Don't you dare!

As many of you know… oops, sorry, thought I was someone else for a mad second.*

In last Friday’s ES (the Evening Standard’s colour supplement), there was one of those made-up interviews that purport to reveal celebrities’ beauty secrets. It was Jane Birkin’s turn to tell us what she puts on her face to look so young, etc. As if we could believe anything she was supposed to have said; as if the products mentioned weren’t sponsoring the newspaper in some way; as if I cared what an aged nymphette, who couldn’t act herself out of a paper bag and who only acquired notoriety because she hooked up with a singing legend, said. Anyway, her parting shot was:

My best beauty tip is…
Smile and be happy.

Gee, as they say over there, thanks for the advice! Without it, I might have thought I needed to behave like a normal human being and react to any misfortune that might befall me in the usual way and be miserable for a while. But, no, now whenever something terrible occurs I will just put on my best smile and pretend it doesn’t affect me. This goes further than other similar crappy pieces of advice – like ‘Be positive’, for instance: it somehow says that one can be, and indeed is required to be happy, regardless of what’s happening in one’s life.

It’s so dismissive and patronizing. You say something to someone; they listen to you and go, ‘Never mind. Be happy!’ ‘Oh, OK, then!’

At least one person seems to have managed it: Nigella Lawson. She’s determined to find happiness at all costs. Bad things happen to her, but she always bounces back without a backward glance. I find it obscene. (I’ve already slapped her, for that among other things, so I won’t labour the point, but she does annoy me). I thought she was the only cold, calculating, heartless, er, woman, but it looks like she’s got disciples.

Don’t ever say that to me or I’ll slap you!*Women on the Verge of Thinking

Un véritable scandale

Il y a quelques jours, j’ai lu, dans le journal, une nouvelle qui m’a complètement suffoquée : dans un lycée anglais sur cinq, l’apprentissage des langues vivantes n’est plus obligatoire. Que va-t-on enseigner aux élèves à la place ? Comment envoyer un texte au moyen d’un portable ? La meilleure façon de porter un capuchon ? Quoi ? Déjà que les langues mortes ne sont pratiquement plus enseignées du tout ; que le latin, qui est d’une si grande utilité sur le plan de la logique et du raisonnement, est tombé en désuétude, que va-t-il bientôt rester des disciplines qui produisaient jusque récemment des individus cultivés ?

Je ne vais pas énumérer les avantages qu’apporte la connaissance d’une ou de plusieurs langues étrangères : la liste serait trop longue et d’une trop grande évidence. Tout simplement, les langues étrangères ouvrent l’esprit, et si l’Angleterre persiste à se refermer sur elle-même de cette façon, elle ne pourra que produire des individus encore plus bornés qu’ils ne le sont actuellement.

Je ne sais pas comment les langues sont enseignées de nos jours : elles l’étaient assez mal de mon temps. Vers la fin de mes études, j’ai passé un an dans deux lycées anglais : les professeurs de français ressemblaient à mes professeurs d’anglais en France, c’est-à-dire qu’ils étaient un peu ennuyeux et n’obtenaient de bons résultats qu’avec les élèves qui avaient une aptitude naturelle et un goût pour cette langue. Mais, même les autres élèves, ceux qui n’avaient pas d’oreille et dont la mémoire n’était pas assez bonne pour retenir les règles de grammaire et le vocabulaire, même ceux-là avaient au moins un aperçu de la manière dont une autre culture fonctionnait et, au bout de six ou sept ans, il leur en restait quelque chose. Ils étaient au moins capables de commander une tasse de thé ou de café et de lire les étiquettes des produits en vente chez Marks & Spencer ou à Monoprix, quand ils venaient passer un week-end à Londres ou à Paris, de nombreuses années plus tard.

Un jour, je devais avoir treize ou quatorze ans, sur le chemin du lycée, je me suis dit, comme ça, tout d’un coup, combien j’aimais être capable de lire et de parler l’anglais. A l’époque, mes connaissances étaient bien sûr limitées, mais je me souviens d’avoir compris que ce n’était que le début d’un long chemin qui ne pouvait que se révéler de plus en plus intéressant et utile. C’est ce jour-là que je suis vraiment tombée amoureuse de l’anglais. Et, lui, il ne m’a jamais déçue.

Les imbéciles qui ont permis aux directeurs de lycées de mettre au rebus les livres de français, italien, espagnol, russe, etc., méritent une claque bien sentie!

Guest Slapper of the Month X

I hesitated before asking GreatSheElephant to be my Guest because she does quite a lot of whingeing on her own blog, entitled, er, The Great She Elephant, and I thought it might be boring for her to come and kvetch on mine, but she said that being grumpy was one of her greatest pleasures in life - that and speed-dating (at least I think that's what she said; I may be wrong). Apart from living in overcrowded London and being freelance and loving pussycats, what she and I have in common is that we feel murderous on a regular basis. I was nodding furiously when I read her Slap. I bet you will too. Thanks, Jane!

Dirty pig

I’m at Leicester Square tube station, waiting for a female friend, when I see him. He has just passed through the Piccadilly Line barriers and he seems to be walking straight towards me. He’s handsome in a debonair, terribly English sort of way. No, let’s make that gorgeous. I can’t stop staring. Our eyes lock. Casually he reaches into a pocket as he nears me, brings out a piece of paper…

And as he walks past, he screws it up and throws it on the floor. “Pig,” I mutter.

In the novels of Carl Hiaasen baroquely awful things happen to people who litter, mostly at the hands of the deranged, bath cap wearing, heroic ex governor of Florida. In fact, for Hiaasen, littering is a signifier of a weak or often downright bad moral character and I can’t help feeling that he’s right.

So, to the business man on the Tube sitting opposite me who takes an orange from his briefcase, peels it, eats it and carefully leaves the peel on the seat next to him, I say, “Death by alligator is what you deserve.” If the orange complete is clean enough to put in his briefcase, why isn’t the peel?

Here, I must make a disclosure. I leave newspapers on trains when I’ve finished reading them. And I love to find newspapers on trains that other people have left for me to read. A copy of Vogue or Harpers would be nice occasionally too, maybe a good book. But not orange peel, water bottles, juice cartons, burger wrappers, salad containers and stinking, half eaten packets of chips, still smeared with ketchup.

Littering shows a complete disregard for others, a lack of consideration for others who share your environment. Litter isn’t just physical rubbish – it can be noise leaking from headphones, overly loud (and never interesting) conversations, the smell emanating from unwashed, undeodorised armpits during rush hour.

London may be one of the largest cities in the world but at the same time, it’s a small, crowded place and we all have to live here. Don’t take up more than your fair share of space and pick up after yourself.

Or my alligator will get you.

Really maddening

Big problems with Blogger. Stop. Might not be able to post for a while. Stop. Dealing with it. Stop.

Update: Problems resolved (it looks like). Stop. Wasted masses of time trying to work out what was wrong and what to do about it. Stop. Blogger might have said. Stop. Scrogneugneu (really useful and funny French swearword). Stop."£!$%^&*!

There is no justice!

So what else is new?

No, no, there really is no justice.

In a normally quiet London suburb there is currently a man who thinks he can do whatever he wants to whomever he wants because he’s just been found not guilty of harassing his neighbours.

For years he has abused them verbally, shone lights into their bedrooms, listened in on their telephone conversations, played very loud music in his garage so everyone can hear it, generally made their lives a misery.

Finally, finally, three weeks ago, he appeared in front of a magistrate. All his neighbours – except one, who didn’t think she could bear the stress of testifying and who is now being shunned, quite rightly in my opinion, by her neighbours – stood up in court and gave evidence about the years they have spent battling with this man. The police made their case too.

The ‘trial’ lasted over a week. It looked like a sure bet he would be found guilty. What else could the magistrate do, those people said to themselves?

He could say that, yes, listening equipment was found in the man’s possession but there was no abiding proof that he’d used it to eavesdrop on his neighbours’ telephone conversations. He could say that because he played loud music in the daytime no one was really disturbed by it. He could say that all his neighbours were neurotic old women (they were mostly elderly women, but women are the ones who find aggressive males threatening) and he’d never heard such a load of rubbish in his life.

He could say all of that and he did.

I haven’t got the strength to slap that magistrate as hard as I would wish to. There’s no point trying to slap the man: he’s invulnerable now. His name is Norman and he lives in Ruislip.

Yes, that woman again!

Ok, when you’re called Marie-Antoinette, your name has a hyphen and you cannot be called Marie or Antoinette. It’s Marie-Antoinette or nothing.

I hate the woman but I don’t see why she should be insulted – spellingwise and namewise – by all and sundry.

Slapping all and sundry! And stupid Sofia Coppola.

(There! I feel better now.)

There's no 'right' way

October is Breast Awareness Month, and breast cancer is in the news again today: apparently, a study has shown that screening may not be the perfect solution:

Researchers looked at international studies on half a million women. They found that for every 2,000 women screened over a decade, one will have her life prolonged, but 10 will have to undergo unnecessary treatment. The report, published in the Cochrane Library, involved a review of breast cancer research papers from around the world. The scientists found mammograms did reduce the number of women dying from the disease. But they also discovered it was diagnosing women with breast cancer who would have survived without treatment, meaning they were undergoing unnecessary chemotherapy, radiotherapy or mastectomies. …. They also revealed a further 200 women out of every 2,000 experienced distress and anxiety because of false positives – a result that indicated a cancer was present but was later found to be wrong. (more info here)

I was one of those ‘false positives’ and I underwent a double mastectomy for nothing… or maybe not… who knows? I’d had symptoms of something being wrong. I told my story at length last year (see A Tale of Two Titties) so I won’t bore you with it again. I think it will be up to individual women to decide whether or not they want to be screened, in the absence of any symptoms. Nearly eight years on I am very glad I did what I did.

If I’d actually had cancer after all, I probably would have fought the disease with all the means at my (and medicine’s) disposal – up to a point, though, ‘life at all costs’ is not a mantra of mine – but I hope I wouldn’t have been made to feel a failure if I’d died in the end. I’ve said it before, cancer is the only disease that makes people use words like ‘battle’ and ‘fight’. No one talks about ‘fighting heart disease’, do they?, and when the person dies they’re not said to have ‘lost their battle with heart disease’. Having a life-threatening illness is difficult enough without being made to feel as if one’s not trying hard enough. If you know someone who’s suffering from cancer, please be gentle with them and let them cope with it in their own way. Sometimes the body wins regardless of how strong the mind is.

Slapping the ‘cancer bullies’! Hello, Debra!

It won’t wash

For two weeks, while I was in purdah, working from morning till night, the BBC inundated us with programmes about Iran. The series was called Uncovering Iran, and its aim was to persuade us that we do not have to fear anything from that country and its demented leaders.

It was so depressing: Iran was on the way to becoming a great place, especially for women, and then, pouf!, it reverted to the Dark Ages. I once met a young Iranian writer, whose wealthy family had got out of Iran in 1979. A few months ago, Harpers & Queen (for which she contributes from time to time), published a long article about her ­– complete with rather attractive photos, in which she expressed her love for her country (she was a small child when her family emigrated here) and her immense desire to go back as soon as possible to play her part there. As far as I know, she hasn’t left London, where she leads a life of luxury and is free to do whatever she pleases.

I don’t care how beautiful Iran’s poetry is, how marvellous its art and how articulate and imaginative its writers. The Germany that spawned the Nazis was one of the most ‘civilised’ countries in the world and look what happened! So this blatant and cynical attempt to make us see Iran as a wonderful, civilised country didn’t work on me. I cannot forget that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is a Holocaust denier who has called for the elimination of Israel and thereby of the rest of the world’s Jews (because what do you think would happen if Israel didn’t exist?). First show me that Iran isn’t a country full of people who want the destruction of my race, then I too might ‘challenge some of the perceptions [I] still hold about this intriguing country’ – as the BBC expects me to – and marvel at its achievements in the arts, etc. Until then I will reserve my admiration for more deserving subjects.

Slap! The name of the Iranian woman mentioned above is Kamin Mohammadi.

And on the 11th day...

...Bela went out.

I met my deadline on Friday (what did I tell you!) and came out of total hibernation yesterday. I didn't leave my postcode, but still... Most of the places I wanted to visit where closing early so I got rather frustrated, but I was pleased to see that my legs were still in working order and that the area hadn't changed too much in the meantime. I intend to venture farther in the course of this week.

I haven't been completely insulated from the news, though: guess what my position is on the 'veil' question!

I was going to slap someone, but maybe she's suffered enough. Hello, Micki!

Guest Slapper of the Month IX

Sometimes, when I'm introducing a Guest, I have so many facets of their personality to choose from and present to you that I don’t know which ones to emphasize; this time I can say without hesitation that WinterWheat of Triticum Turgidum is above all a mother. Oh, and she’s very tall. I think that’s it. Isn’t it?

Slapsterhood of the (Downward) Traveling Pants

I’d like to slap whoever thought it would be a good idea at the turn of the millennium to revive the ‘60s hip-hugger look by stocking our department stores and online shops with ultra-lowrise jeans.

Back when unleaded gasoline was introduced, I remember being confused that consumers had to pay more for a product that contained less. Ditto for organic foods. The same principle applies to ultra-lowrise jeans. For the service of cutting away 4 extra inches of waistline (with high-tech, diamond-prism lasers, presumably), jeans manufacturers get to command $200+ per pair.

But it’s not the price that earns them a slap. It’s the designers’ decision to keep the rise ridiculously low regardless of the length. A 6-inch rise might make sense on the body of a 5-foot-tall woman who wears a 28-inch inseam. I, on the other hand, at 6 feet tall, wear a 36-inch inseam, so I’m attracted to jeans by lowrise manufacturers like Hudson, True Religion, and Notify because their pants fit my legs. But, well, er… okay, how do I put this? The rise is the length between the crotch seam and the top of the waistband, right? On a human body this represents a curved surface. Six inches curved barely clears the top of my pubes (sorry Bela). Now, I’ll be the first to admit that nothing says SEXY like an exposed butt crack or a peek of c-section scar, but not both at the same time. That’s blindingly sexy, and it’s rude to go about blinding people.

Due to their construction, ultra-lowrise jeans must be worn tourniquet-tight to keep them aloft. They sit at the widest part of the hips, so they have nowhere to go but down. Anyone with enough subcutaneous body fat to menstruate is bound to look like a “popped can of biscuits” and be accused of sporting a “muffin top” if she wears her jeans snugly enough to keep them up. To add insult to injury, she becomes a potential target for that woman, you know the one I’m talking about, who walks around scrutinizing other women’s bodies and snarkily murmuring things like, “She should NOT be wearing those jeans.”

Derrick Shepherd, a legislator in Louisiana, must have been channeling Snarky Woman when, in 2004, he attempted to drum up support for a bill (HB 1703) outlawing lowrise jeans on grounds of obscenity. People showing their “whale tails” (thong backs) would be forced to pay a $500 fine. According to Wikipedia, the Times-Picayune editorialized on May 8, 2004: “Some Louisiana lawmakers seem determined to make us the laughingstock of the nation. But even ideas that are dumb and comical can have dire consequences. A bill that would pull into the criminal justice system children and adults who wear their pants low is not only dumb -- it’s dangerous.” I would add: especially in a state that allows booze to be consumed in moving vehicles and women to walk around topless in exchange for beads. A slap to Derrick Shepherd! (No, I take that back. He lives in Louisiana. He’s been slapped enough.)

I have strong libertarian leanings and I think that people should be able to wear what they want, however uncomfortable, unflattering, offensive, or shocking it may be. I recently saw an adolescent boy riding his bike in a t-shirt that read “I F*CK LIKE A BEAST.” Huge red letters. I hate what he was wearing but I’ll defend his right to wear it. (Although I do pity his mother. Unless she’s the one who bought it for him.)

Anyway, back to the jeans: I’m happy to say that fashion-forward designers are attempting to revive higher rises, although I’ve seen some truly horrible pleated ones that push the boundaries of fuglitude. I don’t want my waistband grazing my ribs either, thanks. Whatever happened to the waist?

PS. I've just been told I'd be slapped myself if I didn't mention that WinterWheat is also an academic and a feminist and a perfumista – all in all, a ‘well-rounded’ human being. There! Happy now, WW? LOL!

PPS. I case you're wondering, I don't let myself be bullied by my guests (or anyone else for that matter). WW has railed (on her own blog) against women who define themselves purely through motherhood so I thought it might be fun to, you know...

Who knows?

I used to think – erroneously – that I worked best under stress so I used to procrastinate like mad: any mundane or even boring activity was always more pressing than the work I had to do. Deadlines were mythical dates that didn’t have any significance and no attempt was ever made to meet them. In fact, they seemed to be there just to be missed. I worked like that for years; my Paris employer used to send me desperate pneus (the equivalent of telegrams, but for local consumption) asking me to get in touch with her a.s.a.p.; I let the phone ring for hours (you weren’t allowed to leave it off the hook and it was fixed to the wall so you couldn’t unplug it); I ignored every entreaty to finish the work (I never let on that I hadn’t even started); finally, finally, when I judged I had driven everyone nuts for long enough and it was actually time to do the work else there would be no more work to do, ever, I did it – in three weeks instead of three months. At the end of the marathon I used to collapse in a heap on the floor, swearing I would never put myself through that again.

And then I began working for a translation agency (my more faithful readers will be familiar with it) and I started being given deadlines that were two or three days apart. There was no time to procrastinate so I knuckled down and did the work. I haven’t missed a single deadline for 19 years now – where’s the beaming smiley when you need it? – and I know that no one is at their best under stress. It’s an illusion.

I’m currently doing a couple of translations for the BBC. It’s a recurring thing and years ago I used to have at least two whole months to do it, which enabled me to combine it with my agency work. More recently, the BBC deadline (which is decided by someone else) has been getting shorter and shorter just because everyone is always on holiday or on attachment or has a mild cold (see previous posts I’ve written about it), and because producers are the least decisive people in the entire world. As I said, it’s a recurring thing and they know it’s coming every year, but they always act surprised and keep me waiting and waiting and waiting. Until this morning I didn’t have a deadline at all for my current work. It paralysed me completely for a few days. I had the material to work on but I couldn’t do it: I needed to know how long I had so I could pace myself and work out what to do and in what order. The deadline I have now been given is a bit too short to be comfortable but as soon as I got it I felt as if an enormous weight had been lifted from my shoulders. I did more this afternoon than in the past three days.

We need to know. There is of course a big deadline for each of us; a huge deadline by which everything we’ve always wanted to do should be done if we are to be at peace, but, except in some special cases, it will be kept secret until it suddenly comes upon us. Everything would be so much easier if we did know. Mine is apparently Wednesday 7 July 2027. That’s one deadline I wouldn’t mind missing. (Wanna check yours and get depressed? Log on here)

Slapping the BBC – again! And my old self for making my life more difficult than it should have been!

Call back your troops, archy!

i shall organize the insects
i shall drill them
i shall lead them
i shall fling a billion
times a billion
times a billion billion
risen insects in an army
at the throats
of all you humans

Thus spake archy the cockroach.

Because of him I have an infestation of moths and no means of eradicating them efficiently.

Don’t tell me to use cedar chips or lavender oil: they make my clothes smell lovely but the moths don’t mind them at all. The only things that used to work were plaquettes Vapona but they were taken off the shelves several years ago. Since then, I’ve been regularly finding moth grubs in several corners of my very small flat. I only wear natural fibres and I fear for my pashmina (who says it’s not fashionable any longer?), and for the other fine wool shawls and beautiful cashmere sweaters I bought in TK Maxx over the last couple of years.

Rather than spending money to develop new and effective anti-moth products, the makers of Vapona et al. have chosen to stop production completely and go on to something else. Maybe they only wear Lycra.

It’s a ridiculous situation: I am an adult; I can be trusted with noxious chemicals; I wouldn’t ingest them or rub my face with them or do whatever it is one shouldn’t do with a Vapona thingy. I’m hoping that it might be possible to buy some more in the future because the World Health Organization now supports the indoor use of DDT to control malaria. The W.H.O. supported indoor spraying with DDT and other insecticides until about 20 years ago. The controversy about its use had been going on since the early 60s, when an environmentalist called Rachel Carson managed to persuade most people that it damaged the environment, although it probably presented no health risk to humans. And DDT was banned. And malaria-carrying mosquitoes flourished. Like my damned moths. I hope people will come to their senses and stop equating a ‘potential’ harmful effect with an ‘actual’ bl**dy nuisance, and allow the use of anti-moths again.

Ok, my moths are not the cause of more than one million deaths every year nor have they infected five hundred million people with malaria, but they are very annoying.

Slapping archy! And indifferent manufacturers!

PS. I'm assuming everyone has read archy's life of mehitabel and its sequel archy & mehitabel by don marquis. You have, haven't you?

Têtes à claques XIII

Why Sarah Waters? Because she looks so smug; because she has a PhD in English Literature and chooses to write, as she says herself, ‘faux-Victorian melodrama’. Ha! It’s soft porn. The word ‘bawdy’ is often used to describe her novels; I shudder when I see that word: it represents everything I detest – in literature and elsewhere.

Why Andrew Davies? Because he’s an old lech, but he should know better than to adapt that kind of crappy stuff. Please don’t tell me he’s a wonderful adaptor; I know he is. His recent adaptation of Bleak House was a gem, and so was almost everything he previously adapted for the small screen. But together with Sarah Waters he managed to produce the most preposterous and repellent thing I’ve ever seen on television – Tipping the Velvet. (As a bonus, it also featured one of the least talented offspring-of a-famous-person ever: Rachael Stirling, Diana Rigg’s daughter. That programme really had tout pour plaire, as we say in French.)

They say everything is being dumbed down. No kidding! Sarah Waters and her faux-Victorian melodramas have been short-listed for the Booker Prize (the most important literary prize in the UK). What next? A Mills & Boon/Harlequin ‘novel’?

Slap! Slap!

PS. Don't you think they look like each other too? The same pixie face. Creepy.

Mes deux centimes

I was going to write a ‘Where were you when...?’ post today, but my friend WinterWheat has done one on hers (Triticum Turgidum), so I’ll just say this:

Just as the people who were massacred by the Nazis were innocent; just as the people who were sitting quietly on the underground and on a bus when they were blown up in London last year didn't ask for it ; just as the ordinary people who are regularly murdered by deluded fanatics in Israel and elsewhere are blameless ...

... the 2,800 people who were reduced to dust in the Twin Towers five years ago were not responsible for their horrendous fate.

There are people who take apologies, mea culpas and any goodwill gestures towards them as weakness. As we know from the preposterous ‘Peace in our time!’ comment by Chamberlain, all those years ago, there are people with whom appeasement does not work. It didn’t work then; it won’t work now.

Biting the hand…

Don’t get me wrong: Blogger is great. Blogger enables me to waffle on about my bugbears. Thanks to Blogger I can find out what my friends think. I love it, quirks and all.

But I wish, I wish there was a system of notification that would tell you when someone has commented on any post you contributed to. Darling Bloglines goes dring! dring! dring! when a blog you like to read has been updated or edited, but that’s it.

I wanna know when a new comment has been posted on one my favourite reads.

Slap!

If you say so

I’ve been sitting here, waiting for the next post on this blog, wondering why it wasn’t appearing. Duh!

I’ve been unusually unstressed and peaceful in the last few days, but today a friend told me something that made my blood boil.

Suppose you’ve got an appointment to have a seaweed wrap at a beauty salon (no, I’ve never had a seaweed wrap in my life, nor any other wrap; I haven’t even had a facial; I’m not terribly fond of being pummelled by strangers – anyway, we’re not talking about me, we’re talking about you). Today is Tuesday and you have an appointment for next Wednesday, but when you made the appointment you didn’t know you wouldn’t be able to turn up that day because you’re going on holiday tomorrow until next Wednesday (no, not me: I never go on holiday). So, you phone the beauty salon, talk to Zelda and ask her to postpone the appointment to the following day instead. She says fine, thanks for calling. You breathe a sigh of relief, congratulating yourself for remembering to call: the salon charges the whole price of the treatment if the appointment is cancelled with less than 24-hour-notice .

When you get back on Wednesday, there is a message from the salon on your answerphone. It was left yesterday by Priscilla: she was just calling to remind you that you were coming in tomorrow Wednesday for a seaweed wrap. Aaaargh! You pick up the phone straight away and tell silly Priscilla that you talked to Zelda last week and that your new appointment is now for tomorrow Thursday, and it should be written down in the book anyway. ‘Oh, yes, here it is,’ she says. ‘That’s all right, then.’ Relieved, you can now unpack your bags and rest after your journey.

‘Le lendemain, elle était souriante…’ – don’t mind me: it’s a funny French song that seemed relevant just now. The following day, you turn up at the salon, ready to be wrapped in seaweed, but Priscilla’s not there, and Zelda has had a lobotomy in the meantime and cannot remember anything about your conversation or anything about any cancellation. She’s the boss of the salon and she’d like to get an extra £500 for the missed appointment. Isn’t that what a seaweed wrap costs? Non? I haven’t got a clue. You remain firm and insist that you did cancel the appointment last week, and in the same breath you curse the absent Priscilla for not telling Zelda about it and Zelda for not believing you. You can tell she doesn’t: she’s got this sour expression on her face and she goes, ‘If you say so.’ If you say so?! Is this how you treat a customer? (I’ve just watched a TV programme about how bad customer service is in this country. You don’t say!)

So I’m slapping Zelda and anyone who, instead of accepting their staff may have made a boo-boo, assumes the customer is lying and openly expresses their disbelief, thereby making the customer feel yucky and not wanting to be wrapped in seaweed after all.

Guest Slapper of the Month VIII

How do you introduce Katiedid of Seldom Nice Nowadays? Her blog always makes me scream with laughter. It’s not for the faint-hearted, though: it sometimes contains, erm, ‘language’ (and so does her Slap – you have been warned, LOL!). Are there any limits to her imagination? The things she does with words and images! She is one of a kind. It is my pleasure to welcome a true heir of the Surrealists.

Bela is kindly allowing me to guest slap this month, but I'm so anxious about it. Who do I pick for a whole month? What if I pick one target, only to find a better one later? Gahhhhh! So here is a brief list of folks I would like to slap at the moment:

1.) Taco Bell, for their fourth meal campaign:
Hello idiots, this is AMERICA. We couldn't care less about your fourth meal proposal because we're already too busy choking down our ninth meal of the day.
2.) Snakes on a Plane:
I'm not slapping the movie because it isn't geniusly cheesy. It is. I'm simply sick of the hype and the formulaic quality of the concept ("scary things" + "transportation" = "hit movie.") What's next? Clowns on a Plane? If you can squeeze 20 of them into a tiny car, imagine the terrifying possibilities a jumbo jet offers. Or Mimes on a Spaceship? After all. In space, no one can see you scream. No, maybe I'm being too hard on the movie. The formula breaks down when you consider Mice on a School Bus. That'd be kind of adorable, actually.

3.) Galvanized Steel Plumbing:
No special reason, but it's had it coming for a while now.
4.) The "Two-Buck Chuck," aka Charles Shaw, wine cult:
Shut up, already. It does not taste "pretty good." It's cheap. It's potable (technically.) It's like raving about the Ford Escort as a kick-ass ride: we nod not because we agree, but because that's how one politely allows others to their insane delusions.
5.) My next door neighbor:
He's a nice guy. But he carries his pet bird on his shoulder everywhere he goes. Everywhere. Unless you're sporting a matching eyepatch and pegleg, that looks a little crazy to the rest of us.
6.) The very small minority of people who make fun when I quote Shakespeare:
Listen, it's not my fault you can sing his stuff to the theme from Gilligan's Island. Now I'd understand if folks rolled their eyes because quoting Shakespeare comes off as pretentious in some cirucumstances. Oh hell. It beats a round of 99 Beers on the Wall, doesn't it?

7.) I would like to slap rogue racoons, but they'd only bite my hand clean off if I tried.
8.) Open buffet restaurants:
I hate them. So much. My antipathy towards them pains my husband to no end. "Honey, there's no waiting, you get to serve yourself!" Don't we do that pretty much every day at home for free? Sanitary concerns with buffets aside... if I'm going to the expense of eating out, I want someone to serve me for a change, thank you.
9.) Which brings me to, self-serve checkout stands at stores:
I've worked retail checkouts before. I refuse to do it without pay. Manning a register and checking people out can be crummy work, but earning minimum wage while putting up with poorly maintained and obstinate machinery is a perfectly honorable job. I have no desire to revist the salad days of my own youthful employment. I therefore don't care if I have to stand in line a whole three minutes longer to wait for a cashier to ring me up. At the very least customers should receive a discount for doing this work for the store. I know a shell game when I see one. Stores which are introducing it promise, amongst other things, that it will keep costs down so they'll pass the savings onto us. Remember when ATMs were first introduced, and the banking industry promised us that lower charges would swiftly ensue since we'd removed the human element (meaning, someone's job) from the practice? Did that happen? No, now we see charges for ATM card use and for interacting with an acutal teller on top of it all, too. Don't buy into their confidence man's scam!
10.) Johnny Depp:
Were it not for him, as an American I could have lived my life blissfully unaware of the existence of Vanessa Paradis. She's his supposedly beautiful partner, if you go for that sort of "I don't eat sandwiches, I just smell them as they pass by" angle-boned waif look, and as long as she smiles with her lips closed. However, you shouldn't be able to play children's hand games with your face. Games like:
Here is the church, Here is the steeple,

Open her mouth, and see all the people! Gaaahhh!

It's as if her teeth don't exist as a set, but as individual dental entities.

On one hand, I find it refreshing she didn't conform to make it in the modeling and entertainment world. On the other hand... LOOK. AT. HER. TEETH.

BONUS SLAP!
I'd like to slap myself, due to my poor grammar (see #3.) And also for being so depravedly shallow (see #1 through #10.) I'm unable to slap who I'd really like to, the Syrian ambassador to the US, because I'm unable to articulate anything beyond "fuck you" to him whenever he's on the the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer pretending to care about the Lebanese people, or for that matter, peace with Israel. But this is not "Fuck You of the Day," so it's not on the list. (Well, just in case Bela will let me get away with it: fuck you, Imad Moustapha.)

For your delight

‘He is the very pineapple of politeness!’ says Mrs Malaprop of another character in The Rivals, the play they both inhabit, as it were. She’s one of Sheridan’s most delightful and enduring creations. Many have emulated her speech since she first appeared on the stage and we have all met at least one person who deserves to be nicknamed after her. If you do not know a Mrs Malaprop I can give you directions to one who lights up the blogosphere with her special kind of linguistic magic practically daily and never fails to make me chuckle or hoot with laughter.

In the meantime, here is a wonderful article on the subject by Jeanette Winterson, the author of Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (her only readable book, in my opinion, but that’s another story):

‘Communicating with the dead is risky, especially on constipated ground’
by Jeanette Winterson (The Times, June 2006)

My column on damp squids and holly reefs and other howling etymologies seems to have delighted Times readers enough to send in stacks of their own. In the way of things, I was also bereted by two readers, indeed made into something of an escaped goat, for being sufficiently unfamiliar with the English language to imagine there was such a thing as a damp squid.

Now that I am also the Big Brother household’s favourite read, I shall no doubt suffer the fate of a previous contestant who thought East Angular was a sovereign state somewhere near China.

This is the sort of thing to drive anyone stark raven mad, or indeed to turn this whole column into a bit of a wild elephant. The only thing for it will be to drive off in my hunchback car and get a bit of aquapuncture.

Food seems to offer rich pickings for howlers: a fast-food joint in Singapore calls itself ‘Sudden Food’, but if that has crept up on you too quickly, have pity on the lady still searching for the recipe for Ends Meat, as in ‘I don’t know how I am going to make ends meet’. For the ladies’ man, Damsel Jam seems too good to miss and, for those who want to eat modestly, there is always the microway.

Other readers have been astonished at menu recommendations for Acid spumante (I cannot comment for legal reasons), banana spit, and home-made shepherd’s bush. At a wedding buffet recently, guests were met with Sausage Rolls, followed by Profit Rolls, or elsewhere, Prophetic Rolls, the kind of food, I imagine, that warns you of exactly how ill you are going to be by bedtime.

On the other hand, prophetic rolls might be just the thing to use to strike a happy medium, though why, as our reader inquires, we should wish our psychic friends to be unhappy, or indeed strike them when they are not, remains unclear.

Communicating with the dead is obviously a risky business, especially as they might be buried in constipated ground or, as the Countess of Harewood kindly suggested, have too hastily signed over their Power of Eternity.

One husband told me that his wife likes to say: ‘'If my mother were alive now, she’d turn in her grave.’ I know that’s not quite a fake etymology, but I include it, along with ‘my words fell on stony ears’. This must be close to bear-faced cheek, which might be a relative of the moveable beast, as in ‘Easter is a moveable beast — it all depends on when the hens start laying’.

I feel very sorry for the child who nearly choked on his biblical cord, and for the gentleman who feels ‘out on a limbo’. I think we have all felt out on a limbo sometimes, perhaps especially the lady who ‘has a milestone round her neck’.

I was sent a delicious little book, entitled A Decapitated Coffee, Please. This is a truly bonkers collection of malapropisms and misnomers, lovingly brought together by Des MacHale, and published by a little Irish publisher in Cork called Mercier Press.

Anyone out there — and it seems like most of you — who revels in our linguistic glories should get hold of this book. It is the kind of thing to keep in the loo — which, incidently, to correct one of my readers, doesn’t come from regardez vous, as the night-pail was sloshed out of the window, but from gardez-l’eau, indeed as the posh French chambermaids emptied their posh French chamberpots. Needless to say, the non-French less posh were soon copying the idea and mispronouncing it as Gardy-Loo. It is a bit like our friend San Fairy Ann, who I am told, has a sister called Fairy Nuff.

Anyway, the little book is perfect for the loo, and will cheer you up on those gloomy days when you are feeling a bit down in the mouse, presumably the mouse-hole, which I see is really a mouse-all, because that’s where all the mice live.

A couple of my favourites from the book are: ‘You could have knocked me down with a fender.’ And: ‘Now that I have read a book about Swedish sex, I know where my volvo is.’

Mrs Winterson used to talk about an interfering madam she disliked as a ‘proper Cleopatra’. On further inquiry I discovered she had ‘a rod up her asp’.When I asked what this meant, Mrs Winterson replied: ‘She won’t let sleeping snakes lie.’

Language deserves respect. Anyone who mangles it ought to be slapped.

Update (27 August): A word of caution: if you’re one of those unfortunate people for whom words mean nothing and who couldn’t care less about them but who still insist on writing, be very careful. Using a spellchecker doesn’t help: it doesn’t have a brain and will choose any word that resembles the one you can’t spell and produce a sentence that doesn’t make any more sense than the one you wrote originally. It will be much funnier, though.

Oh, here’s another one!

This will get the post-feminists’ (I’m being kind here: they are female chauvinist pigs) knickers in a twist again.

Vertiginous heels are back in fashion. Heels have been steadily getting higher over the past, what?, 15 years or more. Some very expensive, haute couture styles are now ridiculously high, and women can’t walk in them: they teeter along and constantly risk falling over. Why is that, then? Why are comfortable, practical shoes not fashionable any longer?

Well, just like hairless women remind men (and everyone else, except those who don’t want to see) of pre-pubescent girls, i.e. beings they can patronize and not take seriously, women precariously perched on very high heels are vulnerable, ‘incapable’ beings: they can’t run; they stumble; they have to be steadied and protected. They become helpless little females again. And that, for some reason, seems to be the impression some women want to give.

I too used to wear heels, back in the 70s, not extremely high ones, not stilettos, just heels high enough to give me a bit of a lift. Then the kind of shoes I liked disappeared from the shops. Doc Martens came on the scene and one could only find rather chunky brogues. I wore trainers for a long time, and more recently just flat shoes. Now I can’t wear heels any longer. I’ve lost the knack. Shame. On the other hand, I don’t think I would want my bum to stick out the way it does when you wear very high heels. And I can do without looking as if I spend my life standing on street corners. I don’t wear ‘f*ck-me shoes’ (Germaine Greer, who coined the word in the 90s, would be proud of me).

But things are looking up. There may be a backlash against ridiculously high heels in the near future. Clare Coulson is already denouncing them in the Telegraph online (I pinched their photo, by the way). It may herald a return to more practical footwear and hence to another kind of woman. Perhaps. With a bit of luck. I won’t hold my breath, though.

Slapping Christian Louboutin, Manolo Blahnik et al.

Scream!

Just a quickie while I wait for something to really aggravate me (of course I’m in a state of constant irritation at the moment but the cause hasn’t changed so I won’t bother you with it again).

I’m slapping people who say ‘Believe it or not...’ followed by something totally not incredible. ‘Believe it or not, being rich and healthy is better than being poor and sick.’ Erm, y-e-s! Pretentious is not the word (as they say in sly theatre reviews).

I also want to slap anyone who peppers their speech with ‘methinks’.

Feeling lazy today: please nominate your linguistic pet hates.

Update (21 August): re. being pretentious, I've already railed against French people using English words or expressions all over the place, even when, sometimes especially when there are perfectly good French equivalents (Parlez-vous English?); this time I'd like to slap English people who mistreat the French language in the same way. I have to single out someone called Linda Pilkington because she's in the news at the moment (well, the perfume news I read about elsewhere on the Net). Linda, whose other fragrances all bear extravagant (and to my ears unpleasant) names, has called her latest creation Orris Noir, thereby taking a leaf out of Miller Harris's book and mixing English and French words in the hope that those perfumes will sound more up-market than they are. They end up sounding silly instead.

I don’t belong any more

I’ve been called a rabid feminist several times in my life: never to my face, mind you, this is the kind of thing women (it’s always women) say about you behind your back, but, you know, there are ways of finding out. I’ve always called myself a feminist. Rebecca West once said, ‘...people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat,’ and, since I’m not a doormat either... Until now I’ve been proud of the label (not the ‘rabid’ bit, obviously) because women who think it’s an insult and insist that they have nothing to do with it are just deluded: they believe that they are making free choices in every areas of their lives, when, in fact, in many of them, they are behaving exactly like men and society in general want them to behave, but more importantly they believe that the freedoms they are enjoying now are permanent and cannot be taken away. One almost wishes for Sharia law to come into force in the UK and take away all the things they take for granted and refuse to see as hard-won victories by the militant feminists of yore.

Enter the militant feminists of today.

In an article in The Sunday Times, Sarah Baxter, a Greenham Common campaigner, writes,

Women pushing their children in buggies bearing the familiar symbol of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament marched last weekend alongside banners proclaiming “We are all Hezbollah now” and Muslim extremists chanting “Oh Jew, the army of Muhammad will return.”

As a supporter of the peace movement in the 1980s, I could never have imagined that many of the same crowd I hung out with then would today be standing shoulder-to-shoulder with militantly anti-feminist Islamic fundamentalist groups, whose views on women make western
patriarchy look like a Greenham peace picnic.

The compassion for people of colour has been translated into feminists standing with terrorists who are terrorising their own women.

Please read the rest of her article here. I’m not a young woman who thinks she has it all, but I’m saying, ‘Over my dead body!’ to the future it conjures up.

Oh, and please suggest an alternative for ‘feminist’: I feel bereft without my label.

Slap!

* If you’re not familiar with Sharia law Wikipedia can help. Here.

Update: If the links didn't work for you earlier, please try again. Naughty Blogger had replaced them with its own address. They should work now.

Daylight robbery

As if it wasn’t the cause of enough stress as it is, with erratic and infrequent mail deliveries, expensive and complicated rates, etc., the postal service will very soon be the source of more aggro: on 21 August, post will be priced according to size as well as weight.

I have in front of me a bright red leaflet produced by the Royal Mail: there’s a price chart and lots of blah blah about the new system, like ‘If your item fits inside the red area [more about this in a minute], is no thicker than the 5mm thickness indicator and weighs under 100g, then it will be classed as a Letter’. There’s also a double page with two letterbox slots drawn on two different areas and in two different colours. One is for the old ‘Letter’ and the other for the new ‘Large Letter’. You’re supposed to put your item within one of the areas (‘Place corner of item here’) in order to gauge its size and work out which kind of letter it is. However, it’s not just the length and width that determine the category but the thickness too so the only way to do it would be, I think, to stand the item at a right angle with the leaflet to see whether it would go through those slots if they were cut out. But it won’t work: letters are not the same thickness all over; they’re very often thinner around the edges, for instance.

The system is absolutely preposterous and would be risible if it wasn’t going to be implemented in a couple of weeks’ time. I believe some people spend their entire lives trying to figure out how to get money from us. It’s sheer extortion (leading to sheer exhaustion, LOL!). And a stupid waste of our time. The Royal Mail should just order us to stick up our hands and give up all our cash every time we go to the post office. It would be quicker and the result would be the same.

Slap!

Update: I hadn’t actually had a good look at the price chart earlier. I have now and I’m truly depressed. Things that are small and light, but bulky, like, for instance, erm… at random… a small McDonald’s ‘The Dog’ toy, which I have a drawerful of (some people are gender confused, I’m age confused, no, actually, I’m just rediscovering my inner child), well, things like that, which wouldn’t go through the slot for Letter or even Large Letter, will now have to be sent parcel rate and that means a jump from 32p to £1. Unbelievable!

Guest Slapper of the Month VII

My August Guest is Jemima von Schindelberg – isn't that a wonderful name? Her blog, Imitation of Life, is full of quirky poetry and insights. She's supposed to be a teacher (those kids are so lucky) but she's a writer, really. As you can see below, she feels strongly about things and doesn't pull any punches.

A Violent Pornography

I need to open with an emphasis on what I’m not. I am not an easily shocked, shy retiring spinster type of prude. I am not a self-important, do-gooding, fascist type who wishes to control the minds of those I deem ignorant. I’m not living in a bubble cut-off from the realities of what life has become in the 21st century’s developed world. Generally I dismiss complaints against extreme art with a shake of my head and a quick “they’re missing the point”; I am, however, speaking to you today in the guise of Concerned of Birmingham, outraged by some violent ‘art’.

I rate A Clockwork Orange*, Goodfellas**, and City of God*** among my favourite movies, all unflinchingly violent but, as with the obscenity distinction between pornography and art, they offer something else. I have delved into the darker parts of my personality playing violent video games (such as The Simpsons Hit and Run) where I see that violence and competitiveness provide the entertainment. Entertainment becomes dangerous when a me me me greedy culture is the immoral substructure of an explicitly violent, and outstandingly realistic entertainment package.

So I am grasping this opportunity to slap, or slapportunity if you will, to drown the makers of Grand Theft Auto, the many sequels and the many imitators with oceans of shame. These are the games of speeding in shiny cars, of theft, violence and all manner of anti-social behaviour presented in such a slick and stylish way that one cannot help but be seduced by the glamour. Entertainment aimed, allegedly at an adult market that know better, glorifying a self-centred, materialistic and utterly selfish mode of living. Not only do these games miss the intended audience influencing small minds, they also normalise violence, bringing the act of killing into people’s homes, influencing grown minds.

The blurb says:

Five years ago Carl Johnson escaped from the pressures of life in Los Santos, San Andreas... a city tearing itself apart with gang trouble, drugs and corruption. Where film stars and millionaires do their best to avoid the dealers and gang bangers.

Now, it's the early 90s. Carl's got to go home. His mother has been murdered, his family has fallen apart and his childhood friends are all heading towards disaster.
On his return to the neighborhood, a couple of corrupt cops frame him for homicide. CJ is forced on a journey that takes him across the entire state of San Andreas, to save his family and to take control of the streets.

Liberty City. Vice City. Now San Andreas, a new chapter in the legendary series.

I have always been a little troubled by the ultra violent, but believe in free speech, the right to choose, individual responsibility, yadda yadda. During a Circle Time session when we were discussing activities we enjoy (in an effort to help the children see their shared humanity, their similarities and thus to make friends more readily) I became concerned. It turns out almost all the boys have played the GTA San Andreas game, adore it, and would defend it passionately. Interesting that I’ve had a lot of problems with violence and fighting from this group also. So many of them seem to have unlimited access to play unsupervised. So many struggle to draw any distinction between reality and the fantasy painted in the 18 films and games. They are unsupported, having no guidance to consider the moral implications of visiting prostitutes and carrying weapons.

The violent cinema causes violence argument is an old and not especially convincing. Clearly many people see violence and do not react violently, The Crusaders, Genghis Khan and Jack the Ripper didn’t rely on cinema to get their passion for violence flowing. It is not as simple as that. I have to draw a distinction between passively viewing violence and taking an active role, even as far as holding a replica gun, and pulling a replica trigger in some games. The added level of involvement has to go some way to normalise violent acts and make them seem an every day occurrence. How much easier it would be to pull the trigger when faced with a violent situation, when you’ve simulated it a thousand times and become acclimatised to the consequences of a gun shot. Don’t forget Grand Theft Auto’s verisimilitude resulted in a shortlist in The Culture Show’s Design Quest.

The websites I visited made a show of their adults only policy. These games are Rated m for Mature, but this is no protection. Options of “Click here if you are British and under 18”, “click here if you’re from the rest of the world and really mature”, enter your date of birth. Why do they even bother with this? If I’m a bloodthirsty ten year old with no one watching my online activities, my conscience isn’t going to stop me entering the site I’ve been warned is unsuitable. At a Parents’ Evening one mother reported how she resorted to breaking the PlayStation in order to get her sons (and husband) away from the violent DVDs and games they shared. Dad liked to share. Mom was powerless. This horrified me, and is probably a whole other gender-culture related slap.

The children, my dearly loved students, have no concerns for their own safety. They believe in Grand Theft Auto, see truths and validation that are lost on me. Ok, so they’re happy to inhabit this world, happy for our world to become more like it, thrilled by the Ray-Ban glamour, high-speed excitement, the fashion and passion. But, ah-hah, “What if someone wanted to hurt you?” asks the naïve teacher. Haven’t I warned them a thousand times of the cycle of violence and suffering that result from an act of anger? “I’d kill them first,” comes the instinctive reply. The wrongness of killing is absent. The likelihood of being caught off guard, overpowered or punished is less real than their sense of potency and the safeguard that a raft of extra lives confers. There is no danger and no conscience. I feebly quote The Qur’an, The Bible, The Torah to impress on these children who spend maybe ten hours a week in religious instruction, that every religion is certain on the question of the sanctity of life, but it is way too late. They have lived the GTA life, the thrills much more alive than tales of angels and damnation meant to scare them into submission.

I am not going to slap those who find violence and crime exciting or alluring. We are usually not responsible for our passions and interests, an attraction to that which is forbidden or dangerous is common and understandable. I am slapping parents and other carers who are so irresponsible they allow unlimited access to age inappropriate material, to the media machine that looks at success in terms of sales and not the effects on society and to a company that throws all its expertise into making their interactive violence as realistic and alluring as is technically possible. These games are not art, offering nothing more than pleasure taken in the pain of (simulated) others, they are the trigger on a time bomb that will inflict needless suffering on an already pain-weary populace.

Thanks to System of a Down for lending me the title, although I didn’t actually ask permission, so technically it’s theft: see what happens to my moral fibre when I start researching these games. All quotations and images from: www.rockstargames.com/sanandreas

*A Clockwork Orange has young people dancing with violence as a symptom of a decaying society. It is a warning, a futureshock, with exquisite photography, soundtrack and utterly thought provoking. Youthful attraction to ultraviolence is shown as a phase we can outgrow.

**Goodfellas explores the attraction to crime and violence of the poor and impressionable. The consequences are shown. And it is also exquisite in visual and audio terms.

***Again a decaying society, of haves and have nots, a dog eat dog world that anyone with a brain and some luck would seek to extricate themselves from. A wake up call to those who close their eyes to the favelas and see the poor as subhuman and far away. It too has high standards for the sights and sounds.

****Cartoon violence. A yellow, non-realistic, humorous, humanistic icon is in no way similar to any aspect of the world I know. Probably quite a bad influence on the youth, but at least they know it’s not real. Then again, my youngest believed visiting Disneyland would result in her being transported into an actual cartoon where everything and everyone would look like they do in the animations, so can I really assert non-realistic violence is safe?

Tête à claques XII

The heat wave is apparently over. Phew! I couldn’t stand it! No, not the heat – the moaning, the whingeing, the grumbling, the millions of newspaper articles with dire warnings about heat strokes and other various illnesses caused by the hot weather.

I know a 76-year-old woman, in good health, who lives in a lovely, airy house, with a gorgeous garden, and who, after reading all those doom-laden articles, was convinced she wouldn’t survive – like those very frail old people who were left alone in deserted French towns a couple of years ago and who died because no one thought of checking up on them.

I had heat stroke once, years ago – in Israel, in the middle of August. I was staying with Polish relatives of my mother’s who had recently arrived in the country, complete with goose-down mattresses, duvets and pillows. I was sleeping in a kind of meringue during the night and being fed incredibly stodgy food during the day. I collapsed. I was put to bed sans duvet, and given sweet and salty drinks. All I had was a slight fever and a headache. I didn’t die.

Who’d have thought the Brits were such wimps?! There won’t be any more complaining, I hope. I’d be very glad not to see such a lot of yucky white flesh on show as well. Not a chance of that, though, the Brits strip down to their knickers as soon as the sun comes out for a second. Ugh!

They never stop talking about the weather, yet they’re always taken by surprise by it. The whole of the UK comes to a standstill whenever the place isn’t grey and chilly. We’ve just had ‘the wrong kind of heat’, very soon – too soon for my taste – it’ll be ‘the wrong kind of snow’ again.

Slap!

I was right

It's not happening: Now What?

Worried, angry and frustrated

Maps from www.iris.org.il

This will tell you why I can't write just now: This Ongoing War

Just read it! It's updated every day so go back if you want the latest news.

Slapping the biased media!

Updates (Wednesday 19 July): For the first time in days, on the World at One (BBC Radio 4) today, the war in the Middle East was replaced by an item of domestic news. Are the media already getting bored? Is Israel getting too long to get wiped off the map? That’s what they’re waiting for, aren’t they?

Every day I’ve turned on the radio or the television and switched it off again within a minute, after hearing the word ‘Israel’ followed by a verb signifying aggression. “Israel attacked...”, “Israel bombed...”, etc. Even when whatever Israel did was in direct response to rockets fired by Hezbollah, this wasn’t made clear in the reporting and the lasting impression was that Israel was the aggressor.

So what else is new?

Two of the very first words I learned as a small child were ‘propoganda’ and ‘demagogia’. That’s how my Russian father pronounced them. He said them often, usually at the television. I used to laugh at him and think he was slightly paranoid, but I see now he was right. He knew the meanings of those words first-hand. As teenager, he had lived through the Revolution, then through the 30s and beyond in France, where propoganda and demagogia were also common currency. Nothing has changed: these days, as always, if you want to be liked (or get a huge round of applause on BBC programmes like Any Questions?) all you have to do is to tell lies about Israel. I should be used to it by now, but I’m not. I carry on being dismayed.

And I wonder.

I wonder why anyone would want to ally themselves with people who don’t value their own lives nor those of others. The answer is very simple: anti-Semitism. Some people would rather support murderers than be on the side of the Jews. They should be careful not to back the wrong horse, though: history might remember them as those who tried to carry on Hitler’s work.

(Saturday 22 July): Apparently, there are still some people out there who, although Israel has been in the news for years, still haven't got a clue how tiny that country is. The maps above are meant for them.

(Thursday 27 July): And this map is for those who still think that size doesn't matter.

Ta da!

Guess what!

I've done it!

Me. Myself. On my own. Thank you Tina, Craig, Wayne, Nicholas and those lovely people at PC World. Didn't need you in the end.

I won't bore you with the technical details. Let's just say it involved downloading drivers from the Internet, unzipping files, moving folders about, telling the computer to get off its butt and go and look for stuff and install it now, this instant, otherwise I'm going to have a fit, etc. etc.

*grin*

Update (Friday): The replacement disk, which arrived this morning and which I thought of using to install broadband on my laptop instead of downloading the whole thing again, is also missing an essential driver and miscellaneous bits of info. Wonder what the techies would have suggested I do today if I'd waited for them to solve my problem.

Ta da!

That’s what I was going to say today, after successfully installing broadband on my computer.

Except it didn’t happen.

I spent the entire day trying to coax my computer into recognizing the modem supplied by my ISP. But it wouldn’t. I had a wonderful team of helpers – Tina, Craig, Wayne and Nicholas. It cost me 25p a minute to speak to them, but Nicholas was very nice: he called me back after 20 minutes…

In the end, after trying everything, I suggested they send me another installation disk. So I can spend another day being frustrated and aggravated.

My ISP has already started to charge me for broadband; no one actually said what would happen if my computer absolutely refused to communicate with the modem. “No, I don’t want to work with you: you’re a nasty little dark grey box. Blech!” Am I condemned to carry on paying as I go for ever and ever now?

Slapping my ISP again –because it’s been making my life more difficult than it already is for the past month and because there doesn’t seem to be any light at the end of this particular tunnel.

Last year… in London

There is a very old story on the theme of Death that goes like this:

One morning, the caliph of Baghdad’s vizier ran to his master and fell to his knees, pale and shaking with fear, “I beg of you, my Lord,” he panted, “permit me to leave the city today!” “Why?” said the caliph. “This morning, while I was crossing the square, a man bumped into me in the crowd. I turned around and recognized Death. He was staring at me in a threatening way. My Lord, he’s looking for me.” “Are you sure it was Death?” “Yes, my Lord, he was dressed in black from head to toe and had a red scarf round his neck. Please, my Lord, he’s looking for me; let me leave this instant; I will saddle my fastest steed and, if I don’t stop on the way, I can be in Samarkand by the evening.” The caliph was very fond of his vizier so he let him go immediately. A little later, he went out of the palace, disguised, as he often did, to mingle with his subjects in town. On the square, he noticed Death and went up to him. “I’d like to ask you a question: my vizier is a young man in good health; why did you scare him this morning by staring at him in such a threatening way?” “It wasn’t a threatening look; it was a look of surprise. I wasn’t expecting to see him here, in Baghdad. I have an appointment with him this evening… in Samarkand!”

On a sunny morning, last year, in London, innocent people met Death at the hands of murderers (not ‘martyrs’). A lot was said about the victims at the time and they are in the news again on this first anniversary of the atrocity. I felt very sorry for all of them, but particularly for those who died thinking they had cheated death a little while earlier – those who escaped from the hellish underground only to board the bus that was blown up in Tavistock Square.

Again I’m slapping everyone who condones those kinds of terrorist acts – wherever they are perpetrated.

I’m not sure if I’m also allowed to slap someone who is a survivor of 7/7… ok then, I will: in an interview in the Evening Standard, this man said, “Terrorist bombs are a daily routine in Iraq, but they also happen in Afghanistan, Egypt, Turkey, Bali, Madrid and so on…” One country is missing from that list; a country that should have been mentioned by name, not vaguely included in a general ‘and so on…’ I’ll give you a clue: it begins with the letter ‘I’ and suicide bombers have perfected their technique there over a great many years. Is it a memory lapse or is it perhaps that, like someone who was grilled by Melanie Phillips the other night on The Moral Maze, he believes that that particular country deserves it? One can have been through a terrible ordeal and still say objectionable things.

Guest Slapper of the Month VI

Red Queen of She'll be feverish after so much thinking and I have been cyber-friends for several years: we usually laugh at and get annoyed by the same things. She has a lot of common sense and a light touch. She radiates kindness, but when something gets her goat...



Mad enough to slap someone? It’s not your fault.

Yes, fellow slappers, finally, a plausible defense for our inordinate rage – we may be suffering from Intermittent Explosive Disorder (IED).

IED has been described in The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, that bible of mental health professionals, since its 1980 edition. It is classified as an impulse control disorder, along with kleptomania, pyromania and pathological gambling. However, IED is in the news lately because a team of researchers from Harvard Medical School and The University of Chicago have found the “disease” to be far more prevalent than was previously thought, afflicting as many as 16 million Americans. They are saying IED may be to blame for the rise in “road rage” plaguing our culture.

Huh. Aren’t we all angry from time to time with the stressors of modern life? I have been known to curse at other drivers (within the confines of my own vehicle), give my PC a good whack upside when it’s acting hinky, engage in a primal scream in response to endless automated phone menus. But we’re not talking about plain old losing one’s temper. IED anger is “grossly out of proportion to any precipitating psychosocial stressors.”

Persons with IED exhibit “several discrete episodes of failure to resist aggressive impulses that result in serious acts of assault or destruction of property” over the course of a lifetime. According to the Harvard and UC researchers, IED costs sufferers an average of $1359 in property damage. That’s not much. Heck, I only need to toss my bleeping computer out the window one time to meet that figure.

Anybody buying this theory yet? The researchers have linked IED to low serotonin levels. (Serotonin is a neurotransmitter that helps mediate the body’s production of adrenaline – think “fight or flight” response.) So if IED is a disease caused by a discrete neurochemical deficit, it can be treated with – you guessed it – medication!

I’ll admit I’m frustrated with my own “industry” of mental health professionals for making it all too easy for people to avoid taking responsibility for their behavior. Such disease-mongering has been an identifiable problem for at least three decades. They doubtless deserve a slap. But my experience is that these individuals are well-meaning. I believe they as much misled as misguided. So let’s dig a little deeper and ask, Qui bono?

The study I mention was funded by the National Institutes of Mental Health, a US government agency. Sounds like it might be legit. But keep in mind that pharmaceutical companies comprise the most powerful lobby in Washington DC, with enormous influence on how government research dollars are spent. (EU members, don’t pat yourselves on the back too vigorously – roughly half of the largest drug companies are European, so this is a global problem.) According to the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, in 1990 the big pharmaceutical companies allotted approximately 11 percent of sales revenues to research and development of new drugs, while more than three times that much – 36 percent – went toward “marketing and administration.” The investment is certainly paying off for them: From 1960 to 1980, prescription drug sales were fairly static as a percent of US gross domestic product, but from 1980 to 2000, they tripled. They now stand at more than $200 billion a year, with by far the largest increase being among neuropsychological medications.

Are you good and mad now? It’s not your fault. You’ve been provoked – 200 billion dollars’ worth. SLAP! Take that, drug companies!

Tête à claques XI

Told you the mellowness wouldn’t last long.

Before you go on reading, please answer this question: did you enjoy Truly Madly Deeply? If you’ve answered, “Oh my god, it’s my favourite movie; I’ve seen it 25 times and cried soooo much each time,” you can stop reading now because this post will upset you.

If, on the other hand, you’ve answered, “Ugh! That movie made me want to throw up: it was so syrupy and fake and the acting was disgusting,” then please carry on.

Juliet Stevenson was the main culprit and I wanted to slap her very hard for it when the film came out, all those years ago, and I can’t wait one minute longer.

I used to adore her. I saw her in her very first part at the RSC in 1978. She was 20 years old, I think, and fresh from drama school. She’d got the part of a servant in a marvellous production of The Taming of the Shrew because the actress who should have been playing that part had broken her leg or something, and she made a great impact in that small part. I got to know her and the following year she even stayed in my flat in Paris, while I spent the summer in Stratford. I saw everything she was in and was never disappointed. She had a superb, distinctive, grown-up voice and she was always good. She was also very serious and dedicated and had unbelievable self-discipline.

And then Truly Madly Deeply happened and that was it. She became the most mannered actress ever – a kind of caricature. My partner’s theory is that she was praised so much for her performance in that film that she must have thought that was what the public wanted from her so she gave it more of the same. And she started playing fluffy (she doesn’t have the physique for fluffiness) and scatty women because she was offered other parts like that after that landmark film. Her voice got shriller too.

I stopped being able to watch her, but I don’t give up easily on people and I’ve seen her in other things since then – just because I keep hoping that one day she will be the powerful performer she was when she was young. Tonight my partner and I saw her in a terrible production of The Seagull, directed by the perverse Katie Mitchell. Perverse because she decided to go against the text all through, without any reason whatsoever. Perhaps tomorrow’s reviews will reveal that the nonsense we saw on the stage had some profound meaning, but I doubt it. Juliet wasn’t bad, but she couldn’t be good in such a preposterous production. I’m afraid I hid from her, when she walked by in the foyer after the show. “Darling, you were wonderful!” I couldn’t possibly have said that to her – no way.

I’m slapping Dame Juliet (it’s only a question of time…) for being such a disappointment.

Stay tuned...

I’ve just finished my work (four days before the deadline, hooray!) and I’m feeling all mellow and incredibly well-disposed towards everyone (hmm, almost everyone).

I don’t think it’s going to last, though... so don’t go away.

Let me explain...

Every so often I tell myself I must cut down on the time I spend on the Net. I never do, of course: it’s too much fun and I would miss it. However, British Telecom must have heard me and decided to help because four days ago it cancelled the number my ISP uses to allow me unlimited access to the Net for a reasonable sum of money every month.

Just like that. Without any warning.

You put on your computer in the morning (or rather, in my case, in the middle of the afternoon), you click on the cute icon and then, instead of that infuriating series of beeps and funny sounds, you get a different infuriating noise, a voice saying, “This number has not been recognized.” Qué? You try again and again and then you get on to your ISP and then to BT and you spend the entire day trying to find out what the f*** is happening, or, in my case, your partner does it because they have a little more free time to devote to such nonsense than you do at this particular point. The ISP and BT give you differing versions of what they think is happening and every time you have to tell your entire life story to the new person with an impenetrable accent that answers the phone. Finally, it does appear that BT has cancelled that number.

Ok, ok, I should have broadband. I could have broadband for a little bit more money, but I have a geriatric computer (i.e. a 3-year-old one) and broadband might make it give up the ghost completely and I can’t afford to buy a new one and anyway why should I be forced to have broadband when that other system worked very well for me?

My ISP says they are doing their best to obtain a new number from BT, but I reckon it’s not really in their interest since they know that everyone who’s lost that connection will now get broadband with them and not stick with pay-as-you-go, which costs an arm and a leg (that expression reminds me of a very funny incident, but I haven’t got the time to tell it to you, sorry). They say we should have more info by Tuesday.

So, if you have a blog and if, in the past few days, I haven’t commented on it as often as I used to, it’s not that I'm on a deadline (which I am) or that I've gone off you, but it’s because every second I spend on line is costing me masses of dosh.

If I still get that stupid message on Tuesday I’m applying for broadband. I bet my ISP and BT are in it together. I’m not very fond of conspiracy theories – you know, Diana died because of a drunk driver; Serge Lutens has nothing against the Americans; J F Kennedy was killed by… etc. etc. – but, in this case, I could very well believe those two big corporations are in league against us. I think I can hear them laughing...

Slaps all around!

Football or Big Brother

That’s the choice on TV at the moment.

Blech! Blech!

Slap! Slap!

Now what?

In my first post on this blog Oh, to be a freelancer! (the previous ones came from my weekly thread on MUA) I wrote about my relationship with the agency that supplied me with work for 18 years and what used to happen with the one piece of work I was still doing for them. This year it’s been different. No early phone call. No threat. No warning that it might be more difficult than usual or that the deadline might be shorter and do I really want to do it, anyway? Nothing.

So I emailed the woman the other day. Today there are two messages on my answerphone and an email saying she’d like to tell me about ‘what’s happening’ over the phone. I’ve emailed back to say I’d rather read about it. (She’s always wrong-footed me that way: forcing me to react to bad news there and then, and I don’t react well to bad news).

I know what’s coming. I know there will be no British Tourist Authority brochure this year, or any other year. That’s one third of my very small income gone. The surprise will be the reason why. Did she decide it wasn’t worth her while giving me work this year – after 18 years of bons et loyaux services? Did the British Tourist Authority refuse to pay for the proofreading again and did she tell them – on my behalf – to go jump in the lake? Whatever the reason, since the work should have started in three weeks’ time, I would have expected to be told long before now. I think after 18 years of etc. etc. I deserved that courtesy. I never missed a deadline in all those years. Because I never went on holiday in the summer, like all the other French translators, I was always there to answer questions – at any time of the day. (It very often seemed to me I wasn’t a freelancer, but a tele-worker.) Before the advent of email, I used to deliver the work personally (the agency is at the other end of London) whenever a deadline was especially short. Oh, I don’t know what else I used to do to make her work easier. Now this.

But I'm a freelancer so who cares.

Updates (14 June): I now know ‘what’s happening’ with the brochure: it’s not good but it’s not as bad as I feared. The BTA has decided to just update last year’s copy, which involves spending an awful lot of time fiddling about with PDFs and stuff. At least I won’t be totally idle in July, but how do you cost adding 23 words here, seven there? The woman knew about it a little while ago, but she was about to go on holiday so she decided to tell me on her return.

I decided to leave this Slap up because, although I may have been a bit unfair to my employer, I know she wouldn’t think twice about doing what I thought she had already done and if not this time then maybe next year.

‘Paying it forward’, isn’t that what it’s called? LOL!

(26 July): Just heard from the agency that the brochure has been cancelled. The English copy to translate should have landed on my desk over two weeks ago. As it happens, because I don't work full-time any longer, I didn't turn down any other translating jobs in order to stay available during that time and for the next four weeks, but someone else might have. All they said was “Sorry!” ‘Sorry’ doesn’t do it when you’ve lost a third of your income with no hope of making up the loss.

With women like these…

I couldn’t believe my ears the other day: I was happily listening to a short story on BBC Radio 4, when I heard something that made me jump: something I’m used to reading from time to time on the message board I belong to. That moronic comment about old ladies’ smell. The latest one read, “X on me smells like an old lady. You know those elderly women who don't bathe for days?”

Well, I don’t, actually. When I think of a bad body odour, I think mostly of men who are too macho to use antiperspirant, for instance, not of women – old or young.

A woman wrote that otherwise good short story; a woman posted that idiotic, offensive comment. There are lots of things that annoy me, but one thing that annoys – and distresses – me more than any other is when women are being misogynistic. Some women internalise men’s clichéd opinions of them and spout them out without stopping to think about what they’re actually saying. They're the ones who usually proclaim loudly that they're not feminists. I believe such women are trying – subconsciously maybe – to suck up to men. Silly, short-sighted and misguided!

Slap!

Guest Slapper of the Month V

Still Life of dancing in place is one of the most exciting people I’ve had the privilege of ‘meeting’ in cyberspace. She may be stiller than she used to be physically (I gather she led a very active life before her accident) but mentally… wow! She writes beautifully about her new life. Here she is – in slapping mode:


Reserved

Last week I received a parcel surprise. A t-shirt sent from my friend Alice, catering to my slightly bent sense of humor. Its color was an ice cream swirl of pinks and cranberry, and in the center was the universal symbol of accessibility flanked by the message...
I'M ONLY IN IT FOR THE PARKING. Lovely!

However we all know that within every bite of sarcasm, there is sure to be a smidgen of truth -- and apparently Dateline felt the same.

The other evening I took much vengeful pleasure in watching a segment which exposed able-bodied drivers taking advantage in the use of handicapped parking spaces at a local Walmart. As each driver exited their vehicle and began WALKING to their locations, the field reporter approached and asked (ever so nicely), excuse me, but what type of disability do you have which allows you to park in that reserved space? I wooped. Responses ran the gamut: from jacket shielding of the face and running from camera view to adamant claims of entitlement (chronic leg pain, night blindness (it was midday), partial hearing, etc.). Some even went as far as to produce counterfeit or expired temporary placards (disabled parking identifications cards) -- Shameful.

According to the Americans with Disabilities Act, businesses are required to provide at least one handicapped parking spot per every 25 spaces. This particular establishment had seven accessible spots, so I can safely assume that the lot's entirety was that of at least 168 other available options. One offender, with identity protected, summed it up by admitting to the pros (proximity and availability) outweighing the cons ($110 penalties and social tsk-tsks). And to me, for once, the words spoke louder than the actions.

I understood clearly this person's attitude of disregard to my or any other physically challenged person's human needs and rights. It is also the unspoken evidence each time a person causes me to wait outside of five empty bathroom stalls because they prefer the spaciousness and private mirror afforded in "mine". Or when I am not able to maneuver my chair up an accessible ramp because someone on foot is blocking my path, self-righteous and unapologetic, they silently tell me --"I don't really care". So, to all of those making less of my greater needs: those who use my parking space, my bathroom stall, my water fountains, my ATMs, my public phones...if you don't want to sit in the chair, then stay off the ramp!

SMACK AND A ROLL OVER YOUR TOES!