In Leicestershire Ego Est

...which looks a lot better than "made it" as a title.

The journey was best expressed as a series of vingettes, really.

Sky Harbor
Two airport workers express an interest in my Kindle 2. We chat - or rather, they chat and I do a very geeky gush about the technology - and then one of the pair (the shorter, slightly more aggressive one) says how he's always two or three years behind the curve to get the cheaper kit and to let the format wars settle down, which is how he got his BluRay player for almost nothing. I nod, and tell him about Toshiba selling the HD-DVD format to China, and what this will mean for grey market imports. He leaves looking concerned.

PHX to LAX
I'm reading the Sharpe novels, in order. The guy sitting next to me on the plane tells me he likes the Kindle 2 and wants to know more. There is another geeky gush from me about the K2, and this time I manage to cover some of the downsides to the device too.

LAX
A heavily armed security guard stops me to ask questions about my bag. My carry-on luggage is a replica Mk7 gas mask bag from Magnoli, of the type sported by Indiana Jones in "Raiders". He likes it, but was more concerned with whether it was functional. I assure him not, and even so I don't have a WW2 vintage gas mask. (And even if I did all I would do is wander around asking "Are you my Mummy?").

LAX is HUGE! Bigger than that, in fact, and in a state of disrepair.

At the international terminal, which LAX uses as a last attempt at getting money out of visitors (ten dollars for a sammich? You have to be kidding me!), the announcements in English are made by a guy who has a "Welcome! to the woooorld of tomorrow!!!" voice. Don't know what that is? Watch the first episode of "Futurarma".

LAX to FRANKFURT
Any way you cut it, flying economy sucks.

The journey was made marginally less hideous by the following elements:
- the very pleasant german lady I sat next to. She spoke very little English, I spoke very little German, we found ways to communicate.
- assorted movies. I never thought I would be glad to see "Night in the Museum 2", or "The Proposal", but I was. I was also glad to see "My Life In Ruins" and a John Malkovich movie in which he plays a character based on The Amazing Kreskin.
- the Doctor Who soundtracks for seasons 1 to 4, parts of which made all the turbulence over Greenland entertaining rather than worrying. Somewhere out there, someone has to have had the idea of a Doctor Who thrill ride.

Frankfurt Airport
The taps in the Gents are rather more intelligent than I would like. As you approach the basin, the tap turns itself on. The flow is quite...forceful, one assumes to get the water hot enough to do any good, but immediately you place your hands anywhere near it, the tap slows the flow down and thereby avoids you spraying water over yourself and anyone standing near you.

This usefully entertained me for some minutes, which was just as well because at this point I was little more than an ambulatory fungus anyway.

I did another little demo about the Kindle whilst waiting for the near plane - Frankfurt to Birmingham - and the final flight I admit I spent in something of a daze.

Birmingham
My how efficient it all was. In baggage retrieval I couldn't change money in order to get a trolley, nor could I get my hands on any UK currency. No one seemed to know anything very much, so I yomped the length of another bloody airport looking for my next connection. Eventually I made my way to the station and got on the right train. I navigated Birmingham New Street with whole minutes to spare, whilst assorted Rail staff watched me being kicked around by my luggage.

To be fair, they'd no idea how little sleep I'd had in the last 24 hours and they had no idea how difficult everything had become.

Leicester
The hotel: cheap and cheerful, theIbis in Leicester has MDF tables with a matress slung on the top for beds. The showers have little or no water pressure, something of a disappointment to end the mighty crossing with.

Everything else, though, is fab.

It's good to be back.

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Stumbling from the wreckage

Wow....

OK, so I now have everything packed and tomorrow's fun is down to "everything not already in a bag is being thrown away!"

Also, I sat down and to chill out sewed a button on a pair of shorts that I might never have reason to wear again, but which are nevertheless coming with me.

It worked really well. It's bed time.

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So much for the cunning plan.

There's an art to packing and moving.

Basically, it involves planning out what you need to to and breaking everything down into small stages. Ideally, you'd take a room a day and pace yourself, making sure that everything had a place and that you carefully considered what needed to be where. Then nothing would be a rush and everything would have a place. There would be no last minute panics, no frantic rushes.

It's a good plan, and it would probably have worked, except that having made my plan I then ignored it.

Never do this.

So now I'm panicking a bit. Not much, because I have a whole day tomorrow for things to happen in, so it's not too bad. Yet. But because I am now blogging instead of working I think I might be in a bit of denial about what needs to happen next.

I thought blogging this might be a nice little break while I rally the troops once more to have another crack at sorting out the bedroom and living room - which, really are the two remaining places to deal with.

I fly on Wednesday. That's the day after tomorrow, and tomorrow all my stuff goes away (yikes) and the stuff that isn't going away or coming with me is garbage. There's quite a lot of it, and it is mostly actual garbage. Why have I kept so many boxes? What was the attraction in hording all these plastic bags? Whatever the reason, I think they're becoming packing material and that works quite well. I have some fragile stuff to carry with me.

The other big issue is: 50lbs per bag. It's not really very much, is it? I worry that I might have to shed some items, although to be fair I have tried to send the heavy stuff on ahead. There are issues, though, and these I have to resolve tonight.

Now, in fact.

Which is why I'm here at the keyboard, using writing as an excuse to not deal with real life much as I sometimes use real life as an excuse not to deal with writing.

Ah well. Back to work. I shall blog at you once more from England.

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Keeping the Faith

America is becoming increasingly Godless, says Glenn Beck, and this is the cause of everything bad!

For those of you who don't know...Glenn Beck is a former standup comedian turned conservative talking head. He, as you can see, is on the Fox network.

Early in the piece he makes several claims.

1: ten commandments at a court house

2: Can't pray in school

3: Can't sing Christmas carols in this country.

Oh and the national motto "In God we trust" is being taken off the currency.

I'll let Snopes take the currency issue.

One of the things about the USA is that it doesn't have, or sanction, a national or state religion. Quite a few Christians wish this were otherwise, although they're still very much in the minority.
The USA doesn't have a state religion because it was founded on principles of religious freedom. The state is entirely separate from the church (or churches), as in France.

To a Brit like me, this seems a little odd. When I grew up, there were daily faith based assemblies in school and we sang hymns. We also sang a lot of groovy christmas carols at Christmas. None of this prevented me from growing up Agnostic, but at least I got to enjoy all the religious flummery that goes along with holidays like Easter and Christmas. At least I understood what those holidays were for. Kids in the USA do too, although they also associate nearly everything with the acquisition of cards and sweets. Commercialized? Why yes! Certainly!

That aside, the reasons that kids don't say prayers in school is because the schools in which they may not pray are State schools. They are funded by a government which is constitutionally unable to pick religious sides. The First Amendment to the Constitution says

Amendment I

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

So schools either represent all faiths or none. Which is great, really. How hard would it be to get into a multi-faith based system that represented all the major religions?

Well, except that the USA cannot prohibit the free exercise of any faith. Which means that any faith based assembly is going on for a while and will contain some startlingly contradictory elements; it's got to represent the assorted schismatic factions of Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism...the list is endless. And you just know that the Scientologists would want equal representation, as would the Pastafarians and possibly some of my own nearly-beloved Discordians. Also, what would be wrong with Rastafarians wanting in on the deal? Or Satanists? Or the members of the Reformed Cult of the Ichor God Bel-Shamharoth? Or even Cthulhu cultists?

No, that way lies madness. So, no prayers in school.

As for the singing of Christmas carols, well, people are at liberty to do so. Just not in schools. There are some commercial groups - like Wal Mart - who would prefer to not alienate their non-Christian customers at Christian festival times (because Wal-Mart is a tool of Mammon, when you get down to brass tacks, and doesn't care what's happening to your immortal soul as long as it can have your cash in the here and now, and it knows that infidels of all kinds have money).

Of course, this could all be taken care of if the President was also a Defender of the Faith (and no, Charles, you can't be defender of the faiths, you get the title from Henry VIII who was named it by a Pope and didn't give it back after he broke from the Church). The President could pick one of the countless flavours of Christianity.

They really are without number, especially as it turns out that Baptists regard each and every church building as a separate little faith-ette. Which is quite scary. Or they just have a healthy respect for swimming and wet t-shirts. Who can say?

I would count them, but it gets confusing after you've hit the big ones (Catholics, Anglicans, Lutherans, Unitarians, Latter Day Saints, Menonites, Jehovah's Witnesses, Baptists, Methodists) and you soon get lost trying to work out which ones regard the others as Christian and which don't. Apparently the Baptists still think that the Catholics aren't Christian because they "worship Mary".

IN the light of all this, is it any wonder that the Founders of the nation took a look at the state of religion in their time (and I suspect that Thomas Jefferson may have sneaked a peak into the future as well), and decided that if you wanted all the colours of the rainbow to be seen equally, you had to make sure there was no chance of one being allowed to drown the others out.

Hence this nation being Godless, apparently. But given the number of churches, temples and places of worship I pass on a daily basis, I can't help but think that there are more gods here than anywhere else in the world.

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Artists? Making money? That'll never catch on!

Amanda Palmer says something important which I cannot find fault with. Go, read her blog.

Back so soon?

OK. So my position is that I'm not a consumer. Consumers are what corporations wish we were - passive, dull, happy to accept the next thing on the production line. This attitude has got them into trouble, because while the customers were changing the suppliers were not and all of a sudden it turns out that maybe we've been giving the wrong people the money.

In times past, a good artist could find themselves a rich person to glom onto. Said rich person wanted to be seen to be wealthy and what better way of demonstrating your ridiculous levels of disposable wealth than by supporting an artist? These people were referred to as Patrons. "Oh," they would say "he/she is such a patron of the arts!" and they would fan themselves. Or something.

The point is, we're actually all in a position to be able to do that. To an extent. I'd like nothing more than to be able to amble up to...ooo.. Charles Stross and say "What ho, Charles, here's thirty large. Sequester yourself away in yon drafty garret and turn out another of your excellent scientific romances."

I can't, much to my (and Charles Stross's) disappointment. What I can do, and what Amanda Palmer is suggesting I do, is give money directly to the artist. It's a world idea, really. Instead of saying "I do like the latest song, Ms Palmer, and have bought your CD! Here, enjoy this fraction of what I gave a record company" I can just hand her the entire five, ten, twenty bucks...or perhaps a smaller amount for just the one song as a download.

Why do I like this? Two reasons.

1: I don't like supporting the maniacs who currently run the music, movie and games industries*. I don't like giving Those People money because they think I'm a criminal scuzzbucket moron who they're happy to treat like dirt that they own. This is a misconception I wish to clear up. So if I can circumvent them, I will.

2: Enlightened Self Interest. This year it has become very obvious that writing is what I enjoy most. I want to be able to stop doing awful jobs and become a writer. If I can do that by producing things people like and might actually pay me to own/read etc, then what I want to do is make it really easy for them to support me.

So how about it? I think she's right. Does anyone disagree?



*I will support publishing because I'm addicted to books, I can't help myself. The other day I was shopping for a power adapter and accidentally bought a book at the same time. I'm a reader, I'm hopelessly hooked. I have a Kindle 2, 300 books on that (give or take) and it's just not enough! God help me if I ever own a house again.

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I quit!

...my job, at least.

I've got two weeks at my current employment and then I'm taking flight, literally.

I can't wait to quit. Much as I like the people I work with - most of them, anyway - I've had about enough of the company itself. There have been some interesting reactions.

Overwhelmingly, the people I have told have been glad for me. Two have said they'll be sad to see me go, but just about everyone else is making the best of a bad job in a company they aren't particularly happy to be working for. The reason they're staying? Again, overwhelmingly, it's because there's nothing better to go to.

This is actually a little sad. There are some nice, talented people at the place where I work and some of them deserve a bit better (or a lot better) than they're getting. I suppose it all depends on what they are willing to risk in order to better themselves, and what the price for failure might be. For a lot of my colleagues, the price of failure would be too high, and that's to be regretted. I hope things improve for them and opportunities arise for them to leave too.

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Series Cancellations, TV Conservatism and The BBC

Yes, I'm returning to a current bugbear. The thing is, many folks in the UK have no idea what they would be letting themselves in for if the UK's television landscape became like the USA's.

A quick reminder of How Things Are in the land of the free: Television programs exist to create a reason for you to watch adverts. Their primary purpose is to sell advertising space. This is how the networks make most of their money. A TV show that doesn't get an audience is taking up valuable space which could be better used by a TV show that people actually watch.

It's not about art. It's not about good. It's about "watched".

Our case in point is the ABC series Defying Gravity. This was a brave attempt to write some interesting sci-fi coupled with the proven-popular mechanics of relationships and angst as seen on Gray's Anatomy. Add to this the now-popular "every episode contains flashbacks" thing, as popularized by Lost and we have a patent way to get to know the characters and their inter-relationships while we advance the plot.

The plot is a goodie: after a tragic Mars mission, NASA decides to take a Grand Tour of the solar system. In flashback, we follow the crew of the ship through training and selection. In "realtime" we follow the progress of the mission and the challenges they face. The production design is nice - very "20 minutes into the future" - and the characters are engaging and interesting. They're all sympathetic to a greater or lesser degree, so the ensemble cast works really well, and we have only one real standout villain - the control freak Mission Director back on Earth.

We also have a problem: a mysterious entity known only as "Beta" is with the crew. We know it's alien and very powerful, but nothing else. In Episode 8, after all hell has broken loose, Beta decides to reveal itself to the crew. They stand in front of an open door - some are awestruck, some disquieted, and one is wondering what the hell is going on...and we only have to wait a week to find out for ourselves.

Except that episode 8 is the last we will ever see on broadcast TV. The show was quietly - and I had to Google "defying gravity cancelled" in order to find the news - canceled with the remainder of the 13 episodes to be seen. They won't be broadcast, so when ABC releases the DVD we can buy them and watch them that way.

I was watching the show on the Hulu website, since I don't have a TV, and was therefore contributing to the ratings. However, the show is gone. The stated reason for the cancellation was that the show was "having trouble finding an audience". This means that the ratings were not where they needed to be in order for the show to be worth broadcasting. Not that it failed, or was bad, but it just didn't get watched by enough people. It may not have been watched by enough people as it was shown, so they might not have included the online viewers. I don't have the figures, so I don't know.

However, it's my case in point: in a commercial environment the success and failure of a TV show, the drivers for every decision made about it, are economic. Let's use a more familiar example: Doctor Who would have been canceled in 1963 after the first story: BBC Execs were not happy with the show, it seemed to be having trouble finding an audience too - and if they'd been looking at advertising revenue, we would never have seen "The Dead Planet" let alone an actual Dalek.

If this sounds like sour grapes because a show I was watching got canned, you'd be wrong: I was far more invested in Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles which was just as interesting and well written, but also didn't get an audience. Primarily, I think, because not enough things exploded.

It's possible that Defying Gravity was too scifi for the Not We and not Scifi enough for the We. It's possible that the We decided there were too many squishy organic relationship things going on and this show was clearly for [edit: Not We], while the Not We were having a hard time reconciling the presence of people in space and an alien with romance and angst. These things are not mutually exclusive, but the audience was having a hard time deciding whether it liked the combination and ABC weren't really helping with the marketing. This show should have been perfect: it should have been a show that the Scifi Nerds with Normal Partners could have watched together, but for some reason that didn't happen. It's a shame, since I think it could have happened, but the show wasn't allowed time to develop. It was on the air for two months, and I found it on Hulu totally by accident whilst trying to find Better Off Ted.

Now imagine if this were to happen to the BBC. The typical BBC season is six episodes. If the BBC were dependent on ads it might kill a show after three. ITV axed Primeval because it was too expensive, and this means that we end up in an environment where if a show is going to succeed it has to be cheap. So you can kiss Torchwood and The Sarah Jane Adventures, a third season of Being Human, another season of Survivors and almost anything else not guaranteed high viewing figures goodbye. The TV landscape doesn't have space for anything that isn't able to justify the production costs, which is why we have seen so much reality TV over the years and why so much if it is awful.

It also means that TV becomes formulaic, that there is little or no risk taking in story or script, that you simply don't take chances. Look at the output of the BBC over the last few years and compare it to ITV and Channel 4. Look at the output of NBC, CBS, ABC and compare them with HBO.

If we end up parceling out the license fee or making the BBC accept adverts, we will end up with conservative, dull, ugly TV where nothing interesting or dangerous ever happens.

The alternative to the BBC is not something we want to see, because the alternative is shit.

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