barbarians, we are

Jez says we are all barbarians really.

Switch off the televisual apparatus, get down to the gallery, see some pictures.

I agree.

henry cooper is alive and well

Good to see our 'Enery in the papers. My foremost memory of Henry Cooper is watching him from the car while he served my Gran in his greengrocer's shop in Wembley. He was talking to her and she was laughing all the while. I don't know what he was telling her and neither did she, being profoundly deaf, but I've no doubt it was something charming. It's a better memory than him ''splashing it all over'' - I see he's going to be doing more of that hence the newspaper item - and probably slightly better than putting Cassius Clay (later to be Muhammad Ali) on his arse.

HC decries the demise of teaching the noble art of boxing in schools. I'm with him on that. I never had the opportunity; wish I had now. Instead I was offered Judo lessons, which I tried even winning a medal in an inter-school championship, but it's not the same I don't think. Anyway, the point to this post is Henry's pearl:

“Whenever something or someone upsets you, count to ten before responding. Losing your cool isn’t good for you.”

Sound advice, and I could have done with doing this the other day. Trouble is, it takes discipline and practice and, unless you deliberately go looking for altercations, you don't get the practice. I learned from training our pup that any such counter-measure has to be done at level 1 or 2, yet often you're at level 5 or 6 before you know what's going on and it's too late. Maybe we could try counting to ten during every meeting; that might work. Still, no one got harmed during the making of this episode.

not the God question

My ''impossible'' question is no longer impossible; it has been downgraded to ''very, very difficult''. Having played the quiz I suspect this is largely due to the number of players ''skipping'' the question instead of guessing. Even if you can't read, you still have a one in four chance of getting it right! Using intuition, you can cut the odds even more. Though relatively illiterate, I still managed a score of around 60% over 200 questions using intuition, and a smidgen of common sense. The question was never impossible.

The question that is impossible is the existence, or not, of God. I think nothing gives me less satisfaction than hearing a debate about the existence of God. Unless it's about football; I just don't get it. But there are probably many parallels between supporting teams and religion.

The question of God's existence is not relevant. It's a distraction, it's missing the point by a mile. Isn't it time religious debates moved on? What's really relevant is the wisdom that has been laid down for the benefit of mankind across all the religions - and I'm including atheist ones too. Much of this wisdom crosses religious divides. This implies that this wisdom doesn't acknowledge the supremacy of any god; it is more important that knowing gods.

Gandhi put his finger on it when asked if he was a Hindu. Yes, he replied. And a Christian, and a Muslim, and a Jew. He wasn't just being diplomatic, he was pointing beyond the differences in gods to the wisdom at their cores. Wisdom for everyone's enjoyment and benefit. Not just for followers.

on pensions

The BBC commissioned a survey which suggests half the UK are not putting ANY money into pensions, and on the BBC news yesterday, it was further suggested that a person aged 50+ would need to put £1000 every month into a pension scheme in order to acquire a pension income of £10,000 (by today's value, I presume) from age 65 onwards. So that's,

(65 - 50) x 12 x £1000 = £180,000

According to this article, again by the BBC, the Office for National Statistics reveals longevity for men in the UK in 2006 to be 77.3 years. Let's call it 78.

(78 - 65) x £10,000 = £130,000

Is there something wrong with this maths? What happened to the average pensioner's other £50k? Okay, this is a gross simplification: investments could go up - or down; inflation could go up - or down; interest rates could go up - or down. Based on recent trends it's down, down, down all the way. Notwithstanding the potential effects that peak oil, climate change, and population growth will have on all of this. Is it any wonder people aren't climbing over each other to give fund managers their ''hard-earned'' wonga?

People forget how new this extravagant pension idea is; my grandfather's father never had one and I doubt my grandchildren will. Our generations have been living in a cosy bubble of prosperity and it's about to be pricked. We really have to rethink our old age plans.

impossible question

A short while ago I signed up to Goodreads. Such is the speed of modern times and my impetuousness that I can't remember how I came to be there in the first place; was it a stray link or was I searching for something in particular? I must get my short-term memory checked out.

Anyway, never mind all that. I idled away some hours on the trivia quiz and thought I'd better offer up some questions of my own, and I'm surprised how difficult they turned out to be! - it grades them by some black-box computation and puts it on their stats page. I put up a couple more and, apparently, I've now submitted the ''impossible'' question. 'Larks!

town & country

I have to say, half-way through and Small is Beautiful isn't as good a read as I thought it would be. I think the overall spirit of the book is sound but the message often suffers from emotional and wayward composition. Maybe it's because it was written over 36 years ago - hmm, not a great while ago - or maybe it's just me.

However, every now and then a familiar truth will stand out. I'm more certain than ever now why I had to get away from London, and why, when I eventually settled down to family life, we chose Hertfordshire, and why that wasn't far enough and we eventually moved to rural Wiltshire, and why now, living in Ciren, even though we live closer to the open countryside than the town centre, and it's a small town, a pleasant town, it reminds me too much of suburbia and I ache to move again.

Schumacher says the spirit of man is not meant for urban living and yet James Lovelock, in Revenge of Gaia, says 90% of us now live in urban environments. Both say we have problems because man has divorced himself from nature, and from the Earth. Towns are the problem, the countryside is the solution, I believe that.

mo' jazz

My iGoogle feed page informs me today is International Jazz Day: a day set aside each year (since 1991) ''for the world-wide celebration of America's only indigenous art form''. I didn't know that about Jazz; I assumed art was derivative. Nevertheless, the link to How to start a jazz collection comes a bit late to be of much use but I'm relieved I managed to work out the right steps, and execute them, more or less, in the right order. But, as Armstrong probably never said, It's jazz, not rocket science*.

*In case I forget to mention it later, rocket science will be celebrated on 20th July, 40 years since the giant leap for mankind.

work & income

In the four and a half months since I've been ''laid-off'' only one person has correctly identified what I really need; an Income. I have no trouble finding Work; in fact the list of things I can find to do far exceed the time I have available to do it in (a commutation, surely, of Parkinson's Law), and Employment I've always regard as something someone finds you to do in order for you to conform to the requirements of society. The latter I could live without, really; it has no merit other than a short cut between the first and second. Even Self-Employment won't do.

What I'm actually looking for is the key to Self-Reliance.

a case for time travel (part two)

Around the time of my birth a lot of exciting and good music was being made and recorded. By the time I knew how to tune a radio or put a record on, most of this music had been relegated to the bin of history: it was the age of hippies and rock, soon to be ''prog. rock'', and, in less than a decade's time, punk rock and the rest, as they say, is history, and history is bunk. With forward on hold, and sideways not looking too clever, there's only going back.

I've just arrived at the end of a little sojourn into late 50s jazz. I started, naturally, with Miles Davis, followed through with Coltrane, Adderley, Lee Morgan, Art Blakey, Sonny Clark, Dexter Gordon, Hank Mobley, Wayne Shorter, Horace Silver, Oliver Nelson, Grant Green, and Kenny Burrell... This final CD I'm listening to is Charles Mingus, Ah Um, and I have to say I've obviously inadvertently kept the best to last. Superb.

a case for time travel (part one)

There's an apocryphal tale that when 70s band, Free, signed to Island Records, its owner, Chris Blackwell, asked them to consider changing their name. I think he was afraid of putting Free on the album covers and having punters believe they were gratis. Bassist Andy Frazer, who must have been only 15 at the time, stoically told Blackwell the band was called Free and he could take it or leave it. Of course, this implies a certain degree of irony on Blackwell's part, or maybe irony was lost on him, I don't know: they were Free, not The Free.

Forty years on it's causing a problem no one at the time could have been aware of. Try Googling for the band. Even Wiki's disambiguation has them way down towards the bottom of the page. For youTube, it's best to go for Paul Rodgers or one of the other band members, and take it from there. It's worth it, you forget how good a band they were. And so young. When they started making records not one of them was over 18. I suppose that doesn't sound like a big deal today when we have Britain's Got Talent, X-Factor, etc., but it was; there wasn't so much instant fame. Yet singer Rodgers was just 17 and had one of the best soul voices in Britain. He still does - I checked it out - but he looks more like Tom Jones these days. Even the roguish looking broken tooth is capped. More is less, dear boy.
~

Further thoughts on bands and the definite article. There was the case of Eurythmics being constantly introduced as The Eurythmics. The Rolling Stones became Rolling Stones for a while (at the same time as Keith Richards became Keith Richard - after a while it was said he wasn't sure which it was), and then back to The Rolling Stones. Them could never have been The Them, and The Who has to be The Who, of course, even though the question mark was dropped. But The Guess Who? Surely not. (That's my question mark btw - they don't even have that.)

go native bees!

Hey, did you know our honey bees aren't ours?
They are, allegedly, Italian. And probably from New Zealand.

Apparently, these bees were considered more docile than our native species and produced more honey per colony. However, despite their temper and laziness, British bees may prove to be more resilient to CCD.

And The Co-op, when not digging the countryside for gravel, are investing in a project which might see an expansion of the native ''black'' honeybee, apis mellifera mellifera (brown), and its cousins, apis mellifera nigra (black) and apis mellifera lehzeni (heathland). Good for them! Go Native Bees!

effing ethics

I've been thinking of transferring my current accounts to more ethical banks, partly for the ethics and partly because the recent financial fiasco has shown how unsafe banks can be, especially if they're of the hard-nose variety. That's the impression anyway. Naturally, I thought of the Co-operative Bank, part of the Co-op group. They seem ethical. According to their website they have an ethical policy which states;

''it won’t invest in businesses whose core activity contributes to the unsustainable harvest of natural resources...''

and an ethical engagement policy which states;

''The Co-operative Insurance and The Co-operative Investments states that they will encourage the businesses in which they invest to end the exploitation of nature – which results in the loss of plants and animals and their surroundings – and consider more sustainable natural products and services.''

So I am confused by this story in the local paper saying the Co-op Group is seeking permission to extract five million tonnes of sand and gravel from beneath a plot of countryside they own. Is this the same Co-op or some other Co-op? It makes me wonder. At least with my current bank there's no doubt what they are.

joined-up bloggery

Talking of Appleyard, he links to this article about the decline in blogging. Apparently, the activity is ''so 2005''. Maybe it is but I've said it before and by now any claim suggesting blogging is past its peak is pretty much also ''so 2005''.

Then we learn about Twitter - essentially a ''mini-blog'' when used properly. I love Twitter - when used properly - 95.7% of the time 140 characters is all anyone needs to post and all people ever need to read. Sure, blogging has talent but this takes genius! Of course, not all Twitters are showing genius but I've heard if you give enough chimps typewriters you'll end up with Shakespeare.

Talking of mini-blogs, Bad Science has one and I think Goldacre's mini-blog is better than the big one. I got the TinEye link from ''Superclever image recognition search shows BNP voters don't actually exist.'' Brilliant.

And what's this about ''Peter Hain promotes quacks''? The thing I hate most about this story is the statement;

“It seems extraordinary to me that despite a recent poll indicating that 75% of people want complementary medicine available to all on the NHS, that very few such clinics exist.”

What poll was that then? No one asked me! In fact, a recent poll suggested that 85.7% of people claim they have never been asked to take part in a survey to represent public opinion on any issue. (I know because I conducted the poll. I asked myself, I wasn't entirely sure I was never ever asked my opinion on anything otherwise it would have been 100%. No one else was involved.)

This piece is awash with these meaningless statistical percentages. At no point do we know who or how many, or how they were asked. Did they use the expression ''in an ideal world'' or did they suggest diverting their taxes from valuable research and proven therapies and care to employ non-medical practioners and dubious therapies?

I don't hate all alternative (or complementary) medicine, but I do hate that it's presented as a confederacy. Most of it is, to paraphrase James Lovelock, largely useless but mostly harmless. Some of it is pleasant enough in a flattering way, and a bit has been proven effective. But too much is plain nuts and I wouldn't want to see my tax pounds diverted from, say, Leukaemia research or palliative nursing care, and given to an on-line course graduate sugar-pill pusher. I'd really hate that.

go self-signify yourself

I expect most writers like to tell you something new. It isn't entirely necessary. Even when they tell us what we already knew, they usually tell it in a better way. That's their craft, assembling the right words and putting them in the best order. I admire writers.

I see Bryan Appleyard.com has written an introduction to his links explaining favourites and blogrolls. He says they are ''character attributes'' and ''self-signifiers''; we say we knew this all along; but he puts it a lot better.

He doesn't mention that it's a two-way process: knowing the compiler - or random collector - gives significance to the links. Normally, I would look down that list and think pah! (or uh?), but, no, I reckon they must be cool, despite appearances.

Like, New York?! This made me smile.
~

Btw, I like the idea of searching for images for this blog. On my other blogs I've been mindful to use my own images but as this blog isn't specifically for images, making appropriate images is a drag. Besides, searching for images is educational.

Helen Levitt's NY street scene is evocative of Cartier-Bresson and that's exactly why I was drawn to it. No surprise to find he was one of her influences. I don't know much about Helen Levitt. Finding out she died less than two months ago is strangely sad, almost as this blog began.

Btw2, I also found this ''reverse image search'' which is interesting. TinEye. You upload an image and it searches for identical (or near enough) images on the web. Good for telling who's using your images without permission.

troglodyte nation

It's hard to write this post now. Yesterday, as I walked the dog along the Monarch's Way, the faint sound of traffic finally petering out until only the wind and my squeaky left boot filled me ears, it seemed an easy task. The words came readily as I imagined them being typed into the blog. But in my room, in front of the laptop, I feel despondency clouding over my thoughts. I want to be outdoors.

Being off ''work'' I've learned a few things about myself. I'm obviously an outdoors guy. It began in January when I dug the soil over in my coat, and through until May when I'd gradually stripped down to the waist. I have been in the rain and not minded, I am learning to read the weather, I have noticed the change in wild flowers, and I have developed a bronzed look without going through the redness and pain phase. Working on the allotment, being around to witness and experience, constantly, the outdoors, just seems so astoundingly natural to me. Is that ironic; being in nature being natural? Not really. So what happened?

I am aware it'll be necessary to return to ''work'' for financial reasons, and this would mean office work, ''business as usual''. This saddens me. I wish I was a farmer but that's not likely to be: I was brought up in ghastly suburbia. I'm not kidding myself farming isn't harder work than most urbanites would know but there is the knowledge and I don't have that, not just the ''how to'' knowledge but the all important instinctive and spiritual knowledge that country people have through generations. Whereas, I am urbanite. Like 90% of all humans, I live, work, and think indoors. I am a member of the great troglodyte nation.

Maybe I could become a postman...

love and hate

I hate the weather forecast. It's hopeless. It causes me to make the wrong decisions. It's supposed to rain today, it's art class this morning and I hesitated long enough to find myself on route in the car, looking at the road, looking at the sky, thinking it wasn't too bad, convincing myself it would rain come home time. But it didn't. And it still hasn't. I could have cycled after all, damn it!

But I love the new library. Despite it's hat-tip to modernity, it's seeming lack of book-shelves, and its confusing sections, for instance, IT manuals stacked below a sign which clearly says ''philosophy''. They've streamlined and automated much of the work of the librarians which means you don't have to queue. You can collect your requested books and log them out yourself, you can log them back in, and renew them too - I've just done this while the car sat on the double yellows (something I hate doing but all the short stay spaces were occupied and I wished I'd had my bike). Anyway, in and out in under five minutes. Love it!

People Matter

I began reading E.F. Schumacher, Small Is Beautiful: A Study Of Economics As If People Mattered, today. I requested it from the new library; it was in central storage and took some time to track down, I don't expect it gets much of an airing. It's a book I think I should have read in the 70s but I didn't know of it then. The writing is of that period, quite text-bookish, not the chatty, let-me-explain, easy style of most recent books on ''serious'' issues. I find myself going over paragraphs again, getting into the style; often it seems to be written for economists: there's jargon and terms I can only guess at the meaning and he has an annoying habit of putting many terms in inverted commas.
Despite this the overall message so far is familiar. There's even parallel sentiments I recognise from The Ragged Trousered Phil. Just how far back does this wisdom go? And why hadn't I noticed then, and why are people not noticing still? The so called ''Business As Usual'', I guess.

the pleasure of Feynman

Posting the James Lovelock interview earlier reminded me of a favourite video; Richard Feynman on The Pleasure of Finding Things Out. Feynman was a physicist who had worked on developing the atomic bomb, and on quantum mechanics and quantum electrodynamics. In 1965 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics. He was a captivating lecturer and I can see how in this programme. As you can see in this clip, he also liked to draw portraits.

It's the first part of a five-part video of an original broadcast in 1981 by BBC Horizon (about 50 minutes altogether). Follow the link to YouTube, it's worth watching the whole programme.

public library

I am difficult to impress. It is something I've hated about myself for as long as I remember. It has caused me to seem an ungrateful boy at Christmas and, later in life, to be misinterpreted as 'cool', aloof, dull, miserable, and on occasion antisocial. I'm pretty sure I'm none of these things for most of the time.

You should never read an autobiography of someone you don't know from a bar of soap. I borrowed Roger Scruton's, Gentle Regrets from the newly revamped town library expecting it to be as stimulating and enlightening as the Lovelock book I had just finished. I suppose it didn't cost me anything. Well, no more than I would have to pay for the service even if I didn't use it. But I did wonder why I was spending time on it when I'd also borrowed Steinbeck's East of Eden. It felt like a moment when you take a seat on a bus and the stranger next to you starts telling you his life story - yes, exactly like that! - and it's irrelevant and meaningless, and you just want to look out the window and enjoy the familiar and real meaning of the journey.

At this point, you could simply change seats or stand, but that would appear rude so you get off before your stop because waiting for the next bus, even in the cold and rain, is better than this. With a book, a book from the library, you simply return it early. God, I do love the public library!
~

I borrowed a third book that day. (Three seems to be a natural number.) It was John Humphrys' Beyond Words: How Language Reveals the Way We Live Now. It was well written and convincing but I found I agreed far too easily and was bored with the cause before chapter three was over. Never mind, I was heading for the library anyway...