Bring Back Play.

I still have my third guitar, a Hofner President circa 1958. I know that because I scrawled the date through one of the ‘f’ holes when I was fifteen. It was the result of “If you learn to play we’ll buy you a good one” and several hundred hours practice on my part. It was £34 and cleaned out my parents bank balance. It still plays perfectly well and is currently worth more than £500. Since then I’ve acquired seven more and played tens of thousands of hours and still love it. Ditto motorcycles, woodwork, art and writing. Last week I did a big clean up throwing out a massive Betamax vid camera, large tape vid camera, mini disc player, 4 track cassette recorder, OM10 film camera, umpteen power widgets from stuff I've already thrown away, all ‘must haves’ at the time, all pristine but now worthless. I'm even clinging onto XP not wanting to 'upgrade' to Windows 8 whose only virtue is you can use it with an indiscriminate poke from a gloved hand! And all these made by under-age over-worked Chinese who go home and commit suicide. And in a way it’s all my fault. I was a toy designer. One of the major tenets of toy design is to create the maximum results from the minimum effort and skill. As an example Spiro-graph, if you’re old enough to remember it, produced beautiful patterns by just winding a handle. I designed a kiddies record player that even a reasonably intelligent dog could use, and got offered a job on the strength of it. I now of course consider designing toys on the criteria of “can it be used by a reasonably intelligent dog?” isn’t a useful environment for young humans. Over the years play as in ‘exploring one’s abilities’ has been replaced by ‘getting stuff that does amazing things for you with the minimum of skill and effort on your part.’ It’s like becoming a baker by buying a bread-making machine. Yes it’s not as rewarding as learning to bake but also one can become trapped in the ignorance of one’s own potential and entrapped by what’s available to buy. And when the next best thing comes along and the next you want it because it will do even more amazing things for you. That’s why I’ve had to throw all that stuff away and why I’ve still got my guitars that I love to ‘play’.

Auschwitz, Cocaine, Humphrys.

John Humphrys interviewed a holocaust survivor this morning, an eighty-five year old Jewish woman living in South Africa. He was polite and mild but the framing of his questions indicated a perverse negative bent to his own human condition. Yes he’s always been a nob-head but his personal perversion was particularly evident in contrast to this gentle, wise survivor of Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen. Where he tried to elicit anger, hatred, bitter memories and tears she continued serenely on like a swan being pelted by stones from a stupid young lad on the canal bank. Where she had decided to put the experience to one side and build a new, happy and successful life for herself he wanted to perpetuate the dreadful drama into new existence for the ‘entertainment’ of his audience. Where maturity is the loss of our own personal dramas he was using Radio 4 to perpetuate them in a multitude of listeners. It’s often said that ‘all drama is conflict’, and that’s true where a never-ending soap, to be never ending, requires its protagonists to be constantly kept in a maze of destructive karmic stasis. Drama pre the 1950’s was based on the resolution of conflict, on the opportunities, taken or not, for maturity. The current definition considers this exit strategy an impossibility. Currently in Big Brother an impossibly immature couple jointly called Speidi, though universally hated, have made it to the final because they’re ‘entertaining.’ Might the British public be beginning to value loathsome ignorance more than enlightened maturity for its better entertainment value? If so the next series should be a house full of cocaine addicts freshly plucked from both the gutter and financial institutions with Big Brother turning the supply tap on and off from ‘all you can eat’ to none at all. I take it all back, that should be made. And whether he’s a user or not put John Humphrys in there too. I’d watch that.

Bring Back Fur.

Mothermouse and I are now looking back at Christmas as a high point of hyperactivity. We’re fondly remembering trips in the car to far-flung places like Waitrose and Sainsbury’s, days when we used to get up in the morning and get dressed. Honestly we’ve now got more bird food in the house than human, and cat food supplies aren’t far behind. We’re centrally heated mice looking after our cousins out in the cold. That said our cat cousins are still hell bent on eating our bird cousins, which confuses one’s conscience somewhat. It’s a scary thought that us humans couldn’t swap places with any animal for more than half an hour in this weather. I mean without central heating, a nearby supermarket and the internet how do they survive? It’s my contention that Homo erectus is wrongly named. We should have been called Homo-hairless because the amazing brain development that typifies our species is far more the result of being bloody cold due to a major outbreak of alopecia than being able to vertically unbend. I can just imagine gorillas laughing their socks off at this new bread of hairless scraggy chimps only able to survive by setting light to anything they can lay their hands on and living in caves. And can you imagine the ignominy of losing our hair. I remember seeing a hairless cat once and it brought all the memories flooding back. If ever there was a case of an inferiority complex spurring on a complete species into shouting, “we’ll show the fuckers.” And now a million years later it’s only right we support the other animals that’ve continued on in equanimity merely from the good fortune of retaining their fur and feather tog values. Especially as we’ve practiced insecticide, bird-icide and basically any-creature-that’s-not-us-icide. And well a fair amount of us-icide as well come to think of it. If science is so great the best thing it could do would be to motivate our follicles into producing a nice thick glossy fur coat again. We’d be so much happier and content not having to rely on British Gas.

Cat Retrieval.

Yesterday me, Mothermouse and Britney go for a walk to the end of the road. Taking a cat for a walk is novel but she waits by the front door just like a dog and almost walks to heel when she’s not investigating front gardens. Brit usually peels off for some deep investigating and Mothermouse collects her after shopping on her way home. But yesterday Brit was getting too near the main road so I decide to take her home while Mothermouse continues on. Brit doesn’t like this and reluctantly follows me but obviously isn’t satisfied with this quick up and back so I decide to detour down a jennel (an alleyway) to extend her walk. This is where the fun starts. It’s winter, cold with snow on the ground and birds are hungry, and behind a six-foot brick wall a bush is a centre of activity. Britney eyes up the wall and only just manages the top. Being human I’m slow to put this equation together and as my hand rises to grab her tail she disappears down the other side. Birds, bush and cat are now the other side of this formidable barrier. I ponder. Someone, Mothermouse, Britney and/or birds will be inconsolable if I don’t resolve this situation. I knock on the front door of the house and ask the lovely but perplexed lady if I can retrieve my cat that I’ve been taking for a walk from her back garden. I’m grateful at this point I’m not wearing my cow onesie I got for Christmas. She closes the door judiciously to check and does indeed find a ginger cat terrorising the birds from beneath her bush, as it were. She locks her lurcher in the front room and we proceed to the back door. I call Brit, she comes but decides the call of what must be the feline equivalent of Woolworth’s PicknMix is too stronger and returns to the bush. I call again, she comes again and this time I grab her. I thank the lady and leave, all the while wrestling a cat willing to leave its skin behind to get free. We get home, I lock the front door and feel pleasantly successful, but unbeknown to me Brit has unfinished business. When Mothermouse does finally come home some twenty minutes later Britney greets her from the front garden of next door but one. Job done.

Post-Humanity.

Last night watched Don McCullin film following his career as a photographer of humanity in war situations. Each and every individual was traumatised irrespective of winners or losers, army or civilian. Set against this backdrop of fragmented decomposing bodies it seems I have a trick of comfortable suburban existence. We have as a species through ingenuity built comfortable nests. As a bird might through sticks and discarded feathers we have through ingenuity of substances and atoms. Yet though we have evolved the capacity to understand we cannot survive the life conditions of any other animal. Change places with a newt, a gorilla, a beaver, even a mouse and we wouldn’t last the week out: we don’t have the fur, the feathers, the cold blood. We formed tools, tamed fire because we couldn’t survive without them. And today my survival depends on massive complex understanding. As a species it’s something we’re very proud of. Going back a bit, evolution has progressed in discrete step from rocks to soil to plants to animals to humans, each able react in a more complex way with its environment. Where animals left behind the static life of roots humans have left behind the mercy of their climate, their pray and predators alike to be cocooned in the outcomes of knowledge, which at its root is imagination. With imagination and a thousand millennia we have arrived at 2013. Don McCullin’s photographs show we have imagined the unimaginable just as much as its benefits. And with imagination our minds have been able to make many realities, the past, the future, the value of money and a capacity to ‘read’ into the minds and motives of others. Our reality is no longer the ground beneath our feet but a daydream world of illusions manufactured in the isolated nether regions of our own brain. Our wonderful imagination is leading us towards a post-human species not of this earth, but that exists in an illusory space created by the firing of synapses; a space where fear makes powerful men crave more power, wealthy men wish for more money and creative men desire more control. These imponderables of dissatisfaction are the substance of synapse space, the roots of the tree of knowledge that was evident 2,000 years ago. There is a no more interesting time to live than when one’s species is faced with a decision between reality and illusion.

Aren’t Humans Amazing.

Big B last night. Woman, centre of own universe, feels down-stop-American couple joined at the lip refuse to touch lips with anyone else for fear of infidelity-stop. These two human units have garnered the most ‘leave us’ votes from their BB housemates and begin full of umbrage. American unit (couple) say ‘screw you we’re down trodden foreigners, we don’t like people we love each other, we’ll mess up your games for you.’ Woman unit says you’re destroying my reality in which I am the centre of everything. Both units cling to disdain for company. Now one might expect their BB housemates would react to these self-inflicted outcasts in a likewise belligerent manner but they didn’t. Woman unit was comforted by Rylan, who gave her externally the central position she alone held internally, and all the BB housemates supported the American unit’s right to their belief in exclusive lip fidelity, even though it cost them a meal and they themselves continued to touch lips with anything that had lips. The male half of the American unit retracted all his negative comments and added, “these people have supported us more than the people back home.” Later Rylon was in the hot tub with the female half of the American unit complementing her on her intelligence no doubt influenced by the size of her surgically enhanced twin frontal lobes. So in the face of BB’s dastardly plotting and intransigence they all proved yet again that humans are amazing.

Something to Think About George.

The P/E or price/earnings ratio for any stock shows the stock price divided by annual earning per share and the stock price reflects the current valuation of the company. (not its asset valuation though that comes into it) Its average over the last century has been around 6 with peaks in 1929 and 2000 of around 16. These were due to excessive bank lending pushing up prices way about the stock’s, and in the latter case housing’s realistic value from either assets or profitability. These unreal inflated prices crashed back to moderate values leaving a mountain of very real debt. There is a need for P/E ratios and the rise of housing prices to be restricted to realistic limits, but that’s not for here. If I were to apply a P/E ratio to a domestic family it would be different. The overall net income of the family relates to its stock price, it’s value in the labour market place, and what it saves per year equates to its net profit after expenses, i.e. its ‘earnings.’ So the P/E ratio for a family is annual income over annual savings. So for a poor family who can barely cover its outgoings its P/E ratio is zero where as a family with a £1m income spending say £50,000 would be ~20. A hedge fund manager on £100m and spending £1m would have a P/E of ~100, and if he could only manage to spend £100,000 it would be ~1,000. So for a company the P/E range is historically 2 to 18 but for a family it is currently 0 to 1,000. I’m not sure how true all this is but as we’re all living the same life in a way there really shouldn’t be that much variation. If nine times is the range for corporations it shouldn’t be that much more for families. Something to think about George.