but I thought that a different format would give far more opportunity to make click-clack sounds on the keyboard, which is obviously what I live for.

And so here are my thoughts on the world's 2006 (rather than my own 2006).

World Events

Without looking, it is telling (and somewhat depressing) that I cannot remember much of what happened this year. Not that I've forgotten the events entirely, but this year seems to blend in with 2005, as if 2006 lacked its own distinctive taste. Indeed, I think that's probably the theme of the year. It might be because (as of now) I'm living where I was 12 months ago, doing the same job, and most other things are broadly the same in my life, so it's quite easy to mix the two together.

Beyond mere personal bias it probably does seem fair that most of the trends evident in 2006 were also evident (even if they didn't begin) in 2005.

After refreshing my memory there does seem to have been some consistent headings under which to mentally log most of the affairs.

- Environmental, energy and resource issues seemed to become important again.
- The Middle East continued to be the focus of world affairs.
- In the United States, the neo-conservative right seemed to falter.
- The Chinese continued whatever the hell it is they're doing.
- British and European politics remained utterly hopeless.

Ignoring the last point (which is more a "lack of theme" than anything else) the remaining points seem at least partially interlinked.

On environmental / resource politics, I'd like to give a brief story some of you may be familiar with.

In 1980 the economist Julian Simon bet environmentalist Paul Ehrlich that from 1980 to 1990 the cost of five key resources (copper, chrome, nickel, tin and tungsten) would fall. Ehrlich would hypothetically stake $200 on each resource, recording how much he got of each. When 1990 arrived, prices were adjusted for inflation and depending if prices rose or fell one would pay the other.

The economist easily won the bet - the original $1,000 investment had lost a staggering $576 of its value. To take one example - $200 had bought 195lbs of copper which by 1990 had dropped 18% in value.

The wager is reasonably famous in economics circles and I remember my free market environmentalist professor finding the whole thing very amusing. Indeed, he thought it said a great deal about economics and the environment.

And in a way, it did. For a start, it tells us that environmentalists probably shouldn't bet economists on performance of financial markets. What it also tells us is that doom and gloom predictions on how resources are about to run out are rarely likely to be straight-forward, especially when you're considering commodity prices which are affected by a dozen factors other than the amount of copper left in the ground.

The reason I mention this incident was because this year the following three things happened.
- In April 2006, Copper reached a new high. Paul Ehrlich's 195lbs of copper (bought for $200 in 1980, about $460 in today's money) was now worth $614 dollars.
- The US Cent and certain types of British pennies became worth less in face value than the materials (copper, zinc) contained within them.
- People stopped dumping cars on our estates.

The first two are fairly self-explanatory but the third deserves a comment. When I started in my current employment a major problem was dumped cars. People who could not obtain money for their vehicles via scrap were being forced to pay to dispose of their cars and so were leaving them in areas where local authorities or other agencies would be forced to remove them.

The problem has now largely stopped. I can't remember when someone first mentioned this to me, probably in 2005, but it was something along the lines of: "Nah, we don't get any problems with that anymore, the fucking gyppos take 'em to the scrap yards now - they can get money for them now the thieving bastards."

Casual racism aside, this seemed an interesting development. Of course pundits were full of heard chatter that commodity prices were increasing due to Chinese industrial expansion but by and large my life does not heavily involve commodity markets anyway. But this was a real-world affect : the explosive growth of cities like Shanghai was indirectly leading to less dumped cars on peripheral estates in Orpington, Kent over five thousand miles away.

Of course the lord giveth, the lord taketh away. Abandoned vehicles are no longer a problem but copper (and other materials) have become so valuable that people are breaking into our empty properties and stealing copper pipes and hot water cylinders at an alarming rate (causing subsequent leaks and floods).

There have also been reports of people angle-grinding entire railings off, large stainless steel gates being carried away and even fire fighting equipment stolen for it's scrap metal value. What previously would not have been worth the effort is apparently now economically rational behaviour.

I mention all this copper stuff because it highlights one of the recent shifts in economics and politics. I remember as recently as 2000 people on television saying we had reached some sort of Zen post-material economy where everyone would work in tech and we didn't need to worry about mining anymore. True, most people thought that was bollocks even then, but while prices remained low no-one worried about it.

Now things have changed. While I certainly wouldn't rush to make any wagers on future commodity prices it seems likely prices will slowly creep up. The obvious example being energy.

While not as dramatically as with some metals, energy drifted upwards in 2005, a trend not really reversed this year. Indeed, in January 2006 one of the first stories was Russia increasing their gas prices to Ukraine (much to the outrage of various politicians who suddenly realised they were at least partially dependent on Russia). Coincidentally, 12 months on, today there is a story of how Georgia has just agreed to pay increased gas prices to Russia.

True, prices in Europe have improved recently, but much of that seems to have arisen due to an unseasonably warm winter which future years may not bless us with.

Energy prices are not just affected by demand but are more sensitive to instability (which obviously could affect supply). And in the major oil producing regions of the world this has not been the most stable year in history.

In Latin America, Molares fulfilled his promise to nationalise Bolivia's natural gas fields and in neighbouring Venezuala recently Chavez has won yet another mandate for oil-funded populism (much to the chagrin of the United States, no doubt). In Russia there have been steady moves towards increased national- control of resources (witness Russia's recent snub to Shell). In all three of these cases the theme is that supplier has much more scope over political measures like this than ever before. True, a lot of this depends on the overall demand for oil or natural gas (and therefore state of the world economy) but at least part of the reason is the state of the major energy producing region on Earth - the Persian Gulf.

Most obviously, there was Iraq. It's been apparent for a long time now, but by mid 2006 it seemed totally undeniable that the situation is nothing but a mess. It maybe that the United States eventually achieves it's long-term goals in Iraq (which might include splitting the country into two or three parts) but any possibility of "winning" the propaganda war has been lost.

Evidence of this is widely available but you know things are bad when even network TV shows like Family Guy, American Dad and the Simpsons all feel safe to openly criticise the war (albeit fairly tamely).

Overall though, little new seemed to occur in the Middle East. Iran continued with it's nuclear program and basically told the world they'd better get used to it, Hamas won an election which rattled the Israeli's and the US but doesn't seem to have gone anywhere so far and somehow, beyond all odds, Ariel Sharon (who fell into a coma on January 4th 2006 you might remember) is STILL not dead.

True, Saddam Hussein was sentenced to death (and he lost his appeal today apparently) but instead of it taking place in the background of a stable and prosperous economy, it's taking place in a country where only yesterday British troops attacked a police station with a thousand troops.

Certainly, from the point of view of the American right the sentencing of Saddam seems to be too little too late. They, more than anyone else, seem to have been the losers in American politics of last year. The perception of a quagmire in Iraq and the reality of higher gas prices meant that the Republicans faced some losses to the Democrats in November and Rumsfeld (who had earlier in the year lost a Supreme Court case over Guantanamo) lost his job. Left-liberal satirists now feel comfortable writing ironic articles about how neo-cons were probably part of a Trotskyite plot to destroy American imperialism from the inside.

Of course, the left in America is still as anaemic as ever and can report almost zero advancement for the nth year in a row. The only positive development I can think of, which took place outside of the traditional left, occurred around the recent mobilisations in the Latino community - the peak of which involved demonstrations of more than a million people on immigrant rights.

The only other political development I can think of which came out of America in 2006 relates back to the environment. It was the release of 'An Inconvenient Truth' the movie featuring one-time Futurama guest star and former-vice president Al Gore.

Speaking generally, when thinking of the acclaim that both Clinton and Gore seem to have faced since leaving office I am reminded of the old joke about Gorbachev and the Communist Party : "He did something they never managed in 80 years : he made them look good".

Clinton I'm told apparently has some sort of Jedi-mind trick / Robe of +10 Charisma which explains some of the love he receives, but with Gore, the only rational explanation is that he and Bill were followed by Dick Cheney and GWB. I suppose if Gore didn't shoot anyone in the face he's already one-up on his successor.

Anyway, on the movie, I'm not 100% sure of what sort of reception the movie has faced internationally, but everything I've heard has been positive (I've not seen it yet so can't comment). Roger Ebert said :

"In 39 years, I have never written these words in a movie review, but here they are: You owe it to yourself to see this film. If you do not, and you have grandchildren, you should explain to them why you decided not to.

Which sums up some of the hyperbole I've heard about the movie.

The reaction in the UK seems to have been similarly positive and papers like the Independent have reached a chorus of mutual orgasm on the subject. Indeed, it fitted in with their general theme this year which seemed to be "Make every single front cover either about Iraq or the environment".

Which brings us neatly to British politics generally.

Including the Independent, the papers managed to cover six basic stories this year, if one excludes sports, PR hype and celebrity gossip (which now accounts for 98% of all articles). The six stories were thus :
- The government is shit.
- Crime is out of control.
- We don't like immigrants.
- We don't like Muslims even if they're not immigrants.
- Iraq. Oh dear.
- The Environment. Oh dear.

I am happy to say I do not buy a daily paper but from my sampling of papers found on the train every single story fits into one of those categories. The first is a non-story as the government are always shit, and crime does not seem to be fundamentally different from every other year (coverage occasionally get's more or less inflammatory and/or racist but that's about it). Iraq & the environment I've already covered.

What of the other stories? The immigrant story is interesting because I have almost no left-wing defence of immigrants (or immigration generally). The argument seems to be exclusively between Daily Mail readers and business people. What most people involved in such debate don't seem to grasp is that no matter how angry they get, while business supports further immigration, immigration will continue. This fairly obvious fact seems to have eluded most commentators though and as such, very little political movement has taken place there, despite many thousands of column inches on the subject.

General feelings of Islamaphobia seem to have continued although in the lack of a terrorist attack (so far) it's died down a bit recently. Wherever possible our execrable papers do their best to stoke the fires, recently mentioning that a suspect who may have shot a police officer escaped by dressing up in a veil to go through Heathrow airport. It than transpired that story may not have been true or something along those lines, but it makes you think doesn't it?

Helpfully someone from the Church of England recently said security forces should have the power to forcibly remove Islamic women's veils. As someone who has lived in a multi-cultural area all of my life I am certainly glad that people are finally taking on the menace that veiled Muslim women represent. For too long we, the silent majority, have suffered at the hands of this terrible clique who terrorise the average citizen. I mean, how many times have you got on the bus and there's a Muslim woman in a veil with a can of tenants larger in hand, threatening passengers and abusing the driver? How many times have you got on the bus and a group of Muslim women in veils have been loudly playing music to the irritation of all other passengers? How many times have a group of veiled women, coming back from a football match made your journey hell?

I could go on. You get the point.

Technology

Continuing my overall theme of this being "2005 Part II", I can't actually think of much that really happened in 2006 worth commenting on with regards tech. Speaking personally I'm using the same operating system, the same webmail service, the same forums and the same general technologies that I was using a year or more ago.

The top twenty of so websites I visit (in terms of frequency) probably only has one new entry (a private torrent site) and that certainly pre-dates 2005.

From the industry generally, the biggest tech stories of the year were probably :

- Google buying YouTube
- Nintendo releasing the Wii
- Sony releasing the PS3
- Microsoft releasing IE7 and Vista (sort of)
- Dell / Sony laptop batteries proving to be some kind of ordnance.

I am far from overwhelmed by any of these developments (although I've not used Vista or the PS3 yet) and the Google purchase was a business story more than anything else which represented no new technical innovation.

Still, it was nice that "user generated content" was in much of the media (so much so that Time's 'Person of the Year' was a mirror to represent the contribution we had all made...awwwww). There has been some drunken excitement about the future of media, but I'm pretty sure they're just reproducing copy from eight year old copies of Wired. What very few people seem to be openly saying is that if technology continues there's a good chances a lot of the media whores and their bosses will be out of a job within a decade or so.

Turning to gaming, I'm still not convinced by the Wii, the PS3 completely fails to interest me and more concretely the only game I played fully through this year was Capcom's Dead Rising on the 360. Which admittedly was rather fun.

Overall there was little that was revolutionary. iPods and other gadgets got smaller, internet connections got faster, cameras were more common (but still not very good) on phones and PDAs, wireless connections were more ubiquitous (although often unreliable), spam increased and the government continued to spunk money away on terrible IT projects. On the whole things moved in the right direction though, just not very fast.

Films and TV

I'm not going to bother talking about music here, because I rarely listen to new albums, so it's much more of a personal experience than a reflection on the industry. But TV's and movies are different. I see lots of new movies.

Or so I thought. Upon reflection though, I have actually watched precious little this year in terms of new releases. I didn't watch Clerks 2. I didn't watch Superman. I did watch X Men 3 but I kind of wish I didn't. I watched Ultraviolet and laughed at how poor it was. I kind of watched Underworld : Evolution but was too high to pay attention to what was happening.

Three movies I recall as not being particularly bad : Children of Men (which was genuinely good), The Prestige (which was quite fun although not as clever as it thought it was) and Right At Your Door (which was OK).

If that represents the entire output of Hollywood then it doesn't say much. True, I could watch the movies I missed (including Inconvenient Truth) but I've no real desire to either.

I give this rather gloomy appraisal to contrast with a couple of examples from television. You see, American television has been, for a few years now the superior of American movies and this year was no exception.

This is not to say that American TV isn't often terrible (King of Queens, Everyone Loves Raymond, How I Met Your Mother being three examples which spring to mind albeit all following the sitcom format) and is probably on the whole abysmal. Most of the people I know who have visited the United States in the last few years have said actually watching American TV is truly horrific. So many advertisements with so many terrible programs filling the schedules.

And I've no doubt they're right. But we're not interested in averages here. We're interested in the best. In 1977 produced Annie Hall, Eraserhead and Star Wars IV : A New Hope. Who cares if they also produced in the same year Smokey and the Bandit and the Exorcist II. We can forgive them for the latter, given the former.

The three TV shows I want to mention are Lost, Battlestar Galactica and Heroes.

Lost has received considerable criticism as time has gone on because, let's face it, it's complete nonsense and is the dramatic equivalent of a huge prick tease. But both those characteristics are fundamental to the show and while it has things which are hugely infuriating (characters who refuse to ask/tell each other anything and their story direction with some of the characters being two examples) I still very much enjoy it. Or at least, I very much look forward to watching it, which is the point. True, at times I want someone to pick up an axe and start giving out some justice, but even failing this it's easy to see it's superbly made (watching it on the HD projector is just a 40 minute tourist advert for Hawaii) reasonably well acted with at least some thought gone into writing when compared to the average procedural. It's possible it will disappear up it's own arse or have to finish suddenly when facing a drop in ratings but until then I'm very much glad it's on.

Battlestar Galactica I'm sure I've mentioned before, but is basically Star Trek done right. With reasonably modest production values and only about four recognisable actors (two of which are genre show mainstays Dean 'Al' Stockwell and Lucy 'Xena' Lawless for god's sake) it's at times the best drama show on TV. It's a sci-fi show which isn't always about changing the polarity of the deflector dish but how human beings would cope in strange and severe conditions. The show has received some rather irrational criticisms from some (e.g. semi-unhinged cancer survivor Dirk 'Face' Benedict who played Starbuck in the original) regarding the weakness of the male characters and the overall cynicism and anti-Americanism of the show which I'd reject fairly strongly. Obviously the show isn't so cringingly gung-ho as the original BSG but that's almost certainly a good thing, and outside of a few suicide bombing references the show is very much about portraying the humans as America as far as I can tell.

Finally, a new show this year was Heroes. I don't want to go on about this too long, it's relatively new, only eleven episodes in and there's plenty of time for them to ruin it. So far, it's brilliant. Yes, it's massively derivative (if you can watch a single episode without spotting at least ten sci-fi/comic book references per episodes then you're no geek) to the point where I'm wondering at times if they're paying royalties to anyone. But who cares?

The most direct thing I can say on Heroes is merely a suggestion you watch the first three or four episodes if you've not already. Then go watch X-Men 3 (very broadly they're similar in meta-story) and the latter (despite having a massive budget and some excellent actors) merely looks embarrassingly shallow compared to the former.

Which is why TV is increasingly superior to movies for action / drama. There are many hours in which to grow accustomed to characters and establish back stories. You grow to feel for the characters. There is just a wider canvas to work with.

OK, I'm done for now. Maybe before the New Year I'll say something about how I felt this year. If not, then enjoy New Year's Eve, whatever you do. I will most probably be at Slimes, just for a change.

Love,
D

 

 

Things you can do from here:

• Subscribe to "Les Confessions" using Google Reader
• Get started using Google Reader to easily keep up with all your favourite sites

 

 

One Hundred & Thirty Eighth : Better Living Through Chemistry (Attempt #23)

One Hundred & Thirty Eighth : Better Living Through Chemistry (Attempt #23): "What follows is an introduction to my most recent attempt at neurochemical self-improvement. This time I have been experimenting with the nootropic Piracetam. Don't read on if you're opposed to that sort of thing. This is just the intro. I will be recounting more in later entries.

Background

'But why?'.

It's kind of the obvious question I suppose. A friend raised it recently. 'Why do you take drugs?' I easily sidestepped the question with an accurate but disingenuous 'Which drug? Aspirin? Chocolate? Ecstasy?' retort. I knew what he meant but my question was fair enough - it really does depend on what we're talking about. I don't take ketamine to improve my concentration or social skills - and given it entirely ruins both these things this should be fairly obvious. So any answer I give will be inaccurate.

This particular drug/supplement experience is linked with a desire for self-improvement. To explain, while I am not sure I am satisfied with terms like 'ADD' or 'ADHD' (and the conditions they claim to describe) but I would say that it appears from anecdotal evidence that there are large numbers of people who have semi-serious problems with concentration spans, self-discipline, mental alertness, etc, etc. There are a number of things one can say in response to this.

1. There is no problem with anyone, everyone is fine. People are just a bunch of whining fags. Our performance in this area is fixed.

2. There is a problem and it's particular to a tiny minority who are to blame for ruining their minds with drink, drugs, video games and loud music. The immigrants may also be to blame, who knows.

3. There is no problem, but there is till scope for change.

4. There is a problem, but only in the sense that humans cannot work within unrealistic demands of society. 9 to 5 jobs are unnatural, so how are people expecting to work within such a pattern. (And so on.) As the slogan used to go : Do not adjust your mind, it is reality at fault. Our minds should work the way they do.

5. There is a problem, but this is only (or mainly) down to various societal factors - maybe our diets have too many addititives, or a certain kind of TV diminishes our capacity to think properly, or something else. Whatever is the cause, there is a modern-life induced disease which is making some of us suffer from some kind of ailment.

It should be self-evident that I am of the opinion that 3,4 & 5 are most likely to be true to varying degrees. In any case, I personally have problems staying mentally alert, and highly productive - even when performing tasks I enjoy. Naturally one's concentration / mental energy is not unlimited and it's perfectly natural to feel tired if you've been (say) studying or writing for hours and this is not my concern.

The point is, in normal circumstances I am not satisfied with my own cognitive performance. I have, since 2005 experimented a couple of times with both Ritalin or amphetamines to improve my productivity. There is a lot that could be said about Ritalin vs. (street) amphetamines but ultimately availability trumps all other factors. Ritalin is difficult to get hold of (I am not a person who feels it is ethical to lie to a GP to get drugs) and so paradoxically one is left with the illegal route as being easier. The primary problems with amphetamines (here I am talking of amphetamine sulphate or base) is roughly as follows :

- dosing is not necessarily a precise affair (to put it mildly). Yes, I could gel capsule it but I do not swallow capsules and it's just too much messing around.
- the drug is unnecessarily euphoric. I like euphoria as much as the next man, but it's inconvenient when in some circumstances.
- the effects on sleep patterns can be unpractical. It tends to result in one-day a week being 'a recovery' day (where it's best not to do much) which isn't always possible.
- the potential ruinous effect on health.

Of these, the last is the least important by some distance. I have been told by one of my friends that I will probably die of a heart attack soon, but I'm not really sure that bothers me. For sure, I am an intense physical coward and the thought of being (say) beaten up or burnt in some incident or accident fills me with dread. But the thought of 'dying' as such - how is that a worry? I'm not sure I fully comprehend how one could be afraid of being unconscious given the pleasure sleep usually brings. True, I could suffer some horrible injury, but I'm not too worried about that yet.

Anyway, the point is while I am happy to continue this substance abuse, I would prefer to combine it with something which wasn't perhaps so unsure / illegal / expensive & dangerous. Which is why I keep my eyes out for different things.

So for instance the researcher I dealt with in Cambridge (on the stimulant users trial) talked to me about a drug about to be released which will do a very similar job to Ritalin but will not be a central nervous stimulant (and cause the problems this usually does). We were both quite excited by the prospect but it occurred to me that the drugs companies must have a mid to long term interest in producing cognitive enhancing drugs. The problem as I understand it, is that in the United States, one cannot simply produce a drug and say 'This makes men smarter, I want FDA approval' - the FDA will only examine such things if they are for treatment of a particular 'disease'. And so all these drugs are developed to either 'cure' things like ADD/ADHD (if they even exist as accurate diagnoses) or treat in a different way degenerative diseases like Parkinsons or Alzehimers.

I admit some of that is probably a little conspiratorial but either way, the Financial Times recently noted that the ADD/ADHD (i.e. Ritalin, Adderall & co markets) drugs are worth something like $3bn per year, with growth of something like 20% a year predicted for some time now.

This Approach

I had read on the internet a little bit about a drug called Piracetam which was linked with improving ecstasy usage ('bringing back the magic' as it was called). I was not particularly interested in this per se (I am not looking to have a particularly hard 'roll' most nights and indeed recently when I have had it, it's actually been mildly inconvenient) but I was interested in the general effects of cognition it was said to have. So I did some reading. I will leave interested parties to read the Wikipedia article and the links given in the article, but suffice to say it was a drug supposed to :

- improve memory (in the longer term)
- improve alertness/concentration (unsure what sort of term)
- link well with amphetamine based drugs.
- cause no additional neurotoxicity and very few side-effects

I was dubious. People on the internet (as you'll note from this entry) write an awful lot of shite when they want and who knows what to believe when internet idiots meet marketing hype. Reliable research is hard to come by. There are reports recounting experiences, but it's difficult to tell how trust worthy they might be (forums help in this regard). Much more importantly these things are so unique to the individual in terms of effects. There are so many characteristics that could affect an experience that subjective accounts become very difficult to judge (without prior experience of that individual and their tolerances). Even the people I am close to, with whom I share a reasonable amount (height / birth-place / ethnicity / drug history / opinions / etc) vary biologically quite a bit (I am on average 15-20kg lighter than most people I know of the same height).

This is particularly important because the people who indulge in this sort of thing (charitably we could refer to these people (of which I am one) as 'adventurous' rather than simply lunatics) have some rather odd lifestyle traits. So you'll read someone's account of exactly what they took and when, down to the nearest milligram, with heavy warnings not to deviate from this master plan, and then in the next paragraph the writer will casually relate that he did all this while on industrial strength anti-depressants, or while recovering from heroin addiction or similar which you think must have had an effect. So I didn't know.

A few weeks later, a chance encounter with some fellow psychonauts I heard someone mention what sounded similar to Piracetam. This is someone I had encountered before and who I could trust way further than a random internetter and so I was very interested in what they had to say. Unfortunately by this point everyone in the room had taken a reasonably large dose of ketamine and so it was difficult to remember my own name, let alone complex sounding drugs. I tried to find out what the guy was talking about, but the conversation quickly became surreal and the thread was lost. Later I left them my email address and was relieved to get an email which confirmed my suspicion - we had been talking about the same things. So I thought I'd try it.

Some internet shopping later, and I was ready to go.

Methodology

I must note :

- I do not have a scientific background, and as such am ill-qualified to conduct experiments of any kind.
- I am not even attempting to make objective measures - these are all feelings about myself, which are going to be horribly unreliable by anyone’s standards.
- I make no efforts to control for the placebo effect (I could double blind this sort of thing somehow, but I realistically cannot be bothered).
- I am an idiot.

Having said that, I would generally say I am reasonably honest with myself and am reasonably experienced in this general area. With that in mind, onto the point.

I purchased 2.1kg of Piracetam. This came to something like £100 when you put delivery into the equation. According to Wikipedia, it is perfectly legal to import this into the United Kingdom, and I'm sure that will stand me in good stead at my trial.

Proposed Dose :
2.4 grams Piracetam x 2 daily (once at 8am, then again at 12-1pm)
1 x 3g of letchitin granules (approx 886mg of phosphatidyl choline and 200mg choline)
1 x spoonful of fish oil

The packaging for the Piracetam says three to four times a day, but I have a psychological aversion to taking a 'stimulant' (even a perceived stimulant) late in the day if I know I will be trying to sleep. If I think I will be going out then of course such concerns evaporate, but if I am planning a regular work day the next day I very rarely take any stimulant beyond (say) 4pm.

The letchitin is a source of choline which apparently is useful. I have read various things online saying choline is a must to avoid blinding headaches but
(a) every single report I have read has been contradicted by another report.
(b) I do not really fear headaches since I do not suffer them usually.

On rare occasion I have taken a very specific combination of drugs (in a most foolish fashion) and had the most hilarious headache but this was to be expected. I will outline details in my next entry, but suffice to say the days I didn't take any choline no such headache materialised. The internet, as usual, is full of faggots who can't handle their drugs.

I will post my findings later (today was day ten).

Otherwise, the last month and a half has been the most tremendous fun. This has mainly been due to :

- I've found a slightly more productive (but no less ruinous) outlet for my gambling
- My new job has taken on new developments which has left an organisational chart which in turn has resulted in receiving sarcastic salutes from my colleagues. I have been incredibly productive of recent as well.
- Slimelight about three or four weeks ago was perhaps the most fun I've had there in months, which was nice in a 'renewing the faith' sort of way.
- I've found being honest with people, even in unlikely situations is actually incredibly profitable.

The only downside was that I was ill at one point. My first 'flu / cold in three months, which isn't bad compared to last year (which was a continuously cold between November and March). I made it worse by some bad timing, but I am well over it now.

More later."

One Hundred and Thirty Sixth : Improvement

 

 

Sent to you by D via Google Reader:

 

 

One Hundred and Thirty Sixth : Improvement

via "Les Confessions" by dante.fs@gmail.com on 27/02/07

I recently watched Hot Fuzz. It was OK. Perhaps seven out of ten if you follow those sorts of categorisations. I don't really want to get into a in-depth discussion of the movie here though, primarily because there's a lot better reviews than I can manage already out there.

Instead, I want to think about one of the things I found myself thinking about after seeing the movie. It's a point which I was reminded of when reading Jakiri's blog on Hot Fuzz (which I shalln't link to, mainly because I'm lazy but also because it's got spoilers and such).

It's about the idea of progress.

You see, recently, I was going back through some old work I had done. One of the advantages (if you can call it that) of working at the same place for five years is you build up (albeit inadvertandly quite a considerable portfolio of work of whatever form. In this case, it was a basic web front-end for one of our databases. I had forgotten about it, but people were still using it and I was asked to look at some kind of problem.

And upon examination I realised to be quite frank it was utter crap.

Now, I had never thought it was a Sistine Chapel of web-scripting, but I had just forgotten how terrible I was. And I don't say this as someone who believes himself to be some kind of zen master who has discovered how to channel his chi. I'm still crap. Everything I do screams self-taught bad-practice at every turn and it'd be obvious to anyone with an ounce of training how bad most of the technical stuff I produce really is. (Fortunately, that's not my actual job, but merely something I have to do to achieve certain functions).

But even though I'm still crap I can tell this older stuff is much much worse on a whole number of levels. Technically it's much worse (in terms of elegance, structure, syntax style, etc) but much more importantly, from the user's perspective it's so inferior than I've done more recently.

So what's my point? Wow, I'm improving. Big deal. But that's just it. Every single day I feel like I'm closer to solving "the problem". (It's never quite clear what the problem is, but I'm getting there nonetheless) and every day when I get to work I can see so many ways I could make things better it's often actually quite overwhelming. I feel in my giddier moments that if I was immortal and could work on these various problems for ever I could solve them all. That I would be, every single day, striving towards some kind of perfection.

Now, I freely confess that most of these thoughts are because I'm a lunatic with a drug addiction, but I'm sure you can all see some link to your own lives inw hat I am saying here. How much better are you at your job than when you started? how much more understanding do you have on your subject than when you started your degree? Whatever really. Improvement, progress is natural. Or so you'd hope.

I relate all this because as I say, I went with my wife to see Hot Fuzz. I was not disappointed with it, I must say but this was because I had already seen Shaun of the Dead (which I did not rate highly).

I do not say these things to be some kind of hipster contrarion. They are both good movies, on some level. But as I remember one friend commenting to another a decade or so ago, re : the Foo Fighters, "Well...they're not Nirvana are they?"

Similarly, Hot Fuzz, no matter what you say about it - it's not Spaced is it? I could bore you endlessly here. Do I need to retell the quite dull anecdote of how T&F phoned me in the middle of the first ad-break of the first episode to say with joy that they had "made a show about (or at least for) us"? Probably not, you get the idea. Fanboy through and through.

So I loved Spaced. I thought Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz were good, but not very good. So what?

Well, let's take exhibit B. I love the film Clerks. Hell, I have adopted the name 'Dante' as an indirect result of the film for God's sake, do I need to say more? And yet I mildly dislike Dogma, hate J&SBSB and haven't even seen Clerks 2. Out of fear.

The above two examples can be explained away through the fan(boy) principle. Once you're a fanboy, you're basically a wanker who can't be pleased and can't lisen to anything new with a "fresh" ear. In short : You have expectations. An obvious example : I remember quite clearly when Red Dwarf Series Six finished. Everyone talked about it at school. "To be continued..." Wow, this is going to be great! And so we waited. And waited. And...well, you've seen Season 7, you know the rest

Did our fandom spoil Season 7? Or was it the fact that Season 7 was badly written shit? In this case, probably the latter. But perhaps we were just young and naive and overlooked the dreadful jokes which the earlier series were littered with. And then when older, wise and more cynical we could simply not ignore the atrocities which filled Season 7. Who knows.

There are other examples. I can't remember the first NOFX album I listened to, since I downloaded a whole bunch of them in one go. I had heard them in clubs a bit (I later realised) but after listening to their output repeatedly, I find myself finding my favourite album firmly located about a decade or so ago. Not their first works (which they freely admit were shit) but nothing in the last ten years or so either.

Or Woody Allen. I remember watching Hannah and Her Sisters when I was very young (far too young to get most of the jokes I suspect) and god knows which order I saw the rest. But of the twenty or so of his movies I've seen, my favourite has got to be Annie Hall (which to be fair, did win Best Picture). But it's a film from 1978 for christ's sake. He's made something like fifteen movies since then, surely one of them should have eclipsed Annie Hall by now?

I think you might be able to see the point I'm getting at here.

I'll just say this. One of the people on my friends list could be described as having a somewhat delicate soul. I am fond of her, but she (entirely understandably) seems to worry about the state of the world. That the atmosphere will be ruined, that resources will be fucked up, that the many social and economic problems in the world will overwhelm our smug little western lifestyles. And she's absolutley right, of course. But you know what...? I'm not worried about any of that. Not really. Because I know we can overcome all of that.

It'll take time, and it'll take a hell of an effort, but there's going to be hundreds of thousands, no - hundreds of millions of people going to work each and every day getting better at what they do. And even things like cancer or AIDS or blindness. These are huge, terrible problems, but deep down, they don't worry me on a general level. Sure, they'll kill me, possibly my kids (should I have any). But eventually, we'll beat them. Because something like blindness will be made into a hundred thousand smaller problems and we'll kick the arse of each one in turn. It won't be one genius. It'll be a bunch of people. Working together. Either because of profit margins or because of the greater good, I couldn't give a shit why they'll do it. But I'm convinced that it'll be done. Eventually. Because that's my belief in progress.

But you know what depresses me a little? It's that, while I think we'll beat Cancer and AIDS and global warming and anything else nature throws at us...I'm not sure Simon Pegg and Jessica Stevenson will ever make a sitcom better than Spaced. Or that NOFX (or anyone) will make a better punk album than Punk in Drublic. And Allen's never going to top Annie Hall or Smith Clerks. Granted, these aren't big problems, but that's why I find it hard to be down about the state of the world.

The big problems will come down, bit by bit. But the small problems? Whedon making anoter show as popular and likeable as Buffy? Moore making a comic-book better than Watchmen? VNV topping Futureperfect? I don't think we (or more accurately, they) even know where to start.

 

 

Things you can do from here:

• Subscribe to "Les Confessions" using Google Reader
• Get started using Google Reader to easily keep up with all your favourite sites

 

 

One Hundred and Thirty Fifth : This Post Is Part Of The Problem

One Hundred and Thirty Fifth : This Post Is Part Of The Problem: "I think it was Lenin who said that the interests of the working class should become the subject of discussion among communist intellectuals. If the masses are interested in football, or bingo or the monarchy that this much be an issue that activists should grapple with on a theoretical level. You can see his point, but I think he was wrong with at least one case.

The Power of Satire

Isaac Davis: Has anybody read that Nazis are gonna march in New Jersey? Y'know, I read this in the newspaper. We should go down there, get some guys together, y'know, get some bricks and baseball bats and really explain things to them.
Party Guest: There is this devastating satirical piece on that on the Op Ed page of the Times, it is devastating.
Isaac Davis: Well, a satirical piece in the Times is one thing, but bricks and baseball bats really gets right to the point. It's hard to satirise a guy in shiny boots.

- Woody Allen's 1979 movie Manhattan

The above excellently lambasts the impotence of liberals intelligentsia vis-a-vis something like fascism and is one of my favourite parts of the movie. It is also however, fundamentally incorrect.

It is wrong because satire actually works well when used against people with shiny boots. In fact, of all it's targets it best against such people. Don't get me wrong, if fascists are on the march then Isaac's right - you'll want to get some guys together with some bricks and bats. But before it gets to that stage ridicule is probably the most potent weapon available.

This is true because fascism requires in order to be a force that people take it seriously. Again, this is not to suggest fascism can be defeated by clever op-ed pieces, nor does it mean there won't be a time for baseball bats. But for fascism to be seen as some great spiritual revival it (or whatever) requires people to be in a particular mental state. This is why there are anthems, symbolism and marching. It is like a horror movie - the music, lighting and actors all have to work together to maintain the terror in the audience. If someone in the audience laughs then the spell is broken and we see what is really there, most usually a blonde with limited acting skills in a tight top as some clichéd music screeches away in the background.

Ideas in this sense build a house of cards and when one suddenly is pulled away as a result. It's not just fascism. Take the idea of an absolute monarchy, where the king or queen is the total ruler of a nation.

Against such a structure let's concoct a piece of satire. We'll imagine a scenario where the king's main advisor has just quit. Somewhere someone publishes a rather crude cartoon : A picture of the king, sitting on a toilet looking in a confused manner at some toilet paper while two servants look on. One servant says to the other 'So it's true - without help he really doesn't know how to wipe his own arse.'

And so it is suggested simultaneously that the king is a man with bodily functions like anyone else and also he is actually less competent than the average child. And instantly punctures it the ideas behind a monarch : that he is a figure chosen by God to lead to people - that he is a serious and wise figure and so on.

How could a king respond to such mockery? Ban the cartoon, which would give the piece more attention and confirm his own lack of sense of humour? Or does he leave the idea that he is an incompetent buffoon out in the zeitgeist? Either way damage is done.

Or take religious fundamentalists. People have said that forces like Al-Qaeda are somehow 'unsatirisable', but they are the easiest people of all to mock Sure, they may not care - as with Isaac's fascists - but that is different. The object of satire is not to make the King think he is a fool, it is to make everyone else think he is a fool.

And as the recent Danish cartoons of the prophet Mohammed shown, people who hold religious beliefs strongly are the very easiest to mock. The resultant protests showed how much many Muslims cared about such things. And as any child who has encountered bullying or taunting learns : you should never show you care. I suspect that in the next twenty years (as Islamaphobia grows) you will see an incredible torrent of abuse and ridicule poured onto Mohammed and representations thereof. There will probably be (if there is not already) some gay porno where someone dressed as Mohammed (or Bin Laden) has several dozen men ejaculate on his face after he is fucked in the arse. Why? Because it will piss people off, and that is enough for some people.

What every child eventually learns about insults is the J Russell Lynes quotation :

If you can't ignore an insult, top it; if you can't top it, laugh it off; and if you can't laugh it off, it's probably deserved.

And in a sidewise sort of way, we've arrived at my point. You see unlike fascism and religious fundamentalism there is another blot on human civilisation which I've come to see as basically immune to satire. And that is the phenomenon of 'celebrity culture'.

By this, I mean the trend where trivia about nonentities come to media communications generally. Yes : Big Brother, manufactured boy bands, Hollywood 'stars' and their inexplicably dull lives.

It is not something I write about particularly because that would miss the point (as I'll now explain) but I'm breaking my own rule to make some things clear.

You see, I have an illness. Well, a personality disorder really. Or better put I have many personality disorders. One of these disorders is an overwhelming desire to be a complete and utter know-it-all. Not that I think I know a great deal or that I am not aware of the cavernous gaps in my own knowledge. No, I am referring to knowing things on a much more banal and uninteresting level. Not general curiosity about the world (which is obviously a healthy driver in any persons education) but more a sort of low level nosiness.

So, someone at work will be having a conversation that I am in earshot of. They will then ask something like 'What does EKCFG mean?'. Then, I will interrupt my work regardless of what I am doing alt-tab to IE and find myself (should I not know) on Google typing in 'define:EKCFG'. I do not know exactly why I do this, but there we go. It is not simply to appear smart - in most cases, I do not even bother letting the person know. I just would be annoyed not to know.

The disturbing thing is, and most of you will probably have similar experiences is about how much you don't need to google. Despite years of alcohol and drug abuse my brain still seems to hold in it a disturbing amount of unimportant things about a dearth of subjects. We all have this, about all sorts of things. Which year which movie was released in. About which side project of which band released a particular single and what position in the charts it got into, and so on. I'm sure that everyone finds themselves at some point thinking 'How the hell do I know that?'.

And without doubt, the most disturbing example of this is how much I find myself knowing about the lifestyles of the rich and the famous.

Celeb Culture More Generally

I won't spare too much time criticising this trend - it's been done by writers more eloquent than I. But an example. I returned home from Slimes this morning to find CNN on in the front room. The report was about Anna Nicole Smith's death and the subsequent struggle over her child's paternity. I did not time the report but I estimate it was three minutes or so, with a short interview with her former attorney (I think) plus comments from somebody whose name or significance I did not catch. The report, by today's, standards was nothing special.

Let's think about this for a moment. This was CNN, an international (allegedly respectable) news broadcaster with millions of viewers across the globe. And it was covering the death of one young woman in rather ordinary circumstances. The case does not highlight any new or interesting legal or medical point of which we should all be aware of. The woman herself had no political, economic or cultural significance in particular and in general the issue is not a particularly good example of, well - anything really.

Instead, her death is being given coverage because she is famous. And it is through coverage like this that trivia seeps into our minds. I do not care that Ms Smith has died, I do not care about her baby and nor do I care for the insights of her former attorney. I do not care to know the fact that her child has left the island of Barbados but now I know and I cannot easily unknow it. Apologies to those of you who did not care to know either but I hope you can forgive me for illustrating a broader point.

So why did the story get coverage? Well, firstly you could argue that as CNN and it's ilk are twenty-four hour stations they have to fill their airtime with something and this is quick and easy for them. Likewise, because there are four free London newspapers now (the Metro, the London Paper, London Light and City AM) there are four times as many column inches to fill. And thus this sort of news is pollyfilla which can be squeezed in to take up as much space as required.

And from the media outlets perspective there is some truth to all this. It's much easier (and cheaper) to sit at a desk in London and tap out some nonsense plagiarised from an internet forum about how some airhead propositioned some other airhead in a Hollywood parking lot than it is having correspondents around the world producing real coverage. But from a media recipients perspective should we care what is cheaper for them to produce? Why should we have to put up with substandard fare simply because they wish to cut costs? There is plenty going on in the world to fill every second of CNN, Sky News, BBC News 24 and he rest - without resorting to this kind of drivel.

The second (and more important) argument for such coverage is they are responding to demand. People want to know. And the scary thing is, I think they're right. Some people do want to know whether Britney has been dumped or who Paris Hilton was seen coming out of a restaurant with or whatever. And this could be for two reasons :
- Some people are just inherently shit.
- The need for closure.

The first we cannot do much about. But what do I mean by closure? Well, people may genuinely want to know what happens with Anna Nicole Smith's child simply because the story has begun to be told and so you must find out what happens next. If I said to you, 'Do you care about what happens to Jill Smith's baby?' you'd presumably ask 'Who?'. But if I told you about a girl I knew, who had been pregnant and who was rushed to hospital yesterday with some labour complications then, in at least some of you, a small amount of curiosity would be created as to how she would do. This seems natural.

And this is what I'd term 'the soap-opera effect'. Even the people who watch soap operas will often admit how silly they are but there is still a grim determination to find out what happens next, as if waiting for the punch line of a bad joke. But in the soaps at least, this is a punch-line which never comes. If the writers are in anyway competent they will have started the thread of a new storyline before the old is completed and so keep you hooked forever with all the self-respect of a meth addict.

Indeed, I would admit that this 'soap opera effect' probably applies to some of the television I watch. Smallville is a basically poor show, but I still find myself watching it week after week, if only to find out what horror the writers are going to inflict upon us. And once you've started, you might as well see it through to the end. At least Smallville will end. With the major soap operas, there's a good chance they will outlive some of us.

And so we want to know more about Anna Nicole Smith because we already know a little bit. But at least she is famous for something - she basically sucked off some old billionaire to inherit his fortune. Whatever the moral and legal issues raised by this, it's kind of an event, albeit not the sort of one I'd fill my newspaper with if I was an editor.

But moving onto the next level we have people like Paris Hilton who, to quote Kelly Osborne is basically famous 'for sucking cock in a porno' (you see, why do I know Kelly Osborne said that? Who put that knowledge into my brain? Why do I ever know who Kelly Osborne is?). Now whatever our personal feeling towards young woman sucking cock we should admit it is not a particular unique event in global history. Even if we were to restrict numbers down to just women who have sucked cock on camera, should we ever desire to assemble all those who have done this we would need some football stadiums to put the resultant crowds in.

And it goes without saying that most of these women are not famous. So unlike Ms Smith (who, by marrying an old billionaire has done something most of us will never do) Ms Hilton is not famous for anything in particular, aside from being wealthy in the first place. If we continue downward on this celebrity ladder we arrive (especially in this country) people who are famous merely for being famous.

And while this trend seems to be getting worse, it is not new. The criminally under appreciated animated show Duckman had an episode where the protagonist accidentally gains fame and has the world's media camped out on his front lawn. One television journalist summarises the situation perfectly : 'Now live to the ongoing Duckman crisis : Not because the story is important, but because the constant coverage we give it makes it important'.

And this is more or less it. The media can select someone (more or less at random, although it helps if they are particularly crass, stupid or good looking) and amplify them into a world important figure. Eventually many of us find ourselves thinking - who is this person? Why are they are on television? Did they really say that Hollywood starlet is too fat to be a Bond girl? What are their opinions on origami. Etc, etc.

Once again I would re-emphasise nothing I am saying here is new and I suspect what I am saying here is understood by most thinking persons. I am interested, however in the response. A lot of people notice how shit the news is these days, where the BBC covers such drivel and such we all pay for. And one response is to get very angry (a little like I am doing here) and the other is ridicule or satire. Both miss the point (yes, including this post).

Satire, as discussed earlier, is a powerful tool in some circumstances. And unsurprisingly it's been used against celebrities in a variety of fashions. I was not a viewer but I have heard many people sing the praises of the Channel 4 program Pop World. From what I understand, the programs gimmick was basically taking the piss out of musicians. So in interviews they would make guests appear stupid by simply denying them the usual respect they might be given or asking them foolish questions or whatever. And while this sort of thing (and even shows like Brass Eye, which I was a personal fan of) may be amusing I think they actually contribute to the problem.

You see, there is no point in making Britney Spears look stupid. It's utterly redundant. Even with 'stars' who might take themselves more seriously, what's the point in mocking them? There's no point in pointing out this is all bullshit - we all know it's bullshit. Unlike the monarchy or religious fundamentalism all that a modern celebrity demands is that they are famous. By putting them on television, even if it is to call them a cunt you are acknowledging that they are worth insulting in the first place. It is not worth writing a blog condemning how shit Big Brother is because that implies it is something which requires the attention of thinking people in the first place. And that is why satire or even criticism (like this blog entry) is part of the problem.

So what is the solution? To Big Brother, to manufactured pop bands, to wealthy heiresses who suck cock on or off camera? Well, as every child is taught : quite simply : to ignore them until they go away. There is no point condemning them, or conducting interviews with stars so they look like idiots or even getting angry in your office at someone who starts telling you about Big Brother.

As I see it, there are three types of people regarding this issue.

- The first, will have no idea who any of the people mentioned above are. These are the most truly excellent of persons which we should all aspire to be. Keep up the good work.

- The second, will be people who buy Heat magazine, who genuinely care about whatever the media have selected for the love/hate of the week and who can't wait for Big Brother to start again. These people are the enemies of human civilisation and we should try to systematically ignore them.

- The third will be everyone else in the middle. They're aware on some level something is terribly wrong with the mass media, with the drivel pumped out under the guise of entertainment news. And although they hate it, they're not really sure what to do. They might pick up Heat magazine while in the dentists waiting room, or if they are on a train and someone's left a copy so they can sneer at it. Quite obviously by writing this blog I am in this category. I will seek to rejoin the first however.

Pledges Against Further Denigration of Our Culture

And so, my personal pledges I would ask people to consider in their own lives.

1. I will not buy any newspaper or magazine which covers these stories in any depth (or at all if possible). Or watch any related television show, or buy an CD related to any hype merchants, etc.

2. I will attempt to not buy products advertised along with such coverage (although this is tricky if you're not watching these things in the first place). I would not even bother telling people why you're not buying such things, let the companies work it out.

3. I will not get into arguments or discuss (except tangentially) any aspects of this cultural stain. I will not write tedious blogs like this one on the subject.

4. I will attempt to distance myself from persons who are likely to discuss such things. I saw once a Livejournal post where someone said they would delete anyone from their friends list who discussed Big Brother. This seems a most excellent policy to have (although it might be best not to tell people why you're doing it and simply ignore people who do this).

Hopefully that should be enough.

As always, I hope you are all well."

One Hundred & Twentieth : Mixed Bag

 

 

Sent to you by D via Google Reader:

 

 

One Hundred & Twentieth : Mixed Bag

via "Les Confessions" by dante.fs@gmail.com on 17/03/06

I apologise for the disjointed nature of this entry. This can partially be attributed to the fact I was drunk when writing parts of it. Secondly I am simply out of practice. And finally perhaps I am not in the best of moods. You see, I write this in the middle of what might be termed a "losing streak". My Friday, that is, St Patrick's Day, was a bit rubbish, all things considered. I'll gloss over some financial stupidity on my behalf (suffice to say I made things worse for myself) and then point out that for the first time in four years my pay has been messed up by the payroll department. Or rather, the entire companies pay has been messed up.

The details are rather boring but basically we're all being paid late. With all the ensuing hilarity that brings. Direct debits, cheques for charitable events, standing orders will all probably bounce, costing me probably hundreds of pounds. I should be able to claim it back at some point but it's safe to assume that point won't be right now, when I need the money. The fact I am £600 past my overdraft limit does not help matters. To say I am screwed is to indulge understatement somewhat excessively.

So anyway, to cheer myself up, I decided to go to Synthetic Culture at Egg.

As most of you know, I like clubbing. I will one day give the subject a thorough written examination that it deserves but suffice to say I believe it as an attempt (among other things) to counter the alienation experienced by young modern city dwellers. In fact, I'd be unsurprised if the vibrancy of a cities club scene is in some sense influenced by the level of alienation felt in day-to-day life.

So while I have often complained that when trawling city streets I encounter almost no-one whom I know personally this is generally reversed when clubbing.

I am not a Friday clubber as a rule, my usual haunts over the last two or three years have tended to be Saturday orientated for one reason or another and had not been to Sin City in months. Nevertheless last week when I went out I bumped into fourteen or so people I knew and talked to many more. Last night, at Synthetic Culture, I did not bother to keep count but it was in excess of thirty or so. And not just people I could give a cursory nod - people who talked to me about their upcoming trips to the Whitby festival, going back home to the United States, who could demonstrate elaborate and confusing card tricks, or simply who I could hug with the memory that I had drunkenly got off with them at some point in the past. People I knew.

More specifically, I like Synthetic Culture. I do not think it has the undefinable charm of Slimelight but it is a wonderful venue, and the crowd is diverse and pretty enough for most. True, it is expensive and the security are vaguely unfriendly, but these are crosses we all bare. It is definitely somewhere I will have to get high at soon, something I have somehow avoided doing thus far.

The point of all this is that despite all this positivity my losing streak still managed to curse me. So example one : I lost my wallet. True, it was returned, but sans bank card & Oyster card. So that was one annoyance. And then I was talking to some girl - a rather nice, pretty girl - to whom I delivered what I believed to be my most charming line in banter. And we laughed for a while, and then she punched me in the mouth.

Here it is important to realise that while I am indeed plagiarising Allen I am also being entirely literal - although it was more a slap, but the principle remains. You know those conversations where you're joking about something and the other person goes along with the joke and then you're both presumably working off the joke on so many different levels that it's different to keep up? Well yeah, I had one of those, but then it turned out they may not have been joking at all.

I suppose this merely goes to show my old adage of there being a lot of shit in this world that's disguised as irony. Still, it's all good.

And then there was the journey home. I have been spoiled slightly in that I am used to journeys home from clubbing taking half an hour. True, I am usually accompanied by a 6ft transvestite which means there is a degree of awkwardness, but the journey itself is utterly painless. Not so tonight, thus the losing streak. Without my Oyster card there was a four mile walk to get to an appropriate bus stop. And then there was a half an hour wait. And then, of course, there was a fight / altercation on the bus which meant it randomly had to stop for twenty minutes. I believe there was some debate about who had taken whose wallet, and perhaps whether a punch in the face was going to be forthcoming for someone or other. To be honest, I'm not sure - I just sank into my seat and tried to avoid the world while the bus driver was called a cunt by various passengers who turned out to be, almost certainly, customers of my work.

Overall I had a good night, but I am worried slightly. What will this losing streak hold for me on Saturday? Should I stay in bed and simply watch television? Is that the safest option?

Hey, that's my home town!

Spinal Tap : "This morning we were driving down...route 401 .

[ Loud Cheering ]

Bart : "That's only four miles from my house!"

There is a certain childish satisfaction from seeing your school / home town / what-not in the general media. So when my old school hit the news as most improved school in the country some years ago, it was strangely pleasurable - despite my general feelings for the institution.

I'm not really sure if there is a term for this sort of psychological phenomenon but it seems fairly widespread. And indeed I was mildly interested to find out that the fairly humdrum housing association block of flats I grew up in had been thrust into the limelight last week.

I learnt of this indirectly ; one of the pleasures of not having a mobile phone (or at least, not using it to the point where it's never on) is that no-one can ever contact you. This is of course also one of the downsides.

So I received a message from a friend who had received a message from another friend who had received a message from my wife. The message was simply "Call your mother".

There was relatively little drama but it turned out that this had happened in the flat above my mums. For those suffering from link fatigue, I quote at length :

A young couple were victims of a "cold-blooded murder" when masked men armed with a shotgun killed them in their home. Jordan Jackson, 20, was found in the hallway of the flat in Menlo Gardens, Upper Norwood, south-east London. He had been shot in the neck.

Leyla Djemal-Northcott, 21, was shot in the head as she lay in bed.

Mr Jackson's twin brother, Kieran, was also shot on Tuesday and remains under armed guard in hospital. Another woman has been treated for shock.

Police said the two gunmen fired at least six shots during the attack at about 0640 GMT.

My mother mentioned she heard a loud bang, some continuous screaming for a period and then what sounded like furniture being moved around. She was relatively unconcerned by the incident, presuming the victims were "druggies" (it's interesting to see how people's moral abacus work) although she was mildly concerned when she realised the girl worked in the local post-office.

Interestingly (well, not really) when I lived in West Norwood a man was shot in the head in a local barbers up the road from us. Apparently that guy was a friend of the victims here, or somesuch. The only other thing of note (aside from the cool yellow stickers which were put everywhere over the stairs by the CSI types when I visited to represent blood splatter) was the totally random coverage. The initial Reuters report had at least 2 major mistakes and was barely fleshed out as a story. The BBC report only made the front page of the England section for about an hour before drifting onto the London section and then disappearing altogether. Despite this, the story for some reason is on the Gulf Times (Qatar's top selling English paper) website.

My (ex)wife's reaction was rather more comical, she's moving out as a result. She says she cannot be comfortable again there. I did mention she was crazy, yes?

All Indifferent Things Come To An End

When I was in Edinburgh, I woke up one of the days with a flash of inspiration. Chelsea weren't going to win that day. I didn't even know if they were playing, but I knew they wouldn't win.

I had £100 and I needed to bet it all on them drawing that day. Keep in mind at this stage I didn't actually even know who they were playing so my confidence may have been slightly misplaced. So I scrambled up, checked BBC Sport and realised they were playing Everton. To give some context, the form for both team in the Premiership so far was :

Everton : L-W-L-L-L-L-L-L
Chelsea : W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W

Despite this, I couldn't quite shake the feeling I had. But £100 was a reasonable amount of money at that point. I mentioned all this to my then girlfriend who implored me not to be foolish. For some reason, I listened.

The eventual score was 1-1. The odds were 7-1.

I tell you this not because I want to big up my psychic score-predicting abilities or to blame my current financial problems on those who have, for one reason or another, seen fit to care for me. Instead it demonstrates the old adage "all good things come to an end". Or in the case of a Chelsea winning streak all not-particularly-good-unless-you re-a-Chelsea-fan-which-personally-I'm-not things come to an end.

In a similar vein I want to take this opportunity to outline my betrayal. I have changed. Turned my back on what all that I once believed to be holy and good.

There's no easy way of saying this, but...

Well...

After what must be ten years of abstiencne, I now have started wearing a coat.

In my defence, it is not a very good coat. In fact, three separate people have insinuated that it is rather homosexual. Not just in the sense it's gay and thus, in our new street lingo "not very good" but gay as in the sense that it actively looks like I'll be getting greased up and entering Mr Leather International.

I'm sorry. It started as a simple lend from a friend. I had decided to switch my Slimes clothes slightly which required an outer layer of some description, lest I freeze to death in this arctic weather we've been having. And of course, I faced ridiculed and abuse from my peers for wearing it. Quite rightly. But now I'm stuck. I of course cannot give into their sneers so I'm forced to wear it, possibly for months. Possibly through a hopefully insanely hot summer. I hope they're happy with themselves.

Everything Else

So much time has passed since my last update, it's difficult to know what to say. Little of actual consequence has occurred, life is pretty much as "normal" as it ever is in the Dante-verse. Among my non-adventures I have;

• visited a fetish club (of sorts).
  
• was offered a free lobotomy by an axe wielding drug dealer
  
• consumed what seems like a sea of vodka and a hundredweight of pills.
  
• received a pay rise (in fact, this was dated the first of January which means I achieved one of my New Year resolutions in ZERO seconds. Beat that, fuckers).
  
• made friends with what seem to be rather orthodox Jews.
  
• project managed a shift in the way we deliver hazard data to our partners (well, sort of).
  
• been late for work umpteen times.
  
• been elatedly happy more times than I count and much more than I deserve.
  
• quit my second job.
  
• tried to update this thing at least a dozen times and let a blank, white screen defeat me.
  

I hope to update again soon, but then I hoped to not be a dismal mediocrity in this life, so who knows when I'll speak to you next?

 

 

Things you can do from here:

• Subscribe to "Les Confessions" using Google Reader
• Get started using Google Reader to easily keep up with all your favourite sites

 

 

One Hundred & Nineteenth : My Feet

One Hundred & Nineteenth : My Feet: "Before I begin with a fairly dull update on the last few days I wish to comment on the curious phenomenon which occurs in modern offices at semi-regular intervals. For instance : In my office someone will come round and carefully hand me a plain white or brown envelope. The envelope will generaly be unmarked and this transfer will be handled discretely as if it contained some bribe as in the good old days of Local Authority politics. Sometimes a knowing look is given, and every so often this is accompanied by a nod (or for the more adventurous, a wink).

Instead of being untold riches distributed in unmarked ten pound notes it instead will contain an inevitably unhilarious birthday card. If this process was started by a proto-fascist the card will be accompanied by a worryingly neat pro-forma where individuals can mark when they've signed the card.

The whole process baffles me somewhat, and I presume it's only a theme in offices with women in them (admittedly almost all offices these days). I certainly don't recall the same thing happening when I worked in the male-dominated tech support desk, for instance. Instead, when someone was unlucky enough to be celebrating their birthday they would generally be called 'an old tosser'. If they were a popular member of the team they might be subjected to a physical beating, a method of showing appreceation, presumably. Sometimes a pint was promised later on. In any case, there were no cards.

This is because these things are almost always organised by some friendly if overly-efficient woman who is invariably middle aged. Of course when it comes to her birthday the whole system breaks down into a bloody shambles and everyone forgets until the last minute (cue guilty line manager running up to Clinton Cards at lunchtime).

Anyway, depending on the size of your department and the distribution of birthdays you can expect to get this at varying frequencies. My current department has about fifteen or so people in it, so I get one roughly once a month.

My bafflement mainly stems from the point of the whole exercise. Sure, I can appreciate that getting a birthday card can be nice (it shows someone cares or something) but to get such a formal token seems rather...empty. Pointless, in fact. Furthermore, when one is asked to sign such a thing, what is one supposed to actually write?

If you're lucky, you'll be first or second to receive the card. Then you can just write 'Happy Birthday, have a great day' or something along those lines. The problem is, if you're last to get the card then you'll realise the last fourteen people have written exactly the same bland statement.

In the Buffy episode 'Out of Mind, Out of Sight' the Scooby's find a (presumably disappeared) young girl's year book which has been signed entirely with the platitude 'Have a nice summer'.

Willow: 'Oh, my God. 'Have a nice summer.' 'Have a nice summer.' This girl had no friends at all.
Giles: 'Uh, once again, I teeter at the precipice of the generation gap.
Buffy: ''Have a nice summer' is what you write when you have nothing to say.'
Xander: 'It's the kiss of death.'

If such a thing exists for birthday cards it must certainly be 'Happy Birthday, have a great day!' (exclamation mark optional, depending on one's outlook). The point is that it shows that
a) You've got nothing personal to say to this individual
b) You took zero effort/time to actually think of something.

Needless to say I am no exception, although ocassionally I try to write something with a different turn of phrase. For instance, it was the birthday of the youngest member of our department, who turned 21 on Friday. So I wrote
'Happy Birthday, enjoy the decline. :('

The remark was not supposed to be particularly caustic but merely a reflection on some obvious truths. Things, in a physical sense, tend to go downhill from 21 or so. And you may as well be aware of it early on. Sure, you can arrest such a decline by a good diet, working out, etc - but generally you're only slowing the inevitable.

Of course, that much is obvious and I imagine everyone expects certain 'changes'. For instance, people tend to get fatter. They tend to get balder (or greyer). More wrinkles. They tend to get more tired easily. Their memory goes. And so on. I anticipated all of this and much more. What I didn't anticipate was other, slightly more pathetic changes.

For instance, my nose has become a lot more hairy. My sense of smell has declined dramatically (I'm not sure if this is related to the former point). I find myself needing more sleep in order to stay even remotely sharp. My jaw randomly cracks if I open it beyond a certain angle. And then there is the issue of my feet.

I used to like my feet. Despite the fact that I walked everywhere as a child (my mother was a fond believer in urban rambling) my feet also seemed 'soft', even near the ball of my foot. My toes have been termed 'prehensile' in the past, but I like them, as they're useful for lifting things about when I can't be bothered to get up (i.e. most of the time). I do not remember there being any blemishes on my toes, and save one broken toe caused by attempting to karate kick my cousin (and missing) I rarely had any problems with my feet.

Well, in the last five or so years things have changed. My feet smell terrible, the skin has deterioated so now I have horribly hardened and tough skin and there are random calluses which never ever seem to go away.

These problems have accelerated recently since a couple of weeks ago my boots broke. The sole split completely which led to a strange shifting of weight leading to additional pain and general feet related badness.

Naturally I attempted to repair them. First with super glue, then with a oven stove and a hot knife. Then I moved onto araldite and finally thought about using a hammer, some nails and a mecano piece. Then I gave up in failure.

I was going to leave it for a couple of months when finances might allow to actuall replace my shoes, but instead I did the rational thing and went to my friendly local pawn brokers / loan-'till-payday / soul draining merchants and borrowed money at 200%+ interest rate. While I waited for this transaction to take place the shop was robbed (nothing particularly dramatic, someone just grabbed some jewellery and ran off down the Walworth Road) which led to spending a little under an hour in the shop as the police were called and the place locked up.

Still, once that was finished I travelled to Camden to buy a new pair of boots, pretty much the same ones as before - albeit slightly plainer.

As I have noted before having new boots is kind of like an ongoing battle between flesh and leather. Your foot will creak and blister against the shoe which in turn, will eventually break and give way. The problem is in the mean time your foot is in some pain. And thus they were.

Naturally, this occurred the weekend that I was doing a Fire Walk for Phoenix House in Tooting Broadway.

When I originally volunteered for this I hadn't given much thought to what was involved. Somewhat naively I just presumed you turned up, walked over some hot coals, and then sod off home. This wasn't the case.

Instead, there was a two and a half hour training session run by a martial arts practioner of some sorts. It was familiar territory (achieving new things through positive thinking, visualising your goals being completed, etc) but there was also a Derren Brown esque 'How to weaken someone's arm using a Jedi mind trick'. Well, almost. It got me thinking about a few things, and I pretty much assume I'm a ninja now.

I was fairly unphased by the whole thing, despite the fact the instructor kept telling us over and over again that it's 1263 Fahrenheit or something like that. I mean, physics yada yada yada. Heat transferrance is so slow, you don't actually get hot and it's all good. Admittedly when I saw the actual flames I was momentarily thoughtful, but then realied the worst that could happen would be I might suffer horrific third degree burns, and that would presumably get me ages off work.

Anyway, after the training session I did the walk which as Debbie has noted before was a bit of a non-event. Below is a picture, althought it was a bit dark. Thanks to Olly for the photo and the rest of the gang for coming out to witness this, although God knows why they did.

I'd like to do similar activities, except perhaps more advanced. The glass walk just sounds like the same principle, so perhaps something like bending a needle through your skin or whatever it is. Perhaps bungee jumping? I'm no longer apprehensive of needles (thank you Guys Drug Research Unit) so I suppose I have to go find some other stuff to confront. Not laziness, obviously - that might be a step too far.

As a final point : My feet were somewhat blackened by the experience, but otherwise unharmed. Unfortunately yesterday I ran for the train in my new boots and my feet are in agony now. So : Walking on hot coals is considerably less painful than travelling by public transport."