Sometimes people don’t blog because life is going well. Sometimes they stop blogging because they’re ill. Sometimes it’s because nothing interesting is happening. And sometimes it’s because the person is too damn busy—or tired—to find the time. For me, it’s been the latter.
I’ve had side projects coming out my side projects—I’ve just finished another tranche of leaflets—and have been too exhausted to sit and cogitate and comment.
But things are settling down. And, hopefully, I’ll be round with comments over the coming month. Hopefully.
Every four years I get ridiculously optimistic about the new year.
The last time was 2008. Yes, the year the banking system collapsed. Also the year I spent six months on the dole. But the year, too, I secured my current contract; so not all bad.
2011, by contrast, has been totally shitty. It even finished with a shitty flu bug. And it’s left me piles of shit on the side, that are still waiting to be cleared up. So it’s hard to see how this year could be worse. (No! It’s okay Universe! I can imagine how it could be worse.) And I must be due a regression to mean soon. In fact, I can feel it in my soul: this is gonna be a good year.
Actually, my soul might just be channelling this: Caitlin’s Harnett’s Tying Hands and Holding Shoelaces (Warning: the button opens a pop-up window, which your browser will block.) The song’s a mesmerising net of plucked chords, gentle percussion and sudden melodic sprinkles – like an upbeat Street Spirit (Fade Out); it’s completely entrancing. And there isn’t a record whose lyrics better embody the innocent and wonder of falling in love.
So, before you get any further into 2012, listen to Caitlin. Then listen again. And then again. And maybe listen a little more, just to be sure. 2011 is dead. Buried. Let it go. Open your eyes to the possibilities around you. Let wonder infuse you. We still have another 358 chances to really screw things up. And surely one them has to pan out, hasn’t it?
Late Happy New Year.
And what shoulder and what art
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
There was a period, five or six years ago, when I was consistently losing arguments with colleagues. I couldn’t get a suggestion accepted without a row, and I became conditioned to expect a negative response to every email. So, for the first time in my life, I gave up. I stopped reading emails. Friends and family were unable to reach me. And to this day, my in-box retains thousand of unread messages received during that epoch.
I’m back on top these days. But I’m not sure I’m fully healed, and my correspondence with HMRC is testing the strength of the new “tissue”. I was physically shaking as I printed off my appeal against the withdrawal of my working Tax Credit. And I’m beginning to expect every letter will bring a failed reply.
For that reason, I held off querying a procedural issue until I was ready to send my appeal; I didn’t want HMRC plunging me into despair at the moment I needed every beat of self-confidence. But actually, their reply turned out to be pretty positive.
The procedural issue was a mistake, and has been corrected; HMRC won’t be asking me to pay back any money until the appeal is decided. Plus one to me. They also admitted to inaccurately
advising me, and apologised; their change of heart only strengthens their case, but it shows they can make errors and admit them. Plus one to both sides. And finally, they trash talked me.
'You have 30 days to comply...'
The HMRC is actually a boss monster.
Well, not “trash talked” as you’d recognise it, the exact phrase was I look forward to receiving the additional evidence…
; but until now, nobody at HMRC has ever looked forward
to anything I’ve been proposing to send. And from between the lines I can hear the sound of muscles stretching and sinews tightening; something has piqued their interest.
All in all, it feels like the moment you discover a boss monster is vulnerable. It can take damage!
, you yell. Or—in this case—make mistakes. Now all I have to do is land more blows until it “dies” – taking care not to “die” myself; because if I lose, I can’t reload a saved game.
You won’t believe how close I have just come to committing fraud. It’s taken every moral fibre of my being to resist.
I better backtrack and explain.
At the end of September HMRC—i.e. the tax man—decided to ‘review’ my claim for Tax Credits.
Tax Credits are welfare payments given to us poor people through the tax system. And a review means stuffing every bill, receipt and bank statement into a manilla envelope, and mailing it to HMRC. I guess it was something like the experience TRM went through in trying to secure a loan, except for me there was no upside; I’ve been in receipt of the ‘loan’ for years, so the only possible outcomes were ‘as you were’ and ‘Oh shit!’
Oh shit.
My claim for Tax Credits has been denied, and the last eighteen months worth of payments have been reclassified as an ‘overpayment’. I’m now in hock to the Taxman for an eye-watering £4500. Even someone earning £60,000 a year would struggle to conjure a wodge that big in 30 days; and if I was on £60,000 I wouldn’t be in receipt of Tax Credits. In fact, depending on the exchange rate, I’m now only a few quid better off than being unemployed. So it’s back to counting pennies for me.
For the first week, it felt like a close friend had died. That’s not hyperbole; that’s the only experience I can compare it with. I’ve been in shock following an accident, and this felt the same – except it lasted for days. The colour drained from the world and I felt like I was walking around 6′ lower than everybody else. Imagine being fired for breaking a rule that hadn’t been explained to you up front – and wasn’t even in the contract, if you’d bothered to read it; and, on top of that, being told to repay the last nine month’s salary. That’s what happened.
Knowing what I now know, I could have easily avoided the problem. All it would have taken is an invoice. Yes, that simple. That’s what’s so frustrating. But that’s just not how this contract has evolved, and my informal ‘invoices’ aren’t going to tick their boxes. (At least, I wouldn’t let them through.)
Of course, I had to crowbar these requirements out of HMRC with a Freedom of Information Request. But even so, I’m the kinda person looks at the rules and says, ‘Yeah, you’re right. Fair cop.’ and rolls over and gives up.
I’m also a worrier: the way I solve problems is by thinking and thinking and thinking about them. Give me a couple of minutes and my brain starts whirring away searching for solutions. That’s great when there is swift feedback; it allows me to scan the ‘solution space’ like a dog searching for its ball. But you can’t get a swift answer out of HMRC – they use a special, ‘third class’ postal service that ensures a letter dated Monday arrives on Saturday. And, so I’ve been worrying about it, for three weeks, with more to go.
So exhausted and fed up, a thought snuck into my mind: ‘This is just a ‘box ticking’ problem; it would be easy to “discover” an overlooked document, that said everything they needed. My client would definitely back me up. And nobody would ever be any wiser…’
I went as far as mocking up such an email. But, after an afternoon of staring at it, I shredded it. I’m better than that. And at the moment, the worst that can happen is I toast my credit rating—and the debt can be cleared in a year, with a Debt Relief Order—I don’t need to put myself at risk of criminal prosecution.
So it’s back to winning the old fashioned way: by kicking their asses with logic and evidence. The response to my Freedom of Information Request came with a deadline extension, so I have time to reshape my argument. All I have to do is prove that I engaged in ‘profit seeking’. That’s enough. If I can show I’m a ruthless, money-grabbing bastard out to the exploit the world, then I can walk away with the cash.
Shit. I’m fucked, aren’t I?
More a manifesto than a song.
Caveat: I’m not a professional physicist. Although I do have the mad-scientist look down pat, especially first thing in the morning.
Suppose, for a moment, that the laws of physics allowed me to throw you a baseball faster than the speed of light – what would happen?
Well, seen in ultra-slowmo, the baseball would hit you before I’d appeared to throw it. And as it hit, it would split into two. The “real” ball would fall to the ground and come to a rest normally. But, simultaneously with that, a “fictitious” ball would fly back to me and ‘annihilate’ with the one I was throwing. (And by ‘annihilate’ I mean simultaneously merge and disappear.)
Weird though that description sounds, it doesn’t depend on Relativity or Quantum Mechanics; it’s schoolboy reasoning of the ‘two trains entering a tunnel travelling at 50mph and 60mph’-type variety. (If I get time, I’ll make the argument in detail.) However such simple, ‘common-sense’ logic requires there be two balls that spontaneously appear and disappear. And it’s the potential for weirdness like that which has upset physicists and made one promise to eat his boxer shorts on live TV if neutrinos actually turn out to travel faster than light.
A hundred years ago, that reaction would’ve been understandable. But today we’re used to particles appearing and disappearing, and doing other ‘weird stuff’. Neutrinos, for example, spontaneously change sex: it’s as if, one minute, you’re talking to a bloke; then you blink and, suddenly, the man has become a woman; and then you glance away, and look back to discover the woman is once more a man. (Although, kinkily, neutrinos have three sexes.)
And to state the obvious: neutrinos aren’t baseballs. In particular, they don’t reflect light,1 so seeing one, once, is nigh on impossible – let alone seeing the same one simultaneously in two different places.
Moreover, subatomic particles can already communicate superluminally through private back channels. Einstein was incensed by this technical violation of Relativity and insisted the behaviour was impossible. He was proved wrong.
Nor is Relativity itself flawless. It’s predicts more mass than can be seen in the universe, leaving astronomers and particle physicists scratching their heads searching for this missing “dark matter”, and prompting some to propose a reimagining of gravity from, *ahem*, the ground up.
And because Relativity doesn’t prohibit time travel, it’s already theoretically possible to get into the same paradoxes that superluminal neutrinos would allow,2 except with grandfathers instead of obscure bits of quantum-mechanical book keeping.
Nor does Relativity explain why time moves forwards, or play well with Quantum Mechanics. If there is to be a theory of “all physics”, one of those two will have to give ground. And some attempts apparently allow superluminal neutrinos.
Of course, if I were betting, I’d bet as much money on Relativity as I put against it. Relativity has been around a long time and proved immensely successful, and it might just be the OPERA scientists got their clocks wrong. But mainstream physics’ notions of time and causality seem glued to the nineteenth century. Should the OPERA results be independently verified, then maybe there’ll be the justification to move forwards. And it won’t be the end of the world – because, well, we’re living in that world. Plus or minus a set of boxer shorts.
- In the jargon: they don’t “couple to the electromagnetic field”. Although, fact checking has revealed that they can nevertheless interact with photons (papers here and here). But the cross sections are small, and so it’s only likely to happen in supernovas or the big bang. It might also be important as this paper suggests that photons don’t travel at the true speed of light but are retarded by interaction with (the neutrino-like particles expected to constitute) dark matter.
- Travelling faster than light is the same as travelling slower than light, and then popping back in time. Well, almost. And it’s exactly the same as travelling slower than light while simultaneously travelling backwards in time…
Standing in a cramped kitchen, I unbox a handful of leaflets, weigh them out on a set of temperamental scales, bag up the required weight and rebox the rest. I feel like drug dealer. And to me, at least, every 6g leaflet is as precious as heroin. I will spend the rest of a eleven-hour day delivering these packages to my distributors; twice returning home to eat and to weigh out more packages.
[—now, if this wasn’t a blog, I’d carry on, ‘This was the culmination of a month’s worth of effort…’, but I’ve already told that story. So I can’t help thinking that blogging makes you tell a story too soon. Anyway—]
By the end of the evening, my foot had become a bloody mess, although—oddly—that wasn’t the one that hurt. Nor was it the only thing that’d had me swearing.
One person had written down the number of leaflets they were prepared to deliver in place of their house number (which probably means the form was misdesigned, although nobody else got it wrong). Neighbours directed me to the correct house.
And while I’d given stringent warnings about the tight timescales involved, there were still those who did their best to back out when I showed up; twice I was asked, “When am I going to deliver them, then?” I looked hurt. They found time. Sometimes, it pays to wear your heart on your sleeve.
As a ‘thankyou’, I sellotaped a fun-size Mars bar to every package, and labelled it, ‘Energy food for distributor.’ Some got it.
‘That’s to keep me going as I deliver them.’, said one man, as I dropped off his package.
‘That’s to keep you going as you deliver them.’, I replied, unable to alter the line I was parroting.
But others remained bamboozled.
‘What’s the mars for?’ someone else asked.
‘I didn’t understand that “energy food” thing’, said another, when I saw him later; ‘it was cryptic.’
Oh dear.
My inability to communicate with some distributors doesn’t bode well for my attempts to communicate with the rest of the town.
Anyway, as I put my bloody feet up for the final time, I found an email from a distributor saying she’d completed her round.
‘Thanks for the mars bar. Brilliant idea.’ she added.
That was a lift. Another email requesting more leaflets arrived as I replied to the first. And, over the course of the weekend, the predominate complaint was that there were too few copies.
‘I didn’t overburden you with leaflets, did I?’, I asked one distributor.
‘No, I didn’t have enough.’ she replied.
And no-one has reported a typo. 
So now I’ve been given the go ahead to start planning the Christmas issue. Second system syndrome, here we come.
I’ve not been commenting on blogs the last couple of weeks because I’ve been designing and copy-editing a newsletter for a local charity. (The newsletter was supposed to go out to every household in town, about 5000 homes, but pressing deadlines and a lack of hard cash have limited the first run to 2000.)
It was while developing this, that one person said to me, ‘You seem to be doing a thankless task by pleasing so many people!’
Well, actually, no. I loved that. I really did.
When I joined the team, the newsletter was being constructed in private, and the mailing list was drawing a blank – so much so that I had to check my emails were getting through. Displaying a draft to the entire membership produced the exact opposite result; I was buried in criticism. But it wasn’t spleen. People were passionately arguing for the things they believed in, and that fired me up. (You might say they provided me with a “banquet of buzz” – sorry; truly sorry.) While part of me would be adamant that “No way is that going in!”; another would argue the flip, that “Yes, we could put it in – if we did it like ‘so’.” And so, slowly, the best ideas squeezed their way through my defences until the newsletter had outgrown my own plans and was more representative—and better—than I’d've ever produced on my own.
I know, from my spies on the committee, that not everybody is happy. But I hope I’ve pleased most of the other members – because if I can’t get a sympathetic audience on side, what chance have I got of winning over a whole town? (Well, none. But a dozen positive responses would be an improvement on the zero we were gonna get.)
I’m trying to resist posting regular music blogs because I know how annoying they get when you don’t share the author’s tastes. And, as we’ve established, I don’t have any taste. But…well I, can’t quite contain my enthusiasm for Wishes and Thieves. Their brand of submarine shoe-gazing provides the perfect antidote to a lingering Eurovision hangover. It just fizzes and bubbles like a diver exhaling their final breath. Think Cranes. Think Radiohead going through a lo-fi phase after someone spiked their drinks with happy pills. Lots of happy pills. So continental shelf, rather than Mariana Trench.
The place to start is We Lie. That’s the track which made me stop and relisten, and pretty quickly had me singing along. Give it a couple of plays, until your ear is trained to their sound. And then it’s time to dive in to the brilliantly inventive Lighthouse:
I thought Lighthouse was the most musically varied track on the EP (YMMV). It has pretty sophisticated lyrics, too – The only place that I find peace is when I sink down below/And though it’s dark I feel so safe.
(Again, YMMV.)
Overall, the group’s biggest shortcoming is their drummer. He can hit the beat but the not the grove. That’s down to confidence and skill, and should be fixed by more practice – unless it turns out he’s a lobster (in which case he has my sincerest apologies). But I definitely want to hear more tracks.
So got this far? Then the EP is available for free at their website. It’s great.
Alone, alone, all, all alone,
Alone on a wide wide sea!
The first I knew about blogging was when it erupted into the IT media. At the time, it seemed like a way for people who couldn’t code HTML to have a website; Geocities mark two (we geeks can be snobs, you know). So I let it pass me by.
What turned me around was TV.com. TV.com was a social networking site for tellyphiles. When I joined, it was a half-baked platform containing every feature that’d ever been seen anywhere on the web. Blogs were there, as the centrepiece of a user’s profile pages. And people used them to publish updates about their life or start free-form conversations. The prose wouldn’t win any pullitzers. But each post would prompt comments – perhaps a sentence of encouragement or a witty rejoinder (and from me, whole essays…). These were precious words that told you someone was listening, since there weren’t any stats worth their name. Sometimes a post would rack up over a 100 comments, and how many Jo[e]s Bloggers can manage that? Occasionally there were stand-out conversations or brilliant pieces of improv. I even found my opinions changed, as I saw life from the other sides of the tracks.
Eventually the TV.com “scene” collapsed (a change of owner, external events, and the rise of Facebook colluded to rip the heart out of the site). And it wasn’t till last year that I found time to find a new home. So here I am, minus one social network, but armed with a TV.com model of how blogging should work: one where comments are as important as the posts.
And to that end, I’ve been trawling the intertubes looking for interesting folk. Whenever I’ve found a blog entry that made me laugh or wanted to extend a comforting arm, then that’s what I’ve done, in the hope the author (you?) would reciprocate – just as happened on TV.com
But although I’ve made entreaty in dozens of commentless blogs, there have been few replies. I don’t know why (the internet doesn’t transmit my BO). To me blogging is Twitter without the brain-truncating 140 character limit and Facebook without the privacy issues. My posts are only “branches” waiting to be decorated with “leaves”, and those “leaf”-like comments are what fuel me to produce fresh posts. I don’t know why would anyone would swap the solitude of ‘Deary Diary’ for sociability of ‘Dear World’ and not want to talk; do people really only want to convince the world that there opinions are right?
But maybe bloggers haven’t figured out conversations goes both ways. (Why else would we need a campaign to make people reply to comments?) And don’t realise that 50% of the work the joy of blogging is commenting on other people’s blog. So let me spell out the rules. (Well, they’re more what you’d call ‘guidelines’, than actual rules.) If you don’t like my attention—and yes, I can kerreepy and eristic—and you don’t want me ruining the symmetrical solitutde of your blog, then ignore my rowdy thoughts. I’ll soon go away. But if, like TRM, you prefer conversation to Google Analytics, and want to keep the comments flowing, then share some of your grey matter here. (And that goes double for you uber important bloggers – pony up with the comments or you won’t get none from me.*) It doesn’t matter what you say. It can be lame, funny, or serious; just share. Even if I don’t initially appeal (the reverse was probably true, too), you might find that—after a few ups and downs—we warm to each other, learn from each other, and so become…y’know: chums…pals…bosom companions…friends…
* Muses and professional blogs may be exempt. Comment rates can go down as well as up.
Obligatory music video
The pictures aren’t in any way relevant: just the lyrics.
Credits
An idea for a post pointing-out bloggers are bad commenters had been going round my head for a while, but it wasn’t till TRM’s initial comment that this post fell into shape. Ta, love.
See also
And while we’re there, this is post is just a longer and more prosaic regurgitation of Let There Be Words. But I appreciate not everybody is poetically literate.
Something really weird happened to me yesterday. I was walking home along a grassy river bank, after having had lunch with my Dad, when I was approached by two guys in black track suits. (Don’t get your hopes up: it’s not heart-stoppingly exciting.) The nearest addressed me with a polite ‘Excuse me.’ And, when I gave the go ahead, uttered two bizarre, non-English words. I thought I’d had a stroke, so I said ‘Sorry?’ and he repeated them; ‘Ba-’ something, I think.
I’ve no idea what language he was speaking. But I’d swear they were chatting in English as they approached me. (In fact, I thought their conversation had ended, ‘Let’s ask him.’) Their speach was fluent, unhesitating, and without overt accent. Their demeanour was relaxed and confident. They were carrying bundles of white leaflets, for what looked like an Italian restaurant, which I assumed they were mailing through doors. Nothing in their demeanour hinted they were lost or in need of help. And they’d passed plenty of other people before picking on me. So I apologised again, said I didn’t understand, and walked off.
On reflection, I should have checked if they were okay. (Or at least asked, ‘Do you speak English?’ given that they’d probably asked me, ‘Doyouspeak gobbledegook?’) But, as I say, they seemed to be perfectly capable English speakers. So the encounter came off as surreal; as if I was being tested. And all I could think afterwards was ‘Why did you pick me? Why do you think I’d be part of your secret club? Am I really that odd looking?’
Obviously the answer is ‘Yes.’ So there you have it.
-
Want to know why I'm commenting on your blog? Read this.Comments are always welcome (even on old posts); just click on the comment count or 'Add a comment' link at the bottom of each article. Your email address won't be displayed or shared - it's used to generate your avatar. If you'd rather pick your own then visit gravatar.com
Emails addressed to my a_spod handle, at the 1000kindsofrain.com domain, will reach me.
Notes, Links, Quotes & Thoughts
A beautifully simple explanation of DeCasteljau’s Algorithm.
Mobile fingerprint scanners are being deployed in the West Midlands after successful trials.
How Louise Mensch turned a twitter molehill into an impregnable fortress.
A nice analysis of how the yank’s decision to leak the news of the underwear bomber has made us all less safe.
I’ve just been called by 01234 56789. Strangely, I didn’t answer.
Will Self writes,
…the risk that people seem most reluctant taking is not a physical but a mental one: just as the concrete in children’s playgrounds has been covered with rubber, so the hard truth about the effort needed for intellectual attainment is being softened by a sort of semantic padding.
He goes on to make lots of valid points, and there were only a couple of the words I didn’t know. Robert Peston admits that a lack of women on the board represents market failure.
You expect lawyers to have a degree of basic competence. But no. Employment tribunals failed because
…in some cases lawyers took too long to file court papers and the actions were ruled out of time. Also, some claims were made citing a breach of employment laws that did not exist at the time.
It’s in a story about more police corruption. Former shelf-stacker Suzanne Moore lays into workfare. And there are lots of juciy stuff to quote. Like
…most menial work leads to more menial work. The idea that this is the stepping stone is as much of a fantasy as The X Factor. The stepping stone is education. That’s what makes you free, not work. Now the young are to pay for [education] and work for nothing? And all while most of our political and media class spout lousy morality tales about lousy jobs while undermining even the basic minimum wage. Please.
Charlie Brooker on the financial crisis:
Banknotes aren’t worth the paper they’re printed on. If they were, they’d all have identical value.
The entire economy relies on the suspension of disbelief. So does…an animated cartoon. This means that no matter how soberly the financial experts dress, no matter how dry their language, the economy they worship can only ever be as plausible as an episode of SpongeBob SquarePants. It’s certainly nowhere near as well thought-out and executed.
Banking, as far as I can tell, seems to be almost as precise a science as using a slot machine. You either blindly hope for the best, delude yourself into thinking you’ve worked out a system, or open it up when no one’s looking and rig the settings so it’ll pay out illegally.
Can we have him replace Stef Flanders?
The Government’s decision that a family members must work 24 hours in a week before qualifying for Working Tax Credit will force parents to take on more hours, reducing the work available for everyone else. Net effect: increased unemployment. Just what we want.
Cait Reilly’s effort may be changing employers attitudes to the work programme. (Priceless fact: Tesco took on 1400 people for free but only gave 300 of them jobs at the end.)
Al Murray pens a nice piece of the Paul Chambers Twitter fiasco.
Jonathan Haynes, writing in El Graun, says
Part of the role of journalists in the internet age is to aggregate the overwhelming volume of news for those who don’t have the time or inclination to look at everything.
Out of context quote of the week:
Women’s gender-biases thus tend to be stronger than men’s….our results tend to support the claim that mother-daughter relationships play a particularly seminal role in structuring human social relationships…
It’s hard science, too. Find out more
Table of the week, the BBC says the UK has the most state-owned healthcare system of the US, Germany and France. It’s also the “cheapest” (as a proportion of GDP).