npr broke with tradition yesterday morning and broadcast something interesting and highly amusing during Morning Edition; a piece describing what is meant by the term “Zombie Banks”. It would seem that all the bank bailouts have done is keep the organs of the corpses artificially alive, dragging the rest of the economy, and therefore the rest of us, down with them. Sapping the life out of all of us, they continue to stumble on like flesh eating zombies. Now, I like this analogy and it seems pretty accurate from my perspective, but I was truly awestruck by the earnest pleas from the interviewee who was getting quite worked up:

We have a situation where there are zombies roaming around and the government programmes so far are an aspirin, when instead you’ve got to chop its head off and get the economy growing again.

Please give it a listen, it’s four marvellous minutes of mirth.

This weekend we hosted our first proper middle-class dinner party! That’s “middle-class” in the English sense rather than the American sense; over here no-one identifies as working class, and so everyone is either middle-class or “upper-class”…again, very different to the English idea of upper-class.
Other than that, everything else was pretty much what you’d expect in Islington, only we enjoyed it immensely. We’ve been very lucky in meeting so many cool people since we arrived.
The news over here remains as blinkered as ever; Obama Vs Republicans, or J.M.Keynes Vs The Free Market as it will be recorded in history. No mention of the rest of the world, such as the massive bush-fires in Australia. Some links:

• Explained: right-wing dads forwarding their shit
• The UK rushing closer and closer, and closer to the inevitable Police state.

Do you remember the exhilarating feeling of finishing your last A-level [high-school exam] ? Do you remember thinking “thank fuck I’ll never have to remember any of that shit again” ? Finishing the Maths exam was particularly cathartic because I just didn’t understand it. I found it fascinating, but no matter how much work I put in it just didn’t click. Goodbye calculus, good-riddance imaginary numbers, sod-you complex planes, and bollocks to natural logarithms, I remember thinking.
Twenty years later I’m now dealing with all of them in my job! It was hard enough when my brain was fresh and quick, before the years of alcohol and TV abuse, but now it just hurts. The last two days have involved a load of head-crunching and I still don’t understand how any of it works. Whenever I see a formula that involves either e or i, my brain goes into shock and changes the subject so it doesn’t have to deal with it.
There is however a benefit of twenty years’ experience: I can now use all of these arcane concepts, without actually knowing how they work and get stuff done.
But it’s not enough. I need to understand how they work. It’s like being confronted by a locked door or some copy protection – and that’s why I have sets of picks and a large collection of 2600 magazines.
Any tips for how to understand difficult sums welcome.

At the age of 15 I was really into hip-hop/rap/electro; at the time the three were difficult to separate. It always seemed astounding that some people (mainly old-farts, but quite a large proportion of peers) hated it so much. They would try to explain why they didn’t like it but to them it was so repugnant that the best they could manage was along the following lines: “It’s just shit! Listen! It’s just…shit! That’s not music! It’s shit.”
Well the other day, as part of my job (really), I had to listen to Get Naked by G-Mack. Now, as much as I’d like to think of myself as being reasonably articulate, I can only accurately describe it as obvious shit. Because it’s shit. Listen to it. It’s clearly shit isn’t it ? Either that, or a CB4/Ali-G style joke ? “G-Mack” ? It’s got to be a joke.
Annoyingly this occurred in the same week that I heard the Snoop Dog remix of “Walk the line” by Johnny Cash. It was so bad that I couldn’t stop listening to it – it made me laugh!
Now there are two possible explanations for what’s going on:

1. This young people’s music is genuinely piffle.
2. I’m now officially an old fart.

As someone who listens to all kinds of new music, to me it’s clearly explanation 1. But deep down I know the real reason is explanation 2.
And then, after tripping over this embarrassing mess, I realise that it’s only a matter of time before I buy a cardigan.

Shameless geekery – look away now.

• One of my favourite pieces of the internet is this classic rant from my boy, Linus Torvalds, on C++. I read it regularly and it gives me a warm feeling that maybe I’m not wrong about everything. Well today I noticed the message ID (see above) – he uses Alpine too! I was beginning to think me and Michele were the last users on the planet.
• The Google got broke this morning for over an hour. It turned out the culprit was a single solitary byte: ‘/’. The vast, global, unstoppable, empire-smashing Goliath knocked out by ASCII 0x2f. I wonder if it was fired from a slingshot ?

Ever since being introduced to Nick Cohen’s ridiculous claptrap I’m always astonished that serious newspapers give him column centimetres (let alone column inches). So it’s not surprising to read an article like this where he is given carte blanche to demonstrate what an inexcusably clueless twat he really is.

Really; Nathan Barley could do a better job.

Obama’s inauguration was the closest thing I’ve ever felt to the descriptions of the coronation in 1952; the popularity of TV in the UK pretty much began with the coronation.

I was at work, and we all watched it on the big TV in the conference room. Afterwards, we had lunch, and when I got back to my desk this email from my dad was waiting. It summed up my own feelings in a far more elegant way than I could have achieved:

That was wonderful. Congratulations America.

The age of George Bush is over; The age of Obama begins. Not my words but those of the BBC reporter.

This is the Labour Party winning the 1945 election. The end of the the War In Europe. The final end to The Second World War.

How about the beautiful poem and the emotional speech at the end of the ceremony by the old Civil Rights campaigner.

And Aretha!

Three great days in one lifetime is really more than one can expect

And Obama is already putting into effect the things he promised. For a day or two, the media on all sides couldn’t avoid acknowledging the greatness of it all.

But now, we’re back to business. Fox has already started its campaign of hate that would be comical if there were no stupid people to lap it up.

“Do you want terrorists living in your back yard ?”

But the cynicism in me, seeded by being English, left wing, and not part of the aristocracy, has now mutated to aggression. Anyone who doesn’t realise how wonderful and historically significant the recent events are, is clearly an irredeemable moron.

Twice today I got very angry as the result of ignorant, bigoted, bullshit. This time I’m going to keep up the pressure. Inaction is a weapon of mass destruction. Even if it means losing touch with friends or even family, I’m going to be true. Leaving my own parents, and some of the best friends I could have ever imagined, has taught me a lot. Not matter how crap I am at keeping in touch with people and how crap they are at keeping in touch with me, the real friends don’t mind. Bernard Baruch (not Dr Seuss) summed it up many years before though:

Those who matter don’t mind, and those who mind don’t matter.

Happy Squirrel Appreciation Day!

Last night’s drive home from work was interrupted by a total nutter. There were four of us in the car: Jon driving, his wife, me and another freeloader in the back making fart jokes. The traffic slowed right down, as it always does near Conshohocken, because two major roads merge. Jon let a car merge from the slip road and carried on driving. This was the correct behaviour; one car lets one car in, it’s called the “zipper system”. But the next car to merge disagreed and kept driving, slow pushing left, despite there being a car, our car, in the way. We couldn’t believe the guy was doing this and watched while he slowly drove into the side of our car. Jon, appreciating that this guy wasn’t going to let up with his bizarre behaviour (courtesy, safety, and physics clearly not his key skills), braked to halt, letting our friend scrape past us and in front of us into his position of victory – where he remained until the next exit. Meanwhile, as the traffic was moving so slowly during this period, Jon had called the Police and given them the details, including the registration number (so clearly visible directly in front of the windscreen). All the while, the guy was giving us the finger. He got off at the next exit and we pulled over on the hard shoulder to wait for the law.
A state trooper was there in less than 5 minutes. He pulled up, fired blinding lights at us and swaggered up to the passenger window with another blindingly bright flashlight. He asked us if we wanted to file a report – and on being told that we did, asked us all for ID. In order to save you the tedious details of the ensuing conversation, the outcomes were:

• Even though we’d called the po-pos, he treated us in the same way they always do – as if he was doing us a favour for not nicking us.
• After an extraordinarily long wait, he returned our IDs and told us they were treating the incident as hit-and-run (good – the guy who did this is clearly not fit to be driving himself around).
• I was breaking the law because I didn’t have State ID.

This last point was news to me, and I understand that ignorance of the law is no excuse but…I gave him a green card! That is federal ID. It was issued by the Department of Homeland Schutzstaffel. I had to get photographed, x-rayed, fingerprinted, interviewed, and give blood for that, and yet he’s telling me I have to go down to the department of transportation with a gas bill and pick up a poxy “license not to drive” ? It didn’t occur to me until afterwards that he was clearly making that shit up. A compulsory^Wmandatory ID card is unconstitutional isn’t it ? I don’t know, so have asked the ACLU. We’ll see. All this goes to show that I forgot the golden rule: don’t ever, ever, ever involve the Police ever, ever, ever….unless you need to claim on insurance. As I’ve mentioned before (ignore the first bit about 70’s wallpaper), the Police aren’t there to help you. And they do it so well.