A simple game, complicated by idiots...

I have a new mobile phone.  The old one started developing the unmistakable signs of phone Alzheimer's, and had to be institutionalised for its own good.  Its replacement is the finest model Samsung could provide for five pounds.  That's right, five hundred pee.  Initially, I could scarcely bring myself to look at the wretch, so cheap-looking was it in comparison with the one it replaced.  However, one day in its presence changed all that.

I've always been someone who champions simplicity.  It's usually the most subtle and elegant solution to a problem that proves also to be the most robust.  Complication adds links to the chain, weak ones.  Actually, that's quite a potent analogy I've happened across there.  When constructing a chain, one wouldn't make it any longer than the task at hand demands it be.  Additional links would simply inhibit its ability to do its job properly.  So why would you bother?  That's right - you wouldn't.  *But* this problem-solving Occam's razor approach to design seems to have gone the way of the Bakelite Dodo in our digital age.

It seems the more complicated and diverse the applications to which an electronic device can turn its hand, the better.  And we all just take this change as shorthand for progress.  No-one steps backs from the crash site for a moment to ask: is this device a better solution to the problem than its predecessor?  With phones, the answer is a resounding no.

Take my wife's phone for example.  It's an all-singing all-dancing smart phone.  It does a number of things quickly and well.  The only fly in the chowder, in fact, is that you can't really make phone calls on it.  If the manufacturer had a shred of self-knowledge and/or decency, service-pack 2 would be a loudhailer; it's that bad.  My new phone, on the other hand, excels in this regard.  It's battery lasts for months on a single charge.  And should I lose it or drop it down the karzey by accident, I won't need a bank loan to replace it.

Occam's razor...tell your friends.

Physics? - it's the Devil's work

I've been reading quite a bit of physics lately - specifically Profs Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw's rather lovely "Why Does E=mc2?".  It's an admirable and ambitious undertaking, this, by the Britain's foremost chalk-and-board-worriers.  They propose to take a lay reader (Hello!) and bring him or her up to speed with modern physics over the course of 250 pages or so of easy-to-digest prose and maths.  The maths, the geek Ant 'n' Dec are keen to point out, never gets any harder or more abstract than Pythagoras' Theorem.  And this is true.  But, then, that's not really the issue with modern physics, is it?  It's not the maths; it's the mind-bending implications of that/those/them maths that send the noggin into a tailspin in the small hours and cause nosebleeds.

For example, Pythagoras gets dragged into matters to explain Minkowski space-time.  I won't go into the nuts and bolts of MST here because to do so would go well beyond the scope of this blog and indeed my brain.  Suffice to say, Minkowski space-time is a model of the universe that allows us to agree on an objective definition of distances between objects and events in space-time.  These distances are the same of all observers of the two events or objects, so they are useful to physicists.  But, crucially, the Minkowski space-time model does this without rupturing the law of cause and effect.  Actually, it's not P's classical theorem, which *would* upset cause and effect; it's a small variation on it: it's the difference twixt the square's the other two sides, not their sum. 

Any fool can follow the logic of the distances in space-time, then, but this is only half the battle.  The implications of space-time are shattering to the jobbing liberal arts graduate.  Time and distance are relative, and the nothing can outgun the cosmic speed limit, "c".  That's not the speed of light, incidentally; it's the speed of any massless particle.

Don't let all this demi-ranting put you off, however.  It's a wonderfully accessible book.  You just need to read it like a textbook, which is what it is after all.  I find that the more intractable passages and chapters need at least 8 re-readings, and one should leave 10 hours or more between each re-reading to allow the ideas to percolate and fester.  You're not going to tear through this over the weekend then, but when you consider it took the finest minds in history nigh-on three thousand years to concoct all this bullsh1t, then you least you can do is spend a month or two staring at their findings, with your tongue stuck out and your eyes crossed.  No mental pain - no mental gain, and all that.

 

Begorrah, which way to the station?

The wife and I have just returned from a weekend in Dublin.  It's been a few years since we darkened its door, and, as I was there on Friday for work anyhoos, we decided to extend the visit.

Dublin has a special place in my heart.  I spent a lot of time there in my late teens and early twenties - an impressionable time for anyone of course.  But Dublin is an easy city for a easily-led fop to become enamoured of.  It delights in its artists rather than its buildings, which is unusual for a capital city.  This is probably a function of its having been built by the British.  It is *full* of striking Georgian terraces, making it look very unlike the rest of Ireland.  Dubliners, therefore, don't take massive pride in the city's aesthetic qualities.  No, it's their wordsmiths that get the praise.

Take for example Davy Byrne's pub.  Leopold Bloom stopped for his lunch there in Joyce's Ulysses, and acolytes still call in to replicate the scene with a Gorgonzola sandwich and a glass of burgundy.  Compare this with The Grapes in London's Limehouse.  As a child, Dickens used regularly to visit Limehouse to call on his uncle who lived there.  His uncle would take the boy to the pub and place him on a table in to sing ballads for the entertainment of the regulars.  The pub is still largely as it was in Dickens' age.  It's a wonderfully atmospheric place, with its dark smoke-stained wood panelling and the sound of The Thames lapping up outside the rear windows.  But how many Londoners are aware of this place?  Hundreds maybe.  London is so busy hoicking-up its petticoats to attract tourists with a bit of architectural leg that it rather overlooks its gems like this.

Hard Rain's Gonna Fall

I had occasion to cycle to Homebase en route home last evening, to fetch some new paintbrushes - never a joy at the best of time, this.  I go through paintbrushes like a chimp through bananas.  I can't seem to clean them properly, despite following the manufacturer's instructions to the letter, and buying the finest brush-cleaning chemicals money can buy.  They all turn into petrified slabs.  Anyhoo that's not the point of this article - let us return to our sheep: it was a grim January evening in east London; it had been vaguely damp for most of the day, which don't mind ordinarily.  A small drop of the wet stuff never killed anyone (with apologies to the family of anyone it did, however.) 

But when I emerged from HB, the weather took a turn for the worse.  It started to rain.  The rain wasn't heavy, more fat really.  By this, I mean the drop density wasn't high.  Visibility was good etc., but the individual drops were massive, like peanuts.  They seemed to be falling to earth quicker that the usual, smaller raindrops.  I realise this is a physical impossibility if Newton is to be believed, but my hand to God, it was the fasted rain I've ever seen.  Each drop carried such a payload that being struck by one actually hurt; it was like a small electric shock.

By the time I'd unlocked the bike and reattached the lights, the game was up.  I was soaked.  I shot home and jumped in the bath.  Also, the new brushes soaked-up enough moisture to keep them soft for the duration of the journey home, so not a wasted effort.

It's a Fair Cop

There was a bit of intellectual foot-gazing in the press here in Inglaterra the other day about Iranian court's decision to sentence a man to blinding. He'd been found guilty of assaulting a woman who'd spurned him. He threw acid in her face during the attack, permanently blinding her. The Iranian judicial system apparently sets great store by retribution because it decided that what's sauce for the goose etc...

Here in the west there was muted uproar. Not even the world's wettest liberal could dispute the vile nature of his act or deny the pleasing cosmic symmetry of his punishment. I think it was the fact that a government (even one in a rogue state) had meted out such old testament punishment that troubled. Had this fellow tripped while legging it from the scene of the attack and fallen face-first onto a pair of resting hedgehogs thereby blinding himself, no-one would have given a shite. I dare say even Michael Foot would have spat something along of the lines of "Good. He deserved it, the twat." on being told the news.

Iran's policy on these matters does raise an interesting question though: what would they do were someone found guilty of genocide? If they're being consistent, they have to wipe out perpetrator's race. This thought *must* have occurred to some young (Iranian) Turk in the legal profession there. I imagine his line manager puts him in his place by saying "Well, I think we'll cross that bridge should we ever reach it. Don't you?"

You Gotta Have...

The wife and I popped to the pub on Saturday evening with a couple of old friends. As the night wore on, more and suspiciously well dressed young persons kept turning up. Each wandered through the public bar before disappearing downstairs to a basement room. It turns out the pub had a resident northern-soul deejay, who was down there spinning discs furiously.

It leaves me absolutely cold, northern soul. Any sub-genre that so wilfully wallows in obscurity is on thin ice from the off. And NS aficionados do love to score points with the rarity of their vinyl. They might deny it, but it's what drives them One can only imagine the self-satisfied sashaying that goes on when the deejay plays a track so overlooked by history that even the recording artist it can scarcely recall murdering it.

The reason the tracks are obscure is that all were originally considered second-rate at best, so that only seven copies were pressed. (In fairness to Barry Gordy's musical judgement, most did then go down like the Hindenburg upon release). Worse still, some didn't even get that far - the record company deciding that upon mature reflection, one might just as well try and market bowel gas. Whatever your take on soul music, I think you'd agree that Motown knew its onions. They produced wonderful, joyous and accessible pop music. When, therefore, they decide something stinks, stink it does. All the expensively-shod preening to the contrary won't change that.

Also, if NS were objectively any good, the phenomenon would have spread far and wide - at least as far as the Capital. No. Apart from the occasional misguided pub in Clerkenwell, northern soul's spiritual home consists of wretched northern mining towns and Butlins in Caistor.

I'll Drink to that.

I was in the States recently, not on a fact-finding mission of national importance or anything, but on hols. Mrs O and I had intended to visit Japan, but that was lidder-ally blown out of the water. (Don't look at me like that. Humour's all they've got left.) As Wilde famously observed (Oscar, not Kim), Britain and the United States are two great nations divided by a common language. This is less true now, perhaps, that it's ever been, due to instant mass communication. However, there are other areas in which the vide between ourselves and our cousins across the pond appears wider than ever. One such area is beer.

We are middle-brow tourists at best, Mrs O and I. We generally eschew museums and galleries in favour of down-at-heel supermarkets and bars. I've concluded from my travels over the years that you only get to see a country properly when in locales like this, when the natives have their guard down and don't expect to meet foreigners. It's pointless visiting a bar in Times Square for example; you'll be served German beer by a Pole. I could experience that in Beckton were I minded to. No, you need to seek out the grubbier quarters.

I shouldn't dress these actions up entirely as a work of social anthropology. We both like a drink and bargain, so it does pay to go off piste like this. But while doing so, we did learn that modern America is in thrall to Newcastle Brown Ale. It's everywhere - and not in the slightly shame-faced way it is in the UK, where it's kept hidden on low shelves in pubs in case someone brings his mother in for a sherry before dinner. They not only stock it in the States; they celebrate it. There are giant promotional bottle tops emblazoned with the blue star on every bar wall.

Needless to say, I didn't feel tempted to sample any while there, but it did raise an interesting question: if they can misjudge us and our culture so completely, might we be doing the same to them? I suspect yes.

Before I visited America for the fist time, I thought I knew their beer. It would be straw-coloured, fizzy piss. In fact, they have a wonderful range of fascinating ales to try - wheat beers, honey beers, porters etc. And yet we picture them in dungarees and baseball caps, drinking Bud Light at kegger parties (I have no real idea what a kegger party is incidentally).

I remember an Australian friend of mine telling me that on arriving in London for the first time, he'd been horrified to find that Britons believe he and his kind drink nothing but Fosters. According to him, only confused old woman and infants would even consider touching it, such is its lowly status.

It's a minefield.

That reminds me: I was at a party some years ago, to which someone brought four cans of Special Brew. He was English, so had no excuse for this unconscionable breach of etiquette. He was quite unapologetic too; he parked himself on the sofa and placed his booty on the coffee table just in front of him. Then all we early arrivees sat around chatting and drinking as we waited for the party proper to kick in. A friend of mine arrived a little time later. He spotted the SBs on the table, pointed at them, and shouted "Who the FUCK brought those." Which is what each of us wanted, but was too repressed, to say.