Literary roundup

My avider readers may have noticed, amid the sporadic coverage of this year, that my book reviews have been trending to the negative. Of the two books I've reviewed this year, both have fallen short of my expectations, at least in any positive sense. My public, I make no doubt, will be worried for me. There's only so long one's soul can survive on the sort of diet I've discussed in the previous two literary posts.

But allow me to reassure you, dear reader, that my literary experiences have not all been negative. I have in fact read some fine works this year. Some of them, indeed, several hundred times.

There's a Wocket in my Pocket is far from Dr Seuss's greatest work. It lacks the compelling characterisation of The Cat in the Hat, the poignant pathos of Yertle the Turtle or the timeless sagacity of Oh, the Places You'll Go. But on the other hand, its vivid depiction of a world packed with sentient creatures in every cranny echoes the powerful meanings of Shinto or Gaian animism, and that can only be a good thing. In other words: if you think there's a jertain in your curtain, you'll treat it with more respect.

More importantly, the pages are made of stiff card, which means it can survive day-to-day handling by a 16-month-old child. That, indeed, is the common theme of this list.

Ten Little Babies, Gyo Fujikawa's sinister thriller based on the Agatha Christie novel, tells of the varying fates of - as the title suggests - ten babies. The illustrations make quite clear, however, that the nine little babies who went to bed late are not included in the ten who originally sat down to dine. So in fact there are 55 little babies in this book, only ten of which are accounted for. A disturbing thought.

Guess How Much I Love You is the only book on this list that belongs to me, having been a gift from Susan some years ago, and ownership not having formally transferred to Atilla. I must remember to include it in my will. In reading to 'Tilly, I have been forced to recognise that although stretching out one's arms or reaching up high are fine graphical demonstrations of "this much" - flipping oneself upside down and stretching one's feet up a convenient tree trunk is, frankly, hard.

Duck's Stuck, a muddy fable of farmyard life, doesn't aspire to either the poetic or artistic heights of a Seuss. But it does have a quiet little charm of its own, which I can best explain by pointing to the fact that Cow's lines are predominantly words that you can actually moo. "Cow chewed. Feathers flew. 'Try now', mooed Cow." I defy you to read that aloud without changing your voice. This, together with the great "Aaaa-chooo", have kept this book firmly at the top of Tilly's favourites list for more than three months.

How to Catch a Star is a little more advanced, with its themes of holistic astronomy, sophisticated engineering and animal training. 'Tilly is less convinced by it, generally seeing it as a last resort to fend off the moment when he finally has to accept that it's bedtime.

Honourable mention should go to That's Not My Polar Bear, now pretty much retired, but an invaluable guide to distinguishing wildlife. Thanks to this book, 'Tilly has known since before his first birthday that if he is confused between two polar bears, he can identify one from another by carefully squeezing their noses, tickling their tummies and rubbing their tongues. Valuable tips, I'm sure we can all agree.

Sam Vimes, RIP

I'm a Terry Pratchett fan.

My credentials for that claim are, I think, impressive. I started reading his books before many of his present fans were born. I've introduced dozens of people to the Discworld. Until 2001 I was a leading light of his online fan community, and I have an e-mail address "@lspace.org" to prove it. I once bought the man a drink, and - indirectly at least - he first introduced me to my wife. It's no exaggeration to say, Pratchett changed my life.

So it's not a casual or flippant verdict, when I say that his latest book, Snuff, frankly isn't up to it.

I wouldn't go so far as to say it's a bad book. (Although I know one reviewer who would.) It was good enough to keep me up late enough to irritate the wife. Say rather that it's - unfinished.

First among its issues is pacing. The first hundred pages are, frankly, tedious. Characters whom we know as terse and economical spend page after page rambling on about nothing. And three-quarters of the way through the book, we're into the nailbiting climax... which drags on for altogether too long before seguing into another chase scene, culminating in... another confrontation, ending with the villain safely captured with 30 pages still to go. No prizes for guessing what happens next.

In between, we skim like a mayfly across the surface of the story, although 'surface' may be too flattering. Because there's also a problem with focus. In the first few pages, it's established that our villains are smugglers who peddle lethal drugs to trolls. A little later the crime seems to have morphed into trading in stolen goblin artifacts. And then there's a whole plotline about slavery. In fact our shadowy baddies are guilty of all these things, although you get the feeling it's sheer lucky coincidence that all these crimes are committed by the same handy villains - but none of them are described in enough detail to make me care as I should like about such atrocities. The evil mastermind never even appears on page, which makes it hard to feel much closure from his implied comeuppance. And at least two promising characters are introduced, then promptly forgotten, only to reappear for some particularly clunky jokes at the end.

The man formerly known as our hero, Sam Vimes, is being sent to the country on holiday.

In this book, the Vimes who has faced down dragons, clowns, assassins and kings is pitted against - a young thug whose very description reads "nondescript". If the calibre of your enemies is a measure of greatness, then Vimes has fallen far. From the indomitable, cynical rage of his earlier books, Vimes is reduced to a sort of selfconscious squirming about his place - both geographical and social.

Vimes lay there miserably, straining his ears for the reassuring noises of a drunk going home, or arguing with the sedan-chair owner about the vomit on the cushions, and the occasional street fight, domestic disturbance or even piercing scream, all punctuated at intervals by the chiming of the city clocks, no two of which, famously, ever agreed; and the more subtle sounds, like the rumble of the honey wagons as Harry King's night-soil collectors went about the business of business.

This sort of detail - which goes on for several hundred more words - would be understandable if it were Vimes's first trip outside the city - but of course it's not, he's been on much longer journeys than this before. It's hard to describe this hideous sentence as anything more charitable than 'filler'.

And that, sadly, is characteristic of the writing in this book. Even when the pace picks up after the first act, the lightness of touch from earlier volumes is gone. In the face of life-threatening urgency, characters noted for terse seriousness find themselves spouting turgid speeches that it is, frankly, hard to imagine anyone staying to hear the end of.

For comparison: here's an exchange between Vimes and Vetinari in Feet of Clay (1996):

Lord Vetinari glanced at a piece of paper. 'Did you really punch the president of the Assassins' Guild?'
'Yes, sir.'
'Why?'
'Didn't have a dagger, sir.'

Now here's the same two characters in Snuff (2011):

Vimes's knuckles reddened. 'They are living creatures who can think and talk and have songs and names, and he treated them like some kind of disposable tools.'
'Indeed, Vimes, but, as I have indicated, goblins have always been considered a kind of vermin. However, Ankh-Morpork, the kingdom of the Low King and also that of the Diamond King, Uberwald, Lancre and all the independent cities of the plain are passing a law to the effect that this drivel goes on for another full page.'

But by far the worst is what's happened to the character of Sam Vimes himself. He's always been a character 'on the edge', wrestling with his inner demons to act as a good man should. But now, this ultimate defender of the downtrodden against the wielders of privilege - repeatedly trades on his own privileged position. At one point the local plod turns up to arrest him, and rather than presenting his exonerating evidence, he simply intimidates the young man with his physical power and personal prestige. Within a few pages, the constable is practically tugging his forelock to his better.

Vimes has become the thing he hates: an aristocrat. He quite literally makes up the law as he goes along. And that's supposed to be all right because he's a good man.

The Pratchett of even ten years ago would have been the first to point out the problem with this. But now he seems to have given up the philosophy, along with the humour. What's left is a workmanlike story with some nice images; but if this were the first Pratchett book I read, it would also have been the last, and my life would have been quite different.

Parenthood

For those who don't know: Susan is currently expecting our first child.

(By "expecting", I mean "growing internally". A bit like a cannabis plant, but more expensive.)

It's an exciting, disturbing and costly time. There's stuff to buy, stuff to research, stuff to prepare and book and make. And Susan's appetite, always healthy, is growing positively heroic. Having spent years learning to cook smaller portions, now I find she can eat as much in one sitting as I can. The difference being that while I typically eat only a light breakfast and/or a light lunch followed by a proper dinner, she currently eats solidly for three or more meals a day. I think of myself as following the "camel" model, whereas she's closer to "cormorant".

And it seems as if there's a carefully constructed script that we're supposed to follow. No-one has given us a copy - which is fine by me - but somehow we're meant to know it.

The midwife tells us some of it. Yesterday, for instance, S had a blood test that's supposed to tell whether she may be developing diabetes - the midwife told us about that one. And the various ultrasound scan sessions. (For some reason, it's customary to refer to the image one sees on these occasions as "perfectly formed". I don't know about anyone else's experience, but what I saw on the screen would not have looked out of place on a Halloween mask.)

And we're shopping for all the hideous paraphernalia of early parenthood. Cots and bassinets and mattresses and changing tables and strollers and child seats and day-care facilities and who knows what we've forgotten? (Apart from the people trying to sell it to us, of course.)

At this point, I'm wondering through what loophole "parenthood" has slipped into the modern world as something that's still allowed to be done by amateurs. If you want to build a house, or a bridge, or a car, or open a pub, or treat a sick animal (let alone a human), or even cut down a tree in this country - there's a whole grand checklist of things you need to know and do, and even enterprising, can-do people will take time to research it. Most of us, most of the time, will just find someone who's qualified to do it for us.

But not parenting. There are plenty of books that tell you how to do it, but there's no nationally-mandated standard or test to pass. There is no compliance certificate for children.

I'm not complaining. It just seems - incongruous, that's all. After all: the arguments for building codes - that it affects public safety and hygiene, makes a material difference to people's lives, that faults may not become apparent for many years after building, may be impossible or outrageously expensive to fix later - all apply a fortiori to raising a child.

The whole tooth

We call it the Medical Mile: a stretch of Remuera Road where every building is a high-powered clinic. If you can buy a medical treatment in New Zealand, this is where you come to pick it up. Just down the road is where my sister-in-law got her eyes lasered. Along this road you can buy any treatment from a glorified pedicure to hair restoration surgery. It is not a locale for the faint-of-wallet.

It's my teeth that have brought me here. I want a deep filling replaced; my high-street dentist has spent the best part of three hours excavating it with everything short of heavy mining equipment, before declaring that she's never seen such a devious and twisted root and how would I feel about going to a specialist? It's a shame, she says, because my teeth are mostly in excellent shape - I only have the one filling, but it is, as we say up north, a doozy.

Reassuringly, the consultants' surgery is not quite on the Medical Mile itself. Presumably going twenty metres down a side road makes the rents cheaper. But inside all is light and modern and airy, a far cry from the rather dingy high-street offices of my regular dentist. You can see what these guys do with their $1000 an hour.

There are four women behind the reception desk, all of them carrying the air of full-time employees, all working. Only one of them is dealing with a visitor; according to the sign in front of her desk, she's the one I need to check in with. Of course. Her visitor is telling her all about her daughter's pregnancy.

I approve of this. Making the clients feel relaxed is an important part of the job; if that means chatting aimlessly, then chat they should. Quite right. I just wish one of the other three could deal with me in the meantime. All they have to do is hand me one of those stupid forms asking about my medical conditions. But they're far too busy to look up from their respective spreadsheets.

Eventually I get my form ("Do you have leprosy?", and suchlike penetrating questions - I wonder if the purpose is to check that you've come to the right clinic) and take a seat. There are half a dozen people in the waiting room, mostly older than me. There are two ways to look at this: either I'm successful enough to afford The Best treatment earlier in my life than others, or I'm mug enough to be paying top dollar while my hipper contemporaries all know better options. I decide to look on the bright side.

I don't have to wait long.

Dr Peter shakes me warmly by the wallet and welcomes me into his surgery. Here, again, the evidences of Upmarket are not hard to see. The mounted binocular microscopes for peering into one's cavities; the X-ray viewer displaying on screen, rather than (as at my high-street dentist) on tiny sheets of film; the video monitor on the ceiling - I'm not stuck with staring into a lamp while he rummages. On my first visit, I got to watch Belinda Carlisle - not that I was really in the mood to appreciate it, but I was looking forward to some more eye candy to relieve the next hour and a half. But instead I'm treated to BBC coverage of the aftermath of Britain's election. I'm not sure I wouldn't be better off with the lamp.

Dr P exclaims in admiration at the quality of my teeth, even while he sets to work on the miscreant molar. There are drills, buzzsaws, sanders - it looks like Black & Decker's entire catalogue in 1/36 scale - and pretty soon I can sense the gaping hole where my temporary filling used to be. Then he attacks the remaining filling material with a collection of solvents, the least of which is chloroform. I'm wondering whatever happened to general anaesthetics.

The session lasted a little longer than the budgeted 90 minutes, so I consider myself lucky to be charged a mere $1000 for the experience. And now I have a nice even filling that looks and feels vaguely like a tooth. Bargain. The downside is that I have to go back in June for him to take out the temporary inner filling and replace it with a permanent one.

All kinds of juvenile

Students have been in the news lately, and not for the right reasons. I remember when students made headlines by their exemplary work calling into question the advertising of well-established brands. Ah, those happy bygone days...

Last week, we heard a great deal more about the "Undie 500".

For those who have the good fortune not to know what that means, it's an annual event - a "tradition" - of students driving from Christchurch to Dunedin, to go on a pub crawl. Ostensibly it's an occasion for car enthusiasts to show off their lovingly maintained vehicles. But in the way of traditions, it's become so much more than that. Nowadays, to hear the media tell it, it's mostly about drunkenness and rioting in the streets. At the event a couple of weeks ago, some 80 people were arrested and 67 charged.

Politicians love it. The mayor of Dunedin - one Peter Chin, a typical local politithug - was quick to blame out-of-town students for the whole mess, conveniently ignoring the fact that most of those arrested actually lived in or around Dunedin. John Key, our Beloved Leader, seemed unsure whether he should be wringing his hands with sorrow, or gloating over lawbreakers facing the Awful Majesty of their comeuppance. He settled for deploring the "waste of their futures", as a result of graduating with a criminal conviction.

(Yeah, like any employer is going to care about some student misdemeanour... It's just another part of the Great Lie we tell kids, the lie of the "permanent record", that there's some kind of recording angel who knows the wrongs they do and will hold it against them at some unspecified later time. Absolute bollocks, of course. The truth is that almost nobody cares now, and even they will have forgotten by Christmas.)

And today comes the news of another fine tradition, this time from Lincoln University. (That's Lincoln the one-horse town near Christchurch, New Zealand, not Lincoln the historic county town in England. That Lincoln has a university that is, as far as I know, entirely reputable.) New Zealand's self-styled "specialist land-based" university held an Oktoberfest party (huh?) with a German theme. Nothing wrong with that, apart from the date. What got it into the news was the fact that an unspecified number of students turned up sporting Nazi uniforms, regalia and slogans.

"It was not an issue of racism or Nazi ideals, it was a lack of understanding," says student association president Megan Harte. She points out that some of the students were first years who may not have known what the "Holocaust was all about".

I feel for Ms Harte here. She clearly feels it's her job to defend the indefensible. Even so, this is pretty feeble stuff. Lincoln is a very "vocational" university: it doesn't even offer a course in "history" or anything like it. It's not clear why students of "Valuation & Property Management" should be expected to come out of university knowing much more about the Holocaust than when they went in.

Dear Mr Key, Ms Harte, Mr Chin, and countless other Kiwis: university isn't about learning facts and skills that will see you through your working life. Sure you might pick up some of those if you're lucky, but really you'd learn ten times faster by just going out to work. University is a nice sheltered environment where you go to grow up. The courses are just there to give you something to think about while you do it.

Troubleshooting your Rheem Integrity continuous-flow boiler

1. Is the gas connected to the boiler? If not, what is it connected to? This investigation should be undertaken by someone with a functioning sense of smell, and preferably without any naked flames.


2. Is the power connected? Jiggle the plug into the socket a bit. Try plugging in something else, like a lamp, to test it. If you bring down one of your nice bedside lamps for this purpose, try not to scratch it on the wall en route.


3. Is it a weekend? If so, don't bother calling around gas fitters. Everyone in the Auckland area who has the first clue how these things work, also has better things to do with their weekends. Good for them. You can get by without hot water for a day or so.


4. Are you sure about the power?


5. Don't take the cover off. I mean it.


6. If you conducted the test described in (2), try the boiler again now. Then try running an extension lead out from inside the house. An ordinary, lightweight lead will do - it only has to power a bit of basic electronics, nothing heavy-duty. Connect the boiler to a socket you know is working, and try the hot water again.


7. It was the power, wasn't it?


8. In your bathroom, probably on the ground floor, there's a socket like those shaver outlets you get in hotels, with an orange LED plus blue and green buttons cryptically labelled "Test" and "Reset". When you press "Test", the orange LED should go out. When you press "Reset", it comes back on.


9. For no very obvious reason, these buttons control your boiler. If the LED is out, the boiler won't work, even though the socket outside appears to be turned on.


10. I know, I know.


11. If you absolutely must call Rheem:
    1. You should know, it'll cost you at least $100.
    2. A man will come and look at the boiler. He will be perfectly civil and informative, and yet somehow contrive to make you feel like a drooling idiot.
    3. He will take the cover off - revealing an incomprehensible mess of wiring that will make you glad you didn't take the cover off - and re-invoke the last few error codes by following a high-tech procedure requiring a retractable ballpoint pen.
    4. These codes will all say "Ignition failure", which means "out of gas". I think it's the only error code there is.
    5. Feel free to discuss the weather, sports, any home improvement projects you may have in mind with this man. He's perfectly friendly once you get to know him.
    6. There's also a water filter, which he'll check if he's feeling thorough, but since the water comes directly from the mains, it's vanishingly unlikely - under normal operation - that the filter will ever have anything to do
    7. That'll be $100 please.
    
    
12. If you need to call an electrician, that'll be closer to $200. For that fee, he'll tell you about the trip switch in the bathroom.

And that's the lessons I learned this last four days. Provided to you, the faithful reader, for free. Such are the joys of home ownership.

Pacific survivalism

Just when we'd pretty much forgotten about swine flu, the government is urging us to panic - sorry, I should have spelled that "prepare" - all over again. "Swine flu will hit us hard", apparently.

As vague, existential threats go, swine flu is pretty mild. All we're supposed to do is stock up on preserved foods ("three to five days") and paracetemol. The idea being that nobody should have to die just because they can't get to the shops for a few days.

I like this kind of fearmongering. The prescribed precautions are cheap, and not too hard. More importantly, they scale: everyone can do this, without actually causing the end of civilisation as we know it. Contrast that with full-blown survivalism, which traditionally involves lots of land plus a robust attitude to trespassers.

In New Zealand, most of us can imagine electricity, and water, failing. We can imagine police, medical and fire services not being available. We can imagine a world with no food in the shops and no petrol in the pumps, at least temporarily. What we really can't imagine is the world of the traditional demented survivalist fantasy: where civilisation breaks down, and we have to stand alone against armed gangs and crazed marauders.

This kind of scenario always assumes that the protagonist stands alone. And hey, it could happen. I'm no more immune to heroic fantasy than the next guy. But it could also be a self-fulfilling fantasy. For me, when that disaster strikes, I'd rather be working with my neighbours than against them.

The kill

A few days ago, I wrote that we were over house hunting. The searching and the researching and the devoting every weekend to trekking the length and breadth of the city - all this we've been doing since September. Enough already.

And last night, we nailed it.



It was an auction, which I know as an opportunity for either heartbreak or cutting observation, depending on how much you care about the house. We did care about this one. It's the nicest house we've seen in a couple of months, it's in the right area and the right nominal price range...

It's amazing, the things my mind does to me when it's under pressure.

I made use of all the experience I gained at our first attempt to buy at auction. Set a high limit, as high as you can bear; position yourself at the back, where you can see the other bidders; don't bid first, but when you do get going, don't hesitate.

Setting a high limit was easy. The CV was so comfortably within our range that I couldn't believe bidding would go too high for us. But psychology is a funny thing. As we sat in the packed café, waiting for the auction to begin, I kept thinking about resale value, running costs, opportunity costs - all the reasons why we might be paying too much. Was it worth what we'd agreed? - and could we afford it? - really? - really really? Six percent of 400,000 is 24,000 - plus 20,000 to repay, that's 44,000 in the first year, and then Susan is going to have to get the bus to work, that's not a calculation I want to be doing in my head, certainly not now, but I can't stop myself.

Sitting at the back was all very well, but as the place filled up I realised two things. One was that we'd been trumped by people standing behind the back, out on the street and leaning in through the windows. The other was that with ten rows in front of us, we risked invisibility. But one has to have faith in the auctioneer - it's not in his interest to overlook anyone.

Most of the people are not unlike us - young-ish couples, presumably looking for a place to start a family. Directly in front is a pretty Asian woman in her 20s, wearing jeans so low-slung that they're practically a wardrobe malfunction in progress. I avert my eyes, resolving not to fall for this obviously deliberate distraction. To our right I overhear the agent talking to a mother-daughter team - the daughter a straight-haired blonde woman, animated and pretty, but showing signs of the sun-induced premature aging that characterises most white New Zealanders. So they've got their sights on our house too.

A couple of rows in front is a blond guy whom I stigmatise instantly as a wannabe yuppie. He's sipping white wine, wearing the bottom half of a cheap suit, and has just eaten a cake with whipped cream. His figure suggests that he's slightly too fond of cream with his cakes - a professional man in his 20s should be slimmer than that. On his lap is a folder labelled "Congratulations on your new vehic..".

Through it all we wait quietly, patiently. Susan's body language is defensive, but I consciously adjust mine to be more open, and tell myself that I feel better for it.

Our house is first in the running order. The auctioneer mikes up, introduces himself and runs through the selling points, just in case we've forgotten why we came, then asks for opening bids. I know how this bit goes - no-one wants to open the bidding, everyone sits silently. But not tonight. "Two hundred!", shouts the yuppie in a Chardonnay-fuelled voice.

The auctioneer evidently knows the man - that's probably how the parasite got his money, I reflect bitterly - and accepts the offer with more than good grace. The ice broken, several bidders dive in - I can't see them all, there's a column in the way - but bidding quickly escalates to $360k.

Here the auctioneer develops a mischievous streak, calling "Going once, twice, three times" without a pause. Half a dozen hands shoot up - mine among them, but I don't think he saw it - doesn't matter anyway, bidding is going again.

At $440k there is another pause. Maybe this one's for real. After decently waiting for the third call, I put my hand up. At $450k we drop to $5000 increments. At $460k, my opponent bids $1000; the auctioneer invites me to do likewise, but the hell with that, we'll be here all night, I've got to land a knockout punch. "Sixty-five!", I yell. "Sixty-six!" "Seventy!"

There we stop. I start daring to hope we've finished, but I know we haven't. After a theatrical pause while the agent "consults the vendor", the auctioneer announces that the reserve has been met and the house will be sold.

At which the other bidder tries again - another $1000. It takes until $480,000 to shake the bastard.

But it's done. And finally - for the first time in almost eight months - we can look forward to a settled future. We can spend our weekend doing something we actually want to do.

"So - more open homes this Saturday? Just to gloat?" I suggest jokingly to Susan on the way out.

She seems alarmingly keen on the idea.

Cobblers to the world

I don't suppose that shoemaking is quite immune to the recession, but it's not at the top of the list of industries clamouring for our money to prop up its business plan. After all, most cobblers went out of business decades ago.

And yet they're still out there. What high street doesn't have a shop advertising, among random other services, "shoe repair"?

Not ours, I'm delighted to say. This shop also offers to repair handbags and other random leatherware, but shoes feature prominently in its advertising, which is good. It's a lot of work to find a really comfortable pair of shoes, I'm glad there are still people out there who can extend their lifespan, and I was delighted, this morning, to have the chance to give them a bit of business.

"They're my wife's", I explained as I dumped the bag on the counter. Just in case they might be under any misapprehensions, you understand. Like any heterosexual male, I personally have never owned more than two pairs of shoes concurrently.

The cobbler was an elderly man - not perhaps old enough to be the Wandering Jew, but certainly old enough to remember a time when "service" wasn't a dirty word. He pulled out the shoes and examined them critically. Susan had helpfully tucked a note into the boot explaining what was wrong with them, but on examination it wasn't hard to see.

"Sandals - $30 to 40. It's fiddly, you see, taking the sole apart, you can never tell what's going to happen. The boot, that's easy - $20."

"Perfect", I replied. "I'm authorised to spend that much."

He grinned and gave me two tickets, stamped "THURSDAY" - which, after some thought and debate with his colleague, he crossed out and replaced with "MONDAY". "They're in good hands, sir," he assured me as I left the shop.

I'm not sure what it was that made me feel so good about this transaction. Perhaps it was the warm glow of repairing two of Susan's most-loved items of footwear. Perhaps it was the old-fashioned service ethic - the man was all but tugging his forelock as I left. Or the surprising sense of smugness from knowing that, once again, we were mending something rather than throwing it away. Whatever it was, it left me positively looking forward to visiting again.

Disasters

Bad things happen in threes.

I'm not quite sure where I picked up that bit of folk idiocy. I suspect my mother is to blame. But anyway, it's bugging me now.

Two weeks ago, I ran the car into a small rock that someone had thoughtfully dropped in the middle of the road. The impact bent the arm of the suspension, and made the car unnecessarily interesting to steer. It cost $400 to fix.

Last week it was the TV. That only cost $100, plus a week of Making Our Own Entertainment.

All this is bad enough, but what's worse now is waiting for the third shoe to drop, if you see what I mean.

Has it already happened? Is it the nice house we saw last weekend, that - by the time we got around to making an offer for it - had already been sold, for less than we were willing to offer? (I blame that one mostly on the bank, but partly on my own incompetence.)

Is it something health-related? Susan is currently struggling with a cold, and I've been fighting an ongoing battle with my innards for longer than I care to tell you.

Or is there something worse, something more dramatic and acute, lurking around the corner to complete the set?

I don't know. If no-one had ever told me that bad things happen in threes, I wouldn't be worrying about it. But on the other hand, I wouldn't have understood all those cultural allusions and references either.

So I can't really blame my mother. Blame myself, rather, for not believing me when I tell myself superstition is bollocks. I'm such an idiot.

Self-googlement

It's a long time since I Googled myself. But today, galvanised by the discovery of the waterfowl-abusing Jeremy Stamper's site, PersonRatings.com, I thought I'd see what the Internet reputation of my real name currently looks like.

Turns out there are dozens of me out there. There's entries on Facebook, LinkedIn, Classmates and other social networking sites with my name, each describing a completely different person. Hundreds of pages, none of them relating to me.

With one exception. The number one result in Google is a home page I created for myself back in 2000, before most of those sites existed. I haven't updated it since 2001. And it's still the most-linked <My Real Name> page on the 'web.

Now that's what I call a reputation system.

Three kinds of stupid

You're probably aware of the "Dunning-Kruger effect", although maybe not by that name. It's the psychological effect that shields us all from the ego-devastating realisation of how incompetent we are. It's why we're all, privately, sure that we'd be good at things we know nothing about, like designing websites or running restaurants.

I discovered this the other day while researching incompetence. It's a diverting piece of research. But it's not the kind of incompetence I wanted to write about. As I might have expected of myself, I successfully researched the wrong thing.

Every comic and wannabe from here to eternity has a stock of lines about how some intelligent, articulate, middle-aged professional spends hours trying to figure out their video/voicemail/laptop/Roomba/toaster, while their six-year-old kid only has to sneeze at it to make it sit up and perform tricks that would, in more enlightened times, have got the little brat burned as a witch and serve them right. But only Scott Adams, to my knowledge, has proposed a complete pseudoscientific theory of this widely-observed effect.

Adams (in one of his books, not available online) posited the idea of an "incompetence threshold" - a measure of our own capacity to be defeated by something that's supposed to be simple. This threshold, he says, rises a little with every year of our lives as the world around us grows more complicated, until we reach the point where we're completely flummoxed by tasks that would've seemed trivial to our pre-teenaged selves. And as each new generation grows up in a more complex world, they redesign tasks on the assumption of more complexity, and the "correct" way to complete these tasks slowly grows ever-more-infuriatingly opaque to older people.

Take recycling, for instance. Today's kids seem to have no difficulty at all with the rule that certain types of plastic - identifiable by the number stamped on the base - go into certain bins, and that's the end of it. But me, I can't stop thinking: "How clean does it need to be? Am I supposed to peel the labels off first? How do I know if the lid is the same plastic as the bottle? Can I put the bottles in a bag? What kind of bag?", and when I actually ask about these, or the myriad other questions that no-one seems to have mentioned, I'm made to feel as if I'm personally responsible for muddying the clarity of the basic message.

And so, more and more often, I find myself guessing the answers and hoping for the best. I'm deeply grateful that, for now at least, my wife handles most of the recycling - but, Adams's theory tells me, it's only a matter of time before she's as out of her depth as I am now.

Adams belongs to the Muntz school of philosophy: "people are acting stupid, ha ha". (Although in fairness, he does say that people aren't, on the whole, really stupid - it's just that, in certain circumstances and from certain perspectives, they appear that way.) Another famous blogger, Joel Spolsky, takes a different angle on the same issue. Spolsky, more constructively, tries to explain what it is that makes people seem so stupid, and how to help them.

Spolsky is in a minority. Laughing at people is always more fun than trying to understand or help them. It is, fortunately for us all, an influential minority - because people who think of incompetence as a problem to be solved, rather than a character flaw to be ridiculed, tend to get things done. In politics, however, it doesn't do so well. "Don't laugh, it's not his fault" is an inherently elitist thing to say.

What started me on this train of thought was my own experience, last week, of trying to comment on Nodressrehearsal's blog. Because my valued friend NDR has disabled "anonymous" comments on her blog, you need to sign in either with a LiveJournal account, or with something called "OpenID", which lots of sites, including Blogspot, support.

Now, I already have more Internet service accounts with more people than I can easily count, and I'd really like to minimise the number of these I create. So I decided to create an "OpenID" account, in the hope that it might also serve for other purposes someday.

And this was the task that defeated me. It seems to me that the powers behind "OpenID" haven't read or understood Spolsky's book. In a distracting environment, with lots of things to do at once, the task of signing in to a LiveJournal site with an OpenID proved to be beyond me.

It was quite a shock to learn that my incompetency threshold has reached the point where I am officially incapable of leaving a comment on NDR's blog, but it's just something I have to live with.

Basic immortality

Y'know, I've always been told that everything and everyone dies in the end. It's part of being alive, the philosophers have assured me cheerfully. It's what gives our existence shape and meaning. It returns us to our rightful state, as part of the world.

And then someone told me about this little bugger.

This tiny jellyfish, instead of dying after spawning like any self-respecting cnidarian, instead reverts to a juvenile, colonial-polyp state and gets to do it all over again. There is, allegedly, no limit to the number of times it can repeat this cycle. According to the Daily Telegraph, these immortal monsters are threatening to take over the entire ocean.

They're only 5mm long, so that doesn't sound all that scary. Still - if science fiction has taught us anything, and personally I think it's taught us practically everything, it's surely taught us how powerful immortality can be. Imagine if one of these things manages to open a bank account.

(A few years ago that would have sounded far-fetched, but given banks' recent performance, I'd have to say it'd be rash to rule out the possibility...)

When we grow old, all we can really do about it is spend lots of money - whether on Porsches or hair transplants or plastic surgery. None of which will really restore us to a polyp state. (Alternatively, we could go on pilgrimage to the Himalayan plateau, to live on yak butter tea and pure enlightenment. But historically, very few people have thought that was a price worth paying, and anyway I understand even Nepal isn't what it used to be in this regard.)

But little ol' Turritopsis nutricula - when it notices a grey tentacle here or there, all it has to do is find a partner and rut its way back to youth. How useful is that?

On second thoughts, though - from my point of view, what it would mean is that whenever my acne cleared up enough to let me get some action, I'd immediately be returned to pepperoni-faced ridicule. I remember my teenage years, and on the whole I'm glad they're behind me.