Because I'm far too idle today to actually write anything

In a linky sort of mood, rather than a writy sort of mood. An error in mid-atlantic from Danny O'Brien, and a nice interview with Garrison Keillor, in which he coins (at least for me) a new sense of the verb 'to ralph'.

Still Two Cultures

The Two Cultures are both alive and well, thank you very much, as is the yawning chasm that exists between them for some people, most aptly illustrated by their pathetic attempts to reach across it. This piece by Philip Pullman (of His Dark Materials fame) in the Guardian is so lazy, clumsy, and, well, undergraduate, I'm not sure what's most infuriating: the casual disdain towards science, or the attempts to demonstrate affinity that only show cluelessness. It appears that Pullman's piece is intended to be part of a special science fiction edition of the paper's Life section. Go write me eight-hundred words on science and fiction, says the editor to Phil. Doesn't need to be coherent or anything. Just take a vague position and throw some of the right words around. Good man.

Forgive some liberal quoting, but go read the whole thing first. I'll be here when you get back. Says Pullman:

I don't do science, though I love to read about it. What I do is fiction. They are such different activities that I sometimes wonder whether the same type of mind can do both.

Yes, they are very different activities, but rather than consider with some thought what each might involve, and how those people who do both - because there are such people, whatever Pullman might 'wonder' - manage to live with themselves, we're given a glib apples-and-oranges dichotomy. Which is false anyhow, because science and fiction don't occupy the same conceptual space, so whyever would one preclude the other? There are certainly reasons why people who are interested in one might be less interested in the other, but there's nothing intrinsic about each that conflicts with the other. It's like wondering aloud how people can enjoy both bananas and jazz. Huh?

I'm not talking about science fiction; it's a respectable genre, with conventions (and Conventions, too), and a canon, and giants and minnows, and classics and trash, but I don't write it and don't much read it. I'm talking about all the rest, about the basic thing that's known as story.

And with that keyboard flourish Pullman relegates science fiction to something other than 'the basic thing that's known as story', with no justification that I can see. I'm reminded of Kurt Vonnegut's frustrated assertion that any writer who notices technology is labelled a science fiction writer. The background becomes the perceived foreground. Here's what science fiction is: it's fiction involving conflict between man and an environment that's to some degree realistic, and to some degree speculative. Here's what science fiction isn't: it's not fiction involving realistic conflict just between humans. Pullman makes his mistake explicit:

Because stories are fundamentally about individual human beings in human situations. They are the answers to questions such as What will happen when Oedipus meets Jocasta? What is Dorothea going to do when she realises she's made a terrible mistake in marrying that old stick Casaubon? What will Mr Bumble do when Oliver Twist asks for more?

Nope. Some stories - and presumably the ones that Pullman prefers - are fundamentally about individual human beings in human situations. Others aren't. Still others are about individual human beings in situations that reek of humanity, but in a way that Pullman seemingly cannot reach his mind into. What are we to make of the (both literal and figurative) chess-game conflict between Dave Bowman and HAL 9000 in 2001? That it's not human? It's intensely human - indeed, the plot discusses issues of exactly what it means to be human by juxtaposing it with the strengths, failures and frailties of a pseudo-human. But place that discussion against a background of speculatively extrapolated technology - rather than, say, a background of nineteenth-century gentle-folk - and suddenly, for Pullman, the background appears to rob the story of any claims to storiness.

And furthermore:

The tensions, expectations and satisfactions we get from fiction are of that sort, and it isn't science, because those aren't scientific questions. A scientific question, I take it, is one like What will happen if I drop two weights at the same moment?

Well, stop the presses. First of all Pullman wonders aloud whether anyone can 'do' both science and fiction, and then he claims, to devastating effect, that the questions we ask while processing a story as readers aren't 'scientific' questions. Of course they aren't. It's a straw man made up of straw men, and I can't imagine anyone claiming otherwise. But he misses the essential reason that the questions he describes are not 'scientific', or at least not amenable to scientific enquiry. The reason is that the weights are real, and therefore constrained by physical laws, whereas the story characters are purely fictional entities, and therefore constrained by absolutely nothing other than the author's intentions. They don't have to behave rationally, or consistently, or with any regard for what's real or possible. The difference Pullman seems to want to direct us towards is that between the human, and the non-human; that is to say, between that which can produce genuine story, and that which cannot. But the human/non-human dichotomy has nothing to do with storiness, and certainly has nothing to do with our ability to ask scientific questions about behaviour. Pullman seems to prefer clumsily reductionist portrayals of science: weights, and electrons. But science is also cognitive science, and biology, and psychology, and dozens of other disciplines which frame scientific debate on a conspicuously human level, at which point they would certainly apply, in their own way, to Oedipus and Dorothea and Mr Bumble. The reason science doesn't apply to these characters isn't that they're human. It's that they're not real.

There's also bad science in the piece:

The difference is that once a scientific question is answered, it stays answered - at least, until someone changes the question.

Not so. Once a scientific question is answered, it stays answered only until a better, more complete answer comes along.

So doing science is not the same as doing fiction.

This is an assertion, not an argument. It's certainly true, but glibly, emptily so. The assertion also bears little relation to what's come before. There are all sorts of levels at which it's possible to discuss how science and fiction interrelate, but Pullman isn't terribly interested in clearly distinguishing them. They're lazily conflated into this sentence. Here are the three levels that come to mind:

1. The level at which humans 'do' science, and 'do' fiction. That is, the processes humans go through in order to pursue scientific enquiry, and in order to generate fiction. There might be some overlap here, but it doesn't seem unreasonable to suggest that those processes are quite different.
2. The level at which the actual universe 'works', and at which the fictional universe 'works'. This seems to be the level at which Pullman's piece addresses itself, but it's a pointless exercise. His argument is something like: you can't ask scientific questions of story characters because they're human. But that's nonsensical. The reason you can't ask scientific questions of story characters is that they're not real. The corollary of that, which Pullman misses, is that it'd be just as silly to expect his dropped weights to behave scientifically in a story. It's not a scientific question, because they're not real weights.
3. The level at which humans process stories. This is actually the level which interests me most - it's the core of my aborted PhD. Asking questions about how stories affect their readers, how they work, or don't work, and why they work or don't work, is entirely amenable to scientific enquiry.

It is to be hoped that:

When it comes to science, it's not hard, these days, to find enough superb writers and fascinating material to satisfy your most demanding interior set-designer. In biology and evolution, there are Richard Dawkins, Steven Jay Gould. . .

does not mean that Pullman is unaware that Gould has been dead for two years. But Pullman really gives away his Two Cultures meme right at the end:

It isn't hard to find things out. But the best reason to read about science is not to check facts, but to revel in wonder.

That's actually fair enough, so long as what Pullman means by 'to revel in wonder' has something to do with the wonder of understanding, the wonder of discovering how things are, rather than how one might wish them to be. However, as an example of what he means, he continues:

Part of the impulse behind my longest story lay in the extraordinary poetry of the phrase "dark matter", and my discovery that Milton had anticipated it in Paradise Lost:

Unless the Almighty Maker them ordained
His dark materials to create new worlds

Rather than understanding, on some fundamental level, what 'dark matter' is, and how it's a concept that's used to account for gravitational anomalies in the universe, Pullman's 'wonder' seems to consist of making a thin connection between the 'poetry of the phrase' and a superficially-similar phrase used by Milton. On this level, Pullman is exactly right: fiction is not science. But nor does borrowing some buzzword from science (cf. 'chaos theory', 'the butterfly effect') and using it out of all reasonable context confer anything other a magpie's taste for the shiny and eminently stealable. In particular, it doesn't carry with it any of the scientific content to which the phrase might refer. All you have are the words, and what you do with them might be fiction, but it's no longer science.

Pullman finishes:

When you come to write the story, you mustn't lose that first impulse of wonder. Science and fiction deal with different entities, and ask different questions; but each can intoxicate, inspire, console, and feed that appetite for mystery and revelation that makes human beings at least as interesting as electrons.

Science is often accused - typically by those for whom it seeks only to debunk and explain away - of being reductionist. What Pullman does here is a lazy portrayal of science as the deterministic, reductionistic process for rude mechanicals that he would abhor were it presented to him that way. Fiction, says he, is about humans. Science, says he, is about deterministic electrons - and therefore cannot form story. Well, no. Science is also about humans. It's also about fiction, since fiction is a human process - both its creation and its consumption. We might not be able to hypothesise scientifically about Dorothea - not because, to repeat this until it sinks in, she is human, but because she's not a real human - but we can certainly hypothesise about the brain and the fiction-writing processes of George Eliot, and about how each human who processes the text of Middlemarch does so.

The Little Blue Light in the Dark

A few years ago I was sitting by the pool at a friend's house - actually her sister's house, but that's by the by. It was a hot, clear deserty day - a photo I took that day shows A. and the friend in the foreground, with a large cactus in the background. As we sat there, a small robotic pool cleaner was roving about the bottom and sides of the pool, hoovering up pool-crud. And I was completely captivated. I sat there far longer than was entirely necessary, watching the thing, and never got tired of it. You might imagine that there aren't too many homes in Britain with swimming pools, and you'd be right. So I'd never seen one of these adorable beasts before. But something more than just novelty was going on here.

I have this thing about machines. Not just any machines, though. It's very specific. I mean, I'm devoted to my PowerBook, but it doesn't quite qualify. There's a class of machine that very quietly and efficiently performs a repetitive and/or lonely job. I feel, towards machines of that type, something that I can only think of as affection, in a weirdly anthropomorphised sort of way. It makes me happy to know that they're busily going about their business, keeping things moving along, without praise or fault. We run a little wireless network in our apartment. Both the AirPort Base Station which acts as the router, and the DSL modem, qualify. They're on all the time, quietly blinking away to show that all is well. And it makes me happy to know that they're there. But here's a thing. A few days ago I cleaned out a large closet that'd become a bit of a dumping ground for un-unpacked boxes while we were moving, and put our laser printer and the AirPort and modem in there, to hide all the spaghetti cabling. And I now oddly feel greater affection for them, which I can only imagine is to do with the fact that they're now stuck away in a lonely, dark place, still cheerfully keeping our net running freely. I feel like peeking into the closet every now and again to see if they're okay. Not to see if they're working, you understand - I can do that from my PowerBook - but to see if they're okay, that they feel valued and appreciated.

Doesn't need to be anything so high-tech, either. When we moved into this place, a couple of power sockets in the kitchen and bathroom had little emergency light things plugged into them. They're very simple. A light-sensitive doodad on the front detects when the light in the room is low, and turns on the small blue emergency light. It's not very bright, but it's enough to make sure that you don't walk into things on your way to wherever. And I think they're quite adorable, and feel affection towards them. Thanks, guys, for being on watch every minute of the day or night. How selfless of you to watch over us like this. Appreciate it.

Obviously this is some sort of category error. Machines don't get tired or lonely. They're not afraid of the dark. But still, my feeling of affection towards them for doing tireless, lonely jobs doesn't need to be rational to exist.

And I'm reminded of the most tireless, lonely job that we've ever asked a machine to do: to sail away from the Earth towards other planets. Even further, beyond our vast but cosy-on-a-universal-scale solar system, into the depths of, if not nothingness, then very-littleness-indeed. Some are decades old already, yet still they quietly do the job we asked them to do. It's endlessly endearing. It's one reason why the end of Silent Running is quite so affecting. It's not that the humans are gone, or that this is the last (so far as we know) oasis of greenery in the universe. It's that the little robot is finally alone, yet still puttering away keeping things going. Not for anyone in particular, and with no end in sight. It's just what he does, so he keeps doing it. It's also why the central idea of the first Star Trek film works so well. Not the film as a whole, which has its moments but has the pacing of continental drift, but the central idea: that one of these lonely probes might actually find some companionship out there in the blackness, and then wake up to wonder what its purpose might be. It's actually a idea that's reassuring, because what would the alternative be? That the probe is driven mad by eternity, or that it dies a slow death, alone in the dark?

Anthropomorphism. It's what we do. Sometimes it's our little blue light in the dark.

A Long Summer and the Death of a Scientist

Currently playing on iTunes is the new-ish Mull Historical Society album 'This is Hope'. It's every bit as baroque as 'Loss' and 'Us', every bit as giddily catchy in places and perversely dissonant in others. Colin Macintyre is one of those people who's way too talented to take the easy route, so is constantly pushing against the edges of his already-wide talent (cf. Kate Bush, Andy Partridge). 'How 'bout I Love You More' is buzzing around my head right now in the same way that 'Watching Xanadu' did three years ago.

I associate Xanadu with a particular time during that year. There's an odd link here, too. The most sweetly grandiose track on Hope is 'Death of a Scientist', which is, so far as I know, the first song written about the death of David Kelly - not the Hutton Report hoop-la that came afterwards, but the simple tragedy of his suicide on a bright, sunny, summer day in the woods of the Oxfordshire countryside. Not all tragedies happen in the shadows. I'll always associate Kelly's suicide with the summer of 2003 in England, which was hot and still and hazy and bursting with primary yellows and greens and blues. I was living at a friends' place for a while, pending visa stuff, and the relative cool of the attic bedroom was a peaceful sanctuary. I could look out of the window and see woods much like the one in which Kelly slit his wrists and waited patiently to die. And that place, that attic, will always be brought back in a moment when I listen to the Mull album 'Us', which I played during much of that time. I'm not sure exactly what the process is that causes us to connect songs to times and places - whether it's our mood, or the significance of the time - but I think there's something about Colin's stuff that makes it more likely.

As for Kelly, when the story of the 2003 invasion of Iraq ends up being written, he'll not be much more than a footnote - a decent man driven to destruction by forces much larger, and far more ruthless, than him. Meanwhile, the instigators of that folly will be relaxing with a cool drink in Texas or Tuscany.

Randomness of the day

Driving home along Lincoln Boulevard in Santa Monica, I catch sight of somewhere that looks like 'Kid 'n a Slum'. Fair enough, I think. 'Boyz N the Hood'. 'Kid 'n a Slum'. Why not. Maybe it's a nice slum. Maybe it's a very tough kid. But then this might be a clue.

Then dinner at Izzy's Deli - a very nice 'Rod Steiger' steak sandwich, thanks for asking. At the bottom of their special dinners menu is the following line, verbatim:

EVERAGE: Coffee, Tea, or Fountain drink.

'Deli to the Stars' indeed. It's quite something when Dame Edna has her very own section of the specials menu.

Mosaic and a Remembered Cliff Lift

Once upon a time, and scarily not-so-long ago, I was lucky enough to work somewhere that also happened to be a big Internet hub in Britain, and which - because of that - was one of the first places to get the Mosaic web-browser. World-changing stuff, but it just seemed curious at first. Quirky and cool, but not so much more than a toy. So what we did with it was what I suppose would be called 'surfing'. Just following the Blue Brick Road from link to link, seeing where it might take us, finding out what the dimensions of this weird 'World Wide Web' thing were. If I'd sat up most of a night, I probably could have visited every web-site in existence at the time. That joke about 'reaching the end of the web' and needing to turn back wasn't really a joke back then.

The web is so unutterably vast these days that I'm not sure we really 'surf' any more. We go to places we know. We search. We want what we want, and we want it now. I read somewhere that Google's 'I'm feeling lucky' button is hardly ever used. We don't want serendipity. We want relevance in a sea of babble. Which seems a shame, because once in a while a careless wander leads us somewhere that we might never otherwise have gone. A good measure of whether you're 'surfing' or not is whether you can remember how the hell you got somewhere. If you've no earthly idea, you were probably surfing.

I haven't a clue how I got to The first web mag about funiculars yesterday (and didn't you just know that there'd be one?), but I happened upon something that made me both happy and sad, and was glad for the serendipity. It kind of filled a gap for me.

My childhood holidays were primarily spent at Scarborough, on the Yorkshire coast. A week or two during the long summer holidays from school, and my memories are all good. The place had - and still has - a magic that only a long childhood association with a place can create. My mother also knew the place from when she was a kid - it's really a family haunt. On the other hand, my dad never quite seemed to connect so well with the place. Partly I think the climate wasn't exactly what he associated with a relaxing holiday - he's a sun-worshipper, and was much happier when we started going to more Mediterranean climes later on. But also partly because he didn't catch the spirit of the place when he was a kid.

After our last family holiday there in 1984, we'd go back for a pilgrimage at least one day each summer - it's about an hour-and-a-half's drive across the wuthering North York Moors from where I grew up, but the radical bleakness of the landscape on the journey makes it seem much further. And we were all fond of saying that it would never change. Fundamentally that was true - the North Bay still genteel and sleepy, the South Bay still a babylon of penny arcades and Kiss Me Quick hats by the fish market on the harbour. The miniature railway still always ran around the parks and along the North Bay promenade. Enough of the touchstones of the place were there to make it feel like home.

For some reason, there was a several-year gap in my pilgrimages in the '90s, and then, when I finally got back in '98, something of real significance had gone. Just vanished, the space it left behind landscaped so as to pretend it had never been there. It was this wonderful little monument to a more gentle age. The photographs you see there were taken in 1997, a few years after I'd last visited, and the year before I visited again. By the time I got there in '98, the whole cliff lift had been packed up, sold and shipped off to a small coastal town in Cornwall, the hill-side resculptured (actually very very well, but still) to deny its history. The oversized stone shelter still remains at the bottom, but that's all. The tracks are gone, as is the ticket office at the top. It's all grassed over. Until yesterday I'd not seen the lift in this graveyard state.

We used to take this lift home from the beach every day. I'm sure that my sister and my dad must have been there some days, but in my memory it's typically my mother and my brother and me. By the time of the holidays I remember best, in the late '70s and early 80's, my sister didn't come with us - at least not for the whole trip. She was older and had another, more sophisticated world by then. My dad would usually leave the beach earlier than we did, and head back to the hotel for a nap before dinner.

So it was my mother, my brother, and me. We'd take the wandering path down the cliff-side from the hotel in the morning, bringing whatever supplies we might need for that day. The bulk of the day would be spent in a kind of British Seaside Zen, at the beach hut (Scarborough Council called them 'bungalows', and my parents called them 'chalets') that we rented from the Council each year. It's the middle one of these, which was, and remains, number 132. It was a wonderful location, feet from the beach, with a little cafe nearby in case we wanted some munchies. The huts themselves were self-sufficient, in a very austere British sort of way. Each one came with deck chairs, a small stove and sink, a little fold-out table. It was all we needed. We could sit and watch the weather doing whatever the weather was doing. Often raining, but not always. Impromptu football or cricket on the beach. Sandcastle-building. Much radio-listening and quiet reading. The obscure art of crisp-packet shrinking. And lots and lots of people-watching. The huts were raised from the wide promenade, so we could watch the world go by - especially on those hot summer days when it seemed that most of Yorkshire decamped to the beach. The hut to the left of ours (facing the sea) was occupied by a family from Leeds that was also there every year, so we formed a small community. The small patch of grass at the end of the row of huts was ours, for sun-bathing (in those moments of sun). Afternoon entertainment for my brother and me, and a couple of friends who were there each year, might involve a walk along to the delightfully cheesy fun-fair (now also gone, alas) which sat at the end of the prom, to while away a couple of sandy-feet-on-cool-concrete hours playing bingo for low-rent prizes, or trying to push foreign coins into arcade machines without being caught.

And then, at the end of the day we'd pack up the chairs and such, lock the hut, and head back along the now-quiet promenade towards the hotel. Only this time we wouldn't dream of climbing that rambling path. This time we'd pay the small fee to travel in style, powered up the side of the cliff by electricity and iron engineering. Stepping out of the ticket office at the top of the hill, the beach would seem a thousand miles away, the path along the hill-top now a gentle stroll past the lonely stone shelters, decorated gaudily with playbills for whatever variety treat the Floral Hall (now also gone) was putting on that season.

That cliff lift journey was an important part of the ritual. It divided the beach from the hill-top, and it punctuated our day. A number of other cliff-lifts still operate in Scarborough's South Bay, but the one that was part of my childhood is gone. It's nice to see it, finally, in its final days, but I'd rather it was still where I remember it.

Update: A nice little piece in The Guardian, comparing and contrasting the delights (and histories) of Scarborough, on the north-east coast, and Blackpool, on the north-west coast. It includes this lovely line about Scarborough's cliff lifts:

For some idea of the experience, imagine stepping into a cricket pavilion that suddenly begins to descend quite rapidly at an angle of 60 degrees.

He's just a fast-food knight

One of the most useful ideas which spins off philosopher and cognitive scientist Margaret Boden's categorisation of human creativity into the 'P-creative' and the 'H-creative', is that it asks us to value the P-creative far more than we might otherwise. P-creativity (the 'P' stands for 'Psychological') is the meat and potatoes of creative thinking. It's the process each of us non-Leonardos and non-Newtons goes through in life. Our thinking is creative only within the context of our own lives. Pretty much every creative thing we might do, and every creative thing we might think, has been done before, or thought before, a gazillion times, and will be again a gazillion times. These things are - so says Boden - still creative because we couldn't have done them, or thought them, before that point. Something in our lives or our thought processes changed, and we were suddenly able to tweak the rules we'd been using so far, and by so doing access conceptual spaces that are new to us. P-creativity is interesting primarily because it tell us something about what it's like to be human. P-creativity is growing.

H-creativity (the 'H' stands for 'Historical') on the other hand, isn't about what it means to be human. It's about what it means to be one particular human - Leonardo, say, or Einstein. The sort of human who is capable of doing something, or thinking something, for the very first time among all humanity. It's what we tend to think of - and to value - as truly creative. We scorn P-creativity as unoriginal, hackneyed, cliched. But we shouldn't. By doing so we scorn what it's like to be human.

Though Zach Braff's hugely enjoyable Garden State might have some terrific jokes, it doesn't have an ounce of H-creativity. There's nothing in it that's truly creative or original. But that's okay. It's actually a film about P-creativity, on at least two separate levels.

Braff's thinly-autobiographical character, Andrew, travels home to New Jersey after a number of years away in LA, following his paraplegic mother's accidental (though perhaps not) death by drowning. He eschews the cocktail of anti-depressants and other deadening medication that he'd been on since he was a small child, and gradually the colours and feelings and sights and sounds and people from his home come seeping, then flooding, back into his life. He's then forced to confront a whole load of growing up very quickly. It's a bit like one of those wonderfully cheesy moments at the end of a film in which some character's aging is wilfully arrested, only to catch up on him during the denoument with a great whoosh of special effects. Andrew is forced to grow very quickly, and we watch him progress through the P-creativity that's what growing up consists of. Stuff he couldn't have known, or understood, until that moment. Cue a great deal - especially in the second half of the film - of slightly self-important and wow-heavy-man dialogue, but, well, that's what growing up feels like. It's largely the process of mistakenly thinking that our own tedious P-creativity is actually H-creative, and then becoming embarrassingly aware that, no, it's just plain old P. Everyone else has already been there, done that, got the T-shirt.

That P-creative naivety infuses Braff as a film-maker too. He's (way) young, and there's going to be a confidence and precision about his work some time soon, but it's not there yet. Garden State is full of ideas, and brimming with talent, but it's a first album from a band that hasn't quite decided what its sound is yet, and there's no unity to the music. So what we see is Braff discovering techniques that are new to him, mixing and matching them with an enthusiasm and innocence that provides the film's freshness. It's a film made with a P-creative verve, about a kid who's discovering what life's like. And being P-creative - going through the same old rites of passage and naive missteps - is what it's like, both as a film-maker and as a human being. Because life is new to us, and that's the whole point.

In which I can be bought for the price of a Chicken Bake

Okay, I feel rambly today. We'll start one place and end up somewhere else. This one isn't going to explode the Death Star, so much as take a few pot-shots at Mos Eisley, then scoot around aimlessly on Hoth, before spending a few centuries stuck in a swamp on Dagobah, and finally shooting at the exhaust port but just impacting on the surface.

Forgive a moment's ex-pat cliche, but we'll start with: British Foods That I Miss. Because, well, there are some that I miss, and it seems oddly unfair, now that we have such a global marketplace for many products, that foods are often very much not one of them.

There are sweets that I miss. Note: not candy, sweets. My chocolate fix is mostly dealt with by the fact that Hershey's makes Cadbury milk chocolate over here in some sort of licensing deal. Though I've always been puzzled by the substitution here of almonds for hazelnuts. Give me a bar of Whole Nut (whose whole nuts are hazelnuts) straight from the fridge rather than a bar of Fruit & Nut any day. And never quite quite mind that sometimes a bar of Galaxy is just what I'd go for. Cadbury's Dairy Milk does the job. As for the fruity, gummy stuff, there isn't anything in the US that I've really become attached to. I'm fond of Mike and Ike, but nothing (nothing, I say) comes close to the intense fruity and filling-loosening hit of a bag of Sports Mixture or Midget Gems or, frankly, anything, from the Lion Confectionery Co., who make the best sweets in the world. Trust me.

And then bacon. Yes, yes, I know that the US has something it calls bacon. It's a cut that we call 'streaky bacon' in Britain, and it's what you choose if you can't afford the real stuff, which is 'back bacon', a leaner, thicker, meatier cut. And, no, it's not the same as Canadian Bacon - that's something else still. US bacon has its place - which is typically as a garnish in burgers or for a bit of crispy crunch to accompany some scrambled egg at breakfast - but there's nothing quite like a bacon sandwich made with the real stuff: three or four thick rashers, not too crispy, with good-quality but otherwise plain white bread, lots of salt, and a little mayo. Some people swear by brown sauce, or ketchup, but I'm faithful to Hellman's myself. Yum. (Try Dino's Grill in Spitalfields for a fantastic breakfast, and some spectacular bacon.)

Bread's a funny item in the US, too. Two things are startling to me. The first is the vastness of the range of breads available over here. Potato breads and Hawaiian breads and sourdoughs and a huge range of wholewheat breads. The bread aisle is typically baffling to me, but I'm getting there. The second is how amazingly long this stuff lasts. US bread seems to be baked for longevity, rather than freshness. That has its advantages, of course, but I find myself missing stuff that's still warm from the oven. Even medium-sized supermarkets in the UK mostly have their own bakery these days, and there's a constant supply of warm, fresh baguettes and other loaves throughout the course of the day. Maybe it's an LA thing, but I've yet to find a really good, fresh and crusty baguette here. (Oh, and I miss Heroes in Oxford, too.)

But perhaps none of these bizarre omissions compares to the greatest one of all: the meat pie. Say 'pie' in the US and what you mean is typically a pie made from cooked fruit, and typically served as dessert. That's all well and good, but the combination of pastry (and/or perhaps potato) and meat (with perhaps some vegetables thrown in there too, if you're lucky) is something approaching bliss. Start at Cornish pasties and then continue through sausage rolls, steak & Guinness pies, shepherd's pie, cottage pie. (The North Gare recommendation for meat pies is Piemaker, a takeaway place on South Bridge in Edinburgh that used to be a haunt.) All the way from the hautest-cuisine Beef Wellington right down to the humble yet mighty Greggs. A complete meal in your hot little hand.

How is it that such a staple in one country can be mostly ignored in another? Beats me, and I'm in rambly mode today so I'm not even going to speculate. However - he says, emphasising that 'mostly' in the last sentence - I have found something that's a reasonable analogue (if not quite equivalent) of the Greggs meal-in-your-hand-for-less-than-a-pound. Moreover, it's politically correct. I'll explain.

There are many reasons to be in love with Costco. I'm very much attuned to the idea of boxes piled high which you navigate through yourself - even when buying significant consumer electronics. I get very grouchy when offered unsolicited 'help'. I'm constantly delighted by the Brobdingnagian sizes of the packs - forgive a mixed reference, but I feel like a shrinking Alice, having just nibbled the right side of mushroom. But there's something deeply, deeply civilised about the idea of a Coke and a Hebrew National ('We answer to a higher authority') hot-dog for a dollar-fifty. Moreover (too many moreovers, he says, moreover), that combo is perfectly enhanced by the addition of a Chicken Bake for less than three dollars, which is actually big enough for two people. And it's, whisper it, essentially a meat pie. It's that beloved fusion of pastry, meat, and a few vegetables, and it's quite yummy. Maybe you can go home, after all.

And what better than to shop somewhere that's on the side of the angels? I've spent much of the last few years in the US, and I've yet to walk through the doors of a Wal-Mart. I can't see that changing. It's not that Costco pays better. It's not that Costco's employees get better health benefits and are unionised. It's all about the Chicken Bake. How cheaply my allegiance can be bought.

Cricket! In LA!

It's true I tell you. A. and I spent a wonderfully peaceful and bucolic afternoon last Sunday at the LA Open Cricket Tournament, organised by the Southern California Cricket Association at Woodley Park in Van Nuys. It was the last day of the three-day event, involving twelve teams from as far away as Chicago and Trinidad & Tobago. We got there about noon, just in time for the last half-hour or so of the semi-finals, and then the whole of the final.

This was definitely post-colonial territory. Most of the teams were of either Indian/Pakistani or West Indian origin. Other than that, the afternoon couldn't have felt more oddly English. Despite being only a couple of miles into the San Fernando Valley, the Woodley Park grounds are huge, mostly-green oases of calm. The main pitch is shrewdly ringed by leafy trees, allowing badly-needed patches of shade all around the boundary. Granted in England this would have to have been a blisteringly hot day at the end of a long dry summer, but it could have been England.

Free (and yummy) Indian food was laid on by the caterers, and we also loaded up with free water and ice cream as we lounged lazily in the sun. The final itself was a clash of styles - both player and fan. It turned out to be between a Punjabi team, and a pseudo-national team from Trinidad & Tobago. Both Indian fans and players were aggressively passionate, loud and macho, whereas the Trinidadian fans were too busy having convivial - if hotly contested - games of dominos to concern themselves much with the cricket. As it turned out, they needn't have worried: both teams' bowlers were much of a muchness, but the Trinidadian batsmen quietly and professionally took the Punjabi bowling apart, and ended up winning at a canter.

The afternoon had a sleepiness to it that couldn't have been more appropriate. Done properly, cricket has a meditative quality to it that's soothing to the soul.

A Gricean Hitman

Paul Grice's analysis of the pragmatics of conversation, which concludes that conversation is a cooperative act which, if it's to be effective, should follow certain maxims, defines informal protocols for getting the message across effectively. It applies to both speaker and listener. To the speaker it says: Here's what to do if you want to be clearly understood. To the listener it says: Here's what you should assume the speaker is doing if you want to understand the various pragmatic implications in what you're hearing. In heavily paraphrased form, they look like this:

Quantity: Include as much information as you need to, but no more than that.

Quality: Don't say anything that you think is false, and don't claim anything more than you have evidence for.

Relation: Be relevant.

Manner: Be clear and to the point.

The Gricean maxims are based on a single, fundamental assumption, which is this: both speaker and listener want the conversation to involve the most effective and efficient transfer of information. (Though, since they set out principles for such transfer, the corollary is that they also set out how conversation might deliberately be perverted by violating the principles.)

Gricean maxims apply to stories too, though not without some interesting modifications. The modifications follow from the fact that the fundamental Gricean principle is violated: the speaker - the author, film-maker, playwright - no longer necessarily desires the most effective and efficient transfer of information, and often in fact desires to tease or even mislead the listener. Nevertheless, with the modifications applied, Gricean maxims can still work to inform how we process stories at a meta-level.

I find that I'm most interested in screenplay narratives these days, not so much for the visual, filmic quality - although that too - but because the modern screenplay is such a refined and constrained beast. As we sit through a two-hour film that maybe isn't working very well, we might think it's dragging along painfully, but two-hours-or-so is a hugely compressed time in which to tell a complex story. One of the effects of that compression is that the filmic Gricean maxims come into play all the more. This is especially true of the 'Hollywood' screenplay. I'd claim that the most significant difference between the 'Hollywood' screenplay (wherever it might be made, and by whom) and the 'Independent' screenplay (wherever it might be made, and by whom), is that the Hollywood screenplay squeezes as much juice as possible out of the Gricean maxims, particularly those of Quantity and Relevance. Independent screenplays are happy to use - and typically make a virtue out of - whimsy, loose ends, quirkiness. They're far more about character, and mood. Hollywood screenplays are essentially plot-driven stories. If you want to pack a complex plot into a couple of hours, it's got to be tightly packed. That means wasting nothing. Use and reuse every symbol, every location, every character that you can. Link the nodes in the story very richly, because you can't afford to spend time creating too many nodes. Everything's got to be relevant. Everything has to count.

Now, since most of us grow up processing these highly-Gricean film narratives, we know how they work, even if we don't realise how much we're aware of that. So much of our processing of such a narrative is at the meta-level. A listener new to the genre might ask questions which exist more at the story level than at the meta-level: 'Will James Bond manage to defuse the bomb before it explodes?'. But anyone who's been around the block once or twice knows that the correct question is more like: 'Of course James Bond will manage to defuse the bomb before it explodes. That's how these films work. But how will he do it in this case?'.

The Gricean questions of Quantity and Relation are somewhat merged. Since a Hollywood screenplay is by necessity so parsimonious with its ontology - it can only afford so many characters, so many locations, so much dialogue - we expect relevance. And if we're expecting it, to a certain extent we demand it, and would feel short-changed were it violated. (The same is not true of Independent films. We have different meta-level expectations of those - ones not concerned so much with plot mechanics.) We're constantly on the lookout for foreshadowing, which is just one way of having something serve double-duty in the film. We expect that there won't be loose ends, so as we process the film we're projecting the thus-far-loose ends forward to see if we can propose how they'd be joined up. Indeed, a simplistic (but not too simplistic) rule for the successful plot-driven film might be: Make sure all the ends are tied up (because that's what the audience wants), but not in the way that the audience has predicted (because although they want you to play fair, they like to be outwitted).

Which brings me, eventually, to Collateral, which follows the filmic Gricean maxims wonderfully, but fails in part almost because of that. Despite the star billing, the film introduces itself as Independent - seemingly shot in mostly natural light, lots of hand-held camerawork, digital film-processing for a gritty realism, creating an expectation that what we're going to get will be messy and quirky - but gradually becomes more Hollywood as it progresses, ending with every loose-end tied and every note of foreshadowing paid off. The consequence is that the audience is required to fade from one set of expectations to another during the course of the narrative, with some grinding of gears.

Specifically, a character is introduced at the beginning of the film in such a way that (kicking in the Gricean maxim of Quantity), we know she'll be back. It's a nice beginning, which serves to introduce us effectively to Jamie Foxx's taxi-driver character, but the Independent film would leave it there, as a loose end to be left dangling - or tied up in our imagination some time after the film's end. The Hollywood film, however, is parsimonious. It must have her return, and in such a way that she's central to the plot. It quickly becomes clear that the obvious way for her to return is as the final victim of Tom Cruise's hitman. We're told (kicking in the Gricean maxim of Relevance) all about her preparation for a case that she's prosecuting the next day. Stuart Beattie does his very best to smuggle this into the screenplay as just inconsequential character information, but we're in Hollywood territory by now, so we expect that this will be relevant. (Moreover, there's an added bit of meta-level processing here: since Jada Pinkett Smith gets up-high billing, and since there isn't really enough meat in the opening scene to justify this, if we're paying attention even the film's promotional materials are subject to a Gricean maxim of Relevance.)

When, towards the end of the film, we're finally told that Pinkett's character is to be the final victim, there really isn't any surprise. And there ought to be. It ought to be a chilling moment. But we're in Scooby-Doo land here. Quite apart from the fact that we know Pinkett's character will be back, and in a way that's central to the plot, the final victim can't realistically be anyone else. There are no other candidates that we already know, and we know that the last victim will be someone we know, because (kicking in the Gricean maxim of Quantity) otherwise Pinkett's first scene would be unnecessary information, and Hollywood screenplays can't afford that; and because (kicking in the Gricean maxim of Relevance) we know she must have some further relevance to the film.

Structurally, then, the film is a curious straddle of Independent and Hollywood. Otherwise, it's deeply absorbing and engaging. It feels like the first film I've seen about LA (not just set in LA but about LA) since I moved here, and it catches the city wonderfully well. It smells of LA. The disorientation of a long night awake, the constant contrast of the dark and neon, lights reflected on every surface. It's a journey both around and into the darkness of the city.

The Phone Event Horizon

Sometimes I feel like I'm walking in a wide corridor, filled with other people, except they're all heading in the other direction, and I can't figure out why. Example: this slashdotted piece on DrunkenBlog, which touches on various Digital Rights Management issues, but especially the idea of the convergence of various digital doodads - including, notably, Apple's iPod - on, heaven forfend, the mobile phone. The scrambling for a piece of the legal digital music industry at the moment is indeed ferocious, and I don't even pretend to be keeping up with it. I'm old-fashioned enough to prefer to buy CDs and then rip them to my laptop anyhow. Even though the days of vinyl gatefold magnificence are long gone, I still want the actual thing in my hand, damnit. Think of it as an a priori backup, if you like. But I do care enough that the idea of a mobile phone being the foundation of my digital life makes me want to gag.

I fully plan to be the last person on earth without a mobile phone. Phones generally strike me as hateful things. Their job is to interrupt you when you're doing something else, and then demand your attention. I have a truly physical reaction to the strident ringing of a telephone - especially, but not exclusively, when the call might be for me. It makes me tense, anxious, somewhere in my stomach. Go away, already. Send me an e-mail, which I can read when I'm ready, and then respond to in my own way, in my own time. Or I can ignore, if I'm not interested. Whatever.

Social telephone conversations are a kind of torture. I think in general I try to say something when I've got something to say, and shut the fuck up at other times; that mode doesn't transfer to phone conversations, which seem to me something like a tennis match, each person batting the ball gently back across the net. Put on the spot like that, I either clam up or make some feeble attempt to engage in, horrors, small talk, which I'm about as fluent in as Welsh, and which is as baffling to me. In person, conversation can have lulls and pauses, and naturally does. But over the phone silence is as deadly as to a radio DJ, and the pressure of looming silence turns me into a bag of nerves. I like silence. There's not nearly enough of it in the world. Actively trying to avoid silence when one has nothing particular to say feels deeply wrong.

Now, mobile phones have all of the irritation of their sedentary cousins, and add some more too. They go off in cinemas, and theatres, and libraries. They simply must be used whilst driving, it seems. I realise that I'm not exactly a people person, but, good grief, how much do people have to say to each other, such that they need to be contactable twenty-four hours a day?

The DrunkenBlog piece includes this bit of cognitive dissonance:

If you take a look at your desk, there are lots of gadgets you want to take with you. Your mobile phone of course, your PDA, your MP3 player, your USB pen-drive, your digital camera. But out of all of these, there's only one that you generally have with you at all times: your phone. Everything else is secondary; if you had to pick one thing, chances are it's going to be your phone.

Beg pardon? Putting aside the fact that, of those gadgets, the only one I actually own is the USB pen-drive thingy, this paragraph couldn't describe me any less accurately. I'd love to have a nice compact digital camera to carry around with me in my bag, ready to capture whatever. I'd love to have an iPod too. The PDA can realistically go screw itself; my laptop is almost small enough to carry almost everywhere I go, and big enough that I have to ask myself: do I really need this with me at all times? The answer to which is, of course, no. Besides, isn't what most people have on PDAs the sort of stuff that they'd have on their mobile phones these days? See? I have absolutely no idea. The technology flies past me like a mildly-irritating, buzzing thing that wants some lemonade. But the phone, the object of greatest desire for so many, wouldn't be on the desk in the first place. Unless it was someone else's desk, and I was just hoping to steal their Post-It notes. Now that's advanced technology.

Within a few blocks of where I'm sitting writing this, there are five mobile phone shops. Big gaudy things, the shops are essentially extended banner ads - outside and inside - for the products, the tiny, wee little phones that sit amongst the gaudery like venerated relics inside the hushed space of a cathedral. Douglas Adams wrote a piece in the original radio version of the Hitch-Hiker's Guide, in which Arthur ends up on a world that's been torn apart by - we eventually discover - a gradual creeping take-over by shoe-shops. The episode introduces the concept of the 'shoe event horizon', a point at which shoe shops have taken over so completely that no other kind of shop can exist. It's a kind of apocalypse for the civilisation, which implodes and reverts to more primitive times, living off the ground, where shoes aren't needed. I can't help thinking, in a not-very-serious-but-hey-this-is-a-blog sort of way, that we're heading towards a 'phone event horizon'. If that meant that we'd subsequently revert to simpler, quieter times, when we talk - quietly, thoughtfully - with people when we're actually with them, and otherwise write - quietly, thoughtfully - to people when we're not with them, then it can't come quick enough for me.

Dogpiles and Giants

I read a piece a while ago, but can't remember where (hey, I'm super-informative, aren't I?), which bemoaned the fact that most web-browser users actually use them in ways that the designers scarcely intended, and also make use of very very few of the features that would help them to get results that are useful and targeted.

One example of bizarre behaviour is that most browser-users apparently fail to distinguish between the address box at top of the browser window, into which URLs can be typed directly, and the search box of their favourite search-engine. The result of this is that, since search is what people do all the time - it's what they know - it's common for them to type a URL, even if they know what it is, into the search-engine's search box, and then find the link to the site they want from the search results, rather than to feed the URL to the browser directly. It's one of those <hits head> moments that drive programmers slightly nuts. No matter how much care and attention you might lavish on interface design, the user knows best, and won't be gainsaid.

An example of inefficient search behaviour is that users typically make use of none of the more-advanced search-syntax features that most engines provide. None of the boolean operators, nor the ability to search for pages without specific words, for example. Most users scarcely even use quotation marks to identify the search term as a phrase, rather than just an unordered collection of words.

Both of these examples, and others too, are shown very clearly in a whizzo new feature of meta-search-engine Dogpile. It lets you see - in what it claims is 'real-time' - searches that other people have submitted. URLs submitted as search terms seem to account for perhaps one in ten searches, and quotation marks to define phrases are few and far between.

I have my doubts about the unfiltered nature of the 'unfiltered' searches. Conventional wisdom has it that 'sex' is the most common search term, and I've yet to see that once. Searches for 'food' seem to arise with startling regularity, however. ('Whaddya want? Bagels? Noodles? Sushi? Be more specific, can't ya? I'm trying to be relevant here!') There are certainly plenty of icky searches. A favourite is 'mouth watering twat' - I'm amused by it, you understand, not in search of it. But not so many as you might think.

Many of the search terms, in fact, have bizarre juxtaposition that reminds me of nothing so much as They Might Be Giants (a favourite tipple of mine) song titles. And so, with a great big TAN-TA-RA!, I proudly announce the very first North Gare quiz, courtesy of Dogpile and TMBG. Mixed in amongst the following are ten They Might Be Giants song titles, and ten actual, real search-terms courtesy of Dogpile. Your mission is of course to decide which is which. TMBG fans are excused. No fair if you already know their stuff.

Okay, here we go:

1. nudist grand junction
2. turtle tattoo
3. college as a waste of time
4. the big big whoredom
5. chess piece face
6. how great thou art techno
7. neon sign in madison
8. hypnotist of ladies
9. why does the sun shine?
10. miss nude usa
11. s-e-x-x-y
12. low hanging balls
13. shoehorn with teeth
14. playground pokemon
15. wooden gun rack
16. purple toupee
17. dark & metric
18. xtc vs. adam ant
19. build pirate ship
20. hemlock meadows camping

Highlight the invisible text below for the answers:

TMBG are responsible for 4, 5, 8, 9, 11, 13, 14, 16, 17, 18. Dogpile must take the rest.

Score 5 and under, and you are Your Own Worst Enemy. Score 6 to 10, and you are, at least, a Mammal. Score 11 to 15 and your Bangs probably are that on which the world hangs. Score 16 to 20, and there is almost certainly a Birdhouse in Your Soul.