the corner office

Bah. Yesterday morning I went into work for the early shift, which requires changing trains at London Bridge for the short hop to Cannon Street.

The crap part of spring is that everyone still acts like it's -25C outside and so trains are still heated, windows closed. I got onto the train and the air was hot, rotten, fetid, with regular coughs and sniffles and I thought to myself 'so help me if I don't get sick from breathing this damned air.'

So true's nuts, I've come down with man flu. I've more likely than not picked something up from Leo, who along with thousands of nursery-going toddlers is just teeming with lurgy-germs. But I'm still blaming the foul air on that train.

This might sound like a frivolous post but it's not. 65 years ago young Japanese men were willing to commit suicide to further the cause of their country. The explicit nature of the sacrifice was and remains unfathomable to us in the West, but the Japanese response to the quake and tsunami has already reminded the world how different their culture is. Combine that with an interesting moral question: if you were an engineer at that plant, being bombarded with potentially lethal doses of radiation, but knowing what would happen if you left and allowed the thing to go into meltdown, what would you do?

I think that one of the lessons to be learned from the Fukushima nuclear disaster, no matter what happens over the next few days, is that the world needs better robot technology.

Anyway, enough of grumbling about the up-is-down world of Keynesian economics, and on to other edumacatory stuff. To wit, our new two hours of intellectual TV on Sunday nights.

First up is Civilisation, aka The West r00lz, everyone else dr00lz, presented by Niall Ferguson. I have a difficult time watching Prof Ferguson. First of all, I don't know what it is, but there's always footage of him strolling along in his chinos and his junk is just too meticulously arranged. I hear him talking but my eyes have to be averted and every time I look back at the screen, there's the junk. I can't get past the junk. He needs to wear different underwear or something. Or dark trousers.

And if it isn't that, his presentation style doesn't work for me. Blah blah then one of 15 stock punch line blurbs invariably containing the word 'dominance' or some variant thereof, and riffing on the rhetorical question of whether the West has had its time in the sun, always topped off with an intense look at the screen like the audience had better hurry up and answer back to the TV. 'No no, you're quite right, Niall, the Chinese are gonna fsck us all up any day now.'

In fairness, that's probably just the script writers trying to make it all gripping and stuff. But the content just isn't satisfying or persuasive. Sunday night's topic was 'science' but after an hour of blathering about how the Ottoman empire fell apart, the only 'science' that got discussed was the fact that some Europeans had skooled themselves some calculus and knew how to calculate the trajectories of cannon balls. And make clocks. This is all that science has given the west?

So much for hour 1.

Hour 2 is immensely more enjoyable. I don't even know what the series is officially called but I think we can safely just call it the Brian Cox show. I enjoy this partly because of the subject matter and partly because I get to rag the hell out of the missus. Because fo sho, the dreamy Prof Brian Cox has ladies swooning the length and breadth of the country, and the producers know who their target audience is.

Here is a shot of dreamy Brian Cox in front of a glacier. Here is a shot of Brian Cox building a sandcastle. Here is a shot of Brian Cox cavorting in an empty prison. Here is Brian Cox jumping from a ladder. Here is Brian Cox playing the feckin' piano. Here is Brian Cox having his hair blown back by a supernova. Here is Brian Cox riding a unicorn.

And all the while, sounding wistful and poetic. I look at Ronwen and grin and she says 'I know, I know', and then I look at Ronwen again and she's all like 'enough, just stop it!' and I say 'a unicorn! A feckin' unicorn!'

Having said that, Cox does make it all pretty interesting and accessible, when he isn't standing around looking windswept. All told, it's turning out to be a very good series.

Serious, highly paid economists are starting to say things like:

"In the short term, the damage could even knock off almost 1% of the country's GDP," he said.

"Longer-term though, it will balance out, through the rebuilding exercise which will be positive for growth will all the construction taking place. It could turn positive in about 12 months."

If that's the case, why not flatten the whole of Japan and make 'em all really prosperous? The UK's economy ain't doing too well, why not flatten London to get things going again?

If GDP numbers end up showing growth in a year's time, then that just goes to show how utterly lousy GDP is at measuring prosperity.

Japan has been devastated by the earthquake. Over and above the loss of life, every single yen spent on replacing a new building is a yen that could have been spent on buying food, buying a book, putting a kid through university, paying for a holiday, paying for research into a cure for cancer.

Bastiat kicked the fallacy of the broken window to touch 160 years ago. It's depressing that people still believe and parrot this nonsense.

A quote:

Think about how quickly the phone has migrated from the desk, to the hand, to the ear, to the ear canal. The technology to enhance humanity with access to the internet is literally burying itself into our heads, call it I-fi. There is more to come.

A few nights ago I had a YouTube playlist going in the background, and suddenly there were a few Doors songs. Not a bad thing, I like the Doors. One of the tracks was Break On Through. What made me do a double-take was instead of hearing the usual lyrics 'She get, she get, she get,' (which never made sense, but hey) there was Jim Morrison singing 'She get high, she get high, she get high.' (thanks, YouTube.)

WTF? thought I. My first reaction was 'feckin' South African censors'. But it turns out that's what the whole world heard - Elektra (the record label) censored the song back in 1967. The album was remastered in 1999 and 'she get high' got added back. All versions since have the uncensored 'she get high.' Also, apparently, you can no longer buy the original version anywhere.

(As a bonus tie-in to the recent Blade Runner mention: Ridley Scott released Blade Runner: The Director's Cut in the early 90s, and until as recently as the early 00's (as I recall, based on searching around a few years ago), you couldn't buy the original version on DVD. I see now, though, that you can buy a collector's edition containing all 5 versions. Five!)

Exams are over, so back on the bike I am. I've cycled to work twice this week. Lots of fitness to regain. It's been pretty cold. I persevere.

My ride home includes climbing up Bromley Hill, from Downham. By the time I reach the bottom of the hill, I've been on the bike for an hour, over and above the hour riding to work in the morning. Bromley Hill kills me.

Tonight I was behind a fella on a bike, similar to me (which is to say, not some 4' tall King of the Mountains who races up the hill at breakneck speed - instead, tall, somewhat inelegant, laden with panniers etc). Most people seem to make it up the hill much faster than I do. Did I mention the hill kills me?

So anyway, this bloke doesn't go speeding away. In fact, I soon realise that I could actually be going faster than he is.

Now, I'm not a competitive dude, in that way. Sure, I could've overtaken him, but instead, I just took it easy, stayed right behind him, and relished the knowledge that I could have overtaken him if I'd wanted to.

Halfway up he dropped a gear and put his back into it, which required me to work a little to catch/keep up, but soon I was on his tail again and thinking to myself 'I could pwn this dude if I wanted, I could totally pwn him.' But I didn't, because I'm not competitive that way.

Sadly, I can't see anything good coming from this:

We have long-term goals for the franchise, and are exploring multi-platform concepts, not just limiting ourselves to one medium only

When the money people are saying things like that, then even one medium sounds like one medium too many.

The family have arrived back from SA. Trip complicated by junior getting a bug of sorts and spending half the flight sleeping and half the flight puking (actually 80/20 apparently but that has less of a ring to it).

Now the missus is in the bedroom catching up on sleep, the kid is on the couch downstairs also catching up on sleep, and I'm in the spare room eating Sugus. Bliss.

So that was that. Now it's over for a while.

I finished the exam late morning, then did something I've been wanting to do for ages - walk from one side of Kensington Gardens to the other end of Hyde Park. It was cool in a London park kind of way - which is to say cold, dreary, the grass green with a hint of mud, rows of skeletal trees, getting hazier as they march off into the distance. And the neverending roar of traffic.

Ended up walking even further across London, treated myself to lunch and a pint, then came home.

Now... what? I'm feeling oddly decompressy-at-odds. I feel like I should be feeling guilty about something. Like there's a reason I can't just sit down and do bugger-all for the evening.

Although, actually. Family back on Saturday. The house needs some sprucing up. Admin ignored for six months and more. Time go get cracking!