I was recently given an excellent book by Ben Goldacre called “Bad Science” (by cheese, who is consistently awesome and sometimes gives me things just because I might like them). I am only about 100 pages through it so far, and I already wish to give the man some sort of award for universal competence. Perhaps my opinion will change when I reach the end of the book, but he has already touched on several of my favourite things to despise and mock, so even if the remainder of the book is a let-down I suspect my overall impression will still be favourable.

“Bad Science” does not seek to champion reforms in scientific methods so much as attempt to give the layperson an understanding of what makes a method or a study scientifically good or bad (good or bad meaning reliable and relevant results versus meaningless noise). People accept a shocking amount of tripe purely on the basis of  “a study” without understanding anything about that study or how it was conducted. A close friend of mine pursuing a career in medical lab science is constantly ranting about the complete ludicrousness of journalistic spins on studies, complete lack of background, and an immediate adherence to the most dramatic possible interpretation of results.

I have ranted before on this blog about the astonishing willingness of individuals to accept blatantly ridiculous facts as gospel (“we eat spiders in our sleep” being my favourite example). Sometimes I think we accept these things because they are so damn stupid, not in spite of it. The logic runs something like: “Science proves amazing and unbelievable things all the time, like that the earth revolves around the sun or we are all made of tiny atoms or that energy is equal to mass times the speed of light squared. Therefore, amazing and unbelievable facts which I hear must have been scientifically proven by someone, or no-one would ever believe them. Yey, spiders!”. Yeah. Right.

What Bad Science attempts to disclose is not what to think, but how to think. How to logically evaluate the conclusions that have been drawn from a given set of facts, and to reach not only your own independent conclusion, but an understanding of why another conclusion might be lacking or indeed superior. While I am all for expressing my opinion and hammering it home with a blunt instrument if necessary, this book definitely goes one better.

One of the most worrying trends in the modern world is the easy acceptance of unsubstantiated conclusions as scientific facts because of buzzwords on a par with the flux capacitor, and the assumption that all studies are done with the same level of professionalism and rational thought.  So please,  don’t be one of the people who think somebody once conducted a scientific study on nocturnal spider consumption. Display some motherfucking ability to reason. Read this book if you are not sure how.

I used to have a rule about never owning anything I couldn’t carry. Ostensibly this was to do with my immense portability, love of freedom, ability to pick up and move on short notice as the whim takes me, etc. In reality it was a little more to do with the fact that not only do I want to be able to do these things, I want to be able to do them by myself. However moving to NY necessitated the purchase of furniture, which I justify by assuming if I really needed to I could just take it apart and lift it myself, because you know, flatpacks can be carried. Hah.

Which goes part of the way to explaining why I ended up stuck at the bottom of the approximately 7 steps up to my apartment, completely incapable of transporting the large flat-packed bookcase I had in my possession as far as the apartment door. You could get the rest of the way toward said explanation by taking into account the fact that I have quite probably never in my life looked at anything that fits indoors and thought “nah, I can’t lift that”.

Now, I know I am not Batman, but I have always been able to figure out a way of moving heavy things. Whether by shuffling them along the ground, dragging them,  rolling them, lifting them a few inches at a time, or whatever else presents itself as a potential solution. I have flown with 3 suitcases and a bag despite having only 2 hands, I have re-arranged large items of furniture like beds and wardrobes many times. So I assumed, despite barely being able to maneuver this thing onto the trolley at IKEA, that I would figure it out somehow.

Em, no.

First off, the damn thing was 7’ long and fucking heavy. I tried lifting and dragging, no dice. So I managed to get it upright, and then laid it horizontally on the stairs, where the top came about one and a half  steps short of the highest point. So with a mighty effort and looking ridiculous, I crouched down and pushed from the bottom and it gradually crawled upwards. Theoretically, this would have been a perfectly rational if rather foolish looking method of getting it up the stairs. Except that just as I thought I had it, everything stuck. There was a lip on the top of the stairs over which it would not go. Letting go to run up and pull it that fateful inch over was unthinkable because it would slide back down, pushing it from below was impossible. I collapsed in a mildly amused but desperately frustrated heap, and wondered what the fuck I was going to do if I could not get the damn thing out of the hall.

I would like at this point to say that desperation is the mother of invention, and that I devised an ingenious and McGuyver-worthy way of getting the damn thing into my flat. But that would be a giant lie, because what actually happened was that I realized my neighbor was at home, and feeling rather silly I enlisted his assistance in the moving of said heavy thing.

I may have set back the feminist movement by 20 years.

Someone described me like that today and I found it physically impossible to go a whole day without repeating it somehow, because its brilliant.

The theme of today’s post is essentially “bugger this for a game of soldiers”. Today I found out how long a green card takes to get. No wait, sorry, I should clarify that. Today I found how long a green card takes to get if you are not married to an american, related to an american or winning the green card lottery. In other words today I found out how long it takes to get permission to work long-term in america based solely on what you would actually be working at in america. Just so you know, it takes considerably longer this way than any of the above, which appears to me to fly in the face of all logic and good sense.

I asked for this from my employer about 8 months ago. I wanted them to start the green card process, because I wanted to have some sort of fallback should the arse fall out of the job market again and I find myself not only without employment but without a right to reside at my address anymore. It is one thing to abruptly lose your job and another to abruptly lose residence of a country 3000 miles from your native one. It would be not only disgustingly inconvenient but frightfully expensive to rectify. So the request seemed like a sensible one.

At the time the process was described to me it seemed a tad lengthy but potentially very worthwhile. 6 months of PERM (aka: the can-we-replace-you-with-a-citizen test), a year of waiting for PERM certification, another year to process the application for a green card along with an adjustment of status in order to extend my visa. So at best, this process takes 2-3 years. What escaped me at the time is that this is merely the timescale involved in _applying_. The backlog of people waiting for the aforementioned verdant immigration card is a minimum of FIVE FUCKING YEARS. So that means, as of right now, it will take a good 7 years for me to actually get one of these. If during that time I am let go or change jobs, the whole process crashes and burns and has to start all over again.

My current state of mind can be summarised in 3 words. Fuck. That . Shit.

I have a few personal rules about New Years Eve. Some of them are obvious, and based on logistics, like “never go somewhere you can’t get back from on foot unless you are in a country with real public transport”, “never go to a niteclub”, “make sure you have bought enough to drink and give away” and so on and so forth. I find it requires more careful planning than your average night out, mostly due to the fact that everyone is an exuberantly drunk moron. Not that this is necessarily a problem until one throws up on your shoes.

But my most rigidly adhered to rule in recent years is to never make a New Year’s resolution. Firstly, it’s a completely arbitrary day, and so I refuse to conform to such a ludicrous convention, mostly out of sheer contrariness. Secondly, any resolution not important enough to be made as soon as you thought of it is clearly not going to be adhered to and is a damn waste of time and effort by definition.

So I hereby declare some January 19^th resolutions which I have just thought of and decided were important. Ahem.

• I will save some fucking money. I have a habit of spending everything I earn in a great big happy flow of joy and whatever-I-feel-like-ness. This is not a long term plan.
• I will fly less than I did last year. This would be really easy for most people. But I think even I can keep it under  50,000 miles in 12 months

Not exactly lofty aspirations, and admittedly rather vague, but the more specific versions that contain actual numbers are in my head. Of course these are just the new ones, there are perpetually ongoing resolutions like “try to drink a little less”, “go to the gym more” and the ever popular “stop being so chubby”. But essentially, these are the plan.

I will be interested to see how this progresses. Oh, and happy fucking new year everyone. Ain’t life just grand?

Or at least this seems to be the Polynesian view on language. My hotel was called the Waikiki Kaiulani (pronounced as spelled in case you wondered) for fuck sake.

I’m not really partial to sun holidays. I have only been on the classic package holiday once at the age of 16, and that was with my family and therefore by definition of limited adventurousness. Since then I have always taken an approach to holidays that crams in the most places I have never been, things I have never done or seen, or friends I enjoy hanging out with as possible, ideally a combination of all of the above. However I realized that this time around, I was quite likely to need a bit of a post-excitement break, and as it turns out that was a pretty good call.

I spent all of my London time trying to meet everyone I know, all of my HK time trying to simultaneously do cool stuff and refrain from losing in my lunch in one of two unpleasant ways, and all of my Japan time trying to do cool stuff while somehow figuring out how to read signs entirely written in Hiragana. Basically what I am trying to say here is that I was pretty damn busy. So when the last leg of the holiday arrived I was eminently relieved and delighted that I had chosen to spend it in Hawaii.

You go through several phases when you get to Hawaii. The first goes something like – “whoa, this is stunning, I want to live a beautiful carefree life of freedom and sunshine here and leave the rest of the world behind forever”. Phase 2 consists of the dreamy daze in which you plan your future life of surfing and hiking and a crappy job you don’t have to care about because all you need is food and a place to sleep.  Phase 2 lasts until about a day before you leave, at which point you move to Phase 3, which goes a little like “if this were possible, everyone would do it. Actually I don’t really like being poor. There are no real jobs here, everyone is a damn scuba instructor or a hotel receptionist, and even if I could work remotely this bloody place is in the most inconvenient time zone imaginable. Damn”. This is followed closely (in my case) by the logic that I shall simple have to become rich enough to go to places like Hawaii frequently. It can probably safely be said that everything I want in life boils down to “I’ll be needing some more money for that”. On the plus side, at least my goals are straightforward.

On the whole, I loved the place. It is completely, stunningly, unswervingly beautiful. Ok, the scenery is perforated by the occasional large mall or highway, but fewer than you might expect. Honolulu is fairly populated, but the only other Island I was on (The Big Island – what a great name) has a few small towns and a whole lot of empty space. Though this may be something to do with the active volcano. Which brings me to another salient point – it has fucking volcanoes. Volcanoes! Nothing more need be said on the matter.

So I have covered the scenery, which is most definitely worth looking at for hours on end. The weather is perfect, and varies very little from season to season. The food is your standard American tourist fare, tastes good, doesn’t cost much, and comes piled so high it might fall off the plate if you look at it too hard. You have some obvious additions like fresh seafood, and the local beer is also pretty decent.

The entertainment varies from snorkeling, to parasailing, to watching the smoke pour from a live volcano to firing automatic weapons, and those are just the healthy activities. Personally I spent a lot of my time just enjoying being somewhere beautiful where I could swim and lie in the sun (by which I mean lying in the shade but being warm anyway – my skin is so pale it practically glows in the dark). I did manage to fit some activity into my relaxation though, parasailing, snorkeling and volcano-gazing being the highlights. I would go back in a second for an indefinite period if I had the chance, which hopefully I will again some time. This place goes firmly on the list titled “reasons to live in the US”

Hawaii appears to have changed my thinking forever about holidays that involve a beach, and I am grateful to it for opening my mind. And for having really nice trees.

I think I can safely say without fear of contradiction (because this is my blog and I can fiendishly delete comments that contradict me) that the irish government largely consists of corrupt, incompetent assholes. Now one could make an argument that this is to some extent true for all governments, and one would not be incredibly unreasonable to do so. However for some reason I have never quite figured out the consequences of corruption and incompetence seem to be practically non-existent in Ireland.They involve a few newspaper articles, maybe a slap on the wrist and some public censure, or perhaps in a severe case the odd custard pie. They rarely if ever appear to involve seizure of assets, jail time, or facing the motherfucking consequences of your actions.

The current hot topic in irish politics is the Lisbon treaty, an EU treaty basically designed to streamline the European parliamentary structure. Ireland has already rejected this treaty once, as far as I can tell just out of general assholery and slight panic. Basically, it appears the irish government was hoping to get away with quietly pushing this through and obtaining a yes vote without people really noticing. So there wasn’t really a whole lot of information going around aside from “Vote YES” in big red letters. Naturally the paranoid elements of the populace were perturbed, questions were asked, it turned out that several top tier irish politicians had not even managed to get through the summary document, and the majority of people voted against the treaty out of general frustration and confusion. Naturally our government then wrote to the EU saying “eh, sorry about that, how embarrassing, let’s take another shot at it” and we are now having the same referendum again, in a beautiful tribute to democracy. Yes we know you have a vote, but you voted wrong, try again.

The Lisbon treaty is a long. complicated boring legal document outlining the re-arranging of the EU in order to try to be a bit less monstrously complicated, and to streamline things like the voting process. I do not at this point claim to understand everything in it, but the part that people seem to be objecting to in our tiny island nation is the bit that says EU law takes primacy over the laws of an individual country. Of fucking course it does, you arseholes. It has since we joined the damn thing in the 80s, we bought into this idea quite some time ago, what the hell are you pissing around now for?

We appear to be terrified at the prospect that our constitution could be overruled by the EU. Well kids, I have to confess, what I really don’t get is why the hell we are so protective of our damn constitution. What is so amazingly great about how ireland works? Even if this treaty did make it possible for the EU to overrule more of irish law (which it doesn’t), we are talking about a constitution that contains the line “The State recognises the special position of the Holy Catholic Apostolic and Roman Church as the guardian of the Faith professed by the great majority of the citizens.”, as well as another of my favourites “In particular, the State recognises that by her life within the home, woman gives to the State a support without which the common good cannot be achieved”. Don’t even get me started on the fucking preamble.

What exactly are we protecting here? Our outmoded links with religion? Our sexism? Our neutrality? We are neutral until America decides they need somewhere to re-fuel, then we are a fucking military air-base. What the hell are we afraid of? The primacy of European law is not news, and the specific concerns of the irish people, retarded and irrelevant as they were, have been consummately addressed not only within the treaty we helped to fucking write but in the form of further legal declarations on top of said treaty that were basically just put there to say “No really, we mean it, ireland can deal with abortion itself. It’s like, in the treaty already. Did you not read it?”.

The EU is an essentially good thing, that enables us to better organise everything, fight climate change, and ensure that essential human rights are equally enforced across a multitude of countries. Enlightened self-interest seems to be the most positive force available these days, so now that we have the self-interest part down pat perhaps we can try for some enlightenment, and realise that the EU is actually in our best interests, and that pointless nationalism is inherently fucking stupid. And while I’m at it, why is neutrality so goddamn important? because as far as I can see our reasoning goes along the lines of “we are a tiny island nation subject to easy potential annihilation” which would be rendered less potent as an argument by say, joining a large association of 27 countries.

I don’t give a flying fuck about neutrality,  and I’d vote to legalize abortion, and so I am desperately disappointed because these issue are both nothing whatsoever to do with the Lisbon treaty. The blatant scaremongering by the Vote No lobby is a disgusting travesty rivaled only by the utter bullcrap of the Vote Yes lobby.

The treaty has already been summarised extremely well by people who are not me, so instead of regurgitating I shall point you in the direction of this excellently written and particularly amusing and informative guide by Jason O’Mahony. Complete with Eval Kanieval references. I urge you in the spirit of democracy to consider your decision carefully and make up your own mind, in full posession of the pertinent facts. However, should this be too much effort or otherwise an unattainable achievement, there is one simple step you can take to resolve the whole issue:

Just fucking well vote yes.

This evening a man claiming the rather dubious moniker of “Neon Sandwich” stopped me on the street in soho in order to take a photograph of my shoes. Now, my shoes are pretty amazing, but such an event is nonetheless, fairly rare. In fact I think I might go far as to call it entirely unique.

He claimed to be doing a photographic study of topography, though exactly what relevance this had to my shoes is as yet unclear. He did however offer a chinese palm reading for my trouble, which I declined on the grounds that it sounded like utter wank.

I am generally a tad skeptical about things I believe to be the art world’s equivalent of chronic masturbation, but I always enjoy a bizarre diversion in an otherwise statistically unremarkable evening.

You gotta love New York, if only for the weird-ass shit.

“Everybody has their own path”

“And some of them are wrong. I want to be right”

“Wouldn’t you rather be happy?”

“But how could anyone be happy without being right?”

“You might not know you were wrong”

“So I could be happy, and be wrong, but happy because I didn’t know I was wrong?”

“Exactly”

“Then I’d rather be right.”

“You don’t mean that”

“Yes I do. You are just not capable of believing I mean it”

In my last post, I mentioned I had about a dozen things to wrap up. Oh, how I mock myself for this ludicrously optimistic statement. I have what seems like several thousand things to “wrap up”, all in a rather short space of time. In retrospect, it appears I have the organisational skills of a rather stupid fish. Despite having known about this move for several months, I seem to have left most of the actual arranging of things to the last available 3 days, thus making my life a logistical nightmare of spectacular proportion.

People keep asking me if I am excited. Interestingly, the answer is no. 3 months ago when the move was approved, I was excited. I suspect when I touch down in Newark (only airport in the world that is an anagram of “wanker”, as someone pointed out to me) I will be excited. But right now it has not sunk in and doesn’t feel real. What does feel real is the burgeoning pressure of meeting everyone I want to see before leaving, and the increasing urgency of terminating all contracts and ensuring that I have transportation for all my belongings.

I am not excited, nor am I worried. This is by far the easiest move psychologically which I have made since moving down the road to live in a student estate for the summer of 2001. I already know where I will stay for a whole month, I have already been to the city and done a lot of walking, not to mention getting the hang of public transportation. I already know how to get to my flat, my office, and how to actually do my work. In my head, this is by far less daunting than moving to London, aside from the fact that it is rather far away

What I am is merely incredibly, stressfully, busy.

1. I am moving to New York in approximately 6 weeks

Yes, I have decided to leave my beloved London for pastures fresh, or in this particular case, pastures fairly smelly and a tad on the filthy side, but still pretty interesting. This move doesn’t mean I like London any less, I don’t. I love it here. But I am a firm believer in learning from experience, and I don’t intend to limit that experience to just one big city. So I’m off. If I’m not back in 2 years, avenge my death. But eh, email me and check if I’ve just moved to Asia first.

2. There is a reason I took the blog down in the first place

Recently this blog was gone, for about 6 months or so. The reason for this is that through an odd set of coincidences, people I work with became aware of its existence and location. Yeah, I know, I don’t care what people think, why does it matter, I am a great bit pus-filled hypocrite. Right.

Obviously, if I don’t use profanity in a professional email I am censoring myself. If I wear a suit to a meeting instead of jeans I am being fake. I work for a global company, owned by a big company, owned by a huge company, clearly I have sold out.

Of course I have bloody well sold out, that’s what having a job means. I sell my time and my abilities for a portion of my life and in return I get paid. I just don’t happen to feel bitter about it. During the time that I am doing that job, I do not behave in the same fashion as I do at home. In the same respect that I do not put my feet on people’s desks, eat sandwiches in a meeting, play guitar hero, or randomly lie down on couches, I also do not generally discuss my personal opinions or feelings in a professional capacity. Nor do I particularly want those to come up, because I don’t necessarily want to intertwine them with my job.

I get paid to do a job in a professional fashion, and I believe that one should give value for money or get a different job. Since I don’t currently want a different job, I choose to segregate my ranting from my working. I feel no obligation to excuse myself for the things I write here, but I also have no desire to be in a professional situation in which principle will require me to state this. I sell my attitude and my behaviour in the exact same way as I sell my time. My moral decisions are not for sale, matters of personal taste however are another matter.

Everyone sells themselves. The key is to sell yourself for lots and lots of money.