Go forth

So then, plans are afoot to reintroduce beavers to Scotland around 400 years after they died out, with the primary reasoning being to promote so-called ‘beaver-tourism’ – a popular activity in Amsterdam, I hear. Wolves and wildcats are also candidates to bypass the immigrant detention centres and be let loose on the highlands.

The concept is quite beguiling – I’ve always felt that Britain was disappointingly lacking in serious wildlife. The USA has alligators, wolves, bears, mountain lions and more. We just get badgers – only dangerous if you’re a fan of mashed potato and called Bodger – and foxes, which are basically ginger dogs that have found a way to get food without the need for tin-opener-operating humans. We could do with a giant feral hedgehog or something to instill some respect for nature and pick off the occasional drunken chav late at night. Particularly the one having an argument at the top of his voice on his mobile outside my window at three in the morning last week – a vicious six-foot ball of spines and teeth rolling out of the darkness would have sorted that one a treat.

It’d add a bit more of a challenge to hunters too. There’d be the chance that as you stare through your high-power scope at a distant stag munching on the moor and generally minding his own business, there could be a pack of wolves behind you about to turn you into pedigree chum. That’d even up the odds a little.

But seriously, I do worry that we humans as a species never seem to learn. I’ve been sitting here trying to think of a human-driven introduction of a species that has actually gone well. They seem to have been almost universally disastrous in environmental and frequently economic terms – rabbits in Australia, killer bees, zebra mussels, cane toads (in Australia again, a country which has been comprehensively decimated by many, many species introduced by humans). Even seaweed has gone horribly wrong.

The usual pattern is that once an unfamiliar species is introduced, it enters an environment where nothing is equipped to keep its numbers down. Subsequently, it’ll breed like…er…rabbits, take over, and destroy populations of whatever it feeds on plus out-perform any competitors and, if you’re super unlucky as is the case with cane toads, the introduced species will be poisonous and kill half the animals that do try to eat it. Habitats are networks of evolved relationships, and sticking a new creature in there leapfrogs (no pun intended) evolution to frequently detrimental effects.

So yeah, the idea of beavers is nice in principle, but let’s hope that those responsible are pretty damn sure that they know what they’re doing. I’m not that hopeful myself.

Irony in action, folks.

One day last year at work my friend Emily and I heard a rather insistent mewing sound coming from the front door. And by insistent, I mean that we work upstairs and could still hear it. When we went to investigate, we found this:

As soon as we opened the door the cat trotted in, happy as you like, meowing all the time and rubbing up against us to say hello. After a while, and since we had to get back to work, we coaxed it back outside and regretfully headed back upstairs.

Except things didn’t end there. A couple of days later, the cat appeared again. And again the day after that. It started to jump through the downstairs windows whenever they were left open in order to explore the office and had to be chased out when it stomped over the keyboards in accounting. At lunch time, if you went outside it’d run up to you in greeting, or sleep in your lap…

Over time, it learnt when to turn up. I’d arrive each day at ten to nine in the morning to find it waiting at the door, nose pressed against the glass. It started to demonstrate better timekeeping than some of the employees. When we let it in, it’d immediately prance upstairs to the production office, which it would carefully explore to see what had changed from the last time it had visited. All this time the cat would be purring and kneading the floor with its front paws so much that it looked like it was on a rocking boat in a stormy sea. After exploration time to check that everything was to its liking, the cat would usually curl up asleep in the empty chair behind me for the rest of the day:

Inevitably, the cat got a name - dubbed Pushkin by our editor. It was evident Pushkin had a home; usually at around half four she would wake up, stretch, and paw at the door to be let out. On a couple of occasions she’d come in having had flea drops put behind her neck, so someone must have been taking care of her – there are houses behind the office which we suspect she came from. We were careful never to feed her, except for the time she pulled a packet of old, stale pitta bread from a bin and delicately munched away the soft upper side of one.

Pushkin was smart too – I was usually the one to let her out when I noticed her scratching at the door from the production office to the stairs. So she figured that she could pretend to stand there so that as soon as I stood up and walked over to open the door, she ran behind me, jumped up on my chair and curled up in a nice warm spot rather than her usual colder throne. I had officially been outwitted by a cat.

She brought tremendous enjoyment to everyone in the office – staff from downstairs would come up especially to see her and to watch her twitching in her chair as she dreamt the day away. Any deadline stress could instantly be cured by a few moments stroking Pushkin. She once spent half an hour sitting on my desk, her nose resting on my wrist, intently watching the mouse cursor dart around the screen as I laid out pages for the magazine. We (okay, I) even built her a castle from a Mac shipping box. You can’t see here the windows and nameplate that were added later:

Unfortunately, as I write this we’ll be heading into the fourth week without any sign of Pushkin. The office feels emptier without her. I hope that the reason she’s disappeared is benign – maybe her owners have moved away, or she’s found another place in which to while away the hours. Perhaps there’s another office in Chelmsford that is having their day brightened by a friendly furry visitor. But there’s a lot of traffic in the area, so I can’t help but fear the worst.

You never know, though; maybe one day when I turn into the courtyard at my workplace in the morning, she’ll be sitting there waiting. We’re certainly going to keep the job free for her.

Flight of the Conchords has been my televisual choice of late, albeit through the collected first series on lovely shiny DVDs. It’s a comedy stuffed full of running jokes about a pair of New Zealanders in America trying to make a success of their novelty band, aided and abetted by their useless manager as he moonlights from his job in the New Zealand consulate. It’s unusual in that the music escapes from the band and into the plot, turning the series into a kind of musical sitcom. And considering that I would generally prefer to have my feet sliced off and fed to me rather than watch a musical, it does a pretty good job. So certainly recommended then. My feet do look so very tasty though, so we might be onto a winner on both counts.

The program is illustrative of a bit of a trend I’ve noticed in US television of late (while written and acted primarily by New Zealanders, Flight of the Conchords is very much an American HBO series). There seems to be an increase in more naturalistic and subtle comedy, creating humour through embarrassment just as much as jokes.

The quintessentially successful US comedies have been the likes of Cheers and Friends and Frasier, shows packed full of set-ups and punchlines meticulously honed by a team of writers to garner as many laughs as possible in a short space of time. Yet recently we’ve seen the likes of Curb Your Enthusiasm and the US version of The Office (which has become really rather good after a shaky start when it emulated the Gervais creation too much.) Both are grounded in a type of comedy that has been traditionally, although not necessarily correctly, seen as more British.

Of course, there are still many of the old-style comedies out there, such as Scrubs and the like, and long may they continue. But variety can only be a good thing.

Something that crossed my mind a while back, and has been bugging me ever since, is this: what rationale is there for continuing to supply gas to domestic homes? Think about it…it’s an invisible, intangible, yet highly volatile substance that we have to pump to our houses through expensive and relatively fragile pipelines whereby it ends up perfectly ready to escape through the tiniest of holes and explode unexpectedly, distributing you and your house over much of the surrounding area. If you do manage to keep it confined to quarters, best be sure that your central heating system is up to scratch lest the carbon monoxide snuffs you out in your sleep with the silent hands of an assassin.

If someone asked you to keep a couple of buckets of petrol or a crate of TNT in your house, you’d probably have to think twice before agreeing. But no-one raises an eyebrow at paying to pipe in an explosive gas which presents a serious threat to that very unraised eyebrow.

It’s not just a safety thing; surely it’s extremely uneconomical? There’s a whole infrastructure of pipework, pumping and processing stations dedicated to supplying millions of houses which must cost enormous amounts to install and maintain. Then all we do is set light to it to warm up a bit of water for our radiators and boil some potatoes for supper, all the while hoping our dinner isn’t going to be curtailed by a massive fireball and the sudden rearrangement of our homes into a neat circle of bricks around a crater.

There’s nothing here that couldn’t be achieved with electricity. Sure, the chefs amongst us might say that gas hobs are slightly better to cook on than electric, but it’s not that much of a sacrifice for a safer life. If baked beans could only be cooked by inserting a stick of dynamite in the pot, I think I could just about manage to cope without them.

In the meantime, if we must continue to burn all that natural gas – which at least will get rid of the nasty stuff – send it to gas power stations and convert it into electricity. That’s got to be more efficient than sticking it through the four tiny little burners on your kitchen hob, with half the heat warming your kitchen rather than the saucepan full of Smash.

And if it stops us having to pay an extortionate amount of money to a man from Corgi every time the boiler needs servicing, then all the better. Just what do dogs know about gas that makes their training so expensive anyway?

Thanks for the image from David Forward’s website.

This is fascinating to me on multiple levels:

Yes, yes, it’s just dolphins playing with bubbles – so far, so hippy-dippy. But it’s the capacity for play in animals that interests me. The dolphins are creating these purely for fun, for the sheer hell of spinning them around, nosing off ever-smaller rings of air to swim through. There’s no useful purpose to them here except entertainment. It’s a very human-like trait to exhibit, although that’s a terrifically arrogant statement – we could just as well say that humans exhibit dolphin-like or ape-like traits.

On top of that, the other thing that grabs my attention is the actual bubbles being created – shimmering hoops that manage to retain their shape even when split apart. A bubble should be round or something close to it, goddammit, not this bizarre toroidal shape! A bit of research showed that quite a few species of dolphin and whale make these – something I never knew until now. And, were I inclined to take up swimming seriously, I’d be able to create similar, but less impressive rings. Although given that I swim like a particularly suicidal brick, any feelings of achievement I might obtain by successfully doing that would be somewhat tempered by my impending watery death.

Of course, being the ever-reliable internet, the same research turned up the usual nutters who seem to think that this is tied in to extra-terrestrial activity. Love the ‘computer-enhanced’ images on that page – nice of them to let us know the huge and obviously fake white blobs that have been painted in might not actually be real.

I don’t know why some people can’t accept that the natural world can be fascinating and amazing enough in itself without having to ascribe it to some nebulous alien or spiritual force. I imagine it’s the ongoing influence of creationism, simply reinterpreted into another form. And that’s a dangerous force when it prevents people from thinking about things critically. Luckily though, I happen to know for a fact that dolphins have other beliefs entirely.

I’ve been reading Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men, not because of the just-released Coen brothers film, but as a result of enjoying another book of his – The Road. The two novels have certain parallels: while The Road is about a man and his son’s journey through a post-apocalyptic American landscape, as one succumbs to radiation sickness caused by an unspecified cataclysmic event, No Country covers the more individual apocalypse resulting from someone’s decision to make off with a satchel of money found at the scene of a drug deal gone wrong.

What I’m finding difficult to deal with is McCarthy’s writing style. In short, he almost totally eschews punctuation, with the exception of full stops and question marks. There are a very few commas and apostrophes, the latter of which seem to be rather erratically applied – present and correct in “I’m”, but missing altogether from “cants” and “wouldnts”.

In The Road, this device seemed to work; it echoed the shattered worldview of the novel – when civilisation has been all but destroyed, what use is there for the tiny, niggling elements of written language when that very language is struggling to survive?

(Incidentally, I’m aware that my description of The Road’s plot makes it sound like a bad sci-fi novel, and that would be an utterly inaccurate description. It’s a far more grounded tale, imagining the true consequences of the presumed nuclear war. There are no monsters here beyond humanity itself and the psychological horror of the near total emptiness of the remaining world.)

Nevertheless, this low-punctuation style appears in No Country for Old Men (and, presumably, McCarthy’s other works). But for me it doesn’t work here; it achieves nothing beyond being a rather overt and intrusive statement of the writer’s style. Maybe it’s the grammar freak in me coming out – I spend a fair bit of time proofreading text at work – but every time I come across a missing apostrophe or suchlike it creates a hitch in the flow of reading. The lack of speech marks are a particular bugbear, making conversations awkward to decipher at times. Lynne Truss would probably blow a gasket. Or…ha-hah!…lapse into a comma.

Despite all this, I am enjoying the novel. I just have that sneaking temptation to send Cormac McCarthy a package of little apostrophes and inverted commas in a pepper shaker, so that he could sprinkle it over his writing and season to taste.

So then…a blog.

I guess I’m coming a bit late to the party here. These are the days that have crept up upon us when it seems that ninety percent of the people you meet are running a blog, or a myspace site, or are sitting behind their computer corralling everybody they’ve ever met into their friends list on Facebook. Will we ever reach the moment where the headlines say “Man has entire world population listed as friends”?

Actually, that’s a pretty long headline, though I’m willing to bet the Onion has got it covered.

But anyway, I decided to begin this experiment for a whole range of only moderately interesting reasons. And at the risk of turning my first post into the sort of dull drivel that’ll force your brain through your nostrils and make a mess of your keyboard, here goes…

1) I enjoy writing. And despite the fact that I studied two flavours of English at university, together with a year-long creative writing course, I’ve ended up doing almost no writing for myself since. Initial searches for a job after university actually ended up bizarrely with me becoming a graphic designer in magazine publishing. Now I enjoy design very much, and no doubt there will be posts in the future covering the topic, but the only writing I really get to do at work is for marketing material and suchlike which is not exactly fulfilling creatively unless you’re the sort of person who wants to constantly tell everyone how amazing and wonderful and nipple-stiffeningly fabulous everything is.

2) To blither on about things I find interesting. And that’d be a whole lot of things which I hope will start to emerge.

3) To see what it’s all about. I’ve had this tribefive.co.uk domain for some time, nominally to set up as a portfolio for freelance design work in my spare time. But pressure of my full-time job has meant I haven’t got all that far on that score. So I might as well use the site for something, and it gives me a chance to experiment with setting up and configuring WordPress, the blogging software running this mountain of self justification and pretension.

4) As a pathetic excuse to spend a lot of money on something that is cool, but that I don’t really need. Which would be the positively bulimic MacBook Air which is so thin that you could probably fold it into a paper aeroplane. Furthermore, it’s got a swishy gesture-based touchpad that’ll take me one step closer to being Tom Cruise in Minority Report. Although I don’t really want to be that close to the Cruise-meister, seeing as Scientology appears to have sent him mental. There aren’t many religions that appear to class insanity and spouting gibberish as a desirable end result - that’s the sort of thing that usually starts religions. Anyways, my reasoning goes as follows:

- I wanted to start a blog
- I don’t really want to have to go and sit at the computer every time I want to post. Being able to blog whilst on my sofa, out and about, or lying in bed would be much better. Blogging from a reclined position is really the only civilised way to do things, after all.
- Thus, lovely wireless technology of joy must be acquired to achieve this. Yes, yes, there are much cheaper and more practical options out there, but la la la I can’t hear you. Yes, I already own two other computers but fingers in ears, fingers in ears.

 So then, the Mac’s on order, and this first post is…posted.