Whinge

I am a very bad blogger. Sometimes, I even forget I have a blog. Today, I remembered, and shuffled over to see if it was still there. It was. Is. Bugger. Did I write all this? How is it that I have time to write this much waffle? And it’s not like I didn’t ask myself, at the beginning, when a blog seemed like an exciting sort of thing to do, how is it that people have so much time to write such waffle? So I knew what I was in for.
But really, what’s this all about? It isn’t real writing or anything and I don’t think anyone thinks it is. At the top end I suppose it’s all about traffic, and the point of it is probably equally divided between peppy popularity and product placement. But down here at the pond-scum end, it’s just us little amoebas whiffling away about whatnot. And haven’t we figured it out by now: the internet is not real life and 99% of the people who live there are not real people? Yes, of course we have. We watch the next generation blissing out on some myspace hallucination, and we know they’ll grow out of it. Or will they? It’s different now. Mind you, all old people say that, when they don’t feel like getting their heads around whatever new thing.

Doug Shaw Update

Doug Shaw loves me. He said so. And not just any old Doug Shaw either, but Doug Shaw Prime. THE Doug Shaw! Not just Doug Shaw the arch villain, or Doug Shaw the mad professor, or Doug Shaw the trapeze artist; but Doug Shaw Himself. Doug Shaw loves me because I mentioned his name so many times, a couple of posts back. So this is how it works, eh? Mention someone’s name enough times and they find your blog, just like that. And then they either love you or they hate you. Doug Shaw loves me, Mandy De Waal hates me: 50/50 odds, not bad… Neil Gaiman, Tori Amos, Neil Gaiman, Tori Amos, Neil Gaiman. Tori Amos, Neil Gaiman, Tori Amos, Neil Gaiman...Tori Amos…

So, Doug Shaw Prime, thank you for solving the Doug Shaw mystery. I’d leave a grateful comment on your blog but I can’t, it won’t let me. I’m not going to push it by hacking either , not because I can’t (he-he), it’s just that I’m dead scared of that half-a-cow corpse you have in your freezer…
Dear readers (all three of you :-) ): you can see the corpse for yourselves by going to http://revdj.livejournal.com/ and scrolling down a bit.
But, seriously: are people googling themselves or something? ‘Cos, how does this work? What are the chances of you stumbling across your name mentioned on one of a zillion piddly blogs, just by accident? If I google myself I don’t get anything at all. I am unfamous. Infamous would be more interesting and probably quite lucrative. But I’m not going to go there because I still have living relatives and there’d be hell to pay.

The Borg, The Devil and the Coffee Shop

There’s a difference between a coffee shop and a Coffee Shop. In a Coffee Shop, you’ll get high-concept, applied to a hundred franchised outlets nationwide (or thousands, worldwide). The overwrought menu will feature high-octane shooters with porno names, novelty ‘coffees’ and power smoothies, frou-frou fusion folly on twenty different types of stale bread slapped together according to the formula by underpaid high-turnaround staff. There is no owner, there’s a holding company. The manager will not be able to change the CD because there isn’t one, there’s a permanent shuffle of twenty prescribed popular trax. The rows of jars on the counter are décor, filled with coordinated coloured water. If you ask for Marmite toast they won’t have it. The patrons will be posers. They’ll click their fingers at the waitress impatiently. They’ll be networking, networking, networking. Many of them will have sunglasses on top of their heads. They’ll be loudly animated and will check to make sure everyone else has noticed how happening they are. You will not be allowed to ignore them.

By contrast, a coffee shop will serve real coffee, and you can ask the owner to change the CD if Eros Ramazotti’s annoying you. A coffee shop is where you can spend the space between the time and, unless a large table of lost Coffee Shop creatures has wandered in, which seldom happens, you can even spend it in peace. The décor is as invisible as good typography. If there’s a row of jars on the counter, they’re full of macaroni, or pickles, or tips for the kitchen staff. You’re assured of human kindness in a coffee shop, and of a menu which might be full of typos and amusing spelling but offers things that nourish, and that you can recognize. You’ll get honest sandwiches at a coffee shop and you can always get Marmite toast. If they’ve run out of Marmite they’ll trot down to the Spar and get some. Your fellow patrons will be people. They’ll greet the waitress warmly. They’ll be reading tabloids/Tolstoy/Time, or writing lists/letters-to-the-editor/literature, or chatting face to face. Or they’ll be playing backgammon, or agonizing over the lotto numbers. By and large, they’ll keep their business to themselves. You can eavesdrop if you want to.

So the coffee shop which used to be my home away from home is gone. One day it was there, and the next it was covered in paper which said, exciting new Coffee Shop opening soon. Sure enough, some weeks later, there was a Coffee Shop, where my coffee shop used to be.

This coffee shop thing is a symptom of a world gone Meta.

So is Wikipedia. I’ve been troubled by Wikipedia for a good long while now. I tell kids to stay away from it. But why? They ask. I stop just short of answering: because it’s the devil*, and say instead: because it’s often not accurate.

But it’s worse than that. Wikipedia is The Borg. And more direly even, it’s the Borg without a Queen.
Don’t get me wrong. In some ways I admire the The Borg (and I love dinner-time conversations that become incendiary when someone suggests that the solution to humankind’s angst could be to just go Borg), but everyone knows that there must be a Queen. Without one, the hive-mind disintegrates into useless units of hapless confusion. There are people who have found Wikipedia entries about themselves that range from wishful thinking to downright false, and after they’ve gone in and corrected the entry, they return to find that some kind soul has incorrected it back again. That’s the thing about popular opinion and the way it becomes canon, despite reality. The aggregate wins.

It also seems lately that Wikipedia and Google have some sort of galactic domination arrangement. I used to get a good variety of results on a Google search, from academe to news to popular opinion and all sorts of psychedelic stuff in-between, and I could more or less make my own mind up as to whose information I would get the most benefit from. These days, I have to sort through the first three pages of search results with a fine-toothed comb to get something that’s not Wiki. There’s a lot to be said for keeping information in context, and for keeping sources intact. When everything’s flattened out by aggregate, you get muddy puddles in isolation, with no paths leading to and from. When it comes to plain old information anyhow, I want a meritocracy. With Wikipedia, how do I know if the person telling me a thing is qualified to tell it?** And if all information is to become cast in this type of format in the future, as some people think it will be, what will there be to compare it against? There are whispers in certain circles, predictions of the imminent birth of artificial intelligence from deep within the womb of Google itself… who’d have thought? We thought it would be humanoid at least, didn’t we? Nuts and bolts, with an operator’s manual and an Off Button maybe – but humanoid. Or caninoid, or whatever. Reassuringly recognizable anyhow.
Wikipedia as AI’s 2-IC… I don’t even want to think about it. Not today. I’ll think about it tomorrow. Rhett, oh Rhett.

*What is the devil? Fundamentally, it’s things that scare us. It’s also things we don’t understand, and things that threaten to displace us, and things we can’t be bothered to investigate further. It’s the tokoloshe under your bed, it’s over here, it’s out there. It’s different things to different people and usually boils down to fear. So Wikipedia is not the devil, then. But maybe Google is.

**With apologies to The Cosmic Cabman, who does actually write good stuff for Wikipedia. If you wrote it, Dio, I’ll ratify it without question. This is flagrant cronyism of course, which excludes me from ever being considered by a lucid panel of experts for the post of Wiki Queen. Actually, Afrikaans Wikipedia is at this point probably a really reliable source of info, if only because the online community is small and cozy enough (by web standards anyhow) that everyone knows someone so credentials can be cross-checked… and anyone writing an inferior article risks have his biltong confiscated…

Praise Tom Eaton!

I’ve become Tom Eaton’s Number One fan, I hope he feels honoured.

Regarding his book, The De Villiers Code, some silly interviewer asked him: “As a South African writer / storyteller did you set out to write a story South Africans will recognise as their own?”
My Tom answered: “No. I set out to write a story that South Africans would recognise as Dan Brown's. Stephen Fry described The Da Vinci Code as ‘complete loose-stool-water’ and ‘arse-gravy of the very worst kind’, and while I think he may have been a little charitable, he was going in the right direction. It's not the gullibility of people that offends me. I'm also not a religious person, so I don't get worked up over the arrogance of assuming that 600 pages of drivel by a write-by-numbers typist can reveal what 2 000 years of scholarship couldn't. What I really mind, though, is that his excremental writing goes unchallenged. You wouldn't let a stranger stand in your living room for hours on end, shovelling faeces down your shirt while he screamed, ‘You're a moron!’ So why would you let Dan Brown do it?”

(The whole interview’s at http://www.litnet.co.za/ricochet/homebru_tom_eaton.asp )

The De Villiers Code is one of the most wickedly funny things I have read in a long time, but there’s a catch: you have to read The Da Vinci Code first. You’ll need one of those protective pointy silver foil hats that they wear in the movie Signs; it might help to stop your brains from leaking out your ears, but it must be done. I did it, and look, I’m still fine aren’t I?

Would the real Doug Shaw please sit down

At a Star Trek thing I was at last year there was an individual going by the name of Doug Shaw. He said that he was a writer of books on economics, and was busily speed reading (both of which habits I associate with psychopathic conditions) through a huge book (the kind you could use as a weapon) on the History of Western Philosophy. He had a tense, unhinged charisma and a scar on his cheek and struck me as being someone on whom I could loosely base one of the villains in a story that I'm working on. So who was this person? I embarked on an epic google, but it turned out that trying to find a specific doug shaw is tricky. There are hundreds of them. They even have a collective website, dougshaw.com. But then, if I were a real villain, I might also purposefully choose a name that allowed me to get lost in the crowd.
I finally found one with genuine villain potential. A MENSA member with a scheme for every occasion; a rampant capitalist whispering into the ear of politicians, offering the planet up for sale in so many ways; the host of strange pay-at-the-door parties and then: the piece de resistance – some sort of rabid underground religious evangelist. ACME Evil Genius! Absolutely perfect! I don’t even care if he’s not the right doug shaw! So, Doug Shaw, if you’re reading this (no, the other doug shaw. No, not that one, the other one… ) I hope you don’t mind too much. It’s a compliment.

Verily, my friends (and VERILY, my enemies!!!), I have risen up in the world. I have been quoted and also shamelessly flattered in a real article by a real editor lady: http://www.women24.com/Women24/Columnists/Article/0,7173,12-147_9791,00.html
The article is all about silliness, and how it’s okay to be silly, and about how silliness can actually save the world. I am vindicated, and newly galvanised to the promotion of the Great Way of Silly. From now on, this blog will be nothing but silly, silly, silly!

Lost Property

A friend recently failed the Scientologist's personality test. This is unfortunate, as I was hoping for a contact on the inside. I don't know any practicing Scientologists but I know people who claim to have escaped Scientology, and they're reluctant to discuss it - they seem a bit embarrassed and a bit broke, and one gets the feeling they'd rather just forget about it altogether. I'd very much like to know more about the interesting Scientology story regarding the alien ruler Xenu who fixed the overpopulation problem on his 76 planets by bringing millions of people in for a tax inspection, then drugging them and shipping them off to earth (presumably unpopulated at the time), where he had them stacked around volcanos before nuking the volcanos. The way I understand it is that most personality problems experienced by people today can be attributed to the fact that the lost souls of those unfortunate nuked aliens attach themselves to humans, clinging desparately to some vestige of existence and causing all kinds of schitzophrenic glitches in the average human's matrix.

Of course, this might just be a story made up by anti-Scientologists to discredit the religion itself. I don't know. One of the most interesting things about this church is the vehemence of its opposition. Something which is so hated by outsiders must surely be hiding great truths. Or not.
I wonder, if my friend made a substantial enough donation to the church, maybe they'd ignore the failed personality test and let him in. He can infiltrate, and we'll be able to see if all these stories are true. I mean, if I could prove that I had thousands of anguished alien souls hanging onto my aura, it would explain a LOT.

Girl put your records on...

...tell me your favourite song, you go ahead let your hair down...

This blog began as a medium through which I could stay in touch with friends and family all over the globe and in particular, with my sister B who was living with us at the time. That’s funny, hold on, let me check that… Yes it’s true: so I could stay in touch with B although we lived on the same property, in the same house in fact. It didn’t work quite the way I’d planned – I thought I’d make chatty, newsy day-in-the-life type entries. Looking back at the blog I’m laughing at all the concrete evidence of best laid plans coming to ruin…

But I don’t think I could stay in touch with my own pinky finger, quite frankly, because I have too many Fishies. Fishies are those bubbles that some people have in their heads. They go, “plook, plook” in the silvery depths and mostly it’s like Chinese torture, although sometimes, on really lucky days, it’s like an epiphany, or Christmas-tree lights. Some people have Nebulas, which are pretty much the same thing, just more sophisticated. I always felt odd because of them, and never fitted very well anywhere, least of all in my own real life, until I discovered Neil Gaiman’s “Sandman” some years ago. The character Delirium, who often trails a flock of bobbing rainbow-fish balloon-things and seldom makes sense in the traditional meaning of the word, was a revelation to me because I already knew her so well. I felt a bit better about my own fishies after I met Delirium because although she’s odd she’s basically a good person. When I discovered much later that Neil and Tori Amos were friends, and that Del was partly based on Tori, the world began to make a whole lot more sense to me, non-traditionally of course but nevertheless.

Anyhow, this is to say, I’m sorry about all the Fishies. There are a handful of people in this world who I love too, too much for words, among them: Ray; my Terrifical Teenage Daughters; Mom and Dad; B; Weez; Mom Joss; Nu; Dio; Migi; Choz; Alli Cat… if you’re reading this, guys – thanks for putting up with me.

The end of days is nigh, as usual

A while ago, after reading up about carbon trading, I wrote something about our planet being able to withstand the ravages of human nature, that for all our delusions of grandeur we could never actually destroy it as such. Destroy environments conducive to the wellbeing of our species and others, sure, but not destroy the actual planet. Well, I was wrong. It IS possible. See http://qntm.org/destroy

Well, Really!

! A request has been made to this blog. It comes from none other than a Compliance Officer (Resistance is futile). So: One of Two, also known as Nu, having been mightily impressed by our (patent pending) mouse-over-and-waft Sniff-n-Sneeze© plugin, asked that we develop a mouse-over-and-spell-check gizmo for the comment box. It seems she’s been unable to access the Natural Comment nano-betaframe thingy itself because of blogger-VS-word cut/paste (ERROR!!!DINGDING!!!FATAL:ERROR!!!! put your hands on your head and drop your cookie settings now:ERROR!!!) non-compliancy Issue no: 73.9. You know the one. Ok, fine, we’ll see what we can do but personally I think that this is just a terrible excuse - we geeks (hehe) know the error’s actually to do with her Sink Notification Socket. Thingy. And the way she always forgets to charge her Svchost Antimatter Modulator – I mean really, it’s no wonder.

Captain-Postman Pete said he’d tried to look at this blog but suddenly everything went all funny on his keyboard. So he tried to blame me for dropping some or other virus on him. Oh puh-leeez, come on. Pff. Like, I don’t have better things to do than script viruses all day long and fling them at non-geek friends and family. People like us (us geeks, you know) must just take a deep breath and count to ten, I suppose. So in the interests of the sanity of geeks (like me) everywhere, I have added to the FAQ. Sigh.

FAQ continued:

7. Why does my computer wig out when I look at/try to post comments to your blog?

Either a.) You're technologically challenged and should not be allowed within a 10 Km radius of any computer or b.) You have some heavy internet karma.

I can't help if the answer's a, but if it's b I can't help.

So try this: Go into the garden and find a portable-sized rock. Talk to the rock, let it absorb your frustrations. Feel the power of the rock. Respectfully pick the rock up and carry it to where your computer is. Place the rock gently on the desk near the computer. Now, while wearing a red knitted hat with a bobble on top (like the ones they wear in the movie "The Life Aquatic") inside which you have hidden a moth's wing, a blue marble and a flat penlight battery, sit down in front of your computer and switch it on. When the desktop appears (or, when it doesn’t – like if after waiting for over an hour all you get is a black screen with an ominous dos prompt instead of a desktop, for instance), put your right hand upon the rock while addressing the machine thus: "you bloody bastard computer, don't mess with me or I'll hit you with this rock." Then, phone a geek and request an emergency consultation. While waiting for him, keep your hand on the rock and your eyes on the monitor, scowling dangerously. When the geek arrives, have him look at the computer, but all the while, do not let go of the rock. The geek should have the problem sorted in no time, because in my experience too-big-for-their-boots computers always respond very well to geeks when there is a primed rock handy. This is a seriously dark and deep binary magick, you understand, so while you are performing this entire ritual it might also be an idea to have a shaman (or other intermediary) available, to intercept any demons which might want to take advantage of a rip in the fabric of spacetime.

If this fails (because nothing is perfect), then try seeing the loss of all your stuff (treasured letters form far-flung friends and family, for example; or your entire portfolio) as being a wonderful opportunity to start afresh. No, really. For heaven’s sake, stop crying. And next time, back up.

Poetry is dead, long live Poetry

I often carry on about my computer getting dragged into black holes but this time it really did. Apart from trees falling down on phone lines and stuff… long story but the short of it is that I now have a new phone line and a new computer too. Not sure if I’m glad because I must admit that not having a computer or a phone line did free me up for other pursuits, like painting with real paint; reading real books; writing with real pens etc - not that I pursued any of them besides the reading but I did have good intentions. Anyhow, alas/alack, now I’m binary bound and shackled once more.

This laptop takes a little getting used to. It doesn’t have the patina that my old monster had. Doesn’t make the same comfortably familiar Cranking Victorian Machinery noises, like an old and rusty (but faithful) robot-dog called up out of its basket for a spot of reluctant cat-chasing. But it’s okay. It will do.

I was amazed to find that famous people have been leaving entertaining comments on this blog in my absence – ok, one semi-famous person anyhow. See “Poet as Hired Gun”. I had thought that this blog was fairly innocuous and a bit boring, with at most about five occasional readers, but it just goes to show. This month it was Mandy De Waal, she-poet who runs with wild horses (?) in the Magaliesberg, and still manages to hold up a well paid day-job too. Mandy doesn’t do garrets, and is ‘empowering’ other ‘poets’ to follow suit. There is a lot of Added Value in it.

Here is a comment posted by Gwen Watkins to Mandy’s original article about poetry and business, which can be found at http://www.biz-community.com/Article.aspx?c=18&l=196&ai=9575

“The concept of using poets to pursue a political agenda is hardly new, nor the idea of persuading workers that "imaginative" ideas will in any way set them free.

Many poets were used by the state or tacitly wrote to please. For as many freedom poets as you can find, I can find those that glorified the state. Even Shakespeare was not above twisting the truth so as not to annoy Queen Elizabeth I – the play Richard III is not in the least accurate but the truth did not set you free in those ‘enlightened’ times – it put you in the Tower of London.

Poetry is about the flight of imagination – it springs from deep and true emotions. It’s something I have done for forty years but never on command. Shaped poetry to achieve an end is no longer poetry and as for praise singing – its very name tells you exactly what its purpose is – propaganda set to rhythm.”

Which was very well said, I thought.

PAX

I've decided to put all my grudges aside and be more mature. So, forthwith, I will no longer be mean to Marketing People. I won't make sarcastic blog entries about Marketing People. I won't post any more irritating comments to Bizcommunity. I will live in peace, and let Marketing People live in peace too.

This I swear, so help me gods.

Just Brand Me

A triptych:

1
Kieron Dwyer is in big trouble. He subverted Starbucks. After he’s been sued to smithereens, no doubt he’s going straight to hell. Not many can parody a mindset so eloquently, and this thing is a work of art, so damn and sue me - I’m posting it. (For the full story go to http://www.cbldf.org/pr/001130-starbucks.shtml)

2
The people in charge of protecting the interests of the brand integrity of the film Attack Of The Killer Tomatoes™ sent Neil a letter threatening to sue if he does not remove a link to AOTKT’s official website. Not that Neil did ever actually link to that, um, illustrious entity in the first place. Initially, he was amused, thinking it might be some kind of prank by Dadaist Lawyers, but was disappointed to find that it was not. Anyhow, if you have nothing better to do (e.g., if you like watching lawyers make asses of themselves on behalf of people who think too much of themselves; and especially if you hate vegetables), you might want to scuttle off to these urls and be mildly entertained:
http://www.neilgaiman.com/journal/2006/03/mystery-dada-tomato-threats.html
http://www.tomatoesareevil.com/ (links page, although the Link That Caused All The Trouble doesn’t exist. Anymore.)

3
Authors and other artists often use cultural markers to help describe the particular ‘flavour’ of a scene. Some brands get so interwoven with a culture that they become like unto salt for the table. But a couple of the big guys are unhappy about the use of their marks in fiction; worried that overexposure will result in “trademark dilution”. If they get their way, you won’t be able to say the word “Harley” in a story about a biker anymore. And don’t use Nike’s name in vain ok? Or Else. No more free advertising, guys. If you want to advertise McDonalds in your story you’ll have to pay them for the honour.
So instead of writing something like, “In a fit of depressed defiance she ate an entire box of Quality Street,” you’ll have to write, “…she ate an entire box of those assorted toffees and chocolates in various brightly coloured foil and cellophane wrappers; you know - the kind often given by pupils to teachers at the end of a school year.”

Poet as Hired Gun

“Poets will no longer live outside the fringes of business, but will become increasingly commonplace within the heart of the corporation as cultural decoders, praise singers, mediators between management and labour and as a facilitator for forging a new paradigm for leadership.” - Mandy de Waal

She says this with a straight face. She believes it too, deliriously caught up as she is in the evangelism of Marketing. Mandy has in her trinity: the market as father, brand management as son and ‘poetry’ as holy ghost. One gets the feeling that her holy ghost is her wild card - ‘Poetry’ is just so hot right now.
Thankfully, we can trust genuine poets to evade this new career that Mandy is so excitedly marking out for them, because one of poetry’s many functions is to expose precisely the kind of speech she sells for what it has always been – rhetorical verbiage. Spin and praise-singing by their nature can never claim the edge of poetry’s diamond blade. No deal, Mandy. Whatever you put out in the name of Marketing Almighty won’t really be poetry, and those who devise it won’t be real poets. Deep down, you know this, Mandy.

(Besides, what corporation in its right mind would invite poverty and chaos by admitting a poet to the inner sanctum? And in any case, the vital elixir of attic dust wouldn’t settle well in gleaming boardrooms. You’d have allergic reactions all over the place)

I agree with the Eskom Man

As everyone living and travelling in SA knows, we are having some trouble with our power supply. We’ve grown so fast that the grid cannot cope, no-one seems to have predicted it, and then there’s the trouble with that bolt (?) at Koeberg. We are helpless as babies, of course, plugged into and completely dependent on the matrix, and people sit around gnashing teeth and rending garments waiting for the power to come back on. The boss of Eskom got really upset in a boardroom recently, where there were wraparound windows with all the crisp Cape Town daylight anybody could possibly need for a meeting pouring in, and where every electric light in the room blazed nonetheless. “Turn them OFF!” he raged. He mentioned that we’re greedy and excessive and we’re part of the problem, and I completely agreed with him. Many didn’t, including David Bullard, who went on to pen a sarcastic and indignant paragraph berating the man for urging us all to be less wasteful. The gist of his angst is that THEY (meaning whoever is in charge of anything at any given time. My kids say that Chuck Norris is THEY) are incompetent gits and THEY’RE making excuses and THEY have a duty and THEY’RE failing us.
But I still agree with the Eskom Man. We DO have to learn how to use less. If only we had a global Mao-type entity to initiate a re-education programme of some sort to this effect, with really steep penalties like execution or something for failure to comply. We won’t do it ourselves, by choice, so someone’s going to have to dictate it.

I got Tagged. Huh? I’m usually about three light years behind any given current development but it made me feel kind of important, in a sad little way. Tagged? By Toutatis, What does this mean?!? It must be a Marketing Ploy! But no, it’s one of those circulatory pass it on things. This one doesn’t seem to come with dire warnings about what will happen to you if you don’t pass it on, so there isn’t any fun in not-passing-it-along-on-purpose-just-to-see-if-the-terrible-things-happen. May as well pass it on then… Thank you, David.

Four jobs I've had:

Window Dresser
Waitress
Illustrator
Starship Navigator (at school they called it “tends to daydream”)

Four movies I can watch over and over:

Pi
Life Aquatic
Finding Nemo
Galaxy Quest

Four places I've lived:

Blantyre, Malawi
Chirimba, Malawi
Johannesburg, S.A.
Cape Town, S.A.

Four TV shows I love:

Star Trek
Voorblad
Going Nowhere Slowly
Fawlty Towers

Four highly regarded and recommended TV shows I haven't seen:

Highly regarded and recommended by the general TV-addicted public? I don’t even want to know.

Four of my favourite dishes:

Noodle soup
Toast with peanut butter
Macaroni cheese
Bread & butter pudding

Four sites I visit daily:

- not online daily, but most frequently I visit:
neilgaiman.com
hereinmyhead.com
a couple of blogs: do they count as sites?
bizcommunity.com (out of a sado-masochistic compulsion to observe Marketing People in their natural habitat, and also to amuse myself by irritating them as much as possible with pernickety comments. They are very easily irritated and sometimes I have nothing better to do when my brain gets empty. Which is sad, sad, sad I know but we all have our vices)

Four places I've been on holiday:

Zimbabwe
Mozambique
Botswana
England

Four albums I can't live without:

Tori Amos, Scarlett’s Walk
Loreena McKennit, The Mask and Mirror
Zakir Hussain, Making Music
Eva Cassidy, Live at Blues Alley

Four places I'd rather be right now:

Navigating a Starship
Sitting on the shady bench overlooking Diana’s Eco Shrine in Hogsback
Reading a book on the stoep of one of the beachfront cottages in Keurboomstrand
Having an ice-cold whatever’s-going at midday in the dark, cool Waenhuis in Nieu Bethesda after walking the dust roads on a particularly dry, hot and windy day.

Four other people I’m tagging:

Dio
Owen
Neil :-)
Desmond Tutu

Emission Control, We Have a Problem

This is a Very Long lecture-thingy, anyone who doesn’t like it can go and google “britney and kevin” or something.

A good while ago I asked, what is Carbon Trading? After a month of looking at it from as many angles as I could, I really wish I’d never asked, because it turns out that Carbon Trading is like piling all the deck chairs onto the up end of a sinking ship and sipping cocktails while pretending it’s not sinking. It is a great delusion, and probably the most ambitious business scam in history.

It works like this:

We on planet earth have something called the greenhouse effect, a natural heating system that is necessary for life on earth as we know it, but which in excess is harmful to life as we know it. Certain human activities have pushed the limits in this regard, by releasing far larger amounts of the relevant gases than would naturally have been released. This isn’t a good idea right now – as yet, we have nowhere else to live. A bunch of countries got together in the early nineties to see what could be done to mitigate snowballing of the greenhouse effect. Some stuff was decided. All participating countries had legally binding Reduced Emissions Targets to meet. The targets were inadequate, but it was a start.
Also, a plan was devised which, among other things, allows CO2 and other greenhouse gases to be traded. The idea was that the more you intended to emit, the more expensive it would be for you, in theory penalising the worst offenders where it hurts them most – in the pocket. (In practise, of course, the more the big money spends itself the bigger it gets)

Very simplistically: say you normally use 150 emission units, that is; you emit x amount of greenhouse gas. It’s been decided that this is too much and you are given an amount of 100 units that you may not exceed. Your neighbour is in credit, though: he uses only 50 units because he has far less industry than you do, but is also allowed to use 100. You yourself can’t actually get by with only 100 and still live the way you’re used to living, but if you want to you can buy 50 of your neighbour’s unused units (with money or trees or good deeds, it’s quite flexible) and use them for him on your own behalf. He’s happy, you’re happy, everyone’s saving the world and making money into the bargain. What is being traded here is, literally, hot air: and look - you are still making exactly the same amount of emissions as you were before. So is your neighbour. And mostly, the Kyoto Protocol becomes a farce.

Carbon Trading, AKA the Emissions Market, is a forked-tongue arrangement for ‘offsetting’ greenhouse gas emissions. It will allow poor and underdeveloped nations to remain poor and underdeveloped while under licence to rich overdeveloped nations who will continue as before, in real terms not reducing emissions at all, just spreading them around a bit.

Carbon Trading has many rabbits in its hat, but has trees as its star crowd-pleaser. The theory goes like this: trees remove CO2 (one of the greenhouse gases) from the atmosphere, and store the carbon molecules. Therefore, if we plant new forests* in poverty stricken countries, they will function as global CO2-sponges and carbon-containment-fields (officially known as carbon sinks). The development of genetically modified super-trees is also proposed, which may soak up even more CO2 and store even more carbon. An amazing offshoot of this is that the poor get to benefit from it, through infrastructure investment and through the trees themselves, which can eventually be harvested and used in wondrous ways.

It sounds okay if you’re too busy with the daily grind of life to be paying proper attention, which is mostly the case. A closer look suggests that this kind of mopping up and storing is temporary. The theory is, at best, wishful thinking and at worst, outright deception.
The loco logic of Emissions Markets (google it – the money-numbers are staggeringly huge) says that it’s okay - we can keep releasing carbon that took millions of years to lock down in fossil deposits, if we just plant trees which will mop it all back up again. Instantly. Well it’s not that simple. The way they put it, we’ll have a planet full of people thinking that Carbon is the devil and only trees can save us, halleluiah. Carbon and Carbon Dioxide are not the same thing. Carbon itself isn’t a “greenhouse gas”. Carbon’s not the problem – it’s the conversion of it into extra CO2 by releasing too much of it into the air that’s the problem. Fossil deposits like oil, coal, peat and chalk are the most efficient carbon sinks of all - they can store carbon for eons while trees cannot. Stripping fossil deposits and replacing them with trees is like smashing a ruby and replacing it with a red glass bead – only much, much worse.
The Carbon Trade marketing pitch uses the sentiments of reasonably educated people to dishonestly plug for the “welfare” of the less fortunate. “It will help all the poor people so much,” the schpiel goes. “It’s win-win! We will plant trees that the poor will benefit from and the poor in turn will benefit the whole earth by allowing us to do so! Why, you too can offset your own greenhouse footprint, Joe Public - just plant a tree for every X amount of air-miles that you do. We have seen the light, and it’s trees.”

Get totally serious about spending serious money on searching for alternative, clean, sane, renewable energy? Stop over-consuming insane, dirty energy in the meantime? By the Gods, why bother? Let the leftover mutants huddled around the North Pole as the century ends worry about that stuff. Let them trade bread if they want to. If they can find any. OK let them trade nuts and berries then. If they can find any. For now we’ll just trade carbon credits because it’s so lucrative. Live in the moment. No worries, eh?

Genuine ethics would probably not smile upon carbon trading with its potential for abuse and corruption, and its ability to deflect attention and money away from a committed search for alternative energy sources. (It’s not just energy either – we do so many things in excess that are harmful, for example, we mine peat on a large scale so that we can use it as a medium to grow table-mushrooms in. We want millions of mushrooms on our plate right through the year and so this is how we do it)
The Emperor always needs a new suit and the tailors will always have a job. And, since the world-pool of generally acceptable things is increasing exponentially (in the interests of runaway-train-freedom-of-speech and freedom-of-whatever-whenever, all that), we might soon get some new Reality TV: once a week, all the little kids who tug at mummy’s skirt and say “But the Emperor has no clothes on!” will be lined up against the wall and shot. Pour encourager les autres, as Lynne Truss would say.

Maybe the planet has a plan of its own and maybe we’re part of it. Maybe it consciously wants us to keep turning up the heat and become extinct so that it can have a new era, experiment with some novel and interesting life forms. The runaway greenhouse effect is not necessarily bad for the actual planet (which seems to relish changing its look and feel from time to time); it’s only bad for humans and quite a few other species. But I believe** that the Earth itself will survive us. As important and powerful as we think we are, I don’t think we actually have the ability to vapourise the planet, even if we childishly nuked it one day just to see what would happen.

* Not actually forests. More accurately, they plan large scale monoculture tree plantations. There are big differences, for example: An established forest has a generational spread of young, mature, old and dying plants, as well as a variety of species both fauna and flora. All the species support different cycles within the whole while interacting, the system is robust because natural disease etc has less chance of bringing down the entire system when there’s a variety of species with different immune responses. Detritus is quickly broken down by myriad organisms and becomes compacted as humus on the forest floor – sealing it layer by layer and, if undisturbed, trapping carbon molecules in the medium to long term. A natural mature forest is one of nature’s own carbon sinks… etc… etc. Whereas a plantation consists of a single species and generation, vulnerable to various scourges, humus is not effectively formed, carbon molecules only trapped in actual trees for as long as they stand – short term… etc…etc.

**Belief: You can only believe something you do not know to be true. Whatever cannot be verified or proven in the present must simply be believed, or not believed. You don’t have to believe in tax, for instance, because it exists and can be proven. But you have to believe in fairies, god, human kindness, etc because no proof exists.
Some believe in Virgin Birth, even against proven biological facts to do with humans and their ridiculous inability to wind-pollinate. But then, we know very little verifiable stuff about Angels at this point. Perhaps in the future it might be proved that they can in fact do it without doing it, and sceptics will have to apologise. Maybe cloning is not so much a new technology as a forgotten art, and back in 0000 they were using it all the time. Could artificial insemination qualify as immaculate conception? In the hands of the right Marketing People, yes absolutely.
Belief is a wonderful tool. You can believe, or not believe, in absolutely anything you want to. There are no limits and no boundaries with belief. It’s very much like Marketing, actually.