Chasing Waterfalls

The Roar of Silent Waterfalls

2008-03-23T02:31:00.002Z

It's Easter. It's Purim. It's a whole load of other holidays, including a Shi'ite festival and, if I'm not mistaken, a Hindu one. There's even a full moon. The place is just soggy with noumenon.

But to me, most of all, it's the Equinox: the time of change. The sun has swung up into the bright half of the year, the time of growth and possibilities. Before the next equinox, before the darkening of the light, I will be in New York. For good.

At this time, I'd like to share with you some words I wrote on my first visit to the city, a half a dozen of those equinoxes ago.

They say that people who live their entire life within the sound of Niagara Falls never actually hear them, until for the first time in their lives they travel out of ear-shot of the Falls, and suddenly the silence hits them like a solid wall of anti-noise. And I know, and you probably know as well, that feeling you get when after a long, hard day you kick off your tight shoes and suddenly, for the first time, you feel just how foot-bindingly tight they have been all day.

That's how NYC feels to me.

It's been said that freedom is "the hunger in dark places, the longing of the soul," and with these magnanimous sentiments I neither can nor wish to disagree*. Let me say only, then, that freedom is also the roar of silent waterfalls and the vice-like grip of doffed shoes.

And this is what NYC means to me: finally, it is defined not by its attributes, but my the attributes it lacks. When I search the faces on the subway, in the streets & in bars, looking in fearful desperation for what I dread to find, I fail to find it: that miserific expression of hateful, hate-filled despair that I think of as the London look is almost totally absent here in NYC.

People here are just good. And that's all she wrote.

At 22.30 on a cold, dark night, huddling against a wall to shelter from the rain, I realized that there was nowhere on earth I'd rather be.

It took three years; three years of sorrow and darkness; three years of fear and doubt and despair (and some spectacularly Sucky Jobs, which I really will post one of these days...) but in less than six months, I'll be there; I'll be home

This post is dedicated to thegirl, in the hope and expectation that we will both achieve our dreams.

*I still (2008) agree with the sentiments. The miserable failure who uttered them? Not so much.

A Dirty Trick On The Comp Sci Students

2007-11-11T07:06:00.000Z

Back in the 1990s [when people still believed in stuff], a Computer Science professor once played a very dirty trick on his students. Like most professorial pranks, it was delivered during a mid-term exam.

The class in question was called something like Technological Privacy Tools 202 and was concerned with the potential uses of Privacy Tools like anonymous proxy servers, digital bearer cash, encrypted emails and so on. So, there was a mid-term. You know the way things work in exams-

(Any Republicans who may be reading this will please think back to junior high school)

-anyway, they have this piece at the beginning in italics that explains the rules:

read all the questions; no looking at your neighbor's paper; no loud whispering of “Hey! Hey! What does this bit mean?” …

Anyway, this particular prof had written something along the lines of:

…please indicate how you would use the Privacy Tools to deal with the following situations. There are nine questions. Q9 will take you a little longer to answer than the others, but will be worth double marks, and if you can answer it satisfactorily, it will show that you have truly understood the lessons of this course.

So, the students read through the exam, and sure enough QQ1-8 were things such as:

Your stupid government has violated international law by banning online gaming. How can you wager your hard-earned cash on a little Texas-Holdem without the Federal Bureau of Killjoys finding out?

And then the students came to Q9, which read, as near as I can remember it:

You are a farmer in North Korea. Two days ago the soldiers came and confiscated the last of this year’s crop. Your baby is sick. Weak with hunger, you sit outside your house when a movement catches your eye.
An unmanned aerial vehicle is flying over the country, dropping thousands of parachute packages. One lands near to you, and you pick it up.
It is a solar-powered PDA, which comes with a recorded video message in your language, explaining its features. Features like the webcam, the email app and the internet browser, as well as the hotlinks to a number of interesting sites: a nutrition guide to the flora and fauna of East Asia, a medical diagnosis and treatment site, the schematics for a number of firearms and a comprehensive manual of guerrilla tactics, as well as email addresses for a number of expat Korean organizations and links to the Privacy Tools we have studied in this course.
With the sum total of human knowledge at your disposal and ready access to a world of big-hearted fellow human beings…
What now?

You know, Professor, students are supposed to cry during midterms when they don’t know the answer to the question.

You magnificent son of a bitch.

S E Asia again

2006-12-15T02:39:00.000Z

Strictly speaking, I have already gotten out, though only temporarily.

It's been observed that one of the problems with being unemployed is that you start work as soon as you wake up. Another problem is that you don't get paid vacations. I haven't been off the Island of Lost Souls in twenty hellish months. The first thing I did, when I locked in my current long-term contract, was to book a little time off.

I thought of Cape Town again. (Not Rio, much though I love it. I'll save it for when I'm based in New York, when it will be much easier to destinations in the Americas than in Asia or Africa.) Then it occurred to me that I had never seen Angkor and that, since it is literally on the other side of the world from New York, this was pretty much my last chance. So this post is coming from the city of the angels, Bangkok, from where I shall be jetting to Cambodia tomorrow.

I came in on Qatar Airways, a first-rate long-distance carrier that I thoroughly recommend, with a blink-and-you-missed-it layover in Doha. What little I saw of Doha impressed me. It seemed like an efficient and well-organized airport - granted, I had flown out of Gatwick so pretty much anything short of a prison riot would have impressed me well-organized at this point.) Doha is either dry, or the bar is well-hidden; I suspect the latter based on something al-Hamedi once said. (Sorry, can't find the reference. ISTR he described Qatar as "the end of the pier"; the place Saudis go so to women can walk around without wearing tents and people can have the occasional drink.) The other thing I noticed about Doha is that they use English style plugs, with their three huge prongs. Why, I wonder?

As for Bangkok, the new international terminal is a disappointment. They really need a separate immigration counter for people who were polite enough to fill out their immigration cards beforehand (which excludes pretty much all the tourists.) The coup does not appear to have affected life much. In fact the whole city is much as I remember it, although the shrines to the king are bigger than ever before; this is apparently his diamond jubilee.

Ma qui la morta la bloggi resurga!

2006-12-11T21:17:00.000Z

Now from the dead may my blog awake again!

What a horrible year 2006 was.

For the first three months I was between jobs, as I had been since I told Sucky Job #6 to FOAD back in 2005 - more on that later; now that I am blogging again I plan to post the entire, sordid series of Sucky Jobs.

A couple weeks after my Last Post (March 10th), I ended up in Sucky Job #7; a contract gig working for the most useless and dysfunctional company I have ever encountered, an experience that nearly lost me my closest friend in the world.

Another Sucky Job followed, one that was unusually pointless even compared to the previous Sucky Jobs.

We were halfway through 2006 now, and it had become painfully obvious that my escape route from the continent of the Neanderthals was blocked. Out of the dozens of American companies I applied to, not a one would consider sponsoring me for an H1B visa. At the same time, I was working on the long distance short cut of joining a big transnational and getting moved internally. That went nowhere as well, and besides - it would involve spending another two years in la cita dolente in the hope that they would one, move me at all, and two, move me to New York and not, say, Kaakhstan.

There was one remaining possibility, and it was a desperate expedient, but hey, any means necessary, right? Become a graduate of a US school, and I could use a techicality in the visa laws to finesse my way into an H1B and hence into a green card and freedom.

The only course I could do at this point in my life would be an MBA. (Before you ask, yes, I did go to business school in London. But I didn't get an MBA; I got some kind of wack-ass MS that nobody quite recognizes. Like most of the things I end up doing, it seemed like a good idea at the time. So there was no reason why I couldn't do an MBA as well.)

There was only one problem. To get into business school one needs two professional references.

I could hardly get them from Sucky Job #6, since we had parted on acrimonious terms. (They swindled me out of my last paycheck. I'd have sued them if the Brits knew what the fuck the word litigation means. But I've little confidence that the grandson of a machinist would get very far suing the grandsons of dukes and viscounts in a British court.) Nor could I get references from Sucky Job #7, since I had resigned from the company in disgust. (I'll be writing this up later. It's quite a funny story, to people that weren't involved in the events themselves).

A reference from Sucky Job #8 was no problem. My manager there was a real mensch. (Actually, it was my friend Fergal from business school. Yes, I'm corrupt. Deal with it.)

I desperately needed another reference.

At this point I was given precisely the opportunity I needed: I was hired to do a spot of coding for a huge commercial bank. It was by far the most challenging and worthwhile thing I did in the last five years. I worked my ass off, twelve hours a day, fought off the passive resistance of their full-time-preventers-of-IT-services department and completed my task on time, and even managed to write up some documentation, which I am told none of their developers had ever done...

And in return, I asked my manager for one lousy little reference. He told me it would be no problem. It seems, however, that it was. The deadline for one school went past, then another, then another.

Right after that, my grandmother, my last remaining grandparent, died. (That is to say, her heart stopped beating; she had fallen to Alzheimer's syndrome a couple of years previously so it might not be strictly accurate to say that she herself died in October of this year.) At any rate, we cremated her in my, her, hometown of Necktie, Greater Glasgow; it was a rainy day, appropriately you may say, but then most days in Necktie are rainy, and as her simple pine casket was lowered into the fire I thought, I will write a will, and I will say if I don't make it, scatter my ashes in Manhattan, so that I will go home, if only in death.

And so I flew back to la cita dolente, to despair, to the prospect of complete and total defeat, to the distinct possibility of my own death. I am genuinely convinced that if I had had to stay in London for another two years, it would have been fatal. Whether I died of a stroke, like my grandfather, or by my own hand when the pain became too much to bear, they would undoubtedly have succeeded in killing me off.

Notice the tense I used. Past. Because something wonderful has happened.

I'm getting out.

I have been accepted by a business school. (I'll call it the Patrick Henry U). Not a famous or glamorous one; not a name you'd probably recognize, though they do quite well on at least some of the league tables. Not a great location, either; a town that I consider to be flyover. But hey, at least it's not London. I can tough it out for a short while, then I can leverage into a job in New York. I'm getting out!

(And I may not even have to go to Patrick Henry after all. It occurred to me that I might get away with using a co-worker as my second business reference, and that allowed me to make the deadline of a school in New York, one you would recognise the name of.

(I'm not posting the names because I'm a little paranoid about Patrick Henry revoking the offer if they realize I'm still applying elsewhere. There's no reason for me to worry, of course; this blog is pseudonymous and I'm reasonably confident that my True Name can't be deduced from the bad puns and veiled references I use to describe my life. For instance, "Patrick Henry University" - you thought that was George Mason U, didn't you? But it could be a literary allusion; check your premises. Or am I just bluffing and it is in fact GMU?

(And also, of course, nobody ever reads this blog. Still and all, I'm taking no chances.)

Right after that, mirabile dictu I was hired to do something worthwhile that will advance my career, working for a big transnational bank. It's as though the stars have moved into alignment.

Whatever. All I know is that, for the first time in way too long, I have hope. Hell, I have something better than that. I have certainty. God bless Patrick Henry U and their admissions director; even if I end up studying somewhere else I swear that I will never forget how they helped me when nobody else would or could.

I'm getting out!

The World's Most Shameless Movies

2006-03-10T10:08:00.000Z

Inspired by this post from the admirable Dean Esmay, here's my list of the Five Most Shameless Movies Ever.

5. The Other Blockbuster: Ever notice how often the blockbusters come in twos? Armageddon/ Deep Impact. Volcano/ Dante's Peak. Lord of the Rings/ Harry Potter. etc/ etc

Every time one studio has a Big Idea another studio will copy it. Invariably. Shamelessly. That's entertainment...

4. Chiller: (OMFG. Researching it on IMDB I just found out that this one was directed by Wes Craven. I'm tempted to upgrade it to #1, because if anyone should have know better than to make a POS like this it was Craven. Still, he cast Cathy Tyson in a major international picture, so he gets a free pass; I'll let this stand at #4).

Chiller is an example of a class of movies apparently designed to ~~pander to~~ warn "flyover" America of the dangers of Things That Nerds Are Into. (Another example would be Mazes and Monsters, which explained in tedious detail how RPGs Will Make Our Kids Crazy! The genealogy of these movies goes back to Reefer Madness, at least). In Chiller, the Evil Nerd Craze That Will Destroy Our Families was cryonics, which viewers were assured would allow Satan and all his minions to possess the bodies of the dear departed*. I've singled this movie out as particularly because of its potential effects. In the final scene, a wiring fault in the cryonics facility destroys the remaining corpsicles, and this is evidently intended as a Happy Ending. Now, I don't know if cryonically-preserved bodies will ever be re-animated by advanced technology; I kind of doubt it. (Not the technology itself; the will to use it for that purpose - who wants to be up to his ears in 500-year-old primitive ancestors?) But I am 100% certain that bodies that have not been cryonically-preserved will not be re-animated by advanced technology, for the simple reason that they won't be frcking there. The implied message of Chiller is that cryonically-preserved bodies should be destroyed, which strikes me as desecration at best; at worst, murder.

Either way, it's shameless.

3. Cruel Intentions II: Not to be confused with Cruel Intentions. The original was possibly the best modern adaptation of a classic I've ever seen, and within those constraints remarkably faithful to the source. Sequels are always difficult. You can show how the original characters develop (eg Smokey and the Bandit is about outrunning the cops and winning the bet; the sequel is about realising there's more to life than that); or you can show the characters, unchanged, in a new situation, which is what most sequels do.

What mercifully few sequels do is show exactly the same characters (with worse dialogue), played by completely different actors (worse actors), in a plot almost identical to the original, only considerably worse. That's Cruel Intentions II.

The single most shameless aspect of this movie is the opening scene, which is essentially xeroxed from the original. Imagine if the opening scene of Godfather Part II featured Ed Wood playing Don Vito Corleone sitting in a room listening to a cabinet-maker begging him for favours. That's Cruel Intentions II.

The Intentions couldn't have been as Cruel as the actuality...

2. Showgirls: Yep, you saw it coming. There are many movies out there that have gratuitous nude scenes that distract from the plot, which is generally a Bad Thing; Showgirls has a great deal of gratuitous nude scenes but frankly, the plot is so lame, one-dimensional, exploitative and irredeemably tacky that any sort of distraction is a blessed release.

By far the most shameless thing about this movie is the pathetic attempt by its writer, Joe Esterhas, to defend it as a serious movie. (Over on IMBD Bothan from Birmingham AL rips Esterhas a new one. Go read it. You'll be glad you did.) Joe: you're a dunce.

Showgirls is utterly lacking in any redeeming quality whatsoever; its influence was so baleful as to fatally damage the careers of two very promising perfomers (Gina Gershon & Kyle McLanahan); and yet, remarkably, there exists a movie more shameless and more putrescent than Showgirls; a movie that can only be described as a disgrace to the human race, and its name is

1. Barb Wire: This is the single most shameless movie ever made. Beyond any shadow of a doubt.

Plan 9 From Outer Space may be the worst. The Birth Of A Nation is perhaps the most repulsive. But, categorically, Barb Wire is the most shameless movie ever made.

Part of its shamelessness, a small but significant part, is the fact that the movie is an unapologetic vanity vehicle for Canada's most in-your-face surgical addict. Pammie: stick to movies like your widely-downloaded Pammie And Tommy On A Yacht (NSFW). Please do not torture the artistic sensibilities of the world with any more movies like Barb Wire

Part of the shamelessness of Barb Wire was the fact that the plot is, quite simply, stolen from Casablanca. Not that there's anything wrong with that, if you do it the right way: for instance, Last Man Standing is A Fistful of Dollars is Yojimbo - just as Cruel Intentions I is Les Liaisons Dangereuses. Remake a classic well, and you get another classic. Remake a classic badly, and you may be forgiven, if you meant well.

The makers of Barb Wire, however, clearly did not mean well. The plot of this movie is, as I said, stolen from Casablanca and you no doubt recall that in Casablanca, the protagonist is the proprietor of a bar in the neutral zone between the Good Guys (the Allies) and the Forces of Evil (the Nazis). There is not one single original idea in Barb Wire, and so in that movie too, the protagonist is the proprietor of a bar in the neutral zone between the Good Guys and the Forces of Evil. Except that, in Barb Wire the Forces of Evil are universally referred to as the "Congressional Republic", which, given the release date (1996) can only be construed as a reference to the Wicked Republicans who had ~~won~~ usurped control of Congress a couple years previously. By thus equating Gingrich's Republicans with Hitler's Nazis, Barb Wire chose to be the mimetic Index Case for the BusHitler Syndrome that has since reached pandemic proportions.

To sum up: this movie was a meretricious, parodic plagiarism of a great work of art; a hackish vehicle for a walking advertisement for Dow Corning; and worst of all, blazed the trail for the demonising of political opponents as the equivalent of the Nazis - which has not only tarnished and corrupted political discourse but has cheapened the suffering of the victims of the Nazis' crimes. Every single person connected in any way with this movie ought to be ashamed to look at his own face in a mirror.

Barb Wire is unquestionably the most shameless movie ever made and released.

*Interesting to compare this premise with that of Potter's Cold Lazarus, in which the soul of Daniel Field was bound to his cryonically-preserved head and thus unable to enter paradise.

Creator of "Bad MoFo" Now "Dead MoFo"

2006-03-09T20:05:00.000Z

Gordon Parks has died. That's Gordon Parks, the director of Shaft etc, as opposed to Gordon Parks, the director of Superfly, who's been dead pretty much forever.

I've nothing much to say on the subject; I just was surprised to learn that the directors of the only two blaxploitation movies everyone can name on a bet were father and son. Never knew that...

Life Imitates Seinfeld

2006-03-08T22:34:00.000Z

So I found the motherlode of Seinfeld quotes (H/T Ken from secondbreakfast) and one in particular caught my eye:

Jerry: So your saying UNICEF is a scam?
Cosmo Kramer: It's the perfect cover for a money laundering operation . No one can keep track of all those kids with the little orange boxes of change.

It made me quite nostalgic for the 1990s, when the idea of the UN as a huge washer-drier for dirty money was just a surreal comedic fantasy, and the idea of crazed fanatics using 747s as guided missiles was just a pulp spy novel plot.

Biologist JBS Haldane once observed that "the universe is not just stranger than we imagine; it is stranger than we can imagine." We've learned that that's not always a good thing.

The Hell With The Little Bastards

2006-03-07T16:32:00.000Z

Bill Hicks used to inveigle against restaurants that banned smoking but allowed children. ("BECAUSE OF THE HYPOCRISY!")

Here's more in that vein from a commentator on Chicagoboyz who wasn't prepared to sign his/ her name to one of the more cutting analogies I've ever seen on a blog.

Personally, I want the government to subsidise my gym membership. What? Society gets a benefit from me being fit. I'm less likely to suffer from heart problems, which means not only will I not be a drain on the healthcare system, but I'll likely stay economically productive much longer than the unfit. Why, if nobody went to the gym we'd all be a bunch of lard-assed parasites, and nobody would ever get anything done. Society would collapse. If you think about it, I'm actually subsidising the rest of you idle layabouts! Seventy pounds a month is a small price to pay!

Three Failures

2006-02-13T21:12:00.000Z

1. After a night of passion with last year's Miss World, George Best fell asleep on a big pile of banknotes and was woken by a waiter bringing his champagne breakfast who shook his head and asked, "George, where did it all go wrong?"

2. A hundred years ago, a wealthy American businessman signed a million-dollar contract with a shakily-drawn X, and explained that he was illiterate. "You're a self-made millionaire and you can't _write_ your own name?" gasped the vendor. "Do you know what you would have been if you could?" "Yes I do," said the businessman, "if I could only have signed my name the day I got here from the old country I'd have been janitor of the Pedestrian Street synagogue ever since...."
(Some similar ones over at snopes; or there's Maugham's Revised Anglican Version, if you prefer...)

3.Rupert Brooke:

Because God put His adamantine fate
Between my sullen heart and its desire,
I swore that I would burst the Iron Gate,
Rise up, and curse Him on His throne of fire.
Earth shuddered at my crown of blasphemy,
But Love was as a flame about my feet;
Proud up the Golden Stair I strode; and beat
Thrice on the Gate, and entered with a cry --
All the great courts were quiet in the sun,
And full of vacant echoes: moss had grown
Over the glassy pavement, and begun
To creep within the dusty council-halls.
An idle wind blew round an empty throne
And stirred the heavy curtains on the walls.

Wandering thoughts on these Three Failures:

1. Best enjoyed telling this anecdote. He'd achieved the lifestyle of his dreams; why would he want to crawl out of bed on a cold morning and run around the soccer field when he could get liquered and loved up to his heart's content? On the one hand, the admiration of skinheads, bezitted adolescents and low-ranking hotel staff; on the other, booze & babes. I don't think it took him too long to make up his mind.
2. Succeeding at something good prevents us from succeeding at something better. Become a janitor and you'll likely never become a millionaire. A Sucky Job (such as my appalling Sucky Job #5, or the still more hideous Sucky Job that followed it - which I will get around to blogging about one of these days) may zap your brain so thoroughly that it may prevent you from seizing opportunities: for Non-Sucky Jobs, for becoming a better person, for joy and happiness. (Certainly, when I was mired in the depths of my last Sucky Job, it prevented me entirely from blogging. That's why my greatest admiration is reserved for people like Dean Esmay or Robbie Taylor, who can plough through Sucky Jobs and still keep doling out the free icecream to the blogosphere.)
3. In his poem, Brooke achieves the ultimate success of storming heaven, and finds that the paradise he imagined is a deserted ghosttown. This concept - that to achieve your goal and find it worthless is the ultimate in failure, worse than abandoning the goal before it is reached - is either a very deep philosophical insight or the product of a very diseased mind. And, judging from this, this, this, this and this, I'd have to go with the diseased mind theory. Brooke was a thanatophilic miseryguts; a kind of gaijin Mishima, right down to the hungering after violent death. Still, he talked purty.
4. At any rate, we can take comfort from the thought that "There is no such thing as failure. You either get the result you expected or you learn something from the experience", which has always struck me as being a rare example of a motivational soundbite with genuine teeth; actually, it's the most succinct statement of the scientific method I've ever come across.

(Inspired by this incident).

Groundhog Day, Part II

2006-02-02T13:59:00.000Z

At 0830 this morning, xj, the Seer of Seers, the Prognosticator of Prognosticators, emerged from the subway and saw...

The offices of a large accountancy firm.

Which means: A whole load of Americans are going to be filling in tax returns some time in the next eleven weeks.

Also, that the stereotype of the socially retarded accountant wasn't simply made up; for the love of God, who schedules meetings for 0830 in the am? My brain needs to warm up like an old-fashioned vacuum tube amplifier in the mornings. Don't expect frontal lobe activity before about 1000 (on a good day)...

Groundhog Day Part I

2006-02-02T13:56:00.000Z

At 0800 this morning, xj, the Seer of Seers, the Prognosticator of Prognosticators, emerged from his burrow and saw...

London.

Which means: My life is going to continue to suck for the ~~next six weeks~~ duration.

Hopeless in Gaza

2006-01-27T00:56:00.000Z

So, the one set of people more reliably unreliable than the British Tory Party, ie the Palestinians, have shown the extent of their "respect to the opinions of mankind" by electing as their new government Hamas, an organisation so terroristic that even the Zeropeans noticed, and whose party platform includes:

“Initiatives, and so-called peaceful solutions and international conferences, are in contradiction to the principles of [Hamas]”;

“There is no solution for the Palestinian question except through Jihad.”;

“[Israel] is behind the drug trade and alcoholism in all its kinds so as to facilitate its control and expansion.”

(And, ladies, check out Article 17: Hamas evidently regards any kind of outreach activity as an act of war).

Hamas considers Palestine to be “the navel of the globe”; I would argue that it more closely resembles another small, circular body part.

I do not condemn the Palestinians for wanting a state of their own; rather, I condemn them for blowing up children to score cheap political points. (I forget who it was that said that if these people would only adopt the tactics of Ghandi, they'd see an Israeli Labor government in three months and an internationally-recognised sovereign Palestinian state in three years...)

Some may say that the Palestinians have been hard done by, and I would agree: hard done by the Israelis, possibly; hard done by their enablers in the Zeropean Union, probably; hard done by the Arab states, certainly. (The motto of the other Arabs with respect to the Palestinians has always been millions for murder, but not one cent for relocation. The one Arab state that made a serious attempt to accept Palestinian refugees, ie Jordan, ended up the target of a Palestinian coup, which gives you some idea.) It's perhaps an explanation; it's no excuse. A human being will weep and rage for a brutalised, frightened child, even as he administers the lethal injection to the serial killer that child grew into.

(Commentator Vercingetorix at protein wisdom is all over this one.)

Not That There's Anything Wrong With That...

2006-01-26T15:27:00.000Z

Jeremy Thorpe.

Mark Oaten.

Simon Hughes.

Are there any straight people in the Liberal Democrats?

I'm just asking...

"xj Brings Peace to Mid-East"

2006-01-25T22:21:00.000Z

According to the Quran, Mohammed was transported from Mecca to al-Masjidi al-Aqsa (the Far distant place of worship) and back, in one night, by divine intervention.

For some reason, Moslems generally assume that the Far distant place of worship is the one on top of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, but this is nonsense on its face: the distance between Mecca and Jerusalem is less than eight hundred miles, whereas the distance between Mecca and London (home to several mosques) is nearly three thousand miles.

Clearly, therefore, no place of Islamic worship in Jerusalem can be the Far distant place of worship. (If it were, that would mean that Islamic worship was forbidden by divine decree to go any farther from Mecca than eight hundred miles, which would mean among other things that no Moslem could live in Europe, the Americas, most of Asia (most of Iran, for that matter, and all of Pakistan), pretty much the whole of Africa (including Darfur, as near as I can work out), and of course the whole of Australasia.)

It would seem to me that the Far distant place of worship is by definition located as far away from Mecca as possible. In principle, one would expect to find it at the antipodes of Mecca. However, checking this handy resource I find that the antipodes of Mecca are slap-bang in the middle of the Pacific Ocean: clearly, Mohammed didn't go there.

(The antipodes of Mecca do turn out to be disturbingly close to the location of R'lyeh, but I would not seriously ask my readers to believe that Mohammed was connected in any way with the worship of Cthulhu; you'll have to go over to little green footballs if you want that sort of thing.)

No, I think we must look for the Far distant place of worship on a piece of land reasonably close to the antipodes of Mecca. But which?

French Polynesia? Was Tahiti, around the time of Mohammed, the sort of place that could be described by the Quran as a place of [Islamic] worship, or was it not? That's kind of a no-brainer.

Easter Island? Famous for statues. Statues are bad, m'kay? The Grand Ayatollah is very clear on this subject. Easter Island is no place of [Islamic] worship.

No, there is one very obvious place, not a million miles from the antipodes of Mecca (about five thousand miles, in point of fact, but who's counting?), which clearly fits the bill: a location world-famous for its magnificent monumental art (completed, conveniently, just in time for Mohammed's journey there in 627 CE); a location whose art is entirely two-dimensional, and consequently entirely halal (see the above al-Sistani link for details); a location whose art, visible only from space, seems expressly designed to complement the subsequent journey into the heavens that Islamic tradition insists Mohammed embarked on after being transported to the Far distant place of worship...

What could be more obvious than the fact that the Far distant place of worship is the Nazca plateau?

Now this discovery means, of course, that the Islamic claim to Jerusalem as a particularly holy city of that religion is obviated: indeed, it is not clear why Moslems would have any especial interest in Jerusalem now that its claim to be the location of al-Masjid al-Aqsa has been shown to be nonsense. The mosques that happen to be located in this Islamically-unremarkable city will retain their sacred character, no doubt, but the city itself? No more sacred than, say, Urumqi in China.

(Moslems do venerate Jesus Christ as the penultimate prophet; the next best thing to Mohammed. But Moslems also believe that Jesus did not die on the cross in the Jerusalem metropolitan area, or anywhere else for that matter: the Quran clearly states that "they slew him not nor crucified, but it appeared so unto them" [verse 157; scroll down] - it would appear that the Roman occupation force in Judea c. 30 CE were a somewhat gullible lot, capable of ~~stringing~~ nailing up Judas Iscariot or some random bloke called Simon in place of the turbulent rabbi they had in mind...)

Consequently therefore, this discovery of mine means that the al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades will naturally redirect their attentions from the State of Israel to the Republic of Peru, and will turn their dread arsenal of high-ordnance women and children towards the shameless kuffirs that have dared to claim dominion over the holy ground of al-Nazca. (Because as you know, the sole reason for the activities of the al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades was to liberate the Far distant place of worship from the control of non-Moslems. It's not like they are the deniable fifth column of a crazed theocracy of genocidal Holocaust deniers or any such arrant nonsense.) This change of policy will have dire implications... for the al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades; the Peruvians know exactly how to deal with that sort of person...

For my role in bringing peace to the Middle East, I will eschew all prizes and awards; the satisfaction of a job well done is all I crave. With one exception: if any Lebanese protest babes feel a compelling desire to express their gratitude to me... well, it would be rude of me not to-

I'd Like To Think So, At Least

2006-01-25T21:44:00.000Z

Generally when I do these things the answers I get suck out loud (my animal personality is "badger"; my Heinlein book is "I Will Fear No Evil" - easily the worst thing he ever wrote; my Matrix persona is "Cypher"; oh, and according to the Historical Leader Reincarnation Test, I used to be Adolf Hitler.) Now, finally, I get an answer I can be proud of:

I'm a Chevrolet Corvette!

You're a classic - powerful, athletic, and competitive. You're all about winning the race and getting the job done. While you have a practical everyday side, you get wild when anyone pushes your pedal. You hate to lose, but you hardly ever do.

Take the Which Sports Car Are You? quiz.

So I'm the car I always dreamed of owning as a teenager. Nice.

H/T the Instadude. (But don't all go there at once. We wouldn't want to crash his server in an xj-lanche...)

Why Satire Is Obsolete, part xxxviii

2006-01-25T13:25:00.000Z

The classic comedy show The New Statesman featured a contest between two British Tory MPs as to which one was more right-wing than the other. The contest was won by the author of the article Towards a New Economic Miracle: the case for slavery.

Remarkably enough, a prominent Tory MP has now argued in favour of slave labour, with every appearance of sincerity.

And even more remarkably, he has apparently done it to make people think that he is less right-wing. (Then again, Pol Pot was very big on forced labour as well)...

H/T Tim Worstall (again)

ROTFLMFAO

2006-01-25T13:17:00.000Z

...is an overused phrase, but in the case of this it's the only appropriate one. And as you might gather from this post, I loved the Princess Di-ed reference.

H/T Tim Worstall.

Bringing the Nobel Peace Prize Into Repute

2006-01-18T00:17:00.000Z

Via Shay at Dean's World comes the shocking news that once again, somebody has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize who has actually done something to promote the cause of peace.

The Nobel Peace Prize has traditionally been awarded to people who start or escalate wars, or otherwise oppose the enforcement of peace, with mass murderers being also highly thought of. (Hello down there, Tookie: hot enough for you?) But standards have been slipping of late: first Rudy Rummel, and now Ayaan Hirsi Alli, have been nominated!

Chasing Waterfalls believes that this is a very disturbing trend in international relations. The Alli nomination strikes at the heart of everything that the Nobel Peace Prize has come to represent. (It's as though the Literature Prize had been inexplicably given to someone who wasn't crazed with a murderous hate towards the US, on some spurious and nonsensical grounds such as talent.) After this unprecedented nomination of not one but two decent, courageous, sane and entirely admirable people, there is only one way that the Nobel Committee can regain their erstwhile position in world esteem: give the Nobel Peace Prize to the president of Iran.

You read it here first....

Forget it, Jake, it's.....

2006-01-16T00:15:00.000Z

Proof, if more proof were needed, that the city government of the City of Los Angeles consists almost exclusively of crooks.

In other news, water is wet, fire is hot, the Pope is a Catholic, and our investigative team has a Shock Revelation concerning the personal hygiene habits of bears.

(I needn't give myself airs; it's not so long ago that half the city council of my "beloved" hometown of Necktie, Greater Glasgow, were busted for dealing drugs out of high school classrooms. What made it worse is that they had built the high school themselves, in the deserted part of town next to the airport; and when the public auditors started asking embarrassing questions along the lines of So, baillie, ye built a school wi' nae bairns tae learn in it? Whit were ye thinkin'?, the city council then tried to shut down several schools on the other side of town so that their students could be moved to their, ahem, Kwik-E-Mart. I swear to God I am not making this up. I wish I was.)

Seriously, the abuse of eminent domain is one of the cruellest and most despicable acts that can be committed by a government; I hope everyone responsible burns in Hell. (Which, for an LA public employee, is pretty much a foregone conclusion...)

H/T the bootylicious Sondra. And BTW, Polanski fans will find a grim Easter Egg in the tenth graf of the KTLA story linked above. Chinatown, indeed.

Slim N Kim 4 Life

2006-01-15T10:40:00.000Z

So, Eminem has rehooked up with exwife Kim.

I think Kipling said it best:

The Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire,

And the burnt Fool's bandaged finger goes wobbling back to the Fire.

Another Triumph For The Magic Kingdom

2006-01-12T22:32:00.000Z

The Saudi ruling family's claim to power and pre-eminence in the Moslem world derives from their guardianship of the two holy cities of Medina and Mecca. Here's an example of just how well they've been guarding the latter.

Part of the problem is that pilgrims all have to visit Mecca on the same day. Yes, that's right: Wikipedia, the world's most impartial and reliable source of information [/sarcasm], confirms that the pilgrimage must take place during the four days of Eid-ul-Adha. Now, given that there are at least one billion Moslem in the world, each one of whom is required as a religious duty to make the pilgrimage to Mecca at least once in their lifetimes, you can imagine the place gets pretty crowded around al-Adha.

The official explanation involves a bunch of people tripping over luggage, which begs the question: WTF was the luggage doing there? Mina (where the deaths occurred) is a grand total of three miles away from Mecca, where the hajis were staying. Who takes luggage on a day trip?

HT Mary from Dean's World. And remember folks, Alhamedi is your first-stop shop for Saudi-related facts and analysis!

I For One Welcome Our New Robot Overlords

2006-01-06T10:42:00.000Z

It seems that someone has written a program that can analyse music written by a given composer and then compose a new piece in the same style. And the usual suspects are squawking that this is the End of Humanity because a soulless machine is composing music.

But this is missing the point. The soulless machine is not composing new music; it is composing derivative music, which is a far easier task. So easier, in fact, that high-school kids who are taking music exams are expected to do it under exam conditions. (A friend of mine at high school who sat the national Music exam mentioned that one of the questions that came up every year was: "Here are a bunch of random notes. Please make them into a fugue in the style of J S Bach.")

It's a very nice hack, no doubt, but as one of the commentators at Dean's World observed, the real achievement would be to get a machine to compose completely new music.

Nazis in Space

2006-01-05T23:34:00.000Z

Remember the plot of Star Trek: The Slow Motion Picture? Where a being that evolved out of the Voyager space probe decided to exterminate all life on Earth?

Recently I had occasion to check out the Wikipedia entry on known and reputed Nazi war criminal Kurt Waldheim, and it turns out that one of the two people chosen to write the messages to hypothetical space aliens that were carried by the Voyager space probe was none other than Kurt Waldheim.

The other? Jimmy Carter.

Suddenly the plot of that lousy movie makes a lot more sense. If my only experience of humanity was Kurt Waldheim and Jimmy Carter, heck, I'd want to destroy the world too.

Quote of the week

2006-01-05T10:32:00.000Z

From one of the commentators over at protein wisdom:

The NYT may not “love” terrorists, but is friends with privileges with them.

Happy New Year, Ba'ath Broadcasting Corporation Style

2006-01-03T22:37:00.000Z

So there I was, minding my own business, and doing what I prefer to do on New Years' Eve, which is to say, nothing very much, and someone turned on the BBC's 'Ere, It's Noo Year, Innit? programme.

There was the usual licence-payer fodder: socially dysfunctional squawking-heads bleating on about oh wow! It's NEW YEAR! I mean, Kirsty! Isn't it FANTASTIC! I mean, it's like A WHOLE FREAKING YEAR later than it was a YEAR ago! And what makes it even more special is that it's actually THREE HUNDRED AND SIXTY FIVE DAYS later than that as well! Golly Moses! (Fuck knows what these people do when it's a leap year: I dare say it'd be like the scene in Scanners when that chode's head explodes...) Plus, of course, there was a drunk Scotsman wearing the kilt: you know, there to demonstrate the BBC's commitment to Overcoming Racial Stereotypes.

(Not that there's anything wrong with that; I'd wear the kilt myself. But only if she'd wear the boots.)

At any rate, about ten minutes before a large clock in central London made exactly the same bing-bong-bing-bong noise it had made twenty-four hours previously, the BBC decided to favour the Poor Bloody Licence-payers with the Good News of the Year. Yes, humble peons! There were hurricanes! There were earthquakes! Your capital city was bombed by ~~terrorists~~... ~~militants~~... ~~freedom fighters~~... ~~enlightened social reformers~~... martyrs for the Glorious Truth! And, most horrific of all, the Wicked Dubya is STILL the Chimperor of the United SStateSS of AmeriKKKa! But still, there was some GOOD news!

And the Poor Bloody Licence-payers were then treated to the Ba'ath Broadcasting Corporation's idea of the Good News of 2005, which boiled down to this:

-England won the Ashes, which was indeed Good News (except for the ~1 billion Australians that live in London);
-London got to host the Olympic Games, which was a matter of total indifference to the rest of the country but was extremely Bad News for us London taxpayers who will now have to foot the bill for this meretricious junket, in addition to paying the Mayor eight pounds to drive across our own city;
-Our beloved Leader, our Great Helmsman, the Lord God's Annointed Tony Blair, won re-election.

I want to focus on this last item, because I honestly believe it is the most shameless and disgraceful thing I have ever seen on British television. (True, they did show "Fahren-hate 911" a year or so ago, but I didn't watch it).

A second-rate leader of a fifth-rate political party secures a sharply-reduced majority in a gerrymandered legislature by dint of being marginally less despised than the universally hated "leader" of the walking corpse formerly known as the British Conservative Party... and this is grounds for national rejoicing?

Wikipedia tells us that in this particular election the ZaNuLabour Party won all of thirty-five percent of the popular vote (less than George W Bush in 2000; less than Bill Clinton in 1992; less than Salvador Allende in 1970) in an election where less than 62% of those eligible to vote actually did so* (substantially fewer than voted in last month's election in Iraq) and therefore the total number of UK citizens who actively supported Tony Blair, however grudgingly, is approximately 22%.

(Whereas the total number of UK citizens who are forced to pay the BBC to defaecate its acephalous Chomskyite pro-terrorist propaganda over the airwaves of the world is considerably in excess of 22%, since by law every household on this Island of Lost Souls that choses to watch any kind of television broadcast from any source whatsoever is forced to pay the BBC over one hundred pounds per annum for the privilege even if they never watch one moment of the BBC's yay-jihad-boo-nasty-Yanks rantings.)

Consequently therefore, the results of the 2005 general election were a cause for celebration to, at the very most, roughly 1/5th of the population of these islands (the remaining 4/5ths expressed no support whatsoever for the simpering simpleton who was reconfirmed as sole effective political decision-maker under what passes for the British constitution nowadays) and the BBC's inclusion of this event in their Celebration of Good News seems to me about as tasteful and appropriate as Eamonn de Valera's notorious communication to the German ambassador expressing his condolences for the death of Adolf Hitler.

(Yes, I'm bitter. My plan of Getting Out via the associate program of some investment bank developed not necessarily to my advantage: it turns out they recruit almost exclusively from their former interns, whereas suckers like me who tried to go to graduate school while holding down a day job weren't really placed to get onto the summer intern programs. (xj: he screws up, so you don't have to). I'll keep trying. Meanwhile, I'll have to pay another year's worth of televisual poll tax.

(Well-meaning non-native commentators on places like Biased-BBC sometimes ask why UK residents don't kick up more of a fuss about the Ba'ath Broadcasting Corporation, but really, what would we do? Write to our MPs? Please. MPs under the British system have just enough power to sneeze; if they have written permission from the Leader of the House, countersigned by the Cabinet Secretary, they may wipe their noses afterwards. (Besides, why would an MP bother? Only ten percent of the seats in the British House of Commons are marginal enough that a sitting Member risks being unseated in an election.) Or I suppose I could gather together some like-minded friends and we could petition the Government for redress of our grievances, except, whoops, that's now illegal. (American liberals who wish their country was more like Europe should be careful what they wish for.)

(To coin a phrase: I want my Green Card...)

*I voted. They may not have counted me, however, since I voted my conscience, IOW I wrote "None of the above are acceptable" on the ballot paper. (Kilroy and his flat-tax party didn't put forward a candidate here in my part of London, alas).

And Now That The Grievances Have Been Aired...

2005-12-25T22:51:00.000Z

Chasing Waterfalls wishes all y'all a very Merry Christmas (Christians), Happy Hanukkah (Jews), Kool Kwanzaa (pretentious African-Americans), Frolicsome Festivus (even more pretentious Seinfeld devotees), Super Solstice (unimaginably pretentious Wiccans), Yummy Yule (too-scary-to-be-truly-pretentious neo-Odinists) and ... I think that's the lot, unless I missed out a holiday observed in rural Laos or some such place.

Whereever, whatever.... have a good one.

Duncewatch IV: A New Hope(lessly stupid In-duh-vidual)

2005-12-25T21:25:00.000Z

For many years Liberia was ruled by a group of people called the True Whig Party. The opposite of a True Whig is presumably a Fake Tory, and if you were to look up the phrase "Fake Tory" in a dictionary I bet you would come across a picture of this man.

Nowadays the true self-hating devotee of misery is running short of utterly pathetic losers to root for: first the Red Sox, then the White Sox, and even the England cricket team failed to fail, and who knows - maybe one of these days Scotland may actually win at soccer? But it's good to know that there is still one absolute zero in the universe of human achievement: the British Con-servative Party. They're the most reliable people who ever lived: they will always let you down.

But even by the unexacting standards of his decripid party, which is not so much a political movement as a bowel movement, Oliver Letwin really stands out. With the election of a new fool^H^H^H^H venerable statesman to the pitcher of warm spit that is the Tory Party leadership, that bunch of superannuated chodes got a temporary poll boost. The prospect of maybe, just maybe, actually getting within sight of power evidently scared them so much that they tasked their economics spokesdolt with pissing all over what was left of their free-market credentials.

"We should support redistribution", quacks Oliver. No, actually, Oliver, you shouldn't. You should support growth; you know, that rising tide that lifts all the boats? You know, opportunity? You know, hope? I mean, really, dude, if your idea of good fiscal policy is to suck the financial lifeblood out of the productive economy and spend the proceeds on hiring a bunch of Deputy-Sub-Under-Administrators of Gender-Sensitive Organic Recycled Nappy Empowerment Outreach Programmes, then what the FUCKING FUCK IS THE FUCKING POINT OF OPPOSING THE FUCKING CURRENT GOVERNMENT? You might as well just negotiate a merger with the ZaNuLabour Party and turn the country into a de jure one party state instead of a de facto one.

Oliver- you betrayed and demoralised your party's base; you betrayed the closest thing left to a Conservative value; and, frankly, you totally look the part- Oliver: you're a dunce.

Oh, and one more thing: I want my Green Card...

Utterly, Utterly Shocking

2005-12-14T10:00:00.000Z

This is simply amazing. It's a piece explaining in some detail just what a lying hypocritical sack of shit Michael Moore is.

Which is hardly a sensational revelation, since everyone already knew that Michael Moore is a lying hypocritical sack of shit. No, the really flabbergasting bit of information in this article is hidden away in the first sentence of the second graf:

Michael Moore, apparently, has a wife.

Think about that, folks. Here we have a man so morbidly obese that he generates his own weather systems; a man so vile that he will score cheap debating points off a victim of Alzheimer's disease and then gloat about it in a movie; a man who has poisoned the wellsprings of public discourse with wingnut conspiracy theories, whose dishonesty exceeds in corruption the worst excesses of the Soviet propaganda machine.... this is a man who represents the absolute rock-bottom of human degradation and depravity. And some poor woman was prepared to get hitched to this creature?

As the novelist Anthony Powell once observed: "Women may show some discrimination about who they sleep with, but they'll marry anyone."

(H/T Eric Scheie).

And the latest nominations for the Stupid Criminal Hall of Shame are...

2005-12-06T17:04:00.000Z

via Samizdata, this story gives a whole new meaning to the phrase quis custodiet ipsos custodes...

(Yes, I know the second link is to the Ba'ath Broadcasting Company. Just go look, it won't kill you this once).

Fahrenheit 1861

2005-11-28T10:56:00.000Z

Here's a hilarious parody.

That is, I think it's meant as a parody. It's possible that somebody just spoke to a contributor to Lew Rockwell's site, wrote down everything he said, and then made a multimedia presentation of it. (Which, come to think of it, is pretty much what Michael Moore did in the first place...)

(H/T Dean Esmay.)

Irony of the Week

2005-11-28T00:12:00.000Z

Via Marginal Revolution (via JMPP, apparently) comes an unusual story of an American expat who may (or may not) find himself in trouble with what passes for the law in Cambodia.

It seems he is the proprietor of a site with the URL www.euthanasiaincambodia.com (and you may cut and paste that into your own browser window should you be so inclined, but as a confirmed thanatophobe I am not disposed to give a hyperlink to a person who defines "life" as "the way to death"), and he has been accused of... erm... erm... at any rate, he has been accused by the family of a British woman who believe that prior to her suicide she visited his site, and it encouraged her in her subsequent course of action.

One wonders how she found it in the first place: google "euthanasia" and the only Cambodian-related entry in the first five pages is a story on The Register about the suicide of the aforementioned Brit. (As a UK resident, I default to www.google.co.uk; YMMV).

At any rate, it is something of a mystery to me why the family of the aforementioned Brit should have focused their ire on this particular website and not, say, the estate of the late James Clavell ("There's a very easy solution... Die. You do not have to endure the unendurable"). FWIW I agree with Tennyson, Crowley and Richard Bandler that a permanent solution to a temporary problem is less than ideal, but the reason I found this particular story so poignantly ironic was its final sentence:

Prosecutors who questioned [the owner of the site] said they had not filed any charges against [him] and needed more time to make a decision.

Needed more time to make a decision....

Like the man said, the two saddest words in the English language are if only...

The First World War Ended in 2005

2005-11-24T23:29:00.000Z

As I've said before, the Brits do not, in general, observe the holiday of Thanksgiving because they have nothing whatsoever to be thankful for.

This year is an exception, because last night, at the stroke of the midnight hour, England's surreal and despicable "licensing" laws were finally put out of everyone's misery.

These laws prohibited bars and stores from selling alcoholic drinks after 23.00 (22.30 on a Sunday, since British legislators have never seen anything wrong with laws respecting the establishment of religion). There were a couple of loopholes, for instance strong drink could be sold in conunction with food (cruel to expect a man to digest traditional British cuisine sober), and places of entertainment could apply for "late" licenses if they played music. In practice this tended to mean that every overambitious lounge bar would put in a boombox, treble the drinks prices, charge people fifteen pounds for the privilege of going in the door and call itself a nightclub (liberal readings of the nightclub loophole allowed the flourishing of bolge such as Sevilla Mia, a cramped and frankly insanitary dive off Oxford Street whose "music" consisted of an elderly Spaniard with a classical guitar and a stutter. (Yes, I used to drink there. It was cheap. They didn't charge for going in the door and their drinks were only twice the usual ruinous London prices).

Most aspects of life in Britain are living fossils, which made sense at the time they were adopted but have persisted beyond all reason and utility out of sheer inertia (or frequently, fear that whoever reforms them will do so in his own interests; that's why Britain had a hereditary house of the legislature until 1999(!) - and when this was eventually reformed, it was reformed so as to blatantly favour the political interests of the reformer, one T Blair). Licensing laws were no exception to this rule. They were introduced as a temporary war-time measure during the Great War - the worry was that if munitions workers spent all night drinking, they risked coming into work still drunk and drop shells on the factory floor; it was felt that this might prove detrimental to the War Effort. So repressive Singaporesque laws were enacted, forbidding the sale of spirituous beverages at hours when the lower classes damn well ought to be sleeping in their beds, or someone's beds at any rate.

(The upper classes were, of course, not captured by the licensing laws, which did not apply to private members' clubs on the wonderfully Clintonesque grounds that private members' clubs were not actually selling drinks because the drinks were already the property of the members.)

The Gipper once said that nothing lives longer than a temporary government programme, and so it proved in this case. The Great War was won, the Kaiser deposed; the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich rose and fell; the Berlin Wall was built up and torn down; and still the licensing laws cramped the style of the British toper. When the licensing laws were enacted, the Soviet Union was just a murderous glint in Lenin's eye; they outlasted that other repressive horror by more than a decade. When the Blair administration ascended to power in Year Zero (1997 under the old calendar), a plank in the party manifesto was the abolition of these absurd laws and finally, a mere two elections and eight years later, they finally delivered.

It's rare indeed that I will ever have a good word for the domestic policy of our beloved Leader the Lord God's Anointed Blair, but slaying these vile licensing laws was a genuine good dead. (And may I say, it took a certain amount of moral courage, given that pretty much every one of Britain's trashy newspapers have been blasting on this policy since it was announced, on the grounds that it will apparently promote the abhorrent sin of "binge drinking" (journalists disapproving of drunkenness??? Pride by Insolence chastened? Indolence purged by Sloth?))

It gives me hope that as his political career draws to an end, the Maximum Tone may get around to abolishing certain other examples of governmental outreach that were enacted as temporary wartime measures - like the income tax (a temporary emergency measure introduced during the Napoleonic Wars). Hope springs eternal, and it will be all the springier now that it can treat itself to a nice Hoegaarden at 23.30 should it be so inclined.

Duncewatch III: Further Duncewatch

2005-11-21T23:19:00.000Z

I've decided that Duncewatch was too good a concept to limit to the aftermath of Katrina. Natural disasters come and go, but blasting on fools never goes out of season.

The particular fool that I am now pointing my blogospheric Gat towards is that most despised creature of the cyberspace bestiary, the Troll. I'm talking about a sorry excuse for a blogger that has been posting the same extraordinarily boring piece of spam on all the blogs I look at. This same "proctology project" used to spray his scent all over Samizdata, before he was banned for being an obnoxious troll, and was shameless enough to then sneak back under another name and post more drivel (since he was stupid, or arrogant, enough to attach his URL to his post, the imposture was rapidly detected).

This unpreposessing digital spirochete generally uses the name Victorino de la Vega, and styles himself either "Doctor" or "Professor", seemingly at random; the academic chair to which arrogates a claim is at "Amaurot Heights, Oklahoma, United States Minor Outlying Islands". (Mr de la Vega's grasp of geography is evidently no more advanced than his understanding of common courtesy, although his inept allusion to More's Utopia, whilst somewhat sophomoric, has a certain touching naivete that suggests the possibility that there is a human being buried under the accumulated encrustations of reflexively paranoid ranting that are de la Vega's most prominent feature. But you couldn't prove it from his lame-ass comment spams).

No: if ever there was a blogroach, it's Victorino de la Vega. His user profile boasts of the "free advice on ethical issues" available at his blog; my advice to (Professor/ Doctor/ Monsignor/ Rear-Admiral/ Eagle Scout/ Sturmbahnfuehrer/ Whatever) de la Vega is that the next time he feels tempted to spew his ill-digested delusions over the entire blogsphere, he would do better to treat himself to a nice cup of Shut The Fuck Up.

Victorino - your comments are stupid; you stupidly post them to the comments facilities of every blog that hasn't yet banned you... Victorino: you're a Dunce.

(I see from his Blogger profile that his favorite books include something called The Mechanical Bride. It's the only way he'll ever stand a chance...)

"Number One Fella B'long Missus Queen" Considered As A Clueless Twit

2005-11-03T00:20:00.000Z

So, the big-eared hippy who's heir to what's left of the British throne is taking a little vacation in the US. As I said over on the bootylicious Sondra's blog, Prince Charles is:

The worst embarrassment to Britain’s royal family since George III tried to abdicate in favour of his pet dachsund. Charlie boy is of course named after the only British monarch to be officially put to death, and shows even less overall ability than his namesake. He is what an economist would call a “perfect negative indicator”: guaranteed to be wrong on every conceivable subject.

Recently he has said that he will be more appreciated after he is dead. I for one will not feel appreciation when Charles dies. I will feel relief.

Charles' visit to the US (in the company of his horse^H^H^H^H^H lovely 2nd wife) was discussed over on Samizdata. The following was going to be a post there, but it grew too big (on the 1000-word-post-is-refuge-of-sociopath principle):

I'd say the problem with the British political scene is not that "liberals"are giving excessive leeway to Islam; it is that all politicians are giving excessive leeway to what us Scots would refer to as "wee chancers".

Since [a commentator] mentioned Islam, let's consider two possible targets for a zealous follower of that religion. One: a large corporation that engages in the business of gambling (which activity BTW is expressly forbidden in the Koran) and which dares to use the name of the sacredest of Islamic holy cities - Mecca. Two: employees of a city council who display toy pigs on their desks.

It would seem to me that the first case is far, far more offensive to an overly-sensitive Moslem than the second; conflating the name of the Holiest City with a forbidden sin cannot be anything but offensive, whereas the display of an "unclean" animal is, at worst, icky. (And Michael Totten bears witness that even a majority-Moslem country need not be a porcophobic country. HT Pejman's new site for the Totten link.) Nevertheless, one of these two potentially-Moslem-distressing organisations has been bullied into dhimmi-esque submission, and I'll give you a clue: it's not the gambling business.

How interesting that the much, much less offensive display of Piglets should be suppressed when the much, much more offensive Mecca Bingo is free to flaunt its kuffir shamelessness. I dare say that wee chancers find a big, rich powerful corporation a more formidable target than an effete city council staffed by eunuchs. After all, the modus operandi of a wee chancer has not changed materially since the days of the most successful wee chancer of all time: "Poke out a bayonet! If it meets steel, pull back! If it meets mush, poke harder!"

I believe us decent people of all colours, creeds and other distinguishing features owe it to the several wee chancers of the world to always provide steel for their bayonets. It's the only way the wee chancers will learn.

Glaswegian Fiend's Exploit Explained

2005-10-31T22:54:00.000Z

Over on Pundita I came across a post on the ineffably vile George Galloway, which contained this interesting snippet:

In 1997, while he was a Labor Member of Parliament, George Galloway blocked proposed legislation (the "Conspiracy and Incitement Bill") to ban foreign terrorists residing in Britain from "plotting and conducting terrorist operations overseas."

Which surprised me: not that Gruesome George blocked the bill, of course, but that he could. The rank-and-file British legislator has almost no power whatsoever, especially if he is not a member of the government party (GG used to be a member of the Labour Party, which was not in power when this bill was being debated). When I was at school back in the 1980s I remember being told that the British parliament had stricter rules of order than the Supreme Soviet. Certainly a "private" member of parliament can't filibuster debates (unlike a US senator) and an MP who votes against his party line several times is likely to be thrown out of the party (like Galloway) in which case he will pretty much be reduced to forming a new party if he wants to continue in politics (like Galloway).

About the only privilege a "private" member has, in fact, is that he can introduce legislation. But this is not as much fun as it might sound: the time allocations for debates are controlled entirely by the government, so the only way a "Private Member's Bill" stands a chance of becoming law is if the government choose to allocate time to it.

The "Conspiracy and Incitement Bill" was a member of that rare species. Proposed by a private member, the government (this was the Conservative one back in the dim and legendary era Before Blair) decided to support it. Accordingly, it got its Second Reading debate, was referred to the appropriate committee and reported out, and proceeded to its Third Reading debate. If it had passed this debate, as seemed likely, it would have gone off to the House of Lords, who would probably have passed it as well, in which case it would have become law.

At this point Gruesome George enters our tale. He took an interest in this proposed law, and I might speculate on his motives for that, if I didn't live in the country with the world's most repressive libel laws. (I want my Green Card...) Possibly Roger L Simon has some thoughts on the matter... At any rate, Galloway was one of the few MPs who turned up to the Third Reading debate; in fact fewer than forty MPs were present at the Third Reading, which meant that the House didn't have a quorum to enact legislation. Galloway was the man who pointed it out. That was all.

IANAL but I don't believe the lack of a quorum would have ipso facto rendered the law invalid; it would be seen as a procedural matter of the House of Commons alone. Therefore, it's narrowly accurate to say that Galloway "blocked" the legislation, although his actions were (procedurally) less egregious than the SOP of the US Senate: Byrd's filibuster of civil rights legislation or Helms' blocking of Weld's ambassadorship being two examples that spring to mind.

UPDATE (Nov 4th): The creature Galloway has been less assiduous in his Parliamentary attendances recently.

Happy UN Day, fellow chattels of the tranzi superstate!

2005-10-24T10:19:00.000+01:00

Hey everybody, it's UN Day! Details over at www.un.gov - sorry, I mean www.un.org, since Der Tag has not arrived quite yet.

I'll be celebrating by vigorously exercising my Universal Human Rights, which of course may in no case be exercised contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations -

("Everything for the Superstate! Nothing against the Superstate! Nothing outside the Superstate!")

-so, just to be on the safe side, I'll be engaging in UN-approved actions: coercing sex out of twelve-year-old African girls; taking bribes from Mid-Eastern massmurders; helping assassins evade justice. And I'll see if I can't dodge a couple parking tickets too.

Meanwhile, in a wonderfully-timed national vote, the Brazilians have shown exactly what they think of the UN's victim-disarmament policies. To coin a phrase: GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOAL!

The UN is now sixty years old. Time it was pensioned off.

It's the Envy of the World - at least, it makes the World turn green

2005-10-22T11:52:00.000+01:00

ISTR there is a Chinese proverb about the frog in the shallow well that thought he was in heaven because he'd never known anything better.

I always think of this when I hear Brits boasting about how one of their peculiar institutions (typically, the BBC, or perhaps the NHS) is the Envy of the World. I want to grab them by the shoulders and shake a clue into them while yelling: "Then why has none of the rest of the World been dumb enough to copy it, fucktard!"

via Tim Worstall comes this story of the way the NHS is really run.

We know a few things about large organisations: principally, that the way to get them to actually work is to make them small organisations. Or when that is unfeasible, make them virtually small by delegating decision-making down to the lowest possible level (decentralised command in the military being the prime example).

Large organisations with overly-centralised command and control are dysfunctional for three reasons:
1. Organisations exist to suppress the price mechanism and replace it with an internal command microeconomy. Consider Selfridges. You could run Selfridges as a collection of self-contained businesses - say, the girls who are selling the perfumes don't rent their sales desk from the store, buy the perfumes from the various suppliers and then keep any resulting profits - but that would be dumb, because they would spend all their time fretting over the accounts of Weird-Smelling Shit Inc, and would have no time left over to try and sucker in the dude who's wandering past their sales desk en route for the Overpriced Garish Metrosexual Shirts Department. Suppressing the price mechanism is efficient for small organisations that don't need much in the way of, erm, organisation - but as the organisation grows larger and more complex it starts to badly need the signals that the price mechanism sends, in order to efficiently allocate resources. Much of the problems with the NHS arise from the complete suppression of the price mechanism, which is a feature rather than a bug, admittedly, but the sort of feature that's hard to distinguish from a genuine, bone-headed, fatal, Blue-Screen-Of-Death-inducing Mother Of All Bugs.
2. Lacking the price mechanism, the guys controlling the organisation are forced to rely on other forms of communication from the grunts at the coal-face. Basically, reports. Forms. Endless reams of forms. Bureaucracy. Even when this system works properly, filling in these damn forms is a colossal drag on the effective's time. There is also the fact that low-level effectives will lie and spin as much as they can get away with (Wilson's SNAFU Principle).
3. Shooting the messenger. The previous two features can't be avoided. This one can, and is, by any manager with the slightest ability. It's tough enough getting any kind of signal out of the self-serving noise of underlings when you actively reward the bearer of bad news. Shooting the messenger is something Evil Overlords do in bad movies.

Gordon Brown, the Right Honourable Chimpanzee, dishonestly raised my taxes and those of every working person in Britain, so he could spend more money on this clusterfuck called the NHS. The world being what it is, most of that money went on hiring clowns like the ones that TW rightly savages in the above link. Do you feel proud, Gordo? The sad thing is, that thieving socialist Neanderthal probably does.

(There is a certain grim irony in this disgraceful story's taking place in Thatcher's home town of Grantham. The NHS was one of those ghastly edifices of English Socialism that she never quite got around to. We're all paying the price for that now).

Instafisking (TM)

2005-10-19T23:34:00.000+01:00

Saddam Hussein has just been put on trial for mass-murder. And, given that Johnnie Cochran is no longer around to ask George Dubya Bush whether he at any time in his life uttered the word "rag-head", I guess the conviction is kind of a foregone conclusion. (BTW ISTR that Alan Dershowitz was second chair on California v OJ Simpson. Or maybe fourth chair. Or twenty-seventh. OJ had a lot of lawyers. Anyway, I remember Dershowitz giving an interview back in the mid 1990s where he expressed a desire to represent Saddam Hussein, should he ever go on trial. I wonder what made him change his mind?)

There's a post over on Instapundit discussing whether "we" should have tried Saddam before now. Rarely has there ever been a discussion that more begged the question "Who you call we, white-man?"

The point is that dear old Sadders is not being tried by the powers that overthrew him, a la Hermann Goering and his chums; Saddam is not even being tried by a bunch of bien-pensant tranzis, the way Milosevic is being tried in den Haag (and the court is apparently going for some kind of Guinness World Record, since it is now more than four years after the Serbian SoB was arrested: I'm reminded of the last words of the serial killer Carl Panzram: Hurry up, you Hoosier bastard, I could kill ten men while you were foolin' around!") No, Saddam shares with that other tyrant Charles Stuart a privilege afforded to few fallen despots: a public trial by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein his crimes were committed.

Some may say that the trial could have been a little more speedy. It could. The Coalition of the Willing could have put him on trial the day they pulled him out of his bijou bachelor pad in the converted septic tank. For that matter they could have summarily shot him and the entire Ba'ath party leadership on the steps of the supreme court in Baghdad, and broadcast the event on FOX NEWS. (And part of me wishes that they had: it gives me a lovely warm glow to imagine how the BBC would have reported that...)

But how much more fitting it was to wait: to wait until the Iraqi people had given the finger to Ba'athism in the first free elections in decades; to wait until they had voted twice; to wait until even his own asshole buddies in Tikrit threw up their hands in despair and joined in the voting...

Saddam chose to rule by power alone, and when a superior power overthrew him, by his own chosen rule his life was forfeit to that power. The Coalition could have said "You are our enemy" and shot him outright (or gone through the motions of a trial the way the victorious Allies did to the Nazis at Nuremberg). We didn't, because we have learned that power, alone, destroys itself; power is strong only in the service of justice. And in the service of justice, we handed the monster over to his victims, who are now prepared to try him for his crimes, prove those crimes beyond any reasonable doubt, and finally achieve a degree of closure after their thirty years of torment.

"Here is neither haste, nor hate, nor anger", peal the Trumpets,
"Pardon for his penitence nor pity for his fall.
"It is the King!" - inexorable Trumpets -
(Trumpets round the scaffold at the dawning by Whitehall.)

When Charles Stuart was executed in that dawning by Whitehall, it set a precedent: for the first time in the history of Europe, a ruler had been held to account by his people. There had been coups and depositions before, but this was new in the world. Charles' dynasty may have been later restored; his tyranny was not; when his worthless son tried to resort to Daddy's maxims of governance, he was chased out of the country and the foundation was laid for the rise of democracy, not just in Britain but throughout the Anglosphere - the Glorious Revolution that drove out James Stuart and established the supremacy of the British Parliament was the inspiration for the American Revolution, and the theme of defending the liberty of the people against the encroachments of the state was common to both. Kings, dynasties and regimes come and go. Precedents are for ever.

When Saddam Hussein gets what's coming to him, it will set a precedent: for the first time (that I know of) in the history of the Mid-East, a ruler will have been held to account by his people. There have been many, many coups and depositions before, but this will be new in the world. The genie is out of the bottle, and all the impiety and witlessness of Ba'athists, mullahs and monarchs can't call it back.

Australia launches world's largest sheep database

2005-10-19T12:19:00.000+01:00

Story here.

I'm guessing it will be called www.match.co.au.

Dubya's favorite political philosopher

2005-10-15T19:05:00.000+01:00

Recently I read a somewhat lizardoid condemnation of the new Iraqi constitution, which enshrines Islam as one of the sources of Iraqi law. Now there are various responses that one might make to this: there is, for example, the yar-boo-sucks-it's-better-than-Afghanistan response; or there is the rather more sophisticated response that recognizing a religious belief in the constitution does not necessarily make a country a theocracy - even Sweden, that liberal icon, has an established church whose membership roll BTW is kept by a department of the government. (I swear this is true. A Swedish friend of mine who converted to another religion when he got married had to register the fact with the Swedish embassy). For that matter, the constituent countries of the UK (England, Wales, Scotland & Northern Ireland) each have an established church, and each church has a different theology, and each church has the Queen as its Supreme Governor, with the gloriously surreal result that Her poor Majesty is forced to change her religious opinions from Episcopalian to Presbyterian every time she crosses the border into Scotland.

But it struck me how remarkable it is that we in "the West"/ "the free world"/ "civilization" (we don't have a snappy name for the societies that cherish the values that evolved out of the European Renaissance, but you know what I mean) regard the separation of church & state as a Good Thing. There is almost no precedent for this in human history. If you could talk to the ghosts of Marcus Tullius Cicero, Tokugawa Ieyasu, Harun-al-Rashid, and Charlemagne, they would laugh at the idea that a person's relationship to the State and a person's relationship to the Deity could ever be separate. Cicero would be proud to tell you that he served as an augur (soothsayer), an official government post to which he had been elected; Ieyasu would explain to you that he held the office of Shogun because he had been appointed by the Emperor in Kyoto, who was the descendant of a goddess, and a god in his own right; Charlemagne might be diplomatically silent on the question of whether he was the boss of the Pope or the other way round, but he would boast of forcibly converting the Saxons to Christianity, their alternative to living as Christians being dying as Odinists; whilst his penpal Harun-al-Rashid would have serious trouble understanding your point - surely all government derived from the Will of Allah, by definition? Government without God, to these people, was a little like water without wetness; like sky without air.

The modern notion of separate church and state evolved out of the chaos spawned by the Reformation, and the exhaustion that the people of Europe felt after one hundred and fifty years of making fratricidal war in the name of the deity they called the Prince of Peace. It was a kludge, a compromise, not a policy. Periodically, Puritans or Bourbons would try to turn back the clock to the mythical days when everyone believed The Truth... but gradually "the West" learned that the separation of church & state strengthens both, and when by contrast church and state become confused, then the Church becomes unholy and the State becomes ungoverned.

I said that separation of church and state is almost unprecedented in human history. Because there are a couple precedents. Genghis Khan, for instance, whose oldest ally was a Christian and whose wisest councillor was a Chinese Taoist, practised religious toleration throughout his empire. (True, he rabidly persecuted Moslems; that was because the Caliph had dissed him. Another disadvantage of uniting church & state is that one has to suck up the other's fuckup).

However, as far as I know the first person who ever expressed the notion of separation of church and state lived before Genghis Khan. It wasn't Socrates (who was condemned to death by the Athenians for blasphemy against their gods, and explicitly acknowledged that they had every right to condemn him), nor was it Aquinas (who did however expound the notion of human law and religious law as separate, though both dependent on the Will of God). No, as far as I can work out, it was Jesus Christ.

As far as I am aware, the first instance in human history when anyone ever formulated the idea of separation of church & state was the moment when ol' JC, asked whether it was morally permissible to pay tribute to the Godless Idolators in Rome, replied with "Give to the Emperor what is the Emperor's, and give to God what is God's". Separation of church & state, folks.

George W Bush is notorious for saying, during the 2000 presidential debate, that his favorite political philosopher was "Jesus", and oh, how the MSM (and pretty much everyone else) howled. Ha! Dubya's so dumb! WTF did Jesus ever contribute to political philosophy?

Well, here's one, and I think we can agree it's a biggie. From the notion that religious belief is a personal, not a political, matter, derives a whole load of other notions - for instance, that the other aspects of a person's inner life are nobody's damn business - that there is in fact a whole sphere of human action that is not within the appropriate purview of the state - that people who differ from you in a bunch of ways can still be just as good a neighbor and just as good a citizen and human being as you are.

And BTW this is why I utterly despise "religious conservatives": next time they feel tempted to wave signs reading "WWJD", they might want to check with his biographers.

(Posted in response to this over at M Simon's blog.)

o fortunatum natum...

2005-10-09T01:03:00.000+01:00

Thirty years ago today*, Professor Volokh and his family arrived in the US.

Thirty-one years ago, xj arrived in this world.

I'm more honoured than I can express to share an anniversary with the pre-eminent legal scholar of the blogosphere. Eugene Volokh is no doubt fortunate to be an American, but America is no less fortunate to claim him as an adopted son. (And I believe he made a wise choice, whatever his commentator Rhadamanthus may say. BTW Rhadamanthus: classical scholars will associate this name with a person who knew the law inside and out, but ended up spending eternity in hell. As such, it is the perfect "screen name" for a Volokh Conspiracy commentator who prefers England to America...)

Nasdrovyeh, y bolshoyeh spasebo, Gospodin Volokh!

*I mean October 8th; which is what the date was when I started writing this. There's a famous saying to the effect that "writing is easy: you just sit down and stare at the screen until drops of blood form on your forehead". True, too true...

A fine example of the Politician's Logic fallacy

2005-10-07T09:25:00.000+01:00

via Tim Worstall.

The Politician's Logic fallacy goes like this:

Major Premise: Something must be done.
Minor Premise: This is something.
Conclusion: Therefore, we must do this.

(Logic-choppers will recognise this as a part of the class of quaternio terminorum fallacies).

The ZaNuLabour regime is especially fond of the Politician's Logic fallacy, which can "justify" literally inconceivable amounts of meretricious legislative busywork. Here, the Politician's Logic fallacy appears to have resulted in a much-ballyhooed new law that is exactly the same as the old one.

OTOH there is another explanation. The failed lawyers, mouth-breathing polytechnic lecturers and overpromoted county council button-sorters that run Britain's government may be competent at something, but legal drafting ain't it. Mybrotherthelawyer tells me that the legislation that comes out of Parliament nowadays is so badly-written that often nobody in the legal profession can work out WTF the laws actually mean. It's not unheard of for one clause of a statute to mandate a certain action, and another clause of the same statute to forbid it. The main cause appears to be the government's habit of making things up as they go along. Consider the bill that established the Financial Services Authority, back in 2000 or thenabouts: over one hundred amendments were made during the committee stage, with ministers popping up like meercats with ADHD every five minutes or so and proposing fresh new reams of nonsense. I'm told that a number of judges stated, off the record, that they would dismiss any cases brought under the financial services legislation because they considered it literally impossible to follow the statute consistently.

Either way, it's nothing a Brit can be proud of.

I want my Green Card...

More bombs in Bali...

2005-10-01T23:29:00.000+01:00

via Samizdata (this post was going to be a comment over there, but it got too big; thousand-word comments are reserved for poorly-adaptive sociopaths.)

If I were John Howard, I'd find out who the governor/ mayor of Bali was, get him on the phone and tell him: "I just want you to know that Australia congratulates you on declaring independence from Indonesia. Welcome to the free world."

The mayor/governor would no doubt reply "Er, we haven't declared independence!" Howard would retort, "Yet."

The precedent is East Timor, where Australia intervened in support of independence for a former province of Indonesia that had been the target of violent terrorist acts committed by persons from elsewhere in the Indonesian archipelago.

Indonesia is not a nation, properly so called (a political unit defined by a shared myth of values); it is an empire (a political unit in which diverse groups with no common values are held together by force and/or fear). There is no particular reason why Irian Jaya, Sumatra and the Moluccas should all be ruled by the same bunch of Java-based crooks; it was one of those things that just sort of happened when the Dutch East India Company's back was turned.

Empires fall. The "Evil Empire" controlled by Russian communists fell when the emperor (Gorbachev) realised the costs of holding the empire together had become unbearable. Let's see if Indonesian president Yudhoyono has the makings of a Gorbachev.

After all, I suspect that his choice may be to end up like Gorbachev or end like Godunov.

Duncewatch II: More Duncewatch

2005-09-29T23:38:00.000+01:00

The Necktie Daily Excess, the grimy and exceedingly yellowish newspaper that services my hometown of Necktie (the Sewer of Scotland) is notorious for being last with the news. I believe their October 19th, 1947, edition announced to the world that GERMANY SURRENDERS! HITLER PRESUMED DEAD!.

I dare say eighteen formative years of exposure to that lamentably flaccid organ have had their effect on me, because I am returning to the very stale Katrina-dunces theme. I want to talk about Kanye West.

Now, Kanye West does not, strictly, belong in the Duncewatch thread because he is not a dunce: if anything, he is, as a Brit would say, too clever by half. What he said was stupid, but he is by no means stupid for saying it.

(BTW my apologies for the link to the National Review; I was forced to link to a publication that is prepapred to employ John Podhoretz when I could not find any genuine news sources on Google. For obvious reasons, I do not consider Dan Rather's former employer to be a news source.)

No: I remember reading about Mr West's remarks a few weeks ago (via protein wisdom I think, though it may have been Instapundit) and thinking "uh-huh"; and I remember that two days after this I noticed that a rash of posters promoting Mr West's latest album had erupted all over London's Tube system, and I thought "uh-huh". Publically proclaiming virulently controversial opinions when ones latest record is about to hit the Tower and Virgin outlets on six continents? Nooooo.... I do not believe Mr West is stupid.

Nevertheless: Kanye - you said stupid things in public; you stupidly incited people to Fear, Uncertainty and Despair on the back of a natural disaster... Kanye: you're a Dunce.

BTW what brought this on? I was watching a show on what passes for television here in Formerly Great Britain, and they were praising Kanye West so fulsomely that I was forced to switch over to the Bollywood spectacular on the next channel, lest I choke on my own bile. Which reminds me of an incident today: over on Pejman's new site I saw a graf insinuating that the "AIDS" virus (presumably HIV) is weakening over time: good news for xj and fellow louche man-whores. So I was about to click on the link and check out the good news... when I saw the URL: www.bbc.co.uk. So I didn't bother.

It's not that I no longer trust the BBC to tell the truth; it's not even that I expect them to tell lies; it's that I honestly believe they can no longer tell the difference. They no longer even possess the limited evidentiary value of Newsweek or Investors' Chronicle and similar consistent negative indicators: they cannot even be relied upon to be wrong.

FBI now OFFICIALLY stands for Female Body Inspectors

2005-09-21T01:05:00.000+01:00

I once read a reprinted interview with Lenny Bruce, in which the great comedian explained how he would work burning social issues into his standup.

What he would do was talk, perfectly seriously, about said issue for however many minutes, and only then move into the jokes. Say he was doing racial integration of schools (this was back in the 1960s): he would give the audience a brief, well-reasoned explanation of precisely why the whole notion of "separate but equal" schooling on the basis of legally-mandated classification derived from imprecise abstractions generalized from epidermal pigmentation was stuuuuuupid, and only after that would he go into the routine about the governor of Alabama finding out that his daughter was engaged to Harry Belafonte. ("Oh, an Eye-tal-ian boy, Lou-Anne? Hmmm...")

(It struck me at the time that this whole business would likely evoke a sort of reverse Voltairean reaction in its listeners: I agree with what you say, but I will oppose to my death your saying it: where the fuck are the dick jokes?)

I don't know if Lenny Bruce could make this technique work (I kinda doubt it, since his act in the last year of his life consisted almost exclusively of reading out memos sent to him by his lawyers) but OTOH, this works kinda well...

The whole sorry story FBI-vice-squad story is here.

Wandering Thoughts on this story:

-If I had joined the FBI for the purpose of, say, fighting terrorism or catching serial killers or for that matter finding my sister who was abducted by aliens, I'd be pretty pissed off if I were suddenly transferred to the Bureau's Department of Panty Drawer Sniffing. Like, exploring the interesting career opportunities for former Special Agents in the private-sector security industry pissed off. (Renaming the office after that pinhole-sphinctered closet-case J Edgar Hoover was bad enough, but this...)

-Speaking of JEH, I heard somewhere that when his agents burgled the apartment of Angela Davis and stole a number of photos she had taken of her and her boyfriend "doing the wild thing", JEH insisted that they be brought directly to him. (Perhaps that slithering piece of imbecility wanted to see what he was missing?)

+Pornographic websites are typically hosted outside of the US, so in order to enforce a ban on pornography the FBI will need to either:

-Prosecute American consumers while letting foreign producers go free, which is political suicide, or else;

+Force the entire 95% of the world that does not have the (generally) good fortune to live in the US to obey laws passed by the US Congress:

-"Sure, jefe, if you want to let the rest of the world vote in your country, we'll follow your laws, you betcha";

-The following countries are likely to be hosting websites of this nature: the Netherlands, Hungary, the Czech Republic, various nations in Central America/ the Carribbean. The following countries are not likely to be hosting websites of this nature: Syria, Iran, North Korea, Sudan, Saudi Arabia. Remind me again whether the former, or the latter, are supposed to be America's allies?

In the internet age, a ban on looking at nudie pictures is stupid. Correction: stupid is what this idea aspires to. It is so far beyond stupid that the light from Stupid would take a thousand years to reach it.

Every so often the Bush administration does something that is so bat-shit insane that the only explanation is Karl Rove: "Hey, Mr President, if we slap a bunch of tariffs on steel while arguing for free trade - or, even better, if you make a powerful speech attacking the financiers of terrorism and then let the press corps film you walking hand in hand with a Saudi prince - that will give all the leftists epilepsy for the next six months!"

I'm guessing this is one of those things. Just reading the story made me foam at the mouth. I dare say heads are popping over at the Daily Kos right now...

Let's leave it with a quote from the aforementioned J Edgar Hoover:

"I regret that the FBI is powerless to act in cases of oral-genital intimacy, unless they have in some way impeded inter-state commerce".

Words to live by, G-men...

(Final note: it has just occurred to me that this may, in fact, not be a cruel, repressive policy of the Wicked Dubya and his minion Darth Rove, but may instead be a brilliant scam by the world's most accomplished chutzpenick to allow him and his buddies to download as much hot lesbo action as they want on office time and get paid, and indeed commended, for it... In which case I am speechless in admiration).

Codependence Day

2005-09-15T20:17:00.000+01:00

I see from Wikipedia that September 15th is Independence Day in (are you ready? the full list will take some time): Costa Rica; Guatemala; Honduras; Nicaragua; and El Salvador.

Oh, and the Central African Republic as well.

(Just kidding about that last one ;-))

Is it just me, or does the fact that five territorially adjacent nationstates have the exact same Independence Day suggest that the said nationstates are kinda sorta missing the point of "independence?"

(What if they did all declare independence from Spain on the same day? Independence, like democratization, is a process, not an event. For instance, the united States of America declared their independence from Great Britain on July 2nd, 1776; however, the modern United States of America observes its Independence Day on July 4th because that was when the Continental Congress approved the draft Declaration that Thomas Jefferson and his committee had drawn up. And the French celebrate the day the Bastille was sacked despite the fact that the sacking of the Bastille had approximately nothing to do with the eventual outcome of la Revolution: there were something on the order of twelve prisoners in the Bastille on July 14th 1789, none of them particularly memorable, the Marquis de Sade having been redeployed to Charenton lunatic asylum a short while prior to this. The Centroamericans could follow these examples of adaptability: say, Guatemala could get the date the declaration was proposed; Honduras could get the date it was ratified; El Salvador could get the date of the first shot fired in the War of Independence; Costa Rica could get the date of the subsequent peace treaty (to honor the pacifism enshrined in their constitution; and Nicaragua could get the date that Red Dawn was released.

(Just kidding, guys. Elect a compsymp like Aleman and you gotta expect a little gentle teasing... Kidding aside, wouldn't independence from the Brits be a better precedent?)

At any rate, here's an ole to y'all, y'all, y'all, y'all and y'all, and a special attaboy to the Costa Rican libertarian movement, which has endowed that country with the rare distinction of being the only nationstate on earth to elect card-carrying libertarians to high office.

(Please note the form of words: the Costa Rican libertarian movement, not the Costa Rican Movimiento Libertario. The former deserves several bushels of attaboys; the latter may, by its actions, come to deserve them. Hope springs eternal...)

...dust to dust

2005-09-13T00:57:00.000+01:00

So, England have won the Ashes.

For the benefit of any Americans who may have wandered in here tonight, this is a trophy in a game called cricket: think baseball on Quaaludes. I don't understand it either; I'm Scottish. But it seems like a big deal in these parts. I recall one of my lecturers at undergraduate used to put the cricket scores up on the chalkboard, although as the Test series progressed he stopped doing this and instead wrote "Don't mention the cricket!"

The Ashes is also close to the English heart, because it is a contest between England (the Mother Country) and Australia (the MoFos). It speaks to the unique origins of the Australian nation: every other nation-state on Earth is either A: dominated by a culture that evolved from a big ol' tribe that settled there at Time Immemorial (eg Korea, Thailand; B: dominated by a culture that evolved from some mixture of fusion, cooperation, cooption and conflict between various big ol' tribes that settled there between Time Immemorial and 1492AD, inclusive (eg the UK, Germany, and Italy - especially Italy); C: dominated by a culture that evolved from voluntary emigrants from places that fall under categories A and B (the USA, Brazil, New Zealand, Canada - true, some of these places have significant minorities that are (Canada: the former Hong Kongese) or are descended from (USA, and of course Brazil: African-Americans, and -Brazilians, respectively) invountary emigrants; but the majority, and hence the dominant theme of the dominant culture, evolved from voluntary emigrants - which probably accounts for the subtly different style of these cultures, as compared to the Old World)...

Australia, however, is the only place on Earth to fall under Category D: dominated by a culture that evolved from involuntary emigrants from a place that falls under category B (viz, England). (Brits like to say that time was when criminal degenerates were deported from England to Australia, but nowadays it's the reverse: Rupert Murdoch, Richard Neville (in the 1960s, anyway), Kylie Minogue, etc...)

Plus, there is a reason the trophy is called the Ashes. And that reason is that the first time the Aussies defeated the England team, in England (back in 1882, when the population of Australia was about 17,000, including the sheep), some Aussie girls burnt part of a cricket stump to symbolize the death of English cricket, and presented the Whinging Pommie Team with the resultant Ashes. (The Americans who have wandered in will note, with delight, a Genuine Quaint Tradition from Little Old England).

So you can imagine how humiliating it is for the English to be beaten in the Ashes, which they are, almost always. (This is part of the reason the English do not observe the holiday of Thanksgiving: WTF do the English have to be thankful for?)

Still, it's not totally unheard of for the English to win the Ashes. Wikipedia tells me it has happened at least once in my lifetime. To hear the British MSM talk, you would think it was unprecedented - eschatological.

It isn't. No, it's that whole Redsox thing that scares me. A Redsox World Series victory is like a Portent from the Book of Revelation; I believe you'll find it somewhere between the horse-shaped locusts with gold crowns and human faces(9:vii), and the unclean frog-like spirits emerging from the mouths of various unlikely characters(16:xiii). (And to continue the eschatological theme, at least one former Redsox player is going to rise from the dead - at least if there's anything to this whole notion of cryonics.)

Homemaker loathes own home

2005-09-12T23:40:00.000+01:00

According to AP News (which, of course, means it's probably wrong, but still), Martha Stewart has stated that her period of house arrest was more unpleasant than her stretch in jail.

Excuse me? The internationally famous expert on elegant living has publically declared that spending a few months in her own house is less fun than a jail sentence?

Well, there goes the stock price of Martha Stewart Living. Let's hope Martha sold the stock short...

(Erm, let's not. The last time she tried that it didn't work out to well...)

OTOH maybe she was misreported; perhaps she was really trying to say "House arrest is tougher than jail because when you're all alone in your home, it's really hard to have a good... conversation".

Eyewitness account of the Superdome

2005-09-07T23:21:00.000+01:00

Here.

H/t Dean Esmay, whose previous post is a must-read as well. (Gave me a Rio flashback...)

Duncewatch I

2005-09-06T22:05:00.000+01:00

First in an occasional series, tracking those whose comments on the Katrina tragedy and its aftermath have been remarkably lacking in frontal lobe muscle, and, to continue the John Kennedy Toole theme, entitled Duncewatch.

This one goes out to all those people (like Azael in the comments to this post over on protein wisdom - BTW "Azael"? I wonder if he meant Azrael? Azazel?) who argued that the Wicked Dubya is solely to blame for the chaos in New Orleans because he didn't send in troops to maintain order immediately, without waiting for the consent of the governor of the state.

(To an intelligent layman from some faraway country this might seem like a very good thing for Dubya to have done; cut out the bureaucracy and take decisive action, instead of idling strumming a guitar out in California (Hah! He's so DUMB) but in fact there are some very, very serious laws (try a search for "Posse Comitatus Act") about when the US federal government can use troops to carry out governmental functions within the US without the consent of the governor of the state wherein said troops shall be deployed: basically, never; it amounts to declaring that a condition of insurrection exists, which is not an exactly tactful thing to do in a principal city of the former Confederacy...)

Therefore, to criticise the Wicked Dubya for not acting until he got the go-ahead from the governor of Louisiana (who took her time in requesting federal assistance, for reasons that may, or may not, become clear in the fullness of time), is to propose the following legal theory:

That a person duly constituted to exercise authority over the military [1] may disregard the written laws and constitution of the polity and deploy the military to prevent an emergency[2] perceived by [1] even absent the support, and indeed even overriding the vigorous opposition of the appropriate duly constituted supreme political authority[3].

I think that's a fair summary of the legal doctrine that would have allowed GWB [1], to deploy the military to prevent riots, rapes and murders in New Orleans [2], without the consent and despite the objections of the governor of Louisiana [3].

Now, my question to anyone who thinks the above is exactly what GWB should have done is this:

If you substitute General Pinochet for [1], prevent fall of Chile to totalitarian communist tyranny for [2], and Salvador Allende for [3], you have an accurate portrayal of the Chilean coup of 1974: General Pinochet, a duly constituted senior officer of the Chilean army, decided that he was going to prevent the emergency he perceived of an impending communist takeover of Chile, by overriding the duly constituted supreme political authority of Chile, Salvador Allende.

All you liberal, progressive folks who think GWB should have overriden the state governor and damn the consequences: be careful what you wish for.

(As for Azael: anyone who can read the phrase "also sprach Azael" and reply with "loved the Wagner bit" shouldn't be bloviating on public policy; if you use Wagner when you should have used Nietzsche, you might want to check exactly what you are using for Shinola.)

Disclaimers.

I love the music of Wagner. The ideas of Wagner not even a mother could love.

Allende was elected president of Chile under the then constitution despite the fact that he never won a majority of the popular vote; in fact something like sixty per cent of the voters in that election voted against his policies. Shit happens, and mature adults deal with it and do not, for example, start comparing the shit unfavorably to Adolf Hitler. (I believe the last British prime minister whose party received a majority of the popular vote was Sir Winston Churchill in the 1950s; certainly Blair (and Thatcher) never had popular majorities).

A Confederacy of Duxes

2005-09-06T00:42:00.000+01:00

Maybe New Orleans isn't dead yet:

ITEM: "When wolves attack their settlement", Ayn Rand said, "animals perish; men write the Constitution". Close enough.

Indulge me for a moment by considering this glorious feat. The streets are deluged by floods of foul water, law and order has collapsed, the cops are behaving like the Crips (with notable, honorable exceptions) - and out of this Hobbesian state of nature these people have created not merely order, the basis of peace, but division of labor, the basis of profit.

And What Is More: they are still serving beer, the basis of civilization!

Heck, they even took time out to party!

Gentleman, raise your glasses, and ladies, raise.... your glasses too, as I'm all out of beads ;-) I give you The Big Easy!

Note on title: "Dux" is the term used in Scottish schools for the highest-ranked student in a class; it is therefore the opposite of "dunce" and, since it also is Latin for "leader", has better connotations than "valedictorian". The whole thing of course is a pun on this.

The unmentionable odour of death Offends the September night

2005-09-05T22:41:00.000+01:00

Item: Jude Wanniski, a populariser of supply-side economics, died last week. Wanniski's masterwork The Way the World Works synthesized the economic thinking of fiscal firebrand Arthur Laffer (Wanniski first sketched the notorious curve that came to bear Laffer's name) and monetary theorist Robert Mundell (1999 Nobel Laureate in Economics) and threw in his own idea of the efficient political market to produce a model that he believed could explain, well, the world. As a former customer, I can testify that his consultancy business did a pretty honking good job of explaining the markets; I benefited from his advice to the tune of thousands of dollars. And for helping remind the world one more time that taxes are sand in the gears of production and trade, he deserves the thanks of mankind. He had literally thousands of original ideas, not all of which I could endorse, exactly, but he was a force for good, and a loss to the world.

Item: then again, it may be as well that Wanniski never lived to see this hellish conjunction of two of his most, erm, original ideas: opposition to the war in Iraq, and support of Louis Farrakhan. Aren't the streets of New Orleans filled with tainted water enough, that The Less Than Honorable Louis has to start pissing on the corpses of the dead in this way? Go sit on the Washington Monument, bowtie-boy.

Item: Not just him. Every kind of scum-sucking nematode has drivelled out some statement or other linking the hurricane to their own silly little holy wars. Pride of place of the Roll of Shame goes to the Juergen Trittin, a German Green politician (loves plants, can't stand people) who claimed that Katrina happened because the Wicked Dubya Administration didn't get the Kyoto accord ratified. (Remember? The agreement that the US Senate voted 95-0 against, the one that would cost trillions of dollars and lower the average global temperature in 2100 by approximately 1 degree celsius? That Kyoto?) As many in the blogosphere have remarked, it's a crying shame President McKinley didn't have one of them Kyoto accords; would've stopped the 1900 Galveston hurricane fer sure.

It's an ill wind, they say, that blows no good. This was an ill wind.

There's a drinking game we used to play as undergraduates: I've never. You go round the table, each one in turn stands up and says "I've never..." (as it may be) "...gone over Niagara Falls in a barrel", and anyone who has done this thing has to stand up and drink. (Of course, the trick is to deny various unusual sex acts and watch who stands up. There is usually someone who will admit to almost anything if they can get a drink out of it).

We didn't, when we were playing this game, say I've never... and I never will. Because when you're nineteen and life is all about sports and alcohol and hotties in leggings and that foodstuff of the gods that my room-mate invented, the Box o' Meat, and the worst thing you can imagine is having to sometimes do a write-up or a spot of calculus... I never will is not in your vocabulary.

(I never will again I understood, even then. A friend of mine from primary school had dropped dead from some poorly-explained virus: meningitis, I guess. He was a loss to humanity: a natural leader of men. And by that I mean: sassed the teachers non-stop and founded the Official School Goofy Club (motto: "lassies in fishnet tights are fun!") of which I'm proud and honored to say I was a member. Did I mention he was eleven years old when he died?)

But none of us undergrads ever thought that any new experience might be barred to us for ever. By a particular girl, sure, but there were plenty more out there. A given door might be closed, but the building would always be there, wouldn't it?

For me, the phrase I never will entered my vocabulary about four years ago.

I've never gazed up at the Twin Towers and I never will.

I've never seen New Orleans -

I can't bear to finish that sentence.

God willing, I never will.

Go read it. Now.

2005-08-11T23:18:00.000+01:00

The great Jeff Goldstein hits one out of the park. Heck, out of the country. The solar system...

Also via protein wisdom, this may just force me to rethink that whole relocate-to-NYC idea of mine. "They can take oor lives, but they'll never take oor deep-fried Mars bars!", as I'm sure William Wallace would have said if he'd ever tasted that particular Scottish delicacy...

UPDATE: Anyone who agrees with the official idiot quoted in that New York Times story that "Trans fat clearly contributes to heart disease" is invited to check out the scientific position here. Or buy this book, if fancy a more substantial read.

"Ici c'est bon de tuer de temps en temps un emigre, pour encourager les autres"

2005-07-29T22:43:00.000+01:00

The good news is that it seems all of the sad excuses for hominids behind last Thursday's damb squibs have been caught.

The bad news is that before they got around to actual terrorists, London police whacked a perfectly harmless wetback.

"Stupidity", Robert Heinlein observed, "is the only universal capital crime". Running from armed police officers who identify themselves as such, and moreover running into a subway station the day after several of them have been bombed (and by someone who lived in your house)... this may not be stupidity, exactly, but I'd hate to live on the difference.

(I know. I know. He was Brazilian; in Brazil the police have "the IQ of a mango and the integrity of a daffodil". And he was worried about being deported - and contrary to some beliefs, the UK government has occasionally been known to stir out of its habitual torpor and deport the odd illegal alien; one friend of mine outstayed his welcome from this island of lost souls and was deported- two, if you count a Kiwi who got a very nasty letter from The Home Office saying, in effect, "Make my day, punk". Still. Better in Brazil than dead; better in Brazil than in Britain, perhaps; Brazil is no place to be middle-class and aspiring, but nowadays Britain is hardly better).

As for the cops who shot him, I have two observations:

1. If they thought this man looked like a member of an Al-Qaeda affiliate, then I fully expect them descend on next year's Wimbledon tennis tournament and arrest the Williams sisters for membership in the Aryan Nation.

(Maybe they were just trying not to profile anyone? And the next time there is a rape committed in London they will pull in a bunch of women as suspects? I mean, it wouldn't do to confine the investigation to people who are actually likely to have committed the crime; that would be profiling).

2. Having shot the wrong guy, couldn't they at least have planted some kind of excuse on him? I mean, don't these people watch The Shield?

(I mean, say they planted some drugs on him. Nobody cares what happens to drug dealers. Over in Thailand, the Bangkok police have been quietly offing meth vendors for the last two years and aside from the occasional hand-wringing op-ed piece in the Financial Times and some more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger footage from the travel channel, there's been nary a squeak in protest. Or suppose they planted a gun on him: this is Britain, the land of the hoplophobe; most people in these parts seem to believe that carrying a firearm through the streets is a worse crime than abusing a child - that's certainly the message that judges send out when they hand down sentences for felonies).

They didn't, though, which suggests that for all their trigger-happy ways, the London police remain closer to Dixon of Dock Green than Mackey of Farmington.

It is my fervent hope that the twisted medievalism of Al-Qaeda and its asshole buddies can be overcome by "Dixon" methods rather than "Mackey" methods. We'll see. Meanwhile, I shall raise a caipirinha to the memory of Jean Charles Menezes, who died in the War on Terror and is with the angels.

Again With The Bombs...

2005-07-22T01:29:00.000+01:00

...but what a contemptible little set of bombs they were. To call them pissant would be too generous.

In my early childhood I was told that the first time the Nazis bombed England the casualties were as follows: Humans, 0, Rabbits, 1. It inspired, or so I was told, this song.

And today - the mighty warriors behind this latest triumph were, I am sure, hoping that the Brits would be cowering in terror from north, south, east and west, but really, what have they achieved?

They grazed a granny. (link).

No offense, Ma'am; we hope you aren't badly hurt. (We know you aren't. The weak sisters die young; the strong women live forever. The little old ladies are little only in stature; their spirits are a hundred feet tall).

Y'know, when the miserable little cowards behind this latest venture eventually wind up in the next world (after tripping over their own shoelaces and falling down some stairs, I'd wager, judging by the level of competence they have displayed today), when they collect their seventy-two raisins;

(You poor, deluded, dupes. If you wanted raisins, you can get them in any convenience store. And if you were dumb enough not to check your translation, and thought you were getting virgins - don't you know that every moment of intimacy takes place between two virgins, because every intimate moment is unique in its delight, and so whatever one's past, one always comes virgin to every encounter? - Well, no, you don't. If you were healthy enough to know that, you would be healthy enough not to find joy in blowing people up).

-At any rate, you wouldn't want to be these two-bit losers, on the day they finally choke on their own drool and find themselves in Hell. I believe there is something worse than being eternally tormented for being evil, and that is being eternally laughed at for being a useless fuck-up.

But seriously, boys, I take it all back. You are the ultimate in terrorism. Because terrorism is a confession of weakness; it screams to the sky "Nobody really supports my cause, so I have to murder a bunch of random people just to get noticed!" (Of course, under a well-run government the terrorists get noticed in ways they never wanted (police raids and cruise missiles are a poor substitute for seventy-two something-tasties) but still they get noticed, and that might be their true psychological payoff). At any rate, terrorism is a confession of weakness, like the pathetic little inadequate that stalks the beautiful woman he knows he can never, never deserve while he remains as he is. But you, you pathetic little pratfallers, you can only aspire to the weakness of the terrorist: you are people who have fucked up even your fuck-ups.

And you know what? When the last one of you has choked on his own hatred we'll still be here. Drinking our beer, wine and cocktails. Reading and saying whatever we like. Flaunting our shameless flesh. Loving who, how and where we want to. We'll bury you, you sad little inadequates, and we won't even notice while we're digging your graves because you know what? We have so many better things to do with our time than worry about you.

"Well - business as usual, Mr Ward!!

2005-07-09T02:34:00.000+01:00

Yes, business as usual.

Last night, at about 21.30, all the lights went out. So this is it, I thought, it's finally happened, the Mullahs have exploded an EMP over the city. The GoldenEye has opened... Then I tried to to call my friend Michela a half a mile up the road:

xj: Hey, Michela, have the lights just gone out at your place?

MICHELA: No, what are you talking about?

xj: Oh... must just be a brownout...

It was, in fact, just a brownout. And it was, in fact, just a brownout of my block. And it was, in fact, nothing more than a practical joke brownout: you know, the sort where you rush to the store to buy up their stock of candles, flashlights and matches, and get back home precisely five goddamn seconds before all the lights go back on...

God bless the electricity company and all who serve in her. I saw worse brownouts back before 9/11. (That was when I shared an apartment with an accountant from London Energy; my theory is that someone in his office had a grudge).

This morning, half the Tube network was out of action. Osama and his miserable passel of raisin/virgin afficionados may gloat, if it warms the cockles of their shrivelled hearts, but we Londoners know better: this is business as usual, Mr Ward! On one out of every ten average days in this city, half the Tube network is out of action. Half the Tube network being out of action is our normal state. In fact, the Tube's definition of good service is "trains are running to some vague approximation of timeliness". You think you can scare us by making trains crap? Bworn an' bred in de' briar patch, Br'er Osama!

Kidding aside, that there were Tube trains running at all today was a triumph. It's a fine tradition of this city to hate and despise every connected with the Tube network, so I will not say anything along the lines of I am proud, honoured and humbled by your incredible achievement in keeping our city moving and thus spitting in the face of the evil men that tried to hurt us all, and you especially, the other day. May God bless you all. No, I would not ever care to voice such sentiments. I'll just look forward to the day when we can go back to damning the damn Tube network for their damn ten minute delays without any inconvenient choked-up feelings of gratitude...
.

...and one more thing

2005-07-07T23:01:00.000+01:00

I'd like on this day of horrors to share with you a joke that a South African of my acquaintance told me in September 2001; I think in fact this was the first joke I was ever told after 9/11.

The year is 2050. Little Johnny, a precocious boy, has been reading some old book and has come across a reference that puzzles him. So he asks his wise old Grandpa:

JOHNNY: Grandpa, what were the Twin Towers?

GRANDPA: Oh, they were two very tall buildings in New York City. They were destroyed half a century ago by Moslem terrorists.

.
.
.

Pause

.
.
.

JOHNNY: Grandpa, what were Moslems?

I remember my clearest memory of 9/11 is dread: but not primarily dread of al-Qa'ida and their merry gang of private-pilot medievalists, or naked existential dread at the thought of so much death, though those were certainly present. No, what I felt most was an utter, scalp-prickling, bowels-liquefying, scrotum-retracting dread of omigod WTF will the Americans do NOW? There are things in human garments that accuse George W Bush of being a crazed warmonger. Well, a few days after 9/11 I read an op-ed piece that, in effect, urged the US government to demand that every ISP on Earth give the NSA complete access to its communications, and seriously suggesting that hold-outs should be destroyed by cruise missiles. By heaven, at this moment I stand amazed at Dubya's moderation...

(Oh and BTW the author of that little piece of "ugly American imperialism"? It wasn't Mark Steyn. It wasn't Ann Coulter. And, AFAIK, it wasn't anybody remotely connected with FOX NEWS. It was written by John Keegan, a British military historian and a former professor at that neo-conservative think-tank known as Princeton College. Lest we forget, that's how normal people felt after 9/11; GWB could have nuked the entire mid-East into a sheet of glass and nobody other than Dennis^H^H^H^H^H^H Justin Raimondo would have cared to raise a protest). (No link to him. I don't believe darling Dennis is the sort of person this blog should be linking to. I dare say you could Google him, if you felt the urge to wallow in his vile, Jooooooo-hating filth).

It's a sad fact of life that whilst decent people have in their list of concepts things like "benefit of the doubt" and "try to see the other fellow's point of view" and "who am I to cast the first stone" and "live and let live" and a whole bunch of ideas like that that make civilisation possible - assholes (a category that encompasses all divisions of mankind and includes a fair number of white Anglo Christians, in my experience)... assholes see all these nice, friendly concepts as just being another way of saying "I'm a wimp; I surrender".

The asshole can therefore rob, cheat, abuse, betray and generally dis' the decent person a number of times without any retaliation, because it takes quite a lot to convince a decent person that somebody is an irredemable asshole... but one day the asshole will cross a line, which may not have been obvious to either party in advance, and it becomes obvious that the asshole is, in fact, nothing more than an asshole, and all bets are off. In one of his novels CS Lewis described how a decent person deals with a true, irredeemable asshole: "He fought him with a clean hatred, as though for the first time in his life he knew what hatred was for, why God made that emotion". (Something like that. Ransom whacking the Un-Man in Perelandra, if anyone wants to look it up).

I've sometimes thought that al-Qaida's entire silly jihad might be one colossal exercise in Suicide by Cop. And by that I mean, they know that they can't face the modern world; that they don't have the balls and the intellect to face the challenge of adapting their faith to the challenges of modern living: as Iraqis and Afghanis and Lebanese have done and, I do believe, some day soon Syrians and Egyptians and Iranians and maybe, who knows, even Saudis will do. No, they cannot face that challenge, and so choose death, by provoking the very people they know will come after them, and hunt them down, and grant them grace. Well, to all jihadis I say what a better man than me once said, "If you wish to die for your cause, then we aim to please". Inshallah, most of them will come to their senses first, and the rest will take few innocents along with them. But whatever it takes, boots on the ground in Qom or mushroom clouds in the sky over Al Qasim - don't think we won't do it. Not just for us, but for all the good people they're holding hostage right now. And I don't just mean the Quattrochis and the Woods and the Bigleys. I mean all the Arabs, all the Pakistanis and Bangladeshis and North Africans and everybody else that these miserable savages have prevented from living their lives.

Fifty-some years ago Italy, Germany and Japan were controlled by fascists. Today, I have Italian, German and Japanese friends, and the only reason that was possible is because the decent people of that time gave their all to make sure that the twisted idealogies that held Italy, Germany and Japan hostage were annihilated, rendered so thoroughly dead that today their meagre handful of adherents lack the credibility to be evil: they are merely pathetic. See, I'd like to think that when that conversation really does occur in 2050, the last line will go something like this:

JOHNNY'S FRIEND IMRAN: Uh, sir, what were terrorists?

Good night, London. Today, at least, I'm proud to live here.

The Prayer for the Dead

2005-07-07T22:58:00.000+01:00

Unto them from whose eyes the veil of life hath fallen may there be granted the accomplishment of their true Wills; whether they will absorption in the Infinite, or to be united with their chosen and preferred, or to be in contemplation, or to be at peace, or to achieve the labour and heroism of incarnation on this planet or another, or in any Star, or aught else, unto them may there be granted the accomplishment of their wills; yea, the accomplishment of their wills.

John Wilkes Booth Had A Point?: The Horrors of the Lincoln Center

2005-03-31T22:51:00.000+01:00

Lincoln Center is a large mall-like object located next to Columbus Circle, on 59th Street and Central Park West. (The SW corner of the park). The upper floor appears to be devoted to jazz, and since musical wanking does not appeal to me, I gave this area a miss. (Besides, I'm pretty sure they wouldn't have let me in without a necktie).

The only other bar in this place is called the Stone Rose. This BTW was the name of a talentless but inexplicably popular Britband of the early 1990s: imagine a very, very buggy beta version of Oasis. The parallel is not gratuitous: the Stone Rose is a very, very buggy beta version of a lounge bar. Specifically, it is the very, very buggy beta version of the piano bar on the top floor of the London Hilton (a bar in NYC beaten out by a bar in la cita dolente! Oh, the humanity!)

My first impression was that this place was reminiscent of the style bars in Camps Bay, Capetown, with the difference that the Camps Bay bars have a stunning view of the Atlantic Ocean, whilst this place has a stunning view of... a traffic circle. The drinks are overpriced ($8 for a small Heineken, which BTW the bar staff snatched away half-full when my back was turned), but that wouldn't be a problem if the clientele was good. The clientele was not good. We're talking rotund warpigs, 4s who think they're 9s, mutton dressed up as... mutton. (Another difference from Camps Bay: Camps Bay attracts genuine hotties; the Stone Rose set are lukewarmies, if that).

I sat down on a stool by the window and scanned the room. After a couple of minutes one of the bar staff came up and told me "Excuse me, we need this stool." I was so shocked that I let him take it.

You know, one thing that has surprised me about NYC is the general level of courtesy and politeness, which is far higher than London. NYC of course has a legendary reputation for rudeness and I wondered where it had happened to all this famous attitude. Now I know. The bar staff at the Stone Rose have apparently sucked all the rudeness out of Manhattan and are using it themselves. It's safe to say that pigs will fly over the frozen landscape of hell before I go back to the Stone Rose.

(Though this is actually not the worst bar I have ever been in. There was that one place in my hometown of Necktie (the Sewer of Scotland) filled with foul-smelling oldsters crazed on Tennants Eighty-Shilling (a beer that tastes exactly the same going down as it does coming back up). On the whole, I'd rather be in the Stone Rose).

But I would far rather be in the place I went to take the taste of the Stone Rose out of my mouth. It's called Snafu, and it's just off Lex somewhere in the high 40s (I think). This is what a bar should be: relaxed with vibe. It's vaguely out of place on that somewhat-nothing part of the East Side, but if you're in the neighbourhood, well worth a visit. (Apart from anything else, the girls are way better looking than at Stone Rose).

Sunlight in Manhattan

2005-03-31T16:46:00.000+01:00

Tuesday evening I ate in the oyster bar under Grand Central station (a pretty good place if you feel like a few mollusks) and went on to the Upper West Side. I was still feeling low-energy and I figured that the Upper West was a low-energy neighbourhood. I was right. And how. (I'm told I may be the only person to have ever voluntarily gone to the Upper West in search of nightlife. I didn't find any).

On Wednesday, for the first time since I arrived here, the sun shone. There is something wonderfully depucelatory about the first sunny day of spring, especially when it's a day like yesterday when the sky is solid blue, the air is still cold and the sun shines brighter and clearer than you've ever remembered it. In the sunny patches of the street it was actually warm.

I spent the day failing to do touristy things. Went to the Empire State Building: two hour line to get in. I think not. There is almost nothing that can motivate me to stand in line for two hours if I can possibly avoid it. (I'd do it for a large sum of money, of course. After my succession of Sucky Jobs I've become hardened to doing vile and degrading things for economic payoffs).

After that, I went down to Battery Park. The wait for a ferry to Liberty Island was, you guessed it, two hours. (Bad trend developing here...) It seemed like a pity to spend such a wonderful day indoors, so I figured I'd go on the Circle Line cruise around Manhattan island. However, I got to the pier around 2.30. The last full cruise leaves at 1.30 (who knew?). They do shorter "semi-circle" cruises, but I couldn't be bothered. Instead, I went down to the Brooklyn Bridge and got some shots of the skyline.

In the evening, I met up with Jack (a friend of Mybrotherthelawyer) who just recently moved to NYC. Over steaks in the hokeyly Aussie Outback Steakhouse, we talked about his impressions of the city, which were nearly all good. (He did complain about the rents. He's just about to move into a three-bed brownstone apartment in the Village, sharing with a friend, and between them they can just afford it. This from an executive at JPMorgan).

Ten pm came rolling round. Jack, who had to be in the office at 7.30 the next morning, went home. At his suggestion I headed off to check out the Lincoln Center. The results of that check deserve their own post.

xj About Town

2005-03-29T23:08:00.000+01:00

Braving the Deluge, I went down to the West Village and had a Korean barbecue, then went in search of a bar called the Blind Tiger that my Lonely Planet guide assured me was all that. Remarkably enough for a venue listed in an LP guide, this bar actually exists. It's not so much a target-poor as a target-nonexistent environment (on a stormy Monday night at least) but I got into an interesting conversation with a marketing guy from Intel who was in town (from Boston) for a few days.

Woke up this morning feeling the effects of the rain and a beer called Brooklyn Pilsner, which is all right but has a rather odd aftertaste. The damn rain had stopped at least, so after checking my emails (I've cold-mailed a few agencies and I asked my friend Annabel to try to fix me up with an interview at her old bank here in NY - none of these people have got back to me yet however), I decided to do the sights.

I wandered vaguely around Chinatown and the edges of the Lower East Side for a couple of hours before breaking for some dimsum. (This was a weird experience. Portions were huge and for some reason, they didn't have soy sauce but did have Worcestershire. Fusion cuisine?)

Then down to the financial district. It's visually breathtaking, but it would take a better writer than me to make I wandered around photographing a load of very tall buildings interesting to the reader. The Wall Street area is the most crowded I've yet seen Manhattan, and even then the crowds are not half as dense as in London. (There are parts of la cita dolente, eg around Piccadilly or Oxford Circuses, that make me feel like I'm trapped inside Soylent Green. Yet another reason to leave...)

(I was expecting Wall Street to be bigger. Instead it's a narrow little canyon of a place. Of course a load of the big banks have moved uptown - Morgan Stanley and Bear Sterns, that I know of, and probably others).

Finally, I went up to the Frick collection, which is housed in the former mansion of the late Mr Frick. (And I don't know how he can have stood to live so ridiculously rococo a residence. It must have been like living inside a gold-plated cuckoo clock). The collection has the usual semi-talented Renaissance daubings. (Ever look at the faces on one of these Quattrocentro "masterpieces"? The expressions are nearly always inappropriate and often hilariously so. You'll find pictures themed "Adoration of the Magi" where the Magi have expressions of fixed disgust plastered across their features, or Pietas where the women look, on the whole, kind of relieved. I really don't see the point of Renaissance painting).

The Frick has, however, three treasures: three glorious Vermeers, snapped up by Old Man Frick back in the day when everyone thought Rembrandt was the Old Master and Vermeer was underrated. You'll find details of these magnificent paintings here, and all I will say is that the Officer and the Girl is simply beautiful.

Ground Zero

2005-03-28T17:48:00.000+01:00

Last night I wandered all over Midtown trying to find an internet cafe, and it turns out that I just missed a huge easyeverything just off Times Square, which is where I am blogging from now.

It is raining today like you wouldn't believe. I've never seen such rain, not even in Glasgow. A good day to go to the museums, perhaps, except that this is Monday and they are closed. (I wonder why museums close on Monday? The fish shops in Scotland used to all close on Monday but that was because the trawlers operated out of the Western Isles where they were all too superstitious to put to sea on "The Lord's Day". Now of course all the fishing boats in British waters are operated by Spaniards (thanks, EU) so the problem doesn't arise).

Instead of culture then, I went for couture. I did the British tourist thing and went down to Century 21 to score a load of cheap clothes.

Century 21 is a few steps away from Ground Zero.

I stood at the edge of the site and quietly said the prayer for the dead. It seemed like the thing to do. I was not as moved by actually being there as I had expected; less moved than when I saw the Anne Frank museum in Amsterdam. I wonder why. Maybe because the site itself is, when all is said and done, just another hole in the ground. (There is the cross that was formed from the splintered rebars, which I dare say Christians would be very impressed by, but to me it's two pieces of metal set at ninety degrees, and that's all). Like the man said, it's not there any more. I can get a feeling, from looking up at the Woolworth or Chrysler Buildings, what it must have been to look up at the Towers when they were still standing, but it's just not visceral to me, the way I guess it would have been if I had spent years seeing those towers on the skyline and the suddenly... not.

Walking away I caught sight of the Wall of Heroes and, more on a whim than anything else, looked for the names of people I'd once met.

And I found one.

He was a moneybroker at Cantors - Cantors in London, based in London when I knew him, but it's quite possible he was transferred to Cantors New York, which of course lost something like two-thirds of its people on 9/11. Don't get me wrong, it's not like we were close friends or anything. To me he was that nasal voice on the squawk-box yelling things like "Ones yen three at six, four bid now, four at six!" and the one time we actually met (so he could buy me some drinks as a bribe for more business) he spent most of the evening talking about various cruel and unusual things he had done to some unfortunate prostitutes. But still...

It just hit me, that was all, that someone I knew was murdered by the terrorists. I always knew it could have been me, but somehow, seeing that name up on the Wall makes it more real.

First Impressions of New York

2005-03-28T02:42:00.000+01:00

-Queens is no prettier than its reputation. It reminds me a little of Glasgow, and that's no good thing.
-Manhattan OTOH is breathtaking. I ended up staying in Murray Hill, which is up next to the UN (I'm not a twelve-year-old Congolese girl so I guess it's a safe neighbourhood for me). It's actually quite quiet, at least on Sunday evening it is. The hotel I originally booked into was up on W 103rd, which they referred to as "the Upper West Side" and everyone else in the universe refers to as "Morningside Heights", at any rate a few blocks south of Columbia U. This hotel was a third the price of the one I'm staying in. After booking I checked the place out on tripadvisor.com, and discovered there were a number of reasons the 103rd St hotel was so cheap. They weren't good reasons. (The hotel market in NY seems depressingly efficient). So I switched.
-Kirsty MacColl (?) was right: the wind _does_ go right through you. I may have to buy a scarf.
-Almost impossible to find internet cafes in this city, it seems. I'm writing this from a Kinko's on 34th and (I think) Madison, and paying through the nose for the privilege. _And_ my business school email doesn't work, (as usual)...

Lost my Virginity...

2005-03-28T02:26:00.000+01:00

Everyone I know in London raves about Virgin Atlantic. (That should have warned me. Things that Brits think are jolly marvellous, like the NHS and the BBC, generally turn out to be horrific disgraces to mankind). Despite the fact that I used to hang out with one of their stewardesses (I'll call her Cherry, with good reason), I never got around to travelling with VA, until today.

Here are some of the "high"points of this, erm, experience:

-LHR is now officially the worst airport in the world, narrowly beating out Ruzhny in Prague. In Prague I had to stand in line for an hour and a half to go through passport control (when I was _leaving_ the country; I'm guessing it was a communist-era law they hadn't got around to revoking at that point) but at LHR today I spent a total of THREE HOURS standing in various lines, until I felt like I was trapped in some kind of Soviet Union themepark.
-I was picked on for the Potemkin Security Check, as usual: shoes off, pockets out, the works. I guess it's like a DWB, except in my case it would be "Flying While White". Either that or the "security" "guards" were worried I was one of those blond, clean-shaven Scottish hijackers we see so much of nowadays...
-Following these horrors, the Virgin inflight movie screens had the unmitigated gall to show a cartoon of happy Virgin passengers being magically wafted past security checks. I felt a sudden and poignant urge to buy a high-powered sniper rifle and take aim at Branson's balloon the next time the strutting popinjay takes to the air.

These inflight movies BTW seem to constitute the sole reason anyone would want to fly with Virgin. Everyone, even nebbishes in Cattle Truck Class like me, gets his own screen with about fifty movies, and quite good ones too. (OTOH they were also showing Fahrenhate 911, which for some reason was described as a documentary). The main problem with the inflight movies was that they shut them off an hour before the (pretty lousy) landing, so I was left to listen to various brats squalling in relays in a manner reminiscent of the Dilbert cartoon about the colicky baby convention...

Virgin? Not worth a fuck.

Westward, Ho!, or, Blog, Interrupted

2005-03-28T02:14:00.000+01:00

I really don't know what's happened to this blog. (Well, actually I do. I've been so debiliated and preoccupied that I haven't got my head around posting for a while). The point is that lately I have gone for months without a single post, only to pop up every so often with a colossal screed about how miserable my life is, a sort of Deject!Deject!Deject! as it were. The most recent posts have been a series of Sucky Jobs I Have Had, and not to spoil the surprise ending, but I am building up to a gargantuan monster of a final post in that series...

...which I am going to interrupt for the reason that I have gone to New York for the week, and I want to record my impressions as and when I'm impressed. (When I eventually get around to the Final Sucky Job, then I'll row back a copy to before this post to maintain the continuity of the series).

The main reason for this trip to NY is what we finance geeks call Due Diligence. At the moment it seems quite likely that I'll spend a few years living here (that's the plan, anyway) so I figured I should check the place out; it would be madness to move to a city and then realize you hate it (the way I did with London - though to be fair, London wasn't so bad the first few years. It was only when I started to travel and actually see some other places that I realised how much London sucks).

What do I expect of NY? Well, I know that in many ways this is not really an American city, more like a Zeropean one that just ended up on the wrong side of the Atlantic. Still, I'm hoping that I will find the Big Apple more congenial than la cita dolente that I've toughed out for the last ten years. We'll see.

The Sucky Jobs I Have Had: Pause For Thought

2005-02-16T00:25:00.000Z

So, let's summarize. My "career" in the 1990s sucked because of the following factors:

-Obnoxious coworkers and managers;
-Being forced to perform various degrading and useless errands;
-Acerebral copying of data from one medium to another;
-Dysfunctional organisations;
-Routes to career advancement blocked;
-Being forced to listen to endless tsunami of drivel from ditzes at neighboring desks;
-Unrealistic deadlines forcing me to work like a coked-up beaver to meet them;
-Utter, senseless futility.

My "professional" life in the 1990s had only one redeeming feature: the fact that I did not have to endure all of these torments at the same time. In my darkest hours-

(And there were some profoundly dark ones. I believe I was clinically depressed throughout my first year at Angus Ogg and my entire time at Changi. I was certainly sullen, listless, self-pitying and generally bad company)-

In my darkest hours I could still console myself with the thought that Things Could Be Worse.

The Sucky Jobs I Have Had, Part V

2005-02-05T02:38:00.000Z

Changi Asset Management
The least said about this Gehenna the better.

It made Angus Ogg look efficient. As an example, this twelve-storey corporate monolith had precisely one fax room. All faxes had to be sent and received from this fax room.

(I swear to God I am not making this up. I wish I was).

The fax room communicated with the rest of the building by a team of elderly message boys who used to totter up and down the stairs about four times a day. They went home at three-thirty pm.

Our clients used to send us faxes with messages like "Our agent in Buttfuqistan has been kidnapped by the Robert Fisk Appreciation Society, please send 2,000,000 groats ransom by close of business or he'll be short one head", and we would get them the next morning at ten-thirty, when the messengers' pacemakers kicked in again. This sort of thing happened on a regular basis.

I worked for one of those teams that are very common in financial organisations, that do nothing and do it with great thoroughness. The principal activity seemed to be producing weighty reports that were snail-mailed out to clients who, as far as I could work out, threw them away on receipt. Several hundred of these things had to be produced every month, to ridiculously unfeasible deadlines. If I had to sum up my time at Changi, I'd say frenzied drudgery.

They also used to do fantastically bizarre things like taking a two hour liquid lunch and then saying, "Damn, we haven't finished our reports. We'll have to work the weekend again".

When I worked at Changi I could not imagine that a more pathetic, humiliating, dispriting and utterly worthless hellhole could possibly exist. When I found another job at the beginning of 2000 I was sure that there was nowhere to go but up.

The Sucky Jobs I Have Had, Part IV

2005-02-05T02:26:00.000Z

Morgan Stanley
Actually, this didn't suck. I'm proud to have worked there (which is why I'm using the real name of the firm, rather than a thinly disguished nom de clef like all the other Sucky Employers).

There were only two problems with Stanley.

One, in order to get a well-paid job you pretty much had to join the Marine Corps. Pretty much all the directors were Marines. (And the Corps wouldn't have an unorganised grab-astic piece of amphibioid shit like me, I'm sorry to say).

And the other problem was that I had to sit next to the Secretary From Hell who had some kind of compulsive disorder that meant she had to spend hours on the phone describing every single facet of her, and her children's, and her extended family's, life. Imagine the Daily Bleat without the humour, without the satire, with Gnat replaced by two fantastically stupid and banal brats, and two hours long. Every day. Right next to your ear. Loud.

Other than that, it was a good place to work.

The Sucky Jobs I Have Had, Part III

2005-02-05T01:58:00.000Z

Angus Ogg Bank
Even today, I find it hard to believe I pissed away nearly two years in this profoundly dysfunctional institution. They were famed across London's financial district as the bank that employed people who had no business being employed in banking. Among other quirks, they paid a bagpiper in full Highland dress to play the Last Post at six pm every evening. Also, anyone caught riding in the lift without wearing his jacket was fired on the spot. I'd say the only redeeming feature of Angus Ogg was the people. I'm still friends with some of my co-workers from those days.

The managers, however, were all assholes, except one, who was a moonbat instead.

During my tenure at Angus Ogg, Princess Di smacked into a Parisian underpass and became Princess Di-ed. And there was great wailing and gnashing of teeth among the servile regophiles that infest London. The day after Diana got mashed into pulp, this moonbat manager came to me with tears in his eyes and said, "xj, you're clever, explain it to me: you go all your life believing in God and then something like this happens. How is this possible?"

Just so we're clear: this wasn't some overpromoted kid. This was a mature man, a father of children, an executive of a large corporation. He had presumably heard about the genocides in Rwanda and Cambodia and Stalin's gulags and the whole two world wars thing, and probably at some point somebody had brought up the fact that there were these guys called the Nazis that had murdered, oh, six, seven million people in cold blood, and yet the only thing that had ever caused this moonbat to doubt his faith in a benevolent God was a car wreck involving a dumb, useless ditz whose only achievement in life was to marry a big-eared hippy who had the hots for another woman, cheat on him with an even bigger loser than Prince Jug-Ears, and give birth to a dork with a swastika fetish.

Diana? To coin a phrase, "Screw her".

The Sucky Jobs I Have Had, Part II

2005-02-05T01:54:00.000Z

Scaife Trust
I spent three weeks in this appalling institution. My job consisted almost exclusively of copying numbers from one piece of paper to another.

In pencil.

The Sucky Jobs I Have Had, Part I

2005-02-05T01:37:00.000Z

Whitehall Trust
Straight out of college, I got a job with the investment arm of a commercial bank that had delusions of Goldman Sachs. The environment could be described as Boiler Room meets Full Metal Jacket. (I was Gomer Pyle, of course).

Supposedly, I was being trained to become a Big Swinging Dick; in actual fact I was a sort of gofer-cum-frat-pledge for whatever nonsense the bank's traders could dream up. One incident springs to mind. The boss-fella had decided, for some reason, that it was critical to the success of his global currency options trading desk that he find out precisely when King Charles I was executed. Of course, finding out this vital piece of business information was my job, because everything was.

Now, this was in the mid-90s, pre-Google and practically pre-Internet. If you wanted to find out information back in those days, you had to phone people like some kind of Neanderthal. So I phoned up the history departments of a couple universities that owed me favours, but I couldn't dig up anyone whose area of study was "Incompetent and Vainglorious 17th Century Monarchs, Capping Thereof". I told this to the boss-fella, who by the way was a stereotypical Yorkshireman, whom I'll call Byeck. The following dialogue ensued:

BYECK: Bah! Useless, xj! Try the King Charles Society!
xj: Is there a King Charles Society?
BYECK: There must be! Ask directory enquiries!

So I called up "directory enquiries", that is to say the phone information service, and they gave me a number...

VOICE ON PHONE: Hello, King Charles.
xj: Hello, could you tell me when King Charles was executed?
VOICE ON PHONE: Haven't a clue mate, this is the King Charles public house.

That was the sort of thing I did for a living in my first job.

There was also the matter of the hookers.

On my very first day, Byeck slapped a phone number down in front of me and told me, "xj, phone up this number and book yourself a massage."

My first thought was Now this is what I call a sign-on bonus. My second thought was, Wait a minute, this will turn out to be the CEO's daughter, won't it?

But I called up the number and sure enough, I got a hooker. She, ah, read me the menu. I did not in fact book a "massage": calls on trading floors are recorded and I had some vague notion that it might be used in evidence against me.

(It was. Someone got the tape of the call and played it on the PA system. Glad I didn't ask for anything Wonkette...).

It turned out that Byeck suspected the woman living in the apartment above him of being a hooker, and had got her number somehow. Then he had decided that, rather than cut into his busy schedule of... whatever, he was going to get the newbie to do it.

He told me he wasn't surprised that the woman had turned out to be a hooker because only three types of people could afford to live in central London: foreign exchange traders (like him), libel lawyers, and prostitutes.

Y'know, if a young person were to come to me for career advice, I think I'd have to plump for prostitution, as I suspect it would be significantly less psychologically damaging than foreign exchange trading. (Of course, nobody with any morals what so ever would become an, excuse the expression, libel lawyer).

As for the other traders, they were almost all as big or bigger assholes than the boss-fella. One threatened to fire me when he didn't like the cup of tea I brought him from the tea shop across the street. ("That's harsh", commented Byeck. "Just suspend him for a few weeks without pay"). It was something of a relief when the failure of the European currency system to collapse on schedule convinced the bank's executives to downsize the foreign exchange department, and me with it.

Update: Speaking of hookers, I see that Belle is posting again. The Curse of xj has been lifted!?!?

Still... Pretty Good Year

2005-01-03T11:38:00.000Z

On the subject of New Year's Eve, I'm with Conrad the Gweilo*: New Year's Eve is when the people who don't go out do go out, and those of us with lives might as well stay home. Despite this, I made the mistake of letting my friend Michela drag me out to some ridiculously overpriced hogmanay hoedown in a hole in the ground in Chelsea. I have to say that I've spent better New Year's Eves: for example, all the ones when I did nothing, since spending eight hours in a converted storage cellar listening to wanky jazz covers of songs that weren't very good in the first place, while being jostled every twenty seconds by the waiters and the remarkably unappealing clientele, and paying ninety-nine pounds for the privilege, isn't exactly my idea of fun.

(Michela the convent-school-girl, seeing that I was not really in a party mood, decided that the best way to cheer me up was to pour champagne over me. It did not have quite the effect she was hoping for).

So much for the last New Year's Eve I will ever spend in Europe. I've known for years that I wanted to get the hell out of Britain (I'll blog about the reasons for that decision at a later date, but if you read Samizdata you'll probably guess what I'm talking about). With my background in finance I considered Switzerland for a while. Then I visited the place, and that cured me of any desire to move there. So, I'm getting the hell out of "Zerope" while the getting is good. Right now it looks most likely that I will end up in New York, via the associate program of some investment bank. I can think of worse ways to spend a few years.

*The Curse of xj strikes again: Gweilo Diaries has gone dark. I'm seriously tempted to link to Daily Kos or some other obnoxious blog to see if I can't take them down as well. xj: The Bloginator.

Dodged a bullet

2004-12-27T04:15:00.000Z

To think I almost went to Phuket again this time. And I dare say I'd have gone back to Patong as well, on the west of the island, just where the hammer fell.

People I know may have died. I guess the hotel I stayed at will not have been hit; it was at least ten minutes walk from the beach. But they say that a hundred scuba divers are missing. Let's hope none of the folks from DiveAsia were among them.

It feels a little like 9/11 again. (That could have been me, too. If my life had worked the way it was supposed to, if I hadn't been stabbed in the back in my first job at Whitehall Trust currency trading, I could well have been there at Ground Zero).

I was planning on blogging about jetbikes but under the circumstances it would fantastically tasteless. This evening I fly back to LHR (with a six hour stop-off in Bahrein: could be worse, could be Tegel or, god help us, Dublin) so there may be no posts for a while.

Update: Looks like they all made it.

xj Gets Lei'd, And Other Festive Delights

2004-12-25T04:23:00.000Z

So for Christmas Eve my dumb hotel organised a dumber Gala Dinner, attendance compulsory, price TWO THOUSAND BAAT. (Sorry for shouting but jeez louise! Two thousand baat! That buys a lot in this town: it bought me a nice pair of all-leather shoes the other day for instance).

Now, this "Gala" was held in the hotel restaurant, which is by the pool and is open air. (Uh-huh. Open air... tropical storm... what's wrong with this picture? To be fair, the storm had pretty much moved on by the time the "Gala" started).

For some reason the staff were handing out leis, a traditional floral necklace garment from the Thai island of Hawai'i. (Wait a minute....)

The food consisted mainly of big chunks of roast meat, which was fine with me, although it was not as good as the Brazilian rodizio place I ate in the night before, and unlike the Brazilian place the "Gala" did not have sambaing Brazilian hotties. It did have dancers, however.

Polynesian dancers.

I'm still trying to figure this one out. My best guess is that some moron confused "Samui" with "Samoa". Either that or a firm believer in the wacky anthropological theory that the Thais are Polynesian by original extraction. At any rate, this Polynesian show was conducted with the efficiency of a school play: the PA system would be blathering on about "our two dancers" when up on the stage would be one poor embarrassed girl. I sat at the table and thought: "Here I am, sitting at a table at a Christmas celebration in a Buddhist country, watching Thais pretend to be Maoris. It's the dark side of globalisation."

After this farce they had a raffle of some kind, where as far as I can work out the same person won three of the prize, at which point it was clear that the evening, having started badly, was getting worse. So I left.

Some other highlights of the evening:

At the stroke of the midnight hour I was in the reggae bar. The band was doing a set, and their first song for Christmas day was "Losing My Religion". Now that's what I call style. (OTOH they have played the Cheeky Girls song every time I have been there, so maybe they don't have style after all).

On the road to the reggae pub there was a traffic jam, and the girls from one bar were out trying to direct the traffic. One of them even had a whistle. Of course they were all wearing Santa hats.

Dive Bunny

2004-12-25T04:04:00.000Z

I'm glad that I did that scuba tune-up. Yesterday I ran into one of those low-air situations that the exercises teach you how to deal with. I think there may have been a leak somewhere in my scuba suit: I blame giant clams, of course. It's really no big deal: just grab the nearest diver, stick his alternate air source in your mouth and swim back to the surface. Other than that, the two dives I did yesterday were great. Breathing thirty feet underwater is pretty neat. And the fish are nice. (Except for those tiny blue fish that take little bites out of you).

The voyage to and from the dive site was pretty good as well, and by that I mean the sea was in fine, stormy form, and the boat pitched and yawed like an acquatic bronco. I never get seasick, so I enjoyed the ride.

Sadly, the stormy sea was the precursor of a genuine tropical storm that brutally struck the island just as we came into port. I've never been in a tropical storm before and, frankly, once is too much. I can't stand rain and snow and all the shit that falls out of the sky. (This is another of the many, many reasons why LA is my dream city: it rains about once every thousand years and if you want water, just steal it from the next county....) Well, mae pen rai.

Scuba Divers Do It Under Pressure

2004-12-23T09:49:00.000Z

My proudest possession is my Open Water Diver's card; my scuba license. Most of the other things in my life that other people would be proud of are not that big a deal to me. Getting into business school, for instance, happened because I got a super-high GMAT score (it certainly wasn't on the strength of my joke of a "career"), and that super-high GMAT score happened because I spent my entire childhood being "encouraged" (in a way that occasionally verged on abusive) to develop the kind of personality that is good at passing silly written tests. OTOH to pass my Open Water certification I had to master and bypass my own fears and limitations, such as my limiting belief that I would never, ever, be able to float unassisted in water for longer than a couple minutes. (I was wrong about that, as I have almost always been wrong about things that I thought were impossible).

I got my OW cert the last time I was in Thailand, back in 2003 with the excellent Dive Asia. My instructor was a Thai called Aey who told me he was an architect and gave scuba classes between commissions. (This is horrifying, in a way, that the IMF and the local oligarchs between them should have so savaged the Thai economy that a highly-trained professional would end up moonlighting in the tourist sector to scrape together a few baat. OTOH, Aey was a truly magnificent instructor).

Since that time I have dived precisely once, off the Cape of Good Hope. This was an interesting example of Murphy's Law. First of all, the water was freezing cold. (That damn current that freezes Buzios stops off Cape Town first). Then, the dive was launched over a load of big, slippery rocks, with the result that I slipped. This is not a good thing to do when you have a 25kg scuba unit strapped to your back and you don't have all your breathing apparatus in place. I had to be rescued by the divemaster Yolanda. (Usually, when a cute blonde wraps her legs around me I'd enjoy the experience; in this case I was too busy gasping for breath to make the most of things). Then, on the way down, we got ran into some weeds and had to come back to the surface, and finally, on the way back, I got cramp from the cold and had to be towed. Not my finest hour, really.

In view of this fiasco, when I booked a dive trip for tomorrow I decided I had better have a scuba tune-up session today. This took place at the exclusive hill-top location of the dive company, a splendidly third-world facility complete with dirt roads and free-range chickens. The whole thing took about two hours and involved performing various underwater stunts, all designed to show you what you would do if, for instance, a giant clam severed your airhose. (Actually, that specific case was not dealt with; I think it falls under the general heading of low air situations). So tomorrow I'm off to a couple of rocks in the Gulf of Thailand where, I am assured, the fish are worth the trip. (The divers saw a shark yesterday. That's more than I did when I went out on a shark diving trip in South Africa).

The only problem with diving is that it is a depressingly clean-living activity. It generally involves getting up at some god-awful hour of the morning and you are not supposed to drink any kind of alcohol the night before (for fear of dehydration) or six hours after (decompression sickness). Still, mae pen rai as they say in these parts.

Chaweng nightlife revisited

2004-12-23T09:24:00.000Z

The "Reggae Pub" turns out to be a vast open-air barn of a place, which is located at the end of a peninsula in the lagoon. (This lagoon is just west of the main (only) street in Chaweng, so if you want a quiet night in don't choose a hotel on this side. I'm not sure there are any hotels that side of the street anyway). The peninsula is lined with endless bars so to get to the Reggae pub I had to run a sort of gender-bent Tailhook gauntlet of shrieking and grabbing bar-girls. The venue itself has big pictures of Bob Marley and other traditional reggae accoutrements, (along with the Confederate flag: wonder what Jeff Davis, or indeed Bob Marley himself) would have thought of that?

The very best thing about the reggae pub is the music, provided by a live band fronted by one of the best singers I have ever heard. I didn't get her name, but she is a little Thai girl with dyed blonde dreadlocks and an entirely magnificent voice. She covered a song by Mary J Blige and it sounded like Queen Mary herself was singing it. I was amazed to see such a powerful voice coming from such a tiny body.

One interesting thing about Chaweng is the tourists who want to be bargirls. Two nights ago I saw some white girls dancing on a bar (this was one of those wooden, open-air bars usually danced on by the Thai bargirls) and last night there were a couple of Aussie girls pitching in on grabbing duty outside another bar. I'm told by my Romanian friend Slava that there is a new craze for "agrotourism", where people from the cities can stay on working farms and get up close and personal with the livestock: I guess this is just the same idea applied to a whole 'nother industry...

Did They Know It Was Christmas - for dictators?

2004-12-21T07:25:00.000Z

Via Instapundit, here's a depressing but only too predictable explanation of exactly what the money raised by Geldof's Live Aid got spent on. Read it and weep...

Samui nightlife

2004-12-20T10:53:00.000Z

Somebody, I think it is Tyler, has a thing he says to men who complain about the bitchy attitudes of good-looking women:

You have to imagine yourself in the reality of a beautiful woman. She has all these strangers coming up to her and kissing up to her because they want something out of her. The only way she can fend them off is to put up the bitch shield

Or something to that effect. Anyway, I recommend that every dude who has ever wanted to try that exercise but lacks the empathy or imagination should come to a Thai beach town and walk about for a few hours. You'll quickly get the hang of how it feels to be forever being pestered by people who want to be really, really nice to you. There are, for instance, the tailors who want to give you the World's Best Deal on suits, and street vendors who are convinced their teak elephants are exactly what your home needs. (They are very, very well carved teak elephants, I will admit). And then there are the bar-girls.

You have never, ever, seen anything like a Thai bar-girl. They are typically about four foot six, speak two dozen words of English and have just arrived from a small town in deepest Isaan (the north-eastern region of Thailand). They generally claim to be in their mid-twenties. Crowds of them lurk outside at least half the bars in town (there are not actually very many gogo bars in Chaweng, but quite a lot of what it's polite to call "hostess" bars). And they will do anything, almost literally anything, to get you into their bar.

The last time I was in Thailand, in Phuket, I got used to being grabbed by tiny women cooing "Hey, sexyman, you come with me", although I admit it was a surprise the time I had this done to me by a T-shirt vendor. The bar-girls in Samui, however, make the ones in Phuket look positively demure. Last night in addition to being grabbed, I was goosed, several times, and spanked more than once for daring to walk past their bars. The idea of being sexually molested by cuties is initially attractive, but it gets very old very quickly.

Aside from bar-girls, Chaweng seems to be a fairly target-poor environment. Last night I saw I think three sets of Aussie girls and that was about it. Most bars in town fall into either the "bar-girl" or the "sports variety". There is also a widely promoted "reggae bar" on the other side of the lagoon, which I plan on checking out this evening.

Last night I spent several hours in Chaweng, then on a whim I went to Lamai. I'd been warned that Lamai was wall-to-wall sleaze, which is true enough; it is, however, Thai sleaze, which means a whole load of girls in not especially revealing clothes sitting around more-or-less open-air bars cooing "Hey, sexyman, you come with me" and playing a variety of simple boardgames with the punters. (The reason they play the boardgames rather than, say, talking is because they don't speak much English, so presumably this is their way of connecting with potential tricks. From the point of view of meeting regular girls, Lamai seems entirely useless.

I am glad I went however, for two reasons.

One was the drive there. In addition to regular car taxis, and motorbike taxis, Samui also has a lot of songtheow. This I'm told is Thai for "two benches", and that is just what a songtheow is: a pickup truck with a couple of benches bolted onto the long sides of the back. The market for songtheow is profoundly inefficient: in the course of two minutes four songtheow came along, which charged between one hundred and two hundred baat for the same journey. Of course I picked the one that charged one hundred baat for the ride. And boy, was it a ride. Let me tell you, I have never seen such contempt for human life in a driver. (Not even in Italy. Not even in Brazil). You have to wonder what kind of fucking lunatic drives at one hundred and sixty klicks an hour round a curve above a 200 ft drop. It's one thing to do this in a tuk-tuk at street level, but up in the mountains it's something else. This was by far the most fun I have ever had on a bus.

And when I got to Lamai I met another of the colorful characters that seem to inhabit this part of the world. There was a Thai guy twirling what I can only descrive as a rope made out of fire-crackers. Literally. He was twirling a rope above his head, and fire-crackers were going off. Loud fire-crackers with a lot of smoke. In London all they do is toss the odd fire-cracker around in Leicester Square: the Thais have sooo much more style....

Koh Samui Described

2004-12-20T10:22:00.000Z

Possibly the coolest thing about Samui is the airport. It is open air. The terminals are a collection of wall-less huts. I flew down with Bangkok Airways, still the best airline in the world: premium service with economy prices. (What other airline offers free coffee, muffins and internet access to economy passengers? Plus, they do online booking with as little as one hour's notice). In a fairer world the WTO would force the contemptible bureaucrats that operate Varig, Gulf and all the other pitiful archaeopteryxes that infest our skies to sell out to Bangkok Airways.

Samui itself is your basic tropical island, perhaps not quite as magnificent as Phuket, but it is pretty damn good. Most of the action is on the east of the island, concentrated in two beach towns called Chaweng and Lamai. ("Diluted" might be a better word, on second thought. These towns, more or less, consist of a single very long street with hotels and shops fronting the main drag or skulking down alleyways).

I made the mistake of booking an hotel up a hill on the rocky point that divides the two towns, which was so inconvenient that I have paid extra and switched to a very nice mini-resort in northern Chaweng. The site consists mostly of teak cabins (with power showers and air-con I might add: this isn't rural Laos), and it backs onto the beach. It has a bar and a beach chair/towel service. BTW on Samui you cannot get any of these things from public vendors (as in Rio) so it's a good thing I ended up where I did.

The only complaint I will make about this hotel is that they have forced me to buy a ticket for some dumb Christmas Eve dinner. It must be said that my plan of going out to Asia to escape festive schmaltz has developed not necessarily to advantage...

Reminds me of the Cereal Expert scene from Cryptonomicon

2004-12-19T13:00:00.000Z

One of Samizdata's finest explains the connection between instant coffee and DIY.

True.

2004-12-19T08:22:00.000Z

So I was grabbing a bite to eat in a place on Thanon Khao San and the radio was on. The announcer said: "Here is the news, from the Thai government public relations agency". Which I thought was kind of funny, in a 1980s-satire-of-South-African-reporting-restrictions sort of way, except that as far as I can work out what followed was a genuine news broadcast, apparently written by the Thai government for broadcasting on radio. It was interesting to see how blatant they were. Kind of like if the BBC were to open their broadcasts with "The Six O'Clock News, from Michael Moore and the op-ed page of the Independent".

(Okay, it was probably a translation error, like the one that led the airport bookstore to shelf the prison diaries of Jeffrey Archer under Non-Fiction. I'm sure the radio meant to say that the news was provided by the Ministry of Truth, or something totally innocuous like that).

Bahrain

2004-12-18T02:21:00.000Z

For some reason I couldn't find a reasonably-priced direct flight at the time I booked, so I ended up flying by Gulf Air, which is not an experience I want to dwell on, although they are not quite as bad as Varig. This involved a three-hour stopover in their home port of Bahrain. Here's my impressions of Bahrein, to the extent that you can form impressions from an airport.

Bahrein, frankly, was a pleasant surprise. Consider: this is an island off the coast of Saudi Arabia (and if you don't know just what a repulsive medieval hellhole Saudi Arabia is, take a look at the Religious Policeman link on my blogroll, if you have a strong enough stomach). Bahrain is not not Saudi Arabia. For instance:

-In Saudi Arabia, any kind of public reference to religions other than Islam is illegal. In Bahrain, however, they do Christmas. And they do it very thoroughly I might add. There was a huge tree in the departure lounge and illuminated Santas all over the place (trust the Arabs to favor anything big and shiny) and some of the Filipinas in the duty free stores were wearing Santa hats. Mawkish carols were being played everywhere: I even heard the quintessentially American White Christmas.
-SA is famously dry. Bahrain isn't. They have alcohol on sale and unlike in some other moslem countries (Malaysia for example) they don't card you to prove you are not a moslem before they let you buy alcohol. (This is an extremely good thing: believe me, you don't want to fly by Gulf Air sober). Bahrain is also the only place I can remember seeing Tuborg: that the Danes are prepared to export it here suggests there is some kind of market for it.
-Saudi women are known as BMOs (Black Moving Objects) because of the ugly tentlike chadors that they are forced to wear by the Saudi religious police. I saw fewer chadors in Bahrain airport than in Heathrow. (The Gulf Air stewardesses wear pants suits and silly stewardess hats, with a sort of bizarre silk scarf hanging down behind, which makes them look as though they have just come from awarding the prizes at a medieval tournament).

All in all, the tiny amount that I have seen of Bahrain I find intriguing and quite encouraging: here is a place where Islamic rule hasn't produced the usual hell on earth, but rather something like Utah with headscarves. Maybe there's hope for Afghanistan and Iraq after all.

Update: No sooner have I posted this than Bahrain gets a mention over at The Diplomad. (One of the commentators mentions that they recently had elections to the legislature: recently, that is to say after the invasion of Afghanistan, which may have concentrated a few minds in the MidEast.

Worst. Quarter. Ever.

2004-12-18T02:07:00.000Z

There have been no postings to Chasing Waterfalls for the last three months, and this is because,

like my momma always told me
ranaranaranaranandcodeineandgoddamit you little mother fucker
if you ain't got nothing nice to say then don't say nothing
(Eminem)

The past three months for me were slow death by karoshi: tough courses and Orgulous Projects from business school joined forces with more than usually frenzied drudgery in my day job until I felt like Neo fighting the Agent Smiths in The Matrix: Crap Sequel #1. Thank god it's all over. I am now sitting on Thanon Khao San in Bangkok, where I have gone for ten days' desperately-needed R&R.

(Yes, it means I will miss Christmas. Actually, I will not miss Christmas in an emotional sense. Christmas is all about cold weather, shopping, family life and mawkish music. Christmas is a long list of shit I can't stand. In any case the Thais have at least as much "christmassy" muzak and tchotchkes as the Brits. The Thais are such a bunch of Anglosphere wannabes).

Updating my map...

2004-10-09T15:12:00.000+01:00

your own visited country map

Brazilian Elections

2004-10-03T01:23:00.000+01:00

Since I blogged about the political posters in Rio, it's only fair that I follow up with an explanation of why those posters got there.

It seems that it's election season in Brazil: not at federal level, but at state and municipal level. (it's not just in Rio: I saw election posters in Buzios and Foz, and a few days ago I saw a story on Bloomberg News covering the re-election campaign of the mayor of Sao Paolo, a former sexologist. (Everyone gets screwed by their government, but at least in Sao Paolo you get screwed by an expert.))

In the US, libertarians and such people like to joke that elections are a contest between Socialist Party A and Socialist Party B. Well, in Brazil, you also have Socialist Parties C, D, E, F, G, H, I, and a bunch of other Socialist Parties that I forget the letters of. No kidding, every single Brazilian political party appears to have the word "socialist" or "social" in its name, except for one or two that have the word "workers" instead, just for variety. There are so many parties, in fact, that they have to have numbers: 13 is the number of the Partido Travalho, which controls the federal government, and 25 is the number of the party that the mayor of Rio belongs to. I don't know the name of this party but I certainly know that the mayor is called Cesar Maia. And how do I know this? Because:

1. The city is full of posters advertising the merits (or at any rate, the names and faces) of rival candidates for the city council. These candidates are endorsed by various political parties, but at least 70% of them have a sort of footnote endorsing Sr Maia for mayor.
2. The night I went to Circo do Voador there was a major club night in a venue down the street. The promoter had spared no effort. There was a battalion of spokesmodels outside, handing out flyers and drinks coupons. The name of this promotor was displayed on a big banner outside the venue, and written on all the flyers just in case anyone forgot. The name was Cesar Maia.

The rival candidates for mayor do not appear to have such deep pockets, although the PT candidate threw a sort of small-scale street party outside my hotel the day I flew back to London. Of course, all of these people have other ways of getting their message across. For example, they have vans that drive up and down the avenues playing jingles, and there is always the old propeller-driven-plane-trailing-a-banner lark, or for variety you could get a resident of a top-floor apartment to unroll a 50-foot banner from his balcony.

The impression I went away with is that Brazilian politics mostly involves finding new ways to almost-but-not-quite bribe the voters, and as far as this goes, I am all for it. It is certainly more useful than anything a British politician ever does. And, seriously, the Brazilian system seems to work. The streets are clean, the beaches are well-maintained, the buses run on time (and on two wheels, whenever they take a corner), there are plenty of fairly cheap taxis and there are cops and renta-cops everywhere.

Let's just say, and this is something that really leaps out at you:

In Rio, you can't go five minutes without seeing a city employee picking up garbage.
In London, you can't go five minutes without seeing a city employee slapping parking tickets on cars.

Where would you rather live?

X-Prize Won

2004-09-30T23:40:00.000+01:00

Looks like the X-Prize, a $10M purse for the first privately-built and -operated vessel to fly outside the limits of the atmosphere (space travel, basically), has been won. Hat tip: Samizdata

Some people saw it coming a long time ago. If you're interested at all in this topic, or even if you aren't, do yourself a favour and click here to check out Victor Koman's great novel Kings of the High Frontier, a magnificent and moving story whose vision of privately-funded space travel is starting to be realised.

Cachaca Fodder

2004-09-30T21:29:00.000+01:00

Rio works a little like this. From Centro, you go uptown to Lapa/ Cinelandia, then Botafogo (apparently the gay district), then Urca (just under Sugarloaf Mountain), then you go through a tunnel to Copacabana, then Ipanema, then Leblon. In my time in Rio I stayed in both Copacabana and Ipanema. Ipanema is upscale, the rich neighbourhood. Copacabana has a definitely downtown feel to it. Nossa Senhora, the main drag, is a Manhattan-style canyon.

Lapa is an area of bars near to the old aqueduct. Bars is not strictly accurate. There are a couple of traditional-style bars, which charge about BRL5 for entry. (BTW BRL5 = USD 1.7 = GBP 1, more or less). However, most of the places at Lapa are more like sandwich places that serve beer and caipirinhas. They have plastic chairs and tables out on the street, and music blaring out of boom boxes. There are street vendors who will sell you drinks, or sausages on sticks, or hippy tchotchkes. There are also some more informal street vendors who come down from the favela and sell you... other stuff. (Every so often the police will drive through Lapa in a convoy with their weapons pointing out of the windows of their cars. It doesn't seem to bother the drug dealers, and anyone who happens to have a joint in his mouth carries on as before. Hey, this is the Brazilian police force we're talking about. They were probably coming to get their cut). All in all, Lapa has a great vibe to it, a little like Long Street in Cape Town.

I went there a few times when I was in Rio, but the most memorable evening was the one before I went hang-gliding.

I got up to Lapa around 10pm and there were a bunch of people in a circle, some playing drums and one or two dancing in the middle of the circle. For a moment I thought it was some kind of candomble ceremony, but as far as I can work out it was just a bunch of people who fancied a bit of a boogie. Very African, at any rate. A Swedish girl I'd met the previous week came up to me and said hello. She told me how a few kids had tried to jack her the previous day, on the road up to the favela. She said I must never use the road, because it was dangerous; I must use the stairs instead. (The whole time I was in Brazil I never felt unsafe, unless you count the sphincter-twitching fifteen seconds of hang-glider launch. But those stairs to the favela are quite a sight: they lead up to a shanty town but they are tiled). Just then the Swedish girl's boyfriend showed up so I went up to the back street where I got a beer from one of the street bars and sat at a table outside. There was a girl a couple of tables away, kinda cute. She made eye contact with me, held it. Well, it would be rude not to. I went over and asked "Fala ingles?" She did speak English. Quite well. Game on. I'll call her Surfchick.

Surfchick was, frankly, a crazed party reptile. She was knocking back the beer and the cachaca shots (the cachaca shots in Lapa come wrapped in transparent plastic, like 80-proof ice poles) and later on she pulled out a spliff and passed it round.

So we talked. She was fascinated by my blond hair: I think there are no blond Brazilian men. When I told her my name, Richard, she went "Oh, like Leo de Caprio in the movie!" [The Beach] So I told her how I had been to Thailand and we talked about travelling for a while. She told me her dream was to go to LA and I told her that was my dream as well, although I suspect we were attracted by different things (she: surfing; xj: actresses). For some reason I mentioned that I speak German (up to a point) and we agreed that she would teach me to surf and I would teach her to speak German. She had been to Berlin once, and she liked it. (She told me that she had shot up heroin, once, when she was there. "Of course you did," I told her. "You were in Berlin...")

This was no more than an hour into the conversation and she was making this confession to me. I've noticed that Brazilians are quite open and, how can I put this, quite fast. She told me, not long after this, that she wanted to fuck me. The only problem was the Other Guy. He had been sitting with us the whole time, saying nothing in English (which he did not speak, at all) and very little in Portuguese. I'm not sure whether he was Surfchick's boyfriend or her date for the evening, and Surfchick did not seem exactly sure herself, but she did make it clear that he was a coworker. So she wasn't prepared to go off with me that evening: it would have trashed her reputation. (Actually, there was one moment where she said she would come with me to a motel and the hell with the OG, but I told her "let's share another beer and then go". I thought it would be better not to seem needy. Fuckup #1).

A few times, she dragged me into the toilets to make out. (Her idea. I knew it wouldn't work. This was Lapa, so the toilets were not exactly sanitary. Plus, there was one toilet for the entire bar, so we didn't get much beyond first base before people started kicking the door). She kissed like a vampire, sucking my lips into her mouth and biting them. Quite hard. And she bit me on the shoulder once or twice. God knows what she would have been like if I'd actually fucked her.

Eventually she and the OG went off to Circo do Voador. (This is a live music venue a few streets away. I went there on my last night in Rio. It's okay if you like concerts). She asked me to give her my email and kept promising to mail me the next day. Like a fool I believed her and didn't ask her for her email (Fuckup #2, and there is no excuse for this one because I know better. Anyway, I didn't have a pen or paper with me. Moron. "Failing to plan is planning to fail", like the man said). She didn't email me, of course. I was so distraught that I threw myself off a cliff (see previous post).

Big deal, you may say: xj misses out on an ONS with a drunk slut. Well, I live in London, so I know drunk sluts when I see them, and Surfchick was better than that. She had a great personality; there was a light that got into her eyes when she spoke about surfing that was glorious to see. And she had taste (she was into me, which is pretty much the definition of taste). Surfchick was great for my morale in many ways. It's too bad we never got it on, but if you're reading this, Surfchick querida, just remember: Cachaca foda!

Well, I lived...

2004-09-24T20:58:00.000+01:00

Oh, did I ever. I´m so glad I did this.

Launching a hang-glider is similar to walking the plank, only faster. You run at high speeds down a very short ramp ending in a thousand-foot vertical drop, which is easily one of the most terrifying things I have ever done. The worst thing is, of course, not knowing. When I dive I know whether, eg, the cylinder has oxygen in it, because I have checked it myself. I know jack about gliders. The thing could have been a death trap for all I knew. And of course there is the usual unhelpful internal dialog, along the lines of i´m gonna crash, i´m gonna die...

Luckily, the process of launching the glider is extremely quick. There are perhaps three seconds of utter frigid dread and then you are off the ramp and in mid-air and the updraught hits you... Feels good. Feels better than good.

The view is more or less the view you get from a high mountain, except that you are actually looking straight down on the houses, cars and beach, which is pretty cool. And you literally feel the wind in your hair.

(The pilot pointed out a car wreck to me. "Dangerous activity, driving" I said).

Interestingly, at no time during the flight itself did I feel the slightest fear, not even when my feet were released from their straps so we could land. (Although this was uncomfortable, since it meant the strap around my waist had to support all my weight). The landing was almost effortless.

Yes, what with hang-gliding and my night at Lapa, this must be the most fun I´ve had in.... too long.

Don´t know if I´ll be able to blog until I get back to London, since the weekend will be pretty full.

xj's Last Post?

2004-09-24T15:45:00.000+01:00

I flew back to Rio on Wednesday (or quarta-feira as they say in portugues: it means "fourth day of the week". Wednesday is the _third_ day of the week, of course, but hey, who's counting)? After a week of lousy weather, the sun is now blazing down and I have the burns to prove it. I didn't put enough barrier cream around my lips with the result that I now have a kind of sunburn goatee. Muito elegante. Although sunburns have their uses: dark-skinned girls find them fascinating and exotic.

Last night I went up to Lapa (a bar/ streetparty area near the financial district with a great vibe) and I had a most interesting evening. I'll blog about it later... if I'm spared.

Yes folks, in two hours xj is going to throw himself off a cliff. I'm going hang gliding.

Now, I have never in my life been hang gliding (regular gliding, yes, I did it for a while at university. But gliding involves four hours of standing around for every ten minutes in the air, plus it was pretty expensive for a penniless student. I dropped out after a few weeks). They say that Rio is the place to do it, and certainly this city is beautiful enough from the ground; I can't imagine what it will look like from the air. I was sitting around the other day trying to picture myself dong this and the thought of it absolutely scared the shit out of me. So I knew I had to do it.

I'm sure it's quite safe. These are tandem flights - you ride in a pouch behind the pilot, who's been doing this for decades and never crashed yet. (Yet). I confidently expect to be blogging this evening.

Was: Unortgemaesse Betrachtungen

2004-09-21T23:24:00.000+01:00

The original title of this blog was Unortgemaesse Betrachtungen.

Now, giving a blog this name was clever rather than smart. Here´s the back story:

The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche once wrote a book attacking the sacred cows of 19th century Germany. Because he believed (accurately) that his ideas would be more or less ignored in his lifetime, he gave his book a title which is quite hard to translate into English: I´ve seen it rendered as Expeditions of an Untimely Man; Untimely Meditations; and Thoughts Out of Season. (I like the last one best). At any rate, the title in German is Unzeitgemaesse Betrachtungen.

The German word Zeit means "time" and the German word Ort means "place", so unortgemaesse Betrachtungen would be Thoughts out of Place or perhaps the thoughts of a man who is in the wrong place. Which is what I have been for most of my life: in the wrong place, in a place that is wrong for me. Readers of my blog will know my contempt for Europe. London itself might be bearable, weather or no weather, if not for two unforgivable defects: the women are bug-ugly and everything closes too early.

So UB was an expressive title for my blog, but the problem was that few people could pronounce it, fewer still could understand it and probably nobody would ever get it. Clever. Not smart.

Therefore, the new name of this blog is Chasing Waterfalls.

The title honors the magnificent Iguacu Falls, and it´s also a better expression of who I am.

The Iguacu Falls

2004-09-21T23:00:00.000+01:00

I´d heard that the world´s biggest waterfall was the Iguacu Falls, but that´s not strictly accurate.

It turns out that the world´s biggest waterfall is one of the Iguacu Falls. On the border between Argentina and Brazil, the river Iguacu (or Iguazu if you´re in Argentina) hits a series of cliffs and produces some waterfalls.

About two hundred and seventy waterfalls, in fact. (Not all of them are very big waterfalls, it´s true, but still - two hundred and seventy)!

Argentina got most of the waterfalls, and seems to have named most of them after its generals (one got named after General Belgrano, which is a name that springs to mind when you think of churning water...). Brazil got a nice view of Argentina´s waterfalls. And they both got to share the biggest one: the Devil´s Throat.

I have one word for the Devil´s Throat: awesome. And I mean it in the classic, not the mallrat sense. To see, to hear the Iguacu Falls is to be struck by awe. The sheer volume of the waterfall is amazing: it throws up a cloud of vapor that you can see for a mile, hanging like woodsmoke over the fall. There´s the incredible roar of the water, there´s the spray hitting you in the face, but what I remember best is the swifts. Hundred of these little birds wheel above the falls, and every so often one of them breaks out of the flock and dives into the spray like a Stuka, to pluck a bug out of the air. There is the rest of the park, with the other 269 waterfalls (on the Brazilian side you get the panoramas, on the Argentinian side you get up close and personal). And on the Argentinian side, there are speedboats that will take you under some of the smaller waterfalls. (They´re not kidding about that either. Wear cheap shoes and bring a change of clothes. But you´ll be glad you stuck around for the ride)...

The parks themselves are so-so; Iguacu is sub-tropical and, frankly, not as impressive as the interior of Phuket as far as jungle goes. But hey, you´re not there for the jungle, are you? You´re there for the waterfalls. And they´re worth the trip: certainly the trip from Rio, and possibly the trip from England.

And, partly in honor of this magnificent sight, I have decided to rename my blog-

Foz do Iguacu

2004-09-21T22:32:00.000+01:00

Foz do Iguacu is a town close to the joint borders of Brazil, Argentina and Paraguay, and has precisely two reasons to exist. (That´s two more than many places, but still). The first reason is the world´s biggest hydroelectric dam, Itaipu, which is a few miles up the road this way. The second reason is the Iguacu Falls, of which more later.

As for Foz the town itself, it is flyover, doubled, redoubled, in trumps, and vulnerable. It´s like the prototype of the town in Mississippi where Bad Things happen to Good People in Cheap Movies, with a bunch of skyscrapers thrown in to remind you that you are in Brazil, where they build big.

(Oh boy, do they build big. To get here I flew via Sao Paolo - it is apparently a Brazilian law that every flight that crosses Brazilian airspace has to stop at Sao Paolo. From the air, Sao Paolo is simply monstrous. It is a huge, sprawling, gray ogre of a city. As far as the eye can see in every direction are buildings, endless buildings, with a few narrow roads and the occasion tree crying because it is all alone in the world. Sao Paolo reminds me of the city in the sci-fi classic The Shadow of the Torturer, which the characters took half of an entire book just to walk across).

Foz has little to recommend it. The nightlife I can only describe as Barcelona plus a double espresso: nothing is going on, but it is going on a little more energetically than in Barcelona. There appears to be only one place in town that can actually cook food (the churrascaria place on Quintino Bocaiuva, if you´re interested); everywhere else will fob you off with doughy pizzas and overcooked, garlic-drowned meats (again, like Barcelona - how can a town that´s ten minutes drive away from Argentina be so lousy at cooking steak)?

As for the townspeople, it seems most of them go to church on Sunday night and the ones who don´t appear to be Moslems. (I´ve seen a bunch of girls in hijabs here, which you absolutely do not see in Rio, ever. Hard to believe it´s the same country...) I guess that tells you all you need to know about the people of Foz, and about xj´s chances for a little action in this dump.

But there is one thing about Foz that more than makes up for all these horrors, and that is the subject of my next post...

Buzios Follies

2004-09-18T15:15:00.000+01:00

Everyone told me that I must see Buzios, a little resort up the coast from Rio. So I got up up Thursday and headed off for the bus station. I decided to go by mass transit rather than a taxi. Now, this in theory would involve:

1. Bus to subway station
2. Subway to nearest stop to bus station, which is not particularly near
3. Walk or get another bus to the bus station
4. Get yet another bus to Buzios.

Steps 1-2 worked fine. Step 3, however, ran into problems when the bus I was on drove past the bus station and onto, first the motorway, and then an vast industrial zone containing absolutely nothing except endless rows of automobile components stores. I mean, literally nothing else. In its way, it's one of the most remarkable things I've ever seen. You'd think there would be the occasional cafe or drugstore, but nooo. Anyway, the bus did not stop until near to the city zoo, which is nowhere near the bus station, and by this time it was almost noon, so I decided to give up on Buzios for Thursday and instead booked myself on a tour for Friday.

Not the best decision I've ever made.

This bus tour, which was advertised in both the hotels I've stayed at, works a little like this:

Get up at some god-awful hour of the morning and sit on a coach for four hours, shivering in the over-eager air conditioning and looking out the window at the squalid houses and undistinguished landscape of northern Rio state. Many pleasant views of the industrial zona norte on the early part of the trip. When you get to Buzios you can sit for one hour on an unremarkable beach attached to a two-bit country club, which to be fair will bring you overpriced caipirinhas if you ask often enough, and where you will have an unmemorable lunch. You will then be driven to the shore where you will go for a brief sail on a motor vehicle to look at the coast of Buzios. (The coast of Buzios is pleasant rather than beautiful, and not worth the trip). Then you get to wander round Buzios town for an hour, and then you go home. The trip is supposed to last ten hours; in fact it lasts twelve, so you will get back around 20:00, which is not especially late for Rio.

What I have just described is the best possible scenario for this trip, and even that would be a waste of time. What actually happened was that it was cold and overcast all morning. (Because of the location of Buzios they get more or less the same Antarctic currents that make swimming off the coast of Cape Town such a bad idea. The water off Buzios is maybe warmer than off Cape Town, but choosing between them is like setting the precedence between a louse and a flea). And then, during the boat ride, it started to rain. Oh boy, did it start to rain. It was about the worst rain I've ever experienced, and cold, too. And it rained the whole time I was in Buzios, and most of the way back. (Did I mention the over-eager air conditioning on the bus? Just what you need when you are sitting around in wet clothes).

As for Buzios town, it is full of shops selling tourist tchotchkes, and expensive restaurants. The town reminded me a little of the Hermanus/ Gaansbai area of the Western Cape: partly the weather, and partly the sheer sprawling Lebensraum of the place. (Buzios is, like Hermanus, a center for whale groupies). There are also a shit-load of dive shops. From what I saw the vis in the water is not especially good, although I imagine there are some interesting reefs. Still, diving in water as cold as Buzios's is not my idea of fun. I tried it at Cape Town, and never again.

Buzios is supposed to be a major party town, and I suspect it genuinely is. The streets in daytime have a forlorn and neglected feeling to them, which reminded me of Patong Beach on Fire Sermon Day, when all the bars were closed. There's nothing quite as dispriting as a party town when there isn't a party going on.

Buzios? Maybe it's a good place, if you go in summer, and if you stay a couple nights, and if you aren't dumb enough to go there on a stupid tour. As for me, this trip was one of the biggest wastes of time in my entire life. You have been warned, people.

xj. He screws up, so you don't have to.

The Curse of xj

2004-09-16T20:05:00.000+01:00

Weather's overcast today so the beach is no fun. So I came into the internet cafe* to rewrite some of my Orgulous Business School Project and read a couple blogs.

And what do I find? Belle de Jour is shutting down her blog. It's amazing. No sooner do I set up this blog with a link to Steve den Beste than he shuts down his blog, and now Belle is shutting hers down too... Come to think of it, back in 2000 I set up a link on my website (as it was then) to Anarchista of blessed memory, and within a couple of weeks she shut her site down...

Now the Curse of xj has claimed another victim. Maybe I'd better delete my entire roll before I take down the entire Blogsphere...

*Internet cafes in Rio do not serve coffee. Go figure.

xj Returns to Stone Age

2004-09-15T01:20:00.000+01:00

One thing I have noticed about the Brazilians is that they really, really don't do internet.

I wasted the best part of a day trying to book a flight to the Iguacu Falls online, before giving up in disgust. Varig inisted on a ridiculous notice period of several days before flying, one of their two competitors doesn't do etickets and the other competitor had a functional website and did do online tickets but refused to accept that there are actually people in the world that don't have a Brazilian social security number. In the end I spent most of another day trying to find the travel agents listed in the Lonely Planet guide, none of whom actually exist.

You'll be pleased to hear that in the end, I found myself a nice package and I am going to the falls next Sunday. I even get to cross over into Argentina where I'm told the view is even better. (Slowly but surely, I'm colouring that map red...)

Anyway, what with that and having a life, I haven't blogged since Saturday. There's also the fact that Rio has not very many internet cafes and they all seem to close at ten in the evening. Therefore, expect blogging to be pretty light until I get back to London, which will be September 28th.

(And when I do get back I will have about twenty-four hours to rewrite my proposal for my Orgulous Business School Project. My supervisor just emailed me to say he is throwing out about half the proposal. Nao legal* as we say in Rio....)

*"Not nice"

Update: I, xj, am running on Rio, ie Atlantic, time. This blog is running on London, ie GMT+1hr, time. Hence the time of 1 am on the post where I complained that no internet cafes were open later than 10pm. Just so we're clear...

It's the country of the future... and it always will be.

2004-09-11T10:51:00.000+01:00

Now, I love being in foreign countries. But the sheer awfulness of travelling to foreign countries always amazes me.

There is the getting to the airport, which involves spending forty minutes and paying fifteen pounds to travel two miles. (I'm convinced that getting from the city centre to the airport is harder in London than in Bangkok, which at least has some proper roads, unlike London which has narrow, windy little alleys that were designed for seventeenth century sedan chairs and weren't big enough even then).

Then there is the flight, which varies from unpleasant to Abu Ghraib. This time I made the mistake of flying with Varig, so the flight was Abu Ghraib, although in Abu Ghraib the prisoners at least got something to put over their eyes, which is more than the prisone^H^H^H^H^H^H^H passengers on Varig get. The sole in flight entertainment was some chickflick dubbed into Spanish with Portuguese subtitles. Too, I'm pretty sure the seats on their plane were smaller than usual. I felt like I was playing Twister in some medieval Cell of Little Ease. Oh, and there was the small detail that my flight was supposed to be direct to Rio, but the pilot decided it would be more fun to go via Sao Paolo. (Sao Paolo BTW is several hundred miles further than Rio). To be fair, the flight from Sao Paolo to Rio was fine. It seems that Varig's longhaul service is a disgrace to mankind but their domestic business is shit hot (the exact reverse of BA).

One interesting feature of Rio international airport is that many of the ATMs appear to be dummies. I had to walk to a completely different terminal to find one that would accept any of my cards. I suppose it never occurred to anyone that people in international arrivals might not have Brazilian bank cards. To get cash out of an ATM in Brazil (assuming it will give you any), you have to go through a ridiculous pantomime which involves:

1. Put your card in.
2. Take your card out.
3. Press the button to withdraw the maxmium amount of cash.
4. Put your card in.
5. Take your card out.
6. Do the hokey cokey and turn around.
7. Finally you put in your PIN #.
8. And you get your cash
9. And you realize it is worth about twelve pounds
10. Repeat Until (pigs fly over frozen landscape of hell)

The journey into Rio from the airport is interesting. The airport is on the north side, which is heavily industrial and smells like it, and is full of low-grade concrete buildings. After driving through this until you are quite sick of it, you go through a tunnel and suddenly come out into the Rio of your dreams: tropical, palm trees, sun kissed. (Well, today it's pretty cloudy. But metaphorically sunkist. It's full of girls in bikinis anyway, which is close enough). It's quite a contrast to the north.

One thing I did notice on the drive was the political posters. These are physically quite similar to the pictures of Saddam Hussein that used to be plastered all over Iraq, although the Rio posters are for rival political candidates, and they are everywhere. I think it is a seriously bad sign when the political advertising crowds out the commercial advertising, which seems to be happening here.

I'm baked from sleep deprivation so I guess I will hit the hotel room for a couple hours then go explore properly.

xj Learns a New Word

2004-09-04T01:18:00.000+01:00

"Zeropean".

Says it all.

(Tip of the hat to Vodkapundit's commentator Sofia for expanding my vocabulary).

No Settling the Precedence Between a Louse and a Flea

2004-09-02T22:42:00.000+01:00

This is a blog, and there's an election coming up, so naturally I'm going to discuss politics, right?

Wrong.

Not that I'm against it in principle. It's just that the choice on offer is, frankly, kinda repulsive.

The incumbent[1] is a sleazy warmonger with drunken children[2] who has presided over a recession[3], eroded civil liberties[4] and generally embarrassed his fellow citizens. He has murky ties to dubious business interests[5] and has abused the power of the government to help out the steel industry[6]. Under his administration, the intelligence services have apparently lied the country into war[7]. His economic policy consists of spend, spend, spend and leave office before the bills come due[8].

Meanwhile, the challenger[9] is a corrupt opportunist who will evidently say anything to anyone in the hopes of gaining an increasingly unlikely victory. His flip-flopping position on defence policy[10] has revolted even his nominal supporters, except for the hard core of "impeach the incumbent" wingnuts[11]. Some time ago he was associated with a controversial, extreme position[12] and as a result, is passionately hated by some, despised by many and liked by virtually nobody. To the extent that anyone actually supports him, it is only because he is seen as the man most likely to defeat the incumbent in an election. If he fails to do so, his party will drop him like a hot brick and he will never be heard from again[13].

As you can see from this analysis, British politics is a depressing subject, and I do not intend to blog on it. At least in America, Bush cut taxes...

[1]Tony Blair.
[2]His son Euan Blair was found passed out near Leicester Square after a night out drinking.
[3]A major slowdown in the productive economy has been masked by increased government spending on button-counters. There are now more administrators than nurses in the NHS, apparently.
[4]The Terrorism Act, the proposal to limit trial by jury... pretty much every press release out of Downing Street.
[5]eg Bernie Ecclestone of Formula One. More than one Blairite minister has been accused of taking bribes.
[6]Lakshmi Mittal.
[7]"British intelligence" was cited by George W Bush as a justification of Operation Iraqi Freedom.
[8]Blair, or rather his monkey Gordon Brown, has spent fantastic amounts on hiring deputy-sub-under-administrators.
[9]Michael Howard.
[10]Now opposes the Iraq war, even though he voted for it at the time. Most natural Howard supporters have denounced this policy.
[11]eg The Spectator.
[12]As Home Secretary in the early 1990s, he forced through a Criminal Justice Bill that was seen as amazingly repressive. It was a very big deal when I was a student. Among other things, it eroded the right to remain silent in court.
[13]Which is what the Tory party do to all of their failed leaders.

Homage to Catalunya, or not

2004-09-02T21:30:00.000+01:00

Serves me right for boasting about the weather. On Sunday night there was a colossal thunderstorm. Actually, the rain wasn't so heavy, quite refreshing really, and the lightning was quite a sight.

During the day, also, a weird thing happened: a girl came up to me in the street and tried to sell me a signet ring. Not that she was a street vendor, you understand. No, she was just a girl who had got hold of a man's signet ring, don't ask how, and decided to fence it to me. I didn't buy it, of course. Signet rings don't go with my image.

As for the nightlife, it was no better, though it wasn't any worse. I did find a decent bar in the old city, with an African theme. It called Thiousan and had incense and soft reggae and would have been a great chill-out/ tongue-down venue if not for the extremely hard wooden chairs. (African carved wood, of course). The rest of the night was a total washout. I found the world's only empty Irish pub and I wondered how such a thing might be possible. Then I took a sip of their beer. Mystery solved. (The standard beer in Barcelona is called Estrella Damm, and damn is what you will say when you try to drink it. I know how hard this is to believe, but Estrella is genuinely worse than Scottish lager. I'm serious). Other than this, the only remotely interesting thing that happened all night was the drunk local guy who insisted on buying me a drink and rambling at me in Catalan for half an hour, ignoring my frequent "!No hablo espanol!"s. So much for travelling, meeting the locals and getting to know the culture - the only locals who gave me the time of day were a hooker, a thief and a drunk. I'd like to think local culture has more to offer than this, although you couldn't prove it from me.

And everywhere the most awful kind of tourists. English hospital deputy-sub-under-administrators who communicate entirely in Bureaucrat. Swiss from deservedly obscure cantons build on vaults of Nazi gold. Scousers who insist on engaging you in a debate about the role of religious prejudice in the Glasgow football scene. (It's ironic that in Amsterdam and Prague, which are famously the two sleaziest cities in Europe, I met a better quality of tourists than in Barcelona).

Travelling back on Monday, it hit me. Barcelona is the provincial capital of Catalunya. As in, provincial. As in, flyover country. (That's why there are no available women: because there aren't, in the flyover). Barcelona is flyover. It has flyover vibe and flyover businesses and flyover locals sitting around flyover bars and flyover cafes having staid, flyover conversations and never, ever, laughing or waving their hands or, you know, having actual fun the way people do in proper cities. Barcelona is not a proper city and never will be a proper city, any more than Birmingham will ever be a proper city however many schlemazls get crammed into the god-forsaken hellhole, because it is a place where there is no reason to be.

(Unless you have a thing for Gaudi, in which case you probably deserve to end up in Barcelona. Gaudi was a demented hack with a tile fetish. He was Frank Lloyd Wrong. What kind of fuck-up spends twenty years on one lousy church and still doesn't get it finished)?

And what is worse, Barcelona is not merely flyover, it is European flyover. The best thing about the city is the subway: huge wide air-conditioned trains and timers that count down the next train to the second (and are never reset, unlike the timers on the Tube) - the Barcelona metro has now displaced the Bangkok Skytrain as my transport of delight. The very worst thing about the city is the waiters. I've found a new respect for Manuel from Fawlty Towers: at least he moved. The laziest, most half-hearted glue-sniffing bagboy in the most two-bit grocery store in London is a positive demon of productive efficiency compared to a Barcelona waiter. And they have serious difficulty with the idea of credit cards. I tried to buy a shirt using mine and they insisted on seeing my passport before they would accept the card. (I told this story to my friend Michela, who's Italian and therefore used to dysfunctional financial systems. She burst out laughing. Nowhere she has ever been, not in Kenya nor in the Maldives, are they that primitive. Not even in Italy). Barcelona is Euro-socialism in action: public wealth and private squalor.

Well, let's be fair. There are a couple of good things about the city. I like that the bars don't shut just after teatime, the way they do in England. I like the South Asian men that stand around on street corners selling cans of beer, if you can't be bothered going into the bars. I like the fact that you can buy cheap, good quality clothes (if you remembered to bring your passport. And nothing else in the city is much cheaper than London. Drinks are about the same price, or a little less. Food and taxis and hotels the same). If I ever find myself in this city again, I won't throw a hissy fit: it's a semi-pleasant, and in some ways a quite civilized place. (Most flyover is). But still, Barcelona is flyover, and in future I hope to fly over it. Still, I wouldn't say this vacation has been entirely wasted. This city is unique in one respect: it is the only city that has ever made me glad to be going back to London.