The truth about fundamentalism

Karen Armstrong is the foremost world authority on the fundamentalist elements of all three "religions of the book". I am amazed that she can maintain her academic detachment, knowing all she knows about the bloody histories of their fratricidal contention. Today's comment in the Guardian gives just a taste of what she's on about.

What's wrong with Kansas/Connecticut/the Democrats?

Gary Younge is so brilliant. Here is another wonderful commentary he's written in the Guardian, which has the best explanation about how electoral politics work in the US (without getting into the whole "third" party miasma - don't get me started!) This will explain, far better than I ever could, why people who are too poor to pay taxes love the Republicans, why the numbers don't seem to add up in the red state/blue state comparison (hint: they are ignoring someone - could it be? oh, no not again! - black people!!) and, most perplexingly to Brits who know a few Americans, how someone like GW can be elected and even popular.
Some provocative excerpts:

In his book What's The Matter With Kansas?, Thomas Frank described the tendency of working-class people to vote Republican as a form of derangement. He said that the working class had been hoodwinked into voting against its economic interests by "values" issues such as abortion and gay rights. There were two main problems with this argument. . .

So what's the matter with all these analyses? First of all they seem to step over a huge elephant in the room - namely race. There is a reason why we are only talking about white working-class voters: black people, regardless of income, overwhelmingly vote Democrat. Indeed, were it not for black people, the Democrats would have won the presidency only once, in 1964. That was the year President Lyndon Johnson signed the civil rights act, turned to an aide and said: "We have lost the south for a generation." We are well into the second generation now, and the racialised politics of the south seem to be influencing the rest of the country rather than the other way round.

My second hotspot blog

Well, not counting the two I did in between from a motel in Minneapolis. I am back in Keflavik in the 1.5 hour stopover between Minneapolis and London Heathrow.
The trip was great. The highlight, after being there for my grand-daughter's 3rd birthday celebration at a faux Italian kid-friendly restaurant, was Homecoming Sunday at Walker Church. The music has got better in the three years I have been away. It was very powerful. I requested number 62 in the Walker songbook - a countryish number called Powerlines by a guy called Larry Lattanzi.
Powerlines across the prairie
Haybales in the rain
Fields that stretch forever
Fenceposts across the plain.
It's a song about riding the train through America's heartland on a "steel gray afternoon" and just the ticket for the homesick blues. We finished up with "I saw the light" and then of course "Amazing Grace" in the circle afterwards. I feel better now.

Wasn't that a time?

The Guardian has a retrospective article about the Greenham Common Peace Camp. Participants in the demonstrations are asked for their recollections, both the positive and the negative, and it is interesting to see where they are now and how they compare the political feel of the present day to 1981-83. One of the women pictured left is now a Plaid Cymru member of the Welsh Assembly. She feels very betrayed by the Labour party's present support for war in Iraq and the Trident missile. No surprise there. Many women today question the exclusion of men that was a major hallmark of the Greenham Common camp. Could there be a connection, do you think? Who knows how many gentle, thoughtful young men, now more anonymous even than the Greenham heroines, were discouraged forever from political activism, and what if they had come to lead the Labour party, rather than a naked opportunist named Blair and a curiously old-school, paternalistic socialist named Brown, and all their male and female acolytes, none of whom would have been at Greenham Common in the first place? It kind of makes you think.

Minneapolis

I have been in Minneapolis since the evening of the 29th and I've been pretty busy catching up with my grand-daughter Savannah and my daughter Aimee. On Wednesday we went to the Midtown Global Market, which is almost as good as I had been led to believe. My middle sister Cindy was also here from Wednesday night through Saturday morning. We took her to the Seward Cafe Thursday morning and on Friday she took Aimee and Savannah on a mini-shopping-spree at the Mall of America. We all got together with Savannah's paternal grandma and her sisters and mother on Friday night at the Old Spaghetti Factory for Savannah's 3rd birthday. Savannah is a big fan of Dora the Explorer and her cake and most of her presents featured Dora and her companions. Aimee and Savannah go home tomorrow night and then I must turn my attention to all my friends here that I came here to see. The trip will culminate for me with Homecoming Sunday at Walker Church and then back home via Reykjavik. I really have no excuse not to blog constantly, because there is free wifi everywhere including my motel. But as you can see, I am not blogging constantly; must be age and laziness.

My first hotspot blog

This is my first ever blog from a hotspot. And what a cool hotspot. I am in the cafe in the Reykjavik airport, in transit from London HR to Minneapolis. The future has truly arrived for me. I envisioned something like this when I was a 12 year old just discovering science fiction. No really, I did. Not exactly like this, of course. But not dissimilar.

More generalisations on race, nationality and otherness - the umpire strikes back

So, a little English boy comes home from school after his first introduction to cricket. Mum says "What did you learn today?" (as you do) and the lad replies, "I learned all about cricket. They throw balls at you and if you don't hit them, you're out. Unless the ball hits you in the leg, and then you're a BMW." (For non-cricket-playing folk, see Law 36 for an explanation. Not that you'll understand it any better.)
I have been following the story of the forfeited test cricket match, with all its overtones of dying empire, the tough but fair Aussie umpire, the aggrieved and dignified Pakistani team captain, and the British, Asian and Australian public, all divided in opinions and slants on the subject. (Except for those who don't really care.)
Sport is a tricky subject, but cricket is especially so. A lot of people see it as a pretentious, upper-class holdover, and it does embody a lot of the worst and best about Englishness. And then it is transmuted through the crucible of colonialism, so that there is a quintessentially West Indian cricket, a brusque and ultra-conservative Australian cricket and a passionate version of Pakistani cricket, charged with politics and nationalism. It never really caught on in anglophone Canada (not that I noticed) let alone Scotland, Wales or Ireland, yet India, Sri Lanka and South Africa all have their devoted fans. What is it about cricket - is it the tea interval, the silly white coats and stilted gestures of the umpires, the massive and Byzantine "laws of cricket" (when other sports, even English ones, are quite happy to have "rules".) And is this latest crisis, which some have called a farce, the echo of a dying empire or the roar of an unrepentant umpire?

Doonesbury today

Today's Doonesbury is one of those that will stand out as a classic, in my opinion. I found it powerful and affecting.
While we're on the subject, here is a good charity to help the innocent victims in Lebanon, if you're so inclined.
Blog's been quiet, I know. I am trying to get into a new exercise routine, but also saving my energy for the great leap across the pond to occur Tuesday, 29 August.

Murray Bookchin

I forgot to post an obituary link for the wonderful Murray Bookchin, who died four days ago. This seems to be a big year for the passing of venerable old leftists, but Murray was a peach, way ahead of his time and his generation. He was thinking in terms of a red-green coalition and libertarian socialism before there were even the words of a common language to express such ideas. Fortunately, he was also a good wordsmith and so could make them up.

Electoral fantasies

I neglected to post at the time, but a week or so ago, More4 (TV channel) in the UK broadcast the last two episodes of The West Wing, bracketed by a half hour mock quiz show (a thing the Brits do so well) (shown twice, that's how it bracketed) on all things West Wingish. If you think that sounds really stupid, one of the contestants was David Tennant, lately of Dr. Who triumph, and another was Mark Oaten, recently (supposedly) disgraced MP in the Lib Dem party, behaving not the slightest bit disgraced, thank you very much. The quiz show was all charming; yet a third contestant was Arabella Weir, a lady with a very sophisticated sense of irony.
Contemporaneously with the progress of the West Wing was the birth and growth of the political blog. Blogs made an appearance on TWW, first as a joke, then as an irritant to the WH press office, then as a serious, if novice, player at the tables of political power negotiation. (This story arc roughly paralleled their actual place in the American political landscape at the relevant times.)
Now, in the realm of what used to be only a liberal pipe dream, a right-wing Democratic Senatorial sinecure has been toppled, largely by the power of liberal bloggers and their close allies, web-based activist groups such as MoveOn.org.

Not Nice People, part I

"It's the stupidity, stupid." So says Mathew Yglesias, long one of my favourite political bloggers (now with Prospect magazine) and probably a fairly nice person, although I don't know him apart from his writing. Which is quite intelligent. The Stupid One? Oh, that's George W. Bush, of course. So profoundly not a nice person that words utterly fail me. I cannot write blogs about what a bad person the current "leader of the free world" is, but fortunately I don't have to. There are many others who do, and I admire, salute and quote them.

Not Nice People, part II

Christopher Hitchens (not all that nice a person himself) is especially vitriolic in his condemnation of Mel Gibson. "Sick to his empty core with Jew-hatred" is in fact how he describes the unfortunate Mr. Gibson, now described in Hoolywood lingo as "toxic". Well, not much wiggle-room in that expression.

Why It Is Called Bath

The city of Bath, not surprisingly, started out as a settlement around a Roman bath which in turn was there because of a natural hot mineral spring. The thermal spa survived for 1200 years until 1979, when it was closed due to a death from Legionnaire's disease. Today it finally re-opens. The new spa has been decades in the planning and a few years in the building. It was a millenium grant that finally got the ball rolling, and still there were problems, including an abortive attempt to open last year. As the BBC says, the city has its soul back.

When worlds collide

I really wanted to post the accompanying picture to this brief article in the Independent, but it was not on the web, apparently. The story is about a boatload of refugees from Africa who landed on a pleasure beach in the Canary Islands, and the picture, a two page spread of stunning impact, showed the dehydrated asylum-seekers, some of them barely conscious with heat exhaustion, being administered water, shade and human comfort by holiday-makers as they all awaited the arrival of a Red Cross rescue team.
In less heartening immigration news (not about immigration at all, in fact, which is what makes it especially maddening), the same paper had the story of numerous cases of respected musicians who have been deported from or refused entry to the UK due to visa technicalities. Care to take a guess which continent most of them happen to hail from? Included in the litany of ignominy is the story of Thomas Mapfumo, billed for the Womad Festival but sent back from the airport to Zimbabwe, and a nine-member Mozambique group not permitted to pass through Britain on the way to a concert in Italy because of the lack of transit visas. I really cannot say anything more about all this, or I will start ranting.

Flaming July

I am in full-blown rage-at-the-news mode this month. It is all so appalling, or else it's just squalid and depressing, or else it's the sort of thing that would be funny if it were not disgusting. Amongst the things exercising my rant-cells:

• The war between Israel and Lebanon/Syria/Hizbollah/Iran


• The uneven reporting between Israeli and Lebanese civilian casualties


• What all this is revealing about the US-UK relationship


• What the infamous "open mic" exchange revealed about the US-UK relationship


• Racially motivated murders


• UK plans for a "border" patrol NB: The UK is an ISLAND nation, and islands DO NOT HAVE BORDERS! Next time you rip off a failed policy from the US, at least adjust the language of it appropriately.)

After the deluge

Here is a plethora of books on Hurricane Katrina,reviewed by NPR's All Things Considered. The links below are for possible purchasers in the UK and Europe. In the US, follow the links in the article to purchase and benefit NPR:

• Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans? by Toni McGee Causey, Colleen Mondor, Jason Berry


• The Storm by Ivor van Heerden, Mike Bryan


• The Great Deluge by Douglas Brinkley


• Breach of Faith by Jed Horne


• Path of Destruction by John McQuaid, Mark Schleifstein


• Dispatches from the Edge by Anderson Cooper


• 1 Dead in Attic by Chris Rose, Charlie Varley (Photographer)

And one that NPR missed:

• Come Hell or High Water by Michael Eric Dyson

Generalisations on race, nationality and otherness : Part I – British v. French

My DH and I have been engaged in a slow-burning debate since we first met over which national character is the more inherently racist, American or British. There is no acrimony or personalisation involved in this, it’s just an intellectual exercise to us, giving me (I can’t speak for him) a chance to show off my knowledge of history and powers of acute observation of human behaviour. (Of course, both of us being white, we can afford to be detached about it.) But I tell this to lead up to my statement that to me, the worldview of the typical white Briton is so overwhelmingly and obviously racist that I constantly marvel at how blind they all are to it. But that fits in with their general arrogance and blinkered self-interest in general, a fact that DH often marshals in his defence of his countrymen as maybe bastards, but not racist bastards.
For the last year or so, without any output or resolution, I have had these thoughts on national identity and “otherness” (which I am going to use without quotes as a more meaningful term for what is usually packed uncomfortably into the term ”racism”). The thought trail is so long and tangled that, like my thoughts a few years ago on the death of Christendom, it will take several quite long posts to get it all down. Even though the intro brought up the question of otherness in America, I will probably leave that to last, because, like America’s national identity itself, it is built up on that of its myriad predecessor nations. Instead I will start with the nation where I now find myself, which is either Britain or England, depending on who you ask, what language you use, the context, the season and probably the phase of the moon. (And thereby hangs a tale indeed). And I will discuss British national identity and its brand of otherness by comparing and contrasting with the French, the predecessor nation of England in many senses.
In a way, the impetus to begin this work was the absorbing story of Zinedine Zidane and what happened to him in the World Cup 2006 final game, final minutes. I won’t repeat the story; if you don’t know it and yet are still reading my blog, well, just follow the link and get caught up, OK? After England went out, folks at work naturally began to talk about the rest of the World Cup, whether they still cared, and who they would support and why. I said I would support France, because, well, I just like them. My next-desk neighbour, who was probably baiting me to some extent, asked about the well-known female predilection for supporting football sides based on the attractiveness of the players and I said I thought France excelled in that area too (neatly sidestepping, or so I thought, the personal nature of the question.) But, no, now he wanted to know which players in particular I thought this applied to. Henry, I replied, without hesitation, and Zidane. “Oh, so what you’re saying is you like black men.” Reader, I was speechless. I can just about imagine the most unregenerate redneck in Georgia (whom I personally happened to know back in the 70s) saying such a thing to me.
British people are always surprising me like that. Their arrogant assumption of superiority, for which they have no basis in evidence whatever, goes almost beyond mere arrogance into a realm of psychopathology. A fictional character who really illustrates this very well is that of Ronald Merrick in Paul Scott’s Raj Quartet. Although there are plenty of instances of the British treating African and Carribean people with brutality and contempt, the closest equvalent relationship to that of the one between white and black Americans is the strange co-dependency of the white Briton and the Indian, especially those of darker skin. I observe this every day and to American eyes, trying to decode it, it is baffling. The IT division where I work has many employees and contractors from the subcontinent and they are socially invisible to a great extent. With a few exceptions, a modern free-spirited woman who was probably second-generation and very assimilated, or a very light-skinned long-time passport holder with quite advanced skills who really, really tries to fit in socially, the Indian employees are only spoken to in a work context and are casually overlooked in a lot of informal social activity. Institutionally, I cannot help but notice that the corporate intranet has said not one word about the Mumbai bombings, as opposed to their strong reactions to 9/11 and 7/7, special collections, two minute silences, reports on our friends at the scene, despite the fact that we have far more colleagues either in or from Mumbai than either New York or London. But the thing that really surprises me is how Indians from India, as opposed to those born here, no matter how educated or Anglophile they are, completely acquiesce in their inferior treatment. DH says they are just naturally “like that”. Well, I rest my case.
It isn’t just India. Britain views her former empire as simultaneously still somehow hers and “nothing to do with me”, depending on the most expedient view for the case. If you try to pin them down on the unequal state of current relationships with immigrants from former colonies, or with a dysfunctional, exploitative relationship between governments of the same, they just sort of don’t understand the question, always a sure sign of a deep-seated superiority complex.
The French, on the other hand, just make me crazy. Looking at history, the coming together and breaking up of France’s overseas empire was more brutal and painful than that of Britain, especially after adjusting for relative length and size. But the thing is, that in trying to foil the independence of Indochine or Algeria, the French treated their colonies as enemies in a rebellion, not as recalcitrant children who must be whipped into obedience for their own good. The arrogance of the French was saying, why don’t all Africans and Asians just want to be part of France, as we want them to be? The arrogance of the British was saying, these dusky peoples will never be English (no more than the Scots and Welsh and Irish) but they should be grateful that we bother to rule them.
The following long quote illustrates, if nothing else, that I am not the only one to see it this way:

CONTRASTING PICTURES
People in Africa were burdened by colonial perceptions of who they were. The British believed Africans were essentially different from Europeans and would stay that way. This point of view invited racism, implying that Africans were not just different but also inferior.The French, by comparison, were prepared to treat Africans as equals, but only if they learnt to speak French properly and adopted the values of French culture. If they reached a sufficient level of education Africans might be accepted as French citizens. To fall below the required level was to invite charges of racial inferiority.France encouraged an increasing closeness with her colonies on the eve of independence and thereafter. Britain took the view that it would give limited support to its colonies as they moved into independence; for the British independence meant being independent of Britain.
Back in 1914 there was already an African politician in the French National Assembly (the equivalent of the British House of Commons). This was Blaise Diagne, representing Senegal. Another leading figure was Leopold Senghor. Before he became a politician, he was a teacher. In the 1930's he took the post of senior classics teacher at the Lycee in Tours, France. No British public school or grammar school at that time would have accepted an African as a teacher no matter how brilliant.At a military level, there was a continued reliance on African soldiers by the French. Senegalese soldiers continued to be in the French army after World War II. This stands in contrast with the British, who immediately demobbed African soldiers after the war.

Lest you think this was a view biased by the writer’s own nationality or interest in the question, by the way, the source is a BBC World Service history of Africa.

IGN: A Scanner Darkly Review

Philip K. Dick's paranoid drug war novel A Scanner Darkly has been made into a film by director Richard Linklater. Probably not by coincidence, it stars a sort of who's who of Hollywood drug use and/or recovery graduates: Robert Downey, Jr., Woody Harrelson and Winona Ryder, plus the is-he-is-or-is-he-ain't stoner Keanu Reeves. Reviews are mixed.

Sic transit gloria

Deborama had allowed herself to be pulled into World Cup fever. I taught myself enough about the basics of the Beautiful Game (with some assistance from my ride-to-work guy - thanks, Jan!) to be able to watch all the England games and one pretty terrible defeat of the US team early on. Yes, the England exit was truly heartbreaking. Dear old Sven and sad little Davie Becks, I'm going to miss them from the tabloids (that I never read anyway, but it gets into the Zeitgeist, you know.)
So, I am really just checking in, because it has been so long since I last blogged. The changeable weather was getting me down, things are not great at work or at home, and now the weather has decided to settle and it's settled on - hot and hazy, with high pollen count. Great. I plan to spend much of the next month in a tepid bath.
I have seen a few good movies recently - The Squid and the Whale is highly recommended, as is Breakfast on Pluto and Transamerica, which I saw within 24 hours of each other this weekend. And I also just finished reading Freakonomics, which is as good as everyone says it is.

Another good man gone

George Tofte was a very dear friend, a fellow spiritual traveller, a fellow Scorpio, a fellow curmudgeon who had fought and won the battle against rage, even in a small way a soul-mate, as were (or are) all the members of our little group of spiritual seekers from my days in Minneapolis. (The Initiates. The name is ironic. There is no initiation.) George died Sunday morning and we are going to miss him a lot.
My favourite George T. quote: "Conservativism used to be a philosophy. Nowadays, it's a form of psychopathology."

How can a poor man stand such times and live?

You can listen to this while you read this post.
It all started innocently enough. I have a little blogette in the community project called Kitchen Gardeners International. I saw a nice two-page spread in the Independent this morning on seed saving, so I thought I would post about that in KGI. Unlike this blog, or at least, unlike this blog used to be, KGI is meant to be a rant-free zone. But in the course of looking for extra links on seed saving, I uncovered an atrocity. That is to say, it would be an atrocity if it were being enforced, but given the state of things in Iraq, I somehow doubt that it is. After all, what do religious fanatics and neighbourhood warlords care about either seed heritage or Monsanto's profits?

Crosswords

'Wordplay' is a hot new documentary about what most would consider a terribly uncool subject: crosswords. The work focuses on a man whose name is not so well-known to UK crossword fans, who feel utterly superior to American cruciverbailists but maybe should not; Will Shortz, the long-time crossword editor of the New York Times, deserves respect on both sides of the Atlantic.
Much of the superiority complex of the British solvers and setters is due to the fact that the quintissential British crossword is the cryptic, with "concise", "quick" or "easy" crosswords appearing in the more lowbrow publications and cheap puzzle magazines. In America, on the other hand, a very challenging "straight definition" style, with more closely packed crosses and very arcane words, is the standard fare of intellectuals, while cryptics can be found but are considered an eccentric variation. (Except for readers of the Nation magazine, which has featured a very excellent American-style cryptic since the 1800's.)

On the suicide of Vince Welnick and depression in general

Nobody does elegaic quite as well as John Perry Barlow. On his blog Barlowfrienz, he gets by turns poetic, mournful, funny and piercing. Welnick's recent death, "the curse of the keyboardist", is linked up with Jerry Garcia's death and the spiritual malaise in its wake, with the deaths of earlier GD keyboard players and with that of one of Barlow's non-GD friends, the actor Spalding Grey. There is also a beautiful lyric that Welnick wrote, which Barlow cannot recall the melody of, and an excerpt from his writing on depression (Barlow's) which is one of the most insightful and compassionate things ever said on the subject.

What if . . . Sandi Thom is the anti-Christ?

Oh, good. So it's not just me, then.
No, but seriously, I was feeling like such a curmudgeon, because now that I am riding to and from work with a much younger man, instead of taking the train, I hear a lot of radio - not commercial, thank grid, but BBC Radio 1 and Radio 2. And most of the "new" music I hear strikes me as being pure crap, whereas new music I get on my own, rather than having it spoon-fed by a m.o.r. "content provider", is really good. But "I Wish I Was a Punk-rocker" is in its own little class of awfulness. AND it's a fecking earworm. It's going through my head right now. It's enough to drive you to taking drugs that adversely affect short-term memory.

Great British Menu

DH and I have been watching Great British Menu on the BBC for its long, long 8-week stretch. Although we didn't "vote" on the menu, we were quite interested in the results, which are, if you're interested:

Starter Smoked salmon with blinis, woodland sorrel and wild cress: Richard Corrigan (Northern Ireland)
Fish course Pan-fried turbot with cockles and oxtail: Bryn Williams (Wales)
Main course Loin of roe venison with potato cake, roast roots, creamed cabbage and game gravy: Nick Nairn (Scotland)
Dessert Custard tart with nutmeg: Marcus Wareing (north of England)

I was also interested to find out. via online discussion groups here and here, that the GBP (great British public) tended to agree with our criticisms of the show, most of which apply to all of the reality programming on TV, even the supposedly high-brow stuff on the BBC - it is insulting in its gimmicky, short-attention-span repetitive nature.

Funny little facts

Three of the top female British authors' names form the pattern AX, BY and XY : Zadie Smith, Monica Ali and Ali Smith.

A word of the day that came up this week forms a Highly Improbable Anagram with another little-known word that I just happened to know. The two words are : neoplasm and pleonasm.

Shelby Foote, Walker Percy and William Faulkner all hailed at various times from the same little Mississippi town - Greeneville.

The truth about MySpace and the Arctic Monkeys

So, the Arctic Monkeys came from nowhere to number one due to their clever self-promotion on a lifestyle website called MySpace.com? Right? Wrong. The truth is, as ever, far more interesting.

Nottingham, defended

If you keep up with UK news, you will have heard early last week about Nottingham being declared "the capital of crime" in the UK. Jon McGregor is a brilliant young writer (first novel If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things reviewed by Deborama's books two years ago) who happens to live in Nottingham. He has published an article defending his city which is well worth reading. Deborama works in Nottingham and can testify that it is a very vibrant multicultural city which has a lot going for it. However, McGregor says he has never seen a gun there, even in the the hands of the police, and I have to say I have seen armed police around the train station numerous times. Also, there was a gunshot murder just across the road from an office I used to work in in the city centre, on the doorstep of a popular night club (since closed).

Hallelujah - it's a dud!

Historian Martin Kemp rejoices for history-lovers in the fact that the film everyone is reviewing, dissing or discussing (The da Vinci Code, of course) is so preposterous, un-hip and boring that it can't do much damage after all. It's a similar theme I have heard from others, including a Catholic who says her church has nothing to fear from such a silly attack. So, dear readers, if you have seen it, please comment. Even if you haven't - go on, you probably have an opinion. I am probably going to see it at some point, even though I found the books so childlishly and poorly written that I could barely make it to page 2. (And I didn't try to go any further. But I already know the story, having read Holy Blood Holy Grail years ago.) I was also moved to note, when I saw a short TV feature about Rosslyn Chapel and its over-running by da Vinci code groupie tourists in recent months, that I was very glad to have been a Templar-chaser back when it was a more solitary past-time, and to have had the opportunity to visit Rosslyn in relative peace.

Independent booksellers in the UK

The Guardian Unlimited Books section's Stephen Moss discovers that maybe it isn't all doom and gloom in the world of independent bookstores after all. Perhaps the news of their demise is premature. Perhaps the supermarkets and huge chain bookstores are cutting their own noses more than they are spiting the face of UK bookstores with their insane discount schemes.

Bollywood, call centres and the 35/10 rule

The Observer story "Hi, it's Bollywood calling" gave me a rich vein to explore to get back to my blogging. There is such an overwhelming number of call centre jobs (and so few better ones) that a vast majority of India's young, highly educated men and women are now employed thus, and so of course, it has become a major cultural reference, giving rise to soap opera plots, hit movies and novels. What I found especially fascinating is that a recurrent theme in these works, and therefore presumably in the interior lives of the hapless call centre workers, is the idea that they are structuring their lives around the customers mainly in the US, working night shifts to coincide with the American clock and tutoring their excellent and educated speech to be more American-friendly, all in the service of a people whom they find to be vastly inferior to themselves in intelligence (if not in other ways). This has given rise to the 35-10 rule, which call centres teach their workers, which is expanded to explain that the language, understanding and world-view of the average 35 year-old American help desk customer is about equal to the average 10 year-old Indian. So just think about that the next time you find you can't program your microwave and when you get India on the phone, try to be a better national example, OK?

An Inconvenient Truth (a film)

I am not sure what this trailer is trying to say, except that it concerns a film called An Inconvenient Truth. I am not sure what the "41,974 people" thing is or why it is in "selected theatres" or if it will later be in general release or if anyone is trying to found a movement around it. But anyway, there it is. An inconvenient truth indeed.

Barcelona in words and links

I got back from Barcelona yesterday at noon. The trip was a success, in that I have always really wanted to go there, and I did not have a bad time. Having read Alain de Botton's excellent book The Art of Travel, I was primed for disappointment, or rather not to have absurd expectations so as to avoid disappointment. Also I went there determined not to do what Aimee used to call "tweaking" and which I am prone to anyway by temperament, and of course it is expected of me, as a middle-aged upper-middle-class woman travelling alone. I took only two changes of clothes and my toothbrush and of course my credit card (I'm not crazy) and I stayed in a hostel in the dead centre of the city. I flew EasyJet and I did not rent a car; it was a break on the cheap. Much Gaudi architecture was seen and inexpertly photographed (see next post) and I did a lot of walking, including the 92 stairsteps up to and down from the hostel. Also Sangria and both red and white Spanish wine were drunk. The wine was great, though very pricey in restaurants. Sangria - hmm. I guess it's OK as a mild tipple in the hot weather. The one paella I had was almost inedible, one of the worst things I ever had. Tapas on the other hand, was a great success. I had one posh (ish) seafood meal down by the harbourfront and felt massively ripped off. At least the seafood was fresh, but my God, you expect at least that as you sit right in front of fishing boats and pay a small fortune for a late lunch. But then there were no side dishes, no garnish, measly portions and they even charge you for the basket of plain french bread like from the supermarket, with butter or olive oil or anything. But I won't go on about it.
Barcelona is lovely, like a sort of older, wiser New Orleans. I had the Paul Simon line about "angels in the architecture" playing through my mind as I rambled around, planless, clueless, slightly intoxicated by the sunshine and wishing I could speak and understand Catalan. I tried but failed to pierce the veil of time and see it as it might have been in the Civil War with George Orwell mooching about in his curious mix of nerd and action hero (a little like me in my own head.)

Barcelona in snapshots

So, here are some pictures of Barcelona, mainly architecture and people-watching scenes:

Big business sees a chance for ethnic and class cleansing

Gary Younge, writing in the Guardian comment section, covers the resurgence of Jim Crow in a more subtle guise, as mostly poor and black Katrina evacuees struggle to vote. New Orleans mayoral elections this year see big businesses ex-friend Nagin as the only black major candidate against two white men who are better friends of big business than he proved to be. The mostly white neighbourhoods are far more resettled, and looking to expand their gentrification into the wastelands left behind. Evacuees in Houston, facing constant harrassment in a daily struggle just to live, now have to find a way to vote postal with no mailing address, or travel hundreds of miles just to exercise their right to vote.

Bye, bye, Scott McClellan

Don't let the door hit you in the butt on the way out.

I really like the Queen

I really like that she does stuff like this. I would be very disappointed to find out that it was the brain child of some civil servant/courtier. It doesn't sound like that sort of thing, but like something she would just think would be "fun". Like, hey, I'm the Queen, I have been very very good for years, I am 80 years old soon, why not? And then we are watching - yawn - yet another "reality show" "competition", this one to see which famous celebri-chef will cook a grand birthday feast in June for HM and a few hundred guests. But get this, she doesn't choose the menu, the British public chooses it. These are the same people who vote which D-list celebs have to eat slugs in Australia, so I think it is mighty brave of her to agree to this. She is a game old bird, in a lot of ways. And you gotta respect that. I still don't want to swear allegiance to her, though.

Can you judge a book by its cover?

The Guardian Education section has this article about the old proverb "You can't judge a book by its cover". According to recent research, apparently you can. Well, at least, 77% of the time you can.

Piters and Stokmans's unabashedly bookish study, called Genre Categorization and Its Effect on Preference for Fiction Books, was published just a few years ago, in the journal Empirical Studies of the Arts. Their experiment builds on a pilot study Piters conducted in the mid-1990s. There, he found evidence that a book cover "has to visually represent what the book is about since that might be an important cue in identifying a book as belonging to a specific genre".

Of course, I couldn't help thinking, that's a pretty old proverb, and probably when it first started, book covers looked like this:-

Thousands Rally for Immigrants Across U.S. - Yahoo! News

There have been times lately when I have despaired for my country. News from the USA often speaks of a people who have lost their heart, their compassion and their greatness.This reassures me.

America's ghost town

A review of a hip hop video by Louisiana artist Juvenile is a forum for a searching look at embattled black New Orleans. Things are not really improving there, people, despite the fiery grass-roots spirit of a lot of black and white musicians and workers of all kinds. Valiant community effort will only get you so far against obstacles like these. From City Pages.

Barcelona

I am going to Barcelona for May Day. I will post more later when I have the time. Oh, yes, there will be pictures.

The left hand of God

Here is an interview with Michael Lerner, founder of Tikkun magazine, briefly a policy adviser to Pres. Clinton, and now the author of The Left Hand of God - Taking Back Our Country from the Religious Right. This is from an online magazine about the environment called The Weekly Grist.

The lonesome death of Rachel Corrie

A play based on the life of Rachel Corrie was cancelled in the US. Billy Bragg has written a song about it, to the tune of Bob Dylan's haunting and memorable ballad, "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll". You can download it from The Guardian.

Swami Beyondananda calls for up-wising

This is priceless - and necessary.

In 2005, Americans had to face the sad realization that the Bush Administration's "pro-life" stance appears to be limited to the unborn and the brain-dead. Despite being panned by critics everywhere, the Iraqi Horror Picture Show continued its run, as thousands and thousands of born fetuses - ours and theirs -- lost their right to life. While we may or may not have saved face by staying there, we have most definitely lost ass. And we've been assured we'll be stuck in that morass until -- well, until there's no more ass to lose.

The next logical step

A few years ago, I read and reviewed a very clever SF novel called Jennifer Government. Some people reading this book might have thought: clever premise, but it can't happen here. Oh, yeah? I just hear about how Target (a private corporation with which I do have some personal history, I confess) is now making a nice little profit on selling forensic services to police and FBI, because of course a private company can afford to have the highest state-of-the-art facility when it is needed to protect their property. How long before the next logical step, and the police will need to charge crime victims so they can afford the fees to use the high-tech labs they contract for from private corporations?

Blogkeeping - meta-blog me

I still occasionally indulge in the blog-related sport of link tracking. If I click on the counter at the bottom (and I think this will work for you too, if you're interested. No? Thought not.) I can choose to view the last 100 page hits by the referring page. The vast majority of them are search results and this is where it gets interesting. Two things of interest to me are trends and being number one for "obscure" searches. In the trends world, there was a time when I got a lot of hits for searches on Jive Turkey (a turkey restaurant in NYC that I mentioned in passing on Deborama's Kitchen) and Aimee Tyler, a minor soft-porn actress or model or something (I had a really hard time finding a picture clean enough to link to on a family-friendly blog.) This was because of the caption to the family reunion picture, where my daughter Aimee and my nephew Tyler just happened to be standing next to each other. These two entities must have fallen out of fashion because I hardly ever see these search terms any more. Almost from the beginning, I have had tons of hits from people who try to widen their pathetic horizons by typing the word "sex" into a Yahoo or Google search. In fact, for at least the past two years, this has accounted for about 40% of all hits and at least 50% of search result hits. My ranking in terms of where in the list Deborama falls has moved up steadily from low three figures to 88th to 30th (with Yahoo.) This result only happens if the searcher uses the directory function rather than searching the whole web. I guess commercial online sex shops don't use the directory, which is really stupid of them. If you search "the web" for sex, you get 558 million hits, but if you search the Yahoo directory, you get less than 2000. I am not sure where Deborama falls amongst the 558 million, but it is there, although obviously this list is very volatile. Now, here's an interesting trend. After sex, the highest number of search hits are for people searching for recipes, hitting Deboramas' Kitchen. And by far, at least 90%, are searching for a recipe for hash-browns. Who knew? And of course, although these anonymous searchers have no way to know this, I actually do have one of the best hash-browns recipes in the world.
On the other track, there a few interesting searches where a Deborama blog comes out at number one. For instance, I have a super-meta-links page called Deborama's Fund of Knowledge and it comes out first on a search for "fund of knowledge". I will try not to let that go to my head. In the recent statistics, there is another of those serendipitous hits; I posted a link to a story in Fried Green al-Qaedas about a veteran's hospital in the late 1970s that mentioned the phrase "POW mentality". The first hit on the search term was my post, the post I linked to was number four and the main American POW-MIA website was number five.

Supersize my paycheque!

From the LabourStart mailing list, I heard about the quixotic battle of New Zealand fast food workers in the organisation called Unite to organise a union for minimum-wage workers at McDonalds, as well as KFC, Burger King, Pizza Hut and a call centre. The group has already coordinated the first ever strike at Starbucks.
McDonalds is represented in negotiations by the infamous union-busters Teasdale Associates. They successfully busted a service-workers union attempt to organise fast-food workers in the 1990s, but the government of New Zealand is likely to be more supportive of labour than was the US government at any time in the last thirty years. An attempted strategy of giving exclusive pay-rises to non-union members backfired when Unite won a legal challenge against it. See, in America they probably would have got away with that.
In related breaking news, a journalist was assaulted by a McDonalds negotiator. See the Unite website, supersizemypay.com, for more on that and other Unite issues and campaigns.

Kirbe-e-e-e-e-e PUCKETT!

Another obituary and another tragically young passing - I found out that Kirby Puckett has died at the age of 45 through the City Pages online (I am a little late reading it, though and it is a week since his passing.) Kirby Puckett brings back memories of the two Twins wins in the World Series, and the first one I experienced, I think it was 1987, I attended the victory parade with my son Carey who was 8 or 9 at the time. I remember being overwhelmed by the size and energy of the crowd (and a passing wistful wish that you could get anything like that kind of crowd for a peace demonstration.) And I remember seeing tough little guy Kirby, in an open-topped limo with his team-mates, his bald pate gleaming above a plush mink coat. There is a certain kind of exuberant classless, tasteless classiness that poor boys (or girls) with hearts of gold exhibit when they hit the big time that I just love, and Kirby had that to the nines. The linked tribute describes his dynamic style of play so I won't try to top that. But he was a true Minnesota hero.

Penzance, St. Ives, Mousehole, Newlyn, Land's End and Porthcurno

We are having a great time here. We are staying in a four-storey Georgian Terrace with a smashing view of the harbour of Penzance and St. Michael's Mount. It is easy walking distance from anything you want, from charming seafarer's pubs where the dog is welcome and the beer is warm and strong, to a fancy deli with great local produce, to a little cafe that serves hevva cake and pasties and crab sandwiches. The weather was great for two days, then rained for two, and is now OK (and very sunny). This morning we drove in the direction of Land's End, failed to visit the Telegraph Museum because it's closed, and happened upon a gorgeous and completely deserted beach. I have provided one picture of the beach as a taster. I have tons of pictures of varying quality. We buy fresh seafood at a fishmonger attached to the wholesale fish market in Newlyn and cook it in our pretty well-equipped kitchen; so far we have had scallops, gurnard and sea bass for dinner.
Yesterday in the rain we went to St. Ives. I got no pictures there, but I will try to find some; it's amazing, and I wouldn't want to try to drive there. We went to the Tate and I had a revelation about JMW Turner, who I had never at all appreciated before. There will be more later, both words and pictures.

Devastation

Is it a sign of my advancing years that this blog seems to be turning into an obituary blog? Granted, it's a good one, and the esteemed people who have passed away in the three years I have been blogging fill me with feelings of awe and respect and sometimes, inadequacy.
Linda Smith - she was five years my junior, I had enormous respect for her political mind, self-possession and acerbic wit. And I didn't even know she was ill. Died yesterday of ovarian cancer at the bright young age of 48. Life is just not fair.