---

"If you have to persuade yourself of something, you're already inclined to doubt it."

- Christoper Hitchens

"There are questions you can't ask if you don't have the tools to answer them."

- Brenda Milner

"Rewards and punishments are the lowest form of education."

- Chuang-tzu

"There is nothing worse than aggressive stupidity."

- Johann Goethe

"A world that can be explained even with bad reasons is a familiar world."

- Albert Camus

---

---

"Never cut what you can untie."

- Joseph Joubert

"Being on the edge isn't as safe, but the view is better."

- Ricky Gervais

"If you are the smartest person at where you work - quit."

- Paul Tyma

"There is no sinner like a young saint."

- Aphra Behn

"If you're going to tell people the truth, you better make them laugh; otherwise they'll kill you."

- Oscar Wilde

---

Look Back in August

---

A small personal landmark that went past unnoticed. My tenth blogiversary - at around 10pm on August 22nd, I'd been writing here for years in double digits.

Ten years ago....

• I was dealing with the end of a hopeless relationship by getting pointlessly drunk and having lots of meaningless sex.
  
  This last weekend I got drunk with some old friends and afterwards decided to re-visit an old cruising ground, just to see if it still worked for me after all these years.
  
  And I had pleasantly meaningless sex with three strangers. One of who I kind-of almost fell for - we swapped phone numbers, but any thought of a relationship is, um, hopeless. Which is fortunate, because I only feel romantic when I'm drunk.
  
  That at least is different now.
  
  
• I was teaching myself to sing, and trying to record some songs. But constantly getting sidetracked by technical issues.
  
  Today, having promised myself I'd start work on some music, I hit upon a way to synthesise a strummed guitar instead. And spent the day working on that.
  
  
• I'd just finished a contract with an idiot employer.
  
  Yes.
  
  
• I was running around with a band of socialists, despite severe misgivings about their theories, strategies, and indeed aims.
  
  Now, most of my non-net friends are disenchanted socialists.
  
  
• I had vague ideas about being a science fiction writer.
  
  I have vague ideas about being a horror writer.
  
  
• I was back living with my parents.
  
  Yes. But they don't seem to mind so much this time.
  
  
• I couldn't figure out a snappy way to end a blogpost.

---

---

"People are not who they say but rather who their actions reveal them to be."

- Ziad Abdelnour

"Whatever we cannot easily understand we call God."

- Edward Abbey

"You need to be thought of to be ignored."

- Russell Peters

"The truth doesn't work for everybody."

- Robert M Price

"Arts degrees are awesome. They help you find meaning where there is none."

- Tim Minchin

---

The Crass Ceiling

I don't get many unwilling students.

I get students who party all night and don't have the energy to study all day - and that's fine. It's their youth to enjoy, their choice to make, their quota of daily strength to allot how they choose.

I'm all in favour of fun - in fact, I wish I'd had a lot more of it when I was a teenager. Getting drunk for the first time at 23, eating a block of marijuana resin at 28 - supplied by a friend who'd decided to give up...and falling hopelessly in love for the first time at 32 - that's my pattern, trying everything a decade after everyone else.

I do get students who want to learn english, but don't want to put in the hours practicing, so they never become fluent - that's okay too. I don't have the patience to get good at the guitar, or program properly in python, so I understand.

I get students who're only want to use english for one purpose - whether that's discussing ponies on facebook or (I kid you not) qualifying as a teacher of english. Kein Problem (german), La'isa Moshkila (arabic), No Hay Problema (spanish).

What I almost never get is students who aren't at all interested in the subject, and don't want to be enrolled in the first place. When I get them, it's because their pushy parents or pointy-haired bosses are making them take the course.

You can't force someone to be interested, you can't bribe them into it, and you can't rationally persuade them they ought to force themselves to work at it until magically it becomes interesting to them. Which is why, contra the preachings of certain managerial types, I don't try.

Teaching in the private sector, your job security is nonexistant and whether your employer is sensibly professional or a delusional nutjob is luck of the draw. But the job of teaching itself is bearable, because you actually are a teacher, not a glorified prison warder.

However, I do get two distinct types of student. Type A is happy to forumulate opinions, present them in clear sentences and discuss them openly. Type B is afraid to form any clear belief, really really doesn't want to put them into words, and is afraid to state them in case someone else disagrees.

Type A is known as "most of the boys". Type B is "most of the girls".

It's the conventional wisdom - and therefore probably wrong - that boys outperform girls academically until about 13, then girls overtake them. For all I know, that could be broadly true of physics and literature. But for language learning, the boys consistently outstrip the girls.

It's not for lack of raw ability - not that I think there really is such a thing. It's confidence. The attitude that there's no personal shame in making a mistake and being corrected, that if you don't understand the explanation you have the right to ask again, that one doesn't need to fit in and have fashionable opinions to be respected.

Among the boys, even the nerds are jocks. Among the girls, even the most forward are apologetic about it.

So what can I do about it? Not much. Simply because you can't force someone to be free, and you can't inject confidence by encouraging someone to invent their own there and then from nothing.

In talking about this with female teachers, they say the same, so I don't think it's just that I'm intimidatingly butch (ha!) or that female student connect better with female teachers.

The classroom is a rather artificial environment, so perhaps in the real world outside the boys become taciturn and the girls are the gossipy flirts. But I don't think so.

It seems that even though young women now want careers, independence, and not to be quiet housewives...they still habitually act as though they don't.

---

"Truths kept silent become poisonous."

- Friedrich Nietzsche

"Whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth."

- Friedrich Nietzsche

"If the world is crashing around your ears, you choice is future or no future."

- Eric Hobsbawm

"Patriotism is a disease."

- Albert Einstein

"The degree of one's emotion varies inversely with one's knowledge of the facts - the less you know the hotter you get."

- Bertrand Russell

---

Boys of Summer

---

They voted me "Best Teacher".

It's not difficult to be the students' favourite - you just have to be the one out of fifty temps on zero-hour contracts who's on their side and admits the obvious.

• Yes, the timetable is wrong.
  
• Yes, speaking and listening is more interesting and useful than reading and writing.
  
• Yes, you do learn more vocabulary from watching kids TV than a textbook chapter on marriage ceremonies in outer mongolia.
  
• Yes, you're supposed to spell country names like mongolia with a capital letter, but it's okay if you forget.
  
• Yes, this exercise is incredibly boring and doesn't teach anything you'll ever need. So yes, we will abandon it - but mark it as "completed" in my pointless pile of paperwork that I have to fill out but no one will ever read.
  
• Yes, the managers are idiots, and so are their rules, and yes, if we want a productive lesson, we have to find ways around them.
  
• Yes, the school's very own custom-made textbook which I'm under strict instructions to follow is boring, unclear, irrelevant, badly thought out and often just plain wrong. Which is why we just have it open on the desk in case an idiot manager looks in.
  
• Oh, and yes, that other teacher is a complete moron who fills out very neat paperwork but couldn't teach to save her life.

Well, I don't actually have to say that exactly. The students say it themselves on their official "feedback" forms. The bits of paper they fill out at the end of the course, where I ask them to *not* emphasise just how much they learned from the Dr Who transcripts we went through and the Dr Who videos I'm not supposed to show.

---

I got an email today from someone I taught two years ago - just to say she's taking a baccalaureate in biology.

You can never predict who'll stay in touch. But you can usually predict who'll make progress while you teach them and after they leave. The best speakers have the confidence to stand up and make mistakes, to accept correction...and to not mind that there is no single correct way to say things.

They're also the ones who aren't bored by grammar but also aren't really interested in it either. Which means the best speakers are the worst linguists. Which is why I'm such a lousy language student myself.

---

Most teachers have a particular view of what students are capable of. Specifically, that:

• They can learn the base meanings of 10 words at a time, but can't handle simultaneously learning three meanings of one word.
  
• They can learn a grammatical rule, but can't cope with there being more than one opinion about what the rule is.
  
• Anything the teacher doesn't know how to explain, they can learn by a magical process called "osmosis".

---

I always learn from my students. The only reason I know about drifting and slenderman is a class of ten year olds told me. Usually what I learn though, is that my book about their language is wrong.

The german word for "bullshit" is..."bullshit". Not even "bulschitt".

And no one has said "Angenehm" on meeting someone for the first time in a century.

---

In seven years doing this, two students have figured out I'm gay - and both were called Alex. Alejandro, nerdy bespectacled spanish polyglot. One of those clearly advanced-level students who gets miscategorised as lower...and thus gets to be the unofficial teaching assistant.

When we did the dumb lesson on "What do you want to be when you grow up?", he wanted to be a pole dancer. Then changed his mind to "dandy".

He lent me his Jeanette Winterson novel...and I lent him my William Burroughs. He said he was "interested in androgeny and sexual ambiguity...but liked girls". Can you say that in your second language?

The other, from this last month: Alexander, big blond handsome german metrosexual. Straight but loved flirting with everyone - boy or girl, staff or student.

The kind of guy who will offer, in front of the whole class, to do anything - "Anything at all, mein Kapitano" - if only I give him an A-grade. Which he deserved anyway. And he knew it.

I've actually never been tempted to try it on with any student. The idea isn't repulsive - just as the idea of sex with a tree isn't repulsive, just a bit surreal with no attraction.

I guess I'm nonpedagogicosexual.

---

It's not quite over yet. There's a few classes still running for the next one or two weeks. After which I'm officially unemployed again...or officially emigrating for work again.

---

---

"Only a person of deep faith can afford the luxury of skepticism."

- Friedrich Nietzsche

"The invisible line would have no meaning unless most people were on the wrong side of it. Exclusion is no accident; it is the essence."

- CS Lewis

"Whiners, if given power, become tyrants."

- Gary North

"Happiness is like an orgasm. If you think about it too much it goes away."

- Tim Minchin

"Tolerance is the result not of enlightenment, but of boredom."

- Quentin Crisp

---

Monsters from the Id

---

I am surrounded by idiots.

But everyone thinks that.

If you're an idiot, your definition of an idiot is anyone who disagrees with you. Seeing as that's pretty much everyone, they surrond you.

If you're not an idiot, your definition of an idiot is anyone who can't bear to think they might be wrong, misguided, or not respected. Seeing as that's pretty much everyone, they surround you.

---

The difference between an idiot and a fool is that a fool accepts all criticisms unquestioningly, while an idiot accepts none.

So if you're wondering whether you're an idiot, imagine someone calling you an idiot. If your response is to consider that they might be right, you know they're wrong.

But if you're wondering, you're already not an idiot, because idiots can't endure introspection - because that's a form of (self) criticism.

---

The result of educating an idiot is an educated idiot.

If you can list ten arguments against a belief which is important to you, you're educated. If they're all strawmen, you're still an idiot.

---

Idiocy is not a failure of intellect but of courage.

---

---

"Beware rhetorical questions. They tend to paper over whatever cracks are in the argument."

- Daniel Dennett

"It is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages."

- Friedrich Nietzsche

"The history of religion is a long attempt to reconcile old custom with new reason, to find a sound theory for an absurd practice."

- James Frazer

"Crime is contagious. If the government becomes the lawbreaker it breeds contempt for laws."

- Gore Vidal

"Nothing in this world is harder than speaking the truth, nothing easier than flattery."

- Fyodor Dostoevsky

---

Just Kill Me Now

---

According to my Death Clock I have five years to live.

I should probably hurry up and do something then.

Actually I often find myself thinking life is so banal, people so willfully stupid, and compensations so paltry...that I should just run a nice hot bath and cut my wrists.

Then I realise I'm contemplating suicide to avoid spending an hour on the phone to correct an administrative fuck-up that's delayed my wages. Again.

But I do have a blogpost prepared, just in case I decide to go through with it.

The last impulse to end it all was occasioned by an email from work last friday. It "invited" me to an "input session" where we would "workshop" "pedagogical strategies" to counter "issues" around "literacy". And another one the next day. Over the weekend.

Oh, and the invitation is compulsory.

So, I'm now going to count my blessings:

• I'm having sex tonight
  
• I'm in a place advanced enough that the only person who might possibly object to my having sex tonight...is his girlfriend
  
• Thanks to a week of packed lunches without chocolate, I'm actually losing weight
  
• I'm in a place advanced enough thet malnutrition isn't a problem - and obesity is
  
• There's a rather nice, reasonably priced tablet computer which I might get
  
• I have the spare cash to do so
  
• I have a job which is often interesting
  
• I have a job
  
• I may not have the cash for a home of my own, by I've got parents who must secretly quite like having me around - seeing as I can see no other reason for them letting me live with them
  
• There is zero chance that the "input session" will be useful, but it gives me several hours travelling time in which to study something interesting

Clicking the Death Clock again gives a different random estimate.

---

---

"Oh what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to believe."

- Robert M Price

"If you can charm everyone it means you don't care about anyone."

- Christopher Hitchens

"Socialists don't believe in fun."

- George Orwell

"Some dance to remember, some dance to forget."

- The Eagles

"It isn't what people think that's important, but the reason they think what they think."

- Eugene Ionesco

---

Something Old, Something New

---

I have a new job. It's also an old job. I hate it already and I haven't even started it yet.

In 2011 I spent six weeks as a summer teacher for Cavendish. It was a standard piece-of-shit language school, complete with:

* Insane idiot manager at head office
* Nice but useless manager at local office, too weak-willed to resist the insane idiot
* Resources extending to one whiteboard marker if you were luckly
* Requisite teacher with alcohol problem
* Requisite nervous newbie teacher
* Requisite intellectual teacher who wants to have learned discussions about world music with the class
* Popular teacher with collection of Dr Who videos (me)

After five weeks the insane idiot manager finally realised her daily incoherent emails were being ignored. She fired the entire staff. And got sued for non-payment of wages.

Last friday, Cavendish phoned me, desperate for teachers. To start on monday. Urgently, and did I mention they're desperate? How desperate? Desperate enough to pay my travel costs.

Different branch, different town, different manager, same piece-of-shit school.

Today (sunday), four of us TEFLers sat for five hours in a boiling room, listening to an "induction" on the labyrinthine rules for:

* calling the class register
* assessing the students
* getting assessed by students
* filling out plans for the day's leeson
* filling out different plans for the week's lessons
* filling out forms for what actually happened in each lesson
* ...and which part of the whiteboard is officually approved-of by inspectors for writing the date on.

So, starting monday I wake up at 4am, take a two hour train journey, spend four hours in a classroom, take another two hour journey back, sleep, and use the remaining hours for real life - pretending to plan lessons that don't need planning.

The question is, can I tolerate boiling hot classrooms, students hungry and exhausted for ramadan, and filling out mountains of paperwork giving meaningless answers to absurd questions...for six weeks?

Well, the money's pretty good, I generally get on well with students, and all that train travelling gives me a chance to catch up on a small backlog of six hundred podcasts I've got saved.

Life is all about priorities.

---

---

"A compromise is the art of dividing a cake in such a way that everyone believes he has the biggest piece."

- Ludwig Erhard

"No one is surprised to read of barbarity in a book from a barbarous age."

- Robert M Price

"The art-house audience accepts lack of clarity as complexity."

- Pauline Kael

"Would you be thankful to a person who cut you with a knife in order to sell you a bandage?"

- Dan Barker

"A flag is a symbol and I leave that to the symbol-minded."

- George Carlin

---

---

Every Saturday for the next 30 weeks, five quotations to ponder. There's no unifying theme to each set, or to the overall collection - except that they seem to me insightful, provocative, perverse or interesting for any other reason. I've randomised the order, on the principle that two randomly chosen fragments of text can sometimes spark off each other in unexpected ways. Enjoy.

---

"Women have been forced to fear whilst men have been forced to dare."

- George Bernard Shaw

"Good judgment comes from experience, and experience - well, that comes from poor judgment."

- A.A. Milne

"When you invite a middle-aged moralist to address you, I must conclude that you have a taste for middle-aged moralising."

- CS Lewis

"Every religion begins as the delusion of one or two people."

- Robert M Price

"If you're told what's the same but see what’s different, or told what's different but see what’s the same, you’re a scientist."

- Neil Degrasee Tyson

---

My Idea of Fun

I've spent the last three months trying and completely failing to make any music.

I've tried out virtual synths, put together my own virtual synths and drums, experimented with effects and signal paths, come up with a few possible solutions to mixing problems - and found reasons why the solutions don't work.

What I can't do is write a chord sequence, lay down a bassline, or come up with a vocal melody.

And I think the reason for this is very simple: It's no fun anymore.

When I say "fun" I mean "taking pleasure in a process, regardless of any end product". Some people shop for fun - and when they get home, find they're stuck with this thing they've bought. Flirting can be fun, even if it's with someone you can't have at the end of the night.

Fun is important. If you're learning a language, then the prospect of getting some gratification as a result of using it in a year's time is just too distant. Anyone who's become fluent in a second language will tell you: You'll never get good unless you fall in love with the language. And love is it's own reward.

I've been learning about textual criticism techniques, applied to the bible. Why? Some people insist they know my intentions better than I do, telling me they know I want to join the embrace of a mother church. In fact, there's absolutely nothing I want to get out of it - I've just found that I enjoy studying it, and following the reasoning of its experts.

I'm a problem-solver. Figuring out how to do something is interesting. Doing it...isn't. Don't get me wrong - I'm certainly not an expert in making music, but I know that, for instance...

...a good compression curve for a vocal line involves noise gating between -36dB and -48dB, applying softknee of ratio between 2:1 and 4:1 up to about -12dB, and preserving transients by squashing the dynamics above that by at most 2:1.

And if you didn't understand any of that - or if you understood and fundamentally disagreed - nevermind, because that's not the point. The point is: figuring out the numbers is fun; making up a song to apply them to is just a chore.

So, how can I make it fun again?

Saying "Concentrate on the pleasure you'll get from the finished song" is to completely miss the point. Saying "Set artificial limits on yourself, and see how well you can overcome them" is better...but I'm doing that anyway, and it's not enough.

You may by now have figured out that (1) I don't have an answer, and (2) finding a way to recapture the problem-solving fun is itself problem-solving fun - otherwise I wouldn't still be trying to do it. So applying any solution I come up with may itself suffer from...being no fun.

Falsies

---

Somewhere on his blog, Scott Adams (of Dilbert fame) lists things he used to believe, sorted by how old he was when he realised they weren't true. Here's my version.

00: ?
01: ?
02: ?
03: Adults know that children can see them.
04: Once you understand there's no reason to be afraid, fear vanishes.
05: Talking to yourself means you're mad.
06: My teacher knows what she's talking about.
07: Violence achieves nothing.
08: People appreciate honesty.
09: Nobody wants to be an outsider.
10: People are basically decent.
11: You can't gain real understanding from books.
12: True friendship is unconditional.
13: People know why they believe what they believe.
14: People can be persuaded with simple facts.
15: Being able to spell correctly and use big words makes you intelligent.
16: The official rules are the real rules.
17: There are two sides to every story.
18: Elegant ideas are truer than ugly ones.
19: Everyone realises you can't trust the police.
20: Being a parent makes you competent to raise children.
21: Money doesn't make you happy.
22: It's possible to be apolitical.
23: Drug users are damaged victims.
24: Once you know what's right, doing it is easy.
25: Overweight people are ignorant about health.
26: If someone loves you, they respect you.
27: You can repair psychological damage with kindness.
28: Losing faith means gaining reason.
29: The young are rebellious and the old are conservative.
30: Doing something for a long time makes you good at it.
31: You can't love humanity without loving humans.
32: Respecting a person means respecting their beliefs.
33: Everyone grows up eventually.
34: Memory is accurate and willpower is strong.
35: Only love that lasts is genuine.
36: The purpose of schools is education.
37: Science is the search for truth.
38: It's impossible to be mistaken about you own beliefs
39: Ruthless people are sadists.
40: Pleasure is sinful.
41: Reason has a method and unreason has none.
42: Doing what you love means doing it well.

---

Old Time Religion

I've been reading the bible.

Well, mostly I've been reading about the bible.

Well, mostly I've been reading about the process which led to the complilation of the book whose name just means "The Books".

But here's a thought. When reading the new testament in the original (or is it?) greek, the question is usually: What does this word mean in this context, and how does it affect the general message?

When you look at the old testament in hebrew, it's more often: What should this word be, once you put in the vowels and decide where the word and sentence boundaries are?

If you look at the quran in arabic, the question is: Where are the words?

By analogy, here's something in english:

This is the house that jack built. It is a very fine house.

Take out the spaces and punctuation, and you've got something like the greek new testament situation:

thisisthehousethatjackbuiltitisaveryfinehouse

Now take out the vowels, and we're in old testament terriatory:

thssthhsthtjckblttsvryfnhs

And now, remember that ancient arabic had a highly ambiguous alphabet, where one symbol could refer to three or four consonants:

dhzzdhhzddhjggbrddzvryfmhz

Your challenge Mr Phelps, should you chose to accept it, is to take this stream of consonants, and turn it into a grammatically correct set of one or more sentences. And they've got to match the theology of your ruling sect at the time.

Oh, and although you're not supposed to admit it, you know it was written in many dialects by many amenuenses, some of them barely literate, who inevitably made mistakes even if they weren't, and some of who weren't above a little creative fraud.

So it's no accident that large sections of the quran are gibberish, and the best interpreters can do is make almost-grammatical word-salad...and then try to interpret it as pointlessly convoluted metaphor. Actually, each clause is several dozen pointlessly convoluted metaphors, because you've got a lot of doctrine to justify, and not much text.

But our muslim friends do have one advantage: There's only one version of the quran. Somewhere between 650 and 700CE (depending who you ask), the caliph Uthman compiled all the surviving scriptural fragment which were politically useful to him...and had all the others destroyed.

Compare with the new testament situation, where we have between 5,500 and 5,800 hand-copied fragments. A few are complete copies, some are entire letters or gospels, and most are bits of scrolls with holes in them.

And no two copies of the same text exactly agree.

There are about 400,000 textual variations. 99% are spelling differnces, slight paraphrases...or in some cases entire missing sentences left out by sleepy scribes. Of the remainder, 99% constitute minor doctrinal variations. Which means a few constitute major doctrinal variations.

Things like: Is there one god, two, three or thirty? Was Jesus a flesh-and-blood man, or a holy hologram? Is he the adoped son of god, or a "real" one, whatever that might mean? Is there a hell? And if there is, can we be saved by faith alone or by good works? Can women preach?

Is the afterlife an eternity playing a harp on a cloud telling god how wonderful he is? Or is your soul put into cold storage (purgatory?) until the end of the world, after which you get a new, perfect physical body on a new, perfect earth? The book of revelation says the latter.

If you're a non-jew converting to christianity, do you need to avoid bacon sandwiches and mutilate your genitals? Speaking of which, would you be closer to god if you cut them off entirely? On the other hand, should you seek out every experience god has made available to you?

Is now a good time to mention that at least six of Paul's thirteen epistles are almost-definite forgeries?

Surely though, if you go back to the earliest versions, that should tell you what the original writers really said. Good luck. In the first 1000 years, there are about 300 fragments. In the first 200, a grand total of four. And in the first century...exactly zero.

Oh, and the earlier you go, the more variation there is. Apologists acknowledge this and like to claim the original inspired wording must be scattered among the variations because...actually they don't give a reason.

The odd thing is, all of this is mainstream in the world of biblical scholarship. Which is composed mainly of committed believers. So, before you start to study a subject, expect to find two things. First, everything the general public know is wrong. Second, an expert is someone who knows what's almost certainly not true, not someone who's absolutely confident what is.

Frapped with Gold

---

The Strict Machines. Possibly the world's only skatepunk/flamenco fusion band.

Together in the early noughties, they somehow found time in their busy schedule of acrimoniously splitting up and reforming to write an amazing number of songs...a very few of which they got around to recording.

Guess who held the microphone? And did the mixing, mastering, pressing, sleeve design etc. Yes, and today I stumbled on the second and final EP I did for them.

So here they are, The Stict Machines:

---

Moonlighting

---

I've been experimenting with spoken-word recordings. This is me reading "The Thing in the Moonlight", by HP Lovecraft.

---

Thing 3: Big Boy

---

Yes, I'm still here.

It's just that I've spent the last two months failing to do a lot of things. Failing to find work, failing to get support from the government, failing to master video editing software, and failing to make any more music.

I succeeded in writing some short horror stories...that failed to horrify anyone.

And so...another failure....

---

Allow me to introduce: My boyfriend.

I do have friends-with-benefits (and indeed wives), but this is the one that lives with me. This is the one I can go to sleep next to. This is the one I don't mind kissing.

He's seven inches long, and made from two layers of high-quality silicone - a hard inner layer and a softer outer one for that "realistic fleshy" texture. His name's "Johnny", he's made by Vixskin,and I picked him up online - cut-price from Uberkinky.

You can clean him by soaking in bleach, or boiling in the kettle for two minutes - which gets him really hot and wet.

I'd been promising myself something like him for over a year, so yes, anticipation is always better than reality.

Like most boyfriends, he's a total dick. He's designed to feel like human skin, which he does...albeit human skin covered in raspberry jam and smelling slightly rubbery.

Oh yes, and he's too big for me.

I have two major orifices, and he's too wide to fit into either of them. Which is why most of the time, we're happy just to cuddle.

---

Thing 2: Magic Mike

You can have a professional recording studio in your laptop.

Actually, you can have a software version of the kind of luxury studio that would have cost millions 20 years ago. You can have compressors, EQs and reverb on every drum. De-essers, chorusing and saturation on each backing singer. For a few dozen pounds or dollars or euros, you can have a replica of an effects box that you heard on a hundred top 40 hits...but which only exists in ten studios because they only made ten of them.

So why do almost all the tracks made in bedrooms still sound crap? Well, two reasons. One, it's one thing to have great bits of kit - it's quite another to know how to use it to make great bits of music.

And two...some hardware can't be reincarnated as software. Like microphones. There's a reason why producers still spend absurd amounts of cash on a vibrating membrane in a metal cage with a fluffy coat. There's a reason there's so much voodoo and bullshit about how this brand of mic has a mysterious magical extra ingredient that the other one doesn't.

Even if they do all the recording onto a hard drive using Cubase or Sonar or Reason, any sounds that come from the real world have to go through a microphone, and all the clever software in the world can only do so much to compensate for a lousy signal.

High noise floor, low top end, 50Hz hum, hiss and crackle - all things which turn a vocal performance into a fuzzy mess. And not the funky kind of fuzzy rock'n'roll mess either.

This is my microphone.

Actually, I've got a dozen or so, but this is the one I use.

Yes, it's from a broken headset, and it's superglued onto the remains of a different broken headset.

And this is the mic from a second one, superglued onto another broken frame.

And this is Mark II of the first one, superglued onto...yes, a third one. If you see what I mean.

You see, some years ago I wandered into a computer shop on the off-chance they might have a decent microphone. What they had were big, hugely padded headsets for GBP10.

They refused to fit, they hurt my ears, they were too quiet, they were made of plastic with somewhat lower tensile strength than the cardboard packaging, and they fell apart in a month.

So I got another one, because the little microphone was bizarrely brilliant. The second headset didn't even last a week.

Some years later, I had a box of old headsets with rubbishy microphones, and a pair of good but rather silly-looking mics with no headsets. And a pair of scissors, and a tube of glue.

The result is either the Lovecraftian abomination of the audio consumer world, or the surprising alternative to spending a few hundred pounds that I don't have.

Thing 1: Pinky Piggy

Welcome to my new mini-series on "Things". In which I show you seven of my "Things", largely as an excuse to tell the stories behind them.

Today, my latest mascot.

My parents own a holiday bungalow. The idea was that they buy the home, rent it out, and live on the proceeds in their retirement. The reality is...it needs constant maintenence and gets booked only a few weeks a year - which pays just enough to cover the maintenence.

The rest of the time, we've got a place to relax, eat, sleep, look at the scenery, watch TV, browse the internet and bicker. Yes, we can do all these things at home, on bigger TVs, with faster net connections and more comfortable beds, but...

...but well, there's two kinds of holidays. There's the kind where you do things you'd never do at home - rock climbing, swimming with dolphins, trawling the red light district etc. And there's the kind where you do what you'd do anyway, but away from the stress of it all. Escaping to a simpler, calmer world. I think this is meant to be the second kind.

Oh, it is pretty quiet and relaxing, because the bungalow is in a large estate of identical bungalows, all equally vacant most of the year.

It was built on a part of the coast which, according to experts paid to tell business people what they want to hear, wasn't slowly crumbling into the sea. So we get to sit on the porch, watching the cliff edge get imperceptibly closer as it, um, crumbles into the sea.

Last month, we took a car full of frozen food and excitable dogs to our retreat, with the plan to get hungry by walking the dogs, get sleepy by eating the food, and get rested by sleeping off both...before driving back for more food and more sleep. This is the English version of a day out.

So, with dogs muddied from their walk, and the nice new carpet muddied from the dogs, we started to cook the hamburgers. Then all the electricity shut off. We found the junction box, confirmed that some kind of safety cutoff had engaged...and disengaged it.

We started the hamburgers again. All the electricity shut off. Yes, there was definitely something wrong about the cooker. So we microwaved the burgers and phoned the letting agent.

Who agreed that yes, the cooker with the non-working timer, non-working mysterious unmarked dials, and badly working grill...probably wasn't working properly. And needed replacing.

So yesterday we again took the two hour journey to our three-star place of escape from the cares of the world, stopping off to manhandle a "new" second-hand cooker into the back of the car, manhandled it out again and into the bungalow, manhandled the old one into the car, and drove to the site of recycleing/disposal to manhandle it into the big steel box marked "Metal Appliances".

Whoever the man was, he was well handled that day.

But there, next to the "Metal Appliances" notice, was...an adorable stuffed toy pig.

Mascot to the men who worked there, but they were happy to let me have it - and the pig (hur hur) - provided I promised to "feed him well".

Which I did...to the dogs, who have been merrily fighting over their new toy ever since.

---

Tomorrow, another Thing.

Introspective Behavior, Please

To see yourself as others see you.

Or...through a glass darkly.

Or...by their odd little sidelines from other projects shall you know them.

(Click to view the inside of my mind at full size)

Crimes of the Near Future

Coming Soon...

I've finished the songs.

Which is to say, I've

(1) Come up with backing tracks, and remixed them...quite a lot. Usually this involves changing one thing at a time until I realise the riff or sound I started with is the one which doesn't belong.

(2) Written a load of (pseudo)lyrics. Eroswings suggested I try doing scat singing - in fact that's more-or-less what I'd planned from the beginning. I come up with a basic vocal melody, and I've written a little program to generate nonsense words, which I can fit to it.

(3) Recorded them. This involves packing my laptop and a crappy old microphone to the garage, where I can make strange vocal noise without anyone overhearing and thinking I'm having a nervous breakdown in Farsi.

(4) Processed them within and inch of their lives. Now, the thing is, I'm a pretty terrible singer. On a good day, I can harmonise to a monotone - which is what I do in recording.

I then run the recording through a compressor, a gate, a denoiser and a pitch corrector - this last to wrench my wandering pitch to 110Hz, aka concert pitch A2. I can then use an offline pitch-shifter to move the pitch of individual syllables around, making a little melody.

Honestly, it would be easier to use a vocoder.

(5) The difficult bit. Arranged my vocals over the music, EQing them so everything's clear, and adding reverb, chorus, tape saturation and whatever effects seem like a good idea at the time.

(6) Taken my five - yes, five - songs, and mixed them into a continuous, er, mix.

Stage (7) will be: Upload the result to youtube.

I'm going to wait a few hours before (7). So I can listen with a fresh pair of ears, do any last minute tweaking, and not rush into deciding this is the final, finished product

After all that, I'm not entirely happy - I made a lot of mistakes, and hopefully learned from them. This EP (11 or 12 minutes) is a practice run, and I reckon I can do the next one much better.

So, at midnight on March 1st, as promised...

Slow

---

I have five pieces of backing music composed.

I have some lyrics (of a sort) to go over them.

I have the time and equipment to record and mix them.

Unfortunately I'm

(1) Very good at inventing distractions
(2) Dealing with a lot of bureaucratic shit
(3) Suffering from a six-week cold
(4) Thus unable to sing
(5) Far more nerishly excited by the prospect of redesigning my virtual studio for the fifth time in a month than actually using it
(6) Going through my annual period of depression, and
(7) Really, very good at inventing distractions

However, I'm hereby making a solomn promise to my blog that I'll start recording within the next 24 hours.

That's the trouble with having no god to be ashamed in front of, no social circle to be pressured by, and no neurotic need to make my parents proud. The only person pushing me is me.

And I'm not very pushy.

---

Legs

Two things we tend to believe about computers:
1) Every year they'll get faster, more powerful, and maybe even easier to use. The same for software.
2) Most people will be up to date.

Which is odd, because neither has been true for well over a decade. In fact, they may never have been true.

In the 1970s it was a rule of thumb that every year there would be a new generation of hardware on the market, and it would be ten times the speed of the previous year.

Estimating computation speed has never been an exact science. You can chose CPU-cycles, gigaflops, or MIPS as your yardstick, all giving different results. And in any case, two systems which run at the same speed for one task might have very different results for another.

But as a rule of thumb, it worked. Every year, add a zero to your chosen measure of speed.

In the 1990s, the rule was: Every year, speed doubles. And the unspoken implication was: Speed will continue to double for evermore.

Which in retrospect made no sense at all.

If you imagine a nation where every 30 years the population doubles, then to feed everyone you'd need the production of food to double in the same time.

But if it takes X amount of ingenuity to multiply food productivity by two...it will take X times 2 ingenuity to multiply it by four. Which means every 30 years, you have to be twice as clever. And then twice again.

Like the Red Queen said, you have to run twice as fast just to stay where you are.

Even if you're dumb enough to think you can double scientific progress by doubling the number of scientists - or doubling their wages - it's still not sustainable.

In any case, the implicit assumption would be that scientific progress is a never-ending road, which itself assumes that the universe is infinitely malleable, if only we can get smart enough. Infinitely smart in fact - which I'm pretty sure is a meaningless phrase.

Odd how we can believe obviously false things just by not quite stating them explicitly. Clarity is the enemy of the ideologue.

The world of computing hit the brick wall of unmalleable reality around the year 2000. Unless someone found a way to increase the speed of light, or shrink atoms, electricity couldn't be made to flow faster through wires.

We got hyperthreading - a way to shoehorn two short instructions into the space of one long instruction.

We got the botched implementation of 64-bit processing, which had the big selling point that arithmetic with literally astronomical figures was now slightly easier.

And we got multiple cores - a tacit admission that CPUs couldn't be made faster...and the best we could do was run several in parallel, hoping that those tasks which didn't have to be run in sequence could run concurrently...and the results reintegrated by clever shuffling.

My 64-bit laptop has eight cores. Which is to say it has four hyperthreaded CPUs.

Which leaves only the problem that most software is still 32-bit, and most either can't handle multicore processing, or runs tasks that can't be split into several parallel streams.

The focus in computer development is now away from vainly trying to squeeze ever decreasing efficiencies out of silicon and copper.

The USB3 standard is ten times the speed of USB2.1 - but the new faster data streams still have to be funnelled through the same CPU.

Screens are wider - mine is 17.5 inches. Good for watching widescreen TV - in fact it's rather difficult to buy a small flatscreen plasma monitor for your PC. They can't make them much better, so the new notion of an upgrade is to make them bigger.

Mouses, MIDI keyboards and headsets can now be wireless. Which means you get the slight convenience that wires which occasionally got tangled...now don't. And you can now sit on the other side of the room, listening to your MP3s through bluetooth.

Old, obsolete, slow processors are reincarnated in netbooks and iPhones - where you can do what you did 20 years ago, at the speed of 10 years ago, but mobile, and on a very small screen. And pay for the experience.

It's a similar story with software, and operating systems.

Windows 8 was essentially Windows 7 with a new interface. An incredibly annoying, hard to use, badly thought-out interface, marketed on the bizarre assumptions that (a) everyone had touchscreen technology, (b) everyone wanted to use touchscreen technology, and (c) using a touchscreen to operate software designed to use a mouse...was somehow better.

It also pointlessly rearranged the configuration options, on the grounds that moving around the items in your shelves is the next best thing to getting better items.

Windows 8.1 made the further advance of bringing back some of the useful features which 8 had taken out.

"Bloatware" is the name we give to small, useful programs which acquire large, useless extra features. The alternative to bloating is to repackage the same program with the exact same functions, but with snazzier graphics and call it an upgrade.

Which is probably why our second belief is false. People aren't up to date.

Why use MS Office 2014 when MS Office 2003 does everything you could possibly want? Actually, MS Office '97 was all you needed, and it almost never crashed - but it won't install on your new system.

Why use Reason 7 when Reason 5 runs without a freaking dongle, and everything Reason 7 can do that Reason 5 can't do...you do anyway in Reaper?

More to the point, why install new versions of old Firefox plugins, knowing the new versions cause crashes with your other plugins?

I grudgingly moved from Windows XP to Windows 7, mainly becuase my new 8-core widescren laptop cannot run XP. The BIOS simply doesn't have the option to use the old IDE filing system - it can only use the admittedly better AHCI.

So I'm now running Windows 7 made up to look like XP.

Except half of my XP programs won't run under 7 - in spite of Microsoft's insistence that they can, in 7's "compatibility modes'.

Which means, for those XP programs which don't have a 7 replacement, I'm running them in a virtual machine.

And finally, being up to date is expensive. And most people haven't got much money.

Out of date software that people still use is called "legacy" software, and the dirty open secret is that pretty much everyone is a legacy user.

Like in Blade Runner, the future is old. In the future, we'll all live in the past.

FAWM 2014 Day 5

Five days of rain.

One change of bank account, one bureaucratic screw-up, five telephone calls to fix it, three assurances from three bureaucrats that it's all the fault of a different bureaucrat.

One rhinovirus, four types of pills, three days with a head full of cotton wool and a nose full of concrete.

One laptop virus, one complete reinstall of Windows.

Two backing tracks composed, no lyrics written.

One slight change of plan: I reckon I can do an EP in a month? Five songs?

FAWM 2014 Day 1

Things that can get in the way of your first day of composing:

• Staying up till 4am the night before, watching consecutive episodes of "Castle" - even though you're coming to hate all the characters
  
• Having a cold, a sore throat, and generally feeling a bit meh...when you wake up at midday
  
• Headphones developing a dry joint and not working -
  
• Realising the TR808-style drums you made yesterday are a bit rubbish -
  
• Coming up with a backing track loosely inspired by Depeche Mode's "Just Can't Get Enough"...and then realising you've spent two hours making a bad pastiche of, um,  Depeche Mode's "Just Can't Get Enough".

Nevermind. As someone said, "An expert is someone who's made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field". So I'm several points closer to being an expert. Making mistakes is easy. Recognising them is easy for anyone who isn't an idiot. The hard part is not doing them again.

Low Symphony

---

Depression.

I've had it on and off all my life, and I still don't know exactly what it is. Here's a few possibilities:

• Feeling unhappy for no apparent reason
  
• Being drained of willpower, so even the simplest of tasks feel impossible
  
• Anger without enthusiasm
  
• Being lonely, but hating people
  
• Like having a bad headcold, but with only the non-physical symptoms
  
• Actually, literally having an infection, but without obvious bodily symptoms
  
• The entirely appropriate reaction to seeing your own situation clearly
  
• An overreaction to your own situation
  
• A hormonal imbalance, for unknown reasons
  
• The emotion pattern set by an unhappy childhood, continued into adulthood
  
• Something to do with grey skies and low light levels
  
• The psychological aspect of high cholesterol, high blood sugar, high blood pressure etc.
  
• The way most people have always felt throughout history, recently reclassified as a problem

Joan Baez said "Action is the antidote to despair". Which may be just another way of saying "Brooding just makes it worse, so find ways to distract yourself".

My preferred distraction is trying to make music. What I've actually spent the last month making are preparations for making music. I'm very good at preparing, just not much good at doing.

A new laptop, a whole load of configurations to optimise it for recording and composing, a pristine software studio tweaked until it's just how I like it, three self-synthesised drumkits and a virtual synth.

Oh, and a little program to make lyrics in a fictional language, because there's nothing I particularly want to write songs about.

A blend of prevarication and preparation: "Pervariation".

FAWM (February Album Writing Month) starts tomorrow. The challenge is to write 14 songs in 28 days. I have the Concept part of Concept Album sort-of worked out - now there's just the little matter of figuring out how to do the other part...by doing it.

---

The Answer

It's my birthday.

I'm 42, which is either the answer to life, the universe and everything...

Or the age when your everyday conversation starts to include terms like "mortgage", "patio", "pension", "you're-too-young-to-understand" and "I'm-not-racist-but...."

Or the age when all the idiotic opinions you had at 21 magically become mature insights gained through experience.

Or possibly the time you get a strange urge to cheat on your partner because if you leave it any longer you won't be able to, somehow.

Or...the time by which you've not just moved away from your parents, but found an excuse to live in a different town.

Or the time when you start to define yourself by your job, not your impossible ambitions.

Well, I don't have a mortgage or a pension, I'm the one married men cheat with, and I've moved back in with my parents. So there.

My impossible ambition involves a new laptop, some old software, and a month to record an album.

But it is my birthday so...there will be cake.

Wolf...Blood

---

I wrote this in the week before leaving. Now I'm back in England, and it seems like an appropriate final memory of Saudi.

---

Arabs don't have a concept of camp...but they know all about camping.

Going out into the desert, collecting dry wood on the way, pitching a tent and making a fire - then sitting around it cooking food, drinking coffee with cardamom, telling stories and building companionship into the night.

Of course, the tent is Made in China, the pitching is done by the same pakistani or philipino menial on minimum wages who also makes and serves the coffee, and the fire is started with a blowtorch, but the spirit is the same. The fire is also inside the tent, because it gets much too cold outside.

When you need to empty your bladder of all the coffee, there's a portable toilet (combined with shower facility) because you can't just pee on a sand dune when you're a hundred kilometers from the nearest city. Though that's exactly what I did when it was 'engaged'.

Here's something we don't do in the west on our camping trips: Perform classic poems for each other. The poetry may be read from smartphones nowadays, but the last time you were around a campfire, did you do readings of Milton for each other? Ging-Gang-Goolie it isn't.

Someone mentioned my dubious achievements as a singer, so I was encouraged to Do The Show Right Here. I gave my rendition of "Sweet Dreams" (which was called "deep and insightful" by the audience) and even managed to recall a poem to recite - Blake's "Sick Rose".

Then...someone set off fireworks in the distance, causing much excited murmuring. It seems fireworks are the traditional signal that a hunting party have found and killed a wolf - so we jumped into out giant people carriers (Arabs don't do small cars) to go and see.

I was initially reticent about going to look at a newly killed animal, but then realised I'd been spending the night munching on bits of sheep and cow grilled on the fire.

The wolf was grey and thin, surprisingly small - maybe four foot from long snout to tail...which was still twitching it's last as we arrived. There was a bullet wound and a trail of blood from it's neck, and after less than a minute all movement ceased. My hosts and their friends posed with the gun for each other's cameras, holding up the wolf's head by it's ears. I was struck by the sightless eyes that seemed to point directly at me, and the long, lolling red tongue.

The children got to pose too, including the youngest - a boy of ten who I'd played hide-and-seek with earlier. I posed with them - I've seen dead animals by the roadside before, but never touched one, let alone one still cooling. Everyone seemed happy. I asked whether the wolf would be eaten, but was told it was forbidden to eat any animal that eats meat.

Back in the tent, all dozen of my hosts said this was the first time they'd ever seen a wolf. Hunting for them was common, but seeing was rare, and killing almost unknown. They explained that wolves were a major problem, not just killing for food but being cruel and destructive simply for fun, killing 30 or 40 sheep on a farm in one night, but carrying just one on his back (sic) to the den.

So how many sheep farms were there locally? Apparently none. I considered asking how wolves could be such a threat if they were so rare...but didn't bother. There are probably less than 200 arabian wolves left in the wild. I wonder how long hunters will continue to search after they're extinct.

Two subjects always come up when saudis get into conversation with westerners. 1) Is it true that if they go to the west they can have all the sexual partners they want without shame? And 2) Why aren't you a muslim?

The second turned into a Q&A. They trotted out all the usual arguments, I responded with the usual refutations, and they replied that although they accepted the arguments presented failed, they still believed. At the end, they understood that faith isn't a matter of evidence, but of needing a certain kind of love in one's life. Most people need it, I don't, so until our needs change, our beliefs won't. All very amicable and civilised.

Except for the one inevitable idiot who repeatedly insisted that although he couldn't justify his faith, I had a duty to read every justification until I found one that was convincing. But not for anything that wasn't the wahabi varient of the sunna varient of islam.

But: it was interesting to hear the muslim version of Pascal's Gambit, specifically: If you don't accept any religion, and any one of the infinitely many possible religions that claim an afterlife is true, you'll go to hell. So by accepting islam, you increase your chances of heaven by an infinitely small amount...and isn't that worth it?

I've been here 14 months. My plane leaves in 4 days. Suddenly I'm surrounded by people who say they'll miss me when I'm gone. I have no idea how I'll feel about saudi when I'm back in england...and no idea how I'll feel about england after getting to know saudi.

---

I was in the limbo of "about to leave but not yet gone" writing that. Now I'm in the limbo of "lots to do but can't quite yet start it".

---

The Missionary Imposition - Update

It's finally happened. I've heard an argument from an evangelist which I haven't heard a thousand times before. In fact, three of them.

1) Islam is true because it prevents car crashes. Music is forbidden in islam, because music excites your emotions, which makes you drive too fast, which makes you crash. But no music means no dangerous driving.

2) Islam says music makes you think of sex. Islam says thinking of sex is bad. Islam saves you from things which islam says is bad. Therefore islam is true.

3) In answer to my comment that you can't persuade someone into or out of a religion for the same reason you can persuade someone into or out of love: In islam you *can* persuade someone to fall in love. The reason being:

3.1) It's forbidden to fall in love before marriage, because doing so might lead to the man declaring his intention to marry the women, but then changing his mind, which always causes severe psychiatric problems for the woman.

3.2) Getting married is a complicated, costly procedure involving the man seeking permission from the woman's father, and paying a large dowry. If he divorces her later, he loses their house and property, which he probably can't afford. Therefore he will decide to stay with her, which after a few years will lead to love.

3.3) A man is incapable of loving any children he didn't personally progenitate, therefore is incapable of raising them. But if he and his wife do procreate, then fall out, the presence of the offspring will force them to stay together, which will force them to decide to fall in love.

And as an extra added bonus:

4) Hospitals in the west are replacing medicine with readings from the Qu'ran, which cast out demons and thus work much better than nasty drugs. It says so in a little book, and books are always reliable because if they weren't, the police wouldn't let people publish them.

And the moral of the story is: For one who wants to believe, any excuse is good enough...but no amount of excuses is ever enough.

The Missionary Imposition

I've never met a Jewish evangelist.
I've met a few zionists, but none of them were jewish. In the same way as I've met a few maoists, but none of them were chinese.
I've yet to meet a buddhist who's actually from a buddhist country. Almost everyone I've met from a hindu country, if they mentioned their religion, was muslim.
The proximimate reason why I've not encountered evangelical jews is...most jews don't believe in a god. Some of them might regard their right to a homeland as god-given, but that's in a different compartment of their brains. Compare with those atheists who kind-of wish there were a god so they could *hate* him.
But even the hassidic types with the cool broad-brimmed black hats and curly forelocks...the ones who really do say "Oy Vey!" and use "schmuck" to refer to a part of the body which they mutilate...they don't look for converts.
They might believe you're going to Sheoul for not following all the dumb rules they've interpreted into their magic book, and they might personally think you'd look better in a skullcap...but they don't try to *push* you into salvation.
Christians on the other hand take it as a personal affront that you're not one of them.
Even the ones in sects which believe they-and-only-they are the elite, hand-picked by the almighty for paradise, where they can virtuously enjoy watching the rest of us burn for eternity...even these are insulted if you don't want to join.
Which is a little odd, because you can't be the elite few without being few.
You can see the same kind of double-logic in most marxist groups. The rightous are in the oppressed minority, therefore the smaller and more oppressed the minority, the more rightous they are.
But how *dare* the majority not *want* to join us?
One doesn't need to believe in a magic man in the sky to believe in a holy cause. Or adopt the hypocrisy.
Muslims are different again. They might find it incomprehensible that you're not already one of them, but if they try to convert you...take it as a compliment. Because it means they like you - they think you're worth saving.
I've got my own double-standard here. On the one hand I find the arguments tiresome and simple-minded. But I *do* enjoy humiliating soul-winners when they try it on.
There's absolutely no excuse - it's like beating a retarded child at chess...and feeling affirmed by it. *And* getting angry when they don't realise they've lost.
Usually I know their holy texts better than they do, and half a lifetime of careful thinking means I'm fairly good at out-thinking people who don't think much. There's no trick to it.
Especially when the arguments all look like these:
"If there's no god, where do you go when you die?". "My religion is true because the believers of the other one eat babies". "It makes me happy to believe, so it'd make you happy, so it's true".
"This line of scripture sounds a little like a fashionable bit of science, therefore gay marriage is wrong". "You can't explain X, therefore god did it, therefore Obama is the antichrist".
"Atheism is a religion, and you believe science is infallible, so...something something something".
In science, the least interesting thing about an idea is who had it. In the wider world, the least interesting thing about a superstition is...the superstition. Why it was invented, why people believe it, and the tortured ways they justify it - these are the stuff of anthropology, psychology and history.
And that's why it would be interesting to meet a jewish evangelist.

Name that Voice

They say you learn a lot when you teach.

Mostly what you learn is
(1) You don't know the subject as well as you thought you did, or
(2) The books are wrong, or
(3) The subject has got really weird quirks and byways.

Usually you discover these things when students ask questions. For instance: What's the English word for the sound made by camels?

So far as I can tell, there isn't one. We can certainly have a stab at describing the noise - a long gutteral croak, or a low wet mournful keening. Terry Pratchett described it as "like a herd of donkeys being chainsawed"

We can attempt to *transcribe* sounds, like "woof" or "arf" for dogs, or "boc" and "cock-a-doodle-doo" for chickens, but I'm talking about a noun naming the sound or a verb indicating it's production.

Lions roar, dogs bark, small dogs yap, very small dogs yip. Cats mew or miaw, angry cats hiss, sheep and goats bleat or baa, cows low or moo, birds chirp, parrots squawk, horses neigh, pigs snort or oink, ducks quack, donkeys bray, pigeons and doves coo, wolves howl, chickens cluck and elephants trumpet.

So there's plenty of special words for animal sounds, and a selection of words for more general sounds that we can also use for animals - bears and gorillas grunt, mice squeak, tigers and panthers growl, monkeys chatter, some birds sing, and if they don't, they call or cry. Dolphins and whales also sing.

Crickets chirrup. I once read in a book about psycholinguistics that grasshoppers make six distinct sounds, with meanings like "I'm hungry", "I want to have sex" and, rather wonderfully, one used specially for "I've just had sex". But for those of us who aren't grasshopper experts (Cicadologists? Locustophiles?), they probably just chirrup too.

Hippos, rhinos, deer, reindeer, moose (or is it mooses?) oxen and bison - these join camels in the list of animals whose utterances we don't designate with a specific word. They just "grunt".

I've absolutely no idea what sloths sound like. Maybe they're too lazy to speak.

Esperanto has a word meaning "to make the sound appropriate to the animal": Blek. The closest English has to this is probably "call".

So what do humans do? That's easy, we txt.

Gate Star

There's a term in prison slang: Gate Happy.

If you're gate happy, your release date is days or a few weeks away, and you're feeling bouyed up and optimistic, looking forward to it. You're still on the inside, but you're nearly out.

Even if there's nothing for you on the other side of the gate but a nebulous freedom and a whole lot of concrete problems, the prospect feels better than a stone box.

Well, I've got two weeks to go. And I'm feeling pretty good about it - with the inevitable downside that time can really *crawl* when you're waiting.

As for what's waiting for me...hmmm.

* A bacon sandwich. Yes, I'm perfectly happy to live without pork, but seeing as I haven't had it for over a year, I want it.

* A midnight meetup with my married, closeted friend. Yes, I'm perfectly happy to live without, erm, porking, but seeing as I haven't had much....

* A replacement laptop. I don't live online, but pretty much everything I do except basic biological functions involves a computer. Sometimes two.

* Parents and friends. You don't need to see them very often, but it's good to have them available.

* The Doctor Who 50th Aniversary Special. Plus a year's worth of other recorded TV and radio, so I can be a complete and utter couch potato over christmas and new year, munching my bacon sandwich in front of my new laptop.

* Same old same old. The plan was to wait out the recession while getting moderately rich doing a job I enjoyed. Now I'm bored with the job, not well paid and the recession's still going on.

* Little holiday, big plans. There's a lot of things I want to do or try out. But talking about them seems to make doing them more difficult. Which is either a profound psychological insight which explains much human behavior...or me being a bit weird.

* See the world. Some time off teaching followed by a job in a decent school will hopefully turn me from a tired old lag (more prison slang) weighed down with experience...into an experienced old lag weighed down with wisdom.

I want to try a different country. 

How to Say Goodbye

Three ways to leave. (1) Talk the boss out of his fantasies, so he'll fill out the paperwork which will allow me to leave. (2) Get driven to a country that doesn't need the paperwork, and buy a plane ticket there. (3) Put a brick through a window so the police will deport me. The fantasies of (1) are: That this business which has been bankrupt for 6 months can be turned around and transformed into a cash cow which will make the boss enormously rich. That I am not out of patience with his incompetence and utterly bored with working here. That his one asset (yours truly) can be persuaded to stay, with promises of becoming enormously rich (see above). That breaking several laws by keeping me will go miraculously unnoticed by the authorities. Oh, and that the other school in this town which went bankrupt and the two others which soon will be...are exceptions to the rule. Oh, and that being 2 months in arrears with the rent for my accommodation is neither a breach of contract nor liable to become a problem vis-a-vis my having a place to live. And that I am not as a consequence moving all my stuff into the classroom, just in case. I have actually lived IN a school before - working in Bulgaria for a different delusional incompetent. Oh, and that refusing to answer the phone is an effective coping strategy. Oh, and that I'm prepared to put up with this shit. As for option (2), Interlink - the incredibly slow and bureaucratic company which owes me wages for 3 week's work - should pay me, and the other three teachers it owes, by the end of this week. Which will enable me to get a plane ticket and a ride to the airport. This would entail breaking fewer regulations than staying - go figure. Alternative (3) is a last resort. Making plans is the easy part. Now for the hard part.

Update

1) Leaving soon. Finish the month's course, sell the school, arrange the trip home.2) Laptop dead. See you when it's revived, or there's a new one. 3) Sending from the phone is a pain.

Word Processing

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What words should I teach? What words do students actually need to know? I don't know either, and intuition is always a lousy guide, but here's one approach to finding out.

The latest Oxford English Dictionary contains about 290,500 entries. The Concise OED has 65795, and I'm using these as my starting point.

I can discard 13,479 entries because they're phrases instead of individual words, plus I can lose 2,727 entries because they're hyphenated terms. That leaves 45,495.

But which ones are absolutely essential, which are kind-of useful, and which are in there to make it look 'comprehensive' or because the compilers just liked them?

I have the subtitles of 20,749 BBC programmes broadcast over the last two years - in effect, transcriptions. By ditching the shortest 749, then filtering out formatting data and punctuation, I've got a pretty large corpus of reasonably authentic utterances.

So, what words from the COED occur with what frequency in the BBC transcriptions? And what words don't occur at all?

Well, here a selection from the 14,633 individual words which occur exactly zero times in two years worth of BBC TV. I know what ten of them mean.

Word	Occurances
backgrounder	0
bouclé	0
chametz	0
contumacious	0
delist	0
dyspepsia	0
externalism	0
gambado	0
headquarter	0
inamorato	0
kaffeeklatsch	0
linstock	0
menhir	0
mutuel	0
orangeman	0
pemphigoid	0
portière	0
raja	0
sandinista	0
siksika	0
stumer	0
tetrastich	0
tynwald	0
usufruct	0
yaar	0

That means 29,140 words occur at least once. Here are 25 of the 19,381 which occur less than ten times. I know the meanings of 14 of them - what about you?

Word	Occurances
shirty	9
maraschino	8
cortisone	7
serried	7
ganglion	6
turbocharger	6
gilet	5
som	5
convulsion	4
nimbus	4
unlistenable	4
divestment	3
miscast	3
spousal	3
bioactive	2
epsilon	2
leafhopper	2
prelate	2
tambourin	2
angiography	1
chinkara	1
eclampsia	1
honeyguide	1
minuteman	1
piscina	1

9,339 occur a hundred times or more. The following happen more than ten but less than 1,000 times.

Word	Occurances
honourable	704
underwear	529
vain	416
troop	327
muffin	264
max	215
cam	177
blip	150
uncanny	129
gland	111
aerospace	96
detonate	83
mangle	72
yam	63
ringside	55
chamomile	47
embryonic	41
poncho	36
uneducated	32
bawl	27
gunfight	24
permissible	21
convection	18
lucre	16
morass	14

A more managable quantity of 520 occur 10,000 or more times. Here are some of those between 1000 and 10,000:

Word	Occurances
summer	8831
offer	7861
including	6985
hopefully	6285
fruit	5693
showing	5224
closed	4761
sight	4342
location	4031
countryside	3784
product	3474
lack	3211
arrive	3001
transport	2793
shower	2633
iron	2484
breathe	2297
panic	2162
twist	2031
cave	1921
purple	1824
innocent	1718
fraud	1641
virtually	1560
assume	1480

Here's a selection between 10,000 and 100,000. Do any surprise you as being more or less common than you thought?

Word	Occurances
get	273618
much	117311
home	63526
course	45194
lovely	34349
such	28509
front	24414
while	20752
easy	18113
hold	16047
dad	13846
hour	12535
cost	11389
beat	10660

A mere 76 occur 100,000 or more times:

Word	Occurances
the	3812984
to	2404952
a	2098428
of	1699308
and	1640805
it	1432806
in	1209482
that	1173021
for	730257
on	699870
have	633194
this	568081
be	564405
are	532264
with	490772
not	401645
at	396377
he	374352
do	368329
me	350617
all	346828
what	338545
there	337154
as	331112
but	321033
like	319404
just	309660
up	305068
can	297541
about	290147
out	285530
so	285324
going	283807
think	281064
from	275761
get	273618
will	269378
know	267222
here	252640
go	239097
an	220785
very	212718
them	212592
see	201120
time	196690
now	187122
if	187114
right	182193
by	182007
more	179865
really	176809
good	169427
people	168640
or	163126
back	160195
some	159211
she	157138
want	152556
no	148444
then	137351
into	134491
down	130689
how	130228
look	124413
come	124007
way	123631
make	122129
over	119391
well	117864
say	117728
much	117311
need	115195
bit	113799
off	107582
little	103122
take	101002

So, here's one difficulty in learning a language. Once you've got the major meanings of the top 100-200 words, you've got tens of thousands of others to learn, and the additional benefit of knowing each of them - their usefulness - is pretty damn small.

How often do you need to describe something as 'spicy' (position 3,000, 975 occurances)? Or 'compulsory' (position 5,000, 370 occurances)? Or describe someone as a 'colonel' (position 7,000, 182 occurances)?

I may have had the occasional 'manky' cheese sandwich (position 10,000, 85 occurances) - but I'm not sure I've ever used the word in conversation.

The Arabic method of learning languages is "memorise the dictionary". It doesn't work, for obvious reasons. But it's...interesting that they've taken only the most difficult, least interesting and least rewarding part of the process, missing out all the easy, fun and useful parts.

The Arabs are almost British in their ability to miss the point.

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Algebra of Need

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This is a bit of a rant. Sorry.

There are three reasons to stay in a job, or a place, or an arrangement. One is for the money, or some other definite, measurable and significant benefit.

Two is because you enjoy it.

And three, the job itself isn't what you love or benefit from, but it comes bundled with something that does give you something good. You might not like the city, but you stay because your family are there. A personal reason.

Well, my personal reason to stay in this job, this city and this country...is incredibly busy and a two hour plane journey away. I am thoroughly bored with teaching - maybe after a good holiday I'll start to like it again, but right now I get no pleasure from stepping into the classroom.

And the money...is always promised, and in the future. The one big contract which will make us all rich is always on the horizon, and negotiations are in progress, but it never arrives.

So, of the three possible reasons to stay, I don't have one.

And I do have reasons to leave. I am sick of so many things about this country. I'm sick of the insane bureaucracy that means it takes a year to get a licence to set up a business, and six months to get a bank account, and three months to get a work permit - which ties you to one contract with one employer for twelve months.

The only way to get out of a contract is to commit a crime and get deported. And if it comes to that, the easiest crime to commit is to go on strike.

I'm sick of the infantile supersition that's tied up with self-mythologisation. The more intelligent Arabs I've met are puzzled that god's chosen people are not rulers of the world - and the stupider ones can't grasp that outsiders don't want to be god's chosen people.

In this last, they're a bit like the stupider Americans.

Why did god deliver his message in Arabic? Was it because he was talking to an arab? No, it's because arabic is god's language. And how do we know this? Obviously, it's because he delivered his message in arabic.

Oh, and because arabic allegedly (but not really) has sounds that no other language has. Because...something or other. And therefore...something. Somehow.

We know the Quran is the perfect, eternal word of the magic man in the sky because it's impossible for mere mortals to make a sentence which compares in beauty to any of its sentences. And we know this because the people who've appointed themselves to judge the beauty of competing sentences have already decided that no sentence can compare.

I'm sick of a government that's trying to reap the benefits of being open, while staying closed. They want to be innovative and cosmopolitan while staying a fossilised monoculture. The people are obsessed with images of drugs, alcohol, sexual freedom and even political dissent...and with condemning each other for having the same thoughts.

This is a culture that's trying to develop a work ethic while maintaining a racist elitism that justify's only foreigners doing work. And not just foreigners from poor countries.

I'm sick of an educational system that confuses rote recitation and mindless copying with learning. Tomorrow I'm invigilating an exam for elementary students who, after six years of study, can name every object in their house. They just can't construct a single complete sentence about them.

They've actually asked for more tests and exams, presumably on the grounds that the more tests you do, the more chance you'll get the answers right by the law of averages.

Oh, and strictly unofficially, no one gets graded below 50%, even if all they do is write their misspelled name at the top of the sheet. Because low grades are "discouraging" and high ones are "respectful".

So what's the plan?

Well, there is another potential big contract that will take four weeks for come into effect...or else collapse. In fact it's the biggest ever. So if after six weeks the money is rolling in, I can stay until the work permit expires in February.

If it isn't, I'm out. And with luck I'll even be home for christmas.

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Edit: Actually, a slight miscalculation. The work permit doesn't expire in the second month of the Gregorian calendar, it expires in the second month of the Islamic calendar - which is used in one islamic country, and almost exclusively on official documents. Like, erm, work permits.

Expiration date: The 27th of Safar. Also known as the 30th of December. New Year's Eve.

So I've got ten weeks.

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