I've got a gig in a week. It's organised by Radical Artists Network.
They're not notably organisational types but they've got five bands to play in a pub. And with a week to go, I'm promised that all the stage equipment - amplifiers, speakers, turntables, microphones and cables - will probably be available. Or at least, the various people who provide these things have messages left on their phones.
All I need for my act is a CD player and a microphone, and this is apparently being sorted out by someone who's usually reliable.
Not that I have the moral high ground here on getting things set up - I'm still not sure what set I'll be playing.
Two things I could probably have done without today:
(1) A familiar sounding telephone call to the effect of "My computer's sick. It won't even boot up. Can you come and fix it? And only take an hour please because I've got stuff to do on it."
(2) My own computer to become similarly sick after using it to backup files from the first computer's hard drive. A virus of some kind? Something that corrupts the boot sector?
I don't particularly need my music making computer to become inoperative just as I'm due to make some music. Looks like I'll be up all night with screwdrivers and installation discs again.
There's a small hippo on my bed.
My parents have purchased a "Junior Hippo" water pump, for use if and when the house gets flooded by rain and/or seawater and/or sewage.
Portsmouth has had minor flooding over the last decade - nothing more than ankle deep - and the bit I live in has miraculously (mostly) escaped. But sooner or later the hippo will have to come out of his box.
Sort-of following on from that, there's a debate going on in the scientific blogosphere about whether climate scientists should present a united front to the public on what they all agree on, ie that climate change is happening now and will get worse, or be open about their disagreements over detail.
On one side are those who say the important thing is to push governments to do something about climate change, not to muddy the waters with debates about exactly how much the sea level with rise and when.
On the other side are those who say such a united front would be alarmist, and whether or not alarm is justified, all alarmism will sooner or later be debunked and the skeptics (read: deniers) of climate change will have won the propaganda battle. Result: scientists who essentially spoke the truth will be disbelieved because they got caught out in small lies, nothing will be done, and the planet will become a much more hostile place because of it.
As a non-scientist who follows science, I'm pretty much in the first camp. Here's what I wrote in one debate:
Sometimes it's a good idea to be a little inaccurate, just to get things done.
When Carl Sagan testified in court against creationists that science is a self correcting process while religion has no such mechanism, he was not being absolutely, scrupulously honest. But the important thing was not to educate the judge about the finer details of post-Popperian philosophy of science, but to get rid of the rabid mystics.
Charles Darwin knew there were minor problems in his theory - there were gaps in the fossil record and he had only the haziest notion of how heritable traits could be stored inside an organism. But the important thing was to beat the critics, not give a seminar on what Evolution theory didn't explain.
And here, it's certainly true that global climate change doesn't exactly cause specific rainfalls or storms. But if you insist that the public have a detailed, nuanced understanding of the issue, you risk losing the bigger argument, which is about whether climate change exists at all.
The majority seem to be in the second camp, or undecided.
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