The moving finger rants

One of my colleagues, previously referenced in these annals as $MINION, will shortly be squeezing an entire person out of her body. Tough job. I couldn't do it. So naturally, conversation at work over the last few weeks has tended to revolve around notions of expectancy and parturience. Apparently, so $HOUSEKEEPING_SUPERVISOR claims, the more younglings you produce, the easier it becomes to pop 'em out.

Specific examples were provided. (I've learned that, once you get a mother talking about the human gestation period, it's difficult to get her to stop.) In particular, $HOUSEKEEPING_SUPERVISOR's fourth progeny, a (now) young lady by the name of Ella, was so eager to emerge into this world that she hurtled forth in the lift on the way up to the maternity ward.

Brief as the lightning in the collied night, I was. (As the bishop said to the actress.) Ere a man hath power to say behold!, I said: Is that why she's called Ella?... middle name Vator?

Tumbleweeds rolled through the scene. (That's okay, I have staff to clean the dining room these days.) Somewhere, a lone carrion bird cried out. Not even a titter ensued. I need better staff.

To be fair, $CHEF sniggered, but only after I'd said oh come on, that was funny. He's allowed to take an extra couple of seconds. He doesn't speak English.

In other news, I appear to be a manager now. People laugh at my jokes when they feel they have to. Not everyone, but it's still better than previously.

It is the responsibility of those receiving cash tips to declare the income for tax purposes to HM Revenue & Customs.

It is? I didn't know that. Oops.

What am I supposed to do about the Swiss chocs and this nearly-full litre bottle of liquorice schnapps that I received this week? I suppose the taxman's welcome to come round for a swig, but I've already eaten the chocolates. And of course he'll have to drink it without mixers. And I'll be taking photos.

On a vaguely related note, I caught the worcesterberry harvest, so I should have a bottle of purple-flavoured schnapps in a couple of months. If it turns out well I'll have to wait until next year to buy more berries.

My next project is probably going to be sea buckthorn schnapps; it grows wild on the cliffs around North Berwick, and is reputed to have voodoo properties medicinal effects. Either it or something spelled very similarly is related to wormwood. Could be interesting.

Eight hours of rugby morons— we had to hire a Rug Doctor™ at two pm, three hours before the match even started, to clean up the carpet-vomit—and then, blessedly, back home.

I'm sittin in Apocalypse Laboratories, drinkin sazeracs, and listenin to Classic FM. They can't touch me in here. Life couldn't be better.

Well, admittedly, toga-clad redheads could be feeding me grapes, but other than that, life couldn't be better.

Next weekend, on the other hand, scares the shit out of me.

The Royal Society of Edinburgh recently released a report damning VisitScotland and calling for it to be scrapped. Or so the Scotsman tells me. Actually, the RSE's press release says nothing of the kind: it barely mentions VisitScotland at all, and merely recommends that they (for a suitably nebulous they) radically reform the support structures for tourism. I haven't read the report: perhaps the report has stronger language. Perhaps the Scotsman is just being sensationalist again.

It's true that VisitScotland are, often, a bunch of incompetent morons who seem to have difficulty in the important business field of arse/elbow distinction. I'm wildly in favour of sweeping reforms, or, on bad days, the tactical nuking of Livingston; nonetheless I think scrapped is a bit strong. First of all they need to decide whether or not they're working with, or against, the accommodation providers, and then I think we can work upwards from there.

However, the knives are out now. Apparently (so the Scotsman tells me) VisitScotland had to change their information on rail travel, because FirstScotrail complained that they were being OMGMEEEAN to them. This is ironic, because the bandwagon that FirstScotrail are jumping on is just about the only movement-related thing that's happening to wagons of any kind at the moment.

Laying aside for a moment the astounding fact that VisitScotland actually got something right for once—namely, that the state of the railways is woeful and unless you're travelling between Edinburgh and Glasgow you'd better get a car, and if you are travelling between Edinburgh and Glasgow it would be faster to walk—this presents me with a moral dilemma. I loathe both organizations, and now they're fighting, so which do I root for?

I have to come down on the side of VisitScotland, because, while it is bungling, inept, and sometimes belligerent, there have been occasions when they've sent us a guest and nothing has gone catastrophically wrong. With FirstScotrail, on the other hand, I've learned to take a massive dose of opiate-based painkillers before even setting foot in the station. There has been one single occasion that I can recall in the last eight years when I've got on a train and not wanted to kill everyone before it starts to move. (Notable example here, and there are many others that languish unblogged because they are too painful to recall.)

Besides, in this case VisitScotland were being entirely accurate and honest, and they were reporting unbiased facts that tourists should know. This is their job, and I wish they'd do it more often. They didn't describe the rail network as skeletal, they said that it was at its most skeletal in the Highlands [emphasis mine, exactitude-fans]—that's a comparative, and to my knowledge it's not libellous or legally actionable in any way. They also apparently had a picture of a sign that said Beware of the trains. This is good advice. Even if the rail network was marvellous, if you get hit by a train it's really going to put a crimp in your day. This is the sort of thing that, in my experience, a lot of tourists need to be told.

I see what's going on here. Not only is it open season on VisitScotland, but one of the most notable complaints in the RSE report (so the Scotsman tells me) is that VisitScotland focuses too much on the central areas, as opposed to the outlying ones that need support. The tourism industry in those areas is struggling for a number of reasons, but key to them is not that VisitScotland has abandoned them, it's that tourists can't bloody get to them in the first place. This is, of course, the fault of FirstScotrail, not VisitScotland^[0], and as a result FirstScotrail has noted that the best defence is a good offence, and that, conveniently, that VisitScotland is now fair game.

Actually, no, there's no moral dilemma here for me at all. I am still on the side of Right as always. Both of you are cretins and should learn to do your jobs. You, provide public transport to places that people want to go; and you, provide information for tourists. It shouldn't be that hard. It's what you're paid to do.

If that's too difficult for you, could you try not to be complete bastards while you're at it? That would be nice, thanks.

~

Holy damn, there were a lot of StudlyCaps in this post. Do businesses think that extra capital letters give them an extra competitive edge?

It doesn't. Even if Scotland's rail network is a bit dodgy is a controversial statement, this isn't: BiCapitalization makes you look like a wanker. This is Truth.

Noted blogger the Bad Astronomer has just celebrated the fifteenth anniversary of his first ever webpage, which led, via a somewhat circuitous route, to him becoming a noted blogger, a couple of book deals, and all kinds of good things.

Still… Fifteen years. Wow. I never would have suspected back in ‘93 that sitting down and venting my spleen would lead to this. It’s been a lot of work, fun work! But the important fact here is that you just don’t know where a hobby, a moment of indulgence, a lark, will lead.

If you get that chance, if you find yourself (or someone you know) facing one of those moments, jump on it! It might be a terrible decision, sure. Being alive at all is a risk, but the best stuff comes when you take a chance. That decision might turn out to change your whole life, and make you very happy, very satisfied, and very, very ready to continue on for another fifteen years. At least.

Fifteen years later, he still uses too many exclamation marks, but that's just his thing. Sometimes, naive optimism can be inspiring. Sometimes it's just nice to hear that someone else is happy.

Anyway, I might as well give it a go. Three things I do for fun are act, cook and rant. Acting hasn't really panned out into a career yet, but that's no reason to stop doing it. And my links to production companies have allowed me to leverage the other two synergies.

Coming soon to an Internet near you....

Three Guys Argue A Lot About Cookery
(title subject to change)

It's a television show, but it's not on television. I am advised by my Executive Producer that mainstream media is for wusses, and YouTube is where all the cool kids hang out. So, instead, I shall be a legend on the internets.

Expect plenty of cryptic posts about what I've had to eat this week.

Filming schedule has been pushed back and back again, often on a couple of hours' notice, so yesterday I found myself doing an early shift at work so that I could go to a script readthrough that never materialized.

Instead I met up with J and J's father, who had a spare ticket for The Merchant of Venice at the Lyceum. But first there was steak. Lots and lots of steak. Petit Paris is doing a two-course pre-theatre deal now, and the starter, while somewhat less steaklike than the main, was also excellent.

I've never heard Shakespeare done in a Scots accent before. The entire cast appeared to have just walked in off the set of Taggart. Ruggedly handsome Weegies and women clearly attacked by hair-straighteners in the dressing room. The contemporary setting worked well in context, and seemed to defuse most of the controversy surrounding the play.

Somebody had conned various pillars of the Jewish community into kicking up a fuss (but the flyer has a picture of a Jew on it!—seriously, have any of you read the play?) and, in the event, the best these learned men could come up with amounted to but Hasidic Jews didn't exist in Shakespeare's day, so hah. Doubtless they did not, but neither did Armani and Nokia, both of which were much in evidence.

Although, in the case of the latter, I seriously doubt that Shakespeare meant for Gobbo's I cannot get a service to mean quite what it did on stage last night.

I was somewhat surprised to find that Shylock only turns up for five scenes and then is completely nullified by Act IV, after which the whole thing degenerates into a bog-standard Shakespearean romantic comedy: you know, the kind of thing where somebody doesn't tell somebody something and hilarity ensues.

All of British situation comedy seems to be predicated on this single concept. Somebody doesn't want to admit something, misunderstandings mount, and humour is spontaneously generated, abiogenetically, from the proximity of these events to three cameras and a studio audience. I can never watch this stuff. I always end up throwing stuff at the screen and shouting something like HAVE A CONVERSATION WITH YOUR WIFE, DAMMIT!

In the very early days I instituted a fundamental policy of Openness and Honesty with Jehane. What with her being female and all, it took a couple of years for me to train her entirely out of duplicitous blackguardry. I insist upon this policy simply because I have no wish for my life to turn into a third-rate sitcom, or, even, a Shakespearean romantic comedy.

~

I have been waiting about a fortnight to use the word `blackguardry' in a sentence. Which reminds me: Lidia at work has decided to expand her knowledge of English by selecting a Word Of The Day, pinning it on the noticeboard in the kitchen, and attempting to use it in five sentences during her shift. Her English is already pretty damn good, but I notice that it still gets left to me to write the sarcastic emails.

Naturally, as soon as I heard about this laudable practice, I gave her `antidisestablishmentarianism'. Returning the next day and reading the noticeboard, I discovered that today's `word' was apparently mercy, have mercy.

For tomorrow, I'm thinking `squamous' or `chthonic'. Or `colonic'?

Sitting at my computer desk reading a magazine, wondering why the page doesn't turn when I frantically scroll the mouse wheel.

Being woken up at six am by a random muscle spasm in my calf that was threatening to crush my shinbone into powder. Spending the next day walking to the bathroom and back only with the aid of the Pool Cue of Justice.

Explaining to the woman in the master bedroom that the hairdryer does work, and yes, that's what the big blue button marked ON is for.

So I've been watching a lot of Babylon 5 of late. This time round, it's not 1994 and I don't have to remember to wait in on Thursday nights for it, since it's all on the hard disk (*cough*torrent*cough*). Consequently I'm actually able to watch each episode, in order, and pay some sort of attention to what's going on.

I love the way that it's a single story, an epic tale packaged as twenty-five minute episodes and fed to us in discrete installments. I love the way that it gives you the sense that what you've just seen is a part of something much bigger; that as the closing credits roll we still don't understand everything but we might, just, learn something more about what's going on further down the line. I love the sense that what we've just seen is part of a plan.

I was very angry about something a few hours ago. Somebody was being moronic about something for reasons that I won't go into just now, because to do so will ruin my vibe (and for which reasons I shall probably lock this post down until I've got it all out of my system).

***ASIDE***

Okay, so which fucker decided that it was okay to declaim your ignorance of anything useful? Yes, you, I'm talking to you, little miss ``oh I'm so *girlish giggle* terrible with machines''. It's a computer. LEARN. These people seem to think that they can go around saying ``oh, I'm computer illiterate'' as if it's some sort of badge of pride. It's not funny, and it's not endearing: all it does is demonstrate that you are utterly incapable of existing in your own society.

YOU MORON! LOOK AROUND YOU! COMPUTERS ARE EVERYWHERE!

No one comes down to breakfast and says ``oh, *tee-hee* I'm so useless with a toaster''. No one ever says ``I'm so bad with cars, I always get a man to walk in front with a red flag''. No one says ``isn't it so hilarious, I can't do up my own buttons?'' No one says ``I wet my pants yesterday, isn't it such a scream?''

No one finds it amusing when you feel the need to declare your utter incompetence regarding a ubiquitous aspect of modern life.

It's the equivalent of a grown-up adult saying ``oh, isn't it such a larf, I have to have all my food pre-chewed''. All you have done is to publicly express your utter unfamiliarity with the world in which you exist and to which you are supposed to contribute. And somehow you think this is funny. You are a worthless, resource-sucking leech, a vile pestilence upon society: you are an execrescent, cancerous pustule on the anus of humanity. You should GET THE FUCK OFF MY PLANET AND GIVE YOUR SHARE OF THE OXYGEN TO SOMEONE WHO DESERVES IT.

In this particular case, this was a lawyer who earns five times my salary and was unable to work out that the USB-shaped jack fits into one of the USB-shaped sockets on the laptop. The know, the ones that have the matching symbol for USB connections. You know, the only ones on the entire machine that are remotely the same size or shape.

FUCKWANKING ARSECANDLING MORONBASTARDS!

(Oh yes, and a further aside: this was a conference for the Family Law Association. Family Law is a rather specific area and it's practiced by some rather specific lawyers. There were twenty-seven young ladies in the room, all wearing pinstripe suits and skirts and heels and generally being Hot For Teacher; and there was one guy, sat there with his free sandwiches and his coffee and a very obvious thought bubble above his head which read ``I know why I went into Family Law''.)

***END LENGTHY ASIDE***

Ahem. I was very angry about something a few hours ago. Now I'm less so, and it's largely because I've just sat here and watched a few episodes of something that hints that there are much larger machiniations going on that I can't see.

I feel very small.

I think I can see the point behind religion. What we experience is part of something the scope of which we are currently unable to comprehend. Perhaps we will be allowed to understand as time progresses. There is a creator (in this case, JMS) who knows what is going on, and if he won't tell us why, then he has good reasons for doing so: it's much more entertaining for all of us that way.

It gives one a sense of security. Life with a mythopoeism—no matter how fictional, metaphorical, irrelevant, poorly acted, fucked-up in the aspect ratios and/or with obvious CG—is somehow much safer and more friendly than life without.

(I'm not about to trawl through 1000 pages of Cryptonomicon to find the appropriate quotation, but religion is also incredibly useful for providing one with a common set of turns of phrase. The example in Cryptonomicon was along the lines of ``may God have mercy on their souls'' as opposed to something like, ``they died and metabolic functions ceased. So what?'')

I could go online (here, for instance) and find out all I don't know about what happens to Babylon 5 and the background to the Shadow War and what happened to Sinclair during those missing 24 hours (and why). I'm not going to. We ask for No Spoilers for a reason: it signifies that we surrender to the series creator's will, and agree to have information revealed to us when he deems it dramatically appropriate.

For a lot of (most) television shows, and films, I will read spoilers. I like to know what's going on and I like to feel I understand the background to things. (I also like to know more trivia than whoever it is I'm talking to at the time.) I feel the same way about real life. I want to read spoilers for Real Life™ because I want to know what's going on; because I want to understand the background, and the reason, for things; because I was put here without my consent and I want to know why; because I am a scientist and it is my duty to try to understand; and because I am impatient and if it is all to be mystically revealed to me towards the end, it will be too late for me to do anything useful with the information.

I do not, however, want to see any spoilers for Doctor Who or for Babylon 5. These things are important.

And yes, I am a huge nerd.

Back in August Belinda Robertson (`cashmere queen Belinda Robertson', to use her full title) organised to fashion show to promote her `range of cashmere essentials' with music and champagne sparkling wine. The postcard-sized flyers used to promote the event consist of a picture of a model---I think it's Katie Robertson, Belinda's daughter, but since I can't see her face I can't be sure---wearing cashmere knickers next to a cello.

(Wouldn't cashmere knickers itch like a Dimension Of Pure Itching?)

We had a stack of these flyers at the hotel. The event finished on the 25th August. Since then I haven't thrown the leaflets away because they add a nice splash of colour to a table otherwise covered in identical `come to our ghost tour' and `come to our other ghost tour, with the same people wearing different outfits' leaflets. Plus it's a very nice picture of Katie, and it seems faintly disrespectful to just dispose of her, to cast her aside like grains of salt from the basket of an old man, simply because the event is over.

Over the last eight months the stack of flyers has gradually been getting fewer and fewer. Somebody has been finding a use for all those pictures of Katie's bottom.

At work for eight o'clock this morning. Alarm goes off at seven. Press snooze. Alarm goes off. Press snooze. And so on.

Eventually get up and stagger over to the computer desk where I keep my cigarettes. Knock the mouse and glance at the computer clock.

08:34.

No it wasn't---or was it? The alarm clock still said 07:15, I own no other functional timepieces, and the Speaking Clock was conveniently unavailable. I have never been dressed so fast. If you heard a sonic boom in the vicinity of Tollcross this morning, that was me.

I have no way of directly pinning the blame for this series of events on my computer. Nonetheless, I suspect that Windows decided to randomly change the time settings just for a big old laugh. In any case, Bill Gates will be getting the bill for my dry cleaning.

Dammit, I want my Linux box back.

In other news: today at work was the first time that a guest has actually come out and used the word ``prostitute''.