Long Have I Waited…

When I decided to start writing ODHSNM again, I thought I’d begin with an explanation of why I hadn’t blogged for so long.

It’s been nearly three years since I last wrote anything on here.

Three YEARS of real-world measured time.

It hasn’t just SEEMED like three years - it really was.

But then I looked back and noticed that I had opened roughly one in every three posts since 2014 apologising for not having blogged for ages.  

As if anyone cared.

So I’m not going to do that. I’ve been away for three years and now I’m back. It happened. You lost. Get over it. Etc.

To be honest, I thought about starting all over again with a new blog. Looking back at the last ten years of ODHSNM I have to cringe at some of the hot takes I’ve put forward, some of the political positions I’ve advocated and some of the pretentious drivel I have foisted upon the world.

Please feel free to search the Blog Archive on the right for something “problematic”.

I’m sure you’ll find something you don’t like.

But I decided NO!

NO!

This is all part of my “creative output” and so I’ll keep it here on the internet as a testament to the lived experience of whatever on earth I had been thinking at the time – even if I can’t figure out what that was now myself.

If I said something I no longer agree with, it’s because I’ve changed my mind.

Can you believe that? In 2020? Someone changed their mind and admitted to it?

Sometimes, I changed my mind because new facts came to my attention.

Sometimes, I realised that things I had thought were right were, in fact, wrong or incompatible with other things I think are right.

I know.

Quaint.

Anyway, there are a few good ones on here:

• the one about In The Night Garden
• the Vasectomy series
• the one about Frozen

So NO! The past happened, for good or ill. I’m leaving it there.

What you can expect on “New ODHSNM” (which we may henceforth abbreviate to NODHSNM) will be a little different from what has gone before.

Because one of the main reasons I haven’t been blogging is that I have been writing a novel.

And now it’s nearly finished.

And I’m going to release it as a paperback and an e-book in the near future.

So I’m going to write about that.

Because if there’s one thing the world needs more of, it’s people writing about writing.

LOL.

Wish me luck. 

Toddler Strategies for Business Success

It’s every parent’s biggest worry: am I responsible for spawning the antichrist?

The period when your conviction that your little darling is not - in fact - the Beast of Revelation come to bring about a reign of terrible darkness across the world is really put to the test is commonly known as the “Terrible Twos”.

A more accurate description would of course be “childhood, taken as a whole”.

This may be overstating things. I speak not from personal experience here – the eldest of my own brood is but a fiveling – but from that tried-and-tested mix of bigoted exaggeration, wilful blindness to nuance and deliberate trolling which is the hallmark of blogging.

As Marx said in his Theses on Feuerbach:

The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.

From a philosophical point of view, I am pretty sure that I have got the whole of toddler psychology worked out.

Unfortunately, I have yet to ascertain how put the crucial insight - “they always work out what will wind you up the most, and then do it” - into action.

Toddler reasoning is essentially unanswerable. There is no reasonable response to hyperventilation, uncontrollable crying or just shouting "BUT I WANT IT!"

I am surprised then that, given their mastery in manipulating human behaviour, no one seems to have seized on the business strategy applications of leading successful toddlers.

Why go through a long and delicate negotiation when a public tantrum has been proven time and time again to get you what you want?

Or suppose you have botched a big client presentation – why not blame your sibling?

Remember, there is no question or challenge that can’t be answered with “but he did x, y, z first ” once you have given up on the idea that you are inhibited by:

• The need for things to be true; or
• The need for parts of your overall argument to have any relation to one another or the point you are defending.

I can’t believe that more toddlers are not leading FTSE 100 companies, given that like most CEOs they are, at heart, innumerate psychopaths.

The Czech is in the post – pt 2

Here’s the second instalment of my guide to Prague for people who share the exact circumstances my wife and I found ourselves in last week. For everyone else, there’s always Tripadvisor.

Czech Language

This is probably historically a highly tasteless remark, for which I apologise in advance - but Prague is basically a German city inhabited by people who speak a language that bears no resemblance to German.

Everything I saw pointed to either Vienna (if it was less than 400 years old) or that whole kind of Brothers Grimm medieval Germany thing (if older).

Anyway, as well as excellent English and German, the Czechs speak a language called “Czech”, and this is a Slavic language. As such – and again I apologise for any cultural insensitivity here – it is a lot like most other Slavic languages, from Russian, to Polish, to Serbian and so on.  For example, the Czechs say “dobra den” and the Poles say “dzien dobry”. PotAYto, PotARto – DUMPling, DIMPling.

Mercifully, the Catholics got to the Czechs before old Cyril and Methodius, and they use our Roman alphabet.

However, this is of little advantage when your find yourself confronted with repeated storms of consecutive consonants, which really do not lend themselves to English tonguing. Elvira and I struggled to ask for “Trdelnik” when we found it, and ended up rendering it like Dora the Explorer saying “turtleneck”.

And here I must insert a little linguistic rant of wider relevance. English has its faults, but it makes do perfectly well with 26 letters. If you need all those goddam accents to cover all the sounds your language makes – perhaps you need some more letters. I’m just sayin’ is all.

Anyway, I can only begin to imagine how Czechs play Scrabble. They are not, however, above a bit of Engrish.

Czech Money

The Czechs are not members of the Eurozone, which means that you can still have loads of fun wondering what the hell is going on with a currency you cannot get your head round - which in turn means that your holiday descends into a purgatory of near-constant mental arithmetic.

Their money is called the “koruna” and £1 is worth anywhere between 25 and 31 of them – which makes for very confusing “value for money” assessments when shopping.

Here’s a piece of useful advice (by my own low, low standards). Get your koruna in the Czech Republic, not in the UK. You get a much better rate (worst case, +3 more koruna to the pound) and you will not be slapped around the face for waving euros around, at least in the vicinity of the airport and Prague itself. Unless, I suppose, you are being met by Vaclav Klaus, who doesn’t like euros. But nor does he drive a taxi.

 

As well as suitcase-hostile block paving/cobblestones, the streets of Prague are lined with exchange booths, in which tourists swap their home currency for ever-fluctuating korunas.

To your left, you can see an example of Czech language, Czech money and German economic colonialism all in one place.

And that, dear readers, brings me on to a little adventure the missus and I had...

So there we were, standing outside an exchange booth trying to work out whether “we buy” means that they buy pounds off you for that many korunas or they buy that many korunas for a pound, when a man sidles up to us and starts asking if we’re interested in changing money.

Now, this chap spoke good English with that kind of accent which, to UK ears, could place him anywhere from Strasbourg to the Urals. He looked kind of Kazakh, or something else Central Asian. Anyway, he said that he’d give us 32 koruna to the pound – which was the best deal we’d seen.

My suspicions were first raised when he insisted on carrying out the transaction behind a parked car. But I wasn’t too alarmed – he’s probably just trying to dodge tax, I thought, and that is in both our interests... I wasn't going to hold that against him. 

So I say I want to change £100. He suggests £200. I say I’ve only got £100. So he whips out a bundle of notes, and counts through them at Paul Daniels speed – one thousand, two thousand, three thousand, one hundred, two hundred. He has my £100 in his hand when I realise that I have actually seen a one thousand koruna note, and the notes at the bottom of his pile are a different colour. And size. And they had “Hungarian forints” written on them.

Like a panther, I grab my money back, rebutting his protestations that they are real banknotes by declaring - I was very proud of this particular bit of wit - “I can read”. And away we go, very pleased not to have been ripped off. Later on that day, I checked the exchange rates and found that 1000 forints were going for about £2.79.

Elvira was deeply impressed by my display of shrewdness. All I can say is that the deep suspicion and cynicism about other people that condemns me to a life of perpetual isolation sometimes has its upsides.

Coming next...Czech Technology and Culture. For real, this time. 

The Dukes of Moral Hazard

After praising the Greek government for sticking to its guns on a referendum on the bailout package yesterday, I was rather surprised to find that some 15 minutes after I had published it, Papandreou had changed his mind. The ODHSNM kiss of death strikes again. 

Suddenly George had decided that “democracy” meant something a little less Athenian and bit more Burkean than he’d previously been inclined to lead the world to believe.

By that, I mean:

1. Because the parliamentary opposition supported the bailout – no doubt after having their children taken hostage by G20 agents and spirited to a bunker in Cannes – there was, in fact, total agreement in the Greek polity on the whole “selling oneself and one’s descendants into slavery” issue.
2. The general public had their chance for a say when they elected their MPs. No point whinging about it now Stavros. Just eat your grass and be quiet. 

So, well done everyone - especially Existential Doubt for his article explaining WTF brought us to this moment. That’s the crisis over.

Well, call me paranoid and a prophet of doom, but I’m glad Elvira and I decided to book our upcoming break in a non-Euro country (the Czech Republic, since you ask).

While flights might be cheaper after the Euro has collapsed, I don’t want the added hassle of bartering for food, huddling around burning pieces of furniture in an exploded basement overnight and fending off marauding barbarians during the day on top of the usual stresses of a holiday.

Yes, well done EU and G20. The banks can rest easy knowing that there’s nothing you won’t do to stop them losing a penny. Things are going so well.

While we’re at it, EU, why not finish the job properly? All the governments – step down. Let’s get a Hapsburg on the throne and change the name back to "Holy Roman Empire".

Go George Go

For what it is worth, Greek prime minister George Papandreou can count on the support of this blog in his efforts to inject a little democracy into the EU’s attempt to set an all-time record for throwing good money after bad.

As Seumas Milne says in the Guardian today:

It makes no sense. Unless it's understood that it's not the Greek economy that's being rescued, but European and US banks exposed to Greek debt.

Perhaps my economically-literate blogger friend Existential Doubt could offer some elucidation as to exactly where all this money is going and how it’s going to help?

Money has to be continually poured into Greece so Greece can give it to the financiers, who will stop lending money to governments that spend vastly more than they collect in taxes if they ever lose out, resulting in the collapse of social democratic welfare statist civilisation as we know it - which is only possible when states borrow huge amounts of cash with no idea about how to pay it back from financiers. That about right?

So, am I being naive or missing some obvious point if I can't help but see this as simply delaying the inevitable and impoverishing yourself in the process?

As Kenny Rogers would say:

You've got to know when to hold 'em - and know when to fold 'em.

Anyway, that's enough economics. Here's some politics.

Papandreou offers the Greek people a referendum on whether they want to return to the kind of economic and political colonisation by foreign powers that they spent most of last 500 years trying to shake off, and suddenly, he’s an irresponsible, weak lunatic because - god forbid! - if they are given a say in the matter, the people might decide that they would rather that the banks lose some money than be reduced to eating grass to survive for the next 50 years.

You can question the democratic credentials of a prime minister of Greece whose father was prime minister of Greece and whose grandfather was also...errr...prime minister of Greece. But he seems to have remembered that democratic politicians are there, when it comes to a moment like this, to serve the interests of their people first rather than international capital. 

This Treaty marks a new stage in the process of creating an ever closer union among the peoples of Europe, in which decisions are taken as closely as possible to the citizen.

That’s Article A of the Treaty of Rome, which led to the creation of the European Union. I wonder what went wrong...

Adopt a peasant

Have you ever fancied owning a poor person? Well, now you can – if you live in Hull, Blackpool or Westminster.

If this pilot scheme goes well, middle class people all over the country could adopt their own family of peasants or a clan of urban lumpenproles. I for one think it would be simply lovely!

The theory is that people with jobs "mentor" a jobless household to get them into work, according to the "social entrepreneur" behind it, Emma Harrison. I find it hard to imagine what a "social entrepreneur" does, unless it means making money out of social programmes – which, with £300 million of government contracts under her belt, Ms Harrison looks highly adept at doing.

I can't help but think this is ridiculously patronising in every way.

Is the grateful serf supposed to view his employed mentor with such admiration that the very force of the example set by seeing a real-life working person makes them stop being a feckless skiver on the spot?

Or is the middle class role model just supposed to fill in forms for their unemployed protégée, in nice, legible handwriting, using long words, spelled correctly – like a Job Centre Cyrano de Bergerac?

I'm intrigued to know what special understanding of "how to find and keep a job when you have no skills or experience" the middle classes of Hull, Bristol and Westminster are presumed to have.

I have a sneaking suspicion that someone like me coming into your home and telling you that - for example – you might find getting a job easier, oh I don't know, if you learn to read or stop drinking Special Brew in the morning is unlikely to go down any better than it does coming from the government.

Coming soon – "voluntary" workhouses funded by wealthy philanthropists and the all rest of the Victorian era! You won't be laughing at my moustache soon...

Hail to Alan Cartridge

This splendidly-named printer shop is right by Leeds-Bradford Airport. This kind of ingenuity in retail is highly worthy of laudation.

What's even better is that their website makes no attempt to capitalise on the joke. Maybe it's not a joke. Maybe the owner is called Alan Cartridge. Who knows?

Anyway, it is infinitely superior to any use of the word "plaice" in the name of a chip shop, or any kind of punning hairdresser's title – and I include in that my own (imaginary) chain of Weimar cabaret-themed barbers, "Mein Herr".

Sadly I don't have a picture of my absolute favourite-named shop in my home town of Boston – "I Can't Believe it's Not Stolen".

I do however, have this one (above, if the reference to "this" is overly confusing), also from Boston. I pity the fool who buys cheap underlay!

By the way, I now have a Twitter account for this blog, under the handle @RogerofSicily if you're into that kind of thing. Become my follower and I will lead you to salvation! All I require is 10 per cent of your gross earnings, for life.

Should I worry?

So I Googled "Wikileaks" this morning to see what the latest developments in this news story were...and look at the top paid result I got (left - you may need your glasses. Sorry).

"Join the Special Forces" from HM Armed Forces... Good to see that their PPC budgets have not been affected by the spending cuts. However, I suspect that they may not have researched their audience very well in this particular case.

According to Adwords, the military is paying 4p per click on that one as of right now. That's a bargain - get bidding.

A constructive use of time – learning German, pt 1

Having recently seen "Julie and Julia" I have decided to insert a theme to this blog over and above "whimsical misanthropy", with the hope of getting my work made into a book and major Hollywood film.

Naturally, I would like to be played by Leonardo Di Caprio in this movie, with whom I share certain irreparable facial creasings between the eyebrows, due to prolific frowning.

Anyway, I want to share with you the experience of learning the German language by way of the Michel Thomas foundation course. Eight CDs and £27 from Amazon, as opposed to the usual RRP of about £80. Not a bad start!

Just learning a foreign language would hardly be gripping enough for a major motion picture, unless of course I arbitrarily impose a deadline – probably of a year. That will undoubtedly give rise to all sorts of dramatic ebbs and flows which will allow compression into a gripping 90 or so minutes.

What I like about the Michel Thomas method is that he asks – nay, demands – that you don't try to learn or memorise anything. I can assure the late Mr Thomas that I will abide scrupulously by that injunction!

He sounds like a fairly interesting character and comes across as very funny on the CDs (he is extremely intolerant of the two students he uses as a teaching aid) ... I will elaborate on my (entirely fictional) relationship with him as we progress.

In the interests of full disclosure: I did three years of German at school, and I watch a lot of programmes on the History Channel, which seem to feature rather a lot of certain aspects of 20th century German history. I am also good at making German-sounding noises.

So I start from a reasonably strong position. In the wise words of Jimmy Nesbitt in an old Yellow Pages ad about yoga: "I see myself as more of an intermediate".

I'll fill you in with all sorts of detail about why I'm doing this and the hilarious and moving experiences I go through in the course of this over the coming weeks. You'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll give me a load of money and learn more about the medieval High German consonant shift than you ever thought possible.

Bis Morgen!