The papers are full of news and dumbasses and BS artists huffing and puffing and being caught out and doing perp walks and talking nonsense and grumbling and lying and I'm just about ready to go current affairs cold turkey for a year or two.
Instead, I turn to my new favourite saying, which is to say, Leo's current favourite saying which gets uttered a lot around the house at the oddest of times, and now I find myself cycling to work or sitting at my desk and the words just pop into my head and immediately cheer me up.
So that's another historical thing done, so I may as record my thoughts on the wedding for posterity...
They didn't even say 'I do.' They said 'I will.' Ah well.
It still blows my mind that I regularly cycled down the same roads those Jags and Bentleys and Rollseseses were cruising down.
Prince Harry has bad posture. In fact, despite the concentration of international royalty, there wasn't a lot of regal going on in the Abbey. So much fiddling and figdeting and scratching of noses and straightening of hair. Maybe it was always like that, but we never got to see it.
Ditto for the talking. William and Kate rushed and whimpered through their vows like scaredy little teenagers. I was expecting something more, like 'I'm a future King dammit, and I could have every one of you beheaded, now Behold, Hear Mah Fukken Vows. And then bring me Excalibur.' It was nothing like that.
The Queen doesn't get to sing God Save the Queen. Must be kinda weird to be singing 'God Save the Queen' when she's right there in the room. Back in the day she could've had you beheaded if you didn't do it enthusiastically enough.
Westminster Abbey is an impressive building. It must be quite an honour to be buried there (except that you're too dead to enjoy it).
You may have gathered that I don't care much for Archbishop Rowan Williams but I have to admit he had some pretty slick moves getting his mitre on and off, without getting caught up with the lappets on the back (and yes, I had to google to find out what they were called).
Mama Middleton isn't a bad looker. Papa Middleton looked like a proud dad, the whole way through. What must go through their minds, other than 'we've earned more of our money than they have.'
Speaking of regal, the Queen knows how to wave. These young whippersnappers don't. Kate's loose-wristed flippy-flappy will not stand the test of time, I think.
What was coming out of my PC headphones was more interesting than the blathering on the TV, so I missed the start of the balcony thing, and I only got to see one of the kisses. Tsk. A generation to go from one (groundbreaking) kiss to two. Two! How many generations to go before it's OK to slip a little tongue?
For 364 days of the year, the BBC channels and fuels the national obsession with 'fairness' and 'equality.' And on Royal Wedding day, we get reminded repeatedly how 'we're all commoners' and how Mama Middleton's family have come, 'in a few generations, from miners in the North of England, and now a successful business woman.' Wtf?
And when they weren't telling us how lowly we all are, the cognitive dissonance went into overdrive in the opposite direction. The couple drive down the road in the old man's Aston Martin. Nice touch, bit of an encore for the adoring crowds. And then we're treated to some ditz in the studio saying 'it's showing that they're just like us, going for a drive,' to which Huw Edwards diplomatically pointed out that in fairness they were being tailed at close range by the police protection unit. Yes, and it's a freakin' Aston Martin, leaving Buckingham Palace, for chrissakes.
Prince William isn't the Second Coming after all (just as well, because I don't think the Book of Revelations was something the news presenters had swotted up on for the occasion). Still, the adulation and sheer crap the BBC presenters came up with might make you wonder. The same ditz talking about the Aston Martin drive says 'and he's such a good driver.' Aaaaargh!
Not that the newspapers were much better... the Times and Telegraph sites' headlines and leaders have been retch-worthy for 24 hours now. Even the Guardian's website got into the spirit, notwithstanding the little 'Republicans click here' button on their front page, which made all the wedding coverage go away. Then the 'Royalists click here' button to make it all come back. Teh lols.
There was even a 'street' (rather: lawn) party in our complex. I might lack the 'get into the spirit' gene when it comes to special occasions like this, but I have to admit that it's still quite something to see.
For all the UK's problems and foibles, it was all another reminder of just how lucky we are to be in this country. What an amazing place.
So the Royal Wedding is kicking off. Now, you know, good luck and best wishes to 'em, and I'm not going to bah humbug it all, but let's allow ourselves this much: Wedding Fever has gotten a little OTT. It's a lovely occasion but there's only so much excitement I can muster.
What might juice it up a bit is if, when everyone's in place in Westminster Abbey, and the couple are about to take their vows, it turns out that the Prince is actually the Second Coming, and He Rises Up, as the vast columns of the Abbey shudder, and the aristocrats and poets rise from their graves, and He casts His mighty Eye on the Archbishop of Canterbury, and He smites him for saying such stupid shit all the time, and then He turns to the terrified throng and says 'LATER FOR YOU, PEASANTS', and then He and Kate ascend to Heaven in a beam of light while Jimi Hendrix's Voodoo Chile (Slight Return) plays in the background.
The vast majority of the world's books, music, films, television and art, you will never see. It's just numbers.
... you simply have no chance of seeing even most of what exists. Statistically speaking, you will die having missed almost everything.
The article is well worth a read. It may seem like a daft thing to get worried about, but for collectors/hoarders/archivists (like me), this can be a hard thing to make peace with.
Tangentially, but maybe not, because you could say the same about human history, this also reminds me of a quote I once read by free software prophet Richard Stallman (excellent book, by the way):
"I was always in favor of immortality," he says. "I was shocked that most people regarded immortality as a bad thing. How else would we be able to see what the world is like 200 years from now?"
We're back. The North Pembrokeshire coast in Wales is a very beautiful place, and we had a great holiday. We saw cliffs and coves and beaches and went for boat rides to remote islands and explored little villages and walked along piers and causeways and saw old cathedrals and medieval ruins and iron age hill forts and prehistoric burial monuments and visited museums and farms and dilapidated churches. We had standing stones and cannons down the road from our holiday house, and were within minutes' walk of coastal paths and shops selling weird Welsh ales. The only pity is that we hadn't gone for longer.
That's the 21st century - before you sing a ditty for the cameras, you have to remember to switch off your cell phones. The M-P massive are heading off for a bit to where cell phones aren't needed and relaxing and de-angrification will be the order of the day!
My Earth Hour grumble prompted some discussion in the M-P household, the general theme being that it was perhaps a bit of an 'asshole post.'
I think the gist of it is that it's impolite to criticise things like Earth Hour because no matter how wrong-headed or downright dangerous people's views or activities, as long as they mean well, then they should be given the benefit of the doubt. I recognise the social instinct but I still think it's wrong. And I also think that Earth Hour and similar slacktivist efforts are also as much about signalling concern and assuaging guilty consciences as they are about solving problems. This is human nature and we all do it, but we should see it for what it is.
But anyway. My real gripe isn't about the psychology of Earth Hour, but about what it suggests as a solution to the very real worries about climate change. As with Earth Hour, the issue is so often about going backwards, about austerity, about doing without. Yet this is doomed to failure. I think the only solutions will come from looking forwards, not backwards.
In an earlier draft of this post I put it this way: the world is full of poor people who are becoming less poor, and they all want cars and hamburgers.
Now, the first thing to accept is you're not going to stop them, and the second thing is that it's arrogant of wealthy westerners who've been enjoying these things for years to start preaching about going without.
Cars, and hamburgers aside, I stumbled across this TED talk tonight by the inimitable Hans Rosling, who says it far better than I could, and he points to an even simpler indicator of rising wealth and increased energy consumption (and, as I recently heard it put, one of the most valuable inventions and one of the most fundamental tools of female liberation in the 20th century): the washing machine.
If you have 9 minutes to spare I highly recommend his talk:
The whole thing is worth quoting, but this gets the point across:
But when I lecture to environmentally-concerned students, they tell me, "No, everybody in the world cannot have cars and washing machines." How can we tell this woman that she ain't going to have a washing machine? And then I ask my students ... "How many of you doesn't use a car?" And some of them proudly raise their hand and say, "I don't use a car." And then I put the really tough question: "How many of you hand wash your jeans and your bed sheets?" And no one raised their hand. Even the hardcore in the green movement use washing machines.
And this is why I don't think people deserve a free ride for supporting ideas like Earth Hour - if they had their way they would be hurting people:
My mother explained the magic with this machine the very, very first day. She said, "Now Hans, we have loaded the laundry; the machine will make the work. And now we can go to the library." Because this is the magic: you load the laundry, and what do you get out of the machine? You get books out of the machines ... This is where I started my career as a professor, when my mother had time to read for me. And she also got books for herself. She managed to study English and learn that as a foreign language. And she read so many novels, so many different novels here. And we really, we really loved this machine.
And what we said, my mother and me, "Thank you industrialization. Thank you steel mill. Thank you power station. And thank you chemical processing industry that gave us time to read books."
Earth Hour: an opportunity for well-meaning people to do something about global warming, where 'something' means sitting on their arses in the dark for an hour, instead of doing something really useful, like reading a physics textbook and learning how solar power works, or doing something to earn money that could go to an environmental charity or be invested in an alternative energy company, or, or, or, or, or, or or or or or.
We used to have earth hours all the time. We lived in caves, were hungry and filthy for all of our miserable 20 year lives, and couldn't yet begin to imagine how much we would achieve, once we'd discovered the magic of being able to stay awake and socialise and think and learn, long after it had turned dark outside.
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