Kapitano

A Bit of the Other

I got a message from a guy. Looking for no-strings-attached 'fun' from a likeminded, openminded man.

I sometimes get messages like it, and sometimes I follow up on them, and sometimes we meet for sex. It might be blow-and-go. It might be tea and, erm, crumpet. Occasionally it's a long chat followed by a lot of cuddling in a nice warm bed.

But this message had something slightly different about it. He's in his forties, a little overweight, versatile, considers himself gay...and asexual.

An asexual man would like to have sex with me. Which means either I've missed something important about asexuality...or he has.

The notion of asexuality makes sense to me. If Donald Rumsfeld says there are known knowns, known unknowns and unknown unknows, then it seems reasonable to ask if there are unknown knowns - things we know but don't know that we know. And in several senses the answer is yes.

Likewise if there are people who like men but not women, women but not men, or men and women, then the forth side of the square would be people who just aren't into sex - with anyone.

But the trouble is, there's a lot of people out there who wish they were asexual, and convince themselves they are - compare with lipstick lesbians and straight pretend bisexuals. Think Brett Anderson in the 90s, David Bowie in the 70s, or any of the student types now who adamantly refuse to define their sexuality - while having a steady girlfriend and never trying a homosexual experience.

There's no shortage of blogs written by mainly young people who've been seriously put off sex - by abuse, religious indoctrination, or just a really bad relationship - who want sex...but don't want to want it.

My emailer though presumably isn't like that - unless his notion of sex is of a billclintonian, asymmetrical kind, where someone can have sex with him without him having sex with them.

Again, it's not without precedent - or president. The notion of the gay top is both recent and western - if you travel back fifty years or east three thousand miles, you'll be in a place where gay men are thought of as the ones and receive, and straight men as the ones who give, usually to women but sometimes to men. Role is more important than gender.

But I don't think my emailer is like that - he's 'versatile', so at least likes the idea of not being the receptacle of another man's, um, attention.

Maybe he thinks of himself as biologically male, sexually homo, but mentally neither male nor female. If there are men trapped in women's bodies and vice versa - and I know there are because the closest I've come to sex with a women is almostgoing home with a M2F post-op transsexual - then perhaps there are neithers trapped in an either's body.

I'm tempted to respond just so I can ask him. But maybe that's not the right reason to have sex with someone.

Old and New

I'm now 39.

Or to put it another way, "Oh my shitting christ I'm nearly 40 and that's like totally middle aged which is the same as old really and I don't want to be a tedious old fart because there's still lots of stuff I want to do and anyway how the hell did I get that age anyway 'cos it's like yesterday I was 20 and apart from creakinger joints I still feel that age on the inside you know?"

So yes, it's my birthday, and yes, there is cake. Or rather there was cake and soon there will be more cake. Moar Caek.

After which, there will be no cake again for a very long time, nor chocolate or ice cream. But there will be cardiovascular exercise and hopefully an air of unbearable smugness as I approach my fortieth aniversary steadily getting thinner. And less out of breath when I climb the stairs.

There's other things to do too, but a lot of them kind of depend on that.

Goodbye Fool World

I've been thinking about suicide. Not doing it, just the strange attitudes people have to it.

Recently my local newspaper led with the story of a sixteen year old boy who'd killed himself - and tributes from friend and family. Except at no point did the multipage article admit that the instigator of his death was himself - instead, it was repeated several times that he'd been "found hanged".

When people (especially celebrities) are "found dead" or similar, it's a newspaper euphemism for suicide. Marilyn Monroe was "found dead", but Elvis Presley wasn't - even though in literal terms he was. Even Harold Shipman was "found hanged in his cell".

With this boy, one of two things happened when the family found him. Either it was as reported and they found him strangled by a noose - possibly with a suicide note though the newspaper didn't mention one. Or they found the aftermath of an asphyxiation-enhanced masturbation session gone wrong - and cleaned up the scene before calling the police to make it look like suicide.

The latter is hardly unusual, though I'm not claiming any special knowledge of what happened in this case. It just shows how an apparent suicide in the family is more "respectable" than a kinky wank, and how cold families can be in preserving that "respectability".

Suicidal impulses are universal. They occur - and usually pass without incident - in all ages, classes, and cultures. Nonagenarians kill themselves, and so do children. But for no very good reason, the latter fact is hidden and felt to be shocking.

Young children do kill themselves - they have the presence of mind to plan it, the strength of will to go through with it, and the depth of emotion for events make them want to do it - but it's very rarely acknowledged. Somehow it's viewed as even more shocking than when they kill other people.

And when it is, it's treated, implicitly or explicitly, as an issue of mental illness. As though the suffering and thoughts of pre-teens were incomparably different from those of the adults they would become, and the only possible reason for a child to want their life to end is...well, not being in their right mind.

"He did it because he was bonkers" has to be the great non-explanation - after "God did it" of course.

I've read that Japan has the highest suicide rate in the world, possibly linked to their culture of fear and shame at failure - even the prospect of failure. But I've also read that Hungary has the highest rate, allegedly from a kind of national dysthymia linked to a long history of poverty and incompetent government. And I've read that the record holder is Finland, because of...actually because of no easily oversimplifiable reason. Maybe the weather.

Everyone's got the right to off themselves. I regard it as a basic human right to chose death if that's what you want. But the reasons people do it...very often don't make a lot of sense.

David Rappaport shot himself because he felt he'd never be a serious actor - though personally I think he already was. Kurt Cobain thought he was losing his creativity. Justin Fashanu hanged himself after a seventeen year old boy had an attack of guilt after consensual sex, claiming it had been assault - even though the case had already been dropped.

Spalding Grey planned his years in advance - and talked publically about it. Socrates didn't kill himself - but the state demanded that he pretend.

The laws about sex and tax may be hopelessly confused, but just how fuckheaded must lawmakers be if they make it illegal to kill yourself? In Singapore they'll jail you for trying, and in Ireland...I bet you can't guess what the penalty used to be there. Yes, that's right.

Right now, ordinary people are killing themselves because they'd rather die than live with with a debt they can't pay off. And others one step above them on the social ladder are calling them "cowards" for doing so.

I managed two preposterously botched attempts in my twenties because...actually I can't quite remember why. And if you think that's bad, I know someone who managed to screw it up four times, all because he couldn't get a girlfriend.

Then there's suicide as a pose. I've hung around with enough emos and goths to know the tropes - and how "cry for attention", "cry for the world", and "cry for help" blur into each other. Before that it was Morrissy fans, and the Romantic poets of two hundred years ago weren't that different. They were treated with derision too.

Perhaps the boy in the newspaper was just trying to say "You'll be sorry when I'm gone", or else he really was just bored with life, or there was abuse involved, or the emotional abuse of loneliness. Maybe he couldn't have explained it clearly himself.

Either way...why is it in a newspaper at all? What kind of people pay to read about the uneventful death of a stranger? Exactly what kind of "public good" is served by reporting on the grief of different strangers?

Suicide is a subject you can't pretend doesn't exist. But that doesn't mean you have to be intelligent about it.

Self Self Self

Bloggers are supposed to be self obsessed, aren't they?

You've heard of people searching for their own identity. Well today I found it. I realised exactly who I am.

There's an old song from the musical My Fair Lady, which runs:

Wiv a little bit of luck,
Someone else'll do tha
Bloomin' work.

You've heard people telling stories which begin something like, "There was me, and John, and Mike, and Dave and...someone else - don't remember who. Doesn't matter. Anyway..."

And you've heard parents tell their children, "Oh of course it's not your fault. It's never your fault. It's always someone else to blame...."

That's me. I'm someone else. I'm the one who does the job because no one else will, the absent one who gets blamed...and the one who was also there who no one quite remembers.

The film Unbreakable hinges on the second lead, played by Samuel L Jackson, discovering who he is - he's the evil criminal mastermind.

The Vorlons in Babylon 5 are obsessed with the question "Who are you?" - though they've forgotten their own answer. In Farscape, Scorpius finds the remains of his parents because he hopes they'll tell him "Who I should be". The song which most sums up Rocky Horror probably isn't "Time Warp" but "Don't Dream It, Be It".

Notions of "The Real You" permeate psychology, and much of psychoanalysis is concerned with "stripping away layers to find the true self". In Heidegger and Sartre, the notion of Authenticity is crucial. The antagonist of Shakespeare's "Much Ado about Nothing" justifies his malice by saying, in effect, "I must be true to who I really am".

I of course don't believe in an unchangable, essential self. But if I had to define the person I tend towards being, it's...someone else. The one who'll do tha bloomin' work.

What about you?

Rememeber Me?

I've been quiet. What have I been doing all week? Well....

Twenty years ago I learned how to memorise the sequence of a deck of cards.

Most likely you also know the method, and most likely you also can't actually do it - we just know how. But just in case you don't, well....

There's basically two tricks for memorising things - strategically timetabled revision, and mnemonics.

The former means you learn something, then remind yourself of it (say) five minutes later, then an hour after that, then the next day, the next week, next month, next six months and next year - or something similar. There's an entire study system based on identifying your personal 'best first interval' (usually about five minutes) and your personal 'interval multiplier' (usually about 1.7). It's good for learning stuff you don't have to recall in sequence.

For sequenced information - lists, presentations, tables etc. - there's mnemonics. Which is basically to have a list of things already rote-memorised, which you then link to things you want to remember. The links usually last about a day, unless you reinforce them with revision.

So lets say you got a list of ten 'pegs' or 'slots', which are colourful, memorable pictures of things which look a bit like the figures one to ten. Here's the one I use:

1 - A rocket in space
2 - A quacking duck
3 - Wobbling jellies
4 - A creaking swivel chair
5 - A bloodstained meathook
6 - A bomb with a lit fuse
7 - A cliff seen from a helicopter
8 - An hourglass with trickling sand
9 - A balloon on a stick
10 - Laurel and Hardy

And lets say our list of items to be linked to these are a shopping list - cheese, chocolate biscuits, a tin opener etc.

How can you connect a rocket with cheese? How about a space rocket crashing through an asteroid made of cheese, and getting stuck halfway through with a squelchy noise? The cheese is lurid yellow and full of holes, like in Tom & Jerry cartoons, and the rocket is a futuristic sleek white affair with red highlights. Colourful, noisy, comic, absurd - in other words, memorable.

For the biscuits...how about a duck finding a packet of biscuits and loudly crunching them up? Or a refined, aristocratic duck in a tuxedo using its beak to dunk a biscuit in a china cup of earl grey?

And the tin opener? How about a tin opener made of wobbling red jelly?

Now without looking, what were the three shopping items? Or rather what were the three 'triggers', 'pegs' or 'slots'? Rocket...cheese. Duck...chocolate biscuits. Jelly...tin opener. And you can do them in reverse order too.

Okay, it's a party trick - and one for extremely dull parties. You can apply a similar method to memorising the sequence of a deck of cards, but the world record for doing so is twenty two seconds, so you probably can't use it to break the bank at Monte Carlo. Some poker players do use it though, to remember what cards have been played and which ones might be in other player's hands.

One variation uses parts of your own body. Another involves taking an imaginary walk around a house you know well, using objects on tables and walls to link to. It's called the Loci method (Latin for 'place') and it's a visual variation - visual methods are faster to make and recall associations, but verbal methods are more reliable.

The most common of the 'advanced' verbal methods is called the Major system. It involves taking numbers starting at zero, and translating their numerals into consonant sounds (not letters), making a list of words which have those consonants, and using this list as your 'pegs'.

Here's the conversion system:

0 - S as in Set, Z in Zero
1 - T in Take, D in Dare, TH in Think, TH in This
2 - N in November
3 - M in Mine
4 - R in River
5 - L in Lettuce
6 - SH in Sham, S in Pleasure, CH in Church, J in Judge
7 - K in Kite, G in Go
8 - F in Flame, V in Vertigo
9 - P in Pump, B in Ball

So your first ten words might be:

0 - Sea
1 - Door
2 - Knee
3 - Mail
4 - Ray
5 - Lair
6 - Jar
7 - Key
8 - Fur
9 - Pear

W, Y and H sounds aren't used. You can extend the list by adding new numbers, and if you forget a word, you can always make a new one from the number which generates it.

The best 'memorable' words tend to be nouns - specifically concrete, familiar, countable nouns. So 'Daisy' for '10' is better than "Hertz" or "Odious" because it's more easily visualisable.

I once memorised a two hour lecture as forty five bullet points using this system - and afterwards read them back to a nice young man in an utterly failed attempt to chat him up. Perhaps if it hadn't been two hours on 'Why Pokemon is Propaganda for Satan' I'd have had better luck - or kept up practicing.

But sometimes it's difficult to find good words. If only there were a list of dictionary words arranged by their Major System codes, so you could easily find ones that works for you.

And that's what I've been doing all week. Making one. Here.

All is Quiet on New Year's Day

The annual New Year's Eve party. Some entirely subjective highlights:

Craig

Imagine being invited to a party with lots of people, only two of who admit to liking pickled onions. You've got nothing else in common, but everyone assumes you two will click immediately - probably finding a spare bedroom later to have sex in, which everyone can snicker about. So they try to matchmake you.

That's me and Craig. Metaphorically - I'm not that into pickled onions. I'm nearly thirty nine, overweight, socially awkward, straight acting and into deep questions. He's about nineteen, tall and thin, if anything overgregarious, into dancing...and camp as a row of tits.

So we got introduced - as "that guy's gay too!" - exchanged thumbs up signals, and went back to our previous conversations. So much for forced compatibility.

But an hour or two later, there he was, face down in a spreading pool of his own vomit, semiconcsious and very, very drunk. I rolled him over onto his side so he wouldn't do a Jimi Hendrix and choke on his sick, then sat down and propped him up, with head supported over a bucket which a girl helpfully found.

And so it was, that I did spend half an hour tenderly holding young Craig in a bedroom, as he slept. And there was indeed a bit of snickering about it.

Then we moved him into a corner, found a pillow and blanket, and let him sleep it off. He was cold and sweating but not shivering, so I checked his pulse - it was slow and weak but the breathing was strong.

Hours later he came back downstairs, ravenous for pizza.

The Gatecrashers

Round about midnight, half a dozen or so young men marched in through the front door. No one knew who they were, and after a few minutes, they got shepherded out.

Then a second group appeared outside, wanting to come in - I went to talk to them. There were four or five of them, the leaders being two women in little black dresses. One of them pulled up her dress and leered at me - her version of bribery.

I explained, "The party's over, there's no food left, there's no alcohol left, you weren't invited. Please leave now". They still wanted to come in - they were of course, rather drunk.

After I said it the third time, they tried to charge their way in, and I reached out to block their way. So the two girls started screaming and punching me - with only slightly more force than a strand of wet spaghetti.

Others got rid of the nuisances, who smashed a window and a nearby car's windscreen before stealing someone else's taxi ride. Eventually the police arrived and weren't interested.

The Debate

I've been a socialist for ten years, a member of a trotskyist group (the SWP). Paul's been a socialist for at least as long, a member of a different trotskyist group (Millitant).

So, as with Craig "the only (other) ~~gay~~ socialist in the village", we were introduced and a debate set up. Here's a transcript:

Paul: If you're a socialist you should always support the Labour party.
Kap: Why?
Paul: Labour is the traditional home of the working class.
Kap: Traditions change.
Paul: Wait! Stop right there! Not so fast! Woah! No! listen! No, listen to me! Woaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!
Kap: ....
Paul: Labour is the traditional home of the working class.
Kap: Maybe it was once, but since Blair it's been essentially a tory party.
Paul: You're being ultraleft! Typical SWP! You're a prick!
Kap: If you want to know whether the Labour party's progressive, you look at its current policies, not its old ones.
Paul: Eight million working class people voted Labour at the last election! And the SWP's only got two thousand members! You're an ultraleftist! Prick!
Kap: Probably about four thousand members, and the fact that people vote for a party doesn't mean it represents all the interests of their class.
Paul: You're being a total prick! You're a prick! Prick!
Kap: I'm asking you why Labour should have unconditional loyalty, no matter what it does.
Paul: I'm not going to talk to you any more! Prick!

Paul started chatting up some girls - who later described him as "that very weird man with the manicure". And I had a long and very interesting conversation with a highly intelligent young fellow about religion, ethics and philosophy. The political left in Britain may be a joke, but I think it's great that kids are getting lessons in ethical conundrums and deep questions at school now.

Hours later, Paul reappeared and gave me a hug and a kiss on the cheek, saying "Good morning, darling". Adding "I'm the biggest faggot in the world. Have we got time for a blowjob?"

Perhaps fortunately, we didn't. But evidently someone had told him something that made him decide to like me.

And so, barring a long walk home and sleeping through most of New Year's Day, those are my final memories of 2010. This is one time I don't think it's a good idea to start as you mean to go on.

Here's to a better 2011.

The Old One

Five ways I know I'm getting old:

(1) Songs from my youth are on Radio 2. The BBC runs eleven national radio channels, among them Radio 1 for contemporary pop appealing to teenagers, and Radio 2 for tedious old farts politely referred to as "over 35s" - who don't like loud or strange music but also aren't into classical or jazz.

When I was in Radio 1's "target demographic", Radio 2 featured morning programmes dedicated to songs from stage musicals, and evening programmes for big band dancehall stuff from the 1940s and 50s.

Now it's got Human League, Ultravox and (oh the horror) Status Quo.

(2) Recession and mass bankruptcy. Coalition and Conservative government. Casual racism from the public and simpering patriotism in the newspapers. Idiots saying "I'm not sexist, I love pretty girls", TV news being thinly disguised advertising for other programmes, and the Brain Drain.

All things I spent half of my adult life being told were gone - and good riddance. Yes, I remember them all from the last time. At least I don't remember them from the time before that

(3) I don't associate much with people my own age - because they're boring.

It's a jolt to realise the thirty six year old man in the pub pontificating on subjects he know nothing about as an elder to a skinny-jeaned group of students half his age...is younger than me.

(4) I automatically expect the next big thing to be the same shit in different packaging. The iPad - a glorified netbook. Lady Gaga - early Madonna with even worse dress sense. The latest political theory - trickledown Regenomics. Another royal wedding - another PR stunt.

(5) Questions like "What am I supposed to be doing with my life?" overshadow questions like "What do I want to do today?"

I had my midlife crisis when I was fifteen. Another one is just not welcome.

Streetwise Sunday - Stuffed Edition

The last Streetwise Sunday of the year...and I think the last for a while. So, as with everything else at christmas, there's three helpings, plus a little extra, even though you don't really want it.

First, the large cooking bowl I found on a pavement. At the time, it was filled with stale dogfood that must've been there for at least a week. I dumped the contents into a bin, took the bowl home, washed it...and weeks later Mother made a christmas cake in it.

I'd like to show you the cake, but I'm eating the last of the second christmas cake as I write. So here's the bowl in it's pristine state.

The term "street furniture" can refer either to things like cars, lamp-posts and homeless children that you tend to see outside, or to the result of a home or pub that's just had a refurbishment - and leaves the defurbished furnishings (furbishings?) outside for, well, anyone who might want them.

And the mysterious thing is, no one ever does. Not even me.

Our third helping is...actual food. Specifically, a microwavable lasagna-for-one (price GBP1) on the pavement outside the university's biomedicine department. Now, the people who mostly eat these things are the unemployed, students, the retired, and the otherwise bankrupt. I'm at least two of these, and I quite like them.

So, who inhabits the university at christmas, and which rooms have microwaves? Postgrad researchers...and the offices of postgrad researchers. So I think I have a fair idea who microwaved it, then threw it out of the window in disgust.

Unless they were recreating the famous apocryphal experiment of dropping things off the leaning tower of pizza. Except it wasn't pizza, it was lasagna.

And the bonus?

Christmas is a time for togetherness, for getting a little bit drunk and enjoying yourself doing something silly, and for big sparkly trees.

Either that, or the time for the council to put up a big sparkly tree outside the guildhall, then putting a fence around it with dire warning not to go anywhere near, just in case people get a bit drunk and do something silly, like climbing up the tree until it topples over, dumping them hard on the pavement...so they can sue the council from hospital.

The One Day of Christmas

"Sir, I protest! I am not a merry man!"
- Worf, Star Trek: The Next Generation

This year I got exactly one text message wishing me a merry christmas. It read "Happy Christmas. Your vid gave me a stiffy". I think I'll have it framed.

Most of the assorted great aunts and uncles, Nth cousins and their offspring - the ones who made childhood christmas so tense and unpleasant - are now thankfully dead, estranged, in homes or in, er, Canada.

Even my brother decided he'd rather spend the season with colleagues rather than family, which is fine. So it's just two retired parents, three parrots, five dogs, an indeterminate number of mice, several tones of accumulated junk and one currently unemployed and penniless teacher - spending most of the time in separate rooms. Finally, a family christmas we can actually enjoy.

I was going to do a twelve-days-of-christmas type list, but most of them are ones. So here goes:

Here are twelve things of christmas that came to old Kapp-y...

One night on youtube
Far too much chocolate
One book of science
Crap Doc Who Special
One drunken phonecall
Old films on TV
One mislaid wallet
Cold in the nose....
One family noshup
Big indigestion
Refrozen snow
And a txt msg about a stiffy

Last Christmas (but One)

Two christmasses ago I spent the holidays backing up a few hundred gigabytes of data from hard drive to DVDR. Now I'm backing up much the same data from DVDR to external hard drive.

That christmas I got a present - thermal underwear. This christmas, it's so cold I couldn't manage without it. Back then I was awake most of the nights and asleep most of the days, living on tea with powdered milk, and chocolate biscuits. Now...well, I had to replace the old kettle.

I was putting off the hard work of writing lyrics by developing a collection of virtual synths. Now I've got a chorus and half a verse in front of me...and I'm coming up with a way to add a little unpredictability to mixing desk EQs.

I was getting nostalgic with a lot of old recordings I'd made of 70s Dr Who episodes. This year it's Blake's 7. The cold virus probably isn't the same one either.

But one thing is different this time. I've been given my very own christmas tree.

Happy Sleighbells to you, and may your new year resolutions last longer than your new year.

Humbug

Someone's sent me an ebook. It's called "Answers to Non-Muslim's Common Questions about Islam" by Dr Zakir Abdul Karim Naik, published by the Islamic Research Foundation.

Instead of me editorialising, why don't I just summarise what it has to say, and you draw your own conclusions? Here goes:

1) Why is polygamy allowed in Islam?

Most religions (including Christianity and Hinduism) allow polygamy - or at least don't explicitly forbid it. It's secular laws that limit marriage, even though men are biologically promiscuous - which science proves.

Islam is better than all the other polygamous religions because it's the only one to warn you not to have more wives than you can cope with.

2) Why not polyandry?

It's forbidden because women only need one man, and besides if she had more than one husband it might not be certain who the father of her children is - and that would be, er, bad.

3) Doesn't Islam degrade women?

Every other civilisation does, and western culture turns women into sex objects while pretending to free them. Sexlessness is dignified in women.

And the veil prevents rape in some unspecified way.

4) How can Islam be a religion of peace when it's been spread by conquest?

If Islam were a religion of violence, all the non-muslims would have been executed when Muslim armies invaded their country.

5) Are Muslims terrorists?

"The policeman is a terrorist for the robber."

6) Why aren't Muslims vegetarians?

They can be.

7) Why do they slaughter animals by decapitating them?

Because it's quick, relatively painless...and it lets the nasty germ-ridden blood flow away.

8) But doesn't eating meat make people violent?

Not if they only eat herbivores.

9) Isn't bowing to the Kaaba (that giant black cube in Mecca) idol worship?

It promotes unity among Muslims, so it...isn't.

10) Why aren't non-muslims allowed to go to Mecca?

Immigration control is good when we do it.

11) Why can't Muslims eat pork?

The Qur'an says so - just like the bible. Plus pigs carry disease, and aren't monogamous - "Many times after dance parties, they have swapping of wives".

12) Why can't Muslims drink alcohol?

The Qur'an says so - just like the bible. Plus "8% of Americans commit incest...Almost all cases of incest are due to intoxication".

Oh, and "ALCOHOLISM IS NOT A DISEASE - IT IS SATAN'S HANDIWORK". (Yes, that part is all in capitals.)

13) In law, why are two female witnesses equivalent to one male witness?

Women are more emotional than men, so less accurate.

14) Why is a woman's inheritance half that of a man?

Occasionally it isn't. If "the deceased has left no ascendant or descendent but has left the uterine brother and sister, each of the two inherit one sixth".

And men need more because they have families, which women don't.

15) Is the Qur'an the word of God?

Here I can quote the full text:

"(to be corrected and provided after a few days)
* apprximately 5 pages"

It would appear Dr Naik hasn't got around to writing this part yet.

16) How can you prove life after death?

Science can't prove it doesn't exist, so it's logical to believe it does.

If there's no afterlife, morality is impossible.

The justice in the afterlife balances out the injustice in this one.

17) Why are there sects in Islam?

All the other sects don't read the Qur'an right.

18) What's so special about Islamic ethics?

Under Shariah law, reported rapes and thefts are low.

19) If Islam is so good, why are Muslims as bad as everyone else?

It's media slander, it's just a few rotten apples giving the rest a bad name, and some non-muslim historians say the Prophet (peace be upon him) was a wonderful person.

I don't know about you, but I find it perversely comforting that although customs and cultures are so varied across the world, drivelling bullshit is the same everywhere.

Out of Africa

I was offered a job. Actually two jobs. Actually two jobs for me and one for a friend.

I'd get to be a teacher of general English in a school, and a teacher of Business English in a prestigious university in the capital city. Combined, the wages come to around USD1000 dollars per month, plus free food and lodging, in a country where everything's really cheap.

The other job is running the school, for the same sort of deal. USD250 per week disposable income each.

There is, however, one tiny niggling problem. It's in Khartoum, which is in the Sudan, which is probably just about to have a civil war, and where white folks and gay folks are not notably popular.

I knew there was a reason they were so desperate for me to sign the contract so quickly.

Oh, but there has been another offer. From people I've found to be much more educated, friendly and non-judgemental than almost everyone in Britain. The affluent middle class of the stable, rich, technologically advanced...um, Saudi Arabia.

National stereotypes: Less confusing than reality, but just as absurd.

No Worries

I've a nasty feeling I'm going to look back on this part of my life as a happy one. Because I've got no major problems - just a constant stream of minor irritations.

This evening I got a phone call saying could I please come to the university for twenty minutes to help out with poofing a thesis. Fine - I do a lot of poofing, but I'm not averse to proofing as well, which is what they actually wanted.

So I stomp along the slippery remelted snow, and when I arrive...another call saying please wait (in the cold) for ten minutes. And there will be food!

The student arrives when promised...and has us stomp for another ten minutes to his flat, where he's very kindly decided to cook for us both before doing the work there. It's lemon chicken with rice, and lots of trimmings - very nice.

Of course, I'd just eaten a large meal before leaving and I was already feeling stuffed but...it would have been impolite to mention that. Just like it was impolite to mention that the requested twenty minutes had become three hours I'd apparently agreed to.

So three hours later, after midnight, he says he'll call me at six AM. Ah no, I chuckle, you mean six PM - you've got them mixed up before, remember? No, he means six AM, because there's a load more work to do and he's left it till the last minute and it's due in the day after.

So, this is Kapitano, the man with no problems, about to sleep off quite a lot of indigestion in preparation for an early phone call on the day of rest.

Streetwise Sunday - Christmas Come Early Edition

Yes, I do believe in Santa Claus! And I can prove He exists!

Walking home I found, within five minutes of each other...a glove and half a fizzy drink.

Followed by something to go with the fizzy drink - two chicken mayo half sandwiches.

Followed by something to wash them both down with - half a can of coke.

If I have food poisoning tomorrow, I shall also believe in the devil.

Weekend Woundup 6

All the tweetlike thoughts I've stumbled on recently and thought they'd look good on the sideblog.

The first words of wisdom are "I don't know".

The second are "And neither do you".

All political questions resolve to one: Are you on the side of the bully, or the victim?

There are those who state their principles clearly, and those who live by principles too unclear to state.

The former are harmless bores, the latter are the best and worst of people.

An authoritarian is someone who answers your question only to make you stop asking it.

when someone says they love you, they're trying to blackmail you into loving them - whether or not they do love you.

A 'Love Story' is a fiction where this coercion does not exist, and is always effective.

Love that dies is preferable to love that turns bitter.

It's easy for me to forgive others for being right. The hard thing is to forgive myself for being wrong.

Recognising that the establishment intellectuals are wrong does not entail believing the anti-establishment proletarians are right.

Socialists who are not proletarians lose nothing by failing to see this, so they often do fail even though they have a word for precisely this failure - workerism.

The moment someone describes their work as 'Subversive', it ceases to be so.

A one sided debate will only convince those who are already convinced.

When encountering a group: find the leader and assume they're incompetent until they prove otherwise. This saves time, as almost no leaders deserve their power.

The Encyclopedia of American Loons

"The Nice Must Go."
- Not Frank Herbert

"Don’t overestimate your reader’s knowledge and don’t underestimate their intelligence."
- Tim Radford

"You educate people by explaining complex ideas in a simple way, not by explaining simple ideas in a complex way"
- Ed Young

"Dignity isn't something that can be bestowed on another, it can only be taken away."
- PZ Myers

"After a time, you may find that having is not so pleasing a thing, after all, as wanting. It is not logical, but it is often true."
- Mr Spock

"You can know the name of a bird in all the languages of the world, but when you’re finished, you’ll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird."
- Richard Feynmann

"You simply cannot solve problems that you do not want to identify."
- Dierdrie Walker

"There is a boy across the river
with an arse like a peach,
But alas, I cannot swim".
- The Wounded Heart, Afghan poem

"Secrets are only as secure as the least trusted person who knows them."
- Bruce Schneier

"A man thinks that by mouthing hard words he understands hard things."
- Herman Melville

"One Trot faction
Sitting in a hall
One Trot faction
Sitting in a hall
And if one Trot faction
Should have a nasty squall
There'll be two Trot factions
Sitting in a hall."
- Alex Kelly

"A is for Beginning"
- Paul Morley

"Beauty's where you find it."
- Madonna, Vogue

It may be true that we all have one good novel in us, but who's to say it's the one we write?

"The notion of objectively ordering works of art seems bizarre to me."
- Roger Ebert

"Something is missing."
- Paul Morley

Streetwise Sunday - Poolish Edition

Either someone was carrying a kiddie's paddling pool and dropped it on the pavement upon realising they didn't have children, or this is the sad remains of the council's latest efforts to persuade us we're a summertime seaside resort.

They do that periodically, before someone points out that you need sun for that kind of holiday.

A Gay at the Races

People used to tell me "Opinions are like arseholes - everyone's got one but no one wants to examine each other's".

They used to tell me that quite a lot - and chuckle as though it were (a) funny (b) insightful (c) true and (d) something I hadn't heard a hundred times before.

Opinions can be like arseholes of course - there's usually a big hole at the center, there's a lot of shit behind them, some people seem to spend their lives sucking up to someone else's, I don't show mine in public very often, and they generally benefit from being strongly fucked occasionally.

The same people used to tell me things like "Everyone is genetically nationalist so there's no point in fighting it" or alternatively "Everyone is naturally xenophobic but I've overcome it through willpower". As though these were not the arsehole-like opinions they'd opined about earlier.

Different people told me things like "Black on black racism is a myth created by white racists", or "The whole notion of race is pseudoscientific rubbish and if only everyone realised that they'd stop hating".

(In fact there is a useful - though vague - idea in biology called "race", which neither racists not anti-racists differentiate from its pseudoscientific namesake. Neither group knows or cares about science, in my experience.)

By a quirk of fate, I'm currently spending half my waking hours with middle eastern men. No, not like that - I'm helping out with the wordprocessing side of writing PhD theses. With the nice side-effects that I'm (a) getting acquainted with fascinating and complex ideas in genomics and proteomics, and (b) getting acquainted with people who can help me get a well paying job sometime soon.

Yes, they know I'm gay, and have so far shown no inclination to throw rocks, tell me I'm evil, or cast out demons - which places them some way above the local evangelical christian church, which did once order Satan to stop controlling me. Though it also provided me with a boyfriend for a week in 1992.

But oh dear. What should I hear from my scientist friends in a conversation about an African colleague who'd just left the room? "These black people - if you look at them the wrong way they'll kill you".

Sigh.

There are a number of good reasons to neglect your blog.

Having nothing interesting to write about
Having nothing interesting to write about that would stretch further than a twitter post
Having not much free time
Being too tired to blog in what free time you have because you're so busy the rest of the time
Being kidnapped by space aliens and rectally probed for quite a long time

One of the above is not a reason I haven't been updating recently. I'll try to do better.

Streetwise Sunday - Fitness Fad Edition

You decide to get fit. What's the first thing you do? Come up with an exercise regime? Stop eating chips? Go on ebay looking for cheap treadmills? Tell someone?

No, before you do any of that, you've got to have the right clothes. Jogging shoes, training suits, and maybe one of those nifty pedometer plugins for your iPhone. So, all fired up, you go to Sports-Stuff-R-Us and get your gear, because you've got to do this fitness thing properly, right?

Then a week later you're so pissed off with feeling exhausted all the time while still being exactly as fat as you were before, you throw the gear out of the window.

This is one item I thought about taking home but didn't.

The White (Photo) Album

I live in the town where Charles Dickens wrote that insipid potboiler about ghosts and Tiny Tim's big turkey. Some things haven't changed much since the christmas he wrote it.

There are christmas trees, and trees that look christmassy. They look nothing alike.

It looks...gloopy. Gelatinious. Like an enormous dump of egg white or...something.

We have a big open-air TV screen in the town square. I'm not absolutely sure when or why it was installed - maybe it was for the last olympics. In any case, it's usually tuned to the BBC's 24-hour news station, which means we get to stand outside in the snow, watching a snow-topped plasma screen three metres across, telling us how there's a lot of snow about lately.

There are three things you can do with snow. You can annoy people by throwing it at them, you can write your name in it, and...

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