“how would you like to be in the pictahs?” asked Brother B via email one evening last week. He told me that he was making a short film which he hoped to enter into a small competition organized by a local brewery: Dogfish Head. The only requirements were that it was to be western-themed, feature some Dogfish Head beer and be less than 5 minutes long. Cool! “What do you need me for?”
“To play a horse. Called Tutu.”
He sent me the script and it was short, weird, and funny enough to make me sign-up there and then. Tutu only had three lines and that didn’t seem like too much of a challenge, even to someone who hasn’t acted since he played Mr Pickles in the school play when he was 11 years old. Actually, that was a pretty challenging role; I had to sing a solo, the lyrics of which included the line “I’m a merry fish merchant, on Fridays I’m gay”. Mental scar tissue had kept that memory safely repressed until now…
But this was just a bit of fun, and B is a top chap, and it meant going down to Maryland for the weekend, which would provide a timely break from the normal routine. We agreed to meet up on the Friday night for a short read-through in preparation.
Riding home on the Friday evening bus, I re-read the script and started to wonder whether any of it was possible. For a start, we were going to be filming in a wild-west theme park…had they arranged this with the park owners? There was a lot of gun play; firearms in movies is a tricky business at the best of times, but in a theme park? Have they thought this through? Then there was a Matrixesque scene with a slowed-down bullet that the hero gets trapped in his teeth. This was surely fantasy…
It didn’t take long for Michele and I to realize that this wasn’t just going to be a handful of people messing about with a camera-phone; there were four of five people in B’s room, all disturbingly professional, and prepared. There was a shooting script, an inventory of terrifyingly professional equipment and personnel that would be joining us the next day and enough industry jargon thrown about to make James Cameron get itchy. The park was out of season and therefore closed, but we not only had permission to film, we had the offer of real cowboys on real horses for background shots, and real firearms with blanks that they use in their re-enactments.
The next morning at five-to sparrow-fart, B and I headed off to Maryland.
The weekend was spectacular fun and over time the details will come out together, hopefully, with the film. For now all I’ll say is:

• I got to be the clapperboard guy in a few scenes and it was every bit as brilliant as I thought it would be; I’ve found my new dream career!
• The sentence “Let’s not get any more spaghetti on the Cow” was used in earnest during filming.

After a particularly stressful day at work today I met up with my geek compadre, General Dan. We had arranged an excursion to a ham radio test center so that we could attempt to obtain our first Technician licences and thus be granted entry to an exclusive club of old fat blokes with beards.
In a nutshell we both passed; not only the “Technician” test but also the “General” which, for the benefit of the uninitiated, is a bit like being given a diplomatic passport into the world of talking bollocks to people over radio.
We celebrated in the traditional manner: steak and ale at a local Irish Inn, with a traditional Irish Frank Sinatra tribute act bellowing at some old people.
And there was much rejoicing.

We’re literally only seconds away from 1325397599 and the excitement is palpable. So to usher in the new dawn of 1325397600, may I present the ancient lost classic story of Caudexus of Neucrox.

Caudexus was an uninspiring man with a very tangled, disordered mind; he also denied the existence of the Gods, which angered them greatly. Despite being Gods, and therefore all powerful, the idea of a human denying their existence made them uncontrollably angry. Even with their infinite powers, they were unable to ignore him and therefore had to punish him for eternity.

Caudexus’ tangled mind caused him great impatience, and hindered his abilities to concentrate on any one activity at a time. Sometimes this would lead to great accomplishments (by his own estimation) but more often than not it would lead to him being unable to do anything even vaguely practical.

The Gods took advantage of this weakness (despite being infinitely strong themselves) and condemned him to forever live out his days in the same wretched task: making a cup of tea.

He would sit on the sofa, fancying a nice cup of tea, and plugged away at his laptop. He spent his time flipping between pointless programming projects, reading blogs, and sending lame messages to his on-line friends on whatever social network was en-vogue at the time. On occasion, the desire for a nice cup of tea overwhelmed him to the extent that he had to abandon the sofa, laptop, and foot cushion, to head to the kitchen.

He simply filled the electric kettle with water, turned it on, placed a tea-bag in a mug, and waited for it to boil. As he waited his tangled mind would soon begin feeding him ideas that he had to investigate further, and so he would temporarily go back to the living room and resume his place on the sofa with the laptop, and maybe a small bird.

A cup of tea was always in preparation from his last visit to the kitchen; the Gods’ evil plan was so cunning that it ensured he would never finalise his cup of tea.

On his next visit to the kitchen he would discover that the kettle boiled some time ago and needed to be boiled from scratch. He would inevitably become impatient and return to the other room to continue pursuing the new ideas that his tangled mind had suggested to him. This cycle continued.

Very occasionally he would concentrate on actually waiting in the kitchen until the kettle had boiled, at which point he would pour the boiling water into the cup and onto the tea bag. But the Gods’ had planned for this by ensuring the tea would be revolting until it had brewed properly. The brewing process was even more tedious and led to even more tangle-minded thoughts, which in turn led to forgetting the tea until it was too cold to be considered potable, and the process would have to be restarted from scratch.

Very occasionally, of the order of several months, he would eventually manage to make a drinkable cup of tea, at which point he would approach the fridge to get some milk…but the Gods’ plan ensured that by this time, the milk would have gone off.

Caudexus was thus condemned for eternity to engage in this perpetual battle which would never yield a nice cup of tea.

There’s a lesson for us all there probably. Happy New Year.

Update – Caudexus eventually moved to the USA where the problem was further exacerbated by the 110V kettles which took twice as long to boil.

Two work-funded piss-ups in one week outside of Christmastide is unusual and welcome, but it was made up for by the demands of the deadlines. Altogether, recent work experiences have increased my determination to produce the desired goods, whilst making it seem more achievable. When plans are mapped out in great detail and with concrete dates, life looks different, especially to people like me who don’t deal with planning their own lives very well. Ask me what I’m doing for Christmas and I’ll shrug. Ask me where the project at work will be on that day and I can tell you precisely where we hope it’ll be. Consequently, as that date approaches, if we’re behind I’m going to end up working stupidly long hours just to get back on track. It’s a very clever way to keep us all on our toes. But also quite reassuring in a not very reassuring way.

The latest weekend is all but over and now Leo is preening himself on my left arm. Meanwhile the latest addition to the family, Bertie the foster cockatiel, is running around the bottom of his cage desperate to come out. We have to re-home him but until then we just have to make sure he’s content. Fortunately he is like all cockatiels I’ve ever met: entirely adorable. He will make someone an extraordinarily good companion.

Yesterday Michele and I went to Fort Washington State Park with the intention of watching the hawks migrate. It turns out we were late for the migration season and so we had to make do with the more quotidian bird spotting. We got chatting to another fellow bird watcher who turned out to be a German radio Ham (his handheld radio was singing morse code melodies through his jacket pocket). We had a long chat during which we discovered he lives a few streets away from us and was delighted at the prospect of mentoring a new, young (hah!), Ham. The experience rekindled my excitement about getting a Ham licence.

The rest of the weekend was pretty mellow: comedy TV, a great curry, a bit of garden maintenance, cracking some Mac software (gdb and hexedit were the only tools required btw), and fixing “The Meanness”. At least it feels like something has been achieved.

Halloween was as joyfully uneventful as usual this year.
Brits probably won’t understand this: but the hype and marketing bullshit surrounding Halloween in Britain is not regarded with so much cynicism here; having fun on Halloween is so deeply ingrained, that people tend to see it as “the fun celebration” of the year; much like Christmas in Britain, but without all of the days off. People genuinely want to have fun and do so, with all of the other crap as an aside.
Christmas here is much like Christmas over there too, but without the days off. Same with Thanksgiving. All of the other stuff about spending shitloads of money you don’t own, to buy presents for people you don’t like, who won’t enjoy what you’ve bought them anyway, is exactly the same. But Halloween is not like that – it’s about enjoying yourself.

Outside of Halloween and the fun stuff, days off work are generally frowned upon. If you get sick, obviously you shouldn’t come into work to spread your germs around; but frankly why should your company, or your country, pay for you to be ill?
Thankfully, most companies have dealt with this by combining all holidays/vacation together with sick-days to form the simple, easy-to-understand, concept of “Personal Time Off”. Rather than getting 26 days per year of holiday and around 6 months of paid sick benefit (like I had in the UK), we now have a convenient 20 days of combined holiday and sick-pay entitlement. It’s so much simpler!
As a result of this, whenever a national holiday occurs here, people lose their minds with joy! AN EXTRA DAY! So different from the tragic Bank Holidays that we all know and love.

But let’s not forget that all of the lovely benefits and paid holidays we take for granted are as a direct result of generations of people fighting; fighting though poverty, pain and suffering. That we have weekends, 8-hour work days, and paid holidays, is something we tend to take for granted. Moving to the US also made me notice other things I had previously taken for granted back in Britain: a spectacular national healthcare system, some serious rights for workers and plentiful paid holidays.

It’s not that working people don’t deserve these things – it’s that we need to remember why we have them and keep fighting the motherfuckers who want to take them away.

Yet again this wasn’t what I intended to say. Arses.

Uncovering hypocrisy is important. For example, take Ted Haggard (please); here was someone who spent his entire public life telling people to avoid homosexuals and drugs, and instead obey God (or obey himself, as God’s chosen spokesman). Meanwhile he spent his private life fucking men and dealing hard drugs. Pointing out the hypocrisy there may well serve humanity; for example imagine a male, teen-age, member of Haggard’s congregation who was tortured with guilt for feeling things he was unable to control, and felt right, but believed (thanks to Ted and his friends) to be wrong.

Last night we watched an episode of Have I Got News For You which included an odious woman whom I now know to be called “Louise Mensch (Bagshawe)”. She came across as the usual sort of detached, privileged, horsey Tory MP that doesn’t understand why anyone is poor because, after all, who’d want to be poor?

During the programme, the topic of the “Occupy” protests came up, and she publicly demonstrated her simple naivety by invoking one of the most common, pathetic and hopeless arguments used by the impotent right: how can anti-Capitalism protestors be taken seriously if they buy coffee from Starbucks/buy anything/own iPhones/etc. Enjoying the “fruits of capitalism”, whilst arguing against it, made the protestors hypocrites in her eyes. Even Ian Hislop (hardly a lefty) said that he considered responding to this statement a waste of time because “it was too obvious”.

There is a problem with the entire notion of Hypocrisy in a political context: anyone who feels that their current society is flawed, and therefore wishes it would change, still lives within the constraints of that society, and is therefore ripe to be accused of hypocrisy. This isn’t a good situation, and is all too open to abuse from people who, for whatever reason, prefer the status quo.

Pointing out hypocrisy in others is far too easy for people who don’t want any sort of change. Being a hypocrite is also too easy when the alternatives are impractical. For example, and at the risk of invoking Godwin’s law, no-one would accuse someone who spent time in a concentration camp of hypocrisy because they were eating Nazi food and being complicit with Nazi rule, would they?

So how should an anti-capitalism protestor behave in order not to be accused of hypocrisy in a capitalist society? Answers on a post-card please; the address is “shoved up your own arse”.

Beware companies that claim to be “cool”, and walk right out of the door if they use a word like “funky”.
My current employers are housed in a tall office block, sandwiched between 1000 floors of KPMG office space. Just seeing the letters “KPMG” together brings me down – and seeing them in the context of “inspirational marketing” turns my stomach.
As the lift doors open on each KPMG floor they reveal the same paint colour, the same carpet, the same framed posters containing the same meretricious artwork and copy, which tries to persuade the same non-existent customer that they are not just a boring financial company; actually they are inspirational, passionate and have vision. It’s difficult to see why the global “Occupy” protests fail to appreciate this and instead argue that these companies are simply crooked machines for turning poor-peoples lives into trinkets for the ultra-rich. Have they not read the posters?
Working in an office building like this can be truly dispiriting for many reasons; as far as I’m concerned the biggest reason is that the vast majority of workers there not only believe in what they’re doing, they also believe in the company, and tragically believe they are on the path to the riches that hard-work can provide. The belief in the system, and The American Dream is as strong amongst these willing slaves as it ever was.
In case you think it offensive that I used the word “slaves” in this context, you may be right. These people don’t have to do this work, they are welcome to work elsewhere. They are welcome to starve. There’s no doubt that the poor in the 1st world live more comfortably now than they did 100 years ago – and perhaps that is progress. But at what cost? Poorer countries are suffering in their place. Meanwhile the rich are richer than ever before.

As well as the brief view into KPMG’s world, the lifts provide other valuable insights. For example we get to hear the conversations of our corporate brethren. People talk about the same shit no matter where they work. They use the same cliches and laugh at the same things that they don’t find genuinely funny. We’re all the same – we just do this stuff to cope.

Additionally we get to watch the in-lift entertainment provided “free” by “Captivate Networks” (link deliberately not given). In each lift is a little screen displaying all of the corporate news that today’s business people enjoy reading at 7 in the morning as they go to their allocated office space. We get sport, weather, news tid-bits, stock-market ticker values and, most importantly, inspiring tweets from CEOs of cool, funky companies! It’s so inspiring!

Still at least we’re not under Communist rule where everyone has to wear the same clothes, talk about the same things and go to identical workplaces. At least we are free to slag it all off in our blogs…unless we encourage anyone to try and change anything of course – even if it involved telling people to close their bank accounts. That would be tantamount to terrorism.

After work I arrived at the Rosie to find Dave, Ian, Kate, Suzanne, Seb and the others already comfortably settled out the back, enjoying the last remnants of the slowly falling sun. By sheer luck (in both directions) they were all approaching the point where their pints needed refilling. Everyone ordered “the usual”, and Dave offered to give me a hand at the bar.
Then the alarm sounded and it was time to get up for work. That was my morning experience today. Thanks brain.

Right, before any other business can I just exude on the topic of these headphones? That’s rhetorical obviously.

The headphones wrapped around my fat head at this moment are Sony MDR-V300’s that were picked up at a flea-market in East Falls a couple of years ago for a tenner.

Now, I spend the majority of my waking life wearing headphones; the only way to find the required seclusion for software development in open-plan offices necessitates headphones or earphones. At the last place they were “Koss” phones provided on day one by Mr Fritz, and they served me well in their various incarnations. Nowadays I have a cheap pair of in-ear “noise cancelling” cheapo mobile plugs that came with some phone or other.

At home there is rarely a need for headphones and so these Sony cans haven’t had a lot of use. Additionally I’m pretty skeptical about “high quality audio” for reasons too plentiful and intricate to go into here…but by god now I’m using these headphones it’s apparent they are orders of magnitude better than anything I’ve experienced before. Trying to describe how and why they’re better is going to be too difficult but just believe me when I say that it’s extraordinary how different a track sounds in these compared to the usual crap I’m used to. There’s bass – but not muddy, OTT, bass – just a proper bass response. There are details in the recording that were inaudible before. It feels like I was previously listening to music via ear-plugs.

Lifewise things have been pretty unremarkable (apart from a couple of unblogable things) but there have been some high points:

• Discovering an excellent Sonic Youth album I’d not heard before.
• Discovering an excellent Camper Van Beethoven album I’ve not heard before.
• Spending a couple of nice Sundays with a couple of good friends doing fun things – a separate blog is needed to fully describe these; especially Cabelas.

Well that wasn’t what I intended to write at all…

How to deal with middle-age, by Armando Iannucci: