SAY, WHAT?

Some misheard song lyrics:

Don't like her make-up, I love her - 10CC
(Don't like Jamaica, I love her)

Snap My Picture - The Prodigy
(Smack My Bitch Up)

Might as well face it you're a dickhead in love - Robert Palmer
(Might as well face it you're addicted to love)

A french bikini on Hawaii-island girls, frying poultry in the sand - The Beach Boys
(... By a palm tree in the sand)

I thought my mum sat on you - George Harrison
(I've got my mind set on you)

'RANK' XEROX

I work in a small-/medium-sized office in the City (of London). There are 60 full-time employees. One of my ‘responsibilities’ here is to help the IT manager with small/easy desktop support-type problems. This also means looking after four large Xerox photocopiers/printers. They seem to require a lot of attention and whenever anything goes wrong I’m the first port of call. (There is a point to all this – bear with it!). Amongst other things, I replace and order toner/ink/etc. It’s a dirty job but someone’s gotta do it…

Approximately every six–eight weeks a new toner drum is required for three of the four machines. One toner drum is well over a foot long and 10cm wide. It’s made of very solid plastic – the kind you couldn’t possibly pierce with a blade regardless how sharp. In addition, each machine has a ‘waste toner bottle’ which is used to catch used toner (black powder) emanating from these toner drums. These bottles are also made from extremely hard, thick plastic. Toner drums and toner bottles are known as ‘consumables’ because they are consumed by the machines and need to be replenished.

Every time I return from a machine to my desk clutching a spent piece of monstrous, indestructible plastic, I am gripped with anxiety about what to do with it next. I suppose this is a good example of ‘Dumpster Clocking’ (see Generation X post a couple of months ago). For the second time since I’ve been in this job, I phone Xerox. I wish I could post a digital photo of these objects because they need to be seen to be believed. Xerox, I figure, are a huge, multinational company and they must have a recycling policy. They are, like, XEROX! after all. We’re not talking about ‘North Circular Office Suppliers’. I think the word has even made it into the dictionary (verb: to reproduce documents).

Anyway, I rang them to see what their official line is on how to dispose of these items. This is a rough approximation of the conversation.

Hi, how do I recycle Xerox products?
Go to our website, download a form, fill it out and stick it on a cardboard box and then post it back to us at the Post Office. We will take care of it.
Great – I’ll do that. Presume toner drums and waste toner bottles can be dealt with in this way?
Er, no.
Why not?
It’s too expensive.
Too expensive?
Yes
What, ‘too expensive’ as in ‘not profitable’? How about I let the empties stack up for a couple of months and give these to the same courier that brings the replacements. Then they’ll be bought in and taken away in the same journey?
We only recycle parts, and toner/waste toner is classed as a consumable, not a part.
So what should I do then – chuck it in the rubbish?
I’m not sure what our policy is. I will give you the number of our Health and Safety department.
Hmm, this doesn’t sound like a Health and Safety issue.
(Clueless). I don’t know how to dispose of toner drums. I will give you that number now.
Oh! Well, all right then. Bye.
Bye.

I phone up Elaine Grange at Xerox. She is utterly unhelpful but sympathetic at least. I tell her I am appalled at the lack of any coherent information on the ethical disposal of these products. She makes sympathetic remarks and agrees that it’s poor. I comment that this is a small office in a big city but this company alone, over the course of a year, produces boxes of waste that will never break down in an environmentally friendly or even in an environmentally unfriendly way. Multiply this for the entire city and it’s a bleak picture. Put simply, these things will never break down. Elaine offers to send me an email so I give her my address. She assures me that she will ‘investigate’ and be in touch. When the email arrives I am amazed to find that she is passing the buck even further – maybe she figures that this way it will be off her hands and also off Xerox’s hands. The email – unedited and uncut – is below. Her sign-off is longer than her message and she has barely written in sentences.

http://www.office.xerox.com/perl-bin/product.pl?mode=recycling
This is the link for Green World Alliance - an easy guide to returning free of charge various cru's drums etc. The Asset Returns manager is Robert Clarke and he can be contacted on 01895 845403. Regards, Elaine Grange
----------------------------------------------------------------
Customer Support Administrator
Xerox Environment Health and Safety
Welwyn Garden City, Hertfordshire AL7 1HE
Telephone: 01707 353434 Fax 01707 353914

This time I didn’t follow the link or make a further phonecall. I’ve already made two calls (one to a Xerox office and another to Xerox’s Health and Safety department). Also, this isn’t the first time I’ve been through this Trying-To-Recycle-The-Toner charade. I had a stab at it before Christmas. Companies such as Green World Alliance will not collect toner except in bulk quantities. And anyway, I resent that I am being passed around the houses. Recycling should be made easy, not a matter of jumping through hoops. As I have said, Xerox is a giant company. They are delighted to send couriers out to premises when the item is something they can charge us for. But they will not let their couriers come within a mile when the same items need collecting. It’s a disgrace. Of course, it’s convenient for them to make money by supplying a good or service. But when the same issue becomes a bit less convenient they wash their hands of it. I don’t even expect Xerox to lay on a collection service. It wouldn’t be difficult to put the items in a box and return them at the post office using a returns service. I’d be happy to do this every few months. But they will not even take delivery of the plastic, which is so toughened and thick you could use it as a weapon and knock someone out with it.

So what am I to do? I am, basically, a receptionist here…. Corporations should take on some responsibility for this, it shouldn’t be for the ‘little people’ (the likes of me) to fret about. The sad end to this story is that I threw the plastic in the bin. No doubt it will now languish in a landfill site for a thousand years.

Great Inventions - the Bicycle

Apparently, at least according to my mate, the bicycle is the most efficient machine man has ever created. Amazing! Apparently, it even beats the rocket. I asked my friend to define his terms a bit - "like, efficient in terms of turning potential into kinetic energy, or some other measure of efficient?". He kind of went with that. Most probably he realised it was too far into the evening to explain what was in his mind in a way that would make sense to me. I'm not an engineer. There were many people eating curry and drinking lager and of course it's possible he was making it up. I really hope not.

HUNTING!

Well, it's sure been difficult to ignore this. I was aware of it all last week in the news, on Question Time, in the papers, etc, but it seemed that the media - in much of its coverage - tended to feature extremists from both camps arguing with each other. Hurrah! then, for Alexander Chanceller's column in the Guardian. It's the first thing I've read/listened to/watched all week that caused me to think, in quiet agreement, 'Yes, that's just how I feel too'. This is a cut-down edit of what he had to say. It's carefully written to appear more moderate than it really is:

From where I sit in Northamptonshire, I overlook land on which Henry VII used to hunt deer with Anne Boleyn, and I am close to the 'countries' of the Grafton and the Pytchley, two of the country's most famous foxhunts. These and most of the other 184 packs of foxhounds in England and Wales have been planning to meet today; but if they do so, it will be in cautious, unfestive mood. A hard-core of hunt members intend to flout the ban, but the majority seem to want to stay within the law. This means laying artificial trails of scent for the hounds, or simply taking them out on exercise.

There cannot, however, be much in that to stir the blood or to satisfy the passion for the chase. No more cries of 'tally-ho', I imagine; no more blasts on the hunting horn. Just a New Labour-approved leisure activity. The challenge to the hunting ban will go on: the Countryside ALliance is planning to take the issue to the European Court of Human Rights. But I would be very surprised if most hunt members didn't soon tire of this and looked for other ways to relieve the boredom of country life in winter. Should we regret this? Most people will not. Like me, they have no interest in hunting and many will rejoice at the ending of a sport they regards as a cruel indulgence by a privileged few.

But while I sympathise with this point of view, I admit that I do regret the ban. Hunting remains an important focus for community life in the country - perhaps more important than ever. When so many villages have lost their pubs, shops, post offices and bus services, it is one of the few things that bring all types of people together. And foxhunting is also the countryman's shield against the city dweller's view of the countryside as a leisure facility, as a pastoral idyll to be preserved for his occasional enjoyment.

I feel indignant at the presumption of a government that chooses to override the rights of a minority, simply because a majority of the electorate disapproves of what that minority does*. Perhaps I am heartless, but I don't care enough about foxes to put their welfare above the happiness of the people whose whole lives revolve around hunting them.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
*Much like the Criminal Justice Act (or whatever it was called) where police were allowed to break up convoys of people listening to music 'characterised by repetitive beats'.

So the above isn't a tremendously fasionable point of view to hold in London left-wing circles (ie where there's a particular concentration of Guardian readers) but who cares.

"They fuck you up..."

This was just very funny - from an article on Rufus Wainwright in the Observer. Incidentally, is RW any good? Does anyone know? He's certainly winning a load of plaudits from respectable sources. Anyway, his father, the fairly well-know (well, I'd heard of him before at any rate) singer-songwriter Loudon Wainwright wrote a song called 'Rufus is a Tit-Man', "half-jokingly weighing up the competition" for his new baby song. (He'd have had a lot more to worry about if Rufus was an Arse Man). Still, not the finest song a father could pen in honour of his new arrival. Writes the journalist:

"That relationship and the absence is at the root of many of Rufus Wainwright's own yearning melodies, but if finds its most poignant expression in the song 'Dinner at Eight', which describes a confrontation with his father at a restaurant some years ago. 'We had just done a shoot for Rolling Stone together', he [RW] says, 'and I told him he must be really happy that I had got him back in that magazine after all these years. That sort of kicked things off. Later in the evening he threatened to kill me. So I went home and wrote 'Dinner at Eights' as a vindictive retort to this threat'.

Rufus is not the only one who dwells on the family break-up. The night before I met him I'd heard his sister, Martha, signing at a charity gig in a bookshop in Greenwich Village. She mines similar territory to her brother, though in a slightly more aggressive fashion. In interviews, Martha Wainwright is relative sanguine about her growing up. 'It wasn't the Von Trapp family', she says, 'But the issues that I have with my mum and dad are much less that those most of my friends have with their parents, probably due to the fact that there are no secrets'. Still, her first album will carry the title of a song which, she suggested on stage, was written for her parents: 'Bloody Motherfucking Asshole'.

Good interview.

MORE 'CRISP' SENTENCES

(Exasperated): "The situation's just not crisp!"
(Ironic): "Hmm.. *that's* crisp!" (this was said to me, actually, when i accidentally plugged an analogue phone into a digital phone socket).

Honestly!

BIRDSONG

Never Again Would Bird's Song Be The Same

He would declare and could himself believe
That the birds there in all the garden round
From having heard the daylong voice of Eve
Had added to their own an oversound,
Her tone of meaning but without the words.
Admittedly an eloquence so soft
Could only have had an influence on birds
When call or laughter carried it aloft.
Be that as may be, she was in their song.
Moreover her voice upon their voices crossed
Had now persisted in the woods so long
That probably it never would be lost.
Never again would birds' song be the same.
And to do that to birds was why she came.

(Robert Frost)

I like 'he would... and could' - the first for emphasis, the second for uncertainty.

KYOTO AGREEMENT

I don't know what the point is. Really, why bother. It's sad to think of all the other delegates' participation, when the US - the world's biggest polluter - will not take part for "economic reasons" (read: "greed"). The US emits more particle pollution than other countries put together. Tackling all those sedentary Americans driving half a mile in their SUVs powered by cheap gas.... this is what the Kyoto Agreement is for!!!!!!!

It's the environmental equivalent of the year when Man Utd became too big and arrogant to take part in the FA Cup and decided to play in some little-heard-of tournament in Brazil. Instantly, the FA Cup was devalued.

(I can't remember who won it, but I'm glad it wasn't my team - yes, as if! - because this would always be the year when the perceived main competition had withdrawn.

THINGS THAT ARE 'CRISP':

A new ten-pound note
A lawn on a Winter morning when there is a ground frost
Dehydrated Autumn leaves
A piece of burnt toast
Hair that has been excessively styled and sprayed with hairspray.

So, the word describes things that are very cold / very hot / very dry.

Except in this office, where people are using the word 'crisp' on a daily basis to mean 'in a timely fashion', 'prompt' or 'on the ball'. Now, I know the word can carry this meaning, but people are using it all the time, in sentences such as "He's not that crisp at updating his diary"; "you're very crisp today", etc.etc. It seems to be all the rage. No doubt it's a form of corporate speak spreading rapidly across the City. Roll on the day when it is considered as passe as 'to flag up', 'going forward', 'in the ballpark', etc. I've certainly had more than enough of it already.

FOOTBALL

Football results were a big deal for my dad. He didn't display much of an emotional reponse to them, though. He never seemed particularly disappointed or pleased by the results - regardless of who won or lost (LUFC excepted). But it was clearly important to him to be 'in the picture' and to know what was going on. It may sound self-piteous, but I'm certain he's never listened to anything I've had to say as attentively as he's listened to the 'classified' results on the radio! (although he might be a bit more mellow about the whole thing these days).

As a young kid, the classified results got into my head. It seems that football was never far away on Saturdays. Raking leaves in the garden, driving to/from respective grandparents', etc, etc, it seems a transistor radio was always tuned to football reports and coverage. It took on the quality of a soundtrack.

The Scottish results were a peculiar pleasure (he'd listen to the classifieds from start to finish). Hence, the following placenames are still imbued with a strange, nostalgic, distant kind of quality:

Montrose, Dunfermline, Alloa, Forfar, Motherwell, Stranraer, Stirling Albion, Raith Rovers, Hibernian, Kilmarnock, Airdrie, Stenhousemuir, Queen of the South, Arbroath, Ayr, Hamilton Academical, Gretna, Partick Thistle, St Mirren, Dunbarton, Cowdenbeath…

They all sounded so far away. The only time I ever heard these names was on Saturday radio. They have all the mystique of... I don't know how to describe it. They are something like an incantation, or a charm, or a spell. And this is still true. Of course, it think it helped that they were kind of tied up with the seasons, and the tones of the BBC announcer made them more special.

BIRDSONG AND LANGUAGE

Heard a dawn chorus of sorts the night before last (probably because I wasn't in London). It kicked off at around 4am. I hadn't heard one for a long time, I don't know why (time of year?/sleeping heavily?) but it was a tonic to lie in bed listening. I found the following birdsng info on a website. No great surprises but it’s all interesting. I can’t roll my Rs like a Frenchwoman for similar reasons a nightingale can’t cheep like a sparrow: when we were youngsters, we weren’t exposed to those particular sounds. Here are the best bits of the feature:

Auditory Memory
Songbirds appear to learn their songs. Young male nestlings listen to their fathers and other males of the species, then commit these songs to their auditory memories. This "sensory" phase seems critical for song production: young songbirds raised in isolation produce abnormal songs never heard in nature.

Babbling
When male songbirds reach puberty they begin to practice their vocal skills with soft, unstructured tweets and trills, comparable to the pre-linguistic babbling of human babies. Next they shift to louder vocalisations ("plastic" song) and finally to "crystallised" songs matching earlier memories.

Courtship
Most male songbirds rely on singing to woo members of the fairer sex (and to repel other males). Why is one bird's song more attractive than another's? It seems that size does matter - of the repertoire, that is. Females are more impressed by males with a larger variety of songs.

Environment
Social interaction affects song learning. During the early sensory phase, birds memorize more songs than they later crystallize. So which songs stick and which don't? Songs which are similar to neighbours' songs are retained, and those that are different are rejected. This compares to the way human infants "tune" their babbling according to their language environment.

Identification
Even without a "Hi, it's your mum", most of us would immediately recognize our mother over the phone. Humans are adept at recognizing individuals on the basis of voice alone. The female great tit can pick out her mate by the way he sings. Starlings also can distinguish the song of one bird from another.

Noam Chomsky
His view that human brains are "hard-wired" to learn language has parallel support among some bird researchers. When songbirds are raised in acoustic isolation, they later produce abnormal song - yet this "isolate" song still retains species-typical attributes such as notes per song and trilled syllables per song.

Perfect Pitch
In humans, it's rare to "name" a pitch like 'C' or 'G-sharp' – a skill known as absolute pitch. Songbirds rely extensively on absolute pitch to perceive and classify sound. Experiments with starlings show that birds also use relative pitch ("higher than" or "lower than"), which is the strategy most often employed by humans.

Quick Learner
Young songbirds can quickly memorize, and then imitate, songs they heard as nestlings. A baby song sparrow needs only 30 repetitions of a song to later produce the song. Nightingales are even faster learners - they need only hear 10–20 presentations of a song to learn it.

Syllable
The smallest "processing unit" used by songbirds appears to be the syllable. A male and female zebra finch were placed in side-by-side cages. Researchers then flashed a strobe light at various intervals to interrupt the male’s singing. He almost always stopped singing between syllables (a place of natural pause); only rarely was a syllable interrupted without being completed.

Turkey
Known for its distinctive "gobble” rather than for melodious song, the turkey does not belong to the order of songbirds (songbirds are “Passeriformes”, which account for about half of all living bird species). Nor does the chicken, quail, pigeon, or dove. For these birds, vocal behaviour appears to be inborn, not learned. When deafened as nestlings, these birds go on to develop normal "gobbles," "clucks," and "coos".

Use It or Lose It
Humans have a "critical period" for learning their native language; by adolescence, the ability to learn new languages closes off because we lose our sensitivity to phonetic contrasts. So too for some songbirds. Though often raised within earshot of one another, they tend to form early memories only for their own species' song.

Wingstroking
When female cowbirds are particularly pleased by the song of a male, they move their wings rapidly to and fro in appreciation - the avian equivalent to batting the eyelashes. Male cowbirds are then more likely to repeat the songs that receive such a reaction. This is further evidence that songbirds are "action-based" learners - their social experiences influence which innate songs will be crystallized and produced in adulthood.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
A wild songbird isolated from its kind, locked in a cage in a laboratory, singing distorted songs for a scientist... is an unhappy vision.

(All this from the John Hopkins University's website)

CANAL BANK WALK

It's practially the middle of February already, which means Spring is just around the corner. So, anyone for Patrick Kavannagh?

CANAL BANK WALK
Leafy-with-love banks and the green waters of the canal
Pouring redemption for me, that I do
The will of God, wallow in the habitual, the banal,
Grow with nature again as before I grew.
The bright stick trapped, the breeze adding a third
Party to the couple kissing on an old seat,
And a bird gathering materials for the nest for the Word
Eloquently new and abandoned to its delirious beat.
O unworn world enrapture me, encapture me in a web
Of fabulous grass and eternal voices by a beech,
Feed the gaping need of my senses, give me ad lib
To pray unselfconsciously with overflowing speech
For this soul needs to be honoured with a new dress woven
From green and blue things and arguments that cannot be proven.

Isn't this great? It even sounds fresh. How about 'The bright stick trapped'? Everyone can envisage a bright stick trapped. Apparently he wrote this soon after leaving hopsital (one of few people to recover from lung cancer). He'd been at death's door and so now he seems overjoyed to be walking along a canal. Canals are evocative places, being commonplace/banal (the word he uses), but also beautiful. The last two lines are, I assume, a reference to his Catholicism. Blue being a colour associated with the Virgin Mary (or is it purple?!?). Assume his unselfconsious prayer would be one of thanksgiving/praise, because he's happy he's still around.

The "arguments that cannot be proven" - presumably these are religious ideas that are greater than his capacity for understanding. Seductive ideas you have to 'go with'... In fact, as he says himself, arguments to enrapture/capture his imagination, such as the Resurrection. Because he probably feels resurrected himself.

That's my take on it, but poetry is anyone's guess. If I am way off the mark, please let me know in the comments.

MANY BLUE TITS IN NEED OF STARTER HOME THIS SPRING

A baby boom among Britain's blue tits could cause an avian housing crisis in 2005, according to wildlife experts. The British Trust for Ornithology (BTO) is urging people to put up nesting boxes to help the birds this spring. Data collected for the trust showed that 2004 was a productive year for blue tits, many of whom will now be looking for their first homes.

Natural nest sites, such as holes in trees and buildings, are vanishing as woods are tidied and houses are repaired. The BTO is organising National Nest Box Week between 14 and 21 February - in a bid to persuade people to put up nest boxes this spring. Once a bird has found a place to nest it may return for several seasons. According to BTO Nest Record Scheme data, blue tits have an average of just over seven chicks per nest, with each chick being fed about 100 times each day. It is thought that between hatching and fledging the average blue tit family will eat about 10,000 invertebrates. The BTO says that encouraging blue tits to nest in the garden could provide an ecologically friendly form of pest control.

JOKE

A tourist approaches a busker in New York and asks for directions: "Excuse me, could you tell me how to get to the Carnegie Hall?".

The busker replies, "Practice, man - You've gotta practice."

EINSTEIN/CHOCOLATE

I’ve just eaten three quarters of a luxury 200gram box of chocolate. This is a very large amount of chocolate to eat, but it was there and it tasted so good and no one else wanted any and my blood sugar/energy was low and I didn’t have an appetite for any other food (and it was Lindt!) and… so on and so forth!

Now I feel sick from all the sugar. So why do it, knowing from experience I'd feel bad afterwards?

Einstein (apparently) once said,
“Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results”.
You can't argue with that.

PhD

"Alan Warner (b1964) grew up in the Scottish west coast port of Oban, and after a string of odd jobs, ended up competing a PhD on suicides in Joseph Conrad novels at Glasgow University. He began writing Morvern Callar, his first novel, while doing shift work on the railways in the early 1990s. With the intercession of fellow novelist Duncan McLean, it was published in 1995. Warner was immediately contracted to write a sequel, These Demented Lands (1996), in which Morvern features heavily. " (from the Guardian)

My final year (ahem) "dissertation" was on Joseph Conrad. I've also had a serious of 'odd' (in more ways than one) jobs. Now, if only I could write a book that translates well to cinema, I'd be just like Alan Warner.... "Suicides in Joseph Conrad Novels"... interesting subject! (but hardly rolling back the boundaries of innovation in terms of technology / appliances / understanding).

LETTER TO THE TIMES

This is good:

Sir,
On attempting to switch off my laptop recently, I received a message: "You do not have authority to shut down this computer."
I cannot begin to describe the satisfaction I acheived by removing the battery pack and seeing the message fade away. The computer has not dared to repeat the message since then.
Yours faithfully...
DS
Camberley
Guildford