Dull of Kintyre
The latest forecasts are saying that this weekend will burn us all to a glorious crisp. London will be ablaze with fizzing rays that beckon us through the streets towards the parks and commons, where a thousand barbecues will spring up to convert a million burgers from succulent meat patty to curious black disc of crumbling toss.
And we will dance the traditional dance of the splodgy red Englishman who dismisses suncream as some kind of poofy make-up shit. We will holler and sweat and forget to bring the breadcakes. We will wake up six hours later in A&E dipped in a vat of camomile lotion, attached to a stomach pump and attended to by a hospital porter with busy hands and a lazy eye. Ye gods, just add a ten mile tailback and we would be in classic bank holiday territory.
But it does not matter how many head wounds we receive once the children next door decide the normal game of frisbee is not enough fun. After today we will be grateful to bask in that atmosphere...at least after today. We are currently living through a miserable little pit of a Wednesday even now filling up with rainwater and bile. Today people are edgy and the celebrity potties are overflowing with verbal filth.
I returned to the office earlier after being trapped like a rat in Marks and Spencers. The aisles were blocked by luggage and the queues were populated by extras from a bad zombie film. The last straw was when somebody paid by Visa for an item priced at 66 pence...the smell of retribution poured off the rest of the queue like grease from a takeaway.
So I passed back through reception in a foul mood, barely even noticing an American passenger asking one of our staff “but why is it raining?”
In the office, one of our highest managers was bewildered. “Paul McCartney just called me a fucking tosser”, he said.
“Really?” I said. “What for?”
What for? Because, he explained, Macca does not know how to catch a train. He had said to McCartney that the doors had been closed so that the train can leave on time, but Paul just narrowed his eyes and snapped that he has been waiting half an hour for this train. Nobody can say for sure why the daft bastard was unable to work out how to get on board in the intervening twenty nine minutes and thirty seconds.
“So he walks away and mumbles that I was a fucking tosser,” he said. “Another manager steps in and tells him that nobody should speak that way to our staff. Paul just grumbles incoherently, shrugging like a Frenchman with a dislocated shoulder.”
“Hmm. I suspect that son of a bitch has been hanging around Bob Geldof again,” I said. “Is he doing Live 8?”
Indeed he is.
Perhaps we are being unfair. Macca did not go so far as to say “do you know who I am?”... although it would be more appropriate to ask “do you know who I was?” And if he had sworn at someone whom we despised...well, we would have been applauding the wrinkly old sod. Judging a person’s character is only a matter of what side that person is on. We are forever taking offence and taking personally what people say just because frustrated outbursts do not come with a red triangle and a written disclaimer.
Still...in this case, our manager was amused rather than upset, so what the hell.
This was just one of many strange ripples send out by Live 8. Pink Floyd are reforming for the event, an event that nobody expected yet few people seemed to actually care. As somebody pointed out, if each artists only gets 20 minutes to perform, the Floyd will not even get chance to finish playing their introduction.
Ebay, meanwhile, found themselves jostled on either side by a weird crowd...first they said that they would not stop ticket touts using the site to sell Live 8 tickets but would bung some money to Bob in a pisspoor gesture of goodwill. Max Clifford saw this and choked on his breakfast, whilst Bob said “fook” a lot. A load of “vigilantes” then bid millions of pounds for each ticket to fuck up the auctions, which meant Ebay had no choice but to retract their previous statement and annouce they would close down all Live 8 auctions. The Bob said “fook” again because Paul McCartney was precisely half an hour late this morning to their power brunch.
To hell with all that. Just one more thing and we can go our separate ways.
The Guardian and Observer should be at the forefront of debunking mumbo jumbo and general quackery...the yin to the Daily Mail’s carcinogenic yang. So why the hell did the Observer give over several pages of their normally excellent food magazine to Gillian McKeith the other day? Here she was diagnosing food deficiency through tongue analysis. The article did allude to the cold reality of real science, but seemed happier when it was using up two full pages with a picture of her lying naked in a pile of fruit and vegetables. (Anybody who mentions melons here should hang their heads.)
No matter how much gibberish she spits out, no matter how many genuine scientists say “no, actually you are wrong and I have a pile of evidence to prove it,” she keeps on going, unstopped and unstoppable. The Guardian has Ben Goldacre’s Bad Science section, of course, in which he once bought his cat the same phD as McKeith claimed to have earned from a university of nutrition. Yet in today’s Guardian there is a two page article on biodynamic food.
Ever heard of it? If not, think of a pond. Think of an enormous pond crammed full of jabbering ducks, each wired up to a bunch of microphones that run through an amplifier and distribute the resulting signal to a network of massive speakers, the sort they erect at the sides of a music festival stage. And think of the sound that results: a deafening chorus of quack, quack, quack, quack, QUACK.... Okay, so we are not going for in-depth analysis here...if you give any kind of damn then the information is doubtless all over the internet like stink on a monkey, but for now we shall wallow in a single quote and then wash our hands of this rubbish.
”In order to understand biodynamic farming, there has to be a paradigm shift.” explains Ton Baars, newly appointed professor of biodynamics at Kassel University in Germany. “I try to explain to my students that there are forces such as gravity and magnetism which are accepted by conventional science, and these forces we refer to as hard forces. But biodynamics deals with soft forces as well. Biodynamics is a holistic view of the world, and our science also takes this approach.” – from The Guardian.
Tch.
And we will dance the traditional dance of the splodgy red Englishman who dismisses suncream as some kind of poofy make-up shit. We will holler and sweat and forget to bring the breadcakes. We will wake up six hours later in A&E dipped in a vat of camomile lotion, attached to a stomach pump and attended to by a hospital porter with busy hands and a lazy eye. Ye gods, just add a ten mile tailback and we would be in classic bank holiday territory.
But it does not matter how many head wounds we receive once the children next door decide the normal game of frisbee is not enough fun. After today we will be grateful to bask in that atmosphere...at least after today. We are currently living through a miserable little pit of a Wednesday even now filling up with rainwater and bile. Today people are edgy and the celebrity potties are overflowing with verbal filth.
I returned to the office earlier after being trapped like a rat in Marks and Spencers. The aisles were blocked by luggage and the queues were populated by extras from a bad zombie film. The last straw was when somebody paid by Visa for an item priced at 66 pence...the smell of retribution poured off the rest of the queue like grease from a takeaway.
So I passed back through reception in a foul mood, barely even noticing an American passenger asking one of our staff “but why is it raining?”
In the office, one of our highest managers was bewildered. “Paul McCartney just called me a fucking tosser”, he said.
“Really?” I said. “What for?”
What for? Because, he explained, Macca does not know how to catch a train. He had said to McCartney that the doors had been closed so that the train can leave on time, but Paul just narrowed his eyes and snapped that he has been waiting half an hour for this train. Nobody can say for sure why the daft bastard was unable to work out how to get on board in the intervening twenty nine minutes and thirty seconds.
“So he walks away and mumbles that I was a fucking tosser,” he said. “Another manager steps in and tells him that nobody should speak that way to our staff. Paul just grumbles incoherently, shrugging like a Frenchman with a dislocated shoulder.”
“Hmm. I suspect that son of a bitch has been hanging around Bob Geldof again,” I said. “Is he doing Live 8?”
Indeed he is.
Perhaps we are being unfair. Macca did not go so far as to say “do you know who I am?”... although it would be more appropriate to ask “do you know who I was?” And if he had sworn at someone whom we despised...well, we would have been applauding the wrinkly old sod. Judging a person’s character is only a matter of what side that person is on. We are forever taking offence and taking personally what people say just because frustrated outbursts do not come with a red triangle and a written disclaimer.
Still...in this case, our manager was amused rather than upset, so what the hell.
This was just one of many strange ripples send out by Live 8. Pink Floyd are reforming for the event, an event that nobody expected yet few people seemed to actually care. As somebody pointed out, if each artists only gets 20 minutes to perform, the Floyd will not even get chance to finish playing their introduction.
Ebay, meanwhile, found themselves jostled on either side by a weird crowd...first they said that they would not stop ticket touts using the site to sell Live 8 tickets but would bung some money to Bob in a pisspoor gesture of goodwill. Max Clifford saw this and choked on his breakfast, whilst Bob said “fook” a lot. A load of “vigilantes” then bid millions of pounds for each ticket to fuck up the auctions, which meant Ebay had no choice but to retract their previous statement and annouce they would close down all Live 8 auctions. The Bob said “fook” again because Paul McCartney was precisely half an hour late this morning to their power brunch.
To hell with all that. Just one more thing and we can go our separate ways.
The Guardian and Observer should be at the forefront of debunking mumbo jumbo and general quackery...the yin to the Daily Mail’s carcinogenic yang. So why the hell did the Observer give over several pages of their normally excellent food magazine to Gillian McKeith the other day? Here she was diagnosing food deficiency through tongue analysis. The article did allude to the cold reality of real science, but seemed happier when it was using up two full pages with a picture of her lying naked in a pile of fruit and vegetables. (Anybody who mentions melons here should hang their heads.)
No matter how much gibberish she spits out, no matter how many genuine scientists say “no, actually you are wrong and I have a pile of evidence to prove it,” she keeps on going, unstopped and unstoppable. The Guardian has Ben Goldacre’s Bad Science section, of course, in which he once bought his cat the same phD as McKeith claimed to have earned from a university of nutrition. Yet in today’s Guardian there is a two page article on biodynamic food.
Ever heard of it? If not, think of a pond. Think of an enormous pond crammed full of jabbering ducks, each wired up to a bunch of microphones that run through an amplifier and distribute the resulting signal to a network of massive speakers, the sort they erect at the sides of a music festival stage. And think of the sound that results: a deafening chorus of quack, quack, quack, quack, QUACK.... Okay, so we are not going for in-depth analysis here...if you give any kind of damn then the information is doubtless all over the internet like stink on a monkey, but for now we shall wallow in a single quote and then wash our hands of this rubbish.
”In order to understand biodynamic farming, there has to be a paradigm shift.” explains Ton Baars, newly appointed professor of biodynamics at Kassel University in Germany. “I try to explain to my students that there are forces such as gravity and magnetism which are accepted by conventional science, and these forces we refer to as hard forces. But biodynamics deals with soft forces as well. Biodynamics is a holistic view of the world, and our science also takes this approach.” – from The Guardian.
Tch.
posted by Jamie at 4:17 PM
2 Comments:
Funny, that. "Paradigm" has exactly the same effect upon me as "entrepreneur". Who'da thought it?
The word 'professor' is a little suspect too, in this case. 'Liar who's coining it in' would seem more appropriate.
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