Shaving Trends

I've just stumbled upon an hilarious, rather ballsy (forgive me!) website, advertising a product designed to capitalise on one of the more bizarre recent fashion trends to sweep America (or so I'm told). Be sure to play around a bit, and especially to try the 'test drive', which is particularly funny. Am I the only one who finds this whole idea hard to take seriously enough to even consider spending money on it?

Happiness Myths

An interesting, if disappointingly peremptory article here on why most of us suck at predicting what will make us happy. Of particular note to me and my Buddhist housemates is the conclusion that the 'myth of fingerprints' (I always wondered what that Paul Simon song was about!) seems to be one of the biggest problems with our predictive powers. Maybe you blog readers would consider posting a comment telling Laura and I what makes you happy, especially if they are things you think we might not have tried. Not that we're not happy people of course, it's just that there is always more to learn (and that fact makes me very happy).

Back Again

Most of you know I've spent the last 18 months battling an as yet unidentified and unexplained back problem. Whilst there is a glimmer of hope on the horizon (I have recently found somewhere willing to give me a proper x-ray) I learned two bits of unfortunate news today.

First I visited my GP to refill my prescription of Diazepam, a small dose of which is handy if I have a particularly bad day or night, or need to travel or attend a conference. Dr. Pickering is strange about doing this, he always makes the same joke - "I guess we can safely say you're not addicted to it then". It's one of those remarks that's supposed to be rhetorical, but it always feels like I'm supposed to respond in some way. But how exactly does one respond? Does he really expect me to say 'No, I'm not a drug addict', or maybe I should say 'Just give me the goddam drugs old man!' (obviously not, but it would be fun to watch his face). Anyway, my other reason to visit was to ask him about Repetitive Strain Injury (RSI). As a knock-on effect to my dodgy back, I've been experiencing pain in my arms and shoulders, which is clearly related to my computer habits (it gets worse when I type and better when I don't). He groaned when I asked him what he knew. It turns out he's the 'Occupational Health' doctor for the university. 'Oh good', I foolishly thought, 'he'll know all about it'. He said he would arrange to get me into the Occupational Health centre, which is technically only open to staff, to get some 'bumph'. When he said this - he didn't ask me any questions about my problem, what I was feeling, what I knew about it, what I was doing about it - my heart sank. Was this going to be useful? Or was it just going to be a load of stuff I already know? I should have been more assertive then and there of course, but I didn't want to seem rude, since he was doing me a favour of sorts.

Well, I wasn't surprised to find that the material I got was an extremely poor, misleading or just plain misguided version of all the things I've already read and known about for over a year now. Get up and stretch, position your monitor thus, blah de bloody blah. Heard it, done it chapter and verse, and got the pain anyway!

So far, I've found my doctor to be a nice chap, genuinely concerned about my problem and eager to help, even though he regularly reminds me that his own knowledge about back pain is almost non-existent. (This in itself is sort of astounding, given that every statistic I've ever seen puts the number of people experiencing back pain in their lifetime at between 6 and 8 out of 10... isn't that something GPs should know a bit about?). But this time I felt a bit disappointed in him for underestimating me in such an unflattering way. I mean, he knows he's sitting opposite a PhD student who spends most if not all of his time researching. It's what I'm good at, it's probably my primary way of entering and exploring the world. Does he really think I would come in asking about RSI knowing nothing? I've read extensively on the subject, and as it turns out, it looks like I know more than he does - and he's the bleeding occupational health doctor for the university!

This is a mistake a lot of people seem to make about academics. I know there are lots of us who actually do live in ivory towers where all we think, talk and read about is our subject, be it Iranian pottery or the mating habits of octopi. But there are also quite a lot of us who actually live in the world and put our skills to practical use on a daily basis. The academics I know are generally very astute consumers for example, because they like to learn all about a type of product, read reviews, know how it works, etc. before they buy it.

Anyway, ranting aside, on occasions when I despair of the National Health Service I console myself with the admittedly dim possibility that with a US citizen for a partner, it may be that if things get really bad I can go and try my luck with the US health care system. But reading this article today I realised I was being silly - no company is going to insure me for a problem like this, not when I've had it for years without anyone having the foggiest clue how to diagnose, never mind treat it. And by the sound of it this is an increasingly common problem in the US.

So maybe I should be looking to get a job in France or something, since they are supposed to have a healthcare system that works (although it sounds like it's one of the last things that does!). I could take up deconstruction, coffee and smoking. I think I'd prefer a hacking cough and regular headaches to this constant, unfathomable back ache.

Reading Genesis

Thanks due to the Guardian's excellent weekly 'wrap roundup', for my discovery of a highly entertaining blog about the Torah on Slate. It is a relief and a pleasure to discover that even those with faith in God find the Old Testament stories - as I do - to be at best morally ambiguous, and at worst to make some of Hollywood's most gratuitous recent excesses seem positively tame (though perhaps Sin City, which I saw for the first time today, might give Genesis a run for its money; it's not for the faint hearted). Here's an excerpt (I had exactly these kinds of thoughts when I attempted the bible properly for the first time a few years ago). The full blog is here.

Chapter 19

This chapter makes the Jerry Springer Show look like Winnie the Pooh. The Sodom business is worse than I ever imagined. Two male angels visit Lot's house in Sodom. A crowd of men (Sodomites!) gathers outside the house and demands that the two angels be sent out, so the mob can rape them. Lot, whose hospitality is greater than his common sense, offers his virgin daughters to the mob instead. Before any rapes can happen, the mob is blinded by a mysterious flash of light. The angels lead Lot, his wife, and daughters out of the city, and God destroys Sodom and Gomorrah with brimstone. Lot's wife looks back and is turned into a pillar of salt. (God may have listened to Abraham's rebuke, but He surely didn't heed it. What of all the innocent children murdered in Sodom and Gomorrah? What of Lot's innocent wife?)

But the chapter's not over. After the attempted mass gay rape, the father pimping, the urban devastation, uxorious saline murder, it looks like Lot and his daughters are finally safe. They're living alone in a cave in the mountains. But then the two daughters—think of them as Judea's Hilton sisters—complain that cave life is no fun because there aren't enough men around. So, one night they get Lot falling-down drunk and have sex with him. Chapter 19 poses what I would call the Sunday School Problem—as in, how do you teach this in Sunday school? What exactly is the moral lesson here?

Skype Us!

Since Laura is now on the move and on her way over to the UK, this might be a good time to alert those who don't know about it to the wonder of Skype. It's a simple piece of software that allows you to call someone over the internet free of charge. You can find it at www.skype.com. As it says on the site, all you need is a broadband connection, headphones for your computer and a microphone - if your comuter doesn't have one built in. You can buy a perfectly respectable microphone for a PC for less than £5. I won't post our usernames for fear of strange people getting hold of them and using them for nefarious purposes. We'll happily email them to you if you fancy keeping in touch this way.

Religion & Science

Two brief things:

First, I've put up some more Spring photos on my Flickr page, so if you haven't looked for a while, follow the new link on the sidebar to 'My Flickr Page'.

Second, I spent a good bit of today listening to a recording of one of the debates from Professor Dan Dennett's recent UK tour, which was designed to promote his new(ish) book 'Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Global Phenomenon'. The book has caused a bit of a storm of controversy in the US apparently, although listening to this lecture from the more secular UK, it's a bit hard to see why.

Dennett - who for those who haven't heard of him from Laura - is a Professor at Tufts. He has a reputation for being rather intolerant of those who do not share his faith in scientific method or his view that it is of primary importance in philosophy. In other words, I'm not sure he and I would agree on very much, philosophically speaking. Still, despite this reputation, his contribution to this debate comes across as pretty gentle. He describes it as a 'sketch of a sketch' of what a naturalistic theory of the evolution of religion might look like. He's not claiming to have falsified religion, or indeed to have proved anything. Instead, he's just trying to provoke a bit of healthy debate on a subject about which a lot of people are still absurdly, disappointingly dogmatic.

The best thing about this lecture though is probably Alister McGrath. He's a Christian Scientist, which is the kind of title that would normally send me running for the hills. But he gives Dennett more than a run for his money. The nicest thing about him - and I guess about Dennett's performance here too - is that he is gracious and open-minded. He is genuinely interested in exploring the issues, and not in scoring points with the audience or with 'winning' the debate. Both speakers make some insightful points, and points that I think anyone can appreciate, whether they have any philosophical background and interests or not.

I think the recording, which you can find here, is around an hour long, so I recommend listening to it in bits as I did, but it is well worth listening to, as it encourages us all to reconsider our prejudices on these emotive issues.

[Thanks to Jess for pointing out my original mistake. I confused Alister McGrath (Oxford) with Alasdair MacIntyre (Notre Dame). This was a misunderstanding on my part, a result of a conversation I had with Laura about Notre Dame. Apologies for the confusion.]

The Walmart Effect

For those of you who live outside of the UK, it may surprise you to know that the UK is still in the early stages of the anonymising, globalising strip-mall effect that long ago decimated many of the USA's local businesses (especially independent food retailers) at the expense of the global supermarket chains. Walmart for example, only made it's first appearance here within the last decade (buying up Britain's 'Asda' chain of stores). Nevertheless, as a recent article in the Guardian makes obvious, their mission is to conquer the rest of the world in much the same fashion as they have in the States. (More on this in a moment).

This will have a particularly devastating effect on the character of British towns and cities, because many of them - at least those older than a hundred years or so - were originally built around their local markets. Where such markets still exist, they constitute a rare source of income for local people - and that means farmers and food producers, not just vendors. If the markets go then so does that source of revenue and incentive for local food production, as well as one of the last vestiges of actual community that many British cities have left. (If any of you are wondering why local food production is so important, then just think about how much climate-altering pollution it takes to fly a plane-load of fruit from New Zealand to your fruit basket). The British folks amongst you will all probably have noticed that British city centres all look much the same these days, since they all have the same dozen high street chains, which carefully design all of their stores to look, sound and smell exactly identical. Local markets are probably the only things left in our towns and cities that remain distinctive.

For a vivid demonstration of how this sort of trend strips a town of its character, we can already look to the Newtowns - pre-planned towns based on a US-style zoning model, with a large shopping mall at its centre. I grew up in such a Newtown, a place called Livingston. In Livingston there are no longer - I'm not sure there ever were - any choices other than the big chains, such as Asda, Tesco, and Morrisons. Of these there is only the slightest evidence that any of them give a shit about local business. I was happy to discover recently that my own local supermarket Waitrose has started stocking locally produced foods (I immediately went in and bought a basket full, hoping to encourage them in this unusually ethical and positive project). Perhaps they actually read the slip I put in their 'Suggestion Box' (thought I doubt it, it probably just looked like a good marketing ploy).

Of course, some among you might be wondering what all the fuss is about, why it's such a bad thing if food is cheaper and staff are nice to you for a change. Here are just a few thoughts about what's wrong with Walmart and the power it wields over government and its employees (and I'm certain it's just the tip of the iceberg). It's taken from aforementioned Guardian piece, which is about a forthcoming documentary by director Robert Greenwald. The full article is here.

Robert Greenwald's [documentary]... builds a picture of the devastating impact Wal-Mart culture has had on the landscape of small-town America, and is having on the wider world. Greenwald... shows how the homey store created by Sam Walton in the Fifties, now the world's wealthiest corporation with a revenue of nearly $300 billion, blights almost every aspect of American life.

It is hard to say which part of the film is most shocking. There are the interviews with the owners of father and son stores in middle America who watch their life's work destroyed overnight by the arrival of a Supercenter. There is the footage from squalid Chinese sweatshops, where workers live in slave conditions to fuel the aggressive discounting that Wal-Mart (slogan 'Every Day Low Prices') prides itself in; there are the testimonies of former store managers forced to cut overheads every month by understaffing and underpaying and denying health cover to 'associates' (which is what they call the workforce); there are the antiunion Swat teams that fly in on private jets from headquarters in Arkansas to target and harass any individuals who make a motion to join a union; and there is the unbelievable litany of murders and rapes and muggings that have occurred in Wal-Mart car parks because the company refuses to shell out on security.

[...]

At Becton the Asda 'colleagues' (as they are known in Britain) seem happy enough to help, but it is hard not to notice the difference between someone who has been incentivised into 'welcoming you' and someone who does so because they want to... I wander the aisles for a while, beset by a familiar kind of superstore despond, take notes of prices which compare unfavourably with those at the market, and hope in vain to see a couple of colleagues chatting to each other, which is considered 'time theft' by Wal-Mart HQ.

There is something in all vast supermarkets' relentless demonstration of choice that seems to suggest the opposite. Asda colleagues may have pockets of pride and so on but, in among the deals of the week, I find it's hard to get a few headlines out of my head. The one about the store being fined nearly a million pounds in the North East because it attempted to bribe employees to leave their union. The one about the store in Leicestershire where, in a panic about illegal immigrants, any colleague with an 'odd-sounding name', even those who had worked nearly 20 years at Asda, was told over the store tannoy to report to the manager's office with their papers. I collected a basket of shopping, but didn't fancy the queue, so I headed back to Queen's Market.

[...]

[Says a market stall vendor] "What people don't realise is that the women who come here shop to cook. Ninety per cent of them don't work, but they do know how to cook. They will buy 10 kilos of onions, 10 kilos of potatoes, just for the week. They don't want any convenience food. We are told repeatedly that is what the government wants: home cooks.

[...]

Neil Stockwell sees the same indications that it is the beginning of the end for him. 'We've been told we have to close now at six o'clock for example,' he says. 'We used to go on, on a summer evening, as long as we wanted. Me and my grandad used to drive out of here at midnight. Lovely summer's evening we'd be selling grapes, oranges, lemons. For some reason Asda will be allowed to stay open all night. Explain that to me?'

[...]

1,306 the number of convenience stores currently owned by the Big Four (Sainsbury's, Asda, Tesco, Morrisons).
54 the number of convenience stores owned by the Big Four in 2000.

22% the percentage by which independent stores in the UK declined between 2001 and 2005.
40% the percentage of Britain's small independent grocery stores predicted to be lost by 2015.

£850,000 the amount Asda were fined by a British court this February for offering illegal inducement to try and get workers to leave their unions.
1.6 million the number of women who have sued Wal-Mart in a US court for gender discrimination, the largest class action suit in history.

Since I hate to finish a post with only depressing news, I wanted to say a big 'Well done!' to The Gap, who are at least making an effort to stop their clothes being made by starving children in sweat shops.

It's funny because it's true...

...and yet so many people still don't realise it! Go Mac!

Colbert on Bush

I'm posting this primarily because I think it won't get as much coverage as it deserves. There is a transcript (or if you prefer and have decent broadband a streaming video) of satirist Stephen Colbert's frankly extraordinary speech at the White House Correspondent's dinner last weekend available here. Whilst I think the full routine - especially the sketch at the end - is way over the top (not unusual for Colbert, if you've seen his show), you have to admire the breathtaking audacity it takes to get up in front of your country's most important politicians and journalists and say something like this. I can't imagine who booked Colbert for this event, but I'm fairly sure their career is now in tatters.

I don't take the same satisfaction from Colbert's stinging remarks as the Democrat bloggers seem to, since I think it's a sign of just how depressing America has become (politically) in the last few years. Still, at least someone is making the most of the 1st amendment, and how!