Weed in the pond.

Let us spray.
Originally uploaded by ALBOWIEB

#thenews

I twittered/tweeted/posted the following tweet yesterday evening whilst the BBC News was talking about a gang of paedophiles that had been caught in Scotland:

// How do you catch a paedo gang? Do they have matching hoodies? #thenews #

A highly-irreverent, quite a naughty approach to the story, which I immediately tried to backtrack on a wee bit by twitterising thusly:

// The news fries my brain; it's death and the very gutter of human dignity followed by a comedy series or a late movie. #

But I was still hung up on the first thing. We've been discussing in our public administration seminars why it is that people misunderstand functions of local government so much - is it a journalist's job to educate folks or a councillor's? I can't quite sort it in my head that it's a journalist's job - in whatever way it's their job to entertain and titillate people to the extent that they will establish a relationship with their newspaper and keep buying it, it's that simple. It could be argued that ignorance keeps the councillor in his job and everyone's happy, but the coverage of local government in newspapers is necessarily simple and simplified.

The reason I bring this up is the gang of paedophiles. Do they really hunt in packs? Will you find them sat in groups of 6 in an MPV outside Mothercare? Do they have secret handshakes and five-aside football teams and hang around together? The seamy and the depressing and the evil is simplified and boiled down to a 2-minute bulletin between two chunks of entertainment that gives people the very barest update on what is going on in the world. The MP expenses scandal suits this style perfectly - no politicians are to be trusted; they're all out to get every single penny they can off the poor, hardworking majority of the country who work hard and pay their taxes. Good versus evil, you've made your cup of tea in good time for the next programme, the world has been put to rights and you can sleep easy.

Stereotypes are the very enemy of a civilised society. It's how Brazilians get shot on the tube, or child doctors get 'paedo' daubed on their house by angry yet stupid lynch mobs, or how good MPs like Ian Gibson are lost to absolute hysteria. It's why the news fries my brain. But at least there's something funny on after.

The Observer.

Gosh, the number of impossibly-keen observations I make in the day and forget them before I have a chance to transfer them from synapse to digit to key. I carry a notepad but I'm too lazy to fish it out. This could be the root of the problem. There's a difference between being observant and being an observer, I feel. Anyone can be observant, but translating that into the place where you become someone who observes and translates those thoughts and reports them - there's the art.

I'm an observer, I like to look at what's around and what's going on and how it's being done, I like to do things and tell people about them - but the translating, the getting things down on paper and making them as interesting as they are to my eyes. That's the hard part.

It's a duck. In the grass.

Quick, duck
Originally uploaded by ALBOWIEB

A bit of excitement.

The funniest thing that happened to me today was coming out of the toilets in the university library I managed to open the door at exactly the same time as a large bloke was trying to come through the door from the other side of it. Hilarity ensued. Mainly on his part.

This is my exciting life.

Speaking of my exciting life, I'm partially in this month's Total Politics magazine. My good friend Alisdair sent in one of my anecdotes - which I was saving for the memoirs, I might add - to the idiots page. The very first one - it was the most embarrassing thing that happened to me all year in Parliament.

Je suis en retard.

After reliable scientific study I can confirm that my fancy DAB radio alarm clock doesn't change the time automatically. My phone - no muss, no fuss - the little thing just did its job and gave me the right time. How efficient.

Unlike my alarm clock, which went off an hour early this morning and didn't go off again an hour later when it was supposed to - hence why I'm sat at home at the moment instead of in a lecture on something or other. I could be missing a crucial bit of law today. If I get sued I'll have to do a counter thingy against whoever made my radio. I'll be the Erin Brockovich for all those poor saps who were ever late because their alarms didn't go off, they'll make an epic but factually inaccurate cinematic adventure all based on what will have been started this morning. It's inspiring stuff.

I thought maybe that my radio had gone on strike when I first got up this morning - it's my default assumption these days now that it's become fashionable again. It's the cabin crew next. Much like with the post, I'm not planning on going on a plane, but I'm outraged nonetheless. I never get letters, but as soon as the postal wallahs go on strike I have literally dozens of missives sat forlorn in the corner of a foreign warehouse...

The Arrows are off.

Red, White and Blue
Originally uploaded by ALBOWIEB

Kumbaya.

When they get to the 'someone's singing, Lord, kumbaya' part I always imagine God saying 'I know, it's you', or 'Is that what that is?'...

Happy Sunday and that.

We get some post.

We got some post this morning. It wasn't even very good post, but it was post nonetheless. I had always thought that the surefire way to know that there was a postal strike going on would be the fact that you don't get any post. I find the process of getting a letter as mystical as watching a DVD or listening to music - who puts the Spice Girls on that shiny little disc of plastic for my aural delectation, and how do they do it? How does a miasmic sequence of events taking place within the very bowels of my car conspire to move me along the street? I just don't know. Just as I have no earthly idea how someone can stick a bit of paper with my name on it into a box and it gets put through a hole in the house the next morning.

Some of the magic was dented this morning, I must say - I think the postman hit their head on the door.

You see, the front garden currently resembles the final round of the Krypton Factor. There's a pit of mud to negotiate before the stairs with no rail, a quick dance around the smashed up paving slabs and a gravity-cheating, death-defying shimmy along a plank of wood to get to the front door, suspended as it is over a terrifying mix of hardcore and cement. You don't want your shoes to turn into concrete ones.

It was fortuitous that my dad's efforts coincided with the postal strike - I wouldn't wish the assault course to get to the front door on anyone, let alone those hard-working members of Her Majesty's Postal Force who are being cruelly made to work long hours with diminishing pay. If they did make it to the front door I'd probably remind them that they're living through the same recession as everyone else and to grow a pair, but the cowards just stick the letters in and run for it. Something went awry this morning as I heard a distinct thump before the letters came through - I felt a momentary jolt of sympathy course through my body, generally an alien emotion, but it quickly passed - the scab probably deserved it.

The thing that has been exercising my brain of late.

I'll tell you what's been exercising my brain lately - mainly because that's the entire point of the blog, but also because it's been exercising my brain and this is a useful form of excretion. Namely, how do you actually know if a person is a compulsive liar? If you ask them and they say that they are, then clearly they can't be, because if they were actually a compulsive liar they would be compelled to say no. But if someone says that they are a compulsive liar then they're not a compulsive liar because a compulsive liar would be compelled to say no, but even so they're still lying.

Would a compulsive liar in that case be able to pull off a spectacular double-bluff where you ask them if they're a compulsive liar and they say yes meaning no but actually lying? And then on the other side of the coin, if you ask someone this fateful question and they say no what are you to do? Because they're either a compulsive liar or they're telling the truth, but you've got no way to ascertain whether it is true or not and oblivious to the whacking irony of the situation - which is that the one surefire way you could use to ascertain the truth of the situation is in fact a recipe for further confusion.

That's been on loop for about two days. How to confuse an idiot. Next time, can God create a rock that he can't pick up?

A pedalo on the Serpentine.

43
Originally uploaded by ALBOWIEB

A surfeit of opinion.

I got a card from a friend the other day thanking me for being generous with my time and my opinions. I’m glad she appreciated the first part and I think the latter was meant in a nice way, but it’s what I’m like. I love giving out my opinion, it’s why I like blogging – I write what I think and no-one gets the chance to argue back. It’s why I like twitter, because although my opinions come in all shapes and sizes, the small ones are often the most provocative and shocking.

I’ve become increasingly convinced in recent times that I’m turning into a kind of pseudo-intellectual cash machine that gives out too much money than it was asked for, that all I really want to do is get paid to give my opinions out. I’d love to be an opinion-former – one of those people you disagree with but you really crave to find out what they think about something because you like their style.

Opinions really are secondary to the style – most of mine are so thin your mum would try to find them, but dagnabbit I hope they look good.

Twitter is killing blogging. Discuss.

I was given this title a number of weeks ago by the ever-charming Brennig when I asked for things to write about – the fact that it has taken me so long is probably proof enough of the slow and lingering death of blogging. There were a couple of blogs I remember years ago back when blogging was the new thing where people had cancer or somesuch and they were writing about it. Gritty, real-life stuff written in a breezy, confident, accessible way that people went gaga over. I don’t know if any of them actually did die or not, I don’t know if blogging was popular long enough for people to stay and find out. They probably got book deals and the dying became incidental.

Strangely enough blogging is undergoing a similar sort of process – that long, slow death being covered in a breezy, confident manner. When it does happen no-one will notice, so I guess it’s safe for now.

But twitter. Twitter, twitter, twitter. How long will that be around? I’m kind of over it myself – like any long-term relationship I’ve started to let things lapse after a year. I’m using it for my own nefarious purposes, turning it into a dressing table of things I like to hear about in the morning – bits of political news, celebrity gossip, lots of stuff about cars. I can’t say that in the last three or four months I’ve developed the same relationships that I did at the beginning.

I don’t think that twitter is killing blogging – there are any number of reasons that I tweet far more often than I blog, but I think they’re entirely different media. There aren’t many topical overlaps between the two things for me; what I blog about I don’t tweet about and vice versa. Twitter is functional, it’s toast versus blogging’s steak. I blog for the joy of writing, shaping and crafting a post and telling a story – twitter would never be able to match that.

What twitter might be doing is killing my ability to think beyond two short sentences, but that’s neither here nor there. Language is such a fluid, changing thing that there are always changes and influences on its behaviour. Txting was going to destroy the world not so long ago, but it hasn’t. Let twitter have its day, I say – there will always be A Little Bit of Wisdom in Every Box...

You may gag our newspapers...

There's an air of the public protest, a whiff of a sit-in on twitter this evening. I don't really want to write about it in great depth on my blog for fear of heavy reprisal from a huge multinational company that has been accused of dumping toxic waste in West Africa. And besides, that really isn't my thing - I'm all about the jokes and the wit and the jokes. You can't really be that funny about toxic waste and fifteen people being killed by it. Allegedly of course. All I might be saying is that their relatives are a lot richer than they were before. Oops.

You can follow the twitter stuff - the easiest way is for me to link to the search term 'Trafigura', for some reason that keeps popping up in people's tweets. More background here.

UPDATE: Sometime after my bedtime, but I'm still awake and I don't know why...:

Oh well, everyone's talking about it openly now, I'm sure we'll be sharing a big cell together, or something. Here is the Guardian report on allegations that Trafigura killed 15 people and injured 1000s more by dumping toxic waste off the West Coast of Africa.

This is the question that the Guardian is banned from reporting about from Parliament:

From Parliament.uk, “Questions for Oral or Written Answer beginning on Tuesday 13 October 2009″
(292409)
61
N Paul Farrelly (Newcastle-under-Lyme): To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what assessment he has made of the effectiveness of legislation to protect (a) whistleblowers and (b) press freedom following the injunctions obtained in the High Court by (i) Barclays and Freshfields solicitors on 19 March 2009 on the publication of internal Barclays reports documenting alleged tax avoidance schemes and (ii) Trafigura and Carter-Ruck solicitors on 11 September 2009 on the publication of the Minton report on the alleged dumping of toxic waste in the Ivory Coast, commissioned by Trafigura.

The whole thing is just outrageous, makes me angry. I just wish Trafigura were selling something I could now not buy.

Pull ourselves together.

I look at a good deal of society and quite often think that we’re two steps away from wibbling mass hysteria. Just before I left London face masks were becoming a de rigueur accessory for fashionistas and obsessive compulsives – as Michael McIntyre has pointed out, how ironic just as Michael Jackson dies. Swine flu is the great maguffin at the moment, the thing that catches in peoples’ minds and hides under their beds. It’s financial collapse, nuclear war, terrorists, Janet Street-Porter, cervical jabs and those damn Commies.

All over the country ordinary, assuming walls have suddenly sprouted white boxes full of magic alcoholic juice that will stop the whole thing in its tracks. The NHS has spent millions on posters telling people to blow their noses and wash their hands with no sense of self-consciousness. Blow your nose? Wash your hands? I suppose it’s something to do, like building a fall-out shelter and stocking up on tinned foods. I've got to say though - catch it, kill it, bin it is one loon-filled step away from kill the pig, cut its throat, spill its blood.

X Factor

I'm hooked. I was thinking about live-blogging the X Factor this weekend, such was the modicum of excitement surrounded such an big event as the beginning of the live finals. Unfortunately my modicum turned to a flood and a torrent, so all I've got so far is:

23:17 - wondering why I didn't liveblog the X Factor this weekend.

Doesn't make for an in-depth read.

The X Factor fascinates me. I've not watched it for a few years - there's a certain amount of interest early on, simply because you have to see what kind of retarded self-deluding talentless fool has put themself forward. And not just for judging. The X Factor is like the national lottery for luvvies. We're tricked into thinking that these Bright Young Things have walked off the street and are plucked out of obscurity by Simon Cowell's all-seeing eye. The ones that walk of the street are the dribbling behemoths with egg-stains on their jumper who think they're going to be bigger than Mariah Carey. They are often already bigger than Mariah Carey, but not in the way that they think.

The ones that get through are the ones who have been going to drama school, learning how to cry on demand. They each have A Story - curiously these stories aren't ever duplicated, which leads me to believe that they're raffled off behind the scenes. This is like some big bucks Murder Mystery party-slash-tabloid Cluedo - 'it was the black girl in the housing estate with the mum with cancer'... It's not really about the singing anymore - as if there was ever a purist era of reality television - I'm sure that this weekend's phone votes will quite presciently have predicted the winner of the entire series, because the entire thing is about finding the most bankable star. The people who vote are picking the person they're most likely to buy an album off once they've lost a few pounds and had their hair done. It's propaganda, but it's like a drug.

Walking through Hyde Park.

Pigeons
Originally uploaded by ALBOWIEB

What I didn't do today.

I did a grand lot of nothing today. There are many things I should have done - such as finding paid employment or working my way through the EU library book mountain that has formed in my bedroom. I maintain that I can't really read any of them for health and safety reasons, someone (i.e. me) might get hurt.

I do tell a little caucasian lie there, I popped out down the road with my mum to visit this charity that helps people with special needs with accommodation. I got offered a house, I think it was the Spongebob Squarepants t-shirt I was wearing, I hadn't tried too hard with the hair today and in harsh sunlight I do look a little autistic. That could have been it.

A bit of context.

I do feel occasionally like I ought to put some context alongside the pictures that I send ALBOWIEB's way from my Flickr account. They're mostly there to tart up the place, but I'm sure there must be a couple with amusing related stories about how the little photo came about. Then again, 'here is a picture from my short break in Devon' verges dangerously on the side of Boring Old Man, which is not really the place I want to be.

That last picture was from my recent short break in Devon - the one where I had to walk 30 miles to see some helicopters. There were also some jets there, as you can see by the evidence thus provided. Red Arrows. Magnificent things they were too, flying this way and that and not crashing into each other.

Just for information though, not crashing into each other doesn't count as a positive in my book. I was actually hoping to be a witness at the scene of an historic air crash, just because it's one of those things that quite heartless and macabre but would secretly be quite cool. The news agencies would be agog, following my twitter feed with ejaculatory abandon, my twitpics despatched around the world to inform the masses.

Our man on the ground, Sam Burnett.

I should be studying right now.

It's been a busy few days - as well as a useful spot of learning, we've been getting lots of information about different things.

For example, you're supposed to do like a million hours of study on top of the few hours of lectures. I think that's mainly so that if anyone complains they'll be all 'did you do a million hours of study?' and then they'll be all 'no...' and then they'll be all 'it's not our fault then is it, we did recommend you do a million hours of study.'

I'm not really that used to actual study work outside of a lectural context, I must be honest with you.

Perfect formation

Arrow straight
Originally uploaded by ALBOWIEB

Good evening.

Gosh, it's bedtime, but I thought I'd better crack one out, as it were, before I popped off to sleep. First two days of lectures have happened now - I'm exhausted, but it's been really interesting so far. I'm going to be starting a second blog in the next few days/week or so to put up some of the stuff that I've written and write about the course itself in the sort of nauseating detail that wouldn't be appropriate for ALBOWIEB's brand values.

Jokes. I don't really know anything about journalism, but I will be starting a new blog. How will you know? I'll tell you, silly. Must dash.

I feel so old.

OK, so I'm an elitist postgraduate student and I've been there before and don't like to mix, but occasionally I do have to emerge and rub shoulders with the proles. Can you believe that this year's intake of cannon fodder were born in 1991? This gasts my flabber and urbs my pert. I feel so old. They missed the fall of Communism, they couldn't even speak in the days when a traffic cop would stop the car and say 'who do you think you are, Nigel Mansell?', having to wait too long for a nappy change would be their idea of an annus horribilis, I'd started secondary school before they were even at nursery, they didn't have any time to build up any excitement for the millennium celebrations, they don't remember a world without DVDs.

I feel so old.

A conversation happens in our house.

"A squirrel's ruined one of your plants."
"Which one?"
"I don't know which one, it had a grey bushy tail."

a jet passes overhead.

follow the trail
Originally uploaded by ALBOWIEB

Living in the hair and now.

I go for a haircut. A place I used to get taken to when I was little - a bastion against the insidious culture of regular redecoration, dark and hairy and manly.

Local radio burbles in the corner by the window - last year's DJs presenting the hottest of last year's music, imposing themselves on the room but welcome in lieu of having to make small talk. I'd love to go to one of those American places where we'd chat about the kids and I'd take a phone call on my cell mid-trim, but this isn't a film and I don't even have any children. A haircut is the one bit of prolonged service where both parties have to remain in each other's company. You'd never have to chat with the waitress or the guy on the till in the petrol station. It gets awkward beyond 'how are you', I'm no small-talker.

Conversation was ultimately the least of my worries - I wasn't sure if the guy had early-onset Parkinson's or was still steamed from last night. His breath was retchingly boozey and his hands were shaking. I like that hairdressers like to put on some theatre - a squwoosh of talcum powder, the clacketing of the scissors, the fake accents, that pointless thing with the mirror at the end - but when it gets to the point that customers are praying to make it through...the drama becomes somewhat misplaced.

I was getting anxious. This was taking too long. I don't see so good without my glasses, I'm at the mercy of my captor. He was stopping sporadically, bracing himself against the back of my chair, limbs pumping. At one point he broke off to stare at himself in the mirror some. I would have left him to it, but I was imprisoned by a wall of fabric and half a haircut.

We got through it, our mutual unspoken ordeal - my heart was going like a piston when he whipped out the cutthroat, but I still have both ears and a complete neck. He paused as I handed over my nine-odd pounds of hard-earned. Perhaps he was expecting a tip ('lay off the sauce, son, and knock 20% off that ridiculous asking price'), maybe he was going to say a few words. For all his faults I liked the wee chap, we shared a something.

...I believe this is what's known as Stockholm Syndrome.