The Uncertainty Principle

I've been on tenterhooks/ending in dirty looks

Starting this-so-called- 'blog I promised myself I would never write an entry about "blogging". Don't get me wrong, there are several bloggers who can write eruditely and interestingly about the relevance and significance of the media-form. I am not one of them. As such anything I wrote about it would be about as valid and useful asking self-important and enbittered unpublished author whether they thought their work was significant or not.

Any previous development in publishing and communications (be it wood-cuts, the printing press, mechanised periodical production or TV) have brought about an explosion of two phenomena. Popular religious works and pornography. If you don't believe me, ask Robert Darnton.

So in a sense the interweb marks a qualitative development as it has brought around an explosion in religious publications, pornography but also emoticons.

Blogging is great, and if you don't read, Harry Hutton, Jah Jah Dub, John Band, or Pootergeek, you really are missing out. Since I started reading them I have been entertained, amused, informed and made to think to varying degrees.

The recent clashes over on Pootergeek's comments however, show some of bloggings limitations. While I enjoy reading things that challenge my opinions, it does get seriously frustrating when people who can't argue or make rational points, fail to understand both what someone is saying and the nature of the medium in which they are publishing it.

As Simon Munnery once said, "A Million monkeys were given a million typewriters, it was called the Internet".

A lot of people work in the same place/don't let them get in your way

In my final year at University I used to cut-out and collect interesting looking adverts for jobs* I would have absolutely no hope of getting but that would be roughly in the field of my desired career. Someone who knows more than me about the world of work suggested that this would help begin to focus me on "career goals". Well, I think that's what they said. To be honest I tend to tune out after people start talking to me about shifting paradigms.

After graduation, however, I found the chasm between the ambitious youthful naivety of the jobs scrapbook and the grim reality of graduate scheme rejection letters seriously disheartening. It was lucky therefore, that I never saw this job advertised before starting proper work. It would give you a deeply wrong impression of how the world works.

Is it just me or is there something wonderfully eighteenth-century about this position? Sounds like something a Provincial French Academy would have offered Rousseau as an essay competition prize - "a 'vision' of how the world or their corner of it can become more just, more peaceful". Brilliant.

Hats off to them. It makes me feel like giving all of next month's rent to the Foundation just for floating this as a serious venture. Please someone exceptional and visionary I know apply for this and let me know how it goes; and if the opportunity comes up, mention that idea for the sofa-car I've been developing.

* I too find it staggering that I have ever managed to get a girlfriend.

How can we be abstract when we're always on the brink/ of finding something new

With friends, family and colleagues being firmly wedged into '05 like me into a plate of Cadbury's Mini Rolls, I felt it is high time for me to sort out my New Year's resolutions.

1. Find an occasion to make and consume a multi-tier Pavlova. Preferably with some other people present (see point four below). My previous attempts at meringue would have been far too brittle to stack for that authentic 'Last-days-of-Rome' style excessive indulgence.
2. Read more Jerome K Jerome, after re-discovering in 2004 that his Late-Victorian man-about-town witticisms still strike home for the early-twenty-something posturing fop, trying to make something of himself in 2005.
3. Buy and learn books on international relations, so before difficult meetings I can say to my boss, 'This reminds me of those testing hours at Potsdam when...'
4. Stop claiming a high metabolism allows me to devour cakes and biscuits whenever I damn well please. Continue to eat said items, but face up to my gluttony.
5. Stop using the phrase, 'in terms of' in either written or spoken form.
6. Start referring to girls I don't know well as 'Duchess', as a general term of endearment.

They put the numb into number they put the cut into cutie

Several things other than being ill annoyed me about Christmas 2004. Firstly, a nomination for Pseud's Corner.

"Bush Monkeys, by any measure, is an intelligent, civil and beautiful
expression of the artist's frustrations with the current presidential
administration. It is a wonderful example of responsible and effective political
criticism." (Source: BBC News Online)

Second, was the succession of broadsheet cartoonists making 'hilarious' parallels of Father Christmas as an illegal immigrant or bearded terrorist suspect. Oh I get it! He's got a beard! He's foreign! He could be, like, an immigrant! That's funny!

Things that were unashamedly brilliant about Christmas 2004:

• Watching Shrek for the third time. I particularly favour the torture and interrogation of the Gingerbread Man; "Do you know the Muffin Man?"
• Reading a new Elvis Costello biography by my mum and dad's fire, hitting the chocolate wafers rather hard.
• The poppy wall-of-sound mix of voice, horns and keys on the Costello track TKO (Boxing Day) on Punch the Clock.

Robyn Wilder's blog has an impressive and readable account from some friends of hers that survived the Tsunami.