Suddenly San Franciscan

Due to the visa restrictions on The Mrs (and I don’t think I ever wrote about that in detail - so the basics are that because US law doesn’t recognise our marriage, he can’t have the kind of visa that a wife of mine could.  Don’t get me started on this one - I could rant all day on the subject.  Anyway…) he was only given permission to stay in the country for six months, then has to leave and re-enter.  So on Saturday I saw him off on a plane back to London, where he’s going to spend a couple of weeks catching up with people.  I’m going to leave to join him this coming Friday, as based on his last experience coming into the US six months ago, we’ve decided that whenever he needs to come back in I’ll travel with him.

So for this week, the cat and I are left to our own devices, which if today was anything to go by, aren’t very interesting.  No, to be fair, the weather wasn’t great, and a domestic day planning for the trip was quite sensible, but it’s odd being in this house without company.  Even though a lot of our ‘in company’ time involves us sitting in front of our computers, at least we’re doing it together :-)

March 15th, 2009 | Tags: real life | Comments (1)

Or at the very least some journalists who know how to write.

It’s a long-standing point in our house that the BBC News site has become an abomination in the eyes of anyone who values good writing, properly structured and with all the punctuation in the right places, so shoddy has it become.   But every now and then I stumble across a piece of writing so horrifyingly bad that my assumption can only be that the software somehow mangled it in the process of publication because no one would ever write professionally like that.  Then the professional in me, who used to produce material for the BBC and knows how much time and trouble used to go into checking things after they’d been completed as well as before, nudges me and whispers the phrase “falling standards” in my ear.

Today I see one such, and at the risk of breaching their copyright, I feel compelled to reproduce the horror just in case they change it and this is lost to posterity.  The whole thing is currently here, and the first twelve paragraphs follow: 

As it prepares to announce its annual results, no-one can doubt how bad things are for the UK’s leading advertising-funded broadcaster.

 

The days when an ITV franchise was deemed “a licence to print money” and a single regional company - Granada - could splash out millions on high-quality dramas such as Brideshead Revisited and The Jewel in the Crown are long gone.

 

ITV’s commercial director Rupert Howell admitted this month that it was “scrapping for its life”, as he pleaded with the government to let it make money from “product placement”.

 

It is one of a series of regulatory changes it is seeking, as advertising revenue dives and audiences fragment.

 

You might expect ITV to play up its problems as it tries to bounce the government into changing the rules.

 

Channel 4 has dominated the debate over the future of public service broadcasting, with Ofcom and ministers floating ways to safeguard the smaller channel’s future.

 

A merger with BBC Worldwide or Five has been mooted, which is expected to announce big job cuts.

 

But things must be dire for ITV to suggest a merger with the two other ad-funded terrestrial broadcasters, Channel 4 and Five.

 

It says this is “blue sky thinking”, as requested by the government, in response to Lord Carter’s interim report on Digital Britain - but such a merger really is thinking the unthinkable.

 

The government would need to scrap the competition rules, as it did with the Lloyds Bank takeover of HBOS - hardly an encouraging precedent.

 

Other broadcasters and production companies simply will not wear such a merger.

 

Channel 4’s chairman Luke Johnson says he regards ITV’s pension hole as an “enormous poison pill” and sees no great value in equity in ITV.

Marvel at the misuse of quotation marks!  

Gasp at the inexplicable diversion into a possible Channel 4/BBC Worldwide or Five merger!  

Cringe at the linguistic ineptitude of a sentence such as “A merger with BBC Worldwide or Five has been mooted, which is expected to announce big job cuts.”!  

Wrinkle your brow in confusion at the way the suggestion of an ITV merger is referred to as if the reader already knows about it!  

Wrinkle it again at the mention of the ITV pension hole, which is actually ‘introduced’ to the reader six paragraphs later with the sentence “ And, perhaps worst of all, it has a huge pension hole.”!

But if your sensibilities are already too badly affected, I urge you, dear reader, to steer well clear of paragraph seventeen as I now quote it:

The internet has broken the traditional TV advertising model and in, trying to get a slice of the action, ITV bought the wrong internet company - Friends Reunited - at too high a price.

Seriously, does NO ONE edit this crap before it’s published?  Or at least give it a quick read after?  I despair.

March 3rd, 2009 | Tags: news | Comments (1)

Way back after the successful passage of Proposition 8 by 52% of Californians who voted, I said I would write up my thoughts on the way the ‘No on Prop 8′ campaign had been run.  In the end I didn’t do that because there was a rush to do so in other channels and by people probably better qualified to comment on American or Californian campaigning than I.  I did feel strongly that the campaign could have done with a little Harvey Milk-style up frontness about it being a gay issue, rather than hiding behind the ‘fundamental rights’ banner and never showing a single gay person, and there were other points I’d have raised, but I left it to the better qualified.

But the issue is hot again because this week the California State Supreme Court will hear the arguments in the cases which have been brought to have the passage of the Proposition declared invalid.  And once again I’ve looked at a campaign communication and had my hackles rise.  This coming Thursday is the day of the hearing, and so on Wednesday night the ‘Eve of Justice’ events will constitute a series of vigils across the state.  On the San Francisco event page of the Eve of Justice website (keep trying - it’s seriously buggy) appears the statement:

The evening will begin with a legal update from one of the attorneys who will argue against Prop 8 before the Justices of the Supreme Court the following morning. We will entrust them with our prayers for equal rights which they can convey to the rest of our legal team.

And just seeing the word ‘prayers’ there makes me want to scream.  A prayer, by definition, is a religious concept - what does that have to do with my own desire to see other people gain or retain the same right that I enjoy with The Mrs?  Considering the way religious structures have been used systematically to demonise lesbians and gay men for centuries and strip even the most basic respect and rights from us, I’d have thought that the last thing we want to be doing is showing any respect for those structures back.

A key argument in the Proposition 8 debate was that religious diktat has no place in determining civil policy.  How did no one involved in assembling these materials consider that suggesting we’re all invoking God or gods ourselves is at best hypocritical, and at worst, massively offensive to those of us who hold no religious belief, and certainly don’t want our support for a political campaign to be construed that we believe in praying for what we want?

March 2nd, 2009 | Tags: news, proposition 8 | Comments (1)

I’m not sure I’ve ever talked about being asthmatic on my blogs before, because most of the time it’s not really an issue.  It came on about twelve years ago with no warning but a horrendous attack which led to me being taken to Casualty.  Since then I’ve mostly managed it with inhalers, and if I have one really bad attack a year that’s probably my average.  I’ve never yet managed to work out what it is that triggers these attacks, sometimes they seem to be environmentally-related, sometimes they just come out of the blue.  When they do hit, they’re quite extreme and I get the sense can look quite alarming to those around me.

My one really bad attack for this year (hopefully) was on Saturday.  Unfortunately it hit the minute I walked through the door of the home of some friends we were due to stay with that night, and I worried that there may simply be something in the environment that was setting me off.  The slight easing whenever I went outside seemed to support that, and reluctantly we made the call to find a hotel to stay in that night instead.  (And yes, I know you’ll be reading this, and yes, I’m still horribly, horribly, upset that we had to behave in what felt like such a rude way when you’d offered us your hospitality.)

But the reason for blogging about it isn’t just once again to apologise, it’s because a comment that was made by someone other than our wonderful hosts subsequent to the attack has wound me up and wound me up in its casual dismissal of what is a potentially very serious condition.  While the last thing I want to suggest is that my asthma is life-threateningly bad, it’s nevertheless a fact that it is a condition that kills people.  A couple of people among The Mrs’ close family have died from related problems.  When you’re having an attack it feels like, no matter how deeply you try to draw in a breath, nothing is happening; no air is making it into your body.  It can be quite scary and certainly more than a little panic-inducing.  

So a comment like “it’s only air - you’ll get more” spoken to someone who recently went through that experience feels on the one hand unbelievably condescending, and on the other phenomenally insensitive.

Therefore, as a bit of a public service anouncement;

An asthma attack can be fucking scary, and the effect of one on the sufferer should not be underestimated.  As well as the symptomatic inability to get usable breath into one’s lungs, there’s an accompanying pain in the chest caused by overstraining to breathe that can persist well after the attack itself is under control, and during one can be almost as debilitating as the shortness of breath.  An extreme attack can come on suddenly and be so severe that the sufferer can be unconscious and then even die before being able to deal with it - a particularly well-known example of that was the actor Charlotte Coleman though that kind of sudden onslaught is thankfully fairly rare.

So if you find yourself dealing with someone having an attack, please don’t underestimate the seriousness of their experience, or its possible consequences.  Generally speaking we manage the condition effectively with inhalers (or steroids for some people) to the point that we don’t much think about it, so on the occasions when that doesn’t work, it’s a big deal.  There’s actually very little that anyone else (outside of the medical profession) can do in practical terms - there’s no CPR or Heimlich Manoeuvre for asthma - but as a bare minimum it would be appreciated if you at least took it seriously.

Thank you for your attention.  We now return to our usual programme of fluff and misanthropy.

“Fluff and Misanthropy”?  What a *great* name for a blog.

March 2nd, 2009 | Tags: real life | Comments (4)

It’s a funny thing to note in a culture that’s generally as warm and fuzzy as the one I currently live in, but I’m always thrown by the heavy use of pronouns in conversational contexts where I’m not used to them.  Americans make much use of the words ‘he’ and ’she’ of people in the same room, and even in the same conversation, where I instinctively feel that the British reaction would be to use the person’s name.

For example, this morning someone trying to ask me for something (a document in this case) which he’d forgotten the title of, said “I mean that thing that she did” indicating the person sitting to my left.  My reflexive feeling when I heard the words was that the ’she’ made it sound a bit aggressive.  And that’s what always goes through my mind, which is why I think I’m just conditioned to hearing people use names in statements of that kind.

I said ‘always’ just then because this isn’t a one-off.  I’d judge I have that reaction at least once every couple of days.  I also get it in other cities in the US so I don’t think it’s an exclusively San Franciscan thing.

There are a number of linguistic quirks that I’m aware I need to be wary of adopting; I’m finding it worryingly easy to say ‘line’ when I mean ‘queue’ for instance, but I’m fairly secure in my belief that I’ll only ever use ’sidewalk’ ironically.

But I think if I ever lose that little mental shudder over ‘he’ and ’she’, I’ll know I’m on the slippery slope.  And if I ever actually end up hearing myself do it, drastic measures will be called for.

February 26th, 2009 | Tags: culture shock | Comments (1)

The California Court of Appeals has ruled that it’s ‘unconstitutional’ for the State to restrict the sale of violent video games to minors.  Legislators had suggested that the local obscenity laws which restrict the sale of sexual content should also apply to violent content.

No no no, says the court.

It’s obviously not the first time that a legal standard has been set that says it’s okay to let kids experience violence vicariously but god forbid they see something that brings people pleasure.  It’s happened in the UK plenty of times.  But every time it happens, wherever in the world, it just depresses me a little more.

Sex is good.  Isn’t it?

February 20th, 2009 | Tags: news | Leave a comment

The Mrs has become one of the drivers of a World of Warcraft-related podcast, and is currently relishing the comment made by someone that several women listeners have decided that his voice is like ‘liquid sin’.  Much as I love my husband and indeed his voice, this came as a surprise to both of us, but inevitably and rightly he’s started basking in it ever so slightly.  My assumption is that the sheer exoticism of the British accent is wooing mostly American listeners.

Which put me in mind of the occasion a few years ago when I spent a good deal more time on the forums at Millarworld than I do these days, and the related consideration that online communications often result in mental impressions of interlocutors which prove to be quite different than the reality.

The Millarworld incident was kicked off by an innocent enough “what do you sound like?” thread which led various people to describe their voices and accents, and some of us to post sound files to demonstrate.  My own voice, which I don’t like, tends to sound quite deep when recorded, and of course the English accent lends a particular tone.  Somehow, it wasn’t what most people seem to have been expecting.  The result of my tiny “Good afternoon, this is me and this is what I sound like” snippet therefore exploded out of any proper scale and I had my own brief opportunity to bask.

And then it all took a turn for the sordid.  Several people asked me to record personal messages for them in ‘the voice’, and it wasn’t long before someone thought it would be funny to have me saying, basically, utter filth in these cultured tones.  Because I was a very gung-ho member of the community I agreed to all of these requests, and indeed a number of them are still sitting on my server where I posted them for people to download.  I listened to them last night while doing a bit of clearing up, and honestly, I’m shocked that I was quite that gung-ho.  Most surprising of all was the fact that a number of very solidly heterosexual men asked to hear me describe the things I could do to them sexually for them to keep and listen to in the future.  Did that make me an inadvertent sex worker?  :-)

Anyway, the moral of this story is that lord knows what The Mrs is being asked to say to people in the voice of liquid sin while my back is turned…

February 19th, 2009 | Tags: online life, warcraft | Comments (1)

Because I certainly am - I’m sick of Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Yammer and all the rest.  It drives me mad how much time apparently rational adults devote to communicating with their friends through those channels rather than just, you know, communicating with their friends.

One of the people I work with had a minor brain scream last weekend and took herself off everything - goodbye Facebook, farewell Twitter, bye-bye to it all.  And after her immediate panic attack, she suddenly realised that all of those people she felt disconnected from were in fact all still there, and all she needed to do was choose to have a direct conversation with them, rather than just announcing stuff indiscriminately to the world.

For her, for me, and for anyone like us, Geekamania is here.

February 18th, 2009 | Tags: real life, tech | Comments (2)

Yesterday was President’s Day, and therefore a holiday here in the US.  Fortunately we went into the long weekend with no specific plan, but a “let’s play it by ear’ attitude, so no grand designs were ruined by the three days of pretty much continuous (except when it was hailing) rain.  Seriously - non-stop, heavy, don’t-even-think-about-coming-out-here rain for three days is a pretty depressing prospect.

And the strange thing is that doing nothing of consequence made it feel like the actually long weekend went by too quickly, so now I feel like I need a break :-)

February 17th, 2009 | Tags: real life | Leave a comment