Sunday 27 March 2011

Census

Dear Census organisers,

How many visitors are staying overnight here on 27 March 2011?
Overnight? Well there's the homeless Eskimo who's been staying with me for the past 3 months, but since he works the night shift at the fish-packing plant and only sleeps here during the day, he's not going to show up on your census.

What type of accommodation is this?
It's a Tyneside flat. It's one of two flats that look like a terraced house. That's not quite the same as a tenement flat, but it's not a terraced house either. I could put "in a purpose-built block of flats or tenement". Although purpose-built might be stretching it a little too. It's quite likely this place was assembled completely by accident.

What type of central heating does this accommodation have?
Useless.

What is your sex? Male / Female
There's no "Trans / Intersex / Other" option? That's appalling.

Do you stay at another address for more than 30 days a year?
I suppose I do...

What is that address?
OK, so I have a choice of "Another parent or guardian's address" or "Other".  What does it mean by "another parent"? The parent other than the one you usually live with? Way to make me feel like a 12-year-old, census.

Do you look after, or give any help or support to family members, friends, neighbours or others because of... problems related to old age?
Yes. I'm 90 years old and suffer from Alzheimer's, and I allowed my great-granddaughter who's studying nursing to interview me as part of her coursework.

How would you describe your national identity? English / Welsh / Scottish / Northern Irish / British / Other, write in
I wouldn't describe my national identity as anything. I wouldn't describe my national identity. It's a silly, divisive concept. Could I get away with "Earthling"?

What is your ethnic group?
One of the choices is "Irish"? But that was a national identity a second ago? You're telling me that Irish is a distinct ethnic group to say, Scottish, but that a Nigerian, a Somalian and a black South African are all just "African"?

Could a British person tick "Any other White background" and write "Caucasian"? Because if Caucasian isn't an acceptable ethnic group on the grounds that the census people won't know whether you could have ticked the British box but didn't, it must be equally unacceptable for say, a Armenian? So they would have to specify that they're an Armenian, whereas a Senegalese CANNOT specify that they're a Senegalese or even a Francophone-African, they just have to tick "African".

Yeah, so earlier when I said this census was making me feel like a 12-year-old, I wasn't talking about the kind that comes in a whisky glass, but I am now.

What is your main language? English / Other, write in (including British Sign Language)
It's a good thing I don't have to write in British Sign Language as my main language, because the row of boxes isn't long enough.

How well can you speak English?
Eh, je ne comprends pas cette question. Ce boîte-ci, "Not at all" - ça veut dire "tres bien", n'est-ce pas?

Last week, were you: [working as an employee, etc]
I'm filling this census in on a Sunday, as per your instructions, so what I was doing last week depends whether I'm one of those people who think the week starts on Sunday.

How do you usually travel to work?
Since I occasionally get a lift to work, and always get a lift home, I use a car for more than 50% of all my to-and-from-work journeys combined. But since you've specified to work, the statistically correct answer is bus.

There are no more questions for Person 1.
That's a shame, I was enjoying that.
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Friday 25 March 2011

Class

Because income alone is no longer a reliable indicator, here is Hazyshade's Controversial Post-Economic Guide To Determining Your Social Class.

Middle Class
You are genuinely polite, able to put people at ease, and willing to consider everyone’s point of view no matter how bad their grammar is. Your typical pastimes: volunteering at local charities (and giving money to them without telling anyone), shopping online, getting very responsibly pissed with your middle-class friends and waking up in each other's beds to the amusement of all concerned. You read: books (and get your news from the BBC). Your favourite non-car mode of transport: train.

Lower Middle Class
You are a shameless snob who does everything the propah way (the environmentally conscious way if you like to think of yourself as left-wing, or the moral way if ditto right-wing) and spend a lot of your time “nudging” people into doing likewise. Your typical pastimes: admiring your collections of dull ornaments, shopping at proper local boutiques, giving money to charity as visibly as possible to encourage everyone else to follow your example, correcting people’s grammar. You read: either the Guardian or the Torygraph, again depending on whether you like to think of yourself as left- or right-wing. Your favourite non-car mode of transport: bicycle (left) or feet, typically accompanied by dog (right).

(Needless to say, yours is the only social class that still believes the terms left- and right-wing actually mean something.)

Upper Working Class
You are a humble worker who takes pride in your work and are content with what you have, while still believing in your own capacity to improve both yourself and your immediate surroundings. You believe in living and letting live. Your typical pastimes: sitting around in pubs, shopping at good old-fashioned out-of-town megamalls, going to sporting events, doing the ironing with the radio on. You read: the Independent/i, or the Sun if you’re in the mood for amusing headlines and/or boobs. Your favourite non-car mode of transport: bus.

Working Class
You are a humble worker who drones on and on about rich bankers, political correctness gone mad, how Britain’s going to shit, and how no-one has any business trying to be something they’re not. Your typical pastimes: looking unimpressed, slagging off your boss, avoiding any physical contact with other working-class people in case it makes you either gay or a cheating scumbag/whore. You read: the Metro, the Daily Mail. Your favourite non-car mode of transport: taxi.

Upper Class
You aren't reading this blog.
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Wednesday 23 March 2011

Songs

Inspired by the ubiquitous 30-day song challenge on facebook, it's:

Hazyshade's 30-Minute Song Challenge

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Friday 18 March 2011

DREU

I have invented the Day-Ruining Equivalent Unit to measure the badness of bad days.

1 DREU is the amount of shite that would suffice to ruin your day by itself, even if the rest of the day was utterly average.

(Since the badness of days is a subjective assessment, what qualifies a day as ruined is a subjective measure, to be defined by the individual affected.)

As an example, I'll take a day completely at random, like yesterday:

Losing a travelcard and having to take a half day off work to sort it out: 1 DREU. Coming to the conclusion that I couldn't sort it out because I didn't have the insurance document, and would therefore be out of pocket to the tune of £420: 2 DREUs. Walking 10 miles in the course of a day, ending up physically exhausted: let's say ½ a DREU. Being asked to write a report on a chess match, but getting to South Shields half an hour late mostly as a result of my own incompetence and missing the entire Board 1 game: 1 DREU. Total badness: 4½ DREUs.

Hopefully those people that I moaned at over the course of the day will be reassured to know that there came a point after which I just found the whole experience hilarious :-)
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Monday 14 March 2011

Caps

Do you recognise this logo?












If you walk around in public for any length of time, you'll probably see it on five different heads. It's been made oh so fashionable by the likes of the Limp Biscuits and Mr. Jay Zed.

If you buy one of these caps, you are giving money to the Evil Empire. (Admittedly, they have never actually set a big pile of fossil fuel on fire for the hell of it, or paid third world children a dollar a day to cut rainforests down. Their evilness mostly stems from the fact that I don't personally like them.)

However, if you buy one of these instead












or these









or even these












three things will happen:

  • You will look like a cool, individual kind of person
  • You will make the Yankees $10 poorer, which will make them think twice about offering another $100,000,000 contract to some All-Star reserve outfielder who'll keep them qualifying for the playoffs at Toronto's expense every darn year until 2050
  • You will allow me to tick off another team on my rather geeky quest to spot all 30 Major League baseball caps outside North America. So far I've got 13: Y*nk**s, Red Sox, Tigers, Astros, Reds, White Sox, Dodgers, Giants (Giants was an interesting one, I could see from behind that the inebriated gentleman peeing on a fence at the Edinburgh Festival was wearing a Major League cap, but to get a glimpse of it from the front required greater nerve than usual), Padres, Angels, Braves, Athletics, Mets. There was also the time when I'm afraid I failed to greet my friend Will with my usual exuberance, because I was double-checking that the young lady on the opposite side of the crossing was actually wearing a Texas Rangers t-shirt. I don't know if I should count t-shirts.

Baseball, by the way, is a wonderful game, and cannot possibly be compared to a kind of rounders where they couldn't hit the ball so they made the bats bigger, and then they couldn't catch the ball so they all put massive gloves on...
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Thursday 3 March 2011

Meter

And it came to pass, in the thirty-eighth year of the reign of Queen Elizabeth, that Yakko from the Animanics decided to do to the countries of the world what Tom Lehrer did to the elements of the periodic table, and Yakko's World was born.

Yakko's World is an excellent song, but his map of the world was wrong even before it became out of date. It is of great importance that this song be re-written in accordance with the United Nations' up-to-date list of sovereign nations. For how else will I ever beat Sporcle's Countries of the World quiz? (How could I get Sao Tomé and Principé last time, and miss out Kenya?)

The 6 lines in each verse are divided into 3 rhyming couplets, and each line is approximately a sixfold dactyl followed by a single stressed syllable, with a few optional anacruses... I'll draw you a diagram:

U = stressed syllable
v = unstressed syllable
[U],[v] = optional syllables
colours indicate rhymes

[v] U v v, U v v, U v v, U v v, U v v, U v v, U /
[U] [v] U v v, U v v, U v v, U v v, U v v, U v v, U /
[U] [v] U v v, U v v, U v v, U v v, U v v, U v v, U /
[U] [v] U v v, U v v, U v v, U v v, U v v, U v v, U /
U v, U v v, U v v, U v v, U v v, U v v, U v v, U [v] /
[v] U v v, U v v, U v v, U v v, U v v, U v v, U [v]

I hope you followed that.

This is a pretty inflexible meter - any break in the pattern of U's and v's creates a jolt. The Nightmare Song from Iolanthe is in the same basic meter as Yakko's World, and when a long syllable in the text falls on an unstressed syllable of the meter...

"In your shirt and your socks, the black silk with gold clocks, crossing Salisbury Plain on a bicycle"
...the line is a devil to sing intelligibly at speed.

It's easy enough to set words to music in a way that matches long vowels with stressed syllables and short vowels with unstressed syllables. Being sensitive to the lengths of the consonants in between those vowels and their effect on the rhythm - "gold clocks, cross", for example - is harder. There's a line from Yakko's World that I think is beautifully constructed: "Switzerland, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Italy, Turkey and Greece". No consonant clusters between words (thanks to Austria beginning and ending with a vowel). "Switz" and "Czech" are both slightly heavier than "Aus" which creates a secondary stress pattern.

The only imperfection is that there is no consonant either on the end of Czechoslovakia or at the start of Italy, so the final -a of the former is stretched out to microscopically more than its natural length. (Yakko puts a glottal stop in there rather than singing "Czechoslovakia, Ritaly", to which I say: hosanna in excelsis.) I might have chosen to replace Italy with, say, Germany for that reason - but that would sacrifice the pleasant alliteration of T's between Italy and Turkey, so I probably wouldn't.

Alas, I can't half-inch this line wholesale into Hazyshade's World, because Czechoslovakia is no more. Tangentially, this is a double shame because it was one of two countries that were perfect double dactyls (U v v U v v) all by themselves, and therefore very useful for a certain form of poetry also called the double dactyl in which six of the eight lines are double dactyls, exactly one of which must be a single word, for example:

Hankety-pankety
Boy in a blanket, he’s
Off on a goose-chase to
Look for a star,
Incontrovertibly 
Journeys through Faerie
Strip off the blanket to
See who you are.

Even worse, it's been replaced by Slovakia and the Czech Republic. The Czech Republic is a trochaic country. (It would fit perfectly into Modern Major General/Elements Song.) If you try to shoe-horn it into a dactylic meter, you either understress Czech or overstress lic - or find an entirely different solution...? There are other countries as awkward and more, which makes this more of an intellectual and artistic challenge than just finding the countries that rhyme (of which there aren't really enough. Anyone reading this blog who's thinking of building a new Pacific island and declaring it independent, would you consider calling it Trance, or maybe Blurkey?) and then filling in the blanks.

Enough waffle: let me sketch out this thing, and if I think I've done anything particularly clever with it, I'm sure I'll let you know. I just like talking about poetic meter - it's a sort of fascination of mine, partly because modern poets seem to think the study of it rather beneath them.

Clap Progress Report: dropped plectrum through sound hole.
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