London 2012 again

I know I've already talked about this, but I had to come back to it.
Somebody pointed out to me the other day that the London 2012 logo looks rather like Lisa Simpson giving a blow job to a person unknown.
This seems like one of those ink blot tests that are designed to see if you're likely to become a serial killer sometime soon but I can see what they mean. I wouldn't have seen it myself, but now it's been pointed out to me, I can't see it as anything else.
I also hadn't noticed how "London" had been printed with the irksome but trendy affectation of favouring a lower case initial letter. How very annoying that is. Capital letters seem to be used somewhat randomly more and more. I don't approve!

Arise, Sir Salman

So, the furore this week surrounding Britain’s allegedly troubled relationship with Islam is that Salman Rushdie appeared in the Queen’s birthday honours list and is to become Sir Salman Rushdie. The nonsense starts with the fact that those named on which are not chosen by the Queen nor is it issued on her real birthday, so it is neither her honour nor her birthday, but I digress.

Salman Rusdie achieved great fame by being sentenced to death (in absentia) by the late Ayatollah Khomeini, whom I imagine was nicknamed “Laughaminute” by his friends. This “fatwa” is now not officially sponsored by Iran but a good proportion of the allegedly devout (for which read violent nutters) support it. Put it this way, I’d not want to live next door to the Rushdies nor be on the same flight as him.

He won the major UK prize for literature before he wrote the Satanic Verses, a book that I am reliably informed is not very good. It’s hardly unusual for an author of his fame to be given an honour of this sort. The government of Pakistan has angrily demanded that the Queen retracts the honour because “The move is part of a campaign being waged in Europe and the West to hurt the feelings of Muslims”. No, boys and girls, it’s called free speech. Pakistan should feel entirely welcome to give whatever honour it bestows on any author who writes a dull book that allegedly defames Christianity, the Queen, homosexuality and anything else that I consider to be part of my culture and personal make-up. That’s why England and Pakistan are separate nation states. We pander far too much to the affected brittleness of others, be they Pakistani or Welsh speakers.

Once more I feel principally concerned that the sort of tiresome, deeply predictable flag burning and affected hysteria reflects very badly on the vast majority of calm, sensible Muslims. I imagine a great many of them today are thinking “not in my name”. At least, I hope so. I am actually quite pleased that whoever decided to give this UK honour to a UK citizen rightly disregarded as irrelevant the opinions of an hysterical, posturing, ill-informed group of head cases. We should not refrain from giving an honour in these circumstances any more than we should choose to bestow an honour on Martha Stewart because a lot of Americans believe she’s a great person.

Islam appears to me to attract far too much attention from a crazy minority whom we all need to stand up to. This is straightforward bullying, dressed up as a more reasonable request for respect for the religion of another. The British high commissioner had been summoned to the Pakistan government’s offices for a good dressing down. That is their right. I really believe that Pakistan’s high commissioner to the UK should be summoned to Buckingham Palace, where I heartily encourage the Queen to exercise her right (being head of state and thus above the laws of the land) to bend over and show him her arse. Go on Liz, I dare you.

Perils of not knowing your brands

I don’t like clothes shopping. On my most recent trip to Australia I found a brand of T-shirts that I really like so I did my usual thing in these situations. I bought two t-shirts and immediately wished I’d bought more. For some reason, Australian clothes appeal to me. In an attempt to procure more similar kit with the same logo, I went online to see if I could buy any direct from the manufacturer or some UK distributor. Imagine my considerable surprise when I discovered that “element” is a brand pretty much exclusively worn by skateboarders. I’d sort of come to accept that O’Neill, Billabong and Rip Curl are very Australian and somewhat associated with surfers but this doesn’t really bother me. Australians of many ages continue to surf and it’s normal to wear that stuff without actually being a surfer. But skateboarding? As if.

Even when I was 20 years younger and 20 pounds lighter, in the absolute best case I would have looked ungainly on a skateboard. Well, ungainly and fearful. Ungainly, fearful and oddly improbable. Sort of like David Cameron when he’s trying to look down with the kids. Right now, I’d look like a bad comedy sketch. So I now realise that my favourite t-shirts are an unwitting attempt to tell the world “I really like skateboarding, me.” Hopefully there won’t be any other skateboarders in the streets of Manchester to notice. Don’t tell, ok?

Jamaica deserves better

I've now got home from Jamaica. Fundamentally, Jamaica sucks for the reasons in one of the blogs below. I feel sad for the overwhelming majority of Jamaicans, who I found to be lovely people. Sure, customer service can be surly and the place needs some serious work to be a viable tourist destination, but this is small scale stuff. Most Jamaicans are very decent, passionate people who really deserve to live in a safer, less corrupt, place than they do. This is a subject much discussed by the Jamaicans I met.
I've no idea what to do to deal with the corrpution and crime that's slowly destroying their society. I hope that somebody works it out.

What's Welsh for "bullshit"?

I read on the BBC news website this morning (here) that Thomas Cook travel agents are in trouble for alleged racism. The reason? They requested that Welsh speaking staff in their Bangor office hold work-related conversations in English rather than Welsh. There is uproar. These are my initial thoughts:

• Good luck to anybody who speaks Welsh. It’s a lovely language and it’s an important part of the Welsh heritage (but nothing to do with my English heritage so I don’t feel any personal connection with it).
• In a work environment, it’s practical to require that the dominant language is spoken by everybody. If not, things go wrong. It’s completely practical.
• When in Wales, English people are generally paranoid that Welsh speakers drop into Welsh only when bitching about the English people. Given how few people speak Welsh as their first language, code switching into Welsh (as a second language) is mostly an active choice in the way that a friend of mine and I sometimes switch to Czech when we don’t want to be understood. This therefore uses a language as a deliberate barrier, which isn’t good publicity for the language and culture.
• I can’t find any solid statistics for what proportion of Welsh people speak Welsh as their first language, but it seems to be about 10% from a quick look at various surveys online. I also suspect that a lot of people would claim is to be their first language for patriotic reasons but truly it isn’t. In the United Kingdom, the de facto national language is English. Welsh and Gaelic should be kept alive, but not to the exclusion of commonsense.

If the office in question is made up of Welsh speakers, then requiring them to speak English as the official office language would be an outrage. But somebody must have complained to Thomas Cook’s HR department here. That suggests that there’s a certain amount of nastiness behind the use of a language that others don’t speak. Welsh deserves more than to be used as a code language for work place bitching.

Three cheers for amateurs!

Today’s my 38^th birthday. I am in a hotel that resembles a prison in a place I’m not fond of. Rather than being downhearted, I am using the time to do some serious catching up on rubbish on the Internet for the morning. Then I shall spend this afternoon doing some work that is now very overdue. It’s my birthday though, so sod it: I am going to take the morning off.

The picture to the above right is the official logo of the 2012 Olympic games in London. I, for one, think that it’s shite. I also expect that it took a lot of cash to produce it.

The BBC online invited people to send their own contributions in and I personally thought the one below was great. It’s altogether better than the rubbish they actually chose, although I suspect it came from some small time guy who isn’t an amateur, but who doesn’t work for some big agency.

So very often, the amateurs or the small guys are so very much better, yet are pretty much always overlooked. It’s a shame.

Jamaica: Lovely people, yet hard to love

I’ve not been blogging much recently. I feel fairly sure that my blogees continue to have fulfilling and happy lives without my ramblings, but they do then stop tuning in.

The reason is that I’ve been dealing with a seasonal spike of work and travelling a lot. Sadly, I mostly travel to places I don’t altogether love, such as the Czech Republic and Jamaica, where I am right now.

I pity poor people who come to Jamaica for holidays because I think it’s a dangerous shithole. Many of the people you meet are lovely, but many clearly just hate your guts because you’re white. Oh yes, racism is a two way street. As the experience of being in a white minority goes, it’s a world away from Ghana and Zambia. Also, things work in Zambia and it doesn’t come with the impression that everybody’s trying to rip you off or trick you somehow.

After a long flight, my pre-booked pickup at the airport wasn’t there. After about 20 minutes of loitering, along with a number of other lily white assed people, I began to feel that I was starting to look like the wildebeest that was tiring first. I thus expected to become prey to some scandal. Then I eventually noticed somebody holding an A4 piece of paper, rolled up and yet through which I could see my name. There was my pick up, found by accident. Things just don’t work here. He was a nice enough guy, but he’d just arrived and thought nothing of being late. Trust me, after a flight of nearly 10 hours, in 32 Centigrade heat but wearing clothes for an English early morning, you don’t want delays.

At the hotel, I was checked into a room which I strode into, sighed heavily and noticed that the room was already amply filled by a big angry bloke. It had taken me ten minutes of humping luggage about (no lift, no offer of help) before I’d found it, as the room numbering system is truly random. No apologies followed for the error but I now have a room with aircon. I’m making the most of it, as apparently it stopped working for a day yesterday.

I just want to be at home. The Caribbean generally is very over-rated (give me Greece or Spain any day).

The picture is a snap of the pretty view from my bedroom window. It aint pretty, but I’m glad the barbed wire is there.

Now don't let me encourage any racism here. One of the reasons I dislike it as I do is because I honestly am entirely indifferent to the colour of a person's skin myself, yet I feel a lot of Jamaicans make assumptions about me because I happen to be white. I've no respect for racists, but ignoring nastiness becasue the people invovled happen to be black is itself racist. Colour doesn't matter: if somebody's an arse who happens to be black, they're still an arse. Period.