Truffler's Treat

8:13am: I am a twit...
...ter...
...er


Please 'follow' me:

http://twitter.com/JonMinton


I am sure I will never be able to write in sentences and paragraphs of more than 150 characters again.

11:20am: M$ Songsmith 'pwnd'
In a decade, all music will sound like this.

8:40pm: What?!
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/7897394.stm

So, one guy expresses his opinion about an issue; another guy disagrees with the first guy's opinion, and personally insults him; then the first guy says to the other guy "I'm sorry I caused you to insult me"?!

Not quite the same as apologising to someone who shoots you in the face for getting in the way, but fairly similar.

(Personally, I think Mandelson's more of a Karl Rove than a Dick Cheney, but fortunately I've never met any of them...)

10:08pm: Fallout 3 Detox: 28 Weeks Later
Currently, I'm trying to detox my evening self from habitual intoxication by Fallout 3, a post-apocalyptic computer game set in Washington DC.
As conceptual 'methadone', given that it's also got a post apocalyptic setting and gratuitous gory violence, I've just watched the film 28 Weeks Later.
The problem: I got bored of it after slightly over an hour. The plot got far too predictable.
This is probably because because this is an English-language film, and for some reason, English-language countries don't really seem to know how to do horror, and don't know how to do apocalypse. We don't seem to be sufficiently willing to countenance and run with the relentless situational logic inherent in a story that's truly horrific, and truly apocalyptic. We don't seem to be willing to accept that, if something really terrifying and really horrific happens, it's going to happen to everyone, and not make a distinction between 'the worthy' and 'the unworthy', and between 'men' and 'women and children'. In short, we seem to forget that horror should be completely devoid of moral content. In English language horror the agents of death and mutilation always tend to operate as 'cosmic balancers': killing the anonymous, the morally stigmatisted, the men, and the sexually and morally promiscuous before everyone else, and sparing the repentant sinners (the women who learn the errors of their ways before the zombies manage to eat their brains) and the young and pure (children). The problem with moral horror is that it's always immoral, by being 'preachy' in a way that smells of fire, sulphur and brimstone.
Japanese horror films are horrific. Spanish horror films are horrific. English and American horror films (and, worst of all, American-financed American horror films) are not; they're boring and predictable.

Perhaps it's not morality within horror, per se, that I'm railing against. Instead perhaps it's the type of moral framework employed within these films that I don't like: it's deontological - obsessed with categories, boundaries, and transgressions - whereas I think I'm more of a cold-hearted consequentialist: what matters is what happens; one should reward those actions that lead to good things happening, and not reward (or even punish) those actions that lead to bad things happening.

In 28 Weeks Later, and from a consequentialist perspective, the two children at the crux of the story are responsible for the violent deaths of dozens, or even hundreds, of people, as well as millions of pounds worth of damage. So what if they didn't intend those outcomes: those were the repercussions, and that's what matters.
From the deontological perspective adopted within the film, however, none of that matters. The children are children: a sacred and hallowed category of person, and so automatically assumed to have a morally privileged position to the many adult victims whose deaths they cause.

Watching 28 Weeks Later makes me sympathise with the National Institute of Health and Clinical Excellance (NICE: though I'm sure many people would disagree with the acronym), and the cold-hearted rationality underlying their Quality-Adjusted LifeYear (QALY) -based utilitarian cost-benefit calculations. This, despite me from an academic discipline that's taught me that they're the cold-hearted bad guys in the social sciences, and we're the warm-blooded good guys!

8:32am: Money as Debt
I almost forgot to post a link to this 47-minute animated film on the principles, concept, and 'ontology' of money.

It's by far the most interesting and insightful thing I saw last year. It does a good job of bringing financial and economic theory back to everyday practice [1]. Most importantly, it suggests how "one thing can lead to another", "how we got here from there".

Any comments/ideas relating to the video and its ideas welcome.



[1] See also Margaret Atwood's Payback, which I strongly recommend.

10:40am: Kids on Christian Metaphysics and Ethics
AKA 'Awkward Questions about Jesus'

(From BBC semi-improvised comedy programme 'Outnumbered')


Fortunately (from religions' perspective) children grow out of applying logic to religious belief by the time they're ten.

6:23pm: Bush Approval Ratings
Just came across this.

Questions for US Citizens; so-called 'World Citizens' who somehow think that, just because you watch a lot of US films and TV shows, you should have a stake and say in how (probably) the most dysfunctional country in the developed world should be run [1]; and [2] nerds [3]:


i) If the approval ratings were to drop down linearly, when would you project a 0% approval rating?
ii) If you (like me) think the ratings show signs of approaching a 'floor' value asymptotically, what do you think this asymptote value is likely to be? (i.e. what proportion of US citizens do you think would 'approve' of the US president no matter what he did? Also, how much of this 'automatic approval' is because he's a president, and how much is because he's a Republican?)
iii) Converse of question ii: Do you think there's a 'ceiling' asymptote? And if so what do you think this value would be? i.e. what proportion of US citizens would disapprove no matter what the president did? (Bonus subquestion: how many 9/11 type events would it take for Bush to be this popular?!)


You can start guessing.... now!

---

[1] I fear I'm one of these.
[2] To clarify, I mean, in Venn diagram parlance, the union of these three groups, not just the intersection.
[3] I know I'm one of these (See previous footnote.)

6:48pm: Resolution
As a new year resolution I decided not to play computer games before 7PM.

As a result of this, 7PM is now 'magic hour' (and sometimes lasts well over an hour) and dinner is ready (and starting to digest) by 6.45PM.

Another resolution is not to buy any new games for at least six months, so it's likely the 'magic' will begin to fade. (Unless, like my mother, I discover some kind of endless, enduring appeal to Solitaire.)

2:10pm: Porishead: Third
Listening to this.
Bought it a few months ago; only listened to it once before.
I got out of the 'habit' of listening to music about 3-4 years ago. I tend to listen to (and find myself frequently annoyed by) Radio 4 instead.
I became drowned in music: my collection of mp3s became so large every song started to feel generic and anonymous. There was no longer a sense of ownership of the music, of making the commitment to at least decide to listen to X instead of Y. Instead 'music' became one of many buttons I could press: 'on' it flows; 'off' it stops. Just another stream, someone else's stream. Music became just 'sounds', rather than something connecting me with my soul.
Note to self: listen to more music. One album at a time...

1:25pm: Happy New Year!
Happy New Year!

I've decided that, if I'm going to bother 'blogging' (terrible term), I should at least make what I write interesting to my most dedicated reader: me!

More specifically: 'Future Me' - the Me of a few hours, days, weeks or months hence who's forgotten whatever it is that 'Present Me' happens to be knowing or thinking about now.

For this reason, I'm thinking of 'blogging' (still terrible term) sundry thoughts and first impressions regarding something I've read, heard, pondered, or seen that Future Me might care about. (Even if no-one else will. Fortunately, Future Me doesn't really care about how clearly or 'poetically' Present Me writes. In fact, the worse Present Me's writing, the more smug Future Me will feel in his own quality of writing... set the bar low, Present Me says)

Currently...


I've finally gotten around to reading The Gershon Review. (I printed it before Christmas.)

I first became interested in (in principle) reading the report when I heard, on the radio, the term 'Gershon Saving' mentioned: savings (or should that be 'savings'?) attributable to the Gershon Review recommendations.
"What is efficiency?" asks one of the chapter subsections. I think this subsection wasn't long enough. Efficiency, it seemed to say, is getting a higher ratio of 'outputs' to 'inputs'. From this perspective, the Public Sector is just a black box, marked 'Process'. Two lines emanate from the box (say, horizontally), of equal length. The line on left concludes with an arrow pointing towards the box, and is marked 'inputs'; the line on the right concludes with an arrow pointing away from the box, and is marked 'outputs'. The efficiency of the process, it seems, is just the ratio of 'outputs' to 'inputs': cut the inputs, while keeping the outputs the same, or increase the outputs, while keeping the inputs the same... and the process is more efficient.
This reasoning assumes that public services are a lot less complex than almost all circuit boards (light switches aside), or even a cubic millimetre of braincells. No feedbacks, no interdependencies, no stochastic components, no non-linearities, no time-lags, no inputs that are also outputs, no connections between process boxes, no 'known unknowns' regarding the intricacies of bureaucratic structures. Just a simple division of a nominator and denominator.

Written in 2003-4, a promise is made to make the public sector more than £20 billion more 'efficient' by 2007-8. (No storms on the horizon then. Let's all be 'lean' [leveraged?] and 'efficient' like those geniuses in the private sector. They know how to do things efficiently; we don't.)
Achieved how? Mainly, through around 70,000-84,000 job cuts.
Where? From 'Back Room' rather than 'Front Line' staff. (The 'Front Line' are the outputs; the 'Back Room' are the inputs.)

Salience seems to be important behind this reasoning. Why pay for a solid lump of hardwood when you could just have some MDF covered in mahogany laminate? (Just make sure the joins don't show.) If the 'customers' (as claimants and service users are now called) can't see the employees then the employees can't be very important, can they?
However, salience is more complex, and more important than that. Different ways of delivering 'outputs' produce different types, different qualities, of output. The problem of 'incommensurability' rears its ugly head: an X is not an x is not an [X]: someone on the 'frontline' who spends half of the time with the claimant filling in forms (which previously were filled in by someone in the 'back room') is not providing the same service, the same output, as someone on the frontline who doesn't have the added paperwork (or e-paperwork: just because something is handled electronically doesn't necessarily make it less time-consuming). Change the inputs and the outputs can change in unexpected and undesirable ways. (Tap it like you used to and it won't sound the same, won't feel the same; even if, on casual inspection, it looks the same.)
Another example: automated electronic transfers of fund lack the saliency of an interpersonal encounter. Where's the sense of reciprocation? The sense of gratitude and recognition of the service provided by the recipient?

I'm more of a believer in an 'ecological' approach to organisations: When I look, I can't always tell the difference between a resource-hogging parasite and a vital organ. Unlike many people, however, I know I don't know this.

7:25pm: War and Peace
I heard this earlier:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7706163.stm

If people are trained for a few weeks to respond to perceived threats with lethal force, and then, as one of their first experiences away from home, are placed for a few months in a dangerous and unpredictable environment where it essentially pays to be paranoid, and where horrible, traumatising things happen, should it surprise anyone that many of those leaving the armed forces come with a set of dispositions, habits, and attitudes that, by civilian standards, count as mental illness?
To use Pierre Bourdieu's terms, I guess the purpose of military training is to help people acquire a War habitus. Place someone with a War habitus back in a Peace field and of course there's a big potential for mismatch: seeing threats where they don't exist, responding with violence to the slightest provocation, thinking in 'conspiratorial' us-verses-them terms, being overly-prepared to carry out orders without hesitation... all these sane (as in potentially life-saving) behaviours in the mad environment of war suddenly become mad behaviours in the sane(ish) environment of peace.
Given this, can anyone explain to me why many Right-wing Populists (e.g. stereotypical Daily Mail readers) seem to believe that compulsary military service would be a good idea for the perceived problem of dysfunctional and uncivil teenagers?

10:20am: Large Hadron Collider
Imagine that a group of explorers spot another group of people playing a board game (think checkers/draughts) using some stones to represent their pieces.

The LHC strikes me as akin to trying to understand the rules of the board game by looking very, very, very carefully at the stones being used to play it.

I don't get the point: can someone please explain why I should be either interested or excited?

9:45pm: Last night I saw Hellboy 2. I enjoyed it more than I'll ever admit to. It's about as good a rendition of a standard good-guy-fights-and-beats-bad-guy arc as I can imagine (though, ultimately, that's what it is); not least because the 'good guy' is the son of satan, and the 'bad guy' is played by one half of late-eighties pop sensation Bros!
Visually, as can be expected from del Toro, it was beautiful. The director (who also wrote the script) has a brilliant way of making fantasy dirty and grimy, just as cruel, complex and harsh as 'the surface', but more heightened and exotic. He has a way of enchanting and re-imagining and re-animating aspects of nature (earth, grass, stone, ice, water) into anthropic daemons, of turning monsters into sculptures, sculptures into monsters, fairies into insects, insects into fairies. (I think of Del Toro's style as like a cross between H.R. Giger and Hans Cristian Anderson; he also seems to have a 'thing' about wind-up clocks...)

In other news: my brain seems to be getting tired of thinking of new ideas for my PhD thesis, and (more problematically) expressing them in 'academicese' (or even English). Soon I think I'll move into a phase of 'drudge-work' - reattaching references and citations, re-reading what I've written to make sure it obeys at least some grammatical conventions, and so on - in order to give my enthusiasm for really thinking some time to recover.. (at the moment it feels like I'm trying to reach an asymptote).

10:34pm: Wall-E
Imagine a caring but naive parent who wants to feed their child some bitter medicine. To make it a bit easier on the child they mix in some honey, and then some more, and then some more, and then some more, and then some more, until they're left with a big pot of honey containing a teaspoon of medicine.

Then they feed it to the child.

And then the child vomits.

2:31pm: Varieties of Gaming Experience
One day last week (they all seemed to blur together) I was playing GTA 3 (the 'original', though I remember the earlier, overhead predecessors) whilst listening to Radio 4 and a programme started whose premise seemed to be as follows: some concerned, well-meaning, well-healed, radio-4-listening, world-consciousness-raising parents believed their son was spending too much time playing computer games, and thought they would try to 'inspire' him out of the joypad bashing by taking him somewhere 'exotic' (the Mongolian Steppe, I believe) and showing him that the real world was such an exciting, interesting and engaging place that he didn't need to look to 'virtual worlds' for excitement, interest, or engagement.

A fine sentiment (though, as before, it's slightly naive and objectionable that rich Westerners should believe that the every-day activities of poor Easterners should automatically be more exciting or interesting than their own), but I think it's based on the wrong idea about one of the main appeals of games. Games narrow, rather than expand, our range or interests, choices, possibilities, and experiences: that's what's so addictive about them.
I write as someone who knows the visceral appeal of (computer) games all too intimately. I think it's a more heightened, more temporal, microcosmic variant of what draws people towards religious rituals, life-coaching manuals, habits and routines, and strict 'moral' codes. To my mind, such activities make reality more game-like: they narrow down the range of choices people have (and have to make) in their daily lives, they strongly dictate the goals towards which individuals should direct their efforts, they offer a limited range of options about how such goals should be achieved, and they assure adherents that achieving the goals whilst playing by the rules will be amply rewarded.
For someone who can adopt a game-like metaphysical framework, the world becomes a clearer, simpler place - with good guys and bad guys, right actions and wrong actions, things to strive for and things to avoid. Do an hour of yoga every day before going to work, and you'll live to a grand old age in great health; pray seven times a day (at times and in ways that are clearly defined), and you're guaranteed a place in paradise; just do these things this way and everything will be fine. 'Life' becomes a game: no more need to worry about the 'what' or the 'why' of it all, now all that matters is 'how'. ('How' to become a millionaire; 'how' best to show one's devotion to God; and so on...)

Within the programme it was mentioned that the son the parents wanted to wean off games by showing him the breadth of the world had been diagnosed at school as 'dyslexic' and 'dyspraxic'. If he were in the US, I guess this means he'd been labeled as having 'ADD'... whatever the official diagnostic category, my guess is this means the child has more difficulty 'paying attention' and 'staying focused' than most of his peers.
Or, to flip this logic on its head, this probably means he's probably already more 'open to new experiences' and aware of things going on around him than most of his peers. Perhaps his world is a little less linear, a little less structured, a little less certain, a little more ambiguous, than most of his peers'. Perhaps, then, computer games function as temporary respites; oases of structure and certainty in a complex and shapeless world populated by people who don't seem to realise that it's not a game.

... Or maybe that's just me.

10:52am: Tribes
Assuming that my time is worthless, I'm continuing to get infinite value from the BBC (by having no television, and thus no legal requirement to pay a television license, but at the same time listening to BBC radio and watching programmes on the iPlayer). Recently, I've been taken by a couple of programmes based around the contrivance of Developed World 'westerners' going to and living with ancient tribes.

The first is 'Last Man Standing', in which pop anthropology is hidden inside a thick coating of high-energy, US-style reality TV gameshow: six male contestants - arrogant, narcissistic jocks from the US and the UK - have to compete with each other in a series of games. The twist: the games are those created and played by various ancient tribes from around the world. Each week, the jocks would live with the tribes and learn the rules and techniques of the game; invariably, this also meant learning something of the customs and rituals of the tribe, at least insofar as rituals - dances, chants, ceremonies and so on - were integral parts of the games.
Most interesting to me was an episode in which a form of 'cricket' practiced by a tribe in Papua New Guinea: many generations ago, Western missionaries came to the tribe to 'civilise' them, and taught them Christianity and cricket; after the missionaries left, the tribe seemed to discard the Christianity but keep the cricket, adapting it into something very much their own. Batters bat with carefully selected and prepared tree branches, delegating the running to specialist runners, grass skirts and feathers flailing as they run, each team comprises fifty or sixty players, intoxicated on a local herbal drink, who burst into intricate song and dance routines lampooning their opponents each time one of their players is bowled or caught out. Sometimes the games turn into low-level warfare, they mention; a few years ago a rival chief's son was killed...
Originally I thought the reality TV gameshow format was incorrigibly inappropriate, a sign of the BBC desperately trying to force interest and appreciation of the 'other' to uninterested and unappreciative lumpenproletariat. But then I realised that the format was, in an odd sort of way, completely appropriate, as its central conceit - ranking and sorting of young males into a dominance hierarchy - is fundamentally tribal, a kind of isomorphic thread of male behaviour that links all cultures, whatever their level of ostensive economic development, whether they live in jungles or cities.

More recently I've watched two episodes of what appears to be the female corollary of Last Man Standing, called 'Tribal Wives'. Perhaps more conventionally anthropological, without the gameshow structure, the 'suspenseful' music, and the ADD-inducing editing, it's instead based around the premise of the high-flying, highly-stressed career-woman-with-kids wanting to 'rebalance' her work-life with her home-life, and her body with her spirit, by going somewhere where people haven't forgotten how to be in touch with their environment, their friends, their feelings, and their inner-selves. (i.e. the premis follows, arguably, from a kind of naive fetishisation of extreme poverty.)
The two episodes I've seen made an interesting contrast. The first involved a middle-aged, previously divorced career woman with three kids going to a small tribe (or perhaps 'band') of about 50 people who lived in the Brazilian rainforest; the latter involved a sub-middle-aged (mid 30s rather than mid 40s) Irish previously-divorced (from shotgun marriage following teenage pregancy when aged 17) career woman with three kids going to a medium-sized tribe in a dry African dustbowl.
Although it wasn't stated explicitly in the programmes, the first tribe were mostly hunter-gatherers, though with some basic agriculture, and the second were subsistence farmers, entirely reliant on their crops and their livestock.
Again, though this wasn't stated explicitly, the first tribe seemed friendlier, happier, calmer, and more egalitarian, both in terms of differences between household wealth, and gender relations (for example, they were monogonous). The second tribe, by contrast, seemed to be unhappier, more possessive, less friendly (they laughed at the protagonist when she tried to 'fit in' by dressing like them), more tense, more jealous, and more unequal (for example they were polygynous - one man with many women, which by implication means many men with no women - and marital relations appeared to be skewed in favour of male dominance over females).
By the end of the first woman's sojourn in the first tribe, she had been married to a middle-aged divorced tribal man who had spent the previous few weeks courting her with offerings from long hunts in the jungle, and was distraught at the prospect of leaving the tribe and their way of life. By contrast, the second woman was very happy to leave when her stay was over, having suffered drought, diarrhea, and persistent social ridicule.
The first woman arrived and left in a plane; the second woman in a car. When the second tribe saw the car, they were jealous ("She must be rich because the windows of her car go down without a handle", one of them said). The first tribe, apparently, were not.

Though just a set of contrived, carefully edited (and thus potentially misleading) anecdotes, the differences seem to fit with what I've read about the relationship between agriculture and inequality. Once people depend upon their possessions to live, they start to live for their possessions. More possessions thus means more chance of surviving; less possessions, less chance. Comparative wealth soon matters as much as absolute wealth, as having less wealth that others means having one's life-chances increasingly determined by those with more wealth. Accumulation and ownership thus become predominant concerns, and can spiral (and have spiralled) into practices and standards of living that can endanger the entire planet...

I've realised I just sounded like a self-righteous hippy. Of course the situation's more complex than this, and I'm essentially ambivalent (rather than simply dismissive) about modern ways of living. However, ambivalence and endless equivocation isn't a useful way of thinking about these issues clearly; better to take on a perspective and see where it takes you, than to change direction mid-route.

10:24am: 'Super Size Superpower'; The BBC
Our World: Super Size Super Power - a BBC documentary shown at 5.20 in the morning, on their 24-hour news channel.

If a Martian were to watch the programme without sound, I think it[1] would conclude that black people are fat; white people are thin. I'm sure that's not the intended message, but it does seem to give that impression.

One of the most unintentionally funny moments is when the (thin, white) British presenter and the (thin, white) American scientist walks into a Mississippi fast food outlet and the presenter says something like, "So this is soul food?". The scientist responds in the affirmative, and comments that all of the vegetables are deep-fried in lard.

Then there's the scene where the too-obese-to-work black woman with the blonde hair sits outside her porch and describes the great variety of foods she cooks for herself; all the while swaying back and forth, her stomach creasing along different fold-lines as she moves from position to position.

And then there's the scene where the presenter is weighed and has his height measured by a nurse, and seems unable to suppress a smug smile throughout, knowing full well that he's not fat. "My BMI is 22; whereas this woman's BMI is 60" (Cue too-obese-to-work black woman with blonde hair, mentioned previously)

Then, near the end, there's a Mississippi keep-fit initiative where a nurse leads a hall full of school children: the nurse is fat; most of the children are not[2].

---

There's something oddly quaint about BBC documentaries like these: it's as if the BBC still can't shake its early role as a provider of 'public information' programmes, designed to 'educate' the British Citizenry, by producing programmes that try to present complex and important issues in a way that the 'average viewer' can understand. In doing so, as in the above documentary, the BBC sometimes seems to underestimate the viewer's intelligence; and overestimate their interest in the issues. (Implicitly, with respect to the latter, they seem to concede the point, by putting on 'worthy' shows like these on at times when only severe insomniacs would be awake.)

Over the decades this assumed role of 'educator' has perhaps become increasingly about trying to make the average UK citizen more conscious and interested in 'world issues': a current series being broadcast is A Year In Tibet, where TV cameras follow the daily lives of farmers and spiritualists/quacks in [guess where!]: it's all very sedate and picturesque, but I can't help but feel the series was commissioned based upon the assumption that the average Brit should be interested in ways of life that, in fact, they aren't.

In terms of raw economics, for all its assumed (and to an extent true) left-wing ideological biases, the BBC is a regressive organisation: everyone who watches TV has to pay the same amount for the service, but the people who tend to make use of the service tend to be richer, older, and better educated than average (who traditionally tended to watch ITV: the UK's only commercial television station; and now tend to be more likely to have cable and satellite TV). The BBC, in a sense, takes from the poor and gives to the rich.

At the extreme end of this distribution are people - like me - who don't have a television, but regularly listen to radio 4, and watch the occasional programme on the BBC's iPlayer service. (Neither of which requires having a TV license, as that only covers television broadcasts.) In a sense, I'm getting 'infinite value' from the BBC.


erm...


... I don't really have a point to make. The BBC, and its 'worthy' programming, is just something I'm, for the reasons mentioned above, very ambivalent about.

Now: to get on with some work[3]!

---

[1] I've already created a hypothetical Martian: don't ask me to hypothesize its genitals too!
[2] The fact everyone in the hall seemed to be black seemed to suggest racial apartheid can be achieved quite easily without laws that mention skin colour directly, and so make the country a pariah state...
[3] Work, for me, at the moment, is writing a chapter on Incapacity Benefit reforms as part of my thesis. Technically, as far as the national accounts are concerned, this isn't work, but a form of 'economic inactivity' , as I'm in full-time education. Whatever the Office for National Statistics and the International Labour Organisation thinks about what I do, it usually feels a lot like work...

9:02am: Bookish Rock
Happy eating-chocolate-to-celebrate-the-zombification-of-Jesus Days!

On Friday I saw the best 'gig' I've seen for years: The Eels. Or more specifically, "E + 1"

The Venue: The Grand Opera House at York. (Have a look at the website: I challenge you to find any opera; though many things are, I'm sure, in the Yorkshire sense, 'grand')

The Ticket: said "The Eels plus Support"

The Support: A one-hour BBC popular science documentary, "Parallel Worlds, Parallel Lives", in which Mark 'E' Everett tries to discover more about his father (whom he only knew as a bitter, laconic drunk) and his infamous Parallel Worlds theory of quantum physics. Asking one of his father's physics colleagues and friends whether he was ever disappointed that he was never any good at 'math', his father's friend paused, and said, "I'm sure, if your father had the .... 'emotional vocabulary', he would have said he was very proud of you and your musical achievements." The documentary was projected on a white canvas, three stories high.

The gig itself: two multi-instrumentalists - E plus 'The Chet' - moving between a range of exotic instruments - pedal steel guitars, piano, dinky drumset, electrified saw (!) - set out throughout the stage, picking out the two instruments they thought could most represent 'the essence' of the song being performed. In between some of the songs: book readings!

The Book: E's Autobiography, Things The Grandchildren Should Know. Declaring it the 'height of pretension' to read out his own autobiography, E has his bandmate read it out on his behalf (who, during parts of the readings, impersonated E by putting on a thick pair of spectacles).


Is there anything that screams Rock-and-roll more than a book reading and a science documentary on a Friday night? I think not...

12:39pm: Graffiti Snob
Happy New Year ! (!)

The local store I tend to go to most often [*] has a cash machine on its outside wall. In the evenings and night-time, various 'hooded youths' [**] tend to congregate around the machine, as if doing so will make them richer by proxy.

The machine has been helpfully annotated with some graffiti: on the metal frame at the top, in faded black felt tip pen, is a sentence based around a transitive verb: of the form 'A verbs B'. I neither know nor care about A or B, so don't care how and in what order they verb, so long as it isn't too loud.

On the right side of the frame, is the following declaration:

AZBO Kid!

This piece of graffiti infuriates me: surely one doesn't have to be the bastard lovechild of Adolf Hitler and Margaret Thatcher to believe that "there's no such thing as Zociety!" How dare someone misspell the acronym of Anti-Social Behaviour Order!


Then, above the cash machine, clearly written in a tasteful white chalk, is the following:

Eat the Rich!

Ah!, I thought, a facsimile of the right-wing American satirist P J O'Rourke's famous allusion to Jonathan Swift's even more famous satirical 1712 pamphlet A Modest Proposal. Now that's graffiti with learning; that's graffiti I can condone.


But then, I thought, what if "AZBO Kid!" is being ironic? A send-up of the British Educational system, and its failure to provide sufficient standards of literacy to the poorest members of our society, who then, unable to persuade employers to give them work, instead turn to crime. If this were the case, then "AZBO Kid!" is the smarter graffiti.


...And then I bought some milk.



[*] There's one slightly closer, but it doesn't have the range. I suspect it's some kind of drug front, as it has very low stock levels, a thick wire mesh protecting the windows, a door that looks like it could survive an extensive kicking, and is run by a burly guy with a shaven head, who seemed surprised and faintly annoyed when I once went in to buy a Mars bar.

[**] I've now reached the age where I consider 'youths' to be a category that excludes me and is thus somewhat less than human.

12:15pm: Nervous Burrito
I have a strange sense of humour.

I also have a dual identity: as a PhD student at the University of York, within the Department of Sociology; and as a PhD student at the University of Sheffield, in the Department of Geography. (The identities are relatively easy to reconcile: I just have to try to be over-read, "economically inactive", and middle-class; just slightly more so as a sociologist than as a geographer)

Anyway, as part of the second part of the dual identity, I've been asked whether I'd like to meet fellow Geography PhDs as part of a departmental Christmas meal on the 14th.
For this I needed to say whether I wanted a main course that was either 'pizza', 'pasta' or 'Mexican'; and if so whether it should be 'meaty' or not.

So, I wrote the following:

Dear [PhD student who is organising event],

Thank you very much for 'squeezing me in'.

Regarding main course: I'll go for 'vegetarian (non-meaty) Mexican'.

Looking forward to meeting fellow University of Sheffield card-holding
postgrad students [1] before I head back to York!

Best,
Jon Minton


[1] It's complicated... White Rose Studentship funding structure... I
usually have to draw a diagram to explain it!

To which I received the following response:

Hello Jon,

you have too choose a specific main from the menu. Do you mean vegetarian
Burritos when you say vegetarian Mexican?

Cheers,

[PhD Student organiser]

To which I replied:

Hi [PhD Student organiser],

I'm sorry: I don't have a full copy of the menu. However, so long as no part
of the burrito used to have a central nervous system it sounds ideal!

Best,
Jon

Did I mention my strange sense of humour?

10:11am: Random Realisation
"Pimp My Ride" uses a verb as a noun and a noun as a verb.

3:14pm: Cyriak
This guy's animations are incredible, a real testament to the possibilities of human visual imagination.

8:51am: Blog Betrayal
I have been unfaithful to Livejournal.

And I plan on being unfaithful to Livejournal around once a week. (For the last three weeks I have been seeing whether I can be faithful to my schedule of unfaithfulness before telling anyone about my misdemeanours.)

4:24pm: Karl Rove is retiring
Interesting background.

Fucked-up childhood + keen social intuition = modern-day Machiavelli?

5:52pm: Tsotsi
I've recently finished watching Tsotsi, and there's a lot of things I don't like about the film.

• I don't like the lack of context behind the characters and their place in the world: too many things are taken-for-granted. Perhaps lack of context is a strength, however, as to retread South African political and social history would make the film more unoriginal.
  
• I don't like the overall premiss or 'arc' of the film: the process of redemption initiated by a chance event (the accidental theft of a baby): too much of a cliche.
  
• I don't like most of the protagonist's gang-mates. They're simple, uninteresting stock characters. Again, tired cliches.
  
• Not much happens. The pace is too slow. I got bored about an hour through and started surfing the internet for a few minutes before returning to the film.
  
• The handling of Tsotsi's transformation is fairly crude.
  

Despite the above, I really like the film. I found it very moving in places, especially nearer the start (before my attention wandered).

I like Tsotsi almost entirely because of the way the lead character's played. He's played with an almost Martian detachment and curiosity about people and the way they behave the way they do. At the start of the film, he doesn't understand human emotion and human motivations. He doesn't understand 'decency' to use one of the few smart plot motifs developed in the film. He doesn't understand the fundamental drive and desire for life. He doesn't understand politeness; he doesn't understand compassion.
What 'worked' within the film were Tsotsi's confused, angry, restrained, analytical, curious dialogues, initiated at gunpoint, firstly with a disabled homeless man, and later with a single mother. Without these scenes, the film would have been fairly weak. With the scenes, the film was intelligent, nuanced, poignant, and beautiful.