Recruitment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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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

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?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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?

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!

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

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?

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

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

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

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