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.

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