A Thought Experiment for Dog Owners

In 2014, the human race will be enslaved by aliens. They start landing on earth in January; by February, it’s clear that they’re not interested in talking to us but want the planet for their own.

By the end of June, what’s left of mankind is totally subjugated and is living effectively as domestic animals in the homes of our ten-foot tall insect overlords.

Suppose then, that you are one of these survivors and that you are being taken out for a walk by your “owner”. Coming down the street towards you is another gigantic bipedal crustacean accompanied by a man on lead.

What is your natural inclination at this point? You want to greet, speak with, possibly even sniff the anus of your species-mate – right? You’re a prisoner of a being you don’t understand and you see a fellow human. Of course you’re interested.

But when you try to sidle over to communicate, you are yanked back immediately and hustled on down the street by the firm grip of three chitinous space-tentacles.

Dog owners (you see now where the anus-sniffing reference came from? Well, actually I suppose the title gave it away somewhat...). Dog owners: your dog is interested in other dogs. Just deal with it. 

They're not interested in other dogs because they perceive their lives as some kind of post-apocalyptic servitude (although some might –who knows what they think?). No – because they are dogs and the most interesting thing to a dog, is another dog.

It never ceases to amaze me how many dog owners – at the sight of another dog – dash to render their own dog as immobile as possible or to drag it along as though there was no other dog there at all.

What are you afraid of? A bit of jumping around? A bit of ass-sniffing? That they might be conspiring to overthrow us?

The number of people who live near me who (i) own a dog and must therefore be credited with some degree of insight into dog psychology and (ii) who nevertheless view the presence of ANY OTHER DOG as presenting a threat level equivalent to a gang of drug-crazed African child soldiers is truly astonishing.

Dogs are not people. They interact differently from people. Sometimes that involves growling, play-fighting and other forms of behaviour – including bum smelling - we would rightly be unpleasantly surprised at were they to occur between two humans meeting for the first time.

Dog owners: let your dog be a dog this new year. Remember, the boot might be on the other foot one day.

The True Meaning of Christmas

I’ve been helping my eldest with his homework: a project on Christmas around the world.

Now, there are no doubt people out there – not ODHSNM readers, of course – who would find this outrageous.

Not me helping my son with his homework. The “around the world” bit. The true meaning of Christmas, they declare, can’t be reduced to some multicultural, relativistic blah blah blah...  - a line of argument which you know full well will inevitably end in someone blurting out the word “Immigrants!”

The true meaning of Christmas, they will say, is...erm...

Well, dear readers, let me put this to you. Christmas is just a celebration of good stuff at a crappy time of year. It has had all sorts of stuff superimposed on it over the centuries, but at the end of the day that’s what it started out as and that’s what it still is.

Don’t give me all that “it’s the birth of Jesus” malarkey. Christ is a late addition to Christmas.

He’s been stuck on top of at least two sets of pre-Christian traditions.

Pagan dessert

Firstly, the Northern European pagan Yule celebrations around the winter solstice. That’s where you get your holly and ivy, your Druidic mistletoe, your Christmas trees, your Yule log (chocolate or otherwise) and all those other Germano-Celto-Scandinavian accessories.

Not one of those things – except perhaps a log – would have been found in the Iron Age Middle East, so have clearly come from somewhere other than the Jesus story.

The second source is Greco-Roman paganism, specifically the festival of Saturnalia.

Saturnalia (Kronoia for the Greeks among us) was a month long celebration of the good old days before that bastard Zeus cursed mankind with the need to work for a living. It involved:

• Gift giving
• Eating and drinking to excess
• A general end-of-term, office party kind of vibe all round, when slaves were afforded freedoms usually denied them and the bosses made fools of themselves

Sounds Christmassy, doesn’t it?

There are loads of other hypotheses kicking about saying that the Christian myth is based on other bits of

Not real

ancient lore, but why get into all that? It’s like arguing about whether Tolkien’s orcs were green or grey. Even if there’s a right answer, it doesn’t matter what it is because it’s ALL MADE UP.

The point is – and I’ll go out on a limb here – it is completely impossible to extract a “true” Christian core or indeed a “true” pagan core. It’s a big syncretic mess of bits and bobs appropriated from here, there and everywhere.

Look at Santa Claus. Where does he fit in? Don’t try to tell me that he’s “really” Saint Nicholas, the fourth century Turkish bishop and early Christian martyr. What the hell would he be doing with reindeer and elves? He’s as obviously mashed up as Baron Samedi.

Balls

Why do you think the Puritans banned Christmas in 1647 as “a popish festival with no biblical justification”? Precisely because they could see how pagan it all was. At least Oliver Cromwell had the balls to recognise it for what it was instead of whinging about the corruption of the “real” meaning on Radio Four.

You can’t select certain bits and say that’s the “real” Christmas and the rest of it isn’t – the Christian bits, the non-Christian bits, whatever. Every step along the way contributed to getting us where we are today. Who can say where taking any of them out would have taken us? There is no distinction between the signal and the noise.

The materialistic aspects of Christmas are just as ancient as the spiritual aspects.

And if we accept that consumerism is our current religion (or substitute for it), then a 50 year tradition of buy-buy-buy from Black Thursday to the January Sales is getting on for half the age of all “ye olde traditions” the Victorians bequeathed us.

It’s as silly to worship a tree or indeed money as it is to worship a big old beardy sky-fairy.  If you pick away rationally at every part of the Christmas myth, eventually you’re left with nothing but a bloody long winter ahead of us.

Maybe we don’t need to have a justification for having a party. The weather’s shit, it’s dark all the time – don’t we have a right to cheer ourselves up?

Perhaps THAT, ladies and gentlemen, is the true meaning of Christmas. 

Apocalyptic Visions

My kids love going to the fairground. I do not share this love with them.

A trip to the fair inevitability concludes in:

1) A large wad of cash wasted – one leaves either with nothing at all to show or with something that is actually worse than nothing, such as a dart gun or a squeaky inflatable dolphin.

2) A screaming tantrum from one or both of the boys, who do not realise that there are precisely zero ways for them to have fun at a fair when the cash reserves have been exhausted.

For them to have fun, I say.  There is one thing I take pleasure in at funfairs – and best of all, it’s free.

I am, of course, talking about admiring the astonishing artwork on display.

Now, I like charmingly amateurish unlicensed renderings of popular cartoon characters as much as the next man. But what I really like are epic-scale depictions of beautiful people having KERRRAY-ZEE PARTY TIME!

In hyperreal colours!

Via airbrush!

This, for example, appears to be Amanda Palmer, with the words “Energy Dome” exploding out of her ears. Perhaps this fairground owner is a massive Dresden Dolls fan.

Actually, that’s quite a good one.

What I really like are the ones that defy the laws of perspective; which look like superficially skilful renderings of the human form (or of Porsches), but which have disturbing, subliminal inaccuracies which leave the viewer uneasy for reasons they cannot describe.

You can’t tell me that is not a disturbing image.

If Hieronymous Bosch was alive today, I think this is what his last judgments and visions of hell would look like. 

Reading Homer

Homer, not Uncle Albert

In my last post, I referred to “the child of morning, rosy-fingered dawn”. Some of you may be surprised to hear that I didn’t make that phrase up.

It is, in fact, an epithet used repeatedly by the Greek poet Homer in The Iliad and The Odyssey.

Pretty much every time he mentions the dawn - which is a lot – it’s waggling its rosy fingers.

Anyway, these books are kind of a big deal. They are, I hear, a central part of the Western literary canon.

And as we all know, the Iliad tells the story of the Trojan war and the Odyssey tells the story of Ulysses’ (the translations I read were all Romanised) return from Troy.

Or do they?

In fact, the Iliad tells a very small part of the Trojan war. It doesn’t include:

Just good ol' war buddies

1. The beginning
2. The end
3. The bit everyone knows with the Trojan Horse

Essentially, it tells the story of Achilles acting like a dick because Agamemnon acted like a dick, until his boyfriend Patroclus gets killed and then Achilles kills everyone.

Not included, again, is the bit about Achilles getting killed by tearing a ligament or whatever.

In fact, what we primarily have is to pad out the above is:

• Exhaustive descriptions of various Greeks’ and Trojans’ ancestry;
• Followed more or less immediately by exhaustive descriptions of how those sorry descendents died horribly.

If I learned one thing from the Iliad, it is that there are far more ways to fuck someone up badly with a spear than I had ever imagined.

For example:

The spear struck Archelochus, son of Antenor, for heaven counselled his destruction; it struck him where the head springs from the neck at the top joint of the spine, and severed both the tendons at the back of the head. His head, mouth, and nostrils reached the ground long before his legs and knees could do so.

Thereon Polypoetes, mighty son of Pirithous, hit Damasus with a spear upon his cheek-pieced helmet. The helmet did not protect him, for the point of the spear went through it, and broke the bone, so that the brain inside was scattered about, and he died fighting.

Menelaus hit Pisander as he was coming towards him, on the forehead, just at the rise of his nose; the bones cracked and his two gore-bedrabbled eyes fell by his feet in the dust.

And so on.

So that’s the Iliad. Think you know the Odyssey?

Think again. Far from focusing on the well-known, exciting parts of Ulysses’ voyages (eg encounters with the Cyclops, sailing between Scylla and Charybdis, lashing himself to the mast to listen to the Sirens), these are all dealt with in one flashback.

About 70% of the Odyssey is taken up with the frankly rather weird situation going on with his wife Penelope and 115 “suitors” who have been having a three-year long bender round at Ulysses’ in his absence.

So an awful lot of the Odyssey concerns not, in fact, what you and I might call “an odyssey” – but rather:

1. Ulysses pretending to be an aged tramp and talking to a pig herder
2. Ulysses pretending to be an aged tramp hanging around the party, getting abused (someone throws a hoof at him!)
3. Ulysses continuing to pretend to be an aged tramp long after anyone normal would have said “I’m not really an aged tramp – I am, in fact, the king and I am not happy with all this”

Eventually, of course, the “aged tramp” routine wears as thin for Ulysses as it did for everyone else several books earlier and – as is the way of Greek epic poetry – it all ends happily ever after with a massive bloodbath.

On balance, I preferred the Iliad. 

Waking up early

One of my kids is an early riser. And that means we are all early risers now.

Young Tancred (3) never knowingly misses welcoming in the child of morning, rosy-fingered dawn, with a hearty slam of his bedroom door.

And that’s just a metaphor, because at this time of year “dawn” in the sense of “sunrise” comes approximately half an hour after I leave the house to go to work.

People of England: one compelling reason to hope for, pray for  – hell, even campaign for – Scottish independence is that the only people who actually want the clocks to go back in October would no longer be our fellow citizens.

The 200 or so sheep farmers (and ten to fifteen remaining milkmen) for whose benefit the remaining 60 million of us spend the best part of six months only seeing natural daylight at weekends would be someone else’s problem.

Anyway, back to our youngest.

Usually and non-metaphorically, he’s welcoming that obscure 5.30am to 5.45am slot, during which he:

1. Wakes up;
2. Has a big shit and then;
3. Decides it’s time everyone else – principally (although not exclusively) his elder brother, Roger Jr – was awake too.

Even if I sleep through or pretend to sleep through the initial barrage, I can rest assured that I will soon be woken by one grassing the other up for something or other, or someone needing their arse wiping. My favourite way to start the day. 

Roger Jr and Tancred are very different characters. While Roger Jr is eager to please and (as a corollary) fairly obedient, Tancred is a thoroughgoing anti-authoritarian anarchist. He obeys no law but himself. Nietzsche would be proud of him. Nietzsche, frankly, is welcome to him.

Every night, we pack him off to bed with a reminder that he’s to stay in his room until his clock tells him it’s morning, that he’s not to wake Roger Jr up, that he’s to stay quiet etc. And he goes along with it.

But come the morning, he does whatever he damn well feels like. Which 9 times out of 10 is to disregard the instructions he was given the evening before and go to play “jumping off the bed” or “hammering the floor with a shoe” or whatever else it is he and his brother get up to most mornings.

To be quite honest, this is starting to wear a little thin. Reasoning with a three-year old is difficult at the best of times. Reasoning with a three-year old sociopath is something else.

Your suggestions, dear readers, would be welcome.

Right now, all I can think of is to wait until he’s a teenager. And then wake HIM up EVERY MORNING.

FOR EVER. 

Russell Brand has my vote

You may have noticed Russell Brand being in the news a bit this week: not for his shagging or drug exploits or even for offending the delicate, but for saying that he doesn’t vote.

That derives from this, an article he wrote for the New Statesman – which he was guest editing this week.

Quite what it means to get a celebrity to “guest edit” a magazine, I don’t really know. How many crap contributions were spiked by Russell Brand? Did he give the advertising department a hard time for a lack of renewals? I suppose we’ll never know.

Anyway, over the course of 4,500 words, Russell Brand (celebrities are always to be referred to by their full names – that’s in the ODHSNM style guide. The editor would have a fit if I didn’t follow it) says this:

I don’t vote because to me it seems like a tacit act of compliance; I know, I know my grandparents fought in two world wars (and one World Cup) so that I’d have the right to vote. Well, they were conned. As far as I’m concerned there is nothing to vote for. I feel it is a far more potent political act to completely renounce the current paradigm than to participate in even the most trivial and tokenistic manner, by obediently X-ing a little box.

He also says:

Apathy is a rational reaction to a system that no longer represents, hears or addresses the vast majority of people. A system that is apathetic, in fact, to the needs of the people it was designed to serve.

This has caused an eruption of ruffled pomposity from the political and media establishment this week – whose response to Russell Brand’s unauthorised trespass into their exclusive domain has been akin to the expression on the face of a wood pigeon that has just fallen out of a tree.

It is best summed up by the tired spectacle of that sneering symbol of everything that is loathsome and exclusive about the establishment, Jeremy Paxman, calling him a “trivial man” on Newsnight – followed by columnist after columnist commenting on this and then on each other’s comments, like a dog eating its own shit, sicking it up, and then eating it again.  

The argument appears to be that Russell Brand is not entitled to express an opinion on politics because he chooses not to vote, despite having a reasoned explanation as to why this is. Maybe Russell Brand's explanation can shed some light on why millions of other people don't vote - or is that an impossibility because he's a Hollywood celebrity? I'd suggest that he has more in common with those non-voters than anyone playing the Westminster game. 

Russell Brand is a witty man who expresses himself well, while also annoying people and being a monstrous show-off. Who else was like that? Socrates was a lot like that. You could argue that Jesus was a lot like that.

CLEARLY I AM NOT COMPARING RUSSELL BRAND TO JESUS OR SOCRATES. Come on, this isn’t the Daily Telegraph comments section.

You don’t have to agree with his point of view (Russell Brand even points out later in the article – YES, I DID read it all – that he acknowledges that apathy also comes from laziness and the inability to care about distant things) but he deserves a hearing. That’s what’s different between today and back then. 

Equally ridiculous looking

Russell Brand may not be the best person to explode the political/media/business cabal, but so what if what he says resonates with people? Paxman trivialises himself once again by playing the man not the ball. His persona and schtick is just as absurd as Russell Brand's. 

Plus, this is not a new point of view. Here’s HG Wells, 100 years ago talking about Parliament.

So far representative government has not had even the beginnings of a fair trial. So far we have not had representative government, but only a devastating caricature. 

Politicians are: 

Not really the elected representatives of the people; they are the products of a ridiculous method of election; they are the illegitimate children of the party system and the ballot-box 

Criticising the electoral system, HG Wells (the celebrity, not the conference centre) says 

The system lies, in fact, wholly open to the control of political organisations, calls out, indeed, for the control of political organisations, and has in every country produced what is so evidently demanded. The political organisations to-day rule us unchallenged. Save as they speak for us, the people are dumb. 

Echoing Russell Brand, HG Wells goes on: 

Elections of the prevalent pattern, which were intended and are still supposed by simple-minded people to give every voter participation in government, do as a matter of fact effect nothing of the sort. They give him an exasperating fragment of choice between the agents of two party organisations, over neither of which he has any intelligible control. 

Last quote, I promise: 

Our governments in the more civilised parts of the world to-day are only in theory and sentiment democratic. In reality they are democracies so eviscerated by the disease of bad electoral methods that they are mere cloaks for the parasitic oligarchies that have grown up within their form and substance. 

Perhaps HG Wells was a “trivial man” too. He did, after all, write science fiction novels, thought bicycles were the future of warfare and was a prominent “useful idiot” for Lenin.  

Oops - now we can't take him seriously on anything

Perhaps I am a trivial man too. Almost certainly I am. 

And I'd much rather be one than the sort of creature a Paxman takes seriously. 

My point is simply that there has been a tradition of dissatisfaction with the (still) prevailing political orthodoxy that goes is more than a hundred years old. That critique is not new, nor is it something that establishment has a right to reject out of hand because a “celebrity” is putting it forward. 

You shouldn’t have to be nothing but “serious” to be taken seriously. Politics is not the sole domain of people who have never thought about or done anything other than politics. 

The meaning of “democracy” is not exhausted by the Westminster farce and the media wankers who tell you what you can think about it. Russell Brand has reached his own conclusions – so can you. It's as much ours as it is theirs. 

Top Five Pointless Conventions

Lots of things we take for granted in everyday life do not serve any reasonable purpose. Today, ODHSNM considers some of the most egregious.

Encore

So you’re watching a band. They’ve been on for a while and they haven’t played their most popular songs.

What’s this? They’re walking off the stage? But...but...NO! You must return! We, the audience, demand it!

What is the point of an encore? Everyone knows you’re going to do it. Band - you are not spontaneously responding to the audience. You’ve got a LIGHT SHOW sorted out for this bit, FFS.

Audience – you could all sit there in total silence and they’d still come back out and play the same three songs they intended to play all along. They're not going to waste that light show. 

Perhaps once an encore was a spontaneous response to audience demand. Now – like most of the grammar of pop music - it’s a ridiculous bit of play-acting nobody can remember why they do. Just don’t bother. 

Outside Broadcast

Suppose there has been some big news event, with a political element to it. Cue TV reports beginning:

“I am standing here outside Number 10 Downing Street...”

WHY? That is the last place on earth where anything relating to this news event is likely to happen. Nor are we convinced by the presence of a TV crew there that you are somehow at the heart of what is going on. You read a press release (or whatever) and drove the crew over there, the same as everyone else!

Why is it considered necessary to put a man in a coat in front of a well-known monument or some building that has a bearing on the story in question? Do you think we can’t grasp the idea of “politics” without a picture of the Houses of Parliament?

The 9 to 5

OK, not everybody works those particular hours, but the vast majority of us do. This is incredibly inefficient and detrimental to our collective well-being.

Rush hour, peak time fares, lunchtime queues, “all our operators are busy at the moment” – these are all side-effects of the idea that we all trying to do the same things at the same times.

Couldn’t we all stagger our working hours to avoid getting in each other’s way?

Yours sincerely

 Perhaps this valediction is in irreversible decline with letter-writing heading for extinction, but I for one will not miss it.

Firstly, at 37 years of age, I still struggle to spell it. Secondly, the whole sincerely/faithfully thing is a tiresome pinhead for pedantic angels to dance on.

But thirdly and most important, what the hell does it mean? In what sense am I claiming to be “yours”?

“I remain, Sir, your obedient servant”...? Is that what it’s derived from? If so, that’s not really how I want to sign off a letter. Because I don’t.

Parliament

Ha ha! A pun on the word “convention”.

But seriously, in what way is (i) the ability to get selected by a party machine as a candidate and (ii) the ability to make lawyerly speeches in the big green debating club in any sense correlated with (iii) having ideas about social and economic organisation that are likely to do any good and (iv) being competent to implement them?

It may have been suitable for a 19^th century Britain run by gentlemen for gentlemen, but it looks pretty preposterous today. 

PLEASE BE ADVISED - The convention that the photo and the text should be in some way related has been bypassed - this is a picture of a pelican put through Glitche.