Symbolic Forest

The Boss’s first grandchild was due yesterday. He didn’t’t seem unduly excited, concerned, or worried. In fact, he didn’t seem to care at all.

The Office Secretary came rushing up to us this morning: “Has Your Boss’s grandbaby been born yet?”

“Um … we have no idea.”

“You mean you haven’t asked him?!”

“Well, no.”

She scurried away, leaving us to get on with stuff. Five minutes later, a high-pitched scream echoed through the office corridors.

“Baby’s been born, then.”

“Must be.”

Keyword noise: colleagues, grandparents, overexcitement.

Yesterday’s post made me think about blogging slightly, because I found myself creating a new category just to put it in. I’m still not sure how I should be creating categories, so I wasn’t entirely sure if I was doing the right thing.

I know this site hasn’t been going for very long, but the list of categories seems to have an awful lot of “(1 post)” entries in it. Somehow, it doesn’t feel as though I should be creating an entire category just to put a single post in; but I’m doing it in the hope that they will fill up over time. No doubt I’m going to make some wrong choices over time, but I can always try to re-sort this later.

I’m doing it that way round because I know that if I don’t leave categorising until I have a sample supply of posts to sort, it’ll never get done. It might give me some idea of what sort of category headings I need; but I’d be too lazy to get round to doing the filing. And where tagging might fit in, I’ve got no idea at all. My own category headings make no sense at all as post tags; but if I do start to tag things I don’t want a paragraph of tags cluttering up the bottom of each post. I’d need some way to disguise them.

Anyway. I know I don’t have many readers yet; but what do you think? What’s the best way to categorise stuff, and what’s the best way to go about categorising stuff?

Keyword noise: blogging, categorisation, filing, irony, tagging, taxonomy.

One thing new about Saturday’s trip to the NMPFT: the museum now houses Bradford’s local BBC radio studio, usually used to broadcast BBC Radio Leeds. The studio and offices are in one of the ordinary museum galleries, with large windows, presumably very thoroughly sound-proofed, to make sure everybody gets a good look at the presenter at work.

Now, the BBC seems to have made a habit of doing this in the past few years. Their studio here moved from a cupboard in one of the council offices, to a shop by the bus station; again with big windows so passers-by can watch. The same has happened to their studios in Hull. Somewhere at the BBC, a few years ago, someone made a note: “all radio studios to have big windows for random passers-by”, and they’ve stuck to it ever since.

Thinking about it, I’m wondering where they came across the idea. Back in the 1990s, I rather liked the TV series Northern Exposure, which, as it happens, featured a local radio station which broadcast from an ordinary town shop, the DJ sitting by the window watching everyone pass by as he talked. Maybe, someone at the BBC is a Northern Exposure fan too, and ever since then has been doing their best to put the BBC’s radio presenters into public view.

Keyword noise: BBC, Bradford, Yorkshire, broadcasting, radio, Radio Leeds, museums.

A few weeks ago, after I’d just bought the hosting and domain name for this site, one of the friendlier managers at work came up to me in the office…

“Do you know much about website hosting?”

“Well, funny you should ask that, because…”

It was nothing to do with work at all; he’d decided he wanted to set up a family website, with a [surname].org address, to keep in touch with friends, family, and the distant relatives in Australia.^* And I told him that I’d been looking into it, the prices I’d found, how much I’d paid, and so on.

This morning, he came up to me again:

“I’ve bought some webspace from the same place that you did, and I was trying to work out how to put stuff on it. I was wondering … do you know anything about setting up a blog? I was looking at WordPress, and I was wondering if you knew much about it?”

“Well, funny you should ask that, because…”

So, it looks like – at least as far as this manager is concerned – I’m going to be the office WordPress expert in future, even though I only have a couple of weeks’ experience with it. Lucky for me that it’s easy to set up, I suppose.

* If you’re not British or Australian you might not know this, but everyone in Britain seems to have some distant relatives in Australia that they never get in touch with more than once per decade. I’ve got several separate lots, apparently. Presumably if you’re Australian than the reverse applies.

Keyword noise: blogging, colleagues, expertise, Wordpress, websites, hosting.

Yesterday: a day out, to the National Museum of Photography, Film and Television with The Parents. We’d not visited almost since it first opened. Most of it has been completely rebuilt since, but the gallery on the mechanics of TV is still unchanged from 20 years ago, back when blue screen Chroma-Key was an amazing feat of modern technology. The exhibits have all been re-captioned by Tim Hunkin, but even he only gave it a 2/5 score.

We didn’t go to see anything specific, but we did look around the current exhibition: Fashination, about the grey area between fashion and art. It seemed a rather strange choice for the NMPFT to put on. I suppose the connection was the importance of fashion photography, which was touched on in one part of the exhibition; but it really would have fitted better at somewhere like the V&A. The most interesting section – given more prominance on the website – was the “street fashion” polaroids of random people and their clothes. As someone who wishes they could just wake up, throw on something random and still look great, I love the idea that fashion is not the province of Great Artists whose work is more suited to a catwalk or photograph than to everyday life. Which seems to be entirely the opposite opinion to everything else in the show.

Keyword noise: art, Bradford, Yorkshire, fashion, photography, street fashion, style, museums.

The other day, Peter of the Naked Blog said he thought the BBC should not have given as much attention to the video of the suicidal murderer Mohammed Sidique Khan:

MSK didn’t justify anything. What he did was demonstrate his religion-related fanaticism. By airing and promoting his views like this, you are guilty of leading thousands of ignorant assholes to follow in his vile ways.

Now, his first two sentences I agree with. I don’t think, though, that the BBC should just have ignored him. Mohammed Sidique Khan was, we can clearly see, a twisted, insane, brainwashed murderer who had fallen under the influence of evil, cold, vicious men claiming to be “religious leaders”.^* You can’t explain to people how sick and twisted his views were without telling people what they were.

It’s impossible to negotiate with people as mad as MSK was. You can’t pull out of Iraq, because Iraq isn’t really the issue here; and if Iraq wasn’t an issue at the moment then MSK would have been told he was killing himself in the name of Palestine, or Kashmir, or Afghanistan, or any country in the world which doesn’t have a Talibanesque government. One of the main problems politicians have is that by and large, they are intelligent people; but they have to deal with people who aren’t intelligent, people who are stupid, people who don’t think, and people who are downright insane. There is nothing we could have done to save Mohammed Sidique Khan from becoming the deluded murderer he was, other than making him less stupid and gullible to start with.

* I admit to being slightly biased on this.

Keyword noise: fanaticism, Mohammed Sidique Khan, religion, terrorism.

The Mother has discovered The Internet. Specifically, she has discovered a plethora of genealogy websites, and is using them to try to track down our family tree.

Now, her family is fairly easy to trace back into the 19th century. They had a family bible, kept newspaper clippings and wedding invitations, and are nice, simple, and straightforward to track. My Dad’s family, on the other hand, is another matter.

Dad doesn’t know anything at all about his family tree, beyond his parents, sisters, and the names of a few more distant relatives. Questions to my grandmother, before her death, always went unanswered. However, my aunt has kept plenty of details about our family, and does know a lot more about how they’re all related. As we were visiting her anyway, The Mother asked her if she could get out her family births book so The Mother could copy it all down. And we quickly found out just how complex and baroque my father’s family really was.

For one thing, their surnames are all rather confusing. Once you go back beyond the current generations, very few people in our family bothered to get married. This was, it turns out, one of the reasons why my grandmother always refused to answer queries about family history. It’s very unclear whether her parents ever did marry – there’s no record of it, and my great-grandmother kept paperwork in both surnames until her death – but, my aunt told us, anyone who asked my gran directly about this would usually get punched. Some of my gran’s brothers and sisters shared her surname; but some of them took their mother’s name. My great-grandfather was apparently in the Cavalry – “there’s a photo of him in uniform, on a horse” – in India, in the 1920s, but nobody knows any other details about him.

My grandfather’s family is just as confusing. They, also, rarely bothered to marry. When they did, it often made things worse. One of my grandfather’s close relatives married a man called Frank. Her sister then married Frank’s son – I’m not even sure how you draw that on a family tree. Their son, incidentally, was the mayor of Southampton a few years ago. Having a grandfather who is also your uncle, in an entirely legal way I should add, clearly doesn’t stop you entering politics.

The Mother, being upright, respectable, churchgoing, and definitely no-sex-before-marriage, was rather shocked at all this. She is one of those people who sees The Past as a golden age of morality, when things were done properly and you didn’t get all these single mothers all over the place; so she was rather surprised to see that before her own generation, a lot of my ancestors just didn’t think that way. Myself, I’ve always had a suspicion that Victorian morals are both fairly modern and a middle-class innovation, so I was rather pleased to find all this out. Even though it might make genealogists blanche at the thought of trying to draw the tree out, I rather like my ancestors now.

Update, September 24^th 2005: we’ve since discovered that my gran’s parents never were married, because my great-grandfather already had a wife, who he never bothered to divorce.

Keyword noise: family secrets, genealogy, history, morality, The Parents, The Mother, social history.

This morning I awoke like any other morning: with The Cat sitting on top of me and doing cupboard-love purring as loud as he possibly could. “Aren’t you a nice cat!” I said, sleepily, tickling him under the chin. “Ooh, you are furry!”* Eventually, I dragged myself out of bed to go downstairs and give him some breakfast. It was only then that I realised that today is September 1st, and my month is therefore doomed.

You see, I keep believing that it’s vital that the first thing you say every month is “White rabbits!” and if you don’t, you’ll have a month of bad luck. Or maybe you’ll just miss out on a month of good luck; I’m not entirely sure. It’s hardly something you can do meaningful experiments on, given that most months – like today – I forget about it anyway.

Last month, I did remember about it. I cheated slightly: I pegged a reminder note to my dressing gown, and managed not to mumble anything to the cat. Last month, I guess, I did have a rather nice month, so maybe it does work after all. Luck is where you find it, though. I have no idea what will happen to me a month from now; maybe, though, when October 1st comes around I’ll remember to look back and see if this month was lucky or not.

* Yes, I regress to twee baby-talk when I’m near cats. Shoot me now, please.

Keyword noise: The Cat, superstition, white rabbits.

Today’s Top News Story: the government is planning to ban extreme pornography.

Now, as this idea goes: where’s the downside? It’s going to be a vote-winner, and the Opposition are bound to take the “well, we would have done this years ago!” line. But it does open up a rather nasty can of worms which. Being your stereotypical Woolly-Minded Liberal, even to the extent that I actually read The Guardian regularly and occasionally even agree with parts, I have no idea what to do about it. The question is: what is porn? And more importantly, what is extreme?

There’s no doubt that an awful lot of the stuff out there on the internet is only going to be attractive to a tiny minority of people. If you think you’re the only person out there with your particular fetish, then you’re wrong: someone somewhere will already have created a website devoted to it. The problem with that, of course, is that some people’s fetishes really are not things that anyone else is going to approve of. Now, I personally have no problem with what anybody wants to do in private, but the keyword there is consensuality. Where fetishes involve doing things without the other person’s consent, it’s not acceptable to me.

The can of worms comes into it, though, when you consider that the proposed law would outlaw pornography that shows illegal acts. In British law, the legality of a lot of S&M sex is a very grey area. Even if you want your partner to do certain things to you, it might not be legal.^* The second can of worms is that, looking at downloaded graphics, it can be impossible to tell if consent was given at the time. Indeed, some writers and campaigners would claim that no porn is consensual at all, because of the cultural context surrounding it.

There’s a lot of stuff out there, and a lot of it makes me sick to the stomach. But, even so, I’m fully expecting that this law – and it will become law – will go too far, and that we will see people being prosecuted for downloading images that, to my mind, are entirely harmless.

* The most famous legal case in BDSM circles is the Spanner Trial, in which a group of gay men were convicted and imprisoned for actual bodily harm even though the “victims” had consented; it is not the only one, though.

Keyword noise: bdsm, consensuality, Jane Longhurst, pornography, S&M, Spanner.

It’s Friday lunchtime. I’ve popped into town just to get out of the office for an hour, and now it’s time to head back to work. Into the car, and I’m gently drifting through the car park towards the exit with an Add N To X album playing loudly on the stereo, when…

Something is moving too close to me, but before I can respond – BANG!

A big, dark car has driven right into the side of me. I jump out of the car in a great panic, forgetting to turn off the engine or even try to take the key out.

I had absolutely no idea what to do. I’ve been in crashes before, but only ever as a passenger. This was the first time that anything bad had happened to my own car. I was shaky, jittery, shocked and adrenalin-flooded. No idea what I should be doing, other than taking down the other driver’s name and address. Looking back, though, luck was on my side. I’m not hurt, and the shock went away after a few hours. The car still works. I can still drive it, even if it does have a big, nasty dent in the side. If I’d been hit a foot further forward, the door would probably be unusable; and I’d have possibly been hit too. If it was a foot further back, the back axle might well have been wrecked. As it is, though, I just have a big dent until the garage can manage to get hold of some replacement panelling.

Keyword noise: accident, cars, crash, driving.