I don’t often use the Context filter on this blog (hur hur). This isn’t a personality project, it’s a philosophical one; and while my personality interacts with my thinking, I don’t tend to talk about my recent bus traumas and how my pets are doing here. There are other places for that. However, I have the filter because sometimes things that happen will directly affect both how I think, and how often I get the chance.
20/11/2009
Chaos Theories
[ Editor's Note: Staff illness, my illness, a paid writing project, a real ale festival and significant levels of exhaustion are still in between me and the keyboard. But I do now have a working computer again (again!) and will be back as and when I can. If anyone's still reading this after a 4 month hiatus, ... I appreciate your dedication but suspect you've too much time on your hands. Thank you. --JQP ]
Imagine, please, a kettle. Examine the water in this imaginary kettle. It’s pretty much stationary, I’d imagine, at room temperature. Treating the kettle and the water in it as a system, at that temperature the system is extremely predictable: nothing in it is moving about much, the level of chaos is fairly low. Now turn the kettle on and watch very carefully.
23/10/2009
Vatican Rag Week
Well, ain’t that interesting. It looks as though Henry VIII’s victory over the Vatican may have been a temporary achievement after all.
22/10/2009
Back to Basics
Well, that was a lot of blog posts. I will admit I have not read all those published by the writers I follow since I effectively went offline; that’s because you guys posted over a thousand articles in that time and much of it is no longer in any way “news”. But I did find a few things I felt rant-worthy in my trawls through the blogosphere.
21/10/2009
Wut?
Right. I’ve got things at the pub under control. I’ve had a couple of days off. My email works again, and I’ve got internet from home. I’m back. Be warned.
27/08/2009
O Frabjous Day!
And so it came to pass in the year of the Millenium, when all manner of dangerous prophecies and signs were spread about the place, that the green hills and merry cities of ancient Albion were afflicted, nay, Invaded, by a terrible WYRM of great and hideous aspect, well hung with wispy tentacles of Vaporous Vapidity and Malicious Mindlessness. As its terror and INFAMY spread throughout the land, it cast down from on high the sages of Oxford and of Birmingham. From its evil Eye burst forth tendrils of calumny and gossip which infected those of high and low estate alike, who settled squelching into the swamp called Superiority Complex, saying “Hah, hah, we’d never let our children grow up like that!“: but they did speak falseley for the BEAST fed itself upon those very same children. And the names of the BEAST were many and nefarious, but its true and secret name was Cliche.
03/08/2009
Books in Boxes
JQP has fallen down the hole marked “House-move” and will climb out eventually.
22/07/2009
Surveillance Societies
[ Editor's note: This article was originally written for PSUK and appears here by permission of the editors. ]
Surveillance, it seems to me, comes in two categories differentiated by purpose; that is, all surveillance efforts will fulfill one, or both in some mixture, of two purposes. The first is the easiest, and the most etymologically obvious: surveillance is investigative.
A typical example of such surveillance work would be a phone tap. You initiate a phone tap to find out things you didn’t know before; it is an investigative tool. A point-to-point communication which should thus limit information exposure is compromised by external surveillance, permitting the watchers to learn things they would otherwise be unable to learn. But it is worth noting that this investigative function for surveillance is effective precisely in so far as it is covert; a subject aware of observation behaves differently.
21/07/2009
The Wrath of the Righteous
I had a nice little list, today. Things worth bringing to the attention of my occasional lectors. I was going to write about how England won something. At cricket no, less. I was going to mention how Neil Amstrong wants us to go to Mars, and how strongly I agree: and how South Africa has finally redeemed itself after Thabo Mbeki by developing a potentially viable AIDS vaccine. But then I checked up on what the Angry Black Woman said today and now, I’m angry too.
In truth, I am not angry. I am enraged. Which proves I should heed Nojojo’s advice better in future, and not read the comment threads on articles about race in America.
17/07/2009
Ties That Bind II
Re-capping my last, the tie made a certain amount of sense as part of the consolidation of British pub trade, in the context of the generally anti-competitive run of business over the later 20th Century. But it didn’t really do any good for anyone except brewers. There were even advantages from the advent of keg lagers, and the occasional keg bitter: they are point and click. To be a real ale cellarman is a craft, with physical and intellectual skills that must be taught and learned, practiced and honed. You have to know the beer, you have to know the tools, and you have to use them every day. This meant that a bad landlord could really mess up your beer (I’ve heard dark tales of the drip trays going back into the top of the mild every night, for example). With keg, you’d have to take an axe to it to really mess it up.
But the over-all consolidation of the trade was, as I said, not really good for anyone except capital accumulators. It made the beer worse, it made pubs worse, it made publicans lives’ hell and it radically reduced competition within the UK market. We’ve gone some way to fixing that, partly through the work of CAMRA and others, partly by just making better beer. Where there were 60 independent brewers in Britain at the start of the 80s there are over 600 now. Brewing is beginning to be a competitive industry again. But the pub trade is getting even worse: 35 pubs a week have been closed in the last year. Think about those numbers for a moment.
