20 years ago today

November 9th, 1989. My wife Elizabeth and I were hold up in some dilapidated campground in Tennessee.  We managed to pitch our tent just before the heavens opened up and transformed our surroundings into a muddy bog.  I had turned 24 the day before and in celebration we abstained from our normal diet of tuna fish sandwiches and potato chips and splurged on a fancy restaurant, Shoney's.

Being stone-broke and living out of the back of my pickup truck we took a pragmatic view of restaurants: if the food was cheep and there was lots of it, we'd eat there.  Thus we tended to frequent all-you-can-stomach chains like Fir's Cafeterias and, when we felt flush, Shoney's.  

Anyone who has passed through the American South has doubtlessly encountered a Shoney's.  They're part of the quintessential Red State dining experience and, along with morbid obesity, inbreeding and homophobia, a proud Southern institution.  In fact, with menu items such as the Deluxe Pancake Platter (1609 calories, 32.3g of fat) and the Sausage and Biscuits Breakfast (1057 calories, 65.7g of fat) one might say that Shoney's is leading the charge to keep redneck asses the widest in the world.  USA!!

Be that as it may, twenty years ago when faced with the choice of having a birthday dinner served up cold with the help of a can opener and an individually wrapped cheese slice or presented to me in the form of a ten-yard long buffet overflowing with deep-fat-fried goodness, I found myself reaching for a plate and elastic waistband trousers.  

But I digress.

The campground where we found ourselves that wet night in 1989 was almost unique in its luxury: it had flush toilets and hot showers- two items of almost palatial indulgence after weeks spent pissing in gas stations and washing our hair in MacDonald's bathrooms (Those hand dryers that everyone hates?  When you're homeless you learn to love their hair drying ability.). 

Even more exciting than the prospect of standing under warm water until our skin shriveled up was discovering that just off to the side of the reception hut there was a heated room with a pool table and a colour TV.  After months on the road, a good portion off which was spent in willful ignorance of the goings on of the larger world, we were positively giddy with excitement at the possibility of whiling away an evening partaking in what, to a sheltered individual, would seem the most mundane of activities: shooting pool and watching television. 

Elizabeth racked up the balls, I bought two grape Nehis and flipped on the tube.  She leaned over to take her first shot, a cigarette between her lips, blue jeans and cowboy boots; black hair almost touching the green felt of the table.  I watched her move around taking her shots, pushing her hair back from her eyes, taking a drag and letting the smoke curl up toward the ceiling.  Totally confident, completely focused, unbelievably sexy.

Elizabeth cleared the table without me so much as getting a cue on a ball and I made a mental note never to play her for money.  She racked 'em up and dropped two stripes on the break.  Seeing that it could be some time before I was a participant in the game I figured I'd try and catch up on what was happening in the larger world; I flipped channels until I found CNN and settled into what at one time was probably a padded chair.

The picture quality was dreadful and it took me several minutes to realize and then come to grips with what I was seeing.  When the reality had sunk in I could only say: 

"I don't fucking believe it!"

"I don't FUCKING believe it!"

"I DON'T FUCKING BELIEVE IT!!!"

By this time my wife had abandoned her game and was standing next to me watching in jaw-dropping amazement as the world changed before our eyes:  The Bornholmer Strasse bridge was open, thousands of people were pouring into West Berlin from the East, there were people standing on the Brandenburg Gate waving German flags and popping corks!  There was no gunfire, no tanks in the streets, like air from a balloon the old world order was deflating and no one, seemingly, was being killed over it.

We looked around for someone to share this moment with but there was no one to be found.  Cold and darkness had driven everyone back to their tents or RVs.  We stood in the blue and white TV light holding hands and crying as half a world away a monumental wrong was being made right.

Now, 20 years on, there is only one Germany and its leader is a woman who walked across that bridge, east to west, on that bitterly cold November night.  There's a lot of old wounds that still need to heal and a long way to go before the formerly divided sides reach socioeconomic parity.  Yet it does seem that they continue to make the best out of a most amazing start.

Apostrophe was not a Greek philosopher

As threatened, a much needed and highly subjective little primer on the use of apostrophes.  Pay attention class.

For several months the horrid pub on our corner displayed the following sign, see if you can spot the problem:

Toilet's are for customer's use only!

The correct answer is, of course, that the sign is redundant.  No one who wasn't suicidally insane would ever think of entering one of their tiled gas chambers.

Eventually one of their patrons must have sobered up enough to point out to the management that "Toilet's" is a possessive, implying that something belongs to the toilet.  However, in their quasi inebriated state they undoubtedly neglected to mention that in the case of nouns which are made plural by adding an "s" at the end, the "s" after the apostrophe is not used.  Thus if the sign writer wished to convey that something belonged to the toilets, the correct usage would be "toilets' ".

Several conversations along these lines must have occurred because the sign went through a rapid series of revisions:

Toilets are for customers use only!

Toilet are for customer use only!

Toilet's are for customers use only!

At last, after all exhausting all other options, they settled on the sign that graces the front door of the pub today:

Toilets are for customer's use only!

Hallelujah.

To be slightly more clear: singular nouns that don't end in "s" (or an "s" sound), are made possessive by adding an apostrophe "s".  Plural nouns that do end in an "s" get an apostrophe after the "s".

• the cat's meow
• the dog's dinner
• two flags' stripes
• thirteen ships' rum pots

These rules also apply when we are talking about time, and since time=money we can safely assume that the rules apply to it as well.

•  A dollar's worth of crack
•  One afternoon's fun
  
• Twenty years' jail time
• Many nights' regret

For singular nouns and proper names which end in an "s" you are on your own.  Cross'  is just as good as cross's and Lewis' works as well as Lewis's.  If it sounds good, that's the one you use.

Just to fry your noodles: if a plural noun is not one formed by adding an "s" (like women,  sheep or rice) then you need to add an apostrophe "s" to indicate possession: women's, sheep's, rice's.  The same is true for nouns which change their spelling as plurals (and end with an "s" or "z" sound): mice and dice become mice's and dice's although to be fair those do sound a bit strange.

There are about three-quarters of a million words in the English language but there are only seven possessive pronouns that don't get an apostrophe tacked onto the end.  They are, in an order which makes a nice shape:

• yours
• hers
  
• his
  
• its
• ours
• theirs
• whose
  

Every single other possessive pronoun gets an apostrophe: everyone's, somebody's, one's, etc.  People who have received government grants tell us that even the most blind-drunk football fan can easily memorize a series of seven digits or short words, if you are that fan, make these your words.

Lest I forget, for the love of God, "it's" is a contraction of "it is" or "it has" NOT the possessive of "it."  If "it" owns something you write it like this: "...its very own little black dress..."

Style guides for the use of apostrophes are like thermometers and religious sects, no two agree.  Even when they do you can come up with some truly bizarre, if perfectly grammatically correct sentences:

• My lovers' friend's sex toys (the sex toys belonging to a lover of several of my friends)

I'm going to skip over all that nonsense like it were somebody else's problem and finish off with dates and sins of omission.

Dates

• The nineteen sixties: The 1960s
• The twenties: The 20s or The '20s
  
• Thousands of years: 1000s of years

Omitted characters

• In contractions (remember the last lesson?): they're for they are, I'll for I will or I shall, ma'am for madam
  
• In abbreviations:  gov't for government
  

There are pages and pages of additional rules governing apostrophes but I've grown bored of the subject so I will leave it up to you to Google any specifics that I might have missed.  Be warned, the improper use of an apostrophe in an otherwise lucid article, e-mail or birthday card is a salient reminder to the reader of that you are lacking in education, moral fiber and don't know the proper order to apply clotted cream and jam to a scone. 

Next up: defective people

You there! Listen up!

It is beyond my limited mental powers to understand how anyone could be let out of school without knowing the correct usage of THEIR, THERE and THEY'RE.  I have just read an otherwise insightful article about evolutionary theory in which the author utterly destroyed his credibility by mixing up "their" and "they're" not once, not twice but three times.  It's a schoolboy error- if you happen to be in third grade.

For those of you who are similarly grammatically challenged, here is a handy primer you can cut out and tape to your computer monitor:

THEIR is a third person, personal pronoun.  "They took their briefcase full of money and left."

THERE can be an adverb ("She went there last year and lost her remaining teeth."), a pronoun ("There is nothing more I can do for your goldfish."), a noun ("From there on you have to take your own lobster bib.") or an adjective ("Talk to that guy there, he saw the cows attack.")

THEY'RE is a contraction of THEY ARE as in "They're destroying the English language because of poor grammar."

Up next, apostrophes.

Finland, Finland, Finland

Thursday evening in Helsinki. I just arrived and had a quick walk around. I've been to Finland several times before but have always stayed slightly outside the town centre. My observations thus far:

* These people really need to turn down their air conditioning. Seriously, the taxi in from the airport felt like I was riding in a refrigerated lorry and my room could double as a meat locker
* Like all of Scandinavia, the women here are supermodel beautiful. Two things set Finnish women apart: their hair is beyond blond- we're talking spun fleece -and they have the most amazing eyes you could ever imagine: sky blue with a dark ring around the iris. Stunning.
* Despite the horrible winter weather and good social safety net, there are still homeless people here. I can think of few places worse to live on the streets than Helsinki in January
* Buskers with bagpipes seem a little out of place
* The have the required Irish Pub
* My hotel is loaded with identically dressed Americans with name-tags
* Swedish might be their official second language but all the signs are in English
* I am now two-hours more jet-lagged
* My hotel room is beautiful. Huge marble bath (complete with rubber duck), comfy bed and enough pillows to build a fort
* €20 a day for Internet access is worse than nuts, it's criminal

I have to admin that after four-years of living this life, a bit of the luster has worn off. I still get off on traveling, no doubt about that but I'm starting to think a bit more about what comes after this, if anything.

In fact, as I was wandering around this afternoon I kept thinking, "if I don't want to buy anything, there is nothing here to do." The bright lights and pretty things are wasted on me- all my needs are already so over-fulfilled that I can't imagine simply buying things for the sake of owning them.

This got me thinking about what it is that I really need- how low and slow could I go with my life before it would start to get uncomfortable. I haven't had a chance to think it through properly yet but beyond decent food, shelter (preferably someplace quiet with trees and an ocean nearby), proper health care and warm clothes, a few other things popped up immediately (these are in no particular order and are subject to change, addition or subtraction without notice):

* My cameras
* The Internet
* A Mac laptop
* A good colour printer
* A mobile phone
* My musical instruments
* Drawing paper
* Good pens and pencils
* Books. Lots and lots of books
* Access to reliable transportation
* Earplugs
* Cooking utensils
* Root beer
* Peanut butter

Since I am talking about things I didn't mention people. Having good lovers and friends is vital. As much as I am comfortable in my own skin and with my own company, I do like to be closely associated with people who catch my drift.

I'd like to carry on along this train of thought but it looks like I just might be completely exhausted enough to sleep tonight and I don't want to waste even a few precious moments hacking away here when I could be investigating what dreams await.

Get OUT!

There should be no children allowed in Business Class, ever, under any circumstances. I don’t care if their parents pay triple for a ticket, put them in an E seat in the back row and surround them with a pile of foul smelling airline pillows. Two of my last four flights have been made torturous by the presence of howling rug-rats. At this very moment, one row in front of me there is a woman with two of the evil creatures. Thankfully she has one strapped down to minimize its impact on humanity. I can barely believe this, or indeed bring myself to write it but she is changing one of their filthy diapers! What the fuck is going on here?! What kind of twisted fuckhead would change their baby’s nappie while seated next to other passengers on an airplane? Get a fucking grip lady, there is a loo with a fucking pull-down baby changing table less than ten feet away. How fucked up does your social programming have to be to think it is right and acceptable behavior to clean up your crotch-fruit’s shit and vomit in the wide open spaces of a BA business class seat?

This makes me think that perhaps it’s parents I despise and not children. No. I don’t think so, children are evil things that serve no useful purpose until they can grow up and graduate from law school. Abortion should be legal until age 23.

Back in Blighty: up all night

I'm back from ten glorious days in California. I spend the first few days of any visit to the US experiencing a major cultural gear shift but after after a week or so I get used to big cars, big piles of food and big people. Having someone bag my groceries is such an unbelievable luxury that words alone can not describe the joy it produces in my heart.

It has just passed five in the morning and I have slept a grand total of fifteen minutes in the past 24 hours. I suffer the ravages of jet lag worse than anyone I know. The eight hour time change between California and London leaves me a sleep-deprived, psychotic wreck for weeks. When I made the journey in March I spent four days without sleeping at all. It was as if that part of my brain that controls my sleep functions had been removed. It wasn't that I didn't get tired, I was appallingly tired. I staggered drunkenly from house to tube to work to dinner, occasionally falling fast asleep in a chair somewhere and then waking moments later with a neck-snapping jerk.

Out of desperation I tried melatonin and it seemed to help make me tired but I awoke the next morning feeling hungover and spent the remainder of the day walking around in a haze- but at least I got some sleep.

Quarter after five now and I know that if I go back to bed I will toss and turn for an hour, doze off and when the alarm goes off at 8:30 I will feel even worse than if I just stayed up. Even if it were possible for me to get to bed now and sleep a full eight hours I would be fucking up my body clock even more.

I wish I could see the humor in all this but I can't. I've always had problems with sleep and up until a few years ago if I didn't get 10 full hours a night I couldn't function. Now my problem is insomnia- days and days will go by where I get only one or two hours of sleep per night. I don't want to drug myself to sleep and all the relaxation exercises I do, the meditation, the deep breathing, don't do a damn thing except remind me that I am still awake, mind racing, pleading with any god that will listen to grant me a few dreamless hours of unconsciousness. No such luck.

Turning into a cult? When hasn't it been a cult?

Absolutely excellent article by John Hart, a columnist for the Independent.

I've been meaning to write a piece on the health care "debate" going on in the US but each time I make the attempt my utter disgust with every single Republican in Congress blinds me with rage and I have to close my computer, take a sip of water and say a silent prayer of thanks to whatever gods are listening for the UK's free at point of delivery, National Health Service (NHS).

They've had the NHS for 61 years and no, it's not perfect but it's a damn sight better than the US alternative: no coverage for the poor, the unemployed, the underemployed, for-profit insurance companies who deny treatment to protect their bottom line, families who are forced into bankruptcy because of a mountain of medical bills, the list goes on.

Once again I'm sitting here across the water shaking my head at the ignorant insanity that is the bedrock foundation of the American Right. The fact that these uninformed fanatics are able to hijack the debate surrounding a vital domestic issue is perhaps more a reflection on the President and the Democrats than it is on the Conservatives themselves.

Obama entered office with a mandate to insure the uninsured and both his moral foundation and political momentum are eroding because the right-wing have grabbed the spotlight and made the public forget that PEOPLE ARE DYING every day in the US because of a lack of adequate health care.

There really can be no consensus. The Democrats must simply push through health care legislation over the frothing mouths and shaking fists of the entire Republican Party. Civil rights was not won through compromising with the Southern political establishment. There are some things that simply must be done, not because they are popular but because they are right.

Travel math

I have 227 stamps in my passport.

My passport is three years old.

Three years is 795 days.

That is one trip across an international boarder every 3.5 days.

According to Carbon Footprint Checker my travels have put 60,000 lbs of CO2 into the atmosphere.

To neutralize my carbon footprint and appease my conscience it would cost me $357.00

$.33 per day, every day for three years.

Of course this doesn't include energy use at home, in hotels, taxis and the few times I hired a car.

Let's call it an even $1 per day.

$1 per day to erase my stain from the earth. $1 per day allows me to maintain a lifestyle of comfort, travel and westernized prosperity with no further thought for the repercussions of my energy intensive actions.

Such a deal.

Praha

I'm in the second half of a long stretch in Prague. One migration and one internal procedures audit which is even less exciting than it sounds. Truth be told I wouldn't mind doing these audits full-time. I would get the requisite travel I require to maintain a healthy appreciation for London and the demands are very low: show up, ask to see some paperwork, tell them everything they are doing is wrong, leave. I have the evenings to myself and I never have to work until 2AM re-permissioning every folder on a file server by hand (as I was doing last night).

It's the height of the summer travel season and Prague is filled with tourists. My hotel, the Intercontinental, seems to be the favourate of visiting Americans. They are hard to miss: trying to squeeze their immense girth into the lifts, tucking in their t-shirts and wearing white socks. They are also the only ones eating at restaurants before 8:30 at night.

To tell the truth, I'm with them on that one. The European habit of eating dinner very late doesn't suit my metabolism. Tucking into a pork-pie (or in my case a tofu-pie) at 10, an hour or so before bedtime, guarantees I will spend the best part of the wee hours clutching my stomach in torturous agony.

In Spain there is a federal statute which prevents restaurants from searving anything but hard rolls before midnight and dance clubs don't even start shoveling out last-nights cigarettes until 3AM. Yet these people manage to show up to work at 9:00- still drunk and wearing the clothes they left in the day before but at their desks they will be.

To be fair, that last sentience applies to the English. I've never met a drunk Spaniard during the morning commute but I encounter them with staggering regularity on those few days I manage to Tube to my office in London.

Right. Prague. They have a mini version of the Eiffel Tower here. It's up on the top of what, from a distance, looks like a small hill but which is in fact a daunting, wooded, Matterhorn. I didn't set out this morning with the intent of scaling that particular mountain but I kept wandering further and further afield and ended up at its base. They have a funicular which runs to the top but the queue to get on snaked back to Italy so I decided to hoof it.

I come from San Francisco so I'm used to a good bit of urban mountain climbing however I grossly underestimated the scale of the task facing me. My timing, as always, was well off and I started my accent at high noon. By the time I reached the summit, a good 45 minutes later, I was feeling distinctly old and out of shape. Never mind that the route to the top is a well maintained car-free road with gradated switchbacks. Bah! I found a disused goat path that looked much more direct and considerably more interesting. There certainly wasn't a shortage of shirtless, tattooed homeless guys using my path as a public urinal; this provided all the motivation I needed to scamper up those last 200 meters.

I have to say that the view from the top was stunning in its absence: you simply can't see Prague for the trees. I considered for a moment trudging up the spiral staircase to the viewing platform of the mock Eiffel Tower but I was again thwarted by the queue. All of this worked to my advantage.

Through a break in a wall I discovered a large park and rose garden. Massive trees provided the perfect mix of sun and shade and I settled in for a nice bit of daydreaming, napping and note-taking. For almost two hours I stayed under my tree; thinking about the nature of things and watching people being happy. Eventually I explored the rose garden and took a keen interest in the bees as they toiled away collecting for the betterment of their hives. Nearly our entire agricultural system, not to mention ecosystem, is dependent on an insect whose lot in life is to be born, work for six months and die. Unless they're the queen they don't even get to have sex and their working conditions make a Laotian sweat shop seem like a wide-open prairie. They must have some pretty impressive motivational posters tacked to the walls of the hive.

Taking a different goat-path I made my way back down; passing through orchards which had long ago returned to a feral state. Much to the delight of a Japanese couple the trees were loaded with fruit. I watched for a while as the man, somewhat inexpertly, climbed a tree and dropped a dozen pears into his lady friend's outstretched hands. I picked some cherries and sat in a grove of apple trees feeling lucky and happy.

If you ever get to Prague, and I highly recommend a visit, after you have done the cathedral, the castle, the astronomical clock and a river cruise, do yourself a favour and spend a day walking to the Eiffel Tower on the hill. Every city needs a green lung to expel the traffic and crowds; for London it's Regent's Park and for Prague it's Petrin Hill.

Foolish

I miss you so much my teeth hurt. I miss you even though I know you are the devil in a woman suit. I miss how your long, thick, chestnut hair fell on the pillowcase. I miss the way you wiggled your nose when you were thinking and how you would wrap yourself around a project until you achieved perfection.

I miss listening to you talk in your sleep.

My family and friends didn’t like you much. They thought, still think, that you were aloof, cold and pretty much an uncaring, selfish bitch. Back then I defended you, as good boyfriends do. I was stupid in love with you and there wasn’t a damn thing anyone could say that would break the spell.

Being with you was like playing tennis with someone better- I had to up my game. You were smarter, I was more clever, you were a hopeless optimist and I was a calculating realist, I was the better photographer but you were the better artist. Our biggest failing was that we were never a team. We were never able to lash together a constructive working arrangement. There was respect, I guess, but it was only shown grudgingly. You were too concerned with never admitting you were wrong about anything at all and I was too busy resenting how fucking brilliant and beautiful you were.

When you left me you said it was because I wasn’t the one for you. We both know that, at the time, it was just a bullshit excuse because what you really wanted was the freedom to fuck all the pretty little college boys you found. In the long run however you were spot on. We weren’t right for each other; the few times I have seen you since have confirmed that fact. After ten minutes in your company I realize that I don’t find you in the least bit fun to be around. You never make me laugh, your pop-n-fresh optimism is unnerving and your new-found social and environmental conscience, not to mention your British accent, are thin affectations.

Of course I still want to fuck you. Call me shallow if you will but you’re still a slammin’ hottie and I don’t hate you enough not to want to rub soap all over those perfect breasts.

So here I am, 36,000’ over Germany listening to sad songs and thinking about you. Pathetic I know but that’s how it is. Since you left I’ve been with women smarter, better in bed, almost as beautiful and certainly easier to live with but I have never found a replacement. Occasionally you say you want to be my friend but I’ll have none of it. I don’t know how to be friends with you- I don’t want you in my airspace at all. Not, as an impartial observer might think, because you are like concentrated evil to me. Rather it’s because we had so much potential for greatness, not necessarily as a couple but in a partnership, that it pains me to know that we will never be able to work together for ridiculously lofty goals. You have a million ideas but they lack substance; I have the substance but not the drive. Truth be told I guess I need you more than you will ever need me and that’s something I simply can not accept.

Be that as it may I want you to remember one thing: for the record, on that gloriously sunny San Francisco day, on that hillside, you in that sweater and me in my cowboy boots and hat, your hair brown streamers in the wind, on that hillside, on that day, you leaned back into me.

Think of all the trouble it would have saved if you’d have just stayed where you were.

40 years ago this very second

"Houston, Tranquility Base here, the Eagle has landed."

A few hours and one grooved boot print later, Neil Armstrong creates a record that will be in the books forever.

Never has 160kb or memory taken us so far.

Nowhere man

Bakerloo line. 9:15AM and already the tube is brutally hot. I'm sitting in the last seat of the last car. Across from me is a pretty rough looking dude sprawled over two seats. I have my earplugs in and am doing my best to ignore the existence of the universe.

The doors open, people get on, the doors close. Our carriage fills up rapidly with each passing stop; there are only two seats remaining- one next to me and one next to the transient guy. A fairly hot blond gets on, looks at the empty seat next to me; looks at the empty seat next to my friend across the way, looks at us both and sits down next to him.

More people crowd on and still no one sits next to me. I squeeze up against the bulkhead and try and look friendly- no one even glances at my seat. At one point I have people standing in front of me but no one will sit down.

At this point I would like to say something like, "and then I noticed that there was a huge mound of melting ice cream on the seat next to me" but that wasn't the case. The seat was fine, padded and inviting.

It made me think of Neil Gaiman's book Neverwhere in which the characters who have dropped out and fallen through the cracks of society live in a shadow world which runs alongside the real. They were there, just outside the edge of our vision, standing behind us in the Post Office queue, next to us as we walk home from the pub, late, cold under the yellow streetlight.

There I was, one of them, the forgotten, the misplaced, the ignored. Somebody else's problem- taking up space, two spaces in fact, but not a presence in any tangible sense. Only a vague perception behind the eyes of "no, not there, that seat is not vacant but I can't really tell why."

Edgeware Road. Baker Street. Oxford Circus. On and off go the businessmen, the shop assistants, the lads in their football colours; I sit in my private state of mind and watch from a very great distance.

Charing Cross, my stop, I stand and knock a woman with my bag. "Sorry" I say. She looks up at me and says, "no problem" and goes back to reading her book. I step off the train feeling much relieved.

This makes me happy

This has been a really crappy day

Which has capped a really crappy week.

I need to lift my spirits but all I can seem to do is sit at work and hit "Stumble."

What's my motivation? Oh yeah, I don't have any.

That's sorted then.

Fuck Virgin Trains

Yesterday I spent an infuriating hour on the phone with two different Virgin Train customer "service" representatives trying to change a ticket.

Yes, it was an Indian call centre. Yes, I could barely understand them. Yes, they were rude, unhelpful and could only follow their script and yes, I was hung up on when I asked to speak to a supervisor.

All I wanted the fuckers to do was abide by their own terms and conditions and change my fucking ticket for the stated £10 fee. Simple. I wasn't asking them for anything difficult, like a pleasant attitude or a blow job before I boarded. I wanted them to put me on a train which left one day later than the one I was booked on.

If anyone who works for Virgin is reading this let me first say, "I'm fucking sorry you work for such a festering pustule of a company." I'd also like to add that if you work in one of Virgin's sweatshop call centres and you were one of the two assholes who spoke to me yesterday- I hope you spend eternity having to make cold-calls to people who can shock you in the nuts every time you ring them.

This is how it played out as I went through each page of Virgin Train website with the faceless drone:

Me: "Click on Terms and Conditions and tell me what it says"

Drone: "It says you can change your ticket for £10. But no matter, because you chose an e-ticket option you can not change your ticket."

Me: "Why?"

Drone: "Because it is an e-ticket."

Me: "And that's different because?"

Drone: "Because it is an e-ticket."

Me: "That doesn't answer the question."

Drone: "..."

Me: "OK, let's go on to the next page."

Drone: "Now select the e-ticket option and click continue, see how it now says that you can not change your ticket?"

Me: "Yes. Fair enough but go to the next page where I pay for the ticket. What does it say under Terms and Conditions?"

Drone: "That you can change the ticket for £10."

Me: "And you don't see a contradiction or a problem here?"

Drone: "You can not change an e-ticket.:

Me: "Right. Let me speak with a supervisor."

Drone: "Of course."

Click.

Silence.

The really fucked up thing is that since every train line in this goddamn country has a monopoly on their routes, if I wanted to get back to London (and, unbelievably, I did) I had to use Virgin Trains. I ended up having to buy another full-fare ticket because Virgin made it impossible for me play by their rules.

It took me fifteen minutes to dig up their customer service contact details on their website and I sent them off a sternly worded complaint. Have I heard back from them? Of course not. Will I ever hear back from them? No. Never. They want me to simply give up, accept the ass fuck and move on. Well they can suck my balls. I'm filing complaints with anyone who will listen. I'm going to the press. I'll start a boycott. I'll write Richard Branson. I'll make sure every single person I meet at any business or social event knows what gutter dwelling leaches Virgin Trains are. I will not be made to look the fool.

However, in the meantime, I'll sit in the 1st class compartment, drink their drinks, eat their food and steal their little packs of biscuits. That'll show 'em.

Honestly

I'm not an atheist- not quite anyway. But I do happen to believe that most religions, with the possible exception of Buddhism (which is more of a philosophy anyway) are pure evil.

This pretty much sums it up:

http://www.irreligion.org/wp-content/uploads/2007/12/321.gif

Language difficulties

I've been in Manchester for the past week (Macclesfield actually) and I'm having a hard time understanding what the hell anyone is saying. I don't suffer alone: two French guys sitting at the table next to me just spent the better part of five minutes struggling to understand the waitress when she asked them what type of bread they would like.

Waitress: "Wheeeet ur bruuun bred?"

French guys: "Pardon?"

Waitress (slower and louder): "Wheeeet ur bruuun bred?"

French guys: "Wit or bruin brad?"

Waitress: "Brad. Whut type o brad do ya want?"

Me: "She wants to know if you would like white or brown bread."

French guys: "Ahh! We would like rolls."

To be fair, I had to listen pretty hard to catch her drift so it's not surprising that my French friends were struggling.

They really need to dim the lights in this place. I feel like I am sitting in pizza parlor.

I've spent the last five nights at an ancient old manner house which was converted to a hotel and golf club about two-hundred years ago which, coincidentally, was the last time the carpet was changed or indeed cleaned.

I rolled up to the place on the hottest day of the year so far (30 C) and they stuck me in an attic room at the top of five flights of stairs (no lift). Even before I opened the door I could feel the heat radiating from the door. Stepping in I was slapped back by stale, furnace like, air.

I searched the walls for a thermostat, switch or leaver- anything that would activate whatever passed for air conditioning at the time of the pile's construction. Nothing. I called the front desk, "Help! How do you turn on the AC? My shoes have melted into the carpet."

"I'm sorry sir, none of our rooms have air conditioning." Came the reply.

"You must be joking! I'm in a pottery kiln up here and the damn windows don't open more than three inches!"

"That's a security feature."

"A burglar would have to be suicidally insane to try and scale the side of this building to get to my room! You have got to get me into something cooler."

Needless to say I was told that they were full up, "But there is a fan in the closet." I was helpfully informed.

That night I slept naked on top of the bed- spread out like a starfish, fan osculating a steady stream of hot air up and down my body.

I'm going to cut this short because my lack of sleep is pushing me over the edge of exhaustion.

• The next day it started raining and hasn't stopped since
• My room temperature never dropped below the boiling point of lead
• I am now in a different, modern and altogether better hotel only a few miles down the road
• I am freezing my ass off because even though there has been no sunshine for days they've turned the heat off for the "summer"

Thank you and goodnight.

The history of the universe (abridged)

http://www.savageresearch.com/humor/historyOfTheUniverse.html

Along the not so straight and narrow

Just rolled in the door after spending a few days in Devon attending a wedding and getting in some practice at being terrified while driving through the narrow country lanes.

We hired a car that, by American standards, would be considered a compact but in the UK is classed as a guided missile cruiser with wheels.

I always make it a point to warn my English friends who are traveling to the States not to underestimate the distances between things. A guy in the office recently asked me if I thought that, given a week, he could see The Grand Canyon, Vegas, Death Valley, Yosemite, San Francisco, Big Sur, Santa Barbara and LA. I said, "Sure, if you're only going to look at them in a book."

Quite the opposite is true in Europe and especially Britain, which is small enough to fit inside Oregon with room left over for all that remains of the Empire. There is a great line in a Fawlty Towers where a visiting American said he couldn't find the main road and instead had to use the “little back street called the M5." A joke which was completely lost on anyone living outside of England.

The English countryside is a baffling maze of hedgerows and single-track lanes. Street signs were banished around the time of the Norman conquest and houses are named, not numbered. First time visitors often find themselves in the dead of night and pounding rain looking for "Broken Coxswain House, near the Thee-headed King's Vicar pub five bridges past Potten End on the left."

I've been driving in the Devon lanes fairly regularly for the past seven years and I have yet to get comfortable with the experience. After frequent encounters with locals barreling down on me from around blind corners I've gotten a bit jittery. On Saturday I was trundling along in second gear when I rounded a bend and came face to face with the grill of a delivery truck. I managed to stop without becoming a hood ornament but was then confronted with the prospect of backing uphill around a corner because Lord knows locals don't reverse for the punters.

I managed to pull it off but in so doing I put a nasty gouge in the left-hand fender . The rental company was more than happy to charge me £151 to fix the damage. Of course by "fix" they mean "wash and send it out again." By that point I was in no mood to argue. I was happy to pay whatever it took to get that miserable beast off my hands. Truth be told, I would have abandoned the goddamn thing in the middle of the motorway if I thought I could have gotten away with it. The longer I spend driving in London traffic, the more I learn to love the London underground.

Cash in hand

The US is, nominally, a secular nation but has "In God We Trust" emblazoned on their banknotes.

The UK which has a state religion (Church of England) has on their banknotes:

• £5 Elizabeth Fry (prison reformer)
• £10 Charles Darwin
• £20 Adam Smith
• £50 John Houblon (Governor of the Bank of England)

Other fun tidbits:

• 92% of Americans believe that God exists or that God "probably" exists
• 26% of Americans think Evolution is true
• 38% of English believe in God
• 48% of English think Evolution is true
  

If atheists really wanted to gain some traction in the US, they should push for a state religion.

George Carlin: Sun Worshiper

When I was a kid my friend Mark Duncan and I would wear out diamond needles listing to George Carlin albums. We were in Catholic school at the time and it was pure rapture (pun intended) to listen to him mock the authority of our overlords.

His shtik was more gentle back then; he seemed to still posses some fondness for Holy Mother Church. Later, perhaps as his own beliefs changed, his routines took on a decisively more aggressive tone.

In an interview with Reuters in 2001 he said, "I don't have any beliefs or allegiances. I don't believe in this country, I don't believe in religion, or a god, and I don't believe in all these man-made institutional ideas."

The one thing he did believe in was the sun:

Without them, we would never know

5:45 in the afternoon. CineWorld in Haymarket; a nearly empty theater, watching State of Play as it attempts to be the All the President's Men of the Bush era. It fails in that attempt mainly because it over plays the "conspiracy theory come true" angle and spends the last 40 minutes trying to pull all the pieces together into a final, muddled, twist.

This isn't to say the movie isn't enjoyable, it is and there is some fine acting all around. Russell Crowe is particularly believable as an overweight, ex-hippie investigative reporter attempting to balance protecting a friend (even after screwing his wife) and Getting The Story.

When I came out of the movie I couldn't help but wonder how many people believe that die-hard muck-rakers still toil away in grubby newsrooms, knocking back Jack Daniels and committing small-scale felonies in pursuit of a scoop.

Back in the pre-CNN age when I was a cub reporter with delusions of grandeur, a well-founded cynicism and mistrust of all politicians, I actually worked with guys not dissimilar to the Russell Crowe character. They kept whiskey in their desks and knew the phone numbers of cops, bookies, gang informants and the mayor's barber. Information was their commodity; they acquired it and traded it with the deft precision of cold-war spies. They knew that discretion was the key to staying in the game and sources were never, ever, burned.

I don't know how things work now- I haven't set foot inside a newsroom in 15 years. I do know that with the advent of 24/7 network news the stature of journalists and the profession of journalism began a steep and steady decline. CNN lowered the bar and Fox News dug a hole and buried it.

To someone like me who grew up idolizing photojournalist, humbled by the steel-will of Edward R. Murrow and believing that Woodward and Bernstein were tobacco stained superheros, the sight of overpaid, vile-spewing pundits shrieking at each other during the news-hour is nothing short of criminally repulsive.

Gone is the dignity and depth that Walter Cronkite would bring to every story he presented. Replaced by an endless stream of government issued sound-bites and talking points. US news programs have descended to the level of Jerry Springer-like farce. Likewise the slanderous rags which pass as "news" papers here in the UK can do nothing to instill confidence in the profession.

One would think that this sorry state of affairs would be the root of the mistrust the general public feels towards journalists. To some extent and within some quarters this is true, however it doesn't explain why a significant number of people will trust Fox News over the BBC and bloggers rather than the New York Times.

I think that part of the reason stems from a frightening trend to blame problems not on the perpetrators but on the messengers. A conversation I had recently illustrates this point nicely:

Random woman at a party (RWAAP): "We need to get the reporters out of Iraq and Afghanistan so that our troops can do their jobs!"

Me: "Don't you think we need to know what's going on in war-zones?"

RWAAP: "No. The military sometimes has to do things...certain things...to win the war and they can't do them if there are reporters around."

Me: "OK. So we should pull reporters out of ALL war-zones, like Rwanda, Georgia and Palestine so those soldiers can get on with the job?"

RWAAP: "Yes. I mean, NO! We need to protect our troops."

Me: "Right. Because our guys never commit atrocities?"

I didn't get an answer to that because my partner pulled me into the garden and chastised me for "not being friendly."

For further evidence of this overwhelming desire to blame the press for reporting on government malfeasance rather than the government for committing it, take a look a the comments from this article from yesterday's San Francisco Chronicle about a New York Times reporter who escaped from the Taliban:

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article/comments/view?f=/n/a/2009/06/20/international/i085949D20.DTL

The reporter, David S. Rohde, clearly has balls of steel to go along with his Pulitzer, yet he and his newspaper are slammed both for his being in Afghanistan and reporting on the war. Do yourself a favour and search the New York Times website for Rohde's articles: they are insightful, well researched and yes, address uncomfortable subjects like prisoner abuse. The irony is that Rohde wasn't even working for The Times when he was taken captive- he was doing research for a book on the conflict.

Without news organizations like The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, Associated Press and the BBC the public at large would be nearly blind to the workings of both world and local governments. If it weren't for men and women with cameras, notebooks and tape recorders the atrocities of Tienanmen Square would have gone unreported.

From the Khmer Rouge to My Lai, Watergate to Blackwater; Katrina, Chernobyl, the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami, WMDs, Parliamentary expenses and Iranian elections- if you have heard about it, read about it or watched it on TV, reporters delivered the content.

The shift in readership from traditional news outlets to blogs is one I find particularly disquieting. I will never argue against the right of any idiot with an opinion, myself included, to post whatever mindless drivel he or she wants on the web. What I find alarming is that so many people are substituting raw, unsubstantiated, gossip for hard news gathering. There seems to be a feeling that bloggers, unencumbered by the need to verify their stories, somehow are privy to information and sources unavailable to people with press credentials.

Don't get me wrong. Blogs have their place and the immediacy of the Internet is a useful tool for providing a first look at breaking news. The ongoing election crisis in Iran is the most recent example of this. However, as the BBC was quick to point out, running video clips without first being able to ascertain their legitimacy jeopardizes the authenticity and accuracy of the coverage.

In my mind it is that question of accuracy which divides the world of on-line and real-world reporting. The New York Times doesn't always get things right but unlike the blogsphere, they can suffer serious repercussions for getting it wrong. The Jayson Blair scandal in 2003 is a prime example.

Jayson Blair wrote for the New York Times for four years and filed hundreds of stories, a large number of which contained fabrications. He was hauled before his editors, confronted with his unacceptable behavior and took a "personal leave of absence" from the paper. After he came back he seemed to have turned his life around but it wasn't too long before inaccuracies started creeping back into his pieces. He was sacked in May of 2003 for what the paper called "a profound betrayal of trust and a low point in the 152-year history of the newspaper."

A career destroyed, public humiliation and embarrassment. The price paid when legitimate news organizations fail in their duty to convey accurate and truthful information. What then are the penalties for a web site like The Drudge Report when they convey blatant falsehoods? According to the BBC they would be, millions of dollars in advertising revenue and a place in Time magazine's 100 Most Influential People In The World list.

(Take a look at an excellent article by Andrew Shapiro on this subject: http://www.mediachannel.org/originals/shapiro-drudge.shtml)

Who then are we going to trust? A newspaper who's very existence depends on its reputation for accuracy and in-depth investigative reporting or an anonymous blogger sitting alone in his apartment churning out whatever pops into his caffeine soaked brain? For many, the answer is the latter. It's easier to believe a comfortable lie which agrees with your own point of view than inconvenient facts which oppose it.

I fully expect The New York Times to publish articles that run counter to my world view and to reveal that institutions or individuals I hold in high regard are flawed- sometimes fatally so. That is the nature of a free press and I wouldn't want to live in a society where such journalistic freedoms, along with inherent checks and balances, were absent.

The rapid decline of the standard bearers of professional journalism and the rise of unmoderated, unaccountable, opinion blogs, on both sides of the political spectrum, bodes well for any politician who wants to cut a shady deal or any multi-national who decides that cleaning up toxic sludge from a little place called Love Canal is just too much of a financial burden.

Knowing that we are being watched is supposed to keep us honest. That's why here in the UK we now live in a nation-wide Big Brother House of interlaced listening posts and CCTV cameras. While the effectiveness of this surveillance for deterring crime is debatable, what is unquestionable is the impact a camera and a pen in professional hands has on governments and large corporations. If no one is watching, they can, and will, get away with murder.

Where does it come from and where does it go to?

I have decided that I am going to will myself to write something here every bloody day just to keep my fingers accustomed to striking keys. I have become so apathetic and lazy with my writing that each time I open my computer and launch Word, I stare at the white wasteland of a new document window until drops of blood form on my forehead.

Inspiration is not something that comes easily to me. Normally I must wait for outside influences, typically in the form of soul-destroying heartache, to force my hand. Considering that I am in a fairly stable relationship I must therefore either sow seeds of discontent (a process in which I am nothing short of an enlightened master) or look elsewhere for my angst fuelled creative impulses.

Last-minute panic is also a recognised deep well of motivation and one which I sampled liberally from during my years before the higher mind. Unfortunately the repercussions for failing to update scantly read blog entries do not compare to the seemingly life threatening consequences inherent in missing a term paper deadline in grad school.

Which leaves me with only one fallback: inner motivation. My capacity for which could fit inside a matchbox without having to remove the matches. Without a clear goal I just don't see the point in doing anything at all. Indeed it is only the fear of a deathbed review of a wasted life which prevents me from forgoing gym memberships, tennis, photography, all forms of social interaction, travel and shaving for beer, a wife-beater shirt and daytime TV.

Having set myself a goal of daily postings may trick my nearly atrophied brain into believing that it has to produce some sort of reasonably coherent drivel before it can shut down and wander randomly through YouTube videos.

Whether or not this ruse will pay dividends in the long run will, of course, remain to be seen. At the moment I'm running late and analysing the finer points of this new strategy will have to wait.

Pride of Place

Having been an unwilling observer of the Great British Public for over eight years now I have come to the unmistakable conclusion that they are suffering from an intense lack of national pride.

Before I can expound on that somewhat sweeping generalization, a few points of clarification are in order. First, by “national pride” I am in no way referring to the rabid and, seemingly, inbuilt fear and mistrust of all foreigners which, over the eons, has imprinted itself on the lizard-brain components of native born inhabitants of this island. Xenophobia, as any Scott, Welshman or Pole will attest, is, for the English, both a way of life and a national treasure.

Near as I can figure, this hatred of The Other by the English toward, well, everyone really, comes not from a belief that their land of rolling hills and pebbly beaches is the finest to be found. Rather, the English fear that the great unwashed supposedly massing at the boarders are actually able to do everything, from running a metro system to fitting bathrooms and fucking, better than they do.

Thanks to the flying busses of Ryan Air and SleazyJet, the English rank and file have been able to venture outside the drab confines of their cloud-shrouded cocoon and witness first-hand that trains continue to run when it snows, that the phrase “having a drink” is indeed singular and that deep-fat-fried is not a food group.

These reluctant tourists return home and perform a uniquely English bit of rationalizing. “Sure,” they say to themselves, “the food, climate, healthcare, education, mass transit, postal system government and overall way of life is better in [fill in the country of your choice] but those damn [fill in race or nationality of your choice] want to come over here and take our jobs, and sponge off the NHS!” Nowhere else have I heard people acknowledge that the very infrastructure of the nation is rotten and then, without stopping to breathe or think, complain about all the hordes of moochers trying to get in.

When I first heard this I assumed that the immigrants were being blamed for the crumbling motorways and byzantine bureaucracy (and there certainly is an element of that) but what they were really saying, without seemingly understanding the contradiction, was that England is crap but the rest of the world still wants to live there anyway. Yeah, it’s a toilet but just look at all those poor fuckers standing outside waiting to take a dump.

The English, more than most, know how to hold a grudge. The Germans are hated for starting two world wars, the Spanish for sending two Armadas and the French for being French. In southern Spain and France the English have been exacting a type of revenge by buying all the habitable coastal property and walling themselves into gated compounds. Learning the native language is simply out of the question, jacket potato stands are easy to find and the local supermarket stocks Marmite and Walkers crisps.

The English are not looking for a home down south so that they can rub elbows with a bunch of foreigners- they want a Blackpool with better weather. New Yorkers have Florida and the English have Spain. It’s not much of an advertisement for a place if, as soon as the inhabitants have saved enough money, they flee.

I happened to glance at a British newspaper recently (a very rare occurrence indeed) and my eyes locked onto one particular sentence: “England: it’s all a bit rubbish and that’s OK.” I’m not pulling this quote out of context; the entire article paid homage to English mediocrity. Somewhere along the line it has become perfectly acceptable for this entire society to accept failure as an acceptable option. They expect Australia to beat them at cricket, the Americans to dictate their foreign policy, their children to be fat, fish and chips eating lumps, their health service to leave them for dead, their government to tax them to starvation and the Royal Mail to steal their post.

It is a telling sign of the state of the nation’s self-worth that when it came time to give a nickname to the spectator’s hill above The All England Tennis Club (home to the Wimbledon championships) they named it after Tim Henman, who never even made it to the finals.

For the English, any overt display of national pride not specificity directed toward athleticism is preceded as distasteful. Along side this is a deep despair that although they used to be the world’s biggest swinging dick, they now are lucky if Sudan returns their calls. Mix these two attitudes and you get a people locked into a gilt riddled self-abuse spiral, which can’t but fuel a seemingly genetic predisposition toward alcohol abuse and poor dental hygiene.

To be fair, the English are only a few generations removed from their salad days of Nazi stomping, wave ruling, little brown people exploiting, global dominance. Even Hitler knew he couldn’t fuck with the Royal Navy and it took someone who was for all intents and purposes the living embodiment of divine perseverance to drive the British out of India.

The good old days ended about the time the HMS Sheffield was sent to the bottom by an Argentinean fired, French made, Exocet missile. Only years later did it come to light how close a third-world banana republic came to doing what the combined might of the French and Spanish fleets could never do: rout the English navy on the high seas. Maggie and her team hunkered down in Number 10 knew they would face a public political castration if the Falklands were lost. The Tories would be driven out of Parliament like diseased animals and Nelson’s Column would collapse in shame.

The question remains: did the dissolution of old Empire lead to the utter collapse of English society and pride? Probably. Of course the people who were once ruled by the crown aren’t fairing very well either. Let’s take a little look at the ex-imperial score sheet shall we?

Zimbabwe: fucked
Somalia: fucked
Uganda: fucked
Nigeria: fucked
Palestine: fucked
Iraq: fucked
Pakistan: fucked
India: mostly fucked
Northern Ireland: only just getting unfucked
South Africa: fucked for years by white apartheid rule and now fucked by black democratic rule
China: taking over the world

Not the kind of marks you’d want to bring home to mum and dad.

I’ll let you in on a little secret: England isn’t all rubbish. In fact, once you leave the cities, step out of your car and take a look around, you’ll find that England is indeed that Green and Pleasant Land of Blake and Wordsworth.

Unlike America, England cannot be discovered from behind the tinted windows of a bus and they don’t put car parks in front of the best picture spots. England must be walked to, on and over. The forests might be gone but the grass is there, the rocks, the lakes, the 500-year-old villages, all survive as if they were sealed in a bottle. Yes, every inch has been trod on before but in a way that’s what makes the place so amazing: Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Romans, Vikings, French, all walked this way before. They all did their fair share of raping and pillaging but in the end the land shaped them, not the other way around.

Put down the pint, snuff out the fag and stand on a cliff along the edge of the Orkneys. You might see that pride of place comes from the beauty of the land and not from your local football club. Remember that empires won and lost are military and political constructions based on outmoded nationalistic ideals and that every family is from someplace else if you go back far enough. If all else fails, remember that Cary Grant was British, how cool is that?