Go forth

So then, Network Rail has been fined a record £14 million for screwing up rail maintenance over Christmas.

Now let’s get this straight. Network Rail is having its usual host of difficulties taking care of the tracks that are generally considered fairly important for trains, and trains are of course pretty important for getting trainspotters off the streets where they’d probably indulge their odd compulsions by collecting guns before one day cracking and heading off to work with a bagful of heavy weaponry.

Obviously then, the answer is to take away the money that Network Rail would use to carry out that maintenance because, as we all know, having less money to invest is guaranteed to mean a better service all round. If we took away all their money, just think how absolutely amazing the train networks would become. I expect we’d get a hundred trains an hour, shooting along tracks as smooth as buttered mercury.

And taking away money is much easier than looking into the problem, working out efficient solutions and employing people to do the job properly. I’ll even help them with suggestions on how to get along with even less money. For example, why don’t we convert the whole system to monorail? That’d mean they’d only have half the amount of track to maintain, instantly halving costs and freeing up cash to pay some more fines. Soon the system will be so efficient that all the funding given to Network Rail will be instantly bounced back again to the government, save for a modest fee of around 20 percent to pay for the bureaucrats needed to think up and administer those fines.

Hmm, hold on a minute. Bounced back to the government? What do you mean, ‘back’? Well, here’s the thing. It’s not a big thing, so let’s not dwell on it too much. Barely even important, really. It’s just that Network Rail is funded by…er…the government, although they are quite keen to give the impression that this isn’t the case. And the government is funded by…um…everyone who pays taxes. So this £14 million of fines is just taxpayers’ money that the government gave to Network Rail, and is now taking back again, less all the thousands of pounds needed to pay for the civil servants and paperwork.

It’s a bit like a lovely merry-go-round of taxes, except that this particular merry-go-round happens to be run by some rather creative minions of Satan who are making it slowly spiral inwards, compressing all the cash into a massive black hole comprised of nothingness and terrible rail transport systems.

Genius like this makes my head hurt.

A thought, of the kind that crosses my mind when I’m trying to find excuses not to go to sleep:

If we had perfect memories, would nostalgia still exist?

Is the hankering for the “good old days” just the automatic self-editing of our minds to filter out the banal, humdrum, and even unhappy side of the past – leaving or enhancing the stronger, pleasant feelings? The good things seem to become better, the bad things become just a little less bad. Does the brain have a little optician’s shop just behind the amygdala to supply its own custom pair of rose tinted spectacles?

If we didn’t forget or alter these events in our mind, retaining a perfect record of our experiences, would we be denied the ability to look back so fondly on things? “Schooldays are the happiest days of your lives” is a phrase that is so often trotted out it has become a cliché, but with our brain’s tendency to modify the truth, who can really tell?

As technology advances, we’re likely to gain ways to record our experiences more accurately. It’ll start in the military and particularly police forces where head-mounted cameras and logging systems are already being trialled, making it possible to accurately keep track of evidence. Over time, this will move into consumer use, and most likely eventually to be integrated into our bodies and accessible on a whim.

It will be the ultimate diary, faithfully tracking every experience. But it won’t automatically do what the brain does – it won’t enhance some memories and suppress others. It will be full and complete; the good, the bad, and a whole lot of the absolutely dull routine rigamarole of life. Ninety percent of it will be memories of brushing teeth, getting dressed, eating, or watching television.

Nostalgia isn’t reality, so will it be lost? And with perfect recall of the best, most enjoyable things we have done, will we be forlorn to look through our memories and see how little of the time we have actually spent doing those excellent things against the time we’ve spent hanging around, working, sleeping, eating?

I have just watched probably one of the stupidest films ever.

Except… let me just stop there, for a quick interjection of honesty. In actuality I haven’t just watched this film. Instead I saw it a couple of nights ago. See how I’m deceiving you and trying to increase the emphasis on stupidity by suggesting that I immediately needed to rush off and blog about it? You’re just absolutely reliant on the honesty of my reporting, aren’t you? I could tell you almost anything and you’d have no idea how true it was. Admittedly, I’d struggle to get away with spinning a tale of a night of passion with Scarlett Johansson (it was actually Angelina Jolie), but for all you know I might be sitting here with my underpants on my head making up every last word as imaginary butterflies spray rainbows through the air.

But despite the temptations, I will try always to be honest, good and truthful, so let’s start again.

Two nights ago, I watched probably one of the stupidest films ever. My grammatically correct heart here wants to write ‘most stupid’, but ’stupidest’ just rings better – you can imagine Elmer Fudd expelling a shower of saliva as he says it.

The title of this film is Shoot ‘Em Up, not an auspicious start if you’re looking for something like a searing portrait of working class life set against the background of the miners’ strikes. But I wasn’t looking for that, because it would be tremendously dull.

It is effectively 83 minutes of the most ridiculously unlikely rolling gun battles and violence with nary a pause for breath. In a bold move, the director has chosen to use the money that would usually be wasted on things like screenwriters and plots to buy in a lorryload of blank bullets and an army of extras whose sole purpose is to die incredibly swiftly. How stupid is it? Well, the lead character, played by Clive Owen, kills someone with a carrot. Repeatedly.

Obviously, Shoot ‘Em Up is brilliant. It is the epitome of mindless entertainment, and there are times when that’s all you need. Switch on television, switch off brain, enjoy, pausing only to wipe the little stream of dribble from the corner of your slackly hanging mouth.

I have a certain fondness for that kind of film – it’s the same joyous cavalcade of stunts that you get in practically every Jackie Chan film. Or in Crank for that matter, which is basically Speed but with Jason Statham playing the bus – if his heart-rate goes below a certain level, he dies. (Funnily enough, if my heart-rate goes below a certain level, I die too, but the point is that he’s got to keep his rate very high. It fails to make any more sense in the movie either, so don’t worry.)

So, you should watch Shoot ‘Em Up if you can. You’ll never admit to anyone that you enjoyed it, and those brain cells won’t grow back, but you can have fun telling everyone quite how stupid it is.

This is the new logo for Cardiff. It cost £45,000.

No, no, no, no, no, no, no. No.

This does not say Cardiff. It does not evoke images of the city’s history, its castle or attractions. It has no sense of the national pride of the Welsh, or indeed any humanity whatsoever. It just does nothing, slipping out of the mind faster than a greased ferret down a teflon pipe. This is the logo of a low-grade technology park, a cheap paint manufacturer or a doomed-to-failure eBay clone.

I’m not even the slightest bit Welsh, but I feel embarrassment for anyone in Cardiff who is going to have to accept this as a representation of their city.

Phew. Bit of a gap in blog posting here – the past five days have been magazine deadline. Every month, the week before print date is a final rush of 12 hour days to get editorials designed, adverts in, and pages in place. Thus does the glamorous world of publishing concertina down into the reality of sitting in front of a computer until your eyeballs collapse, roll down your cheeks and land damply on the desk so they can stare up accusingly at you for inflicting such abuses upon them.

We usually try to organise deadlines so they fall on a Friday; it allows a weekend to recover. Printers work practically 24-7 to keep the presses active so the mag will typically be turned from electronic files to coloured sheets of dead wood on the Sunday. Then it’s off to the shops, and the airport lounges, and around the world in the expensive-class cabins of various airlines.

So what’s been happening out of work in the meantime? Well, for a start the spambots have found the blog, rather faster than I expected. I’m getting about five spam comments a day at present, offering me enough genital enlargement tonics that I’d need a wheelbarrow to get around. WordPress is doing a pretty good job of filtering them out though.

More importantly, the MacBook Air has arrived to satisfy my geeky cravings, and it’s pretty darn perfect for my needs. This very entry is being typed from the downy embrace of my bed as iTunes wirelessly streams post-deadline stress-deadening music across the network – a bit of Alabama 3 hits the spot just nicely.

It amused me to see how, shortly after Apple announced the launch of this svelte little slice of technology, the internet became filled with the usual barely coherent keyboard-pounding monkeys announcing how “it sucks, lol” or variations on the theme.

Have you noticed how so many of our fellow travellers in the interworldweb seem to default into only two possible reactions in situations like this? Either they profess to hate something so much it makes them physically retch up their stomach lining like a sea cucumber, or they love it with a passion that compels them to defend its honour in the manner of a sex-smitten illiterate baboon. You see it in YouTube comments, discussion forums, blogs, everywhere.

For these people there is no middle ground, no compromise. Each knows he or she is right, and will fight to the bitter death with broken English and unintelligible invective. Were I still officially studying English Language, I might be tempted to write a paper on the subject – it’s practically the opposite of Grice’s cooperative principles.

Or perhaps these aren’t real people at all. Perhaps this is just what the spambots do for fun when they’re not plaguing other people’s blogs – expressions of their essential binary, computery nature where you’re either a 1 or a 0, for it or against.

Let us fight for the middle ground, I say. Let us weigh the pros and cons of every situation. Let us champion the cause of reasoned argument, flexible viewpoints and different strokes for different folks.

And if you don’t agree with me, you’re wrong and you suck.

I have a confession to make. So here it is: I don’t drink coffee.

Not one of those earth-shattering confessions, I know. It’s not a revelation that I’m actually two people, or that I’ve been dead all along. But, from the reactions I get from people, it seems to be considered a little unusual. It’s like saying you’re not a fan of breathing, or that no, you wouldn’t like to win the lottery thank you very much.

The typical reply I get when people find out about my coffee-averse nature is for them to suggest that I’m being sensibly healthy, as if it’s a puritan choice I’ve made to extricate myself from the grasping clutches of caffeine in order to become a god amongst men. That’s not the case though – I scoff enough chocolate to easily make up for the lack of caffeine in my fluid intake, added to which there’s a regular can of Cherry Coke that makes up my afternoon ritual on workdays. Coca Cola ranks slightly below depleted uranium on the ‘good for you’ scale.

The reason I don’t drink coffee is this: I don’t like it.

I know it’s supposed to be an acquired taste; kids hate it, but for teenagers it becomes a grown-up thing to do, then by the time adulthood comes coffee is just a natural part of social life. The rise of all the Costa Bucks and Star Neros cafe-genericae shows the power of coffee culture. All these places have a range of options for coffee-dodgers like me though – hazelnut hot chocolates seem to be in season at present. Mmm, nutty.

Yet not drinking coffee still causes awkwardness – I remember a friend crying in bewilderment “But you don’t even drink coffee!” when finding out I was reading a book about the bean’s history. Equally, there are bonuses: I don’t have to get involved with making drinks at work, especially since I don’t drink tea either. Which, incidentally, to me tastes like hot, wet cardboard – I genuinely struggle to imagine how anybody could drink that stuff at all.

Nevertheless, there are signs that I might be changing, slowly adapting as I’m worn down by the constant presence of coffee around me. Last summer, I discovered frappuccinos, which although not exactly your traditional mode of coffee, are a lot closer to it than I usually get. So in ten years time I may find myself a happy part of normal coffee-driven culture. Of course, knowing my luck, by that time the rest of society may well be fixated on beverages made out of pine bark and squirrel droppings or something and I’ll be causing just as much bafflement as I am now.

This is just one of those astounding images I could look at for hours.

I was idly skimming through a copy of Marketing at work a while back when the UK launch of the following essential product caught my eye:

Yes, these are exactly what they appear to be. Snausages Breakfast Bites are bacon and egg shaped food items for dogs, presumably for doting owners to feed to their little Fido at the break of day. Needless to say, they originate in America.

I’m sorry, but dogs do not care what their food looks like, as evidenced by their continued survival on miscellaneous brown and grey meat paste from a Pedigree Chum tin. Dogs will eat anything, up to and including sticks, stones and their own poo. Actually looking at what they’re about to scarf down comes as an afterthought.

And if your much-loved bundle of fuzz were to take a glance at these bacon and egg shaped travesties in the moments before slobbering, they’d be pretty disappointed. Because looking at the ingredients, ‘Breakfast Bites’ contain neither bacon nor eggs, making them a kind of zen food: What is the taste of no eggs and bacon?

Holy cow though, they do have oregano, black pepper, basil, rosemary and marjoram – that’s more herbs than I usually use when I cook something. The ‘chicken by-product meal’ sounds mighty tasty too.

A nose around on the Snausages site (and when typing ‘Snausages’ I have to resist the urge to follow it with a ™) uncovers a treasure trove of twee and pointless foods like these 101 Dalmations biscuits with facts about the film printed upon them:

Hint to manufacturers: Dogs cannot read. Humans can read but do not generally read dog biscuits. And even if dogs could read, they aren’t likely to want to know that each dog in a film they will never see has 32 spots. They would much rather have information as to what each character’s bottom smells like – that’s far more relevant to your average canine.

Honestly, novelty shaped food is something that should be restricted to small children for whom rocket shaped breakfast cereal, Billy Bear sausagemeat and alphabetti spaghetti will induce gurglings of delight. I notice that Snausages don’t seem to produce any cat-shaped dog biscuits - maybe that’s introducing owners to too much of what I like to call reality.

Talking about spaghetti though…

Come on now, dogs are descended from cunning wild animals streaking across open plains in groups, running down herds of deer and antelope for food. Wolf packs did not sit and decide to go for a quick spag bol or lasagne instead. A wolf deciding to go for a quick Italian just means it’s chasing a chap who’s particularly light on his feet. Pasta is not dogfood – the only reason Rover will eat this is because it’s wrapped around lumps of lamb and dogs can’t hide the bits they don’t want under their spoon like a child can.

This Friday was one of the semi-regular trips to London I make to meet with former university compadre Cap’n Sharp. We usually try to do a couple of museums or exhibitions, rounded off by what has now become a tradition of cocktails at a TGI Fridays. I’m not quite sure how manly it is to drink a huge banana and ice cream concoction called a Chocolate Monkey, but it tasted just fine, as did all the other cocktails I tested. Still got to pluck up the courage to ask for a Grendel though…

But that’s beside the point. It’s the culture that’s the important bit, and first stop was the Wellcome Collection, which can only be described as a smorgasbord of medical ephemera thrown into a series of rooms with only loose connections between the various items. Thus there’s an entire mummified body cheek by jowl with a Chinese sign made from human teeth, some 19th century Japanese sex aids, slivers of tattooed skin and a trepanned skull. There is a bit of an emphasis on bodily remains, so the squeamish might want to give it a miss.

There is also a small area dedicated to more recent medical research, in particular the Human Genome Project. A huge rack of books printed in tiny lettering comprise the raw DNA sequence of one person and serve to give a good insight into the sheer amount of data encoded in the molecule. But, and this was the case with most of the Wellcome Collection, I would have liked a bit more information about this. If you’re up on your biology, you’ll know that DNA is encoded with bases designated by A, C, G and T. Through the books on display, some of the letter groupings were in lowercase, while others were capitals, but with nothing to explain the difference. I would guess that perhaps these designate encodings for specific amino acids, as opposed to the junk DNA that makes up much of the molecule, but who knows? I do find sometimes in museums that not enough information is given to the visitor – I appreciate that you don’t always have time to read huge swathes of text about an exhibit, but it would be nice to have the option.

Perhaps the most cohesive part of the Collection was the current temporary exhibition Sleeping & Dreaming which benefited from being dedicated to one topic.

The afternoon destination was the Design Museum, which is always a bit of a gamble depending on what they are exhibiting at any given time. This month’s focus was Jean Prouvé, whose skills lay more in the functional than aesthetic - some of the classic school chair designs, for example, where economy and durability outweighs beauty. As Cap’n Sharp pointed out, they are some of the items that you don’t think of having been designed in the first place. Prouvé also produced some interesting modular architecture, but this wasn’t shown to very good effect at the exhibition. All in all a bit of a disappointment, for me at least. This was balanced out however by the ever-intriguing shop at the Design Museum, filled with all kinds of designery knick knacks. It could easily be extended to twice its size or more and still be successful.