/users/andlosers

Celia came down to Oxford for a week, and stayed for almost three. The house seems lonely and quiet now, without her.

My plan is to be financially patched up and ready to move out in the new year, and I've been asking myself: where will I go? Answers on a postcard. Looking out my back window, at the rain and the endless grey of the autumn sky, I think somewhere else might be good. Maybe Europe. Ce thinks my thirties should be my decade of adventuring, and I agree with her.

That said - and don't get me wrong, the prospect of continuous vitamin D synthesis appeals to me - I love sitting in a warm room when it's raining and cold outside, with a cup of coffee (almost always my moose mug that I bought when I was in Maine; my mother has its twin). It provides a kind of freedom, an assurance that no, you don't have to go anywhere; it's miserable outside. Why don't you stay in and do some writing, or watch that movie you rented last week?

I have to do my anthropology coursework. That's why I'm here. Someone ought to develop a procrastination pill, only I'd probably put off going out and buying it.

Breakfast this morning was a tough call. I have some Onken Bio Yoghurt - the peach stuff with the grains, which is an acquired taste but makes for good eating - or I was thinking about getting the ingredients for a breakfast burrito. Tabasco, green peppers, that sort of stuff. In the end I thought about it so long that it was almost lunchtime, so I bought a week's worth of vegetables and made a meat-free chili. When we were in Rome, I picked up a bag of originario rice, which has been sitting in my cupboard ever since because I didn't really know what to do with it. I figured it might fit, and lo and behold: the starch of the rice thickened the chili and meant I didn't have to fall back to my usual trick of stirring in a little cheese for texture. That's my chili recommendation to you. Stir in some stewing rice instead of cooking the normal kind over on the side.

You can apparently make rice gnocchi with the stuff. They're cunning, those Italians: they lure you in with their olive oil and fresh vegetables, and then it turns out they're all about the carbs and the deep fat frying. They deep fry olives over there, you know. With cheese. And I still need to try making suppli, which as far as I can see are croquettes made with risotto.

My apple trees are weighing down with water. Too bad the apples all have worms in them. The next garden probably won't have apples.

Dear diary,

Today they bombed the moon.

Stay well,

Ben.

People of Oxford! Badly in need of feedback (and, to be honest, a little reassurance), I'm starting a writing group. If you're in the area, we're meeting at 8pm on Wednesday at the Gardener's Arms on Plantation Road, in order to work out the scope of the writing we'll cover and the form it'll take. Come along.

I can't sing. As enthusiastic as I am about music, and no matter how much I enjoy singing my guts out from time to time, it doesn't change the fact that I sound not a little like a blue whale attempting to tackle a Mariah Carey track after half a dozen trips to the bar. The sad fact is, I can't hold a tune at all. (And it is a sad fact: not feeling like I can sing in front of other people, for fear of sounding like an elephant with a case of the sneezes treading on thumb tacks, makes me unhappy.)

So here's a question for my wise and wonderful friends: can this be changed? If I find some singing lessons, will it actually make a dent? Or am I doomed to be out of tune forever? (If it's the former, which I badly hope it is, can anyone around Oxford recommend any good - and relatively affordable - singing teachers?)

I haven't watched this, and I bet it's awful, but here's the talk I gave in Edinburgh a few weeks ago:

I've started a new personal website, Verada.org, which will be kind of a video zine. Here's the first entry, about Paul's stint on the fourth plinth (which is worth a watch):



There will be more, and I'll try to remember my tripod for the next one ...

I'm on the bus, but wanted to share this post about Gary McKinnon, which both sums up my opinions about the case (particularly re: the usual combination of anti-Americanism and British patriotism that has coloured the debate) and bolsters it with a whole bunch of actual facts. If you're interested in the case, or extradition in general, it's required reading.

http://strange.corante.com/2009/08/06/gary-mckinnon-the-truth-is-out-there-just-not-in-the-british-press

Brought to you by the iPhone's amazing! New! Copy! And! Paste! (And posted a full day after I wrote it because LJ wasn't accepting posts from my iPhone, presumably because it's still under attack from Russian political cyberterrorists or something.)

... Now in handy official Number 10 petition form.

If you're a UK citizen or resident who opposes the National Identity Register, please, please consider signing this.

In the UK? Care about the National Identity Register? (Did you know that although ID cards have been partially scrapped, the mandatory database behind it remains?)

Please join this Facebook group and invite as many people as you can. The more I think about this issue, the more I think it matters.

From a No2ID email I got today:

In a stunning piece of bluff and double-speak, the Government announced this week that it was scrapping compulsory ID cards. It is flat out rubbish!!! The Government is still pressing ahead with its plan to make everyone who needs to update certain "designated documents" have to register personal details on the database behind the national ID card, the National Identity Register. In other words, if you renew your passport or driving license after 2011 you will have to supply information which will go onto the National Identity Register. You can choose to have a little plastic card or not, but having your most personal private details logged on an intrusive database - no choice at all. There will then be a fine of up to £1,000 for failing to inform the authorities of any alteration to the information you have been forced to give, such as a change of address or name. The scheme hasn't changed. The Government just hopes no-one notices that their "U-turn" is nothing of the sort. The white elephant is still ploughing on.

FYI.

So to mirror what someone else asked in their journal recently: if you've been following my journal for a while - or my life! - what advice would you give me?

I won't take offence. But if it helps, this entry's public and comments are screened, so you can respond anonymously if you like.

Recommendation: although it's heavy, Morag's post about rape is worth your time and thought. (As is the rest of her journal.)

Twitter is awash with talk about police brutality at the G20 protests, but after almost a week of silence from the official Number 10 account, here's what they had to say:



Lovely! Flowers! Aww!

Hannah and I went to see The Age of Stupid yesterday; her writeup is here, if you're on her friends list.

It was a well-made film. I've always got to remind myself that I'm not the target audience for this sort of thing: if you want to alarm me, throw statistics, facts and projections at me. This was in a more emotional vein, to the extent that documentary segments were actually linked with science fiction footage of Pete Postlethwaite in the future sighing dramatically about how we didn't do anything when we were faced with our own extinction. Apparently it's doing better business than An Inconvenient Truth did, which implies that for a lot of people this is what works.

The big thrust of the film was that 2015 is a kind of tipping point, after which further warming effects are likely triggered that will cause runaway warming; six degrees is the temperature threshold where we start looking at mass extinction as a serious possibility. No real factual evidence was provided, but for argument's sake let's assume there's a large body of rigorously tested scientific theory behind these claims.

This means we have six years to fix the problem. The problem being a side effect of the lifestyle now enjoyed by most people on Earth.

How?

There was a panel session afterwards, populated inexplicably with a guy from UNISON (the public service trade union) and some other dude who looked like he was on drugs, and I think was from a climate change pressure group. Hooray, I thought! Maybe they'll tell me how I can do my part to help solve this problem! They certainly are telling me they'll tell me!

Here are some ways they felt this problem could be solved:

• By changing the global economic system from "growth economics"
• By telling Gordon Brown that if something isn't done, WE'LL ALL DIE
• By marshalling people into action and ordering them to change their lifestyles
• By going on holiday to Ecuador and getting a T-shirt by this famous artist, man, look at it, isn't it cool?

Drugged-out man (who I doubt was actually on drugs; the Father Dougal expression he held throughout was likely indicative of something else) at one point exclaimed that if there wasn't a heavy social justice component - i.e. changing the global economic order - he wouldn't want to be involved. Socialism, by implication, was the answer.

I felt like I was turning into the Incredible Hulk. I wouldn't have made any productive contribution to the debate, but hey, I would have been greener than any of these clowns.

Please don't get me wrong: I believe very strongly in social justice. But I also believe very strongly that if you have an imminent problem, it needs a practical solution. It's clear that most of the social injustice in the world relates in some way to money - illegal wars for oil, oppressive regimes ensuring consistent access to resources, and so on - so it seems like the solution should also come down to money. More efficient technologies will, over time, cost less money than less efficient ones. Think about lightbulbs, and how that market's changed in a short amount of time, in large part due to Ikea ramming the point home and providing low energy bulbs at low initial cost. Rinse and repeat that sort of practical social entrepreneurship and we may be getting somewhere - both on an individual and on a much larger, societal level. (For lightbulbs, think power stations.)

The cool part of that is that social justice follows. Sustainable resources are everywhere; there's no need to underwrite oppressive regimes or go to war to make sure we have another decade's worth of fuel. It's just there. All without needing to rely on a mythical socialist revolution or subscribe to crackpot vanguard theories about global leadership.

Better yet, we don't need to wait for governments to wake up and make legislation. It just takes a forward-thinking business plan and some entrepreneurial thinking; something most of us can get started on.

The Where the Wild Things Are trailer totally just gave me goosebumps.

Yesterday, I saw something that disappointed me and questioned the sanity and intelligence of people I thought I knew on a pretty fundamental level. It made me realise that the years I'd given them were not what I thought they were, and ultimately made me question - without negating the good parts - whether any of it should have happened.

I refer, of course, to the Battlestar Galactica season finale. Read on for major spoilers and mild but deeply-felt swearing. ( Read more... )