sweet effay

Bank holidays, don’t you just love them? We were unable to get an Internet connection all weekend; I have a suspicion that our ISP is trying to force us to move to broadband by making life unpleasant. I never realized just how addicted to the Net we are: I have spent hours upon end sitting here playing Diablo II on one computer, autodialing with the other, whilst very fifteen minutes Mrs effay has been popping her round the door asking whether we’ve got a connection yet. Still, I’ve finally got a connection this morning and it only took ninety minutes.

Except, tomorrow the effay Tactical Nuclear Unit is off on manoeuvres. Long time readers will remember the argument about the tent: We are now off to test out our existing one so that Mrs effay can prove to me that it isn’t big enough, and I can prove to her that she will never get all the stuff she wants to take into the car, let alone a bigger tent. Still the question now is will we be able to cope without computers?

I was going to write about Van der Graaf Generator this weekend, but now I’ll just confine myself to saying that the new album is really very fine. Peter Hammill’s voice is not what it once was, but it will do. There’s just over half an hour of songs and a second CD consisting of studio jams. You know how Hammill is always going on about how Vital wasn’t particularly representative of VdGG? Well this stuff sounds a lot like more like Vital than the other albums, being really rough and strident. I always liked Vital, so I’m not complaining.

Psychbloke goes for an illustrated philosophical top three of Hume, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche. Having just charged through all the A level philosophy set texts, I had to re-read Beyond Good and Evil and, ermm, didn’t enjoy it at all. I found the whole thing rather too hysterical for my taste. Given the fact that I’ve been banging on about Nietzsche to all and sundry for years, this was rather disconcerting. Consequently, I ploughed through some more and had the same reaction. I would rather read Klossowski and Deleuze on Nietzsche than the man himself, and yet I find myself reading Kant for pleasure! I think that I must be going through some sort of intellectual mid-life crisis. Perhaps a few days out in the wilds roaming the mountains, notebook in hand, will sort me out. However, as we’re not going out of Norfolk, there’s not much chance of that.

Glueboot directs our attention to Radio 4’s poll to determine the greatest philosopher. They really are scraping the bottom of the barrel for lists these days. Expect to see a poll for the world’s greatest left handed, mixed race, Fender Strat playing guitarist any time now.

Now I wouldn’t want to accuse the BBC of dumbing down, but check out the ‘philosopher timeline’, where you can pick somebody to vote for if you’re not sure which way to jump. Here’s the entry for Kant:

Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) "Act as if the maxim from which you act were to become through your will a universal law" (Kant's Categorical Imperative or moral law).

Is that it? Just as well I read that, or I might have voted for him.

So who’s going to win and does anybody care? Presumably the celebrities who nominate their favourite philosophers on the website do. What a shame that they don’t say why they have chosen the philosophers in question. Glueboot goes for a top 3 of Plato, Wittgenstein, and Russell but I think that she’s forgotten that Russell isn’t quite the crowd puller that he once was. I’d have to hedge my bets and say either Plato or Aristotle, Wittgenstein (because, outside of Heideggerians, Wittgenstinians are the biggest fan-boys I’ve ever met so they’ll mobilize on mass and, lets face it folks, that’s a pretty big mass), and either Hume or (God help us) Mill.

Obviously the whole thing is bloody ridiculous. Impossible to choose, etc. but you still want to know who I’d go for. Well, assuming by ‘greatest’ we’re talking about most influential without writing complete bollocks, I can get it down to four: Plato, Spinoza, Hume, Kant.

Not a lot of action on the blog front, mainly due to Blair’s education thought police (or OFSTED as they more popularly referred to) breathing down Mrs effay’s neck. They arrived at her school for an initial visit yesterday, prompting one member of staff to have a nervous breakdown on the spot (honestly). Hardly anybody is getting any teaching done; they’re just jumping through hoops for these motherfuckers. Anyhow, when the Mrs isn’t at school, she’s commandeering the computers, and the rest of the time, me ‘n’ the kid are playing Lego, fighting moles, and watching Tom and Jerry. I have also been delving into the delights of the Analytic tradition and now have an irresistible urge to start reading Russell on mathematics as a palliative to all that Badiou. Who ever would have guessed that my maths teachers at school would have been proved correct when they said that I would find this stuff useful in later life? Shame I can’t remember most of it, but then OFSTED weren’t around in those days to make sure that I got a Proper Education.

Here’s another acronym: I finally bit the bullet and bought Coil’s ANS box set this week. I would have bought it straight away, but I got the clamshell at ATP (a third acronym! Work it out for yourselves), so wasn’t sure whether I really needed the whole shebang. The thing that really swayed me was the DVD which everybody says is so amazing. To be honest, it just looks like a more sophisticated version of the patterns you get to accompany CDs when you play them on a Playstation. I watched the whole thing in the dark, and totally failed to spazz out as promised. Nice tunes though, in a sort of aimless whining way. Time Machines is much better.

Helen over at TEDAICBAS wants me to post yet more pictures of people with their arms in the air. Surely I did my bit by inadvertently starting Psychbloke off on this mad folly in the first place? Personally, the photos that I’d most like to see it the moment are of IT lurking around as a Goth…

Ration the amount of toilet paper that your four year old uses. If you do not, there will come a day when you find yourself up to the armpit in a flooded toilet, trying to dig your way through several inches of shit/paper aggregate with your fingernails in order to get the bloody thing to drain properly again.

All my life I have bitten my fingernails. I think that I've just unintentionally discovered a way to break the habit.

On the plus side, I had planned to read some A.J. Ayer this morning: I can honestly say that this is the first time in my life when I have been in a situation where logical positivism looked attractive.

... and I'll be voting. Not because I have any faith in the system or any of the parties, but because I've never seen a decent argument for not voting. Yes, everything that Infinite Thought says is true, but none of it constitutes a reason for not turning up and, at least, ruining your ballot paper.

K-Punk goes with the old don't vote, don't encourage them line, but the point is that these people need no encouragement. If three people voted, and any party had two of the votes, they would happily claim a mandate. This would be more difficult if there were more spoiled papers than proper votes...

Both IT and K-P claim that there is 'an argument for urgent reform of the electoral system'. If you really believe that, shouldn't you be voting for the parties that argue urgent reform of the electoral system, or am I missing something here?

It is possible to live in a constituency, where there is somebody who actually deserves your vote in that they do a lot of good locally even if their party is run by sycophants with their hands down the y-fronts of Big Business (although personally, if they were a Tory, I still wouldn't vote for them). However, the main reason that I always turn out is that I have a gut feeling that these people don't want me to: The people the main parties are desperate to drag down to the polling station are the party faithful who would always vote for them so long as they could be dragged off their couches, but who don't turn out because they think that there is no point. Politicians dread people who actually think about what they are doing and still turn out.

Voting is not such a big deal, but it's not such a big effort either. It probably won't do any good, but it can't do any harm to try and keep the worst of these bastards out of office wherever possible.

...about having children is the fact that you no longer need to make excuses for playing with toys and generally acting like a twat. Toys in cereal packets have always been a great source of delight to me and I definitely choose the cereal with the best toy in every time. Many of these toys are still in my possession; Here’s one I got from a packet of Sugar Smacks (remember them?) back in 1969:

Cool, huh?

How does one justify hanging onto such things to Mrs effay? Simple: Tell her that they are steadily increasing in value every year. Of course, what I fail to mention is that we’ll be selling the living room carpet before I relinquish my Star Trek captain’s badge.

Anyhow, I digress. With the advent of the Little effay, I don’t simply have to look at the toys from cereal packets, but I can play with them too. Presently Coco Pops are coming with Lightsaber™ [sic] Mazes inside.* We’ve got two of them:

Now, the maze bit is obviously rubbish but, not only do they retract, they glow in the dark. Imagine the scene: Me ‘n’ the Little effay at high noon with the blinds down, charging up our Lightsaber™ Mazes under a reading lamp. I snap the lamp off and we run around the bedroom waving our respective weapons and making the whooshing sounds you do under such circumstances. “Use the Force young Skywalker!” I cry. She fixes me with a steely look and responds “Where’s the sauce, light scarlet?”

* In case anybody should think that I’m a Bad Dad, I should point out that I would never let the Little effay breakfast upon Coco Pops given the levels of sugar and God knows what else inside them. No, I selflessly eat them all myself just so that we can enjoy the toys.