Reality/TV

My partner, her 10 year old son and I were having one of those morning-cup-of-tea-in-bed type wandering conversations about how our TV watching was policed when we were kids and how much harder it is now to do that. We wondered if, indeed, there was a point to policing TV (but then, last night's family viewing was Tim Minchin's Ready For This) or was the policing of TV in our youth similar to how early motor cars couldn't be driven without a man with a red flag walking in front to warn people.

The boys in this house are more aware of certain - mostly sport-related - aspects of the world than we were as kids. Which is great. The down side of all this TV razzamatazz however is that often the real world fails to live up to the TV experience. Compare sitting way up the back of the crowd at a major basketball game with the coverage on the TV. Sure, there's atmosphere, but many folks - and young boys in particular - often prefer the autistic feast of stats paraded across the screen to the ambience of the stadium.

This made me think of those nature documentaries with David Attenborough and the like that the BBC used to make back when it wasn't crap. We swam with whales, flew with geese and buzzed through fields of flowers with bees. Nature made the stuff of spectacle. So awesome was the footage that real contact with nature - simply going out into your back yard and listening to a blackbird - seems utterly pointless. Lame as, bro. Reality just isn't as interesting as TV even though TV doesn't give you anything like the sensory richness of the real world. I held forth on this subject briefly. My partner's son nodded wisely:

"That's why we need 3D TV."

Not in my back yard

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Worrying developments at the kennels

Left Jim the dog at the kennels last weekend. Think there's been some sort of change of management.

UN Security Council to Dismantle Internet

A spokesman for the US-owned United Nations Security Council confirmed last night that telecommunications workers around the globe would be drafted in to complete “the greatest disarmament programme since the Second World War”.

The Internet was invented in the 1960's as a fault-tolerant communications network for military and private use. The unforeseen explosion of personal computing, mobile communications and the World Wide Web, however, has meant that ordinary people have accidentally been given access to more information than at any time in history. Some of this information is also correct.

Roy Hobbs, Minister of Branding and New Media in Her Majesty’s Government, described the Internet as “a complete fucking nightmare.”

“There have been no international protocols, treaties or test bans to limit the Internet’s proliferation. With the exception of parts of rural Scotland, every country in the world is now part of what is probably the most dangerous weapon the we have ever known.”

“The threat to ordinary people of unfiltered ideas, lunatic beliefs and unmanaged information has to be countered. Allowing this sort of thing to go unchecked will erode the very bedrock of our democratic freedoms. We must act now.”

Wikileaks.com - the future of web browsing

 “Here in the UK we were pursuing a more moderate approach, a Third Way, if you like. We have already redirected Wikileaks to a list of 24-hour emergency plumbers. Our next step was to give everyone really high-speed internet so that they could spend their time downloading the latest series of Desperate Housewives and watching dancing cats on YouTube rather than reading news items or, dear God, sharing ideas.”

“It’s an approach that has worked well with television.”

“But we have realised that as this is the UK we couldn't possibly deliver a high speed broadband network any time within the next twenty years. So we are following the Security Council resolution and dismantling the whole thing. The Internet was a colossal miscalculation. Demolishing the infrastructure will save hundreds of innocent lives, and will create dozens of much-needed jobs in Reading.”

“Interruption to your daily lives will be kept to a minimum, although you will no longer be able to send or receive email, or call the emergency services. Or anyone else. You will, however, still be able to use your iPhone to play Angry Birds.

He added, “What about that level thirteen, eh?”

New advice from HM Govt to students

Preview of the new UK government poster campaign produced in the wake of the student protests

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Honey - the taste of the burbs

My partner and I visited friends on the outskirts of Melbourne last weekend. They are the proud recent owners of some bees, all lodged in a smartly painted white hive. Keeping bees is not for the faint-hearted. Beyond the threat of stings there is the possibility of "bee thrall" where the beekeeper opens the hive and becomes mesmerised, Quatermass-like, by the fluid motion of the bee commune, forgetting not only why they had opened the hive, but that the hive contains tens of thousands of potentially enraged stingers.

We were lucky enough to taste the first honey from the hive. Tradition has it that the first honey is magical and you should make a wish before you have the first taste. We duly did... and then tasted. The flavours of that honey - squeezed cold into a jar and eaten fresh, no boiling, no added anything - were astonishing. There was liquorice - "ah, they'll have been at the fennel flowers"; there were notes of pear - "the neighbour's pear tree". The teaspoon of honey was like flying through the local back yards. The flavours were like a bee's conducted tour of favourite, fragrant spots. Close your eyes and you're with them. Did I really detect the faintest aftertaste of rusting Holden?

Commercial honey is okay, in the same way that blended whisky is okay. Blended whisky contrives to taste like whisky ought to, generically, but if you want to get into the whole whisky experience: the heather, smoke, honey, peat and goodness knows what else, you need a single malt. Honey, it turns out, is no different.

That first magic teaspoonful has ruined us for all other honey.

Kettling

In the light of recent events in Whitehall, London, where grown men have been beating up children in the defence of democracy  I need to share a quote from Soviet dissident Boris Kagarlitsky:

"Globalisation does not mean the impotence of the state, but the rejection by the state of it's social functions, in favour of repressive ones, and the ending of democratic freedoms." 

I reckon this can equally apply to the idea of Small Government (aka Big Society).  The champions of Small Government imply it will mean less interference in our lives by the state. Events lead me to suspect the opposite will be true. 

For many of school age this was their first taste of how it goes if you use public places to exercise your theoretical right to express your opinions. When I was at school we were always told "if you want to know the time/are lost, ask a policeman." What are we teaching kids nowadays?

Inside the Whitehall Kettle - New Statesman article

Boris Kagarlitsky - Wikipedia biography

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Swiss couple’s reality check in the Maldives

 
Caveat emptor!

If you were from, oh I don't know, let's say Switzerland, and you wanted to renew your marriage vows, why would you go to a palm covered island and have them renewed in a hotel that offers karaoke nights and rides on an inflatable banana as part of its suite of experiences?

Of course, most of the western press are on the side of the couple - falling for the irresistible combo of self-righteous indignation, fundamentalism and consumer rights - so I’m going to skip all the crap-du-jour that the papers are trying to whip up about this. I mean, there may well be hatred, but I would doubt it has religious fervour at its heart. If I was serving cocktails that cost more than my weekly wage, I would probably harbour some lingering resentment of those who lazed by the pool. 

What I wonder is how far removed folks like the Swiss couple are from their sense of place: their sense of home, of where they are in relation to everything and everyone else. Their sense of reality. How can they have thought that going somewhere far away from their homes, friends and family to renew their sense of their place in the world was a good idea? What are they lacking that they need some mystic mumbo-jumbo intoned over them in a language they don’t even understand on a private hotel beach in front of a bunch of people they don't even know? 

It seems as though one of the things that we most want wealth to do is remove us from our fellows. In regeneration projects, if you want to find out about a place you ask the poorest and most vulnerable members of the community as they tend to be the ones spending most time out on the streets, and have the keenest eyes and ears. As you climb the socio-economic ladder you find people more and more removed from their immediate surroundings with less and less knowledge of and engagement with their communities.

For folks like the Swiss couple, it seems the ultimate expression of wealth is the privately-owned island. Those who can’t afford an island go for two weeks in the Maldives, Seychelles or some other self-styled paradise and play make-believe. Make-believe millionaires, make-believe ceremonies, make-believe vows.

Don’t they have a favourite place within walking distance of their house where they could celebrate with friends and relatives? If not, why not? Find one. Get real.

Vilu Reef Beach and Spa Resort

The video - if you really need to see it. You will also get access to the comments... considered opinion from folks who spell Islam with a 'z'.