Just call me Alex

I'm having an agreeable yuppie fantasy today.

That probably sounds contradictory. What it involves is a little window in the corner of my second monitor that shows me the exchange rate between the UK pound and the NZ dollar, and -- and this is the nifty bit -- updates itself once per minute. This window is provided courtesy xe.com, a lovely little site that epitomises the service industry ideal of doing one thing and doing it well. And, most importantly, for free.

This rate is of interest to me because I still have a noticeable amount of money in the UK, and I've been meaning to bring it over, for house-buying purposes, when the rate looks good. As I type this, 1GBP would buy me NZ$2.68159, up from $2.67496 when I first checked this morning.

Over the day, the pound has been trending slightly upwards. But every time I watch it actually make its update, the pound weakens (which is bad). It's almost touched 2.686, before dropping back again when I got too excited and began watching too closely.

This is, of course, entirely in keeping with the known laws of economics, and will come as no surprise to anyone.

When the rate hits 2.71 -- which, for the record, I don't think is going to happen this week -- I'll call my trader and finally switch over my millions from sterling. That's the agreeable fantasy part, anyway. In the meantime, however, it really is pretty exciting to watch it out of the corner of my eye.

(D'oh! Just lost another $200.)

So here's this information that, when I was entering the job market, would have been available only to braying young wine-bar-haunting gits with bicycle clips on their sleeves, whose employers paid more for the service than for the people to watch it... and today, it's freely available to anyone with a broadband connection. Today, a mere twenty years too late to make my fortune, I get to play at being a yuppie for free, without even having to take time out from my real job.

That's so cool.

Addendum (added Thursday lunchtime): So much for my powers of prediction. Today the pound is over $2.72. I'm not pushing my luck any further.

House hunting, year 2

It's curious, how different people's perceptions can be.

Looking out of the upstairs window from 4/33 Rukutai Street, Susan -- already unsympathetic -- muttered to me: "There's a stagnant stream outside."

There was indeed one of those water features that estate agents persist in calling "a stream", but look to me more like a poorly-finished ditch. I pointed it out to the agent.

"What's the problem? We're well above sea level here," he shrugged.

"Sea level be damned," I retorted. "What about mosquito level?"

"Ah, that's only a problem with stagnant water. That out there, that's running water."

I looked again at the water. A lethargic 'skater twitched its way across the surface.

"That's running, is it?"

Babbling, burbling, gurgling, rushing -- all of these would be entirely false descriptions. Truer descriptions would feature terms such as "ochre", "fecund" and, I felt, quite possibly "leprous". This water wasn't running, it wasn't even sauntering, I seriously doubted if it so much as got out of bed.

Have I mentioned what lying bastards estate agents are?

Stiffening drinks

"Moderate" drinking may actually help men perform in the sack, according to a study from the Department of Credulous Research at the University of Western Australia. It's a finding that runs so counter to popular belief that it is hard even to consider taking it seriously.

The study, sponsored (I'm guessing) by Fosters, is being variously reported in Australia, the UK and, for some reason, India. It's barely made a ripple in the USA, and New Zealand media has yet to pick it up. I'm wondering if this reflects the varying states of progress in the War on Fun, as staged in each country. I recall that, in Britain, there was a lot of fuss -- many years ago now -- about drinks manufacturers "suggesting", in their marketing, that a drink might be stiff in more ways than one...

The trouble with this is that, as an issue becomes politicised, it becomes impossible to write about it without taking a political stance. And it might ally you with people, such as brewers and advertising companies, that you'd rather not be associated with. So journalists will be put off such stories, even if they are real, for fear that covering them might damage their own carefully cultivated, politically-aware image.

Not that I'm sure this story is real. The story is based, New Scientist tells us, on an "anonymous postal survey" of 1770 Western Australian men. (Other sources report a sample size of 1580. Why the discrepancy?) I'm no epidemiologist, but "postal survey" doesn't sound very authoritative -- like "phone survey", but worse. Then there's the possibility that Western Australia might have cultural, social, economic or environmental factors that make it anomalous...

All of which just goes to show how badly I'm under the thumb of conventional, Shakespearean physick. I'm looking intently for flaws in the study; loth to accept that it might actually be valid. Because that would mean I might have been wrong.

The Internet is still evil

I lost a friend today. Well, that may be over-dramatic. I hope so. I'm quite optimistic that "lost" may be a temporary condition. And as for "friend"...

There are a few words coined to describe that curious, but still genuine, feeling that grows up between people who only know one another on the 'net. "Cyber-friend" makes her sound like a cutesy, friendly, prototype unstoppable futuristic assassin, and that's way too many adjectives for anyone. As for "e-pal", "netpal" -- surely "-pal" is only a valid relationship for under-13s. "Mate", "buddy", "chum"? Don't go there. "Online friend"? Just lacks punch.

Ho hum.

Whatever you call them, I have a few. Some appear in the list of blogs I follow or who follow this one -- and I really do appreciate all of you, folks. Please don't vanish. Others, for various reasons, don't appear in any of those lists, but I'm always aware of their presence, and pathetically grateful when they take time to comment or e-mail.

JasmineArdent was one of my favourite writers from thisisby.us. Frighteningly intelligent, perceptive and confident. And she liked to argue, as much as I do; she wasn't shy to speak her minds on whatever topic someone happened to be ranting about today. When she agreed with me, which was more often than not, I felt validated. When she argued, I felt stimulated to examine my position in depth. There's not many people who can make me feel like that.

And when I saw that her account had vanished...

It was a little like the feeling you get when you're strolling carelessly across a field on a sunny morning, and you look up to see that one of the cattle that had been dispassionately observing you from a distance has put down its head and is now running towards you. Or, miles from home, you reach the place where you know you left your car, but it's not there. (Yes, I've had both of those experiences.) In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, the whole balance of the world changes.

I quit TIBU the same day, although I left my writing up. And, via e-mail, I talked Jasmine into starting a blog.

She was never too convinced by the idea. Blogging isn't the same as taking part in a hothouse, semi-closed community like TIBU. The daily stimulation, the constant feedback -- just aren't there.

And today I discovered that her blog has gone, too.

I hope she gets in touch. But if she doesn't... Has she been forced to delete it for professional reasons? personal reasons? has she joined a cult, or walked under a bus, or gone to work for the FBI, or in witness protection? -- from my perspective, there's no way of telling. I've lost e-friends before that way ("e-friends"? not as ugly, but kinda -- trivial), and it's always disappointing. But there's nothing I can do about it.

Be well, Jasmine. Write soon.

So much for history

There's an awful lot of silly[1] talked about blogging. There's people who hate it, on the well-founded but rather illogical basis that bloggers talk way too much trivial claptrap, without pausing to wonder if anyone else might find it worth reading. But really that's just a retread of the same argument we, as a culture, had when writing was first invented; and again with paper, and the printing press, and television, and computers.

[1] Brought to you by the Campaign for Intuitive Nouns

So a lot of bollocks gets written. So what? "Ninety percent of everything is crap" said a wise man, years before the Internet was even conceived.

Then there's the even sillier opposite extreme, which holds that bloggers have made journalists obsolete. Yeah, like the light bulb made the sun obsolete. Of course there are functions sometimes performed by journalists that can, in principle be done better by bloggers. And occasionally, it's true, a blogger does succeed in upstaging Old Media. But in general, bloggers quote a lot more from Old Media than vice versa.

Which kind of brings me to today's whine.

With President St Barack's ascension to the thr... sorry, I mean "accession to the White House" -- his very first act in office, before the cheers from his inaugural speech had died down, was to redesign the White House website.

But more has happened here than a redesign. Hundreds of thousands of pages of history have vanished. And millions of blog pages have been altered, in ways their authors will probably never even notice.

For instance, suppose you referred to President Bush's infamous "Mission Accomplished" speech from May 2003. You can find lots of accounts of that speech, mostly written and edited by unsympathetic commentators, all over the net; but the obvious authoritative source to link to is Bush's own press office.

But if you did that, tough luck. It's not there any more. If you click on the Google link that points to it, you find yourself in Obama's "Briefing Room".

I'm sure the text of this speech, and the other bazillions of press releases put out by the Bush White House, still exists in thousands of places. White House archives, Bush's personal files, more libraries than I can readily imagine. But none of those are as easily and simply accessible as the White House website.

Would it hurt to leave it there? After all, the date is built into the URL -- there's no danger of it getting in the way of Obama's speeches. It might pollute search results -- but it would be a trivial matter to set up the site search engine to prevent that.

What bothers me is that by sweeping Bush's own account under the electronic rug, Obama's people have cleared the way to rewrite the history of the Bush years in their own words.

Of course, this Orwellian process is not new. Bush did the same to all of Clinton's releases, when he first moved in. Good luck finding out, now, what Clinton originally told the nation about (for instance) the bombing of Krajina. But the Internet was younger then; blogging was in its infancy, and the practice of linking to sources was not nearly so established. Bush could, reasonably -- indeed, convincingly -- plead ignorance of what he did.

Obama, on the other hand, has already shown that he understands the importance of history-as-written. He's the first president, I believe, to have published two autobiographies before he even got the top job, thus retroactively turning his entire life into a presidential campaign. Consider this line from his new-look website: "President Obama swiftly responded to Hurricane Katrina."

What the... how the... ?

Okay -- from today's perspective, we are at no risk of understanding that to mean what it appears to say. But in twenty, thirty years' time, when both Katrina and Obama are fading memories, who knows how it will be parsed?

See, I remember another leader who surfed into power on the crest of the wave of hope and the promise of change, who began his term by clearing out the dead wood of the (thoroughly discredited) preceding administration. A leader who made it his first priority to reform the sickly organs of government, to lance the ideologically contaminated pustules of his devastatingly unpopular predecessors -- and above all, to rewrite recent history in his own terms.

And for all the parallels with Kennedy, I can't help but think that the name that flickers in my mind, as most closely resembling Obama in political style, is Tony Blair.

Oxymoron of the week:

"Indigenous immigrants".

I'm not sure if these people -- that is, the people who wrote and published those words -- simply have no idea of what the words mean, or if they have deeper conceptual problems with the idea that an individual word can have any such thing as "meaning" at all. There's a research paper waiting to be written there.

This idea provided free for anyone who wants to run with it.

Presence of mind

I saw this French film once -- I was just channel-hopping late one night, and there it was...

It was a gritty, violent story, featuring a group of urban yoof. What I remember is a scene where four or five of these young thugs are in a public toilet, talking about some extremely illegal deeds -- I don't remember the details, but it was something of the order of multiple murder -- you know, the kind of laws that the police will normally make at least some bona-fide effort to enforce. The kids are excited, they're desperate, they're expecting and ready for any kind of trouble. And in the middle of their conversation, a toilet flushes behind them; the cubicle door opens, and an elderly man -- maybe 70 or so -- shambles out.

As the toughs turn to look at him, he says (a line that was translated in the subtitles as): "Nothing like a really good shit."

It was the air of immense satisfaction with which he delivered this line that probably saved his life.

As he shuffles over to the washbasins next to the lads and washes his hands, he delivers a rambling but eloquent story of someone, perhaps an ancestor of his, who was on a train en route to Siberia when, at one stop, he got off to take a dump, and got so caught up in the excitement that the train rumbled off without him. Leaving him stranded in the freezing, unpeopled wastes of central Russia with his trousers down, and not another train due for weeks. But it was worth it, the old man feels, for the sake of taking the time to clear one's bowels properly.

Throughout this speech, the thugs stare open-mouthed, their feet fixed as if rooted, only their heads turning to follow the old man's movements about the room. It was as if their own lives, their own crimes, their own fear and anger and suspicion, were completely forgotten, for the time it took the old man to wash and dry his hands, leisurely, and then shuffle out of the door.

I wish I knew what the movie was called, because that one scene has stayed with me now for at least 15 years. And the older I get, the more I sympathise with his story. It's my constant hope that, come the day when I find myself in a life-threatening gang-based situation, I acquit myself with as much presence of mind as that old man.