meish dot org: life, unfolding

For the last time, because it’s amazing how many people get it wrong, even those who should know better…

Got it? Good.

I’m sorry to suddenly become the nomenclature-nazi, but when people interchange words like those above it just gets confusing. Saying “I’ve just finished a giant blog” or “I’m writing a blog about cheese” confuses the container object for the constituent part. A blog carries with it expectations or overtones of archive, pace, time, multiple postings. Blogs don’t finish. If you’re writing a blog about cheese then I expect to see lots of posts about cheese, exploring dairy products from all angles, not one entry, about Edam.

Likewise, people occasionally say “there are a lot of nice bloggers on my blog” which is nice and everything, but they have a different relationship than you to the content. You wrote it; they responded to what you wrote. You are the blogger; they are the commenter.

It’s a small distinction, but it’s important.

That is all.

I may be incredibly complicated when it comes to everything else (life, random allergies, how I drink my tea, curious neuroses, superpowers, musical preferences etc), but when it comes to sandwiches, I just want things to be simple.

I want my sandwich to consist of:

• some bread (not too stodgy and not too stale)
• a little lubricating spread
• a single filling (not too soggy and not too fatty, and probably fairly boring)

And optionally:

• a portion of accompanying vegetable (or fruit, if you’re one of those weirdos that insists a tomato is a fruit but wouldn’t DREAM of putting it in a fruit salad)
• and/or a dollop of some form of condiment (to add flavour)

and preferably, I’d like the whole thing wrapped up in not too much packaging (recycled or recyclable if poss), costing a reasonable sum (£2ish?) and freshly made.

Containing or conveying matter could be bread, a baguette, a roll or bap (Which do you say? Is there a difference?) a wrap, a fork or chopsticks. Principal filling could be cheese, ham, chicken, tuna, salmon…something else involving simple, strong flavours. The rest is entirely optional: lubricant (Spread? Butter? Olive oil?), additional filling (something else from the first list, or lettuce, cucumber, tomato, etc) and condiment (Mustard? Mayo?) I can take or leave depending on taste, season or availability. Just keep it simple, dammit.

Is that too much to ask?

Well, apparently, yes.

For the last few years, I’ve noticed a creeping obsession among the sandwich-vendors of our nation’s capital and high street to add all sorts of random stuff to their lunchtime staples, turning what might otherwise be a simple, beautiful, tasty thing into something utterly fussy and overcomplicated.

Some sandwiches I spotted today and jotted down in my trusty go-everywhere notepad:

• Oak-roasted Wiltshire ham and mature English Cheddar cheese on multigrain white bread with tenderleaf lettuce and English mustard mayo dressing
• Chicken, mango, fruit chutney, roasted almonds, mayo and rocket leaves on wholemeal bread
• Sustainably-sourced Scottish salmon and fresh watercress with lime dressing on soft wheat tortilla
• Brie, grape and cranberry sauce with mixed salad leaves on white bloomer
• Marinated chicken breast mixed with Caesar dressing, Italian matured cheese, tomatoes and salad leaves on wholegrain bread

Forget about preservatives and flavourings – I just want a sandwich with no added verbs and nouns.
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Previously in these pages, we’ve discussed the ways people hold bouquets of flowers in public when they’re trying to pretend they’re not holding a bunch of flowers in public.

Today, during a pitifully brief pause in the monsoon that has become this Great British Summer^tm, I spotted another interesting classification system in need of recording – namely, the ways people carry their furled and redundant umbrellas when the clouds have stopped pissing all over the city for a moment or two.

Well, I say “spotted”, when what I mean was “nearly had an eye taken out by some moron carrying his brolly in a careless manner”. Naturally, it should go without saying that the person in question was wearing a pinstriped suit, and that the brolly was a golf umbrella, and thus doubly protruding and jabby.

Here’s what I’ve spotted so far (in order to register here, there need to have been two unrelated sightings of each):

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1. All the tuneless two-bar whistlers.
2. All the tinny earbud-makers.
3. All the musicians who write loops which go “chhht-kh-chhht-kh-chhht-kh” when heard through poor quality headphones.
4. All the bus drivers who lurch and stumble along the road, over-accelerating at every start and over-braking at every stop, forcing the disembarking passengers on the top deck and stairs to balance, brace, lunge for something to cling to, as if on a small boat in big seas.
5. All the mobile-yakking women in fit-flops with icy highlights like frosting in their tousled hair.
6. All the boys with jeans slung impossibly, stupidly low, the belt clinging to the tops of their sulky thighs: too low for comfort, they make constant slight adjustments to their mast position while their exposed underwear shrieks disinterest.
7. All the lazy-chomping, open-mouthed, slack-jawed cud chewers, smacking their gum wetly.
8. All the apple-eaters.
9. All the slow-walking blackberry/mobile users, ambling along the pavement or platform, entirely engrossed in the quick flicking of their thumbs across the keypad, the blinking characters on tiny screen, oblivious to the crowds surging around them.

Anyone else?

Ever been to the fridge and discovered that there’s a milk carton there but with only the puniest dribble of cow-juice left in it, not even enough to soften a thimble of tea?

You, my friend, are a victim of that scourge of society, the curse of the polite amount.

Basically, the polite amount is the smallest amount of foodstuff a person can leave without actually finishing it off completely. This usually applies to foodstuffs consumed between people or in a social context.

It could be a splash of milk.
A scrape of butter.
A single, solitary bar snack.

You’ve all been there: sitting in a pub with friends, a solo crisp or dry-roasted peanut gazing up in a lonely way from the bowl or the splayed silver bag innards on the table, with your friends stealing guilty/frustrated/longing glances at it because no matter how hungry, no-one wants to be The Finisher: the one who polishes it off.

You know it when you see it:

• A single chocolate, left in the box.
• A sad biscuit at the bottom of a gaping tin.
• A dice-sized chunk of cheddar.
• A solo slice of bread. And it’s the heel.
• Not enough coffee to make a difference.
• A portion of rice that would make UN emergency rations look generous.
• Half a teaspoon of pesto.
• The last spring roll when there’s an even number of you and the dish contained five.
• Twenty-eight cornflakes, huddled at the bottom of the promising cavern of their box, on top of the fridge.

The issue of polite amounts arises from one of two sources:

a) generosity of spirit and
b) laziness and/or cheapness.

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I wasn’t going to comment on the election of that “tallest-dwarf” smug-faced buffoon into public office while I was in the US, except that now the deed is done, I am roundly looking forward to him being exposed for the zero-content publicity-seeking toffo timewaster that he probably is, and all his bold initiatives being exposed as the rather underthought and populist reactionary twaddle that they no doubt will reveal themselves to be in due course.

No-one comes here to read my whinging about politics, and the internet doesn’t need another blog pretending that London is Where It’s At, so I expect that most of the above can go unsaid.

However, I just spotted this on the BBC website:

I love the idea of news trees – juicy ripe news ready for plucking from the bough, or tumbling onto the heads of unsuspecting picnickers/budding physicists in Hyde Park. A bountiful harvest of golden news ready for pressing into RSS cider. Small birds making nests among headline twigs.

It’s like something that The Day Today (“slamming the wasps from the pure apple of truth”) would have come up with, and thus utterly at home in Boris’s manifesto.

Alas, the story itself reveals this fancy to be merely a typo, which is a shame because with all the stabbings and shootings in the city and the time we’re going to spend waiting for a Routemaster 2.0 bus that will never show up, it might be nice to have nugget of fresh news to nibble on (remember, editors recommend you have five a day!), harvested from a nearby tree, once in a while.

Some of you who keep up with my Flickr stream will be aware that one of the things which crops up with alarming regularity in my camphone snaps is the misuse of apostrophes.

I am an apostrophe dullard: it’s true. I can’t help spotting them when they’re misused, and let me tell you it nearly killed me to write that headline up there. Seriously. I keep looking at it and wincing.

I classify public apostrophe abuse into three buckets:

1. Permissible Error
This usually means that the sign is handwritten, chalked or otherwise home-produced, and is generally an indication that the writer was in a hurry, or without English as a mother tongue, or both, and can therefore be permitted to make a small, apostrophe-sized slip once in a while. Classic greengrocer’s apostrophe territory.

2. Should Know Better
These are usually printed items which are created for a one-off, limited audience purpose. It tends to be that this usage is seen in charity shops, local church/school/community organisation newsletters and on the stand-up A-frame boards for independent delicatessens and sandwich shops. Most of these will have either been created by the proprietor or, occasionally, created by a signwriter acting under direct comission commission (oops!) from the owner. 99% of the time, it’s a plural error.

3. Utterly unforgivable
These are the real clangers. High distribution (vast print run – adverts, merchandise and the like), very visible channels (like billboards and television), otherwise high production values (design, or materials used) and – most importantly of all – very likely to have passed, in copy, design and approval stages, through the hands of several people, at least one of whom should have spotted the mistake. This is a quality issue, and is something that creative or marketing agencies (especially) are particularly bad at managing. Hang your heads in shame (and then get it together! It’s not that hard!)

After the jump, some other favourite examples of this latter type…

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For some reason, my phone suddenly decided to stop sending text messages this morning. It seems to have forgotten the Orange Message Centre number.

So I pop over to the orange site to find the number, and attempt to use the “fixing basic problems” menu to resolve it.

It asks a series of questions, and after each provides two choices: Yes this has resolved the issue, or No it hasn’t.

Are you roaming?

Do you have Line2 selected?

Do you have enough signal strength?

To each I answer “no, this hasn’t resolved my issue” until I get to one which reads

Have you checked the message centre number to ensure this is correct?

The message centre number must be correct in order to send text messages

This is, indeed, the problem I need to fix, but unfortunately Orange provide no way of actually helping me to fix it.

If I click “Yes, this has resolved my problem” I get a message saying “glad we could help” but if I click “No this hasn’t resolved my problem” I get presented with another potential issue (“Is the destination number valid?”) rather than any way to resolve the previous problem.

Please look at that screenshot and tell me how, from that information, anyone is supposed to know:
a) how to check the message centre number
b) whether it’s correct
c) how to correct it.

It seems that “fixing basic problems” is actually “diagnosing basic problems” with no attempt to actually fix them at all. I don’t want sympathy, I want a working phone. Most irritating!

(for anyone else suffering this predicament, I can recommend you find reputable and helpful orange network related answers elsewhere)

OR a list of social faux pas that are likely to get you removed from my follow list

(From my perspective: you may disagree. In fact, you probably will. Life’s rich tapestry and all that…)

1. Using Twitter instead of (or as well as) an RSS feed.
   Most web publishing services these days have RSS built in as standard. If you’ve got an RSS feed and I want to know when you’ve updated, I’ve already subscribed to it. If I haven’t, then I don’t, and you endlessly publishing links to your most recent blog output – constantly pushing your links at me – looks a little needy and interruptive.
   • This is a bit like: having a child who tells you every time they do a poo.
2. Not respecting the privacy of closed communication.
   Twitter is based on trust and overlapping social graphs. If someone tweets something to their protected group, and you reply in public, everyone knows. I’ve seen people’s pregnancies, redundancies and job woes “announced” on twitter by well meaning friends responding publically to private news. Just because it feels intimate and private doesn’t mean it is.
   • This is a bit like: hearing the loud end of an intimate conversation on a packed bus – “so Jeremy’s sleeping with Julie – it’s a secret though, don’t tell anyone!” Apart from the whole bus, that is.
3. Being one-sided.
   Twitter is a social transaction based on mutual curiosity – if I feel that you’re only interested in telling me about you, your life, your activities and your world, but not reading what I’m saying, then why are we linked in this service?
   • This is a bit like: going out and your date only talks about themselves throughout the entire evening, and doesn’t even realise when you slip away through the back door halfway through the night.
4. Engaging in constant, subtle self-promotion or aggrandisment.
   Constructing tweets which look on the surface like status updates, but which are actually intended to show how popular/clever/important/influential the author is gets awfy wearing after a while.
   • This is a bit like: hanging out with someone who wears their swimming proficiency badges twenty years on, name-drops at every opportunity and constantly twirls the keys to their Jaguar in front of your face. OR having a child who tells you every time they do a poo, and expects you to applaud.
5. Being overtly conversational.
   For me (and many others), Twitter isn’t a chat room. When I’m checking out people to add to my twitter list, I often look at their recent twitters. If more than half of the updates on the most recent page begin with @, there’s probably too much chat for my tastes.
   • This is a bit like: people talking in the cinema around you. Even if you know and like them, you still wish they’d shhhhh, or go outside and have the conversation where no-one else can hear them.
6. Being lopsided.
   Twitter is a transaction, so if you never update, and I’m doing all the talking in our two-way relationship, it feels a little exposing and can lead to paranoia.
   • This is a bit like: that bit in a job interview or on a date when you realise that you’ve been prattling on and the person on the other side of the desk has been sitting there looking at you, staring and silently judging.
7. Following hundreds of people.
   Since Twitter is a transaction, about relationships, about trust, the more people you follow the more unlikely it is that you’re able to genuinely follow everyone on your list. That means that there’s no personal connection anymore, and that you’re probably using the service as a broadcast medium – pushing content to an audience, rather than a way to aggregate and consume news and updates from your friends.
   • This is a bit like: realising that someone who says they love you has also declared their affections for several hundred others. Feel special now? Thought not.

(Inspired in part by some of the questions (and answers) in Thayer’s Twitter Survey)

It’s late and dark and chilly, and I’m waiting on the street for a vacant cab to come along.

The pub doors open and a small, jovial huddle pours out onto the street, and assumes a position on the kerb, half a block downstream of me. They similarly scour the oncoming traffic for an orange light.

After a minute or so of unsuccessfully flagging occupied cabs and seeing nothing of use, one of the group spots me, whispers to the others and then, en masse, the shuffle past me, nonchalantly, to casually take a kerbside position a respectable distance – a dozen yards, perhaps – on the other side of me.

Upstream of me.

The twunts.

Now, unless I enact a similar leapfrogging procedure, I’m suddenly at a disadvantage, cab-wise. They haven’t stolen my cab: they’ve stolen my potential cab, which is way more irritating, if you ask me.

I’m just saying, there ought to be a law.

And in the absence of a law, I hope that they do indeed get the first cab which comes along and that the driver is a one-eyed bigoted, outspoken, sociopath with few driving skills and a particularly niffy flatulence problem, who just had a kebab-shop load of stagnighters in the back, one of whom might have had a little accident in the darkest corner of the seat, which may not come to light until a work colleague walks past a jacket belonging to one of the cab predators, gags, boggles and demands to know who’s been practising unholy acts with decaying vermin. Furthermore, I hope that the cab driver has no GPS and a stubborn belief that he and The Knowledge are a lot better acquainted than they actually are, and he doesn’t believe in reading maps or taking directions from people in he back seat either, in much the same way as some people don’t believe in common courtesy, so they end up doing endless circuits of the Kingston one-way system. Oh, and he’s run out of change, too.

Karma’s a bitch.