Untitled (Photographs Two)

Three more photographs, two taken on a trip to my Osteo (earlier entries passim) and one more from the walk round Virginia Water.

(The GPO Tower Across A Building Site)

(The Gulley, Red Leaves)

(The Stone Lawn, Harley Street)

Employment Market Opportunists Number 15: The Money Launderer Again

This week's dodgy e-mail came from someone's mailing list. The lead-in name is david@dpetherbridge.freeserve.co.uk. Here you go...

(starts)
Hello.

Worldwide association Auction Centre , based in the United States, is looking for new assistants for cooperation at distant office, in the United Kingdom. We propose flexible schedules full-time and part-time available. These careers concentrate on providing administrative representation in online auction sales.
Auction Centre presents best auction decisions, concentrated on market research and growth as well as database control.
The main duties of the job as a Representative will include but are not limited to: compiling and maintaining records of business transactions; preparing and sending out invoices and checks; performing basic bookkeeping and routine tasks such as operating the administrative and partially financial fields of the Auction Centre activities, preparing payroll, and other office activities.

Professional Characteristics:
- Giving a priority to customer needs manager
- Demonstrates a high level of personal accountability
- Thinks about the team first over individual issues

Basic Requirements:
- Internet Access
- Microsoft Office
- Basic Accounting Skills

If you are interested in this job please contact us via email.


Have a happy day,
Auction Centre Team
(ends)


By now, you don't need me to tell you this is a 100% money-laundering scam. Test yourself on how many implausible things you can find. Whoever wrote had English as their second European language and French as their first ("We propose flexible schedules"). That means West Africa - nah - or the Far East. Is this Vietnamese? I suspect the "have a happy day" is a giveaway - it's an American thing, so we're looking for French with an American influence. I'm going with Vietnam here.

Reflections on Holly Golightly

Just what is it about Breakfast at Tiffany's and Holly Golightly? There's La Hepburn's look and performance, of course. There's a nicely-judged masala of silly comedy (Micky Rooney), adult stuff (George Peppard and Patricia Neal), romance, heartbreak (Holly's previous husband) and some neat legerdemain with Holly's weekly visits to the crime boss. There's the bits where Holly makes fools of the men she suckers in nightclubs and her ease with cafe society - very appealing to teenage girls of all ages - and the collapse of her dreams of marrying into wealth, which is also very reassuring to suburban teenage girls everywhere, as it confirms that they aren't missing a trick because there are no tricks to miss. Most of all there is the portrayal of life as dizzy and basically innocent fun. With handsome men. Which, oddly, is very appealing to teenage girls everywhere. It's so easy to get a bit of Holly for yourself. Say "Darling" and change your mind a lot, and avoid anything that feels remotely serious.

Holly Golightly was a role model for many thousands of women of my generation. It was a long time before I saw Breakfast at Tiffany's. When I did, I saw fifteen minutes of Holly Golightly and said "Margie". Margie behaved as if she was going to marry up to some Kensington Male, and for a long time we thought that was a real ambition. So did she, which might explain her breakdown in early middle age when it had clearly reached a point where it wasn't going to happen. First, she didn't quite have the looks to compete with the Guildford Girls; second, I'm not sure she had the tolerance for functional sex needed for the task; third, no-one raised in that household with those parents in that marriage could possibly get the idea that marriage was desirable. She thought of men as something to be manipulated and tolerated, and that's not how men think of themselves. I suspect she understood somewhere in her psyche where secrets are recognised but never spoken that her life was not going anywhere special and being Holly throughout her twenties gave her a way to pretend it was. After all, Holly herself falls romantically for a writer who has so far been supported by a wealthy sponsor. (A relationship as far as I know used twice in mainstream movies: the other one is in An American In Paris.) But whereas Holly had actually left a perfectly fine - if backwoods - marriage, Margie had never seen one. Holly had a role model for the future of her relationship with George Peppard: Margie didn't.

That generation of women could use Holly as a role-model because they didn't understand the details. Today's girls do understand the details: for one thing, there is no way they can get a flat anywhere in Manhattan (no-one can). For another, they know that her early mornings and general breeziness are sustained by taking drugs - maybe the amphetamines were better back then, but I'm betting the real Hollies all blew a little pot to come down after a night running the suckers round the nightclubs. Above all, today's girls have jobs and have had since they left education. The job might be as a Good Mother or it might be as an HR Drone, but it's a job, and likely more secure than any partner's. I'm guessing the suburban girl looks at Breakfast at Tiffany's and sees it as an historical curio: Audrey's glamour is still there, but it's the glamour of a museum piece, like a Fortuny dress in the V&A. Your contemporary suburban girl knows that modern glamour takes luck, hard work and a single-minded ambition: Victoria Beckham taught her that.

None of which stops the opening of Breakfast at Tiffany's being one of the Top Five Movie Openings Of All Time. Or one of the best constructed stories in the movies. It may be time to retire it from "iconic" to "historical curio" though.

Alasdair MacIntyre and Fantasy Moral Philosophy

There's a neat article on Alasdair MacIntyre on Arts and Letters Daily. It's broadly approving of the Great Man, which you can tell by this quote:

"Ever since he published his key text After Virtue in 1981, he has argued that moral behaviour begins with the good practice of a profession, trade, or art: playing the violin, cutting hair, brick-laying, teaching philosophy. Through these everyday social practices, he maintains, people develop the appropriate virtues. In other words, the virtues necessary for human flourishing are not a result of the top-down application of abstract ethical principles, but the development of good character in everyday life.... MacIntyre yearns for a single, shared view of the good life as opposed to modern pluralism’s assumption that there can be many competing views of how to live well."

I bet you were nodding along, if not admiring the solemn seriousness of it all. "Good practice of a profession", "everyday social practices", "appropriate virtues", "development of good character in everyday life", "single, shared view of the good life". How many questions can you beg in so few phrases? And how much naivety about people can you show?

There is absolutely no connection between being good at your trade and being a decent person. In fact, everything I know about being any good at anything tells me that the relationship is slightly negative: the better you are at your trade, the more time and energy you have put into it and the less you have for family, friends and assorted Good Deeds. I have met people with very high energy levels who can consult with McKinsey, sit on the board of a charity, snowboard at the weekend and play with the kids - but they had the salaries to afford it. I have also met people who are not very good at anything much, oh, except being parents and citizens.

What irritates me is the implicit assumption that the world is organised in such a way that we can thrive, feed our families and be fulfilled craftsmen and virtuous at the same time. How does anyone thrive on a nurse's salary? How does anyone live honestly when they have to bribe the railway clerks to buy a ticket? How does someone even learn a craft if their employer has no training programme and keeps dumbing-down the work? And who said that we would all fall in love with the girl (or boy) next door? Given the make-up of households today, the odds against there even being a girl (or boy) next door are shorter than you might think.

There is no guarantee we will meet people with whom we can develop loving relationships, or that we will find someone to employ us to do something we find satisfying. Many people have such limited opportunities and hard circumstances that religion or whiskey are the only way they can get through the interminable months. Others enter their adult years so emotionally bruised and suspicious that they could not start and then sustain the relationships needed to work and love well. And so many of us turn to substitutes. There is nothing ignoble about substitutes, if we have little chance of getting the real thing. The religious enthusiasts, New Age mystics, compulsive computer-gamers and sorrow-drowners should be left alone: it is simply impolite to tell them they are missing out without also showing them how they could start to live well despite these disadvantages.

As for the idea that we should have a shared idea of the Good Life? How excellent that sounds, until you remember that we live in a world where there is not enough of anything worth having. There's sorrow, poverty, starvation, ill-health, contempt, ignorance, hatred and anger for every man and woman alive, with some over for seconds all round. The good stuff is in short supply - sunshine in Northern Europe, rain in Chad - because that's the way of the world. It's actually better for us to have different ideas of what the good stuff is: that way more of us might get satisfied. If you like fast cars and I like works of art, we can both satisfy ourselves without competing: if everyone agrees that Pre-Raphaelite art is the thing, almost all of them are going to be disappointed.

It simply won't do to pontificate in such a circular manner with assumptions about the world that just aren't true. It's too much reading Aristotle, of course. You have to have absorbed Aristotle to use words like "virtue" and mean it. Aristotle could do it because he was writing and speaking for an elite and wealthy audience, not merchants, barbers and brick-layers. (I have a feeling he says that such people can't actually live virtuous lives because their pursuits won't let them.) Our modern philosophers are not, and it would be a cruelty to their students and readers if they did. We need philosophers who are going to deal with the real world - one in which there is not even a link between obtaining a degree in philosophy and subsequently finding employment, and no link between employment and being able to afford somewhere to live an independent life.

Why Business Insight Hurts The Head

I have a colleague who has a PhD in Algebraic Topology. He’s working on Customer Insight, which is the fancy name companies give to crawling through masses of data trying to figure out how to squeeze and extra buck out of people. The other day I asked him, by way of idle chatter, if he ever wondered why it was that he could calculate homology groups in his head but found the insight work as hurtful to the head, if not more so. Somehow it shouldn't be harder to make decent progress getting an answer from a database than with a long exact sequence.

It’s the details, we agreed. Abstract topological spaces tend to be fairly simple, because they are a) infinite and b) smooth. It’s the finite world that’s tricky: think of the thousands of pages of alleged proof of the classification of finite groups. Infinite groups are pretty much a doddle by comparison. Or classifying manifolds: it’s only difficult in four dimensions, because there’s a trick that makes it simple that works in five or more.

Business analysis is more like combinatorics. It’s finite, with a ton of fiddly details. If you’re an analyst and you don’t have a report with something like “Assign a sale to the X channel unless it’s Thursday and the application came through the internet from Scotland, when you should assign it the Y channel unless it’s for a gadget not a widget” – if you don’t have something like that, your Sales people aren’t trying hard enough. Or you have really good data stewardship.

In business we deal with a large number of tables with a large number of fields each with its own often idiosyncratic definition. Getting data for a business problem goes through the following stages:

Can we translate the problem into data we have?
If not exactly, how inexactly? How good do we think the surrogate variables are?
Can we get data for a simpler version of the problem that still gives us a good decision?
Where do I get that data?
How reliable is it?
How do I link all those tables together?
How do I get the records I want out of that monster?
What bit of syntax have I got wrong this time?
What do you mean “fieldname sally does not exist in object fred?”

And let’s not even get into incompatible date formats, converting data types, converting one set of indicator values to another, using case statements to define groupings and the fiddly syntax of SQL / SAS.

It’s way easier to calculate the homology group of the direct product of a torus with a Klein bottle.

Untitled (Photographs One)

Whenever I have taken a week off this year, the weather has turned to a grey damp mush. My colleagues have planned their own holidays around not using the same week as me. It's an office joke. Except one day on the last week off when the weather was sunny and I went for a brisk lap round Virginia Water. Armed only with the Sony Ericsson C510, I took these.

(The Red Tree)

(The Copse)

(The Red Leaves)

Movies For The Naive: Outing "Brief Encounter"

For years I heard people talking about Brief Encounter. It was a deeply moving study of unrequited love, middle-class self-control, a Noel Coward script, excellent acting and some wonderful black-and-white photography.

Finally, I was in the room when it was on television. I settled down to watch it, and no more than twenty minutes in turned to the others in the room and said "you know this is about a gay relationship, right?"

You need some context. It was 1947. Britain had been at war for six years until 1945 and the soldiers were still returning in 1947. For those years, the British did not give up sex. Indeed, they committed adultery, casual affairs, knee-tremblers, and the men shagged foreign women while their girlfriends wrote them Dear John letters. All of which was just fine while the Germans were throwing bombs and bullets around, but not so good when they weren't. And so began one of the larger exercises in society-wide denial. The English were not, in 1947, clueless about sex, illicit affairs and one-night-stands. If today a man as good-looking as Trevor Howard met a woman as handsome as Celia Johnson, he would entertain the thought that they might fool around a little. And so would she. Newsflash: people are much the same now as they ever were.

The giveaway scene is in Stephen's flat, which Alec and Laura have borrowed for an evening alone. Stephen returns unexpectedly and Laura leaves quickly, leaving her scarf behind. Stephen sees the scarf and holds it up accusingly saying to Alec "I'm disappointed in you. I thought you'd stopped this sort of thing."

A remark that makes no sense made between two single professional men in their thirties in 1947. But which makes complete sense if it's a man's scarf. This is Noel Coward, not some hack who might very well have written the line by accident. The Master knew exactly what he was writing and what it might mean. It was his one explicit clue.

My English Literature studying companions would have nothing of it. I didn't understand that the story was about "Laura's...horror at the thought of betraying her husband and her settled moral values, tempted though she is by the force of a love affair. Indeed, it is this very tension which has made the film such an enduring favourite. The values which Laura precariously, but ultimately successfully, clings to were widely shared and respected (if not always observed) at the time of the film's original setting..." (Wikipedia).

Yes. Right. You go on believing Celia Johnson wasn't playing a man in disguise. The movie was a huge hit because it showed told an Official Truth its audience wanted spreading: "There dear, that's how it was for me when you were in Africa / Sicily / Normandy."

As if.