Down the road a peacock struts

From Wikipedia

This is not easy to get across if you haven’t experienced something similar, but the other day I stumbled across Andrew Marr interviewing a politician on TV. I think it was one of the Eds or possibly George, Nick or even Dave.

So what?

Well here’s the difficult descriptive bit. For a brief moment it felt really weird to see a professional liar being interviewed on TV.

Weird? Yes I know - how could it possibly feel weird?

Yet it did – momentarily. For about a second or two – no more. One of those things you have to catch and store away because the clamour of daily life soon dilutes them to nothing.

So the weirdness was a brief strangeness - like seeing a peacock majestically strutting down the middle of the road. We once saw exactly that outside our house and for a second or two we had to make that basic adjustment we all make to the unexpected - is that thing really a peacock? It was.

The Andrew Marr thing was much like our double-take on first seeing that peacock. An appropriate image too - peacock strutting.

A startling flicker of evil on the very edge of perception. An insight yet not an insight, because we know these evils but don’t really feel them as evil. Too familiar. Perception has its wicked way with us, drops the veil too soon. Moulds reality, kneads it back into shape, back into what we expect.

We adapt so well and with such phenomenal speed don’t we? No surprises. So we even tolerate professional liars – see them as part of the furniture. Unremarkable. Normal. Not evil - not at all.

Nothing to see here – move along now.

But usually we don’t even get that far – we don’t so much tolerate professional liars as accept them into the backdrop of our lives. Folk still watch TV in their millions, so they must listen to what is said, to the lies, without feeling the weirdness. Without switching off in disgust.

We are too good at this, adjusting to what ought not to be. Missing what could be. Instead we grind out the social and political analysis, treat professional lies as some kind of argument requiring rebuttal. Even though we know what the liars are, what their lies are, why they lie.

It’s weird. But only rarely.

A German view of green power

Fox pee to urine management

This is a patch of dead grass on our lawn. I've included a ten shilling piece in the pic to give an idea of size. Around the patch is a border of lush grass growing like crazy, although that doesn't show up very well.

Fox urine? Well experience teaches that dog urine can do much the same to grass, but this seems super strong to me. Even our Old English Sheepdog didn't blast the grass to this degree.

However, the lush surrounding growth set me thinking - surely we could do more with urine. At one time human urine was collected and used as a mordant to prepare cloth for dyeing, but its most obvious use is as a fertilizer.

Wikipedia has lots of interesting snippets on urine, including this one on urine management.

"Urine management" is a relatively new way to view closing the cycle of agricultural nutrient flows and reducing sewage treatment costs and ecological consequences such as eutrophication resulting from the influx of nutrient rich effluent into aquatic or marine ecosystems. Proponents of urine as a natural source of agricultural fertilizer claim the risks to be negligible or acceptable. Their views seem to be backed by research showing there are more environmental problems when it is treated and disposed of compared with when it is used as a resource.

Governments tend to take the piss, but the day may come when they make a virtue of it.

Kamikaze tea flies

We're having some fine weather at the moment, but I can almost guarantee that if I sit down in the garden with a mug of tea, then within a few seconds one of those tiny black kamikaze tea flies will be floating on top.

Or to take another example - while out walking, it is perfectly obvious that kamikaze tea flies follow you until you stop for lunch and pull out the flask of tea. They dive almost as soon as you pour. Or it could be coffee, tea flies don’t seem to know the difference.

A very common experience no doubt, but how did the kamikaze tea fly evolve? What evolutionary niche have they exploited by diving into cups of hot tea?

Creationists have an advantage here, because they may simply claim that God created kamikaze tea flies to puzzle us. My theory is that there is no evolutionary advantage at all. The flies are merely having fun. They lay bets on who can skim the tea without contact. All we see in our tea are the losers.

A Darwin award theory you might call it.

Incidentally, how does one remove a kamikaze tea fly? My method is a quick scoop with the forefinger. The fly sticks to the finger and is easily flicked off into oblivion.

For the upper classes taking tea on the lawn, the butler would do it with a sliver fly-spoon from Asprey. Even more exotic would be a delicate Ming dynasty fly spoon carved from a single sliver of green jade, but that’s another world.

Death, taxes and wrong ideas

One thing the internet highlights very well is the frustrating problem of wrong ideas. Thanks to the web, the inexhaustible reservoir of human drivel is now impossible to miss. Not only that, but as with the Lernaean Hydra, cutting off one head seems to create two more.

Good ideas are constrained by reality, but wrong ideas are constrained by nothing whatever. That’s why they are so eternally popular with blockheads and charlatans.

Yet oddly enough we need some wrong ideas to dream up better ones. Obvious enough I suppose, be in the hustle and bustle of daily life it is easy to downplay the undoubted social value of having a smattering of wrong ideas.

Unfortunately, wrong ideas have a much greater and entirely pernicious value to those who make political, commercial or even personal use of their infinite variety.

Yet even here wrong ideas tell us something, even if it is no more than a clue to the motives of those who use them. Other people I mean - because we never have wrong ideas ourselves do we? We would never use a wrong idea for personal gain would we?

So the real problem with wrong ideas is not so much that they are wrong, but that they are so conveniently numerous for promoting vested interests and comfort zones. 

Yet surely free speech ought to expose even the most politically useful wrong ideas to the corrective influence of...

Of what?

More wrong ideas? Do the infinite resources of Drivel always send their Non Sequitur Cavalry galloping over the hill in the nick of time? Well yes. Blockheads and charlatans cannot possibly run out of wrong ideas.

Along with death and taxes they appear to be a fact of life.

A child's chair

This is a Victorian child's chair in our guest bedroom. It's for clothes and suchlike, not for sitting. 

Antiques usually have something to say about their times and in the case of this chair I think it's particularly obvious. I'm not thinking of the Aesthetic Movement style here, but rather the basic design.

Firstly there are no stretchers for little George or Georgina to climb on and off the chair themselves. The chair does not encourage that degree of independence.

Secondly there are neither arm rests nor footrest. George or Georgina have to sit up straight with their legs dangling into space or they will fall off. No wriggling around, no stretching across the table for an extra slice of cake.

Ah - those soft-hearted Victorians.

The camshaft bribe

From Wikipedia
Computer animation of a camshaft operating valves

A well-worn issue this, but still worth asking in the interests of clarity.

Decades ago, someone I knew had a camshaft problem on his car a few days before he was due to get married. Specialist work was required and there was a backlog, but the car was essential for the honeymoon. What to do?

Well he simply went round to the workshop and offered twenty pounds to the guy in charge, which was a reasonable bribe in those days.

“You’re next,” was the response and all went well.

So if an NHS patient sees an NHS consultant and opts for private treatment by that same consultant, is that pretty much the same type of queue-jumping bribe? Legally it isn’t bribery and probably the camshaft issue wasn't either, but should we see both examples as bribery to the extent of calling them bribery?

Or are they merely examples of markets doing their stuff and paying for a better service is perfectly okay? 

To my mind, many forms of legal bribery are endemic in the UK, but so is evasive language. The NHS illustration is entirely legal of course, but in effect NHS consultants accept queue-jumping bribes. Why not say so?

It's good to be explicit isn't it? 

But would I use money to jump the queue if a loved happened to be faced with a long wait for an essential operation to resolve a painful or debilitating condition?

Yes. 

Does that make me corrupt? Maybe, or maybe it is only a rational response to an imperfect world. Yet I would not shy away from the word bribe if it came up. 

So does explicit language leave us with a better situation or a worse?