The above titled book, this year’s ‘Eats, Shoots and Leaves’, was conceived with people like me in mind. Written by a couple of genial Trotskyites, it’s a an A-Z of modern annoyances, some trivial (Jimmy Carr) and others significant (nu-snobbery about chavs).

I sincerely hope this entry doesn’t conflict Jim for the second time in a day.

Novelists writing about current affairs

… whether you’ve heard of them or not, the writer will be a Very Important Author. They don’t usually do this sort of thing but, on this occasion, they have chosen to lower themselves from Mount Literature and walk among us. They have been touched by current events, touched in ways we normal people just wouldn’t understand. There are children dying, we’ve all seen the pictures. But have we seen the real picture? The big picture? The picture that tells us what we’re all really feeling? Probably not. After all, we’re not pompous novelists straining for pseudo-profundity.

How would any of us have made sense of the horrors of the World Trade Center attacks if it hadn’t been for the likes of Salman Rushdie, Ian McEwan and Martin Amis telling us how horrible it all was? This was, without the slightest shadow of a doubt, exactly the right time for showboating prose.

Who could forget the opening lines in Amis’s Guardian piece on 2003’s Iraq War? ‘We accept that there are legitimate casus belli: acts or situations “provoking or justifying war”. The present debate feels off-centre, and faintly unreal, because the US or UK are going to war for a new set of reasons (which in this case do not cohere or even overlap). These new casus belli are a response to the accurate realisation that we have entered a distinct phase of history’.

So powerful! So readable! So succint! So unclear whether he thought the war was a good or a bad thing!

Less than 24 hours later and it’s already time for me to eat my words about columnists, since they apparently count Kurt Vonnegut among their number, though I suppose I could take comfort from the fact that he seems to be a pretty infrequent opinionist. Anyway, this bit from the 12th of December is great:

Your Guess Is As Good As Mine

… Shaw, if he were alive today, would envy us the solid information that we have or can get about the nature of the universe, about time and space and matter, about our own bodies and brains, about the resources and vulnerabilities of our planet, about how all sorts of human beings actually talk and feel and live.

This is the information revolution. We have taken it very badly so far. Information seems to be getting in the way all the time. Human beings have had to guess about almost everything for the past million years or so. Our most enthralling and sometimes terrifying guessers are the leading characters in our history books. I will name two of them: Aristotle and Hitler. One good guesser and one bad one.

The masses of humanity, having no solid information to tell them otherwise, have had little choice but to believe this guesser or that one. Russians who didn’t think much of the guesses of Ivan the Terrible, for example, were likely to have their hats nailed to their heads.

… Persuasive guessing has been at the core of leadership for so long–for all of human experience so far–that it is wholly unsurprising that most of the leaders of this planet, in spite of all the information that is suddenly ours, want the guessing to go on, because now it is their turn to guess and be listened to.

Some of the loudest, most proudly ignorant guessing in the world is going on in Washington today. Our leaders are sick of all the solid information that has been dumped on humanity by research and scholarship and investigative reporting.

They think that the whole country is sick of it, and they want standards, and it isn’t the gold standard. They want to put us back on the snake-oil standard.

… The boisterous guessers are still in charge–the haters of information. And the guessers are almost all highly educated people. Think of that. They have had to throw away their educations, even Harvard or Yale educations, to become guessers. If they didn’t do that, there is no way their uninhibited guessing could go on and on and on.

Please, don’t you do that. But let me warn you, if you make use of the vast fund of knowledge now available to educated persons, you are going to be lonesome as hell. The guessers outnumber you–and now I have to guess–about ten to one.

As Kevin Drum reports, a federal judge has struck down the Dover (Pennsylvania) School Board’s attempt to mandate the teaching of Intelligent Design in Dover schools. Some parts of the judge’s ruling really bears repeating:

First, while encouraging students to keep an open mind and explore alternatives to evolution, [the Board’s disclaimer] offers no scientific alternative; instead, the only alternative offered is an inherently religious one, namely, ID.

….The citizens of the Dover area were poorly served by the members of the Board who voted for the ID Policy. It is ironic that several of these individuals, who so staunchly and proudly touted their religious convictions in public, would time and again lie to cover their tracks and disguise the real purpose behind the ID Policy.

… The breathtaking inanity of the Board’s decision is evident when considered against the factual backdrop which has now been fully revealed through this trial. The students, parents, and teachers of the Dover Area School District deserved better than to be dragged into this legal maelstrom, with its resulting utter waste of monetary and personal resources.

Quite the judicial smackdown, I think you’ll agree. Also, I like the first comment on Kevin’s post, by ‘cld’, who says

Intelligent Design is exactly as if you were to say that the lightning is so powerful only a giant monkey in the sky could have thrown it.

I originally planned this as a follow-up to my post about Pól Ó Muirí, but it happens to follow neatly from Jim’s post about newspaper columnists in general.

‘Typing with a glass of Chardonnay’ is a phrase that popped into my mind years ago to describe journalists writing about childcare. If you think about the job of being a columnist, a few things are immediately obvious. You have a valuable platform and an audience delivered straight to your door. But you quite likely have something else too: the ability to work from home and the option of flexible hours. You are in a privileged position and, therefore, uniquely unqualified to write about the issue. The people that most need to be heard on childcare are the people who don’t have the time to write columns about it.

I was reminded of this recently while reading about a group of American mothers who have launched a magazine (Total 180!) for women who stay at home rather than return to their former professional lives. I’m not saying that launching a magazine doesn’t involve a lot of work, but it is worth noting once again that it’s something that can be - and in this case is - achieved from home. According to salon.com:

The first item in a section about goods “that no stay-at-home mom should do without” is a big bottle of Rodney Strong Chardonnay.

Check out Alain Bertaud’s site for some interesting work of his on the spatial structure of cities. I especially like his diagrams of population density and spread in several world cities. Here’s London:

and Moscow:

and Shanghai:

Caroline’s post provides just another example of a widely-observed pattern: newspaper columnists are usually full of shit.

This shouldn’t be that surprising - they’re pretty much guaranteed a regular spot on the opinion pages, and like anyone with a monopoly they don’t have much incentive to up their game. So newspaper editors should keep them on their toes by introducing a little more competition.

Okay, a lot more competition: I think that each day the editors should announce an open contest to fill at least one and preferably all of the next day’s opinion piece slots. Any reader (or non-reader, for that matter) can submit a piece, to be judged by either the editors or their nominees, but certainly by whatever criteria they see fit. Of course, you could put it to a popular vote, but then what would be the point of having editors? (Join me next week, when I’ll be asking: What’s the point of having editors?)

To an extent, something like this is already starting to happen, with many bloggers openly angling for lucrative spots in the dead tree media. But most people would tire of reading the thoughts of a bunch of fucking bloggers as quickly as they do the incumbent columnists. We need to widen the pool of potential contributors to those who don’t already write for a living / pastime, those who don’t necessarily read the broadsheets every day, and those who can’t actually read. I seem to recall reading somewhere that scientists have trained a chimpanzee to employ simple signs to communicate desires for food and affection - I say, give that monkey a column. Diversity is the wave of the future - mad, tumbling, indiscriminate diversity! - and newspapers that don’t adapt will soon go the way of the dodo, or at least the giant panda. The harsh reality is that what with the growth of information and stuff, more and more people are going to be want to get their pro-war Decen-Left posturings from a seven year old Dutch girl and less and less from David Aaranovitch, and the sooner we all face up to that the better.

Now, have I got to 800 words yet? No? Okay, and another thing …

When Mary Robinson recently suggested that women were ‘copping out’ by leaving the workforce to look after children at home, rather than sticking around and forcing through child-friendly changes in the workplace, people went absolutely batshit. It was as if she had personally bitchslapped every mother in Ireland around the head, and then told them their child was ugly.

Writing in today’s Irish Times, Pól Ó Muirí looks at the debate and adds his view. The first thing that struck him?

Surprisingly, the debate was overwhelmingly one between women.

Surprisingly my arse. Worrying and arguing about whether to stay at home or remain in work has always been done mostly by women or on their behalf. If Pól hadn’t noticed this until now, then he is either an idiot, or he’s being disingenuous in order to bolster the rest of his argument. Perhaps what he meant was ‘disappointingly’.

The old image of Irish man being the Cú Chulainn of the family - head, hunter and defender - while Irish woman was Maca, bare-foot and pregnant, running races according to the whims of men, is one that, for the greater part, belongs to mythology. More and more, contemporary Cú Chulainns have realised that, actually, working in a factory, civil service, newspaper (!), from dawn to dusk is not an attractive option.

So unattractive that these Cú Chulainns have banded together and demanded equal paid paternity leave, child-friendly work practices, crèches and job-sharing opportunities?

Er, not exactly.

“Copping out”, however, is not just a choice that women make - men do it too

No, they don’t. Not in any significant number. And pretending that they do, and have accordingly been given the resources to do so by their employers, financial encouragement from the government and the support of society, is to preemptively abort any discussion about how better to provide incentives for men to share the job of childrearing.

More and more, fathers and mothers are having to make arrangements not only for their children but for each other simply because of the demands of time: one makes the sandwiches; one does the morning school run; one commutes to work; one does the afternoon pick-up; one starts the dinner; one does the homework; one puts them to bed.

Can you guess which ‘one’? Here’s a hint.

Ó Muirí is, in essence, suggesting that the forces of capitalism have inadvertently solved the problem of gender inequality by giving everyone a raw deal.

It is a mix and match existence that is far removed from the traditional roles of Mrs Robinson’s era. Parents are morphing into being mathers and fothers.

Ah brilliant Ted! Equality and genuine respect between the sexes has been achieved and all it took was the glib rearrangement of a couple of vowels.

I’d love to live in Pól Ó Muirí’s world. It truly sounds like a fairytale place, where mathers and fothers join together - equally! - to struggle against the evil forces of Capitalism, Commuting and Crippling Mortgages.

Sadly I live in a world where the debate on childcare - to its fatal detriment - takes place overwhelmingly between women while men shuffle at the back and occasionally agree that yeah, working is shit.

On “What the Stuarts Did for Us”, Adam-Hart Davis has just claimed that the term ‘hackney cab’ comes from the French haquenée or “ambling nag” (obviously, the precursors of today’s black cabs were of the horse-drawn variety). This sounded a bit off to me - does that mean the borough of Hackney is named after a kind of horse? Also, and I admit this may not be the most reliable source, I seem to remember Alan Moore having his lead character William Gull claim in “From Hell” that the place-name Hackney comes from the Anglo-Saxon “Hakon’s Ea”, which means something like “area belonging to some Anglo-Saxon guy called Hakon”.

So who was right? Maybe both of them. Here’s the online Etymological Dictionary:

hackney
c.1300, see hack (2).
hack (2)
c.1700, originally, “person hired to do routine work,” short for hackney “an ordinary horse” (c.1300), probably from place name Hackney (Middlesex), from O.E. [Old English] Hacan ieg “Haca’s Isle” (or possibly “Hook Island”). Now well within London, it was once pastoral. Apparently nags were raised on the pastureland there in early medieval times and taken to Smithfield horse market (cf. Fr. haquenée “ambling nag,” an Eng. loan-word). Extended sense of “horse for hire” (1393) led naturally to “broken-down nag,” and also “prostitute” (1579) and “drudge” (1546). Special sense of “one who writes anything for hire” led to hackneyed “trite” (1749); hack writer is first recorded 1826, though hackney writer is at least 50 years earlier. Sense of “carriage for hire” (1704) led to modern slang for “taxicab.”

So a hack is a broken-down nag who will do anything for money. Sounds like most journalists alright.

A joke to be told by a fat comedian in a dinner jacket; bow tie hanging undone about his shoulders, whiskey and soda in hand. Remember to refer to any people in the audience with common phrases like “dollface”, “red”, and so on. “Let me tell you folks, boy we got a lot o’ good lookin’ people in the room. Let me tell you, I just flew in from the Catskils, and boy are my jokes tired.”

I encourage you to try the veal.

Whenever I see those Yahoo! logos, I always think they look creepily cheery. No-one smiles that much. They’re not representative of any human emotion. Come to think of it, he looks like a tiny yellow anthropophage. Why else would he have TEETH?

Oh he’s happy, sure. But that’s no smile!

It was quite amusing to see an enormously fat white Australian guy during the beach riots saying about the “Lebs” he wanted “out”:

“You’re not welcome. This is our land. Get the hell out.”

Of course if as reported Arabs - not alone among men all over the world in this - are making disgusting comments to women on the beach because they “swim in a bikini”, they can fuck off and all, but the big fat white guy missed something. Probably too much Foster’s. I forgot, they don’t drink that stuff.

“You’re not welcome” - Okay, but they’re staying. Unlike that boatload of Afghans your government turned around just after their ally the US started bombing, turning the Taliban-controlled hellhole they were trying to escape into a warlord-controlled hellhole they didn’t want to go back to. Mmmmm … compassionate.

“This is our land” - How is it your land? You’ve only been there a wet week and you stole it off the Aborigines, who you did a very poor job of exterminating, I must say. There’s plenty of room! Get an economy that isn’t based on sheep shearing, backpacker tourists (who you hate as well, I note) and Paul Hogan films.

“Get the hell out” - You get the hell indoors, mate, or you’re going to die of skin cancer because, hold on, you’re white and you’ve only been there for, if I remember correctly, 200 years, so your skin hasn’t had time to evolve to cope with the constant sunshine. Unlike the “Lebs”, who, hailing from a sunny region, are perfectly able to cope*. Good to see you’re trying though - nice hat.

*Okay, the really high skin cancer may be also due to the massive hole in the ozone layer in the past fifty years, but all this science is getting in the way of my argument.

Q: Why do you think there are so many millions of idiots in America, I mean all those stupid people who voted for George Bush even though he’s obviously a complete idiot and … [continues in this vein for several minutes despite repeated requests from all parties to shut the fuck up]

A: Yes, I suppose it would be nice to come from a country that has never made a mistake, like Britain.

Q: Could you take Bill O’Reilly in a fight?

A: I’m 150 pounds of asthma. Bill O’Reilly is the size of a panda.

Q: If I can just get in a quick plug for my-

A: Please don’t.

Q: [continues] new satirical news comedy show starting soon on BBC3- [groaning, booing] I wondered if you would like to comment on our political system and help us write jokes for it? [nobody laughs]

A: No. [everyone laughs]

Q: I’m a political science lecturer here in London, in fact I’ve brought my class with me [class whoops] and I just wondered what you thought was the best political system?

A: [reasonably funny, but not as funny as an academic political scientist asking a comedian what the best political system is]

Q: What did you think of Harold Pinter’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech?

A: I think if I won a Nobel Prize I’d just … thank people.

Those were some of the more reasonable questions - most of them were self-regarding, cringe-inducingly cloying, or just crass. It probably doesn’t come across from the bit above, but the Q&A was still the highlight of the evening though (especially compared to the sit-there-while-I-read-from-my-book bit), since it’s fun to watch someone that sharp deal with the the kind of dullard who really believes that Americans can’t handle irony.

I’d rather die than let my kid see me whoring myself for Estée Lauder, Gwyneth.

What is the Chris/Gwyneth game plan behind that? Chris eradicates poverty in developing countries so Gwyneth can hawk perfume to them? Or maybe in the future the perfume hawkers will be African. Yeah, I guess that’s the dream.

So, this week I had a wonderful experience - walking around Kuwait. Over the course of a couple of hours I walked a few miles around various districts, a little derive if you will. It puts the complaints of Reclaim the Streets in Dublin to shame.

Firstly, very few roads have pavement accompaniment. So you spend most of the time walking on the road. Secondly, each district is divided from the next by motorways. It is impossible to walk from one borough to the next without having to climb over a fence and run across a motorway (some of the most dangerous motorways in the world), where you’ll likely be killed, or worse, stared at by the motorists.

Of the five districts I walked through, each equivalent in size to a small borough in Dublin or London, three were almost entirely sealed off from all other parts of the city (except for a single exit road, invariably in the direction I didn’t want to go), there was one pedestrian bridge over a dual-carriageway and no dedicated pedestrian areas. I have often complained of over-reliance on cars here, or rather SUVs, and that it may be because of the easy attitude to oil and a certain laziness (like the scene in ‘LA Story’ when Steve Martin gets in his car to go to his neighbours house). The root cause of the city’s design may be something along these lines, but the daily reason for reliance on the car is that it is simply impossible to move around any other way. Which is moderately ironic, given that when everybody is on the road in their massive trucks, during the four rush hours (read three hours each), they’re all stuck in a countrywide traffic jam and nobody can get anywhere.

So an attempt to design a city for free movement paralyzes it.

On the upside, there are lots of open spaces in the city, but they’re not like the joyous plazas of a utopedestrian dream. They’re vacant lots, half occupied by derelict buildings, or skips, feral cats, rubble, rubbish, and parked cars.

There’s something about the theme tune to 80s cartoon Jem that just demands analysis.

Watcher: Hmmm… who is the Jem person that the song keeps talking about? She seems outrageous, but I can’t be sure.
Theme Song: “Jem is truly Outrageous”
Watcher: Oh, OK, so she is outrageous. Everything seems to be wrapped up then, now all I need to know is HOW outrageous she is.
Theme Song: “Truly, truly, truly outrageous”
Watcher: Well, I guess that answers all my questions. All this talk of outrageousness has made me forget her name though.
Theme Song: “Woo ooo Jem”
Watcher: Ahhh… that’s right it was Jem.
Theme Song: “Jem”
Watcher: Good, I heard correctly. I wonder what type of music this Jem plays.
Theme Song: “the music’s contagious”
Watcher: Very good. Is it anything else?
Theme Song: “(outrageous)”
Watcher: Beautiful. I had a sneaking suspicion that the music would be outrageous as well, but I couldn’t be sure until that last confirmation.

But as Jay Pinkerton points out, sometimes the kidding has to stop.

That Jem’s obvious cry for help went unnoticed is pitying, given the poetry found after her 1994 suicide: “Jem / Jem sad / Jem is disillusionment / Jem is abandonment / Jem / ooh / Jem Jem Jem.”

For anyone who wasn’t a girl in the 80s: Jem’s theme.