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Oh, The Strain Of It All

Published on December 9, 2006

I just popped out to feed the cats only to find that there are crocuses in flower in the windowbox outside. I planted them at the end of September, not expecting to see much till the end of January at least. No sign of any of the winter and early flowering bulbs at all, not even small shoots, which is a bit worrying; they need the cold and it’s been so warm and wet I think they may’ve rotted in the ground.

I suspect gardening’s going to be even more trial and error from now on and all planting advice will be suspect because of fluctuating conditions.

If this is happening in our pocket-handkerchief courtyard how much more devastating the effect on subsistence farmers worldwide must be : for me (at least for the moment, who knows what the future holds) global warming is just an inconvenient oddity and a gardening challenge. Whether I eat today is not dependent on the weather, nor whether my children go to school, have shoes or clean water or retroviral drugs.

No, my life is actually quite nice. So why can’t I enjoy it?

It’s a beautiful day, the sky is blue and the air still and crisp, the perfect day to get on a bike and do some Christmas shopping around the grachten, where the festive lights on the gracefully curved bridges are reflected twinkling in the canals and all is safe, warm, prosperous, pleasant and deeply self-satisfied in that cosy yet stylish Dutch way.

Most unlike conditions in the world’s megacities, which are growing steadily more overcrowded because of inward migration; people from climate-ravaged farms and countryside desperate for the chance to work 80 hours a week for 5 pence an hour, for the likes of such respected high street names as Tesco, Asda-Walmart or Primark. It’s not just a few flowers that are going crazy it ‘s whole harvests and agricultural systems and the resulting migrations are huge, making the population repercussions of the Industrial Revolution look like a small wet demographic fart. (Mind you it is Dickensian, so at least it has the saving grace of festive appropriateness).

Those people in those megacities and factories are what’s propping up this beautiful city and its pleasant liberal lifestyle. These smartly dressed burghers and their spouses make a nice living moving around the goods and cash those people produce for their owners. We live comfortably because they don’t. We are inextricably linked but it’s a death-dancel that most of us feel individually powerless to do anything about – nor do we want to while life is so gezellig.

There are millions just like me today all over Europe, out festive shopping, taking the opportunity of this lull between storms and trying to get one last good Christmas in before it all gets shot to shit.

Despite appearances many are, like me, grimly aware of the actual cost of the life we’re living. We just don’t know where to start doing something about it, so we’re going shopping. (We’re also trying to forget for one day that the future of Iraq and the Middle East and the likelihood of an unprecedentedly vicious transnational war between Sunni and Shia are dependent on the petulant whim of a man teetering on the edge of full-blown insanity but let’s not talk about that.)

So if you see me out and about around the Negen Straats today, one amongst many other smug, reasonably smartly-dressed but not too flashy middle-aged matrons laden with full, moderately priced but not too cheap carrier bags, recognise that I’m not enjoying myself at all: I too am suffering horribly. My neck aches with the strain of trying to deal with the liberal guilt.

Pity me, sit me down and buy me a coffee, but just make sure it’s Fair Trade.

Happy Hallowe’en, Mwahahahahahahacoughsplutter

Published on October 31, 2006

Not sure happy’s the right word for Hallowe’en, but it’s nicely alliterative. Anyway I found this site, Extreme Pumpkins, via a commenter at Pandagon and this of all the nicely sicko designs sums up how vile I’m feeling at the moment.

I actually went to get a flu shot yesterday, but it’s too late, I already caught something. Every year the bugs blossom earlier and earlier – soon they’ll have to start giving flu jabs in August .

This means I really can’t be arsed blogging today, not with a headful of hot wet sand and the screen swimming like it is and my nose throbbing and throat scratching and my bones hurting. Ow ow ow. Woe is me.

Bed beckons. Luckily we just re-found a couple of second-hand books I’d bought a while since and hidden for just such an eventuality as this. Martin will just have to take up the blogslack today. I’m outta here. I’m sure the world can collapse perfectly well in my absence.

Update: Yeah, yeah, I know I said I was going – but I just remembered I saw that one of our neighbours has put up Christmas lights and decorations already, the day before Hallowe’en. Earliest I’ve seen yet on a private dwelling in Amsterdam. or anywhere.

Just had to get my dibs in quickly.

Idiocy and Genius

Published on June 30, 2006

It’s a goodish day today, if you leave aside the issue of Gaza which seems to be developing with a distinct lack of outcry from the West. This could turn very nasty indeed very quickly. There’s no going back from this invasion.

However, there were far-reaching and excellent legal decisions in the High Court and the US Supreme Court which for once bode well for democracy , it’s a gorgeous day, the garden’s looking lovely and I’m feeling physically not bad at all, considering.

So I’m sittting here doing my usual early-morning routine; drinking tea, smoking and swearing at Labour’s poison dwarf, Hazel Blears, who’s bleating on about how yesterday’s loss of the Blaenau Gwent seat is really a victory and all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.

Lord, I loathe Blears – she’s what happens when you elevate a particularly smug and bovine borough council housing benefit clerk to undeserved national office. I can’t begin to describe the bathetic shallows of the woman, she’s everything you ever hated bout the lower-middle class in one evil little ginger package.

Simon Hoggart would know what to say about her.

I’ve always loved Hoggart – cerebrally, obviously, not in some sleazy Kimberly Fortierian way – and I and millions of others were very sad to hear he’s no longer to host Radio 4’s News Quiz something I’ve always looked forward to on Fridays. It’s not the weekend until the theme tune plays at 6.30.

Although the hilarious Sandi Toksvig promises to be a worthy successor, she doesn’t have the same parliamentary background that makes Hoggart such a cynical, amused radio presence. On the other hand, to have an out lesbian fronting over BBC radio’s flagship satire programme is pretty good too and she is bloody funny – “in February 2006 she joked that, as a result of being Danish and having studied Muslim law, in the light of the Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons controversy, she had never been so sought-after. ”

Toksvig also has a monthly column in Good Housekeeping, which is about as jam and Jerusalem as a women’s magazine gets. I buy it for the recipes, of course.

But we still have Hoggart’s parliamentary sketches in the Guardian to enjoy, and his is the first column I turn to every morning, before spending the next half-hour spitting and cursing it’s ‘hold on to nurse for fear of something worse’ editorials.

I need a good pun to start the day and today Hoggart excelled himself:

“Robert Flello, Labour MP for Stoke-on-Trent South, had a question about drug use among young people. I listened tensely. Would the question or answer make possible an unspeakably bad pun? Mr Flello wanted more money spending on drug rehab work in Stoke. The minister, Parmjit Dhanda, praised his concern for his constituents, but said flatly that there would be no more money.

That was it! Thank heavens! It was, at last, a case of freeze a jolly good Flello.”

Ack, ack ack. I’m going to be wincing at that one all day.

Right, off for a stroll to the shop to enjoy this gorgeous blue and gold morning and get some milk – otherwise I can’t have coffee, and I need serious coffee to get stuck into reading the US blogs. It’s just not possible to read about the wingnuts’ latest depravities without a good head of caffeine to buffer the outrage.

Oh yes, and since it’s Friday, while I’m away, here, have a cute kitten. I’m too good to you people.

Awwwww.

A “balanced” survey

Published on May 12, 2005

From Kos, found via Steve Gilliard:

Of course, there never were any Dean bloggers paid to act as spokespeople for the campaign. Yet this survey is perpetuating the lie that we were. And on a survey distributed amongst other journalists, no less. Several reporters who got this instantly recognized who the questioned refered to and passed it on to me.

Jerome Armstrong and I asked Ross to correct the question and issue a retraction, and Ross has refused. It’s telling that every single reporter we’ve had to contact to correct the record has done so immediately, and with full apologies. Professor Ross, mister blog ethicists himself, is the first to refuse. That’s the first irony. The second is that it was his college — the Columbia Journalism Review’s Campaign Desk, that gave me and Jerome the first mainstream defense in response to the WSJ hit piece. They awarded it the first ever Lipstick on a Pig” award for spectacular hackery.

But really, it’s telling that while most working journalists have been more than willing to correct the record, it’s the campus ethicists that run most afoul of those ethics they claim to uphold.

Update: Oh, and I forgot to mention. Why did Ross call us out? From an email to me:

I had a bunch of examples that seemed anti-business and anti-Republican so I wanted something different.
So the GOP and WSJ efforts to find moral equivalency on the Left to the Armstrong Williams and other such scandals worked. That’s why Jerome and I fought the original WSJ story so hard. Once it’s in print, it’s impossible to kill. It’s like playing whack-a-mole.

Fact is, the examples of unethical behavior are all on the Right, and so he threw us into his little survey for “balance”, even if such balance doesn’t come close to existing.

This is the best example I’ve seen so far of how this need for “balance” leads journalists astray. Because it’s somehow become unfair to single out one side, even if this is no more than the simple truth, they make shit up. If Ann Coulter is a rabid nutcase, Michael Moore has to become one to. Bush is a coward? Then clearly we need to mention the allegations against Kerry, true or not.

About that new Huffington Post and blog

Published on May 11, 2005

New (Since 9 May 2005!), cool and filled with Hollywood magic ™ as it may be, the
Huffington Post blog reminds me of nothing so much as NRO’s the Corner, or any of the other given rightwing gasbag “blog”. It has the same blank faces and dull posts from people you are supposed to know from somewhere, the same corporate blandness of presentation and layout and the same uninspired, almost randomly balanced blogroll.

The blogroll is especiallyrevealing, recent controversy notwithstanding. Let me look at your blogroll and I’ll have a good idea what your site is about, what you think is interesting, who you think are good people to link to and whether or not I’ll find your site interesting.

Most of the Huff’s blogroll is blandly centrist, with the usual media friendly “celebrity” blogs (Adam Curry, ’nuff said) or the soft inoffensive left (Ezra Klein e.g.) but to have Little Green Fascists or Powerline on the rolls? Szeesh. Wasn’t this supposed to be some sort of vaguely progressive site?