Thursday 19 December 2019
St Lawrence Jewry With The Lights On
It was the Lord Mayor's Carol Service Thursday evening, and they turned the lights on in St Lawrence Jewry, so they could move stuff around and have a dust before the City Gentry turned up. I'm not really a City person, but this did make me realise that, while the Bank of England at one end of Throgmorton Street might be the centre of the financial universe, the centre of the traditional City is St Pauls and the Guildhall. Which is where St Lawrence Jewry is.
Monday 16 December 2019
Simply Be - A Road Sign
This is a bus-stop and sign on a journey I make around once-a-week, and have been for years. Suddenly it became a photograph. The subject isn't the girls, or the silly ad, but the road sign.
Covered in pollen and tree dust, only really visible in winter, and offering a choice of destinations ranging from the downright insalubrious (Hanworth) to the supposedly posh (Twickenham), with Hounslow somewhere in the middle.
The advert gets cleaned and renewed because capitalism. The road sign stays dirty because why should Hounslow council spend my local taxes cleaning their road signs?
Week three of the Great SW Trains Guards strike. Nearly Xmas.
Thursday 12 December 2019
The Load We Have To Move
I read James Wallman’s book on how we can improve the way we use our spare time, and in putting some remarks together, kept going off at a tangent. Wallman’s book is full of life-hacks, some reasonable and some utterly silly, and I don’t like hacks because I’d rather identify and solve the underlying problem. The underlying reasons for why people waste their spare time on junk activities are about the structure of their lives, and that takes us away from simple hacks to some serious reviews and actions that lack best-seller friendliness.
Then I remembered Jordan Peterson’s remark about young men and purpose, from one of his classic videos...
and the line “well, at least I moved that load from here to there”. He meant it as a metaphor, and then I realised what the load really is.
Very few people even come close. I’m bad at finding tradesmen and couldn’t find a new friend if my life depended on it. My Game is weak, and my job-hunting is bad. My diet is skewed towards sugar, and lacks variety. This may be because I’m getting old and my taste buds are going. I was in my mid-forties before I worked for a manager who thought I was good at my job and appreciated it. Only a couple of years before that I did my Step Eight and started to feel some actual self-respect. I spent a lot of the first half of my being pretty much a junk person myself. When I was at my alcoholic worst, I worked for some dodgy but not actually criminal people, and I have worked for a company director who wound up in jail, so maybe I have worked for criminals.
Getting honest work is not difficult, but it’s not easy either. Here’s the (*): nurses, policemen, firemen and teachers are paid from taxes. They are paid not to do what the people they deal with want, but what the Government and the organisation wants to do with the people they deal with. It’s a subtle but crucial difference. Provided that the staff are in tune with the public, that’s not so bad, but when the organisation is looks down on the public, that’s not so acceptable.
That’s the load. Do those things and you won’t be asking about the purpose of your life.
Because that’s what living is.
Then I remembered Jordan Peterson’s remark about young men and purpose, from one of his classic videos...
and the line “well, at least I moved that load from here to there”. He meant it as a metaphor, and then I realised what the load really is.
You are someone who respects themselves, and is lucky enough to have friends and co-workers who are considerate enough to express their thanks for what you do for them. Earn a living working in a company that produces something legal that people want and are not forced by law to pay for (*). Pay your taxes and not whine about it. Work hard, exercise, eat right, not drink too much, and not buy things you don’t need with money you don’t have to impress people you don’t care about. Stay away from junk culture, junk food, junk activities and junk people. Try all sorts of things until you find food, drink, music, literature, movies, dance, theatre, sports, athletic and outdoor activities, that you like. Learn to cook, buy food, and keep your lodgings clean. Learn how to recognise users, losers and abusers, and keep them out of your life. Learn how to recognise scientific, political, economic, commercial and personal fraud. (It isn’t as hard as you might think.) Learn to follow the money: ask, about anyone who is getting press coverage and telling you how you should behave, where they are getting their money from, who is financing them? Learn how to find tradesmen to do what you can’t, and don’t begrudge paying them a fair price. Learn how to find and make friends - keeping them depends as much on them as on you. Learn how to find jobs and interview well for them, and also to leave politely when it’s obvious the job is a crock.That’s the load.
You are not going to get married or enter into a domestic relationship unless your parents and her parents are still happily married. You are not going to have children until you are married, and unless you can think, right now, of three ways of keeping a four year-old, a ten year-old and a seventeen-year-old from being bored in whatever the weather is right now. (You should remember those from your own childhood.) Learn Game so you are not tongue-tied and awkward when you meet a woman you want to have an affair with, and especially the one you want to have children with, because you're going to need to Game her for the rest of your life.
Very few people even come close. I’m bad at finding tradesmen and couldn’t find a new friend if my life depended on it. My Game is weak, and my job-hunting is bad. My diet is skewed towards sugar, and lacks variety. This may be because I’m getting old and my taste buds are going. I was in my mid-forties before I worked for a manager who thought I was good at my job and appreciated it. Only a couple of years before that I did my Step Eight and started to feel some actual self-respect. I spent a lot of the first half of my being pretty much a junk person myself. When I was at my alcoholic worst, I worked for some dodgy but not actually criminal people, and I have worked for a company director who wound up in jail, so maybe I have worked for criminals.
Getting honest work is not difficult, but it’s not easy either. Here’s the (*): nurses, policemen, firemen and teachers are paid from taxes. They are paid not to do what the people they deal with want, but what the Government and the organisation wants to do with the people they deal with. It’s a subtle but crucial difference. Provided that the staff are in tune with the public, that’s not so bad, but when the organisation is looks down on the public, that’s not so acceptable.
That’s the load. Do those things and you won’t be asking about the purpose of your life.
Because that’s what living is.
Monday 9 December 2019
On Death
Some philosophers are obsessed by death, seeing it as some kind of defining event in the human condition, but more than that, as a kind of swindle. Death steals life from us. Just when we got it all figured out and are no longer driven by tyrannical hormonal urges (either ours or the childrens’) - bosh! The Grim Reaper comes along and spoils our fun.
Or something like that.
The death of healthy young people is theft, a moral flaw in the Universe. They really have had their lives stolen from them. Old gits like me, not so much. I’ve had my life, made what little of it I could, and my time has passed.
Suffering is another thing. I regard death, mostly, as a release from suffering, and especially the suffering of injury, disease and old age. A young person who lives in paid and has to spend an hour a day on some machine is being released by death, not cheated.
Death was a release for my friend Terence last year, my friend Chris died in his early sixties from the after-effects of prostate cancer, after almost ten years of a second-chance after the first operation that gave a happy family life in those years. Another man I knew, Richard, fell over in the bath after a seizure. He was in his mid-forties. Outwardly his life looked just fine, but his emotional life was something out of a 1950’s black and white English movie, the ones with the domineering mother. Richard’s death was unfair: he still had time to change. My father died peacefully in his sleep after a post-operative blood clot hit his heart.
It’s not death that’s scary. Either nothing happens, you go to heaven, or come back as a donkey, depending on your religious belief. Our death, as Wittgenstein remarked, is not an event in our lives. It’s an event in other people’s lives. In our lives we are immortal: we are only mortal in the lives of others.
It’s dying that’s scary. The pain from the fatal injury or the terminal disease. The fast fading of our health and powers. The sense that we are becoming irrelevant, and maybe even a burden, we who only a few years ago carried the burdens of others. I’m sure there are pathological states (see those 1950’s English movies) best left unexamined.
Death is, ultimately, a release from dying. Our dying does happen in our lives, we do experience it, and we’d rather not.
Or something like that.
The death of healthy young people is theft, a moral flaw in the Universe. They really have had their lives stolen from them. Old gits like me, not so much. I’ve had my life, made what little of it I could, and my time has passed.
Suffering is another thing. I regard death, mostly, as a release from suffering, and especially the suffering of injury, disease and old age. A young person who lives in paid and has to spend an hour a day on some machine is being released by death, not cheated.
Death was a release for my friend Terence last year, my friend Chris died in his early sixties from the after-effects of prostate cancer, after almost ten years of a second-chance after the first operation that gave a happy family life in those years. Another man I knew, Richard, fell over in the bath after a seizure. He was in his mid-forties. Outwardly his life looked just fine, but his emotional life was something out of a 1950’s black and white English movie, the ones with the domineering mother. Richard’s death was unfair: he still had time to change. My father died peacefully in his sleep after a post-operative blood clot hit his heart.
It’s not death that’s scary. Either nothing happens, you go to heaven, or come back as a donkey, depending on your religious belief. Our death, as Wittgenstein remarked, is not an event in our lives. It’s an event in other people’s lives. In our lives we are immortal: we are only mortal in the lives of others.
It’s dying that’s scary. The pain from the fatal injury or the terminal disease. The fast fading of our health and powers. The sense that we are becoming irrelevant, and maybe even a burden, we who only a few years ago carried the burdens of others. I’m sure there are pathological states (see those 1950’s English movies) best left unexamined.
Death is, ultimately, a release from dying. Our dying does happen in our lives, we do experience it, and we’d rather not.
Thursday 5 December 2019
Habits That Remind You That You're Alive
I got this one from the penultimate episode of Fog and Crimes S2. The ageing Police Commissioner of Ferrara tells his wayward-yet-brilliant detective Soneri (Our Hero) that he goes to a traditional cafe for tea and cakes every chance he gets: it’s one of those habits that reminds you you’re alive.
Absolutely.
My weekly sunbeds - if I miss those, I feel like I’m neglecting myself.
Looking at the River Thames when in town (I don’t do this often enough, especially when it’s cold or the District Line has maintenance work)
I used to like stopping in at the Caffe Nero on Archway before descending into Holborn tube for the Central Line. My espresso and pastry at the Soho Coffee on Gresham Street just isn’t the same experience.
Saturday morning gym followed by a movie at a Curzon - I miss that. I could be being too fussy about the movies I see.
Visiting Zandvoort on my way to see my friend in Utrecht. It’s once a year, but it’s every year.
Choosing music on CD. Near-infallible method: go to the classical section at Foyles, look at composers whose names are new to you. Choose on the basis of musical period (Baroque, Classical, Romantic, 20th Century, etc) and type (string quartets, piano, concerto, etc). I’ve rarely gone wrong. Except when I tell myself I really should try to like the Romantic Symphony.
Reading a book that takes me out of wherever I am. The most recent was a Donald E Westlake. I’d look up and think “I’m on the train? I thought I was in Hong Kong.” (Strictly that’s not a habit, but it will pass.)
Absolutely.
My weekly sunbeds - if I miss those, I feel like I’m neglecting myself.
Looking at the River Thames when in town (I don’t do this often enough, especially when it’s cold or the District Line has maintenance work)
I used to like stopping in at the Caffe Nero on Archway before descending into Holborn tube for the Central Line. My espresso and pastry at the Soho Coffee on Gresham Street just isn’t the same experience.
Saturday morning gym followed by a movie at a Curzon - I miss that. I could be being too fussy about the movies I see.
Visiting Zandvoort on my way to see my friend in Utrecht. It’s once a year, but it’s every year.
Choosing music on CD. Near-infallible method: go to the classical section at Foyles, look at composers whose names are new to you. Choose on the basis of musical period (Baroque, Classical, Romantic, 20th Century, etc) and type (string quartets, piano, concerto, etc). I’ve rarely gone wrong. Except when I tell myself I really should try to like the Romantic Symphony.
Reading a book that takes me out of wherever I am. The most recent was a Donald E Westlake. I’d look up and think “I’m on the train? I thought I was in Hong Kong.” (Strictly that’s not a habit, but it will pass.)
Monday 2 December 2019
When Nothing is Quite 'Enough'
My Dutch friend and I are pondering a problem. It’s one of those you-wait-until-you-get-to-our-age problems, so I don’t expect you to understand it.
The problem is that we’ve lost our vim and vinegar and zest for living. We no longer get excited by whatever it is we used to get excited about. It’s getting too easy to let the few things we have to do slide, and let the day pass in activities that don’t add up to anything.
There are a lot of cliched answers to this, some of which are also true but nothing like the whole story. So we’ll skip the you’re-just-getting-old bit. And we’ll skip the movies-really-are-worse-now bit as well. I’m going to allow the 65-is-a-dangerous-age-cynthia argument, because it’s true. For my generation. Even though we know the Rules got changed. I reckon I’m just coming out of the post-significant-date phase now.
There’s nothing wrong with my friend’s life that couldn’t cured by: a) an income of around €3,000 a month after tax, b) being able to write one novel every nine months, and c) knowing that it will be accepted by the publishers and sell reasonably well. Which as any novelist will tell you is a pretty nice life. He would be a transformed man. He would be the writer he wanted to be. But there’s not a lot he can do about turning into that person now.
Which is enough to make it easy to leave some minor project, or even a trip to the movies, for another couple of days or even weeks.
My friend isn’t an alcoholic. I am and we alcoholics are, of course, stuck. What we want is not to be us, and we know that there is nothing out there that can do that trick. No matter how much money we make, no matter how many and sincere the friends we have, no matter how beautiful and charming our lovers, no matter the regard in which we are held by those whose regard we care for… at the end of each day, all those things will take their temporary leave and we will be left with the one person we don’t want to be left with. Under alcoholism and ACoA, everything gets a coating of emotional chilli pepper, so whatever it is, it’s also a distraction from ourselves. I think a lot of people in recovery get a glimpse of that, decide it feels a bit hollow, and stay at an earlier state of the process, where they can believe that their emotions are real, and not the hall-of-mirrors of addiction.
Which is enough to make it easy to leave some minor project, or even a trip to the movies, for another couple of days or even weeks.
There’s one thing nobody tells you about getting older: the sense of reward from doing something declines. It just does. Hormones, thicker skin, whatever. Back in the late 1970’s my friend and I used to go out Sunday afternoon. Simpler times when a pizza and movie at the Odeon was pretty close to living large. Part of that good time was each other’s company.
Other people's company is a valuable part of the whole thing. I heard a couple of twenty-somethings coming out of a Transformers movie in the West End: “that was by no means a good film” said one of them, but the fact it was twaddle didn’t ruin their evening. They could still go have a drink and talk nonsense afterwards. If I set off to see a movie on my own, I need to believe it’s going to be a good movie. If I set off for a walk, I need the sun to be out and the sky to be blue.
The trick is this: to recognise that the thing you decided you weren’t going to do because it wasn’t enough is still better than the default thing you will wind up doing instead. Which is often watching You Tube, or television. So do that anyway.
There’s one other thing, which I got from an episode of Fog and Crimes S2. But I’ll discuss that later
The problem is that we’ve lost our vim and vinegar and zest for living. We no longer get excited by whatever it is we used to get excited about. It’s getting too easy to let the few things we have to do slide, and let the day pass in activities that don’t add up to anything.
There are a lot of cliched answers to this, some of which are also true but nothing like the whole story. So we’ll skip the you’re-just-getting-old bit. And we’ll skip the movies-really-are-worse-now bit as well. I’m going to allow the 65-is-a-dangerous-age-cynthia argument, because it’s true. For my generation. Even though we know the Rules got changed. I reckon I’m just coming out of the post-significant-date phase now.
There’s nothing wrong with my friend’s life that couldn’t cured by: a) an income of around €3,000 a month after tax, b) being able to write one novel every nine months, and c) knowing that it will be accepted by the publishers and sell reasonably well. Which as any novelist will tell you is a pretty nice life. He would be a transformed man. He would be the writer he wanted to be. But there’s not a lot he can do about turning into that person now.
Which is enough to make it easy to leave some minor project, or even a trip to the movies, for another couple of days or even weeks.
My friend isn’t an alcoholic. I am and we alcoholics are, of course, stuck. What we want is not to be us, and we know that there is nothing out there that can do that trick. No matter how much money we make, no matter how many and sincere the friends we have, no matter how beautiful and charming our lovers, no matter the regard in which we are held by those whose regard we care for… at the end of each day, all those things will take their temporary leave and we will be left with the one person we don’t want to be left with. Under alcoholism and ACoA, everything gets a coating of emotional chilli pepper, so whatever it is, it’s also a distraction from ourselves. I think a lot of people in recovery get a glimpse of that, decide it feels a bit hollow, and stay at an earlier state of the process, where they can believe that their emotions are real, and not the hall-of-mirrors of addiction.
Which is enough to make it easy to leave some minor project, or even a trip to the movies, for another couple of days or even weeks.
There’s one thing nobody tells you about getting older: the sense of reward from doing something declines. It just does. Hormones, thicker skin, whatever. Back in the late 1970’s my friend and I used to go out Sunday afternoon. Simpler times when a pizza and movie at the Odeon was pretty close to living large. Part of that good time was each other’s company.
Other people's company is a valuable part of the whole thing. I heard a couple of twenty-somethings coming out of a Transformers movie in the West End: “that was by no means a good film” said one of them, but the fact it was twaddle didn’t ruin their evening. They could still go have a drink and talk nonsense afterwards. If I set off to see a movie on my own, I need to believe it’s going to be a good movie. If I set off for a walk, I need the sun to be out and the sky to be blue.
The trick is this: to recognise that the thing you decided you weren’t going to do because it wasn’t enough is still better than the default thing you will wind up doing instead. Which is often watching You Tube, or television. So do that anyway.
There’s one other thing, which I got from an episode of Fog and Crimes S2. But I’ll discuss that later
Thursday 28 November 2019
Vandalised Windows E-Mail
Thank you for your e-mail. I’m aware that when you took the crime report on Friday morning, I was still upset from the events of Thursday evening and was not making a lot of sense. So I thought I’d summarise the facts, especially since whoever it was took another couple of shots at my house on Friday afternoon (15th) around 16:30, when I made another emergency call (CADXXXX15112019). Two officers visited me at 17:30, looked around and seemed surprised at what they saw.
The earliest date I am sure my house was attacked was Wednesday 6th November when a number of ball-bearings were shot at my house around 22:00, one breaking a window in my back room. (Backroom_20191106 attached). For various reasons (I leave for work when it’s dark, and get back when it’s dark) I simply didn’t notice this until the week of the 11th.
There were at least two more incidents of what I thought was pebble-throwing in the next few days, both in the late evening. I was wrong to think these were pebbles.
On Thursday evening 14th around 22:30 someone shot a number of metal ball-bearings at the back of my house. One came through the kitchen window, leaving a neat round hole and scattering small glass fragments the length of the kitchen. This was followed by two closely spaced shots which broke the glass of a window in my back room.
At that moment I felt I was under attack. One pellet against a wall is a prank, two in quick succession through the same window is malice.
I made the first call to 999 immediately after that. (CADXXXX14112019.)
I recovered two ball-bearings while cleaning up the next morning. The officers who visited on Friday evening (15th) found seven more ball bearings (Ballbearings.jpg) near the back of my house: these must have bounced off the wall. I still have two more to find inside the house.
I discussed two possibilities with the officers on Friday. The first that it’s someone on Camrose Avenue shooting from a window. Second, it’s someone shooting from the back alley. Taking a look along my back alley, all the other houses on Elmgate Avenue have higher fences or trees blocking the line-of-sight. So my house looks like a target of opportunity.
The first could be dealt with by a friendly enquiry from the most likely houses. No allegations need to be made, and it would eliminate the possibility. Your colleagues suggested that the Safer Neighbourhoods Team might take this on.
I will be drawing my curtains and taking a couple of other simple measures for a while. Your colleagues said I should call if there were any more attacks on my home.
----------
So there's something that's been going on and gave me some bad nights' sleep at the end of my week off. I'm waiting for the insurance assessors to visit. I decided that in the chaotic lives of teenagers who shoot ball bearings at houses in the evening, and will soon be spending months in Young Offenders Institutions, that a house with no lights on at 22:00 must be empty, since it's owner must be out, probably at the pub. The idea that it is occupied by a hard-working man who wakes up early is so far out of their experience that they wouldn't even know what the words mean. Hence leaving the lights on. With the curtains drawn. Because if the lights are on, and they can't see anyone moving around (when I sit on the couch, my head is out of sight), they will assume that I am out, or possibly passed out in a drunken stupor like their parents. As you can tell, I wish whoever it is nothing but the best for their lives.
The earliest date I am sure my house was attacked was Wednesday 6th November when a number of ball-bearings were shot at my house around 22:00, one breaking a window in my back room. (Backroom_20191106 attached). For various reasons (I leave for work when it’s dark, and get back when it’s dark) I simply didn’t notice this until the week of the 11th.
There were at least two more incidents of what I thought was pebble-throwing in the next few days, both in the late evening. I was wrong to think these were pebbles.
On Thursday evening 14th around 22:30 someone shot a number of metal ball-bearings at the back of my house. One came through the kitchen window, leaving a neat round hole and scattering small glass fragments the length of the kitchen. This was followed by two closely spaced shots which broke the glass of a window in my back room.
At that moment I felt I was under attack. One pellet against a wall is a prank, two in quick succession through the same window is malice.
I made the first call to 999 immediately after that. (CADXXXX14112019.)
I recovered two ball-bearings while cleaning up the next morning. The officers who visited on Friday evening (15th) found seven more ball bearings (Ballbearings.jpg) near the back of my house: these must have bounced off the wall. I still have two more to find inside the house.
I discussed two possibilities with the officers on Friday. The first that it’s someone on Camrose Avenue shooting from a window. Second, it’s someone shooting from the back alley. Taking a look along my back alley, all the other houses on Elmgate Avenue have higher fences or trees blocking the line-of-sight. So my house looks like a target of opportunity.
The first could be dealt with by a friendly enquiry from the most likely houses. No allegations need to be made, and it would eliminate the possibility. Your colleagues suggested that the Safer Neighbourhoods Team might take this on.
I will be drawing my curtains and taking a couple of other simple measures for a while. Your colleagues said I should call if there were any more attacks on my home.
----------
So there's something that's been going on and gave me some bad nights' sleep at the end of my week off. I'm waiting for the insurance assessors to visit. I decided that in the chaotic lives of teenagers who shoot ball bearings at houses in the evening, and will soon be spending months in Young Offenders Institutions, that a house with no lights on at 22:00 must be empty, since it's owner must be out, probably at the pub. The idea that it is occupied by a hard-working man who wakes up early is so far out of their experience that they wouldn't even know what the words mean. Hence leaving the lights on. With the curtains drawn. Because if the lights are on, and they can't see anyone moving around (when I sit on the couch, my head is out of sight), they will assume that I am out, or possibly passed out in a drunken stupor like their parents. As you can tell, I wish whoever it is nothing but the best for their lives.
Monday 25 November 2019
We Apologise For This Break In Service
Regular readers will have noticed a lack of regular writing, or even pictures, over the last three weeks. There’s sure to be a reason for this, but I’m not sure I know what it really is.
A lot of blogging and even more You Tube-ing is commentary, and usually on some article in the mainstream press or TV. For all the posturing about the decline and irrelevance of mainstream media, it’s still the source material for most of the commentary. Very few You Tubers do their own research. I don’t blame them: original research is difficult and if it’s to be more than digging around public records, it needs contacts and networks. Digging around in public records can still be a good way of getting the dirt.
Some of this blog is commentary, some of it is part of an internal debate with myself on various subjects, some of it is a record of what’s going on in my life. I’m kinda done with the commentary: one can only say so many times that most journalists and politicians are on the wrong side of history and desperate to maintain their status until the last minute. The internal debates will go on, but right now I can’t write any of it down. Perhaps I’m looking for too much and should stick to working out what size of TV I want, or if I want a new one at all. As for what’s going on in my life, I haven’t known how to write about some of it at the moment.
A lot of blogging and even more You Tube-ing is commentary, and usually on some article in the mainstream press or TV. For all the posturing about the decline and irrelevance of mainstream media, it’s still the source material for most of the commentary. Very few You Tubers do their own research. I don’t blame them: original research is difficult and if it’s to be more than digging around public records, it needs contacts and networks. Digging around in public records can still be a good way of getting the dirt.
Some of this blog is commentary, some of it is part of an internal debate with myself on various subjects, some of it is a record of what’s going on in my life. I’m kinda done with the commentary: one can only say so many times that most journalists and politicians are on the wrong side of history and desperate to maintain their status until the last minute. The internal debates will go on, but right now I can’t write any of it down. Perhaps I’m looking for too much and should stick to working out what size of TV I want, or if I want a new one at all. As for what’s going on in my life, I haven’t known how to write about some of it at the moment.
Thursday 31 October 2019
What Money Buys
There seem to be as many financial You Tubers are there are dating coaches. All of them are, of course, about not spending money, or, as we Brits would say, not pissing it away. A lot of them are about saving or investing money instead of spending it, and how much better a person you will be if you save or invest instead of spend.
Right. (cracks fingers)
Money buys four different things: necessities; peace of mind; quality of life; options.
Necessities are the the things you need to make the money you need so you can get the things you need to make the money you need. And not be living in your Mom’s basement. And not looking like a homeless person. Rent, council tax, travel to work, raw food that you cook yourself, water, electricity, gas, clothes, shoes, mobile phone. (If you don’t think a mobile phone isn’t a necessity, you are a privileged white person who doesn’t work. If you did zero hours or temp work, you’d know the only way an agency gets in touch is on a mobile.) Soap, shampoo, toothpaste, nail clippers and nail file. Detergent to wash your clothes with. Razor and shaving cream. Towels. Bedsheets, duvet, pillow and pillow cases. Haircuts.
Peace of Mind is what comes when you know you can handle something going wrong. Being the guy who tears his hair out because he doesn’t have the spare cash to handle a minor upset, from a blown tyre, or water on the laptop, or missing the holiday flight home and having to buy the expensive one-way ticket - being the guy whose world falls apart at that kind of stuff is not a good look, and it’s a lousy way to feel. Anything goes wrong, and you flip off the deep end, because you may have to starve for the next week. That’s why you buy contents insurance, even if you don’t own your own place. It’s why you put money into an Oh Shit account. At today’s prices, you will start to feel comfortable with about £2,000 in the Oh Shit account.
Quality of life. This is two things: less shoddiness, inconvenience and effort, and more pleasure, health, education and personal growth. Shoes from Northampton cobblers instead of cheap things that look awful after six months; good noise-cancelling headphones to avoid the pointless sounds of commuting; my weekly minutes in the sunbed; parking at the station now and again; having a car, even though I don’t drive to work; my movie streaming and music streaming subscriptions, DVDs, CDs, books, movies and occasional live shows - entertainment is quality of life. Dental hygienist once every three-four months.
Quality of life is not indulgence. The difference is not in the act itself, but in the purpose and affordability.
One indulgence is acceptable. Mine is the gym. It’s a fancy one. They provide towels. There’s a swimming pool. The soap and shampoo is Cowshed. I rent a locker. Get there early enough in the morning and pick up a free copy of the Financial Times. I could go to a much cheaper one, but it wouldn’t be twenty yards from Piccadilly Circus. I’ll go to a chain warehouse gym when I retire.
Where I differ from the gurus is this: it’s your money, your life. You want to piss it all away and be poor for twenty years after you stop working, please by my guest. I’m not going to stop you, and I’m not going to vote for a Government that wants to bail you out either. You want to be dumb, go ahead. I have no idea how people can spend thousands on gaming laptops and games, but they have no idea how anyone could live a life as boring as mine.
Because, unless you make a pile of cash and keep it, or unless you are in the top five per cent of salary-earners in your economy, the difference between all those spending-saving strategies is in two things: first, the exact degree of genteel poverty you are going to live out the last twenty or so of your post-retirement years; second, the exact degree of insecurity, anxiety and inconvenience in which you live the forty years you’re working.
Right. (cracks fingers)
Money buys four different things: necessities; peace of mind; quality of life; options.
Necessities are the the things you need to make the money you need so you can get the things you need to make the money you need. And not be living in your Mom’s basement. And not looking like a homeless person. Rent, council tax, travel to work, raw food that you cook yourself, water, electricity, gas, clothes, shoes, mobile phone. (If you don’t think a mobile phone isn’t a necessity, you are a privileged white person who doesn’t work. If you did zero hours or temp work, you’d know the only way an agency gets in touch is on a mobile.) Soap, shampoo, toothpaste, nail clippers and nail file. Detergent to wash your clothes with. Razor and shaving cream. Towels. Bedsheets, duvet, pillow and pillow cases. Haircuts.
Peace of Mind is what comes when you know you can handle something going wrong. Being the guy who tears his hair out because he doesn’t have the spare cash to handle a minor upset, from a blown tyre, or water on the laptop, or missing the holiday flight home and having to buy the expensive one-way ticket - being the guy whose world falls apart at that kind of stuff is not a good look, and it’s a lousy way to feel. Anything goes wrong, and you flip off the deep end, because you may have to starve for the next week. That’s why you buy contents insurance, even if you don’t own your own place. It’s why you put money into an Oh Shit account. At today’s prices, you will start to feel comfortable with about £2,000 in the Oh Shit account.
Quality of life. This is two things: less shoddiness, inconvenience and effort, and more pleasure, health, education and personal growth. Shoes from Northampton cobblers instead of cheap things that look awful after six months; good noise-cancelling headphones to avoid the pointless sounds of commuting; my weekly minutes in the sunbed; parking at the station now and again; having a car, even though I don’t drive to work; my movie streaming and music streaming subscriptions, DVDs, CDs, books, movies and occasional live shows - entertainment is quality of life. Dental hygienist once every three-four months.
Quality of life is not indulgence. The difference is not in the act itself, but in the purpose and affordability.
One indulgence is acceptable. Mine is the gym. It’s a fancy one. They provide towels. There’s a swimming pool. The soap and shampoo is Cowshed. I rent a locker. Get there early enough in the morning and pick up a free copy of the Financial Times. I could go to a much cheaper one, but it wouldn’t be twenty yards from Piccadilly Circus. I’ll go to a chain warehouse gym when I retire.
Where I differ from the gurus is this: it’s your money, your life. You want to piss it all away and be poor for twenty years after you stop working, please by my guest. I’m not going to stop you, and I’m not going to vote for a Government that wants to bail you out either. You want to be dumb, go ahead. I have no idea how people can spend thousands on gaming laptops and games, but they have no idea how anyone could live a life as boring as mine.
Because, unless you make a pile of cash and keep it, or unless you are in the top five per cent of salary-earners in your economy, the difference between all those spending-saving strategies is in two things: first, the exact degree of genteel poverty you are going to live out the last twenty or so of your post-retirement years; second, the exact degree of insecurity, anxiety and inconvenience in which you live the forty years you’re working.
Monday 28 October 2019
OceanLab's On A Good Day
I ran across this on one of the Ajunabeats CD’s I downloaded for train music.
Listen to it first, and reflect on the fact that Schubert never wrote a song this good. A lot of the impact comes from the singing of the then 38-year-old co-writer Justine Suissa,
and the time change between the rhythmic suspense created by the 7/4 of the lead-in to the release of the 4/4 for the chorus.
So here are the lyrics, courtesy of one of those lyric sites:
(verse)
A little bit lost and
A little bit lonely
Little bit cold here,
A little bit of fear
(Lead in)
But I hold on and I feel strong
And I know that I can
I'm getting used to it
Lit the fuse to it
Like to know who I am
(Chorus)
I've been talking to myself forever, yeah
And how I wish I knew me better, yeah
Still sitting on a shelf and never
Never seen the sun shine brighter
And it feels like me on a good day
(Verse)
I'm a little bit hemmed in
A little bit isolated
A little bit hopeful
A little bit calm
Repeat Lead-in and Chorus
As I (first) read it, this is someone who made a decision to leave someone or something (Lit the fuse to it) and hasn’t found any replacement (I’m getting used to it) nor do they really understand why they did it (Like to know who I am) or what they are going to do next (Still sitting on a shelf).
‘Strong’ is an interesting word. Women feel strong, and it relates to will, specifically to defiance. The song’s character is defying the emotional collapse she knows is one Really Bad Day away.
I see Instagram posts showing this month’s super-food, some yoghurt, a salad, a yoga pose or maybe a climbing wall session, and her (the song’s character, not Ms Suissa) smiling in front of some cute or scenic background.
There may even be a cat.
Because how does she feel? Lost. Lonely. Cold. Slightly fearful. Hemmed in. Isolated. Hopeful. Calm.
That’s a very specific list of emotions. The last two look positive, but aren’t.
You don’t feel hopeful unless things are bad. You don’t notice you feel calm unless you should be agitated and upset.
And only people who feel Bad most of the time talk about having Good Days.
So when I started on this, I thought the song’s character was a woman who had made a drastic decision that has de-railed her life. Or found that her life has hit The Wall.
But now I wonder.
In fact, if she’s talking to herself forever and wish[es] she knew [herself] better, is she in fact a Psych patient?
Listen to it first, and reflect on the fact that Schubert never wrote a song this good. A lot of the impact comes from the singing of the then 38-year-old co-writer Justine Suissa,
and the time change between the rhythmic suspense created by the 7/4 of the lead-in to the release of the 4/4 for the chorus.
So here are the lyrics, courtesy of one of those lyric sites:
(verse)
A little bit lost and
A little bit lonely
Little bit cold here,
A little bit of fear
(Lead in)
But I hold on and I feel strong
And I know that I can
I'm getting used to it
Lit the fuse to it
Like to know who I am
(Chorus)
I've been talking to myself forever, yeah
And how I wish I knew me better, yeah
Still sitting on a shelf and never
Never seen the sun shine brighter
And it feels like me on a good day
(Verse)
I'm a little bit hemmed in
A little bit isolated
A little bit hopeful
A little bit calm
Repeat Lead-in and Chorus
As I (first) read it, this is someone who made a decision to leave someone or something (Lit the fuse to it) and hasn’t found any replacement (I’m getting used to it) nor do they really understand why they did it (Like to know who I am) or what they are going to do next (Still sitting on a shelf).
‘Strong’ is an interesting word. Women feel strong, and it relates to will, specifically to defiance. The song’s character is defying the emotional collapse she knows is one Really Bad Day away.
I see Instagram posts showing this month’s super-food, some yoghurt, a salad, a yoga pose or maybe a climbing wall session, and her (the song’s character, not Ms Suissa) smiling in front of some cute or scenic background.
There may even be a cat.
Because how does she feel? Lost. Lonely. Cold. Slightly fearful. Hemmed in. Isolated. Hopeful. Calm.
That’s a very specific list of emotions. The last two look positive, but aren’t.
You don’t feel hopeful unless things are bad. You don’t notice you feel calm unless you should be agitated and upset.
And only people who feel Bad most of the time talk about having Good Days.
So when I started on this, I thought the song’s character was a woman who had made a drastic decision that has de-railed her life. Or found that her life has hit The Wall.
But now I wonder.
In fact, if she’s talking to herself forever and wish[es] she knew [herself] better, is she in fact a Psych patient?
Thursday 24 October 2019
All My Cars: 1980 - 2019
I passed my driving test in February 1979. In rough chronological order my cars have been:
Fiat 850
Saab 900
Lancia Fulvia
Vauxhall Cavalier 2.0 (1991/2)
VW Polo
Volvo V40 (2000/1)
Ford Ka
Renault Clio
Fiat Punto 1.4 Active
Fiat Punto 1.2 Pop Star
The first three were end-of-lifers: I was the last owner. Those were my 1980’s cars. The Cavalier and the V40 were company cars. The Ka got thumped in the boot by another driver in something like 2008, and I swear I found the Clio in a dealership somewhere in south-west England. I do remember a couple of blokes driving it up to deliver. Trade plates and all. The Clio got flooded, though I can’t find the blog post, in about 2010, and then the Punto Active got hit this year.
The Cavalier was a 2 litre automatic and changed my driving style forever. Everyone should drive a bigger-engined automatic at least once for a few months. What I can’t believe is that I ran the family Polo for eight years in the 1990’s when I was unemployed. But I sure didn’t have the money to buy even a beater in those days.
All boring stuff. I live in the suburbs, don’t travel much, my let’s-go-somewhere-two-hundred-miles-away-for-the-weekend days are over, and I regard cars as tools. Not as status symbols.
Let’s hope no-one drives into the new Punto for at least ten years. Please.
Fiat 850
Saab 900
Lancia Fulvia
Vauxhall Cavalier 2.0 (1991/2)
VW Polo
Volvo V40 (2000/1)
Ford Ka
Renault Clio
Fiat Punto 1.4 Active
Fiat Punto 1.2 Pop Star
The first three were end-of-lifers: I was the last owner. Those were my 1980’s cars. The Cavalier and the V40 were company cars. The Ka got thumped in the boot by another driver in something like 2008, and I swear I found the Clio in a dealership somewhere in south-west England. I do remember a couple of blokes driving it up to deliver. Trade plates and all. The Clio got flooded, though I can’t find the blog post, in about 2010, and then the Punto Active got hit this year.
The Cavalier was a 2 litre automatic and changed my driving style forever. Everyone should drive a bigger-engined automatic at least once for a few months. What I can’t believe is that I ran the family Polo for eight years in the 1990’s when I was unemployed. But I sure didn’t have the money to buy even a beater in those days.
All boring stuff. I live in the suburbs, don’t travel much, my let’s-go-somewhere-two-hundred-miles-away-for-the-weekend days are over, and I regard cars as tools. Not as status symbols.
Let’s hope no-one drives into the new Punto for at least ten years. Please.
My very first car - in that colour
Monday 21 October 2019
Buying the Replacement Car
Car Giant having failed as a source of the kind of second-hand car I look for, I looked on the internet. Fiat Puntos with low mileages don’t fill a page, and there was one in West Molesey that was exactly what I was looking for. Phone call to establish it was still available, appointment for 09:00 Saturday morning to look at it.
The car was fine, though the battery was out-of-condition and they replaced it for me. If I had driven it straight away I might not have found that out. I found out because I had to park it up so I could return the rental car.
The logistics were a bit involved: Rental car from home to West Molesey. Buy car. Call AA insurance to get it insured. Drive rental from West Molesey to rental office in Hanworth, stopping to fill tank with petrol, and return car. Call cab firm for taxi back to West Molesey. Battery not yet fixed, walk up road for a coffee and toasted. Walk back to car sales place. Collect car. Drive to Sainsbury’s in Hampton to do shopping
How much did all this cost?
Visit to Car Giant: £0 (Thank you 60+ card)
Car itself: £2,995
Car rental: £110
Taxi from rental: £20
Lost fuel in old car: £25
Payment from Insurance company: £667
Net: £2,483
So because someone didn’t look where they were going when doing a three-point turn, I’m out £2,500.
Okay, so ‘shit happens’. The catch is that usually the shit costs one party way more than the other. In this case the guy who drove into me will face higher insurance charges - if he’s even insured, but nothing like what I’m out. He’s just going to have higher insurance premiums for a couple of years. Had he been driving a car, he might have had a more expensive time of it, but he was driving a solid metal trailer van with what amounted to battering rams on the back, so his vehicle is unaffected.
So now I have a new second-hand car. It’s the size and style I want, and from the little driving I’ve done, the 1.2 engine makes a slightly more sluggish drive than the 1.4 in the previous Punto.
The car was fine, though the battery was out-of-condition and they replaced it for me. If I had driven it straight away I might not have found that out. I found out because I had to park it up so I could return the rental car.
The logistics were a bit involved: Rental car from home to West Molesey. Buy car. Call AA insurance to get it insured. Drive rental from West Molesey to rental office in Hanworth, stopping to fill tank with petrol, and return car. Call cab firm for taxi back to West Molesey. Battery not yet fixed, walk up road for a coffee and toasted. Walk back to car sales place. Collect car. Drive to Sainsbury’s in Hampton to do shopping
How much did all this cost?
Visit to Car Giant: £0 (Thank you 60+ card)
Car itself: £2,995
Car rental: £110
Taxi from rental: £20
Lost fuel in old car: £25
Payment from Insurance company: £667
Net: £2,483
So because someone didn’t look where they were going when doing a three-point turn, I’m out £2,500.
Okay, so ‘shit happens’. The catch is that usually the shit costs one party way more than the other. In this case the guy who drove into me will face higher insurance charges - if he’s even insured, but nothing like what I’m out. He’s just going to have higher insurance premiums for a couple of years. Had he been driving a car, he might have had a more expensive time of it, but he was driving a solid metal trailer van with what amounted to battering rams on the back, so his vehicle is unaffected.
So now I have a new second-hand car. It’s the size and style I want, and from the little driving I’ve done, the 1.2 engine makes a slightly more sluggish drive than the 1.4 in the previous Punto.
Thursday 17 October 2019
Why We’re Helpless When Things That Don’t Go Wrong Finally Go Wrong
There should be a snappy title for the law that states: the longer any given thing in your life works, the less competent you will be at fixing it when it goes wrong.
Contrast:
Ten years ago you found a decent plumber to put in the gas boiler. Then the boiler goes. The plumber isn’t working any more, and you have no idea where to find another one
Vs
Every six months something happens to one of the damn pipes in your house. Like mice can eat copper or something. You have three currently active plumbers in your phone. People you know ask you to recommend plumbers.
It’s also known as the I used to know how to do this, but I haven’t had to for years effect.
Two out three of the last cars I’ve had were from Car Giant: a Ford Ka and the Fiat Punto. In the middle was a Renault Clio that I bought from a dealer in a town in south-west (say Swindon, though I don’t think it was) because I happened to pass it when I was in the town on business. I look for a low-mileage, previous model of a mainstream car: The Ka, a Renault Clio, then the Fiat Punto. The fact that it’s the previous model means it’s a lot cheaper than the latest model, even if only six months older, for the same mileage.
This time round Car Giant failed me. Totally. Utterly. In the nine years since I bought the Punto, they seem to have adopted a policy of only selling the latest model and no older than three years. Minimum price £5,500 (+£150 ‘admin fee’). Main price range £6,500 - £9,500. For a supermini (Corsa, Fiesta). No Puntos. For that kind of money, I want a car I really like, rather can just live with. And I am not a rear spoiler guy (Corsa). Nor do I like an instrument panel that seems to be right in my face (Fiesta). The Fiat 500 is way too small.
So that was Plan A gone.
As I trudged along the alley between Hythe Road and Willesden Junction - which is marked on the map as an un-named thick grey line, and you have not experienced the full range of what London has to offer if you haven’t walked it at least once - I realised I had no Plan B. I had no idea how the heck one buys previous-model, low mileage cars in +TheCurrentYear.
Why would I? The one I had would still be going strong if that guy hadn’t backed into it.
The better your life works, and the longer it works well, the less resources you will have to fix it when stuff starts to break.
Contrast:
Ten years ago you found a decent plumber to put in the gas boiler. Then the boiler goes. The plumber isn’t working any more, and you have no idea where to find another one
Vs
Every six months something happens to one of the damn pipes in your house. Like mice can eat copper or something. You have three currently active plumbers in your phone. People you know ask you to recommend plumbers.
It’s also known as the I used to know how to do this, but I haven’t had to for years effect.
Two out three of the last cars I’ve had were from Car Giant: a Ford Ka and the Fiat Punto. In the middle was a Renault Clio that I bought from a dealer in a town in south-west (say Swindon, though I don’t think it was) because I happened to pass it when I was in the town on business. I look for a low-mileage, previous model of a mainstream car: The Ka, a Renault Clio, then the Fiat Punto. The fact that it’s the previous model means it’s a lot cheaper than the latest model, even if only six months older, for the same mileage.
This time round Car Giant failed me. Totally. Utterly. In the nine years since I bought the Punto, they seem to have adopted a policy of only selling the latest model and no older than three years. Minimum price £5,500 (+£150 ‘admin fee’). Main price range £6,500 - £9,500. For a supermini (Corsa, Fiesta). No Puntos. For that kind of money, I want a car I really like, rather can just live with. And I am not a rear spoiler guy (Corsa). Nor do I like an instrument panel that seems to be right in my face (Fiesta). The Fiat 500 is way too small.
So that was Plan A gone.
As I trudged along the alley between Hythe Road and Willesden Junction - which is marked on the map as an un-named thick grey line, and you have not experienced the full range of what London has to offer if you haven’t walked it at least once - I realised I had no Plan B. I had no idea how the heck one buys previous-model, low mileage cars in +TheCurrentYear.
Why would I? The one I had would still be going strong if that guy hadn’t backed into it.
The better your life works, and the longer it works well, the less resources you will have to fix it when stuff starts to break.
Monday 14 October 2019
Joker - The Movie
Are there two versions of this film? One that the American reviewers saw, and the one I saw recently at my local Cineworld?
This is not the Ultimate White Anger movie. That remains the remarkable 1993 movie Falling Down, directed by Joel Schumacher and starring Michael Douglas. “I’m the bad guy? How’d that happen?” Douglas’ character D-Fens is stone cold sane and sober. He knows exactly what he’s doing, which makes his anger and actions so much more significant. Want to know what Whitey looks like when he gets angry? He looks like D-Fens: it’s deliberate, it’s not pretty, and it’s not backstory.
Joker is backstory: of one of the most well-known baddies in cinema and comics. As that, it is excellent. Unrelenting, intense, gripping, sloshing between wince-making bathos and shocking violence, with a central performance the like of which comes along once a decade.
Joker starts out being a hopeless loser living with his invalided single mother. By the time he strikes out against the three White Boy oafs on the subway, he has a psychotic break. That’s where the touching sequences with the lovely Zazie Beetz come from. I’m not sure if psychotic breaks really work like that, but comic / movie convention says they do.
He has the psychosis because he can’t accept what he’s done. Only Big Bad People kill, and he’s not a Big Bad Person. He’s a loser who idolises Robert de Niro’s TV comedian - some reviewers got very carried away with The King of Comedy references, forgetting that large amounts of cultural appropriation is allowed in comics to ease the creative strain.
However, back in the movie, times are so bad that the majority of the population think that a man who kills three asshole Wall Street guys is pretty much a hero. People show up at protests wearing clown masks.
What do you get when you cross a mentally-ill loner with a society that abandons him and treats him like trash? You get what you deserve...
Not quite. Most mentally-ill loners fade into oblivion, bumbling along under the influence of drugs so awful that there’s no secondary market for them. We’re very carefully told that due to budget cuts Joker can’t get his perfunctory counselling and the bottles of drugs he needs to stay doped-and-functional. He’s off his meds. Literally. His psychosis is over - no more hallucinations involving Zazie Beetz; he has literally killed the source of his dysfunctions (watch the movie to understand that remark); and he is now a conscious moral actor. He is only crazy like a fox.
I used to think that my life was a tragedy, but now I realize, it's a comedy
A comedy can be about laughs, but it can also be a play characterized by its humorous or satirical tone and its depiction of amusing people or incidents, in which the characters ultimately triumph over adversity. Joker’s life is that kind of comedy: he triumphs over adversity by becoming a criminal without intent. Which is, of course, the conclusion the film has to reach.
Is there an action take-away from the movie for incels and the downtrodden, ignored and reviled?
If there is, it’s ditch the distractions, the meds, the cliched counselling and advice because those are hiding the real world from you, and you from the real world. Then strike back at those who hurt you. At that point you can see why SJWs would start to get worried. And then Drop out of the economy and live off illegal earnings. Which would get agreement from the Invisible Committee.
Is it me, or is it getting crazier out there?
It’s not you. It is getting crazier out there, and the Wokeful and the SJWs are the ones making it crazier.
However, that’s not why the Wokeful circled round Joker. They knew from the Venice Film Festival that Joker was going to be received as one of the best films of the decade. No matter what anyone said, it would make a profit. It would get audiences. So the Wokeful hitched on to Joker's star to get the publicity for their causes.
It’s a good comic-book movie. I’d put it right up there with Watchmen.
This is not the Ultimate White Anger movie. That remains the remarkable 1993 movie Falling Down, directed by Joel Schumacher and starring Michael Douglas. “I’m the bad guy? How’d that happen?” Douglas’ character D-Fens is stone cold sane and sober. He knows exactly what he’s doing, which makes his anger and actions so much more significant. Want to know what Whitey looks like when he gets angry? He looks like D-Fens: it’s deliberate, it’s not pretty, and it’s not backstory.
Joker is backstory: of one of the most well-known baddies in cinema and comics. As that, it is excellent. Unrelenting, intense, gripping, sloshing between wince-making bathos and shocking violence, with a central performance the like of which comes along once a decade.
Joker starts out being a hopeless loser living with his invalided single mother. By the time he strikes out against the three White Boy oafs on the subway, he has a psychotic break. That’s where the touching sequences with the lovely Zazie Beetz come from. I’m not sure if psychotic breaks really work like that, but comic / movie convention says they do.
He has the psychosis because he can’t accept what he’s done. Only Big Bad People kill, and he’s not a Big Bad Person. He’s a loser who idolises Robert de Niro’s TV comedian - some reviewers got very carried away with The King of Comedy references, forgetting that large amounts of cultural appropriation is allowed in comics to ease the creative strain.
However, back in the movie, times are so bad that the majority of the population think that a man who kills three asshole Wall Street guys is pretty much a hero. People show up at protests wearing clown masks.
What do you get when you cross a mentally-ill loner with a society that abandons him and treats him like trash? You get what you deserve...
Not quite. Most mentally-ill loners fade into oblivion, bumbling along under the influence of drugs so awful that there’s no secondary market for them. We’re very carefully told that due to budget cuts Joker can’t get his perfunctory counselling and the bottles of drugs he needs to stay doped-and-functional. He’s off his meds. Literally. His psychosis is over - no more hallucinations involving Zazie Beetz; he has literally killed the source of his dysfunctions (watch the movie to understand that remark); and he is now a conscious moral actor. He is only crazy like a fox.
I used to think that my life was a tragedy, but now I realize, it's a comedy
A comedy can be about laughs, but it can also be a play characterized by its humorous or satirical tone and its depiction of amusing people or incidents, in which the characters ultimately triumph over adversity. Joker’s life is that kind of comedy: he triumphs over adversity by becoming a criminal without intent. Which is, of course, the conclusion the film has to reach.
Is there an action take-away from the movie for incels and the downtrodden, ignored and reviled?
If there is, it’s ditch the distractions, the meds, the cliched counselling and advice because those are hiding the real world from you, and you from the real world. Then strike back at those who hurt you. At that point you can see why SJWs would start to get worried. And then Drop out of the economy and live off illegal earnings. Which would get agreement from the Invisible Committee.
Is it me, or is it getting crazier out there?
It’s not you. It is getting crazier out there, and the Wokeful and the SJWs are the ones making it crazier.
However, that’s not why the Wokeful circled round Joker. They knew from the Venice Film Festival that Joker was going to be received as one of the best films of the decade. No matter what anyone said, it would make a profit. It would get audiences. So the Wokeful hitched on to Joker's star to get the publicity for their causes.
It’s a good comic-book movie. I’d put it right up there with Watchmen.
Monday 7 October 2019
The Last Couple of Weeks
On Wednesday 18th September I told the boss I was fading fast and would take the laptop home. I spent the next six or so days sleeping badly, coughing compulsively and trying to blow my nose. On Monday 23rd I did my morning routine tasks and then told the boss I was signing off for the day. I didn’t really feel better until Thursday, when I worked at home, then went to the gym in the evening. I went back to work on Monday 30th and had an early evening. I went to the gym on Tuesday and to my meeting for the first time in three weeks on Wednesday.
On the way back, a gentleman from Bulgaria (from the format of his registration number) reversed his truck into my Fiat Punto’s front wing while doing a three-point turn. He ran into the front offside wing and also pushed the front tyre and suspension inwards. Car can’t be driven any distance. I parked up, we swapped details, and I walked the half-a-mile or so back home.
And got the worst night’s sleep I’ve had for a long, long time. I was wasted the next morning. Thursday morning I spent an hour on the phone to my insurance agent, repeating the same details again to the insurer, who said without a blink “his fault”. It seems it’s the job of people doing a three-point turn to watch what they are doing, not ours to watch out for them.
Thursday afternoon, I blew off the gym because I wasn’t feeling too hot. I had an uncomfortable train ride back, at one point needing to stand in the open doors to cool down. Yep. When I got home, I threw up. It wasn’t food poisoning, thank heaven, because that for me can be horrendous and involves going to hospital. I went to bed about half-past eight, if not earlier.
Friday I managed to do some work from home. I thought I was feeling okay. I had forgotten that my insurance is fully comprehensive and includes a hire car for the time between the accident and the insurance company making an offer, and a nice Chinese girl with an English good-school accent from Enterprise delivered a car on Friday morning.
Saturday I had all sorts of good intentions, which were abandoned when I felt queazy after breakfast. It was the most unproductive and ridiculous day I’ve had in ages. I think it was about some kind of recuperation.
I gave up on going into town because South West trains were doing maintenance work, and so was a lot of the District Line. My Higher Power intended that I rest.
Sunday has been better. I haven’t been out and about, but I haven’t been falling asleep on my couch every twenty minutes either. I went for a walk round my local Air Park, then ran up in the nice hire car to put the key in the exhaust of my Punto, so that the men from a garage with a Southampton (!) telephone number can come and collect it.
I bought the Punto in February 2010, so I’ve had it for nine and a half years. I’d prefer to have had it for another nine-and-a-half to be honest, but where would Western Capitalism be if we all did things like that? So I’ll be off to Car Giant in White City to get a replacement in about a week or so. There’s no question that the insurance company will write the Punto off. I’ll bet suspension units and coachwork cost more than the re-sale value of the car. Someone who knew what they were doing would probably fix it up for around a couple of hundred quid excluding labour.
I reckon I lose around 10%-15% of my life on colds and feeling poorly. Every year. I notice it more now I’m sober and do more with my days than I did when I was drinking.
I have no resolutions to deal with this. It’s just what happens, and I have at least one more cold between now and Christmas, usually just after half-term. Some of that is age: just as I lose the ability to recover fast, I lose the ability to carry on while not-feeling-my-best. But you call me and want to discuss something work-related and I’m on it during the call. Then I fall off again. It’s the self-starting bit I can’t do. Maybe I should schedule all my meetings for when I’m ill.
On the way back, a gentleman from Bulgaria (from the format of his registration number) reversed his truck into my Fiat Punto’s front wing while doing a three-point turn. He ran into the front offside wing and also pushed the front tyre and suspension inwards. Car can’t be driven any distance. I parked up, we swapped details, and I walked the half-a-mile or so back home.
And got the worst night’s sleep I’ve had for a long, long time. I was wasted the next morning. Thursday morning I spent an hour on the phone to my insurance agent, repeating the same details again to the insurer, who said without a blink “his fault”. It seems it’s the job of people doing a three-point turn to watch what they are doing, not ours to watch out for them.
Thursday afternoon, I blew off the gym because I wasn’t feeling too hot. I had an uncomfortable train ride back, at one point needing to stand in the open doors to cool down. Yep. When I got home, I threw up. It wasn’t food poisoning, thank heaven, because that for me can be horrendous and involves going to hospital. I went to bed about half-past eight, if not earlier.
Friday I managed to do some work from home. I thought I was feeling okay. I had forgotten that my insurance is fully comprehensive and includes a hire car for the time between the accident and the insurance company making an offer, and a nice Chinese girl with an English good-school accent from Enterprise delivered a car on Friday morning.
Saturday I had all sorts of good intentions, which were abandoned when I felt queazy after breakfast. It was the most unproductive and ridiculous day I’ve had in ages. I think it was about some kind of recuperation.
I gave up on going into town because South West trains were doing maintenance work, and so was a lot of the District Line. My Higher Power intended that I rest.
Sunday has been better. I haven’t been out and about, but I haven’t been falling asleep on my couch every twenty minutes either. I went for a walk round my local Air Park, then ran up in the nice hire car to put the key in the exhaust of my Punto, so that the men from a garage with a Southampton (!) telephone number can come and collect it.
I bought the Punto in February 2010, so I’ve had it for nine and a half years. I’d prefer to have had it for another nine-and-a-half to be honest, but where would Western Capitalism be if we all did things like that? So I’ll be off to Car Giant in White City to get a replacement in about a week or so. There’s no question that the insurance company will write the Punto off. I’ll bet suspension units and coachwork cost more than the re-sale value of the car. Someone who knew what they were doing would probably fix it up for around a couple of hundred quid excluding labour.
I reckon I lose around 10%-15% of my life on colds and feeling poorly. Every year. I notice it more now I’m sober and do more with my days than I did when I was drinking.
I have no resolutions to deal with this. It’s just what happens, and I have at least one more cold between now and Christmas, usually just after half-term. Some of that is age: just as I lose the ability to recover fast, I lose the ability to carry on while not-feeling-my-best. But you call me and want to discuss something work-related and I’m on it during the call. Then I fall off again. It’s the self-starting bit I can’t do. Maybe I should schedule all my meetings for when I’m ill.
Thursday 3 October 2019
By The River
When I worked on Shaftesbury Avenue, I would cross the river every day. It made me feel like I was there, in London. I used to like walking to Holborn in the morning, until they closed it to incoming passengers because escalator works, exactly because it took me across the river.
Monday 30 September 2019
Thursday 26 September 2019
Monday 23 September 2019
Marc Myers' Why Jazz Happened
Marc Myers writes about jazz for the Wall Street Journal, which must be a heck of gig, considering that there really isn’t that much to write about, and hasn’t been for a long time. His own book stops dead at 1972, with no mention of Wynton Marsalis or ECM Euro-jazz, or of Weather Report, the Jazz Crusaders, or the rise of ‘electric jazz’ or ‘smooth jazz’, or the disgraceful jazz education industry. But then, he’s a journalist, and hand-feed-don’t-bite. Being rude about Wynton Marsalis is still not good for anyone’s career.
For all the music industry history, including a fascinating chapter on the effect of Los Angeles on West Coast Jazz, and the political history, Myers can’t get a coherent story going. It slips out of his grasp every time a new chapter starts. One reason is that he doesn’t engage with jazz as music, and see it as something with its own internal logic of development. He’s writing a purely externalist history, and those often feel dis-jointed.
There’s a line of ideas to be traced from the simultaneous improvisations of Dixieland to the group improvisations of Ascension
and the avant-garde jazz groups working today. That line goes through small bands - trios to nonets - in which soloing is an intrinsic part of the music.
There’s another line to be traced from dance-orchestras playing composed waltzes to the jazz dance bands, to Basie's and Ellington’s bands, which comes to an end in the mid-1960’s. Though solos were played, and often had to be offered to retain good players, these were add-ons: the tune would work perfectly well without the solo.
A small-band piece starts by stating a theme or tune, maybe twice, proceeds to divert by way of three or four solos of varying length, which may or may not refer fleetingly to the opening theme, and finishes with a re-statement of the theme. Big-band pieces are all about the written tune and arrangement, and the solos are at most twelve bars, and only one, and that close to the one on the record.
The more composed more of it is, the less it’s jazz, but if there’s no theme, chord sequence, or mood, then it’s avant-garde. Flamenco Sketches is a mood created by a pace and a sequence of changes, some from one mode to another with the same notes, and some from one key to another. It’s jazz, and can only be played by instrumentalists who are also musicians and of the highest quality.
That’s why West Coast jazz, and the jazz-y music of film and TV soundtracks, is only marginally jazz. Myers explains that this music had to be made quickly and cheaply, and therefore by technically skilled, sight-reading players who could nail the tune first time round. A lot of those men had been through one music college or another on the GI Bill, and could sight-read fluently, transpose effortlessly, and knew their C#7/5dim9 from their Emaj7dim4add13, without having to think about it. Nerds, the lot of them. They could play solos, but it wasn’t what they spent their time doing, when they weren’t in the studios. When they weren’t in the studios, they were driving to another studio, playing golf with music producers, or playing softball with their kids in the gardens of their ranch houses in the LA suburbs. That where Steely Dan and Joni Mitchell found all those effortlessly competent studio musicians in the 1970’s.
And let’s not go near the jazz-fusion thing of the early 1970’s. (Myers does, for a whole chapter.) I was there in the audience. It was not a pretty sight. Only four bands ever did it well: Miles Davis, Weather Report, The Crusaders, and Steely Dan. (Steely Dan was seen as a hip rock band at the time: looking back it’s clear they were really jazz composers who could cut a rock tune now and again.) The rest were, for all the technical virtuosity of the players, a mess. Some of the worst music ever played by superb instrumentalists came out of the jazz-rock / fusion years of the early 1970’s. If the band didn’t have Joe Zawinul or Larry Carlton in it, it wasn’t going to work.
(Digression: Guitarists and post-1969 jazz have never gone well together. Miles Davis remains the only bandleader who ever got genuine feeling and music out of the young John McLaughlin. Most big-name jazz guitarists since have lacked finesse and musicality. Except Larry Carlton, who understood that the guitar is a slow instrument and its notes should be given time to make themselves felt. Listening to his solo on Chain Reaction
I wonder how much Larry Carlton learned from the legendary Steve Cropper?)
So core-jazz is a chamber music based on recognisable tunes, themes or changes, in which extemporised soloing is an integral part, and which has a tinge of the blues, a hint or more of swing in the rhythm, and uses four-note seventh-chord based harmonies, as opposed to classical music, which uses three-note fifth-chord based harmonies. That last bit of music nerdery is suggestive rather than definitive: the point is that hard-core jazz has a distinctive style of harmony which when played anywhere else sounds ‘jazzy’.
Now add in the Romantic artistic ideal of creativity as novelty and genre-busting, rather than creative ingenuity within a genre (at which the Baroque composers excelled, for instance), and a certain amount of good old-fashioned manly competition - in other words, the twentieth-century artistic temperament - and we have a motive for continuous change. It took Jean-Luc Godard less than eight years to go from Breathless to the fin du cinema of Week-end. It’s not surprising that John Coltrane could go from bebop, through the reductio ad absurdum of bebop that is Giant Steps, and one of the most popular albums in jazz, A Love Supreme, to the free jazz of Ascension, in a mere ten years. And what the hey did anyone do after that? Miles Davis provided one answer, with time-no-changes, and then with the `electric’ period, but that was after he had tried to figure out what the rock bands were doing.
In my version of the story, jazz killed itself by using John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, Eric Dolphy and others to work itself to its logical conclusion (Hegel would be so proud). The economic and social changes didn’t help, but weren’t the main reason.
In the usual version, the changing economics and demographics of American towns reduced the audience for jazz. The blatant racism of many American policemen didn’t help. And then the British invaded America in 1963 and the Beatles killed jazz.
Well, not quite.
Any form of art grows and develops with an audience, often mostly from one birth cohort, and when that cohort dies, the music vanishes, to be re-discovered a hundred years later (as happened to Bach. And Shakespeare, for that matter). Lesser talents may have to wait for the development of an entire industry devoted to re-discovering them (as has happened with the `early / period music’ movement).
Jazz always did have a small audience. White women just don’t like chamber jazz, though your grandmother might have liked Bing Crosby. (Everybody likes Bing Crosby.) From bebop onwards jazz has been adopted by people who don’t feel part of the mainstream of society. The easiest way for a white boy to show he was hipper than the average square, and could put some effortless effort into his entertainment, was to listen to hard-core jazz.
Out there somewhere was a huge audience of mainstream squares, just waiting for something that spoke to them, and that they could adopt without marking themselves as outsiders. Or worse, in America, as intellectuals.
They found it in The Beatles rather than in Chuck Berry and Bill Haley, because Lennon and McCartney simply wrote better music than almost everyone else, including Burt Bacharach. Bacharach and David wrote clever, complicated and sad music.
All the time.
Lennon and McCartney wrote songs that were more memorable-emotional-danceable-repeat-listenable and all-round entertaining. What music is after all supposed to be. And often showing a little flash of high-grade sophistication, like the incomprehensible opening chord of Hard Day’s Night, or the Palestrina-like harmonies in If I Needed Someone. Not enough to be difficult, but enough to re-assure everyone that this was not disposable Teen Pan Alley stuff.
That mainstream audience descended on pop and rock music. Record companies exist to make money, and the returns on capital from pop / rock were way higher than on jazz. When the kids who wanted to be dissenters found Bob Dylan and the `protest’ singers, jazz was robbed of most of its second-generation-dissenter audience.
Then it turned out that the Beatles and The Who and quite a few others really were pop-artists who worked in music rather than painting, and so the intellectual and the cultured could get on the pop / rock bandwagon as well. So the only young white boys digging jazz were those who came into it through the electric music of Miles Davis, or an interest in the avant-garde, or through their father's record collection.
But. But most of it was recorded, and most of those recordings were digitised, and so can be stored at a very low cost. Streaming music services create a huge demand for all sorts of sounds, and a lot of hard-core 1950’s and early 1960’s jazz is used to replace the dreaded ‘muzak’ in public places. To modern ears, it is pleasant, has a good but not obtrusive rhythm, and the solos provide a more textured background. Starbucks is never going to programme Ascension. Or even A Love Supreme. There are limits.
Jazz did what so many art forms do: it ran itself out and was replaced by something else. Now it exists in an archive, to be played when the mood is right.
One thing I do agree with Myers about: jazz played itself out in or around 1972. Take the release of On The Corner as the symbolic date. There’s a whole bunch of stuff that gets filed in the ‘jazz’ section in the record stores, but it ain’t jazz. It’s something else. Though his job may depend on him not saying so, I suspect Myers agrees with me.
For all the music industry history, including a fascinating chapter on the effect of Los Angeles on West Coast Jazz, and the political history, Myers can’t get a coherent story going. It slips out of his grasp every time a new chapter starts. One reason is that he doesn’t engage with jazz as music, and see it as something with its own internal logic of development. He’s writing a purely externalist history, and those often feel dis-jointed.
There’s a line of ideas to be traced from the simultaneous improvisations of Dixieland to the group improvisations of Ascension
and the avant-garde jazz groups working today. That line goes through small bands - trios to nonets - in which soloing is an intrinsic part of the music.
There’s another line to be traced from dance-orchestras playing composed waltzes to the jazz dance bands, to Basie's and Ellington’s bands, which comes to an end in the mid-1960’s. Though solos were played, and often had to be offered to retain good players, these were add-ons: the tune would work perfectly well without the solo.
A small-band piece starts by stating a theme or tune, maybe twice, proceeds to divert by way of three or four solos of varying length, which may or may not refer fleetingly to the opening theme, and finishes with a re-statement of the theme. Big-band pieces are all about the written tune and arrangement, and the solos are at most twelve bars, and only one, and that close to the one on the record.
The more composed more of it is, the less it’s jazz, but if there’s no theme, chord sequence, or mood, then it’s avant-garde. Flamenco Sketches is a mood created by a pace and a sequence of changes, some from one mode to another with the same notes, and some from one key to another. It’s jazz, and can only be played by instrumentalists who are also musicians and of the highest quality.
That’s why West Coast jazz, and the jazz-y music of film and TV soundtracks, is only marginally jazz. Myers explains that this music had to be made quickly and cheaply, and therefore by technically skilled, sight-reading players who could nail the tune first time round. A lot of those men had been through one music college or another on the GI Bill, and could sight-read fluently, transpose effortlessly, and knew their C#7/5dim9 from their Emaj7dim4add13, without having to think about it. Nerds, the lot of them. They could play solos, but it wasn’t what they spent their time doing, when they weren’t in the studios. When they weren’t in the studios, they were driving to another studio, playing golf with music producers, or playing softball with their kids in the gardens of their ranch houses in the LA suburbs. That where Steely Dan and Joni Mitchell found all those effortlessly competent studio musicians in the 1970’s.
And let’s not go near the jazz-fusion thing of the early 1970’s. (Myers does, for a whole chapter.) I was there in the audience. It was not a pretty sight. Only four bands ever did it well: Miles Davis, Weather Report, The Crusaders, and Steely Dan. (Steely Dan was seen as a hip rock band at the time: looking back it’s clear they were really jazz composers who could cut a rock tune now and again.) The rest were, for all the technical virtuosity of the players, a mess. Some of the worst music ever played by superb instrumentalists came out of the jazz-rock / fusion years of the early 1970’s. If the band didn’t have Joe Zawinul or Larry Carlton in it, it wasn’t going to work.
(Digression: Guitarists and post-1969 jazz have never gone well together. Miles Davis remains the only bandleader who ever got genuine feeling and music out of the young John McLaughlin. Most big-name jazz guitarists since have lacked finesse and musicality. Except Larry Carlton, who understood that the guitar is a slow instrument and its notes should be given time to make themselves felt. Listening to his solo on Chain Reaction
I wonder how much Larry Carlton learned from the legendary Steve Cropper?)
So core-jazz is a chamber music based on recognisable tunes, themes or changes, in which extemporised soloing is an integral part, and which has a tinge of the blues, a hint or more of swing in the rhythm, and uses four-note seventh-chord based harmonies, as opposed to classical music, which uses three-note fifth-chord based harmonies. That last bit of music nerdery is suggestive rather than definitive: the point is that hard-core jazz has a distinctive style of harmony which when played anywhere else sounds ‘jazzy’.
Now add in the Romantic artistic ideal of creativity as novelty and genre-busting, rather than creative ingenuity within a genre (at which the Baroque composers excelled, for instance), and a certain amount of good old-fashioned manly competition - in other words, the twentieth-century artistic temperament - and we have a motive for continuous change. It took Jean-Luc Godard less than eight years to go from Breathless to the fin du cinema of Week-end. It’s not surprising that John Coltrane could go from bebop, through the reductio ad absurdum of bebop that is Giant Steps, and one of the most popular albums in jazz, A Love Supreme, to the free jazz of Ascension, in a mere ten years. And what the hey did anyone do after that? Miles Davis provided one answer, with time-no-changes, and then with the `electric’ period, but that was after he had tried to figure out what the rock bands were doing.
In my version of the story, jazz killed itself by using John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, Eric Dolphy and others to work itself to its logical conclusion (Hegel would be so proud). The economic and social changes didn’t help, but weren’t the main reason.
In the usual version, the changing economics and demographics of American towns reduced the audience for jazz. The blatant racism of many American policemen didn’t help. And then the British invaded America in 1963 and the Beatles killed jazz.
Well, not quite.
Any form of art grows and develops with an audience, often mostly from one birth cohort, and when that cohort dies, the music vanishes, to be re-discovered a hundred years later (as happened to Bach. And Shakespeare, for that matter). Lesser talents may have to wait for the development of an entire industry devoted to re-discovering them (as has happened with the `early / period music’ movement).
Jazz always did have a small audience. White women just don’t like chamber jazz, though your grandmother might have liked Bing Crosby. (Everybody likes Bing Crosby.) From bebop onwards jazz has been adopted by people who don’t feel part of the mainstream of society. The easiest way for a white boy to show he was hipper than the average square, and could put some effortless effort into his entertainment, was to listen to hard-core jazz.
Out there somewhere was a huge audience of mainstream squares, just waiting for something that spoke to them, and that they could adopt without marking themselves as outsiders. Or worse, in America, as intellectuals.
They found it in The Beatles rather than in Chuck Berry and Bill Haley, because Lennon and McCartney simply wrote better music than almost everyone else, including Burt Bacharach. Bacharach and David wrote clever, complicated and sad music.
All the time.
Lennon and McCartney wrote songs that were more memorable-emotional-danceable-repeat-listenable and all-round entertaining. What music is after all supposed to be. And often showing a little flash of high-grade sophistication, like the incomprehensible opening chord of Hard Day’s Night, or the Palestrina-like harmonies in If I Needed Someone. Not enough to be difficult, but enough to re-assure everyone that this was not disposable Teen Pan Alley stuff.
That mainstream audience descended on pop and rock music. Record companies exist to make money, and the returns on capital from pop / rock were way higher than on jazz. When the kids who wanted to be dissenters found Bob Dylan and the `protest’ singers, jazz was robbed of most of its second-generation-dissenter audience.
Then it turned out that the Beatles and The Who and quite a few others really were pop-artists who worked in music rather than painting, and so the intellectual and the cultured could get on the pop / rock bandwagon as well. So the only young white boys digging jazz were those who came into it through the electric music of Miles Davis, or an interest in the avant-garde, or through their father's record collection.
But. But most of it was recorded, and most of those recordings were digitised, and so can be stored at a very low cost. Streaming music services create a huge demand for all sorts of sounds, and a lot of hard-core 1950’s and early 1960’s jazz is used to replace the dreaded ‘muzak’ in public places. To modern ears, it is pleasant, has a good but not obtrusive rhythm, and the solos provide a more textured background. Starbucks is never going to programme Ascension. Or even A Love Supreme. There are limits.
Jazz did what so many art forms do: it ran itself out and was replaced by something else. Now it exists in an archive, to be played when the mood is right.
One thing I do agree with Myers about: jazz played itself out in or around 1972. Take the release of On The Corner as the symbolic date. There’s a whole bunch of stuff that gets filed in the ‘jazz’ section in the record stores, but it ain’t jazz. It’s something else. Though his job may depend on him not saying so, I suspect Myers agrees with me.
Thursday 19 September 2019
Now That's What I Call A Kitchen Utensil Draw!
Yep. My cleaned-out, throw-away-the-stuff-I-haven't-used-for-a-year utensil draw.
Left to right: cheese-slicer, grater, hand whisk, tongs, strainer, egg-decapitator, soup ladle, big spoon with holes for taking stuff out of water, whisks for electric mixer, spatula, peeler, de-corer, can opener.
These things matter.
Your utensil draw says a lot about you.
Especially if you don't have one. Or it's dirty in the corners.
Which I do, and it isn't.
Just so you know.
Monday 16 September 2019
Dysfunctional Men Don't Have Standards, But Should
There is a very good video by Monday FA Monday called Men Have Preferences but not Standards. Approach this with care, because it could trigger all sorts of hidden firecrackers you didn’t know you had.
My preferences express what I would like, but could live without. Standards are what something has to meet to be a functioning instance of what it is. Preferences are whether you want it in red or green, tall or short, shaken or stirred. Standards are deal-breakers: stuff that doesn’t meet the standards are reajected or excluded.
Would you drive a car with brakes that don’t work? Take a job that pays less than minimum wage? Go to a holiday hotel when you know there’s building going on? Buy an umbrella with a hole in it? Sit on a chair with a missing leg? Eat uncooked chicken? Go out in the equatorial sun without sun-block? Swim near the Red Flag? Marry a Borderline? (Why does that last feel different from the others? And yet it isn’t.)
A man who has only preferences can be talked round. A man who has standards can’t be. When mavens talk about “settling”, they want you to think they are asking you to go easy on your preferences, but actually they are saying you should abandon your standards.
It is dismaying that givens actually need to be adopted explicitly as standards. Monday’s examples for a potential partner are “I like spending time with this person”, and “This person is kind to me”. He points out that some men will take anybody, no matter how awful, because they believe that any relationship is a win for them. Those men don’t have standards.
Now imagine you have standards, deal-breakers. It doesn’t matter for what. Assume that you are not being silly, that your standards are what should be givens, rather than wanting something from the top one per cent. Now imagine that you never meet anyone, or find anything, that meets those standards. Not even basic stuff, not even what should be givens.
And then other people tell you that you’re afraid to take a chance, that you’re too picky or fussy, that you can’t commit, that you expect perfection. That you should be prepared to compromise and make it work. That you should take a partner who may not really like you, or has a personality disorder (remember, I’m an alcoholic, and no-one should have taken me). Because that’s what grown-ups do.
Would you think there was something wrong with you? Or something wrong with the people telling you to drive a car with no brakes? A lot of people think there is something wrong with them. I did. Until I understood what was really wrong with me, got sober, and understood that some of my actions for many years were way smarter than my thoughts. (Some of my actions were dumb, however, especially around my career.)
Towards the end of the video, Monday asks if we really are living in a world where we can either have standards or relationships, but not both. He doesn’t want to believe it, and I don’t blame him. People like him and me live in such a world. That’s hard to accept. Here’s why it’s true:
Functional people are good at recognising other functional people and also at avoiding dysfunctional people. So functional people marry other functional people, and the rest of us are stuck sharing our varying degrees of crazy, damaged and nasty with each other. So far, so well-known. Now let me throw some stats out:
Estimates vary, but about ten per cent of the population suffers from psychiatric disorders at some point in their lives.
By age 16 almost half the children in the UK will not be living with both their birth parents.
Even when they do live with their birth parents, around twenty per cent live in self-reported unhappy marriages.
Coming from a broken home, or an unhappy home, can serve as a proxy for emotional damage. Perhaps half of the population may have lacked the experience of seeing how functional adults manage intimate and domestic relationships. Never having seen this, they lack the upbringing and skills successfully to manage family life and long-term relationships.
How surprising is it that someone can go through their whole lives and never meet anyone who meets the minimum standards for a relationship? Not at all, when you understand that it’s half the population and the only available people they meet will be from that messed-up half.
Dysfunctional people need standards too. Especially if we want to have lives that are not miseries. Having and living by standards means missing dysfunctional and unsatisfying relationships with possibly high exit costs.
Wait. How is that missing anything?
Sounds more like dodging an artillery bombardment to me.
My preferences express what I would like, but could live without. Standards are what something has to meet to be a functioning instance of what it is. Preferences are whether you want it in red or green, tall or short, shaken or stirred. Standards are deal-breakers: stuff that doesn’t meet the standards are reajected or excluded.
Would you drive a car with brakes that don’t work? Take a job that pays less than minimum wage? Go to a holiday hotel when you know there’s building going on? Buy an umbrella with a hole in it? Sit on a chair with a missing leg? Eat uncooked chicken? Go out in the equatorial sun without sun-block? Swim near the Red Flag? Marry a Borderline? (Why does that last feel different from the others? And yet it isn’t.)
A man who has only preferences can be talked round. A man who has standards can’t be. When mavens talk about “settling”, they want you to think they are asking you to go easy on your preferences, but actually they are saying you should abandon your standards.
It is dismaying that givens actually need to be adopted explicitly as standards. Monday’s examples for a potential partner are “I like spending time with this person”, and “This person is kind to me”. He points out that some men will take anybody, no matter how awful, because they believe that any relationship is a win for them. Those men don’t have standards.
Now imagine you have standards, deal-breakers. It doesn’t matter for what. Assume that you are not being silly, that your standards are what should be givens, rather than wanting something from the top one per cent. Now imagine that you never meet anyone, or find anything, that meets those standards. Not even basic stuff, not even what should be givens.
And then other people tell you that you’re afraid to take a chance, that you’re too picky or fussy, that you can’t commit, that you expect perfection. That you should be prepared to compromise and make it work. That you should take a partner who may not really like you, or has a personality disorder (remember, I’m an alcoholic, and no-one should have taken me). Because that’s what grown-ups do.
Would you think there was something wrong with you? Or something wrong with the people telling you to drive a car with no brakes? A lot of people think there is something wrong with them. I did. Until I understood what was really wrong with me, got sober, and understood that some of my actions for many years were way smarter than my thoughts. (Some of my actions were dumb, however, especially around my career.)
Towards the end of the video, Monday asks if we really are living in a world where we can either have standards or relationships, but not both. He doesn’t want to believe it, and I don’t blame him. People like him and me live in such a world. That’s hard to accept. Here’s why it’s true:
Functional people are good at recognising other functional people and also at avoiding dysfunctional people. So functional people marry other functional people, and the rest of us are stuck sharing our varying degrees of crazy, damaged and nasty with each other. So far, so well-known. Now let me throw some stats out:
Estimates vary, but about ten per cent of the population suffers from psychiatric disorders at some point in their lives.
By age 16 almost half the children in the UK will not be living with both their birth parents.
Even when they do live with their birth parents, around twenty per cent live in self-reported unhappy marriages.
Coming from a broken home, or an unhappy home, can serve as a proxy for emotional damage. Perhaps half of the population may have lacked the experience of seeing how functional adults manage intimate and domestic relationships. Never having seen this, they lack the upbringing and skills successfully to manage family life and long-term relationships.
How surprising is it that someone can go through their whole lives and never meet anyone who meets the minimum standards for a relationship? Not at all, when you understand that it’s half the population and the only available people they meet will be from that messed-up half.
Dysfunctional people need standards too. Especially if we want to have lives that are not miseries. Having and living by standards means missing dysfunctional and unsatisfying relationships with possibly high exit costs.
Wait. How is that missing anything?
Sounds more like dodging an artillery bombardment to me.
Thursday 12 September 2019
Burnout Recovery Progress
Why, thanks for asking about how my burnout recovery is going. I don’t know what the cure for burnout is: burn-in? chill-in? chill-out? rebuilding?
I’m still parking the car at the station. This does cost money but I’m not doing it five days a week. And the place I used to be able to park is now jammed with cars and left overnight. Nobody lives on that road. So it’s either park at the station or walk all the way in. And back at the end of a long day. No thank you.
The person who can most frazzle my working life went off on paternity leave, and has now gone on holiday for a fortnight. This is what happens when you have a Higher Power looking after you.
I finished a long and fact-packed presentation about the customers of the business I’m in. It was a personal goal, I used any spare moment I could, I was wondering if I’d ever get it done. But I did, and now people are telling me how much they like it.
Exercise is going well. I’ve learned to forget what I’m doing next when I’m in the gym. Focus on the reps, then the set. I’m trying to get four times a week in. I have abandoned bench press for now. This means I have lost any claim to bro-tude as I don’t do deadlifts or squats either. I’m doing dumb-bell press instead, and I’m sure it’s easier on my nerves. (Bench, squats and deadlift are all exercises which can frak you up badly if you make a bad move. Hence they take a much larger toll on your nervous system than a fairly harmless dumb-bell based exercise.)
I’ve noticed that I feel better if I get to bed at 21:00 rather than 21:30, and even better if it’s 20:30. 20:30 is going too far.
I’m learning not to beat myself up when I don’t immediately do the ironing or the washing up. Chaos is not going to descend if I leave the sheets until a weekday evening.
I had forgotten how restful two or three episodes of a good DVD series can be. I’m still inclined to let one day a week go by with scraps of this and that and far too much You Tube. Maybe I can work on that now.
And I’m slowly coming out of my scuttle - which is what we should call the routine that takes us from home to work to gym to home without ever stopping in the middle to do something random like go to a film or stop at a restaurant. That’s going to take longer.
Still haven’t beaten that afternoon slump. Still experimenting.
On the other items, morale at work is not good. The office still sucks. My social support is still close to zero.
I took a week off at the end of August, a lot of which was about finally coming to terms with passing what I thought was going to be retirement, and yet having to carry on working. I’m pretty much over that, and over myself as an “old man”. I will meditate on coping with getting older in another post. It’s a subject on which vast amounts of horse-shit has been dropped.
I’m still parking the car at the station. This does cost money but I’m not doing it five days a week. And the place I used to be able to park is now jammed with cars and left overnight. Nobody lives on that road. So it’s either park at the station or walk all the way in. And back at the end of a long day. No thank you.
The person who can most frazzle my working life went off on paternity leave, and has now gone on holiday for a fortnight. This is what happens when you have a Higher Power looking after you.
I finished a long and fact-packed presentation about the customers of the business I’m in. It was a personal goal, I used any spare moment I could, I was wondering if I’d ever get it done. But I did, and now people are telling me how much they like it.
Exercise is going well. I’ve learned to forget what I’m doing next when I’m in the gym. Focus on the reps, then the set. I’m trying to get four times a week in. I have abandoned bench press for now. This means I have lost any claim to bro-tude as I don’t do deadlifts or squats either. I’m doing dumb-bell press instead, and I’m sure it’s easier on my nerves. (Bench, squats and deadlift are all exercises which can frak you up badly if you make a bad move. Hence they take a much larger toll on your nervous system than a fairly harmless dumb-bell based exercise.)
I’ve noticed that I feel better if I get to bed at 21:00 rather than 21:30, and even better if it’s 20:30. 20:30 is going too far.
I’m learning not to beat myself up when I don’t immediately do the ironing or the washing up. Chaos is not going to descend if I leave the sheets until a weekday evening.
I had forgotten how restful two or three episodes of a good DVD series can be. I’m still inclined to let one day a week go by with scraps of this and that and far too much You Tube. Maybe I can work on that now.
And I’m slowly coming out of my scuttle - which is what we should call the routine that takes us from home to work to gym to home without ever stopping in the middle to do something random like go to a film or stop at a restaurant. That’s going to take longer.
Still haven’t beaten that afternoon slump. Still experimenting.
On the other items, morale at work is not good. The office still sucks. My social support is still close to zero.
I took a week off at the end of August, a lot of which was about finally coming to terms with passing what I thought was going to be retirement, and yet having to carry on working. I’m pretty much over that, and over myself as an “old man”. I will meditate on coping with getting older in another post. It’s a subject on which vast amounts of horse-shit has been dropped.
Monday 2 September 2019
Why It's Harder To Lose Weight Now I'm Older
One reason is that my BMR decreases. The Basal Metabolic Rate is the energy I use to keep my core temperature up to 37C, handle basic stuff like breathing, digestion, liver function, making new blood and body cells, muscle growth, maintaining body posture, and so on. The BMR of a teenager is high, which is why teenagers can eat so much and not gain anything, while if I ate the same, I would put on pounds. Overnight. The older I get, the lower my BMR, so my energy intake has to decrease over time just to keep the balance.
The other is that it takes effort to lose weight. Self-control takes energy. We have to put our bodies into a different metabolic state so that we burn body fat (ketogenesis) , rather than the calories from the food we have just eaten. That takes effort, and it’s possible that not everyone can work the trick. I have to do early nights, so I don’t start eating last thing. Avoiding eating triggers - TV anyone? Getting through the occasional period of hunger pangs and dizziness - not easy if I'm trying to produce a tedious but detailed data request.
The last time I lost weight was nearly ten years ago (!) and it was an effort fuelled by the fear of having my GP prescribe filthy drugs with names ending in “statin” and “formin”. Over the years, the weight has come back on, but with a different body composition, so I don’t have the high(er) blood sugar that went with the last time I weighed this much.
I have tried to lose some weight now and again, but usually I get a cold after a couple of weeks, or something happens and I can’t keep the calorie-restriction going. I don’t have the fear of God to put in me. 97kgs is a floor I keep bouncing off.
What I’ve realised now, is that If I want to lose weight, via calorie-restriction and exercise, it has to be the only thing I’m doing, other than going to work and routine housework stuff. As soon as I try to do anything else that requires concentration, I fall off the weight wagon.
And like I’ve said countless times before: I’ve given up drinking, smoking, and wenching. You want I should give up chocolate as well?
Read this post from the always-honest Nick Krauser https://krauserpua.com/2019/04/11/how-i-lost-13-kilos-in-7-months/ about his weigh-loss attempts at 43. I endorse every single one of the final ten thoughts. I quote point four:
The other is that it takes effort to lose weight. Self-control takes energy. We have to put our bodies into a different metabolic state so that we burn body fat (ketogenesis) , rather than the calories from the food we have just eaten. That takes effort, and it’s possible that not everyone can work the trick. I have to do early nights, so I don’t start eating last thing. Avoiding eating triggers - TV anyone? Getting through the occasional period of hunger pangs and dizziness - not easy if I'm trying to produce a tedious but detailed data request.
The last time I lost weight was nearly ten years ago (!) and it was an effort fuelled by the fear of having my GP prescribe filthy drugs with names ending in “statin” and “formin”. Over the years, the weight has come back on, but with a different body composition, so I don’t have the high(er) blood sugar that went with the last time I weighed this much.
I have tried to lose some weight now and again, but usually I get a cold after a couple of weeks, or something happens and I can’t keep the calorie-restriction going. I don’t have the fear of God to put in me. 97kgs is a floor I keep bouncing off.
What I’ve realised now, is that If I want to lose weight, via calorie-restriction and exercise, it has to be the only thing I’m doing, other than going to work and routine housework stuff. As soon as I try to do anything else that requires concentration, I fall off the weight wagon.
And like I’ve said countless times before: I’ve given up drinking, smoking, and wenching. You want I should give up chocolate as well?
Read this post from the always-honest Nick Krauser https://krauserpua.com/2019/04/11/how-i-lost-13-kilos-in-7-months/ about his weigh-loss attempts at 43. I endorse every single one of the final ten thoughts. I quote point four:
I’d never taken diet or weights seriously before. You absolutely must make it your first priority in life to make big fast improvement. If I’d had a job, or been daygaming, I’d have too little willpower remaining to expend in the gym and resisting bad food.If you don’t believe me or Krauser, try it yourself.
Monday 26 August 2019
Thursday 22 August 2019
Three songs with That Early Eighties Sound
According to some academic, Eighties music is the most similar-sounding of all the decades. I present three examples:
Joe Jackson, Stepping Out
Trevor Horn with Dollar up front, Hand held In Black and White
And finally, and you may need to sit down for this, Kajagoogoo. Yes, you heard. Don’t watch the video, listen to the music.
What was it? That sound? Not all the songs had it, but most of the best ones did. It has a space in it, wide open chords, a rock-solid rhythm with a hint of swing, and for me, it’s best illustrated by the instrumental section of Too Shy from about 2:05 to 2:40. The repetition is minimalism, the keyboard chords and other sounds are there to help you drift away wondering about what might happen if the shy girl comes a little closer.
After the turmoil, inflation, and general bleakness of the Seventies, people were starting to think that their lives could actually be fun again. That Eighties sound captured the exact mix of optimism and caution we felt, and provided the soundtrack to the good times we had from time to time
Joe Jackson, Stepping Out
Trevor Horn with Dollar up front, Hand held In Black and White
And finally, and you may need to sit down for this, Kajagoogoo. Yes, you heard. Don’t watch the video, listen to the music.
What was it? That sound? Not all the songs had it, but most of the best ones did. It has a space in it, wide open chords, a rock-solid rhythm with a hint of swing, and for me, it’s best illustrated by the instrumental section of Too Shy from about 2:05 to 2:40. The repetition is minimalism, the keyboard chords and other sounds are there to help you drift away wondering about what might happen if the shy girl comes a little closer.
After the turmoil, inflation, and general bleakness of the Seventies, people were starting to think that their lives could actually be fun again. That Eighties sound captured the exact mix of optimism and caution we felt, and provided the soundtrack to the good times we had from time to time
Monday 19 August 2019
When The Blogger Says...
When the blogger says they’re not posting as much because they’re working on a project.
Now I know that feeling.
It has to do with my interest in the philosophy of mathematics. You try making sense of Riemann's PhD thesis on the foundations of complex function theory. I am, slowly, because I'm not Gauss. It's taking up all my background processing capability.
Thursday 15 August 2019
Magnetic Crane Grab
What else would you leave behind when closing down a factory that clearly was rolling steel plate? A crane with magnetic grabs. Because who would you sell it to?
Monday 12 August 2019
Look Through Any Window...
Which is the title of a song by the Hollies. What I'd love is if the couple at the table were talking about... oh, anything but what you know they're talking about, which is work. Notice how everyone is smiling. Clear blue skies and warm weather do that to people.
(I'm honestly running out of things to say about the human condition. Someone fast forward to November 1st. Please.)
Thursday 8 August 2019
Candy Dulfer - Strasbourg St Denis
When you get a tune in your head and it won't go away.
Candy Dulfer's early albums, should you have heard any, which I had, will not prepare you for this performance, and the rest of the concert, which is also on You Tube. This is engaged, enjoyable and thoughtful - not usually words I associate with "smooth jazz".
Monday 5 August 2019
Brexit - The View Ahead
So far Boris has done everything right. Set out his position like he means it. Telling the EU they won’t get their money without a re-negotiated deal is spot-on. Refusing to travel to for meetings with people who say they won’t change their minds is solid stuff as well. Appearing to spend money on preparing for No Deal is just what the doctor ordered. It all makes us realise just how poor at negotiation Theresa May’s lot were.
According to the House of Parliament’s estimate’s https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/parliament-and-elections/elections-elections/brexit-votes-by-constituency/ 408 MPs represent constituencies that voted 50.1% or more Leave. 363 voted 52% Leave, and 292 voted 55% Leave. That’s 292 MPs who should be voting to Leave There are 650 seats in the House. 163 MPs represent constituencies where Leave got 45% or less: they have a solid rationale for voting to repeal A50. That leaves 195 swing constituencies, where the statistics and estimates may blur the result.
I said voting to repeal A50. Not to create endless uncertainty and delay. Nobody voted for that. There was a point to frustrating the process in April when May brought her unacceptable agreement to the House. It was all they could do, and they should have done it. In typical British fashion, the House did the right thing for all the wrong reasons.
Most of the comments and calculations, and my first draft of this, were based on the assumption that the House was a bunch of weasels who want another Government to run the Government. That’s true of some of them: Corbyn and his thugs, Hammond and some others who don’t know their time has passed. Take their names, and treat them as exceptions.
Let’s assume that the House (of Commons) understands that, however much its individual members may want to Remain, almost all of them understand that they have been given their instructions and will not, therefore, be voting to repeal A50. Party policy or not.
The House can and should obstruct a really, really awful deal. It may feel it should obstruct an un-prepared No-Deal exit, though quite how much more time anyone in business needs since June 2016 is not clear. The EU will not throw the UK out. It needs the money and it doesn’t need the optics of “throwing out the UK”. So every time the House asks for an extension, the EU will oblige.
What the House needs to believe, however grudgingly and reluctantly, are two things: first, that the UK is prepared for a No-Deal exit, however imperfectly; and second, that the voters, and more importantly the companies that fund the political parties, are not willing to take another delay with yet more uncertainty.
Many of the MPs are much closer to both those conclusions than you might think. That’s because the media have not been reporting the preparations being made and the money being spent on a No-Deal UK. If they had, Project Fear would seem farcical. The MP’s however, see what is happening in their constituencies, and don’t believe the Guardian, Mark Carney or the Motor Industry any more than you and I do. No-Deal is going to be a speed-bump, not a car wreck, and a lot of MPs know this.
So what difference does Boris make? While Theresa May had Olly “Wormtongue” Robbins whispering in her ear, the House had very good reasons to suppose that any preparations would be insufficient, and that the deal would be awful. Boris can assure them that progress is being made, and come Halloween, the UK will be prepared enough. He can also remind them that the EU are not going to change a single word of the agreement, that the Backstop (My Precious!) will not be removed, at least by Junker’s administration, and that there is no point in buying more time, because nothing will change in the EU position at the end of it.
There’s something else. The House would have had no confidence in May’s ability to lead when and if anything awkward happened. She had the wrong advisors for that: Wormtongue would have told her that it was the consequence of leaving the EU and she should look to make peace with Mordor. The House did not, and rightly, want to step into the unknown with a weak leader who did not believe in her cause.
The House can believe that Boris will step up, and that his advisors are at least on his side.
An election would be a distraction for Boris’ preparations. The timing is awful, since Remainers need Parliament to be sitting in the weeks before Halloween, and Parliament doesn’t reconvene until the 3rd of September. It’s also irrelevant: this isn’t about a party political majority. It’s about a Leave-majority. Boris can’t count on his own party, just as Corbyn can’t count on his party.
Nobody has to vote to Leave. That was done in June 2016. They have to vote to obstruct Leave. To Leave, they just have to not come up with the tricks they used to prevent May’s agreement going through.
I started this by assuming the House was actually full of people who were, under a think layer of gunk, basically decent. I’m going to end it by reminding you that the mainstream media is presently staffed, managed and owned almost entirely by people who would not know the truth if it bit them in the ass and gave them an infectious disease.
Expect bought-and-paid-for Project Fear to rise to hysterical levels in October. It didn’t work in 2016, and it won’t work now. Not even the journalists believe it. However, the journalists’ masters don’t need you to believe it. They need just enough of 650 Very Special People to believe it.
Expect has-been ex-ministers and attention-seeking backbenchers to introduce ridiculous bills to frustrate the Halloween deadline. Expect most of those to be voted down by narrow margins. Expect screaming headlines and bought-and-paid-for marches in the last week of October. When Halloween comes and goes and the House fails to delay, because it has realised the EU cannot let go of its Precious, expect howls of anguish on the front pages of the mainstream media November 1st or some near date. For months afterwards, expect celebrity Remainers to threaten legal action. Expect every traffic jam near a port to be reported as a blow to UK trade. Expect every nasty, dirty trick in the book.
The difference between the MPs and the journalists is that MPs have to listen to the people, or they won’t be re-elected. Journalists have to listen to whoever pays their salary, and it’s been a long time since the revenue from the cover price and the local cinema and estate agents did that. Journalists are paid by billionaires and NGO / EU grants, and play the tunes those pipers want.
Which is slightly off-topic. I could be wrong about the MPs. Angela Merkel might tell Brussels to drop its Precious into Mount Doom and let the UK go, so Volkswagen can sell us some cars. The New Lot might view Brexit as a distraction, and want to be shot of Farage and an EU country which will apply for, and get, an exception to its Armed Forces being in the EU Army. With the UK in, Project Mo’ Yurup will always falter. The House might decide to commit collective suicide and repeal A50.
One thing I do know. I know this: If Recep Tayyip Erdoğan wants a quick billion for his personal pension scheme, he just needs to threaten to open Turkey's Western borders in first week of October, and flood Europe with millions of vibrant and diverse lawyers and doctors.
‘Cause that’s what tipped the balance back in June 2016.
According to the House of Parliament’s estimate’s https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/parliament-and-elections/elections-elections/brexit-votes-by-constituency/ 408 MPs represent constituencies that voted 50.1% or more Leave. 363 voted 52% Leave, and 292 voted 55% Leave. That’s 292 MPs who should be voting to Leave There are 650 seats in the House. 163 MPs represent constituencies where Leave got 45% or less: they have a solid rationale for voting to repeal A50. That leaves 195 swing constituencies, where the statistics and estimates may blur the result.
I said voting to repeal A50. Not to create endless uncertainty and delay. Nobody voted for that. There was a point to frustrating the process in April when May brought her unacceptable agreement to the House. It was all they could do, and they should have done it. In typical British fashion, the House did the right thing for all the wrong reasons.
Most of the comments and calculations, and my first draft of this, were based on the assumption that the House was a bunch of weasels who want another Government to run the Government. That’s true of some of them: Corbyn and his thugs, Hammond and some others who don’t know their time has passed. Take their names, and treat them as exceptions.
Let’s assume that the House (of Commons) understands that, however much its individual members may want to Remain, almost all of them understand that they have been given their instructions and will not, therefore, be voting to repeal A50. Party policy or not.
The House can and should obstruct a really, really awful deal. It may feel it should obstruct an un-prepared No-Deal exit, though quite how much more time anyone in business needs since June 2016 is not clear. The EU will not throw the UK out. It needs the money and it doesn’t need the optics of “throwing out the UK”. So every time the House asks for an extension, the EU will oblige.
What the House needs to believe, however grudgingly and reluctantly, are two things: first, that the UK is prepared for a No-Deal exit, however imperfectly; and second, that the voters, and more importantly the companies that fund the political parties, are not willing to take another delay with yet more uncertainty.
Many of the MPs are much closer to both those conclusions than you might think. That’s because the media have not been reporting the preparations being made and the money being spent on a No-Deal UK. If they had, Project Fear would seem farcical. The MP’s however, see what is happening in their constituencies, and don’t believe the Guardian, Mark Carney or the Motor Industry any more than you and I do. No-Deal is going to be a speed-bump, not a car wreck, and a lot of MPs know this.
So what difference does Boris make? While Theresa May had Olly “Wormtongue” Robbins whispering in her ear, the House had very good reasons to suppose that any preparations would be insufficient, and that the deal would be awful. Boris can assure them that progress is being made, and come Halloween, the UK will be prepared enough. He can also remind them that the EU are not going to change a single word of the agreement, that the Backstop (My Precious!) will not be removed, at least by Junker’s administration, and that there is no point in buying more time, because nothing will change in the EU position at the end of it.
There’s something else. The House would have had no confidence in May’s ability to lead when and if anything awkward happened. She had the wrong advisors for that: Wormtongue would have told her that it was the consequence of leaving the EU and she should look to make peace with Mordor. The House did not, and rightly, want to step into the unknown with a weak leader who did not believe in her cause.
The House can believe that Boris will step up, and that his advisors are at least on his side.
An election would be a distraction for Boris’ preparations. The timing is awful, since Remainers need Parliament to be sitting in the weeks before Halloween, and Parliament doesn’t reconvene until the 3rd of September. It’s also irrelevant: this isn’t about a party political majority. It’s about a Leave-majority. Boris can’t count on his own party, just as Corbyn can’t count on his party.
Nobody has to vote to Leave. That was done in June 2016. They have to vote to obstruct Leave. To Leave, they just have to not come up with the tricks they used to prevent May’s agreement going through.
I started this by assuming the House was actually full of people who were, under a think layer of gunk, basically decent. I’m going to end it by reminding you that the mainstream media is presently staffed, managed and owned almost entirely by people who would not know the truth if it bit them in the ass and gave them an infectious disease.
Expect bought-and-paid-for Project Fear to rise to hysterical levels in October. It didn’t work in 2016, and it won’t work now. Not even the journalists believe it. However, the journalists’ masters don’t need you to believe it. They need just enough of 650 Very Special People to believe it.
Expect has-been ex-ministers and attention-seeking backbenchers to introduce ridiculous bills to frustrate the Halloween deadline. Expect most of those to be voted down by narrow margins. Expect screaming headlines and bought-and-paid-for marches in the last week of October. When Halloween comes and goes and the House fails to delay, because it has realised the EU cannot let go of its Precious, expect howls of anguish on the front pages of the mainstream media November 1st or some near date. For months afterwards, expect celebrity Remainers to threaten legal action. Expect every traffic jam near a port to be reported as a blow to UK trade. Expect every nasty, dirty trick in the book.
The difference between the MPs and the journalists is that MPs have to listen to the people, or they won’t be re-elected. Journalists have to listen to whoever pays their salary, and it’s been a long time since the revenue from the cover price and the local cinema and estate agents did that. Journalists are paid by billionaires and NGO / EU grants, and play the tunes those pipers want.
Which is slightly off-topic. I could be wrong about the MPs. Angela Merkel might tell Brussels to drop its Precious into Mount Doom and let the UK go, so Volkswagen can sell us some cars. The New Lot might view Brexit as a distraction, and want to be shot of Farage and an EU country which will apply for, and get, an exception to its Armed Forces being in the EU Army. With the UK in, Project Mo’ Yurup will always falter. The House might decide to commit collective suicide and repeal A50.
One thing I do know. I know this: If Recep Tayyip Erdoğan wants a quick billion for his personal pension scheme, he just needs to threaten to open Turkey's Western borders in first week of October, and flood Europe with millions of vibrant and diverse lawyers and doctors.
‘Cause that’s what tipped the balance back in June 2016.
Thursday 1 August 2019
Movie Wokeness Is Marketing to a Non-White Male Audience
Computing Forever has a comprehensive review of the various movie franchises that have been infected by woke-ness, diversity, feminism, misandry and other things off-putting to Men Who Want To Watch Movies.
His take is that these changes is deliberate political-inspired posturing by the Hollywood studios, which have become infested by manginas, allies, and LBGQTI supporters. I mean, other than the Warshowski’s.
I’m not so sure. There’s a veneer of Woke-speak in the marketing, and remember that actor/ess interviews are part of the marketing. The veneer isn’t the wood. The wood is surely at least two things: first, Hollywood blockbusters are primarily made for the Chinese and Indian markets, rather than the domestic US market; second, White Men Who Want To Watch Movies are now only twenty-five per cent of the population of the USA, and the prime age range, which I understand to be 18-30, has been, I suspect, deserting the movies in favour of computer games, and box sets or streaming, for quite the time now. Hollywood used to make movies for White Men, because there were enough of them to make a decent audience. Now there aren’t.
So Hollywood makes movies for White Women, diversities in the USA, and the Chinese and Indian markets. (The James Bond franchise had been taking into account the quirks of local markets since forever.) No more evil slanty-eyed Chinese or dumb Black criminals, unless they are cool super-villans. (That explains why nobody complains about the portrayal of Mexican and South American gangsters: psychopathy is super-cool.) No more Uma Thurman. Women have to be “real” and sassy, or strong, or hot messes. These groups are now the primary market.
Who gets to be the Bad Guy, the Dope and the Loser? The one group who isn’t paying dues to Hollywood. The White Man. He has to be the dupe, the dope, the clown and the clueless. Ain’t nobody else left.
Hollywood has learned a lot from Chinese movies, though it has yet to incorporate a love story and a dance scene into a Fast And Furious to keep the Indian audience happy. What it doesn’t know how to get right is Having A Hero / Major Character Who Isn’t A White Man (or Denzel Washington or a Lead Girl In A Sci-Fi series). I don’t either: it’s a tricky balance of ignoring the gender and colour of the Lead, but somehow building in both to the character and plot, without it interfering with the way the character functions. At the moment, NWM Leads have to flaunt their NWM-ness at the audience and lord it over the WM supporting cast, because Hollywood thinks that’s what the White Women + Diversities want to see. And maybe Hollywood is right. I don’t know: I haven’t seen the research.
Meantime, the Fast and Furious franchise is stuffed to the gills with WM leads. After the cars, WM leads are the whole point of F&F. But then F&F really is made for the Chinese, who don’t go for any of this woke stuff. And look at (some of) the box set series. The ones I have, from Sons of Anarchy, through House, to Elementary and The Shield, have strong, white, male characters who take no shit from anyone. Not All Box Sets Are Like That (Game of Thrones!), but some are, because if the producers get it right, the WM audience will buy in bulk.
The old-school feminists understood that the masculine world is a shifting, elusive and fluid thing. They knew that whenever they managed to get into some male bastion, the men had somehow gone to another bastion somewhere else. What they didn’t know was that the only reason they got access to the old bastion was that the men were already leaving. I can’t help feeling that’s what’s happened to a lot of pop culture: WMs have mostly abandoned it, because there are new and more interesting things to do. As a result, it has been turned into an audience-delivery mechanism for advertisers. The WM stragglers are complaining, but the stragglers always will.
His take is that these changes is deliberate political-inspired posturing by the Hollywood studios, which have become infested by manginas, allies, and LBGQTI supporters. I mean, other than the Warshowski’s.
(These guys made The Matrix)
I’m not so sure. There’s a veneer of Woke-speak in the marketing, and remember that actor/ess interviews are part of the marketing. The veneer isn’t the wood. The wood is surely at least two things: first, Hollywood blockbusters are primarily made for the Chinese and Indian markets, rather than the domestic US market; second, White Men Who Want To Watch Movies are now only twenty-five per cent of the population of the USA, and the prime age range, which I understand to be 18-30, has been, I suspect, deserting the movies in favour of computer games, and box sets or streaming, for quite the time now. Hollywood used to make movies for White Men, because there were enough of them to make a decent audience. Now there aren’t.
So Hollywood makes movies for White Women, diversities in the USA, and the Chinese and Indian markets. (The James Bond franchise had been taking into account the quirks of local markets since forever.) No more evil slanty-eyed Chinese or dumb Black criminals, unless they are cool super-villans. (That explains why nobody complains about the portrayal of Mexican and South American gangsters: psychopathy is super-cool.) No more Uma Thurman. Women have to be “real” and sassy, or strong, or hot messes. These groups are now the primary market.
Who gets to be the Bad Guy, the Dope and the Loser? The one group who isn’t paying dues to Hollywood. The White Man. He has to be the dupe, the dope, the clown and the clueless. Ain’t nobody else left.
Hollywood has learned a lot from Chinese movies, though it has yet to incorporate a love story and a dance scene into a Fast And Furious to keep the Indian audience happy. What it doesn’t know how to get right is Having A Hero / Major Character Who Isn’t A White Man (or Denzel Washington or a Lead Girl In A Sci-Fi series). I don’t either: it’s a tricky balance of ignoring the gender and colour of the Lead, but somehow building in both to the character and plot, without it interfering with the way the character functions. At the moment, NWM Leads have to flaunt their NWM-ness at the audience and lord it over the WM supporting cast, because Hollywood thinks that’s what the White Women + Diversities want to see. And maybe Hollywood is right. I don’t know: I haven’t seen the research.
Meantime, the Fast and Furious franchise is stuffed to the gills with WM leads. After the cars, WM leads are the whole point of F&F. But then F&F really is made for the Chinese, who don’t go for any of this woke stuff. And look at (some of) the box set series. The ones I have, from Sons of Anarchy, through House, to Elementary and The Shield, have strong, white, male characters who take no shit from anyone. Not All Box Sets Are Like That (Game of Thrones!), but some are, because if the producers get it right, the WM audience will buy in bulk.
The old-school feminists understood that the masculine world is a shifting, elusive and fluid thing. They knew that whenever they managed to get into some male bastion, the men had somehow gone to another bastion somewhere else. What they didn’t know was that the only reason they got access to the old bastion was that the men were already leaving. I can’t help feeling that’s what’s happened to a lot of pop culture: WMs have mostly abandoned it, because there are new and more interesting things to do. As a result, it has been turned into an audience-delivery mechanism for advertisers. The WM stragglers are complaining, but the stragglers always will.
Thursday 25 July 2019
99F in the City
I went into work today. Because aircon. The trains and the office have it, and my house doesn't. I managed to get lunch by walking slowly in shadows. Any time in the sunshine was just painful. When I got home, I spent four hours waiting for the temperature to drop enough so I could even think about sleeping.
Hottest Day of the Year. I was there!
Hottest Day of the Year. I was there!
Monday 22 July 2019
Louis Rossmann on Giving Up
Two things: if you’re a nerd then you will really appreciate Louis Rossmann, who seems to be the King of Macbook board repair, and a general all-round self-aware person with a direct style I like. His board repair videos are guaranteed to calm the most troubled soul.
This is him talking about people who can’t solve problems, and how much freaking effort it is to solve problems in real life.
I cannot endorse these sentiments enough. Solving technical problems is difficult, experimental, full of hours of wrong directions followed by a moment of “oh, yes, I do it this way” realisation that solves the problem in five minutes. I let my emotions get involved, in the sense that I give voice to my frustration and puzzlement, and occasionally express the opinion that if I was someone really actually clever, like for instance Terence Tao, I would have solved this as soon as I looked at it. Two things to notice here: first, my idea of clever is Terence Tao, not the guy at the next desk; and second, a long time ago, I realised that the really smart people would never work at the companies I work for, and the people at those companies have no idea who Terence Tao is, let alone any way of appreciating how clever he is, so actually, in their world, I’m as smart as they will see.
I also have one actual virtue. I will not give up if it is a problem I believe to be within my competence and the scope of my tools. So I don’t bother trying to fix my work laptop when it does strange stuff because I don’t have administrator rights on it. I’m not going to tackle a problem that needs a proper programming language to fix, because the part of the business I’m in doesn’t have access to properly installed programming languages. If it’s an SQL problem, I am going to solve it. I just keep going at it: try this, try that, even read the manual.
Many of my colleagues don’t do that. They try once, see an error message and give up, or don’t get the results they thought they should get, and give up. For the longest while I have put that down to a) a lack of moral fibre, b) laziness and freeloading, since they always ask me if I can do it for them, c) tactical incompetence, where you suddenly can’t do something for someone who you suspect is off-loading the task to you because they too lack moral fibre.
Louis’ suggestion is that many of my colleagues are suffering from having a very low bar for feeling like a failure. Having various attempts fail is one thing, but feeling that you have failed, and are therefore a failure, or will feel like one if you carry on producing failing attempts, is another thing altogether. He has a high bar for feeling like a failure. So do I. Many people have a very, very low bar. A couple of tries and they are done.
It may be some kind of psychological factory setting, or it may be actual lack of moral fibre, either way when someone does the “I can’t do it, can you do it for me because deadlines”, while I continue to respect them as a human being and fellow traveller through this joyous pageant of Life, I can’t entirely take them seriously again. They aren’t One of Us, the Honourable Guild of Problem Solvers.
I feel pretty sure that Louis would think I was being unkind. And he may be right.
This is him talking about people who can’t solve problems, and how much freaking effort it is to solve problems in real life.
I cannot endorse these sentiments enough. Solving technical problems is difficult, experimental, full of hours of wrong directions followed by a moment of “oh, yes, I do it this way” realisation that solves the problem in five minutes. I let my emotions get involved, in the sense that I give voice to my frustration and puzzlement, and occasionally express the opinion that if I was someone really actually clever, like for instance Terence Tao, I would have solved this as soon as I looked at it. Two things to notice here: first, my idea of clever is Terence Tao, not the guy at the next desk; and second, a long time ago, I realised that the really smart people would never work at the companies I work for, and the people at those companies have no idea who Terence Tao is, let alone any way of appreciating how clever he is, so actually, in their world, I’m as smart as they will see.
I also have one actual virtue. I will not give up if it is a problem I believe to be within my competence and the scope of my tools. So I don’t bother trying to fix my work laptop when it does strange stuff because I don’t have administrator rights on it. I’m not going to tackle a problem that needs a proper programming language to fix, because the part of the business I’m in doesn’t have access to properly installed programming languages. If it’s an SQL problem, I am going to solve it. I just keep going at it: try this, try that, even read the manual.
Many of my colleagues don’t do that. They try once, see an error message and give up, or don’t get the results they thought they should get, and give up. For the longest while I have put that down to a) a lack of moral fibre, b) laziness and freeloading, since they always ask me if I can do it for them, c) tactical incompetence, where you suddenly can’t do something for someone who you suspect is off-loading the task to you because they too lack moral fibre.
Louis’ suggestion is that many of my colleagues are suffering from having a very low bar for feeling like a failure. Having various attempts fail is one thing, but feeling that you have failed, and are therefore a failure, or will feel like one if you carry on producing failing attempts, is another thing altogether. He has a high bar for feeling like a failure. So do I. Many people have a very, very low bar. A couple of tries and they are done.
It may be some kind of psychological factory setting, or it may be actual lack of moral fibre, either way when someone does the “I can’t do it, can you do it for me because deadlines”, while I continue to respect them as a human being and fellow traveller through this joyous pageant of Life, I can’t entirely take them seriously again. They aren’t One of Us, the Honourable Guild of Problem Solvers.
I feel pretty sure that Louis would think I was being unkind. And he may be right.
Thursday 18 July 2019
Un-burning - Part One
Burn-out is usually defined as a Capitalist malady: it’s the inability to be happily productive, because you can’t handle the stress of your under-resourced job in your dysfunctional workplace. Since The Organisation is not going to change, you must.
Yeah, well, screw that. The Mayo Clinic suggests:
Yoga, meditation and tai chi are not support mechanisms for improved post-modern Capitalist productivity. Anyone doing any of those seriously would become more aware of, and less inclined to accept, the BS that is making them feel burned-out.
Exercise. Sure. I do that already. One’s motivation to hit the gym tends to slacken when one is feeling stressed.
Sleep. I do that just fine. Telling someone who is stressed-out to sleep more is like telling someone who is living near a main road to enjoy silence.
And anyone who suggests or sells “mindfulness” is not your friend. “Mindful” in English means “Watch what you are saying and doing, you are not among friends”. Seriously. That’s what it means. “Mindfulness” is sold as a "spiritual practice”, but it is in fact a warning to self-censor your reactions and feelings - which is what "facing situations with openness and patience, and without judgment” means.
So that was useful.
What does a practical man of action do?
We admitted we were burned out, that our lives had become unmanageable. (Where have I heard that before?)
I had two thirty-minute Thai massages a week for a couple of weeks. The ones where she holds on to the bar on the ceiling to balance and walks on me.
I got back into the gym: Saturday and Sunday mornings, Tuesday and Wednesday afternoons. At this stage, simply showing up and hefting any amount of iron will do.
I have one Americano in the morning, with breakfast, and espresso after that. No tea, unless it’s the afternoon and I’m at home. Something about hot water and milk wasn’t helping.
I’m parking the car at the station in the morning. At twenty-five past six there are spaces. Pay by the Ringo App. It’s half the price of parking at Richmond. I feel so much more relaxed at both ends of the day. I kinda knew I resented that walk from the station to where I’ve been parking the car, but I didn’t know how much I resented it.
Yep. It’s pollen time again. Back comes the Beconase. When my eyes start itching, I take a couple of snorts.
I’m easing back my negative self-talk. No more “what’s wrong with me / I’m too old for this / I can’t keep this pace up” and the like. This is the first thing that Mike Cernovich talks about in Gorilla Mindset. I thought I had that one down when I read it.
“Be nice to yourself” I say every now and then.
Since the Doddle at Liverpool Street closed, I haven’t had anywhere convenient to get Amazon deliveries. Then I noticed my local Homebase has an Amazon locker. I experimented with a delivery: the locker broke down for a day, but Amazon sent me a mail when it started working, and I collected the book I’d ordered. I will be using that again. A lack of Amazon delivery turned out to be a little thing that itched.
At work, I recognised that SQL-cutting is monotonous and requires focus. So I’m slowing down a little. I’m taking the pressure off me to cut fast and cut once, because that always works well. I should have learned by now, but, hey, nobody’s perfect.
I move around the office a bit, so I’m not sitting at the same place all day.
I make sure I do something for me during working hours. I’m not the only one at work who gets to the end of the day and realises they haven’t done X, where X is “collect the dry cleaning” or “make a reservation” or “collect the prescription”.
Yeah, well, screw that. The Mayo Clinic suggests:
Discuss specific concerns with your supervisor. Maybe you can work together to change expectations or reach compromises or solutions. Try to set goals for what must get done and what can wait.If you could do the first two of those, the chances are you would not be feeling burned out. One reason burnout happens is exactly because we can’t trust or find support from our “colleagues”.
Seek support. Whether you reach out to co-workers, friends or loved ones, support and collaboration might help you cope. If you have access to an employee assistance program, take advantage of relevant services.
Try a relaxing activity. Explore programs that can help with stress such as yoga, meditation or tai chi.
Get some exercise. Regular physical activity can help you to better deal with stress. It can also take your mind off work.
Get some sleep. Sleep restores well-being and helps protect your health.
Mindfulness. Mindfulness is the act of focusing on your breath flow and being intensely aware of what you're sensing and feeling at every moment, without interpretation or judgment. In a job setting, this practice involves facing situations with openness and patience, and without judgment.
Yoga, meditation and tai chi are not support mechanisms for improved post-modern Capitalist productivity. Anyone doing any of those seriously would become more aware of, and less inclined to accept, the BS that is making them feel burned-out.
Exercise. Sure. I do that already. One’s motivation to hit the gym tends to slacken when one is feeling stressed.
Sleep. I do that just fine. Telling someone who is stressed-out to sleep more is like telling someone who is living near a main road to enjoy silence.
And anyone who suggests or sells “mindfulness” is not your friend. “Mindful” in English means “Watch what you are saying and doing, you are not among friends”. Seriously. That’s what it means. “Mindfulness” is sold as a "spiritual practice”, but it is in fact a warning to self-censor your reactions and feelings - which is what "facing situations with openness and patience, and without judgment” means.
So that was useful.
What does a practical man of action do?
We admitted we were burned out, that our lives had become unmanageable. (Where have I heard that before?)
I had two thirty-minute Thai massages a week for a couple of weeks. The ones where she holds on to the bar on the ceiling to balance and walks on me.
I got back into the gym: Saturday and Sunday mornings, Tuesday and Wednesday afternoons. At this stage, simply showing up and hefting any amount of iron will do.
I have one Americano in the morning, with breakfast, and espresso after that. No tea, unless it’s the afternoon and I’m at home. Something about hot water and milk wasn’t helping.
I’m parking the car at the station in the morning. At twenty-five past six there are spaces. Pay by the Ringo App. It’s half the price of parking at Richmond. I feel so much more relaxed at both ends of the day. I kinda knew I resented that walk from the station to where I’ve been parking the car, but I didn’t know how much I resented it.
Yep. It’s pollen time again. Back comes the Beconase. When my eyes start itching, I take a couple of snorts.
I’m easing back my negative self-talk. No more “what’s wrong with me / I’m too old for this / I can’t keep this pace up” and the like. This is the first thing that Mike Cernovich talks about in Gorilla Mindset. I thought I had that one down when I read it.
“Be nice to yourself” I say every now and then.
Since the Doddle at Liverpool Street closed, I haven’t had anywhere convenient to get Amazon deliveries. Then I noticed my local Homebase has an Amazon locker. I experimented with a delivery: the locker broke down for a day, but Amazon sent me a mail when it started working, and I collected the book I’d ordered. I will be using that again. A lack of Amazon delivery turned out to be a little thing that itched.
At work, I recognised that SQL-cutting is monotonous and requires focus. So I’m slowing down a little. I’m taking the pressure off me to cut fast and cut once, because that always works well. I should have learned by now, but, hey, nobody’s perfect.
I move around the office a bit, so I’m not sitting at the same place all day.
I make sure I do something for me during working hours. I’m not the only one at work who gets to the end of the day and realises they haven’t done X, where X is “collect the dry cleaning” or “make a reservation” or “collect the prescription”.
Monday 15 July 2019
Staircases and Highwalks - London Wall
Last year I was Mr Highwalks. Then I got tired of them, and now walk along the pavements along with the ordinary people. Every now and then, I have to have some fresh air and sunshine, because the office is dull and the aircon is, wait, we have aircon? Anyway, this fell in front of my lens, so here it is.
Thursday 11 July 2019
The X-Bow, Amsterdam
This is the Polarcus Nadia, an oceanographic ship currently laid up at Amsterdam. That weird bow - roughly the reverse of the shape the bow "should" be - is called an Ulstein X-Bow. It's supposed to make the vessel much more stable, stop it hammering up and down in heavier seas, and thus let the crew get more rest. I thought it was an icebreaker at first, but what the frak do I know about ships?
Monday 8 July 2019
What A Suburban Railway Station Should Look LIke
This is what a suburban railway station should look like. Notice that the track and the trackside are clear of weeds. Nor has it any litter. The surfaces are clean. There are no tacky advertisements - though there are a couple of small covered billboards by the entrance.
It's in the Netherlands, outside Utrecht. It belongs to the Dutch national railway company.
Why can't UK railway companies keep their tracks clean and weed-free?
No profit in cleanliness. And no pride to do it just because.
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