http://rampantanomie.blog.co.uk/en-EUhttp://backend.userland.com/rss092http://rampantanomie.blog.co.uk/http://data5.blog.de/design/preview/62/ac5285978b7f117ab9158b658e27c4_160x200.jpg <p> (Extract from debate on 'socialised' healthcare on US website)</p> <p>This debate has become shrill enough to be heard across the Atlantic. It seems that many Americans fear that Mr Obama’s healthcare reforms equate to socialised medicine, on a par with the worst excesses of Stalin or Mao. The less hysterical opposition believes the state isn’t competent to meddle in such a fundamentally important service. </p> <p>As a 39-year old, lifelong citizen of the UK, I’m so appalled by how our National Health System (NHS) is being misrepresented in the US media that I feel compelled to jump into this debate with a native corrective.</p> <p>First, around 8% of UK GDP is spent on healthcare, principally through taxes paid to central government. By contrast, around 16% of US GDP is spent on healthcare, principally through premiums paid to profit-making intermediaries. While questions remain over the NHS’s efficiency, the plain fact is that the vast majority of the funding it receives is spent on delivering healthcare. In the eyes of Brits and other nationalities with similar systems, a preposterous and distasteful proportion of US health dollars is sucked up by corporate intermediaries for no other reason than to turn a profit. </p> <p>Second, the term ‘socialised’ is bandied around with a gleeful and fear-mongering abandon reminiscent of Joe McCarthy. The fact that I benefit from a state healthcare system doesn’t mean I wear overalls, work 16-hour days in a tractor factory and attend a daily realignment where I chant the wisdoms of Chairman Brown. I believe that such fundamental public services as the armed forces, the police force, the fire service and the NHS should derive their funding and authority, and be answerable to, central or local government. It is possible and desirable to have a free market economy where essential services aren’t subject to the exploitative whims of big business. After all, does anyone complain about getting arrested by ‘socialised’ state troopers or having their wars fought by ‘socialised’ marines? It has also been claimed that state healthcare is undemocratic, but it’s hard to see how unless you’re a board member for a medical insurance provider.</p> <p>Third, the NHS does creak in places – it is after all a product of the late forties when the nation was still on a war footing – but it offers every citizen of the UK a comprehensive system of care free of charge and regardless of status or earning power. There is absolutely no prospect of my being denied care because I haven’t been with a given employer for long enough or I hadn’t read the special exemption clause about water-skiing over 30mph. I may pay more tax for this privilege, but I pay far less than many Americans are obliged to hand over to profiteering middle-men who would otherwise deny them what I would consider an essential service. </p> <p>Over the last three years, I’ve had three operations to stabilise a spinal fracture following a road accident, and one to remove broken knee cartilage following a skiing accident. A bill for those procedures would have easily got into six figures. I have paid nothing, nor will I ever be expected to. It is enough that as a hard-working taxpayer, I contribute to a mutually beneficial, cooperative system which would protect me even if I fell on harder times. </p> <p>I certainly have my gripes. After my road accident, I was stabilised and left welded to a spinal board by my own blood for twelve hours because A&E (ER) staff were overwhelmed by drunks and hypochondriacs. There are too many managers and not enough clinicians. It is well nigh impossible to get someone to answer a phone to get an appointment changed. But when it comes to the fundamentals of clinical care, any UK citizen knows the NHS will save their life and give them the care they need with no discussion of cost. And for those who can afford it, and are prepared to pay for a little more speed and a bigger room, private healthcare is freely available. </p> <p>If the political will were there, Americans could learn from other countries’ experiences and build a great, cost-effective, universal healthcare system from the floorboards up, having swept aside the profiteering middle-men. It is galling to see so many millions of people willingly perpetuating a healthcare system so preoccupied with profit that it doesn’t deserve the name, and doing so because of an unthinking fear of government and foreign ways. </p> <p> <small> <a href="http://rampantanomie.blog.co.uk/2009/08/16/take-your-free-medicine-6735656/#comments">Comments</a> </small> </p>http://rampantanomie.blog.co.uk/2009/08/16/take-your-free-medicine-6735656/Sun, 16 Aug 2009 12:56:00 +0200 <p>I'm drawn to air shows. This is partly because I've retained a socially backward child's preoccupation with makes, models and distinctive dorsal fin modifications. It's also because the spectacle of pink, porky, menopausal men nearly bursting through the seams of flying jackets and peak caps that wouldn't quite fit diddy Tom Cruise makes me realise I'm no longer the squarest kid in the playground. Then again, I have considered acquiring big shades and an emblazoned flight-suit and loitering possessively in front of a parked fighter jet when its owner has sloped off for an ice-cream. I’ve even practised my Colgate smile. Ladies, it’s not all about size when you’ve got 30,000 lbs of static thrust and six hard points to offer, woof woof. And I can get my hands on nylons and chewing gum. </p> <p>Wheeling my delusions back into the hangar, there is real spectacle to be relished. The endless wonder of hefty, jagged hunks of metal defying then taunting the laws of physics. Skill, sinew, ingenuity, metal and fossil fuel artfully drawn together into spectacles of soaring splendour. The growl of ancient, piston-engined warriors evoking the terrors and triumphs of the war that formed our world. The raucous, sky-scouring thunder of fast jets barely tolerating human control. Yet in my third decade of aerial gawking, I'm coming to the view that air shows are most of all a barometer - of technology, of our place in the world, of military muscle, of how much we're defined by our past. </p> <p>When I first donned my anorak and took to the flight-line in the early 80s, during the heady and paranoid final act of the Cold War, it was claimed that the US Air Force had more aircraft in East Anglia than the Royal Air Force had anywhere. This pleased me far more than it did the women living in ditches at Greenham Common – my single-minded enthusiasm for anything loud with wings far eclipsed my grasp of current affairs. Like the rest of my pimply brethren in the local squadron of the Air Training Corps, I was mystified and amused by the squadron of feminist peaceniks who descended on us outside a Remembrance Day service in central Manchester, begging us not to place our innocent young lives in thrall to an American imperialist Armageddon (I’m paraphrasing, clearly). </p> <p>The big air shows of those days didn’t disappoint, flaunting all of NATO’s expensive military might. Cold-war dinosaurs were still alive and thrashing with ear-bleeding vigour. Small-talk was pointless when Lightnings and Phantoms were overhead, but the mile or so they needed to turn around did afford some respite. The tarmac actually trembled when a Vulcan got airborne at full chat. The B52 challenged the notion that a couple of acres of rattling sheet metal held together by rivets, spit and hope shouldn’t zip through the sky at 600 knots. The SR71 had clearly escaped from some vault under the desert where vat-grown geniuses designed matt-black titanium demons that outpaced rifle bullets, skimmed space and leaked corrosive fluid when their skin temperature fell below three figures. </p> <p>Then there was the new breed. The novel F16 and F18 still gave the crowd plenty of speed and noise, but this time with impossibly tight turning circles, improbable angles of attack, and fluttering fans of water vapour as the air itself was pummelled into submission by the computers that now controlled it all with some artistic direction from the pilots. </p> <p>Not that the party ended when the Berlin Wall came down, at least not straight away. Instead, the artist formerly known as the USSR was pleased to show off the majestic machines – like the colossal but nimble Su-27 - that had months earlier been the subject of code-names, espionage, speculation and techno-thrillers. </p> <p>I was moved to write this cryptic piece by the air show I attended at RAF Waddington a few weeks ago. I’m fighting with a churlish impulse to call the whole thing a disappointing washout – but by the standards of the 80s, that’s what it was. There was skill, grace and wonder galore – from the unfailingly superb Red Arrows, the crazed Blades aerobatic team, the frankly impossible antics of the Chinook – but something was missing. </p> <p>For a start, the Vulcan didn’t fly. The world’s only airworthy Vulcan bomber, a wonderful brute of a machine, a crowd-puller and the object of much ersatz patriotic nostalgia, is sustained mainly by frantic charitable lobbying. It failed to fly because of some bureaucratic snafu, causing those above the age of 50 to stage a mass huff, pack away their tartan rugs and clog the exit lane with Volvos and Hondas.</p> <p>Then it transpired that only one performer, the RAF’s spanky new Typhoon fighter, had afterburners and supersonic potential – and that didn’t appear until 5 o’clock, precisely the time the canny motorist wants to be on the open road to beat the jam. There were Tornados, Harriers, F16s, F15s et al on static display, but these monsters shouldn’t really be static at all. Why weren’t they in their element, splitting the sky open with howling fury? Can it really be the case that even the Americans can no longer afford to actively display their wares? </p> <p>The Typhoon is impressive enough. Also known as the Eurofighter, it was intended to be the next generation Cold War air superiority fighter. It gets off the ground in a heartbeat and is as advanced and as manoeuvrable as you could wish, assuming you want to take on a Soviet air armada, circa 1988. Unfortunately, it was delivered about 20 years late and at staggering cost. </p> <p>It’s not that the leaking, creaking Tornado fleet isn’t in need of replacement; it’s just hard to see how the over-specified Typhoon provides value for money in these complex times, particularly when the USA could provide something as good off the shelf. The RAF finds itself deploying these high-tech Cold War warriors in Lincolnshire when what our armed forces seem to need most is a way of moving around Helmand Province without being blown to smithereens by enthusiastic amateur bomb-makers. </p> <p>So while the geek in me bemoans the lack of exciting kit at air shows, the changes to the schedule over the last three decades is instructive. Circa 1994, it was just about possible to see the beginnings of a Peace Dividend and a safer world in which East Anglia no longer needed to accommodate wartime levels of US personnel. If the dull fare at Waddington this year simply reflected a safer and sweeter world than we had in 1989, that would be something even a plane spotter could celebrate. </p> <p>Alas, the world is no safer, just a bit more complex. Our armed forces have more responsibilities and less kit and money to fulfil them. When squaddies die on mined roads for lack of helicopters, over-worked Nimrods explode because ancient design faults went unresolved, and a Hercules can be downed by a bullet for want of Vietnam-era safety foam, it’s really no wonder that the RAF can’t lay on much of an air show and show me where my tax pounds are going – unless of course, you count the Typhoon at a unit cost of £84 million. </p> <p> <small> <a href="http://rampantanomie.blog.co.uk/2009/07/17/i-pay-my-taxes-6531792/#comments">Comments</a> </small> </p>http://rampantanomie.blog.co.uk/2009/07/17/i-pay-my-taxes-6531792/Fri, 17 Jul 2009 10:06:42 +0200 <p>Why do so many supposedly bright and well educated people despise the English language so passionately? It seems the passing of formal education in our own language has produced something far worse than mere indifference. Instead, we find a cheerful determination to bludgeon words into banal corporate gibberish that should be confined to a Dilbert cartoon. Or worse, an implacable desire to purge the language of all those messy, old-fashioned, 'oldspeak' words that just get in the way of the optimalised stakeholder paradigms that iteratively disbenefited 'newspeak' should synergise to facilitate user-centric corporacy. Innit. </p> <p>'Disbenefits' sums up this malaise quite nicely. An ugly and wholly unnecessary word that I'm sorry to say has crawled into respectable dictionaries everywhere. This hasn't happened because it fulfills a need to eff the formerly ineffable, the usual if somewhat old-fashioned route to lexicographical recognition. Instead, it's there because professionals, seemingly everywhere, feel compelled to use obtuse language in a chest-beating bid to show how clever and, well, professional they are. After all, if you're being paid a lot to write something clever, you should scorn words like 'deficit', 'drawback', 'obstacle' or 'disadvantage' as opposing terms to 'benefit', and instead use something far more exclusive. Then you should repeat every sentence in the next line, paragraph and chapter, having raided the thesaurus for a gloss of original thought, safe in the knowledge that content will matter less than thickness or syllable-count. </p> <p>Perhaps I'm just bitter, having discovered that far from being in the premiere league of the verbose, I'd barely qualify for the Sesquipedalian Paper Boys' XI by the standards of the workplace. </p> <p>Anyway, this is good:</p> <p><a href="http://www.andrewdavidson.com/gibberish/">http://www.andrewdavidson.com/gibberish/</a> </p> <p> <small> <a href="http://rampantanomie.blog.co.uk/2009/07/07/doubleplusbad-6468364/#comments">Comments</a> </small> </p>http://rampantanomie.blog.co.uk/2009/07/07/doubleplusbad-6468364/Tue, 07 Jul 2009 21:10:37 +0200 <p>A woman sits behind a podium, sweat glistening on her upper lip, shoulders braced against an onslaught. She blinks as camera flashes pop and reporters hurl their jingoistic vitriol at her in beautifully enunciated BBC-English. Their questions all amount to one stinging accusation that brings blood to her cheeks and tears to her eyes: she has let her country down, toyed with and destroyed the hopes of millions, failed beyond hope of redemption and besmirched the flag. She deserves to slouch off into shameful ignominy with Burgess, Philby, Yoko Ono et al. If only we still used Tower Hill as God intended!</p> <p>Of whom do I speak? Margaret Thatcher? Imelda Marcos? Susan Boyle? Alas, no. I’m talking about a British tennis player, Anne Keothavong, who has the outrageous temerity to be merely a very good British player, rather than the greatest player in the world. </p> <p>Can there be a clearer picture of how our news media creates, shapes and warps public expectation than the sight of some bald, fat journalists with notebooks berating a hard-working, full-time athlete into tears for daring to get into a prestigious tournament without the patriotic fervour to win it? If memory serves, even the Army Corporal who, having sworn fealty to the Crown then proceeded to sell intelligence to Iran, wasn’t compelled to face the deranged ranks of the fourth estate for an ersatz inquisition. </p> <p>The group psychosis once called ‘Henmania’ is back and looking for another sap to focus on. Tim Henman was the ideal patsy; good but not quite good enough. The bleating mob could convince itself it had shared in his victories, and enjoy some righteous hand-wringing when he failed to win Wimbledon - a fate which, incidentally, he shared with the vast majority of top-flight, millionaire tennis professionals. </p> <p>Now the mantle has passed to poor old Andy Murray, whose name sadly doesn’t gel so well with the word ‘mania’. It’s regrettable that he’s had his abrasive edge filed off because someone of his stature really does need to tell the press and the goofy yahoos on Henman Hill a couple of home truths. First, he and his fellows are professional athletes, not agents of imperial destiny. Second, to be competing at his level at all is an achievement (and earning opportunity) far beyond the dreams of bald, fat journalists. Finally, he is not a PR consultant and the very idea that we should think less of a tennis player for being ill at ease with the press is too ludicrous to dignify with an argument. </p> <p>To take two subjects at random – Iraq and MPs’ expenses - England seems to expect a damn sight too much of some people and not nearly enough of others. </p> <p> <small> <a href="http://rampantanomie.blog.co.uk/2009/06/30/england-expects-6428277/#comments">Comments</a> </small> </p>http://rampantanomie.blog.co.uk/2009/06/30/england-expects-6428277/Tue, 30 Jun 2009 23:12:29 +0200 <p>I found this nugget in the gossip column of 'Entertainment Now - The Insider's Guide To Variety, Cabaret and Misplaced Ambition'. </p> <p>'Quit your hissing and booing because it's official - Cowell is a soft-boiled patsy after all, not the hard-boiled pro he pretends to be. </p> <p>Having swapped the Britain's Got Talent green room for the nearest saloon bar, 49 year-old Romanian midget vocal performer, Anastasia Shchukina, told all over a treble Drambuie and a cigar nearly as long as she is.</p> <p>"With his swarthy looks, glaring eyes, high waistlines and penchant for ladies of the ample persuasion, everyone thinks he's the how-you-say pimp-daddy hard-man of the forgettable musak scene," she told me in a husky slavic accent direct from central casting. "But I've performed my routine for real hard men - I was wired up to a sincerity meter at the 1984 Stasi Christmas party, and may your decadent western God help you if you mess up your lines at the Lubyanka karaoke night."</p> <p>With her elfin looks and dainty stature, Anastasia barely passes for a quarter of her real age. I forgot she was a woman of the world when she burst into heart-rending sobs midway through ordering a Ploughman's Lunch with extra mustard. </p> <p>"Got you!," she laughed. "That got me into the BGT final and out of some sticky spots over the last few decades." </p> <p>But shouldn't the public feel cheated, I asked, recalling the moment when Anastasia, a.k.a. ten year-old Holly Steele, burst into tears part-way through her semi-final number? </p> <p>"Pah," she said, showering me with cracker and pickle, "it's all just emotional pornography really. I've arranged tragic deaths for relatives and carried around a puppy with a broken paw, but that's all so cliched. You don't want to see talent on there, you just want to see damaged people's emotions get shredded so that you can say "aaawwww" now and again. Could I nail that number without blubbing? For sure. Would it have got me into the final? No. I am just providing a service." </p> <p>Nor does she worry about the authorities catching up with her. "I would just show them the contract - they tell you to make 'em cry and make 'em dial by any means possible - it's all pounds, roubles and zlotys, baby." </p> <p>Interview over, Anastasia was Holly again, chewing parma violets and daintily cuddling up to her on-stage mother, in reality a KGB-trained minder ten years her junior. With a pirouette and a curtsy, she was on her way to Heathrow, next stop 'Bolivia Tiene Talento'. </p> <p>"My Spanish sucks," she confided with a wink. "But everyone understands tears." </p> <p> <small> <a href="http://rampantanomie.blog.co.uk/2009/06/01/midget-gem-6213350/#comments">Comments</a> </small> </p>http://rampantanomie.blog.co.uk/2009/06/01/midget-gem-6213350/Mon, 01 Jun 2009 13:38:48 +0200 <p>Between bouts of despair brought on in no particular order by morphine patches, chronic pain, the ultimate futility of existence, the false promise of a glistening spring day and the fact that Sony Media Manager can't be persuaded that each movement of Beethoven's 9th belongs in the same folder, I was struck between the eyes by yet more confirmation of what I used to think of as irrational cynicism. </p> <p>Engrossed as I was in my almost-daily bout of prescription masochism in the gym at work, I couldn't fail to notice that yoof had trumped male menopause and prevailed upon management to make the fixed-volume, fixed-channel, plasma-screen media-multiplicity show only TMF rather than BBC News 24.</p> <p>I'm not entirely hostile to TMF. 'Pimp My Ride' is trash of the highest order, unashamedly materialistic, outlandish and responsible for many a set of bitchin' forks. 'Pimp My Ride UK' is pure comic bathos, not unlike listening to Billy Bragg covering 'Still DRE' in his broadest accent while wearing a miner's helmet. But I digress. </p> <p>I found myself randomly roped into the kind of target audience that cynical cops and Daily Mail readers everywhere will be very familiar with - the terminally feckless, those whose subsidised 60" TVs are never switched off while their aspirations are never switched on. </p> <p>The ad that triggered this shallow epiphany invited me to text mine and my partner's (i.e. baby-farva's or baby-muvva's) names to a given premium rate service which would then use some ingenious algorithm (or bored clerk in Mumbai) to suggest the offspring's name. </p> <p>Perhaps I'm reading too much into this, but does it say something about our society that people will contact a remote computer recommended by a rolling torrent of digital dross to be told how to label the accidental issue of their organs?</p> <p>I should have passed this burning nugget of zeitgeist to FlamingCross. It absolutely fits his sclerotic agenda. Time for a little lie-down. </p> <p> <small> <a href="http://rampantanomie.blog.co.uk/2009/04/19/a-nugget-of-zeitgeist-5973093/#comments">Comments</a> </small> </p>http://rampantanomie.blog.co.uk/2009/04/19/a-nugget-of-zeitgeist-5973093/Sun, 19 Apr 2009 22:21:35 +0200 <p>While enduring an inexplicably popular film, mainly because my butt was welded to the sofa by drugs, booze and craven etiquette, I had a revelation.</p> <p>This epiphany could unite both hard-bitten cops and hand-wringing libertarians in support of universal DNA-profiling, provided they could agree that a movie should be more than a random selection of karaoke numbers linked by a lazy and vacuous excuse for a plot. </p> <p>Put simply, had the producers of Mama Mia watched an episode or two of The Jeremy Kyle Show, they'd have known that paternity tests are pretty easy in the 21st century, and science is a better way of proving who begat who than a lot of pointless pouting, prancing and pretending to sing to old Swedish pop songs. </p> <p>Come to think of it, we could have just had a compressed and hyper-violent version set before a baying studio-audience in Norwich and starring the likes of Ray Winstone and Kathy Burke. Working title: 'Billy Jean' or 'Mother's Little Helper'. </p> <p>To give Mama Mia its due, I did enjoy Pierce Brosnan's singing; now that's entertainment: <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ZrccOX4fGs">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ZrccOX4fGs</a> </p> <p> <small> <a href="http://rampantanomie.blog.co.uk/2009/03/28/compulsory-dna-testing-now-5846740/#comments">Comments</a> </small> </p>http://rampantanomie.blog.co.uk/2009/03/28/compulsory-dna-testing-now-5846740/Sat, 28 Mar 2009 12:22:57 +0100 <p><a href="http://www.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/americas/03/11/brazil.rape.abortion/">http://www.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/americas/03/11/brazil.rape.abortion/</a> </p> <p>Jose Cardoso Sobrinho, Archbishop of the Brazilian city of Recife, has almost inspired me to cast my cherished atheism aside and set up the Coventry branch of the Orange Order. Unfortunately, due to the economic downturn, I can’t even find enough apprentice boys to intimidate the local Hare Krishnas.</p> <p>A nine-year old girl repeatedly raped and finally impregnated by her stepfather was shown grace and mercy passing all understanding. The girl’s mother, doctors and others involved in the decision to terminate the pregnancy - rather than forcing the child to risk her own life to give birth to her rapist’s offspring - are to be excommunicated. </p> <p>Can anyone explain this to me? Can anyone convince me there’s reason and virtue in this act rather than a devotion to medieval dogma so unflinching, unthinking and unfeeling that it’s plain psychotic? I fear this question isn’t rhetorical enough. Anyone who’s read more than one book on a given subject or been on the receiving end of a poor decision at court knows that truth isn’t absolute and an artfully constructed argument is the best substitute we’re likely to get for it. Besides, religious thinkers have had a couple of millennia to get their ducks in a row and simple logic will always be trumped by the hallowed utterances of dead zealots, ex-Nazis and blind faith. </p> <p>I would genuinely like to be enlightened on the Catholic Church’s system of moral triage. Why, for example, is life in embryo or in terminal agony so much more precious than at any other stage? Why aren’t paramilitary murderers and genocidal dictators routinely excommunicated? Come to think of it, why wasn’t the rapist step-father who conceived this debacle cast from God’s mercy? Could the reason be institutional misogyny?</p> <p>To give him his due, the Archbishop did try to explain. “A graver act than rape is abortion,” he told the press, and the girl herself wasn’t excommunicated because. “the Church is benevolent when it comes to minors.” More tea, vicar? </p> <p>This may seem an exercise in Catholic-bashing, and if it causes any believer who gets this far some offence, that wasn’t my point but I don’t mind at all. Plainly, Catholicism doesn’t have a monopoly on lunatic beliefs but its inability to drag itself into the second millennium makes it such an easy target. </p> <p>Admittedly, secular despots are just as capable of wickedness and merely hijack a desperate human need to kowtow to anything capable of making messianic noises. Far from being arch-atheists, the likes of Stalin and Pol Pot amply illustrate the danger of religious instinct. Far from dispensing with religion, they simply replaced the established version with one of their own making which was no less dependent on fear and unthinking obedience to dogma. I digress. </p> <p>Perhaps I’m missing the point and easy certainty makes for a more comfortable existence than cold reason. Perhaps I’d need years in a seminary to understand the sacred mysteries well enough to want to cast decent people into the outer darkness, to condemn their immortal souls to endless suffering, for saving the life of an abused child. I’m still genuinely curious though. Can anyone explain Archbishop Sobrinho’s actions? Anyone?</p> <p> <small> <a href="http://rampantanomie.blog.co.uk/2009/03/24/can-anyone-explain-this-5823221/#comments">Comments</a> </small> </p>http://rampantanomie.blog.co.uk/2009/03/24/can-anyone-explain-this-5823221/Tue, 24 Mar 2009 22:41:07 +0100 <p>Am I the only one to have noticed the weather? I've been shivering and slithering around all week and marvelling at this fluffy white stuff falling from the sky.<br> Despite this, people are dragging themselves to work as normal on punctual trains and buses, or driving with commendable care on clear roads. It's business as usual for the London Underground and the Channel Tunnel, but then it doesn't snow underground. We aren't even the laughing stock of Europe because our airports grind to a halt on account of a wintry squall that would barely deter a Swede from mowing his lawn.<br> Incredibly, there hasn't been a whisper of this meteorological mayhem on the news. Where is the hysterical, saturation coverage we're entitled to? The endlessly funny footage of Londoners failing to understand this strange new world in white and driving - and indeed walking - like lemons? The shock-horror exclusives revealing that snow is white or can turn into ice? The predictions of another 3cm with north-easterly gusts uttered in tones once reserved for a massive Soviet ICBM launch?<br> Why oh why oh why is everyone being so calm about this Siberian nightmare? I think I'll email BBC Breakfast and complain about their sidelining the piffling weather and focussing on trivial things like war and the future of humankind. </p> <p> <small> <a href="http://rampantanomie.blog.co.uk/2009/02/04/apparently-it-s-snowing-5509337/#comments">Comments</a> </small> </p>http://rampantanomie.blog.co.uk/2009/02/04/apparently-it-s-snowing-5509337/Wed, 04 Feb 2009 23:02:05 +0100 <p>When it comes to judging how far we've come down the road from the class-bound, hierarchical Britain of yore to the golden New Labour meritocracy we've been promised, forget think-tanks and colum-inches; just take a long hard look at BBC2's Masterchef, having first turned the sound down - unless you want the last thing you ever hear without tinnitus to be, "cooking does not get tougha dan dis (you slaaaag)".<br> I frequently find my public sector hackles rising at what that strange show's victims, nay, contestants, nay, kitchen porters of tomorrow, are made to do. I'm not talking about getting to grips with cooking food - if that's not too vulgar a term - to a very high standard; serving bleeding and bleating meat to avoid the risk of its being a tad dry; and giving their meagre morsels of salivatory delight names that would make a beat-poet scratch his noggin - anyone for mezzanine of korfballed pike in a bitumen of drizzled sarin?<br> Instead, I'm talking about the constant, buttock-clenching, lip-biting degredation and kowtowing forced on these saps by the presenters' swaggering, inquisitorial style. Many programmes are padded out with pointless soundbites - take Dragons' Den and its pointless narrator's need to repeat the bleeding obvious for the hard of thinking (the blogger just said that Dragons' Den's expert analyst repeats the bleeding obvious to give cherished viewers extra insight) - but this is worse.<br> Knowing how to cook is just not enough for these sadists. Blue-chip interview questions, usually flung at the little chefs while they're busy chastising scallops, have to be fielded, and fielded out of the park, even if their flatulence of sulky yak liver and distressed onion jus is the closest thing to organic ambrosia these gourmands have ever supped. Unless the little chefs are prepared to say they are the best and destined to win, which is, given the level of competition, at best hubris and at worst a desperate, frightened lie, they're plainly lacking the ambition they'd need to hack it in a professional kitchen. If they can't persuade mein hosts that they'd skewer and lightly braise their own immediate family for Raymond Blanc's amusement and force-feed their flesh to an expectant Westminster lunch service, they are the professional equivalent of a sputum garnish on a coulis of frisky calf a la Max Boyce.<br> I'll concede that there's a bit more to it than that. Force-feeding the little chefs expectation and then stewing them in an emotional pressure cooker makes the tearful disappointment most of them will face all the sweeter for the audience; but that's another debate.<br> In short, it is not enough for them to be good at what they do unless they can regurgitate stylised chaff when asked questions whose only real purpose is to justify the interviewers' existence and put them in their place. On Masterchef and in many workplaces, this approach legitimises a thoroughly modern model of cap-in-hand, forelock-tugging begging and pleading for your job. It is degredation for entertainment, a test of conformity as well as competence. Where, I ask you, is Amnesty in all this?<br> Perhaps it struck a chord because I've had a few interviews in the public sector, all of which only tested my ability and willingness to say the right thing on the day and thereby conform to the interviewer's agenda. I don't claim that this is telltale of a conformist and intellectually craven culture which values saying the right thing more than doing it; I'll leave that for Flaming Cross. I'm just suggesting that being loudly and farcically 'on message' matters far too much in our supposedly restless, democratic culture.<br> After all, do I care about a Tanvic mechanic's willingness to embrace automotive corporacy and facilitate an enhanced customer expectation matrix, or is it enough that my new brake pads and discs work when I leave the M1 at 90mph in the expectation that I'll enter the Little Chef (the dining experience, not a failed contestant) on my feet rather than in the hurtling shell of my unresponsive car?<br> I almost included The Apprentice in this piece, but realised I didn't mind its contestants being degraded. </p> <p> <small> <a href="http://rampantanomie.blog.co.uk/2009/01/16/dance-little-man-5391179/#comments">Comments</a> </small> </p>http://rampantanomie.blog.co.uk/2009/01/16/dance-little-man-5391179/Fri, 16 Jan 2009 23:10:08 +0100 <p>I recently had cause to visit the Home Office. I did so for reasons I'm not at liberty to discuss, my questionable understanding of some complex issues usefully masked by several layers of secrecy which may, for all I know, exist mainly to feed a smug sense of corporate exclusivity.<br> Having dragged myself in from the provinces using one of Mr Branson's 'Pendulino' trains - by far the most comfortable alternative to the motorcycle 'wall of death' - and enjoyed the welcoming embrace of London life that only the Underground can deliver - intimacy with reeking strangers, tooth-rattling inertia, the parched and ionised breath of Hades, the prospect of your sweating neighbour toting a bag crammed with semtex or sarin - I pitch up at the heart, or perhaps a less vital but still well-intentioned and noteworthy organ, of government.<br> A thickly chlorinated water feature, lustrous films of water wrapping themselves around obsidian blocks, guards the doorway to an airy structure of burnished steel and glass that is clean, frosted or infused with colour. This isn't the creaking, beleaguered facade of law and order I've seen in provincial magistrates' courts and market-town punch-ups. This high-concept vision of strength and openness wouldn't look out of place in an investment banker's loft-space being discussed over absinthe and quail nipples, assuming said banker has tasted those tasty, green shoots of recovery rather than drowning in his own mortgage and wishing he worked in the public sector.<br> Inside, sharp-suited automata, their mouths glued into adequately polite half-smiles, check my bona fides, scan me for knives and RPG's, issue me with temporary ID, which would probably explode if I left the building without handing it back, and wave me towards a set of man-size test-tubes. I show a machine the ID, enter the unique and secure code shouted my way by one of the automata, and the test tube whisks itself open to admit me. I step inside, to embrace what turns out to be a disappointing future. I'm not transported to the Soho basement HQ of UNCLE, to the transporter room of the USS Enterprise or to the Batcave. Instead, I stand on a target, am sniffed for explosives - or celery, for all I know - and ushered into a bright and open atrium, a basement floor of tropical plants, demi-lattes, panninis and Yogo classes opening on to five floors of hushed office space, water coolers and signage in soothing colours directing the visitor to a bewildering variety of acronyms and - protect and survive - the bomb shelter.<br> I have my meeting - the contents of which I cannot disclose, but rest assured a small corner of Guantanamo will be preserved for abuse'rs' of apostroph'es - and find my provincial wits somewhat taxed by a charming apparatchik of the new order, bright enough to go far enough, his path unimpeded by cynicism, his high-minded readiness to serve making my withering world-view feel more than a little juvenile, his ten years of bureaucratic insight trumping my two months of long lunches and skimpy research.<br> A chorus of whooping and laughter floods in from the street below, ignoring the tetchy clacking of keyboards and the hushing whisper of the air conditioning. Zimbabwean emigres are staging a demonstration on the street below in support of imprisoned pro-democracy activists. They grin at anyone who comes to a window, brandish their banners politely, wave and tease the security automata, before moving on without a glimpse of the old bill, perhaps having realised that the Home Office has little influence on Mugabe's penal policy, or having already discovered that the same can be said of the FCO, the UN or any other acronym you'd care to mention.<br> I return to Euston, join the expectant mass at the departure board, become part of a frenzied hive-mind when my platform is announced, have a one hour fever-dream of tilting crazily northward at huge speeds while chubby men with floppy fringes shout at their phones about slim margins and enhanced resilience, then find myself back in the provinces and compelled to type a meandering and pointless blog about my unusual day rather than concentrating on my civil service project management exams.<br> If you think this is dull, you should see the textbook I'm avoiding. </p> <p> <small> <a href="http://rampantanomie.blog.co.uk/2009/01/14/children-of-the-revolution-5379195/#comments">Comments</a> </small> </p>http://rampantanomie.blog.co.uk/2009/01/14/children-of-the-revolution-5379195/Wed, 14 Jan 2009 23:21:55 +0100 <p>This is without a doubt the worst trigger-happy action film that I've ever seen. That isn't to say it doesn't have moments of purely technical inventiveness and spectacle. It's just that the whole sorry caper is infected with such a groundless sense of its own wit and sassiness that I couldn't let the gross insult to my intelligence pass unanswered.<br> It does have star draw in the persons of Clive Owen and Paul Giamatti, and God love 'em for delivering the terrible, scatalogical drivel that passes for a script without wincing, guffawing or sobbing at what they'd been reduced to.<br> It might seem that I'm taking a bit of popcorn cinema too seriously. Yet I'd take a sub-par Seagal or Van Damme movie over this because it would deliver its thrills without making the audience endure knuckle-bitingly awful gobbets of fortune-cookie wisdom in a desperate bid to be street-hip and deep. The script isn't so much your dad dancing at a wedding; more like your dad donning a hoodie and trying to bust a street-dance improv outside the offie with his own Level 42 megamix in the sound system.<br> Shoot 'Em Up desperately wants to keep company with the likes of Kill Bill and Sin City but the script alone puts it in a very lowly league of its own. If you want better gun-toting spectacle and edgy writing that doesn't get in the way, return to John Wu and his Pacific Rim confreres. </p> <p> <small> <a href="http://rampantanomie.blog.co.uk/2009/01/10/movie-review-shoot-em-up-5353109/#comments">Comments</a> </small> </p>http://rampantanomie.blog.co.uk/2009/01/10/movie-review-shoot-em-up-5353109/Sat, 10 Jan 2009 13:02:17 +0100 <p>The basic premise is interesting and the director's track record promising, which together led me to ignore the negative criticism and waste a rental credit on this fat, diseased turkey. I may not be fully qualified to review this movie as I hated it so much I skipped the last half hour.<br> You'll be aware that the hero (Annakin Skywalker or whatever he calls himself these days), a lovestruck high school geek, finds himself able to teleport. As any teenage boy might, if he lives in an Oakley commercial, he uses this gift to get wealthy, get laid and get some surf. We are treated to images of Annakin picniccing on the Sphinx's head and clinging to Big Ben to try and persuade us that he is a charismatic, globe-skipping avatar of mind-bending power.<br> In a vain bid to turn this fantastic good fortune into a plot, Samuel L Jackson paints his hair white, produces an NSA ID card and chases Annakin around the world with an electric cane (really), interrupting Annakin's laying and surfing. Matters are further complicated by Annakin's pretty and pointless love interest and Jamie Bell's very confused accent, still in the air somewhere between Darlington and Burbank, but still leaving us in no doubt that dancing isn't just for poofs, divvent yer kna.<br> Each and every principal is bereft of charisma; perhaps Annakin, who mistakes pouting, sulking and glaring for acting, so lacks charisma that he drains everyone else's. Maybe they were all just mortified by the screenplay, which must have been written by a chimpanzee; not even a talented one, probably one of those 'scab' chimpanzees who worked through the screenwriter's strike. In short, give this a miss. If you want a taste of the sassy, well written, roaming action this director can deliver, revisit 'Go' or 'The Bourne Identify'. </p> <p> <small> <a href="http://rampantanomie.blog.co.uk/2009/01/10/movie-review-jumper-5353042/#comments">Comments</a> </small> </p>http://rampantanomie.blog.co.uk/2009/01/10/movie-review-jumper-5353042/Sat, 10 Jan 2009 12:51:49 +0100 <p>The makers of this tosh seriously overrated themselves.<br> They must have thought their lazy and ludicrous plot made their movie as visonary and leftfield as The Matrix, despite lacking any zeitgeist or inner reality, or indeed any sign that it wasn't penned by an eight-year old who spends his waking hours drinking Red Bull and playing Grand Theft Auto.<br> Perhaps the makers thought parachuting in Angelina Jolie gave it the sexy sassiness of Mr & Mrs Smith; instead, the deathly professionalism needed by the distinguished cast to fulfill their contracts and issue their awful lines with straight faces leaves them no energy for anything more than constipated grumpiness.<br> Instead of lending this crock the earthy, urban lyricism of Pulp Fiction, the potty-mouthed, witless script sounds like it was penned by Vicky Pollard.<br> As for its much-vaunted special effects, if your idea of visual flair is endless shots of bullets tunnelling through cerebral matter, then this movie will excite you immensely. Even then, perverts of your ilk will get better value for money from the over-18 content on You Tube.<br> Worst of all, I rented this turkey and persuaded others to watch it, so there go my voting rights for the next few movie nights.<br> This crude, lazy effort at a high-kicking, comic-book actioner has only one distinguishing feature; it's somewhat less awful than Shoot 'Em Up and Jumper. Don't waste your time and money on this when you could just watch The Matrix, Kill Bill or Pulp Fiction again, or anything from Hong Kong. </p> <p> <small> <a href="http://rampantanomie.blog.co.uk/2009/01/10/movie-review-wanted-5353000/#comments">Comments</a> </small> </p>http://rampantanomie.blog.co.uk/2009/01/10/movie-review-wanted-5353000/Sat, 10 Jan 2009 12:45:15 +0100 <p>Welcome to the First Secular Church of Our Lady of Anomie. Let us meditate on the un-sacred mystery of Christmas. </p> <p>Remember, there's no need to be afraid as we let in light and we banish shade. Spread a smile of joy by spending money you don't have on things nobody actually needs. Throw your arms around the world by exchanging dozens of meaningless cards with people you either speak to every day or never speak to at all. Then say a prayer, pray for the other ones who have larger or more annoying families to pretend to get along with. </p> <p>Perhaps your own bodyweight in meat and booze isn't taking the edge off and the only water flowing is the bitter sting of tears? Is that the Thuggee sacrifice scene in Indiana Jones & The Temple of Doom or just the clanging chimes of doom? When the sugar rush of material consumption has faded, who will draw us back to the spiritual life and save the world from the powers of darkness? Well tonight, thank God it's Bono instead of you. </p> <p>Still, here's to Uncle Frank and Auntie Madge underneath that burning sun on that off-season special in Dubai. Do they know it's Christmas-time at all? Thanks to Brothers Bob and Midge. </p> <p>And so we find ourselves, flukes of evolution, confined to a sliver of light in an infinite abscess of nothing, our short lives defined by mercurial joy, dependable pain and unending strife, flailing for hope and meaning, usually finding only disappointment and trinkets to occupy our simian hands while those of us who read too much and are free to do so thank fortune daily that our already benighted lives aren't about to be ended by the megalomaniacs, wars, disasters and tortures that are humanity's birthright. The universe drowns us in an immensity of time, space and indifference. Still, never mind: only one more sleep 'til Christmas!</p> <p>We all know what happens then. Benign supernatural entities bless the Christian and pseudo-Christian world with joy, peace and cool presents. A trinity of fictional characters, Father Christmas, God and Bob The Builder, is believed in briefly before they go back into the attic for another year. Rogue angels or Victorian ghosts should be busy drawing me towards a tearful epiphany which will unacceptably inflate my hospitality budget. 'Neath the cosy lights of town-centre hostelries, glassings and sexual offences will proceed to the festive tones of Slade and The Pogues, perhaps ceasing for a blessed moment of peace outside the kebab shop while Jona Lewie incisively reminds us of the total irrelevance of Christmas to industrialised warfare. </p> <p>Exceptions tend to prove rules. If Christmas is supposed to be a time of peace and goodwill to all men, does that mean the rest of the year is fair game for misanthropic strife? By force-feeding the nation emotional syrup, is it intended to make the poor feel poorer or the lonelier feel more alone? Isn't the whole thing just a fabulous barometer for our civilisation, dependent on ersatz spirituality and greed? </p> <p>I hope I've spread some cheer. Your Majesty, if you're reading, feel free to use this. </p> <p> <small> <a href="http://rampantanomie.blog.co.uk/2008/12/24/a-christmas-message-5271222/#comments">Comments</a> </small> </p>http://rampantanomie.blog.co.uk/2008/12/24/a-christmas-message-5271222/Wed, 24 Dec 2008 14:20:47 +0100 <p>Chronic pain is turning my head into a pressure cooker, the gristly contents stewing away while the odd jet of steam escapes in a random splutter. The nerve endings at the site of my spinal surgery have formed an unresting choir, their efforts never less than a bass grumble and frequently rising through shuffling discord to shrill squeal. </p> <p>Pain is making me a bit peculiar. I can grit my teeth and will the beast into submission for days or weeks, but periodically it wins and I have to take a tranquiliser or two and spend a day or three in a state of narcoleptic surrender. My brain fills with tar and starts functioning like British Leyland, circa 1979. Neurons don't seem to fire, nor can they be fired even if they sit around reading the Sun and picking their noses all day. </p> <p>This isn't much of a lifestyle choice. I'm bloody-minded enough to fight off the beast, most of the time. I work nearly full-time hours, have a social life, swim, lift weights and don't drink heavily every night of the week. In the gym, I cause myself a little more pain just so I can look in the mirror and show the beast that it won't turn me into a pasty, drug-addled pudding. </p> <p>Perhaps I can only win a pyrrhic victory this way, but I've got so much pain to share. It's unfair to share it with people I care about, and too messy and complicated to share with the rest. So, do I fall on my own sword? Do I slap myself silly to daze and distract myself, as I've done once or twice as a non-prescription alternative to opiates? Perhaps I need a new focus. </p> <p>Mice have found their enterprising way into the loft of our detached, ten-year old house. They convened an orgy of gnawing at the plasterboard, insulation and timbers above my head on a night when my pain had me fizzing with adrenaline. The next day, my Guardian-reading, fair-trade tendencies smouldering on the fires of insomnia, I acquired a sleek, black rat trap from a reputable ironmonger, baited it with organic peanut butter and within hours heard the gratifying crack of justice.</p> <p>Marigolds and miniature bodybag in hand, I ventured into the cold space above my centrally-heated life and acquainted myself with my victim. The mouse's back was broken, its carcass sagging from a steel jaw, flecked with blood and seeming too tiny to accommodate nerve, bone, sinew and feeling. This scurrying agent of my pain wouldn't be troubling me again. </p> <p>I had for a picosecond considered buying a humane trap, detaining the verminous critter in an approved manner and driving into the countryside (taking care to limit our carbon footprint) to restore it to liberty and watch it scurry into the golden sunset. But that wouldn't have allowed me to kill something that caused me pain.</p> <p>Am I going a bit peculiar? </p> <p>My solicitor suggested I keep a diary in support of my personal injury claim. I'm sure this isn't what he had in mind. </p> <p>Normal service may be resumed when I've had a good week's sleep. </p> <p> <small> <a href="http://rampantanomie.blog.co.uk/2008/11/23/no-pain-no-gain-5092541/#comments">Comments</a> </small> </p>http://rampantanomie.blog.co.uk/2008/11/23/no-pain-no-gain-5092541/Sun, 23 Nov 2008 19:11:44 +0100 <p>Yesterday, I experienced paraspinal lumbar injections with the benefit of full consciousness and a fair view of the near-live xrays guiding the surgeon's enormous needles. I realised, again, that the horrible but brilliant 'Green Wing' is in fact a documentary. Erudite observations on right L1 vertebral facets are interspersed with bickering about whose turn it is to buy the bourbons, who Crispin from Radiology is boffing, what else Joachim Phoenix has been in (and he did sing those Johnny Cash songs himself you know), and exclamations like, "no, just keep pushing it in 'til you hit bone." I suppose we've all been on first dates like that. </p> <p>I was a big, brave boy and focussed my attention on the pretty, wavy lines on the ECG. Oddly, my pulse stayed around 60bpm. I get more excited than that when Simon Cowell is threatened by some geordie pit-bull whose 30 stone, walrus-voiced daughter has failed to appreciate the Wildean wit on which her deranged dreams have been impaled. </p> <p>The local anaesthetic and steroids injected into my spine didn't achieve a great deal beyond making me walk like Douglas Bader for the rest of the day. What, some kind soul said to me, as I was tottering and teetering around the ward in a backless gown, enjoying the cool draught on my nethers, contemplating my numb legs and the news that my lumbar spine was more compressed and curved than it was a year ago, would Action Man do? </p> <p>This is, you'll understand, an arbitrary segue into something that has been troubling me for no good reason. The fact is, I'm not sure what Action Man would do, and this makes someone of my age feel adrift.</p> <p>He seems to have lost his way since the end of the Cold War. Once he had his dignity, his NATO jumper, his DMS boots and his FAL rifle. Look left and right, find the Germans / Russians, lock and load, rappel from the Christmas tree to an enfilade position, butt of the FAL hard into the shoulder, commando grip on trigger and barrel, drop the filthy Hun / Red with a double-tap, pull the cord in your back for a valedictory flourish, then back to Sindy's / Barbie's tea-rooms for sexless banter.</p> <p>This behaviour belonged to an age when East and West were organised in their hatred and followed the rules. We knew where to point our guns, tanks and ICBM's. Anything more complicated than that could be sorted out by a few cryptic words from George Smiley at a dead-letter drop on Hampstead Heath. </p> <p>Now what have we got? Spooks are so demonstrative and urgent all the time, never finding time to play chess with double-agents in Soho attic rooms. As for Spooks Code 9, they're like S Club Juniors to Smiley's Bob Dylan. Such are the thoughts that mill around in the forebrain while the hospital porter gamely pushes you the ten miles or so to theatre while reciting his 10,000 word thesis on why static caravans are the future of holidays. </p> <p>These days, Action Man, stripped of his military certainties and still denied genitalia, is flouncing around in baggy pants and Oakleys, rescuing dolphins from tuna nets, smuggling tofu into school canteens, trying to stay on a skateboard and looking like someone's dad dancing at a wedding reception. The peace dividend really isn't all it's cracked up to be. </p> <p>Random ramble ends. I think the opiates are wearing off. </p> <p> <small> <a href="http://rampantanomie.blog.co.uk/2008/10/15/inaction-man-4878015/#comments">Comments</a> </small> </p>http://rampantanomie.blog.co.uk/2008/10/15/inaction-man-4878015/Wed, 15 Oct 2008 22:27:36 +0200 <p>The Jeremy Kyle show has taken some flak and for good reason. It may have a gloss of morality about it, but Kyle's manner wouldn't have been out of place at a medieval assizes, where the wretched received their comeuppance from strutting demagogues before a baying pack of their peers. Yet this is commercial television; not a public service, just a consumer product. Drawing in the punters and the advertisers is inevitably more important than the mental health of random members of the urban underclass. </p> <p>So if the show presents itself as a moral forum, it deserves all the right wing derision and left wing sanctimony that can be heaped on it. But aren't we all guilty by association? In bygone centuries, how many of us would have cheerfully taken the wife and kids to the local asylum to stare at the loonies, or, better yet, to the local gaol to witness a good hanging? Even in our supposedly enlightened times, aren't we all guilty of schadenfreude, whether we're enjoying slapstick sitcom suffering or simply relishing the news stories telling of people other than ourselves dying horribly in plane crashes and other acts of malign fortune. It's a pretty rational human response to see suffering and be grateful or glad that it's not happening to you. </p> <p>From there, it's only a small step to enjoying the suffering of the wretched as light entertainment. The Kyles and Springers of this world have been unfairly isolated. How dull would The X Factor be if the desperate and damaged were less willing to humiliate themselves for our viewing pleasure? Even compos mentis performers are persuaded to play their bereavement cards to guarantee that emotional money shot. For my filthy, guilty money, lonely eccentrics murdering soul standards is far better value than Timberlake-clones covering them competently.</p> <p>How would 'You've Been Framed' and 'World's Scariest Videos' fare if footage of nasty accidents happening to people other than us wasn't such good, wholesome fun for the whole family? As for Big Brother, this is nothing more than petri dish television with bacterial life on either end of the microscope. No offence. </p> <p>So, I may watch Jeremy Kyle in a knowing, ironic, post-modern way, but I'm still complicit. In fact, I'm probably more complicit, because I should know better. Human suffering has always been entertaining, but at least our ancestors were less hypocritical about it. Rant ends. </p> <p> <small> <a href="http://rampantanomie.blog.co.uk/2008/09/21/that-s-entertainment-4757153/#comments">Comments</a> </small> </p>http://rampantanomie.blog.co.uk/2008/09/21/that-s-entertainment-4757153/Sun, 21 Sep 2008 12:19:14 +0200 <p>(Excessive reply to a polite, friendly email about football and Star Wars)</p> <p>I'm afraid I'm no more football-literate now than I was back in the day. In fact, what was latent hostility to the so-called beautiful game has solidified into something altogether more bitter. Whereas I might once have tried to make faltering small talk about soccerball, I'm now just as likely to start excoriating it loudly and at length, even past the point where the entire pub has fallen silent so that the local firm's AGM can hear me. </p> <p>I can rationalise this in all sorts of ways. Like any sport played well, it can be a majestic and thrilling spectacle. That's the only plus point that occurs to me. Which negative should I begin with? The pursuit of money above all else? The cynical gamesmanship that defines the sport at every level from kids in the park to millionaires on the pitch? The lack of meaningful sanctions against, or indeed interest in, violence and cheating (does anyone in the game know about video recording yet)? The lack of social responsibility on the part of so-called role models? The legitimisation of tribal violence? </p> <p>I've already blathered on about this at length here: <a href="http://rampantanomie.blog.co.uk/2008/02/11/the_ugly_game~3713305">http://rampantanomie.blog.co.uk/2008/02/11/the_ugly_game~3713305</a></p> <p>Perhaps I'm just not a team player and my hostility to the game is based on unresolved issues from childhood rather than some lofty social consciousness. Still, I'm glad I got off the fence about it. I spent a lot of time last year working with a fanatical Liverpool fan who still nursed a few (real not imagined) injuries from Hillsborough. To him, you can no more be a fair-weather, occasionall football fan than you can be half-pregnant. In his strange, judgemental view of the world, I scored more highly for ladling scorn on soccerball and his endless prattle about underside rulings, Range Rovers, Manhattan transfers, Pele Docherty and penalty spot dunks, than I would have done with a pretended and polite interest in an aribitrarily adopted team. </p> <p>I don't want to seem entirely negative though. I'm all for genetic experimentation if it would liven things up. I've also submitted to Pannini (they are in charge of every player in the world aren't they?) a list of useful reforms:<br> 1. The goalmouth should be the entire width of the field. Single figure scorelines are extremely boring.<br> 2. Scrap the underside rule. My wife understands it and I don't and this is no good for my masculine pride. Also see point 1 re scorelines<br> 3. Have more than one ball. Also see point 1 re scorelines<br> 4. Introduce video referees with the power to suspend play for as long as it takes everybody to settle down and discover that we are all one and love is the answer.<br> 5. Revise the the fines system so that a top-flight player can expect to forfeit more than 0.0001% of his weekly take-home in the unlikely event that he is caught cheating in a major sporting event.<br> 6. Further revise the fines system so that players who a) cheat and b) enjoy it should face an escalating tariff of sanctions beginnning with humiliation, progressing to mutilation and ending with execution or, worse, being compelled to work on a minimum wage and drive a car worth less than an entire street in south Manchester.<br> 7. Change the law of the land so that having an opinion on soccerball is no longer viewed as the only social skill worth having in the workplace canteen. </p> <p>That's better. I needed a good rant. </p> <p>I heartily agree about the latest utterly pointless instalment in the Snore Wars saga. I fear that because it is animated and relatively cheap compared with its forebears, it might turn a profit. I'm not sure that boycotting the film is a good enough way to teach Lucas that the world isn't interested in his ersatz rehash of a yarn that has already bored and enraged his patient fans. Isn't it time a Cinematic Crimes Tribunal was set up at The Hague? Let's see Lucas try his old Jedi mind tricks when he's sharing a bunk with Karadzic. That's something I would pay to see. </p> <p> <small> <a href="http://rampantanomie.blog.co.uk/2008/09/07/aimless-rant-about-soccerball-and-george-lucas-4694116/#comments">Comments</a> </small> </p>http://rampantanomie.blog.co.uk/2008/09/07/aimless-rant-about-soccerball-and-george-lucas-4694116/Sun, 07 Sep 2008 15:57:28 +0200 <p>Thin as my recent output has been, it has all but come to a grinding halt. This is because I'm currently enjoying the unrest cure at Harrogate.</p> <p>Within a wide-angle spit of the gorgeous Harlow Hill on the fringes of that gentrified Yorkshire town, a handsome Edwardian pile houses a police convalescence centre. Having paid my paltry fee towards this charity for at least a year now, and having impressed the board with my scary spinal injury, lurid scar and martyr complex, I felt entitled to cash in, check in and chill out. </p> <p>Those of you not of the law enforcement persuasion, and probably any of you who are, will imagine a free junket whereby fat old knackers nearing the end of their service can treat themselves to a fortnight of subsidised lounging away from the boss/the wife/the kids/the huge scary prosecution file. Well, think again: you're almost entirely right. </p> <p>To be fair, you do have to have an injury capable of being usefully treated here to qualify. My spinal fracture puts me slightly above mid-table. I can't compete with the multiple fracture victims on crutches or the cancer fighters, but I am bewildered by the presence of those who had a minor whiplash ten years ago and want to cash in in every possible way.</p> <p>Dinner table conversations are a process of clinical one-upmanship. Who, for example, has the rawest deal, the longest waiting list, the keenest ache, the goriest injury, the strangest side effects, the itchiest piles? It's like manning the lines for a geriatric medical phone-in; until, that is, you hear yourself and realise you're just as broken and boring as the rest. Then there's the war stories: I may as well have stayed at home and watched Police Smash Grab Camera Action Crisis Pursuit Team . </p> <p>Not that it's all about relaxation, at least not for me. I have daily doses of acupuncure and physiotherapy, an hour or two in the gym, a spot of cycling and two or three purgatorial sessions of pilates, fitball and circuits, by which time I know I'm the quivering, tortured husk of a man approaching middle age. I have a firm and self-flagellating belief that if I yield to my nervous system and relax when I'm in pain, I'll become a fat old knacker. Besides which, my scar will be less big and impressive if my waistline doubles. </p> <p>Not that such self-immolation is de rigeur; relaxation is rife, and it isn't unusual to find a dozen middle-aged cops snoring in the lounge after a hefty lunch, drooling onto copies of the Daily Mail splayed across their paunches. Yet the centre doesn't have all the makings of a classic police junket: there is no house bar; alcohol, bed-hopping and lary conduct are frowned upon; there is a loosely enforced curfew. Having been on the CID course, I couldn't help but feel the centre had overestimated its clientele. Not that this stops most of them happily settling down for the nightly bingo, raffle and quiz. </p> <p>I must sign off. There's a family pack of Preparation H up for grabs in the raffle. </p> <p> <small> <a href="http://rampantanomie.blog.co.uk/2008/07/15/the-unrest-cure-4452910/#comments">Comments</a> </small> </p>http://rampantanomie.blog.co.uk/2008/07/15/the-unrest-cure-4452910/Tue, 15 Jul 2008 20:34:18 +0200 <p>Those who arrived at a compelling and uncluttered view on this issue aren’t around to record their views. For most of us, arriving at such a view would oblige us to jump some hurdles before we vaulted that rail: religious dogma, physical fear, emotional attachments, every instinct we possess. We should discount mere cries for help; an unsuccessful suicide is generally just a successful gesture. Those who mean it, do it, either without fanfare or having ensured they can’t be interrupted by other people’s instincts or their own. </p> <p>We all die, most of us alone and afraid no matter how fit or unfit, old or young, loved or loathed we are when the moment falls. There is no consensus on what awaits us when our last breath rattles its way out of our carcass. Whether we anticipate umpteen talented virgins or oblivion without end, one thing is certain: we will all find out very soon. </p> <p>So is it really so wrong to hasten this process if logic is on your side? Doctors do so every day, whether we choose to admit it or not. For every court case in which a terminally ill patient kowtows to the judiciary for their suffering to be ended without criminalising anyone, scores of less complex and more critical cases are brought to an informal end with a generous shot of morphine or a DNR notice. </p> <p>Focussing on those so near to death doesn’t necessarily clarify matters, partly because freedom of choice and the medical profession’s commitment to preserving life overlap unavoidably. It is however instructive that the most vocal opposition to the lethal exercise of mercy tends to come from religious quarters. Supposed creeds of love always manage to find some fire and brimstone dogma to prolong suffering in the name of righteousness, while in centuries past those who had died by their own hand were denied hallowed ground in their local cemetery. Can such callousness in extremis really give the desperate the answers they need? </p> <p>Should we all have an entitlement to suicide, regardless of age or health? Should the degree of freedom we enjoy include the right to end our own life? As participants in a society, we should come to the rescue of those trying to throw themselves from bridges or under tube trains. Typically, the suicide bid will be a result of depressive illness or huge emotional trauma. The act is patently logical to the subject but their problems are seldom insurmountable. Death might be a cure, but it might not be the right or best cure. </p> <p>Yet some emotional problems are practically insurmountable. Some depressive illnesses are so profound that misery is a constant and unreasoning companion that cannot be fended off by the most inventive psychiatrists. Some physical illnesses promise their hosts a lifetime of escalating pain with none of the joys most of us take for granted. </p> <p>Some states of depression have deep and rational roots that cannot be plucked. Following the death in 1985 of 520 people aboard a Japan Air Lines 747 due to a botched repair, maintenance manager Yasumoto Takagi took his own life rather than live with the shame. Such a burden would be positively cancerous for anyone to bear, particularly in a society where the act of suicide isn’t necessarily seen as dishonorable or immoral. </p> <p>It is a matter of finding a healthy tension. A civilized society values and seeks to preserve life. Yet to dismiss suicide as sinful is unhelpful and irrelevant to anyone desperate enough to be contemplating it. The victim shouldn’t be condemned out of hand; life is finite after all. We should accept that it is not sacred enough to make any burden worth carrying; certainly not if it is only being carried to pander to dogma or moral squeamishness. </p> <p> <small> <a href="http://rampantanomie.blog.co.uk/2008/06/28/can-suicide-ever-be-justified-extract-fr-4375115/#comments">Comments</a> </small> </p>http://rampantanomie.blog.co.uk/2008/06/28/can-suicide-ever-be-justified-extract-fr-4375115/Sat, 28 Jun 2008 11:14:47 +0200 <p>There I slept through my own thin night. Some operatives could surrender themselves happily to oblivion, trusting their hard-wiring to banish the shadows when the crisis had passed, then returning exhilarated to life and light, grinning secretly or howling like shamen. I am afraid of the dark. Not the mere dimming of light when the sun goes down or screens go opaque, but the utter absence of sensation and energy, the brute silence of the void. I use more oxygen than I should clutching the image of a strand of burning silver. It is the fire seared by a low sun across a horizon choked with sea-ice. Matter is energy and energy matter. Where there is light to be warmed by, there is rock to stand on and a universe to exist in. I can illuminate the infinite absence and define it. A nonsense mantra, of course, but a good comfort blanket. </p> <p>Then I returned. Two hours had passed in seconds. Something prevented me opening my mouth to yawn and I remembered the fifty feet of salt water above my head. The day was dissolving, the surface of the water blushing with the sun's last efforts, the blackness of the deep rising to embrace the night. Warning signals competed for my attention. My medical suite had all but repaired my skin but, like a good physician, reminded me I needed to eat and drink and get plenty of rest. It wasn't able to suggest a convenient hotel or spa in keeping with my usual style. A new crop of stubble was already replacing the incinerated hair roots on my scalp.</p> <p>I allowed myself to feel in the raw. My skin throbbed with heat and fitted tightly at the joints. I supposed sunburn felt like that. A body's worth of seared dermis was detaching itself in sheets with no more resistance than shrinkwrap to be fussed over by fish. I tore at my chrysalis with fingers and nails, discovering smooth, healthy skin beneath. </p> <p>Then another warning signal, a jab of adrenaline, and I chose to feel rather than see the invisible shape approaching. The darting movements of the scavenging shoal felt like a gentle rain. The thing closing on me brought a pressure to bear on my torso, squeezing my lungs, increaing smoothly and relentlessly; it was bigger than me, faster then me and knew exactly where I was. </p> <p> <small> <a href="http://rampantanomie.blog.co.uk/2008/06/13/cheap-day-return-part-4309508/#comments">Comments</a> </small> </p>http://rampantanomie.blog.co.uk/2008/06/13/cheap-day-return-part-4309508/Fri, 13 Jun 2008 08:29:10 +0200 <p>Monday 24th March</p> <p>We flew BA from LHR to SFO. My extreme height and my cantankerous spine obliged me to shell out for a premium economy seat, or whatever the BA corporate euphemism is for seats allocated to the lowest rung of the bourgeoisie. The extra outlay entitled us to a modicum of deference from staff, miniature toothbrushes, sleeping masks, hot and cold running movies and a seat pitch you could just about swing a mouse in. When the dullard in front of me fully reclined their seat ten minutes into the flight, I could retain feeling in my legs and had to stretch to read their choice of newspaper. I could also amuse myself by blowing gently onto their hair. </p> <p>The booze also flowed freely, almost taking the fear out of scudding through the stratosphere at 500 knots in an aluminium tube packed with jetfuel, strangers and complementary copies of the Daily Mail (Note to Flaming Cross: Why would anyone want to read about the wretched and banal minutiae of life at home when they're supposed to be on holiday?)<br> In a mere eleven hours, we were transported in a soaring arc across the Atlantic Ocean, the Canadian tundra and the Pacific North-West. 40,000 feet feels high over ocean and prairie. When the flat patchwork quilt of Alberta suddenly stops at Calgary and the Rockies leap up to meet you, it feels less so. </p> <p>Having experienced immigration officials at Chicago, I'd braced myself for more of the same; balls-out aggression with the possibility of water-boarding and invasive searches from paranoid sociopaths in uniform, none of whom could find the UK or Iraqistan on a map. Perhaps something of the Summer of Love remains in SF, however, as the border turnkeys were almost cheerful in their approach. Our papers were processed and our fingerprints scanned in a heartbeat, and nobody wanted to search my bags for RPG's or wish me, 'Gut luck, Tommy.' I was almost disappointed when noone gave me a flower to wear in my hair.</p> <p>We were met in San Francisco by our Bay Area fixer, Rachel. An expat Brit, her accent is still somewhere over the mid-Atlantic, inching slowly westwards. The glottal stops are still firm, but each sentence ends with an upwards tweek as if a small current has just been applied to a delicate area. </p> <p>We'd rented a SUV in order to truly savour native culture. We wanted a vehicle as obese, ostentatious and inefficient as possible in which to cover thousands of miles. Naturally, and true to our fixer's prediction, the airport Alamo man tried to mumble and humble us into an unnecessary and pricy upgrade to an SUV big enough to carry an infantry platoon into Basra. I don't quite remember the reasons, but it had something to do with the holiday period, stock rotation, snowdrops on petals, whiskers on kittens and the fact that a guy my height would look out of place in a vehicle weighing less than three tons and incapable of towing a bus. </p> <p>TBC</p> <p> <small> <a href="http://rampantanomie.blog.co.uk/2008/06/01/fear-aamp-limp-disdain-in-las-vegas-part-4254247/#comments">Comments</a> </small> </p>http://rampantanomie.blog.co.uk/2008/06/01/fear-aamp-limp-disdain-in-las-vegas-part-4254247/Sun, 01 Jun 2008 13:09:58 +0200 <p>Greater London is home to about seven million people, a fair proportion of whom must actually want to live there. Arriving at Kings Cross from the sticks is always a culture shock. It's not that Lincolnshire is some bucolic idyll, all sun-dappled lanes and ruby-cheeked farmers raising their cider jugs to you as you amble past on your straw-hatted nag to nowhere in particular. It's just that London is at the centre of our culture in the same way that the colon is at the centre of the human body. Yes, it has art, culture, old buildings, big buildings, history, a marathon, Sir Alan Sugar and so on. But it also has astonishing property prices, obliging even high earners to live in the kind of squalor that homeless people in Hull would scoff at. It has teeming multitudes all vying for the same pavement space, bus seats and stale oxygen on the tube. It has high crime and poor air quality. It has lots of exciting and appealing jobs, if you don't mind spending four hours a day commuting and having your first coronary at 39. And the tap water tastes like it's passed through every Eastenders cast member since Anita Dobson, without being treated. </p> <p>I'm glad they elected Boris, mainly because I don't live there. And don't get me started on the expansion of Heathrow. Oh, go on then. It's getting more and more difficult to get a long haul flight from anywhere other than Heathrow. This despite the fact that Heathrow is just about the least convenient UK airport for anyone not from London. And don't get me started on the Heathrow Express, whereby the unwitting traveller can find himself paying five times the price of a Ryanair ticket to Nice to get from Waterloo to Heathrow. Welcome to London. </p> <p>Like any professional traveller to a conflict zone, I employ a local fixer whenever we hit London. I can't reveal his true identity for fear that he'll be ejected from his Pearly King troupe or spurned by other metrosexuals, so I'll just refer to him as Bill. We'd never blend in by ourselves, possessing neither cockney, mockney or Australian accents, nor the kind of exotic foreign tongues that make the average London Burger King kitchen sound like the UN General Assembly. </p> <p>Bill tried to help us blend in. We spent the afternoon roaming Hampstead Heath but failed to spot any trouserless Tory MP's or tell George Smiley that the pike had flown north at midnight. We spurned Highgate Cemetery for the tourist trap it was, although I secretly wanted to pop in and search for the grave of Dan Dare. On the local high street, we drooled over estate agents' windows before popping in to a local hostelry where the Norwegian barmaid served us Belgian wheat beer. We then retired to Bill's pied-a-terre where we listened to light jazz, warmed our cockles with cucumber vodka and a fine Gewurtzraminer, and enjoyed a home made southern Indian marsala made from scratch using ingredients picked by Bill on a special trip to the Punjab, sorry, the local Waitrose. Which was nice. </p> <p>TBC </p> <p> <small> <a href="http://rampantanomie.blog.co.uk/2008/05/12/fear-aamp-limp-disdain-in-las-vegas-part-4164146/#comments">Comments</a> </small> </p>http://rampantanomie.blog.co.uk/2008/05/12/fear-aamp-limp-disdain-in-las-vegas-part-4164146/Mon, 12 May 2008 16:01:04 +0200 <p>This travelogue isn't going to take me to the heights of the Hindu Kush, nor to the depths of the Marianas Trench. I won't be sharing the sputum of wild boars with cannibalistic pygmies from the Ribble Valley, nor navigating the Sahel with only a skateboard and a piece of string. No account of this trip will give the reader much that they couldn't find in a travel agent's window, and I won't deviate much from my usual solipsistic style. But it's about time I started to keep a journal, and you're most welcome to indulge my peripatetic ramblings.</p> <p>My first fatuous foray into fiction has taught me that the medium burns through small details like an American car burns through fossil fuel. Besides, memory is a fickle friend, and a mind as crude as mine will soon push aside any notion that doesn't lead to food, sex or sleep (read on, and I promise at least one of those will come your way). So, I feel the need to record the gems we uncovered in case all I actually remember is coal, or, in the case of Las Vegas and South Yorkshire, slag. </p> <p>So, I'll be serialising our US trip, not to immortalise my searing insights into that enigmatic and shy nation, but to give myself a break from grown-up writing which I'm starting to find ruddy difficult. Expect verbiage, parenthesis and unfocussed asides. And sentences poorly structured. </p> <p>Saturday 22nd March 08</p> <p>Our trip to San Francisco begins with the No. 2 bus from Branston to Lincoln (via Washingborough). I put on my blue suede shoes and I boarded the 1981 Leyland Wayfarer twin-deck, so to speak. As with most of the vintage buses on this route, I have to touch my chin to my sternum and crouch to walk around, and the upholstery smells like three generations of old, wet retrievers have died on it. </p> <p>We eventually find a train that will take us to London Village and boldly display our multiple advance APEX deluxe power ranger first class tickets. These allow us to make our way to the hallowed halls of the first class compartment; there, we can sit in slightly bigger seats and enjoy a single tepid beverage of our choice in the knowledge that we could plan a conference with our wi-fi equipment should we so desire. As I nibble my complimentary shortbread petticoat, I know I've struck another mighty blow in the class war. </p> <p>TBC </p> <p> <small> <a href="http://rampantanomie.blog.co.uk/2008/05/07/fear-and-limp-disdain-in-las-vegas-part-4144760/#comments">Comments</a> </small> </p>http://rampantanomie.blog.co.uk/2008/05/07/fear-and-limp-disdain-in-las-vegas-part-4144760/Wed, 07 May 2008 20:08:19 +0200 <p>I'd like to offer my appreciation to the surprising number of people who tune in to this blog on a daily basis, particularly those who join in now and again. I should add that dissent, feedback and suggestions are always welcome. </p> <p>As for the Liberian reader, yours is a love that should not speak its name. To answer your questions, I'm a lady of advancing years, I suffer from necrotising halitosis and I live in Inverness with my retinue of sporran-flinging highland assassins. </p> <p>In a day or two, we'll be off to California for three weeks, during which time I'm not likely to be posting. From 10th April I'll be back, refreshed and ready to rant, so please tune in again from then. </p> <p>Matthew, if you're reading, you owe me a long reply. Sorry I put your name in my last post. I don't really want to trap you in a burning barn, but that could change if you don't send me something to read quite soon. </p> <p> <small> <a href="http://rampantanomie.blog.co.uk/2008/03/19/keep-watching-this-space-3905750/#comments">Comments</a> </small> </p>http://rampantanomie.blog.co.uk/2008/03/19/keep-watching-this-space-3905750/Wed, 19 Mar 2008 17:00:14 +0100 <p>The sky was yellow and grainy like old newsprint. Every few minutes, an airliner would traverse it, drawing an arc of noise and grime all the way from Torremolinos to Ringway. The whining would swell into fierce pressure that flattened the world and receded as slowly as the day’s heat. There was no room for simple heroism in these skies, no silk scarves and goggles, no delirious vapour trails as heroes in Spitfires and Hurricanes slashed across a blue and better sky to fend off the evil Nazis. </p> <p>The blonde boy screamed a throaty, twelve-piston roar as the Spitfire in his hand swooped and rolled in pursuit of Matty Henderson’s Messerschmitt. Matty flung the yellow-nosed craft into an inverted loop but the pilot’s efforts were in vain when Matty’s toe hit a stone and he crashed to his knees. Matty rolled onto his backside, knees glistening with blood and ribbed with peeled skin, the 109 still held heroically aloft. The silence thickened and Matty’s eyes glistened as he considered whether or not to cry. </p> <p>“Gerrup, you puff,” said the blonde boy. Matty nodded at him, sniffed and stood. Eight year olds don’t cry. “I’ll give you a head start.”</p> <p>“Oi, Pyro, why am I being chased all the time?”</p> <p>“’Cause you’re the Jerry. Good guys win. We won, stupid. Anyway, don’t call me that. ” </p> <p>“Why not? That’s what my dad calls you. I’m not supposed to play with you ‘cause you’re a pyroniac and dangerous.”</p> <p>“Why not? ‘Cause I’ll give you a dead-arm times ten, that’s why not.” </p> <p>“Oh, ok. Anyway, why am I always the Jerry?”</p> <p>“My aeroplanes. My rules. Look out, achtung, Spitfire out of the sun.” The blonde boy brought the plastic killing machine in a high arc down towards Matty’s head. </p> <p>“Catch me first.” Matty ran, one leg stiff at the knee and smeared red. The blonde boy followed, machine-gun noises and flecks of spit flying from his mouth. </p> <p>A Maxi was labouring and spluttering up the track towards them at crawling speed, windows open, radio belting out some nonsense about a brand new combine harvester. Tethered to the wing mirror an old greyhound lurched along, no more than bones and gristle knotted together by overstretched skin. The boys knew the old man at the wheel would have something to shout about because he always did. They could already see his lips working soundlessly beneath that famous nose, wide and blossoming red and purple. </p> <p>Matty took a leap into the weeds, kicked another brick out of the farmer’s wall as he half jumped, half fell across it and set off through the nettles towards the field thick with yellow stubble and the barn beyond. The blonde boy followed, pausing when he was safely over the wall to flick the V’s at the old man. The dog yelped as the car’s brakes dug in and its lead was jerked to a stop. Whatever the old man shouted was lost as another airliner churned the air into noise and grime. </p> <p>“My plane is faster in a straight line, you pyro divvy,” shouted Matty as he sprinted across the field, stubble crackling under his Dunlops, once white now grey like old chewing gum. The blonde boy pelted after him, knowing his gangly legs would close the distance quickly. The familiar throbbing in his temples had returned. </p> <p>They both slid to a stop as they found the corrugated cement of the farmyard. The barn doors were open, a safe darkness lay within and it wasn’t overlooked. The air carried the sweetness of hay and the tang of dung, a distant rumble of generators, the slow lowing of cattle nearby. </p> <p>“It says not to trespass over there,” whispered Matty, Battle of Britain forgotten. </p> <p>“Been here lots of times. That barn’s haunted or something. No-one ever comes. You scared?” Matty shook off the question as though it were an inquisitive wasp. </p> <p>“Right then.” The blonde boy sprinted towards the barn. “Last one in loses the dogfight.” </p> <p>Shadow embraced them as they lurched inside, Matty trailing yards behind. This shadow should have felt cool but it nursed towers of baled hay, reeking of heat and cut grass. Stalks and cut twine were strewn on the floor and the corrugated roof and wooden beams ticked and groaned above them. </p> <p>“You lost the dogfight.”</p> <p>“Not fair. You didn’t say go.” </p> <p>“Doesn’t matter. Shot you down in flames.” </p> <p>Matty dangled the plane by its tail and let it pirouette to the floor with a rising howl followed by a phlegm-filled explosion. He laid it down gently without even bending a propeller blade. “Let’s go back, it’s nearly time for my tea.” </p> <p>“Not yet. I shot you down in flames so that plane needs to burn.”</p> <p>“It did. I made an explosion and everything.”</p> <p>“No, I mean like really.”</p> <p>“But you made this one.” </p> <p>“I’m a bit sick of it. Anyway, I’m getting a Focke-Wulf at the weekend.” The blonde boy handed Matty his Spitfire and pulled a plastic lighter from his hip pocket. </p> <p>“You are tapped. And a pyro or something.”</p> <p>“What you afraid of? A few cows? Just watch this Nazi burn.” With a practised motion, he struck a flame and held it to the plane’s tail. Both boys watched goggle-eyed as the fuselage blackened then drooped and refused to catch light. </p> <p>“Thought you knew all about fires then?”</p> <p>“Not my fault. I thought all that glue would burn. Just give us a minute.” The blonde boy picked some long stalks from the floor and wrapped them around the plane with a length protruding from the tail. He flicked the lighter again and the length embraced the flame. </p> <p>“Watch him go down in flames now then.” He tossed the plane earthwards, trailing orange flashes and pungent smoke. The moment it left his hand and moved beyond his reach, a new knowledge moiled in his guts. Even before it fell to earth, he saw in a flash of flame and destruction and heartache what he might have done, and knew he no longer wanted to share a body with the prattling fool who made him do these stupid things. </p> <p>The plastic plane crashed and splintered onto the hard floor and slid into a bale, no longer aflame but blackened. Matty’s mouth twitched into the ghost of a smile. For a second, the blonde boy breathed again. Then the parched straw found the heat and let out a grateful gasp of white smoke. </p> <p>“What did you do that for? What do we do now?” Matty was shifting from one foot to another, still holding the precious Spitfire. </p> <p>The blonde boy pinched his eyes hut and slapped himself once then twice. “Can’t have this again. Go get water.” Matty’s eyes were beading and his lower lip trembled. “Go on. Just get water.”</p> <p>Matty ran, his Dunlops slapping the concrete hard. Matty stood and watched, willing the bale to stop. The sweet grassy air was turning into something hot and bitter, something that tickled the back of his throat and squeezed his eyes. He grabbed the smoking bale, tried to move it, felt it crackle and breathe heat at him, dropped it and stood back, trembling. </p> <p>He shouted for Matty and the water and slapped himself again, harder. Minutes passed, or seconds, and Matty didn’t come. He couldn’t see the roof and the high beams were receding from view, shadows dissolving in gauzy heat. Smoke and flame were leaping from more bales as though they’d been waiting there all summer for this chance to escape. He plucked the lighter from his pocket, swore at it, dropped it and stamped it until it smashed. </p> <p>Then he ran, the way Matty must have done. Lungs working like bellows, drawing the smuts and the smoke and the taste of his own wicked stupidity deep into his lungs, he reached the tree-line, hunkered down in the weeds and turned and watched. Help must come. Farmers had hoses and water. Only the old man had seen him near here. What would happen? Would his life end? Would he go to jail? </p> <p>Tiny compared with the stocky farming lads he wanted to see, Matty staggered into view, lop-sided with an enormous grey bucket in one hand, and lumbered into the smoking maw of the barn. He didn’t come out until after the beams crashed in, after the farmer in his blue overalls had tried and failed to defy the flames, after the fire men had hosed it all down. Then the ambulance men turned up with a stretcher and a red blanket to bundle up something the size of Matty. </p> <p> <small> <a href="http://rampantanomie.blog.co.uk/2008/03/19/bright-spark-possible-prologue-sorry-it--3905654/#comments">Comments</a> </small> </p>http://rampantanomie.blog.co.uk/2008/03/19/bright-spark-possible-prologue-sorry-it--3905654/Wed, 19 Mar 2008 16:36:14 +0100 <p>This conspiracy goes deeper than you thought. Fox Mulder, high priest of UFO conspiracy theory, was a triple agent all along. The faded poster always in shot during heated debates in Mulder’s basement office proclaimed the fatal fallacy at the heart of the UFO creed: ‘I Want To Believe’. If a belief is based on need, it is unlikely to be based on objective fact. Or, as any science student will confirm, if a scientist sets out to prove a predetermined theory, it is all too tempting for them to embrace facts that support that theory and jettison the rest. </p> <p>The very term UFO has been abused; an unidentified flying object is just that, rather than an interstellar voyager which must be knowingly referred to as a UFO in case The Man is tapping our calls. UFO theorists tend to be creative and sensitive people, so sensitive that they’re afraid of cutting themselves on Occam’s Razor. To paraphrase that principle, to stand any chance of being truthful, a theory should dispense with as many far flung or bizarre assumptions as possible. It is one thing to see strange lights in the sky; it is an outrageous leap to suppose that because we can’t explain them they must be extra-terrestrial tourists. </p> <p>Not that extra-terrestrial visits are impossible; they are just wildly improbable compared to the mundane truth of most sightings. The list of suspects is long and distinguished: hallucination, collective or otherwise; weather balloons; satellites, falling or orbiting; aircraft of all shapes and sizes; atmospheric, magnetic and solar phenomena; meteorites; our own spacecraft. From time to time, a sighting will defy explanation, but that doesn’t entitle us to pin a fantasy to it. For example, can we really presume to know everything about how our own atmosphere interacts with our solar system?</p> <p>As for a military conspiracy, is there really anything strange or sinister about cutting edge military contractors not sharing their latest findings with the world? Secrecy in matters of defence technology is de rigueur and always has been. Some now familiar aeronautical marvels were once jealously guarded secrets whose outlandish appearance might have sparked all kinds of yarn-weaving before their public debut. The SR71 first flew more than forty years ago, the B2 more than twenty: military science doesn’t stand still and doesn’t shout about its achievements. Any public servant or defence contractor who signs the Official Secrets Act is in on the conspiracy, if you feel compelled to call it that. </p> <p>Besides, don’t conspiracy theories of all kinds give too much credit to governments? Considering the intelligence failures, whistle-blowing, and domestic and foreign policy disasters of the last decade alone, can government as we know it really be capable of stage-managing the kind of labyrinthine and delicate conspiracies that Mulder used to be so fond of? How can it be that the nation which salvaged a bone fide spacecraft at Roswell has only just managed to create a supersonic VTOL fighter and is still soldiering on with the crude and dangerous Space Shuttle? </p> <p>Perhaps I want to disbelieve in UFO conspiracies. Am I just as guilty of cherry-picking facts to fit a preconceived case? Maybe. Yet I believe wholeheartedly in extra-terrestrial life. Such is the incomprehensible size of our universe, it seems inconceivable that we are entirely alone. However, UFO theorists should think hard about spacetime rather than space in isolation. Not only could we be separated from other sentient life by millions of light years, we could equally well be separated by millions of calendar years, and that’s without considering travelling time. Even if another sentient species had mastered FTL travel and propelled itself in the right direction, the odds against them occupying a sufficiently proximate niche in spacetime to happen upon us are, well, astronomical.</p> <p>And if such a mighty civilisation managed this feat, would they have done so just to probe the gullible, molest cattle and tease airline pilots? I wouldn’t presume to know how an advanced xenoc thinks or feels about such matters, but the activities usually ascribed to them don’t seem to justify the effort involved in getting here. Having said that, the Apollo programme cost $25 billion in 1969 dollars and the benefits might not be obvious to an outside observer: one unsatisfactory game of golf, an extreme sports holiday for 21 Americans and a quantity of interesting rocks moved 250,000 miles. </p> <p>The most objectionable aspect of UFO conspiracy theories is the old fashioned geocentric hubris behind it. We can’t resist seeing ourselves as the centre of the universe and therefore the most fascinating thing in it. Even when we colour in the vast blank spaces left by UFO sightings, we create spacecraft crewed by humanoids who reflect the cultural preoccupations of our times. In the white heat of the Cold War, they’re obsessed with our technological advances. In a more climatologically aware age, they’re fleeing a barren homeworld for our blue-green oasis. Choose whatever fairy tale suits you. </p> <p>As some good and bad sci-fi writers have suggested, for any xenoc race to go to the time and trouble of getting here, they’d have to have a very good reason. We wouldn’t be shaking hands and staging light shows with frail, benevolent humanoids interested only in curing cancer and swapping CD collections. We might find ourselves quite reasonably regarded as vermin by superior and incomprehensible beings who want our real estate. We should be careful what we wish for. </p> <p>If you want to believe a thing before you’ve even seen it, the chances of your seeing the truth are slim indeed. I must sign off. The Man is buying me lunch. </p> <p> <small> <a href="http://rampantanomie.blog.co.uk/2008/03/14/i-don-t-want-to-believe-from-another-hel-3875636/#comments">Comments</a> </small> </p>http://rampantanomie.blog.co.uk/2008/03/14/i-don-t-want-to-believe-from-another-hel-3875636/Fri, 14 Mar 2008 11:55:07 +0100 <p>On the lip of the depression, a hand was splayed on rough stone, lopped off and cauterised in a precise cross-section at the wrist joint. I knew I hadn’t lost that much of myself, nor do I wear violet nail polish or a ring on the third finger. Fedora man had a matching ring, a thick band of unadorned gold. It seemed Portal had been laughing because it didn’t know. If it condescended to speak to its new guest, I wonder if she’d have been reassured to hear that she wasn’t far from home in purely spatial terms. </p> <p>With a bulge of vertigo, I sensed slo-time winding down. I shunted all thought of our first victim to the back of my mind and took in my surroundings. I was on a wide esplanade in a world made of sandstone. On one side, an ancient wall rose from buttresses of dark silica which jutted into a sea of dark blue shimmering into green; rasping and sucking as it mauled the rock. On the other, buildings jostled for space on the shorefront and climbed uphill away from it in a jumble of terracotta rooftops, hotel balconies, crucifixes, aerials and satellite dishes.</p> <p>What I took for tourists with skin tones ranging from snow-white to lobster-red crowded the street cafes. A police car idled in traffic a hundred metres away, the sole occupant’s gun hand tapping out the Morse code for boredom on the roof while the index finger of his other hand explored a nostril. At least a dozen people were looking at me and would start to react in half a second. I had my explanation for why a vermillion giant was standing naked near the dismembered hand of a respectable married woman and her screaming husband. The onlookers would no doubt find their own. </p> <p>With the active camouflage utilities in my suit, I could have become nothing more than a thickening of the air and slinked away in my own good time. Still, I wasn’t without resources. As I snapped back into real time, I launched myself at the seawall, registering only a chorus of screams and the flicker of a policeman’s shades in a rear view mirror as I took flight. Whipcord muscles allowed me to fly as far as I fell, and I hit the unyielding silica hard. The shock reverberated through my endoskeleton and my vision blurred. I carried some of the shock into forward momentum and, inflating my lungs and pinching closed my lips, I pitched myself into the spume. </p> <p>Pain warnings whined at me again as the salt found my scorched skin. I acknowledged and silenced them all as I dragged myself down. I was lucky to find no shallow littoral but an abrupt shearing of the land into dark depths. Schools of fish flitted and flickered around me, group minds with dumb curiosity. At fifty metres, I lodged myself in a rocky overhang, willed my heart-rate to a near standstill, and waited for dusk with a drip-feed of oxygen from my over-inflated lungs. </p> <p> <small> <a href="http://rampantanomie.blog.co.uk/2008/03/13/cheap-day-return-part-3872504/#comments">Comments</a> </small> </p>http://rampantanomie.blog.co.uk/2008/03/13/cheap-day-return-part-3872504/Thu, 13 Mar 2008 18:07:14 +0100 <p>The door unsealed itself in front of me, petals opening then spiralling away. Portal was no longer trying to engage me in conversation and was humming something not unlike Cavalleria Rusticana. It could have orchestrated the melody without taxing its diodes but instead chose to deliver it in a phlegm-filled murmur. Was it a critique of my fatuous desire for heroism, or just a mild annoyance to keep my mind occupied? I suspect both. </p> <p>Once again, I ran diagnostic routines and all my sub-systems responded as intended. Peripheral fields offered me views of the chamber in all relevant spectra, there were no glitches in the autonomic suite and the displacement utilities were primed. I tightened some straps, smoothed my eyebrows and adjusted my lucky pants. I bit into my left thumb until I tasted copper, heard the polite chime of a pain response and watched as the puncture laced itself closed and a bead of blood fell to the floor where it bounced once then rolled to a stop. Portal stopped humming with a choking sound. I apologised, stooped and flicked the ruby out of the chamber. </p> <p>I remained stooped as Portal cleared its non-existent throat. The door sealed itself behind me, the petals this time no prettier than closing jaws seen from the wrong side. The roseate light neither alarmed nor comforted and the silence was impenetrable, bereft of the whip and crackle of massive energies pulling at the leash. My fields showed me that the spots where my crystallised blood had touched the floor had just been irradiated. Portal apologised for being so surgical but this was after all a kind of transplant. It suggested I might like to count down from ten, assuring me that I’d be gone by zero. </p> <p>I got no further than forming the words ‘ready when you are’ in my forebrain. I’d squeezed my eyes shut and before I could pry them open again numerous pain receptors were chiming and I was outdoors under a deluge of UV light being propelled away from a figure by pre-programmed reflexes. I stifled the offensive protocols which were vying with the pain to be heard. I gave myself a surge of stim to help cut down the processing time. I rocked on my haunches on hot stone as this new world rolled slowly around me.</p> <p>Nothing I saw resembled a weapon, much less any hostile intent. I could see, hear, feel and breathe; all encouraging signs. I didn’t need my eyes to tell me the bad news. Portal hadn’t transported as much of me as it had planned. Had it been a carpenter, a discrepancy of a millimetre or two might have resulted in nothing worse than a sticking door. In my case, I’d lost most of my hair, all of my clothes and the tips of several fingers and toes. My skin looked like it had been flash-fried and was still crimson with heat. </p> <p>I noted and filed the pain bulletins, raising a prayer of thanks to the gods of technology. Before my medtech had been installed, I’d experimented with old fashioned pain just to see what all the fuss was about. What I found would have supported an argument for an utterly malicious creator. Good as the entry level brain is at reporting pain, it can’t leave it at that. It has to keep screaming its message at lung-bursting volumes, and won’t desist even when the unfortunate victim has done all they can about the source of the pain. Opiates and the like seem to have been about as effective as holding a pillow over a screaming patient’s head; the only way to really kill the pain was to really kill the patient. Don’t hate me too much because I’ve never experienced toothache outside a virtual sensorium. </p> <p>Had such a thing been possible, the flashing and jabbering of pain bulletins would have given me a headache. My nanonics could solve some of my problems, but I’d need shelter and nutrition first. Even then, I could hardly re-grow my suit and its fabulous toys. A short jump from where I squatted, on the lip of a smouldering, concave depression in the stone, teetered the figure I’d first seen. In the slo-mo time induced by the stim I could just make out that he was falling forwards. He was short and wiry by our standards, with a complexion like varnished maple. He wore a baggy linen suit with matching fedora. One hand was moving to protect his face with its clenched teeth and half-closed eyes; the other held the stalks of a bouquet of flowers, neatly cut and smouldering, the blooms nowhere to be seen. </p> <p>TBC </p> <p> <small> <a href="http://rampantanomie.blog.co.uk/2008/03/11/cheap-day-return-part-3857482/#comments">Comments</a> </small> </p>http://rampantanomie.blog.co.uk/2008/03/11/cheap-day-return-part-3857482/Tue, 11 Mar 2008 18:20:53 +0100