Category: General

Whatever doesn’t fit anywhere else.

Tuning out (and in)

Since Sunday morning, the Doctor and I have slowly been making our way from the Chesapeake Bay to New Bern, North Carolina, in a boat ably piloted by the pater familias. I must confess that I was worried about sporadic Internet access – not only dreading a backlog of emails to digest and respond to, but also knowing that I would be missing out on all sorts of interesting chatter on Twitter.

But being away from the Internet – and perhaps especially from Twitter – can be a good thing. Now that I’m catching up on a few day’s worth of timeline in a few hours, I can see that I might have become involved in various wars, in ways that might later be regretted. The forced remove conduces to slower consideration.

It also starkly reveals how little there is worth paying attention to – among the gems of insightful links and stimulating conversations, there is still so much wasted time, and so many pointless moments of narcissism on a platform like Twitter. And of course, we can all be guilty of those, and I know I sometimes am – but we should try to make those funny, at least, so that some value can be extracted from them.

The one thing I regret having missed is the conversation around Business Day’s publishing the 2008 Sunday Times report, which occupied many SA Twitter timelines on June 15. If you know nothing about this story, read this (see links to earlier articles at the bottom), this and this (especially this last one, where the editor of Business Day, Peter Bruce, summarises why BD published the report, and his views on the controversy that resulted from doing so).

Sure, I can read all the virtual column-inches now, but the conversation has now slowed – the real-time exchanging of views between interested parties has concluded, and opinions are most likely entrenched. You get a chance to influence what people think, and have them influence what you think, on a platform such as Twitter, and this often happens before the columns, op-eds and articles are written. And we don’t often go back to revise our views, especially once we have committed them to ‘paper’. So these conversations are a pity to miss, and one clear advantage that the social web has over books and paper.

But despite having missed a few such conversations, it has been wonderful to get a chance to do some serious reading. If you’re interested in the conversation around what effects social media and the Internet are having on us, read Jaron Lanier’s wonderfully contrarian You are not a gadget. If you are interested in debates around personhood – what makes you you, and are you the same you as you were 20 years ago – Julian Baggini’s The Ego Trick is very good.

Both sorts of interacting (ie. the immediate and the traditional) with words, and with ideas, are valuable. We shouldn’t neglect or demonize either of them – but rather make sure we take full advantage of both. But having said that, until our small boating crew gets back to terra firma next weekend, I quite look forward to reading a few more books.

Hateful speech, hateful characters (but good TV)

In the course of writing a column (see The Daily Maverick, next Wednesday) on Julius Malema and whether ‘Kill the Boer’ should be banned, I was wondering whether there was anyone I hated. Think on it for a moment – “hating” someone is appealing to quite a strong emotion, and I wonder how often it’s true. We might use that word fairly frequently to mean something like “have contempt for”, or “be very angry at”, or somesuch, but what does “hate” add to the picture? Does it mean you want them dead? I did come up with one example of a person I hated, but unfortunately, that person was on my television screen – Marlo Stanfield from The Wire. I certainly want him dead, preferably with some torture and great suffering thrown in beforehand. A great character, certainly, but one that should suffer.

In case you haven’t see The Wire, I’ll say no more. Except that you should see watch the series, which I came to very late for some reason. But now that I have watched it, there’s no question that it fits into the category of the best television shows ever, at least in my estimation (even though I might not be able to help this – it’s listed on Stuff White People Like, after all). To further expose myself to potential ridicule or potential accusations of a deficit in aesthetic judgement, here’s my list, rank-ordered for bestest-ever TV:

  1. The Wire
  2. Deadwood
  3. The West Wing
  4. Battlestar Galactica (the 2004 version)

While I was intending to tell you why, there are lectures to be written, and a Sunday to enjoy. But if there are any of these four that you haven’t watched, they are all worth checking out. And seeing as it’s soon to be Winter, you surely need to think about what to do on those days and nights where leaving the house is unthinkable. Unlike today.

The limits of our language

As submitted to The Daily Maverick

Curricular revisions in the area of religious instruction in South African schools have been the subject of a previous column, in which I argued that political expediency could compromise Constitutional freedoms, as well as handicap the development of a citizenry which is capable of significant intellectual engagement with policy. A related trend, with the same negative consequences, can also be observed in our universities. More recently, the teaching of the most basic foundation of language – grammar – is being threatened. And so, another potential blow is landed against clarity of thought and expression.

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Someone’s serious business, my frivolity

While the bulk of material on Synapses is rather serious in nature, I must confess that I sometimes engage in trivial pursuits. Like laughing at the way in which people sometimes take themselves far too seriously, and flying to London for 4 days, simply to watch a FA Cup Quarter-Final match between Manchester United and Arsenal. Below, I offer a brief account of these two activities, in the hope that readers will sometimes be less critical of the more serious things I have to say, now that they have confirmation that I’m just like them (well, sort of).

So, as to how people can take themselves far too seriously: Yesterday, after having pledged to make dinner for myself and The Doctor, a trip to Gardens Centre was required in order to procure ingredients. Walking past the MTN store, I remembered that I had had difficulty with roaming while in London, and I therefore walked in to make enquiries. While chatting to the clerk, a woman came in, and started addressing the customer in line behind me (the only one). She asked him how long he’d been waiting, emphasising that she was short on time.

Not long, he said, but this was insufficiently reassuring. “I don’t have time to twiddle my thumbs”, she said. She then asserted that she would get on with other business, and that this customer should ensure that her place in the queue was preserved. In a somewhat bemused fashion, he offered an ambiguous mumble, and she departed. Upon returning, and finding herself next in line, she forcefully dropped her phone on the counter, and started loudly complaining that it was misbehaving.

The staff tinkered, at one point plugging it in to check that it was charged. Big mistake. “I charged it this morning! Do you think I’m stupid?”, she yelled. But the problem had something to do with turning off/on, and they were unable to diagnose the fault right there. So they offered to take it in for repairs. No – “it’s not worth repairing. It only cost me R100”, she said. “Well, is it under guarantee? We can take it in for repairs, and offer you a loan phone in the meanwhile”, the staff offered.

“No! You must replace it”. She pointed to the MTN branding on the phone, and said, waving her arms around to gesture at the store walls, “all of this here made this phone, and is responsible for it!”. They then dared to ask if she had bought it there. But she had not – she had bought it at the Waterfront CNA. Well then, ma’am, we can’t help you – you must take it there, and I imagine if you have your receipt, they will be able to help. “Who keeps receipts!”, she yelled. “And do you mean I have to traipse all the way to the Waterfront? I don’t have time for that!”. “We can’t help you, ma’am – you didn’t buy it here, and even if you did, we’d need your receipt to be able to help”.

So she storms out. About ten minutes later (I was having a long geeky conversation with a clerk), she appeared in the doorway and announced: “I have bought a phone from Vodacom!”. Then, she steps in, throws the phone on the floor, and starts stomping on it and crushing it with her heel, shrieking things like “this is what I think of MTN!”. She kicks pieces of phone in the direction of the helpdesk, and storms out again. But – she had forgotten something. Seconds later, she re-appears, throws the charger into the store, and yells “and you can hang yourselves on THIS!”.

We all had a good laugh, and one store clerk had some good fortune, as it appears the phone, once reassembled, was now in better working order.

The other frivolity involved my friend, the occasional celebrity “After-dinner mint” (at least according to a P4 radio billboard that once bore his mugshot), calling me last Sunday to suggest the audacious plan of flying to London to watch football. So we did, because the game was at Old Trafford, home of the best football team (and the ugliest footballer). And seeing as he is an Arsenal fan, and they were “our” opposition, I could look forward to plenty of gloating at his expense once we secured our inevitable victory (2-0 to Manchester United was the eventual score. As the crowd kept reminding the MintMan, his team “is just a shit Barcelona”).

And London was fun. We went to pubs, ate at fat-lip Jamie’s Italian (and, with another friend, at Heston Blumenthal’s Hinds Head, where I enjoyed a 52-hour cooked pork belly). We hung with Simon Pegg at a bar in Covent Garden (no, not really, but he was there), and took lots of Tube rides and a train to Manchester. We learnt that orang-utans use tree bark for sexual pleasure (so the poster said – not empirically verified by us), and that strange fox-like creatures in London steal stuff from your car, if you’re not sufficiently watchful. We saw a famous (I imagine) mouldy wall outside our hotel room. It became known to us that the disabled have access to an “ability suite” at Old Trafford. And also, I discovered that Eton has a “Porny School”, which might be useful information to some of you.

It’s often not the product that’s defective – it’s us

As one of my contributions to the Lead SA campaign, I’d like to tell you all to stop your moaning and complaining. Unless, of course, you plan some concrete action to back it up. It seems impossible to read a local news story that doesn’t have a stream of whiny complaints appended to it, where everything is wrong, and it’s always everybody else’s fault. This pervasive negativity can also be self-perpetuating. Consider the @PigSpotter micro-saga:  There’s a confirmation bias at play there, in that many of the callers/bloggers/twitterers are focusing on the cops who fit whatever stereotype is at play, and forgetting that the majority (?) of cops don’t deserve this moniker. Second, any justified ire is more perhaps more appropriately directed at those who give the cops their instructions, not the cops themselves.

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Shock and horror as it’s revealed that students have premarital sex

So, I wasn’t on campus when the most recent edition of the student newspaper, Varsity, hit the proverbial streets. But I’ve been made aware of something that should surely be directed to the Media Tribunal – an article by Kathryn Mitchell which fails to point out to students just how dangerous it could be to have sex before marriage. Not dangerous in terms of things like STD’s, embarrassment and regret, but rather dangerous in terms of threats like having your spirit “torn up”. Yikes. That would certainly trouble me, if I believed in nonsense like spirits. Judge for yourself whether Kathryn is an agent for the forces of darkness, or just a normal, fairly sensible youth (not that sensible is necessarily the norm).

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SA Blog Awards 2010

The voting phase of the SA Blog awards 2010 has started, and it seems that Synapses has made the final 10 in two categories: best blog about politics, and best post on a South African blog, for my February post on Giving Jacob Zuma the finger. Thanks for the nominations, whomever you generous folks may be. If you’re inclined to follow it up with a vote, then the banners below give you an easy way to do so. The left-hand one is for the politics category, and the right-hand one for best post – of course, you can just click one of them and fill in your other nominations when you get to the voting site.

There’s a bunch of good stuff there to vote for, but also some very strange contenders. Some of the blogs haven’t been updated in ages, and some aren’t even blogs (for example, The Daily Maverick). Unfortunately for me, if one is going to (falsely) consider the Maverick to be a blog, then they (rather than me) should certainly get your vote. But they’re not a blog, so rather vote for me. (Update: see Chris’s comment below. The Daily Maverick have taken themselves out of the running.) You can vote until the 17th of September, and the process allows for one vote per day. Yes, I know, the methodology is completely screwy, but there you go.

Other people/blogs worth checking out:

Two of my competitors for best post: 6000 with his Dear Uruguay (clearly inspired by my post, The hand of god, revisited, but never mind that); and Michael Meadon’s post, On deference, which exhorts us to bear the limits of our knowledge in mind, and to understand what authority means in the context of scientific claims.

Two of the entrants for “Best Science and Technology blog”: Michael Meadon’s Ionian Enchantment and Angela Meadon’s The Skeptic Detective also merit your consideration.

Emancipate yourself from mental snobbery

For many years, I have been a coffee snob. But my entitlement to this snobbery is somewhat questionable, seeing as it stems from a few years spent as a barrista, back in the early 90’s when nobody knew what a barrista was. We did roast our own coffee, though, so were at least marginally authentic. And I could make funky layered drinks, after all. Given that most SA restaurants still today serve a cup worse than the one you can make at home, I certainly felt entitled to some snobbery at the time.

And “the time” lasted for a good 15 years, long after I had desisted from making layered lattes, and had instead begun digging myself  into theoretical holes so deep you needed a heidegger[ref]borrowed from the (absolutely tremendous) novel 36 Arguments for the existence of God: A work of fiction, by Rebecca Goldstein (partner to Steven Pinker)[/ref] to get out of them. But the time is now over, as I have gone and done one of the things that make real coffee snobs roll their eyes, and sometimes snort in disgust.

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Touch me on my studio

All very late in the day, as I’m sure you’re already all bored with touching yourselves in your studios. I don’t have a studio, so can’t really say whether your boredom is premature or not. However, if you are bored of it, and want to encourage others to touch you in your studios, you have two clear options. First, you could contact this guy:
Your studio... on Twitpic

Or alternately, you could procure yourself one of these:

If you opt for the former, make sure to get hold of the Rat before Dawkins does. But if you choose the latter route, simply contact Larry (a Juve fan, but don’t hold that against him) by email using this address. R80, in red, black or white, and available in various sizes – just like your studios are.

Orthorexia, Pollan and fear of food

Originally published in The Daily Maverick.

As that master epistemologist (and occasional US defence secretary) Donald Rumsfeld reminded us in 2002, “There are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns – the ones we don’t know we don’t know.”
Some of these unknown unknowns are probably harmful to us, but seeing as we don’t know what they are, there’s little we can do to safeguard ourselves against them. But as my earlier treatment of the moral panic relating to DStv and porn implied, a known unknown (in this case, the harmfulness of porn) can be treated in two entirely different ways.

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