Category: Uncategorized

This might turn into rather a long post, but do please at least look at the photos. If you click on them, they’ll be larger and you can see more here.

Alice, my girlfriend, and I went to San Francisco last week on holiday, largely courtesy of some air miles from my father. San Francisco is a lovely city. Beyond the Golden Gate Bridge (of which more later) there is the TransAmerica pyramid as a landmark and Fisherman’s Wharf is fun to visit. With the possible exception of Pier 39, it’s not excessively touristy and there are parts that are just nice to walk along. Pier 39, though, does have sea lions. We didn’t make it to Alcatraz but here’s a gratuitous picture.

I’m afraid that this post will sound like I’m bitching. Alice and I had a lovely time in San Francisco. We were lucky with the weather and there’s a lot to see and do in a very pleasant and friendly city. The city somehow feels that it works (in a way that Dallas does not) and it’s easy to move around. The public transport works and, as an added bonus, there are cable cars. These run off a cable running underground and are a lot of fun to ride on. It’s a good city to be a flaneur in; lots to see, some decent coffee shops and restaurants and a general feeling of comfort and unhurriedness.

LA airport is bloody awful
The staff at LAX all wear name badges with ‘Dave 01421’ or ‘Alice 63920’; people are reduced to a number so that complaints may be easily made against them. This was probably an idea dreamed up by some exec in an office who’d never been near the shop floor as a means to facilitate praise and complaints. The human tendency is to notice the bad more than the good; the numbers would be used a lot for complaints, mostly because LAX, built for the 1976 Olympics, was never finished and it shows. Our first port of call was Los Angeles. Air pollution cannot escape LA as the city sits in a bowl. As we flew into LAX, adding to the pollution, coming back from San Francisco, we could see a grey haze floating beneath the cloud. LA is not an attractive city from the air.

Anyway, you’re never going to receive a warm welcome at an airport but an efficient one works just as well. We were near the front of the immigration control queue – I felt sorry for those at the back who had a long wait – but were still standing around for a while and I felt like shouting that when to Jumbo Jets arrive around the same time, you need more than six immigration officials.
We then had to queue again to go past a point where someone looked at the customs declaration for a second time and, bizarrely, to queue to leave the building. Queuing is a generous description for the ensuing mess up a ramp and around a corner. A couple of LAX staff were trying to sort things out but after two long queues people were not in a charitable mood.

Then things became annoying. We went to the AA desk with our e-ticket number because we were flying AA to San Francisco. Logical, no? No. AA were codesharing that flight with Alaska Air but had neglected to tell us, anyone else or put it on the displays. A walk to another terminal and Alaska told us that we had to go back to AA as we should have had paper tickets. AA passed us onto BA, with whom we booked the flights, who swore blind that we had been sent paper tickets. $150 later, we were reissued our tickets on paper that must be worth its weight in gold at those prices. When we came back and handed over our tickets to the AA desk at SF airport, we were told it was an e-ticket and not a paper ticket. Anyway, we made the Alaska Air flight but had it not been delayed we would have missed it. It is worth looking at the TSA Pledge. There is one thing missing from this: ‘efficiency’.

Customer service
People were polite and so on, but were hamstrung in what they could do. The politeness, however, is the standard. Where a bartender in the US might say ‘what would you like, sir?’ their UK counterpart might plainly ask ‘what do you want?’; neither is ruder or more polite as it’s just the way things are done. I suppose it’s a bit like this blog; flowery language and subclauses don’t change the ideas beneath any more than the query of the US bartender. We booked to go on a bus tour of Muir Woods to see the redwoods and then go to some vineyards in the Sonoma valley. It ended up that the tour we wanted wasn’t on offer any more, and we ended up going on a (very good, as it happens) tour of the Napa and Sonoma valleys. People at the tour company’s office were polite but I would rather they’d been efficient.

Why is all cheese in America the same? We stopped at Sonoma town for lunch on the tour and ate at the Cheese Factory. Can anyone tell me why the half-a-dozen varieties of cheese they had on offer to sample all tasted the same? Has anyone ever really expressed a preference for Monterey Jack over American Sharp Cheddar? I can’t believe there’s not a market for something other than variously-packaged, slightly bland cheddar. Brie, perhaps, or even stilton. I don’t believe that the A
merican palette is averse to different cheeses but the invisible hand of the market seems to have banned all trace of camembert, wensleydale and roquefort.

Eating out
Talking of food, we had some great meals out, largely due to the strength of the pound against the dollar, and Plouf and John’s Grill come recommended. The seafood in San Francisco is great – lots of clams, mussels, sea bass and swordfish. I know American food is often knocked for being poor quality (as above) but there are some really good restaurants around. Plouf on Belden Place was a lot of fun. A French restaurant, it had a good menu and a wine list with new and old world wines and a cheery French waiter (the French for clams is ‘palourdes‘) who did seem very happy with his lot in life. Clams and mussels provencale were great – I forget what else we had, but the shellfish was very good. Belden Place is a side street with restaurants all along. It’s slogan is ‘Where the locals go’; I don’t know how true this is, but there were plenty of American accents and its location in the financial district makes me think that it’s aimed at the business community. Anyhow, a meal with wine and the works for two came to about fifty quid total. If anyone can tell me more about Belden Place (if any San Franciscans are reading this…), I’d love to know. We went back to Belden Place, to an Italian called Tiramisu. While it was fine, I was annoyed because the first waiter claimed there was no house white and was generally snotty; the second one (who appeared, I’m guessing, because the other didn’t want to deal with us) explained that there was a house chardonnay, pinot grigio and something else. Anyway, he brought a bottle and it was fine. Decorations a bit dodgy – supposedly Pompeii-esque murals with cracks added. The thing with the first waiter annoyed me – it made me feel ill at ease and that the restaurant didn’t want casually -dressed people in it. The pretention and, frankly, snobbishness wasn’t great. John’s Grill, which features in The Maltese Falcon, was great. It was what I’d call classic American cooking at its best – simple ingredients of good quality, well cooked. Steak, chips and creamed spinach, plenty of a good rose and definitely worth going to. Book ahead though – it was busy.

We did things other than eating…
You can very easily see why Berkeley sustains a left-wing population. On a fine day, sitting on its lawns, walking through its woods or using its amazing facilities (the student union and centre are probably half the size of the entire LSE) makes you want to do more than just live to work. Seeing the privations of some in the Bay Area while you were a student at Berkeley would provide a spur to want to do something about it.

I did get a kick from thinking that Adelstein and Bloom would have walked on those paths at one point. Yes, many fine minds, but those two are important to me. I bought myself a homburg at a shop in Berkeley. Not, sadly, from Mars Vintage Thrift.

The richest country in the world
I mentioned the privations of some. There seem to be a relatively large number of homeless people in San Francisco. I hope this doesn’t come over as strange, but here goes. I wish I was both a better and more confident photographer of people, hopefully in the Steve McCurry style of rapid, unposed, intimate photos. You can’t do a huge amount individually, but I really felt that few people actually saw the homeless; everyone seemed so used to bypassing the homeless that it was automatic. Maybe some photos of people living on the streets of a wealthy city in abject poverty, with little or no healthcare or prospects of a job or housing, would move people a little.

You do sometimes see a lot in the features of people. A lot of the homeless in San Francisco had unkept, matted hair and weather-beaten faces that can give good, expressionful shots. Some, though, by their clothes and the style of their actions, unaccustomed to the streets, and a greater despair in their eyes, gave the impression of having recently lost their homes. Certainly, foreclosing and repossessions are increasing sufficiently in the US that the papers are predicting a subprime lending bubble collapse. Maybe it was an attempt to maintain dignity in a situation that many would consider to be impossible undignified that made it different.

Maybe it’s the nasty feeling that there, but for the grace of God, go I; a lot people on the streets have histories of mental health problems. There is a local version of the Big Issue, the Street Sheet, that has potential, particularly as mainstream newspapers aren’t great, to provide a distinctive coverage of news, perhaps including municipal news, that could make it a better seller; for now, it seemed to concentrate to much on homelessness issues. The idea is to give the homeless and former
ly homeless a voice; this could be done while making more money for the vendor. As an aside, I met a chugger who was collecting for a charity that did microfinance in Colombia, Ecuador, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh – and the US.

The Golden Gate Bridge
I went, with camera, to the recreational pier to take pictures of the Golden Gate Bridge at sunset. The Bridge is a fascinating structure. It has a definite beauty in the curve of the cables but it is the way in which it closes the Bay, adding a finality to the land before the Pacific, that has allowed it to become a loved piece of architecture. It was initially opposed as it would have spoilt the landscape. The way in which it connects to the land is interesting – it’s different at each end – and the girders in the supporting towers make fascinating patterns.

I managed, I think, some decent shots of the bridge with the sun setting behind; after all, it’s pretty straightforward to take a decent photo given the setting. I actually enjoyed taking pictures of the birds more. I think there must have been an updraft of air in front of the pier as a lot of birds were flying and gliding along just in front of me. It’s quite wonderful to have birds flying past a few feet in front of you. You start to see the attraction to prisoners of keeping birds; they give a sense of freedom and being able to ‘shake the surly bonds of earth’. If a picture is worth a thousand words, this will save you more of my prolix.

MoMA in SoMa
We went to the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) which is in South of Market (SoMa). I wasn’t sure about some of the collection (Alice was sure that some of it was a wind-up) but they had a really interesting room on design of objects like typewriters, chairs and coffee makers. All very mundane items, but with the potential to be beautifully designed. The website for MOMA has a good interactive guide to various artists called Making Sense of Modern Art. It has given me a few ideas that, if I have time, I might work on.

I’ll sign off here. We had a great time. After a few weeks of work that were pretty soul-destroying, it was good to be able to spend some time with Alice and to rest. Unfortunately the lines under my eyes are returning already. I’d like to go to Muir, Sausalito and Yosemite and so may well pass through San Francisco again.

xD.

It’s been ten years since Labour came to power, say the Tories, and it’s high time they did something about families. Fathers are behaving irresponsibly, and this is causing their teenage kids to run riot around South London with an arsenal that would embarass a rebel militia. Bad parenting is causing bad kids that will grow up to cause even more social problems than now.

Step back a moment – let’s say that the kids are 15 to 18; they would have been born between 1989 and 1997, five to eight years before Labour came to power. I would suggest that these are Thatcher’s grandchildren; born to parents who had grown up in the relentlessly selfish era that saw large parts of the country in wretchedness, not just because their jobs went, but because those that kept their jobs saw their wages going less and less far and because there was not a social security system in place and because schools and training were cut back and those that fell into the prison system were given little chance to better themselves.

As much as it is the current Government’s responsibility to deal with the current problem, its roots lie in the past.

xD.

It takes me about ten minutes to read London Lite – less time than it takes me to reach the end of the Aldwych – on the bus in the evening, not to mention the fact that it’s a rubbish read from the publishers of the Daily Mail.

Page seven, in a DoughtyStreet-style piece of attack dressed up as journalism, talks about rising taxi fares in London. They will go up 3.2% from April 14. The CPI measure of inflation was 3.0% in December and 2.7% in January.

The two people that London Lite uses to comment are Brian Cooke of London TravelWatch and Bob Oddy, general secretary of the LTDA:

Brian Cooke, chairman of passenger watchdog London TravelWatch, said it was right that cab drivers received an annual cost of living increase that was based on a wide range of measures.

“We are quite happy and content with this, although we do begin to wonder whether a fresh look needs to be taken at the higher rates charged mid-evening and late evening,” he said.

“With London becoming a 24-hour city, we need to ask whether these quite large premiums are still appropriate.They’re not cheap and there has to be this balance. Clearly it’s in Londoners’ interests to use public transport as much as possible.”

Bob Oddy, general secretary of the Licensed Taxi Drivers Association, said: “The reason the increase is very reasonable is because of diesel fuel. Although it was riding high back in the summer, it’s been dipping pretty much ever since. It’s an important component of the fares.”

Mr Oddy said concern about rising fares was “hype”. “The average passenger doesn’t complain. Why are cabs all full if they’re too expensive to use?” he asked.

Neither London TravelWatch or the LTDA can be called huge fans of Ken; moreover, the print version cuts out most of the comments of both. Ken became Mayor in 2000 – seven years ago – and has raised taxi prices eight times. Taxis are a luxury and rising fares at night are to encourage taxi drivers to come out – you know, capitalism or something.

Then, on the interactive bit Page 8, Kevin of London comes out with a classic letter:

Much gang culture is attributable to the absence of a stable father figure and proper family unit. And now, what does the Government do? Gay adoptions? It may sound controversial but perhaps this is a further step backwards. Kevin has cleverly identified a problem – the lack a father figure and the lack of a proper family unit.

His solution, though, is rubbish. If the problem is the lack of a father figure, gay adoption will provide, er, two father figures. A proper family? Do you mean a heterosexual family? I will accept, for the purposes of argument alone, that a heterosexual family may be better than a homosexual family. Does Kevin think that homosexuality is so bad that it is preferable to be brought up by a single parent? Is a proper family one that’s exactly like his?

thelondonpaper is slightly better than London Lite, but I’m going back to reading a book on the way home from work. These are not newspapers – page three is about Kate Moss getting into a small car – but gossip rags with sidelines in scaremongering – see the insightful article on bird flu on pages 12 and 13 – and dressing up bias as news. I’m looking forward to Iain Dale‘s column.

Update 2138: I’m going to call the PCO in the morning and ask for the fares tables since Ken came to office and do a little comparison with inflation.

xD.

“They accused us of suppressing freedom of expression. This was a lie and we could not let them publish it.”

– Nelba Blandon, Nicaraguan Interior Ministry Director of Censorship

I went to Kew Gardens today with Alice and Ahmed and my new camera, a Canon EOS 400d. More pictures later, but I thought this was quite good.

xD.

At an event organised by LSE Labour, I heard Hazel Blears speak last night on feminism as part of the LSE SU’s Women’s Week.

Anyone would think there’s a deputy leadership election coming up – Hillary Benn on the Tuesday, Hazel Blears on the Wednesday.

I thought Hazel did well; for one thing, she actually spoke on the topic of women in politics and made the very valid point that the headline improvements for women in politics – Clinton in the US, Royale in France and Merkel in Germany – don’t do anything to hide the fact that few women are councillors and that, although we are at parity in the Welsh Assembly, there are concerns that in Scotland where women have stood down, men are replacing them and we are moving away from parity; as soon as you take your eye of the ball, things worsen.

In answer to a question from yours truly, Hazel did say that legislation on equal pay audits should go into the next manifesto.

I was actually pretty impressed – she comes across as hardworking, knowledgable and as really caring about her area and the Labour party. However, I am not convinced that she would be the best person for the job. I have a feeling that there would be cosmetic changes and some more fundamental changes in party organisation, but I don’t think there would be the root-and-branch look at Labour on the ground. There was, I felt, a lot of generality and identification of problems but no concrete means of solving those problems and moving forward.

xD.

I’ve just watched Ingmar Bergman’s classic film, The Seventh Seal. I went though a period a little while ago of buying DVDs on Amazon’s second hand shops, so they were cheap and allowed me to feel good about myself by having that sort of film collection.

Anyway, the film. First off, it’s beautifully filmed. Some of the scenes are iconic, foremost of which are, of course, the various shot of Death and the protagonist, Antonius Block, playing chess. Bergman said that the image of a knight playing chess with Death for his life come from a 1480s painting in the church at Täby in Sweden. The image of death portrayed by Bengt Ekerod has also become a classic and echoes down, being picked up, I would say, as the Emperor in Star Wars and as Fear in the Star Trek: Voyager episode, The Thaw. I know that Star Trek is seen as being geeky, but I really don’t care – I will return to this in another post, though.

Other images come through in the film beyond the chess game. One of the images that really resonated with me was that of the knight speaking at a confessional to who he presumes is a priest about his encounter with death and his chess strategy, thus revealing his position to Death, who he realises is the priest. Bergman’s use of light and shadow is beautiful in and of itself, but the meanings behind single frames are potent indeed. One that stuck in my mind is this:

Block has not yet realised that the priest to whom he confesses is Death, but there are several overlaying symbols that encapsulate the film. Bergman is critical of priests throughout the film for using the plague that is sweeping the land, but this moves it on rather.

First off, the knight is trapped by the bars, away from the ‘priest’. I won’t repeat the centuries-old debate about rood screens and separating the commoners from the priesthood, but this is a depiction of the church as an iron barrier between what humanity, depicted by the knight, seeks and the consolation of knowledge – knowledge that is defined as important by the church.

There is, of course, the fact that the knight mistakes death for the priest. To Bergman, the priest is implicitly death; not to say that the priest directly causes death, but causes a death-in-life by trapping people in their concern about death and a belief in god that they promote to their own benefit – although the priest leads the flagellants, and gains status at least from it, he himself does not take party in the flagellation, preferring to make end-of-the-world predictions and crude rantings about not knowing when you’re going to die.

The obsession that the knight has with god and death comes from the church; it is the church that sent him on his crusade for ten years. I do wonder if there is something in Jöns, the knight’s servant, being atheistic and fatalistic because he had no choice but to follow his master while Block chose, after a fashion, to go on the crusade.

Ultimately, though, Block’s only counsellors are Death, through which he gains the opportunity to commit a meaningful act in allowing the family of artists to escape, and Jöns, through whom he gains an understanding that you can’t change everything and some things, even though they are awful, you can at best only mitigate.

I wonder if the same applies to me; am I trapped into a way of thinking because of my upbringing, in terms of environment, culture and education? I have, at times, tried to think whether an action is moral/good/whatever by thinking from a sort of tabula rasa position but I often end up with positions of which Protestant Christianity would approve. Does the indoctrination of the Church mean that we will end up accepting the moral lessons of all or part of our upbringing as default and convince ourselves that that position is, a priori and possibly without god, right?

Anyway, I shall sign off with a picture of Death.

xD.

Every Monday during the university term at ULU, I play for a team called the Kim Jong-il Appreciation Society in the pub quiz league. Said team has won the league for this term, the prizes being cocktails top trumps, playing cards, a keyring, a hangover eyemask and a hipflask, all branded with Jack Daniel’s (except the keyring, which is Smirnoff). Best of all, though, was a case of beer for each of the six people in the team.

Amusingly, the Jack Daniel’s Cocktails Top Trumps has, on the back, a warning that it is not suitable for children under three. Give that four-year-old a Manhattan.

Just for the record, the final points were:

28 – We Are Scientists
33 – Five Geographers but one of them’s Lost
49 – Lego Fan Club
59 – Team Titwank
68 – The Winning Team
72 – The Left Bollock Collection Fund
83 – Fat Kids are Harder to Kidnap
85 – The Hollow Brains
89 – The Kim Jong-il Appreciation Society

xD.

Dennis Skinner is pro-choice. He is sufficiently pro-choice (and, I suspect, keen to expose some of Parliament’s more arcane procedures as such) to organise a three-hour filibuster using the issuance of a writ of election, amongst other tricks, to prevent restrictions on abortion. It should be noted that this was constitutional trickery to prevent constitutional trickery,

The Speaker at one point had to come out with the classic

No, I shall not take a point of order. I shall take the closure motion. I ask the House to listen carefully to the Question. The Question is, That the Question, That the Question be not now put, be now put.

Anyway, here is the debate in all its glory.

xD.

At the risk of being shot down by an uberblogger, I have to take issue with Iain Dale’s argument that the centre ground is the common ground, mostly because I don’t think either exist.

The centre ground is, presumably, the bit in the middle. The middle of what, I hear you cry. It could be between Labour and the Conservatives. Immediately we run into the problem of both parties having wings and factions.

A redraw might have extra axes closer to or further from the line between the two major parties for the LibDems, SNP, Plaid Cymru, Greens and the rest. Straightaway, we’re seeing that there have to be multiple axes where you can talk about centre ground between two or three parties across the broad sweep of policies, but as you add others in

Moreover, the common ground and the centre ground is not the same thing. The centre position between a unitary state and Scotland and Wales becoming independent might be a federation composed of Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland, London, Yorkshire, the North West, Midlands, East, South and South West. That would probably not be acceptable to many people – the centre ground is not the common ground.

Talking of devolution, I believe I’m right in saying that Nye Bevan (and do please correct me) was in favour of states’ rights in the USA because it was the only way to achieve socialism and a unitary state in the UK because it was the only way to achieve socialism. The more left-wing position is here the same as (if for different reasons) the right-wing party. Equally, Tam Dalyell, poser of the West Lothian Question, opposed devolution.

The common ground is what parties accept as the playing field. We should have, in some form, an NHS etc. The centre ground is an abstract that may not have any philosophical coherence and may be so unpalatable that it is emphatically not the common ground.

xD.