Hertz Marble Arch: DO NOT RENT FROM THEM!

I show up to pick up my car; as a Gold member it should be waiting for me, nicely warmed and with a small chocolate on the dashboard (not really).  I am greeted by an admittedly nice woman who should have been home in bed with her cold and not spraying germs on the customers and staff.  My car?  Nowhere to be seen.  We search.  For 20 minutes the agent and I wander in and out of rows of cars until we find the car I reserved, totally trapped in the dead centre of a hundred other vehicles.

Back at the desk I ask to add another driver.

"That will be £9 per day"

"I'm a Gold member, it's free."

"Not in the UK it's not."

10 minutes of arguing back and forth gets me nowhere.  The charge is added by the system and they can't wave it (like fuck they can't).

"Fine, forget it, just get me my car."

"It will take a bit of time..."

45 minutes later they manage to fish my car out and I go down to inspect it.  It's ancient (by rental standards) and covered with scratches.  I ask for another one.  No dice.  It's the last one of that type in stock.  Fine, upgrade me.  Certainly, that will be another £20 per day.

I just about lose it but they know I'm fucked.  What am I going to do?  I need this particular car (estate) to haul a bunch of furniture back from Devon and I know, as they do, that there is no where else I am going to get one three days before Christmas.

Defeated, I drive away.  Three miles later I wonder why it's still freezing in the cab.  After fiddling about with the dials and buttons I discover that the fan only works on full-blast.  Great.  I have a choice between blistering hot or freezing cold.  This is shaping up to be a fun holiday.

I have just finished sending Hertz a sternly worded letter but I know it will disappear down a rabbit hole.  All I can do now is tell as many people as humanly possible to avoid renting from Hertz in general and the Marble Arch branch in particular.

All Hertz needed to do was wave the second driver fee (like they say they do in their T&Cs) and they could have kept my good will and prevented me from slagging them on my blog, Twitter, Yelp and any other site I can find.  I'll tell my friends and family about how fucked up they are and pass the word to our corporate travel people.  At the end of the day, they didn't get my £45, won't get my normal six rentals a year from now on and maybe even lose a few more customers to boot.

As I told the drones behind the counter: you can't just treat people poorly and get away with it anymore, the Internet is a huge megaphone and if someone gets fucked over by a company, a pile of people are going to hear about it.  Or at least the three people who read this blog.

Not this time Amazon

I just finished all my on-line holiday shopping without giving a penny to Amazon; it wasn't nearly as difficult as I thought it would be.

Normally, 99% of all the cash I drop on gifts throughout the year goes to Amazon.  With friends and relatives dotted around the world, Amazon makes it easy for me to point-and-shoot presents wherever and whenever I need to send them.

Not this time.

With very little effort I managed to circumvent Amazon completely and still get all my December Pagan Holiday shopping done.  In fact, I enjoyed the diversity of my new Amazon-free lifestyle.

If you too are looking for a way to avoid free-speech stifling Amazon, check out these sites instead:

Support a truly worthy cause at Amnesty International UK


Amazingly cool stuff from the Museum of Modern Art in New York

Speaking of museums, The British Museum also has a good on-line selection

The perennial favorite of nerds everywhere: Think Geek

Great travel gear and of course, a great magazine: National Geographic

If you decide that everyone has too much stuff, throw a few bob to people who actually are saving lives:

St. Mungo's UK homeless services

Unparalleled bravery: Royal National Lifeboat Institution

IMHO one of the most worthy organizations ever created in the history of the human race:  Medecins Sans Frontiers

My point is, fuck Amazon, if they want to cave into government pressure then there is no reason that we need to send them any dosh ever again.

"If Amazon are so uncomfortable with the first amendment they should get out of the business of selling books."  -Julian Assange

Amen to that.

Hypocrisy Continues

Visa and MasterCard won't let you donate to WikiLeaks but donating to the KKK is still A-OK:

http://tinyurl.com/2682pu2

WikiLeaks Mirrors

The main site is getting hit by DoS attacks but can still be reached by IP:

http://213.251.145.96/

Currently there are over 1300 mirrors and they can be found here:

http://wikileaks.challet.eu/mirrors.html

Boycott Amazon NOW!

Hello Amazon?  Do you sell dictionaries?  Open one up and read me the definition of "irony".  Great.  Now find a copy of the US Constitution and take a look at the first amendment- it says something about freedom of the press and of speech right?  You guys are all for that aren't you?  I mean, if it weren't for the First Amendment you'd mostly be selling cat calendars and bibles.  You are pretty much the digital embodiment of the power of printed word so you'll excuse me when I say:

What the FUCK are you doing pulling WikiLeaks from your servers?!

Especially, I might add, since a corrupt old fuck like Joe Lieberman told you to?  Joe Fucking Lieberman?  The poster-boy for spineless self-interest and political pandering?  Are you fucking serious Amazon?  Give yourself a slap and grow a pair.

You people owe your very existence to the principles you are now denying.  You have caved to pressure from a government that got its ego bruised.  Would you pull Howl, The Catcher in the Rye or The Grapes of Wrath if some crooked Senator asked you to?  The government didn't like what those books said either and managed, with the complicit support of weak-willed sheep such as yourselves, to have them banned.

In light of your staggering act of political cowardice, let me just say that even though it is going to make my holiday shopping about 1000% more difficult, Amazon you will not be getting a single dollar or pound of my cash for the foreseeable future.

I know you don't give a shit- that's your problem.  You'll never notice that I didn't drop $250 on books and a new Kindle but the one or two people that read this blog will- as will my friends and their friends and my colleagues at work and so on.  Goodwill squandered is not easily replaced.

It is an exaggeration to say we have nothing to fear but fear itself, but correct to say that we have lots to fear from cowardice.
        - Brendan Keenan

Total so far

The Republican's are not even technically in control of Congress yet but they have already chalked up some impressive victories:

• Extending tax cuts to the super rich- all over but the shouting
• Raising the inheritance tax threshold to $5 million- all but done
• Keeping "Don't ask, don't tell" in place- check
• Block health care for 9/11 rescue workers- check
• Blocking a sensible path to citizenship for illegal immigrant students- check
• Killing the new arms control treaty- in progress
• Revoking or gutting (more so) health care reform- you betcha, stay tuned

Take my word for it, the US is doomed.  The next two years will be host to an unprecedented display of right-wing excess and insanity.  Obama will be a one-term President and his Tea-Party endorsed successor will preside over a cataclysmic shift toward an American Theocracy.

The US is an empire in decline, ruled by religious madmen, well armed and looking for a fight.  They have become their enemy not by coercion or force but by choice and willful ignorance.  Shouting and waving banners they walked happily into the flames.

To the Barricades

For the past 90 minutes a police helicopter has been hovering over our building, keeping an eye on the mass of protesters trying to push their way to Westminster: the campaign against raising student fees continues apace. 

I have to admit, as much as I like a good street protest, I haven't thrown my lot in with the students on this one.  The reason is quite a simple one and can be summed up like this, "fuck-'em, I had to pay for college, so can they."  Not very liberal of me I know but there you have it.

Thankfully my budding conservationism was quashed when I took the time to look back over the reality of my college years.

I entered college at 19 and when I walked out at 34 I was lumbered with $34,000 in student loan debt.  I had another $30,000 piled on my credit cards- most of which was accrued while I was in school and underemployed.  $64,000 in debt for a photography/art history major pretty much guarantees a lifetime of indentured servitude to Uncle Sam and Visa.

Luckily before I was forced into bankruptcy or faking my own death, I landed an IT job, discovered a stack of money in a college fund my parents had forgotten about and through an amazing loophole in US tax law, managed to get every penny of my withholding tax for 1999 returned to me.  Thus, within a year of moving to London I found myself completely debt free for the first time ever.

Woo hoo.

Without that perfect storm of a good job, found cash and a tax break there is no way I could have ever, ever, paid of those debts.  Far from paying my own way, I managed to land three huge Get Out of Debtors Prison Free cards and I hit them like a semi with no breaks.

Given these humbling revelations I've revisited my knee-jerk reaction to the UK student protests and come to the conclusion that a state sponsored free-ride for college is not in the best interests of the students or the country.

WTF?

Higher education should be subsidized, tuition should be kept under control and there should be need-based grants for those who can't afford the fees but I still feel that the students should contribute something to their education.  Even if that something is having to work in the school bookshop three days a week.  Let me explain.

My evil ex-girlfriend, the Norwegian, gets free education for life at nearly any school she chooses anywhere in the world.   This sounds great but the reality is that she developed an expectation of entitlement that has kept her gainfully unemployed and living the life of a perpetual student.  I don't know where she is now exactly, I'm hoping living in a cardboard box behind a strip-club, but I can tell you that in the 10 years we were in contact she had a grand total of one job that could pay her bills.  The rest of the time was spent in school accumulating degrees and boyfriends.

Am I bitter and jealous?  You bet.  Yet if I push aside the anger, I find even more anger.  Beneath that comes the same kind of self-righteous rage I hear spewing form the mouths of Torries when they talk about how hard they work to provide for their families while we give free houses to immigrants.

Somebody had to pay for my evil-ex to spend her life playing in the academic sandbox because fuck knows she didn't.  On top of that, she contributed not at all to anyone else's education because she was too busy leaching the system.  It wasn't  like her family was destitute: they owned three fucking Stradivarius violins for Christ's sake!

Granted, I shouldn't let the experiences of one spoiled child taint my world-view but unfortunately it does.  A university education should be available to anyone with the intellectual ability to pursue it but giving everyone a blank-cheque leads to complacency.  Means tested grants and loans coupled with tuition caps can keep higher education affordable to both those who are in the classroom and those in the work-force paying the bills.

No shame

Let me get this straight: Republicans are extending tax cuts to the rich (and "middle-class" people making $200K) and yet they are screaming about the deficit being too high?

They hold up jobless benefits for people who can't afford food for their kids so that their rich patrons can have another stack of cash?

Poor people spend the extra money you give them and rich people save it- which provides more short and mid-term stimulus to the economy?

Never could I have imagined that my disgust for the American Right would be greater than what I felt during the Bush years- how wrong I was.

If there is a hell, these people are going there.

Back in the Saddle

The masters of my universe bestowed upon me a small travel budget to do some auditing visits to 14 of our European sites.  14 is a far cry from the 80+ anual trips I've been making for the past five years but I'll take what I can get because since Feb I have been confined to an overly air-conditioned office and a job that consists of brain sucking conference calls and e-mail.

Since my grounding I've been able to take a couple of paying photo gigs which at least keeps me from forgetting how to hold a camera.  On one particularly depressing day at work I decided that I should devote more time to being a rock star so I bought a new bass, cleaned out the back of the kitchen and set up a music room.

Contrary to everything I held to be true, a shiny new bass did indeed make me a better musician- or at least made me think so.  It sounds so ridiculously obvious but after 24 years of playing I had forgotten the 1:1 correlation between playing more and getting better.  I think I simply assumed that I was as good as I was going to get and putting anything more than minimal effort it took to learn whatever crap my bandmates wanted to play was a waste of time better spent watching TV.

Encouraged by my experiences on bass I pulled my guitar out of the closet, bought a stand for it, set it in the living room and spent several days eyeing it cautiously.  When I finally did pick it up I found that with it too, the more I played the more my fingers seem to hit the right notes.  I might just be on to something here.

I started taking my camera with me more and, amazingly, each time I went out, I came back with a good shot or two.  How could this be happening?  Was someone trying to tell me that putting forth an effort, even on activities that I pretty much assumed I'd peaked at, actually paid off?  Maybe there is no theoretical maximum for creativity.  Maybe the reason I get jaded and stuck and bored with my art is simply because I don't do it enough; don't force myself to crank it up a notch and figure out the bass-line to Won't Get Fooled Again and actually conceive of a vision of how I want my photos to look and learn how to make it so.

This should have come as no surprise but you see, I am a lazy bastard and the few tricks I have I never really had to work at.  In fact, I used to think that if you had to work at it, you weren't really that good at it in the first place.  I was (am) a firm believer in natural ability but what I missed was that a gift is only a starting point and I was seeing it as the destination.

Overcoming the laziness is phenomenally difficult for me: my default mode is to sink into bed, a sofa or a depression and moan about all my unappreciated tallent.  I need a support group who will keep me pushing forward, keep me motivated, driven, an AA for polymath layabouts.

My friends are helping.  I'm plugging in a bit more with people living the way of the artist.  Last month a couple of friends and I had a "bring your art to dinner" evening which broke down a few more walls.  What I would like is an Algonquin Round Table without the booze.  Just a place where smart, interesting people with a passion for art, music, writing, life, anything really, could sit across from each other and talk; then later put the talk into action.  Creative collaboration has never been one of my strong points- I prefer to assume a lone-wolf, suffering for his art persona.  However, it would seem that I've worn that suit for far too long.  Time for a change of attitude, outlook and clothes.

Anyone have a round table, some crazy ideas and some free time at lunch?  I'm there.

New Next Thing

Well, it's all over, even the shouting.  Brown is gone, Nick and Dave are having a love-in at Number 10 and I am surprisingly calm about it all.

Strange bedfellows indeed and I'm sure there are more than a few party hacks wondering exactly what was in the Kool-Aid which allowed these two warring factions from the Right and Left to slip so smoothly into the sack.

The Deal is public, all 12 pages of it.  There's been a lot of give and take: we don't get the Euro or ID cards and immigrants, legal and otherwise, continue to be the national punching bag.  To prove that England still has a big dick, Trident is a go but Heathrow will have to keep standing on two legs instead of three.

Fiscal knives are being sharpened and within 50 days we are to have an emergency budget.  It looks like only the NHS and the MOD get to retract their necks.  I hope all you breeders have not become too attached to tax-breaks for daycare because somebody just painted a bulls-eye on it.

We all know the cuts are coming but the one that will hurt the least is for that ludicrous money pit with a dreadful logo called The 2012 London Olympics.  Although the government hasn't specifically said that Olympic funding will be scaled back, they have said that it "is not protected."  I live in hope.

God no longer rains fire on wicked cities, now he sends the Olympics.  Montreal, Sydney, Turin and Vancouver have all paid a dear price for the "privilege" of hosting this two-week steroid fest.  In Athens the streets are burning because the country is in economic free-fall brought about in no small way because they hosted the games in 2004. 

I'll write a full post on the absurdity that is the Olympics later.  The shops are closing and food needs to be gathered.

This new government we have in the UK:  as cynical as I am, as liberal as I am, I think we should give them a chance.  We should also be thankful that the Tories, unlike their Republican counterparts across the ocean, are not totally bat-shit crazy.

Yet.

Democracy how?

I've done my share of left-wing rabble rousing over the years, mostly for noble but doomed causes.  I've marched in the streets, put up posters, knocked on doors, signed petitions, handed out fliers and tricked myself into believing that the good people of [fill in whatever city, state or country I have lived in] would see the intrinsic justice of whatever cause I was advocating.

I hung on to this misplaced optimism until year upon year of crushing defeats convinced me that the great mass of voters are in fact ignorant, narrow-minded bigots who will vote against their best interests because of fear, racism and fanatical right-wing brainwashing.

My home state of California has a very granular democracy facilitated by an initiative process.  Anyone with an axe to grind and enough signatures can put propositions before the voters.  Depending on who you ask (especial after an election) this system is empowering or wickedly dangerous.

As participatory as the initiative process is it has a good number of failings; not the least of which is the relative ease by which a simple majority of voters can change the State Constitution.  A recent and infamous example was the anti-gay marriage proposition.  After the California Supreme Court allowed same-sex couples to marry, the rank and file of the religious right put forward a constitutional amendment banning the practice.  

The homophobes used the same rhetoric employed by anti-interracial marriage campaigners of the 1950s:  "it's not natural", "God did not intend such an unholy union" etc.  The Mormon church sent truckloads of money in support of the amendment and bigots from San Diego to the Oregon boarder were reaching for their bibles and ballot papers to turn back the tidal wave of queers who were set on defiling the sanctity of heterosexual marriage.

"Liberal" California went to the polls and overnight 3% of the population had a basic liberty stripped away.  The family values crowd successfully made it impossible for committed homosexual partners to have any say over the treatment of their ill partners in hospital, while simultaneously sanctifying the legitimacy of drunken, spur of the moment decisions made by vapid but straight morons- I'm looking at you Britney!

All this has come to mind because by a strange coincidence election season here in the UK is overlapping with state-wide primaries in California.  Being blessed as I am with dual citizenship I am able to observe first-hand the differences in the electoral process between  the ancient, some would say mummified, English system and that of the young pretender across the ocean.

I'm one of those people who get ridiculously excited about elections.  It is not without merit that I have worn the label of Political Junkie for most of my adult life.  For me all politics are personal and I consider the trek to the polling booth a sacred duty- a secular pilgrimage.  I vote as if my single vote would decide the election.  My answer to those who feel that one person can't make a difference is simply this, "Florida, 2000."

Casting a ballot is one of the few times we get to put our ideals into direct action.  All the activism and posturing, protesting, shouting and debating lead up to that moment when the tick goes in the box.  There are winners and losers and the debates go on but something changes and we make it happen.

Much is made, on both sides of the Atlantic, of the lack of voter turn out.  Time and again the minority decides for the majority simply because the majority can't find time enough to set down their chicken wings, squeeze into some stretch pants and waddle to the polls.  Blame for this sorry state of affairs most assuredly does not rest on the shoulders of the electoral commission.

Assuming you have the desire, the UK and US governments make it laughably easy to vote  even if you don't actually reside in-country.  California sends a registration form to my UK address every year to make sure all my details are correct and then mails me conformation that I am indeed signed up.  In the UK it is against the law not to register to vote (but voting is not mandatory) and the Register of Electors sends out an eligibility questioner and postal ballot request form each year.

Both the US and UK systems allow you to register to vote on-line, by FAX, by mail and I'm sure they are working on a text message system so even functionally illiterate 18-25 year olds can sign on.  This is where the similarity ends.

Unlike US elections where candidates and supporters/detractors of proposed amendments flood the airwaves, newspapers and Internet with information about their respective positions, in the UK there is radio silence.  I have been trying for three-days to track down any information at all about the voting records, political ideology, written position statements, hair colour, anything about the eleven candidates standing for my local council and the best that I could uncover is that fewer than half actually live in my area.  I was only able to find that little tidbit because their addresses are printed on the ballot.

Eleven candidates who allegedly want my vote so that they can make our council a safe place for kittens and old people or fix parking tickets for their friends yet they all act as if they are in the Witness Protection Program.  With the exception of this guy even the mighty Internet has no trace of any of them.

Our parliamentary candidates fare slightly better- they each have web pages and at least one of them responds to e-mail.

Contrast this with the Primary Election Guide I received from the State of California.  79 pages that include a non-partisan summery of each of the propositions, projected fiscal effects, candidate statements, complete texts of the initiatives and arguments for and against each one.  79 pages devoted to five initiatives and a handful of candidates vying to be the party's choice to run in the real show in November. 

The differences in the two systems is perhaps illustrated most clearly in the ballot papers themselves.  From California I receive a large form with the candidate's names, their occupations and the post each is running for; party affiliation is also indicated. On the back are the initiatives with a short summery.  There are a few instructions about how to fill out the form and a reminder to sign it before it gets sent back.  It's simple, friendly and designed to be completed and counted quickly.

UK postal votes, by contrast, contain pages upon pages of instructions followed by a small, Xeroxed ballot paper.  Voting consists of putting a large "X" next to the candidate of your choice.  The emphasis is on the party, not the individual, as illustrated by the large party logo next to the candidate's name.

This hive-like reliance and trust in party candidates to not only carry out the will of the voters but internally elect the national leader, seems to me a hugely suspect form of representational democracy. 

In the US, you might love your local congressional representative but dislike the President.  No problem, you can vote for your rep and against the President during the next election.  It doesn't work that way in the UK.

In England a vote for the party is a vote for that party's leader.  If your beloved MP is Labour but you can't stand Labour's leader, tough, they are a set.  Thousands of people in the UK are facing this kind of Sophie's Choice in the upcoming election.  Labour's Gorden Brown is widely disliked and Labour voters are faced with the unpalatable decision of either voting for a party they support and a leader they don't or an opposition candidate representing their most hated enemy: the Tories.  

Being a Lib Dem (Liberal Democrat for those of you outside the UK) I don't have to do much soul searching.  Nick Clegg, the party's leader, has the confidence and easy style of someone who knows he will never be Prime Minister.  He gets to be honest without fear of losing power because he has none.  The best he can hope for from the upcoming national election is that he gets to play kingmaker in a hung parliament.  Not a bad deal for a party which has spent the 22 years since its founding in the political wilderness.

It's time for me to give it one more shot and scour the Internet for any sort of fact or innuendo on our council candidates.  Unfulfilled I will then make three wild guess as to the  people best able to represent my interests.  Three people who will decide how our tax money is allocated, how our schools get run, how our local police operate.  I am voting in an information vacuum without tangible, verifiable data.  This is no way to run a democracy.

Remote Control

I've been grounded.

I knew this was going to happen.  They made a bunch of us IT geeks redundant at the end of last year and now we are a much leaner team (read "wild-eyed and panicked").  My former colleague is now my boss and is running the show but he is doing the work of five and hasn't  come out of his office in a week .  He kept calling and e-mailing me over my holiday saying "when are you coming back?" and "you don't really need to stay on holiday do you?"  I could see what was coming.

Two seconds after I set foot in the London office I was handed a heaping pile of orphaned projects  and told to plant myself behind a desk and manage them.

At this very moment I should be in Bogota working with the local office on a massively complex deployment but my travel plans got shit-canned because it was deemed necessary for me to play wing-man for my new boss instead of supporting a site that desperately needs a grown-up to help them through this transition.  I was told to do it remotely and that, ladies and gents, has been a new experience in frustration and exhaustion.

Don't get me wrong, the tools are there: between e-mail, IM, VoIP, Skype, RDP, VNC, etc. etc., I can sit in my living-room in London and with a wave of my God-like hand fix problems that crop up 5800 miles away.  I'm like one of those guys who sits in some office complex deep in the heart of Texas and pilots drones over the mountains of Pakistan.  Except that I'm sorting out why a server didn't migrate to a new domain and not raining death down on unsuspecting villagers.  A subtle difference.

The higher-ups who made the decision to keep me tethered to a desk instead of in the field where I am most effective are willfully ignorant of what these projects entail for the guys on the ground.  I was told to write down everything I do and send it to the team on-site.  That is both bullshit and a fucking insult.  Checklists are fine when you are starting up a plane but not so good when both your engines get knocked out by birds and your options are certain death or some crazy-ass river landing.  

I'm not saying that what I do compares to gliding a brick with wings down like a stone skipping over a pond.  However, I am a firm believer in the value of experience over education when it comes to making rapid decisions in the context of one's personal area of operational expertise.

In my line of work nothing ever works right the first time.  Getting something to work at all is generally quite an accomplishment and having that something work two times in a row is considered by many to be an experience close akin to religious rapture or sexual climax.  Why should Geeks waste time fucking when simply getting a VB script to run without errors releases the same endorphins and you don't even need to cuddle after.

What the bastards in the suits don't realize is that the only reason these god damned projects work is because my boys and I drag them across the finish line on our shoulders.  We go to these sites with all the information we can gather molded into a game-plan based on a model we've used dozens of times before but no matter how much we think we know about the location, no matter how many times we've tested our scripts and arranged our sacrificial ducks, 90 seconds after the last user has left we start fighting a swarm of bees.

If I'm not there, if someone who has done one of these projects before isn't around, then panic sets in.  I heard fear in the voice of the IT Director in Colombia yesterday when we were going over our last minute preparations.  What could I do?  He was facing the spinning knives and I was sitting behind a monitor in London.  

25 hours later and I'm still there.  My colleague and I were up until 4:00 in the morning, pulling remote controlled bunnies out of hats.  A machine would go down and I'd resurrect it, 30 people couldn't get their mail?  Sorted.  Databases refuse to backup?  I'm on it.  They threw us problems and we put out the fires.  Bring it on.

23:28 the next day and we're still mopping things up.  One big piece of the shit sandwich is still missing and I'm hoping to get to work on that before too long.  There it is- just plopped down into my in-box.  Time to open up a well worn bag of tricks and hope I can keep typing until dawn.

Best and Worst

The best thing anyone ever said to me:

 "Holding you feels like home."

 The worst thing anyone ever said to me:

"I wasn't just worried I was pregnant, I was afraid that it was yours."

Thankfully not said by the same person.

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.