The Boiled Egg of Infinity

I read something today – well, actually a couple of somethings – that puzzled me, then annoyed me, then just went the whole hog and made me downright angry. By means of background to this story, you should know that a police officer was shot and killed over the course of the weekend. This incident has led to a series of calls from some sections of the media to arm all police officers, the theory being that if the criminals are armed then the police should be too. I’m not going to comment on any of that – someone just died in the line of duty and they deserve better than ending up as fodder for articles. Unfortunately many media outlets don’t observe similar restraint.

For one, we have Michael Winner writing for a tabloid newspaper, in which he calls for all police to be armed. Putting aside for a moment that he refers to the officer that was shot as a “young lady” and not a police officer, he mentions five or six other officers killed over a period of some years and makes the bizarre statement that had these officers had guns at the time of their death, they would still be alive today. Putting aside for a moment the fact that I don’t think you can be alive today no matter what you had at the time of your death, signed note from God almighty himself included, one of those officers was knocked down by a car. So what good would a gun have done there?

Then we have another tabloid, which refers to the dead officer as a “police girl”. Again, she was a police officer, and I think we should have a little respect for that if nothing else and not demean the woman by referring to her as a girl. She was an officer, she was trained, and she died in the line of her duties. Painting her as some defenceless waif, some delicate flower of a girl who should never have been there, detracts in every possible way from the choices that she made, the commitments she undertook and the stand she made to draw a line in a society that desperately needs moral lines to be reinforced.

It’s a horrible situation and like I said, I don’t think it’s the kind of thing that should be fodder for every Tom, Dick and Harry with a QWERTY keyboard and a functional internet connection so I’m not going to get too far into this thing here. I’m all for raising the level of debate, I’m all for looking into where we are as a society and making changes, and I can even accept that sometimes, as with this, as with September 11th and July 7th, terrible things have to happen that make us re-examine things we previously took for granted. Reasoned, substantive debate is not something I have a problem with. Barely literate tabloid hacks who couldn’t turn in two paragraphs without running it through a spellchecker twice, it’s them I have a problem with, and I really wish they would just shut the hell up.

…the time I almost slammed into Leonard Nimoy with enough force to knock him to the ground?

…the time my car skidded on ice and crashed into, of all things, a gritting lorry?

…how I became a lifelong sci-fi fan?

…how appearing on TV once got me into a lot of trouble at school? (funnily enough, this is related to the Leonard Nimoy story)

…the first time I held my brothers in my arms?

…the time I proposed?

…the time I danced in the rain with my better half?

…the best Christmas present I ever got?

…the first time I ever asked a girl out?

…my graduation?

Hmmmm. Thought I might have mentioned them some time along the way. Any one in particular you want to hear about first?

On this day in 1918 the guns fell silent, and what was called at the time “The Great War” finally came to an end. With millions dead and entire countries brought to the brink of destruction, it was hoped that the world’s first taste of a fully industrialised war would also be it’s last. It’s hard, even in the dangerous times we live in now, to imagine the scale of such horror. Tens of thousands of young men wiped out in a single battle, often gaining nothing either side. Millions of shells fired. Years spent in waterlogged trenches that gouged across the countryside. The potential and unrealised hopes of an entire generation lost to conflict, madness, brutality and fear.

My father’s father – I always called him “Grandpa” – was not in the Great War, but he did serve in World War II. I remember being shocked when, one day, he showed me his enlistment papers. My Grandpa signed on at the outbreak of war and when asked how long he would serve, he picked the option “Duration of hostilities.” That could have meant a year, two, ten, twenty or thirty years spent at war, which was a hell of a roll of the dice when you come to think about it. He was a kind, gentle, honest and funny man to whom I owe so much of myself, and it is strange to think of him as a fighting man, engaged in the dehumanising process of warfare. So strange to think of an ordinary, nice man who, to me, was the epitome of everything that was secure, safe and trustworthy in the world being stuck in the middle of a hellish war.

I don’t think I would have the courage to consciously sign myself up to fight a war that might never end. I don’t think I could throw myself – a single man – into a horror that chews up countries and spits them out. For my grandpa, for all the ordinary men and women who should never have been there, for everyone who sacrificed their future to secure my present, I’m going to give thanks today when the country goes silent for 2 minutes at 11am.

I wish there was some clever way to end this, but there just aren’t words, so all I can give is silence.

Mister Blair (may I call you Tony?), I couldn’t help but notice on the radio last night that you got absolutely mauled in your vote last night. You wanted to extend the time terrorist suspects can be held without charge, from the existing 14 days to a whopping 90. You sent out the whips, and even pulled Jack Straw and Gordon Brown back from overseas trips to shore up support. Then 49 of your own MPs voted against you, and voted down the 90 day amendment. You tried for 60 days, and got voted down on that one too, eventually settling at 28 days. I think they might also have taken your wallet, mobile phone and car keys too, but I think by the time the voting was over that was the least of your concerns.

As a concerned citizen, I worry that detention without charge is one of the primary instruments of a police state, and I was worried when the existing time allowed by legislation was provisionally doubled in last night’s vote. Imagine then, how shocked I was watching the news that night when I found out that even at 28 days, we were among the softest in the world! Leaving aside those regimes around the planet that don’t even bother with civil liberties at all, I was shocked to find that France could hold suspects without charge for 4 years if they wanted to…and that in the U.S., they could (in the right circumstances) hold suspects indefinitely without charge! And this is the road you want us walking down?

What happened, Tony? You won a general election in 1997 that made “landslide” an understatement, and surfed into office on a wave of popular support that was unprecedented and gave you a parliamentary majority bigger than some eastern european armies. You promised reform of social services, a government that cared about its citizens and would create a society that esteemed respect for one another above all else. You were young, passionate, committed, and you got me to cast my first ever vote for your party. Last night on the news, the tired looking old man who tried to extend the powers of the police to detention for 90 days without charge bore little resemblance to the person I helped to elect. I hate to think it, but in years to come I think the words “wasted potential” will find themselves stuck under pictures of you in history books.

Simply put, I don’t believe we can become more secure in our freedom by sacrificing that freedom a piece at a time. If we gave the police 90 days, how long before they would say they needed 180, 250 or 365? It’s not their fault – it is the nature of police and security services to want things to be secure, that is what they’re paid for, and that is what we need them for. That said, a child will want to eat sweets until he or she is sick, and we don’t let them do that, do we? Sometimes what we want isn’t what’s best. How can you think it is ok to lock people up without a chance to defend themselves for 90 days? Surely you can see that to do that is to create the large numbers of disaffected, martyred, pissed-off people that terrorists are looking for?

Tony, I think it’s time to consider your position and maybe think about moving on. What are the newspapers talking about today? Are they concentrating on raising public debate on the balance between security and civil liberties? Are they examining what it means to be a “free society” in a changed, post September 11th/July 7th world? No. They’re all talking about you and what this defeat means for your authority. You’ve become the story, and in doing so you’ve started to overshadow the things we should be talking about.

I’m always going to be left of centre in my political beliefs and what many people would describe as hopelessly liberal (which, contrary to many, I believe means I’m more realistic and pragmatic about things and not less). I’m always going to believe in a government that maintains a strong presence in modern life and doesn’t abandon people to the tender mercies of the market. I believe in a government that is in a position to help, and should because it’s the right thing to do. I just think you’re now in a position to hurt more than help, and when that comes you should step aside.

Yours,

FD

P.S. You also owe an apology to some people who read my blog, they just had to suffer through this boring tirade because of you.

After a long and relaxing weekend, I happened to browse through MCF’s blog, where he talked about the Time Magazine top 100 novels, and how many of that list he had read. Being a derivative type I thought I would have a go myself and was worried to find that I had only managed 18 of them. My reading habits have improved a lot since my teenage years (I still read a lot then, but tended towards Star Trek and Star Wars novelisations, which let’s face it are to good books what a stick of bubblegum is to a roast beef dinner) but it’s refreshing – if a little humbling – to see that I still have a lot of reading to do, and a lot of ideas to be exposed to.

For the record, here is what I have managed to get through so far:

1. Animal Farm, George Orwell
2. Catch 22, Joseph Heller
3. The Catcher in the Rye, J. D. Salinger
4. A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess
5. The French Lieutenant’s Woman, John Fowles
6. The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
7. Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison
8. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, C. S. Lewis
9. Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov
10. Lord of the Flies, William Golding
11. The Lord of the Rings, J. R. R. Tolkien
12. Neuromancer, William Gibson
13. 1984, George Orwell
14. One flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Ken Kesey
15. The spy who came in from the cold, John le Carre
16. To kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
17. To the lighthouse, Virginia Woolf
18. Watchmen, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons

From reading through MCF’s thoughts on the list, and the comments left at Wendy’s Blog after she talked about the list, I would have to agree that there are many books missing from the list that I would like to see on it: for one thing, if Watchmen made it I think Neil Gaiman’s Sandman series should be in there somewhere. If 1984 got in to fly the dystopian flag then surely Huxley’s Brave New World should get in there to help. If one C. S. got in there then surely C. S. Forester’s Hornblower novels could have featured? And what the dickens happened to Dickens?

Still, entertaining enough to read through. Having just finished Jonathan Strange and Mister Norrell (and an excellent read it was too – I highly recommend picking it up if you like a fascinating story written in an interesting way) I’m about to get stuck into Judas Unchained, the second part of Peter F. Hamilton’s Commonwealth Saga. After that…well, who knows, but I now have at least 82 suggestions to work with.

1) I have iTunes 6 on my PC at work.

2) I have iTunes 4 on my Mac at home.

3) I download music on my work PC because I have a faster connection.

4) I then put it on my iPod.

5) I back up my purchased music and take it home to put on my Mac (the PC isn’t mine, after all)

6) I can then play my music at home. Bob’s your uncle, Fanny’s your aunt.

7) A week or so ago I upgraded to the very latest version of iTunes at work.

8) Today I took a backup of my newest purchased music and imported it to my iTunes library at home.

9) iTunes 4 (on my Mac) won’t play newly purchased music until I upgrade to iTunes 6 at home. Cue hours of watching my slow-ass home connection try to download the newest version of iTunes.

10) Hence the counting to 10 to calm down.

Back at work today after a week off and I have to say, this bites serious monkey ass. This time last week I was in a hotel with my fiance, we had champagne to drink, nice places to go and were deciding where to host our wedding reception. Now, I’m stuck in an office, it’s pissing with rain outside, in my absence people in my office seem to have just decided to go on a personal rampage around my desk, someone has moved my bin to god alone knows where, things I asked to be done a week ago still haven’t been done and I have a gazillion messages, emails and notes to work through just to catch up, by which time of course another gazillion will have come in. And there’s no damn champagne.

Like many of you out there in the wider world, I have more than one email address. Some get used for junk email, some don’t get used at all, some are for work, some are for friends. As such, I get a lot of emails in each inbox and sometimes when I check them, what is waiting for me there just makes me smile because sometimes, it’s all you can do.

For one thing, I got one in my hotmail inbox today, and it asked me an important question: “Can pornography ever be erotic art?” Now I gotta tell you, I’ve almost gone 27 years on this planet and I can’t believe I never addressed this one. I’ve read philosophy, history, social studies and various other subjects and damn if they never covered that one. Can it ever be erotic art? I suppose so. There are enough films on TV that basically amount to porn as far as I can see, but when I call up the programme information on my digital TV box it lists it as “Erotic drama” so why not “erotic art” too?

Perhaps on a related note, my hotmail inbox also yielded several emails offering me access to cheap medications – or, to use the spelling currently in vogue, Med1Cati O ns – to correct what must be a staggering case of erectile dysfunction on my part. I say that because these people seem to think I need enough drugs to kickstart an inactive volcano to get my engine room running at full speed again. Okay okay, I’m not trying to paint myself as any sort of casanova but let me just say this – you need that amount of drugs to increase your bloodflow, you’re pretty much dead already. Oh, and I want points for avoiding “stiff” jokes there.

Then we have the “Re:[1]” messages and ones like it from Cornelius Q. Underwriter and Gerhart S. Romanovich and the like. Emails that were meant to make me look at them and think “Why, I haven’t heard from old Cornelius, or Gerhard for a while now, I must check that!”

Finally, we have the wonderful emails that have subject lines like “Do you satisfy your women?” (which I would like to answer with a series of questions like “Do I have more than one?” and “Do I really get to refer to them as “my” women?”) , “Do you know where your woman is?” (my answer would probably be “At the other end of the room saying “Don’t call me your woman you prick.”) and “Where is your mom tonight?” (the mind boggles but I’m gonna guess that she might be at home, since I saw her there a few hours ago, but then again she has a car and you never know).

All this and I still get the occasional ones from the daughters/wives/disowned mistresses of African/Middle Eastern/South American dictators who have 10 million dollars to transfer out of their personal accounts, and all they need is one damn account in the west to do it. Hang on, I have an account and I live in the west……hmmmm……

Some people seem to regard this sort of spam as evil and while I think it’s annoying, it does make me smile from time to time. My mum regularly complains to me that she gets more penis enlargement emails in her hotmail inbox than several of her male colleagues. I always like to point out in return that while they might want to make hers larger, they seem convinced that mine isn’t working at all (and then I point out to her that I’m getting worried, because if enough of them sit in the one place and believe it all at the same time, it might hit me like some libido version of El Nino).

Sure, it’s a pest but in the grand scheme of things there are far more serious and far less amusing pests to deal with, so spam is pretty far down my list. For a really amusing online misunderstanding, remind me one day to tell you the story of the time my mother, who works in psychiatric healthcare, went online looking for information on Cognitive Behavioural Therapy. Turns out CBT can mean many many different things on the wide wonderful web and some of them have very little to do with making you feel more stable and sane. Research at your own peril.

A couple of days ago we made our first ever wedding purchase (well, our first joint one, I already made one purchase on my own and my better half seems to like it on her finger) by forking out for some sealing wax and a little stamp. The idea is that we’ll put cute little wax seals on the envelopes for the wedding invites, to give the whole thing an old fashioned feel. It’s actually cooler than it comes across in my description, and it will look good come the time we have to actually roll the things out for real, but my first attempts have been…well…interesting.

First off, I should point out in my defence that this sort of thing isn’t easy. You have to hold a lighter to a stick of wax, melt a few drops onto the paper, then hold the stamp on it for a few seconds. This gives the seal an image (in this case, a pair of entwined hearts) and makes it something artful instead of something that just happened to drip onto some paper. For those of you keeping count, that is three things that need to be held in this operation, and unless I’ve been looking at things the wrong way round, we only have two limbs with holding doohickeys attached. So there has to be a little shuffle midway through – spark the lighter, melt the wax, drip the wax, drop the wax, pick up the stamp, stamp the wax before it becomes this hard blob on the paper, pull the stamp off before it sticks to the paper and then take a bow, you’ve just done the napalm shuffle.

So first attempts set the paper on fire, or resulted in a torrent of scalding hot wax dripping onto my fingers, or the lighter, or the table, pen, paper, unlucky cat…pretty much anything. And don’t let that Madonna movie fool you – dripping wax isn’t remotely erotic, it’s fucking hot and it fucking hurts. Then further attempts set the paper on fire which again, isn’t remotely erotic. All through it though, all through the burns, the panic and the borderline pyromania, I stuck with it, and I can now seal a letter with wax as well as any member of the middle ages royalty ever could. Hell yeah, I’d own every damn one of them in the wax stakes. However, last night I was practising a little more and realised that when the wax stick is down to a centimetre or so long, it’s really not a good idea to hold it over a lighter and try to melt it, because all you’re really doing there is trying to set your fingers on fire. Damn near succeeded, too.

So I’m off now to commit more crimes before the fingerprints on my left hand manage to come back in. When Churchill spoke to the British people about the war that was coming their way, he was honest and told them that all he had to offer was “blood, sweat, toil and tears” which is fine for a war, but I never thought I would have to start thinking about a wedding in those terms. Then again, I never thought I would be stupid enough to try to set fire to my left hand using a lighter held in my right one, so obviously there are a whole heap of developmental steps happening to me right now and I shouldn’t take anything for granted.

Still wouldn’t swap this for the world though.

Got this link from Kottke.org, which outlines the top 10 design mistakes people make with their blogs. So how many are you guilty of? Are you a blog design angel, or do you take demonic delight in confusing links and clashing colour schemes? And if you are, are you even sorry? Hell, I’m guilty of one of them in this very entry and I can’t say the sky has fallen down on me yet. Now if you’ll forgive me I am off to twirl my moustache, tie a girl to some railway lines and find some websites to terrorise. Mwahahaha.