I have measured out my life with coffee spoons

/

I've measured out my life with this image I keep borrowing from Marcelo Souza too.

People who drink coffee see and hear things that aren't there, says a new study.

Well, duh. Of course they do. They're called novelists.

Anyway, here's an article in the Independent on the report, and here's an extract:

"People who consume coffee and other caffeinated products are more likely to have hallucinations, according to a study published today.

The more caffeine students had, the more likely they were to hear voices, smell things and see things that were not there, researchers at Durham University found. They suggested that increased levels of the hormone cortisol caused by caffeine could be behind the link."

Bad science is forever with us. Next time I hope they'll obey best practice, control properly for bias, and ask the students how many of them sip their cappuccino while trying to write their first novel, play, or epic poem.

 

T.S. Eliot put in best, in the best poem of the last century, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock:

 

"I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;

I know the voices dying with a dying fall

Beneath the music from a farther room."

 

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm off to sink a pot of Lavazza Rosa, and hallucinate the last chapter of Jude: Level 2.

Election Day USA 2008

/

At last, it's election day in the USA. Who will win? Well, I think Obama won the election six weeks ago, on Monday 15th of September 2008 when Lehman Brothers , the hundred-and-fifty-year-old American investment bank, collapsed and filed for bankruptcy protection. (And, somewhat addicted to the high-wire of public prediction by now, I'm typing this before the votes have been counted. I haven't even looked at an exit poll, if any are out yet. There's hours of voting left to go in parts of the US.) That was the event that made the collapse of not just banks but the whole deregulated financial system unstoppable.

 

Check out the graphs in the second half of this excellent video from John Authers of the Financial Times. (You can skip the stuff on the dollar at the start.) In the crucial states Obama needs, Obama trailed McCain until the day of the Lehman's collapse, and then bam, his line shoots up and McCain's plummets, and McCain has trailed Obama in all of them ever since.

 

Almost everything written about this election has been fluff. The economy will always drive politics in a democracy. Only when things are going fairly well will people bother to vote on any other issue. When the economy implodes, so do the hopes of the incumbent party. McCain actually ran a very good campaign under incredibly difficult circumstances: he stayed in the race until the entire American banking system collapsed. His problem was that he had to run as two mutually conflicting things. To get the Republican party to vote for him, campaign for him, and finance him, he needed to run as a Republican. But that's only 40% of the voters. Not enough. And President Bush was so unpopular (this week he recorded a 20% approval rating, the lowest in history, lower than Nixon in the last days of Watergate), that to win the votes of anyone else at all, McCain had to run as a crazy maverick who wasn't anything like Bush and, sure, was hardly a Republican at all, at all. And you can't be both King of the Republicans, and the Scourge of the Republicans. (Look what happened to the last guy who tried to walk that tricky line.)

 

It has been very refreshing to have two presidential candidates that I really like and respect running for the big gig. (I wasn't impressed by the character of either candidate the last time.) It has been sad to see McCain ripped in two by the situation he put himself in. Much of the anger he expressed in that last month was probably at himself. I think he will be very glad indeed when this is over.

 

Obama had the easier task but, even allowing for that, he has run a stunningly good campaign. I think he'll walk this election. On water if necessary. He's not trying to win the popular vote (fat lot of good winning that did Al Gore), he's aiming to sweep the Electoral College. I think he will.

 

OK, that's who will win (oh, and one last prediction... Obama will do well among white voters, getting a bigger share of them than Bill Clinton got, and all that talk about the Bradley effect will turn out to have been fluff too). But who should win? I don't think novelists should have opinions, especially political opinions. It damages their work, by ruling out certain readings, and closing down ambiguities that should not be closed down. I do have private opinions and preferences, but they are private. And my books do not necessarily share my opinions. So I shall outsource my opinion to someone much older and wiser than me, the very wonderful Alan Abelson, of Barron's (Wall Street's favourite newspaper): "This election pits one candidate who should have been elected eight years ago against one who should be elected eight years hence."


There you go. Fair and balanced.

 

May the best man win.

 

Though personally, as a satirist, I would like to get in early, and officially endorse Sarah Palin's 2012 bid for the presidency. She has given so much to us, we have a duty to give something back.

 

I know, I know, you've already watched it fifteen times, but indulge yourself one last time...

 

And, above all, on this day of all days, it is your political duty, if you haven't done so already, to click on this link, and then click on everything you see when you get there, with the sound on.

Eat my naked shorts

/


I know some of you drop in here sometimes for guidance on the future of the world economy. (Hiya Ben, hiya Henry... Hey! Alan! Good to see ya.) You'll notice I have been keeping quiet lately, as the whole thing blows up. This is because I don't want to spook the markets. One incautiously chosen word from me right now, and we could all be learning to skin rabbits.

However, I laughed my ass off last week at the US Fed/Treasury announcement that they had a trillion dollar plan that would save the world, and I laughed even harder when global stock markets leaped 10% in response. What we have here is a huge omelette trodden into the carpet. The fact that a man has burst into the room and announced that he is going to turn the omelette back into twelve fresh eggs does not mean he is, in fact, going to do it.

The mainstream media coverage of the financial crisis continues to be wretched. Most newspapers failed to note that half of the 10% rally last week wasn't driven by suddenly happy investors buying stocks they wanted, it was driven by desperate hedge funds forced to buy the very stocks they specifically didn't want, or risk going to jail. (Because, to get technical, they had to cover their short positions, the day after naked shorts were banned overnight. Does anyone really want an explanation of that? Doesn't it sound much more fun if you don't know?)

No wonder those shorted stocks (banks, financials) all fell on Monday by as much as they rose on Friday, as the hedge funds, having done their legal duty and dodged jailtime, dumped them all again. This market is a joke.

Sheesh, if I start talking about this I'll talk all night. (And I've a novel to finish writing, so... back to my book.)



(Oh, and the very nice photo of eggshells was taken by Linda Alstead, whose website mixes cooking and photography - together at last! She used a Canon PowerShot G3 1/2s f/8.0 at 23.0mm, photo-fans... this means you, Phil, I know you love it when I talk dirty...)


The Little Tree That Could! (Meaningless Statistics)

/

 
I am a great fan of the meaningless statistic. The New York Times seem to be a great fan of them, too. It certainly prints a lot of them.


The truly great meaningless statistic gives you the very precise, scientific-sounding parts of a real statistic, but the journalist leaves out one vital parameter, so that what's left has no meaning at all.


Here is a gem, from today's New York Times:


"The Center for Urban Forest Research estimates that each tree removes 1.5 pounds of pollutants from the air."



Wow! One point five pounds! They didn't even round it up, or down, to the nearest pound! That is so precise! Er, one point five pounds of pollutants every second? Every day? Every year? Over the course of the tree's life? Which might be what, two hundred years? Five hundred years?



And while we're at it, how big is this urban tree, the one that removes one point five pounds of pollutants from the air every second? Or every five hundred years... Is it a six-inch high bonsai tree in a pot on a window sill? Is it a six- foot sapling on a new housing estate? Is it a hundred foot high oak, in the centre of Central Park?



And what pollutants is this mighty oak, or pot plant,  removing with such astonishing speed, or sloth? A pollutant is just a chemical you don't approve of, in a place you don't want it. (Water in your glass is fine. Water in your petrol tank is a pollutant.) Carbon dioxide, for example, is now considered by many to be a greenhouse gas that will destroy the world. So are they counting carbon dioxide as a pollutant? Because trees do little else but remove carbon dioxide from the air. A lettuce could remove one point five pounds of CO2 from the air without even trying very hard. So a hundred foot tree that took five hundred years to do so would be pretty unimpressive. Or do they mean pollutants like lead? A bonsai tree that removed a pound and a half of lead from the air every second would be pretty damn impressive. I'd pay to watch that.


"The Center for Urban Forest Research estimates that each tree removes 1.5 pounds of pollutants from the air."


Jesus Christ.