Interlude

I forgot to mention a few utterly trivial points about the journey here. I got upgraded to business class again for the second leg of the trip, from Munich to Tel Aviv; as I said before, it's very nice but I would not pay for it. Why me? who knows. Perhaps because I'm a fairly frequent flyer and travelling alone?

The security inspection in Stuttgart confiscated my shaving cream, first time that I've ever had anything taken away. In fairness they did offer me the alternative of checking my bag (i.e. not carrying it on), which would have let me keep the stuff; they would have tagged it with a huge great big label and I would have given it to the gate personnel and received it again on the "finger" in TLV. I didn't know that system and thought they meant that I had to go back to the checkin, wait in line, give them the bag, then fight my way through security once more — which had already taken nearly an hour the first time I did it. Ah well, live and learn. (The reason I didn't give it up to the baggage handlers in the first place is that it contained my laptop, and I felt no need to expose them to the temptation to steal or break it.)

Security did allow me to keep my toothpaste and aftershave, but I had to take them from the plastic bag that they were in and put them in a specific and special 1-Litre Transparent Resealable Plastic Bag, which by an astounding coincidence was available from a vending machine right there. In a package of two, though you are only allowed to take one such bag on board. The bureaucratic mind at work is a thing of wonder.

Oh, by the way and on the subject of security, here's an important Public Service Announcement. If you have a connecting flight, e.g. Stuttgart to Munich to Tel Aviv, do NOT purchase anything even vaguely liquid-ish at your first airport! There is a chance that it will be confiscated at the second airport's security check, even though the goods are obviously bonded and sealed and clearly purchased in the airport, behind the first security check. The duty-free shops all know that this will happen but most of them don't warn you, which in my considered opinion borders on fraud.

Ah, it's sunset, the [forgotten which denomination] are out in their speaker vans calling us to prayer. Israel is very far south, and so sunset is early and rapid: pitch-darkness comes barely an hour after you notice that the clouds are getting red.

I bit the bullet and bought shampoo (400 ml), shower-gel type soap (200ml) and a package of razors to throw away. The latter are utter shit: "Life" brand twin-bladed disposable razors* in a packet of 5 for €2.50. The blades are rough and scratchy, it's like shaving with a handful of broken glass. Avoid. The former are good enough products, but obviously far too large. I will not be able to take them back with me, unless I check my bag and risk losing my laptop. Why do the hygienic article makers not produce small sizes for travellers? Perhaps they prefer for us to buy a huge bottle which gets confiscated? I guess our loss is their shareholders' win. Bah.

And another thing. I'm sure I speak for 99.3% of men when I say that we do NOT want to have to examine an entire stock-island-gondola-thing of shampoo, five shelves high and 150cm long, to find something to wash our damned hair with. Perhaps women appreciate being able to choose between low-fat daily-wash creme-rinse-without-brighteners for curly straw-blonde hair and low-fat daily-wash creme-rinse-without-brighteners for curly wheat-blonde hair, but we just get utterly pissed off by the needless complication. I have been known to leave stores empty-handed and enraged, refusing to play this insulting game of too many fake choices. And it's not just shampoo either: when I was a kid, you bought Crest toothpaste or you bought Colgate toothpaste. Now there are over 40 varieties of Crest alone**. Ridiculous!

Attention makers of shampoo for men: Want to drive your competition out of business within a single month? Produce a yellow package with clear black writing that says

This is shampoo.
It will make your hair clean.

No alternatives, no variations, no phony pseudo-distinctions that are (we suspect) either unfounded or based on differences so minute as to lie within the bounds of experimental error; just one single simple product. We would queue up — nay, we would fight each other — to buy that.

* Google bomb, hoping maybe to save someone else from buying them.

** Really. I counted them in the Duane Reade near Columbus Circle.

Blather, Monday edition

Alone in the office, after hours; sun's still up but the day is drawing to a close. It has somehow devolved to me to be the office dishwasher (except Fridays, when the cleaning lady comes), presumably because I am the least afraid of water and the most annoyed by dirty dishes. I wish that someone else might gather the courage and the wit to wash up once in a while, but I don't actually mind doing it and I do enjoy being alone in the office in these bright evenings.

<rant> for a friend who will never read this: Peel the bragging-labels off your damned glassware, already. It doesn't impress anyone, it just looks really tacky and nouveau-gormless. If the glasses are pretty, then we will admire them no matter how cheap they were, but if they are ugly, then our scorn will only be increased by knowing how much you paid for them.</rant>

Walking home the other day, I discovered a positive proof that time travel will be possible (and actually used) in the future: I found a door where there had never been one before. I have walked past a particular blank stone wall every other day for the last fifteen years, and until then it had always been blank. Now, there is a door in it. The door is clearly very old: the stonework is weathered and crumbling, the paint is chipping, the wood is shrinking with age. Nonetheless, regardless of how old the door may be in world-time, in the personal time of my memories I know with absolute and unshakeable certainty that it is new. Somebody travelled back in time and had the builders put that door in, for reasons that I cannot know.

This is what the results of time travel look like: Something changes around us, in a way that is both new to us and much older in the world. We presume that it must have always been there, chuckle over our presumed obtuseness and say "Oh, how can I have not seen that every other day for fifteen years?" But that's not true, we were aware and observant. It was not there yesterday, though today it has has been there for decades.

We are surrounded by time-travellers, meddling in the past in ways that seem trivial to us, although to them the reward of getting this doorway put in clearly outweighs the expense and bother of finding and persuading the stonemason. Perhaps it will be used by somebody's yet-unborn grandmother to escape from a future fire?

That'll have to do for now, my dearies. I am still alive and mostly well, I hope you are too. There is another post in the works, the second in the occasional series of What Second Life Is Really About; it'll be up sometime this week.

Busy doing nothing

At least, nothing that I can or will write about presently, for a complex nexus of reasons arising from bad planning and worse decision-making on my part. So be it.

The topinambour recipe will appear in 2007 2008, I promise—but I have to find it first. The "Zeit" article that I linked to doesn't list the ingredients of the soup (though it does list the other four dishes' ingredients) so I will have to track down the pages that we worked from.

Walking, reading, eating relatively little but more healthily, drinking no alcohol at all.

Except that I ate and drank far too much on Friday at a birthday party, as one does; home at 3:30 and was awake until 5, then slept only five hours. Saturday was correspondingly rocky.

This week's much-delayed Friday Favourite will also be the last, at least for the foreseeable future: a newly-passed law requires German ISP's (and telephone and cellphone companies) to track and record every connection made through their services, and to make this available for six months in searchable form to any government agency that happens to ask. The matter will fail miserably, of course: the data to be collected amounts to several terabytes per day*, there is no provision in the law for payment for the hardware necessary to store all this nor for the electricity to run the hardware nor for a charge for accessing it; there is no definition of what "searchable" actually means; and not even Google has any idea how to dice and slice that amount of disparate data arriving that quickly.

That being said, the law is the law and therefore the system must be implemented at great cost (economic and political) so that it can be seen to fail miserably before the law can be revoked. Now, tracking down persons who infringe on commercial rights is not the purpose of the law, which like many other bad laws around the world has been enacted under the guise of "fighting terrorism;" but the observable fact is that government exists to better enable corporations to pick the pockets of its citizens, so it will not be long at all until this data is being used to sue children who exchange ringtones on the playground or download songs from the Internet. Until the bill is revoked, posting these Favourites is just too dangerous: in Germany, the penalty is not restricted to fines (absurdly high though those can be) but may encompass actual time in jail.

Yes, you're right: it is an egregious pile of crap offensive to any thinking person. But it is also the law, for now, and for the time being we must live with it.

Oh yes, with all the ranting I nearly forgot: here's the song, from this album. Enjoy loudly; singing along is encouraged.

Moving rapidly along as I do think we should, here's a thought to prime the pumps of your New Year's listmakings. To set the scene: George, Harris and the narrator J are preparing to spend a week in a small boat on the River Thames, rowing up to Oxford, and are deciding what to pack.

The first list we made out had to be discarded. It was clear that the upper reaches of the Thames would not allow of the navigation of a boat sufficiently large to take the things we had set down as indispensable; so we tore the list up, and looked at one another.

George said:

"You know we are on a wrong track altogether. We must not think of the things we could do with, but only of the things that we can't do without."

George comes out really quite sensible at times. You'd be surprised. I call that downright wisdom, not merely as regards the present case, but with reference to our trip up the river of life, generally. How many people, on that voyage, load up the boat till it is ever in danger of swamping with a store of foolish things which they think essential to the pleasure and comfort of the trip, but which are really only useless lumber.

How they pile the poor little craft mast-high with fine clothes and big houses; with useless servants, and a host of swell friends that do not care twopence for them, and that they do not care three ha'pence for; with expensive entertainments that nobody enjoys, with formalities and fashions, with pretence and ostentation, and with — oh, heaviest, maddest lumber of all! — the dread of what will my neighbour think, with luxuries that only cloy, with pleasures that bore, with empty show that, like the criminal's iron crown of yore, makes to bleed and swoon the aching head that wears it!

It is lumber, man — all lumber! Throw it overboard. It makes the boat so heavy to pull, you nearly faint at the oars. It makes it so cumbersome and dangerous to manage, you never know a moment's freedom from anxiety and care, never gain a moment's rest for dreamy laziness — no time to watch the windy shadows skimming lightly o'er the shallows, or the glittering sunbeams flitting in and out among the ripples, or the great trees by the margin looking down at their own image, or the woods all green and golden, or the lilies white and yellow, or the sombre-waving rushes, or the sedges, or the orchis, or the blue forget-me-nots.

Throw the lumber over, man! Let your boat of life be light, packed with only what you need — a homely home and simple pleasures, one or two friends, worth the name, someone to love and someone to love you, a cat, a dog, and a pipe or two, enough to eat and enough to wear, and a little more than enough to drink; for thirst is a dangerous thing.

Jerome K. Jerome, "Three men in a boat (to say nothing of the dog)"

I can think of nothing finer than that last paragraph to wish you for the coming year, dear readers.


* Assume for the sake of argument that "several" actually means "1.0003" A terabyte per day is 12 megabytes every second. That brand-new and expensive 320 gigabyte hard-disk you just bought? You'd need twenty-three of those per week.