Trapped in the Mundane

Morbid musings

2011-10-03T23:39:00.002+01:00

When walking through a graveyard the other week (there's not much else in the way of green space round where I live) I noticed that there are distinct patterns to the demographics of the dead. Obviously, death can strike at any time, but if you plotted all the dates on a graph you'd see some obvious spikes emerging.

The first, obviously, is that of those that died in infancy or childhood. This demographic is most strongly represented in the old 19th century section of the graveyard. From the dates on the stones it would appear that, as a general rule, if you lived past about 10 without catching something horrific then you were pretty much safe for at least the next eight years. One interesting thing I noticed was that while this demographic is far less common in the newer sections of the graveyard, the average age seems to have dropped. Children below the age of one are a pretty rare sight in the older sections, while they make up the majority of pre-18 year-old graves in the newer sections.

As a reflection of changing social attitudes I find this interesting -- as infant mortality drops, people seem to become emotionally invested in their children at a much younger age. In some cases this tendency is taken to a stage that makes me a little uneasy -- there's a few modern graves in the cemetery whose stones record the names of infants who died two or three days after birth. I get the impression that the victorians would have classified these sad events as unusually drawn out stillbirths and moved quickly on, probably without ever giving the infants a name. These modern graves, however, are covered with flowers and cards -- something that I'd find understandable if it wasn't for the fact that the most recent of them records a death that happened more than 6 years ago. In a particularly morbid touch, some of the graves have flowers whose notes are signed by not only parents but also by "your little brother" or "your little sister."

The next big demographic is young men between the ages of 17 and 25, whose deaths are generally recorded on small white stones, decorated with just a cross or a regimental crest. The majority are from the First World War era*, a testament to the mind-numbing carnage of that war. With each coming year these stones disturb me more -- I'm now about seven years older than those kids were when they died, and can't help but think of 18-year-olds as essentially big children.

The last demographic spike before old age is populated by young women between the ages of 20 and 30. The cause of death isn't often mentioned on gravestones, but it's not hard to imagine what caused this. Happily this demographic almost completely vanishes in the mid-twentieth century, thanks to the wonders of modern medicine.

The thing that makes me particularly troubled by the deaths of these women is the fact that they are often buried in family plots with their parents, grandparents, etc. Every now and then you'll come across a woman buried in her own grave, usually beneath a touchingly inscribed gravestone composed by her husband, but these are the exceptions. On most occasions the men involved seem to have been all too happy to hand the mortal remains of their former loved ones to the in-laws with all the respect and reverence of someone returning a broken TV to the shop.

bleh.

2011-10-03T22:25:00.001+01:00

As we've got a major cat-shitty garden problem at the moment, my thoughts have been increasingly turning toward supersoakers. As a kid, I fucking loved supersoakers. Me and my brother used the "stopping cats from shitting in the yard" pretext to obtain many hours of damp summer fun. We, and the neighbor kids used to swarm around the overgrown alleyways and bomb-sites round the back of our house, soaking each other with a variety of odd implements. The only-child from the top of the road had a massive super soaker 150, while some of the other kids we played football with favored simpler stirrup-pump like plastic things (powerful, decent range, ran out of water fast). The fat kid preferred to lurk round corners with a bucket (not very subtle, but effective).

Me and my brother favored the Supersoaker 50, the klashnikov rifle of the water-pistol world; cheap and reliable. It wasn't hugely powerful, but it was surprisingly accurate over quite long distances. The bottles it used were a standard size and used the same screw threads as coke bottles (which meant you could carry spares in your belt, filled with water and ready to go).

It was also good for use on the cats that tried to shit in our yard and eat our guinea pigs (we didn't have very exciting pets as children) -- it got them wet enough to make them run away, but not so wet that you felt like you were being mean.

Last night I flipped open the gigantic copy of the argos catalog we've got in the house and turned, by muscle memory alone, to the supersoaker section. Instead of the range of fearsome water cannons, however, I found only strange pink things with flowers and such on ("urr! gurls toys!", cried the sticky fat kid in my head). I figured it was silly to think that they'd keep the supersoakers on the same page that they were on when I was a kid (I mean, there's whole sections in the catalog that weren't there when I was wee small, like the array of mobile phones). I looked though the whole thing, though, and I found nothing.

A quick search of the internet revealed that they do still exist, but that they've gotten much more complicated since their inventor first pitched them to larami. They've now got all sorts of cosmetic doodads, non-detachable tanks, and other such gumpf. I also discovered that there's a whole internet subculture devoted to grown men who play with water pistols.

They take it very seriously.

I find this a little sad.I mean, don't get me wrong, when I was a kid I took the whole business seriously, but, you know, there came a time when I did genuinely only ever use the thing for chasing away cats.

Some of their home-made designs look pretty awesome though... might have to get me some plumbing supplies.

2011-09-08T21:24:00.000+01:00

Unless it's pissing down with rain or freezing cold, I tend to spend my lunchbreaks walking around Islington, where I work. I get an hour for lunch, so I can usually cover a fairly long distance before I have to head back. Most days I walk in a long circuit that takes me down Essex Road, then north-west as far as Barnsbury Road (it's a distance of about 2.5 miles, I think).

Most of the walk takes me along fairly busy roads, but the northernmost section takes me through some incredibly peaceful affluent areas (multi-million-pound early victorian houses, general all-round loveliness). Here I rarely see anyone other than the occasional young mother pushing a pram that probably cost more than my bass. Today though, I turned onto one of the broad old avenues to see a young woman -- younger than me, I'd guess -- running down the other side of the street. She was running in that flustered "oh god I'm so late" way, with her handbag clutched to her side and the other flapping around while she kept to keep her balance in some not-entirely-appropriate shoes.

I probably wouldn't have paid her the least bit of attention if I hadn't been transfixed by her broad-brimmed summer hat, which remained poised neatly on the back of her head; held on my some unnatural force (or perhaps hatpins) while she ran.

As she passed by a small black object pinged out of her handbag and clattered onto the pavement. She didn't stop, nor notice this had happened. "Oh dear," I thought, "she's dropped her phone." I watched her get further and further away, willing her with all my might to notice that she'd dropped it, but my mind powers are sadly lacking.

As she ran round a corner and disappeared out of sight a small argument broke out in my head.

"you should run after her, and give that back"
"but I can't be arsed. I'm hungry and I've got to get back to work in a few minutes"
"really? You're that lazy?"
"I'm sure she'll notice that she's dropped it soon, or perhaps some good samaritan will hand it into the police..."
"A good samaritan, in north London? pffft. Do you remember how stressful it was for Kristen when her phone was nicked?"
"ugh. Fiinne."

I jog across the road, hoping that I'll find a worthless make-up mirror or something else I can ignore without feeling too bad about it. Alas, sitting in the middle of the pavement is a shiny new iPhone 4, unharmed by its fall. I sigh, pick it up, and take off after her.

As I round the corner I'm struck by the thought that perhaps she's already gone into one of the houses along the street, and that I'll have to spend the rest of my lunchbreak knocking on doors and generally embarassing myself. Then I spot her, about a hundred meters down the road, jogging along a little slower now. I shout, but she doesn't hear me, so I run off after her.

At this point she hears a set of feet pounding down the street, turns, and sees a stocky bloke in a hoody bearing down on her. She then does what most women would do -- she starts running faster. I try shouting to her again, but my voice catches in my throat and comes out sounding like the crazed grunting of a madman. This doesn't help.

Luckily, I'm a lot fitter than I used to be, and I can chase down a young woman wearing inappropriate shoes pretty easily (I found that out today, by the way, it's not something I do all the time). I managed to get close enough to speak to her normally without having to shout. The sound of her crazed pursuer calmly saying "excuse me" in a clipped BBC-proper accent seemed to reassure her. She stopped and turned around.

"er. You dropped your phone."
I awkwardly proffer the phone, like a child giving a family present to a slightly intimidating relative at christmas.
"oh god, thank you!"
She takes the phone and smiles
"Thank you so much!"
I grin sheepishly, "that's fine... er..um.."

I turn round and walk away, feeling generally about as embarrassed as I do on the occasions when I've warmly greeted some who looked like a friend, but turned out to be a complete stranger.

Ten years at Crown Woods Secondary School has imbued me with a sense of deep embarrassment whenever I do something unusually noble or nice. It doesn't stop me from doing it anyway, but it does mean that I'm damned either way, caught between my conscience and years of backward social programming.

Names

2011-06-12T22:41:00.000+01:00

This might mark a return to regularly updating this thing, or it might just be an aberration.

I've been writing a sort of potted history of the Austro-Hungarian empire recently, and it's got me thinking about names and translations. These days we tend to think of names as fixed, unchanging things—they're written on all your identity documents and require a lot of paperwork to change—but that hasn't always been the case. One particularly interesting example of this fluidity is the fact that people who travelled around Europe often used to transliterate their names depending on where they were. John would become Jean, Johann, Jan, János, or Giovanni depending on where you are. This is particularly interesting when you bear in mind that many parish birth registers, at least in continental Europe, used to record names in the Latin version (so John would be written Iohannes)—despite the fact that no-one would have ever used this form, or likely even be able to pronounce it.
This has led to some interesting confusions over what to call certain historic figures. Austro-Hungarian Emperors, for example, had separate royal titles in each of their kingdoms, with each styling their name differently. Deciding which spelling to use can be a bit tricky (do you go for the neutral latinate version they used on official documents, the German version they answered to personally, or one of the other variants?) and has bothered me a lot while editing this book.
The prime example of this confusion. however, is Mozart. He is known to history by the name Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, but there is no record of him ever having used this particular handle. His entry in the parish baptismal record lists his name as Joannes Chrysostomus Wolfgangus Theophilus Mozart—a strange mess of latin, pseudo-latin, and Greek that no-one is likely to have ever used. The first part Johannes Chrysostomus is a saint's name, included as a nod to Catholic custom—at the time of his birth this was a largely ceremonial detail, never actually used other than in religious contexts. For all intents and purposes, therefore, his given name was Wolfgang— Germanic name that, luckily for historians and editors, doesn't translate into other languages. His middle name, Theophilus, which literally means "loved by God," can also be written in Latin as Amadeus, in Italian as Amadè, and in German as Gottlieb (this was the version his father used when writing about him).
Mozart himself generally used the name Wolfgang Amadè Mozart, but this was dismissed as an affectation by his friends and associates, who usually called him Wolfgang Gottlieb. The only known example of Mozart signing his name Amadeus is in a silly letter he wrote to a young cousin entirely in pompous-sounding pseudo-latin.
Of course, this level of fluidity wasn't restricted to those who could switch between languages at will. Until fairly recently there was a distinct separation between languages as they were written and as they were spoken. A vernacular name that you used every day, for example, might be seen as too vulgar to actually write down—hence Mikołaj Kopernik becomes Nicolaus Copernicus. This still exists today in many cultures, particularly in the Arab world, where the gulf between Modern Standard Arabic (the formal language taught in schools) and local dialects like Moroccan Darija has widened to the point where the two languages are only just mutually intelligible. It also exists in English, to an extent. Few people write exactly as they speak, whether phonetically or stylistically. While I do actually talk with scrupulously correct BBC pronunciation that my writing suggests, my actual spoken language is peppered with far more idiomatic phrases and industrial-strength swearwords than my writing. When I try to include these in my writing, it often feels forced or out of place. My name stays the same though.

Floyd Rose

2011-03-13T15:52:00.002Z

This is heavy nerd, feel free to skip.

When I was working on Ed's guitar yesterday, I took some time to reacquiant myself with the whimpering horror of the Floyd Rose Double Locking Tremolo.

This beast was invented in the mid-1970s by a chap called Floyd Rose (bet you didn't see that one coming). He came up with it because he wanted a tremolo that you could go Jimi Hendrix-style mental with, without pulling your guitar badly out of tune. In that regard, he succeeded—when properly set-up you can do just about anything with a Floyd Rose and it won't have any serious effect on the tuning. That, in my view, is about the only way in which he succeeded.

The Floyd Rose is a wildly impractical piece of technology. In order to restring a guitar with a Floyd Rose you have to first chop the ball-ends off the strings, then clamp them into the saddles at the bridge (to do this properly you must turn the set screws so hard that you will inevitably strip quite a few allen keys over the years). Once they're all in you have to spend ages tuning the strings, letting the bridge adjust—which pulls them back out of tune again—then tuning them again. It typically takes a day or two before you actually have a guitar that is both in tune and has a balanced tremolo. If you're switching between string gauges or brands of strings it can take even longer. Once this is done, you have to clamp the strings in place at the nut, making large adjustments to tuning a fiddly and laborious process.

If you you try and change the tuning of an individual string (say switching to Drop-D tuning) then this will lower the overall tension on the tremolo, pulling all of the strings out of tune. Similarly, if you break a string, the increased tension on the other strings pulls them all out of tune, and sometimes causes more to break. The second fact makes it foolish to the point of powerful stupid to gig with a Floyd Rose equipped guitar unless you have at least one backup.

Ed has made several modifications to his Floyd Rose over the years (including adding extra springs and placing a block of wood under the rear of the tremolo) which essentially make it into a single-action tremolo, like the Wilkinson Tremolo on a Strat. This makes it less versatile as a tremolo unit, but makes it much, much easier to use.

Even so, the actual tremolo unit is a pretty shocking piece of design. The set screws that allow you to adjust the intonation are positioned underneath the strings, so you have to remove the strings in order to make any adjustments the intonation. You cannot raise or lower the saddles individually, which means that you can only adjust the action by tightening or loosening the bolts that anchor the unit in place. Also, the clamps that hold the strings into the bridge are positioned at a 90º angle to the string pull, which makes the strings more likely to break at that point.

All told, a guitar with a Floyd Rose Tremolo is like an old Rolls Royce where the driver's seat is not covered by the roof. It's a design feature that assumes you have staff to do everything for you, as it would be really unpleasant to do it yourself.

Tinkering

2011-03-13T14:44:00.001Z

I replaced the busted barrel-jack on my Yamaha bass the other week (a relatively simple but very fiddly bit of wiring) and that reignited my urge to tinker with guitars. I can't begin round three of Ben vs. Refinishing (see these posts) until the weather improves, so the other day I took the opportunity to abduct Ed's guitar (the Stratobastard) for a quick bit of maintenance.

It's been more than three years since I made the alterations described here. Surprisingly, the electrics in the guitar seem to be holding up well—there aren't any settings that make it go dead, nor any that crackle or hiss. The only electrical issue worthy of mention is the fact that the pickup housing on the neck pickup becomes live when the pickups are switched into series. I know how to fix this, but I don't have the tools, nor the balls to do it just yet (It involves cutting the pickup casing open with a dremel-like tool and creating separate ground wires for the casing and the signal ground). I'll sort that out one day, but it's not a pressing issue right now.

The main reason I wanted to get this guitar back on the workbench (it's a figurative workbench, obviously, as I do most of my tech work sitting on the floor in the attic) was because of a fretwork issue I noticed during its overhaul. I didn't have time to fix this problem back then, so the action has always been far too high for my tastes. Ed has never had a problem with this, but it has always bothered me. If he wants high action because he likes it that way, then that's fine, but I don't want the stratobastard to have high action because it's impossible to play otherwise.

I spent a few minutes raising and lowering the action, playing scales, and staring down the neck until I went cross eyed. Some day, I'll buy a set of relief measuring tools, but for now I'm more comfortable assessing the state of a guitar by eye and ear. What I figured out was that the guitar was suffering from a condition I call "the hump," where the fretboard has warped slightly around the neck join. It's something that happens as guitars age, and as the neck-wood settles into the join. It's another one of the reasons that I'm going off the idea of ever buying guitars that are less that 5 years old.

Ed's guitar didn't have the worst case I've ever seen, but it was bad enough to make the guitar unplayable beyond the 12th fret. The 15th fret, in particular, stood 2-3mm proud of its neighbors on the treble side. Extreme cases of the hump (the likes of which I've only ever seen on old mandolins) can only be treated by defretting the neck and planing down the fretboard, but this one was mild enough to be treated be re-profiling and re-crowning the frets (using techniques broadly similar to the ones outlined here)

While I was doing this I made a few very minor adjustments to the truss rod, to straighten out the neck a little, and fiddled around with the intonation on the tremolo. The end result is a dramatic lowering of the action, with none of the buzzing or dead notes that caused problems before, and once again, I managed to do the whole thing without injuring myself. Huzzah.

2010-12-07T20:47:00.000Z

This statue is a late Roman copy of Phidias' legendary statue of Athena Pagos, the patron goddess of the Pan-Athenaic music festival. Sadly, the original was destroyed in a Herulian raid in A.D. 283, but we know what it once looked like thanks to this description from the ancient travel writer Pausania

"At the edge of the main stage, roughly forty paces from the beer stoa, stands the chryselephantine statue of Athena Pagos, patron of the festival. She stands on a retangular pedestal with the inscription MαΓςλαζζ inscribed at the base. With her right hand she is operating Hydrualis, her custom Moog microsynth, while she gestures with a bronze microphonos stand in the other."

By the time Pausanias saw this sculpture it was already 650 years old, and had been left exposed to the wind and rain for some time. It is thought that this is why he makes no mention of the vibrant colors used to paint her clothes and make up. No descriptions of this particular statue's decoration remain, but chemical analysis of the remains of a similar statue at Delphi suggest they were originally neon green, orange, and black, with lots of chrome for the accessories.

Knifey-knifey

2010-11-14T15:53:00.001Z

While sorting through the heaps of old stuff in my grandfather's study Kristen found this folding knife.When it came out of the drawer it had probably been sitting in for decades, it looked a little the worse for wear—black with tarnish and encrusted with years of paint and handsweat.

I'm not really much of an outdoorsman (quite a laughably long way from it, in fact) but there's something pleasing about this thing. It's so old and sturdy. I cleaned the blade with liberal quantities of Brasso and treated the handle to a few much needed coatings of teak oil. I think it cleaned up pretty well. I expect if I kept at it for long enough I could get the blade back to its shiny original state, but I feel like that would be a disservice to something this old.

I'm not sure how old it is, exactly, but it has some markings at the base of the blade that give me some clues. The first is the maker's name: J Roger, Sons, & Co. Sheffield. The second is the little logo on the other side (pictured below), which shows a little union flag with a crown under it.

It seems that the company existed from some time in the mid-19th century to the second half of the 20th century. I know they used this particular logo during the 1890s, and possibly earlier than that. It was probably my great-grandfather's, but it may have been in the family for a generation before that. My dad's family are not in habit of throwing away good tools. The scratches and paint smears on the wood suggest that it has been used a lot over the years.

Being a office-working urbanite, I've got no reason to carry this around—and doing so would probably get me arrested—but I feel I should find something to do with it. I put a good edge back on the blade with a whetstone, and oiled up the hinge.

Perhaps I'll take up whittling.

Long distance running, ancient history, and stupid myths.

2010-11-11T00:17:00.000Z

As I mentioned yesterday, I'm currently working on a travel book on Greece. This involves writing the odd historical-interest sidebar or perhaps a little feature here and there on the local culture and events. When writing about the area around marathon I decided I'd combine these two and write about the history of marathon running.

Now, being a person with a near pathological fear of running long distances (with good reason, see here) I can't say I know a great deal about marathons. I was aware, however, that they were inspired by a classical myth but I couldn't remember the details. I opened one of the travel guides I'm using as an occasional reference and there it was--the story of Pheidippides. He was, the book said, a soldier who fought at the Battle of Marathon then ran all the way back to Athens to inform the Athenians of their victory. It's one of those tragic/glorious stories though, because he gets back to the city, delivers the message, and promptly dies. In addition to the marathon, this story has inspired some pretty crappy art, like this.(related side note, why was it decided in the 19th century that hardly anyone in ancient Greece owned any clothes?)

This story set off some pretty powerful bullshit alarms in my head when I read it. I mean, why the urgency? and more to the point, since when has a 26 mile run been enough to kill a fit young soldier? With most of these myths, I wouldn't have cared---if they say Artemis demanded a daughter-burning, who am I to question that assertion?---but this one was routinely phrased as if it was a historical fact, tied in with events that are known to have happened.

Being of curious bent, and having access to the internet, I decided to go a-googling. There dozens of repetitions of the same stupid sounding story. Interestingly none of these seemed to agree on the details, it looked like each one had been tweaked slightly because the writer, halfway through telling the story he'd been told, got self-conscious about the fact that it made no sense. They added in extra details like Pheilippides had already run to athens and back that day, or that he'd been wounded in the battle, or something like that. None of these changes made the essential flaw of the story--why?--go away. Among all these repetitions, however, I found one account that not only made more sense, but also cited its sources.

The source, it turns out, was none other than big-daddy Greek historian Herodotus (the same guy mentioned the other day). Now in most regards Herodotus is about as reliable a source of information as a sugar-crazed ten year old (see here), but when it comes to this period of history his account seems plausible enough. He was, after all, writing about things that had happened close to his home town and within living memory. The anedotes-heard-in-the-pub method he typically used is more reliable when there's a reasonable chance that the bloke in the pub was a eyewitness. Rather than attempt to summarize it, I'll just quote it here. Picture the scene, the Persians have invaded, there's a lot of them, and they need to be repulsed at their beachhead or everyone's royally buggered. The Athenians have put together an army, but it's not big enough...

And first, before they left the city, the generals sent off to Sparta [a distance of about 150 miles] a herald, one Pheidippides, who was by birth an Athenian, and by profession and practice a trained runner. This man, according to the account which he gave to the Athenians on his return, when he was near Mount Parthenium, above Tegea, fell in with the god Pan, who called him by his name, and bade him ask the Athenians "wherefore they neglected him so entirely, when he was kindly disposed towards them, and had often helped them in times past, and would do so again in time to come?" The Athenians, entirely believing in the truth of this report, as soon as their affairs were once more in good order, set up a temple to Pan under the Acropolis, and, in return for the message which I have recorded, established in his honour yearly sacrifices and a torch-race.

On the occasion of which we speak when Pheidippides was sent by the Athenian generals, and, according to his own account, saw Pan on his journey, he reached Sparta on the very next day after quitting the city of Athens- Upon his arrival he went before the rulers, and said to them:-

"Men of Sparta, the Athenians beseech you to hasten to their aid, and not allow that state, which is the most ancient in all Greece, to be enslaved by the barbarians. Eretria, look you, is already carried away captive; and Greece weakened by the loss of no mean city."

Thus did Pheidippides deliver the message committed to him. And the Spartans wished to help the Athenians, but were unable to give them any present succour, as they did not like to break their established law. It was then the ninth day of the first decade; and they could not march out of Sparta on the ninth, when the moon had not reached the full. So they waited for the full of the moon.

So there you have it. Pheidippides wasn't a tragically unfit soldier, he was a professional long-distance runner, and the job was urgent because the Athenians urgently needed to know if they'd be getting any reinforcements.

It has to be said though, if you didn't know which was from the more authoritative source, you'd definitely assume that the 26 miles story was the more authentic one. I mean, look at the details-- A man running about 300 miles in 2-3 days? The God Pan appearing to him and having a little chat? The Spartans turning down the opportunity for an ass-kicking? None of these seem plausible.

Despite these anomalies, however, I think this may actually be one of the few cases where Herodotus got the story dead right.

While it sounds crazy, the distance Pheidippides covered and the time that he did it in isn't impossible. In 1982 a group of RAF officers (who, being handlebar-moustached British officers, were of course familiar with their classical history) asked local historians to draw up the most likely route Pheidippides would have taken to Sparta. Surprisingly the paths and roads Pheidippides would have taken have changed very little in the last two and a half thousand years. The three officers managed to run the course in 36 hours. A feat that is doubly impressive when you consider that they had no decent maps, spoke no Greek, and spent most of the trip being attacked by village dogs. Since then, the race has become a fixture in the ultra-marathon community, called the Spartathlon. The record for Pheidippides' route is held by the Greek runner Yiannis Kouros, who covered the distance from Athens to Sparta, over hills and across rivers, in just 20 hours and 25 minutes.

As for Pan appearing to him, this doesn't seem implausible to me at all. Ultra-endurance athletes are no stranger to Mr Hallucination, or even Mr Full-Blown-Psychosis, as is described in fascinating detail here. It may have actually been a confused goatherd standing by the side of the road, but I don't doubt that Pheidippides thought he saw Pan.

As for the last one, well, this is a minor error on Herodotus' part. He had a tendency to ascribe strange ritual motivations for all sorts of decisions, when he actually just didn't know why things had happened the way they did. The most likely explanation is that the Spartans just weren't logistically ready to march a huge army halfway across Greece at such short notice. It is interesting to note that they did mobilize a week or two later, as Herodotus describes:

After the full of the moon two thousand Spartans came to Athens. So eager had they been to arrive in time, that they took but three days to reach Attica from Sparta. They came, however, too late for the battle; yet, as they had a longing to behold the Medes, they continued their march to Marathon and there viewed the slain. Then, after giving the Athenians all praise for their achievement, they departed and returned home.

I love the way that the Spartans were willing to march 26 miles out of their way just to poke some corpses and marvel at all the gore. Truly, there has never been a manlier culture... "Duude, look, that guy's been cut in half!....man, that's totally badass..."

So there you have it. The real story of Marathons, in which we learn that marathons should be 150 miles long.
I doubt as many people would be up for that though.

P.S. If you were wondering where the more commonly recounted story came from, it's generally thought that it was invented by a Roman historian a few centuries after the event. He'd probably read the account in Herodotus, but mixed up the story of Pheidippides with the actions of the Athenian army after the battle---anxious to get back and defend their city against a possible secondary attack, they made the march home in just a few days.

SPAAAARRTA!

2010-11-10T15:39:00.002Z

Another quote from an ancient Historian, this time Thucydides (460–395 b.c.), who wrote the following in his History of the Peloponnesian War

For I suppose if Lacedaemon [Sparta] were to become desolate, and the temples and the foundations of the public buildings were left, that as time went on there would be a strong disposition with posterity to refuse to accept her fame as a true exponent of her power. And yet they occupy two-fifths of Peloponnese and lead the whole, not to speak of their numerous allies without. Still, as the city is neither built in a compact form nor adorned with magnificent temples and public edifices, but composed of villages after the old fashion of Hellas, there would be an impression of inadequacy. Whereas, if Athens were to suffer the same misfortune, I suppose that any inference from the appearance presented to the eye would make her power to have been twice as great as it is. We have therefore no right to be skeptical, nor to content ourselves with an inspection of a town to the exclusion of a consideration of its power

I've just been writing a section for a travel guide where I noted that, while it is a historically significant site, there's bugger all to see in Sparta.

I think Thucydides is staring at me.

Ten Thousand-Daktyloi Stare

2010-11-08T17:56:00.000Z

I'm currently working on a book about Ancient Greece, and I found this quote when reading Herodotus' account of the Battle of Marathon in 490 b.c.

A strange prodigy likewise happened at this fight. Epizelus, the son of Cuphagoras, an Athenian, was in the thick of the fray, and behaving himself as a brave man should, when suddenly he was stricken with blindness, without blow of sword or dart; and this blindness continued thenceforth during the whole of his after life. The following is the account which he himself, as I have heard, gave of the matter: he said that a gigantic warrior, with a huge beard, which shaded all his shield, stood over against him; but the ghostly semblance passed him by, and slew the man at his side. Such, as I understand, was the tale which Epizelus told.

I did a quick bit of googling and found that yes, this is indeed widely accepted by psychologists as one of the oldest known descriptions of what we would now recognize as an extreme case of post traumatic stress disorder.

The Gentlemen's Club

2010-11-02T21:27:00.000Z

About seven years ago, a few months before my 18th birthday, I got a job working at the local branch of the Co-op. Over the preceding months I had tried, and failed, to get a job in any number of local shops. In every case I was defeated by the mind-numbingly stupid questions most retail chains put on their application forms. After ticking the obvious 'right-answers' for a while I'd inevitably start to overthink things. There'd be a question like "A Crazed gunman runs into the store, do you A: Hide, B: Grab the moneybox and go flying out the back door, or C: Bravely continue to scan items until killed in the line of duty." I'd stare at questions like this thinking "surely they don't expect me to say C, this must be a test of whether I'm a lying cretin or not, I'll put A" and as a result, I'd not even get asked in for an interview.

...In reality my first choice would have been B, I was skint.

I got the Job at the Co-op because of two important factors: 1: the manager, Andy, couldn't be bothered to read through application forms—he preferred to ask a trusted member of staff if they knew anyone who was looking for work, then hire whoever turned up. And 2: My friend Dave was a supervisor there. My interview consisted of Andy sitting me down in the staff canteen and telling me that Dave said I was sane and that the job was mine if I wanted it.

After a few weeks of nervous mistakes, I settled in as a reasonably competent, but certainly not zealous, member of staff. Me and Dave worked together on the Saturday evening shift, which lasted from 2pm to closing time at 10. We'd spend the day serving the nutters and the drunks; providing the yellow-fingered with their cigarettes, the incoherent with their booze. Occasionally our evenings were enlivened by a visit from Crazy Joe, Hag-Lady/Witch-Features, or the incompetent octogenarian shoplifter (never did think of a nickname for her) but for the most part, it was dull work.

The fun would start at about 9:30, when the flow of customers had largely dried up. Paul would wander down from his place of work (I forget what it was at the time) and join us as we picked our way around the shop, facing up the shelves and generally doing end-of-the-day busywork. Using our staff discount cards we'd stock up on beer and Cadbury's eclairs (for Paul), which would be stashed in the office in readiness for closing time. Just before 10 Paul would head round the corner to get us a few pizzas from Domino's while me and Dave heaved the big metal shutters down and closed up shop.

This was all preparation for the weekly meeting of what came to be known as "the Gentlemen's Club." This was a high-class al-fresco establishment for working gentlemen connoisseurs of fine Belgian lager, Italian cuisine, and high-quality British confectionery. We three were sometimes joined by Colin (Sainsbury's), Howie (Pizza Hut), or Danny (Sainsbury's Bakery)—the latter two sometimes supplemented our feasts with gifts of cold pizza and burnt pastries.

The meetings of the gentlemen's club usually took place in Eltham park, near where we all worked and lived. Eltham park is a funny place, it's divided into two halves by the A2 motorway. The southern half is a huge flat field with lots of poorly lit pathways. It's dreary little car-park is a well-known hangout for the area's pervert population, and local youfs used to gather there to get into pointless fights and spray obscene graffiti on trees.

The northern half, on the other hand, is almost entirely wooded, and built on a pretty steep hillside. Curiously, the stabby-stabby hardnuts who wouldn't be afraid of any dark alleyway recoiled from the woods at night, leaving it free for people further down the food chain, like myself. Encircled by the woods and the railway, there was a large meadow, about 200 meters across, in this part of the park. For some reason I never understood, the council always mowed a perfect circle in the middle of this field, like tractor driving aliens, while they left the rest covered by waist-high grass.

It was in the middle of this little circle that the gentlemen's club would meet. It sounds like some kind of occult thing, but our choice of venue was based simply on the fact that it was a long way from the nearest path or streetlight. At night we could sit in the darkness (I use this term relatively, it never really gets dark in London, there was always enough light to eat by and see each other's faces) and see anyone coming long before they saw us.

Given the years that have passed, and the large quantities of alcohol that usually accompanied these meetings, I'm surprised to find that I can actually remember what we talked about pretty clearly. It seems strange now, but most of the conversations at these gatherings were actually on pretty serious subjects. We talked about our relationships, our plans, and our worries about the future. Obviously, these discussions were always supplemented by a constant stream of profanity, toilet jokes, and insults—we were teenage boys after all—but things were generally quite deep.

Most of us were in the process of figuring out how adult relationships, with all their attendant complications and fumblings, worked. I was trying to figure out how relationships worked full stop, having been caught completely mentally unprepared when a girl finally showed an interest in me. Despite what people expect of teenagers, these conversations very rarely drifted into territory that couldn't be shown before the 9 p.m. watershed (as long as you bleeped out all the swearing). I think this was mostly because none of us were really the bragging jock type, but there was also the fact that our social circle was rather incestuous. Dave had known my girlfriend since preschool, while me and Paul had both been friends of Dave's other half for years, lascivious details would have been seen as not only disrespectful, but also as a definite TMI.

Another recurring theme was a desire to know how things were going to pan out... You know how at the end of some films there's a little block of text, just before the credits, that explains what the characters went on to do with their lives after the events described in the film ended? Well, the summer of 2004 had a distinctly cinematic feel for us (I think that's normal when you're 18), and we all wanted to know what was written in that last bit of text.

One one occasion, I remember the subject of weddings coming up, which led to us discussing, then taking bets, on which one of our social circle would get married first. As I recall, my bet was on a Christian friend of ours, because I assumed she'd ascribe more importance to such rituals. I seem to recall that Paul and Dave agreed that it would be Howie, because they thought he'd get married to the first person who suggested the idea, whether he liked them or not, for fear of making a scene.

I don't remember now what the stakes of the bet were, or if there even were any. Seeing as Paul got married on Sunday, however, it seems to be rather irrelevant. None of us picked the right one, so I guess we all have to do shots or down a glass of lemon juice, or something else like that. I think 18-year-old me would have been very surprised by this turn of events. But I think he would have been pleasantly surprised, not only by the wedding, but by how everything has turned out over the last seven years. Mostly by the astonishing fact that I still count these people as some of my closest friends. Of the original 10 or so in the broader group, only two (one being my then-girlfriend) have drifted out of touch.

Although it seems like it was a major fixture in my teenage year, the Gentlemen's Club was relatively short lived. The first spontaneous gatherings took place at my parents' house in February or March 2004, and it became a regular fixture (and acquired its name) when it moved outdoors in April or May. Over the course of that long summer we met on most weekends, and sometimes during the week as well. It stopped being a regular fixture when me and Dave quit our jobs at the Co-op in late August, but there were still a few sporadic meetings over the next month or so. The last one, as I recall, took place a day or two before I left for uni in late September. It was briefly revived in the following summer, when we'd all finished our first years of university, but it wasn't the same somehow. Every now and then, I'm tempted to grab a case of beer, a few pizzas, and head over to the local park, but I doubt that the others—now a married man and a primary school teacher—would be up for that. I'd probably get cold and want to go inside myself after a while.

And Domino's pizzas taste like greasy arse. But then, they always did.

2010-10-11T00:10:00.001+01:00

At a family gathering last week I agreed to go and help my Grandma clear out my late grandpa's study. My grandpa died when I was 14, but he left behind a bewildering quantity of books and papers that no-one has had the time to investigate since then. I think a family friend went through the accounts after the funeral to find all the important financial information my Grandma needed, but the rest has largely been left to gather dust. My grandma now wants to make use of this room, however, so the current contents need to go.

The main task I was given was to sort and catalogue the many shelves of books with the eventual aim of finding someone willing to take them away. The books in my grandpa's study fall into two categories: they're either engineering books (related to his long career as an engineer-turned-technology journalist) or they're theology books (related to his work as a Methodist lay preacher). He took both of these interests very seriously, it would seem, and collected a quite substantial library over the years.

Within a few minutes of looking around, however, I realized that this wasn't going to be as big a job as it first appeared. My grandfather's collection of engineering and technology books is, for the most part, completely obsolete. It's a shame to have to throw them away, but no-one is going to be interested in these texts. Authoritative though it might have been, a guide to computer aided manufacturing techniques written when a top-of-the-line computer had about 64k of memory isn't going to be any use today. They might perhaps be a interesting curiosity to someone working in that field, but they're ultimately useless as reference works.

Bearing that in mind, I decided to focus on the collection of theology texts. Religious scholarship, I figured, doesn't date in the same way as technology journalism, and so would probably still be of interest to someone.

Although I still think they're timeless enough to be of interest to someone, it was very interesting to discover—as I worked my way through the titles—that there are changing fashions and trends in theological scholarship. It seems that there was, for example, a strong interest in the historicity of the gospels in the late 1950s—grandpa had many books from this period that discuss the gnostic gospels, the archaeology of the holy land, and the early history of the Church. I suppose this period of introspection must have been initiated by the discovery of the dead sea scrolls, which was probably the first many Christians had heard of the many dissenting early branches of Christian and Jewish thought.

Simiarly, in the late 1960s and 1970s there was a wave of socially progressive texts, examples of the faith adapting and changing with new social structures and norms. (I expect there was also a wave of books denouncing these new social norms, but my grandpa wasn't that sort of guy).

The most interesting ones I found, however, were the texts that date from during or shortly after the second world war. These books were written by a generation of minsters and preachers who had witnessed two devastating world wars in their lifetimes. The one that particularly caught my attention was a book written in 1943 called In Quest of a Kingdom: An Examination of Jesus' Teaching on the Kingdom of God with Special Relation to the Projected New World After the War by Leslie Weatherhead. To give you idea of what this book is about, have a read of this, the introductory paragraph, with its wonderful preacherly prose.

In this poor, broken world, the teaching of Jesus is the only known philosophy of life which has never been seriously tried. Some have called it impracticable. But two thousand years of trying 'practicable' methods of living together have brought us to hell. Some have called it irrelevant. But the spirit of Man is too sublime to accept as truth that the only 'relevant' methods of getting on with one another demand that every twenty-five years we should sacrifice the youth of the nations and ask from our men of science that they bend all their energies to find new ways of killing others. Politicians labour to produce policies, economists labour to produce theories, psychologists labour to cure our neuroses, and social welfare workers labour at reforms. At the time I write, a hundred groups are studying and planning to make a better and happier world, and yet, while I wish them well, I cannot share their optimism. Incredible as our stupidity may seem in another thousand years, man is still blind to the fact that the cause of all his troubles is within himself.

I asked my Grandmother about the book and she explained that Leslie Weatherhead is very much out of fashion these days. Indeed, a quick google search shows that the last time he was mentioned by a religious leader (insofar as he can be called that) was when Ian Paisley denounced Weatherhead as an apostate and averred that he was probably burning in hell (which increases my opinion of Weatherhead's ideas no end). As we're once again living in an age of war, death, and destruction (not that they're really been a period where we weren't) it annoys me that more religious and secular leaders aren't working on the fundamental problem that Weatherhead identifies in this book: things tend toward horror and death because, no matter how you squish them into pseudo-utopian schemes, most people are still greedy, self-centered, and violent.

While I've been working my way through the shelves, Kristen was rummaging around and sorting through the cupboards and drawers filled with stuff. A process that she has documented here.

While I was there I found an amazing book from the mid-1980s (all about the latest consumer gadgets) that I'm going to have to scan and put up parts of here. It's a masterpiece.

hmm.

2010-10-05T18:09:00.001+01:00

I own two computers. One is a Samsung netbook (an NC10 with 2GB of memory), while the other is a strange old tower PC that I've had since 2004. Both are reasonable machines, but both are showing signs of wear and age. I want to get a new computer, but I can't decide which of these machines to replace.

The NC10 has a flickering screen problem (hardware related) and has recently developed an unpleasant habit of giving me electric shocks (not dangerous ones, but very painful—about the same strength as a cattle-fence). It's generally fine, but neither of those habits are particularly endearing. The warranty expired a while ago, so any repairs would probably cost more than a replacement.

The tower PC is a mess. Over the years it has had most of its components replaced or upgraded, often with bargain-basement or salvaged parts. It's on its second sound card, third graphics card, third power supply (it burns through them every few years), it's had its RAM upgraded many times, and has had more optical drives than I can remember (there are two in the case at the moment, and I'm pretty sure that at least one of them doesn't work.) It has only two working USB ports, no working wireless card, and has been running Ubuntu since I finally got fed up with the five minutes XP was taking to boot up. On top of all that, every now and then it refuses to boot up at all (definitely a hardware issue, as it continued after I completely wiped the hard drive). When it does this I have to unplug it, pull out all its memory, and then shove it back in for it to start working again.

Here are the possibilities:
1. Get a new desktop.
This would be the cheapest option, and it would allow me to keep using Ubuntu (which I've grown rather fond of over the years). On the other hand, it would tie me to the desk in the attic and I do have some concerns about how well certain things would run on a faster ubuntu machine. If I can repair the NC10 cheaply then this is the obvious choice.

2. Get a new Laptop.
This is a more expensive option than the desktop. I think if I get a new laptop it will be a small, lightweight one. I've gotten too attached to being able to sling my netbook around and using it while lounging on the sofa to get a cumbersome one with a short battery life. It would force me to use windows 7 though, and restricts me to a fairly limited range of options.

3. Replace both machines
I could either go crazy and spend a shedload of cash, or I could get two relatively low powered and cheap machines (a netbook of roughly equal spec to the one I have and a dual-core nettop) for only a little more than the price of the current frontrunners in the laptop- and desktop-only options.

Victory Mosque

2010-10-04T23:49:00.003+01:00

Things about this that are teh stupid.

1. The pictures.
Flames and death, swarthy moors and their African soldiers trampling the innocent citizens of Jerusalem? They must have gone back to at least the 19th century to find such fine Orientalist balls. They're all wearing Ottoman-style turbans ferchrissakes! One of them even appears to be wearing a leopardskin tunic, Tazan style.

2. The Dome of the Rock.
Ok. This one is going to take a while. Firstly. the Dome of the Rock (Qubbat as-Sakrah) was built in 691, more than 50 years after the conquest of the Holy Land. Second, the site it was built on is probably the single most contested place in the world. It's best known as the holiest site in Judaism, the location of the Temple of Solomon. However, the last Jewish Temple on the site was demolished by the Romans in AD 70. The city changed hands numerous times between then and the time of the Arab conquest (typically in the bloodiest way possible. Massacres have always been in fashion in Jerusalem) and when the Arabs arrived the Temple Mount was occupied by a small Byzantine Christian Church. A Church that was built, incidentally, after the Byzantines recaptured the city from the Persian Sassanids and banished all the Jews. Thirdly, the Arabs did not trample and stab their way into Jerusalem, as implied in the advert. There was a short siege that ended when the Christian leaders of the city surrendered without a fight. The Arabs did something extremely innovative here, and didn't massacre everyone in the town—they went a step further, in fact, and didn't banish them either. They even, and this is the real shocker, allowed the Jews to return to the city and gave them freedom to practice their religion there for the first time in centuries.

3. Córdoba.
The great mosque of Córdoba was gradually adapted from a Christian Church starting in 784, more than 70 years after the conquest of Spain. It was a Christian Church before, admittedly, but not one of any huge significance. More importantly, the Muslims didn't destroy the old church in a murderous rage. They bought it from the Christian community. Over the next few hundred years they built a beautiful mosque on the site, all the while maintaining pretty good relations with the local Jewish and Christian communities (Jewish historians refer to this period as a Golden Age)*.

One more thing. You know what the Great Mosque of Cordoba is called these days? The Catedral de Nuestra Señora de la Asunción (The Cathedral of our lady of the Ascension). After the Reconquista the Jews and the Muslims in the city were driven into exile. The Christians then built a Church in the Mosque's courtyard that sits there to this day, like a medieval-gothic spaceship that has just come down for an awkward crash landing in the middle of the city.

4. The Hagia Sophia
Unlike the rest of them, this one was made into a mosque almost immediately after the conquest. And yes, that conquest was pretty brutal (for both sides, Constantinople's defenses were immense, and still are). Although the Cathedral suffered in the ensuing looting, it was nothing like as bad as the thorough trashing and pillaging it suffered in the wake of the oh-so-classy fourth crusade. Furthermore, while this church was made into a Mosque, most of the city's churches stayed as they were. Under the Ottomans the building was well maintained and cared for, they didn't do anything tacky like plonking a cathedral in the middle of it. Many of the mosaics and frescos were plastered over, rather than destroyed. When the building started showing signs of fatigue and structural weakness, they got one of the finest engineer/architects in history, Mimar Sinan, to do the repairs. (He also designed its four minarets). Since 1935, the building has been a museum, rather than a mosque. It is now a showcase for the brilliance of the original builders and artists who adorned it that anyone can go and see.

5. "The Muslims"? That's the real kicker. It suggests that all this was the work of some sort of homogenous group. Jerusalem was conquered by an Arab army. Córdoba by a North African Berber army (Berbers look like this, or this, or this). Constantinople by the Ottomans, who were a Turkic people (descended from the Mongols who came from, you guessed it, Mongolia). They were not part of some kind of unified movement, and don't really have anything in common other than their religion. It's like saying "The Christians" and holding up pictures of Richard the Lionheart, Peter the Great, and George W. Bush.

I'm no more of a fan of Islam than I am of any other religion, and you don't have to look that hard to find plenty of atrocities, but there's no pattern here. The idea of a victory Mosque seems to exist largely in their own heads. The closest equivalent I can think of to a victory mosque is something like the Süleymaniye Camii in Istanbul, which was built with the spoils of war in Eastern Europe.

*Admittedly, the standards for a golden age are pretty low in Jewish history—any period where the world at large wasn't actively trying to murder them all is generally seen as a great time.

The Life and Times of 'Dean'

2010-08-16T12:43:00.011+01:00

This slab of text was a draft version of something I was going to put in a book but decided to leave out, I figured I'd put it here.

In the heart of Tangier's Ville Nouvelle, a few minutes walk from the Grand Socco with its cafés and bars, lies the small church of St. Andrews. This curious whitewashed building stands in an odd-shaped plot of land concealed from the street by a dense stand of trees. It was built in the late 19th century to serve the town's small but prosperous British community, whose decision to use the skills of local craftsmen resulted in a building that looks strangely like the work of an Islamic architect who has had a church described to him, but never actually seen one. Inside, it is adorned with the keyhole arches and clean, smooth lines of Morrocan mosque architecture. Continuing this theme, the decoration is limited to the text of the lord's prayer in arabic, carved into the arch above the altar like the koranic inscriptions of a mosque.

Outside, in the shade of date-palms and cypress trees, there is a small graveyard, where a select few British residents of the town have their final resting places. Here you find the graves of the writer Walter Harris (1866–1933), the soldier Sir Harry Maclean (1848–1920), and Emily Keane (1849–1944) an adventurous English woman who married the bandit king of Ouezzane. The most interesting of these graves, however, is also the simplest—tucked away in a shady corner of the graveyard. On the small stone, now broken in half and laid flat on the ground, is the following inscription

Dean

Missed by all and sundry

Died
February 1963

The city of Tanger knew Dean as a barman, an unflappable Rick Blaine type who served drinks, white suited and proper, at Caid's Bar in the Hotel Minzah. Later he opened his own bar, the imaginatively named "Dean's Bar," and his clientèle migrated with him. He had appeared in the international city at some point in the early 1930s (no one is sure exactly when)—just one of the many people who came to Tangier offering no details of their previous life, and stayed because no-one asked. In the 1930s and 40s he sold drinks to a disreputable army of refugees and deserters, spies, gunrunners, and thieves. They came first from the Spanish civil war and later from the war that raged almost to his doorstep. They all spoke to the friendly barman, and he, in turn, passed on the more interesting pieces of information to the British spies who also came in for drinks. After the war his bar was a favorite hangout of writers and poets, artists and musicians—everyone, in fact, apart from William Burroughs, whom Dean flatly refused to serve. A decision that some would say speaks highly of his ability as a judge of character.

It was not until 1992 that Marek Kohn, a journalist studying the birth of the British drug underworld stumbled across the identity that Mr "Joseph Dean" had sought to leave behind. While researching the moral panic that swirled around London following the death of lovely Billie Carleton, an up-and-coming west end actress, from a cocaine overdose in 1919, Kohn began digging up details about the disreputable crew implicated in giving her the drugs. It was a veritable who's who of 19th century criminal archetypes. There was Brilliant Chang—a mysterious Chinese restaurant owner, Edgar Manning—a black Jamaican jazz musician, Reginald de Veulle—a hedonistic transvestite fashion designer, and lastly, there was Don Kimfull—a swarthy Anglo-Egyptian rent boy and hustler.

The last figure in this rogues gallery, Don, was a cross dressing protégé of Reginald de Veulle. He was a man who could get Reginald's guests what they needed, whatever that might be. He dealt stolen goods, procured ladies (and boys) for his guests, and, most importantly, kept them supplied with cocaine. Don was, unsurprisingly, a popular member of Reginald's social circle. When Billie Carleton was found dead in her dressing room, Don Kimfull was implicated by the papers as the man who supplied the drug (the legality of which was in something of a grey area at the time). Both he and his patron were demonised as the depraved sexual deviants who, with the help of their unsavory accomplices (a chinaman and a negro no less!) corrupted a fine young lady. At the inquest, Reginald was found guilty of manslaughter and sent to prison, as much for his lifestyle as for any connection with Carleton's death. Don Kimfull was also summoned to court, but feigned illness and slipped away into the ether.

Here the trail goes cold for ten years—he was an anonymous looking man with underworld connections and a charming, confident personality. In the shattered cities of post-war Europe, with so many people displaced, so many prisoners of war and deserters, it was not hard for such a man to vanish. He probably settled himself in the chaotic black-market economy of a city like Berlin and kept a low profile. No more putting on dresses and hosting grand parties.

It wasn't until more than a decade later that he reappeared behind a bar in Tangier as "Joseph Dean." According to some, he had not entirely shake off the habits of his youth—Tangier rumor had it that he was a secret drug addict, which may have been the reason for his violent aversion to the known junkie William Burroughs. Although he was rumored to be a homosexual (not that unusual in 1930s Tangier) not even the most salacious rumors make any mention of him cross-dressing in his later years. Interestingly, there was one rumor, possibly started by Dean himself through an indiscreet outburst during one of his notorious drinking binges, that he used to be a big shot in London society, but had to flee when some flapper went a little overboard with the naughty salt and died. These dark clouds were not particularly remarkable in the international city, however, and were no impediment to being accepted. He was a warmly appreciated member of the expat community there—as far as one can tell the epitaph on the gravestone was justified. It's interesting that when his friends came to order the gravestone, they didn't bother to include his phony first name, nor attempt a guess at a date of birth. His enigmatic epitaph seems a sort of tacit acknowledgment that the details his friends knew were all wrong, but still respected his desire to remain anonymous.

Finshed

2010-08-08T16:56:00.000+01:00

Well, nearly.

I've put some of the hardware back, and some of the electronics have been put in place. I've run out of shielding foil, so I'll have to wait a few days before that arrives (along with the new knobs). For the moment I'm going to post up flattering pictures of my work, I'll do a proper critical examination of it soon though, because there's plenty to criticize.

See the Future!

2010-07-30T23:36:00.000+01:00

The other day I was aimlessly wondering the internet, reading about Mr Linus Torvalds, when I came across a very strange article. It was written in June 2006 for CNN's 'Money' website and was a list of people who had no power, or that they thought were on the way out. It was called the 10 People who Don't Matter. Linus Torvalds was on the list, because, as he gave away his greatest creation, he isn't someone business people have any interest in.

It's all pretty dull and uninteresting to someone who has no interest in business, with the exception of this marvellous bit of punditry from the list.

Mark Zuckerberg
Founder, Facebook
In entrepreneurship, timing is everything. So we'll give Zuckerberg credit for launching his online social directory for college students just as the social-networking craze was getting underway. He also built it right, quickly making Facebook one of the most popular social-networking sites on the Net. But there's also something to be said for knowing when to take the money and run. Last spring, Facebook reportedly turned down a $750 million buyout offer, holding out instead for as much as $2 billion. Bad move. After selling itself to Rupert Murdoch's Fox for $580 million last year, MySpace is now the Web's second most popular website. Facebook is growing too - but given that MySpace has quickly grown into the industry's 80-million-user gorilla, it's hard to imagine who would pay billions for an also-ran.

.....

I just looked it up, and as of July 2010, Mark Zuckerberg's personal fortune is around 4 billion dollars, while Facebook itself has been conservatively valued at 12 billion dollars.

....

A few weeks ago I read about the interesting history of the Wall Street Post's Dartboard Column. A venue where experienced investment managers make two stock picks, and then the paper's office intern makes two stock picks (by throwing darts at a copy of the nasdaq index). At the end of the week their values are compared. It was started in the early 1990s as a joke, but it has become a closely scrutinized experiment among those economists who believe the market is ultimately unpredictable. A few years back someone actually examined the data gathered from this column and found that while the investment managers did do better than the dartboard, it was only slightly better, not much more than the level of success you'd expect from chance.

Maps

2010-07-14T22:13:00.002+01:00

We tend to think, in these days of Google Earth and GPS, that we've filled in all the blank spaces on the map, but in the last few days I've come accross a fascinating exception to this, an area that appears to be exempt from the attentions of cartographers and also, it would seem, from the normal rules of space-time.

For reasons that I can't go into (shop) I've been doing a lot of research on the city of Tanger (or Tangier, or Tanja, or Tangiers) in northern Morocco. We had a problem with a piece of text, namely that it contained a wealth of information about the fascinating history of the place, but very little about the city today. As part of my research I found myself firing up google earth, so I could get an idea of the layout of the city. Since most of the interesting history involves the Medina (old walled town) and its environs, I was curious to know where things were. I drew a blank. Literally. Google Earth has no streets marked within the medina, and only a fairly low resolution image of the town. I've you've ever seen a medina before, you'll know that aerial photography is not going to be much use. The streets are so narrow, so overhung with balconies and walkways, clotheslines and wires, that it's impossible to figure out where one building ends and the next begins, let alone chart the course of a narrow alleyway. I then went in search of other maps of the medina. I found a few. The first was an old 1930s map that a literature professor had unearthed while researching William Burroughs (who came to Tangier for the low cost of living, but stayed for the plentiful opportunities for pederasty and heroin). It had lots of streets marked on it, but the street names were all in French and, with names like "Rue Joan D'Arc" and "Rue Charlemagne" it seemed unlikely that they would have survived the departure of the colonial administrators anyway. I then found several other maps of the medina. Mostly in travel guides and from Moroccan tourism promoters. The reason why I gathered so many was because I was hoping to spot some sort of pattern. While they agreed on size and shape of the medina, as well as the location of a few major landmarks (such as the Petit Socco and the Kasbah) they disagreed on pretty much everything else. Sometimes they even disagreed with themselves, putting the same landmark in more than one place. The roads didn't just have different names, there was a completely different road layout in each book. I kept looking at the maps, then scrutinizing the aerial photography, but no one road layout seemed any more plausible than any other. Perhaps they were all correct, perhaps they just selected different roads to highlight and mixed them names up in a tombola.

This wouldn't have been quite so bad if it wasn't for the fact that the blog posts and travelogues I found about tangiers gave wildly contradictory information about the location of specific places. Different people would give completely different addresses for the same museum, for example, or give directions that made absolutely no sense. They all railed at the fact that none of the maps or travel guides were correct, and expressed confusion at the layout of the place. Several of them remarked that giving up any hope of figuring out where you were going was the only way to find anything.

There are only two explanations for this. The first is that Tangier's medina makes use of extra dimensions, disobeys the rules of the universe. This would explain the church that seems to wash up and down a hill with the tide, and the historic diplomatic building that is simultaneously next to the Kasbah and down by the Petit Socco. There is another, perhaps more plausible explanation. As part of my research I discovered that Morocco, specifically the hills around Tangier, produces around half of Europe's cannabis. Seriously massive quantities of hashish make their way down to the docks in Tangiers every day, to be shipped to the needy stoners of Europe. Of course, some of it never leaves the country, enough for the stuff to be cheaper than tobacco and easily obtained. Although none of the cartographers or travel writers mention this, I suspect they may have done their investigations of the city while baked off their tits on hash. This would explain the apparently baffling geography of the old town, as well as the inordinate amount of column inches travel writers devote to "these like, fucking amazing little stands that sell these enormous sugary pastry things..."

Two Poems

2010-07-11T16:10:00.004+01:00

Two poems by Jamie McKendrick, whose work I first became aware of through the Poems on the Underground program. They're a brilliant example of how poetic doesn't have to mean vague and ignorant or science, none of this Keatsian Negative Capability crap.

On Nothing

I do not think it is absurd for you to say that nothing is something,
since no one can deny that ‘nothing’ is a noun.
-- Anselm of Canterbury

If nothing is the opposite of something
then it too is something and not nothing.
Or is that just language rushing in
to fill what makes the intellect recoil?

It’s us not nature that abhors a vacuum,
though in frictionless space there’s still a fraction
more than nothing, if not enough of it
to slow the planets in their orbits.

But the full moon hides its emptiness
and every plenitude its opposite;
the present buckles into nowlessness

that lasts for never as a dark star draws
downward threads of light. There nothing exists,
crouching like a sphinx among the rubble.

Out There
If space begins at an indefinite zone
where the chance of two gas molecules colliding
is rarer than a green dog or a blue moon
then that’s as near as we’ll get to nothing.

Nostalgia for the Earth and its atmosphere
weakens the flesh and bones of cosmonauts
One woke to find his crewmate in a space suit
and asked where he was going. For a walk.

He had to sleep between him and the air-lock.
Another heard a dog bark and a child cry
halfway to the moon. What once had been

where heaven was, is barren beyond imagining,
and never so keenly as from out there can
the lost feel earth’s the only paradise.

Graphic Design, 1930s style

2010-07-08T00:15:00.000+01:00

I found this poster while roaming a strange and obscure corner of the internet the other day.

I remember passing the flying-boat dock and its elegant, if decaying, reception building when I was on a boat tour around manhattan. There's something deep-down awesome about flying boats, just like there is with zepplins. Their bulky and awkward shapes make them seem somehow bigger than even the most mahoosive of superjumbos. They suggest a mode of transport that wouldn't leave you yearning a chemical-induced coma after about an hour.

The Shard

2010-07-04T21:24:00.000+01:00

It goes up

Guitar Refinishing: Starting over

2010-07-04T17:27:00.000+01:00

I've got high hopes that I'll be able to make it work this time. As you can see from the strange way that different layers showed through in different places when i sanded it down, the surface at the end of the first round wasn't exactly flat. Most of those problems seem to stem from the wonky application of the primer right back at the beginning.

whoa now

2010-07-02T23:36:00.000+01:00

I was in Halfords the other day, buying some paint, when I saw this.

Are we doing woman-murder humor in auto-parts stores now?

yikes.

Refinishing, Book 1, epilogue

2010-06-30T23:27:00.003+01:00

It's been another week or two since I last mentioned the guitar. In that time I completed the color coat and applied the clearcoat, buffed it to a shine and admired it... Then sanded off the clearcoat and reapplied the color coat, reapplied about half the clearcoat but then ran out, got more clearcoat, sanded off and reapplied the clearcoat, patched color, and reapplied clearcoat again.

Today I sat down in the garden with the offending instrument and checked it over properly. After about an hour of staring at it in the evening sunshine I concluded that it was back to the drawing board time. This post isn't really an update on the progress, more a post-mortem. That doesn't mean I've given up, far from it, but I want to make sure that I've catalogued and understood all the ways that I cocked my first attempt before I have another go. My pride compels me to add that the following pictures make the guitar look a fair bit worse than it actually does.

Sanding
When I started I wasn't really sure what I wanted to do with the guitar. I didn't know what it looked like under the paint, and I was curious to find out. Looking back, I don't regret that—it might have looked awesome under that black paint—but I do regret sanding such a large area of paint away completely. The section that was stripped completely (which can be seen in the original post) covered most of the bottom half of the guitar. More specifically it covered the rough, open end of the grain where the wood was cut. This surface proved extremely difficult to cover with primer, and there were still traces of the rough texture of the underlying wood visible even after the colorcoat had been applied. This would have been ok, but it wasn't consistent, even after the clearcoat was put on the front, it was still possible, in the right light, to see the boundaries of the area that was stripped completely.
   In future I will assume that wood covered by opaque paint is not worth seeing unless I have good reason to think otherwise. If I really have to check, then I'll sand away a small area of the guitar, preferably on the belly-cut at the back. Sanding the wood away here would let me see a cross section of the guitar's construction—whether it has laminates on the front and back, that sort of thing—without leaving an area of completely unfinished wood somewhere important.

Priming
Firstly, I didn't make any attempt to fill the dings and dents in the guitar's body before I started. This wasn't particularly to do with laziness or inexperience, I just completely forgot about it.
   The problems I encountered at this stage were the result of a combination of bad materials and bad technique. The first can of spray lacquer I used was frankly rubbish, and was completely emptied long before the guitar was ready for the color coat. Lesson learned. I'll make sure to get decent stuff next time I do that, stuff that is specifically intended for priming wood.
   As regards the technique problems, these were rather inevitable when you consider that I'd never so much as held a can of spray paint before I started this project. I've since learned the very real importance of those "thin, even coats" people talk so much about.

This image shows more problems that I'd like to admit; visible primer, cracked clearcoat, bleugh.

Color Coat
This stage actually went largely without a hitch, so I'll instead take the opportunity to talk about the more general causes of shittyness in this project. The first was that, at least at first, I had no idea how long spray paint takes to dry. The stuff I'm using is typically tacky-dry after a few minutes and completely dry to the touch after an hour or two. What I didn't realize though, was that it takes much, much longer than that to harden properly.

If you look closely at this picture you can see the indentations left when the guitar was left leaning against some fabric for a few hours, a day or two after the finish was applied.

As the guitar has a set-neck I didn't really have anywhere I could hold the guitar that didn't involve touching the paintwork. On days when I'd been working on the neck this inevitably meant fingerprints from carrying it up to the attic at the end of the day. On the first day or two of work, I left the guitar resting on a tabletop, not realizing that this would leave all sorts of strange imprints on the finish. I figured out a precarious arrangement after a few days that left the guitar propped up using blocks resting on the fretboard and inside of the pickout rout. This allowed it to dry properly, but required a great deal of manhandling to get it in place (usually resulting in yet more fingerprints) and was quite worryingly unstable.
Towards the end of the project I made a hook from a bent coathanger that allowed me to hold the guitar without touching it and hang it up to dry. If I'd had this from the start, I'm pretty sure things would have gone a lot better.
The second big issue was that of masking. I did the masking right at the beginning of the project and, to be quite frank, ballsed it up something horrific.

You hear that sound? Yes, that's baby jesus crying.

I used regular (and very old) masking tape, which didn't mask as well as I might have hoped. It didn't give a clean edge, and paint seeped through in places, forcing me to sand the paint off those areas. Worse than the failings of the masking tape, however, was the cack-handed way I put it on. Rather than a sharp, clean edge, it was a sort of meandering, rough line that veered from the edge of the frets to about a centimeter off the fretboard. I uncovered this horror after the first round of clear coating. As an experiment in desperate damage management, I tried painting over the edge of the neck completely, to hide the monstrous join, but this looked just as dumb.

Oh, the Humanity!

Clearcoat
At first, I thought that the clearcoat went on fairly easily. The truth, however, was in the drying. Coats that looked fine when they first went on, started to look progressively more shit as each day went by. The finish on the front cracked like a playing field on a hot summer and the finish on the back developed strange deep grooves, which were probably the result of cracks forming in the layer below. Kristen suggested that these problems were caused by the coat underneath not being fully dry, which sounds right to me, given what can remember of the order in which the coats when on.

Eeeew. Gross.

Wobbly, Wobbly.

Another big mistake was not putting enough clearcoat on. It's a simple thing, but I didn't realise that you need to put on far more than you think the instrument could possibly need. Extra care should be taken to build up the coats on the edges and on cutaways with really thin layers. Where the viscious, semi-dry paint is likely to flow away from the edge.
If the paint is put on too thick then the hardened top layer will crack when the lower, gooey layer shifts away from the edge.

Tectonic Paint Movements

This post may sound gloomy, but I'm actually in a good mood about all this. Once I'd got over the initial frustration of having cocked it up, I've become excited about the chance to try it again, better. If this was an instrument I had a burning need to play right now, then I'd be really annoyed by this setback, but as I'm an apathetic guitarist at the best of times, so I'm not in any real rush.

Interesting

2010-06-25T23:25:00.001+01:00

I came across an interesting book while doing research today. It's called British Highways And Byways From A Motor Car by the American travel writer Thomas D. Murphy (1866--1928). It was written in 1908, when motor cars were still something of a novelty and not exactly the most practical of vehicles, but it's a well-written and interesting travelogue nonetheless. He covers a quite astonishing amount of ground considering the limitations of the technology and shittyness of the roads. His main problem, even in the wilds of scotland, was not mechanical issues, or poor roads, but the weather. Of which he notes

There is little danger of being supplied with too many clothes and wraps when motoring in Britain. There were very few days during our entire summer's tour when one could dispense with cloaks and overcoats.

For the most part, his descriptions conjure up an image of an England very similar to the one I live in now, occasionally though there's a really jarring reference to something that is very much not there anymore.

His description of canterbury, for example, is pretty hard to distinguish from a description of the city today. It took him longer to get there from london, obviously, but the route the road takes hasn't changed a great deal since Roman times. The city, equally, is fairly unchanged -- although it is a strange thing when he refers to victorian edifices as recent additions to the city.

By comparison, the description of Coventry, which I've copied below, is a eerie glimpse of a city that hasn't existed for a long time.

Coventry, with its odd buildings and narrow, crowded streets, reminded Nathaniel Hawthorne of Boston—not the old English Boston, but its big namesake in America. Many parts of the city are indeed quaint and ancient, the finest of the older buildings dating from about the year 1400; but these form only a nucleus for the more modern city which has grown up around them. Coventry now has a population of about seventy-five thousand, and still maintains its old-time reputation as an important manufacturing center. Once it was famed for its silks, ribbons and watches, but this trade was lost to the French and Swiss—some say for lack of a protective tariff. Now cycles and motor cars are the principal products; and we saw several of the famous Daimler cars, made here, being tested on the streets.

---

Other things I've learned today include what must be one of the most strangely named streets in Britain (up there with Whip Ma Whop Ma Gate in York), "Bullet Loan" in Kelso, Scotland.

Refinishing Part the second

2010-06-19T23:38:00.001+01:00

I've been meaning to update this for a while now, but I've been busy painting, working, and playing Red Dead Redemption. I've done a lot to the guitar in the week or two that has elapsed since the last post, and I'm probably not far from finishing the job (the painting part of it anyway -- the new electrics are another job entirely) After sanding away the paint to look at the wood, I decided to do a more sensible job on the rest of the guitar.I worked with a succession of lower and lower grades of sandpaper and wet n' dry. By the end the guitar was as smooth as a teflon dolphin. In the process of sanding it down I was able to confirm something I'd noticed when I first got it.

That little black dot is the filled-in remains of a hole drilled for a left-handed strap button. This means that at some point in the last 30 years, my guitar was owned by a left handed, but not hugely picky guitarist. This is one of the things I love about getting an old guitar -- there's more mystery, I feel like a musical archaeologist.

The first coat of primer didn't go on very well. The patches of bare wood just seemed to drink it up. I ended up using the entire can without getting it anywhere near smooth enough to put the color coat on. I think the paint (made by Keen) was not very well suited to the task. I went out at the weekend and bought some more white primer -- this time by a company called "painter's choice" -- from homebase. I've never bought spray paint from a shop before. I had to ask someone to go and unlock the case they keep them in, and got eyeballed by the cashier when I went to pay.

For all that work though, it was much better paint. I had to learn a different technique for applying it, as it was much thicker and more runny than the other stuff. The first time I tried to use it I got runs and drips all over the guitar which essentially meant I had to sand away everything I did that day. I found the best way was to apply it in short sprays, adding more layers every 20 minutes or so. Over several evenings during the week I used this technique to get a good, even coat over the whole guitar. After a week of spraying the finish was nice and smooth and covered the texture of the wood effectively.

One thing that it didn't occur to me to do, which I will certainly do next time I'm working on a guitar, is to get some kind of woodfiller or glue and fill in all the dings and dents before I start finishing. Although the thick layer of paint has covered up the smaller dents and scratches, the big ones (which has guitar has more than its share of) are still noticeable.

Today I had a go with the green spray paint. This was the same brand as the fairly useless white primer -- so I was worried that it wouldn't be enough to cover the guitar properly. It seems these fears were unfounded though, as it covered the guitar brilliantly and fast. In fact, if rain had not forced me to bring the guitar in before it was properly dry (putting some smeary fingerprints on it in the process) I think one coat would probably have been enough.

I don't know if the weather is going to cooperate tomorrow, but if it does, I plan to get the color coat finished. I wont bother putting the clearcoat on yet though. That can wait until later in the week. I need to get some rubbing compound too, or it will not look sufficiently shiny.

The color looks a little strange in this picture, almost metallic. It's a trick of the light -- in reality the color is exactly like this, which is the look I was going for.

Graphic Design, 1800s style

2010-06-10T23:25:00.000+01:00

"I need it to look exciting and eye-catching"
"hmm. How about I use every typeface and dingbat I have?"
"Won't that make it a little busy looking?"
"nah, it'll look great"

A Microcosm

2010-06-10T23:12:00.001+01:00

From the talk page associated with this Wikipedia subject sidebar

The template is fantastic, but I have a bit of a concern about the picture of Taj Mahal. The Taj Mahal was built by a Mughal ruler out of love for his wife. The Taj Mahal is not a mosque and it is more of a symbol of love, and has got little to do with Islam. I suggest this be replaced with the picture of the Ka'aba or other more prominent Islamic monument as the picture of the Taj Mahal is misleading. -- Shijaz 12:39, 11 December 2008 (UTC)

This isn't about Islam, it's about Islamic culture, what Muslims have done because of the influence of Islam, even in non-religious areas. If you read about the Taj Mahal, it is considered one of the greatest representations of Muslim art and architecture in the world by historians. The Kaaba is religious not cultural, it isn't considered a part of Muslim art. --Enzuru 03:24, 12 December 2008 (UTC)

I fail to understand how culture is any different from religion - when it comes to Islam (which is a 'way of life')! -- Shijaz 10:20, 13 January 2009 (UTC)

Refinishing

2010-06-05T20:20:00.001+01:00

I like to tinker with my guitars, this is well known, but I'm never really done any refinishing. The closest I've come is the very silly artwork I doodled on a guitar a while ago, but that wasn't so much refinishing as messing around. I've decided to take the plunge today, after umming and erring for a while. The instrument that is getting the treatment is my 1980 ibanez Studio ST-50. It's a nice instrument, but its age is showing badly. The pots are worn and crackly; the hardware is filthy; and the finish (none more black) is covered in cracks, chips, dents, and weird blistered patches (it looks like a previous owner spilled some kind of industrial solvent on the back).

I bought a load of sandpaper, a few cans of spray paint (white primer, racing green paint, and clear laquer), and decided to have a go with it. Firstly, I had to dismantle the electrics and take off the hardware--which didn't take very long, but did leave the guitar looking very weird.

There's something really unsettling about a headstock with no tuning machines.

After that I started sanding off the paint. I'd done a fair amount of research on my guitar and figured out that it was one of the last of its model line made. It was probably cobbled together in 1980 out of parts left over from the previous year's models. While it is ostensibly an ST-50 (the entry level-model), it has a few features (the swanky tuning pegs and brass truss rod cover) that only usually featured on the more expensive models. This meant that I wasn't certain what I'd find when I stripped the paint off. I figured it was worth a look to see if it would look good with just a natural finish.

As you can see from this, the wood doesn't look that great. I'd guess it's a maple cap on the top and bottom with a core of laminated mahogany. It confirms something I'd figured out a while ago -- if a guitar has a solid opaque finish, then it's there for a reason. This guitar, with its mismatched laminates and big ugly join, would not have made the natural finish cut. That's not to say it sounds bad, or it's generally bad wood, it's just not very pretty. I did a quick test with the white primer on the back of the guitar and it doesn't seem too difficult to do (famous last words) as I'll probably only do a plain solid finish. I've run out of daylight today though (hangover stole most of the daylight hours) so I'll have to continue my experiments tomorrow.

The first Rule of Editing

2010-06-03T22:47:00.000+01:00

Putting jokes in the Dummy text?

Don't.

Ever.

It's a pretty simple rule, but surprisingly hard to follow. I wonder how many people get fired every year for stuff like that.

Mixed Messages

2010-05-11T23:52:00.001+01:00

From the Wiki page on Denatured Alcohol.

It's a nice bottle, not very... industrial though, is it?

In Poland, where this bottle is from, the additives they put in denatured alcohol are not toxic, just disgusting.

Under "Upload Information" in the file page, it says simply "Own Work. Own Bottle"

The Farewell Sermon

2010-05-10T22:43:00.001+01:00

The other day I found myself trying to find an authentic source for a text that is repeated on Muslim websites from across the english-speaking world. It is a full version of the last sermon of Muhammad, commonly known as the Farewell Sermon. I found examples of it here, and here, and here, and here.

I've read a fair amount of Islamic scripture over the last few months, and this doesn't read like anything I've encountered before. I don't get the impression, from the scriptures he left behind, that Muhammad was a man inclined towards lengthy prose compositions--he seemed to prefer epigrammatic pronouncements and verse poetry. The reference to "black" and "white" as ethnic groups struck me as a little anachronistic, but it could equally just be an unorthodox translation. There are other things that made me suspicious of this text from the start, the biggest one was the fact that these texts are almost identical, they've got the same caps or boldface for emphasis, the same phrasing, and the exact same words. To me this smells of unthinking copy pasting, like an endlessly forwarded email.

The second thing that bothers me is the citation that most of these texts have at the bottom. It goes like this --

See Al-Bukhari, Hadith 1623, 1626, 6361
Sahih of Imam Muslim also refers to this sermon in Hadith number 98.
Imam al-Tirmidhi has mentioned this sermon in Hadith nos. 1628, 2046, 2085.
Imam Ahmed bin Hanbal has given us the longest and perhaps the most complete version of this sermon in his Masnud, Hadith no. 19774.

The references are fascinating. They look authoritative at first glance---they mention real Hadith collections and are formatted in the right way---but if you subject them to a moment's scruntiny they undermine the authenticity of this text more than they preserve it.

Hadith collections are not exactly scripture, they're probably best described as reasonbly trustworthy anecdotes about the prophet for use in a theological tiebreaker scenario. Where Chrstianity has Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, Islam has the major hadith scholars. Both sets of texts were compiled a long time after the events they describe, and both are fourth- or fifth-hand information. The big difference between the two is that people like Muhammad al-Bukhari and Muslim ibn al-Hajjaj documented their sources and didn't make any claims that their texts were, ahem, gospel. As a result, hadith collections are huge and messy. For the sake of completeness, Hadith scholars often include several versions of the same story, sometimes dozens. Each version has a different chain of narrators (known as an isnad) and reached the collector from a different source. What this means is that three separate hadith about the same event, even it they're from the same collection, are likely to differ. Sometimes this difference is minor -- just a few words changed -- but quite often it's a completely contradictory account. If there was just one citation, perhaps two, then this might be authentic, but this many suggests that, at best, the text has been cobbled together and inferred from several fragments.

All of this, of course, assumes that the hadith contain a full or even partial text of the sermon. The last reference, interestingly, says that one of the hadith is "perhaps the most complete version," suggesting that the others are just fragments or passing references. Hadith collections include all the information that the hadith collector thought seemed authentic enough, regardless of whether it was interesting or useful. This means that some hadith document amazingly banal everyday conversations with no obvious theological importance other than that one of the speakers was Muhammad. They also include incredibly vague narrations. It is quite possible that a hadith that "mentions" the farewell sermon may consist of something like:

Narrated Big Dave
"I heard someone say that the prophet gave some sort of sermon when they all went to Mecca. I have no idea what he said though, sorry."

The last, and most important part of this is the Hadiths actually say. (It took me a while to track them down because not many online hadith collections sort them by number. As a result, I'd written the previous paragraphs without knowing the content of the hadiths. I would go back and rewrite the whole thing, but I'm lazy and that feels too much like work.)

Here are the sources mentioned, and what they actually say --

Sahih Bukhari 1623. Narrated Ibn 'Umar:

Allah's Apostle (SallAllaahu `Alayhi Wa Sallam) (got) his head shaved after performing his Hajj.

Sahih Bukhari 1626. Narrated 'Abdullah:

The Prophet and some of his companions got their heads shaved and some others got their hair cut short. Narrated Muawiya: I cut short the hair of Allah's Apostle with a long blade.

Sahih Bukhari 6361. Narrated Abdullah:

Allah Apostle said in Hajjat-al-Wada, "Which month (of the year) do you think is most sacred?" The people said, "This current month of ours (the month of Dhull-Hijja)." He said, "Which town (country) do you think is the most sacred?" They said, "This city of ours (Mecca)." He said, "Which day do you think is the most sacred?" The people said, "This day of ours." He then said, "Allah, the Blessed, the Supreme, has made your blood, your property and your honor as sacred as this day of yours in this town of yours, in this month of yours (and such protection cannot be slighted) except rightfully." He then said thrice, "Have I conveyed Allah's Message (to you)?" The people answered him each time saying, 'Yes." The Prophet added, 'May Allah be merciful to you (or, woe on you)! Do not revert to disbelief after me by cutting the necks of each other.'

Sahih Muslim 98. Narrated Tamim ad-Dari:

The Prophet of Allaah (may peace and blessings be upon him) observed: Al-Din is a name of sincerity and well wishing. Upon this we said: For whom? He replied: For Allaah, His Book, His Messenger and for the leaders and the general Muslims.

I can't look up the citations from the Sahih at-Tirmidhi because the only translations I can find go from hadith numbers 1-360 and another from 5000 to the end. I can't find the Masnud of Imam Ahmed bin Hanbal anywhere. The only references to this work appear to be repetitions of the Farewell Sermon text, and the one link that looked promising is in Arabic. Ahmed bin Hanbal was a real, and significant, Sunni scholar, however, so I'm sure there must be some actual collection they're referring to.

As you can see, only one of these sources actually makes a direct reference to the Farewell Sermon, and that one tells it as a brief call and response between Muhammad and his followers.

My guess is that this isn't mentioned in the citations I couldn't read either. I think it's most likely an example of Muslim glurge, something which I suppose must spread quite quickly among the many Western Muslims who are separated from the bulk of their religious texts by a pretty inpenetrable language barrier. I'm surprised though, by how often it gets repeated. I mean, Muhammad was quite adamant that anyone who put words in his mouth would get an everlasting arse-kicking for it (See Sahih Bukhari Volume 4, Book 56, Number 667)

2010-03-29T16:14:00.001+01:00

I should have realized, I think, when you got on the train. Like.You were talking on your phone, cradling it against your shoulder while manhandling your bag into the luggage rack. Like. It would have been easier to put the phone down while you did that, but you didn't even stop talking. You know, like. That should have thrown up a red flag, I should have run away down the train in search of somewhere else to sit. Like. Even so, it soon became apparent that you were a Dynamic, Proactive Person, whose time had to be spent Constructively.

Once in your seat you were able to straighten your neck out and speak in your normal voice. Like, you know. Your clear, loud, and above all penetrating voice. From Oxford to Reading, you informed your friend, me, Kristen, and anyone else within about 5 rows of you how your weekend went and how life was going, generally. Like. You weren't shouting, not being deliberately obnoxious—your voice carried because you were Assertive and Proactive and Dynamic. You know. These very same traits, after all, had just earned you a Role at a Media Consultancy. It was only a small Role, but it would allow you to Network and gather Contacts in The Media. Like. You weren't going to ask for less than Twenty-Three Grand a Year, of course, because you were the Outstanding Candidate after all, and less would be Taking The Piss. You know?

If you'd stopped talking just because you were eating your lunch then that would have been Boring. Like. I mean, who cares about talking with your mouth full these days? We're Modern Dynamic Trendsetters, we don't mind the wet smacking sounds of your mouth while you chew, or the grunts and meaningless noises you make when too full of crisps to manage even a muffled response. You know.

It was terrible when you lost signal just outside Reading, really annoying, you know? There was nothing to do but look out of the window and watch the sunny countryside move by. To sit in silence and think. To rest. Time Wasted. Terrible.

Mr Sheen

2010-03-01T22:55:00.005Z

Righteous indignation does not come easily to me. I'm generally too lazy and apathetic to get worked up about anything, even when I probably really should. I think that it's something I'll take it up when I get older, you know, as a hobby. I'll get laser eye surgery in one eye, take to wearing a monocle, and make sure that it falls into my tea everytime I see a picture of a young lady doing something indecent in the sunday papers.

Nonetheless, every now and then I see something that is sufficiently tasteless and offensive that even I'm shocked. When I saw this advert in the Metro today, for example, my future monocle fell right into my lap.

Bleh. I can't be bothered to explain all the things that are wrong with this. Just bear in mind that Two and a Half Men is a show in which Charlie Sheen plays a character called Charlie Harper. He's pictured with lipstick on his face, mud and rips in his shirt, and a halo...

You see what they did there? They've used Charlie Sheen's notoriously violent conduct towards women to promote their show! Oh how very nice.

Shooter's Hill, Autumn

2010-02-27T00:15:00.000Z

Picture, if you will, a small, oddly shaped bedroom in Plumstead, 1993. The room is roughly square, but the walls curve and kink. The furniture--a desk, some shelves, a wardrobe--has been concientiously adapted to the room with offcuts and glue.Generations of thickly-applied paint have settled like snow on the fastidious edwardian woodwork around the door and window. Through the window you can see a garden that rises steeply: at its summit an asbestos garage stands level with the room, distorted by climbing ivy, gathering darkness, and lumpy, postwar glass.
On the bed sit two boys, one eight, the other ten. They are listening to a small radio. Not so long ago, they would have listened to stories, curled up and cublike. Now they wait for songs. They have favorites, but not the pocket money to buy them. Once, they tried to record them by holding a cassette recorder up to the radio's small speaker. This failed, because the younger one wouldn't stop chattering over everything, singing along, barking like a dog. So they wait, hoping that the unpredictable playlist of Capital radio will bring their songs back around.
The radio--a strange black Sony, with a jagged hole in the plastic of one corner--is propped up against bedside clock covered in stickers from the Young Ornithologists' Club. Their interest in birds passed quickly, just like the dozens of other hobbies that these boys had applied themselves to for a few short days; drawing, carpentry, knitting. The fearsomely armed model-kit warplanes that dangle from strings above held their attention for longer than most; they appealed to the older one's neatness, and the younger one's love of chaos and destruction.
After a time, their mother comes into the room. She persuades them to switch off the radio, the younger one protests effusively while the older one gets into bed. Still protesting, he is half carried, half dragged across the hall to his room, where he runs-hops-leaps into bed (on account of crocodiles). It's not fair, you see, they never play the songs he likes when he listens to the radio.

2010-02-21T20:13:00.004Z

Me and Kristen were in TK Maxx* today, while she rummaged around for a pair of cheap but wearable shoes. Shoe shopping, generally, is one of my least favorite activies. I don't hate it as much as I hated, say, the process of buying new trousers back when I was a fat bugger, but I do dislike the way shoe shops operate. The whole process can usually goes thusly: First, find a shoe you vaguely like the look of, then spend five minutes trying to get the attention of a clerk. Once this has been achieved you wait five minutes for them to come back with the shoe, at which point you invariably find that the shoe is the wrong size. So you spend a further five minutes waiting for said clerk to return with bigger/smaller size. They then inform you that the shoe is out of stock in your size. Repeat until too bored to think, leave.

It is this process that led me to get my last pair of shoes from marks and spencer (it was a freak event -- I was in there buying some smart clothes and happened to come across some shoes that looked to have been designed for/by someone under the age of seventy).

At TK Maxx you get the simpler approach of just pulling stuff off the shelves, combined with the cheapness of a shop stocked only with things other shops couldn't sell. So Kristen got some cheap new shoes, and I got to marvel at some astoundingly ugly footwear. I took pictures of my favorites

This isn't a particularly unusual boot, until you realize that you're looking at what Doc Martens would have looked like if they were invented in the 19th century. Think of it, victorian skinheads! Twirling their moustaches and moshing to some punk piano rolls.

What you can't see in this picture is just how heavy and inflexible these shoes were. I know they look heavy and inflexible, but they were actually more so. They look like the ideal shoes for people who have a tendency to blow over in strong winds, or take off when they fart.

This shoe is truly the masterpeice of the whole store. I mean, just look at it.What's not to like? It's got inexplicable woodgrain vinyl, a strange photographic print of a forest and a deer, and it's lined with white fake fur! What possible market, what hypothetical consumer group could this shoe have been designed for? Is it for urban ghetto kids who want to express their desire to live in a cabin in the Canadian wilderness? For geezers who secretly want to become gamekeepers in the Scottish highlands? Sadly, this is a mystery we'll never be able to solve, because I don't think anyone will ever buy them.

EDIT: It has just been brought to my attention that the "Deer Shoes" pictured above come in an even uglier hi-top version.

-Ben

*I have no idea why they changed the name from TJ Maxx to TK Maxx in the UK. I've known two people who've gone by the name TJ, in both cases it was an abbreviation of Tajinder. I can only assume that in focus groups the name TJ Maxx made Londoners think of a Sikh superhero.

Poetry

2010-02-08T23:07:00.002Z

I like poetry, I like hearing poetry read even more. You can imagine my glee, therefore, when I found a huge collection of recordings of poets reading their own work. It's here, at PennSound.

I recommend the Allen Ginsburg and the William Carlos Williams.

-Ben

The Winchester House

2010-02-08T19:55:00.002Z

I read an article a few weeks ago by a technology writer which asserted, essentially, that the internet used to be lovely, but now it's all gone to shit. I can't remember his name, but he was apparently a big evangelist in the early days of the internet -- one of those people who went on earnest late-night discussion shows and tried to persuade people that the internet (that churning, slowly-loading sea of animated gifs, embedded midi, and browser frames) was going to revolutionize politics, culture, and generally change the course of human history. In his view the modern internet, with all its commercial success, has abandoned the anarchic personalized spaces that made the old internet (web 1.0, if you will) so exciting and powerful.

This isn't something I've ever really given a whole lot of thought, as I'm not really inclined toward nostalgia, but now I think about it, the internet has changed a lot in the last 5 years. However, I don't think that it has got worse -- even if you accept the basic tenet of this bloke's argument (commercial success and user friendliness bad -- a line I hear from hipsters all the time) I don't think it's true that the internet no longer allows for strange and personal spaces as well.

I was reminded of this when I discovered this amusing website. It's rather enigmatic, no idea who wrote it, or why. But it's written with a clear, likable style, and provides an interesting perspective on a subect (the winchester mystery house) that always seemed like it could do with a little more incredulity.

-Ben

intermission

2009-12-12T11:44:00.000Z

As this blog functions as a sort of journal for me, it's not surprising that I often find myself thinking about the subject of memory, specifically mine. I won't link to my previous ramblings on the subject because they're pretty tedious, suffice to say that while it takes months for my memories of interesting or unusual events to become blurred or vague, it only takes a week or two for the individual memories to fall out of my mental card index and get shoved, unsorted and heaplike, into a shoebox somewhere. As a result, the next post will probably just be a heap of scenes, probably in the wrong order. The last post was the same, I just forgot to put this disclaimer at the start. Some of the things that I said happened on the Thursday probably happened on the Friday (or the Saturday) and vice-versa, some of the things may have happened slightly differently to what I remember, and some of the things may not have happened at all. (In case you hadn't guessed, Kristen didn't really demand a car with a keel, although she should have done).

Also, I feel I should apologize for the length of these posts. I used to strive for economy and brevity in my writing, but these days I live by the pen, so to speak, and get paid by the yard. The work philosophy of "write as much as you can, then edit it down" is a good one, but unfortunately I can't be bothered to edit my writing when I'm not at work.

While these posts are intended to be about the Gevelow wedding, the actual wedding will probably only play a fairly minor role. This is for a number of reasons. First, as someone's plus-one I didn't really have much of a role to play in the proceedings other than to be there, so my viewpoint is very much from the fringes of all the planning-type drama. Second, although I was on the fringes of the chaos and the drama, it did occasionally sweep me along with it, as chaos tends to do. This means that the build-up to the wedding is at least as memorable to me as the ceremony itself, and so the Great Event of a Lifetime has to compete for mental space in a way that most weddings probably do not. Thirdly, I don't pay a lot of attention to what's going on around me, so I'm a pretty terrible witness.

Gevelow vs. Ida part the second

2009-12-11T23:36:00.001Z

The following morning I woke up, fully clothed, lying on a sofa in a room I didn't recognise. The room was large, and lit only by the cracks of light that shone round the edges of the curtains and blinds. I seemed to be in a sort of half-kitchen half-livingroom about the size of my parents' house.

To my right there was a heap of sheets on a sofa. The heap of sheets was moving up and down in a slow, rhythmic manner. At this point the higher brain functions were starting to shamble into my consciousness, bleary-eyed and wearing their bathrobes -- one of them pointed out that, as sheets don't breathe, the breathing pile of sheets was probably Kristen. Another higher-function switched on my memory and explained where I was, and why. I remembered the journey, the late-night introductions, and the power-cut. I could remember carrying candles around and I could remember the discussions about air mattresses. I didn't remember going to bed.

I didn't know what time it was. Due to the power cut, all the electrical devices around me were flashing "12:00" and waiting to be reset; my body-clock, after 24 hours of non-stop traveling, was doing the same. My phone told me it was one thirty in the afternoon. After the bit of my brain that does maths and knows about time-zones turned up for work a few seconds later, I figured out this meant it was about eight thirty in the morning, which seemed a reasonable time to get up.

---

I've eaten a lot of breakfasts in my time, although probably not as many as I've had hot dinners. Usually they consist of cereal, or, more commonly, toast. The toast is usually rendered edible by some form of butter, but in a pinch cold gravy, mashed potato, or custard will do. Breakfast, in case you hadn't already guessed, is not a meal I take particularly seriously and definitely not one that I've ever spent more than a minute preparing.

You can imagine my shock, therefore, when I reached the top of the stairs and was hit by the smell of all manner of cooking. Various early-rising food pixies had prepared a mountain of tasty, which included everything from bacon to what appeared to be bread and butter pudding. It was easily the biggest, tastiest, and most fattening meal I'd eaten in a few months. A few more introductions were made--an assortment of aunts, uncles, and friends who had gone to bed before we arrived. They were all friendly, and I think I managed to make a reasonably good impression--well as good as could be hoped for, considering that I'd traveled halfway across the world, slept a night on a sofa in my clothes (I was wearing the clothes, not the sofa) and still hadn't showered.

---

After the gargantuan breakfast, I was left at a bit of a loose end. I can't sew, can't bake, and I'm not much good at organizing things, especially things I don't really understand. I had no errands to run, and no important matters to discuss, so I spent a long time just wandering around the house, pushing buttons and giggling. Once that got boring I sat and talked to anyone who'd listen and checked my emails. I watched the heaviest rain I've ever seen bludgeon the landscape, and stared, amazed at the kiteboarders out in the sound -- to whom a hurricane is merely a patch of really good wind. They stayed out there for the whole time we were at the house. Even on the days when we had to batten down the hatches and rope ourselves together if we ventured outside, they were out on the water, leaping off huge waves and jumping over entire islands wearing only wetsuits.

---

Beyond the poolhouse there is a little wooden jetty. It goes out about 20 meters before it ends with a square deck. The deck has two chairs bolted two it and some mooring hooks around the edges. In the afternoon, after the storm abated, me and Kristen walked out there. It was a beautiful day, not something I'm used to in November. The Pamlico sound was glass-flat and the sky pure blue. For an hour or so we sat on the edge of the deck, dangling our toes in the surprisingly warm water and watching the pelicans flapping about on the shore. My body was deeply confused by all this, seeing as it had just got used to the British winter dispensing with the niceties of the indian summer and settling down to some good old-fashioned, pissing-down rain. Nothing on the same scale as Hurricane Ida's outbursts, but somehow wetter, and more insidiously unpleasant; coupled, as it was, with cold winds and steel-grey skies.

After a while Kristen was called into the house for some reason, and I was left to amuse myself again. To this end I wandered back down the jetty in search of pleasingly flat rocks. There were not many -- I'm guessing many others had rummaged among the shoreline pebbles before me -- but I found a couple of reasonable skimming-stones and one pleasingly boulder-like rock. I walked to the edge of the deck and sat myself down by the completely flat water. Conditions were perfect. There was a small patch of ever-so-slightly rippled water about 60 meters off the shore, but that wasn't yet disturbing my reflecting pool.

Stone by stone, I picked my heap away until nothing was left but the boulder. I'd pick each one up, feeling its weight and shape in my hand, then send it skimming across the water. For few moments after each stone sank I watched the ripples dissipate and interfere with each other. I think I managed to get one stone to bounce seven times, but there was no-one there to see it, and I'm a bit too old to impress anyone that way. Once all the flat ones were gone I allowed everything to settle. I kept my feet as still as I could, and tried not to breath too much. I then picked up my huge boulder (it was about twice the size of my fist, roughly spherical, and weighed about 6kg), raised it over my head like a caveman, and heaved it into the air.

I have to admit, it didn't soar like a bird. It flew with the uninspiring ballistic trajectory of a heavy rock thrown by a rather feeble man. If I'd wanted to see something soar, however, I would have watched the birds. I wanted to see this fall, and fall it did. Splooshing into the water like a giant raindrop. The water was momentarily forced down and out, forming into a crown. It held it for one perfect millisecond then -- with a glooping, flopping slopnoise -- it collapsed and sent another sphere, a clear mirror image of the one that went in, flying up into the air then landing in the disturbed water below. I was still watching the water pull tight and flatten when Kristen came back down the jetty to see what I was doing. We got some more stones, and repeated the process. I was impressed to find that, with sufficient force behind it, you can skim a roofing tile quite a long way.

---

Later in the day I decided to make myself useful in whatever ways a generally not very useful person can. I held things, chatted to people, and tried to get a kite off the roof. I spent some more time pushing buttons and wandering around the house before it was time once again to eat tastyfoods until we could no longer stand.

Not wanting to sleep on the sofa again, me and Kristen decided to set up camp in the poolhouse after dinner. We brought an airbed the size of a high-jump crashmat and a heap of bedding. Once the bed was inflated and the stereo fiddled with (even the poolhouse was filled with buttons for me to push), Kristen, loaded down with Jetlag and food, fell asleep at 9pm.

I went back up the house and had a fun evening drinking beer and playing a strange card game that I didn't really understand at the time, and don't remember now. I recall that I seemed to be winning at one point purely because I was able to give my explanations in an english accent.

That night I had the strange experience of sleeping in the middle of a hall about the size of the gym in my primary school. After a while the sounds of the sea were drowned out by the sound of the wind in the trees, and then both were overwhelmed by the rattling of rain on the roof once again.

Gevelow vs. Ida

2009-12-08T22:33:00.001Z

I went to a wedding last week. This is my attempt to record what happened. It will take some time, and probably not do the event justice.

Weddings have never figured much in my social calendar. My family are a pretty godless bunch, for the most part, and my friends are not yet at an age where they crave nuptials, so I wasn't really sure what to expect. As it turned out, even an encyclopedic knowledge of wedding customs wouldn't have helped me understand what was going on. The whole event managed to be nothing like any wedding I've ever heard of while at the same time being the kind of experience that all other weddings aspire to be.

This is not the yet story of that wedding, however, this is the prologue.

---

For a long time the wedding was a vague and nebulous thing in the potential future -- along with Kristen's arrival in the UK. I'd been told that I would be invited if Kristen came to England, but otherwise not, which seemed fair enough. This pairing of events meant that once I was a confirmed guest, with the wedding a definite fixture on my mental calendar (I've never been organized enough to have a real one), I was inevitably rather distracted. Between a newly tangible Kristen, work, and the need to occasionally eat and sleep, Rachel and Ben's wedding remained largely out of my mind until about a week before the event.

The day of our departure lurched unpleasantly from "some time next week" to "tomorrow morning" in that way that such things tend to do. For me, November 11th, 2009, was the first day in years that started at four in the morning. We dragged our suitcase out of the house in the dark, wearing lots of layers. You get a special sort of silence in pre-dawn suburbia that is smashed into little bits by the rattling rumble of a heavy suitcase's plastic wheels. The little wheels were bucking and jerking the bag around from the start, and by the time we neared the station one of them had gone on strike and stopped turning completely. Kristen tried swiveling it to see if it was jammed with something, but the friction-heated axle scorched a big blister on the fleshy part of her thumb. This seemed a bad omen to me, but as I was facing down at least 20 hours of intercontinental travel I decided to keep such observations to myself. I made sympathetic noises and heaved the bag up to the platform.

The train to London Bridge was pretty dull. Like going to work, only with less people and more baggage. There were two off-duty train drivers sitting on the seats in front of us. Eavesdropping on their conversation taught me a number of things I didn't previously know (but most of which I could have guessed): First, train drivers aren't very interesting; Second, Southern railways are locked in a behind-closed-doors argument with the train drivers' union; and third, train drivers are really interested in trains. Like, really, really interested in trains -- more than I realized you could be interested in any mode of transport, even the cool ones like helicopters, hovercraft, and segways. The second train was equally dull, but more brown.

After the usual tedious business of check-in we shuffled, shoeless and saggy-trousered, through security. Things went in trays, laptops were removed, and liquids were scrutinized one last time -- just to be certain that there wasn't a liter bottle of lighter fluid among the shampoo bottles. I checked my pockets for change and keys, checked my feet for shoes, and my waist for a belt. All clear. I step through the scanner...

BEEPBEEPBEEP

It's got to the point now where I am completely unfazed or even remotely embarrassed by the beeping of the metal detector, or the subsequent semi-friendly interrogation and pat-down that the beeping brings. I have no idea why it is but I always set them off. There are no plates in my head, no pins in my bones, and I've never, to my knowledge at least, swallowed any coins. Nonetheless, I get searched often enough to put me right off the idea of becoming a narcotics mule. Once they were satisfied that I didn't have a rocket launcher in my pants, me and Kristen fumbled our shoes back on, refilled our pockets, and stumbled off for some overpriced but sanitary airport food.

The journey from here to Atlanta was pretty much par for the course -- if you've ever flown long-distance then the tedium and discomfort will be familiar. Including the peculiar culinary efforts of Delta Airlines I ate about five meals over the course of the day. In my defense, the day lasted for about two days, so it's not like I'm a total porksnorter. I watched some films on the plane (Harry Potter and the Arse of Beelzebub* and 500 Days of Summer -- which was very good) and slept a little in a neck-crackingly strange position. In Atlanta we had to go through security again for some reason. I guess they were worried that somehow we'd got hold of explosives on the plane and were going to use them to blow up America. Again, shoes were removed, pockets emptied, laptops taken out, and liquids stared at. I stepped forward and...

Nothing.

I was waved through, slightly bemused. I felt like I'd been snubbed. This sense of confusion only increased when I realized that I'd forgotten to take off my belt with its huge metal buckle, or take the coins out of my back pocket. It seems that I make metal detectors work backwards -- perhaps a career as an international smuggler is on the cards after all.

The flight into Norfolk was stomach-distendingly rough. Like trying to sleep on a saggy water-bed that is being carried down a mountain by a group of drunks. Not a particularly pleasant experience. It was like landing in a hurricane or something. Funny that.

While waiting for our bags at Norfolk we looked outside -- Bangladesh-style monsoon rain, Scotland style wind, Southern-style chicken wings -- none of these things seemed to bode well for the drive down to Buxton, NC. Wedding control was contacted, word was that we were go for launch regardless. The weather kept turning uglier by the minute and they wanted us in the house that night in case the department of transportation closed the roads at high tide the next morning. Kristen got an upgrade on the rental car, "something big," she cried to the representative, "with the engine out of a flying fortress and the keel from a goddamn racing yacht." The lady behind the counter gave Kristen the keys to a Chevrolet Malibu, we decided to compromise.

The car smelled of cigarettes and salesman-funk, but our bags disappeared into the cavernous trunk and there was an exciting range of lights, knobs, and switches to play with on the dashboard. After about 20 minutes of pressing buttons we figured out three things: 1. It had no ejector seats, 2. The keel had to be wound down manually, and 3. It was an automatic. Armed with this important information we set the windshield wipers to what my family call "Holiday Speed"** and set off. Kristen driving, me doing some slightly, but not disastrously, incompetent navigation.

We sloshed onto the highway and headed out of town, stopping for some coffee and hash browns at a Waffle House on the way. By the time we reached the top of the outer banks I was already a little nervy. The visibility was low, the roads were under about 2 inches of water, and the wind was literally howling. At this point, just as the roads got smaller and more curvy, the wind picked up to bastard-force, the rain reached an intensity I've only ever seen in films, and giant puddles appeared, lake-like, across the roads. I started wondering if Budget would let us go back and upgrade to a tank.

I'm still not entirely sure whether the rain actually continued to get heavier the whole way, or whether the wind just pelted it harder and harder into the windshield as we got out into more exposed stretches of road. Either way, it wasn't long before it was so heavy I thought it was going to crack the windshield and come rushing into out little haven of dry warmth. In fact, I had quite detailed visions of this happening in my head. I kept this to myself.

We got a call from Kristen's mom. She told us that there was worse to come. I assumed that we were already in the really bad patch she was referring to, and took this to mean that we were making good time. Turns out I was wrong. The conditions did get worse. What was really impressive was when the storm managed to go that extra mile, and get even worse than that.

When we passed Kittyhawk conditions were bad, going on scary. The rain was sloshing around the road, and all the other cars about were leaving swirling, turbulent eddies of water in their wakes. Get too near to another car and the wash would roll up the windscreen like a wave up the beach, totally swamping the wipers for a few seconds and leaving you almost completely blind. At times like that I found myself staring at the blurry patches of red coming from the lights of the cars in front, waiting for them to grow and fill the windscreen, getting suddenly closer... crash! I kept this to myself, and made conversation about the Wright Flyer, particularly the groundbreaking, but fundamentally flawed efforts of Otto von Lillenthal. He hadn't considered the need for a large rear stabilizer, you see, so he ended up tentpegging into the ground...

Over the next hour I went from teeth gritting, pulse-racing, terror to some sort of plateau beyond that point. After driving for a while we reached a long causeway bridge, I couldn't see anything on either side of it, so I have no idea what it was over. Here the wind picked up to such an intensity that the puddles and lakes were gone. The wind was instead flicking the water around in whirlpooling clouds a foot or two above the surface. The road was periodically dotted with strange looking grey blobs, with little smudges of grey spread on the road around them. It took me a while to realize that they were seagulls, surrounded by little trails of feathers, lying where they had fallen after being dashed against the railings of the bridge.

After that we hit a stretch where the road was essentially all there was to the island. A cross section would look like this:

ATLANTIC OCEAN - SAND DUNES - ROAD - SAND DUNES - PAMLICO SOUND

Here the puddles covered the entire road. Kristen had to slow almost to a halt and aim for the center of the road. I held my breath and hoped that they were shallower than they looked. On a few occasions the water was washing across the road like a shallow, slow-flowing river. Driving through these was probably the scariest part of the trip, I ran out of humorous anecdotes to entertain and amuse and just tried to keep my breathing steady.

Later on we were informed that we hadn't been driving through rivers formed by the rainwater overflow. Apparently the waves were breaking over the dunes and washing onto the road. I think if it had been light enough for us to see this we would have screamed all the way to Croatan Ridge and spent the next few days curled up in the fetal position. Luckily for us, and for the wedding (a traumatized, catatonic maid-of-honor wouldn't have been much use to anyone) we carried on unaware of just how scared we should have been.

By the time we reached the dirt road that led to the house, trailing Mark's truck through the headlight-deep pools of water, I really couldn't have cared less whether or not the car went down like the titanic. I knew that we were within walking (or swimming) distance of the house and that was enough to stop me from worrying anymore, my suit could get eaten by fish for all I cared. The void that the absence of fear left in my head quickly filled up with anger. I think this is a built-in automatic reaction with me (something along the lines of "someone has put me in a situation where I have become this scared, someone is going to get a kicking"). By the time I got out of the car I was in a mood to punch someone and scream. I kept this to myself.

There wasn't really anyone I could be reasonably angry at, however, so I tried to keep it to myself. When we got up the house I made a rather theatrical show of being shaken up, I downed a beer and then immediately asked for another, not because I needed to steady my nerves, but because I needed some way of excusing myself from talking for long enough to calm down.

Everyone was lovely and friendly, however, so my urge to scream rapidly faded to nothing. Me and Kristen were led on a tour around the house, or at least around some of it (I didn't realize quite how much of it there was at that point) and received hugs, handshakes etc., from Rachel, Ben, and those of the friends and family who were still awake.

I expect that more happened along these lines, but I was so completely exhausted that I didn't really take any of it in. After a few minutes the power went out, and me and Kristen were led by candle-light to a pair of sofas that had been made up for us. Kristen left the room to find something, and by the time she returned I was out cold, fully dressed, and could not be woken for love nor beatings. During the night the power came back on, along with the lights and a stereo that had its speakers right by my head. I didn't stir.

-Ben

*The newest one - I don't remember the name, or the film, come to think of it.

**Yes, I'll be honest, a holiday marked by apocalyptic storms is not an occurance I'm unfamiliar with -- I've been on holiday in Wales.

Fun with Parcels

2009-12-03T20:43:00.004Z

On tuesday a DHL man tried to deliver our new broadband router. Unsurprisingly, I wasn't in, on account of me having a job. Things went downhill from there. I was left a note expressing their surprise and sadness at the fact that I wasn't there to say hi. I was given two options, either have it delivered again (on a weekday) or go and collect it from my "local DHL office [Map on reverse]".

I looked at the map on reverse. I laughed. Local? It's in an industrial estate next to the battersea power station, who the fuck is that local to? The only people it's local to, now I think about it, are the people in the various other parcel distribution warehouses in that area. Other than the royal mail vans and UPS trucks it's a godforsaken wasteland of abandoned railway sidings, four-lane roads, and unlit, barriered-and-concierged office complexes. Oh, and the battersea dog's home. Nonetheless, I call their hotline and select "collect from office" because that option would still be quicker than getting them to continually redeliver the parcel until one day a delivery happened to coincide with me or kristen calling in sick.

The next day I decide to go there after work. It takes about half an hour's tube ride to get to Vauxhall station from my office. From there it's a fifteen minute walk through a biblical deluge, being continually soaked all the way by the lorries roaring past on the dual carriageway. Once I arrive at DHL's office I find it has all the charm of a prison. I'm buzzed through the main gate and have to walk down a path to the "customer reception" surrounded by razorwire-topped metal fences.

"hi, I'm here to collect a package that was sent out for delivery yesterday"
I give him the number on the slip I was given, he types it into the system.
"I'm sorry sir, but that package is not here"
"what do you mean? where is it?"
"it has been sent out for delivery"
"I phoned your call-center last night and said I'd come and pick it up here today"
"it has been sent out for delivery, look"
At this point he turns his monitor round and jabs his biro at a line of text that says SENT OUT FOR DELIVERY 07:38
"That's nice, but I'm not questioning whether it has been sent out or not, I'm asking you why."
He holds up the slip left by the driver
"packages are sent out for delivery three times, if they are not received by then, they remain at the depot for collection"
To help me understand, he jabs his biro at the relevant line on the slip.
"I know, I can read. What I want to know is why it was sent out for delivery when I asked you not to do so"
"did you call the number on the slip?"
"yes"
"was it an automated service?"
"yes"
"I'm sorry, the automated service is unreliable, we do not always recieve notifications"
At this point he scribbles a phone number down on the slip
"this is the number for this branch"
"why don't you just put this number on the card in the first place?"
"We have asked management, but they have not printed new cards"
"It would have been useful to know all this before I came all the fucking way out here in the pouring rain"
"I'm sorry sir, call during business hours tomorrow and you can arrange collection"
"Can't I just arrange collection now?"
"no sir. "
"Why not"
"I do not have access to the necessary systems"

There is a pause while I count to ten in my head.

"The vans leave before business hours, yes?"
"yes sir, they leave before 8"
"so if I call you tomorrow, it will be too late to stop you sending it out again"
"yes sir"
"so even if I call you tomorrow the earliest I'll be able to pick it up is friday?"
"yes sir"
"That's not fucking acceptable, how many times does this happen each week?"
"I don't know"
"Is there no-one here who can stop this being sent out tomorrow?"
"not at this time sir"

exasperated pause

"ok, fine."

I give up, pick up my slip, and stomp back to the station, shaking with rage. Despite running at every interchange, I still miss every connection home. This makes me angrier. When I finally get home, just before 8pm, I stamp around the empty house shouting at the air and struggling to resist the urge to smash something. I pick up the pile of mail on the doormat and notice that this time the DHL guy didn't even bother to leave a slip. I go to the kitchen, take a beer out of the fridge and turn on the radio.

The doorbell rings. I see the yellow and red of a DHL uniform through the glass. Iopen the door and sign for my package.

He must have been running late.

I have internet, and I'm glad I won't have to go back to Battersea. But I'm still annoyed with DHL.

Englishness

2009-11-27T16:44:00.003Z

Like every British tank since the Centurion, and most other British Armoured Fighting Vehicles, the Challenger II contains a built-in boiling vessel (BV) also known as a 'kettle' or 'bivvie' for water which can be used to brew tea or produce other hot beverages. The BV is a design requirement for all armoured vehicles of the British Armed Forces, and a feature almost unique to the armed forces of the UK.

We may not be a military superpower any more, but at least our Main Battle Tank has adequate tea and coffee making facilities as standard.

Green Cross Code

2009-09-08T21:35:00.002+01:00

I was born in south east London, raised in south east London, and currently live in south east London. This makes me, A: not very well traveled, and B: intrinsically suspicious of people who live on the other side of the Thames. Before I started working in Islington I'd never really had much call to go there -- I used to go shopping in central london, and sometimes around Camden Market, but those places are like a sort of demilitarized zone, they're an independent entity, not really part of north or south london. In the two years that I've been working in Islington and Old Street I've learned, unsurprisingly, that north Londoners are much like their compatriots in the dirty south; they have a bit more money, and they dress like prats, but they're otherwise identical.

With one important exception. You see, while working in Islington has given me the opportunity to see how the other half live, it has also given me the opporunity to see how the other half die. While most of them seem to work the normal live, love, get old, get sick, and die pattern, a significant minority seem to want to cut straight to the end. Sit yourself down on a park bench near Angel station and you'll see it clear as day -- the people of Islington cross the road like people who have given up on life.

I don't mean that they're a little cocky with motorists, or that they perhaps misjudge their timing a little. No, I mean they will try and cross a busy dual carriageway by going across the middle of an intersection. Without looking. With headphones in. Writing a text message. I suppose I'd be ok with this if it wasn't for the fact that I don't like seeing dead people when I'm out on my lunchbreak. It really tends to sour the day. Incident boards with "Fatal Accident: Did you see anything" are pretty common pieces of road furniture, and the air ambulance roars over my office so often they may as well just paint a big H in the middle of the Upper Street and be done with it. I've seen the immediate aftermath of 7 fatal car accidents within about 300 meters of my office.

As a result of all this, I found this song interesting. It's well worth a watch, catchy pop song, good video, and it looks to have been filmed around Old Street station.

Raising Awareness

2009-08-28T00:04:00.002+01:00

I hate this phrase. I was watching an interview with someone associated with the 'climate camp' thing earlier on and she used it about four times in one minute. The best part was when she said that their aim was to "raise awareness of climate change and what we, at climate camp, are doing about it".

Firstly, informing the public about climate change is a task better done by the scientists that have been studying it for decades, not a bunch of humanities students whose awareness of it consists of the knowledge that it is a 'bad thing'. When it is coopted into the agenda of a radical political movement, especially one that does very little to endear itself to the generally self-interested population, it makes the task harder for those politicians trying to achieve some sort of workable consensus on the issue. I think for a lot of people over here the 'climate camp' movement is like the cocky little kid who shouts "yeah, you fuckin' walk away!" moments after you've decided they aren't worth the trouble of a fight -- it brings out a contrarian streak that makes you do what you'd decided you didn't want to do. The lesson is that while this may give you a temporary feeling of satisfaction, you'll find yourself standing, sheepish and scared, in front of the headteacher soon enough.

The other thing is my continuing dislike of pointless gestures. One day I'll try and figure out the exact mental criteria I have for the boundary between protest, activism, and utterly pointless gestures, but for now I'll just note this rule -- If you say your intention is to Raise Awareness, then chances are that what you're doing is a pointless gesture.

Pretty

2009-08-15T18:37:00.002+01:00

A 1934 BMW R7. I don't ride motorbikes, I can't even ride bicycles, but oh man. Want. It looks like it's going to pounce on something and eat it. It wasn't ever put into production because it was too complicated and expensive to produce, it was packed into a box and kept in a warehouse somewhere. What with all the war, chaos, etc., it was only a few years ago that it was rediscovered and reassembled.

-Ben

NHS

2009-08-12T22:49:00.002+01:00

I know that the standard of debate in the US hasn't exactly been stellar for a while, but I'm finding myself getting increasingly annoyed with the fact that we on this side of the pond are being dragged into the mudslinging. According to the American right wing, we live in some kind of dystopian nightmare state, where government bureaucrats decide whether or not we get medical treatment on the basis of our worth to society.

I feel I should put it on record here that that is not the case. We don't leave the old and infirm to die. Last year my great uncle had an extremely complex experimental heart operation at the age of 90, -- he didn't have to pay anything. My grandmother will soon be having a hip replacement at the age of 84. The NHS is not a terrifying monster -- it's not perfect, and yes, there are waiting lists, but it's cheaper, fairer, and delivers better public health outcomes than the US system. Unlike my friends in the US I don't have to worry about what will happen if I get sick or hurt myself, about affording copayments, or losing my health insurance if I change jobs.

A little example of how healthcare rolls over here: Last year I badly hurt my knee. It wasn't a life threatening injury, nor was it painful to the point where I couldn't work, but it hurt a lot and it left me walking with a Igor-style limp. I saw a general practicioner, then a specialist, then I did a few months of physiotherapy. At no point did I have to pay for anything. Now how would that have gone down in the states? As a non-life-threatening condition, I would not have been able to afford treatment for this on my salary, not even if I had company insurance. Under the US system I would still be walking with a limp. I would be in pain most of the time. I wouldn't be able to go to the gym. I would be fat and unfit again.

Like most people in the UK, I'm happy with the NHS and I'd take to the streets to defend it against anyone who threatened to take it away. This slandering of our system is something that many brits are going to take personally. If the US media is not careful we might start making really barbed remarks. You know, hurtful shit that people won't even realise was an insult until they're on the train home.

-Ben

George Fullerton

2009-08-11T22:48:00.002+01:00

I saw today that George Fullerton has died. It's not going to be national news, but his nonetheless he was important. His name will be revered whenever two men gather over a pre-CBS stratocaster or an L-2000 and drool.

----

I've always had a great appreciation for those, like the late Mr Fullerton, who tinker away behind the scenes, who make the unglamorous innovations and get largely passed over by history. I think people like this should be celebrated, not by having their roles exaggerated as some historians tend to do, but by having their contribution noted and appreciated for what it was. People writing histories tend to simplify things, they like to create heroes, visionaries, which are then mythologized as lone geniuses. These brilliant men are held up as the pinnacle of intellectual achievement, the importance of their teamwork, communication, and collaboration are left out.

When I'm writing about the history of science and technology I always try and give a mention to the other people, the people who laid the foundations or did the unglamorous bits. I always try to squeeze in people like Tommy Flowers (The Computer), Ernst Chain (Penicillin), Charlie Taylor (The Aeroplane), and Rosalind Franklin (DNA). Even though those people were, in turn, working with many other people, I feel like including at least one name in addition to the mythologized hero helps introduce at least the idea of collaboration, if not the actual extent of it.

I'm now going to go and play my bass (which is a faithful copy of a Fender-Fullerton design.)

-Ben

Ben vs. Knees

2009-08-07T21:48:00.004+01:00

I have no problem with knees in general, there are even two knees that I'm really rather fond of. However, those knees are not mine. My knees belong to a class of their own -- that is, knees which I deeply dislike. They're not objectionable looking knees, a little nobbly perhaps; and I think the kneecaps are a bit asymmetrical, but they do have an infuriating habit of fucking with my plans.

Around this time two years ago I was a recently graduated unemployed layabout. As I believe is the case with many unemployed layabouts, I found that inactivity bred more inactivity, mentally and phyiscally. I'd made great strides while I was at university; I lost a lot of weight (about 40 pounds) and I'd done a whole world of brainthinky. In the world of rejection letters and endless adverts for jobs in recruitment, however, I found this progress slipping away. By mid-august I'd put about 15 pounds back on, and was rapidly losing the ability to construct coherent sentences (as I'm sure the blog posts from that period will attest) so I decided to do something decisive.

I started going out running every morning. Not very far at first -- the first few times I went out my wobbly and protesting limbs screamed at me to stop within about a minute of my starting -- but I gradually increased the distances I ran everyday, and the speed that I ran it. By october I was running something in the order of 2 miles every afternoon and feeling good. I'd got to the point where I was fit enough that I could do this without once feeling like I wanted to die.I felt myself getting fitter and stronger and I lost about 10 pounds. I even got a job.

A few days after a I started working I went to a local folk night to play guitar with my dad. I was carrying my fretless bass in its bag and thinking about work the next day (I was still new to the world of proper work, and was still expecting to be fired at any moment.) About 10 metres from the door of the pub my left knee made a funny clicking noise and gave way under me. For the rest of the evening it hurt something ungodly. At the time I figured it was something to do with being pitched around in strange directions on the tube; I acknowledged the possibility that my running was a factor, but I assumed that it wasn't the primary cause. This seems a little odd but what you have to bear in mind is that at the time I'd not been out running for three days because of work, and I hadn't ever experienced any pain or discomfort in my knees either during or after running. This incident gets a passing mention in a post I wrote later that evening about all the things about Folk music that get on my nerves.

After a few days, however, it went away. I left it about a week and then went out running one evening after work. This wasn't a very pleasant experience. I wasn't in any pain (again, my knee felt fine during the run) but it was mid-november by this point, and it was dark, and raining, hard. I was running the route that my feet knew off by heart, and there was no-one else around, so knowing where I was going wasn't a problem. Nonetheless, with headphones in my ears and rain splattering on my glasses I was essentially running through a giant, dark, sensory deprivation tank, which wasn't much fun. When I got home my knee felt a little odd, perhaps a bit swollen and tender. The next day it hurt, and continued to hurt for longer than it did the first time. I decided I should knock the running on the head for a month or two.

Over the next few weeks it got worse. It started to hurt all the time. Then hurt more. I started to walk with a limp. A visit to the doctor left me with a support bandage and two weeks worth of muscle relaxants to help the sprain heal. These did fuck all except for making my knee sweaty and uncomfortable when I was at work. I went back to the doctor a few weeks later and got an appointment with the local joint specialist (no, not Stoner Pete) at Queen Mary's.

I described the appointment with the specialist -- and his diagnosis -- here. In addition to explaining why my left knee had so catastrophically fucked up, he was able to tell me why my right knee locked up painfully when I sat in certain positions (a habit it has had for as long as I can remember).

For the next month or two I had to spend every friday morning at a physiotherapy center. I was made to ride on exercise bikes, perform excruciatingly painful exercises involving giant rubber balls, and do odd but difficult things involving frisbees and mini-trampolines. I missed quite a lot of work and had to spend a lot of time on the bus. As there were no showers at the hospital that I could use I had to go all the way home before I could clean myself up. The unpleasant result of that was that I got a yeast infection. On my fucking eyelids. It worked though, and I was able to go back to walking normally. I joined a gym so that I could keep fit without smashing my knees to pieces and was able to go around without looking like a man with a wooden leg.

That's been the situation, more or less, for the last year now -- my knee has twinged from time to time, but not for very long. I've been otherwise fine. That was, until last week, when a routine visit to the gym left me hobbling around like a crone again. I'm currently sitting on my sofa dosed up on painkillers. I have no idea whether this will pass in a few days, or whether I'm going to have to spend another 8 weeks going to the physio every friday and frantically scratching at my eyelids like a crazy person.

Still, I've got Fats Waller playing out of my stereo, and any scientist will tell you that you can't be grumpy while listening to a man who called himself "Fats".

-Ben

G&T

2009-08-05T20:53:00.003+01:00

I am sitting in my kitchen listening to a little light music and drinking a Gin and Tonic. It's a very nice Gin and Tonic. It has ample quantities of Gordon's gin, Schweppes Tonic, and ice. I don't have a very good memory for shopping lists, so this glass is conspicuously lacking in lime. I'm sure the more blinkered and materialistic of you out there will be thinking that my gin and tonic is incomplete but this is not so. Allow me to explain.

A few years ago I saw a documentary that looked at how the human brain handles arithmetic. As part of their research they went to a Chinese school where the children were taught to use abacuses to calculate fabulously complex sums. They got fast with the abacuses. Very fast. Like a frantic game of table tennis. It was impressive to watch, even though it all seemed a little too much like hard work to me. The really clever part, however, came when they took the abacuses away and taught the children to visualise them in their heads. With a little practice, these same children were able to perform calculations at the same speed as they did before, but just by closing their eyes and wiggling their fingers back and forth for a few seconds.

"This sort of thing is all very well for industrious oriental types," I thought, "but how could it help me?"

---

For many years the wonder of that technique languished at the back of my mind -- not forgotten, just unused -- until one day I found myself with a shocking absence of limes. I didn't even have any lemons, which are the flavoring of a scoundrel anyway. While a lesser man would have blanched at such a prospect, I simply stroked my mustache thoughtfully, adjusted the set of my monocle, and -- recalling the cunning tricks of the foriegn children -- poured the malaria-preventing drink of kings regardless. While I was doing this I visualised the lime, and chopped it with the power of my mind. I placed this incorporeal lime, this abstract idea of tangy goodness, into my cold glass and drank it down.

The imaginary lime was just as good as a real one, and had fewer calories. Having achieved such a feat of mental prowess I felt like a bhutanese monk. I was proud of the years in which I have honed my powers; meditating on many a clear beverage after a hard day writing about the inscrutable yet fascinating customs of mohammedians. I stood in the kitchen of my london home, feeling like a sadhu in tweeds, and poured myself another.

It remains to be seen whether this lime of the mind is as effective at preventing scurvy.

-Ben

New York 3

2009-08-02T22:39:00.009+01:00

I'll finish this eventually, probably.

Ellis Island and Liberty Island
During the time I was in the city I took a fairly relaxed attitude to the business of sightseeing -- no itineraries were written out, or lengthy plans made -- I didn't want to waste my time in the city, but I didn't have to work very hard in order to avoid this. There was only one day where me and Kristen actually planned things in advance, and actually went as far as setting an alarm. The night before, in a slightly drunken haze, I'd decided that we should visit Ellis Island the next day, as that was the only major thing that I'd missed the first time.

It turned out that the Ferry to Ellis Island also stopped at Liberty Island. This was an unexpected bonus, although actually going up inside her (snigger) would have required me to have planned ahead and booked tickets some time before I'd even decided to come to New York. The downside of getting a ferry that stops at an internationally known symbol of goodness and the American Way is that you are treated as a potential terrorist from the moment you go near the ticket booth. I went through quite a lot of 'airport style' security while in New York, and had my bag searched* more times than I can count, but the statue of liberty security still came as a bit of a surprise. I mean, their metal detectors were set off by my glasses, for christ's sake, not even when I flew to the US days after a major terrorist scare did I encounter such zealously calibrated machines. We got on the boat after a few minutes being probed in the security tent and were soon chugging away across the harbor. When we got near to the Island the boat started to pitch over at a rather alarming angle as everybody went to the moosh-baroo side to take photos. Kristen, being a salty sea dog** by trade, assured me that this was within safe limits, although it felt still rather precarious to my jelly-like landlubberlegs.

Once disembarked, we walked around the Island and took some pictures of the giant green lady with the big feet. We probably appeared in the background of far more pictures than we actually took ourselves. The statue of Liberty is very big, and very, er, statuey. I've seen her from fairly close up before (on ferries and the like) and well, there are few women who look prettier if you sit at their feet and stare up their nose.

Ellis Island lies just across a narrow channel from Liberty Island. The channel, like most places in New York Harbor, is filled with red and green navigation buoys. Kristen carefully explained the purpose of these but I've probably got all the details mixed up in my head now, so it's just as well that my job hasn't yet required me to man any helms or tillers.

Ellis Island is home to the fascinating Ellis Island museum, which is all about immigration and immigrants (the right sort of immigrants obviously, the ones that politicians are descended from, not the sort that speak spanish). Unlike most New York museums, Ellis Island's is free. It was a fascinating place, filled with little exhibits about the various stages of the Immigration process and the immigrants themselves. It also had some areas where they'd reconstructed what it had looked like when it was in use, which were a bit grim. On the whole though, the impression the exhibits left you with was that Ellis Island wasn't the terrible immigrant marketplace that it's often portrayed as, and that only a tiny, weensy proportion of people were ever rejected and sent home. I do think that they would have been able to process the immigrants much faster if they'd not put the main reception area -- where lots of forms had to be filled out, and questions answered -- in the great hall with the massive windows looking out over Manhattan. I'm guessing that if you'd come from the arse end of the Ukraine, the sight of 19th century New York would have been a little distracting.

The Museum at Ellis Island manages to be free, incidentally, by tapping into an aspect of american culture that I've always found a little sad. You see, in addition to the informative exhibits there were lots of subtle, and not-so-subtle, plugs for the geneological research services they provide on the Island -- "think you might have an ancestor that came through here? Come to our Research-O-Tron and for just thirty dollars we'll tell you."

It's not that I have a problem with finding out about one's past; what bothers me about the sort of research encouraged by Ellis Island is that, most of the time, I feel like it's providing a surrogate cultural identity to people who don't felt that american culture is good enough, or solid enough, to ground themselves in. You know, like the native born New Yorkers who will tell you, with a completely straight face, that they're Irish. Usually on the basis of having one Irish grandparent (I think most people have at least one irish grandparent).

I suppose to many people it's just always more desirable to be from somewhere else, somewhere you can idealise as being more honest, sophisticated, or authentic than where you were born. It's that phenomenon that makes me reluctant to advertise my Britishness when I'm in bars over there -- I've found myself squirming and uncomfortable while some middle-aged guy from the Bronx tells me how he's from Scotland. It's like how a substantial part of the English Upper class have spent the last thousand years or so shutting their eyes, learning Greek or latin, and desperately pretending that they're not in a vulgar, germanic/nordic/celtic country like England. "I mean, ugh, our greatest playright didn't even pay attention to the classiclal unities, how ghastly". The cultural output of the United States has one of the most impressive canons of literature around and american history is marked by a string of noble ideas and well-intentioned individuals that were never able to get the upper hand in Europe. Despite all this, there are still those who cling to the idea that they're not really american, that they're just working over here for a while -- like, I don't know, five generations, and then they'll go home. I feel like these people have missed the point somewhat.

hmm. That was a rather substantial digression.

Rockerfeller Center
Later that day, after stopping to refill on booze, we went to the Rockerfeller center. Not for shopping, or to look at the hole in the ground where the ice rink is in the winter, but to go up it. Of the various things that I'd done in New York last time I was there, the one thing that stuck most in my mind was the view from the top of the empire state building. It was also the one thing that I was determined I had to drag Kristen along to. I didn't want to do the same thing twice though, so I decided to go up the other skyscaper in New York with a viewing area at the top. This was a very wise choice. The top of the Empire State Building, while very high indeed, is ultimately just a narrow balcony encased in a clunky steel cage -- People are constantly treading on your toes, taking photos of the back of your head, and putting the backs of their heads in your photos. By contrast, the Top of the Rock, as it is named, is a three-floor high terrace that covers the whole of the stepped, flat roof of the building. It's big, and comparatively empty. Thanks to the fact that it was closed to the public between the early eighties and the early naughties it's got a well thought through, unobtrusive suicide-guard made from panels of bulletproof glass, rather than the array of steel gratings welded onto other steel gratings that the Empire State Building has.

You can stay up there for hours, and we did, from the early evening to well after sunset. We wandered between the different levels of the terrace, played with the silly art installations, and took photos of darkness settling over the Empire State Building. Through the big binoculars on the rooftop you could see camera flashes from the people on the top of the Empire state building, and the tiny people looking straigh back at you.

Oh, and it had one other really cool feature. As the doors are closing on the lift as you're going up the attendant says "Look up". You look up, and you see a white, backlit drop ceiling. Meh, you think, what's so impressive about that.

Then it goes transparent, and you start flying up a dimly lit liftshaft at the rate of a couple of floors a second. It's like something out of a science fiction film, and quite painfully cool.

So, er. I think that's everything I can think of to say now. I might think of other things at some other time.

-Ben

* in a manner that manages to leave you annoyed while at the same time being cursory to the point of uselessness.

**one of the pretty ones; she's got no tattoos, and she's never lost a limb to the jaws of the White Whale.

Recruitment

2009-07-29T22:49:00.003+01:00

I'm extremely uncomfortable around evangelical christians.

I'm not saying that I can smell faith on people's clothes or anything weird like that -- I don't believe there's an intrinsic quality to the religious that renders them repulsive -- but I find myself in a social situation where there's a lot of jesus flying about I get really uncomfortable and feel an overwhelming urge to run away screaming. I've never been quite sure why this is -- I have long suspected that I'm just a prejudiced asshat with an intellectually superior attitude (which is still likely) -- but I tend to get the creeping heebie-jeebies around my (mercifully few) evangelical christian friends.

I get the same feeling when I'm in restaurants and bars in the US. The glowing friendliness of wait-staff and barmaids makes me incredibly uneasy. These two phenomena share a root cause, although they're different situations in every other way. In both examples I'm bothered by the suspicion that the person I'm talking to is feigning interest in me and what I have to say. You see, I talk a lot of crap; I'm frequently an obnoxious arse and tend to go off on face-grindingly boring monologues if someone accidentally indicates an interest in one of my specialist subjects (guitars, books, most forms of techno-nerdiness). I know this, and it bothers me. I try very hard to be a nice person and, sadly, the only way I know to achieve this is by very carefully watching the reactions of the person or people I'm talking to. If I suspect that someone is humoring me -- whether to get me to attend church or in search of a big tip -- it throws me off completely. I immediately become all quiet and introverted (which isn't something I have any conscious ability to control). If I think I'm being humored then I lose the ability to tell whether I'm being a wanker or not. It's like running around with your eyes shut in a room full of fine china.

It's the proselytising that bothers me, you see, not the jesus. I've got plently of objections to Judeo-Christian religions, but those don't stop me from being friends with religious people, or having tremendous respect for many who have done great things in the name of god. When faced with the prospect of a night out with clean-living christians -- their faces set in rapt attention at my inane babbling, or creased in laughter at my dumb jokes as if they're in the company of Oscar fucking Wilde himself -- I run away and hide.

The only way to bypass this reaction is to get me drunk, as then I cease to care how much I'm offending or boring people, unfortunately there's not generally any booze to be had at religious gatherings.

-Ben

One of the things that triggered this whole rant off was this article, which I found when doing some research the other day. It clearly shows how modern Christian groups are using all the techniques of secular sociology, anthropology, and psychology, to find those vulnerable enough to willingly jump on their bandwagon.

New York: Part the rest

2009-07-26T21:40:00.006+01:00

I mentioned in my last post that I was going to write the rest later. Well, as often happens when I say things like that, other things came up. Specifically for the last two weeks my job has consisted almost exclusively of writing articles -- which tends to drain one's ability to create anything original outside of work. Twelve thousand words later though, the last of said articles is now done -- I should be able to think about now. Unfortunately that fortnight spent writing a dictionary of Islamic architecture has given the memories time to smunge together in my head. I don't think I've forgotten anything, but the events are now lumped in a big memory sack with 'New York 2009' written on the tag, rather than in little bags for each day. This may mean that I'll mix up days, or put things in the wrong order. So if things seem inconsistent or strange then that's probably why. Without further ado, I'll now return to my babbling.

Central Park
After my last trip to New York city I decided that I could happily spend days on end just wandering around central park. Without the pressing need to see the sights I did precisely that. Me and Kristen went there for the first time on my first day in town. Looking back, it seems a rather odd choice of activity, considering how hard it was raining, but such is the nature of the Englishman on holiday. A childhood of holidays in the UK makes you unwilling to put off anything (even a visit to the beach) just because of rain. If you start getting picky like that then you'll have to get used to spending your whole holiday either in your tent or your car.

One of the first things that we stopped to look in Central Park showed me that it was not just the English who have been indoctrinated with that attitude to outdoor recreational activities. Central Park contains a rather lovely boating lake, you can hire a rowboat and take your lovely amour or your bored kids out on the water. Later in the week I saw it bathed in glorious sunshine, but not on this day. To be frank, it was pissing it down. Me and Kristen sat under a London Plane tree (an excellent import, they keep the rain off and can survive even in toxic polluted cities) and watched a flotilla of amateur oarsmen and their soggy passengers as they moved around the lake. During the really heavy downpours the couples cuddled together under their umbrellas, drifting aimlessly, and the gleefully soaked children laughed like drains as theirdamp, red faced fathers rowed furiously for the shelter of the bridge. What really made the scene perfect was the sheer number of the little rowboats that were being rowed backwards - flat end fowards - often by the aforementioned red faced fathers. Such a display of unfettered landlubbery filled me with love.

We walked up through the park about as far as 130th street, before deciding that we were too wet, too hungry, and too much in need of a drink to keep going any further. On our way up through the park we passed through its many different zones, from the dense wooded areas -- with their big boulders and artfully integrated footpaths -- to the broad playing fields and running tracks -- with signs that said "These areas are reserved for Active Recreation only". A few days later I was amused to find that a similar sign exists on the entrance to the sheep meadow restricting access to those engaged in Passive Recreation -- I recreated so passively there that I dozed off.

We went back there a few days later, after visiting the National Design Museum, which I'll write about in a moment. We had just bought burritos from a little mexican place on the Upper east side somewhere that was actually failing its health inspection while they prepared our order. For ten minutes we sat there while a tall, no-nonsense woman from the Public Health Department rooted around in all their cupboards and demanded to know why they kept hand-soap in the ketchup dispenser ("what if someone thought it was sauce and put it on someone's food?".. "But it's soap, everyone knows it's soap" etc etc.) Bearing this experience in mind, we decided that we'd go somewhere nice (with public toilets) to eat our food (which was actually very tasty and entirely soap-free), so we ended up back in the park. That evening we snoozed in the sun and watched yet another New York sunset. Manhattan sunsets are an odd experience, they occur about an hour before sunset everywhere else on the east coast because in Mahattan the horizon is generally about 50 stories up. I believe manhattan-henge (where the setting sun lines up perfectly with the crosstown streets) occurred at some point while I was over there, but I didn't see it.

On one of the other days we went to Prospect Park in Brooklyn, which was designed by the same architects who oversaw Central Park's construction. It was a pretty place, very different to Central Park. Much more, er, natural, somehow. The landscape felt less deliberately sculpted, and there weren't great housing condos looming over you the whole time. The natural vibe of the place was slightly amplified by the fact that it was a little dishevelled. It felt much more lived-in as a result though; there were people having barbeques and parties, children playing football (proper football), and an astonishing amount of wildlife. I saw a bunny (wild, like the ones in Canterbury) and an actual, real-life chipmunk.

---

It seems that I've done the same thing as I did last time. This was going to be a quick write-up of all the places I'd been, but I've ended up with a huge lump of writing about just one thing. I'll write more tomorrow, for real this time.

-Ben

New York Part One: Governors Island

2009-07-13T22:54:00.006+01:00

As the title suggests, I've been in New York for the last week or two, and I return with tales to tell and things to describe. I was going to write about all the various things I'd seen in one big post, but I got as far as Governors Island and ran out of time to write anymore. I'll keep going tomorrow.

Governors Island
The area around New York city contains a lot of water, more than most foreigners realise I think. I mean, if you stood at any given point in New York and ran in a dead straight line, chances are you'd fall into the sea after a few minutes (for the sake of argument I'm assuming that you, dear reader, are some sort of freight train-like hulk that can run through walls). Within this wetness are many islands. Manhattan is a small Island, Brooklyn and Queens are also on an Island (a Long one), Staten Island is an Island (this last point may seem obvious to Americans, but I live in the land of the Isle of Dogs, the Isle of Purbeck, and the Isle of Thanet -- none of which are actually Islands). While these are fairly well known, inhabited places, there are many smaller Islands in the harbour that aren't as well known, or as developed. With the possible exception of Roosevelt Island (which is essentially a micro Milton Keynes surrounded by water as far as I can tell) I think I've been on all of the Islands big enough to fit two feet on and interesting enough to be worth the effort of doing so. The most interesting of these smaller Islands is a little island about half a mile from the southern point of Manhattan, called Governors Island.

Governors Island is so named because it was where the colonial governor lived back in the days of yore. A location that was chosen, I expect, because islands are conveniently angry mob proof and we British are notoriously squeamish about tar and feathers. There's no remnant of this stage of its history left on the island today (the angry mob won, after all) but plenty more interesting historic things have been squished onto the Island since then.

The island is a brilliant place to visit because it has been spared the development and renewal which has worked its way through the streets of the rest of New York city. Beginning in 1783, Governors Island was owned and controlled by the United States Army. It was a military base, with housing for officers and barracks for the enlisted men. In 1966 the Army decided to relocate their command position somewhere else -- presumably because they believed that the entire of New York City was first in line to be turned to sizzling puddles of glass and the occasional shadow scorched into the bedrock (judging from the fallout shelters that most apartment buildings have over there, I'm guessing this was a commonly held view). From 1966 the Coastguard took over the island, using it as their command base for all operations along the Atalantic coast. I'm guessing at some stage in the following decades some people from the city of New York asked why exactly they simply had to have their base of operations right next to some of the most expensive real-estate in the world, because in 1996 the coastguard packed up their things and left, giving the land, and everything on it (right down to the appliances in the kitchens) to the City of New York.

Since then it has sat largely unused. The city wants to make it into a great cultural and historical destination, but it doesn't seem to know exactly how, and more to the point, needs lots of money to do it (In the US, getting government money for anything that involves the word 'culture' is usually about as easy as sucking dolphins from the exhaust pipe of a 1973 AMC Gremlin). They're doing enough restoration and maintenance on the existing structures to keep them from falling down, and letting people visit to see if they find it interesting. What this all means is that the Island has no velvet ropes, no tacky exhibitions or tours, and no attempt to exclude the structures and parts of the island that aren't relevant to some notable event or period. There are no signs telling you what is important and very few restrictions on where you can go. As Kristen said at one point during our exploration "hey, the tape says 'caution', it doesn't say we can't go through anyway". You spend the whole time you're there feeling ever-so-slightly like you're trespassing somewhere really cool.

We started by looking around Fort Jay -- a star fort that was built in the early 19th century to defend New York Harbor. I found this place fascinating because it was a bog standard cannon fort, something that you see all over the place on the UK coastline, but in America. In addition to this, admittedly unremarkable novelty, there was something else about this fort that made it cool -- it was largely untouched. Forts are built in strategically important places, and these places rarely change that much -- commanding high ground is always commanding high ground -- in UK such a fort would be a complete mess. The triangular bastions would have chunky reinforced concrete blockhouses and anti-aircraft positions from the second world war built over them, and the lovely quadrangle of officers housing would be a bare expanse of concrete where the corrugated iron barrack huts would have been built. In addition to all that, the whole place would have been bombed to buggery. But in the US, the enemy was always further away, and so the forts were not called on again after the Civil War, and they were never seriously expected to have any involvement in that.

Me and Kristen poked around in the neoclassical buildings which once housed the fort's garrison, and walked about on the defensive earthworks for a while. I liked the way that you could walk up to the windows of these grand old buildings and see 1980s fridges and cookers sitting in the kitchens, swivel chairs sitting alone in the middle of empty rooms, and kitschy 1960s light fittings aging under a layer of dust.

Around the fort there were dozens of houses, generally semi-detached buildings, but there were some larger, grander houses, reserved for the senior officers who were able to kiss enough arse and grease enough palms to get one. They were all set in lovely grassy parkland with lots of flowers and shrubs, there was at least 10 feet of distance between each house, and broad, empty roads crisscrossing the island. There was one area with particularly lovely yellow weatherboard houses that was actually set around a little park, as if the other parts of the island were too built up, and the people there needed somewhere green to go and relax.

Closer to the water there were lots of big, impressive victorian colonades, like the big artillery barracks in Woolwich, that had charming, whimsical names like 'Training Group H, Sector 3, Building 7' written on black and white metal signs. These weren't quite as impressive as the little houses somehow, possibly because they seemed familar, but also because they didn't leave me with a sense of powerful yearning to live in them.

Dotted around the Island were various peculiar art installations. As far as I could tell, they've been giving artists room and board in some of the houses on the island in exchange for interesting art that they can display and sell. It was a good way of putting things in otherwise empty buildings, a practice that was great, not for the art particularly, but for the opportunity to go inside and snoop around.

We got lunch at a little food van that was parked up in one of the leafy green areas, and ate it by the waterfront, it was tasty, no-nonsense food, and cost very little for a place with such a captive market. After that we walked over to Castle Williams -- a small stone cannon fort that looks like a red brick barrel from the outside. I really wish we hadn't walked inside. Inside the building, around the small circular courtyard, the army had built a hideously ugly reinforced concrete office building that was set into the internal walls. It was truly gaggingly nasty looking, like the crumbling remains of a 1950's secondary school, only glued to the inside of a historic building like some kind of brutalist architectural fungus. It was amusing, however, to stand inside the courtyard and hear each group of people gasp with horror as they walked in "ahh" "ugh, this is disgusting" "whoa, what the hell is this?" etc.

Between the waterfront and the parkland areas, there were a few houses that were just too lovely for words. One was the Commander's House, a grand brick building with columns at the front and back which reached right up to the roof, the other was the building next to it, which was an older building that had been added to fairly recently. It had a first-floor (second floor to americans) terrace and summerhouse, which overlooked the east river and lower Manhattan. It looked like a very nice place to sit and eat breakfast.

It's also worth mentioning the old Staten Island Ferry Terminal in lower Manhattan that the trip to the island starts from. It is a wonderful creation in cast iron that sits on the Battery Park waterfront next to the glass edifice that took its place. It is neat and functional, and has an eyecatching color scheme. I don't mean eyecatching in the sense of garish or bright, just unusual: It is predominantly dark green but other parts of the structure are painted dark blue, pastel-pink, and pea green. It sounds icky, but I think it looks rather fetching. It is also decorated with beautifully shaped neoclassical corbals and finials that have been shaped out of cast iron and lots and lots of rivets. It makes the whole thing look a little steampunk.

-Ben

Interestink

2009-06-24T22:34:00.002+01:00

Archeologists find 35,000 year old flute

This isn't the first evidence of ancient music making, not by a long way, but it's further corroboration that it wasn't just a phenomenon restricted to one or two small communities. It makes you wonder, what is it that causes people to make music? I mean, I've been surrounded by music my whole life -- when you consider my social and family background the only thing that's remarkable about the fact that I play instruments is that I didn't start until I was 16 -- but these people didn't have radios or written music to inspire them. What makes someone start playing a little ditty, or singing a tune, if they've never heard music before? I suppose music could have been an everyday part of human life even then, but it must have started at some point.

Did someone get a tune stuck in their head one day and have to invent music to play it? Did someone start jamming to the rhythm of flint knapping? Or were animal skin-clothed early humans singing along with the birds, like some kind of surreal disney movie?

And what the hell is music, when you get down to it?

-Ben

In other news, I've learned today that if you're half asleep a cat sneezing sounds rather a lot like a silenced pistol. I woke up terrified that I was being assassinated, then I remembed that suppressed weapons are actually only marginally quieter than normal guns, not the muffled sneezing noise you hear in films.

Cuyahoga

2009-06-22T21:51:00.002+01:00

A while ago I was editing an article about the history of the city of Cleveland--Yes, exciting, I know--when I came across the following statement.

"As an industrial city, Cleveland had always experienced problems related to pollution. The city hit a low point, however, in the summer of 1969 when the Cuyahoga River, which flows through the city, caught fire."

The state of the river is evocatively described in this TIME article from 1969.

Today I came across two articles in the New York Times which made me happy. The first is from the twentieth anniversary of the fire in 1989, and is titled "River Not Yet Clean, but It's Fireproof".

The second was published today, on the occasion of the fortieth anniversary of the fire, with the less funny but more optimistic title "From the Ashes of ’69, a River Reborn".

I've not really got anything to add to this, I just thought I'd link some interesting articles.

-Ben

PeTA

2009-06-11T22:38:00.002+01:00

I few days ago I was browsing the internets for things of interest when I came across someone in a string of blog comments on some animal welfare topic saying "well of course, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals kill 95% of the animals they take in". Now I'm not usually one to pay much attention to what people write in news/youtube/popular blog comments -- that way madness lies -- but this poster supplied a link to back this potentially slanderous statement up. The link was to a website called petakillsanimals.com - a name which, I have to say, didn't exactly make me think "well, they sound like they'll have a fair and balanced view on the subject".

The stats seemed to be superfically sound but I didn't have anything to compare them to (what do I know about what an acceptable level of euthanasia is?) and the source they gave to back it up was A. a pdf file, and B. too long and complicated for me to bother sifting through. Not wanting to leave this unquestioned, however, I typed various permutations of "PETA 95 percent really" until I found this blog post. Like me, the writer was rather suspicious of any website with such an obviously heavy-duty agenda, but unlike me, the writer had rather more time to investigate. The result, interestingly (and I checked his figures against the VDACS reports) seems to be that yes, PeTA do indeed euthanize the vast majority of the animals they take in, far more than the state average. Additionally it would seem that they do some distinctly shaky reporting in order to make this statistic look lower than it is.

I'd be interested to know whether this is the result of policy or just a small-scale aberration, none of the PeTA shelters seem to be very big operations -- dwarfed by the ASPCA and Humane Society ones -- so it could be that they've just got a few injection-happy staff members. Either way, it's pretty alarming for an organization that claims to support animal rights, even one as morally dubious as PeTA.

Racing Ladas

2009-06-01T00:22:00.008+01:00

If there's one thing more prone to wild tangents than a wikisurf, it's a two-man wikisurf. This occurs when two people, both sitting at computers, start sending each other links of things they've found, sometimes an interesting seam of pages is found and both individuals go exploring.

Today, for some reason, my dad linked me the wiki page which lists to the drag coefficient of various cars. From there, I found this strange car, which led, via various other things, to my dad discovering this equally strange car. The last discovery left us baffled, a soviet racing car? Does this mean they had auto racing in the soviet union?

The answer, we learned, was yes. Some races were done with little sports cars like the ZIL, some were done with reverse-engineered versions of the formula 1 cars of the time, but most were touring-car style races done with ordinary saloons. This means that while the decadent west witnessed 200mph showdowns between ford GT40s and Porche 917s, on the other side of the iron curtain people were racing trabants, ladas, yugos, and Zaporozhets (which had mighty 26hp air-cooled engines*). There are a whole load of pictures of these races here.

When you consider that people race snails, beltsanders, and lawnmowers, it makes you wonder if there's some sub-set of the human (generally male) population that are born with an overpowering urge to race things. I suppose we won't know until we find the first fossil evidence of a neolithic tire-wall.

We then discovered the Soviet Jet Train, and it got even stranger from there.

*In the Soviet Union there was a widespread (but sadly not true) urban legend that the engines of Zaporozhets were starter motors from old tanks.

Plastic bike

2009-05-31T22:57:00.005+01:00

First Launched in 1981, the Itera plastic bicycle was feted as the future of cycling by it's creators, the volvo car company.

Rather than make the bike out of welded metal tubes, as manufacturers had been doing for about a hundred years, they decided to make their bike entirely from injection molded plastics. They used a variety of strong and durable plastics that had already been developed for use in cars, so they didn't have to do a whole lot of research work to get the project started. The swedish government liked the idea, and gave the company a big grant to get the venture going.

It has been estimated that around 30,000 were made but by the time the factory closed in 1985, only a small proportion of them had actually sold. It achieved a small measure of success in its native Sweden, but was greeted with horror everywhere else. This failure was put down to people being unwilling to adapt to new technology, to poor marketing, and to concerns about the bikes creaking all the time.

What its supporters seemed to have completely failed to take into account, however, is the possibility that the itera bike failed, not because the public weren't ready for its innovative construction, but because it was quite possibly the ugliest thing anyone had ever seen. And this was in the 1980s, remember, a time when people had been forced to acclimatise to much more pervasive and grevious muntiness than anything you might see today.

Even if you disregard the paint-job, which was sadly fairly fashionable at the time (the hall of the house I grew up in was painted a similar combination of brown, orange, and beige by the previous owners) it still looks like a incorrectly molded piece of outdoor plumbing from the soviet union.

Interestingly, while they were a failure in Europe. The warehouses full of leftover bikes were shipped to the Caribbean and sold for a knock-down price. Over there people weren't so picky about looks, apparently, and the idea of a bike that didn't rust away in the tropical humidity had widespread appeal.

2009-05-30T13:39:00.003+01:00

I don't think I really have a particular theme for this post, let alone a coherent idea to write about, so this is probably going to be a little disjointed.

The giant book of sex that I've been working on for the last year or so is finally coming to an end now. All that is left to do is the seemingly unending stream of corrections and revisions which, whilst getting more and more minor, never seem to decrease in number. Either way, I think it's going to print soon, so I'll be off writing about something else (religion I think) and probably getting equally nerdily obsessed with that. Something I've noticed is that my interest in human sexuality hasn't diminished as the amount of time I've had to spend writing about it has declined. Obviously, I had an interest in the subject to begin with, but it wasn't a very academic one.

One of the blogs that I read on the subject, by Dr. Petra Boynton, recently linked an article which touched something of a nerve with me in relation to the now mostly completed book. It's called The New Romantics by the brilliantly named Drake Bennett (no idea who he is, I'm just in awe of his name) and discusses the medicalisation of human sexuality.

This article revived a sense of unease I've had with the Big Sex Book from the start of my involvement with it. As it is a reference book, aimed at high schools, it sticks to a very dry, inoffensive tone. Sexuality is discussed in terms of medical conditions, pathological behaviors, and anatomical interactions. There are concessions to the stickier, less easily quantified aspects of sexuality, but usually, these are left out, either for fear of sounding too informal, or because of the possible moral backlash such discussions might provoke. Discussions of teenage sexual activity are usually framed by concepts of social norms, media influence, and peer pressure. The idea that young people, especially young women, might start having sex because they're horny, or because they're in love is rarely mentioned.

In fact, that's a good example. I said, "because they're horny, or because they're in love". The two things usually go together, for me at least they are part of the same thing. The book discusses emotions and ideas of love and affection; it also discusses hormones, reproductive urges, and the whole sticky-sweaty, in-out-in-out, tongues and hands thing. There is always some sense of separation, however, which strikes me as a damaging view to be teaching. The impression I often got from articles was that sex was a side-effect of love, or vice versa - depending on the article.

Hmm. I'll extend and revise this at some point. I've got to go and meet some friends pubwise now/

cunning id

2009-05-21T22:55:00.002+01:00

Before I start this, I feel I should explain that I'm not crazy. That doesn't bode well for the rest of the post, I know, but I've read more of the DSM-IV-TR than most people, and I don't think I meet any of the diagnostic criteria for bonkers*. Under normal circumstances, even in situations of stress or mental anguish, there is only one consciousness in my head, and I have complete sovereignty over the lands of me.There is one particular situation, however, in which I seem to become less of a person and more of a one-man argument.

I don't sleep a whole lot, which means that waking up is often a difficult and confusing process for me. In the seconds that pass between the alarm going off and the sane part of my brain gaining full control, there is a brief period of conflict between the me that usually just wants sleep, food, and woman (I will resist the urge to give my subconscious a name, because that's a step too far into crazyland) and the me that knows I have to get up and go to work. During this time dream-logic still applies** and sleep-food-woman me will use the best arguments dream logic posesses to get me to switch off my alarm and sleep until noon.

Sometimes these are sucessful, sometimes they fail, and every now and then they're just too weird to do either properly. A good example of the latter is the occasion when -- after staying up all night writing an essay --I woke up convinced that in order to switch off my alarm I had to delete my Mum's phone number from my mobile.

These events used to be rare, but my new phone (which I use as an alarm clock) is unpleasantly loud, which seems to make my subconscious especially resentful. There are two buttons on the phone which control the alarm -- one puts it on snooze, the other disables it. I was late to work last week because some part of my brain managed to convince me that the button marked "Stop" actually meant "stop being so damn loud." This morning it went a step further. I thought that it was making me answer quiz questions before it would go back into snooze mode (which isn't a bad idea for an alarm clock). I nearly tricked myself into switching it off twice when trying to think of the answer to the question I was dreaming (hallucinating?) I could see on the screen.

I probably need to get some more sleep, that, or get a more inscrutable alarm clock.

-Ben

*That particular term isn't in the DSM, but it should be.
**You know, like when Morgan Freeman offers you a lift in his helicopter, whilst somehow being your cat at the same time.

wheely-tripwires

2009-05-13T21:49:00.004+01:00

Behold, a wheely-bag. These things are always annoying for commuters like myself. They drag along behind the person pulling them and are too low to be seen in a crowd. This means that if someone with a wheely-bag crosses your path in an underground station you are likely to go arse-over-tit on the floor.

While this is annoying, I've done my share of international travel, so I'm not going to rail against big luggage with wheels. I know how much easier they make life. My problem is with shit like the bag pictured above. Believe it or not, it was actually smaller than it looks in that picture -- a small laptop bag with fucking wheels on. Why couldn't he just pick it up? He's not old or weak or feeble, and unless it was filled with gold it can't have been that heavy.

I just want to stamp on them.

-Ben

asparagross

2009-05-10T23:31:00.003+01:00

This started as a comment on a friend's photos of their proud culinary achievements. The dish in question looked very pretty but involved copious quantities of asparagus, which made me go into a wibbly-wobbly cinematic flashback.

---

I used to eat some very strange things when I was a kid. The most peculiar of these were probably the foods I consumed as a result of my close friendship with my grandmother's slightly retarded pet spaniel, Archie. I decided, some time around the age of three, that I wanted to be a dog when I grew up*. The reasons for this have slipped my memory, but they probably had something to do with Archie's ability to evade effort, exercise, and baths. I developed a taste for dry dog food, especially the charcoal biscuits -- I had an unusually lustrous, glossy coat as a child. Once, in imitation of my slightly 'special' canine friend, I ate a big handful of freshly mown grass.

Needless to say, it tasted disgusting, and I think I came very close to spraying some St Patrick's day-style barf across my grandma's neatly maintained garden. The upside of this memorable, if unpleasant, experience was that I became one of the very few people in the world who can adequately describe the taste of asparagus.

In case you'd not figured out what comparison I'm going to draw yet -- it's grass. I had asparagus for the first time on a pizza a few years ago and, after picking most of it off, spent the rest of the evening feeling rather nostalgic for Archie; the overweight, excitable spaniel with an extraordinary phobia of other dogs.

I'm always a little baffled why asparagus is considered such a glamorous foodstuff, considering you can get something just as tasty (and just as digestible, from what I remember of the pizza) for free, and tidy up your garden at the same time.

-Ben

*I can't scratch my ears with my feet or track people by smell, so I'm going to assume I've failed in that particular ambition.

Fuck you, Maine

2009-05-06T20:58:00.004+01:00

First Iowa and Vermont, now Maine has decided to legalise same-sex marriage. This makes me very annoyed.

Now don't get me wrong, I'm not in the jesus corner, nor do I think that giving people rights automatically takes rights away from others. I have no problem whatsoever with gay marriage from a social or ethical point of view.

But why, oh why do all these states have to suddenly decide to liberalize their marriage laws this close to my print deadline? The article on Marriage Rights has been amended so many times that there's no room for any more states. I've already had to put Iowa and Vermont into the list of states that allow gay marriage, now I've got to fit Maine in. Maine! Argh. It's five letters and one syllable--I can't hyphenate that. It's going to carry the bottom line over, I just know it, and I'm going to have to spend ages rewording the paragraphs on the next page to stop the crosshead under the picture in column 2 from getting pushed out of place.

Oof, editorial change you can believe in eh? damn democrats and their social reform.

-Ben

What has 80 steel wheels and flies?

2009-04-30T22:24:00.004+01:00

I've decided that I don't want to move to Lewisham any time soon. For various reasons that are too boring to go into I found myself standing around on the platform at Lewisham station this evening, waiting for a train for 20 minutes. The platforms at lewisham have an interesting feature that I'm sure not many stations have-- they're built over a river (The wonderfully named River Quaggy). The problem with this oddity, I learned tonight, is that clouds of little biting insects appear from the riverbed in the evening. I was standing there for what felt like hours, just swatting these little bugs as they landed on my book, face, ears, and eyelids, as well as getting in my hair.

Eventually the train arrived. It came whoosing down the platform (I was standing about halfway down) at about 15mph and I moved towards the edge of the platform (still behind the yellow line) in ancitipation of the scrum that was undoubtedly about to kick off when the doors opened.

When trains go past at a reasonable speed, they push a sort of air cushion in front of them which can smush you backwards from the edge of the platform. Today that cushion of air was followed by more than just a train. Namely the smoke-thick cloud of little biting insects that were caught in the vorticies around the drivers cab. As it went past me I got a faceful of little bugs. Some of them went in my mouth, others up my nose, in my ears, hair, eyes. It wasn't very nice. I spent the rest of my journey home squishing the bugs that were crawling out of my hair and clothes.

I'm still picking them out of my hair. No house in lewisham for me, even if it is monster cheap and gold-plated or something.

-Ben

eeek

2009-04-27T20:54:00.003+01:00

Today is Mary Wollstonecraft's 250th birthday, or at least it would be if she wasn't dead, but that sort of goes with the territory once you get over the age of 100. Not that she made it that far, sadly. Appropriately I've spent my day today writing and reading about the home schooling movement in the United States.

This was a rather eye-opening exercise for me. In the UK home schooling is largely the preserve of ultra-left-wing hairy types who think that even montessori schools are too restrictive, pushy parents of precocious oddballs, and parents whose children have severe mental or physical disabilities which preclude easy integration into the public school system. Only around 15,000 children are educated at home, and this education is closely monitored by education officials to check that it meets with national curriculum standards.

In the US, however, it seems that homeschooling is the preserve of a rather different demographic. A quick perusal of the Department of Education's statistics shows that 72 percent of parents who homeschool their children are motivated by relgious beliefs, and 30 percent of parents polled gave religious beliefs as the primary motivation behind their decision to homeschool their children. Also, rather more children are homeschooled in the US than in the UK -- around 1.1 million in total, or 2.2 percent of the school-age population.

I'm pretty ignorant when it comes to the current state of educational research on the merits of homeschooling in general, so I don't feel able to make any broad sweeping statements about the validity of the practice in general (although I'd really like to). When it comes to the religious homeschoolers though, it's pretty hard to remain neutral on the subject. You see, they go into great detail about the motivations behind their decision to homeschool their children. These reasons range from the merely bigoted to outright batshit insane. Some talk about how high schools are hotbeds of promiscuity and sodomy (where children are told that gay men aren't demons in disguise!), while others rant about crypto muslims, communist conspiracies, and mind-control flouride in the drinking water.

Behind all the rants about the state of the public school system there is one overriding concern that comes up again and again. These people are concerned about their children being subject to influences beyond their control, or worse still, having their ideas contradicted. These children are educated entirely within the bounds of their parents' beliefs, entertained only by media they approve, and play only with the children of other, similarly megalomaniacal, parents. By homeschooling they hope to isolate their children from any and all influences not under their complete control; indoctrinating them with their own warped perspective on the world. In fact, for people so vehemently opposed to cloning, they seem remarkably intent on making identical copies of themselves.

If you doubt the worrying levels of bonkers of which I speak, watch this video or read some of the things on this website. The US has a Marxist education system apparently. Funny that none of my American friends mentioned this...

-----

To go back to Mary Wollstonecraft, here's a little chunk from her 1791 masterwork A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, which discusses far more than just women's rights. Here's what she had to say on homeschooling --

The good effects resulting from attention to private education will ever be very confined, and the parent who really puts his own hand to the plow, will always, in some degree be disappointed, till education becomes a grand national concern. A man cannot retire into a desert with his child, and if he did, he could not bring himself back to childhood, and become the proper friend and play-fellow of an infant or youth. And when children are confined to the society of men and women, they very soon acquire that kind of premature manhood which stops the growth of every vigorous power of mind or body. In order to open their faculties they should be excited to think for themselves; and this can only be done by mixing a number of children together, and making them jointly pursue the same objects.

A child very soon contracts a benumbing indolence of mind, which he has seldom sufficient vigour to shake off, when he only asks a question instead of seeking for information, and then relies implicitly on the answer he receives. With his equals in age this could never be the case, and the subjects of inquiry, though they might be influenced, would not be entirely under the direction of men, who frequently damp, if not destroy abilities, by bringing them forward too hastily: and too hastily they will infallibly be brought forward, if the child could be confined to the society of a man, however sagacious that man may be.

Besides, in youth the seeds of every affection should be sown, and the respectful regard, which is felt for a parent, is very different from the social affections that are to constitute the happiness of life as it advances. Of these, equality is the basis, and an intercourse of sentiments unclogged by that observant seriousness which prevents disputation, though it may not inforce submission. Let a child have ever such an affection for his parent, he will always languish to play and chat with children; and the very respect he entertains, for filial esteem always has a dash of fear mixed with it, will, if it do not teach him cunning, at least prevent him from pouring out the little secrets which first open the heart to friendship and confidence, gradually leading to more expansive benevolence. Added to this, he will never acquire that frank ingenuousness of behaviour, which young people can only attain by being frequently in society, where they dare to speak what they think; neither afraid of being reproved for their presumption, nor laughed at for their folly.

-- Vindication of the rights of Woman, Chapter 12: "On National Education"

If I ever invent a time machine I'm sending a decent obstetrician and a midwife back to 1797 right away.

-Ben

Hmm

2009-04-06T23:15:00.005+01:00

Compare-me-do:

I've said before that one of the great strengths of the United States is, although as I mentioned we have a very large Christian population, we do not consider ourselves a Christian nation or a Jewish nation or a Muslim nation.
--Barack Obama, Address to the Turkish Parliament, 2009

As the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion, as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion or tranquility of Musselmen.
--Joel Barlow, Article 11 of The Treaty of Tripoli, 1797

If the second quote is written out in full, however, you have to include the following sentence, that forms the second half of article 11, which goes thusly:

and as the said States never have entered into any war or act of hostility against any Mehomitan nation, it is declared by the parties that no pretext arising from religious opinions shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.

The history, she burns!

-Ben

I'm sure that I'm by no means the first to raise this similarity, in fact, I expect it was probably intended, so I'm not going to bother to editorialize on what it might signify, as I'm sure other, more articulate, people have done so already.

brainfarts

2009-04-02T22:42:00.004+01:00

This post is going to be one of those nerdy, thinky ones that isn't really interesting in the least, I'm afraid. Feel free to ignore it, I just needed to get it out of my head, in case I started talking about this stuff in a social setting.

I've been off sick for the last two days, spending my days coughing and trying to avoid watching daytime television. I've been doing a probably unhealthy amount of Wikpedia surfing in order to pass the time and, as there wasn't anything better to do, I have been reading about nerdy things -- technology, inventions, and other general all-purpose "boys' stuff". I spent most of this afternoon indulging my strange fascination with things that got developed, tested, even prepared for full scale production, but weren't ever actually used.

Because of their technical complexity, massive cost, and the public accountability of the people footing the bill, the demise of unwanted military hardware projects are usually the most interesting examples of this, and the ones covered in the most detail by the nerds of wikipedia.

Take, for example, the RAH-66 Commanche. In 1982 the US Army started soliciting proposals for a new armed reconnaissance helicopter, various companies put foward bids and the development of a new aircraft started. It was to have all the bells and whistles you could possibly think of -- sensors and avionics equipment that made it more intelligent than most soldiers, a radar-reflecting body made from composite materials, and an engine that was designed to be much quieter than other helicopters. It made its first flight in the mid-1990s and, after numerous delays, was on track to begin production in about 2004. Unfortunately, by the time the millenium rolled around the US army had learned two things -- 1. unmanned drones are pretty good at reconnaissance and 2. even the most expensive and advanced helicopters can be knocked out of the sky by a nutter with a crusty old soviet-made Rocket launcher. After costing around seven billion dollars of government money, the project was quietly dropped in 2004. It was undoubtedly a cool piece of kit, in a murderous sort of way, but just like the Saunders-Roe Princess, the world moved on before it could be finished.

The strange internal politics and technological one-upmanship of the different branches of the US armed forces means that there's no shortage of projects like this, such as the AH-56 Cheyenne (which was a strange halfway house between a helicopter and a plane, designed to avoid various regulations about what aircraft the army was allowed to operate, that didn't really work as well as either) or, well, pretty much anything in this wikipedia category.

I guess I find this sort of thing interesting because these things were developed by a huge team of engineers, scientists, and designers to fulfill a specific role, and nobody ever really got to find out whether they would have worked or not. Imagine spending years and years working on something only to find that you'll never get to know if any of your cool ideas or late-night moments of inspiration worked.

-Ben

Edumacationalism

2009-03-31T20:50:00.007+01:00

I generally try to avoid commenting on matters of education, because I don't like to spill information in public that I've picked up in private conversations with friends and relatives who are teachers. In this case, however, I'm willing to make an exception. Partly because this example of government educational bullshit is particularly heinous, and partly because this is all information out there in the public eye, if you know where you look.

The following piece of fine, high quality education sector bullshit came to my attention this evening and I thought it needed sharing. What you are about to read is copied verbatim, I've not added any mistakes of my own.

Building on the successful Communicating Matters training program in [The borough I live in] a multi-disciplinary team will work with twenty settings to support and Early Language Lead Practitioner (ELLP) from each setting and facilitate networks so that good practice is cascaded and fully embedded across the authority.

It's to do with a government initiative---these are usually stupid ideas thrown up by department of education think-tanks and declared to be mandatory until the next gimmick comes along---that has been dumped on a local school. I'm not knowledgable when it comes to educational psychology, so I can't make an informed judgement of the program in question but, as someone who spends most of their day writing and editing, that paragraph offends me. It's filled with buzz words, meaningless jargon, and it's just generally badly written.

I'm sure that these programs are conceived in good faith, and most of them are based on sound research, but they're usually foisted on already overworked teachers and take money away from schools that could be spending it on something more concretely useful. On top of that, they're always fluffed out and peppered with management-speak to the point of incomprehensibility by the time they reach teachers. This means that they're unlikely to win the enthusiasm of teachers, even if there is a valid concept under all the crap.

I found an advert for a "Full-Time Primary Strategy Consultant" to assist with the program described above in another city---this would be someone who would earn equal if not more pay than a full-time teacher---which i think it worth quoting also, even if only for the further funny jargon.

A successful candidate must be able to:

a)support schools and settings in improving young children's language and communication skills , with particular emphasis on practical ways of improving practitioners' skills in supporting early language acquisition and development,

b)support schools and settings in developing the quality of provision to ensure all children access a language rich environment, raising expectations and engaging all children particularly the most disadvantaged

c)facilitate effective coaching arrangements in schools and settings and engage in the modelling of good practice in those schools and settings being supported;

d)Facilitate the development of clusters and networks, both within and between schools and settings so that good practice is cascaded and fully embedded across the authority;

e)promote social inclusion and help schools and settings to meet the needs of different groups of children, such as boys and girls, children from minority ethnic communities, children with SEN, gifted and talented children, transient children, children from travelling communities, looked after children and children learning English as an additional language;

f)support the planning and delivery of agreed central, network or school/setting based INSET, provide appropriate high quality advice and guidance to schools and settings, offer advice on relevant resources and communicate with schools and settings via agreed media;

g)participate in agreed cross-service initiatives in order to promote children's early language acquisition and development

I wish that I could say that this sort of crap was the preserve of one side of the political spectrum or the other, but it seems to be a pretty universal shade of bullshit. Teachers, doctors, nurses, and policemen are subject to this sort of thing day-in day-out all year round. They have to be proactive, and dynamic!

I'm glad I'm not a public servant.

-Ben

Stock Photo Fun

2009-03-30T20:49:00.007+01:00

I asked picture research to find some pictures to go with an article on Sadism. They like to throw images like this in with sensible ones, just to see how good you are at keeping a straight face.

I'm shit at it, obviously, and I giggled like an idiot until everyone in the office was staring at me. As was the case with the last batch of stock photos, I'm left utterly baffled as to what the photographer thought that this image was supposed to illustrate.

Any ideas?

-Ben

The Editor of South London

2009-03-26T20:52:00.003Z

I spend quite a lot of time in bookshops looking through the shelves and standing outside of bookshops looking in*. As a result of all this I've started to notice certain trends in book titles and cover designs.

The one that I've noticed recently is the strange new formula for naming moderately highbrow books (you know, the sort of books read by yoga instructors, english undergraduates, and book groups). The formula goes "The Something (can be an occupation or description, something whimsical is best) of Somewhere (preferably somewhere exotic)" and seems to be pretty much mandatory these days.

Examples --

The Bookseller of Kabul
The Enchantress of Florence
The Cellist of Sarajevo

Annoyingly my list ends there, because while I've seen shitheaps of books with these sort of titles I can only remember the ones that were in the front window of waterstones today. I tried, but I couldn't find any way of searching for books with 'The' and 'of' in the title. I'll add more, especially the more po faced and pretentious ones, when I see them

-Ben

*There is a branch of waterstones with a big awning near where I eat my lunch, and it rains a lot.

Folk

2009-03-26T00:25:00.004Z

I've just gotten back from seeing Martin Carthy play at my local folk club. He's probably not a well known name to most, but to a select few, the man's a big deal. I was right at the front, in a venue that holds no more than 100 people, so I could hear his guitar playing and singing more clearly from the man himself than I could from the PA system.

He finished with this song -- which namechecks Shooters Hill (which is where I grew up, and about a mile from where I'm currently sitting) in the context of its former fame as a hangout/execution place of highwaymen.

Given what I've been working on, and what I've been talking about with my other half of late, I couldn't help but sit there and ponder the presentation of gender roles and sexuality in traditional folk music. Folk music is a form of cultural expression which has always existed largely out of the reach of censorship and authority. As such, the views expressed in these songs are arguably a more accurate reflection of social attitudes and behaviors than the forms of expression that were permitted in printed books and authorized plays.

It would be a stretch to far, I feel, to claim that the actions described in folk songs were ever the social norm, but they are examples of narratives which have been passed on from singer to singer for generations, which implies that the audiences liked them enough for them to stay on singers' repertoires. The events described in these songs therefore could be said to illustrate what attitudes the audiences of the time had on a number of subjects, from war, to casual sex, to domestic violence, to abortion.

Unsurprisingly, the songs written by those who were traditionally the poor buggers standing on the front-line with halberds or muskets don't have a particularly rosy view of war. Interestingly it is almost never depicted from the point of view of those who were sent off to the battlefield, but from the perspectives of the women left behind (or who chose not to be left behind). War, rather than something noble, is something that takes the martial aspirations of easily led young men and turns young men into corpses, children into orphans, and wives into widows.

Similarly, the delicate social niceties of Jane Austen's courtships are absent from from the lives of common people in folk music. Love and lust dictate who ends up with who, unless a meddling party gets stabby (which does happen a lot). People are fucking in fields, barns, the homes of sleeping parents, and the marital beds of neglectful absent husbands. Women who terminate pregnancies are treated with sympathy, abusive husbands get their comeuppance, and rapists rot away and die, punished by a vengeful god.

One particularly interesting song (which is crying out for some seriously pretentious literary analysis) involves a woman who, after enduring her drunken, abusive husband for as long as she can, stitches him--bedsheets, clothes and all-- into the bed while he sleeps off another bender. When he wakes, she beats seven shades of shit out of him with a frying pan, a cooking pot, and a rolling pin, then tells him that he ever hurts her again, she'll make sure he doesn't wake up the next morning. I think there's definitely something to be said about the use of implements traditionally associated with the subjugation of women to brain a shithead, but it's late and I can't be bothered to give it much thought right now.

There is one factor, however, that makes me rather loath to embrace the apparent consensus of these songs as evidence of a matriarchal counterculture in pre-modern england. The sort of people who sing folk music are, as a general rule, a bunch of stinky lefties (not that I have anything against stinky lefties, I'm probably one myself). I think this is probably due to the link between folk music and communism in the 1950s -- singers like Ewan McColl believed that this proletarian music would inspire working-class solidarity and lay the foundations for revolution. This is relevant because there are literally thousands of traditional folk songs out there, collected by people like Cecil Sharp and Francis James Child, so what we hear are the songs that modern singers choose to sing. I don't think that it's a major factor -- the songs are genuine, after all -- but I think that you could probably find songs to support the argument that just about any political ideology was the traditional mindset of the british people if you looked hard enough.

I expect it's already been done, but I would have thought that a comprehensive analysis of attitudes to race, gender, and sexuality in folk songs would be an interesting portrait of the prevailing social attitudes in different times and different regions.

Anyway. I'm knackered, and I should have gone to sleep a long time ago.

-Ben

Science

2009-03-18T21:25:00.004Z

This is a rather interesting study.

I notice that the authors themselves were extremely reluctant to speculate even slightly on the nature of the link -- preferring the good old standby 'Further research is needed' which can mean anything from "we have no idea what this means" to "we wouldn't touch this argument with a barge pole". I suspect that it's the latter in this case. Thanks to the internet, of course, we have no shortage of editorializing from both sides of the science vs. the jesus debate. It's going to be difficult for either side to get much mileage out of this one though, seeing as you can turn the conclusion upside down and it still makes sense, if you see what I mean. The same result can be read either as "religious folk fight harder, and love life -- heathens just give up because they're weak and feeble without jesus power" or as "Godless folk do not fear death, and go out calmly -- whilst religious people's certainty in the shiny hereafter falls down in the face of the big sleep".

Most of the reports in the American media seem to be favoring the former. See Most Devout Most Likely to Fight Death to the End, Religious Likely to Prolong Life, Study Finds and the church-newsletter stylings of Patients with Terminal Cancer Turning to Religion.

-Ben

netbook

2009-03-15T14:30:00.002Z

I'm currently sitting in the strange wicker chair thing at the end of my garden. This is remarkable for two reasons: The first is that it's a lovely warm sunny day - the first of the year. The second is that I'm typing this on my new laptop. To be specific it's a Samsung NC10, which sits at the fairly large and shiny end of the netbook market. I have only had it for about a week, so this isn't going to be a detailed review of the thing. With the exception of the slightly annoyingly small trackpad though, it's the best new invention ever.

Laptops are hardly a new invention, I know, but this new breed of laptops that are actually portable are something of a revelation. I know that they've always existed, but in the past they've been so stupidly expensive that nobody who wasn't a wealthy professional ubernerd ever bought them.

When I was at university lots of people had laptops, but those laptops rarely ever left the desks they usually sat on, in fact, most of them probably moved around less than my tower PC. I think most laptops are essentially the ideal computer for someone who moves house a lot, but their usefulness for those who want to take them out of the house is rather limited. I found that when taken off the desk they sat on (and actually used on the lap they are nominally intended for) they were uncomfortable, hot, and heavy. I don't know whether this fear was justified, but their thinness coupled with their tea-tray size, convinced me that they would be extremely easy to bend or break.The last nail in the coffin of the idea of a laptop as a portable computer was always the battery life, which never seemed to exceed an hour or two, rendering them fairly useless if more than 4 metres from a plug socket.

I think that the reason for this is that it wasn't until a few years ago that intel showed any interest whatsoever in reducing the power comsumption of their processors. Up until that point processor design was like 1950s american car design, the efficiency of their engines just wasn't seen as relevant. For example, the power supply in my tower PC (which is no mighty behemoth) draws around 450 watts when it's switched on. This laptop consumes about 15. There's very little difference in processing power between the two, just a couple of years of research into power efficiency. The upshot of this is that my new laptop can go for between 4 and 7 hours (depending on what I'm doing) on one charge -- making it actually practical to take my work outside. Not that I have any work with me this weekend, although i do have plenty to do.

-Ben

Homo-Pomo

2009-03-12T00:13:00.004Z

In recent months I've spent a lot of time reading and writing about the study of human sexual behavior. In the course of my research I have encountered two things in great abundance. The first is statistics, the second is arguments about sexual morality.

There's a huge amount that I want to say on these two things, and most importantly on how these two things are often intertwined, but I can't seem to get my thoughts to form into a straight line. I don't have much experience writing to persuade. What little ability I had with persuasive and argumentative language has been eroded by the style of writing I've had to adapt to at work. I can write to explain reasonably well though, so I'll try and put my thoughts into that shape and see if I have any more success expressing myself than with the 2000 words of badly composed argument that I've already written.

Research projects into the subject of human sexuality often struggle to obtain funding (One leading academic had her funding cut after a scientifically ignorant senator mocked her research as worthless government expenditure) and face difficulties obtaining information from a large and representative sample. This means that there haven't been a whole lot of rigorous, large scale studies into general human sexual behavior done in the western world (and buggerall anywhere else). You hear about the findings of sex research in the media all the time, but any experience with the field---or any serious examination of the claims of these survey results---invariably show you that at best, they are based on misinterpretations of rigorous research, and at worst are nothing more than publicity stunts for the respectable commercial fringes of the sex industry.

My recent rediscovery of the awesomeness of science (something I'll write about in more detail at some point) means that I've been throwing myself into the research for this project with rather a lot of enthusiasm. Checking methodology used to obtain figures quoted by writers, analysing existing research, and generally poring over pages and pages of numerical data. It's not exciting, but I do find it interesting, especially when I notice some trend, relevant to my work, that the authors didn't mention in their summary.

I'm currently working on an article which discusses the field of sex research, and the problems associated with it. This means that I've been buried in the numbers rather deeper than usual of late. I've been getting really frustrated with the fierce ongoing debate in the US over the morality of homosexuality - or any other behavior that isn't married couples silently screwing with the lights off. The intrusion of ideological debates into this field makes it very hard to objectively assess the merits of any piece of research. If the findings of a study support one side's agenda then they ring-fence it, and brand anyone who criticises it (not matter how legitimate their criticisms) a godless liberal scumbag, or a reactionary bigot (according to their preference).

The thing that gets on my nerves the most about this situation is that there isn't any sensible reason for these statistics to be such a battleground issue. What causes the most controversy are the figures on the prevalence of homosexuality in the population at large. On the one hand, you have gay rights groups pointing to findings like those of the Kinsey reports (which stated that around 10 percent of men are exclusively homosexual) and saying “look, lots of people are gay, it’s natural, so stop persecuting us” and on the other hand you have the jesus-gang pointing to statistics like the 1993 Guttenmacher institute study (which estimated that only 1-2 percent of adults were exclusively homosexual) and saying “see, hardly anyone does it -- it’s unnatural and therefore wrong.”

There are of course the other Christians who are in a state of denial about the idea of sex research, who believe that if nobody ever enquires about it then 'sinful' behavior sort of doesn't happen. Like a strange 'schrodinger's bedroom' scenario. Those people are a significant minority, but they aren't really relevant to this rant.

This seems to me to be one of the rare ethical debates where the most common arguments on both sides are really fucking stupid. Natural does not mean good, plenty of evil things are natural; similarly unnatural does not mean bad, as there are plenty of good things that aren't natural in the least. Both sides seem to be arguing morals without actually ever debating why the issues in question are right or wrong.

This is a phenomenon I have observed before. I rediscovered a book the other day, called "Sexual Revolutions in Early America" which I recall reading, in part, during my degree. The book essentially takes the same dumb argument over what is natural and what isn't into the field of history, arguing that colonial America was just as sexually open and varied as modern America and therefore (with the exception of some pious ramblings about STDs and prostitution) it's all good.

The defining characteristic of this debate seems to be an unwillingness to make any kind of value judgement based on a rational assessment of the benefits or damages that this tolerance of sexual minorities might have. I expect this from religious groups, as they get their opinions on the subject from ancient texts, but it's annoying coming from those who are aware that the enlightenment took place.

Many of the liberal activists seem to be operating within the distinctly morally relativistic fields of post-modernist thought, in which concepts of good and evil are social constructs, and therefore unpleasant restrictions of natural human behavior.

I've never understood post-modernist critical theory, it seems to me to be what Wolfgang Pauli wonderfully described as "not even wrong". The complete rejection of objectivity and the concept of objective reality undermines any attempt to prove or disprove anything. If the enlightenment has taught us anything, it is that spending ages thinking about ideas that can't be proven either way is a huge waste of everyone's time.

I can't help but think that if liberals dropped the post-modernist stuff, and just argued from pragmatic, humanitarian principles they'd achieve a great deal more in the advancement of gay rights, and scientifically minded people would be able to get on with the serious business of trying to figure out what people like to do with no clothes on without being interfered with.

-Ben

Fleabass

2009-03-07T20:25:00.003Z

When I first started playing bass in 2002 Michael "Flea" Balzary, bass player for the Red Hot Chili Peppers, was probably my most important musical influence. It was his playing that pulled me away from the punk and pop-punk that I was listening to at that time and made me start trying to get my funk on.

His playing was also the main reason why I bought the bass that I did when I came to get my own instrument. I wanted something like a musicman stingray (his bass of choice, most of the time), but didn't have the £1,200 spare to buy one, so I bought a cheap copy. It wasn't a terrible bass, and with my dad's instruction and my own personal curiosity I was able to maintain and, to an extent, improve its playability.

This wasn't a cheap beginner bass though, if it wasn't for the fact that I'd been playing my dad's bass for 6 months I wouldn't have been willing to spend £250 on an instrument. Most people, as I'm sure you all know, don't have a gibson EB-3 laying about in a cupboard that you can play until you think you're confident enough to want an instrument of your own. Most people, when they decide that they want to play a guitar or a bass, have to wrangle the thing from skeptical parents, or their own meagre funds. The instruments you can afford or obtain with such means are not good.

I've played a lot of guitars and basses belonging to beginner musicians. With a few exceptions these instruments were usually so bad that I could barely play them. I'd usually end up sitting around fixing the action, adjusting the neck, and raising the pickups to the right height, as well as setting the tremolo and the intonation. It often took quite a while to get them to the point where someone might be reasonably expected to learn to play on them. I came across these sad instruments so often that I started to carry a set of screwdrivers, allen keys, and a little socket-spanner around in my bag when I was going to a house i'd not been before.

All this is why I was glad to see that Flea has started his own bass company; not making high-end boutique instruments, but cheap and cheerful instruments for students. Most importantly he's made the playability of the instruments the key feature. I don't know how much these things are going to cost, or if they'll be as good as they promise to be, but I hope they're a success. I think too many people get their self-esteem shat upon when they can't play an instrument they want to play, not knowing that it's just because it's shit.

They look pretty cool as well, in a painfully lurid sort of way. I think that their appearance, coupled with their simple electronics, might make them popular with grown-up musicians as well.

-Ben

Pope-tacular

2009-03-05T20:07:00.008Z

Read this. It's only a short little news piece, also covered on the Beeb (with a less infuriating headline).

I'm pretty used to Catholicism-flavored madness---such as the recent case in Italy in which prominent Catholics decided that it was unethical to switch off the life-support of a woman who had been brain-dead for a few years because she 'could still have children'---but this case is really something else. I mean, come on, a 9 year old girl---who was raped---is carrying twins that she doesn't want and that will probably kill her a long time before they could be delivered, and the local priests think that it's evil to terminate the pregnancy?

I mean, ugh.. Even if you discount the mental trauma of unwanted childbirth at nine years old, just the quantifiable medical considerations are enough to make opposing the idea the act of a crazy person.

---

The other thing about the nbc article, after the initial shock of the content, is the headline. I mean come on, 'alleged'? She's only nine years old for fuck's sake! Are they suggesting that a nine year old girl was soliciting sex from her stepfather?

This makes me so many different flavors of angry that it makes me go cross eyed.

-Ben

Am I stoned?

2009-03-03T22:25:00.006Z

Or can I hear more music?
It's much too hipstertacular for me, I know, but I do rather like the Mae Shi. Even if their songs seem to be imbued with the sort of peculiar christian cosmology that you can only get through the serious overuse of psychedelics.

I've just finished writing a 1,500-word rambling blog post which, after proofreading, I've decided will never see the light of day; at least, not in its current form. It's much too far into the realms of shop, and without the things I don't want to say, I think that it's rather toothless and stupid sounding.

I was inspired to write it by this article which got me all riled up and cranky. It's made me more determined than ever to check every statistic, no matter how many times I've heard it before (or how plausible it sounds to me) and to pick my words with great care when I have to summarize someone else's research. Mostly it's just made me paranoid about my own ignorance, and what grevious misrepresentations I may have perpetrated myself.

This article is very interesting, and is quite similar to the sort of things i've been doing myself recently. It's amazing how many 'accepted' facts and statistics disappear in a puff of bullshit-smelling smoke if you look at them closely enough, and follow them home.

-Ben

Pointless fact: I always spell the word 'definite' wrong. I know exactly how it is supposed to be spelled, but for some unfathomable reason my fingers always write 'definate'

Science!

2009-02-28T12:55:00.004Z

I present to you the following paper:

Focht DR III, et al. The efficacy of duct tape vs cryotherapy in the treatment of verruca vulgaris (the common wart). Arch Pediatr Adolesc Med October 2002;156:971-4.

Summary Here

I'm a little torn as to what to think of this research -- on the one hand it presents an effective and cheap treatment for a common problem, as well as another use for the mighty gaffa tape -- on the other hand though, it could deprive honest men and women of science of an excuse to get out the liquid nitrogen. This is troubling because liquid nitrogen has an extremely high awesome-per-millilitre (A/ml), depriving doctors of such important resources now could leave the developed world with a serious dearth of mad scientists ten years down the line. In times of recession we should be striving to support our nation's mad scientists, for without them the Van de Graaff generator and lightning rod industry could collapse.

It could be as bad as when they stopped alchemists from boiling mercury in small rooms.

-Ben

Misinformed Ramblings

2009-02-26T22:22:00.004Z

I'm writing this in the Ubuntu text editor, having (mostly) gone all open source. It's not been the most smooth process, as I rather lack the technical chops to get it to go perfectly, but now that it works it's mostly good. I've not been very bloggy recently, for no decent reason. I'll try and rectify this.

Today i've been doing a fair amount of research into research -- more specifically into sex research, which is the most fun kind of research. You can't go wandering around in that subject area without at least hearing the name Alfred Kinsey, the first person to do a large scale survey of people who professed to be 'normal' in their social and sexual leanings. For good measure I feel like I should say the word research a few more times, as it just hasn't come up quite often enough in this paragraph.

Any google search into Mr Kinsey will return much the same sort of results as a search for a certain Mr Darwin. The Jeebus does not like him, no no no, does not like him at all.

I should write a little context I feel, at this point, seeing as I can pull all the facts off the top of my head (strange job, I learn too many things). His first major publication Sexual behavior in the Human Male came out in 1948, and caused a bit of a shock-horror reaction. He asked a wide range of men, from convicted felons to graduate students, how, essentially, they liked to get their naughty on -- their favored steps in the horizontal monster mash, if you will. This survey is best known now for its very high estimate of the proportion of men who were primarily homosexual (about one in ten) which does somewhat exceed the ratios that more recent surveys have returned (this is most likely due to A: the fact that there were quite a few giggolos and prisoners in his survey, and B: because it was performed just after the second world war, where, amongst other things, a lot of guys had to get pretty damn friendly with no women about). What is more interesting to me is the sheer amount of things that he concluded that were considered shocking, like the statistic that 92 percent of men masturbate (which I still find shocking, but for the opposite reason) or that 40 percent of men liked to have sex with the lights on. He caused even more shock and horror a few years later when he wrote a companion book, Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, which reported that women rather liked sex, 62 percent of them said they masturbated, and 55 percent of them had responded erotically to being bitten. It made monocles drop into cups of tea across the land.

He died in 1956, but the Kinsey institute carry on his work to this day, and have a very good website, if you're ever bored and not at work (or at work, if your job is like mine).

The thing I find interesting is the way that, like Darwin, his publications and personal life are scrutinized by Christians to this day. When you look at this, it seems a little illogical. both the study of human sexuality and evolutionary biology have progressed a long way since the work that kick-started the respective fields. Yet the attacks are made on Kinsey, and not on those doing similar research today.

I was pondering this on the way home from work this evening, and it seems to me that this is emblematic of a complete incompatibility of thought between religious types and science-y peoples. Scientific scholarship is about gathering evidence from the world around you. Religious scholarship is about divining meaning through exegesis, by pulling new ideas from ancient texts. It seems to me that this different perspective is what causes the strange attacks on figures like Darwin and Kinsey. When someone used to religious scholarship looks at the field of evolutionary biology, or sex research, they see the misguided followers of a false prophet's blasphemous revelation. To them, the most logical way of making this field go away is to discredit the founding text. What they fail to grasp is that science isn't exegesis, discrediting Kinsey isn't going to make sex researchers stop, because what they're doing is the study of people, not the study of kinsey's findings about people.

The thing I find most odd about the religious reaction to Kinsey is the underlying suggestion that none of this sort of thing went on before he wrote about it.

-Ben

Do I hear music?

2009-02-26T21:17:00.004Z

It sounds like a bit of John Martyn to me, and perhaps a Stealer's Wheel song that isn't Stuck in the Middle with You. Mmhm.

-Ben

bass babble

2009-02-04T00:57:00.002Z

Neither interesting nor coherent, I'll probably delete it tomorrow.

This evening I was performing a nerdy experiment. It wasn’t particularly rigorous -- no blinding, no control – but the results were interesting to me. There are currently two amplifiers in my room. One is my line6 bass amp, the other is a little Roland Cube-15 guitar amp that belongs to my little sister. I dragged the guitar amp up here because no-one else was using it, and I do sometimes play the guitar. I started using it to amplify my basses a few weeks ago. I first did it because there was a huge heap of stuff on top of my bass amp, and I couldn’t be arsed to move it in order to play. I was very surprised by how good it sounded, in theory at least it should be like trying to use a tweeter as a woofer. As the weeks passed I realised that I was switching on my bass amp less and less.

Tonight I sat down and played the same phrase on my bass through one amp, then the other. I put all the controls on both amps to their neutral positions and tried that. The guitar amp sounded clear and nice, the bass amp sounded like a clock radio that has been shoved under a pillow. I then spent about an hour tweaking every control on the bass amp in every direction to try and make it sound good, with no success. I found that if I carefully adjusted all the controls and turned the volume almost all the way up, I could get a passable impersonation of the sound I was getting from the guitar amp from the bass amp. If I turned up the Roland past its lowest volume setting, however, it not only sounded much, much better than the Line6, it was louder. Like, ear-hurtingly loud. I was a little nonplussed. In theory the line6 is an 80watt amplifier; the Roland, 15. I picked them up, poked them, even changed basses a few times to see what would happen. The result remained the same. I spent about £200 on an amp that can be outclassed by the sort of stuff people buy for schoolchildren.

Looking back, I bought that amp out of a funny sort of desperation. I’d tried it in a store, and really not liked it much. Instead I ordered a Fender Bassman, I’d tried one in a store that someone else had reserved and I’d liked it. It was going to be my first good-quality piece of gear, bought with my paycheck from temp work. The Fender, however, never turned up. There were never ending distributor problems, stock shortages, and, when a store finally got one and sent it off to me, some wanker working for Citilink Couriers snatched the damn thing out of the back of a van in a depot somewhere in Kent.

A few days after I was refunded, I found out I’d got a proper job, doing something I find interesting. About a week after that I went up to Denmark street, played around with some amps, and came back with the line6 amp that is sitting next to me right now. I’ve not ever said this out loud, but I bought it because I’d sort of decided that my days of taking music seriously were over. It was small, light, and sounded better than the giant piece of crap I was playing through at the time. I didn’t hugely care for the sound even then, but it disguised the flat sound of the instruments I was playing then fairly well. I figured that seeing as I was the only one who’d be hearing me play from now on, the sound didn’t really matter.

Now, of course, I’m pissed off. I have an amp that sounds rubbish and is so pathetically underpowered that even if I were to get a call to a band, I wouldn’t be able to project over even the gentlest of drummers (and we all know that there’s no such thing). I can’t get enthused about the idea of replacing it though, as my in-head justifications for spending money on this sort of thing seemed to wear away each year I move away from the fat 17-year-old playing his dad’s bass.

-Ben

2008-12-17T23:42:00.001Z

There is a taxidermist’s shop near my office. It’s a funny little place near Essex Road station with every animal from a wolf to a guinea pig (really) posed in dusty, glassy-eyed silence in the window. I don’t think I’ve ever told many people this before – it’s not the sort of thing that often comes up in conversation – but I really don’t like stuffed animals. They freak me out. Not in a screaming, panicky, and uncouth sort of way but in a hair-standing-up-on-the-back-of-the-neck, quietly shuddering gross-out sort of way.

When I was at university I read an essay called “The Uncanny” by Sigmund Freud. I didn’t get on with most of the rambling psychoanalytic stuff in the essay, but I liked the core concept (which wasn’t Freud’s) which stated that a key component of what people find scary – the uncanny – is “doubt whether an apparently animate being is really alive; or conversely, whether a lifeless object might be, in fact, animate”. It’s a simple idea, but it is true of many scary things: ghosts, zombies, creepy dolls, mannequins, the statues in Blink, and – to get back to what I was saying just now – stuffed animals. They look like they’re alive, but they aren’t – or vice versa. It’s weird. It blurs the line between a living creature and a dead creature.

Today, when I walked past the taxidermist, however, there was no such thing. I stood in front of the window, staring in bafflement for a good few seconds before I started to laugh like a drain. The poor ghoulish soul that runs the place obviously felt that it was a little bit dour given the season, and so he decorated his shop. The thing is; the stuffed animals are pretty much the only thing in the shop, so they were all he had to decorate. Which made the whole thing go from creepy to really surreal.

The deer’s head with gold, sparkly tinsel wound around its antlers is an image that will stay with me for a long time. Nearly as long as the deceased albino guinea pig sitting in the middle of a holly wreath, in fact.

-Ben

Inside my head

2008-12-04T00:41:00.005Z

I found this on my computer this evening. I think it's from the summer, I vaguely remember writing it then. I think it was a blog post that got horribly out of control and was subsequently abandoned. As my babblings go it's not bad, although the voice switches about a bit, probably because I hadn't figured out what I was writing while I was writing it.

The incident boards were still up around the pedestrian crossing when I walked home today. ‘Fatal Accident’ written in black on yellow. They wanted information, but I knew that I had none to offer. Like thousands of other people, I passed by the crossing on Monday lunchtime and saw the tire marks leading to the stopped and empty truck; the police cars in planned formations; and the walking stick lying in the middle of the road. There was no blood, no gory details to gape at, it all seemed like a sterile tableau to me, as if arranged by an artist trying to make a social statement.

On the other side of the road I saw a smiling young woman, which lightened my mood. She looked happy, sitting near the big open windows at the front of the pub. I looked at her for perhaps longer than was really polite, but she didn’t notice, so I felt safe in my indiscretion. She was pretty, but in a slightly strange way. There was a quality to her face -- the slightly angular lines, the large dark irises of her eyes -- that seemed to me like an amateurish drawing of some great beauty. It was not that she wasn’t beautiful, just that there was a simplicity to her features that made me think that she’d come from the imagination of an enthusiastic draughtsman, rather than an artist. As I walked down Upper Street I composed this little descriptive phrase in my head, rearranged it, and smiled, momentarily pleased with my idea.

I turned my attention back to the street in front of me, and was preoccupied dodging the wayward metal spines of women’s umbrellas after that. protecting them against the rain which had now passed. The rain had been heavy while it lasted, and the street steamed; the damp cotton of my sweater was mingling with the sweat patches that I could feel on forming on my t-shirt already, making me shift my bag around uncomfortably. For once, my headphones weren’t in and I was listening intently to the sounds of the city, hoping to feel some poetic pleasure in the sensory experience. I didn’t. I was just struck by how quiet commuters are, they are all focused and tired, not interested in talk. I clutched the reassuring weight of my tatty backpack and weaved my way through the gradually thickening crowds as I approached the station.

Inside the floor was slick with water from the downpour, and neat brown swirls of liquefied dirt were covering the tiles. I dodged past the leaflets and free papers, not making eye contact, not even bothering to look aside far enough to connect the proffering hand with a person. The barriers passed me by in brief clatter of machinery, and my hands returned my travelcard to my wallet without me having to look down at what I was doing.

After walking cautiously down the escalator -- conscious of the long descent, and the hard edged steps glistening with water -- I found myself standing on the platform watching the train leaving without me. The train shot out of sight, and the suction flicked at my hair and clothes for a moment. My hands moved, unseen and unconscious into my backpack for my book, which was curved and warped by mistreatment and damp. As I brought it to my face I realised something: All the way from my office I had been moving, with ears unblocked and eyes raised, and I had felt no more a part of my environment as I did when I walked through the crowds with music loud and eyes on my feet.

I remembered when I was younger; reading about the King’s cross fire, about all those men who died because a fire wasn’t part of their routine. When faced with a station worker blocking the escalators they just ducked past, without breaking their stride, and walked purposefully into the suffocating smoke. When I started working in the city I deliberately took different routes, different lines through each space; I was determined to not get automated like that. It clearly hadn’t worked; familiarity had made me move more swiftly and unthinkingly through stations with each month, entirely detached from the whole process. One day, I thought, I’ll probably squeeze onto a train with a twitchy man with a big bag, smelling of cordite, because I don’t want to miss my train. But for now I seem to be getting away with it, I decide. I’m willing to trust in whatever part of my subconscious is controlling me on my way home. I step onto the train and start reading my book.

-Ben

2008-12-03T23:04:00.003Z

I'm currently doing commissioning work for a textbook at work, contacting academics and asking them if they'd be willing to write for us. This means that I spend a considerable amount of time, well, googling people essentially. I have no idea how on earth this sort of work was conducted in the days before the internet and faculty profile pages.

The thing with googling people is that you often turn up relevant results other then faculty pages or personal websites. Things like mentions of the person in question on blogs, news websites, bookstores, etc. You often find yourself getting odd glimpses of people's personal lives through these little details, funny little personal pursuits or interests, relationships and collaborations with other names you know. It can be very interesting, and sometimes a little odd.

Today, for example, I was looking for the email address of an academic who has become estranged from a project without handing over the text. I found their faculty page fairly quickly, which contained all the information I needed. I also turned up a news story, which was mostly about their other half, but mentioned the writer's name in passing as well. It's not significant what the story was about, but it contained a link to the personal website of his wife, whom they mentioned in an earlier email (they work in the same industry). I saw that she attended the same university BA program as him, at the same time, that they shared a lot of academic interests, and, oddly, that they apparently live on opposite sides of the country. One of them in Buffalo, NY, the other in Irvine, CA.

A curious situation, but alas, one doomed to remain so. There is no further information to be had, and I'm not going to ask a writer intrusive questions about their personal life. This got me thinking about how the information acquired from google searches seems to be generally inadmissible in social situations. Despite the fact that this information is all stuff that people have voluntarily placed in the public domain, admitting to a person that you have looked for it makes you instantly weird.

I think one of the aspects of the internet that people don't think of is that with google, all information is interconnected. Someone can volunteer information about their career to a person they are working with, a brief mention of their personal life can come up in a blog post, and their other half can have a profile page which gives his contact details. That all of these pieces of information are online would not be considered creepy by the person I'm working with. If I were to connect all the information I've gathered from ten minutes of reading, however, and use it -- by, say, emailing his wife asking her to tell him to check his damn email once in a while -- it would be a considered a creepy invasion of privacy.

I think I should make that a personal rule to not use internet searches to create the impression that you are omniscient, or that you can read minds.

-Ben

Hijack

2008-11-24T23:26:00.004Z

I was aimlessly internet-loafing earlier and I came across the wiki page for D. B. Cooper. I've read about this geezer before, but it's still got to be one of the coolest, weirdest events that has never been made into a decent film.

-Ben

Fraternities

2008-11-19T23:54:00.004Z

I came across this when doing some research the other day. It's hardly a shocking finding, but interesting for its thoroughness. I give you this interesting little paper --

Fraternity membership, the display of degrading sexual images of women, and rape myth acceptance

I think the same is probably true of a lot of university sports teams over here. Well, judging from how they act in public, and the songs they sing when they're drunk -- I've never been in their rooms.

-Ben

Flying Boat

2008-11-19T22:56:00.008Z

I have a great affection for examples of people bravely continuing to bark up the wrong tree, long after the correct tree has become apparent. It's most interesting in the world of technology, where you get people plugging away, pushing the boundaries, and engineering to perfection something that looks, with the benefit of hindsight, to have been obsolete from the start. The products of this misguided enthusiasm are often masterpieces in their way though, just not particularly practical ones.

Today I found a fine example of this whilst cruising the internets. It was this bulbous beast, the Saunders-Roe Princess.

It was a giant propeller driven flying boat, completed a few months after the de Havilland Comet entered service and Boeing announced the design that would become the Boeing 707. It flew well enough, and was by all accounts a quite nice plane, but many saw the writing was on the wall for flying boats long before it was completed. No-one ever bought one. The company continued to take their flying prototype to airshows around the world though, seemingly in the hope that people would come round to the idea of a giant flying boat, and warm to its snub nosed charm.

Interestingly there are still plenty of people out there who see this plane as having been unfairly snubbed by the British Government and tragically ignored by an aviation industry to lazy to give it a fair hearing. I don't really see the point in such discussions though. Whilst they are pretty, and pleasing in a nautical sort of way, being able to land in almost all weathers - and not having your plane corrode like a boat - are good things too.

Mind you, If I was an evil genius, I'd definitely fly around in one of those.

oh, and this is an amazing bit of technical drawing, showing all its inside gubbins.
-Ben

2008-11-19T22:38:00.005Z

Flagstones around the war memorial in Islington. I thought they were pretty.

2008-11-11T23:30:00.004Z

Here's another 'what I do all day' post. The writer's proofs vs the editor's red biro. I wouldn't take any satisfaction from dealing such an editorial mauling if it wasn't for the fact that I wrote the article in question, and there's always a certain contentment that comes from picking up your mistakes before anyone else does.

The headings are covered up because I'm paranoid and I don't want angry writers poking me with sticks.

-Ben

eek

2008-11-10T23:52:00.005Z

Dreams are funny things. I think it was Freud who said that, or words to that effect anyway. For various reasons I've been getting very little sleep of late - mostly just running on coffee and tea. I don't know whether this is in anyway related, but I've also not been dreaming much recently either. At least, not that I remember.

Don't worry, this post isn't going to be a tedious account of my dreams. Most of the time dreams are really not worth mentioning to anyone, and nine times out of ten if they can't be explained in a single sentence then they're just going to bore people. The other week, for example -- after working on a project about westerns for for a few weeks -- I had a dream that John Wayne came up to me in the pub and called me a 'dirty commie'. See - one sentence. It's not interesting, but at least it's over quickly. It's a subtle difference but it's definitely better than someone sitting there saying "well. I was in this house, right, and there was a butler following me around with a tray of those funny biscuits. You know, the ones with the cow imprinted on them that tasted sort of, er, malty. Anyway, this butler looked like that Russian guy who was in The Man from Uncle, but it was actually my granddad in disguise...etc."

Every now and then though your subconscious throws you such a horrific unexpected curveball that you have to tell someone. This evening, as a result of one of these dreams, it took me about three minutes to pluck up the courage to go out to the shed and get my washing out of the dryer. It wasn't because of something I dreamed, or even something dreamed by someone I know, but the dream of a person I've never met.

This person -- a colleague of my mother's -- is moving into a new flat soon. She's bought the place, and has most of her furniture in the place, but she's not actually living there yet. It sounds like a nice place, on the ground floor of a new housing block built on the site of the old swimming pool in Bexleyheath (not a place I have fond memories of. It always smelled bad, even for a swimming pool, and it had a really deep diving area at the far end of the pool that I was a bit scared of.) Anyway. Last night she dreamt that she was sitting around in her new flat one evening, curtains drawn, when she heard a knock on the window-glass. In the dream she drew back the curtains and came face to face with a pallid boy of about ten, standing outside the window in swimming trunks, his hair dripping wet. He looked at her and said "Can I come in? I'm all wet and cold." He wouldn't go away -- even when she closed the curtains she could still hear him knocking and calling to her. In the dream she ran out of the house hid in her neighbour's flat.

Needless to say, she is now terrified of her new place.

That sort of thing makes me less bothered about the fact that I haven't dreamt much recently.

-Ben

They Call Me Mister President

2008-11-07T21:25:00.007Z

I'm still happy about the US election result, I'm not sure whether it will translate into any sort of improvement in the world -- but a lot of people are certain it will, and I think that confidence probably has considerable power on its own. Sorry about the rather inappropriate In the Heat of the Night reference, although the contrast between then and now is fascinating. I was surprised that none of the english papers used it as a headline. It was nice to see the headlines in the paper on wednesday, things like "One Giant Leap for Mankind", "GOBAMA!" and so on -- a nice change from four years ago when one major national paper in the UK ran with "How can 58 million people be so dumb?". The Obama campaign flickr page has some interesting shots from election night.

In other news, Field Music are awesome. I'm sure this is old news to a lot of people, but I'm a bit slow on the uptake and not very hip.

-Ben

2008-11-06T20:49:00.002Z

I’ve been writing an article about sex in literature for the last few days, which is a rather big subject to condense down to a single 2800 word article. I’ve managed to get the sections on ancient literature, medieval literature, renaissance and early modern literature, and modern literature done but I just can’t get the 19th century bit down right.

The reason for this is that unlike the other historical periods, I’ve not read a great deal of the great canon novels out there. Ultimately, what it comes down to is that--despite my years of reading everything I could get my hands on, earning a first in English Literature, and somehow ending up in a job that requires me to read and write all day--I really don’t like 19th century realist novels. The glowing esteem that those brick-thick books are held in by literary types meant that I’ve had to suffer a lot in the course of my studies.

In the first year I had to read Hard Times by Charles Dickens. I can honestly say that it was the single most tedious book I’ve ever read. It led me to devise a method of rating literature which, whilst highly subjective, nonetheless proved invaluable in my assessment of different books.

The system is this—how many pages can you read before you fall asleep? Bearing in mind your bedroom is generally the only place in a student house that you can get any peace, and the bed is usually the only piece of furniture in your bedroom, it’s pretty easy to doze off.

I started thinking about this system when I was sitting in a very dull seminar (it was in the middle of winter, in a very cold room and it started at 4pm-- which meant it was dark the whole time) thumbing through the copy of Hard Times that I had only managed to get a bit more than halfway through. The rest of the class were silent and sheepish – none of them had managed to finish it either (I asked before the tutor came in) and this was leading to long and uncomfortable silences. Not one to let a room full of people suffer under the claws of the awkward turtle like that, I bravely stepped in and started responding to the tutor’s questions with my finest freestyle academic bullshit, backed up by quotes taken pretty much at random from whatever page happened to fall open while I was speaking.

You’d be surprised how often that method worked. Once, in my final year, I did a presentation which got 73 (that’s a very high mark at an English uni) on a book I hadn’t even read using exactly that technique. It’s all about pretending to be forgetful rather than unprepared--doing a Boris, essentially.

On this particular occasion though, my method was encountering a snag. You see, it had taken me so much effort to read the two-thirds that I’d managed to plough through that my book was half stuck together with drool. (yes, I drool in my sleep. I’m like an unusually articulate spaniel). When someone else finally started talking--and I was able to relax for a while--I sat there, slouched in my corner of the room, and counted how many pages there were between each group of stuck ones. I wasn’t being hugely scientific, but I found that in the case of hard times I managed to read around 15 pages on average in each sitting, before falling asleep.

Now 15 pages isn’t too bad, it’s only 288 pages long so you’d get there eventually. The big problem--and probably why I’ve never been able to see the genius in these books that everyone else sees—is that whilst 15 pages passed before I actually conked out, my brain generally shut down after about 10 pages. I was reading, but the words weren’t reaching my mind.

My impressions of most of the most of the big 19th century novels that sit on the top of all the ‘best books ever’ lists that people publish from time to time (I suspect with the intention of making people feel intellectually inferior) are pretty much the same. For some reason, realist fiction has an amazing soporific effect on me. I managed to read Middlemarch and some Henry James once, although I wouldn’t say I enjoyed them much. But yes, to meander drunkenly back to my original point (if I ever had one) it’s hard to write about sex in 19th century literature when you’ve never read Madame Bovary, Anna Karenina, or Tess of the D’Urbervilles. Perhaps one day I’ll become addicted to amphetamines or something and finally be able to understand what all the fuss is about.

I wrote this in one huge blaze of typing, so it probably doesn’t make much sense. I’ll come back and check it later. Oh, and the irritating mixture of double-hyphens and Em dashes are the fault of Microsoft word, and are really making me wish I had a mac.

-Ben

neato

2008-10-28T23:48:00.004Z

The Unfinished Swan - Tech Demo 9/2008 from Ian Dallas on Vimeo.

I saw this on 'Why, That's Delightful' a few days ago and was rather impressed. I'm really happy whenever I see games like this (the only other example I can think of is Portal, but there are plenty of others). When I saw how close games were getting to photorealism I really hoped that we'd get some sort of gaming equivalent of impressionism and abstraction. Because, as any 19th century artist will tell you, photorealism is boring. I am pretty sure that in about five years Twilight Princess will look really badly dated, whilst The Wind Waker will still look stylistically amazing. The fact that developers are doing things like this provides a satisfying counterbalance to the ongoing efforts to render team sports, cars, and brutal violence in ever more colorful detail.

Not that I have anything against violent games, or games where I crash cars, it's just that sometimes I like to feel like games should at least try and punch their weight in a cultural or aesthetic sense.

-Ben

I was going to link a load of other things I've read and seen recently, but most of them are in some way political and really, I think that anyone reading this doesn't need to be told that Sarah Palin is a moron again.

Oh, but I should link this fine example of what must, surely, be genius trolling. That, or an idiot of truly magnificent proportions.

"That's just perfectly normal paranoia. Everyone in the universe has that"

2008-10-27T23:21:00.009Z

I’m watching a BBC documentary about the collapse (and alleged demolition) of World Trade Center tower 7. Conspiracy theories like these are always fascinating examples of the many different biases which people bring to the analysis of evidence.

[I was going to write more on this stuff, and I might at some point, but I’m tired now.]

Firstly there is always the way that most people are far more willing to take didactic statements of truth from figures of authority than they are willing to assess evidence on their own. This creates big problems for people trying to debunk conspiracy theories, because they are often started, or prominently backed up, by people with seemingly solid credentials. What is most effective is when a person with an apparently informed background (in the case of the WTC7 conspiracies he’s an architect*) states—without giving any evidence to support his claim—that the scenario he suggests is ‘obvious’ and that ‘anyone can see it’. I’m sure there’s a name for this effect in the study of rhetoric, but I don’t know what it is, either way it is very effective -- it makes people who go along with his arguments feel superior; everyone else, the subconscious logic goes, are idiotic and easily led. The statement that I thought was particularly interesting in this documentary is when the 911 truthman says ‘even a child can see that that isn’t a natural collapse’

Which is just dumb. It’s like saying ‘any child can tell that lightning is caused by fighting sky monsters’ because you think that meteorologists are a sinister cabal who don’t want anyone to learn how they ‘really’ predict the weather. Hypotheses are not given credibility on a first-come-first-serve basis, they have to make sense, and be possible. Generally underpinning all of these things is the anti-intellectualism that seems to be becoming increasingly common in American society in particular. The fact that those who support the official line are world leading authorities on the subject of demolition and structural collapse is seen as irrelevant. Just as the fact that Sarah Palin doesn't seem to know the first thing about the job she's running for, or the sort of issues she'd be expected to deal with, is seen as irrelevant by many.

Even if you disregard the fact that rigging a building for demolition involves tearing out internal walls, drilling holes in columns, and laying miles and miles of cables everywhere (which is hard to do in a busy office building without anyone noticing), this conspiracy theory is no more possible than any of the other unorthodox theories that have surfaced over the years. The reason for this is fairly simple: with each successive counter to their arguments conspiracy theorists add more people to the list of people who would have to be in on the conspiracy. What this amounts to, in effect, is that these people are accusing thousands of people of being accessories to mass murder. A list that includes all of the structural engineers that testified at the enquiry, the FDNY and NYPD witnesses who testified that they heard no demolition explosions, as well as thousands of ordinary men and women in the area at the time.

When people come up with these theories they generally envisage them as being masterminded by some devilish incarnation of ‘the man’ and don’t seem to realise what it is that they are, in reality, suggesting. Even if you accept the idea that thousands of people who pledged to help their fellow citizens, who have risked their lives in the course of that vocation, lied and conspired to kill thousands of innocent people, there is an insoluble problem with all this: people are shit at keeping secrets.

Just think, Nixon couldn’t keep a break-in at an office in the Watergate building secret – and that only involved a handful of people. Do they really think that of the thousands who would have to be involved in a scheme like this, none of them would sell their stories, or have a crisis of conscience?

I've always felt that Hanlon's Razor is one of the best principles to live by, or, in the words of Sir Bernard Ingham, "cock-up before conspiracy".

-Ben

*This is a irrelevant anecdotal slur, but I’ve heard my share of ‘dumb architect’ stories: structural engineers like to tell stories of the many architects they have dealt with who displayed ignorance of construction methods, structural tolerances, and even really basic physics.

2008-10-23T00:37:00.005+01:00

It’s been said many times, by people much more intelligent and articulate than myself, but the internet has really changed the way that people access and interact with information. My job requires me to do a fair amount of research and calls on me to have at least a passing knowledge of pretty much everything, ever.

Now, if you want a fairly shallow understanding of pretty much everything, ever, then the internet is your man – or, more specifically, Wikipedia. When I need to know something for a specific reason then I get my information from somewhere authoritative, but for just a quick orientation on a subject wiki is king.

The problem with it, and its great strength, is the amazing way that information is endlessly interlinked and cross-referenced. It brings out a little known principle of information gathering, sort of like thermodynamics of thought – when reading about something important, your mind will always tend to drift towards information that is less important, but more interesting. This is best demonstrated by this XKCD comic:

Today, for example, I started by reading about a John Wayne film called ‘The Cowboys’ – this was for work, I needed to get a vague idea of the story before I wrote something. Through various strange diversions -- which included articles on Bruce Dern, Yakima Canutt, and Non-Fiction Novels -- I ended up on a website devoted to a little known sideshow freak/magician called Johnny Eck.

All you can see in that picture is all there was to him – he was developmentally normal, except for the fact that his body stopped just below his ribcage, giving him the appearance of a half person. He nonetheless lived a long and varied life, managing to use his bizarre deformity to his advantage. I especially like the anecdote I read about the time when he performed in a travelling magic show with a magician and a dwarf: The dwarf would wear a specially designed pair of giant trousers that came up over his head, and would hold Johnny Eck over the waist so that – in a dark theatre at least – they looked like one person. The magician would pick them out of the audience for the obligatory sawing-in-half trick, and when the boxes were separated the ‘legs’ would get up and run around the stage, with Johnny Eck chasing them around on his hands, angrily demanding that they come back. The cast and crew always found the show hilarious, and once the people who had fainted, or thrown up, had recovered they were pretty impressed too.

-Ben

2008-10-20T19:47:00.004+01:00

At 2am last night I was lying in bed, staring at the ceiling. I'd managed to put down the book I was reading about 20 minutes previously, having grown too distracted by my own thoughts to for it to hold my attention. After a few minutes spent watching a confused moth (the only kind, as far as I can tell) I found myself, once again, considering the worth of my weekend's activities on the basis of how much laundry I'd managed to get done. At this point it became apparent that something had gone badly wrong. I don't want to be misunderstood here, I'm not saying that I was once some great centre-of-attention party animal -- a quick look through the archives of this blog would quickly rubbish that thought -- but you know, I used to have a slightly more interesting life than I do now. I sat around thinking on this subject, and many others, for a few hours before I finally conked out at about half past four in the morning.

The result of this night's intense self-evaluation wasn't any sense of purpose, mental clarity, or some hardened resolve. No. Instead the result was me waking up late, having to run for a late train, and spending the day in a state somewhere south of sensible. I managed to get a reasonable amount of work done -- with the help of rancid-goat's-arse instant coffee -- but towards the end of the day my head was getting a little swimmy.

In the afternoon I was reading through a book on Ancient Mesopotamia, noting down material that could be reused and checking maps and suchlike. At about five in the afternoon the caffeine, sleeplessness and boredom all conspired to turn me into a uncontrollably giggling wreck. I was staring at a map of the Kingdom of Hammurabi which had the ancient cities marked on it, and which ritual and cultural landmarks they contained. The names and labels were starting to drift in and out of focus as I tried to keep my eyes open, and I found myself reading them out loud (very quietly) to myself. After a few minutes the following sequence of words came out of my mouth:

Akshak...Ziggurat...Babylon...Kish!

I said it again, with a funny sort of metric rhythm to it. It made me smile. I liked the way it sounded. I ended up sitting at my desk sort of reciting 'Akshak...Ziggurat...Babylon...Kish' every few minutes and giggling to myself like a man possessed. Even now it makes me smile.

I think I've either come across an extremely pleasing set of words, or I'm starting to go completely bonkers.

-Ben

Mr Ben Digs

2008-10-19T21:09:00.007+01:00

Like many middle class white boys, I have a furtive love for old school hip hop (Oh yes, I don't even spell it with a K, that's how uncool I am). Take a peek through a gap in the curtains on an average evening and you'll quite likely see me dancing around my house to Brand Nubian, Jurassic 5, A tribe Called Quest, or Del tha Funky Homosapien like Henry Kissinger on cocaine. Bearing that in mind imagine my glee when I heard DJ Format+Abdominal on the Adam and Joe show.

That video and the one below this little bit of text are good examples, and feature excellent nerdy computer games references, but essentially everything I've found by DJ Format and Abdominal is face meltingly good.

Other sounds that I've been listening to recently include the sadly no longer active Nic Jones, the strange jazz guitar-tuba-tapdancers combo that are the Born Again Floozies, and Chatham County Line who make some good hillbilly music.

-Ben

treadmilltreadmilltreadmilltreadmill

2008-10-16T00:06:00.004+01:00

I went to the gym today, an event which happens rather more often than even I'm sure I believe. When I was there I was thinking about something that my cousin (who is super ultra fit) said about a good bit of exercise. She mentioned how it made her feel better afterwards, and how she found it invigorating - and she said it in a way that suggested that this was a universal reaction to running, cycling, running, etc. This is a line that I've heard many times from various different people, and it's a line which I think may well be the reason why a lot of people like me give up on this particular aspect of a healthy lifestyle.

Allow me to explain. I hate exercise. I don't feel invigorated, I feel pain and misery. I've learned to expect this, but I worry that a lot of people give up when they realise that the promised moment when it stops being torture isn't ever going to arrive for them; I worry that they feel awkward and out-of-place when others talk about how good it makes them feel and start lying to fit in with the others. I know I did for a while. It took me a long while before I realised the actual reason why I feel good when I get home from the gym. It isn't endorphins or whatever, but simply because that point marks the furthest I can get from the time when I'll feel obliged to go to the gym again.

I just want to make this clear. I go to the gym because I eat a lot, I'm quite vain, and I have a vague sense of concern for my long-term health. Not because I enjoy inflicting that stuff on myself. I think if more people said that they exercise because they think it's a good idea, rather than because it makes them love life, then more people would be willing to keep up.

-Ben