Defenestration
"I bought some batteries but they weren't included."
- Steven Wright
Odd how one thing leads to another. For example:
Kapitano wants to make some music. He's got the software, but only a rather run down and obsolete laptop to run it on. However, he knows lots of tricks for speeding up Windows - probably the most important of which is to cut out all the unnecessary junk.
The problem with cutting out junk is, sometimes you're not sure whether something's really junk. You might need it later, or it might look useless but be vital in some oblique way for some task.
For instance, although everything needed for USB devices seemed to be left in, any USB storage device caused a crash whenever it was plugged in. A rather frustrating mystery.
Now, one way to neaten up and streamline Windows is to have largely self-contained programs - or self-contained versions of programs which usually aren't. In other words, portable applications.
Some you can download, but there's also software for taking an ordinary application and making it portable. It does this by taking a snapshot of your system before installation, and one after, then finding the differences and bundling them all into one file.
Sounds good. Unfortunately it only works reliably when installing onto a clean operating system. So you can either reinstall Windows every time you want to make a portable application...
...or you can use a virtual machine. This is a simulation of one computer, running on another computer. And yes, you can run a simulation on the simulation if you really want to.
You set up your virtual machine, install Windows and the portablising software on it, and install your application with it running. Then copy the resulting program onto your real computer and reset the virtual one to convert another program.
However, this is done in a slightly clunky and one-size-fits-all way. The better way to do it is to compare the two snapshots, work out for yourself the best method, and design an installer program to do it - for which you need to learn the scripting language.
This is the point I'd got to before discovering why USB devices crashed the laptop. It wasn't anything I'd cut out, it was the driver for the USB camera. It messed up all the others. Gah.
However I reckon there is a way to make it work. I just need to set up a virtual machine and make a self contained version - so it'll only mess everything else up when I'm running it.
And then I can make some music.
Fenestration
"I can levitate birds but no one cares."
- Steven Wright
There is a theme to this post.
I've spent the last month cutting up my OS.
Windows XP is around 650MB on the installation CD, expanding to about 1.3GB when you install it on your hard disk - and that's before you install any software. But the core of XP is 85MB expanding to around 200. Approximately two thirds is useless most of the time, and if you can work out which bits of that two thirds is useful to you...you can cut out the junk and get a small, fast, efficient, asesthetically designed and useful system.
If you can work out which bits you need for your software. That's the difficult bit. That's the bit you need six spare days a week for a month for.
I spent most of Saturday installing Windows for someone else.
I get to work generally one day a week, filling in for teachers who are absent/sick/on holiday/doing something better/teaching somewhere else, which suits me just fine. I get just enough to live on, and plenty of free time for things like...um...well, see above.
Like all modern schools, it has computers. And like all schools, it has students who enjoy messing them up. Engineering students don't generally spend their mental effort working out ways to mess up the lathe, veterinary students don't think it's cool to induce seizures in dogs, but students of everything like to see how they can fuck up other people's computers.
Computing students are no exception. They're just better at it.
So, every year after the summer rush, the school computers get sluiced out, reformatted and renewed with reinstalled Windows. This year it was slightly different in that:
(a) It took a day instead of a week
(b) It was done properly by some one who knew what they were doing, and
(c) I put some security in this time
It seems no one had previously thought of using passwords.
So, having spent seven hours (one for each computer) installing Windows 2000, Windows XP and (hack, spit) Windows Vista...I could happily spend the rest of my life never again seeing a yellow bar creeping across a blue screen.
People have never put their laptops on their laps. Laps were designed for dogs, not computers.
Occasionally they put them on tables on trains, or on conveniently raised rocks doing work "in the field" (in fields, anyway), or on the ends of beds, but mostly laptops go on desks. They were originally meant to be portable adjuncts to desktop PCs, but they wound up replacing them.
Nowadays if you're a serious user, you have one laptop on your desk for work, a smaller one in your bedroom for internet and games, and an even smaller one for going on the road. Palmtops, they're sometimes called. Except they don't go on palms either.
And you transfer data between them using USB memory sticks. Everyone's got several memory sticks - one lost under the bed, one lost in a drawer somewhere, one left in a taxi, and the one on your keychain you haven't lost yet.
You can also run software from a memory stick. There are "portable" versions of many (perhaps most) popular programs, designed to be small and self-contained. And this has had one rather surprising but extremely welcome effect....
Because although Windows looks superficially neat and modular, with different separate programs plugged into the operating system, it isn't. Each program is densely intertwined with the Windows core, and the various "extras" you need for the more advanced software - things like DotNet, Visual BASIC, Visual C++, Java, DirectX, Network drivers, sound and video drivers, codecs, QuickTime etc etc.
In other words, it's a tangled mesh of overlaps and interdependencies which no amount of pruning and housekeeping entirely unwinds. In other words, it's a freaking mess.
But portable software isn't messy. You plug it in, run it, and unplug when you're finished. It's clean, simple and sensible. It's what Windows should have been.
And there's absolutely no reason why you can't install it permanently on your hard disk. So that's what I've done.
With a cut down 300MB Windows installation - half of it just for networking - and the same again for DotNet, Visual C++ etc etc, and 2GB of portable-but-permanent software, my antiquated laptop is now a recording studio, video edit suite, graphic design lab, office and browser...and it runs twice as fast as desktop PCs that are supposed to be twice the speed.
Now I've just got to remember what I wanted to do with it.
Watch the Skies
Making a timelapse film of the clouds. How hard can it be? Just point a webcam out of the window, attach it to a laptop that's not needed for anything else, and press "Go".
That's after you've spent two nights failing to the laptop to recognise the webcam, and your mother has spent an afternoon and some powers of lateral thinking after you've given up. And after all that, you find the sky is not so much cloudy as a uniform wash of pale grey.
Last week I did one day of teaching, covering for a sick colleague. This week another day for another one. In both cases after two hours of sleep following a night of drunken debauchery. But hey, that's what Sundays are for.
Actually I'm not sure my colleagues are ill that often - I think they're off trying to find work somewhere better. Either that or they had fun Sundays too.
In any case, I had a very pleasant one-to-one with a cute Swiss lad who plays electric blues guitar. Which meant I gave a lesson in music theory and American blues icons masquerading as one on vocabulary.
Oh, and the school have come up with a cost-efficient solution to the problem of students putting viruses on the classroom computers. If a teacher is ill one day, they call up their friendly neighbourhood substitute teacher, and if the entire class bunks off - which they often do - he spends the lesson reinstalling Windows and putting in security.
There's a piece of laminated paper blutacked to each classroom door, informing us that if any student is more than ten minutes late, we're to send them to the "student room" for quiet study. It's next to the notices telling students they must speak English at all times, and put the chairs on the tables at lesson's end.
If we followed the instructions, we'd have nothing but empty classes and I'd fix the computers in no time.
Tony recognised me, for the first time ever. He was being "moved on" from outside a shop by the manager. Earlier the police had done the same from the beach - and given him a piece of paper to prove they'd done it.
I gave him the coins in my pocket, but what he really wanted was company for half an hour, so I sat and listened while he drank his cider.
He'd spent eight years in the army, eventually serving in Basra - "cleaning up the mess left by the yanks". He says he tried to avoid shooting people if he could. Soon after he was posted, four fellow soldiers were killed when an American helicopter fired a missile on their jeep by mistake. He doesn't like Americans much now.
When detoxing he gets flashbacks to that time - the noise of gunfire, the fear of mines and the whole sense of hopelessness. Eventually he snapped and started shouting at a superior - "What are we doing here? What's this for?". He was put in solitary confinement ("The Greenhouse") for two months and discharged.
Now he's afraid he's going mad, but insists (correctly) that he still has self-respect and people who care about him.
Snappy
Okay. On the one hand I'm back online (fingers crossed) after a week of stressed late nights and disgruntled early mornings. I've finally got this dratted computer working perfectly (fingers and toes crossed).
On the other hand I'm so sick of the sight of it I don't want to go near it for a week.
So...I've found another challenge. A few years ago my mother found a laptop in a skip. It has a 3GB hard drive, 128MB of RAM, and runs (I think) around 250MHz. So you can see why it was in a skip. But mother nursed it back to health, and now it's just waiting to perform some task that only a hopelessly obsolete computer can do.
A few years before that, Mother invested a whole UKP20 in a digital camera. It has space for 26 "high resolution" pictures - 320x240, the same resolution as YouTube, only dimmer and granier. It's chief selling point was that you could carry it in your top pocket.
Yesterday I stumbled upon a tiny program that took snapshots from your webcam - every second, 5 minutes, day, or whatever. And you can see where this is going can't you?
The challenge is therefore:
* To find a version of Windows that'll take up, say, 200MB instead of the usual 1.3GBs. Luckily, I spent the last week developing one.
* Put it on the "skip machine", with the "pencam".
* Find something to take a timelapse film of!
Update: After two nights of (very slowly) installing various flavours of Windows and trying to coax the USB port into life...I think I'll use the other spare laptop instead. The one with 768MB of RAM and the 2GHz processor. The one that works.
One of the Windows flavours was my own reduced version of 2000 - reduced from 360MB to 60. Sixty megabytes will give you a fully functional operating system with no software and no internet.
Compare and contrast with DSL - which I've mentioned before and which Aimee reminded me about. 50MB, giving you internet access, browsers, wordprocessors, a spreadsheet, image editing and more. Hmmm.
So I'm going to give it a go. Watch me as I take a deep breath, hold my nose, screw shut my eyes and dive in.
Still here, just having network problems
...quite a lot of them. And other computer-related troubles.
So I'm mostly offline at the moment. Enjoy the silence.
Eyes and Ears
I'm not going to go blind after all.
Yes, today was my checkup at the eye clinic. Last year it was "You have a severe astigmatism that'll only get worse and probably cause glaucoma which'll likely blind you by the time you're fifty and there's no way to stop it."
Now it's "Your eyes are exactly the same as last year so there's no new degeneration so if you do develop glaucoma it'll start when you're eighty. So we don't need to see you again. Bye."
My right eye is still a bit rubbish, but (a) it hasn't got any more rubbish and (b) my left eye is wonderful! So that's nice.
New Scientist. A weekly magazine of popular science that I read avidly as a teenager. It introduced me to virology, set theory, chaos theory, and some really weird cool stuff about using quantum physics to make unbreakable cyphers.
Now I get to peruse it again, ever since Mother switched her subscription from Time Magazine - on the grounds that Time had become full of neocon cheerleading instead of actual news.
Unfortunately, New Scientist is also now full of drivel. Recently there was a front page article on why the human brain is the most complex thing in the universe - an intriguing notion, until you ask what it means. There is a pretty rigorous definition of complexity in biology, and another quite different one from information theory that could (perhaps, in principle) be applied to the universe. But probably not.
It's a little like saying "Chocolate cake is rich, and so is the Hilton Hotel, so the chocolatiest cake in the hotel is a multibillionaire".
This week, there's a brief article on why men with wide faces are violent. Read that again before going on, just to make sure you got it right.
Testosterone in puberty causes the facial bones to widen, and men to become aggressive - the more testosterone, the wider the face and the more aggression. Aggressive people are violent, so...yeah.
And the fact that the researchers saw some stocky teens "aggressively" playing video games confirms it. Yes, they said that.
They also say it applies to short and small men too - though presumably accept the line that testosterone increases height and muscle mass.
Still, nevermind. Testosterone also increases testicle size (except when it does the opposite, as a sports supplement), deepens the voice (though that's actually more a matter of cartilage structure in the neck), and increases sex drive, which is why men with squeaky voices don't commit adultery. So I've read.
Oh, small detail: If you're going to talk about aggression as a measurable trait in psychology, try not confusing it with the colloquial connotations of the word. That way, you might not talk complete gibberish.
I have now sat up for four nights in a row listening to science fiction podcasts. I've redescovered Ted Chiang (who writes excellent short stories once in a blue moon) and John Varley (who wrote one of the best and three of the worst novels of my childhood) on StarShipSofa. Plus Mike Resnick (who makes sensitive types cry) and Charles Finlay (who makes dumb types nod sagely) on Escape Pod.
I once read that there are now so many Star Trek episodes, films, books, and audios around that someone could literally spend their entire life watching, reading and hearing Star Trek. And given the uncounted thousands of fan-written stories on the net - divided into gen, het, slash, HC, PWP and other impenetrably named subgenres - there's enough for the afterlife too.
I'm not sure I could fill my whole life with the horror of Pseudopod, the various genres of Varient Frequencies or the complete books of Podiobooks...but I'm happy to have a rich supply of bedtime stories. Before I have breakfast and go to bed.
I'll start making tea tomorrow.
It Makes Me Sick
I've had no voice for the last few days. That's why you couldn't see any new blog posts - I was whispering them.
As for why I had no voice, my throat was burned by stomach acid carried by food in a great hurry to reach the toilet bowl, without having to go through all that tedious digestion first.
Yes, I spent half of monday night sicking up monday's lunch - and the other half getting hot and cold flushes. So either I had a little food poisoning...or I'm pregnant.
Considering the recent spate of sex the probability of pregnancy is admittedly raised, but something tells me that's not it.
Tonight, a man slouched against a wall asked if I had any spare change. He said he was a hopeless alcoholic, slowly dying and just waiting for the end. He didn't care about living anymore - just wished it wouldn't take so long to finally die.
I smiled and said, "Hello Tony".
He stared at me in astonishment. How could I know his name?
He never remembers me. Each time he falls back into the cider bottle and onto the street, it's like his memory is wiped clean.
He told me again about how the wife he'd met at a detox clinic threw him out when he relapsed, and how he hoped he could patch things up with his son before the end. He wanted to know why Jesus was letting him go through life like this, if there wasn't some grand purpose that would make it all make sense.
There was a tumor on the side of his head that hadn't been there before - though strangely he looked healthier. There were no cold sweats, DT tremours or numb limbs this time, plus he'd put on some healthy pounds.
He refused to take the coins in my pocket, so I slipped them into the cap by his side, and he pretended not to notice. That's how dignity is maintained. He said he'd buy a bottle of vodka as a treat and sleep on the soft grass of the common tonight.
He's probably there as I'm typing this.
There's a school for adults opening nearby. It goes by the promising name of Worker's Educational Association. I dropped 'round to sniff out the possibilities of employment.
So, I ask, do you run courses in EFL/ESL/ESOL/whatever-it's-calling-itself-this-month? Oh yes. Well, probably. Dunno really, we're just starting up.
How many students do you expect to have? Dunno yet. We'll see who turns up. How many teachers do you have? I couldn't really say - someone around here might know. And what sort of wages do you expect to pay? Dunno really, we're just starting up, you see.
Sigh. So how do I apply? Simple! Just fill out these ten pages of stupid questions and we'll add you to the list of teachers we might interview at some point. When we know what we need.
And finally, a brief lesson on how computers work.
Adobe Reader aka Adobe Acrobat is a program you probably have on your computer that lets you read PDF files. PDF is a way of formatting text in a book-like way, so you can read what look like books on your computer - complete with numbered pages, headings and subheadings, embedded pictures and indeed watermarks and page creases. Very useful.
Now, Adobe Reader takes up 157 megabytes, is slow, awkward to configure, and not exactly neat in terms of how is works behind the scenes with your system. Sumatra, on the other hand, reads PDFs, is 1.33 megabytes, fast, easy to configure, and clean to install.
Like most such admirable programs, it was developed by one person working alone to solve a problem simply because it needed solving. Sometimes such people work illegally, and occasionally go to jail for undoing the mess made by the professionals.
Anyway, I want to deinstall Reader and install Sumatra. But I can't deinstall Reader because the 'helper' program Windows Installer isn't working. Normally I'd solve this by finding the uninstaller program provided by Adobe as a matter of basic professionalism, and run it. Except I can't because Reader doesn't have one. This is like manufacturing a door without a handle, or a car without brakes, but the good people of Adobe presumably had some good reason.
Hmmm, I think. Maybe Reader was misinstalled in such a way that it can't activate or communicate with Windows Installer? So if I reinstall Reader, over the top of itself, it might install correctly and fix the problem so I can deinstall it. Good idea, yes? Didn't work.
So I try reinstalling Windows Installer, thinking the problem may be there. But Windows won't let me reinstall it...because I've already got the latest version installed, so it can't see there's any need to install it. Gah!
Ah, but wait a minute. Installer isn't just a program - it's a Service. A Service is a little program that sits on your computer, always running, taking up space and RAM but doing absolutely nothing most of the time until it's needed. Like now. Which is why, six months ago, I configured it to only start running when it was needed. Well, it wasn't.
So. Deep breath. I configure Installer to run all the time, reboot, deinstall Reader, install Sumatra, reconfigure Installer to not run all the time anymore...and reboot again.
And that, gentle reader, is how you work with computers.
4 and Sore
How do you celebrate your blogiversary? Starting at midnight?
How about long, slow and mutual gustatory carnal pleasuring with a man you've just met? In an actual bed, no less - a step up in the world from your parent's back garden.
Followed by tea (because we're British), biscuits (because there's nothing like Hob-Knobs after Gobbling-Knobs), more love'n'shove (because we can), and sleep (because we're knackered).
Then in the morning, more long, slow etc. etc., followed by more tea, more biscuits, and the swapping of phone number so we can do it again soon.
And on the way home, blinking in the early light, a call from another bloke who's "free for fun" around midnight. The straight-but-prefers-the-way-men-give-blowjobs type.
Friday was my last day at work - also the last for most of the teachers and almost all the students. So you can imagine how serious and earnest the lessons were.
Nothing to do except clear up the remains of two leaving parties, drink tea (because, well....), and hold a particularly ill-tempered meeting - before going off to look for a new job.
You'd think someone who's spent their life running language schools would know better than to say, "The English don't speak English properly". That's a bit like saying "Swans don't swim properly. They should do it like the book says they do".
Spent the evening watching rather too many episodes of Star Trek, while eating lentil soup (because I'm trying to stay on a high fibre diet) followed by chocolate biscuits (because I'm not trying very hard) and then, before you know it...
...it's midnight, and there's time for one more nice surprise.
He's late, which is neither nice nor a surprise, but he's horny as a goat on horny goat weed, and feeling experimental.
Bloke: How can I turn you on, Kapitano?
Kap: Um, well you could try sucking my cock?
Bloke: Okay, let's try that!
So he tentatively tries it, and finds that, really, he likes it. Let me rephrase that. He tries it, and an hour later decides he really really likes it.
And an hour after that, although I'm very pleased for him that he's discovered a new source of joy, I'm dropping hints that it's cold and I'll need to sleep soon. That and I've got stubble burn on my scrotum and love bites on my inner thigh.
Oh just another five minutes, please, he says. So another forty minutes later I finally take his new toy away from him, because it's just a bit sore.
Oh just one more minute, please. Honestly, I am such a sucker. Um, yes.
So this is Kapitano, marking four years of blogging, with tea, chocolate biscuits, a new friend with old skills, and old friend with new skills, no job, no immediate plans, and several red patches...signing off. Till tomorrow.
4
Fore!
For?
Phwoar!
I am 4.
And there'll be a proper birthday post along as soon as I can think of one.
In the meantime, have some virtual birthday cake.
Say What?
Things teachers say in the staffroom:
"[Our Director of Studies] is, like, a total dick."
"Communism is okay if it works. Fascism is okay if it works."
"[Name of student] must be gay. He's just so camp it's unbelievable."
"Sorry, I didn't mean to imply that you're gay or anything."
"They only way to deal with Arabs is to treat them like dogs, quite honestly."
"I don't think you should talk about another person like that behind their back."
I used to work with someone who had Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder.
He scrubbed his hands clean twenty or thirty times a shift - though they were already clean - using the strongest soaps and antibacterials he could find. Each washing lasted ten minutes, and he managed to fit his work life around these semi-periodic washings.
And he lied about it. Everyone knew, no one judged, but he always lied, and it was always the same lie - that his car had sprung an oil leak.
No one tried to talk with him about it, and no one complained. I think the workforce (of thirty or so) had come to a silent consensus:
(1) He's a nice guy and we don't want to upset him.
(2) It's a problem, but not a major one.
(3) It's a problem, but it's his problem not ours.
(4) Trying to help would be interference, and that would be wrong.
(5) Trying to help wouldn't work, so there's no point in trying.
Fair enough. A defensible position, and probably a correct one, given that we were colleagues, not friends. But I wonder what would have happened if (1) hadn't been in place.
I think if he hadn't been a nice guy, all that enlightened pragmatism, all that tolerant humanism, would have instantly gone out of the window. His "quirk" would have gone from being an "eccentricity" to being "severe mental illness which means he can't do his job properly and we can't work with him".
Things students say in the classroom:
"In England it's very easy to get drugs. Marijuana, heroin, cocaine..."
"I don't get drunk on beer. Only after a million pints."
"People are drunk over the whole world, but in England drunk people are everywhere."
"You can die from one dose of cocaine."
"Me? No teacher! I never try drugs, but I know people who do."
One of my friends is an alcoholic. He's starting to see it himself but can't stop.
He doesn't get violent, or moody, or sexual. He just drinks every night until he's (literally) sick, then goes home to sleep it off, and goes to a job in the morning that pays just enough to let him do it again.
What am I supposed to do? In the past I tried to reason and encourage people out of addiction before - before I realised what everyone else knew, that it doesn't work like that.
So what, exactly, am I supposed to do?
Right now, I reinstall an operating system and a load of programs onto a crashed laptop. I've got a catalogued set of 146 "essential" programs, and 103 plugins - plus hundreds of others on dozens of discs. Everything from wireless network driver, MPEG4 codec and MIDI driver to file compressors, flash player and a fiendishly complicated program to work out musical scales.
Oh yes, still working on the music - but in a faintly perverse way working on the video to a song I haven't recorded yet.
It's nearly 5am and I've got to get some sleep so I can stand in front of a class and be intelligent for students who're too tired to notice. It's their final week and the finer points of relative clause structure isn't at the top of their agenda.
Or indeed mine, but unlike them I've got to pretend to care.
What Did You Bring the Book I Didn't Want to be Read to out of up for?
Thursday went exactly as predicted - except a student actually turned up and played ping pong. And then ten more.
Two Koreans, three Italians and assorted Arabs, enjoying themselves with token supervision - using more English in casual conversation that a week in the classroom, and ignoring national boundaries more than they ever do in school.
Pavement Wit: Horn of the Dead
Used to describe necrophilia. Or zombie porn movies. yes, they do exist. Actually, I suspect there's more Porn-of-the-Dead flicks each year than cases of people having sex with corpses.
I do have to wonder exactly why it's illegal to cornhole a cadaver. I mean, does the government think there's hoards of people yearning to get stiff with a stiff, held back only by the fear of criminal prosecution?
Maybe the same thinking is behind making suicide illegal? Or cannibalism. Or bestiality. Or praying to the devil. Or blowing up airports.
But what do I know. Maybe a necrophile is a bibliophile with a fondness for the Necronomicon.
Two weeks ago I had one week of teaching left. One week ago I had six! Now it's back to one. But probably a different one. Next week it may be different.
After that they want me to do cover work...and run the social program.
This blog is six days away from it's forth birthday. What should I do to celebrate?
This month eleven people died trying to climb K2. Is it only people who don't live in countries with mountains think it's impressive to climb them?
I mean, it is impressive. Just rather silly.
This morning I attempted to phone a college to ask if they had vacancies.
The first number didn't answer, the second was an automated switchboard which redirected me to the Literacy Department. Which was actually Hair, Nails and Beauty, who gave me a number for Basic Skills, who were out to lunch at 10am.
So I tried another number, who put me through to The International Department, who didn't know whether they had any vacancies, but gave me another number to call, which didn't answer.
Finally I tried a third route, and got an answer. From someone who also didn't know, but suggested I try the internet.
I was very diplomatic.
"The man whose wife is a doctor waved to me". A simple enough sentence, yes? Two intersecting sentences, bound by a common subject ("the man") co-ordinated by a relative pronoun ("whose"), one placed inside the other. Even my board-out-of-their-skulls and so-tired-they-don't-care-anymore afternoon class got it. Before saying they were bored and wanted to do something else.
So what about "The bicycle whose wheel fell off rusted"? Not so good, because strictly speaking, "whose" can only be used for living things.
"The bicycle of which the wheel fell off rusted"? Um, well...it's grammatically okay but...would you ever say it? Didn't think so.
"The bicycle which's wheel fell off rusted"? I have never, ever heard "which" used in possessive form.
"The bicycle that had the wheel that fell off rusted"? Not quite.
"The bicycle the wheel of which fell off rusted"? That one's my suggestion. It's grammatically impeccable, just rather...odd.
"The bicycle that of which the wheel fell off rusted". Don't be silly.
"The bicycle such that the wheel fell off of it rusted". Um.
Four teachers with three decades of experience between them couldn't work it out. But we don't tell the students that.
The Blogger spellchecker knows "Necrophilia" and "Cornhole" but not "Necronomicon" or "Internet".
"The bicycle which the wheel fell off of rusted". Probably. But I wouldn't want to explain how that preposition got over there.
The World Shall Hear from Me Again
I haven't been watching the olympics, but three stories filtered through to me.
The first two are about how fiendishly cunning the Chinese are. Some of the firework displays at the opening ceremony were done with camera trickery, and the cute little girl who sang an uplifting song was lipsynching.
According to the blogosphere, these show how devious and untrustworthy the Chinese government is. Because in the enlightened West we'd never stoop to using photoshop or mime.
And the other story...Tom Daley, who is (a) 14, (b) British and (c) a swimmer, had an argument with his teammate. I know this because it was front page news in several newspapers.
Russia invading Georgia wasn't.
I know exactly what I'm doing on Thursday.
In the morning, I'm buying the cheapest crisps and fizzy drinks I can find, plus things for making sandwiches.
In the afternoon, I'm teaching. Don't know what I'm teaching yet - I'll decide five minutes beforehand, and wind up teaching something different anyway because it'll turn out the class needs it.
In the early evening, I'm making lots and lots of sandwiches, and carrying the food to the local community centre, to sit with it in a room waiting for students to turn up. To participate in the Meridian School of English Table Tennis (Ping Pong) Championships.
If no one turns up, I'll then eat the sandwiches. If someone does turn up, they'll get the grand prize, which will probably be made of chocolate - because I couldn't get a book token.
Then as midnight approaches, I'll get a text message saying something like, "Soz m8, cant blow your horn tonite cos im feelin like shit. tomoro?".
And finally, I plan to stay up till 0300 trying to write a song. There's three almost written, so hopefully on Friday there'll be four.
Current musical squeeze: Colony 5. Swedish futurepop.
Pavement wit: A rush of crud to the head.
Used to describe those brief few minutes when you get highly enthusiastic about an idea which on reflection turns out to be incredibly stupid.
If you find an opportunity to use this phrase, please include a link to this blog encoded as a subliminal message in your body language.
Mama, Just Filled a Man
Some things tell you you're living in a small town.
Things like...you meet a bloke online, decide he's okay, shag on his bed...and then find you belong to the same political party. And he works with a friend of yours.
What do you talk about after sex? We talked about drug rehabilitation therapies and the Nature/Nurture debate.
Is that what they mean by Sexual Politics?
My version of the Burroughs cut-up method. Take an existing song, and divide - so well as you can - each line into two parts which could be bolted onto other sentences, so this...
I see a red door
and I want it painted black
No colors anymore
I want them to turn black
I see the girls walk by
dressed in their summer clothes
I have to turn my head
until my darkness goes
...might become this...
I see ... a red door
and I want it ... painted black
No colors ... anymore
I want them ... to turn black
I see ... the girls walk by
dressed ... in their summer clothes
I have ... to turn my head
until my darkness ... goes
There's various ways to divide sentences, but you get the general idea. Now write the first part of each line on the left hand side of a page, and the second on the right. Cut the page in half vertically, and horizontally. Now transpose the two page quarters on the right, and see what new sentences are produced.
The result, with a different song, might look something like this:
Is this to me
Is this killed a man
Caught against his head
No escape my trigger
Open dead
Look up has just begun
And gone
I'm just all away
I need to make you cry
Because I'm not back again
Little high tomorrow
Anyway nothing really matters
Doesn't really matter the real life
Mama, just just fantasy
Put a gun in a landslide
Pulled from reality
Now he's your eyes
Mama, life to the skies
But now I've see
And thrown a poor boy
Mama, didn't mean no sympathy
If I'm easy come easy go
This time little low
Carry on, carry on, the wind blows
Part ungrammatical gibberish, part unexpected poetry, the starting point of a new song that mashes up the old.
But now, much as I'd like to stay up and refine the method by which one chops up sentences, I need to get some sleep - so I can spend tomorrow teaching students how to chop up sentences.
So I will force myself to gently drift away, to the strains of Boards of Canada, right after trying to think up suitable title for this post.
Pooch Doggy Dog
I said I'd show you my dogs - or rather, my parent's dogs, but they bark when I get home. Well, by the miracle of bad lighting, shaky handheld camera work and dogs that didn't want to be photographed, here they are.
Beginning with Harry, a six month-old Maltese, who today won first prize in an agility show and is now qualified to be at Crufts. Exactly how he won an agility prize I'm not sure, because most of the time he looks like this:
Not so much a dog as a white furry puddle. He'll impersonate a rug - lying down flat, spread and immobile - at any opportunity. I've almost trodden on him several times, and sometimes it's only the little clues which tell you which end is which.
Moving on we have Perry, a three-and-a-half year old Papillion, the first of three. Perry's easy to get in shot because. whenever anyone's paying any attention to the other dogs, he leaps in and demands equal attention. Here he is posing nonchalantly...
...and here he is posing even more nonchalantly.
Dino shares a grandfather with Perry, but is slightly larger, slightly older, slightly browner, and definitely fluffier. He also has the attention span of a fruit fly on cocaine, and only stood in one place long enough for one picture.
And finally, Sadie. Another brown and white papillion but with two important differences. First, she's barely three months old. Second, she's very timid. And third, she's a lady. Alright, three differences.
The idea is that when she and the two "studs" (ha!) are old enough, we can breed more papillions. And sell them to good homes, eusuring not only there's more cuteness in the world, but that my parents have a busy retirement.
We've got the dog bath, special dog hair dryer, dog food supplements and stacks of books already. The fridge is now divided into "human food" and "doggy treats". And whenever anyone sits or lies down, there's always a dog in the vicinity to jump up and curl up on them.
On Monday I tried to pay in three paychecks from work. Today the bank tells me they've bounced. This is the second time this has happened in as many months.
They've offered me another few (six-ish) weeks working part time. If they sort out the money trouble, I'm taking it.
It's a pity I missed National Take Your Dog to Work Day
Beginning with Harry, a six month-old Maltese, who today won first prize in an agility show and is now qualified to be at Crufts. Exactly how he won an agility prize I'm not sure, because most of the time he looks like this:
Not so much a dog as a white furry puddle. He'll impersonate a rug - lying down flat, spread and immobile - at any opportunity. I've almost trodden on him several times, and sometimes it's only the little clues which tell you which end is which.
Moving on we have Perry, a three-and-a-half year old Papillion, the first of three. Perry's easy to get in shot because. whenever anyone's paying any attention to the other dogs, he leaps in and demands equal attention. Here he is posing nonchalantly...
...and here he is posing even more nonchalantly.
Dino shares a grandfather with Perry, but is slightly larger, slightly older, slightly browner, and definitely fluffier. He also has the attention span of a fruit fly on cocaine, and only stood in one place long enough for one picture.
And finally, Sadie. Another brown and white papillion but with two important differences. First, she's barely three months old. Second, she's very timid. And third, she's a lady. Alright, three differences.
The idea is that when she and the two "studs" (ha!) are old enough, we can breed more papillions. And sell them to good homes, eusuring not only there's more cuteness in the world, but that my parents have a busy retirement.
We've got the dog bath, special dog hair dryer, dog food supplements and stacks of books already. The fridge is now divided into "human food" and "doggy treats". And whenever anyone sits or lies down, there's always a dog in the vicinity to jump up and curl up on them.
On Monday I tried to pay in three paychecks from work. Today the bank tells me they've bounced. This is the second time this has happened in as many months.
They've offered me another few (six-ish) weeks working part time. If they sort out the money trouble, I'm taking it.
It's a pity I missed National Take Your Dog to Work Day
The Taste of Kap.itan.o (Part 2)
When my age was in single figures, my teacher taught the class that there are four basic flavours detectable by the tongue - sweet, salt, sour and bitter. The tongue has "sweet" receptors on the tip, "salty" further back, followed by "sour" and "bitter" near the throat.
The upshot of this was (a) there are only four flavours and their combinations in the whole wide world and all the others are illusions and (b) if you put chocolate on the back of your tongue...you can't taste it!
So I tried it, and was rather puzzled to find I could indeed taste it. So I did the same with the rest of the packet just to be sure - eventually concluding that (a) chocolate is very very nice and (b) I must somehow be doing it wrong.
I wasn't quite sure what it meant to call a taste sensation "unreal" - it felt rather like my parents telling me I didn't really have a headache, I only thought I did. so I just filed it with the other daft things adults said - like "Jesus made the little butterflies" and "If you don't suffer you won't succeed".
When my age was in double figures I read about the mysterious fifth tongue flavour of "umami" - also called "savoury", "meaty" and "monosodium glutamate". And a different teacher taught the class that, because the tongue only tastes four flavours, when we think we're tasting other things, we're actually smelling them - but around the back of the nasal cavity.
And that's why you can't taste much when you hold your nose. I wasn't entirely clear on why blocking the front of your nose should stop air circulating around the back, but I tried it and it seemed to work. Besides, the teacher lent me a book by Stephen Jay Gould, for which I'm eternally grateful.
Now that my age is in five figures - at least as measured in days - I'm ready for the truth. Namely that almost everything I was taught is complete bollocks.
There's 40 or so kinds of taste receptors spread evenly on the tongue, plus 300 or so kinds of smell receptors in an area the size of a postage stamp behind the nose. Thus the flavour of a piece of cheese might be a dozen tastes and two dozen smells, all experienced in shifting proportions as I chew it.
This is clearly too difficult for the seven year old Kapitano to understand. My teachers were right to mislead me slightly. Either that or they didn't know what they were talking about.
If I had a dollar every time someone said their computer had a virus...I'd ask for British money instead so I could spend it.
In this case the "virus in Windows" turned out to be a hard disk that wouldn't boot up. So after taking the laptop apart, cleaning it, checking connections, reassembling and finding it made no difference, it's going back to the vendor, with strict instructions to the owner that he deny it was ever taken apart.
Especially that we used a kitchen knife because we couldn't find a screwdriver.
I'm told I should go to Libya to teach, because they have a shortage of English teachers, and living is incredibly cheap. I'm also told I should go to Saudi Arabia, because they have a shortage of English teachers, and the pay is astronomical - so I'd leave rich but insane and/or dead. And I should go to the Czech Republic, because they have a shortage of English teachers but the fastest expanding economy in Europe. Turkey needs teachers too.
But first I'm going to ask the college down the road if they have a shortage of teachers for their English-for-immigrants courses. This would mean teaching Czechs (here to work before returning home), Saudis (here to study before returning home) and the occasional Libyan or Turk.
I'm the Only Normal Person in the World
I became a language teacher so that maybe, just maybe, I wouldn't spend the rest of my life fixing other people's computers. Tomorrow I reinstall Windows on a student's laptop.
I've told him twice that a clean install will wipe off any existing data and programs - including emails, passwords and ISP connection programs. He smilingly told me it wasn't a problem - a sure sign that he doesn't quite grasp what losing all data means, and will blame me when some document isn't there afterwards.
And later on, a comrade has been getting warnings of viruses on her system, so possibly the same sequence of events again. And I predict a telephone call around midday from a different comrade who's trying to read his email online.
Perhaps I should have been a motor mechanic. They don't get acquaintances phoning them up at work asking if they could possibly drop round to replace the big end. Or do they?
There's straight guy I've been sucking off every so often for several years now. The last time was last week, so the next one might be in two weeks, or two months, but it'll come. So to speak.
Last night I had an unexpected encounter with a fellow of around twenty. It's not often you get to chat before or after sex, and it's vanishingly rare to think "I really like this person and I'd like to have them as a friend even if I never, erm, have them again", but that's what happened.
So I mentioned it to my straight guy - not the friendly feeling, just the gropey feeling.
He's jealous.
A bloke who thinks about female pornstars while I do what female pornstars do...is jealous that I had sex with someone he wouldn't want to have sex with. A man who is slightly ambivalent about the fact that I have a penis...is jealous that someone else enjoyed it.
Is it me or is that odd?
PS. It wasn't raining.
The Taste of Kap.itan.o
It took me a while to understand what Del.icio.us dot com is really about. I mean...social bookmarking? What's that supposed to mean?
But now I think I get it. It's:
(1) An online version of my list of Bookmarks/Favourites.
(2) A way to organise all those sites I stumble across and intend to check out properly later, but usually don't because they're just sitting uncategorised in my Bookmarks/Favourites.
(3) A way for me to show you the useful or daft stuff I stumble on, in a sidebar, on my blog. So you can click on whatever looks interesting to you. Simple.
So look to your right, and see where I've left my muddy footprints.
There's also Twitter, but I won't inflict that on you.
Czech and Poll
I've been feeling lousy all weekend. Partly as a result of getting rather drunk on Friday, chatting, flirting and film watching till 0500, and getting to sleep when everyone else was waking up.
The movie was V for Vendetta, a somewhat surreal story of a bloodless revolution against a future dictatorship in Britain. On the face of it, it's a feelgood, radical-left flick about how all the great ideas of Justice and Goodness can, embodied in one enigmatic hero, move a nation and turn it's oppressors against each other.
Here's the recipe:
* Two parts Phantom of the Opera - a scarred antihero in a mask loved by a strong and beautiful girl.
* One part October - the people rise up against a bunch of utter bastards who they really, really should never have tolerated in the first place.
* One part any science fiction film where government scientists experiment on civilians in death camps.
* One part drama where a serial killer kills all those who made him what he is, one by one and in person, after years of planning.
* One pinch of any Lynda Laplante series where a lone technological genius hacks every system perfectly and untracably.
* One pinch of Radcliffe Hall.
* One part Fatherland - an improbably principled detective unearths the truth about his own government
* Two parts Batman Begins - an urbane but lonely and damaged man with improbable martial arts skills and near indestructibility saves a city. By blowing bits of it up.
* A dash of The X-Files.
So, something of a Melange. Or do I mean Collage? Or is it Homage, Montage or Bricolage? Anyway, all quite enjoyable, though it leaves a few small questions unanswered.
Things like: How exactly do the population (all dressed as Guy Fawkes) bring down the government, what do they replace it with, what precisely inspires them to do it, and why does the army become complicit at the last moment?
Oh, and how do various people we've seen killed turn out to be alive at the end?
I'm part time for the next two weeks - teaching in the afternoons, so hopefully there'll be time to do and think about things that aren't work related.
I'll also probably have a private student - a young Czech fellow known to all as "George". Language acquisition often hits a plateau when (a) general communication gets to the stage of being easy but not fluent, and (b) everyone you work with is a non-native speaker at the same level. George wants to get out of that rut.
Other blogs have polls, so here's mine. What do you think I should do with my free time over the next fortnight? Should I:
(1) Write some songs as quickly as possible, record them as quickly as possible, maybe put together some accompanying video images drawn from random snippets of TV as quickly as possible, and publish the results. Quite rapidly.
(2) Intensively go through David Harvey's online course on Marx's Capital, reading the book as required.
(3) Start an exercise regime to become somewhat less overweight and tired-all-the-time.
(4) Other (please specify)
You decide, and let me know.
Good with the Bad
Wednesday was great, Thursday was awful.
Wednesday was the final day of my Spanish students. They're really switched on and receptive - actually fun to teach and I'll miss them. They got me a thank-you-and-farewell present - a box of posh chocs and a card, wih a message from each of them. One wrote best wishes to the "genial genius" (oh, modesty forbids), and another wrote "for the most eccentric englishman I've ever met".
I like that.
And so we spent our final day watching a particularly bad film version of War of the Worlds starring Tom Cruise, comparing national attitudes towards pets, and even learning a bit of English. Topped off with much taking of photos and swapping of email addresses.
And when I got home...my parents have bought another dog. This one is a ladie called Sadie, a four month old papillion - for eventual breeding with the two male papillions. Oh yeah, we've now got four dogs and they all sleep on the ends of our beds - something which apparently doesn't happen much in Spain.
Pics when (a) the camera's recharged, (b) there's some light and (c) the dogs stop jumping around long enough to photograph.
Then came Thursday.
After two hours of sleep, I was "ready" to meet my new class. It's something of a jolt to switch from five laid-back Spanish teenagers to one up-tight middle-aged Turkish businessman. Not an unpleasant man, and certainly not a stupid one - just turgidly unimaginative.
Still, I wont have him for long, because I won't have a job next week. Unless they need someone to do sickness cover. Good, eh? Yes, that's what I thought.
Then in the afternoon an amazingly-camp-and-almost-certainly-gay-but-painfully-closeted African fellow, who unexpectedly embarked on a discussion of world politics. He cheerfully and intelligently talked about imperialism in Iraq, the client status of Israel, the futility of the PKK's Kurdish separatism...
...before suddenly going cold and twitchy at the mention of atheism. Maybe everyone's got their little "Panic" button - an issue that strips away all pretence of reason leaving only hostility. Most odd.
I think he should practice his English reading skills with this book.
I'm supposed to have fifteen students for the final lesson, only one of who turned up. The others smiled and said hello to me beforehand - before bunking off. The one who came is a possibly-mildly-autistic woman who lags literally half an hour behind the conversation, giggles at random intervals and confidently uses arcane linguistics terminology but can't apply basic linguistic rules.
Bonus good-with-bad 1: I spent an hour fornicating against a brick wall tonight. But we were both too tired to "finish". And it was raining.
Bonus good-with-bad 2: I've found a truly excellent way to save money. It's called "losing your wallet".
Batty Man
Yesterday I had eleven students, today I had five, and tomorrow I have two. The big summer influx of eager young learners looks to be over.
So, two students for three hours. Oh, and I'm required to give them an exam - or "progress check" as we professional educators call it. No one's ever going to look at the results, but I have to give it.
After that I sit at the back of a seminar on "Error Correction" - which is like "error correction" but capitalised and with extra jargon. And then I get told whether I spend next week "on call" (ie jobless) or not.
65% Geek
Created by OnePlusYou
We saw Batman Begins. Actually the entire school saw it. But the students had pieces of paper with questions about the plot, so it was an English comprehension exercise. Honest.
I discussed it with my five remaining students, and we quickly decided Bruce Wayne is a sociopath. Together with every other character in the movie. But he's alone and kills all the other sociopaths who're in groups, which makes him a Hero.
Some years ago when I read Alex Cox's contention that a cinematic Hero is simply a lone thug on the side of whichever group you support, I was dubious. But having seen seven years worth of neo-con wank fantasies (aka post-9/11 parables) I reckon he's got a point.
I've Seen the Future (Part 2)
There's some emotional states we just don't have words for in English. We had to import "schadenfreude" from the German, even though we probably do more of it than the Germans. Some of it we do at the Germans.
"Feierabend" isn't just "finishing work time" but "the moment I stop being a bored employee and become a human being" - something we all understand, but for some bizarre reason don't have a word for.
There's the Portuguese notion of "pink dreams" - night and day dreams somewhere in no-man's-land between erotic and romantic. And the wonderful Yaghan word "mamihlapinatapai", meaning something like "the expressions on the faces of two people who both want to do something but which both want the other to initiate because they're scared to do it themselves".
What about that sinking feeling when you're halfway through confidently holding forth on some subject when you realise you don't understand it as well as you thought? I think there's a whole range of sinking feelings, ranging from "Why did I agree to do this?" and "This person was so interesting before they spoke" to "Why am I bothering to explain this to you, because you're clearly not listening?" and "Did I really enjoy doing this once?"
Then there's all those anticipatory feelings - from "It's going to be one of those days" and "Anything I do to make things better will just make them worse" to "It's going to be so nice when you finally get to the end of that sentence, because then I can say the really smart thing I've just thought of - so hurry up and fucking finish!"
Now, yesterday I lent an old reel-to-reel tape machine to an elderly lady who wanted to play back a large collection of tapes she'd inherited. Two hours later she called to say she couldn't work out how to make it play. I'd tested the machine myself and explained how it worked, but apparently it wasn't working. So could I come 'round to fix it.
It was at this point I got my own special emotion of expectation - the Technician's Anticipated Incredulous Stare. This is where you know the technical problem will be so mindmanglingly trivial that a four year old could solve it, but for some reason a sophisticated adult can't.
Don't get me wrong - there are plenty of technical problems whose solution is very simple, but also counterintitive, or relies on specialist knowledge, and the fact that an ordinary user can't solve them is a comment on the designer, not the user. The TAIS is reserved for solutions like "To switch it on, press the big button marked 'On'", or "You can't watch a DVD on a CD player", and "The computer doesn't know what you want because it isn't telepathic, you staggeringly moronic waste of carbon".
So, I felt that whatever the problem was, it would take one second to diagnose, five seconds to fix, and an effort of will not to gape in slack jawed incredulity. You think I'm being unfair? This was the problem:
For a reel-to-reel tape to play, it must be threaded from one reel to the other, via the read-head. The clue is in the name.
I asked if she'd ever used such a machine before? Yes, she had, but it had been nearly twenty years ago, so she'd forgotten.
She then asked me why her washing machine wasn't working, and how to change the PIN on her new phone. The latter went like this:
Lady: It says "Enter PIN".
Kap: Well if you know your PIN you can...
Lady: So I just put in four number?
Kap: Hang on, is it asking you for your existing PIN, or for a new...
Lady: It says "PIN rejected".
Kap: Um, okay. That means it was asking for your old...
Lady: Let me try again.
Kap: Do you know your existing...
Lady: It says "PIN rejected" again.
Kap: Okay, don't try it again. If you enter a wrong code three times...
Lady: Oh, it says "Phone Locked". What does that mean?
Kap: Um. It means you need to take it back to the shop and get it unlocked, and get them to tell you the phone's default PIN...
Lady: What's a PIN?
Nice lady, just not very good at technology. Or listening.
Apparently I was "very kind"
Mother's birthday. Tea and cream cakes. Shortly followed by more tea and more cream cakes.
The school has three televisions for playing DVDs on. It also has one DVD player and no DVDs.
So I made my own, and played a subtitled episode of Dad's Army to my Spanish teenagers. They rather liked it - but said they'd prefer Benny Hill. Before launching into a vocal rendition of Yakity Sax.
I reckon a film on Fridays would go down well. What do you think - Dr No or Quatermass and the Pit?
I've Seen the Future
"My teacher is a god one."
- Written assessment of me by a student
"I will miss you teacher. You are my boyfriend."
- Student leaving on Friday
"No teacher you wrong! English not say like that."
- One slightly overenthusiastic student.
My class loves playing Trivial Pursuit. But there are two problems. One is that it's designed for people steeped in British culture and trivia - and to some extent that of America. Students from Europe or the Middle East are not in this group.
As for the other...
Question: What colour was Judas Iscariot's hair?
Trivial Pursuit Answer: Red
Real Answer: There is a tradition that Judas had red hair, but it's based on no evidence, biblical or otherwise. There is no way to know what colour his hair was, or if he even existed.
Question: What is the official language of Papua New Guinea?
Trivial Pursuit Answer: English
Real Answer: The New Guinean people, media and government use a creole of English called Tok Pisin, derived from "Talk Pidgin".
Question: Who created a scare with their radio broadcast of "War of the Worlds"?
Trivial Pursuit Answer: Orson Welles
Real Answer: Only a few people thought the broadcast was of a real event. The story that whole states or the whole nation were fooled are journalistic invention.
On friday evening, an art show opening - complete with all the necessary accouterments of cheap red wine, bad finger food, and men in square spectacles and sports jackets lecturing each other on "aesthetics".
I came up with a rather nice pseudo-thoughtful expression for discussing paintings one doesn't understand - "I like what it does to my eyes". Feel free to use it yourself. I used it in every conversation.
No, actually a very pleasant evening. Over five consecutive glasses of wine, I met an interesting artist who made paintings out of food, another who wants to make installations from whatever she finds on the street that day. and a "socialist but freethinking" lady who insisted Spanish is a womanhating language because the word for "woman" is the same as for "wife". My observation that the German for "man" is the same as for "husband" was not greeted with interest.
Oh, and at the end I found that I'd somehow fallen on the floor. But that always happens. People expect it.
In some alternate universe, I get to change the world.
I have an idea in my twenties, tinker with it for thirty years, and publish in my hypochondriac fifties. The usual dullards say it can't be true because they don't understand it, the usual lunatics foam at the mouth that I'm a puppet of Satan, the usual progressives love it because they say it's what they've been telling everyone all along. And after a few years it seems quite sensible and obvious, though society hasn't really changed.
Then I get to die, and even if I explicitly said "No biography please", biographies get written. And then more biographies get written questioning the first lot, my pithy quotations get attributed to other people, and people I'd never heard of are called "influences" and "close friends".
A century after my birth, Hollywood make some cringily hagiographical films of my life, in which I'm provided with a loving wife, some emotional turmoil, a thundering speech or two, and the face of a six-foot-two blond heartthrob who later dies in a drug related car crash.
After another century, my basic insight is still broadly accepted among scientists, but most of my supporting work is "extensively revised", "not to be taken literally" and "of largely historical interest only". And then...
And then...everything I ever wrote to anyone gets published. Including the snarky letters I wrote when I was twelve - because in some way it prefigures what was to come.
How do I know this? Because that's what's happening to Charles Darwin. Interesting stuff, but just a little bit ghoulish.
Imagine it. All my childhood stories about spaceships and time travel. The notebooks on epistemology and logic I kept while pretending to be a computing student. All those emails to friends bitching about other friends. Those text messages arranging blowjobs in garages - lovingly monitored and stored by the Ministry of Defence.
Unfortunately, the blog will be lost in a bizarre snorkeling accident.
I Wanna be a Twain Dwiver!
"The others are in the toilet. They need to piss off."
- My students
There is something deeply stupid about asking an eighteen year old to close their eyes and imagine their dream job.
Partly because any teenager not destined for intensive psychotherapy won't have made up their mind yet. And partly because engaging in a visualisation exercise to answer a simple factual question is perverse and counterproductive, a bit like getting drunk to think clearly.
But mainly because anyone whose ambition involves doing one thing for eight hours a day to make someone else richer...doesn't quite grasp what "ambition" is.
One girl wanted to be a genetic engineer - which gave the class the splendidly off the wall opportunity to talk about "Adenine, Guanine, Thymine and Cytosine in complementary base pairing of deoxyribose nucleic acid meiosis". Oh yes, their scientific english is great - they just have trouble buying a box of headache pills in the chemist.
When I was eighteen I failed my english exams because I'd spent the previous two months reading about molecular biology - on the grounds that it was far more interesting. There is possibly an irony in there somewhere.
Another girl wanted to be a teacher of english - presumably because no one wants to learn her native spanish.
One boy wanted to be a lap dancer, which I thought was sweet. Then changed his mind and decided he wanted to be a dandy, which I thought was exactly right.
Today's Pavement Wit. For use in competitive singing to backing tapes.
Kara Oke? Kara not okay!
I'll get me coat.
View
Sometimes a fictional book review saves you the trouble of writing the book, and sometimes a fictional art review serves in place of the art you can't make yourself.
Re:View
by Nabil Tarkovski
Published 2113, Journal of Temporal Art
Reflexive timelapse films have become an established minor genre in the digital arts. It perhaps started with JKs Living My Life Faster, in which the artist simply took one picture of their face a day for 8 years and played them in rapid sequence. Then Noah Kalina's similar but unnamed project became a lifelong artwork, inspiring dozens of related ideas including one where we see a baby girl's face change literally from day one.
Suzan Webb's work is slightly different. At age 18, in the first week of her first art degree, having just moved into student digs, she found an old laptop and webcam in a skip, plus a battered camera tripod. Later in interview she said the idea came to her instantly, but she didn't expect to continue it for more than a week, let alone twelve years later.
Her room had just one window, and she set up the camera and computer to take one snapshot of her view every hour - but only when she was in the room. When she later moved into a place with two windows, she begged another cam and laptop from a fellow student, and continued her project in stereo.
This timelapse would most likely have little merit if Webb didn't change living space quite so often - and indeed didn't now stay in quite so many cheap hotels in so many countries.
As it is the vista changes from the initial scene of derelict factories, to a split screen of park and kebab shop. to a back garden going through the seasons with occasional bouts of highspeed rain, split with clouds seen through a skylight, to views from homes of friends in New York, her mother's holiday home in Scotland, and a building site somewhere in London.
Occasionally there are black frames, sometimes one or two, sometimes as much as three month's worth, and these I think give a clue to the real meaning of the work. Webb only shows us her life through her views from windows. The black frames are from hours and days when she isn't behind any windows, or in any building. Occasionally she sleeps under the stars, and sometimes she hikes through hills and valleys - in Australia, Canada and the Hindu Kush.
Some use cameras to record their holidays and time outdoors. Webb records what she can see of the outdoors, when she's indoors. This is a record of a person's homelife - one that never shows the home or the person.
Play Nice!
"The authority of those who teach is often an obstacle to those who want to learn."
- Cicero
My mother's elder brother spent several years in the 80s living in Saudi Arabia. He was there for work, with his family, living in a "westerners compound". Back in England, he said the arabs he'd met were mostly decent people, often highly accomplished in their chosen areas...but all basically like children.
I was seventeen when I heard him talk about it, and thought there was more than a hint of a patronising colonial attitude (unconscious, of course) behind the words, but I couldn't prove it.
Some years earlier, his father had taken a holiday in Iraq. He said all the people he'd met were refreshingly friendlier than Britishers, but...psychologically like little children. Pleasant, open, helpful, honest, and simple. I had similar doubts.
Now I teach eighteen and nineteen year-olds from Saudi Arabia each weekday afternoon. I've got a boss who lived there, and fellow teachers with experience teaching them. My teens have the mischievous but easily cowed behavior that I'd expect of five year olds...and all my colleagues tell me I need to be a firm schoolmarm to teach them.
All of which tells us more about western attitudes to children than eastern attitudes to education. We don't like our children much, and if someone behaves in a way we don't like, we're quick to call it "childish". As an insult, it's quite revealing.
I read somewhere there's eight basic theories of "how to teach EFL" - or "classroom practice" as we're supposed to call it. The thing is though, almost all of them share an unspoken premise - that people learn language in a classroom by being given a little grammatical instruction, and a lot of varied activities to "consolidate" or "realise" or "internalise" the grammar theory.
Maybe that's true, I don't know. But it does mean most of the job involves having a raft of activities and games to fill up the ninety minute lessons and keep the students occupied, alert and interested - or at least busy.
Result: I sometimes feel a bit like a playgroup leader. which is fine, but I can't help thinking the real role of a playgroup leader is to keep control of children while their parents are away doing parent things. In effect, to be a warder - one half pacifier, one half gatekeeper.
Nevermind, I'll try to teach anyway.
So much for deep, let's do shallow. How many surfaces can one blob of chewing gum attach to?
I only ask because, either I've managed to sit in three separate blobs of gum in one day, or one especially runny stick currently occupies a park bench, two seats in my home, one pair of jeans, a towel and a jumper.
And as an extra bonus question: My bedroom contains an open window, opened packets of peanuts and chocolates, slightly stale cups of tea, lots of old paper, a sink connected to temperamental plumbing system, obnoxious liquid for cleaning it, three kinds of moisturiser (what?) and a first aid kit. And me. So why is the only smell a strong one of chewing gum?
Not shallow enough? I'm all alone in the house tomorrow, so I'm having a friend round. When I say "having"....
Now, in my modest little life I manage to offend a few people. Last week I offended everyone I work with at a meeting by saying the workbook we all pretend to teach from is "cack". There was an embarrassed tumbleweedy silence, then after the meeting I got private agreement mixed with admonition that I'd been "unhelpful".
Before that I put the odd nose out of joint on a discussion forum where some were advocating the death penalty for baby rape - I wondered why child torture was only newsworthy when the torture implement was a genital organ.
Though that was nothing to the abuse I got for say the Doctor Who final episode didn't make sense.
But now I know what I have to do the get death threats and nationwide vilification. I have to steal a biscuit.
My infamy shall be unbounded. Bwa ha ha.
The Stupid
"So I'm at the wailing wall, standing there like a moron, with my harpoon."
- Emo Philips
Mother: Have you met our new exchange student yet?
Daughter: Yes mum. Her name's Li Yun and she's from Thailand!
Mother: That's very interesting. What does she look like?
Daughter: Well, She's got long black hair and she wears a green dress.
Mother: She sounds really nice.
Daughter: Yes, she is really nice. I hope she and I will be friends.
Mother: I'm sure you will. Now you need to go you your Karate class. You don't want to be late.
Daughter: No I don't. Thanks mum. I'll see you soon.
Mother: Goodbye. Have a nice day.
Yes, it's EFL English. The linguistic water torture spoken only in the town of Stepford - and textbooks for young people learning English. It's like being nibbled to death by anodyne ducks.
I used to wonder why most of Europe had an image of England as both painfully inoffensive but also quite spooky. Now I think I know.
What kind of teacher keeps the only copy of important and detailed information, on a whiteboard? And gives no indication he's doing it? Presumably one who doesn't realise other teachers use the room too.
The school has a social program. Teachers get paid to take groups of students out in the evenings to experience local culture
Tonight it was a pub curry. It was all arranged a week ago - all except for two things. First, no teacher had been asked to be guide/guardian/general-decision-maker for the event - so one volunteered himself. Guess who.
And second...no one had mentioned it to the students.
So I turned up, waited half an hour, and went home. And still got paid for it.
Sometimes blithering incompetence is nice.
Today's pavement wit, to be written on an assessment form following any introductory educational presentation:
Before the presentation, I was keen to know something about the subject. After the presentation, I was still keen to know something about it.
Dark Sarcasm in the Classroom
"Just think, right now as you read this, some guy somewhere is gettin' ready to hang himself."
- George Carlin
I could have done a lot of interesting things on Saturday. I could have gone on the Gay Pride march and flirted outrageously with the crowd of onlookers. I could have gone to the Marxism 2008 conference and debated the collapse of the political left over the last few years. I could even have accompanied thirty EFL students to Brighton and pretended to be a tour guide.
But I was too busy doing deeply uninteresting things instead.
Sometimes you write something on impulse, then look at it and think "That's quite clever, and it's funny with a hint of pathos. But mostly it's just a bit horrid."
So, with apologies to Tiny Tim, Cher, and anyone else who's ever sung the original song in public, I present...Cammy Boy.
Come onto my screen cammy boy
You are seventeen with your toys
You've no way of knowing, just to whom you're showing
And what you've shown to me, bummy boy
When there are gay guys, I don't mind the fey lies
you make it blue, webcam boy
Friends they fail to date me, won't even masturbate me
I've still had you, my nancy boy
You cam from elsewhere, into my place
You squirt a puddle for me, onto your face
I'm an old and fat queer, but you don't care 'bout that dear
My sonny boy
And apologies to Camy too.
Moving swiftly on...Monday.
Yes Monday. Named for the Aztec deity Mund, god of fuckups. We still celebrate his weekly rebirth by fucking up everything we try to do on Monday morning.
I got to work in good time with an adequate plan of what and how to teach my six Spanish students for four hours. The plan was: Seeing as they have absolutely no need to go over the grammar points in the book yet again, but they could use some conversation and writing practice, make up some games that get them talking and writing. It was a good plan.
Then I found neither of my whiteboard markers worked, so I put them in the mysterious magical whiteboard marker refiller device. Which promptly exploded, showering me, the floor and bits of the office in blue ink.
Now, I don't know about you, but I would have thought that "easily erasable" board ink would wash out of clothes without trouble. But no, my nice new shirt is now permanently redesigned in big splashes in two tones of blue. The students rather liked it, thinking I'd gone all fashionable.
The secretary got a few spots on her skirt, and went into that insipid upper-middle class routine of shrugging and smiling and "Oh never mind"-ing, before demanding my immediate sacking as soon as she thought I was out of earshot.
So, I directed a few educational games for a few hours, inventing some as needed. Meanwhile outside the classroom there was a sudden noisy influx of new students arriving from all over the world - the usual mix of those who weren't supposed to arrive for another week, those with incomplete or inaccurate paperwork, and those labeled "advanced" who can't make a one word sentence in English.
There was therefore much frantic rearranging of timetables. I started the first lesson with six students, and finished it with eight, five of them the same.
Then during lunch some of them amused themselves drawing on my whiteboard - with what turned out to be a permanent markerpen.
Oh, and my final class bunked off. Seven new students I hadn't met yet collectively decided they'd prefer to lie on the beach instead.
Chupacabras
"I honestly think it is better to be a failure at something you love than to be a success at something you hate."
- George Burns
Kap: How many words can you think of about Spain that begin with "T"?
Class: Tacos!
Kap: Yes, that's good.
Class: Tortilas!
Kap: Very Spanish.
Class: Bullfighting!
Kap: Um...
Class: In Spanish it's "Toros".
Kap: Ye...s. I meant English words beginning with T that are about Spain.
Class: People who make sex with goats!
Kap: ...
For three or four years I've rented some cheap webspace for occasions when I needed to send or receive large files from people. But with email attachments getting larger and filesharing on social networking sites getting more common, I don't really need it anymore.
So I go to close it down. And find it's been down for three months because the host went bankrupt. Without telling me. Humph.
Kap: How many words can you think of about England that begin with "G"?
Class: Golf!
Kap: Golf? Good one.
Class: Great Britain!
Kap: Ha! Yes indeed.
Class: Gay People!
Kap: Er....
Class: Yes! Gay People!
Kap: Oh alright then. England has lots of gay people.
Apparently today wasn't just July the forth. It was also The Forth of July, which is much more impressive. Not only that, but Jesse Helms died too, which is even better.
Andrew Schlafly just pales by comparison. Whackjobs aren't what they used to be.
Kap: Can you make a sentence using one of these words on the board?
Student: [Looks hard at words, then smiles]. I love my teacher.
Art/School
"Take away the right to say fuck and you take away the right to say fuck the government."
- Lenny Bruce
Last week I went to the jobcentre, stood in line for half an hour, and told a hardfaced lady bureaucrat where she could shove her training schemes, because I'd finally got a job.
Then I went to the jobcentre, stood in line for half an hour, gave up and drank three glasses of cheap red wine, and told a hardfaced lady bureaucrat where she could shove her forms, because I just didn't care anymore.
The first time was in a cramped and dimly lit office. The second was in a spacious and bright art gallery, containing a recreation of the mindless tedium and officious oppression found in the former.
Relational Art is the creation/recreation of a social environment - as an aesthetic object. The viewers participate, act and react, conform or rebel, within the artificial situation - both controlled by the artwork, and contributing to it.
There were interview rooms, a queueing system, a tannoy summoning punters by ticket numbers, threatening notices...and hardfaced lady bureaucrats behind desks.
I took a few snaps.
I also took along my real "jobseeker" documents, and ripped them up in the ladies' faces with much shouting and rude gesticulating.
Just to add to the verisimilitude, you understand. It was quite appreciated.
Recently I jokingly suggested to a friend that a good day trip for Arabic student might be...a gay pride festival. I was roundly told this was not a good idea.
Guess what day trip had already been organised. Oh not to see the festival itself, but there was no suggestion of changing plans when the coincidence was discovered.
One or two students were nervous when they were told - before being reassured that "It'll be great fun, with lots of dancing and music. Gays always have the best music". This from a teacher with two marriages and three children. Heh heh.
Oh, and one devoutly Muslim student proudly came out, declaring "It's my freedom".
So, either the laid back British culture is infectious...or the offspring of the Saudi Arabian middle class vary as much as everyone else.
My insect bites are coming along nicely. I may be teaching with a bandage on my arm tomorrow.
What is the difference between a great uncle and and grand uncle? And just what is the system of numbering for cousins?
I read that George Bush is ninth cousin twice removed to John Kerry. He's fourth and seventh cousin thrice removed to James Garfield...and ninth cousin thrice removed from Osama Bin Laden. But what that means, I've no idea.
Kapitano's current favourite band: Cause & Effect. New wave, synthpop 'n' guitars, mellow dance a la Camouflage and Cetu Javu.
Summer Lovin'
"Teacher, you eat your beans."
- My class yesterday, on seeing me eat some peanuts.
Yes, yesterday was my first proper day as a proper teacher. There was a textbook provided for me to teach from - one so dry and badly thought out that I threw it away after ten minutes trying to use it. That was when the students started to pay attention and I stopped hating the job.
A week ago, there were five arab boys who didn't know that hair can be "wavy", eyebrows can be "bushy" and the start of a beard is called a "stubble". Now, they know. Plus they're no longer puzzled by "Odd, init", "Mind the Gap" and "Eh?".
In today's lesson we supposedly covered the vocabulary chunks involved in negotiating an evening out - "How about...", "Do you fancy...", "Shall we...", "I'd love to but...", "Good idea" etc.
In fact we established (a) that raising middle and index digits with palm inward is an offensive gesture, while the same configuration with palm outward is not, and (b) the differences between "accept", "except", "expect" and "aspect" get quite confusing after ten minutes.
We also established that any textbook for low level students which includes the sentence "Let's meet up in the White Horse around one-ish"...is written by frauds and recommended by idiots.
I've mentioned what I call Pavement Wit before. It's similar to Staircase Wit, but you think of witty ripostes sometime before an occasion for their use arises. By which time you've forgotten it.
Today's example is:
Is the pope jewish in the woods?
More when I think of them. But before there's a chance to say them.
I had sex again tonight! :-).
I count five insect bites. Summer is truly here.
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