I’ve been learning to touch type and I’ve reached that difficult stage, like growing out a perm, where I can no longer properly type with two fingers but I can only touch type at 20 words per minute. It occured to me that maybe I should have learned to touch type using a Dvorak keyboard layout since that wouldn’t have affacted my two-finger typing so much. Maybe it’s not too late to switch now.
Author Archive for ditdotdat
My relationship with Boden is spiralling downwards. Every time they produce a new catalogue they send our household three copies. Two for me and one for my partner. They have me in their database as two people, a rich man and a poorer one. They once sent the rich me their hard-backed catalogue, a glimpse of how the other half shop.
I never buy anything from them now, for two main reasons. The first is that their clothes are dangerously inclined to look frumpy on men, the trousers in particular are cut for men with meaty, american style hams. The second reason is that they waste so much money on sending catalogues to me. I assume that they send too many catalogues to everyone who has ever shopped with them and that is what makes their clothes expensive.
I really like talking to AIs. I suppose it must be for the same reasons that I like computers; the people who make them are similar to me and so it’s a comforting subset of the real world. The C.L.A.U.D.I.O. Personality Test Bot looks tempting. I wonder if it’s worth the money.
Sometimes I hear women talking about their partners in a way that makes my blood boil. They are dismissive and even contemptuous when they discuss the ‘ridiculous’, ‘tacky’ or ‘disgusting’ things that get men going. On the other hand, men are supposed to be considerate and accepting of the female view of romance and sex. It is such blatant hypocrisy. Most of the men I know work really hard, not just pretending or going along with their partner’s needs but actually getting in touch with the female aspects of their own characters. If the women in their lives would make even half as much effort to understand what it is that men need sexually everyone would be much, much happier. I hasten to add that my own partner is not too bad in this respect (although I don’t think she’d suffer from spending some time reading Belle de jour’s amazing blog.)
Well, these nasty skeptics are a real bunch of spoil sports. They went and did an experiment and concluded that “there is no evidence that listeners can hear the alleged RS (reverse speech) sequences unless ‘prompted’ in advance”. So I guess it’s back to the drawing board.
I know I’m probably the last blogger in the world to have visited newsgaming.com. But I did today and played Madrid. If you haven’t played it you should, and September 12th as well. I was in Madrid on the day that the bombs went off. My hotel was at the other end of the road that leads down to the station. I was also there for the huge march against terrorism and for the amazing election night. I felt so much respect for the Spanish people and the way they responded to the bombing, it really gave me hope.
Haven’t we been here before? It seems that the long-running story about the efforts of the Bush clan to keep their little boy out of danger during the Vietnam war is itself in danger; in danger of being discredited because of one mistake in one news report. According to Newsday.com a CBS “60 Minutes” story was based on documents that may have been forged. This reminds me of how the British government seized on a BBC story about how they lied about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction because one journalist said in one broadcast that the lying had probably been deliberate. The story was true, that fact couldn’t be shown to be true. One mistake enabled the government to discredit the whole story.
Sometimes I wonder if these little killer details aren’t leaked to the media as poisoned pills by our governments to help undermine inconvenient stories.
Meanwhile, cluster ballooning is a fantastic idea. Floating thousands of feet into the sky with big bouquets of colourful helium-filled toy balloons.
I suppose it’s the time of year for thinking about terrorism. There were a couple of programmes on television last night about the bombing by the IRA in 1984 of the Grand Hotel in Brighton during the Conservative party conference. Five people were killed and thirty four injured. Both programmes were presented by an old school TV journalist called Peter Taylor who was unable or unwilling to keep his apparent sympathies for the British government entirely hidden. Even so they were both good programmes, the first showed very deftly the events that surrounded the bombing and the second contained an interview with the man who put the bomb into the Grand Hotel, Patrick Magee.
I am sorry to say that I was very pleased in 1984 that the Tories had been attacked, and disappointed that Thatcher was not killed. It happened during the miners’ strike and my loating and hatred for the government and their cronies was at its height. These days I don’t think that the killing of politicians, however richly deserved, is any better than the killing of civilians. What I was really pleased to find out about during the programme was that a woman called Jo Tuffnell whose father Anthony Berry was killed in the bombing has met and is working with Patrick Magee helping victims of violence to meet and maybe achieve reconciliation with the people who carried it out. I admire this sort of careful, gentle work towards peace so much.
By a strange coincidence my cousin Mark emailed me yesterday to tell me about how he took part in the Stonewalk monument walk in August. Another group of brave and inspiring people, this time relatives of people who died on September 11th.
I watched Fahrenheit 9/11 a couple of days ago, on the 11 September actually but I only noticed the date afterwards. During a painful sequence showing pictures of Iraqi children hurt during the American bombing I saw an injured kid being carried out of a ruined house. The kid had wet himself and for a moment, probably because I am in the throes of toilet training one of my own children, I felt the fury and desire for revenge that must motivate many terrorists.
Of course, I know in my rational mind that revenge is a self-destructive motivation and one should try to free oneself from it. But I can’t rid myself of the feeling that someone must pay for the crime that is being committed in Iraq. In fact, as the film tries to explain, there is no point in taking revenge on Americans, or American soldiers, or indeed on anyone apart from those guilty politicians themselves. Maybe it would be just for Bush and Blair and their corrupt cronies to feel the same pain that those grieving parents of dead children and soldiers feel. But I know that the only way that justice can be delivered is by carefully and thoughtfully exposing what they have done so that they and everyone else knows exactly what they are guilty of. So it’s journalists, documentary makers and artists who will be the avenging angels, not suicide bombers.