Women's Work

The award yesterday of the Nobel Prize for Economics to Elinor Ostrom represents something of a back-to-basics, firstly in that it is the first award to a woman, and secondly in its topic: the management of common property resources by communities.

There's a common misconception that equates economics with money. Not so. The circulation and (ultimately) accumulation of money is the topic of a rather dull subset of economics: finance.

I'm not a trained economist. But my economics teacher, Pedro, has told me a couple of interesting things:

• The origin of the word Economy is 'household management'. (by the way...look at how recent that coinage is. It hasn't been synonymous with 'finance' for very long at all!)*

• Quote (and I've stolen this repeatedly from him): 'Economics is about decision making. Usually we use money to keep score.'

The way I see it is this. Women, typically, have various decisions to make:

• Do I spend money on school shoes for the kids, or can I afford to eat myself?

• Is it more important to take the kids to the cinema to see the new Pixar or to pay the electricity bill on time?

• Should I keep having sex with that drunken bastard who sometimes hits me but who also brings home money?
  

Those are micro-economic examples. Can anyone think of any macro-economic?

Isn't it amazing how ordinary women manage these complex, long-term planning decisions on a daily basis, all without the aid of the theories, spreadsheets, computer models and the like that financiers can't seem to manage without?







* This I already knew. It's the topic of 'A History Maker' by the great Glaswegian pedestrian, Alasdair Grey. The book is set in a futuristic time of plenty wherein the men occupy themselves by running around playing at Battles, while the women stay at home and TCOB. How very unlike our own time.

A whole hill of Beanscenes

On my Facebook earlier today, I mentioned that I was working/chatting/whatever by Wifi. This was from a Beanscene café, a chain that’s rapidly become a Glasgow (and Edinbugger) institution.

The coffee’s pretty so-so (still way better than The Big S! But they need to learn the magic word: Illy.), but maybe that will change with the new management. There’s certainly a better range of food now – and even wine and beer (not sure these are A Good Thing. Their previous corkage regime worked just fine). Also…while the WiFi’s cheap (an hour with every purchase), as a Moral Principle, all WiFi should be free! (or, at very least, unlimited with purchase).

So what’s so great about Beanscenes?

We first started going to the original one in Shawlands when our first two were born, twelve years ago. This is highly significant! They define the Platinum Standard in child friendliness. They actively encourage Parent and Baby groups to meet there, informally…and, of course, this is great for business. Mid morning they’re generally stowed out with buggies, babies and Yummy Mummies.

• They’re also a great place for teens to hang out.
• They’re the venue for Bright Young Muslim Things. No alcohol (until...)
  
• They’re nice and quiet for business meetings and the like. I did all my e-mails there today. In another corner, I guy I know was sat with someone with files and laptop and briefcases all piled up.
• There are not many places you can sit and eavesdrop on a conversation which turns out to be about managing stenosis in neonates.
• I meet my Community Psychiatric Nurse for appointments there.
• Their playlist is All The Good Stuff…Yusuf Islam, Blur, Van ‘The’ Morrison, Beatles, Neil Young, Dylan, Doors, Rufus Wainwright, Martha Wainwright Outkast…you get the drift. I want their playlist! (Mind you…my barista – I hope the *don’t* call them that - complained that it’s not big enough so it gets repetitive)
• They promote/manage their own label (still? not sure)
  
• They do evening gigs, readings, writers groups.
• Their House Photographer is Ken Sharp. Today, from where I was seated, I could see Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson, Van, Polly Harvey. Bjork and Lou Reed were around the corner. Keef was by the toilet door.
• Sure, it’s a mainstream commercial enterprise and I’m not saying there’s and interstitial about them. But not a hint of Central Perk, either. There’s usually one nearby. They’re an institution!

Beanscene, Clarkston Toll, Sunday.

L'enfer, c'est les auteurs.

I went to my first ever Creative Writing class today, @ the local library as part of the Scottish Mental Health Arts and Film Festival.

One of the exercises was haikus. Proper 5-7-5 haikus, with a seasonal imagery and dynamic middle line. We were given an object to inspire us...in our case, a lichen-covered, autumnal twig.

I wrote three thematically linked stanzas:

A brittle tree branch
snapped from its mother forest.
Fodder for writers.

Dark evenings' fun
from dry kindling. Nature
dried out for poems.

How cold these scribbles.
Wood burned, on table not hearth.
Sends out autumn warmth.

(extra points for spotting the Basho reference in the last one.)

Then we had to spend five minutes writing something - anything - about hands. Given that about 70% of the class was women over seventy...perhaps it was fortunate that I didn't have to read mine out:

Hands give great pleasure - which is why, in primates, god placed them so that they are adjacent to the genitalia when the primates are in their normal standing or resting positions. There are many other things that primates can do with their hands, but the African Ape species Homo is by far the most dexterous (or in many cases, sinistral). While the other two members of the chimpanzee subspecies, pan paniscus and pan troglodytes, are extraordinarily adept at unpeeling bananas with their feet, only the hairless chimpanzee is able to use its hands to communicate. This it achieves by tapping its fingers repeatedly against a complex arrangement of oil-based polymers.

Doris Lessing meets Douglas Adams meets Max Bygraves, I thought.

Some observations on the characterisation of societies according to their position within the historical dialectic.

Just before I went to Sweden last, I read (via www.thelocal.se) a Prospect Magazine article about The Swedish Soul. 'The Scandinavian Exception' has long been a puzzle: how come they manage to do everything right, in terms of heathcare, welfare, education, social inclusion and, above all per capita GDP. (The groundbreaking 'The Spirit Level' discusses the overwhelming, unignorable correlation between societal equality and all these factors).

So how do they pull off what Hobsbawm called (long before Blair filched the term) 'Third Way', the hugely successful alternative to Anglo-Saxon Capitalism and Soviet-style Communism. Well...it's in the blood. A Swedish Trade Union leader points out that their society moved somewhat smoothly from an egalitarian agrarian society and straight into industrialisation and modernity. Unlike in, say, Britain, there was no intervening feudalism. Accordingly, they regard they regard Social Democracy as obvious. To a large extent they didn't have to struggle for the benefits they take for granted - obvious things like the struggle for independent trade union representation which my own mother played a leading role in in the 1970's.

Now, Marx pointed out that the conditions of the previous historic age are carried over into the next phase. The British Industrial Revolution was enabled by its feudal system: landowners were able to enclose their feudal demesnes for the benefit of the mutton and wool industry. Their dispossessed serfs provided a convenient pool of labour for the Dark Satanic Mills they were investing in in the newly forged cities.

And as for America...they still bear the horrifying legacy of the agro-industrial use of human machinery.

So where does this leave us? I would argue that we can characterise societies in terms of how har along they are on the dialectical process from feudalism-capitalism-Dictatorship of the Proleriat-Emergence Into Communism.

• Scandiwegia: Well, as readers of Stieg Larsson will know, it has a dark underbelly (and a Norwegian of my acquaintance reminds me that the same people who invited Hitler in are still around, still active in society). But...you'd quite like to live there if you were elderly, ill or jobless, no? It's not far off 'To each according to their needs from each according to their ability' And they're all smart techno-cookies who completely get Marx's view that technology is the engine of Growth.

• America: It is significant that America has a Liberal Left but not (to any large degree) a Socialist Left. The average, American, college-educated liberal is genuinely scared at words like 'Socialism' and 'Marx', for the obvious reason that sixty years of anti-Socialism militates against their studying them. Not if they want to hold down a job and mix in respectable company. So we are told, the Received Wisdom has it, that wheras Britain has a class problem, America has a race problem. Well...I'm sorry...but what is 'Race' other than a convenient device for colour-coding human machinery? The US of A was founded on slavery and its wealthier inhabitants continues to prosper from it. It always has been a class issue - Marxist historian Howard Zinn is excellent on this in his Peoples' History of the United States. It is no accident that the Civil Rights movement was largely instigated by the CP-USA and people like my personal hero, Trade Unionist Bayard Rustin. (J Edgar Hoover was right: The Southern Christian Leadership Conference was a Commie front organisation). But...while there ave obviously been many good signs of late...America will not make progress in addressing healthcare, poverty, education, drug abuse, social exclusion, inequality or any of the general Happiness issues until they wake up to Socialism.
  

• England (yes, we have to take it separately from the rest of the UK): The Class War is over and the proletariat lost. As an English emigrant whose formative years were directly shaped by English Feudalism and the stale hierarchy it implies - I believe I'm in a position to comment that it's seriously failing to fulfil its potential as a nation. England was the engine of the early Industrial Revolution...but it never quite got around to sharing its wealth (attempts to do so were crushed mercilessly, and the bitter legacy can be seen across the Northern coal towns). Indeed, it exported feudalism throughout the world in the form of colonialism, and as such...it as A Bad Name. (An Irish friend told me that the only phrase one needs to learn in a foreign language is 'Oh, god, no! Irish!). And the great crying shame is they don't even get it. Brown is On The Side Of The Angels - but even he is still bought into the idea that Britain (read 'England') can prosper on 'Invisible Earnings'* What part of 'The Crisis of Capitalism' would you like me to explain?

• Scotland: Now as a Scot-Of-English-Ethnic-Origin (and boy, does that phrase piss people off. It's meant to.)...I'm not going to pretend for one moment that this dreich, Irn Bru swigging, chip-guzzling, proud nation of heroes is paradise. I merely observe that our socioeconomic history is somewhat different to England's. It is unfortunate for us that, at about the time the Industrial Revolution was kicking off, England exported a vicious brand of colonial feudalism which replaced a looser-knit, more consensual Clan system. (eg.up until The Act Of Union there as never a King of Scotland Dei Gratia, but a 'King of the Scots'.) So Scotland's communitarian culture was held in check...but it's always been there. This, combined with the Scots emphasis on education as a moral duty (we have Knox to thank for this: his insistence that the lowliest crofter was able to read The Bible meant that the Scots were able to read Adam Smith, Davy Hume, Burns, McDiarmid, Irvine Welsh, Tables of Logarithms...) means that we are...different. Our greater sense of JFDI coupled with our awareness that we're 'A' Jock Tamson's Bairns' puts us, I argue, in a better position than our stale, colonial masters to cope with the fact that the historical dialectic has simply moved on.
  
  So what's the plan? Fuck-off big wave turbine generator in the strongest and most reliable current in the world (www.emec.org.uk). Use this to power a hi-speed maglev between Edinburgh/Glasgow and the English cities, so all the people from the defunct Financials industry can commute to where the money is. Or, if they're to dumb to want to come to one of Lonely Planet's Top Ten Cities, the Holyrood government, unlike Westminster, is actively encouraging immigration. We regard asylum seekers, refugees and economic migrants and their children as a valuable economic resource. (and this, children, is why, in Scotland, the BNP share of the vote in the EU election was 0.02%. Or, to quote a friend's CPGB father-in law "We beat the Blackshirts off Glasgow Green!...by the way, I do mean 'beat'.")
  
  Then...who knows? Maybe start running ourselves as though we were Scandiwegia, with free university education, free medicines, free elderly care...oh, wait. We already have those.

Tiocfaidh ár lá







* 'Earnings' is a misnomer here. The whole financial industry is a massive overhead which serves only to skim of tithes from Production Value. Even more bizarrely, Education is regarded as a 'Tax Burden', ignoring the well-established first year economics textbook teaching that $1 on education yields $1k in GDP. Teachers are the economic engines of society!

Geor-Geor-Geor-Geor-Georgia's always on my-my-my-my--my mind

Here's a not-very-good cameraphone photo of my favourite relish du jour. My brother-in-law found it in a Russian shop in Dundee. The main label text is in Russian (nice one, Cyril) and says Adzhika - obviously a cognate of aji, achaar, etc - chilli or spicy pickle in various languages. The text above it is in Georgian script. (Which is where the sauce originates)

The relish itself is a dark, confit-ey reduction of chillis, onions and garlic. It's pleasingly hot, slightly sweet and salty. In Scovilles, it's about on a par with a sambal oelek. It goes especially well with fried eggs but then show me a chilli sauce that doesn't.

I've just discovered that Wikipedia has a category for hot sauces. It doesn't mention this one - but it does have a picture of the retro-cool Harrisa du Cap Bon Phare.

My Pop Soft Spot

This is not exactly admitting to a guilty pleasure - just someone who probably isn't reflective of the bulk of my musical taste.

I've liked Sinead O'Connor ever since I say a small photo of her in the NME - well before I'd heard any of her stuff. It would be trite to say I like her voice*. It's acoustically very similar to Dolores O'Riordon of The Cranberries, but the difference is that you get the impression that every note that comes out of O'Connor's mouth is the one she meant to sing.

Anyway...this is quite clearly the best No 1 single ever. Certainly the best No.1 video.



It's the tear four minutes in that's the killer.

And then there was this - 13 days after she'd torn up a picture of JPII on live TV:



OK...I admit she's made the odd embarassing record...but her Reggae covers collaboration with Sly 'n' Robbie was a lot better than it could have been!



I learnt that lesson - around the same time as I first heard of Sinead O'Connor - when I told a record store employee that Najma Akhtar had a good voice. He told me 'Lots of people have good voices. But she knows how to sing.' Check out Dil Lagaya in her download section.

My favourite shop

I had a birthday trip around the 2nd hand bookshops clustered around Glasgow's Otago Street. There are three: Caledonian Books on Great Western Road (opposite IJ Mellis, Cheesemonger); Thistle Books;...those two are good, and Thistle especially is good at having in stock what you're looking for. But they're a bit too well-organised for my tastes. Best of all is...

It's a little tricky to find if you've never been before, down a shabby wee lane. See this Google Map. Or look out for this landmark:

This is the bibliophile heaven that awaits you inside:

I'm guessing that at one time they tried to categorise and alphabetise everything properly - but they've long since abandoned that idea and gone for the 'Loose Piling' method. There were several minor avalanches when I was in. Useless if you've a particular title in mind, obviously, but book lovers can have a wonderful time mining in the stacks. "Ooh! There's another title that I simply have to have, despite never having heard of it a second ago." And I like the way the floor slopes in different directions and threatens to give way when you walk.

What I bought:

Two titles for my collection of 'Textbooks for languages I have no intention of learning':

• Colloquial Mongolian
• Teach Yourself Swahili

Other finds (from there and Thistle) were:

• The Collected Poems of Hugh McDiarmid (2 vols)
• The Joys of Yiddish - Leo Rosten
• There Are Two Errors In The The Title Of This Book - Robert M Martin. About logical and philosophical paradoxes.
• A Time Of Gifts by Patrick Leigh Fermor. First of a highly recommended trilogy about walking across Europe just befoere the start of WWII.
• You Shall Know Our Velocity by Dave Eggars. I actually wanted (still want!) his What Is The What, but that's serendipity for yer. His A Heartbreaking Work Of Staggering Genius is also highly recommended.
• Marx For Beginners by Ruis. The prototype for the '...For Beginners' series.

Believe me - I could have bought a lot more!

Oh - I did buy some Lancashire and Cheshire cheese, too.

The Ghost of an Old Machine.

Last week, I bade farewell to a faithful, old companion. I tossed my pre-Cambrian PC out by the bins. It was almost 9 1/2 years old - a record, maybe? - but had served me well. I bought it from a dodgy backstreet outfit. PII 333MHz processor, 64MB RAM, 2GB HD (you can get bigger micro-SD cards nowadays!).

It was something of a George Washington's Axe of a PC, though. Over the years, I'd had to: replace the motherfuckerboard; add a CD-R drive (and then another, when that one wore out), add USB and Ethernet cards - they didn't have USB in those days - although I left the phone modem in, as a curioisity; replace the HD (upgrading to 4GB!) and add an extra one at a whopping 8GB; add more memory; and, most recently, replace the monitor with a better one, picked up for £5 in a car boot sale*.

Then there was the time they power unit failed. I googled (this was before ebay), and it turned out that there were only two of a suitable type in the whole UK...and they just happened to be in Bristol, where I was going the following day, right on my route from the airport. They were in a PC graveyard, a business run by a guy who bought up old equipment and disassembled it in his basement.

When I bought an iPod, In discovered two things. Firstly, iTunes won't run on anything olderv than Windows 2000. Secondly, my machine wouldn't handle XP. This set me off discovering the wonderful world of Ubuntu Linux, to be able to run gtkpod.

Here's what it looked like inside.


As my friend Gunnar once said, "When you become a parent, you have to put the case back on your PC." Wise words. Note the crafty use of duck tape in lieu of a hard drive bay. Marvellous stuff, duck tape. It's what holds the universe together.

The reason for replacement was that my brother-in-law donated one of his old PCs, on the grounds that it was '...too old to handle e-mail. It doesn't even have a modem.' I must tell him about the existence of USB network adapters sometime.

But the spirit lives on! I've stripped all the useful components (eg memory) from the dead machine and stuffed them into the new one. One of these is the IDE cable**. Bizarrely, the old one had a backward one which had to be twisted awkardly to get it into the back of a drive. And I've kept the old monitor, keyboard, mouse and graphics tablet (another car-boot £5).

I've not got a DVD-R working in it yet. I did buy one, from the same dodgy backstreet outfit (£17!) . But I knew it wasn't going tom work as soon as I plugged it in...on account of the smoke. Once I get that sorted, I plan to burn and install Ubuntu and dual-boot with XP.

* Complete this well-known phrase or saying:

"Don't get your knickers in a...

...car boot sale."

** Grey ribbon-y thing that plugs into the back of DVD and CD drives.

Wee Devil

This weekend was Glasgow's biennial Radiance Festival of light art. As part of this, Adam and Sophie took part in the production, 'Wee Devil' by an arts group, Giant Productions. They put in a lot of work, making shadow puppets, rehearsing and appearing on three succesive nights.




It was a multimedia production, with live actors and narration and a film projected against the mediaeval Provand's Lordship, Glasgow's oldest house.



Here's the performance.

And here's a cast photo. (Adam on left, Sophie on right, holding demon mask)




Afterwards, we had a spooky walk in the Necropolis.

More from Yorterborrr

Gothenburg = Göteborg (pr. Yorterborrr). More photos from my recent trip.

City of Many Canals

One of a dozen or so contenders for the coveted 'Venice of the North' title

A disturbingly erotic woolen shorts-sox-knee warmers combo

An ergonomic supermarket basket-cum-trolley

A society so hi-tech that even the rodents are online.

Shrimp boat is a-comin' ('restaurang' where dinner is delivered on radio controlled boats)

In the last couple of weeks the fish have wised up and have started attacking the boats. Evidence for evolution?

A refreshingly down-to-earth attitude to fleshly matters.

This is what Swedish Marine Engineering Officers look like.

A poster for my public seminar.

Not a real ship. Only a model. A well cool model! The Captain is real, though. And also a Professor.

Where I did the gig.

The view from the cafeteria.

What a university department might look like, if you didn't forget to fund it for thirty years.

A fat bastard, teaching a university class.


Hej då!

Faux amis pour mes vrais amis.

Linguistic confusions in Scandiwegia:




I think I'm lost. I thought this was Copenhagen?

Probably the most boring licorice shoelaces in the world.

You'd have to be either stupid or stoned to shop here.

I've been up Jorck's passage

Oh, I don't know. I thought he looked like a cute wee...whatever he is.

Now I don't like that!

(but the sensible Scandiwegians have it under control - as always)

This tram got out of the wrong side of the bed.

Snakes in an Elevator!

Well, yes. Bacardi and sex is a fatal combination.

It'll never sell. Mind you...Cafe au Lait flavour seems somewhat appropriate...

And finally...this one speaks for itself...

Baby Doom

I like these:

More from A Softer World

It's one damned thing after another.

"History is written by the victors", says the slogan. In fact, in the case of the Vietnam, it has now been re-written by the losers - as evidenced in George Bush's speech to US veterans yesterday.

In fairness, it didn't start with Dubya. There is a current of popular mythology that says that the war could have been won if the US hadn't soft-pedalled to appease the lefty peaceniks (and if the draft dodgers had done there part...oops better not mention that). Bush is playing on this when he talks about the US 'withdrawal' from Vietnam. That's 'withdrawal' as in 'kicked out.' The US were licked fair and square. Despite their overwhelming advantages in firepower and logistics they had no choice but to 'withdraw'.

Nevertheless, they shouldn't make the mistake of withdrawing again. Last time, we're told, that led to the horrors of the Khmer Rouge killing fields. He has a point there. The US left the region in a shocking state. Part of the mess was the power vacuum created in Cambodia, in large measure due to 'Operation Breakfast' and 'Operation Menu', the covert carpet-bombing of Cambodia which Kissinger used to destroy peace talks and to suppress Viet Minh elements that were in opposition to Pol Pot's faction of the Khmer Rouge. Cambodia and Laos were to be sacrificed to buy time in Vietnam. In so doing, the US shares a large part of the blame for creating a monster.

And who was it who sorted out the mess? In 1968, Cambodia was liberated by Vietnam.

Tip o' the hat to this guy for his photo title.

Looks a scream, hang him on your wa-a-all.

Last week I visited the Andy Warhol exhibition, showing at the National Galleries of Scotland as part of the Edinburgh Festival (loyal readers will recall that last year's blockbuster was Ron Mueck).


I didn't have too much interest in Warhol previously...some good ideas, sure, but I'd got the idea. Or so I thought. In fact, we weren't going to go in at first (we were headed for the Picasso ceramics at the Museum for Scotland), but the queue was short and it was a spur of the moment thing.


I was blown away! I got more out of it than I have from an exhibition in many a year. here's some ramblings.


Warhol was the master of praxis. Just do something, and work out what it is afterwards. Keep churning out repeated images and new ideas will emerge. Say a starlet is terrific and It Shall Be So. Portray yourself as an artistic genius and things will happen. Repetition was obviously his Famous Big idea, but he did all sorts of exciting things with it:

• The Brillo pads and soup cans - in an industrialised, mass-market era, artifice has no value. The artefact becomes art. The trick is to continue to make art at a detached distance from the product.


• Jackie O. (This sort of thing - except with the images more mixed up). It took a while to realise that there were only three separate images, combined in various enlargements. What he's done here is added a time dimension - cf Picasso's 4-dimensional paintings. But he's added a televisual element for the media age: it's not a linear portrait, but a series of snatched glimpes of a public persona beamed intensively into living rooms over a period of intense interest. So it also adds multiple perspectives - the same image of a fixed event, viewed repeatedly by different people and/or the same person, over time - a blurring of time and viewpoints.


• His death paintings - stunning use of silk screen and silver nitrate photography to add noise to images, making the viewer work to draw out the content. In a version of this one (scroll down to Green Car Crash) it comes as a shock that the impaled victim is not the first thing we notice. A version of this has the image repeated, in one repetition with a lot of visual noise. The shock comes when one realises that a faint blur in the corner is the falling figure. (And again - it says something about time: Before and After). In another, one gradually realises that a hospital scene shows a baby being delivered by Caeserean section.


• Skull Paintings. Screen print on heavily impasto'd paint, lending subtle variations to each reproduction and making each one fresh.


• Screen tests. Films to be viewed as portraits. What is a film but a stream of still photos? (I had my own screen test done).


• Stitched photos. He's take four identical B&W photos and stitch them together (he left the the ends of the thread visible). When you look at them, you realise that you're focusing on something different in each repetition. It also turns out that he was a master of composition.

I could go on - but better not. I'll leave you with some children playing with his iconic 'Silver Clouds'.

Capitalism 101

A few words on the Mattel toy recall.

There seems to be a lot of criticism of Chineses safety standards. But is it entirely fair to lay the blame on Chinese subcontractors?

Here's how Capitalism works. Corporations are more or less obliged to constantly find ways of cutting their margins. This is how they maintain a compatitive market position, allowing them to stay in business and re-pay their investors. Those in favour of 'Free Marketeers', who are in favour of unbridled criticism, constantly rail against 'regulation' which imposes non-negotiable costs on companies. (eg John Redwood's call for de-facto tax cuts).

Regulation includes things like financial probity, workers' pay and conditions and product safety. These are the responsibility of national governments and are put into place in response to democratic agreement. In effect, the electorate says "We'd rather not have lead in children's toys, thank you." One way for companies to avoid the costs associated with local regulations is to shop around for laxer regimes - ie to source products from markets where labour is cheaper and less money is spent on product safety.

So...say you're a toy supplier placing subcontracts in a competitive market. Your priority is going to be the bottom line...isn't it? Because that's the impersonal law of The Market. The subcontractor offering the best deal is quite likely to be the one who's paying workers pennies and cutting corners on safety (and environmental impact...etc. etc. etc.).

We know this. Right?

So whose job is it to check whether subcontractors are meting our minimum standards? And whose job is it to ensure that companies supplying into our country do not place contracts on subcontractors whose business model relies on terms and conditions for their workers that we would deem unacceptable? At present, we recall poisonous toys. We don't recall garments made by sweated child labour.

The Way We Live Now

I've got a new phone - and, more's to the point, a new supplier. My old provider's Loyalty Department didn't come up with the goods...so I was disloyal. Slut!

My new supplier is these people. They are slightly unusual in mobile telecoms terms in that their business model is based around the sale of 3G content. Their handsets are set up with shortcuts to their content portals - some of it free (eg. news - albeit mostly tittle-tattle about people I've never heard of) , but mainly paid-for content (TV; empeethrees; games).

It hardly needs saying that mobile telecommunications have changed our lives within a very short space of time. It's hard to imagine how we did without our phones. Example: I was (re)watching one of my favourite films, Gregory's Girl recently. The scene where he's stood up by Dorothy at the clock in the plaza...that would never happen nowadays. We no longer have to make elaborate arrangements to meet people and hand around waiting in anticipation; we can make arrangements on the fly. And I'm sure we've all got stories about life/sanity-saving incidents.

But that's not all. I was browsing through the various 3G offerings, and discovered that I am twelve or so twitches of the thumb away from pornography. Here's a thing; High Street shops all over the UK are openly selling devices which give easy, discrete access to commercial sex product, menu choices including gay, lesbian, MILF, gonzo, anal...etc. I don't wish to moralise about this (although debate always welcome), but merely to highlight it as a a societal change. Gone are the days when images of erections were only available (if at all!) through scary backstreet emporiums.

It's a well cool phone, incidentally. Who'dathunk I'd be carrying not one but 2 video cameras around in my pocket (and a much better camera than on my last phone!). I've got this photo as my wallpaper, my ringtone is The White Stripes' 'I Think I Smell a Rat' and for the alarm, in tribute to Brian Wilson who woke his family up with it every day, The Ronettes' 'Be My Baby'