The Uncertainty Principle

The Sunglasses Principle

I went to Cornwall for the second bout of my summer holidays. It was good. But I forgot my sunglasses, which was frustrating. I had to adopt a permanent scowl for the beach.

This got me thinking. Are there fashion quandaries more tricky than deciding on a set of sunglasses? I ask because I don't know.

Being hilariously short-sighted, I am locked out of the debate. Perhaps it is easy and I am just being struck by that which I least understand. It is certainly true though that solutions for us furniture-faces are few and far between. Prescription sunglasses, I have, but make my lenses even thicker and thus will never be hip. The other two options are clip-ons, (Where are they now?) And those sunglasses out of the Innovations catalogue which fit over your specs and are, in essence, laboratory safety glasses with added UV-protection.

[And no, I couldn't get contacts, because my eyeballs are rugby-ball shaped, so contacts would never be as effective as specs. There is also the Hegley critique, which states that glasses are 'a symbolic celebration / of the wider imperfection that is the human condition'. Contact lenses, therefore, 'are a denial of the self / they are a denial of the other / they are a betrayal of humanity'.]

So what do you actually go for? Its not like buying jeans. For boys at least, you can usually get trousers and tops for most sizes. So you have a wide choice constrained only by personal preference and available resources. Do you go for sunglasses that compliment the shape of your face, that look good on you, even if they are revoltingly unfashionable? Personal style, or prevailing trend? Whither tortoise-shell?

Recently, trendy sun glasses have got bigger and bigger, Fly eyes ones for the ladies, Aviators for boys. But are big lenses still in? Maybe I should go for some perscription aviators with those lenses that react to light. I would look like a 1970s DT teacher indoors and Goose out of Top Gun outdoors.

Apparently though, photochromatic lenses take ages to react to the ambient light. You could potentially come in from a sunny lunchbreak to a meeting, and have to sit through half of it nervously waiting for your specs to change colour enough so you can read the agenda. Instead of effortlessly blending two different looks in one pair of glasses, you just look like some feeble faux 1970s mobster.

Some trendy mens ones, and girls' massive 'Fly' ones, seem to offer a modern take on the mid-90s wrap-around. But turn up in a genuine pair of reflective lense Oakley wraparounds and- despite the £60+ price tag- you'll look as if your ten years late for what ever it was you turned up for.

What the unhip like me need is a visual guide: These sunglasses would work for those with a square jawline....This colour frame would suit you, unless your forehead is too massive to carry the circular lense off.

E.g....This is Dope

(Hat tip to TUPNews for the image)

and...

(Source: BBC News Online)

...that is whack.

Automatic, supersonic, hypnotic, funky fresh

Ciara is excellent. The whole package works, tune, production and video choreography. Particularly the choreography. Note in the video to 'Goodies' - where the surf guitar kicks in and Ciara and friends contort backwards with arms flailing as if in the midst of an earthquake. Furthermore, some of her moves in 'Oh!' try bravely to move us on from the bum-shaking orthodoxy of RnB videoes of recent years by mixing in shapes and flexes that come superbly close to 'the robot' and 'the crab'. In fact, video choreographers could well be the most underrated people since professional gymnasts.

While the chorus of 'One-Two Step' is woeful, it is more than made up for by the sparse electro-beat, and Missy Elliot's rap,

I shake it like jello / make the boys say 'hello' / 'cause they know I'm
rockin' the beat / I know you heard about a lot of great MCs / But they
ain't got nothin' on me

I need not mention the bold move of releasing what is essentially a novelty dance record as the tricky second single after 'Goodies'.

Let me tell you, the day the Sunderland post-punk scene send forth into the world the first acousto-crunk outfit, a legion Razorlight fans will weep tears of intercession. Golden Touch, indeed.

Here is a song to sing / to do the measuring / What did you lose / What did you gain / what did you win?

Safe and sound in my office, watching BBC News Online for developments, the bombs of 7th July seemed strangely unreal at the time. All the news footage felt like it came from a BBC Mockumentary, What if..The very worst thing happened? It was only all the 'missing' posters by Kings Cross and then reading all the obituaries in the last few days that it has begun to hit home. And even then it doesn't, if you know what I mean.

I thought the response yesterday was brilliant. Again. A several million person chorus of, "Seriously guys, Whatever!".

My favourite thing was the way people began taking the piss well before many details came through; has worst terrorist attempt since Richard Reid tried to torch is Hi-tecs on a plane to France. The humour response is getting more and more rapid with each attack. Should someone look into radicalising the Dirty Sanchez boys, who can blow themselves up in the Brecon Beacons away from anyone else? That way the next times the jokes could actually be concurrent with the attacks.

Certainly London this morning was far from the 'City of Terror' headlines I saw. I am proud to be a part of this British understatement/pluckiness/ pure japes and bare laughs reaction to terror. We are not afraid, after all.

Now here's the thing. I don't want to fall out of line. I don't want my upper lip to tremble in the face of adversity. But I am a little scared I am not going to start throwing myself in with Bliar/BushHitler! apologists for terror. But I am scared when I think how close we came to another 50+ fatalities within a fortnight. Indeed, the fact that this was avoided was sheer luck and to do with old or poorly mixed explosives rather than anything else.

There are several coping mechanisms I use.

1. Compartmentalisation - I can't deal with idea of a major terrorist atrocity. No one can. No one should. So break your life down into what it is, a series of basic, manageable, decisions. How do I get home? What do I have for tea? Tonic or bitter lemon? Whizzer or Chippite?

2. Displacement - focus on anything but. Not that difficult. Yesterday I was thinking about:

• Arsenal's profit and loss account on transfers. No Baptista, no Shaun Wright Phillips. Meanwhile Patrick's off and Pires is looking shakey. And then they start considering the 31-year old Dacourt on the grounds that "he would not cost a lot of money and he would be available immediately" - well done, boys. That's ambition. Still, at least this season's strip is proper nang.

• Famouses. On Wednesday night, I went out for a meal and was having a few drinks in the King's Theatre Islington for afters whilst chatting about the Olympics and historical houses. Who did I see? Of course Michelle Ryan, the star of Toby Young's Who's The Daddy?. In a floral skirt and plain white t-shirt she was looking fresh-faced and relaxed as she stood there quietly redefining the phrase, 'hot'. Leading the audience out of the theatre and into the bar when the play finished like some pissed-up Moses, was a bronzed and languid Nick Cohen. Several patrons later an embattled Steve Norris hustled out.

3. Benchmarking - comparing one's own fears and existentialist angst with that experienced by a selected implacable forebear. In my own case, the now deceased paternal grandfather. He fought in the Second World War, forced to work on the railroads in a Japanese Prisoner of War camp, dig mass graves and generally experience a year rich with horrors the likes of which I am never likely to have to experience and even if I did I would lose the plot totally, unable to handle it with half the humour or stoicism of that extraordinary man. Half a century later, not for one one moment did it stop him being an archetypal grandpa.

Most importantly, however,

4. Don't stop thinking about ninjas - develop my Shaolin Monk mentality that I cannot be destroyed. My eventual unimpeachable victory is assured. "The combatant who would win must be in harmony with the scheme of totality, and must be guided by an intuitive
knowledge of the playing out of fate"

Indeed, I cannot stop thinking about ninjas.

On satellite / On Saturday / On Saturnight / On Saturnight? / That can’t be right / But I told you before, I can say what I like

Oh the thrill is here / but it won't last long / you better have some fun before it moves along

Ooh. Now this post is going to re-define self-indulgence. Over the last forty-eight hours I’ve been thinking. I have decided I have hit a plateau recently. It’s my birthday next month, two years since I left College, just over a year since I started my job. Perhaps it is inevitable I desperately hunt for a milestone by which to prove a certain amount of distance travelled.

I share a birthday with Elvis Costello, and he had already released his first two albums when he was my age.

In many ways I wish I had kept a diary. It would be nice to keep in touch with my old self, hold-up past glories and identify some underlying trends that need tackling.

Last night, I was searching through the ‘My Documents’ folder on my tired old laptop trying to find some notes I did for work the other week after a battle on the badminton court with TUPNews.

I stumbled across the play list from my last ever DJ set at College, tucked away in a sub-folder. The event was the great Moulin Rouge party of North Oxford of 21 March 2003. I didn’t usually write set lists and only did so for the parties when I was particularly likely to be tired and emotional. And this was my last ever gig before finals revision took hold; I had handed in my extended essay a few days previously.

I paste it below for posterity, as it was. Take it or leave it, it speaks for itself more than a litre of ink spilled over essay crises, girls and my ideas about Eighteenth-century Germany. This was indeed, how we did it.

1. Award Tour – Tribe Called Quest
2. So Rotten – Blak Twang
3. Don’t Mug Yourself – The Streets
4. 9 to 5 - Dolly Parton
5. What’s my name? – Snoop Dogg
6. One Night Stand – Misteeq
7. Am to Pm – Christina Milian
8. This is how we do it – Montell Jordan
9. Groove is in the heart – Deelite
10. No diggity – Blackstreet feat Dr Dre.
11. Cold Rock the Party - MC Lyte
12. Gossip Folks – Missy Elliott
13. Push It – Salt and Pepa
14. Walk This Way – Run DMC Vs. Aerosmith
15. Express Yourself – NWA
16. Jenny from the Block – Jennifer Lopez cut to Alive- Beastie Boys break @-01:53 to -01:35.
17. Mudian Te Bach Ke – Panjabi MC
18. Everybody Dance Now – CNC Music Factory
19. Suerte – Shakira
20. Just a Little – Liberty X
21. Country Grammar a Vs. Grange Hill Theme - Nelly

Yes I know I finished on a bootleg, this was early 2003 after all.

LettuceWatch

(Source: BIGA)

So I was in the supermarket the other day thinking about lettuces.

English Rounds are old school, but cool. While excessively cheap, it has to be acknowledged that they don't have any real texture to speak of. What little game they have tends to be washed away when rinsing to clear the leaves of mud. But those who are into the English Round probably don't buy it for out and out flavour, it's a statement. You're buying into history. a legacy of English salads immemorial.

There is an salutary lesson in the salad world for the error of going for texture over taste. Stand up: The Iceberg lettuce. Benchmarked against the Iceberg the traditional English Round comes away looking bullish. Iceberg lettuces are usually shockingly poor: aged, waterlogged, bitter and reliant upon one of the new school salad bags to talk up their potential.

There are some who are tempted to get in the Lollo Rossos, Frisees and Lambs Lettuces. Mind you, there will always be those tempted to overdo things. I have got nothing against these salad bowl dapper Dans in principle. But they only really work when clustered, sharing back office functions to build strategic added value onto one of their heartier cousins. Occasionally vital for the odd creative play that opens up further opportunities for spring onions and avocados - but this will only be used to impress others rather than yourself. And your salad should be made for you and you alone.

The current trend for the Cos and the foppish- almost baroque -sounding Hearts of Romaine I can endorse. Yeah Yeah. Their overdone. Whatever. But you have to hand it to them on the branding, they got that Cesar Salad franchise locked down tight. And why the hell not? A hardy mixture of sweet greenness with crunch. Top of the class, but could well be unseated. Nevertheless, unlike Iceberg or the English Round, the Cos and its cousin are easy to make look really good on a plate and catch and disperse dressing effectively and efficiently.

Me? I am seeing a bright summer for the English Curly Leaf, the Clubber Lang of the salad bowl. Think about it: the flabby comfort of the English Round with the sassy curl evocative of the Cos. When they bring it, you will know about it. Buy them early, buy them often.

I was tuning in the shine on the light night dial doing anything my radio advised

When I was younger my brother and I had difficulties sleeping. We both found the silence, more than the dark, unnerving. Because of this my parents started building up a library of books on audio tape that we could listen to aid slumber. A lot of this was about comfort, so the stories would be abridged versions of books I was familiar with - Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, the poems of Edward Lear et cetera.

Rather than growing out of this, I just exchanged the audio books I listened to. Only in my mid to late teens did listening to spoken word tapes become the exception rather than the rule. When my sleep patterns changed radically at University I rediscovered the delights of nocturnal audio using Classic FM, and the BBC World Service as well as my CD collection to ease the essays out of me.

My parents now have a digital radio. Visiting them over the weekend I discovered the delights of Oneword: the spoken word station. On Saturday whilst washing up I heard an interview with Paul Auster and a bit of Lucky Jim. For free! Does anyone else think this is brilliant?

A few months ago I rediscovered my tape of Machiavelli For Beginners. A present from my Mum when I went to Italy at age 16. It is read by Derek Jacobi which is all you really need to know to tell you how good it is. I am sure this early semi-conscious exposure to The Prince led to me loving off the Discourses when I encountered them at University.

Even when you're interested in philosophy, a lot of these buggers can be difficult to read. Especially Marx you sad wannabes, trying to re-capture your so-called radical politics of yesteryear. I bought a copy of Capital when I was 18. I haven't touched it since. The only time I did was under academic duress and that was through the excerpts in David McLellan's pleasantly large print reader.

So why isn't more political philosophy available as audiobooks?

Aristotle's Politics is all that, but I would have enjoyed it more if it was read to me, by, say Kevin McCloud or Sarah Beeny, and I could unpack the shopping or doze off when he gets down to the exegesis of those 138 constitutions. Was it 138?

I was listening to the Machiavelli tape as I fell asleep last night. Am now slightly concerned that I will involuntarily exclaim 'for fortune is a woman and in order to be mastered she must be jogged and beaten' in the voice of Cadfael, and subsequently lose my job.

So def London I represent for all of you / South / East/ West / North and N.W.

DISCLAIMER: Writing anything about Thursday's bombings runs the risk of sounding either glib, pretentious or self-indulgent. You may want to avoid this post.

Once I found out all family and friends were okay the oneupmanship began as people I knew swapped stories about their proximity to terror. I use the tube. Well I'll see your 'I use the tube' and I will raise you an 'I work in Kings Cross, and saw the station being evacuated'. 'Well I only missed one of the bombs by five minutes'. This Four Yorkshiremen stuff is all inevitable and seems to be a coping mechanism; a way to make the attack seem as real as possible for those of us who were left safe and well.

The truth is, I suppose, London is a big place and like me you can be very close to it and still be fine. I did see the station being evacuated but my only thoughts were, firstly, that it is another terror alert and second that a lot of people were on the streets and the average commuter must be as lazy as me this morning as I was only going to get to my desk at 09:30.

You soak up a bit of news and analysis and it begins to hit you but you can't really register the loss of life. The 'missing' posters on the boards, trees and railings by Kings Cross do help the message to hit home, but nevertheless you still can't comprehend the impact of all those lives lost. Each a tragedy and each leaving behind family and loved ones desperate with grief and loss. You can offer your sympathy but you can't understand. That's okay. That's human.

I don't think it diminishes anything though to say how impressed I am that the death toll is that low, and that the emergency plan worked so effectively. I couldn't quite believe it when I heard there were tube lines up and running that evening, less than twelve hours after it happened.

Most roads near my work were closed on Thursday, and I walked north west for an hour and a half or so before getting a bus from Zone two.

You couldn't get anywhere near the Euston Road and a load of commuters were trudging round a diversion which took us up to Camden and round and down to Baker street. It was a beautiful sunny afternoon and everyone seemed extra-polite and considerate to eachother, as if their parents were watching. I had a long pleasant chat to a colleague I hadn't spoken to much socially before. We talked of daydreams we had about setting up our own political parties / social enterprises and pig farms. She mentioned to me her jolly-hockey-sticks sister who had phoned her immediately after the bombs and pronounced, "I get really fed-up at this sort of thing". Yes, I thought. That is the attitude.

There's a whole heap of accurate press commentary on the appropriateness of the British response to this which I don't need to reiterate. But I endorse it fully. I was worried that with the Diana funeral and the attacks on paediatricians, this kind of defiant stoicism had gone out of fashion and was not to return. How glad I am that I was wrong.

Mick Hume has it down well:

Once my mobile was back in the land in the living on Thursday night it started buzzing with delayed texts and voicemails. Most of the "Alive?" had got through earlier. The common theme to all the later ones?

"Proud of London".(And most memorably from Oliver, "I'm from the L.D.N, there's no forgetting that. The big UK, I stay repping that Boi!")

And in a perfect world / where everyone is equal/ I will still own the film rights / and be working on the sequel

I probably shouldn't let myself get started on "anti-capitalist" rioters in Edinburgh.

For me one of the primary flaws that spans most of the evil or wrong in this world is a puritan intolerance of other people's opinion. A pan-fundamentalism; a universal refusal to acknowledge that you just might have got things very wrong and that someone you don't agree with might be right.

I was a Marxist when I was fifteen and had read the Communist Manifesto. Since then, I have learned a bit more about markets, and can see their value, efficacy, and effectiveness. But hey! I am willing to be proved wrong.

I like to try and understand what the gigglers turning over park benches near the G8 actually want. I am interested in knowing their agenda and hearing their programme. Via the BBC, Robin tells me:

“The Carnival For Full Enjoyment has come out of the need to do something about the really serious problems the majority of people face… What we'll need to do is to fundamentally reorganise things. Our vision is of a society that is run
from the bottom up with grassroots control in all areas. ”

Their solutions just sound like fuzz. Platitudes that tune themselves out. As ever, Tony is way ahead of youse guys. The Labour manifesto itself acknowledged:

“People want a sense of control over their own neighbourhood. Not a new tier of neighbourhood government, but new powers over the problems that confront them when they step outside their front door”

So, what’s all the fuss about?

On this Scottish anti-globablisation tip, a blog I like has criticised another blog I like for dissing a young woman at the protests who was taunting a police officer wearing a 'capitalism is boring' badge. The argument seems to be better to waste your time being a naive young anti-capitalist than a square, lame blogger criticising naïve young anti-capitalists. Not a bad argument all in.

Just for reference though: I like social-democratic government and the rule of law.

To date, 275,000 people have been left homeless in Zimbabwe because of Mugabe’s unchecked slum clearance.

In Britain today, around 10 people will be killed on the roads and some 272,000 people will be paid below minimum wage

Back in the mid eighteenth-century, the average working day was eleven hours long. The first outbreak of cholera in Britain in 1831 killed 52,000.

At the risk of sounding pompous, I would say that boredom is something of a luxury. A luxury that is indeed unprecedented in our entire history. And that if that’s one of your biggest criticisms of capitalism and the rule of law then you might be encouraged to think again.

Also, have you guys learnt nothing from CND in the 1980s? Clown make-up and circus arts are one sure-fire way to avoid being taken seriously.

She loves you, Big River, more than me

Are you Proud of Britain?

I am - sometimes, especially with our ace European policy.

If you're not, why not be proud of Canada. Today is Canada day.

Check out the top twenty Canadians.

If you feel a bit guilty about celebrating 138 years of a nation you don't know much about, shatter a few myths about Canadians and Canada by reading this.