Herald & Post Columns The Herald & Post, and anyone related to them take no responsibility for anything I write on here. This is all my own work, and consequently, my own fault.
Yesterday, I was surprised to learn that I’d been quoted in The Guardian’s Joe Public blog. It was a post about whether or not commuters should be allowed to vote in the London election, so they quoted a bit of that stupid thing I wrote about gerrymandering a couple of weeks ago. Here’s what I said:
I really, really want to vote in the London mayoral election. It isn’t fair. I’m being denied the vote just because I don’t live in London. It’s a textbook case of gerrymandering: they’ve drawn up the boundaries specifically to deny people who don’t live in London a vote on who gets to be mayor of London. It’s annoying too that the vote is in early May, as I have every intention of moving to London before the end of the year - and if I do, I could potentially be stuck in a city ruled by Boris Johnson, a man who can’t even run a quiz show properly, let alone a major world city.
Unfortunately, they’d pasted it in, and in the process, lost all of the italics, which was there to indicate that I was being sarcastic. So hilariously, I’ve managed to wind up a load of Guardianistas, who as it turns out, are almost as credulous as creationists…
Surely surely surely surely surely this is a wind-up….
Just checked my watch and April 1st was 4 weeks ago. Next we’ll have travelling salesfolk requesting a national vote valid for any constituency they happen to pass through in the course of their business. I like the chap who seems to think posession of an Oyster card gives him the right to vote. Absurd.
Surely James O’Malley was taking the piss
Doh! I have an oyster card must travel, not I have a oyster card must vote. This must rate as one of the most stupid articles I have ever read.
There’s loads more which also seem a bit aimed at me - take a look, its great.
This may seem familiar to you if you’ve watched this video.
I’ve been reading up on homeopathy recently - it’s an alternative form of medicine to the sort of thing you get in hospitals. It’s “alternative” in the sense that unlike regular medicine, it doesn’t actually work.
To cut a long story short, the premise is that “like cures like” - homeopathists reckon that if you treat an illness with something that causes similar symptoms to the illness, then you’ll be magically cured. For example, Samuel Hahnemann, the bloke who came up with this concept reckoned that he’d beaten Malaria by ingesting some bark that caused shivering and joint pain, a bit like how malaria does. In other words, it’s basically the same as claiming that if you have an illness where you feel like you’ve been punched in the face, the best cure is a punch in the face.
You might have noticed my cynicism when I describe this - don’t get me wrong, it’s not baseless or misplaced. I’ve been conducting a scientific experiment of my own to test whether or not homeopathic remedies work.
Now, I haven’t had any major illnesses recently, so rather than use homeopathy to fix myself, I instead decided to use it to see if I could enhance myself - having watched Superman Returns recently, I’ve decided I’d quite like super strength, so I decided to conduct an experiment to see if homeopathy could give me that.
To make a homeopathic remedy, you generally have to dilute down something bad and toxic using water - to the point where, after several iterations of dilution there is something like (in the case of a popular ‘flu “remedy”) one molecule of the toxic substance to 10 to the power of 400 molecules of water - so it’d actually be surprising to find a single molecule of the stuff in the “remedy”.
As luck would have it, I have this resultant “drug” literally on tap at home - it’s called H20 or “Water”, to give it its “street” name. So I’ve been conducting the experiment with great care - apparently some water junkies have water making up 83% of their blood, and according to the Office of National Statistics, based on 2005, 5.1 men in every million have died from inhaling too much water (”drowning”), so its pretty dangerous stuff. But in the interest of science, I have persevered. For the past month, I’ve been taking a daily dosage of the homeopathic drug I concocted by turning on the tap and holding a glass underneath.
The results, as you might expect, were disappointing - unfortunately homeopathy has not given me super strength, or even any other super powers. I can’t lift up cars and throw them at my adversaries or anything. So my official scientific conclusion is that it “doesn’t work”.
There are, however, some people who claim that it does work, but in the same way a placebo does – if you think that taking something will make you better, you’ll psychologically feel better, which will make you actually better… but with this approach you have to be wilfully ignorant in order to get a reaction.
So, er, sorry if I’ve just ruined the placebo effect for you by telling you a bit about why homeopathy doesn’t work at all.
I’ve got a confession to make. This evening, I did something terrible. I went to my local Conservative Club.
No, I haven’t renounced my dignity, I was there on business. Well, sort of anyway. I was there for the 21st birthday party of two of my friends, Ben & Bailey, who are the cool sort of people I’d make a sacrifice like this for - its just they have inexplicably poor taste in booking venues.
When I parked in their car park, the stench of Conservatism was already thick in the air - there was a notice on the door informing me that I had to be a “member” to park there and there was a regressive fixed-rate fine for parking violations (as opposed to linked to income), meaning that it was the poor who’d be hit the hardest.
So after I’d re-parked my car in the chemist’s car park (Free medicine for everyone? How sickeningly socialist), I approached the entrance again, trembling. I didn’t know what it’d be like inside. Would there be the heads of murdered foxes lining the walls? Would rivers of the blood of poor people pass by the terrace outside? Would there be genuine, real-life Tory voters inside?
I took a deep breath and pushed open the door. I was surprised that I’d made it this far in - every week I write in the local paper and slag off the Tories or Tory values in one way or another. What if they recognised me? I was worried that someone would “out” me as a nanny-state loving liberal. Would they throw me out? Or worse?
The bar appeared to be basically an old man pub, and they had the same selection of drinks on offer as secular bars. What was slightly unsettling was that everyone in there looked like a Tory - its hard to describe exactly what makes a Tory, but if the birthday party hadn’t been there, the median age would have been in the upper-50s or low-60s, and they all looked moderately well off and self-interested. I felt like Louis Theroux observing a group of crackpots and not trying to be offensive to their horrendous worldview.
The other problem was with money. I was buying drinks from the Tory bar - was my money going directly to funding the Conservative Party? Is David Cameron going to be paying for his chauffeur to drive behind his bike using my money? The prospect is too horrifying to even think about.
I spent Ă‚ÂŁ4.50 there (on three Pepsis, since you asked) - I think now the only thing I can do to morally redeem myself is to donate Ă‚ÂŁ4.50 to a cause that opposes the Tories. Maybe the LibDems, as the least evil of the three big parties and the second biggest party in my constituency (the Tories are depressingly first). But then, Nick Clegg is a Tory in all but name, isn’t he? I’m thinking maybe donating it to UKIP - a party equally, if not more hideous than the Tories - the theory being that I can try and split the right wing vote and give the lefties, whoever they are, more of a chance.
I’m assuming all of the evil plans were hidden away as they were allowing “outsiders” in.
My friend Barney is currently on his gap year, but rather than faff about in an impoverished third world hell-hole, he’s done the wise thing, and taken a gap year travelling around Britain (I told him to give Birmingham a miss to make sure that he definitely avoids hell-holes). He’s been in London for the past week, so on Wednesday, I went down there for the day to meet up with him, just for the fun of it.
As you might have noticed - I liveblogged a lot of it on Twitter and my blog’s sidebar.
I met up with him in Trafalgar Square, where, as it transpired, were some sort of St George’s Day celebrations - whilst this display of patriotism obviously sickened me, I was delighted to spot Giles Dilnot from the Daily Politics doing a live OB.
Anyway, after a wander around London we eventually ended up the Sir John Soane museum - he was the architect who designed the Bank of England and loads of other stuff. What was unusual about it, was that aside from it being a small museum (it was Soane’s old house), you had to wait outside for someone to let you in, and then had to sign in, which made it feel all the more exclusive.
You could tell it was an old house - the walls were caked in tat, like all of the paintings and old Roman stuff he’d collected. There was a bit towards the back where there were loads of old Roman head statues overhanging a drop down to where there was some sort of old sarcophagus - it was unbelievably tempting to push them off, but somehow I managed to resist the urge.
After this, and a brief jaunt to the British Museum, we headed to the spiritual home of PKMN.NET meet-ups (this is how I know Barney), The Rocket, where we met up with Mushroom (or “William” as he’s also known). He was somewhat startled when I phoned him and asked if he wanted to go to the pub, considering that both Barney and I both live over 100 miles away from London, in different directions.
After this we headed to another pub, which was something of a personal triumph for us. Only a couple of people reading this will appreciate the significance that we found “The Shakespeare Pub”! On previous trips to London, we’ve (well, I’ve) consisted failed to find The George Inn, which is thought to have been Shakespeare’s and Charles Dicken’s local pub. Considering we were there on April 23rd, it seemed particularly relevant, as it was not only St George’s Day, but Shakespeare’s birthday and death day. It was literally the most relevant place in the world to be at that time.
(Wearing someone else’s hat doesn’t mean that I endorse St George’s Day or the volkisch concept of ‘patriotism’.)
After leaving this pub, we ended up encountering some Morris Dancers just before heading to the pub next to The Golden Hind - the, er, fourth pub of the day, which was the other spiritual home of PKMN.NET meet-ups. Barney bought four pints of a specific drink just to get a free St George’s Day hat. Just goes to show that marketing works.
The Morris Dancers were appalling, have a watch of this:
Warning, if you think an IP address is a postcode in Ipswich, then this might bore you to tears.
I’ve got an incredibly important essay to hand in on Friday - and an even more important dissertation to hand in the week afterwards. So what have I been doing so far today? Quite possibly the most efficient procrastinating ever. Rather than concentrate on things that actually matter, I’ve been busy improving the Twitter feed on the left hand sidebar of the blog.
Now, aside from merely having the text of my latest Tweets, I’ve enhanced it - if I broadcast a live video to Qik, using my mobile phone, that will alert my Twitter - and now rather than just link to it, it’ll display the video in a flash video box so you can watch it on this very same page (there was no end of hassle involving having to parse a second Qik-specific RSS feed and regex out the variables and all sorts). I’ve done something similar with photos, that I can also send in to Twitpic with my mobile phone - if I send in a photo, it’ll now be shown in thumbnail form on the sidebar, with its caption if it has one. I’ve also added a text “glossary” that reads my tweets and if it spots any keywords (like “Adam Hart Davis“), it automatically magically changes it into a relevant link.
I’m pretty damn pleased with it all though - I thought that when I signed up to do an arts degree, I was resigning myself to a lifetime of technological ignorance, not even being able to grasp the simplest of gadgets, but happily, as it turns out, I’m still shit-hot at coding. Well, sort of.
What’s the point in all of this? Well, if you’re asking that question that you don’t understand what web 2.0 is all about - its about doing cool things because you can, not because they serve any practical benefit to the rest of humanity. Really - prior to the invention of Facebook, did you ever have a desire to play Scrabble online?
I’m going to London on Wednesday, so if you stay tuned to my blog, you’ll be able to follow my thrilling adventure in real time! Quite why you’d want to is, er, another question.
The craziest thing has just happened. I went to my local pub for once - literally the pub nearest to my house - this isn’t the crazy thing. Now, my town is one of those small towns where everyone knows each other, and don’t take too kindly to outsiders, so it wasn’t terribly surprising when we saw the man who owns the music shop in there (he was the man who leant me my trumpet, incidentally) - what was surprising was what he said.
“Didn’t you win the Weakest Link?”, “Yeah”, I replied. “We’ve got another winner here!”, he said, introducing me to another Weakest Link winner. Which is a bit of a weird coincidence - what are the chances of that happening?
Apparently he was on in January last year, and took away nearly Ă‚ÂŁ3000, figuratively shitting all over my Ă‚ÂŁ1970. His programme was repeated recently, but I was disappointed to discover that there are no repeat fees.
It was a pretty amazing coincidence, although one thing about it did bother me. It means that I’ve lost my “Thing”. I’m no longer going to be the guy who won the Weakest Link, I’m just going to be the guy with no unique traits whatsoever. Which is slightly frustration, considering how much I’ve gone on and on about being on the Weakest Link. I now need to find something unique and noteworthy about myself, otherwise I risk falling into obscurity. No one remembers Buzz Aldrin, because of the other guy who was on the moon before him,Ă‚Â And Christopher Marlow is an obscure footnote in literary history, because Shakespeare hogged all of the limelight. What can I do to re-gain my lost fame?
I did a double-take as I spotted the front page of the Daily Express at the station today.Ă‚Â “IMMIGRANTS BRING MORE CRIME” it bellowed, in its usual damning fashion. What was so surprising about this is that literally just yesterday, the Guardian were reporting that the “Migrant crime wave [is] a myth“.
What makes it even more astounding is that both newspapers are drawing their totally opposite headlines from the same report. Its the most blatant example of pandering to your target audience since Mitt Romney.
The most remarkable thing though, is that they’re both right. Well, sort of anyway.
In actual fact, apparently the recent wave of immigration has caused no change in the actual crime rate. What the Express are getting so indignant about is that because the crime rate has remained the same, but there are more people, there are more crimes. In other words “A HIGHER NUMBER OF PEOPLE YIELDS A HIGHER NUMBER OF CRIMES, SHOCK”. Which is a bit like being outraged at the fact that there’s more murders here than there are in, say, Slovenia, a country full of those awful murderous foreigners, which has only 3% of our population.
I’m slightly perplexed as to why “no change in crime rate” is even news. And I’m surprised the Express are so outraged - after all, they’re always moaning about immigrants coming over here, and taking from us, now they’re finally giving us “MORE” of something and they’re angry. Immigrants can’t win.
Despite positioning myself as a rationalist, and a militant Dawkinsian (I’m coining that now), there’s one part of my character that before I’ve never really been able to justify: my vegetarianism.
Even though Stephen Law, in The Philosophy Gym, in his philosophical judgement, puts the burden on the meat-eaters to justify their murderous lifestyle, and even though there’s stacks of reports condemning the treatment of animals raised for their meat, my vegetarianism has been driven mainly by the arguably irrational position that “killing is wrong”, and more importantly the notion that “you can’t hurt cute little animals!”
However, it turns out that I can link my irrational lifestyle to a firmly rational topic: the global food crisis.Ă‚Â For those out of the (honey-nut) loop, various tedious economic factors have sent the price of basic food staples, like grain soaring, meaning loads of people haven’t been able to afford food - hence stuff like the riots in Haiti - and its only going to get worse.
The thing is, there’s apparently loads of food to go round, its just that animals used in meat production are getting it instead of humans, and so the production of meat uses more food resources than non-meat products. Which is obvious when you think about it - if you’re growing up a cow so that you can mercilessly slaughter it, it does all of things that the “MRS NERG” mnemonic (Move, Respire, er, Something, Nutrition,Ă‚Â Something, Something, and Something) states whilst its still breathing.
Anyway, to cut a long story short (just read the damn article), Monbiot reckons that if everyone cut down on meat consumption, the global food crisis would be solved. So this means that next time anyone questions my vegetarianism I can trot out an altruistic answer and claim I’m saving the world. Excellent.
This almost makes up for my gigantic carbon footprint.
As a member of of the Guardianista liberal elite, I was under the impression that we’d beaten racism. I thought that everyone was on board the anti-racism bandwagon - I was even beginning to wonder if the racist Daily Mail and Sun readers who are our sworn enemies existed solelyin my head, much like how the Aryan utopia we had before the forrens arrived only exists in their heads.
But today I went to get my hair cut, and had to make conversation outside of my sophisticated degree-educated demographic for the first time in ages, and to my horror, it turns out that casual racism isn’t dead… it would appear to be rife.
I made the mistake of explaining to the woman cutting my hair that I’m a politics student. I really should have known better than to reveal this information. This caused either the man getting his haircut next to me, or the man cutting his hair - I’m not sure who as I couldn’t turn my head because my hair was being cut - to go off on one.
“I hate politics, politicians don’t do anything for us, they’re only looking after themselves”, he began. Somehow, he moved on to talking about immigration, as all idiots tend to do.
I’m ashamed to say that I didn’t have the courage to challenge them on their views, not least because they appeared to be friends with the woman cutting my hair, and I didn’t want to get on the wrong side of someone with the power to make me look like an idiot. I did obviously formulate a counter-argument to all of their bullshit in my head, in order to mentally prove to myself that I’m not a racist, and so that I could post a response to their arguments in due course, in a place they’re most likely to see it: on an obscure corner of the internet.
“They come over here, speak their language and spend our money”, he said.
“You go to London and you couldn’t even tell what an Englishman was, its all black faces… Leicester is mostly black now… I might move to Newcastle, there’s no black faces there”, he continued. I was hoping that someone else would challenge him. “Give it ten years…” the other guy said. Gah.
The clear implication was that black people are somehow a bad thing.
I should probably have said something like “What’s wrong with black people?” or “Isn’t a nation defined by the people who live there, so the definition of an Englishman would be transitive? Wasn’t it Benedict Anderson who theorised that the nation by its very definition an imagined community?”. Not to mention point out the factual errors. Leicester isn’t majority black - whilst the non-white ethnic minorities collectively outweigh white people about 60% to 40%, white people are still the largest ethnic group. And anyway, he never actually explained why this is a bad thing.
Just as I was about to despair at the world, my mood was lightened slightly when the topic of conversation moved on to where the other people in the Barber’s shop were going on holiday. Y’know, going to other countries, speaking English and spending foreign currency.
This said, I wish I had challenged him about his views - it’d make a better story, and its not as thought defeating someone who claims that they “go on YouTube and look for videos of car crashes” is going to be the biggest intellectual challenge.
I did a double-take as I spotted the front page of the Daily Express at the station today.Ă‚Â “