Tank Magazine Vol 6 Issue 1

Every now and then I'm entitled to a really trivial entry. I remember Tank when it first came out. It's always had more interesting essays than most style mags – check out The Cruel Jerk by Kevin Braddock as an example of one of the better essays – and an interesting line in photography and styling. Well, they've changed the format, made it larger, put in a spiral binder and in the latest issue, have lots of pictures of la Claudia. What's not to like? You can download a pdf of the shoot at their website, but here's something to be going on with.

You can, by the way, do a lot worse than see a movie just because it's got la Claudia in it (okay, other than Ritchie Rich): Black and White, The Blackout, Friends and Lovers and Love Actually are all a better way of spending your time than watching Funny People or The Hangover.

Why Sadness Follows a Politic Lie

Something I say all the time is “they don't mean that, they're just saying it to be nice / polite / because it gets them off the hook / whatever.” Remember how one the things I do is lie even when it would be easier to tell the truth? Well, I'm the one who says something polite, evasive, nice, vaguely sympathetic or ambiguously assenting when someone says something dumb, misguided, tasteless, crass, ignorant or otherwise fattening. For all I know, other people may be expressing their opinions honestly and with a minimum of editing and sugar.

So why am I lying? Because a) telling the truth (or telling my truth, which is not quite the same thing) would not achieve anything; b) because sometimes it's the polite or politic thing to do; c) because I can tell I'm dealing with a loony, a-hole, bigot, ignoramus, or someone who just doesn't get it and want to cut the whole encounter short. As for polite lies, no, of course your bum doesn't look big in those jeans.

As an example of the first type: somewhere out there is a woman in her mid-thirties who honestly believes that if the parents do anal sex, their male children will become homosexuals. She thought it said so in the Bible, and she's a fundamentalist. I know this woman exists because I've had lunch with her, and she was a guest of our mutual hosts. I said nothing while she spouted this hate-filled nonsense, and I haven't quite liked myself as much since. Why didn't I call her out on it? It was lunch and I was guest. She was the one breaking the rules by expressing such opinions. Anyway, nobody who believes such things would possibly be influenced by argument and facts, or even see the relevance of facts. (Fundamentalists believe despite the evidence – politicians and management don't believe and ignore the evidence.)

As an example of the third type: the other day at a meeting I found myself sitting next to a woman who, after we'd shaken hands and swapped first names as is an acceptable practice, proceeded to give me what ought to be hereinafter known as the “AA Check-Out”: how long had I been sober? How many meetings a week did I go to? Do I have a sponsor? Do I have sponsees? She was checking that I was an orthodox AA. From what she said later, she was hoping I would unwittingly admit to having some problem with my sponsor, so we could share. In my experience people who do the AA Check-Out are not so emotionally sober, and usually are having some sort of problem with AA as a social practice. Once again, I vanished behind some vague politeness and a comment that sponsors are like lamp-posts: she had to be sure she was using hers for illumination, not support. Get this person out of my life. Now.

When I started this entry, I thought what I felt on these occasions was guilt that I hadn't spoken up for myself. But it isn't. It's a little stab of despair that this is who I meet, an urge not to be near or talking to yet another head case. Somewhere there's a place with people I'd like to meet and who would like to meet me – and once again, it's nowhere I am.

Geoff Colvin's Talent is Over-Rated

I've been reading Talent is Over-Rated by Geoff Colvin, an editor at Fortune. It's a quick, clear read and a much more detailed discussion of the “10,000 hour” rule that Malcolm Gladwell travestied in his last book. Colvin is summarising a bunch of research which suggests that people who do anything – music, sports, mathematics, writing – at a very high level spend a lot of time doing deliberate practice: practice that is carefully designed to take you past your present limits and to remove any sticky spots in your present technique. Top-flight anyones do a lot of this. Indeed at the top level, you don't train to compete, you compete to train. Competition is there solely to identify the weaker points of your game.

Colvin is very good about the way that large corporations are set up exactly not to provide the environment and culture in which people can develop and perform excellently. “How often is feedback at most companies constructive, non-threatening, and work-focused? Evaluations at most companies are exactly the opposite: telling the hapless employee what he did wrong, not how to do better, and specifying personal traits (attitude, personality) that must be changed, all under the unspoken looming threat of getting fired.” Sounds familiar to me. What Colvin shys from saying why it's like this in most companies.

The research he's using suggests that the motivation of top-flight performers is intrinsic to the activity, it's about being excellent at what you do. It's not about winning, proving yourself to your peers, making lots of money, lavish praise, promotions and honours.

Well, unless you're a manager. Then your intrinsic motivations are exactly about proving yourself, winning, making money, status, praise, promotions and, who knows? Even honours, should you do the right thing by the incumbent Government. A manager's skills are the dark arts of seeking preferment, influence and advancement and avoiding responsibility, blame and ill-favor. Managers really are motivated by fear, praise, financial rewards and gee-gaws and they make the company in their image.

That's why most corporate appraisal schemes are fear-based and fault-finding; it's why the training is on the corporate intranet, non-accredited and shallow; why the courses they trumpet are about “leadership” and “effectiveness”; and why they can churn people and organisational structures every two or three years. That's why techies regard managers as untainted by the slightest skill or knowledge, and why the rest of the people who work there regard them as slightly sad or bad. Because they are motivated by the preferment of the powerful and the pursuit of power and influence, and there is something not quite right about that.

it's not to Colvin's detriment he didn't write that - because I'm sure he knows it - but it is a sign of how good the book is that it becomes obvious.

Never change your mobile phone number...

... and always have the phone charged and on. Lots of people don't update their records when you send out that mail about your new contact details.

Your work is what gives you satisfaction. It may or may not be what you do in your employment.

Your job is how you earn your money. You earn money now by doing what your current employer wants you to do, you earn money tomorrow by training on new stuff and finding your next job. When there was "full employment", that next job was with the same employer. Now there is a "flexible labour market", that next job might be with your current employer or it might be with another one.

Always keep in touch with your recruitment agents
Always go to every interview: you need the practice and you learn a lot
Keep your on-line CV's updated and consistent

Body Fat, Weight Loss and All That

I've been reading The Diet Delusion by Gary Taubes, which I commend to you if you want to know anything about diet and nutrition. It prompted me to think over the whole issue of weight loss, diet and exercise properly.

Let's start with the basics. You eat a 300 gram apple. As a result, you now weigh 300 grams more than you did. The only way you will weigh the same as you did before you ate the apple is to lose 300 grams. How do you do that? Well, what goes in has to go out or be stored. The stores are triglyceride molecules in fat cells or additional bone or muscle mass. What goes out is urine, sweat, faeces and moisture in your breath.

How about losing weight by exercising? Say, walking a mile at about four miles an hour. This will burn roughly 100 Calories. The body stores 7,700 Calories in a kilo of (white) body fat. So you have burned up 64 grams of body fat. The catch is, aside from the sweat you dripped onto the pavement or absorbed in your clothes, you haven't lost any weight yet. The body fat has disappeared in a reaction using oxygen and other chemicals to make various waste products: the mass of the waste products equals the mass of the body fat, oxygen and other chemicals. (To many, many decimal places, chemical reactions conserve mass.) Those waste products are still in your body, so you still weigh the same – this is why you never seem to weigh less after a work-out at the gym. You won't lose the weight until you pass water or faeces. What the exercise does is increase the amount of waste material you pass.

By 64 grams for a mile-long walk. Unless you are an athlete or an infantryman, you will use very little energy by “exercising”: most of your energy use is in your basal metabolic rate – keeping your core body warm, processing food, re-oxygenating blood, making all those cells to renew your body and other such work. For a man, that's about 2,000 Calories a day. Cut down your food intake to 1500 Calories in the right way, so that you burn body fat and you are losing 300 grams a day, or 2 kilos a week. That's how you lose weight without having a Hollywood trainer and all day to exercise.

So how do you make sure you burn the body fat? The answer, Taubes is suggesting, is “carbohydrates drive insulin, insulin drives fat”. Cut down on sugars and starches, your insulin levels go down and your body releases more fat from its cells, which burn up and create more waste products. It also reduces the need for all the water needed to handle carbohydrate-based food processing. A good chunk of weight loss in the early stages of any diet is water being disposed of because it's suddenly become surplus to requirement.

This, at any rate, is how I make sense of what Taubes is saying. I'm trying it right now. The challenge is eating a low (refined-) carbohydrate, low sugar diet while working in an office in central London.

Downtown

Is a classic 1965 song by Tony Hatch sung by Petula Clark. Baby Spice – I'm sorry, Emma Bunton - did a version in 2006. (That's over forty years later: those songs were a darn sight stronger than we all thought at the time. Quick: name a song written in 1925 that was in the charts in 1965. No? Thought so.) It's about how you will shake off the blues so much better if you go to the heart of the Big City – even when I first heard it, I assumed it was about Manhattan, not London – and seek out entertainment there. One reason it's strong is that it has an six-line verse, a five-line verse and a chorus. The third three-line verse is:

And you may find somebody kind to help and understand you
Someone who is just like you and needs a gentle hand to
Guide them along...
So, maybe I'll see you there
We can forget all our troubles, forget all our cares and go

Okay. Now, who is Petula singing as and to whom? Sometimes girls sing boys' songs just because that's how it worked out in the A&R meeting. Well, she must be singing as a woman to a man – right? In which case, she's waiting for you downtown, and in 1965 there weren't that many professional women drowning their sorrows after work. Of course, she could be a professional with an older profession.

The key words are: “Someone who is just like you”. Just like you (a boy) how? She's a girl in 1965 and back then girls weren't like men like they are now, in 1965 women were different. And if she was a girl meeting your boy, why would you need a "gentle hand to guide [you] along"? You're a boy, she's a girl, and back then boys and girls who were out late knew what they were out late for. It was a damn sight less coy than it became later. But if you're a boy and she's not a girl, but a boy, and it's 1965, well, then everyone needs a gentle hand to, err, guide them along.

Damn. Another great song that's actually about the gay life. Listen to it on You Tube anyway.

Brief Holiday

On Wednesday and Thursday I took a couple of days in north Somerset, where I stayed overnight in Dunster, walked on the sands of Blue Anchor and Dunster beaches, up to Dunkery Beacon and along the Quantocks. I broke the drive down to have lunch at Glencot House...





...and then took a walk on the Quantocks which started in an obscuring mist that cleared enough to see the reactor houses at Hinckley Point. (Click on the photos for a little more details)



The north Somerset area, between Bridgewater and the Devon border, is a time-warp: I've been going there since the late 80's and it hasn't changed in any way. If anything the fields and forests are lusher than they were twenty years ago: the hedges are certainly higher.



It's a very marked contrast to north Devon - for reasons that turned out to be bad, I thought it might be an idea to look at Ilfracombe, and was reminded of why I never go to English seaside resorts.

On the next visit I will work out some way of breaking up the drive back. Two and a half hours of on the A358 / A303 leaves me feeling a little hyped at the end. The trick is to avoid the M25 during the rush hour, which means you have to pass it before about four in the afternoon or after about eight in the evening, so you leave either just after an early lunch or have a very long day. I will also remember to stay for some time in one place on the return day – perhaps sit on the beach for a couple of hours – so that I don't spend the whole day driving. I will also remember to take the camera along when I'm on the beach.

I'm very bad at taking going-away-somewhere-holidays and this was the first this year. I thought that if I kept it short and simple, it would give me some encouragement to take a longer, foreign, jaunt later on.