Wonders of Nature (Worm Sex, Slug Sex)

From Engels On The Family:

"If strict monogamy is the height of virtue, then the palm must go to the tapeworm, which has a complete set of male and female organs in each of its 50-200 proglottides, or sections, and spends its whole life copulating in all its sections with itself."

(In your stomach I presume).

Amazingly beautiful grossness:

I'm Not Your Customer

I find the training of staff to refer to the users of public and government services as 'customers' increasingly disconcerting. It happened to me most recently at the job centre when, trying to explain that it would have been useful for someone to tell me that I had to file my reimbursement claims before travel when informing me of the scheme, I was curtly told that "the onus is on the customer to find out." In what sense am I a customer of the job centre? If so then they are certainly failing in their 'customer service' (which presumably is the idea in at least some of these cases; 'we treat and value people as though they had money to spend with us' etc.) by apparently not providing any. If I was a real customer, then I would have the choice to take my 'business' elsewhere, but I don't. I have no choice but to deal with these petty bureaucrat assholes. They don't respect us precisely because for this dependence.

A job that I applied for recently (and didn't get) with a company with a large proportion of government welfare-to-work scheme contracts also referred to those that they helped into work as their 'customers'.* Well yes, these companies do receive disgracefully large sums of money from the government for placing these people in jobs. But the 'customers' themselves aren't paying. They are not choosing to enter into any economic contracts. Tagging people under the label of 'customers' places them involuntarily into an economy of exchange and in doing so undermines the seeming human motivation within the role of the advisor of helping people out.

The same goes for the supporters of charities. We do not buy your services. A charitable donation is precisely that. "Q: If I sponsor a child, what will I get in return?" asks an ActionAid ad. Is this really a question that needs to be asked? Are people really only buying bi-annual letters and a sense of their own morality? Conversely I seem to remember being instructed once in one of my waitressing jobs always to refer to customers as 'clients' as this term seems to make more discrete the cash-for-services implication (which is of course exactly what dining out in a restaurant is). I suppose that the seeping of business-speak into every aspect of our lives is just symptomatic of the commercialisation of everything in general. But I can't help but feel that this use of 'customer' is not so innocuous as to be just a reflection a business-based society: it is prescriptive; it alters the way in which we relate to one another, specifically it determines the nature of our human relations as one of economic exchange and in doing so subtly precludes our ability and desire to just to help one another out. Which perhaps goes some way in explaining the unhelpfulness of the job centre staff?

* An article on indymedia a couple of days ago revealing the Christian foundations and ethos of one such organisation (at least not a private company this time) 'Working Links' (from whom I also got rejected) opened my eyes to the ideologies behind these schemes. I realise now that going on about an understanding of social barriers and holistic approaches in my cover letters wasn't going to get me any interviews. According to an advertisement on Reed, welfare-to-work is one of the fastest growing sectors of graduate employment. It seems to me that money would be far better spent training those employed by the government to actually help people who want it into work that has some meaning for them and that they might stick to rather than bullying them into the first minimum wage job that comes along, instead of handing out lucrative contracts to private businesses.

The Statue at St Pancras

I paid the new station a passing curiousity visit today. It was all very impressive and generally quite pleasant (ignoring the crowds milling about the champagne bar). The statue, however, is a hideous abomination. Called 'The Meeting Place' and also widely referred to as 'the lovers', allegedly "reflect(ing) the romance that train travel used to have" (sculptor - Paul Day). The heartache of long journeys, desperate departures and ecstatic arrivals? I failed to find any romance whatsoever in its ugly towering form. His posture is overbearingly coercive, his oversize hands groping at her flesh through conspiratorially compliant layers, the pressure of his fingertips leaving dimples in her clothes, pushing and directing her with his knee. Hers is sickeningly sincere. The shape of the 'embrace' is determined by tensions; they touch at the hips and at the forehead, his bearing down on hers and hers rising unnaturally up into his. Her calves and feet are monstrously proportioned, rising up from eye-level through horrible skewed perspectives, her left leg slightly open, inviting you to look up her skirt from beneath. The creases in her skirt around her huge flat jutting bumcheeks demonstrate the force of her pelvic thrust; his is attested to by the way the fabric of his suit seems to bunch up into his ass-crack. His suit and leather backpack combination (leaving both hands free for the grasping?) is inexplicably comical and repulsive, whilst her lack of luggage belies her seeming business attire. If I saw this particular couple indulging in this particular unsightly embrace on the platform edge I would look away in disgust.

Polar Bear @ The Stables

Well I was going to use this post today as a space of catharsis to vent my inutterable fury at the absolute blind incompetence and arrogant pomposity of those cretinous bureaucrats at the job centre, which, given that as soon as I think about it I become consumed with outrage, could only have resulted in long inarticulate ramblings with the words ' fucking twats' interspersed at frequent intervals. But since then, two nice things have happened to me. First, a lovely young man at the bank (he was probably new) gave me an extension to my overdraft with Minimal Fuss. I just went in and asked for some money and he gave it to me. I got the bus home instead of having to walk in the freezing rain. Then tonight, by way of celebration, I went to The Stables MK, where I haven't been for a very long time, to go and watch Polar Bear. Who were quite wonderful. So I have now pocketed my rage and can instead write about the gig.

Despite the relative emptiness of the tiered auditorium (anything to do with the £15 ticket price I wonder?), a common air of unpretentious appreciation managed to join the crowd across all the empty seats to give the gig a good sense of intimacy. They started off quietly, with several more ambient numbers, blending quite beautiful fluid saxophone melodies with soft-spoken melancholy bass lines, underpinned by a depth of assorted noises, echoes and intensifying resonances coming from Leafcutter John's laptop and other surrounding instruments, including a howling cymbal channeled through the coaxing threads of a violin bow. As the pace started to pick up, proceedings were kept laid back by the soothing voice of the quite lovely and strikingly hirsute Seb Rochford, linking the set together with clearly entirely unpremeditated explanations of songs. The second half (a gig with an interval!) was altogether a little more hectic, with the chaos pad whipped out in the corner. Obviously the cue for someone up in the lighting department to start swirling the spotlights around excitedly around as though someone might mistake them for strobes. At times the artifice of the noise did seem a little mismatched with the unembellished raw chaos of the other instrumentation, particularly when it went all out on the final enlivening 'King of Aberdeen', although elsewhere sampled loops and feedback echoes added a touch of brilliant madness to tortured saxophone solos and shadowy bass lines. The polite persistence of the crowd's encore request seemed to encapsulate the demure enthusisam of the occasion, and the upbeat eccentricites of 'Beartown' left everyone feeling happliy worn out.

I Knew All That Reading Dictionaries Would Come In Useful One Day

This is my new favourite game.
I like it even better than Countdown.
Especially now that its hosted by Des O'Connor.
I suppose I haven't sold it very well.

Frameworks of Freedom

Thank goodness it looks as though the present media brouhaha concerning the review of the UK abortion laws (specifically, the possible reduction of the cut-off date from 24 to 20 weeks) is going to come to nothing. It has been utterly dismaying to witness a gathering storm of public righteous indignance being ruthlessly aggravated by a manipulative media, more intent on stirring up easy emotions than portraying a fair-sided debate. Thus a public opinion poll, cited (and possibly conducted) by GMTV's 'This Morning' this morning, put those in favour of a bringing forward of the cut-off date at an immense 95% - which would be a conclusive outcome for any issue for which public opinion had any real consequence. This figure is the inevitable result of the absolute irresponsibility with which the recent lifelike 3-D scans of foetuses (not "babies" - as the developer of this technology frequently said - the lax use of misleading language equally as irresponsible) in the womb have been cynically (mis-)used to incite natural human emotions and then harness them for the support of essentially unrelated politically dogmatic points of view (none moreso than in the deplorably unbalanced and cynically timed 'Dispatches' documentary last week, which also showed footage of abortions and aborted foetuses). As has been pointed out by many within the debate, the pictures add nothing to what we knew before. They are unscientific, unpolitical, inconclusive, and irrelevant to and obstructive of meaningful, measured debate. A picture speaks a thousand words. A moving 3-D picture of a baby conquers the possibility of discussion - of unprejudiced reasoned thought - in advance. Thankfully, despite all the shock-publicity, this is, and never should be, a matter for the general public to decide. It concerns only an extremely small number of extremely vulnerable women - whom the law must support and protect. The task of the legal system, as a system, is to accommodate, not to exclude and inhibit. Such devastating choices must be made within its bounds, not precluded by it.

Haven't You Got Anything Useful To Do?

A little comment in a paper that I picked up yesterday ridiculed the redundancy of a new report disclosing the unshocking-by-virtue-of-its-patent-obviousness news that UK students drink too much. Or rather inadvertently revealing, in the writer's opinion, the shocking news that today's students drink far too little at only a few units over the recommended weekly allowance. I disagree with the attribution of the useless-investigation-into-the-unremarkable award to this study though - a couple of weeks ago I found a whole centrepage spread (one part of a serialisation I think) in the Mail revealing cocaine use at Boujis nightclub. Following a lengthy undercover investigation by the reporter herself:

"Revealed: The Royals' favourite nightclubs and a culture of rampant drug abuse."

Obviously she must have realised that the article was wholly un-newsworthy and that this was best disguised by using overblown investigative journalism cliches to rouse the geriatric right-wing readership into automatic grumbles about moral decline. The opening line:

"At a darkened London nightclub at 2am on a Wednesday morning, a crowd of twenty-something partygoers are dancing with utter abandon to the thumping beat of a fashionable rap song."

Seriously, that's actually what it said.