May you rot in hell

*chases away crickets* can't see the keyboard, you damned pests

Ahem.

It's uncharitable of me to say this, but I hope somebody died. It's the only thing that would make the accident that held us in traffic through Chiswick for 2 hours and caused us to miss our flight worthwhile.

(4^th April edit)
I'd love to say that the last 2 weeks has given me some perspective on this, but I'm afraid the rotting in hell persists. We left our end of London just after 3pm and were assured by our cabbie that it would take no more than 2 hours to cut through London to get to Heathrow well before the 6.15 cut-off for check-in. Well, we were making excellent time when we reached Embankment just after 4, only to see a seemingly endless queue of cars heading into Chelsea before us. Some panicked phone calls later, and a 500m advancement in distance, and we knew that there was no way we'd make the airport in time. We finally eased our way clear of the congestion just after 6.30, and arrived at the airport around 7.20pm. I'm pretty sure we saw our plane fly over us as we approached too.

We'd been assured by the check-in staff when we called that they would make a plan of some sort on our arrival. The reality was somewhat different. A rather dismissive staff member tried to fob us off with the central office number (which would be available from 9am the next day) and even when we pointed out the compassionate nature of our trip, made noises of condolence but was grudging in her quick scan for availability on the other airlines. In the end, we had to make our way back home again, resulting in a £1250 7½ hour round trip to Heathrow.

Friday morning was a frenzy of phone calls. First call was to our travel agents, DialaFlight, to ask them to organise a replacement flight with Kenya Airlines. We then established with the insurance company that, on presentation of the police reference number for the traffic accident and a written statement from the driver, we would have a fairly straightforward claim for the lost air fare. When DialaFlight hadn't called us back, we got in touch with Kenya Air ourselves, and were told that they were fully booked until the end of April, so they couldn't simply put us on a replacement flight. We could go on standby until a seat became available, but they had no way of knowing how long this might be. They were adamant that a cross-airline arrangement was impossible.

Later still, having had no reply from DialaFlight, we called back, and were told that our agent had been waiting for a call from Kenya Air, never mind we'd expressed the urgency and cause of our situation. Knowing that we could get a refund on the KA tickets, we decided to book new seats on another flight. I left the agent with our details, as he seemed incapable of finding something immediately, and called FlightCentre, who have been reliable in the past. They managed to book us on a BA flight for that evening within 10 minutes, but for £900 each instead of the £600 we'd spent on Kenya Air. Nonetheless, we had to get to SA, so we knew we'd need to swallow the cost and move on.

This is the bit that galls me. I called DialaFlight one last time to see if they'd had any better fortune. The agent assured me the only seats he could get for us started at £1500. When I told him that we'd already booked seats for less than that through another agent, he 'checked again' and astoundingly found the same availability. When he offered me the amazing discount of £1 off our previously quoted price, I was outraged. Knowing our situation, he'd blatantly tried to sell us the most expensive tickets he could find, trying to capitalise on our urgency and distress. The fucking shit-eating bastard. I frostily told him that his attitude was appalling and that I had no intention of using his agency when he had clearly lied about availability to glean a higher commission, and hung up.

That gave us just over 2 hours to make our check-in, and we had to find a fax machine before then to send off a signed credit card authorisation to the FlightCentre agent - who was amazing at every step, by the way. We tubed our way, fully laden, to Barking and thence to Heathrow, arriving right on the 3-hour-prior mark and checking-in without fault.

And the drinking began. And didn't stop until today.

___ No-one here but us crickets ___

If I should die in the air over Nairobi

I should be ecstatic. Today is the first day of the longest holidayperiod-of-leave-from-work that I have had since my wedding. Four years ago. We're flying to a distant land, to bask in Autumnal warmth and parental indulgence. And yet.

There are glaring signs of our inability to come to terms with this trip. Packing has been postponed to the last minute. I literally have yet to do so, and prefer to blog about it, or even clean the house, than take that final irrevocable step. We've paid very little attention to any advance purchasing, and dread informs our every comment to friends and colleagues. Even the house-sitter was only elected last night (by Zara decree. Poor Dean).

Worse still is that we know why we feel this way. Although South Africa fills most people with thoughts of exotic wildlife and magnificent landscapes, it holds nothing but distaste for us. In addition, one of the parentals is ill. Still. The very reason for the trip, in truth. Although it will no doubt be wonderful to see them both, it's also going to be tough dealing with it.

There are a few redeeming elements, though. The parentals are wonderful people, the weather will be a welcome change of sky colour, some very important people are back in the country and may even be visited, and I will be incommunicado from work for the entire period.

So we'll go and give it the old boy scout try, shall we?

Obviously, I will be absent from my adoring communities in the interim. I ask that you keep the keening to a low whine; I will return with 2 weeks of holiday news and may even find time (and, more pertinently, facilities) to touch base before my return.

Link-y goodness

There's probably a metaphor for human existence hidden here somewhere, but it's just as enjoyable without.

Gasp! That's no moon...

How to destroy the Earth

Read it now before They declare it a terrorist manual ;)

*tip of the hat to A - you know who you are*

Support World Cinema

The HMV stores are currently having their annual SWC drive. They've marked down a selection of their world cinema stock to ridiculous prices. I just picked up City of God for £7.99! I could easily have spent my disposable income this month. In fact, come to think of it, I have. The promotion runs for another 6 weeks; go take a look if you like a wander off the Hollywood boulevard.

Broken Saints

Oh. Wow. I dimly remember tripping across this hybrid graphic novel flash animation a while back, and being spectacularly unimpressed. Either I've changed significantly since then, or they pulled both knee-length socks up but, either way, I saw that the final chapter had been posted, so I decided to re-visit it and view it in completion. Probably the best decision I've made today.
Don't believe me, though. Take a look at Broken Saints and decide for yourself. Failing that, ask me for the DVD when it arrives. Because I'm only 5 episodes in, and I know I want to own the whole shebang.

So this is 4am

There's a certain still beauty to the night.

Well, there is now that the pneumatic jackhammers and screaming angle-grinders have been shut down. I'm told it's a small price to pay for living so conveniently close to a London Underground station. If it were 9pm on a Friday after a week of uninterrupted nights of sleep, and I was discussing the issue over a large glass of fragrant merlot in a friendly bar with a group of friends, I might concede the point. Right now, with less than two hours before my radio alarm will hurl me blinking into Friday, it's difficult to be reasonable.

I've sent an email to the LU requesting further information - what was the work for? how many nights will it continue? - using their helpful(?) submission form, only to discover that they "have received my submission and a member of the customer services team will respond within 3 days". Hardly helpful if I'm hoping to avoid the same disruption tonight. No surprise that there is no direct contact information for customer services, neither telephone number nor email address, so I have no (sanctioned) way to accelerate their response. Then again, I'm likely to wake up with the kind of cranky belligerence that will make the usual trial of forging through their defences to get an immediate response enjoyable.

Right, now, however, it's 4am and the night sleeps around me, except for yours truly and the pair of foxes playing in our front garden, and soon they will have the night to themselves.

Househunt humour

Old link, new audience. Shouts to the Scrivener for dredging it from the archives of Little Red Boat.
It's evident that there is at least one letting agent in London who either has sense of humour and an indulgent boss, or is unemployed. Springfields have vacancy lists here and here which seem to have been penned by an imaginative pre-pubescent. And thank the angels of office humour for that! Fifteen minutes of giggling later, and I have the entire staff of our office gathered around me measuring me up for the jacket with lots of buckles and funny backwards sleeves. I might get the afternoon off yet.
Some choice out-takes, if dredging through the actual ads lacks appeal:

• This is a place to conquer the world from; or not, the choice is yours
• provides plenty of room for inventive dance moves
• There are two porters both called Jim who are very nice & helpful
• price includes heating & hot water so you can have as many baths as you wish

I couldn't resist sending them my compliments on their chutzpah, and I was surprised to get a response in similar vein:

Thanks, we are glad you like them. A case of boredom & mild insanity made us start having a laugh with the adverts. We wondered if anybody would notice, they did and they seem to like them. It amuses me & doesn't seem to harm the business (it may actually have increased it slightly). Thanks & tell your friends if they want a flat......

Regards
John
Springfields

What a nice man.

Disclaimer: I honestly get no commission for any letting that occurs as a result of this entry. It's here purely for the amusement and edification of my admittedly very small group of readers.

Finds thinking cap, puts it on

Having had a friend cite Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs while analysing her situation, I took a quick gander at the fellow's (summarised) thoughts, and had the following response (which really needs to be fleshed out when I find 2 spare seconds and the will to rub them together):

The greatest problem I have with Maslow's theory, as it's outlined in your linked text, is that it provides no access to the higher levels of need while a lower need remains unsatisfied. This creates glaring dissimilarities between the tenets of the theory and real life.

For example, if a young child is being raised in a 'normal', loving environment, it could be said to have all conceivable physiological, safety, love and esteem needs met, but it seems unlikely that a toddler would be capable of self-realisation. I can see how removing access to some lower needs could topple the higher levels; it seems self-evident that a child denied food would feel unsafe. But would a child denied a fixed place of abode (like some military kids), since safety is a lower need than love, feel unloved as a consequence? Not necessarily, in my opinion. Children are at a pretty fluid place in their views on the world.

So what if we regard Maslow's Hierarchy to apply to adults only? Well, even that raises some immediate questions. I have seen instances (in my experience and the media) of groups of people living together and deriving esteem satisfaction from their peer group while they go short on food and live in a condemned building. Is their sense of esteem an illusion because their lower needs aren't being met? Does a parent stop loving their child when they get evicted? These are scenarios which, albeit contrived, seem to fly directly in the face of Maslow's theory.

Moreover, all of this presupposes that self-actualization is the highest need that must be fulfilled in a human's life. So what of the person who, having met all other needs, achieves complete self-realisation, only to have one of the lower needs re-appear? Do they lose all sense of self as a consequence? Does a hungry Amnesty worker stop caring about the situation in Palestine every time her stomach rumbles? I'm guessing not. Sure, when you feel unwell, that feeling takes precedence in your general conscious awareness, but do you stop caring about Amnesty when that happens? To reign the scenario in a little, when your esteem needs are being met by a group of friends, but your physiological needs are going unfulfilled, do you feel less accepted by your group? See what I'm saying? It just doesn't hold together very well.
So I'm not immensely keen on this theory in the first place. I think it provides too little scope for the parallelism of human life. It's certainly a start, in that it treats people like thinking beings rather than flesh machines, but it's still way too simple. It reminds me of an old aphorism; "If you hear a simple explanation for a complex situation, it's probably wrong."

Although I intensely distrust the stupid pyramid arrangement of the Hierarchy (who ever heard of a pyramid scheme you can trust?), I like Maslow's categorisation of needs, although I would be disinclined to distinguish between love and esteem. What I'd like to see is these needs arranged as a web, with self-realisation in the middle and the physiological, social (which would incorporate love and esteem as Maslow ranks them) and environmental (or safety) types arranged around it and linked to it and each other, a little like this, maybe:
A deficiency in fulfilment of one of these needs would put stress on the web in the direction of the need, pulling resources away from the other categories and placing stress and doubt on self-realisation. In a web, each of these categories can be sub-divided into its essential components, each with its own junction on the web, exerting greater or lesser influence on your central sense of identity (which is what, in essence, self-realisation is; a stable sense of exactly who you are).

What you'd get is a theory that predicts that, for example, an increase in the level of litter in your neighbourhood would place stress on your safety needs ("Ugh. How can I live in a place like this") and result in a diminished interest in other needs until the problem has been fixed, and a corresponding re-evaluation of self-realisation ("How can I care about the environment when my own district is such a mess?") rather than a complete personality meltdown ("My district is a mess. No time to worry about global warming").

With this arrangement, some of your questions suddenly became easier to consider. When your health is poor (physiological stress), you have less energy to deal with your immediate environment and your social group, and the lack of feedback makes you question an element of your identity (Am I loved? Do I really love x?). If a close relationship fulfils your social, physiological and environmental social needs, it can still put stress on your other physiological and environmental needs, but because your self-realisation grows to incorporate this relationship (2 people living as 1 and all that), the stresses eventually damp out and your centre-point becomes stronger.

If you weight each of the needs, the revised theory becomes even more useful. As greater needs put stress on the centre (the self), it would 'stretch out' to encompass needs or powerful need-satisfiers and provide an increasingly more stable centre to the web. Children, whose centre's begin very small, and whose needs are large and varied, experience large swings in personality as their self is largely undefined. People who suffer from aberrant brain chemistry or abusive upbringing would have similar difficulty in establishing an equilibrium, at least until the stress from the unusual need is incorporated in their self, which could explain some forms of sociopathy.

And so on. I'd love to know what people think about all that.

Oh, the irony

Customer: Worcester sauce crisps please
Shopkeeper: Sorry can't, it's off the shelves, cancer scare.
Customer: Oh right, Chinese Chicken Wings?
Shopkeeper: Ah that's the same , Cancer scare
Customer: Hamburger Relish?
Shopkeeper: Cancer scare
Customer: Sausage and Mash?
Shopkeeper: Cancer scare
Customer: Cottage Pie?
Shopkeeper: Yes, ...no wait, Cancer scare.
Customer: So they're all off the shelves because of a Cancer scare?
Shopkeeper: Yes
Customer: *sigh* Just give me a packet of fags then.
Shopkeeper: Certainly. £4.50 please

Idle thoughts

To be expanded on in due course...

• What would you get if Edward Scissorhands was introduced to Marge Simpson's hair?
  
• What is the present tense of "wrought"?
  
• Another South African city gets a name change. Pretoria, we shall remember thee.
  
• Man confesses to crime on national television, is subsequently arrested. There but for the grace of anonymous...
  
• Jim Carrey kills 120,000 Asians in Bruce Almighty and spends the rest of the movie dealing with his guilt over getting his slimy colleague fired from the anchor team. What the fuck?
  
• Sorry, Daniel Day-Lewis. You made Gangs of New York a fascinating movie to watch. My humblest apologies.
  

New webcomic

I've added Blue Crash Kit to my Comics menu. It's a fun take on furry superheroes who just happen to be living in a MFF triad. Sexy happy silly goodness all round. Go take a look.

Under construction

Please bear with me as I work through some of the options available in Blogger. If you see something appear that you really like, let me know. If you notice something vanish that you prefer to the current layout, yell!
Most recent change: replaced the long lists of links with 2 categories of drop-down menu. It's definitely more efficient, but I think it loses something; it's a little colourless, soulless. But I do like the way it puts everything in reach at the top of the page. No endless scrolling to find a link.
Update: I'm pretty sure I'll be going back to the link lists rather than the drop-downs. I can't put hints in for prospective travellers, and I can't pop the links into new windows. And it just looks yech!

Fascinating facts

(not a meme. promise.)
As brought to you by the CIA World Factbook:

• the US as the only world superpower - is that right?
  
• only 2 countries are doubly landlocked (Liechtenstein and Uzbekistan). Hell, I didn't even know what that meant until now, never mind that there are real-world examples of the type!
  
• arable land: 10.73% - since total land area is only 29.2% of the Earth's surface, this means we are only using 3.1% of the Earth's surface to feed (at last estimate) 6.38 billion people. Yikes!
  
• total population literacy(age 15 and over can read and write): 77% - I'm impressed. Seriously. I'd have expected a much lower figure
  
• Economy overview - Now this is fascinating reading. The USA government's own intelligence agency believes that "central government is losing decision-making powers to international bodies". I wonder if the chap who wrote that is still 'serving his nation'.
  
• World imports and exports figures - Proof! Proof, I tells ya! They've been trying to cover up the existence of Roswell and extra-terrestrial life for decades, and here the evidence sits in plain sight. To whom does the world export, I ask? From whom do we import as a planet? Hm?
  

Content promise

This blog will be free from memes, quizzes and other such impersonalities. I'll reserve this space for pure head content.
WARNING: The silly stuff will still trickle through on Tripping, so don't stress if you're scanning both and notice disparity.

Boerewors!

As I was walking down Queensway, en route to lunch, I caught a whiff of a delicious smell, which rapidly became a full frontal olfactory assault as I continued on my way. I could swear someone was cooking boerewors in quantities large enough to displace the ubiquitous stench of taxi fumes and roast Peking duck with waves of heavenly sausage scent. Try as I could, I simply couldn't find the source, and has to settle for a sandwich instead, but I must have made quite a sight for the few minutes I simply stood there and tried to take bites out of the air itself.
For anyone not in the know, boerewors is a South African specialty which bears the same relationship to the humble sausage that Häagen-Dazs has to ice-cream. If it's been prepared over an open fire, and dressed liberally with fried onions, and presented on a fresh white roll, it'll take the cake and beat it to death too.

Désespérance de vivre

It's been a pretty dire week thus far. I can't go into too much detail on a public forum, but the fact that having my mobile phone stolen from my desk at work is the least horrible thing I've had to deal with since Monday should give you a fair idea of the extent of my abyss.
For once, I've found myself analysing my response to these consecutive blows with something approaching interest. Navel-gazing, I think it's called. I don't do it very often but then I don't often have reason to; my life generally runs on a pretty even keel.
I don't think I learned much from it though. I don't deal well with despair; known. I have trouble accepting solace; known. I become a prickly hedgehog of irritability; known.
*sigh* Bring on the weekend.