Was on holiday. Back now.
Side note
When you put a teaspoon of instant coffee (even if it does taste “so smooth you can’t tell the difference” (from what? Oh, that’s right, from real coffee)) in a mug that still has just a little bit of water in it, the amorphous pile of muck that emerges can look so vile, so evil, that pouring the scalding-hot water over the top almost seems a mercy.
Argh! It’s all broken … (Updated)
I, perhaps foolishly, decided to upgrade to wordpress v 2.5. I’m almost there now, but I seem to have lost all my links and the styles are all out of whack. I’m afraid that you’ll all have to bear with me over the next couple of days while I get it clean again.
Update (9 April 2008):
Well, I think it’s all back up and running nicely again. If anybody can’t see it properly, let me know.
Going global
Warning: own-trumpet blowing below.
I had a look at my blog’s statistics this morning and discovered that I’m globally popular! Here are the origins of my last 100 page-loads:
(click on the image for a better view)
Yes, I’m sure that any blog worth it’s salt gets visitors from all over the place, but it’s still pretty cool.
Abusing the welfare state
I graduated from my engineering degree in November of 1998. I already had a job lined up, which I was due to start on the 18th of January, 1999. I had a couple of months to kill and I decided to go on the dole. What I wanted to do was work in a book store, and I applied to some, but not before first applying for unemployment benefits.
The Work for the Dole scheme was up and running by that point, but since it only applied to people who had been receiving payments for over six months, it was never going to be a concern for me. If I remember correctly, I had to fill out a form every two weeks detailing which businesses I had contacted in my quest for work. I definitely remember realising that all I needed to do was open the Yellow Pages at a random page, call whomever my finger fell on and have a conversation like this:
Them: Good afternoon [I was an unemployed recently-ex-student, after all. You can’t expect me to get out of bed in the morning, can you?]. This is company XYZ. How may I help?
Me: Hi. Do you have any jobs going?
Them: Uhh, no.
Me: Okay. Thanks.
I could then list that company on my fortnightly form, safe in the knowledge that even if Centrelink did bother to check – and I seriously doubt that they ever did; I could have written that I applied to “Savage Henry’s discount rabbit stranglers” and they would have just filed it away – then I was covered.
That felt a bit too much like taking the piss though, so I made sure that my targets were legitimate. As I mentioned above, I mostly applied to book and map retailers. I never lied to Centrelink or to any of the places I applied to. I always admitted to everyone that I had a job lined up and only needed to fill in the two-month gap, but if the truth be told, I didn’t put much effort in either, except for a couple of early applications to places where I genuinely would have enjoyed working. It’s not that I was disheartened; just that I didn’t particularly care. I wasn’t desperate for the cash (although it was certainly handy) or a job (since I’d have to quit in a few weeks anyway). I was really only doing the dole thing to see what it was like and the answer was: boring, but easy.
I’ve never felt any guilt or shame at doing it and I don’t think that any of my friends at the time were judging me negatively for it. It was a little unorthodox, but just accepted. I’ve certainly paid a lot more in taxes since than I received on the dole or for my university education. Fast-forward to 2008 and I am thinking about the social acceptability of receiving welfare payments, both in Australia and abroad.
It may just be the stereotype, but I get the feeling that in continental Europe, both in 1998 and today, what I did would barely raise an eyebrow; that it would be completely accepted. In the U.S.A., on the other hand, I think that it would be regarded by many as a shameful thing to do and an abuse of federal money. In Australia and the UK, I’m not so sure. I suspect that the more “aspirant middle class” you are and the older you are, the more shameful it will seem. I have no idea if the age thing is because it’s a process that everybody goes through as they get older or if there’s been a genuine generational shift in attitudes.
Any thoughts?
Biting off more than I can chew
Today I sat down with my supervisor, Professor Andrea Prat, to talk some more about my research ideas. I would have liked to speak with him more frequently over this year, but it turns out that teaching is taking more time than I anticipated, just as everyone warned me it would.
My ideas are a lot more fleshed-out than the vague arm-waving on my research page and Prof. Prat seemed excited at where they are going. That’s big in itself – when one of my friends here at LSE heard that he was going to be my supervisor he replied with: “Wow. He must have an IQ of, like, a million.” Not having great, gaping holes shot in my thoughts is a minor victory in itself. 🙂
I wasn’t planning on developing it fully for my research paper this year, but even on the area that I was thinking of doing, his unnerving comment was that it is probably still a bit too big an idea for this year.
Bugger.
iPhone goodness
I got an iPhone for Christmas. It was a bit of a pain to set up, since I was on 64-bit XP and Apple doesn’t support iTunes on it. I ended up with 32-bit Vista Ultimate. I’ve been excited about the iPhone and its competitors for a while, since they manage to combine six gadgets (all of which I’ve owned separately) in a single device:
- Mobile phone
- PDA
- (mini-)Laptop
- Camera
- mp3/video player
- USB stick
To a certain extent, the iPhone’s touchscreen and typically-Apple UI are just icing on the cake.
It’s obviously not perfect (what is?), but I’m pleased to discover that most of what I would like to be improved should be possible on the current generation:
| Would need to be in a new generation | Could probably happen with the current generation |
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I know that some of my list are available already for jailbroken iPhones, but I’m hesitant to do that. I’m going to hold out for a while and see if the rumours about an SDK being released in February are true.
Identity theft
While everyone is focused on the HMRC accidentally misplacing CDs with the personal details of 25 million British citizens, I thought I’d relate the following little story. I was in a major bank on Hampstead High Street [*] today. While I was there, I overheard a staff member talking to another (the manager?) about a recent spate of thieves who put card readers on the ATMs (cashpoints). She had just discovered that one of the ATMs outside the branch had been tampered with again. I then had this conversation with the personal banker I was seeing:
Me: Would you take cash out of the teller machine outside?
Personal Banker: Me? No way.
Me: Where would you take cash out?
Personal Banker: I’d use the cashpoint inside the bank, but never outside.
Hmmm …
[*] For those that don’t know, Hampstead is one of the wealthier parts of London.
I swear I’m not a junkie
My wife is American. This has various benefits for me, but one of the best is the opportunity, at this time of year, to gorge myself stupid. Last Thursday was Thanksgiving in the U.S., but we decided to have our little shovel-food-down-your-throat-athon on Sunday night with some of my wife’s friends from university. The turkey was bought on Friday, the giblets removed and discarded (sorry, I just can’t handle them) and we were ready to get started with marinading it.
My wife wanted to follow in her mother’s footsteps by injecting the turkey with red wine. I’d never heard of this technique before, but a good roast is worth a lot in my book and a turkey is famously difficult to keep moist, so I was keen to try it. I raided our travel first-aid kit to look for our syringe, but to no avail. Okay, no worries, it’s off to the chemist we go to get another one. The coversation, at a Boots, as it happens, went like this:
Us: Hi. Do you have any needles? Syringes?
Them: Ummm … maybe. Is it for travelling?
Us: No. It’s for a turkey. We’re going to inject it with wine.
Them: Ahhh, no.
Us: Okay, then. It is for travelling. [Yes, yes, I know. This wasn’t the most subtle of ploys]
Them: We’ll need to order them in. It’ll take two weeks.
Yeah, right. The implication was pretty clear – hovering in the air, as it were. They weren’t going to take the slightest risk of selling needles to drug users. To really slam home the fact that they were looking out for their jobs in a big corporate chain, the conversation finished with:
Us: Well, do you know where we might be able to find one?
Them: Perhaps at an independent pharmacy.
… which is exactly what we did. There’s a wonderful chemist on England’s Lane that just looks Italian (next time you go to Italy, pay attention to the chemists – they’re fantastically unique). It’s certainly run by an Italian lady and she was fascinated by the idea of injecting wine directly into the meat. She insisted on my wife spelling out all the recipe details as she promptly sold us a pack of 10 1ml syringes for £2.90. It was simple, it was easy, it was friendly and it was helpful. She’ll keep our business from now on.
I got really quite angry from the whole affair. My wife and I don’t look particularly shabby (I hope). We were clearly entering the Boots as a couple. We weren’t shifting around on our feet or trying to speak quietly to avoid undue attention. None of these seem consistent with how I imagine a drug abuser would present. It seems perfectly reasonable – to me – to have believed that we were genuine in our request.
But even if we weren’t, I still would have been upset with them. Yes, the UK operates a needle exchange programme, but any kind of restriction on the sale of needles simply raises their implicit price, which can only encourage drug users to share needles. If a chain of Chemists can’t be sold on the idea of harm minimisation, we’re in real trouble.
The turkey turned out great, by the way. We used a Malbec to inject it with, stuffed it with chopped-up apple, prunes and garlic (the bread-based stuffing was being brought by someone else) to sweaten the meat a little, sprinkled quite a lot of rosemary over the skin, roasted it with tin-foil over the top for the first two hours and without the tin-foil for the last hour. Beautiful.
Are Israeli backpackers jerks? Why do people think so?
I recently attended my first Jewish wedding (Debbie and Alex, if you’re reading this, congratulations again). It was great fun, the bride was resplendent and I even got to keep my kippah!
While I was there, I went out for some celebatory drinks a couple of nights before The Big Day and one of the fellas, himself an Israeli-American, threw out this question-pair:
Why does everyone hate Israeli backpackers so much? Are they really such jerks?
Never one to let cultural sensitivities or personal ignorance get in the way of a good conversation, and having met the odd Israeli in my backpacking travels [*], I threw myself at this with a level of gusto that some of the more boring people in society might have labelled “ill advised.” Luckily enough for me, I managed an answer that somehow managed to avoid me swallowing my foot or somebody’s fist. Here it is:
Firstly, the vast majority of Israeli backpackers are doing their travels just after finishing their (mandatory) stint in the military and no matter what your views on Middle East politics, that is a tough job. I cannot think of another force where the chances are as high that people will actively try to kill you or that you will be required to actively try to kill other people. You’re going to see death, and not just of an accidental nature. These guys are coming out with a genuine nugget of pain that they need to deal with. I’m only guessing, but I reakon that backpacking for an Israeli is the ultimate combination of soul searching and letting off some steam. They probably want to spend a month or two (or six, or twelve) pretending that the entire Middle East doesn’t exist, or at least doesn’t exist for them.
Secondly, you’ve got the fact that everyone else on the backpacking circuit is curious and debate-prone. Part of the reason for going backpacking is to meet and talk to people from other places, so they keep asking about it. It makes sense. If you meet an Israeli, you want to know what they think about the Palestinians, about the Syrians, about the Iranians, about The Wall, about the settlements, about, about, about … But that’s the last thing the Israeli backpacker wants. They’re happy – eager, even – to talk about anything outside of the Middle East, but nobody will let them. Everyone keeps poking, not realising that they’re pushing and pulling at an emotional scab. Nobody’s doing it to be an arsehole, but that doesn’t matter because even the friendly questions grate. So the Israelis close off, become insular. They only travel with other Israelis. They become defensive and arrogant, while the other backpackers, who just see them acting like jerks, resent them for it.
[*] The first person to mention “sample size” gets a clip ’round the ear.