152: Absolute zero

Shivering on the electric blanket; every time a piece of flesh peaks out from beneath the covers, the frosty teeth in the air bite away chunks.  My fingers are worn down to raw nubs, like half eaten Mini Milks.  The drain for the kitchen sink seems to have frozen and is causing a leak from the washing machine outlet.  Droplets of liquid nitrogen hang in the air, feeling like burning coals as the freeze my skin.  The radiators can barely muster the effort to gasp out one degree centigrade, and my toes snap and drop off one by one.

I awoke from a dream world of a snowball Earth where frozen seas create a new icy supercontinent.  Snowmen had colonised all the frozen land and sea with vast sprawling megacities, and all vestiges of humanity lay forgotten under ten kilometres of ice and snow.  Sentient snowmanity dominates and past present and future shows no sign of things ever being different.  Measurements such as centigrade and Fahrenheit are long forgotten and would be impractical, focused as they are around unbearably hot temperatures; 0°c is equal to the fatally hot 273 Kelvin, the point where snowmanity and all snowman civilisation turns into lifeless liquid water.

my street as viewed from the window

The concept of Absolute Zero is worshipped as a god-like ideal in the same way the Borg revere the Omega particle.  Pure bars of the noble metal Rhodium sit on altars, contained within a field and cooled to less than 1 K.  Snowman scientists reach out to the Boomerang Nebula as the coldest naturally occurring place in the currently observable universe, and faithful snowmen bow their heads to the ground and weep joyful tears as they contemplate eternal life in the Nebula.  Religious texts speak of a singularity of Absolute Zero located in its centre.  Absolute Zero is said to grant wishes, cause natural disasters, occupy our thoughts and judge us after death.

I thought it a fleeting dream until I felt the encroaching cold and looked out of the window to see my ‘dream’ was a terribly accurate premonition.  Car bumpers are bearded with icicles and the pavement edges deeper down as the ice piles higher.  My insignificant and broken street has never seen a highway gritter, and soon it will be too late.

Blah blah cold, blah blah made up stuff about blah blah cold.  It’s about time I got up, put some hot water down the sink, sorted out the blockage, do the fucking dishes, tidy the flat, do some packing for tomorrow (fingers crossed for the flight), visited my friends and newly crawling godson, had a Christmas themed drink and all the other stuff.  Right; blog done for the day.  One chore down, a million more to complete.

102: clicking, fluey, fibre optic and wasting money

Sleeping on the sofa; folded, concertinaed one bone at a time.  The beautiful percussive melody of bones cracking, throats clearing, lungs hurling, and overzealous yawning.  Now that is two sentences I hoped would be a good deal longer.  I’ll just close my eyes for a moment, I thought three and a half hours ago.  I woke up momentarily about an hour ago; just long enough to feel victimised by the sounds from the TV, and to hit the off switch in that miniature way only a finger can hit.  If I lie face down on the ground will someone please walk on my back?  And twist my neck.  There is an unhealthy build-up of clicking.  I feel fluey is today’s excuse for tedious introspection.  I waited all day for the fibre optic broadband engineer only to find out they had rescheduled it to tomorrow and deemed it sufficient to inform me by text message sent to my landline is today’s excuse for griping and for feeling hard done by.  Oh what a world we live in, still think I’m doing fine, wouldn’t it be a lovely headline, life is beautiful on a New York Times, and in other news I have been sneakily including song lyrics into recent blog posts.  Is it a surreptitious attempt to imbue my writing with the fruits of another’s musical efforts, and to burn up word count at the same time?  Of course it is, and so is the overly self-conscious referencing to my own writing process which I am currently indulging in.

Just discovered another offensive misuse of NHS funds, again by Tayside, again hiring yuck homeopaths (vomit, spit, vomit again).  See the job advertised here, see those people already sending in the sarcastic applications here (Science Digestive).  There will surely be other offended doctors/scientists voicing their derision, as well as jumped up little sceptics like yours truly here.  Regular readers will remember I joined the ranks the last time Tayside wasted public money in this manner (here), but unfortunately was unsuccessful in my application.  If I am to be successful this time around I will have to more carefully consider my application, ensuring I express fully my understanding and experience of homeopathy (or lack of experience which, with regards to homeopathy, is essentially the same thing) instead of coming across like a time wasting prick.  Obviously though, if they continue in their manic desire to fritter away the ever decreasing public purse in this disdainful manner they deserve, indeed require, a dose of time wasting.  More so, they deserve - as parents sometimes say, as the instant solution to end any acts of stupidity - their heads banging together.

Some good websites, my cup of tea:

http://tabloid-watch.blogspot.com/ - Blogging about bad journalism

http://www.minority-thought.com/ - A blog about bad journalism

http://enemiesofreason.co.uk/ - Poundshop popshots at the media moral maze

101

Who’d be a writer, eh?  Forcing themselves to work at stupid o’clock at night.  Skinny, shivering, odd, and malnourished like an underfed houseplant.  Over-thinking every last twitch, discussion and ... and lump?  Every last squeak and shuffle, symbol and soliloquy?  Not me.  Lies, lies; it’s all me.  Who else would I be talking about in my daily descent into my own arsehole.  It is undoubtedly time to take another step back and reorganise this into a serious literary litany, an articulate articulation of hypothetical hypothesis’ and cohesive theories.  On occasion this becomes necessary but the time between occasions is decreasing exponentially.  Soon every single post will be a nostalgic fancy for the days of yester and a helpless call for re-evaluation.  But until then let us proceed as if every word I write is gold.

I’m tempted just to slam the laptop shut and, without being influenced at all by the style of the language in the Stephen Fry book I am reading, dash it all to hell.  The devotion to my blog doesn’t prevent me from doing this, and neither does my need to please my invisible imaginary ordinary audience.  What stops my is the certain knowledge that the fan (yes, I’m moaning about the fan again) in the laptop will continue making a fucking racket, even if I slam the laptop with a brick, slap it with a fish and launch it out the window over a rainbow and into the Lancaster canal.  As it glugs to the clay-y bottom a hundred miles away I hear that persistent over-worked whirring; forever, and ever, that fan.

The contradiction is the longer I write the more I hear the fan, the more I use the computer the more dust the fan sucks up, and the more again I use the computer more the more the dust overworks the fan heating up more of the computer more, more.  More hotter; more louder.  Like paper lit on one side with a candle flame, the keyboard cinders and fries my fingers.  Caustic causing and more meaningless couplings of similarly sounding sounds.

If you don’t have a dream, if you don’t have a dream, how you gonna have a dream come true?  Well, last night I dreamt I was at work.  And it came true.  I went to work.  If I don’t hit shut down soon I may reach my second wind and then sleepy sleepy dream dream is off the cards for the near future.  And without the confusion of clocks back/forward/forgetting and the impending teeny-doom of a day at work, it’s entirely likely I may have some exciting enjoyable dreams.  And then I can tell you all about them in a final frantic suicidal act of masochistic blog flogging.  Telling people about your dreams is unforgivably tedious; blogging about them should mean instant end...

Block Chop 81: Unfocused ramble about this and that

Oh my god; cutting it so fine it hurts, I got my BBC job application in twenty-five minutes before the midnight deadline.  I obviously a complete bell-end who should have completed it weeks ago, but that was all discussed and milked yesterday.  Now I can bask temporarily in the glory of receiving that thank you for your application email, until inevitably I hit the funk of the ...but unfortunately on this occasion your application was unsuccessful email.  How’s that for positive thinking?

The application included answering a great many (well four) difficult concise essay questions, which meant excising rolling mounds of fat in order dip below the word count.  I should have started this blog post with the word omg, but after the hideous fiasco of some bloke, named after an Edgar Allen Poe story, on X-Factor I’m sure I will never use that ridiculous abbreviation, but judging by this long and rambling sentence which has long strayed from any coherent point, I am no longer concerned with exceeding word counts and even if I was I am too tired and gazing lazily into the inviting infinite whiteness of the page below these words, and in a final flurry towards the end of the sentence I refer you back to the Poe allusion before and confirm to you that, yes, I was talking about The Fall of the House of Usher, a thematic masterpiece of interlocking detail, metaphor and consistency.

One question involved watching a twenty-six minute long clip of an old episode of the Ten O’Clock News from the day of the big Raoul Moat versus the police stand-off, in fact almost entirely about this prick and the non-story that was the last few moments of his pathetic despicable life, and then deigning to mention almost in passing, the greatest spy-swap since the Cold War, and the impending World Cup final, which being between Spain and Netherlands was excitingly going to yield first time champions.  I wasn’t aware of the content of the news episode before I started watching, and was worried that I would struggle to find meat to bite onto, but as the episode unfurled I became increasingly disgusted with the manner in which it was covered, and launched into a long and angry rant against the danger of glorifying psychos, creating a pornography of hysteria, the dumbing-down of the news with repetition ad infinitum.  I toned down the rant, aiming for ‘review’ (as the question requested) but possibly not arriving, and worked hard to bring it under 300 words.  For good measure, and other stuff, here is what I wrote:

Too much time is spent on the Moat story.  Despite the fact it is happening live there is very little newsworthy content.  There is a large amount of speculation, repetition, rephrasing of the same information, and unnecessary detail.

The story is promoted as entertainment, and almost seems as though it is intentionally trying to create hysteria.  The section where inconsequential still photographs are shown on screen and speculated about is not interesting, and has obviously just been included to drag out the coverage, and perhaps televise a violent end.

It is my understanding that the BBC has a remit to provide a public service, but I strongly feel this kind of presentation has a detrimental effect on society by promoting homicidal sociopaths as exciting rebel antiheroes.  Stories like this should be covered in the news, but to a minimal degree and not as a dramatic narrative.

There is not enough information to warrant such a long story.  Moat’s mental state and the factors leading up to his crimes are interesting; however no insight is provided. 

The story about the US/Russia spy exchange has many complex political aspects, and deserved a much more in depth coverage.  It will have repercussions lasting for years, compared to the Moat story and I think the BBC has made an error in judgement with regard to balance, information and public service.

The spy story focuses on planes landing and very little else.  No real attempt is made to explain the background to this story or the political and diplomatic ramifications.  Why is the swap happening?  There is no hint.

I enjoyed the World Cup coverage; the focus on Spain, and the detail about the hopeful young fans (potential future footballers, perhaps?) was positive.

I hope it doesn’t go down too badly.  I love the BBC but it is undeniably going through an extremely shitty period: poor quality comedy, crap adult drama (fuck Dr. Who; that doesn’t count), and idiotic rehashes of weird Japanese shows (what stupid cunt used license payers money to bring Hole in a Wall over here); and the last thing they need is yes men.  I can slag it off as much as I like, because I used the get out clause of mentioning I love it.  And I do.  I am also happy to pay my license fee, and don’t think any other broadcasters should get a share of it.  But I don’t think the BBC should be unaccountable for what it spends.  Only a bare minimum of its license income should go to entertainment (game shows, ‘documentaries’ that aren’t documentaries, buying foreign imports, etc), and the rest should be spent on developing proper world class comedy, drama, and documentaries... like the good old days.  There is nothing – NOTHING – on BBC3 which license payer’s money should be spent on.

And one last thing BBC, before I fall asleep hoping you will employ me: your sycophantic rimming of that evil old man Ratzinger, on his hello Britain, I’m a Pope holiday was despicable.  Fine, put it in the news, but he does not deserve hours and hours of pointless coverage on your two main channels for day after day.  Would you do the same for visiting heads of other weird microstates; or other obscenely wealthy homophobic, misogynistic, theocratic perpetuators of ignorance and misery?

So what have we learned today?  Not much, other than today’s sentences have been particularly long, with a slight flavour of rant, and a pinch of lack of focus.  That’s about it, and now my cheek is twitching uncontrollably due to exhaustion.  Night night, Blog.  “Night night, Kevin,” it replied.

P.S.  If you have read this blog post, you have read it once more than me.