Frowny face

I’m off on holiday tomorrow, spending seven nights in Tenerife, where it is apparently only six or seven degrees hotter than it is here in merry of England, but more importantly is a long, long, long way from work.

Don’t get me wrong; I enjoy my job. But I work on the internet, and spend a lot of time pottering about on it at home too (the presence of these very words being evidence of this), and so it’s hard to stop thinking about work. Exciting new trends on-line just get me thinking about how I can apply them in the office.

So it’s hard to shut off, and let go of the general frustrations that everyone feels about their job.

I spent a week in Italy last autumn, and spent much of the time pottering about around Lake Como, reading and relaxing. It was top. However, my demeanor was an unexpected concern for my girlfriend, for whom I was suddenly unreadable. Apparently I spend so much time with my facial features creased into an expression of frown of distraction or frustration that my docile dial was completely unfamiliar. Like if Santa suddenly shaved off his beard.

In short: I spend so much time with something on my mind, that when I’ve managed to empty it of all but the flight path of a butterfly across a lake, I’ve forgotten what to do with my face. So I just shut down. There’s no blissful look of contentment; no idyllic smile of relaxed satisfaction, there’s nothing.

On the plus side, this lack of facial exertion may well stave off the onset of wrinkles for a few extra years. However the drawback is that my smooth and uncreased visage will have all the friendliness and warmth of a cyberman. And they’re crap on holidays. The sea water makes them rust for one thing.

The frustrating thing is that I’m not trying to convey anything more complicated than serenity. It’s one of the most scant emotions – an absence, in fact, of any destructive or troubling thoughts that in themselves might prove difficult to render facially.

Likewise, I’m not trying to specifically illustrate whatever whimsical nonsense is currently scrambling through my mind. In most instances, I’ll be trying to lose myself by focusing on tiny, otherwise unnoticable elements of the environment around me that quite frankly, aren’t worth bringing to the attention of those in my company.

Otherwise I’ll be testing quite how far an uninetrrupted train of thought can go and any errant external transmission of a current idea will invariably just end with a lengthy conversation on why the hell I’m thinking about hurling geese off the roof of a hospital.

So this holiday I shall be making a concerted effort to look relaxed, a task that I will undoubtedly find impossile to ignore, and instead will end up spending the week with a furrowed look of frustrated focus plasted across my brow.

Much as I do the other 51 weeks of the year.

The meaning of life

I’m admittedly a little late posting this, but thank gawd January’s over. In case it slipped you by, January is officially rubbish. It’s too dark for a start. And everyone’s absorbed in self-improvement; trying to be more frugal and healthy and grown-up. Rubbish.

All this self-reflection’s a bad idea in my book. You go from evaluating your place in life one moment, to pondering the very meaning of life the next but one, the very notion of which fills me with horror.

I’m all for a brief bit of purpose, a project to engage you as you go about your day. But the notion that there’s one central reason for our very being is terrible, largely because it means that to do anything else with your day, anything at all, constitutes shirking off from the human race.

I doesn’t matter how admirable your intentions were for the day ahead. You could have been creating unquestionably beautiful works of art, or helping sick kids walk for the first time, or building wells in the third world or perhaps working in the accounts department of an organisation that does all these things, believing yourself, in your own small way, to be making the world a slightly better place. Or you could even have just been trying to feed your family and keep them safe.

If you woke up and suddenly the human race had discovered the meaning of life, none of this would matter; you’d have to clear your diary and crack on with mankind’s new collective mission. Our priority is suddenly clear, and if you ain’t contributing, someone else will have to work twice as hard to cover your ass. Shame on you. You’re like some chakra sapping benefit fraud.

And we love to compare our own contributions to society with those of others. We’re always bitching that obese, cigarette-addicted, extreme-sports fanatics are an unfair drain on the NHS, the RNLI and whatever other resources we feel we’re not getting as much use out of as they. We all feel that we work harder than those in comparable positions of employment. Imagine how much worse it’d be if every person on the planet had some unified responsibility.

Suddenly your worth in the world can be directly measured against that of your fellow man, quantified on some arbitrary axis, a comparison for which you’ve had no time to prepare. Seriously, how were you to know whether you’d be expected to create fine art, communicate with squid, or reach the outer reaches of the galaxy in a spaceship made of sugar?

And this nonsense wouldn’t just be like a job where you’re free to do what you want once you’ve put in your eight hours of toil – it’d be hanging over your head every waking bloody moment.

Horrible, horrible, horrible.

But what if we discovered the meaning of life, our purpose in this world, the reason for our very being – and we’d already accomplished it? Imagine our job was to create global travel, or harness the power of electricity, or walk upright? Or better still, it was something that we had no real day-to-day control over, like growing wings, or gills, or prehensile ears.

Imagine that we all woke up and opened the paper, and turned on the telly, and the announcements were everywhere: everyone get picking stuff up with your ears. It’s your purpose, people, chop chop. Would you suddenly feel all happy and enlightened for knowing?

No. Although it’d bring a spot of originality to everyone’s new years resolutions: ‘In the next twelve months I will establish quantifiably measurable first steps towards achieving synergy with machines for the ongoing survival of my race come the impending entrophy of our existing environment’. But no. Everyone just tries to lose a bit of weight, so they can reassure themselves they’re not in the portion of society that’s constantly being a terrible drain on the NHS and that.

Boring.

And that’s the real reason why January is rubbish. Because it could just be so much more interesting.

Low marks

I keep coming across repeats of old episodes of Dragons Den on Dave at the moment, with previous pitchers putting their grand ideas forward to a panel of entrepreneurs in the hope of securing investment and a spot of business acumen.

A lot of the ideas get rightly derided as rubbish and the poor soul responsible is packed off on their way. Often they don’t work, or the pitcher’s grasp of finances isn’t as sound as the investors would like. But sometimes they get dismissed on the basis that they have created a product for which there is no demand. As inventors, they’ve solved a problem that doesn’t exist.

It’s a justifiable criticism, but there’s still a hell of a lot of products around us that fill no real need whatsoever.

I’m not having a go at purely material possessions here, or souvenirs, or random tat and window dressing. I mean stuff like bookmarks. Without bookmarks, how would your life go on? Well, you’d do what most people do, which is just stick an old train ticket between the pages of whatever you’re reading. Or a photograph. Or any bit of card or paper that comes to hand.

It’s actually quite nice, being able to attribute purpose to these tiny scraps that otherwise bear no continued value other than sentiment. It’s nice being able to hold onto these gig tickets and boarding passes and festival flyers and restaurant receipts, and often they’re not so valuable that you’d keep them otherwise.

They’re not your sole reminder of an event or experience, and without them you’d still have the memory. But it will randomly prompt me to recall a happy past occurence when I chance to glance at it again. It’s like scattering the stimuli for happy thoughts around your house as you’d do with framed photographs. But it’s often more personal than that; a crinkled little trinket that means sod all to all but the holder.

There’s probably some fortune cookie motto in the making here, about not judging a book by it’s cover, but being able to judge the reader by what they’ve separated the pages with. But I’m scared of phrasing it properly, as it sounds like exactly the kind of nonsense that someone would print on a giftshop bookmark and the tout to tourists for two pound twenty.

Brr.

Half the high street shops are going out of business at the moment. My advice to those still with a few fingers left clinging to the edge of financial stability is simple. Stuff all your stock in the furnaces to make your shop all toasty warm and inviting to passing potential patrons, and replace your goods with cheap ‘n’ cheerful blankets and dressing gowns. I for one can’t get enough of them right now and I can’t be the only one. Jumpers, gloves, and scarves too. Anything that’ll keep me warm.

I mean, damn it’s cold. This obviously won’t be news to anyone, and the topic has prolly been the subject of a decent proportion of the words that have spilled out of your mouth in the last few days (especially if you bother to talk to the people that you work with), but damn it’s cold.

While the cold weather has admittedly spurned a few to creative loveliness, it’s doing nowt for me. I just want to hunch over in a ball the moment I get out of bed in the morning and deny the outside world its very existence.

It’s back under the duvet for me, with the eges all tucked underneath like some sort of quilted person pasty. Even when I do overcome my reticence to rise, I’m either shuffling around with my back bowed and my elbows flat against my stomach, or else I’m bolt upright with arms rigidly by my sides and palms splayed parallel with the ground, hopping about in staccato little steps seemingly intended to levitate my entire body off the icy floor.

Then it’s off to work, in a multitude of layers, most of which will remain upon my person until I get home. And a few of those’ll go back on before the frosty day is done and I can get back under that duvet again. Possibly with an bonus dressing gown or two to boot.

And at that point I’ll remember I’ve forgotten to put the bins out and silently scream and curse the cold once again.

Assault by batteries

The war with machines has been a common sci-fi staple for some time now; the notion that one day soon we’ll create artificial intelligence leading to our appliances turning on us with their logically superior but emotionally uncaring mechanised brains and obliterating the human race with shoulder-mounted pulse cannons in a synchronised outbreak of cold global carnage. And that.

But I’m convinced that it’s not artificial intelligence that we should be worrying about, but the bloody energy required to keep even the most basic of gadget going in the first place.

By which I mean batteries. Double ‘A’s. Pesky poison-filled cylinders of unfulfilled promise, that plague my home like rats, deeply and inexterminably entrenched at the heart of so much of my waking procrastination.
Partly I’m to blame for my impatience with the things. Alright, largely I’m to blame. It’s my own laziness that stops me just replacing the damn things in the TV remote when it starts showing signs of invisibility to the television. When even the simplest of commands starts requiring multiple presses of the buttons. Sometimes ridiculously slowly and deliberately like I’m training a house-pet, or trying to convey the word ‘pressing’ in a game of charades.

It’s my fault that I take so long to replace the batteries in the smoke alarm in the spare bedroom that the beeping noise it makes – to alert you to it’s impending inability to rouse you from a smoke-surrounded slumber – has manage to travel downwards through a half-octave by the time I get round to acknowledging its value in my happy home.

And I’ve probably failed to correctly install the software for the cordless mouse sitting beside me right now, which loses connection with the computer approximately once every three minutes. And not the fault of the batteries which I replace on a monthly basis. And – suspecting that they’re not actually the problem – leave sprawling on the other side of the keyboard, intending to stick them in the errant telly remote when it next plays up, just to squeeze those remaining last drops of power out of them.

It’s laziness, I know. But at least none of my robots will have sufficient energy in their pulse cannons to wipe me out.

Daily Disappointment

I can’t work out which are more rubbish: those YouTube photo-a-day montages or the people that create them.

The whole point of time-lapse is that it lets you see a great change in something that has in the real world taken a lengthy period of time, but played out at a significantly increased speed. It’s nothing without an element of actual progress. No-one’s going to watch a film of a stage where sod all is constructed, or a video of a city at night without the head-lamped traffic tearing up the roads like psychotic glo-sticks and the glaring moon rolling across the sky in ten seconds flat.

So why the hell do these people make such long-term commitments to charting the change in their appearances, and then completely fail, over the next decade or whatever, to make any effort to actually make these visual alterations? These people rarely even splash out on a radically different pullover for crying out loud. Instead they create damningly mind-numbing video confirmation of their own conservative unwillingness to accept the slightest element of risk into their lives.

If you’re going to do one of these time-lapse things, and record how your appearance changes, you’d better be prepared to actually make some sodding changes. Blokes (for it’s mainly the masculine half of the globe who make these things) – if at no point in the future do you intend on even growing a beard, piss off right now. To make a truly great video, ideally, you should never shave ever again. Go wild, play about a bit. Unless you stray into the realms of tatoos, or perhaps eating your own ears, it won’t last forever.

The problem of course is that by the time most people get round to doing these sorts of things, they’re in at least their late twenties and have already been through the traditional teenage period of excessive and devoted experimentation. And they’re unlikely to go through all that again. More than likely they’ve analysed all of the data offered to them by these formative years of indentity jiggery-pokery, and conclusively selected the facial fingerprint that’s going to serve them for as long as they’ve got the hairline and cheekbones to maintain it. And probably a few years after that as well.

Any adult going through serious re-invention is either on the witness protection programme, in the grip of a mid-life crisis, or an ageing pop star. Sadly, while any of these people undergoing the photo-a-day treatment would result in a truly spectacular slice of video, unfortunately none of them seem to do it. 

Now folk in witness protection I can understand, but surely a project based on such vain self-promotion is perfect for a fading celeb gesticulating desperately at the public eye? And central to any half-decent mid-life crisis is the feeling that you’ve wasted the best part of your brief existence - who’s more likely to experience such suspicions than someone who’s taken a polaroid of themself every bloody morning for a decade or two? And as always, whilst not once making any bloody changes to their appearance, thereby negating the entire process.

Seriously, you’d think that at one point during the prescribed time period, they’d at least be invited to a fancy-dress party or something? And no matter who you are, who doesn’t enjoy the odd beard now and then?

New targets of irritable intolerance

A couple of posts ago I wrote about using the tag cloud to one side of the page to see what sort of content was falling out of my fingers most frequently, and what sort of identity this blog was evolving. (I’ve since removed some posts about music and the internet and may well post them somewhere else – I felt that passionate cultural comment was somewhat diminished if I then spoke with the same gusto and vitriol about biscuits and polar bears.)

One of the tags that did seem to float prominently to the surface was ‘grumpiness’, about which I was slightly wary. I used to think I was fairly tolerant over all. Stuff didn’t really wind me up, and I was reasonably stoic about life in general. Things just weren’t really worth getting worked up about, and problems wouldn’t be resolved by stressing and moaning about them.

But I’m starting to actually find that many new targets of irritable intolerance are actually just by-products of being enthusiastic about other elements of existence.

Take cats.

Previously, I have always been heartily positive towards cats: for the most part they seem calm and don’t require lots of energy. As long as you feed them and let them in and out of the garden, they prefer you to be reasonably inactive so that they can find you easily and sit on your lap. I like all of this. They encourage dormancy and relaxation. I’ve always liked cats.

But I own a house now. With a garden. With a nice pond with plants and fish and gravel along one side.  And a cat living next door. And no matter how charming that cat may be to others who know it, I can’t stand the bugger.

It’s not the pond that’s so much of the issue here – it’s deep and wide enough for all the fish and other assorted life to be safely out of paws reach - but the gravel itself. And its apparent convenience for the neighbour’s cat whenever he fancies going to the toilet. Which nature requires he do quite regularly.

Anyway, this isn’t a post about poo in particular, but more about the fact that I’ve realised that certain simple elements of my life (a big active pond with gravel around it) bring with them a grumpiness towards random factors that marr my enjoyment of them (cats). Random factors which I otherwise had a lot of time for.

My growing animosity towards cats is purely because I’m sick of cleaning up after one in particular; or rather tired of regularly and liberally spraying the garden with lemon juice and garlic to discourage it. But I’m aware that if I don’t acknowledge this, I’m like to end up with a hearty bah humbug attitude to the lot of them. And when grumpiness grows like this, it’s very difficult to reign it back in again (particularly as random bursts of it can be so damn self-indulgently enjoyable).

But I’m not prepared to entertain continued dislike on such a grand scale on the basis of one unpleasant, albeit reocurring encounter. Harbouring resentment towards an entire species seems a little daft, (unless you’ve been formally insulted by the elected representative of all the world’s butterflies or something).

Cleaning up animal mess isn’t a great time to try to calm down with a few deep breaths, but I do recognise the need to remain calm and mature and keep things in perspective. At least, that’s what I try to remind myself, whenever I’m cleaning up the gravel in my back garden.

And flinging cat poo over the neighbours fence.

Th’internet giveth and th’internet taketh away. th.

The internet used to be a glorious goldmine of trivia and irrelevance, magnificently random factitude and that.

Upon its arrival and subsequent global acceptance, the whole world was blessed with endless colourful nuggets of knowledge without context or reason, none of which ever made a blind iota of difference to our lives other than offering us peculiar titbits to regale each other with in the pub or place of profession. They were interesting wee bits of brainfood, and nothing else mattered.

But with the rise of Wikipedia and other such malarkey, it’s actually becoming a portal for random fact checking, rather than just random fact-dispensal. It’s depressingly easy to actually check up on the most obtusely perculiar subjects, to dismiss the credibility of one of these joyfully whimsical little footnotes with a simple flutter of keystrokes.

Rather than simply loving the randomness of a fact, or at the very least spending an entertaining but ultimately irrelevant few moments debating the credence of somebody’s new slip of trivia, you can now immediately grind them into the dirt with a casual google and destroy the pleasure of an ultimately harmless particular bit of chatter forever.

Brain coral: sushi for zombies

Of course, it’s always been possible to look things up, but the facts were much more run-of-the-mill and general, and reference sites tended to just offer up the same basic overview of nature and history as the encyclopedia britannica. There was nothing too peculiar, certainly not from a source that you’d actually hold any sway by. The oddest fact you always found was that there was a type of coral living off in the ocean somewhere, shaped like, and named after, the brain.

Now there’s so many more qualified people filling up with world-wide web with informed knowledge about overwhelmingly diverse and unusual topics, and worse, they’re starting to actually reference these little myths and murmurs, expelling them at will.

In some cases, there’s something to be said for the practise: sites like snopes, among other things, do a great job of explaining why you shouldn’t be sending on all those worthless charity chain e-mails to people who you believe still call you a friend. And in most cases, their exposing of myths and falsehoods is so well researched, you can briefly amuse yourself reading the stories of their origins. Likewise, the TV show Mythbusters puts theories to the test in such an entertaining way that you don’t begrudge the loss of the odd snippet in the slightest.

But I think there’s still something to be said for preserving the bits of information that have no bearing on our lives beyond entertainment, even if they are utter poppycock. I mean, who’s being hurt by this apparent misinformation? In coversation last week, myself and a colleague both came out with the notion that polar bears cover their noses with one paw in order to more effectively blend in with their snowy surroundings and so successfully sneak up on their prey.

One sceptic googled it.

From here: ‘One of the most persistent myths about the polar bear is that a hunting bear will cover its black nose while lying in wait for a seal.’

uh oh.

‘ Canadian biologist Ian Stirling has spent several thousand hours watching polar bears hunt. He has never seen one hide its nose, nor have other scientists.’

Boo. Perfectly lovely bit of trivia gone forever.

So I’m suggesting a new rule. If you’re going to write a website, in which you expel some wonderously innocent trivial titbit, you’re going to have to come up with something else to replace it.

So, say you denounce polar bears’ nasal cloaking device, I want you to tell me that Shakespeare invented twister. If Disney’s head ain’t frozen, then you’d better say that everyone in his version of ‘Robin Hood’ was voiced by the same two people. If you prove that Eskimos don’t have sixty-five words for ‘snow’ I want to know that Armadillos were sacred to red indians, and they believed they were a sign to ‘roll with the punches’. Tell me that spiders don’t really crawl into your mouth when you’re asleep and… well, actually I don’t mind that one not being true.

The dead cloud

According to this here article, tag clouds have had their day and are being used less and less. While the author notes that they still have their place, they’ve been abused too many times and left too many sites with a cluttered mess of a sidebar.

Like the author, I’d be sorry to see them go. I’m don’t use them for navigation particularly, but they can be a nice at-a-glance indication of the content of a new blog.

I stuck one on this blog because as a new blogger I didn’t really know what I was going to write about. We’re all aware that a successful blog should have a particular specific theme or topic. And that you need to be able to write openly, honestly and often. So I figured I’d start writing, and see from the tag cloud which subjects I was apparently warming to, and focus more and more on them, allowing my themes to evolve naturally.

It’s early days, but if I made use of my tag cloud in this way, I’d be looking at:

Clouded House

1. Internet. This isn’t helpful, and most blogs stumble into this territory fairly heavily. It’s a web-based medium, and it’s beautifully easy to reference something else going on on the net just by linking to it.

2. Music. I’d rather this was more specific. Music’s an endlessly diverse subject, and the type that you like ain’t necessarily what will float the boat of another.

3. Ageing. Fair enough. But lets not dwell on this.

4. Grumpiness. This is the bit that’s giving me cause for concern. I enjoy wee periods of self-indulgent grumbling from time to time, and a blog allows me a nice medium for venting my grousings, but I don’t really want this to turn into an endless barrage of ranting and vitriol. While some quite wonderful turns of phrase can come from a tirade of hot-headed blusterment, it’s hard to sustain my upset with most things long enough to get home and write about them (88% of all irritances happen outside of the home).

And I am making a conscious effort to be more positive and upbeat. I’m of the opinion that I can’t just submit fully to the inevitable mumbling cantankery of the ageing process when I still enjoy so many simple pleasures.

Putting crisps in sandwiches is one obvious if childish example, or the experience of an album ending just as you finish a journey; the final refrain melting into the ether as you pull up at your destination.

I’ll have to spend some time thinking of more of these. Then I can post them with the accompanying tag of ‘cheerfulness’.

ffs

Metro ran a review of a new mockumentary-style comedy show on the BBC yesterday. It wasn’t a particularly positive review, and I didn’t watch the programme; its actual quality is by-the-by. But the review was a little irritating, claiming that ‘the creators of The Office might well hold their heads in shame because their success could be blamed for spawning all these ‘reality’ comedies…’

So what Metro are saying is don’t ever try and do anything remotely original, because even if you do it very well indeed;
a) lots of other people may subsequently use the same idea
b) you’ll be credited as being the originator of a concept and then derided if the output of other people – who you have nothing to do with – isn’t as good as your own efforts.

Instead, just do the same old tried-and-tested tosh that’s been done a million times, keep your head down and most of all, ensure that you don’t make the mistake of inspiring people to change the way in which they work.

ffs.