Wednesday 29th of July '09

there's always this point where I get bored with the internet: world's largest library.
Much like television before it, it has itself to thank for my thanklessness. Chipping away at my attention span as I try and take in as much as humanely possible in order to keep one step ahead of the many friends I've amassed over the years and never hear from except in the form of a fast-forward meant to tickle the funny bone: 'ah, seen it already.. thanks (:delete).' It reminds me of playground conversations about last night's tv. There was always one trying to one-up the other because he got to stay up later than anyone else because his single-parent was an alcoholic yet you feel envious because you got stuck with two parents who only knew the good cop /bad cop-routine and set boundaries. It took me years before I caught a glimpse of Jay Leno. Now he's gone.. But where before you could be cool simply by having been privvy to information no one else has because you had cable whereas they only had whatever the number of channels was taxes pay for.. or atleast having an opinion at the ready. Now the question is not so much Have you seen? as What do you want to see? Google and ye shall find.

I've been drilling it into Andrea whenever she wishes she knew something because her teachers have omitted to teach her you can find anything you want online. She wants to become better at making patterns for clothes: there's a torrent for an e-book. She wants to see the latest fashion but can't afford the magazines: I type in 'fashion' in iTunes and all the major stores and designers turn up with their own podcast for her to download for free. Its amazing what the breaking down of regions for DVDs and tv show rights-per-country means for education. I can't afford to go back to university but I can find anything I want to learn for free online. It makes me wonder about the maintaining of standards in education that we're already having so much trouble with in the UK. There, employers have been complaining to the government about the lack of basic arithmetics and spelling skills, never mind attitudes, of young employees. If our entertainment becomes a when and where ever you want how long before our education also becomes a whatever you want. I get bored downloading on youtube if a video doesn't grab me in the first how-ever-many seconds and go to the next topic that strikes my fancy. Following a few atheists on Twitter has lead me to see videos and read articles on sites where what I thought was a basic understanding of how things work is so lacking that it makes me worry what the future might hold. After all it is not the first time an invention liberated education and led to the demise of mental prowess at the same time.

When the printing press was invented it wasn't long before people started churning out books like nobodies business. This sharing of information led to a standardisation in everything that could be measured; weights, distance, to language: spelling. Before this invention there were only illiterate people now we have dyslexia. Small price to pay perhaps for a limited number of children failing primary school but another side effect from writing everything down is the belief memory is fallible. Before, when someone showed you how to do something you didn't write it down you remembered it. If you went to court to prove or disprove something that affected your legal status and dealt with a fact from many years ago, the village elder's memory was not doubted when questioned. Nowadays we live in a time where if the tree in the forest fell when someone was around: if it hasn't been written down such things happen who will believe him? Memory, and therefore experience, lost its value. When you can look things up why bother remembering it yourself? When everything has been written down and turned into a how-to video on youtube why bother learning how to write ? My handwriting may be terrible and I can only type using two fingers, one on each hand, but what a waste to live in a world where no one bothers. A world where no one makes it to the end of this blog because its too long by my own admission if it were a monologue dubbed over a video showing stupid people doing stupid things. Perhaps worshipping at the feet of priests who claim that everything in a book must be real because we've come to believe long after it was written that everything written holds more sway than whatever anyone may say. In an internet age where anything goes is googled, the question what is true once more becomes open to interpretation. Everything is true if you can find a user group that welcomes you and I'm affraid many of us can't be bothered because of boredom when we again must rise to the task of defining right from wrong, what is fact and what is fiction. I'm inclined to but armed only with Facebook and an iPod: one which defines copyright as anything you post belonging to it and the other a device which pretends to be portable television, a modern version of the book, but unlike the medium for literature is subject to the whims of its parent company when anyone tries to post anything as an app for the world to download through its store. A company named after the fruit from the Tree of Good and Evil nonetheless but that's taking it too far. Though I do wonder who could've been on facebook at the time of the Garden of Eden: "Yeeey look at me I got one friend and I'm in a relationship with her.. and its complicated" only to be kicked out and blog about all the tribes you meet when you're supposed to be the first two, 4 counting the kids. Oh.. 3. Might want to tweet that.

el Plan B

an early rise

random thoughts:

Jumbosquid attacksdivers +old video

Orcas moving into the med in larger numbers. +orca whale culture video

I am the Walrus in my head because of Dan Hsu's tweet he's playing

Beatles rockband. trailer

A went to bed at 6.. its 9:30

"leave the pornsite open I'm downloading a soap."

I've been teaching her the ways of the internet.

All the highlighted words are links to bits and pieces of digital flotsam to inform or entertain and make this blog interactive in a multi-media so last century kind of way. BLOG! sounds like vomit doesn't it ? If you're a mac addict.. hold command while clicking it to open the link in a new tab. I'm not adept in the ways of HTML just yet and am using code so you don't have to read an URL every other sentence. I hate it when you have to reload the page you were reading because you (accidentally) clicked on a Link.

I've become quite adapt at asking for work in Spanish. Its quite easy, actually: "necesitan personal ?" if they have an ad in the window and "Estoy buscando trabajo" if they don't. That's it. They'll mutter something about curriculum and you hand them your cv and try and have a conversation as you might they'll make it clear they're not interested by not looking at you and saying the manager will call you and acting surprised you are still there straight after saying so or point at the lack of customers in their establishment and hold their hands up. If you get the manager straight away they'll tell you it needs to processed by the head-office, even if its clearly not a chain. Every now and again you'll bump into a friendly bartender who has succeeded but if they haven't been there for over a year they're usually of the following variety: barely 18, blonde, female, and there only for the few months in summer allowing them to bypass stringent laws on hiring and firing staff while I had every intention of staying. Had because instead of pulling my hair out waiting for something to turn up last minute I've chosen to return before my funds run completely dry and there's two of us in need of a financial rescue plan. Best return and appreciate any sofa available while I work my way back up again, capable of supporting the two of us as I go along. There's still plenty that can go wrong with my original plan B. The economy can take a further nose-dive and actually become as bad as they've hyped it to be.

I met some of Andrea's Catalan flatmate's friends the other weekend: they are moving back in with their parents. Can't afford the rent anymore. Chatting with my own Valencian flatmate about maybe finding some work in a factory folding boxes: all his mates just outside Barcelona have been laid off. You read the news: British expats areleaving Spain en masse, the local governments are paying Latinos to go back home to make their unemployment rates look good. I don't use hype lightly.

I went to see Transformers 2and thought it was great! But online my fellow nerds all thought it was shit. When you go and see a movie about toy robots that had a cartoon 20 years ago and the first one didn't live up to your childhood dreams don't complain to me about the lack of character development when I'm not interested in Shakespeare. But guess what: the amount it did in its opening weekend is an apt metaphor for what happened in el Crisis. Once upon a time there was a toy that needed to be sold. So they made a cartoon about the toy and sold the cartoon to tv networks all over the world. What a clever way to by pass laws on advertising designed to protect children from large corporation. Without taking into account inflation some of these toys would still be considered expensive today: a person living off minimum wage would have to forego 2 days wages, 3 if you count the one day they used to pay for the GoBotsknock off their kid cried about (that's like receiving a Zune for christmas). Then they re-packaged the cartoon into a Marvel comic. We all hit upon Nirvana. He shot himself. We grew up. Got a job. They waited for nostalgia to kick in. They re-packaged the toys once more and sold the movie rights to the guy who gave you Indiana Jones4 (hint) who talked to the guy who brought you Pearl Harbor (HINT). A $112 million in its opening weekend. They'll be back in 2 years to turn it into a trilogy. Will it be like Spiderman 3, Pirates of the Carribean 3, XMen3, talking teddybears fighting for peace in Return of theJedi ?? What do you think ? Question is: will you go..? if the answer is no: thats what happened to all those sub-prime-mortgages and loans in a land far far away. At some point no amount of special effects will save your plot and you end up with a Waterworld or worse, Town & Country: a romantic comedy for the price of a Transformer movie. So why did I like Transformers Zwei and is the economy hyped both ways ? I wanted a movie about a plastic toy robot I used to have back in the day the wall came down in the country next door and we were winning a cold war with the help of 2 wise old men who promised to join forces and save us if aliens ever attacked our planet. Reminding me of a time before highschool basically. And I wanted it to be like WWII, bigger and with better explosions than the first one. Long enough to actually finish the largest bucket of popcorn they have in that empty mall just off the popcorn
olympic village they built for the Games in 1992, and forget about not getting a singlephonecall or email for a job interview after 6 weeks of handing out and sending off CVs. Hyping moneymaking schemes is what got us here. I know some like to point fingers across the pond
but If we weren't all in on it we wouldn't all be out of a job. Now they are playing up the end of the world because only the threat of eternal damnanation seems to motivate mankind to do anything about anything but mainly worrying together. That's why all the superlatives are on the front pages of newspapers that are still in business: "..blablabla worst since the Great Depression." You know its hype because during the Great Depression farmers were dying on the land of starvation. We're still subsidising farmers so they won't go on strike and dump fresh produce on the highways leading into our capitals are we not ? But we need that kind of angst nowadays even to maintain personal hygiene: "Global Pandemic of Swine Flu underway, UN says it can't be stopped: now will you wash your hands ?" Over 50 million died during the outbreak of Spanish Influenza. A pandemic is when you don't need to read about it in the papers, the ambulance is outside.. you're hoping its for no one you know. Today that is more likely than in the close knit communities of a 100 years ago, when there were only 1.7 billion of us and a lot more whales. If you can still afford to buy sushi from a supermarket, 6 pieces of a tiny amount of food for the equivalent of .. month's wages in ... , while complaining how bad the latest summer blockbuster was compared to the original, in a big plastic box that is not going to be recycled because you're eating it on the way as you're supposed to.. then things are looking up. I just chose a bad time to come to Spain and am fortunate enough to travel back to another country to hopefully pick up where I left off with a lot more appreciation for being able to buy coronas at Tescos and sneaking them into a pub which is shit anyway but then we're only there because its raining. Shame about the whales though. But you know what I mean. Chin up.

You're one out of 6 billion.. start acting like it.

Wednesday 15 July ´09

I think I just need to ..write. I just realised my problem with writing a Blog is that I treat it very much like writing an article and when writing a piece I ofcourse want to nail it. I wanna get it just right. I want it to be informative and entertaining and all that grunge. I guess the problem is solved by giving proper writings an actual title and mere logs, updates, a date.

Its Wednesday 15th of July ´09 the world has not come to an end and I am seriously disappointed. How long do people think they can hype the end of the world without it

turning out like a complete waste of time. Skynet has not taken over the world but we´re working on it: it won't be long before robots patrol a battlefield near youNow they´re making a movie on the end of some Mayan calender called 2012 that is coming out this fall which looks kinda cool in an oversized bucket of popcorn kinda way. I just find it odd that no one´s made a movie out of Revelations. They make a horror movie out of Jesus: 'lets not focus on his teachings but just the suffering' and all the faithful flock and it makes a cool 100 million.. (sorry its actually:not bad for someone who ate with his hands . You´d think they would already be looking to make a sequel, busy skimming through the rest of the no-longer-brand-New Testament. But no, Angels and Demons will have to do.

I quit smoking about a month and a half ago and, and that doesn't really mean anything until it has been several years, and now my cheeks are thicker than they used to be and kind of white. Twittering about this I got a spate of new followers sending me messages of support. My lip tastes funny and my gums look weird after I brush my teeth. I got two mouthwashes, those vitamin pills you dissolve in a glass of bottled water and taste like Fanta, and it won´t go away. So, here's what you should not do when you have something weird, or are in a foreign place without insurance or a job: look up the symptoms online. Only in the extreme cases of abject boredom would I suggest you look up ailments online. You will not be bored but that´s the only thing that will be cured: you now have cancer. Yes, the internet gave me cancer. Its my own fault ofcourse, when I couldn´t find anything that sounded like what I thought were my symptons I should´ve given up and maybe see a docter. But no, I googled on and started looking for pictures. I know I need to go to a dentist and he or she is probably going to give me a hard time while wringing their hands thinking of all the things they can buy with the money I'll have to hand over but I do count myself fortunate they don't look anything like that though they probably could have done with braces but I'm from a generation before it became mandatory. Oh.. before we we're even advised to floss. I should tweet that.. just to see who responds. The scary thing about that is there are people whose job it is to follow certain topics and then befriend you in the hope one day l-like me- you will check out who they are and click on their homepage.. maybe an ad by accident.. and they get to make the 2 c per click as advertised on your Facebook page. But it probably sounded a bit more like "I made thousands in a few weeks from home while I was unemployed."

15:15 its finally quiet around the house. A. paying her monthly due for her double XX rated chromosomes I decided to get the hell out of the house and back to my own apartment for some Gears 2/Horde with Javi, my spanish flatmate. I figured I would get some proper sleep as well as the night before they were cleaning the street with what sounded like a tank and she has upstairs neighbours who start doing the laundry at 11 in the evening till 2am and then most mornings from 5am onwards. Her fridge is very loud at regular intervals though the freezer doesn´t work and when she can´t sleep she likes to flip over beside me like a fish on dry land..

and sighs.. Since I quit smoking pot I´ve learned that the old "its helping me sleep" excuse was really just that: an excuse, because I doze off within minutes. Unless all of the aforementioned are working in tandem to tease me into thinking about Torture, and other things I would like to do to people who keep me from sleeping and are not in the same room with me. That last part I added after some thought, it is now 15:29. Because it gets so unbearable hot in Barcelona, the people here have devised a lifestyle in order to get things done which involves a powernap in the late afternoon that rhymes with the spanish word for
shit. I used to hate split-shifts on the terrace. Now, I get to do it in my spare-time. Even A. thought of it as lazy before summer got into full swing. Heat evaporates the ability to do anything but lounge. So you have to make the most of the mornings and evenings when its bearable. Around 7 am my neighbours start barging through the halls, disrupting my sleep enough to become aware in my dreams but not to get up. Having conversations in what sounds like arabic interspersed with 'valè' or portuguese.. so its probably Catalan. If only they spoke castellano I could learn in my sleep ! But it is not to be and neither is my refuge from the cell division of this living organism we call city: there's now construction on the floor above me here aswell. Skip to 54s of this youtube "Ren loses his cool" for my feelings on the matter.

glueing the chips back unto the boulder

I've been fascinated by the idea of a Blog for some time but after several aborted attempts and then messing around with iWeb on my flatmate's macbook only to discover I couldn't receive comments I kind of gave up. You know, the idea that you can spew anonamuesli your nonsense in the most public abstract space ever created outside Heaven, for people to haphazardly come across and be entertained by. But armed with an iPod touch, unemployed in Spain, messing around with all the functions of this wonderful all-in-one gizmo and wanting to create content on it reminded me how much I used to love writing. So maybe I oughto try a little harder and besides, I got a lot of time on my hands.