Movie Life

A few years ago I was once called to account by a friend for mentioning the phenomenon of luck, "You believe in luck?" he said.

I picked up on his rhetorical tone and answered with something like, "I have the same profound conviction in the existence of luck as I do for the concrete reality of this mug of tea in my hand!" we were at a tea break in a work's canteen. As you might guess my friend was an intelligent and rational person, who had no sympathy for the supernatural or superstition. He was somewhat bewildered by my reply and prompted me further, indicating that he was surprised that I should embrace a concept that he believed was irrational and ridiculous. I countered, saying that he was inferring that I believed luck to be some metaphysical phenomena "That's not necessary," I said "just think of it as an adjective, like black or white -- good or evil." The discussion continued for as long as the allotted period for a tea break and embraced things like the difference between concepts and concrete reality, then we both returned to work.

So why am I pondering luck today and why is this post entitled Movie Life? Well yesterday something very strange happened, I had a rare encounter with good luck that coincided with some recent pondering on the virtues of selfish versus selfless behavior. I would say I'm the the last person to be prone to demonstrable acts of selfless behavior. In fact I'd say I'm suspicious of and often despise folk who display such behavior. I don't think such an attitude is rare, I think most people view the posturing and self proclaimed virtue of public figures with a skeptical eye, I don't really have to mention names do I? But the ice cream parlour that is selflessness serves more than a single flavour, and it doesn't always come with a generous topping of hypocrisy. People frequently put the comfort and needs of others before their own without thought of reward or to enhance their image in the eyes of others. Such acts almost never receive recognition but you sometimes glimpse clues to those likely to act in such a manner through everyday interaction. The guy who defers to people walking through a doorway or the woman who lets another pick up the last bunch of ripe bananas. Of course this is countered by those with a more self-serving outlook, the woman who uses her push-chair borne child to plow through crowds of Christmas shoppers, is one example of such. It's with those considerations in mind that I very recently swore a silent oath to be more selfish. It's not necessary to further detail the reasons I came to this decision but I'll just mention that a mixture of both personal reasons and observations of broader culture prompted the decision. The thing about swearing oaths is that you find that they're going to be tested sooner than you think.

So this piece of good luck I received, well, while out Christmas shopping I idly wandered into a charity shop. I think I was probably looking for second hand books but I found my self thumbing the racks of coats and I stumbled upon a leather coat in very good condition, pea-coat length, in brown leather. I'm looking for a new coat so why not see if it fits, I think and sure enough after trying it on, I find it's not only a good fit but very comfortable too. Charity shop prices have risen sharply since the economy went pear-shaped, so I was expected the price to be beyond my meager means but was surprised to see that they were still asking the relatively modest sum of £10 for the coat. It was while I was looking up the price that I saw the label. It was a name I recognized as being a label that held some reputation but as designer clothing is currently beyond my means, the label held no particular significance for me. I make my way home, confident that I've secured a bargain. It wasn't until I reached home and curiosity got the better of me that I discovered how much of a bargain.

I Google the label to find prices for the coats under this label and see sums like £150, £199, not a bad bargain, I think. Hang on all these coats are nylon or polyester, lets do a search on leather coats. Google spits out a few results, £750 is the first I see, oh shit, it's a £700 coat. There's the dilemma, even taking pre-Christmas inflation into account, I've brought a coat worth a great deal of cash from a Charity Shop for £10. Last week I would have auctioned it on e-bay and shared the cash with the shop, which I estimate would have left us sharing about £200 to £300. A nice dividend for the shop, I could pat myself on the back and even buy a decent coat with my share. That was last week though, since then I've sworn an oath to forsake acts of gratuitous selflessness and I take oaths very seriously. See what I mean, Movie Life? it's like a the plot for a cheesy rom-com.

Observations from Zog

I suppose it's time I came clean, I'm not writing this like most Blogspot or Wordpress users, sitting at keyboard or on a laptop in a cafe. I'm inputting this on an hyperspatial input station from a secret location on the planet Zog. Let me explain, you've heard of David Icke, you know -- reptilians, shape-shifters? Zog is where they, the Zogthurians, come from, I'm here with the Zogthurian resistance. It turns out that not all Zogthurians are evil and bent on planetary conquest. In fact most Zogthurians are quite congenial, the only real inconvenience, apart from the toilet tissue shortage, is the Zogthurian's habitual practice of conducting internal body cavity probes, it wouldn't be so bad if they at least warmed the end of the probe a little, brrrrrr.

As you might expect communication between Zog and Earth can be a little difficult at times. I'm not sure where Zog is but I know it's some distance from Earth, so we don't get all the news channels that you do at home. In fact there's no television at all and the radio broadcasts only come through occasionally. There is excellent internet access though, the Zogthurians  spent a lot of effort securing the broadband connection between Zog and Earth because they're very keen on the internet. They're particularly interested in downloading something called Japanese AV, apparently it offers a valuable insight into human culture and psychology. There are two main consequences that follow from these circumstances, I get almost almost all my news of home via the internet and the Zogthurian consumption of tissue paper has tripled annually since the introduction of direct broadband from Earth.

So I'm not up to speed on news topics like the X-Factor or Jeremy Clarkson, that seem to preoccupy the newspapers back home. I should mention that we do get newspapers too, the tissue shortage has prompted the Zogthurians to import large quantities of newsprint to supplement the toilet tissue supply. Copies of the Daily Mail and Independent seem to be particularly popular although they do use all of the British tabloids for that purpose and the demise of the News of the World was widely lamented. So it was a certain degree of curiosity that I read headlines regarding the British weather. It seemed as soon as the summer had finished that the papers announced each inclement episode as if it were minor catastrophe. There was also number of ominous predictions emblazoned in bold type such as, "Arctic Freeze Predicted" and "Flood Warning". The latest example of this phenomenon was the announcement  that it was actually snowing in December. I know I've been on Zog for some time but I still do recall that things like this used to happen quite regularly at home we called it -- winter.

Being on the planet Zog you might think that I'd be sympathetic to conspiracy theories, seeing as I know that Mr. Icke's seemingly fantastic claims are all grounded in solid fact. Well you'd be wrong there, as far as I'm concerned, Oswald shot JFK and the twins towers collapsed because some Arabs flew into them with bloody great aeroplanes. It's not that I don't think our politicians are above conspiracy and manipulation, Blair's 45 minute claim is a good example of such. I just don't think they're that good at it, they're as about as good at conspiracy as they are at running the economy. So I'm not a conspiracy buff or a truther as they liked to be called but when I caught sight of some other climate related material from the news, I couldn't quite shake the idea there might be a connection. The material in question was the climate change conference in Durban, that has been going on since November. The media has been heralding the rather prosaic approach of winter since the autumn like it was the first time it had ever occurred, could there be a connection? I wonder...

Breaking up

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You might guess from the following that I'm in something of a cynical mood currently. I know it's a bit early but I've been thinking about Valentine's day and how it stopped being fun and became a burden. Don't get me wrong I'm not ridiculing genuine acts of affection between lovers. In fact I'd encourage them, the world could do with more genuine affection but it should be, you know, genuine. Not the competitive fakery that has grown up around this festival, where a man is decried for blowing less than a week's wages on ephemeral tokens of respect. It's become more about edification than affection. Spend x much and you might get a jump at the end of the evening. No thanks, somehow I don't think a tacit form of prostitution conforms to the genuine spirit of the occasion.

So I've embraced the spirit of enterprize and come up with an alternative festival, Chuck Her Day, it occurs on 13th of February. Conveniently timed to spare you the expense of its neigbour. Of course it's not for everyone, only for folk who're trying to free themselves from the suffocating clutches of an unwanted partner. It's conceived with special consideration for those who find executing such tasks so very--very difficult. They can pop into a shop and buy a card to do it and placate their guilt with the comforting knowledge that they're entering into the spirit of their special day.

So Here's my first attempt at a rhyme for such a card:

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Do I need to tell it to your face?

my lust for you has run its race

these words so hard I have to say

I’m bored with you so go away

Your feebly tears so cheaply shed

will not entice me to your bed

nor seductive sigh and no

prospect of irrumtio

I had some fun now I’m leaving

so stop this coercive pleading

I have not love but bold contempt

for such weapons of sly intent

You hate me now don’t tell a lie

so now it’s time to say bye bye

but just wait for this parting shot

you stink of fish and hot that’s not

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While reading this it occurred to me that this rhyme isn't too gender specific and that it Chuck Them Day might be more appropriate. Trouble is though I can't imagine many women sending their men such cards on February the 13th.

The war being waged at my library

My location, being provincial, is not as generously served as some areas. Recently I noticed that proposed cuts in library services in a London borough, Hackney I think, while being vehemently opposed by interested parties and scrutinized in the media would still leave that borough with about four times the per capita library facilities that we enjoy here. Such asymmetric allocation of state funding is the main reason my disillusion over the concept of collective benefit has grown so strong.

Now my taste in literature is eclectic, an attribute I acquired from the second hand book stall that used to grace our market. It's marvelous what the availability of cheap diverse literature can do to dig up the tram lines they lay down in the literary supplements. Alas that stall has been defunct for a long time but my local library had served as a reasonable substitute. A while ago though, I began to notice that increasingly books I'd be looking for would be unavailable either through being absent from the catalogue or missing from the shelves. It was intermittent at first but the frequency of which this occurred increased dramatically. It wasn't until I noticed that books that I'd already read, that were in good condition, had been removed from the catalogue that I began to suspect that arcane forces were at work.

Allan Moore, Richard Matherson, H. Rider Haggard, a few of the authors who've had works removed recently. I was particularly wounded by Moore's removal because his unfettered work had gone some way to instill hope that English cultural life could combat the encroachment of cultural dwarfism. Even though, I should note, that Moore has himself done his bit to advance that phenomenon, albeit possibly inadvertently, when he helped get the ball rolling on the current anti Frank Miller mood. I don't have to look far to find an element of commonality between the works that are being withheld. They all share the property that I call, guy stuff, by that I mean works which give insight into masculine life. How many men do you think work at my local library? Here's a clue, it's somewhere between zero and naught and yet amongst the women who work there diverse minorities are represented, coincidence? I wonder...

Death of the Ball Turret Gunner

I've no patience for people who lace rhetoric with moral imperatives. I'm supposed to care about people starving somewhere or some intolerable injustice being perpetrated in another location because it's the right thing to do. I'm presented with deserving cases that are almost always suitably photogenic. I've no patience because I've no faith in their sincerity, blah blah blah, their worthless words trip like lemmings over a cliff. I've witnessed how much people really care, it's not an impressive tally. Unless there's some suitable emotional bribe, something to stoke those cosey 'dogooder' embers in their hearts, such people will the overlook the most bestial brutality.

Randall Jarrell said it all for me in his poem, Death of the Ball Turret Gunner. With it he illustrates the murderous faculty of the state and the callousness with which it is exercised. Jarrell describes the drama of warfare with the imagery of abortion and illustrates the state's pitiless insistence for murder. Now this is where I'm supposed to be expounding my own moral argument, nothing could be further from the truth. I don't believe there's a any practical alternative to either of those practices but please don't lie to me any more. Don't tell me you're doing for the love of humanity, you're doing it for self interest. You're launching missiles into crowded markets or flushing children down the bog because it's better for you. You're not doing it for democracy or a woman's right to choose.

Dale Farm

Been listening to the 5-Live coverage of the drama unfolding in Essex this morning and reflecting on the positions commentators have taken up on this controversy:

1. Oppressed minority and abusive authority
2. Wicked pikeys who're getting what they deserve

It's a bit of a surprise to find that the 5-Live coverage wasn't really coloured overtly by one of those two positions, there seemed to be a genuine spirit of inquiry, at least the reports I listened to. It seems the BBC hasn't totally been given over totally to its intrinsic political bias but lets withhold judgment on that one for the time being. I'm not going to express any opinions on what I think of the rights or wrongs of the evictions because I don't really have any. With controversies such this the public is almost always left in the dark because the media is preoccupied with promoting their view with little regard to the facts. Leaving the rest of us in the dark as to the circumstances leading to the conflict, such is the case here. Sure I can make assumptions based on stereotypes and that is indeed what a lot of people do. The reticence displayed by the male residents when it comes to appearing on camera as led folk to draw negative conclusions about the residents at the site.

There's assumptions being made about the role of authority too, there's a suspicion of connivance and various accusations being leveled at the local authority. Racism, is the word I've held being leveled, somewhat incongruous seeing as there is no racial distinction between the two sides. Such accusations are culturally derived invocations, magic words, spells recited to conjure sympathy. They're a reflection of the people using them, whom in the this case are the protesters who've attracted themselves to this issue. Rent a mob, is what The Daily Mail would call 'em justified in this circumstance because they're there for the aggro and publicity rather than any conviction in the cause. There you go, I've made an an assumption based upon a stereotype rather than evidence.

The practical consequences of the eviction, once it's completed would seem to represent a problem. Just where are the pikeys going to go once they've been turned out?  I did hear an official fielding questions from the press and when he was asked that he said something like:

"We've informed them of the location of unoccupied legal sites..."

"We don't want to go to Liverpool" was the response he quoted. Well I don't blame 'em, If the solution to problem of relocation is to move people hundreds of miles from their present location away from any work, jobs they might have.

Novel ideas on food production

You know The Third World, where the hungry people live. Well I've just read an article by a political activist saying we should stop producing a lot of our own food and import it from those places. They're really serious about this depopulation malarkey aren't they?