Linky Winky
There are three reasons to study psychology.
(1) You need some pseudoscience to justify your beliefs,
(2) You like to make fun of the pseudoscience other people use to justify their beliefs.
(3) You want to know why people feel the need to justify their beliefs, why they accept such weak justifications, and why they have such daft beliefs in the first place.
If anyone can suggest a link for (3), I'd be most grateful.
I've stumbled on some works by and about James Burnham. In my opinion quite a fascinating figure.
He was an American political theorist of the 1930s, an anti-stalinist socialist who became an anti-socialist paleoconservative, and he's best remembered for a string of failed predictions.
He predicted managers (bureaucrats and technicians) would gradually replace capitalists as the ruling class - whereas in face entrepreneurial capitalists were replaced by corporate capitalists. He predicted Japan would become a superpower after allying itself with Russia - whereas Russia became the superpower. He thought Germany would win the second world war and become a third superpower - all quite plausible, but wrong.
But if you dismiss everyone whose predictions mostly turned out wrong...you'll dismiss everyone. That's the nature of prediction in politics.
Here's an aphorism: When shallow people are wrong, it's for shallow reasons. When deep people are wrong, it's for deep reasons.
I feel that Burnham may (or may not) have been wrong when he analysed Dante, debated Trotsky on the dialectic, or declared Liberalism irretrievably contradictory. But either way it's worth finding out why.
eXile magazine probably soon won't exist anymore. It seems you can't tell the truth by disguising it as humorous cynicism anymore in Moscow. Or by doing it in English.
But in their dying breath they've given me an idea - of how I can become a millionaire. And it's perfectly moral, because it only involves defrauding people richer than me.
The British Potato Council.
The British Peanut Council.
The other website of the British Potato Council
The Potato Fan Club.
The British Potato Council's website for schools.
20th century history. Not about potatoes. But told by a potato.
Democracy is not a potato.
I was here today. A few details when I have the strength.
Ring, Ring
I never realised the office telephone had so many functions.
In some offices, it's a way of telling the public they should visit the company website, where all conceivable questions shall be answered.
In others, it's a radio station provided as a public service. At any time of the day or night, you can listen to Handel's Water Music for as many hours as you wish.
In many, the telephone serves a purely decorative function, positioned on an empty desk to look efficient and helpful. Occasionally it emits a strange ringing noise, but no one there knows why and it stops soon enough.
Increasingly, they're used to send high pitched bleeps and bursts of white noise to whoever calls them. This could be a special service to nostalgic computer nerds, but I think it's a secret communications network used by giant alien insects prior to an invasion. Either that or the collected works of Aphex Twin.
All these wonders and more I have discovered in the last few days. But I've found it's more effective to walk into the office and hand over your CV in person.
Two interviews arranged.
Oh, and I'm booked to teach a class on Tuesday.
They want me to teach that English doesn't have double negatives. 'Cos native speakers don't hardly ever use double negatives. Not never.
They also want me to teach that "state" verbs like Have, Do, Be, Like and Want never occur in continuous form. Apart from state verbs like Run, Sit, Look, Hope and Sleep, which occur in continuous forms all the time. And apart from common collocations like "having breakfast", "doing a runner" and "being a pain". But apart from that.
I wonder what they make of "if I was you" and "to boldly go".
Did both interviews. Contrasting schools - one was large and mistook paperwork for efficiency, the other small and mistook paperwork for seriousness.
Neither school liked me much, but they're both desperate, so we'll see.
PS. I'm going to have sex tonight. If it isn't raining. So if it's dry it'll be wet. Just thought I'd mention it. No particular reason.
Update: Some men cancel at the last minute, some stand you up and you never hear from them again, and some turn up promptly on time before even more promptly changing their mind. This one just oversleeps.
Nevermind. Better fuck next time.
Cemetary and Seminary
A lot happened today, most of it bad. Rather than rant boringly on the details, here's the important points:
* I don't want to work for people who tell me different lies every day, and they don't want to employ someone as highly stung as me unless there's absolutely no one else available.
* I have an interview for another school on Friday - and wlll be contacting more.
* My "jobsearch advisor" (dole officer) thinks I only get jobs to avoid going on government training schemes. Yes, that's what she says.
And on a lighter note:
* I have now twice in my life got lost in graveyards.
I have discovered a new source of spiritual uplift - the Christian Newswire. I learn things here that I wouldn't learn anywhere else.
Did you know for instance, that Arnold Schwartzenegger, Wells Fargo and the president of Brazil are part of the international homosexual movement? Or that being gay kills more people than smoking? No wonder western civilisation is threatened. By gays.
Apparently homosexuals like to mock Christians too. Surely not.
Still, it's easy to be cynical about the Internets. And I always am. Easy, I mean.
But the trouble with being cynical is, although you're usually right, when you're wrong you're really wrong.
Which is just a roundabout way of saying: I'll be looking at this site closely. Even though it isn't. Easy I mean.
School's in for Summer
How to teach your first class:
* Get allocated a class of students at Elementary level. Elementary students require special skills to teach, so make sure you've had none of the necessary training or experience.
* Your students will be in their early teens, so take care to be provided with workbooks written for young children.
* Do not have time to read the lesson plan before you start to teach.
* An integral part of the lesson is the pre-recorded conversations on cassette, so it's vital you get the wrong cassette.
* For bonus points, use board markers that ran dry six years ago.
* Conduct your ninety minute lesson in a tiny, stuffy room.
* Most importantly, have no idea what you're doing.
I'm told by several people that this is the norm. Same again tomorrow.
How I spent my evening:
You've got a cassette to play to tomorrow's students - or rather, you've got five minutes worth of useful stuff, fragmented over half an hour. So you play the tape into your computer's sound card, cut out the useless bits, clean up the signal, and play the result back onto another cassette. Having first spent an hour digging out your old cassette machine and finding some old tapes for it.
It's either that or spend ten minutes of the lesson winding the tape backwards and forwards. Or just getting the class to read out the dialogues, which would be ridiculous. Um, oh.
TEFL may the last industry in the world to abandon the compact cassette. I've got some reel-to-reel machines somewhere they could use.
Ambrose Bierce defined a "career" as "the first day of a new job".
Gizza Job
An interview for a smallish language school.
I arrive at 0900 for the interview. A man greets me, reads my CV and asks a few informal questions, before handing me over to a second man four feet away, who reads the CV and asks the same questions. He then asks me to come back in five hours for the "real" interview, and spends half an hour trying to print out the application form so I can apply for the interview we've just arranged.
He wanders off to find the first man to ask him why his printer isn't working. The first man wanders in, fixes the printer and I take away the form to copy the CV they've already got onto, and bring back later.
I arrive at 1430, to find the second man still out to lunch. He arrives, doesn't even ask for the form I've filled out, but produces his own form of prepared questions. But first, there's a preliminary question:
Interviewer: I understand you know about computers.
Kapitano's Mind: Oh fuck.
Kapitano: Yes....
Int: I was wondering if you could tell me why my printer isn't working.
Kapitano's Mind: Here we go again. Here we fucking go again.
Kapitano: Probably a network or a driver problem. Let me see....
It was indeed a driver problem.
Then there was the list of prepared questions:
Interviewer: Many of your students would be Arabs. Do you have a problem with that?
Kapitano's Mind: Arabs? You mean Muslims don't you. You're asking me whether I hate Muslims. Not foreigners in general, not immigrants, not people with darker skin than me. Muslims.
Kapitano: No of course not.
Interviewer: Should a lesson be teacher oriented or student oriented?
Kapitano's Mind: Oh what a difficult question. Oh I can't possibly guess what the right answer is. Anyone who understands the question knows what to say, as you and I know perfectly well, so what's the point in asking?
Kapitano: It should be student oriented.
Interviewer: How much time should be student talking time, and how much teacher talking time?
Kapitano's Mind: What a fuckwitted thing to ask. It's not like I'm going to stand in the lesson timing my sentences with a stopwatch and failing to explain something because I've gone over my quota of seconds.
Kapitano: Well...pulling a figure out of the air, I'd say 70% should be student talking time.
Interviewer: What sort of relationship should you have with your colleagues?
Kapitano's Mind: Five of them will be mindbogglingly mediocre at their jobs, two borderline incompetent, one staggeringly incompetent, two pretty good and one absolutely brilliant. I've got absolutely no interest in these people outside of the basic courtesies of working together. Apart from the really cute but completely straight one, and the insecure one I have the brief fling with.
Kapitano: Friendly but not friends.
Interviewer: Should you allow students to speak in their native language during lessons?
Kapitano's Mind: Oh Jesus H fucking Christ on a shitty trike. Is this man one of those managerial imbeciles who read once in a book that all lessons should be entirely in the target language, or is he an actual teacher who knows the books are wrong? Hmmm.
Kapitano: If students are quickly helping each other out, that's fine. If they're having conversations, it's not.
Interviewer: What areas of your teaching do you feel you could improve on?
Kapitano's Mind: I'm virtually a beginner, you great twonk. It all needs improving. As you already know 'cos I told you this morning.
Kapitano: I need to improve my teaching of basics to beginners.
I start on Monday.
Exactly what I start on Monday is a little unclear, because they won't know till then how many students they've actually got, and so won't know whether they need a full time teacher, a part timer, or someone to fill in when someone else is ill.
But...I do have a job. Of some kind, And it's five minutes walk from home. So I didn't actually need to go to Bulgaria at all.
Move on, Nothing to See
There's two reasons to neglect your blog:
(1) Have nothing interesting to blog about
(2) Have a lot of interesting things blog about but be too busy doing it to blog about doing them
However, as a marxist, I've found a dialectical unity of the opposites: Be too busy doing things too boring to blog about to blog about them even if they weren't too boring to blog.
But I did get to write a little song, provisionally titled "TV" until I can come up with something better.
Verse 1:
Break, wake
Dark familiar
Lie, stare
Quiet warm
Dreams fade
Numbers glowing red
Time four five six
Creep out of bed
Chorus:
This is the future
Tomorrow's been and gone
Sit and watch the old films
Stand and sing the old songs
This was the future
Can't quite remember when
Life on endless replay
What's old is old again
Verse 2:
Click, flip
Thousand channels
Smile, stare
Lost again
Dreams begin
Numbers glowing green
Channel six oh one
Eyes on the screen
Watch this space to see what I do with it. If the laptop stops crashing.
95% of the internet had just been rendered redundant. This is how.
Nothing is What It Seems
A man stopped me in the street and asked for directions to the community center. Sweat was almost literally pouring off him, and he was trembling uncontrollably - the classic signs of an alcoholic in major withdrawal. I pointed him in the right direction (it was only street away), he thanked me as though I'd given him a hundred pounds, and we went on our ways.
It was Tony. Again he didn't recognise me. The community center hosts an Alcoholics Anonymous branch - maybe he's trying to get his life back.
The thing is, I'll happily play this tiny role in helping him kick his habit, but if he asks for coins to buy that revolting ultracheap cider he depends on, I'll give him spare change if I have it.
I'm reading Lenin's Embalmers - essentially the autobiography of the son of Boris Zbarsky, the social climbing biologist charged with preserving Lenin's corpse under communism. But it's also a history of paranoia, inflated egos and bureaucratic absurdity in 20th century Russia.
The sentiment is snipingly anti-soviet - the rumour that Lenin had syphilis is uncritically repeated as though it has some bearing on his ideas, as is the silly story that Lenin only tried to get Stalin booted out because Stalin was rude to Lenin's wife. Having said that, I was astonished to read just how easily the Bolshevik leaders sank from high-level theory and brave military action in the revolution, into squabbling and scheming afterwards. It's...worrying.
I caught another episode of Derren Brown's Trick or Treat. On the one hand, he's really scraping the barrel now. On the other, shows like this tell us something about what beliefs are now considered silly, and which sophisticated.
He appeared to teach a woman how to hold her breath underwater using "ancient yogic techniques known only to a few", and how to untie a knot using only visualisation. The latter, involving tying what looks like a strong knot, then hiding the knot itself with one hand and "dissolving" it by pulling on one free end, is a painfully familiar trick of stage magicians. The esoteric trick to holding your breath for ninety seconds is...to keep calm. You see what I mean about scraping the barrel, but both these commonplaces are presented as an advanced level of "mind over matter".
Brown is repackaging old stage magic as remarkable but hidden and undeveloped abilities that all humans have. The message is that everyone can work wonders, that the paranormal is normal.
One sequence I think was quite remarkable, ideologically speaking. He claimed to teach the woman how to enter a special "mediumistic" trance used by Victorian spiritualists, which enabled them to break out of otherwise unbreakable ropes and chains, in the dark, in order for them to put on fake spirit manifestations.
In other words, he's openly assuming that the audience knows that all spiritualists are frauds, but claiming they perpetrated their frauds by effectively supernatural means.
Obviously there is no such special trance. Spiritualists broke out of bindings the same way they and magicians do it today - with fake bindings. But Brown confidently expects his audience to be sophisticated and skeptical of spiritualist mumbo-jumbo, while casually swallowing his similar mumbo-jumbo, packaged as "hidden human potential".
I recently saw a YouTube video (now taken down for copyright infringement) of the illusionist Chris Angel walking on water. He was surrounded by the same group of "bystanders" he always uses, looking amazed and whooping their bafflement. And the perspex ramp just below the waterline was just visible in some shots.
Angel is one of those illusionists who's just as well known for debunking new-age scams as for seeming to do the impossible, so his fans ought to know that he wasn't really walking on water - right? Judging from the comments on the video, fully half thought he really was walking on water. For real.
Perhaps I shouldn't be surprised. Penn and Teller once performed a seance, before explaining exactly how they achieved each of the effects. The volunteer student participants then tried to argue that some of the effects weren't faked after all - they just felt too real not to be ghosts.
People really are fuckwits sometimes.
Two comrades are preparing to move homes, which means they're throwing out a lot old books, which means...I've got a big rucksack full of lovely books to read.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Roddy Doyle, Anthony Burgess, Margarat Atwood, Robert Fisk...and one book explaining in great detail why Lawrence of Arabia was (a) a liar of epic proportions to the world, (b) a liar of similar proportions to himself and (c) a big screaming queen who liked being whipped by Arab boys.
Which one should I read first?
Mad, Innit?
Have you ever had a few minutes when you just had to sniff or wipe your nose repeatedly because it kept feeling like it was going to start dripping any moment? Were you one of those children who, having touched something once with one hand, felt compelled to touch it with the other hand? Did you spend your pubescent years trying to fit your actions into patterns based on a particular number?
Did you go through a long phase when you compulsively whispered what you or someone else had just said? Or when you only felt comfortable when you'd brushed all your upper teeth before your lower ones?
If the answer to any of these questions is "Yes" or "Not exactly, but something like it" then I have two items of news for you. First, you have or had Tourette's Syndrome. Second, I'm pretty sure most people have it to some extent when they're growing up.
Tourette's? Isn't that the one where you make animal noises and uncontrollably shout rude words in supermarkets? Well, not exactly. That's the popular image of Tourette's, but it's an extremely rare form. Mostly it's a repetitive action of swallowing, shrugging, saying particular words, humming, moving in a particular way etc.
The Tourette's sufferer don't do these things unwittingly or uncontrollably. Rather, they experience a very strong compulsion, which they can with discomfort resist for a while, before the "pressure" builds up too much and they submit.
In other words, someone with Tourette's doesn't have a neurological condition, or any kind of "genetic" "disease", or any condition that could be meaningfully called "insanity". No, what they've got is superstition. A strong, self-created internal imperative to perform some action - the action's value being ceremonial rather than practical. It's a ritual to ward of "the bad" - where the bad could be illness, pain, the disapproval of others, or anything regarded with fear.
You think that does sound a bit like madness? Then consider that Tourette's symptoms almost always occur between the ages of around seven and fifteen. And consider how children in that age range easily accept such superstitions as "Don't walk on the cracks or the bears will get you" and "You must drink from the special cup".
Tourette's Syndrome is simply the invention of one's own childhood superstitions - and then getting trapped by them, at least until they naturally fade away. Occasionally (or is it frequently?) they don't fade away. The actor Derek Jacobi has discussed in interview how, before doing some things, he has to nod three times and say the word "Amen" to himself - and to do it three times. He plausibly connects it to his catholic upbringing, with the special word "Amen" and the special number three.
Conventional psychology posits (on no evidence) a neurological cause for all this, and prescribes drugs. This is the same conventional psychology that diagnoses "lack of writing practice" as "Dyslexia", "being socially awkward" as "Asperger's Syndrome" and "School being boring" as "ADHD" - and prescribes drugs for the disease called "being human".
It's an open question, and I've no idea how to answer it, but: How many of the socially disapproved acts which get adults put in asylums or zombfied on medication are merely private superstitions which they never grew out of?
In cases where the ritual involves shouting numerals or spinning in circles, the "tic" is disruptive and obvious to all. But what about the presumable majority who have non-disruptive tics? Just odd little habbits that bystanders don't notice or classify as eccentricities? There doesn't seem a qualitative difference.
I only write this because, after revisiting a classic video cutup and following it up with the Wikipedia article, I realised that, yes folks...(cue drum roll)...I was a textbook Tourette's child.
My superstitions changed over time, but there were two basic ones:
1) Presage any important action with a voiceless glottal plosive - think of the "kick drum" sound made by human beatboxes - and close the action with another one.
2) Segment repeated actions, like those involved in eating or walking, into sets of four, and if possible square multiples of four. This was to "enclose" them in a protective box.
Those were my rituals, and I had then between around seven and twelve, but what were the fears they guarded against? I think a nebulous fear of unnumbered, uncompartmentalised chaos.
Of course, I've also been informally diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome, Dyslexia, and (my favourite) Social Anxiety Disorder. Seeing as these are all synonyms for "normal but has trouble with some tasks", and seeing as I can now speedread and sing in public, I reckon that makes me extremely normal.
Hack Cut-a-Cut
I'm still here, just rather busy most of the time and too tired to write about it the rest of the time.
Friday
I'm typing this on a rubber mat. No, I'm not sitting on a rubber mat typing on a keyboard - the keyboard is a rubber mat.
I've knackered at least three keyboards by packing them into bags or rucksacks and carting them around - they just get subjected to twisting and bending forces in transit, and eventually something breaks. But now I've got one of these - a flexible, rollable, portable keyboard for GBP10 - about the same price as a rigid, awkward, non-easily-portable keyboard.
And as a bonus, it's made of silicone rubber, so it takes me back to my pubescent years of using the ZX Spectrum keyboard, with it's famous "dead flesh" feel.
Actually, I've got some spectrum emulators somewhere, with a couple of hundred old speccy games. Oh the nostalgia.
There was exactly one good thing about being a ten year old gay computer nerd in 1982 - the computers. And yes, I did know.
Wednesday
Today I got slashed and burned. It was meant to be me cutting down thorny bushes and shrubs, but they staged a plantarian revolution and cut me instead. It was meant to be the browned greenery burning in the garden incinerator, but it just emitted plumes of lung coating smoke before going out, while I nursed areas of skin splashed by hot petroleum.
The war between man and nature continues tomorrow.
Sunday
Someone asked me if I was depressed. It took me a second to work out why. Both my wrists have livid red cut marks on the underside - the result of trying to uproot a garden of thorns without scythe, secateurs, trimmer, shears...or gloves.
Thomas Edison said something to the effect that he'd discovered nine hundred and ninety nine ways to not invent the lightbulb. My claim is more modest - I now know four ways not to burn garden refuse. One of them involves a tub of vaseline and some cardboard.
Sill, I did get to watch the entire Eurovision Song Contest for 2008.
In 2006 eurovision lost whatever pretence of seriousness it had when a goth metal band from Finland - entered, I'm told, as a joke - won. Since then, Finland have been repeating the joke, with other heavy metal bands - and good ones at that.
In 2007 the hot favourite to win was a Ukrainian transvestite. In the event they didn't come close, but they're the only act anyone remembers - unless you're a Brit and remember the UK's execrable entry, which managed to look like it was painfully trying to be camp.
This year there was a thoroughly misguided attempt to give eurovision back its image of worthy respectability and international-understanding-through-friendly-competition. This is the image it's never had in the UK. About half the twenty six(?) entrants towed the line with completely forgettable "safe" entries - power ballads and eurodisco. The other half hoping to stand out by being...quirky. Apart from Finland's heavy metal, France gave us song which managed to be both instantly forgettable and intensely annoying, thanks to the pseudo-doowop backing singers. Romania did cafe jazz with ranting spoken interludes, the Ukraine gave us techno pirates and Bosnia-Herzegovina were...just willfully weird.
The UK broke with tradition and produced some pretty good soul-funk - but still came traditionally last.
The Writing on the Wall
In my last week in Bulgaria, I had a camera. In the days between booking the flight out and catching it, I took snaps of whatever caught my eye. Here's some of the graffiti.
You've got a spraycan and an opportunity. What's the first thing you think to draw? What does that reveal about you? Hmmm.
Is this patriotic? Is it about war or peace? Or is it just a nice shape that at one moment appealed to one person with a spare moment?
At least I know what these are about.
They export vodka to us. What do we export to them?
Nazis are wrong in every way. Even their geometry.
Still, some graffitio themes are universal.
There's also a second kind of wallwriting, whose purpose I could could only guess at.
And finally...a scribbled out mistake? A drunken whimsy? Something occult?
Graffiti. A message to everyone and no one. The vandalism of the creative. A way to personalise public space, cultural barometer, and Rorschach blot for the perplexed visitor.
Babyshambles
Babysitting. A task that rarely involves actual babies, and sometimes no sitting at all.
Two little girls - D (aged three or is it four), and J (aged six or is it sixteen). D squealed with delight when I arrived and demanded that we throw pillows at each other. J arrived later, completely ignored me and made straight for a plate of food - which she also ignored after three bites.
They happily watched a Scooby Doo DVD, before deciding what they really wanted was ice cream - with sausages. I spooned out some ice cream which, after some arguments over who should get the bowl with the flower patterns, was much appreciated. I had the flower bowl.
Then J wants to put sugar on hers. Well, why not. And now D wants sugar too. And J wants chocolate so she raids the fridge, dropping several kinds of cheese on the floor before giving up. Then D wants jam on her ice cream so they have a contest to see who can put the most jam in their ice cream before they taste it and never touch the bowls again.
Good thing I'd hidden the chocolate.
D suddenly runs past saying she needs to go to the wee wee. A minute later she plaintively calls for help - she needs some new clothes because hers are all wet. I eventually find some new clothes, which she adamantly refuses to wear because they're pink and silly.
They build a tent of blankets and duvets and sit happily watching Scooby Doo again. I settle down for a read of Bill Bryson, but am soon interrupted by a half-hour stereophonic request for cooked sausages, but with ketchup instead of ice cream.
Okay, okay. I put some sausages under the grill, together with a pastie for me - which promptly goes black and smoking. The young ladies appreciate the two sausages each, but get upset when there isn't enough ketchup for a third helping.
D decides she wanted to go to sleep. But then decides bouncing and shouting on the bed was much more fun than lying on it. We have a pillow fight. She needs the wee wee again, but will only do it with the light off. Then it's back to the TV for Scooby Doo's third outing of the night.
I settle down with Bill Bryson just as the mummies arrive back. D puts some clothes on without fuss and I'm told I didn't need to give them food at all.
I've worked out what TV is for.
Or rather, I've worked out the only worthwhile purpose it can serve nowadays. It's there to be scratched.
You capture streams of video as it's broadcast onto your hard drive, then view them and keep the ones that look useful. You compose a backing track on your laptop, and edit the video (with sound) to go with it. The result is magic.
Dull film clips become scintillating pop videos, faintly silly documentaries become witty commentaries, Old songs become new soundscapes. and just occasionally a politician tells the truth.
It's not a new idea. For as long as there's been enough moving pictures for some to be disposable, people have chopped it up into something that isn't. In fact, I suppose there's been art made from trash for as long as there's been artists and detritus.
Anyway, I'd like to have a go at it. So I've set a PC to randomly record ten minutes at a time from random channels. Once I've got enough to fill a DVD-R, I'll let it mature for a few months while coming up with some music, and then see what sounds and images I can collage together over it.
If you're making videos specifically to go on YouTube, be aware that YouTube recodes all videos it receives to fifteen frames per second. If your original is at the standard US 30fps, that's not so bad because it effectively just chops out every second frame - though it's not that good because...it chops out half your frames.
If your original is in the UK 25fps standard, or the US and UK 24fps standard for movies, then things get a little complicated, and the final form may be a bit jerky.
But of course, if the intended final destination is YouTube, you only need your original to be 15fps, and 320x240 pixels. Smaller files, faster uploads, and fewer recode problems.
Now. If like me you want to fit your images to music, with edit points falling squarely on beats, and if like me you plan on making your own music to do this with, and if like me you get a perverse pleasure from adapting your methods to the oddities of your technology...in other words if you're me...you'll want to arrange the tempo of your music so each bar takes up an exact number of video frames.
Still with me? Well, nevermind. If the frames-per-second of the video divides into the beats-per-second (=BPM/60) of the music without a remainder, then you can edit exactly on the beat. So, here's a list of BPMs that are integral to 15fps. The number in parentheses is the number of frames per beat.
60 (15)
75 (12)
90 (10)
100 (9)
150 (6)
180 (5)
225 (4)
300 (3)
If you're working at 30fps, it looks like this:
60 (30)
72 (25)
75 (24)
90 (20)
100 (18)
120 (15)
150 (12)
180 (10)
200 (9)
225 (8)
300 (6)
At 25fps:
60 (25)
75 (20)
100 (15)
125 (12)
150 (10)
250 (6)
300 (5)
And at 24fps:
60 (24)
72 (20)
80 (18)
90 (16)
96 (15)
120 (12)
144 (10)
160 (9)
180 (8)
240 (6)
288 (5)
If you've read this far, you're probably me. So, hello Kapitano, now you know the tempos to use if you're being kind to video editors. Like yourself.
I'm a Lumberjack and I'm Okay
Monday divided neatly into two halves.
The first half involved watching some bureaucrats filling out some forms, and me putting random squiggles in the box marked "Signature".
I shouldn't be in the country for more than six weeks, and much of that time will be spent arranging a job. However, in order to receive the money I need for the plane ticket to take that job, I have to do a ten week course in how to look for a job.
I have now officially started this course four times, and completed less than three weeks of it. It starts (again) in three weeks time. Unless that is I have a good jobby reason for not attending the first day - like, for instance, having a job interview on that day. If I can't make the first day, I'm not allowed to attend the others.
I'll be dealing with at least a dozen schools, so it's a definite possibility - and some schools want up to three interviews.
Now, if, hypothetically, this happens, the procedure is as follows. One set of bureaucrats send me a letter asking me to confirm in writing what I've already told them in person - that I had an interview. They will want proof that the interview occurred but are forbidden to contact any third parties - such as, for instance, the interviewer, for verification.
I send them whatever evidence there is, and they forward it to a second set of bureaucrats in a different building, who forward it to a third set in a different city, who send me a letter asking for further proof - though they refuse to define what constitutes evidence. They also are not permitted to contact the interviewer. After three months they may or may not check that I responded.
Meanwhile the first set of bureaucrats fill out the same forms again and I put a squiggle on them again, arranging to restart the course a few weeks later. On two occasions the forms have got lost in processing and had to be filled out an additional time.
One week later I leave the country.
Yes, I've been through this before.
The second half of yesterday involved waving a great big chopper around - a real two-hander. There was a lot of pulling and pushing. And long poles of hard wood thrusting upwards.
Yeah okay, I was cutting down some trees.
Tuesday consisted mainly of taking a computer to bits, installing various video capture cards, trying out permutations of cables and adaptors, screaming in frustration, and occasionally reinstalling Windows.
Wednesday was similar, but slightly less enjoyable.
I did not cut down any trees.
I've bought some sunblock. At least I think I have. According to the label it's "Medium Moisturising Sunlotion" which "Protects Against DNA Damage".
So if you've got any mediums that need moisturising, or protection against damage done by DNA, I can help.
Still, that kind of labeling makes a kind of sense - most moisturisers contain sunblock, so sunblock is marketed as souped up moisturiser.
Tonight I've been asked to do some babysitting. This means the baby sits on me. I've asked, and it's definitely that way 'round - even when they're being too loud.
Hot!
I've got sunburn.
I've also got blisters, splinters, cuts, and nettle stings.
This is the result of a few hours "honest work" in the "open air", which is part of the "healthy lifestyle".
Other people spend their lives wanting to be rich, trying to turn the clock back, regretting a single mistake, fighting for a cause, or just waiting for their lives to begin.
I spend mine being slightly annoyed.
My dad's running his car on vegetable oil.
He's not doing it for ecological reasons - he doesn't know the difference between CO2 and H2SO4, and probably thinks a carbon footprint is something left by a coalminer's boot. No, it's just that right now it's cheaper to buy a big can of unspecified "Vegetable Oil" from food wholesalers and mix it half-and-half with petrol from a station...than to buy twice as much petrol.
But then, dad always did think the best way to gain pounds was to save pennies. Our diet was always whatever's on special offer at the supermarket.
Just at the moment, between an oil shortage and a food shortage, a very few people can use one as the other. In six months I don't it'll be cheaper anymore.
I do know someone slightly who's converted their car to work entirely on all manner of edible oils, and his solution to climate change is for everyone in the world to do the same. But he thinks it's a mad idea for everyone to ride bicycles instead.
I know someone else who founded an ecological lobby group to push for things like carbon emission reduction tax breaks. His slightly Machiavellian idea was that it was only when such half measures had been tried and definitively proven themselves ineffective that the necessary radical measures would be considered by governments.
He got squeezed out of his own group for being too radical.
Whenever I hear someone on TV talking about "The Climate Change Debate" they seem to be ambiguous about which climate change question they're engaging with - "What should we do about climate change?" or "Is the climate changing at all?". Discussions about the former tend to drift into the latter.
So the world is doomed because the human race is too mad and silly not to destroy it. But nevermind, because I had sex tonight. In a garage. For the first time in (my god!) three months. It was meant to be last night but, well. he was delayed or something.
I really must dig out those old cricketing kneepads. Cramp is, uh, cramping my style. You know you're getting old when you want to stop halfway through a shag because it's unergonomic.
And when you start thinking of words like "unergonomic" halfway through a shag.
What am I going to call this post? Something that ties together several of it's themes. Oh I know!
House
Nothing much to report today, but I did stumble on a story/monologue that I wrote eight or nine years ago. So, here it is.
I was in this...house, the other day. And someone had wallpapered over all the doors and windows. So if you wanted to move...between the kitchen and the bathroom...or the bedroom and the garage...you had to go...under the floorboards.
And if you wanted to go upstairs you had to be careful. Because someone had installed a moat and drawbridge...halfway up.
But that wasn't the strangest thing about this house. Because everyone in it...was a retired comedian...from one of those old music halls...that you only ever see...in black and white. So every time you made a cup of tea...you did a song and dance about it. And every time you wanted to make love...you said so...in a loud...stage...whisper.
And I was feeling right at home in this old house, which had a giant beanstalk growing in the garden...and TV in every room. And I was getting along fine...because the people were my kind of people. Until they told me...that I was the guest of honour...and it was my job ...to give the after dinner speech...
...in honour if the patron...
...whose name no one could quite remember.
I was watching this film. And every time the hero slapped his thigh, the female lead broke into tears.
Or was it the other way around....
I was talking, to a friend of a friend, about the problem of quantum singularities in space-time, and I said to them, "Why is it, whenever anyone promises to telephone you at eight thirty, they never do it, until nine fifteen.
And why is it, you can never remember the names of all seven dwarfs."
And they said, "It's simple. We're all part of a single creature, feeling it's way towards cosmic truth. And sometimes it takes a wrong turning, and we all have to backtrack a little, to set it back on the right path."
And I said, "Okay then, why is it that whenever you want to open a new tin of soup, the tin opener is never where you left it. And why can you never find any paperclips when you need them."
And he said, "God has been watching you since before you were born, and he will be there the moment you die. Every misfortune and each little setback is just God's way of telling you to be patient."
And I said to him...
"The truth is music played on instruments that make no sound. Thought is a blind man guarding an invisible treasure. And language...is a virus from outer space."
And then I noticed. That I was talking to the bathroom mirror.
The Life and Opinions of Kapitano Shandy
I've been starting to write a lot of posts, but not finishing them over the last few days - and so not posting. Rather than knock them into shape or throw them away, here's the posts what I did wroted, as they stand.
I seem to have been quite opinionated lately.
Friday.
"Mayor of London" sounds like an honourary title with no power. Unfortunately it comes with quite a lot of power, which until yesterday was in the hands of Ken Livingstone - arch-sellout and one of those politicians who's always been a former socialist. Everyone knows that in the past he was a good principled leftist - but if you pick any point in his career, it was in some indeterminate period before that.
Now the mayor is Boris Johnson - arch-buffoon and rightwing muppet. This is the man who was invited on chatshows because he was guaranteed to be ignorant, offensive and opinionated - but it was funny because he was harmlessly silly. Now he's a big voice in the capital city.
Sometimes it's nice when the boss is a blithering idiot, because then the sensible people a few layers down can actually make things work without interference. Unfortunately those below Boris don't want to make things work - they just want to make money.
There was supposed to be a serious challenge from a genuinely left candidate, Lindsey German, but initially promising public support just evaporated. Seeing as I'm somewhere in the Russian-doll-like structure of left groups she represented, I'll have to go to some dispirited meetings to discuss the disaster. While avoiding words like "disaster" and "meltdown".
Saturday.
SkyOne reimagined Battlestar Galactica - as an angsty soap opera. The BBC reimagined Doctor Who - as an angsty soap opera. The movie reimaginings of Spiderman, Fantastic Four, The X-Men and now Ironman are full of handsome youngsters with superpowers getting caught up in their tedious emotions.
Now SkyOne are trying to reimagine Blake's 7, and I for one hope they fail. B7 Enterprises tried the same thing and got bogged down in egos and truely abysmal scripts about telepathic badgers, before eventually turning out some audio adventures that, astoundingly, were quite good.
SkyOne also recently tried to remake The Prisoner recently, an endevour which thankfully fell to ego clashes before the abysmal scripts could even be written. You think I'm being unfair? Then imagine The Prisoner - ambiguous, enigmatic, left-leaning with zero love interest - filtered through the puerile minds that gave us Roswell High and Mutant X.
There's a reason all these old shows and comics are being reprocessed. It's because those in the entertainment business are cowards with no imagination. They're afraid to take risks, afraid of anything new and afraid to pitch above the lowest denominator.
There's also a reason why these new-for-old products are uniformally crap. And it's the same reason.
Sunday.
Item on the news: There is a "huge number" of illegal immigrants in the UK - "up to 57,000". And it would cost "the taxpayer" five million pounds to deport them all.
Some thoughts on this, in no particular order:
* The take-home message: "There's an army of them, they steal our wages, then they rob us again just so we can get rid of them."
* Supporting a faltering economy by removing its supply of invisible labour is...an innovative approach to economics.
* Five million pounds is a tiny amount. It would be a large personal fortune for the taxpayer, whoever that is, to pay. In governmental terms, it's a droplet in the ocean.
* "Up to 57,000" doesn't mean "57,000", just like "you could win up to a million dollars" doesn't mean "If you win you'll get a million dollars".
* 57,000 is one in a thousand people in the UK. Now, if you're extremely gregarious you might know a hundred people. If each of them knows a hundred people, with no overlap, then you might know one person who knows one person who's an illegal immigrant. Truly a mighty army.
* Some civil servant was instructed to quantify the unquantifiable - to count the number of people who aren't in a database. So most likely they pulled the figure of "maybe one in a thousand" out of the air, and it became the official figure.
* We're now casually talking about "deporting them all".
* This country stinks. My instinct is to leave, and in a few years if the smell has faded somewhat, then think about coming back. Maybe.
Monday.
Today I got covered in shit and cut my wrists.
The shit was dried pigeon poo, covering the neglected books and furniture I was carting up and down stairs. The wrists are from stray metal nails in some of the furniture I (rather gleefully) smashed up with a hammer to make it fit in the skip.
The less smashworthy furniture was taken away by a white van that happened to be passing. A local landlord saw by chance that we were throwing stuff out on the street for anyone to take if they wanted it...and somewhat eagerly offered to take it all. He bought us canned beers too.
The fellow obviously thought he was ripping off some gullible rich folk. When he tries to install the furniture in whatever property he's renting out to nonrich folk, he may change his mind.
Tuesday.
A day of quiet house-sitting while my parents relax in their little holiday cottage, munch on a picnic, walk the dogs, and doze.
A day for getting an OD of TV on TVOD, including three CSIs (of the Los Angeles flavour), two Waking The Deads, and Derren Brown's Trick or Treat - in which Brown appeared to teach an ordinary man to memorise facts from hundreds of books in a week. From what was shown, he used a hybrid of Howard Berg's "Mega Speedreading" (with its use of spaced fingers as an eye guide) and Paul Scheele's "Photoreading" method (with its notion of letting all the info sink into the subconscious, which then regurgitates the relevant facts in cryptic form when needed).
Now, Berg's method does work, but needs years of constant practice. Scheele's method, so far as I know, simply doesn't work - the only evidence I've seen is both positive and anecdotal, which is a sure sign of a con.
So how did Brown or the man do it? Brown says he doesn't use stooges - but he also says he uses NLP, which is obviously untrue because NLP has always been a dismal failure. Not surprising, as it's based on Dianetics and EST, with sprinklings of misunderstood early chomskyian grammar and cod freudian psychology.
Derren Brown is a showman and a magician - doubly untrustworthy. If he were a politician too he'd be off the scale.
He demonstrated the effectiveness of his memorisation technique by instantly committing to memory the positions of a thousand or so coffee beans - so he could spot the single bean added when he wasn't looking. As I recall, the world record for memorising the sequence of a deck of cards (using mnemonics) is twenty seven seconds. So either Derren brown is several orders of magnitude better than the world record holder...or it's a magic trick.
Most magic is insultingly simple, and the simplest of all is to use a stooge, and the simplest way to convince viewers you're not using a stooge is to lie about it, just like you lie about everything else in your act.
Don't Rain on May Parade
Happy Mayday.
Also known as International Workers Day. If you're pagan it's the Festival of Beltane, or the Summer Solstice, and if you're German too it's Walpurgis Night. If you're American it's probably Labour Day, unless you're a bit mad, in which case it's Loyalty Day.
It's got a christian meaning too but no one can remember what it is. That doesn't seem to matter - it still gets celebrated.
It's also local election night all over the country, but that doesn't have quite the same ring to it.
I spent yesterday lugging unwieldy furniture up and down stairs, heaving sacks of rubble into a skip, and on one occasion dropping a large bag of bricklike books onto my foot.
I spent today talking to bureaucrats.
On balance, I prefer yesterday, which I why I agreed today to do yesterday again tomorrow.
Another name from the past contacts me. Aimee, who I met at university, and who sat through several weeks of me trying to teach them esperanto...is now an esperantist!
She's also the author of the online equivalent of keeping a list of things to do in your pocket - with the benefits that you don't have to decipher your own handwriting and you can't accidentally send it through the wash. Which always happens to my post-it notes.
She's looking to practice her esperanto and renew our acquaintance. Sounds good to me.
Iuj amikecoj daurxas, iuj mortas, kaj iuj dormas dum jaroj. Oni neniam scias kiuj faros kiun.
How large is your XP?
On installation, WIndows XP is about 1.3GB. But half an hour's work removing unnecessary services, components and backups gets it down to 1 gig. Some more work with tools like XPLite and you can have a fully functional XP of 800MB - especially if you remove the driver and DLL caches after installing all your software.
With some more tweaking, in particular the removal of networking capabilities, you can have a 600MB installation that can't access the internet, but can do most of the other things you'd want to do on a computer. If you're devious (or you use nLite), you can get an XP of 400MB that's fast and good for computers dedicated to one or two tasks - like being a Digital Audio Workstation - though it might be unstable.
After many trials (and a few tribulations) I've settled on an 850MB installation, that with a judicious choice of low-RAM-and-CPU-usage software, turns my old 800GHz 1024MB laptop into a workable DAW that can also play movies, read email and do accounting.
Not that I have any money to account. If I did, I'd get a better laptop.
Obviously these estimates don't include the actual programs, which are on a separate partition. Speaking of which, one trick I hit on: Set up a fixed-size page file on its own little partition. Reduces fragmentation and seems to increase speed.
As an addendum: How many versions of Vista are there? Six? Ten?
Actually there's just one. You pay different prices for the Basic, Premium, Business or whatever version, but what you're actually paying for is the activation code. The fifteen gigabytes of bloatware is identical for all editions - which means if you buy the Starter edition and enter a code for the Enterprise edition...you get the Enterprise edition.
Clever, eh?
Letterbox Format
Every year or so, I get to walk around the maze of towerblocks in one of the more depressed parts of Portsmouth, pushing leaflets through letterboxes. In this way, I do my sterling bit for progressive politics at local election time.
This year, in return for two cups of tea and a mars bar, I got reacquainted with a few hundred front doors - some of which had the same broken washing machines and empty wooden boxes outside as last year. I was assisted by a lady comrade who, if nonstop complaining in a piercing voice were an olympic sport, would be a worldbeater.
After two hours she casually mentioned that she never leaflets doors which look like they might have fierce dogs behind them. I couldn't think of anything to say for quite a long time after that.
Late night channel hopping.
The final ten minutes of The Matrix Reloaded. I've never seen the film, but I've now seen the final ten minutes twice. Keanu Reeves - the only actor who's more talented in CGI. Probably the only actor in Hollywoodland who could make snogging River Phoenix boring.
Fifteen minutes of "Hot Shots Part Deux". You might think that a film about a retarded US president sending a series of disastrous missions into Iraq for no clear reason might be prescient, satirical, and even funny. And you'd be wrong on all counts.
Ten minutes of an episode of Ironside. Featuring a mad murderous Bulgarian, threatening a melange of Lenny Bruce and George Burns.
Five consecutive snippets from different "comedy banter" shows. Seen them all before.
Do you remember that episode of The X-Files where Mulder swaps bodies with a man from Area 51? I saw it the night before I left for the country of mad murderous Bulgarians - and it was on again tonight.
Ten seconds of "Sex Change Soldier", a sensitive and moving documentary about the first British soldier to go through gender reassignment. And not an exploitative pile of portentous drivel at all. Honest.
An advert for catfood, whose main selling point was that it contains anti-oxidants. I think they should make homeopathic catfood with omega three and macrobiotic provitamins
Another comedy banter show. Except it turned out to be one repeated from an hour earlier.
Today's word is Lomography. Taking photos of whatever's in front of you with a cheap camera, and later seeing how the fringing, blurring, wrong colours and bad technique all combine to make an arresting image. It's the old idea of executing a hazy plan in the heat of the moment using wholly inadequate technology, and letting serendipity turn it into art.
My thanks to C for reminding me of the notion, and to my parents for providing me with a camera which can be badly misconfigured. I'm going to give it a go - party as a break from trying to get these dratted computers to work. Sadly, when you apply lomographic technique to a laptop, all you get is a paperweight.
Results soon.
Back to Shite, Back to Reality
Nothing very interesting happened this week.
Well not to me anyway - I've spent the last six days failing to turn a series of obsolete laptops into portable recording studios.
You know how it is - you use every trick you've picked up or invented, you throw all your intelligence and all your time at a problem, and finally conclude that some problems can't be solved with tricks, intelligence and late nights. These are the problems you solve with money, as in "you spend your money on a new laptop and throw the old one away".
If I had some money I might do that.
Oh, and I've had a stinking cold too.
The UK has continued its slide into the abyss in my absence.
The police have taken to raiding curryhouses and Chinese resteraunts (plus the homes of their owners) at odd hours, "looking for illegal migrant workers". Perhaps if they raided expensive hotels, farms and any business that has a cleaning staff they might find some. I can't think why that hasn't occurred to them.
Back in Bulgaria, none of the English speakers I spoke with wanted to live in the UK. They used to - they'd learned English to find a new life, either in the UK (because of its nice culture) or the USA (because of its vibrant economy). But not now. The economies are sinking into the toilet, and the cultures are way past the U-bend.
Everyone knows now what revolting people the Brits have turned into, and the former students of English now want German or Spanish. Which is ironic really, because Germany and Spain are even more racist than us.
There were still a few reasons to favour the UK, one of which was its food - cheap, plentiful and even reasonably cosmpolitan. But now that's gone. Courtesy, we are told, of simultaneous worldwide shortages of rice and wheat, caused by newly pesticide resistant insects.
So, my plans are unchanged, but a little more urgent: Find a TEFL job somewhere exotic and stay there for a year. Finding a job takes a week; Filling out the paperwork to go there takes a month.
England, My England
Tea in England now tastes very strong to me, but I still drink it without milk.
The night before I left, Tania invited me for a meal at her apartment with her boyfriend. A traditional affair, beginning with salad, then steak with potatoes, and finishing off with a wonderfully strange quiche-like concoction. It's made with eggs, yogurt and, erm, lemonade, spread between layers of pastry. Each course served with freeflowing vodka.
Family is important in Bulgaria, each village is a loose bundle of overlapping extended families, and family ties remain when villagers commute or relocate to the nearest town. So it wasn't a surprise when Tania's aunt and uncle dropped in, leading to five of us squashed around a small table, noshing, drinking and jeering at the nation's politicians on the television.
Bulgarians have an easygoing contempt for authority figures - which is reciprocated. There can't be many places in the UK where you entertain your family with the collection of political scratch videos on your computer.
I got a lift back to the apartment to finish packing and grab a little sleep, then in what felt like minutes later woke at 0400, took a shower, said goodbye to Wednesday, and locked the door for the last time.
I'd only met Wednesday two weeks before, when she was a day or two away from death by starvation. Now she was twice the size, full of health and energy, and had got used to my coming and going. She hadn't been whining from behind the door when I left her on her own, or rushing about to greet me with big licks when I got back. But this time, she whimpered.
The coach left for Sofia at 0600, taking two hours. Looking out of the window, there were vast stretches of green land, with hills and the occasional lake in the distance, and further in the distance, snow capped mountains - all interrupted at random intervals by crumbling, rusted villages and isolated shacks with fallen-in roofs.
There was a few surprising sights. Factory chimneys with no factory attached, and a miniature castle with proudly fluttering flag, like something out of Walt Disney - though it's really the other way around.
Sofia is like a compressed version of London. Smaller space, more traffic, smaller cars, more accidents, more and smaller busses with more people crammed inside, and tiny booths with foot-square windows where you buy tickets to ride in them. I spent ninety minutes standing in two busses, annoying half the passengers with my luggage.
As with all centrally planned cities, the planning was done by idiots. In this case, communist idiots - there's a reason Bulgarians sometimes use the adjectives "Communist" and "incompetent" interchangeably. You might think it would be sensible to have a bus route that goes from the national coach station to the airport - but no, the planners evidently thought that anyone jetting into Bulgaria would only want to go to the palatial Hotel Pliska, and then presumably back again.
And then, the same planners - now called "former communists" - decided it would be good for travellers to buy their airline tickets at terminal one, and then take a minibus to the terminal two, which is where all the flights are now.
It may not have been planned that there was some problem with the computers and it took me forty five minutes to buy a ticket - and another ten to confirm that yes, it was possible to buy it in Bulgarian currency.
Security was interesting. I was asked to take off my belt so the metal buckle wouldn't set off the scanner - which didn't seem to notice the ferrous metal in my keychain. Half of us in the queue had to take off our jackets, and a different random half had to take off our shoes. I think my coat looked suspiciously Serbian, but my shoes didn't.
In all, I had to show my passport four times and my ticket twice to get on the plane. Once in flight the attendants (who were of course all gay as pink monkeys on laughing gas) tried to sell the cramped passengers food, drink and, er, toy pink monkeys as souvenirs.
If you wanted to pay the sky high (duh!) prices, they accepted "dollars, euros and all major European currencies" - but not money from the country they fly from. You can also pay by debit card, if you can present your passport. Now, I might be missing something, but if you're already on the plane....
After three hours of flight and one of walking and waiting, the people at Gatwick wanted to see my passport again, at two different desks. After that it was all plain sailing. All I had to do was spend my English money on a day return train ticket to Portsmouth - because a return is one third the price of a single ticket. Maybe the British rail system was designed by Communists.
I then spent the next four hours jumping between various trains, eventually finding one that (a) went to where the animated information board said it was going, (b) didn't go straight back to Gatwick before turning south and (c) didn't mysteriously split into two trains going in opposite directions halfway.
Looking out of the window, green fields but no mountains. And a miniature Walt Disney castle with fluttering union jack.
I'd wondered what emotions I'd feel on returning to my home town. In the event what I felt was:
* It looks exactly the same
* I'd forgotten how annoying the locals were
* My feet hurt
* These bags are rather heavy.
I called my (former) boss, giving him my much rehearsed lines "I resign, I quit, I leave your employ, I'm gone" and "Your dreams are a little mad, but your schemes to make them come true are a lot mad". He was...very understanding. That's not "understanding" as in "He understood everything I was trying to say" - because he didn't. He didn't understand that I'd left because his vacillating fantasism made working for him impossible, and he didn't understand that everyone else who'd worked for him eventually left for the same reason, and he didn't understand that the whole plan to set up the best language school in the world in a poor town that doesn't want one is moderately problematic. He also didn't understand that I wouldn't be coming back - he said he'd wait for me to realise I wanted to work for him.
No. He was understanding as in "I don't think badly of you and I'm not angry".
I was intending to go home to my parents - but instead went to the opening of an art exhibition to drink lots of red wine with some pleasantly surprised friends, then followed them to a slightly pointless but enjoyable local election hustings debate - my friends are political types, remember - and then best of all they bought me drinks in the pub.
And so finally to home, and bed, and instant sleep, for a full twenty four hours. To wake up in a place which is highly familiar, but now slightly strange.
Well, a bit stranger than before, anyway.
And So It Ends - You Have Forgotten Something
There's always something. Some little detail that you forget about, that crops up when you think everything else is sorted out, that means you have to change your plans completely. And afterwards you think "How could I have missed that?"
In this case, it's paperwork. It takes a minimum of two weeks (read: a month) to sort out visas and travel documents and work permits to start a job in China. The process involves the school sending you a formal invitation through the post, you taking the invitation to the Chinese embassy in the capital, them sitting on it for "three days", you making second visit when they confirm they've found the rubber stamp...and then booking your flight.
And somehow I'd forgotten that. Seeing as I need to be gone in under five days, it makes the timing a little tight, Though in a way it's lucky because I've been advised against going to China at all.
So the new plan is: Go home. This involves waiting until I'm paid (today), then using the cash to purchase the cheapest plane ticket I can find that'll get me to Gatwick before my nominal employer trundles into town.
Actually he will literally trundle because he's driving a truck across Europe. The flight...is tomorrow. After I get the cash in my treacherous palm, I'll pick up the phone, do my impersonation of Patrick MacGoohan, and say "I resign!"
After that, look for another teaching job. While fielding the cretinoid schemes of the jobcentre, and modestly accepting all the "welcome home" drinks everyone will cheerfully buy me.
Some sex would be nice too. I'm a bit overdue.
Oh yes, the net connection is back up and working fine.
One other thing went wrong - I took over a hundred photos of the sights, and managed to lose them. This could be my subconscious urging me to forget everything that's happened over the last two months, or it could just be Kapitano forgetting things again. I favour the latter hypothesis.
I've written a letter of resignation. Well I say that - it's more a two page rant addressed to my boss.
Short version: "You're a nice enough guy but you're a damn fool. You vacillate, you answer every question with a soup of equivocation, you're a deluded fantasist, and you never listen. Sometimes I'll tolerate these things in friends, but it's suicide to tolerate them in an employer."
So. In case I don't get to post before leaving: Goodbye Bulgaria. The time I've spent with you has been...er, time...spent.
There will be a Short Delay
Bulgaria's premier ISP is Optilink. And it's being upgraded (repaired). Which means, for the duration of the upgrade, however long that is, my net access is, shall we say, restricted.
I can send email, but seemingly not with attachments. Google's main search is disabled, as are the URLs of other search engines. This makes applying to new schools rather difficult and negotiating with those already in contact with me...a little more roundabout. Documents now go via FTP.
It is of course inevitable that, exactly when I most need good net access, I don't have it.
Still, at least I can blog about it.
I can't look at any blogs, but I can post.
Bunking Off School
Another fifteen schools emailed with my CV - this time all in China.
So far only Hampson have got back to me. They telephoned...and said they'd call again. It seems they'll offer me anything to make me sign on for a year - except a decent salary.
China has language schools the way Britain has pubs, Bulgaria has drugstores and the Gaza Strip has craters. There are companies whose sole purpose is to mail out your CV to their list of schools. Payment is usually good - two to five times a living wage - but job security and employee protection is immensely variable.
The other main country where schools proliferate is South Korea.
Okay, Hampson did call again. Twice. Once from the owner's wife, and once from their only native English speaker. And that one was wierd. He answered my questions, sort of, in a perfunctory way - but honestly, the man sounded like he'd been drugged. Slow, dreamy, uninterested, with long pauses.
There's something rather wrong about that school. I sent them an email saying I couldn't work for them because their wages weren't enough for me to pay off my debts - which is even true.
Shit.
The boss was supposed to wait six weeks before coming over here guide us with his, shall we say, scattershot style of leadership. This would give me enough time to arrange a job somewhere else in the world before resigning.
Now he's planning to come in three days. Or possibly tomorrow. Which means...I may have to tell quite a lot of lies. I could just walk out, fly back to England and find a job to fly out to from there - there's the funds, just about, but if I did that I'd arrive bankrupt. Flying from Bulgaria to (say) China is better.
Deal with that tomorrow, somehow. Now I'm going home. Home to...
A dog that won't stay still long enough for a photograph.
At least until she calms down.
Or goes to sleep.
And yes, Tania has promised me she'll find Wednesday a good family, whenever and wherever I go.
We Gotta Get Out of This Place
I've often thought that you could tell a story just by printing out the contents of someone's "Sent Items" email folder. And because the items are listed with the most recent at the top, you'd be telling it in reverse chronological order.
First a brief note from a woman telling her husband she'll meet him at the airport. Then a longer but essentially contentless letter saying she's fine, but there's not much to do and she can't wait for him to come home. Then a long angry rant sent to another man, followed by a message that's just a time and a place, and then something much more affectionate.
After that, a chatty letter telling us a little about her, and a confirmation note sent to register with a dating site. Finally, a letter to a female friend about how she's missing her man in spite of how impossible he's been lately, and a "hope you arrived safely" message to her husband.
Call it "Pamela @ home".
Well, my story begins today with twenty CVs sent to various countries. And I suppose it probably ends with a similar mailout four months ago. Oh I haven't left yet, and it's just possible I won't, but with luck I'll know tomorrow.
One school in particular caught my eye. Hampson, 50km from Prague. It's run by Pavel SudÃk and his wife as center for intensive immersion courses, with lots of new-agey teaching methods involving relaxation, music and fun as aids to learning.
They also do a line in corporate firewalking. That's not a metaphor - they arrange events for corporate types to walk on hot coals to get them in touch with their inner adventurer or some such.
It's touchy-feely, but seemingly in quite a good way, and the students seem to love it. But there's a couple of things that set of alarm bells in my head.
The first is money. They pay CZK120 (120 crowns) per hour taught - thats GBP3.8, EUR4.7 or USD7.5. That's not CZK120 per hour employed, it's CZK120 per hour you teach - so if it's a national holiday and there's no students, you get nothing.
If you do get paid, assuming 25 hours teaching a week, it's close to a survival wage - not much in surplus or savings. They were oddly silent on things like paid holidays and employee rights - and after a bit of research I've found the most astounding reason why. Yes.
The second thing is just how eager they are to have me work for them - they responded to my CV in minutes, which is good, but practically offered me the job there and then.
And when I asked about reimbursement of air fares, they said it's not usual policy but...they'd do it for me. Just like that. And they'd love it if I could start right away - that's "right away" as in "tomorrow". Literally.
They didn't check references or qualifications...and they don't feel the need for an interview.
If a complete stranger running a business wants to do me that many favours, I have to ask whether they're really doing me any favours.
There's a short discussion of the school here.
A Look Around
Things you see on a short walk to the supermarket...
This is the building where I work.
And this is the primary school opposite.
Some things here are quite old.
And some things are quite a bit older.
New houses are being built all the time.
Though old houses could do with a bit of upkeep.
Sometimes it's a bit difficult to tell which is which.
These are everywhere.
Other things are getting quite common too.
There is a bus service.
This is the business venture behind the supermarket.
And this is the supermarket.
Inside I took a few snaps just to see how long it would take some managerial arsehole to tell me to stop. It took about one minute, but the arsehole got a security guard to do it for him.
The guard is a full time teacher of history who gets enough money to live on by walking up and down aisles in a red company jacket. He's been learning English for four years, and is at upper intermediate level. And he thinks rules about photography are idiotic too.
We walked around the market, comparing the German influence on English with the Turkish influence on Bulgarian, discussing East European history, and chatting about his plans to move to America - the UK would be preferable, but the racism makes it extremely unappealing. Occasionally I bought some food on his recommendation.
Bulgaria isn't so foreign after all.
This is the building where I work.
And this is the primary school opposite.
Some things here are quite old.
And some things are quite a bit older.
New houses are being built all the time.
Though old houses could do with a bit of upkeep.
Sometimes it's a bit difficult to tell which is which.
These are everywhere.
Other things are getting quite common too.
There is a bus service.
This is the business venture behind the supermarket.
And this is the supermarket.
Inside I took a few snaps just to see how long it would take some managerial arsehole to tell me to stop. It took about one minute, but the arsehole got a security guard to do it for him.
The guard is a full time teacher of history who gets enough money to live on by walking up and down aisles in a red company jacket. He's been learning English for four years, and is at upper intermediate level. And he thinks rules about photography are idiotic too.
We walked around the market, comparing the German influence on English with the Turkish influence on Bulgarian, discussing East European history, and chatting about his plans to move to America - the UK would be preferable, but the racism makes it extremely unappealing. Occasionally I bought some food on his recommendation.
Bulgaria isn't so foreign after all.
School Report
I think I prepared quite a good lesson today. It's about indirect speech, also known as reported speech.
If you say "Bill said "I love you"", that's a direct quotation. If you say "Bill told me that he loved me", that's indirect speech. See how the present tense "love" becomes the past tense "loved"?
In English you've got four basic sentence shapes for declarative sentences in the present tense, and another four for the past. If you want to report a present sentence, you shift it to the corresponding past - "Bill gates is the antichrist" becomes "Kapitano said Bill gates was the antichrist", "It's been an interesting year" becomes "Kapitano said it'd been an interesting year", and so on.
If the sentence you want to report is already in the past, you don't change the tense - "The emperor wrote hakius" becomes "Kapitano said the emperor wrote haikus", "Stocks had been falling" becomes, rather boringly, "Kapitano said stocks had been falling".
Ah. But. If the reported sentence is in the past simple, you have the option of putting it into the past perfect, so "Gore Vidal ate ice cream" could become either "Kapitano said Gore Vidal ate ice cream" or "Kapitano said Gore Vidal had eaten ice cream".
Fairly simple though. Unless of course...you're reporting speech that has just happened, or that you think refers to states that are still true, in which case you've got a load more options:
"I'm going slightly mad" becomes "He says he's going slightly mad" or "He said he's going slightly mad" or "He said he was going slightly mad".
"Apes are descenced from men" becomes "Roddy McDowall says are descended from men", or "Roddy McDowall said apes are descended from men", or "Roddy McDowall said Charlton Heston was his ancestor".
I put together a little story/test to demonstrate the simpler transformations, and I'm vaguely proud that it's slightly readable as a story while still showing the grammar:
A famous actor is ill in hospital, and a journalist interviews him. This is what he tells her:
"I'm happy here. I'm feeling very tired right now, but I've been tired many times before. I've been thinking about my next movie!
I acted in some very bad films when I was young, but I was always looking forward to the next one. I'd acted in small films, but I was getting bored with that, so I said to myself "I want to be in bigger films!"
I'll leave this hospital soon. I'll be glad to be out of here. Next year, I'll have forgotten these tubes and needles, and I will have been acting in a new film for six months."
Ten years later the actor has just died, and the journalist writes his obituary article. She remembers what he said to her in hospital, and she reports it. What does she write?
Answer:
"He said he was happy there. He said he was feeling very tired, but that he'd been tired many times before. He told me he'd been thinking about his next movie.
He also said he'd acted in some very bad films when he was young, but that he was always looking forward to the next one. He said he'd acted in small films, but he'd been getting bored with that, so he'd said to himself that he wanted to be in bigger films.
Then he told me he'd leave that hospital soon and that he'd be glad to be out of there. He said that next year he'd have forgotten those tubes and needles, and he would have been acting in a new film for six months."
It would have been an even better lesson if the student had turned up.
Okay, there was a mixup over time, but Veli did turn up. Two surprises - first, he polished off the above lesson in twenty minutes, and second he turns out to be only sixteen. Evidently a very well nourished sixteen.
He brought along some specimen exam papers, which we went through. My god. To pick an example, what's wrong with this sentence?
"Whether late nineteenth century classic literature should have taught in schools has proven to be a controversial issue"
Okay, it's not too difficult for native speakers to see that it should be "...literature should be taught in...". But why? Why is "have" wrong and why is "be" correct? How would you explain it?
"Should be taught" is an agentless present-simple passive describing a stable, ongoing situation constituted by repeated action. But it actually took me about a minute to see that. The sentence with "have" is in fact perfectly grammatical - just with a fantastical meaning.
Anyway, I'm happy because my package arrived from England. Containing a rather nice camera for recording the local sights, plus extras of a lead, collar and anti-flea pills for Wednesday.
So, I'm off to snap the local colour. Just as soon as I've figured out which buttons to push.
Straw Poll
Everything is a little confused but here's a breakdown:
* I was told there would be a great demand for my teaching services. So far I've given three lessons to one student. I was then told demand would pick up after the school vacation, but in truth no student wants to take on extra work in the final term, when they're also revising for final exams.
* If there is demand, it would mostly happen at the start of the next school year - which is in September. Five months away.
* The boss has all sorts of plans. These include further building work in the office, more building work in the classroom, the setting up of a second classroom, filling it with computers with the latest (legal) software, running IT and accountancy courses, building a summer school at another site, digitising existing textbooks and writing new ones from scratch.
* Current balance in the school bank account: Zero.
* The one reliable man we've found to do the building work won't be around consistently over the next few months, and won't do any more work till he gets paid for the last lot. Some of which he'll have to do again because he cut corners because we couldn't pay for materials to do it properly.
* The boss says, seeing as I'm feeling down here, he can fly me back to England for a few weeks to do some computer work for him - mainly making PDFs of textbooks, and instructing him in DTP.
* After which he expects me to fly back to Bulgaria and teach.
Now. What do you think I should do?
I have a week to decide.
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