Security

Purcell Room, South Bank this evening

Walked into a friend and colleague and talked to her for maybe ten minutes. In that time I twice had to defend from the security staff the plastic bag I had beside me, containing a bottle of water.

Please keep your belongings with you at all times. Items which are unattended may be removed without warning and may be subject to damage or destruction by the security services as they attempt to form concepts.

Pig or fig

I am in my office on the High Street, among the screaming children; and there was a cockatiel in a buggy. It looked like a young human child but it sounded like a cockatiel. I knew a really vicious one in an old people's home, where a friend of mine had been put so that the people she had trusted with her affairs could make use of her possessions and house before she actually died.
This cute bird would sit in its small cage, plotting to inflict grievous wounds on anyone who volunteered intimacy. An intimacy it invited by singing everything from the twentieth century twelve tone repertoire.
I know the voice. The child was a cockatiel.
I thought of Alice and the child that turned into a pig.
I have no pepper.
As with the grass I referred to in my previous post, there is no one to tell. I feel like Matthew in Invasion of the Body Snatchers. But I have had confirmation of my analysis. After a particularly loud squawk, even the mother could not stand it. A gelatinous alien creature in human form she may be, but the human body has its needs; and one of those needs is not to be screamed at by a cockatiel using the lungs of a child.
So, having picked it up and bounced it and fed it, none of which worked -- and why would they because they don't meet avian needs? -- she took a piece of cloth from the buggy and put it over the bird, which went quiet immediately.
She has gone now, having decided to pull the cloth off it -- at which point the cockatiel assumed it was morning and demanded bird seed.
I cannot help thinking the creature would be better off with me. I could have taken it from here; and, following Alice's story, it would soon have sprouted its wings and beak and presently flown away.

Vandalism in the London Borough of Sutton

As I walked down my road yesterday, on my way to work, I noticed a range of fairly commonplace but wild flowers growing. It pleased me.

I had a lie in this morning. Not for long. Lots of noise in my road. I didn't watch all of it; but, as far as I saw, this is what happened.

First a council nonce went by and blew air through the grass verges. Then another council nonce came and strimmed them. It may have been the same nonce with two machines.

Briefly it smelt of cut grass. But the flowers have gone.

I find that I am incapable of properly expressing the degree of idiocy this suggests. Fool, isn't enough. Cretin... well, that goes without saying.

Better, I suppose, this than that the nonces be swinging on a gas chamber door saying I am only obeying orders; but that will come.

It is impossible to tell them that because they will declare that the Nazi era and their attitude are entirely different. Nor, I suspect, would they encompass a charge of exceptionalism. One might as well debate with a dog turd about one's right to poop scoop it, with the turd advancing claims of its rights.

There are no guidelines. No policy statements exist because, they would hold, it is the obvious thing to do; so how does one argue? I approached the GLA Greens on related matters; and they referred me to my local councillors. Jobsworths, all of them.

The local MPs, coalition boys, do not reply.

Only the Charles Whitman approach works; and it cannot possibly be turned to, quite aside from the obvious fact that they'd shoot back before the gunperson got them all.

So we all go down together. Dungheads and grass cuttings and all. It wouldn't be so bad perhaps but one would share the plague pit with people who would see God's beneficial hand in our suffering.  

I suspect that the stimulus for this vandalism is draughts playing thinking. Someone has complained that long grass is unhealthy. Maybe it makes their polished shoes wet when they put their dustbins on it; or the grass gets in the way of their mixing of cement. Such people have votes; such people must be brown-nosed.

So the grass is kept cropped.

Sod the insects. Sod the flowers; you can buy flowers; but flowers are for the garden. And so on.

The other Whitman in my head, Walt Whitman, suggested in a poem that grass is the uncut hair of the dead. Not his finest line, and he was speaking of grass on graves. But I think of it now; and I reflect that, even in (spiritual) death, my fellows in the London Burial Ground of Sutton like to keep their hair smart.

more dungheads coda

The nonsense went on. After a while the child was standing on the long upholstered bench, bouncing up and down, so that everyone shook. A friend who had lived outside of UK for a while used to call behaviour such as our failure yesterday to complain "being English". Mind you, if my looks could have killed, the entire group would be dead.
It wasn't the child's fault. He was being brought up to be an arsehole, and very efficiently so, I would have thought. He was offered no critique.
He took to throwing his toys under my table and watching her crawl for them.
He took a header and was caught in mid air. This must happen quite often because she allowed him to continue what he was doing and there were no marks on the bits of him that I could see.
He gained in confidence and grew bored with St Vitus' Dance. He began to paw me. The mother seemed to find this charming. I removed his hand. She looked disapproving. He grabbed me. I said Go away; and the shock on his spoilt face showed that he had learned something new.
She and her friend whispered to each other. The mother proposed that they move to a recently-vacated corner, where the bongo playing had been. There isn't much room, said the friend. And it's true; sometimes there are only 6 or 8 people in there.
But who would want their child to remain in the region of a monster.
They moved, leaving the buggy and the cafe's high chair and their coats and their bags and their dirty plates and their empty cups, to the cramped corner. Presently a man came up with his coffee and asked me to advise him: was the space free or not. I said it was and pointed him to the two women.
Typical, he said, and had a polite go at them. It's what I should have done.
Resentfully, they moved their bags. What about the high chair? No, she said, you can put it back; and he moved the high chair; but she wouldn't let him touch the buggy, the thing she owned.
I think of Charles Whitman more and more. It's no help. What he did was quite unacceptable ethically; and anyway the yahoos shoot back; they developed the gun.

More dungheads

I am sitting in a cafe trying to enjoy some peace – the music machine is broken -- and to get some work done. I want to stay here because it is raining heavily and because I have things to get done.

Ten minutes ago a woman came in with a male child which she seated quite carefully in a chair and then disappeared towards the cakes until two minutes ago. During that time the child has been shouting to her at very high volume. The fool has acknowledged each and every shout with smiles and gestures and the child is learning that it is good to be noisy.

The fool has been joined by another fool who is encouraging them both in their folly and bad learning.

Ten feet away a man is wearing headphones and is trying to speak on a phone which he has pushed under the headphones. He uses the pressure of the phones to keep the phone in place, though this doesn't work, while he practices his aggressive bongo playing on the table. Cups and plates rattle.

The phone falls and he grabs for it. The headphones howl. The child bangs his plate on the table. The fools smile. They pay the child no attention except to worship it occasionally.

In my head I am praying to the ghost of Charles Whitman, who shot at his fellow human beings at random; but it brings no alleviation.

The child has just thrown a toy on the floor. The first fool has leant sideways to get it, while the child shouts, without pausing in her torrent of speech. She, the fool, begins to overbalance. Coffees spill on her table. She grabs for my table and I lift the computer away from the moron's grasp. Momentarily everything she is using and that I am using is in the air.

Not a word of apology as she pulls herself back. No one seems to exist for her but her. I suspect that if I challenged her I would discover it is her democratic right to behave with exclusive self-regard. Her friend has just said “Everything is progressing” and she has agreed.

Dungheads

I just made a perfectly ordinary google request about e-poetry which brought the response from google "We're sorry... ... but your computer or network may be sending automated queries. To protect our users, we can't process your request right now. See Google Help for more information."

Someone somewhere has told a fool that he is clever. Dungheads.

I think what annoys me most is the disengenuous "we can't process your request right now" because what it means is that they are going to do nothing. Ever. But they are too slimy to say so and would probably believe that they are being polite. Dungheads.

And the disengenuous claim that they are protecting their users. Dungheads with diarrhea.

There was no squiggle to interpret to prove I am not a robot; just a link to bollocks about contacting my network administrator, checking I haven't got malware and so on. Never a thought that they might have their brains up their arses. Dungheads.

Now I must go round the houses to get the information I want

The Cloud and Sky Arts

I have spoken of The Cloud before: they provide an imitation of efficient wifi to Cafe Nero.

It's much the same every day; only every day it's different. The result of an attitude somewhere between "that's good enough" and "they'll think it's their fault".

It intervenes if you try to connect to the internet. Only sometimes it doesn't intervene properly. So I had to load my browser three times before it deigned to respond -- the way you have to shout some times when people get in the way and stand still.

It takes a while to load because they clutter their page with pictures and logos.

This morning, when it finally loaded, I had to click _get on line_ 7 times before it reacted; and it took me to another page which offered that _get on line_. That took 5 clicks.

Then it offered me the login page. I logged in and it welcomed me.  And that's the end of what they do, beyond being officious; they don't seem to know how to hold the URL you gave the browser and take you there.

[If you forget your password, they ask for your email address and then take you to a page... where they ask for your email address.]

So I typed in the URL and... it invited me to login to The Cloud.

So I logged in for the second time; and typed in my URL for the second time; started work and, within minutes, it cut me off. I logged in again; and 15 minutes later it cut me off.

And every time you login, it says WELCOME TO THE WORLD OF SKY ARTS.

Quite.

That's Sky Arts as in Sky Elbow.