The juvenile sweet tooth

When you're young, you'll eat anything that has enough sugar in it and you'll like it too. Don't believe me? Right, remember how much you liked eating glacé cherries when you were a kid? You used to love baking with them, just because it meant you were allowed to eat some of the leftover cherries (or sometimes, the cherries that were supposed to end up in whatever you were baking), right? Well, try them now. They are nauseating...

Old friends revisited

There are few things in life better than visiting old friends for dinner. One of those few things is having old friends over for dinner.

Life in the fa(s)t lane

I think it's funny how some of the greatest pleasures come from such silly little things. I've commented here before about the immense satisfaction available from puncturing the seals on Nutella jars. Today, I found myself absurdly happy after reading a new post on a friend's blog that essentially just said that things were going really well for her. But on the way home, it suddenly struck me that there's something that happens to me virtually every day that brings me immense pleasure and is ridiculously simple: zipping past traffic on my bike. When the sun's shining and all you see are people (well, mostly blurs of people) sat in the sweltering heat of their cars, going nowhere, with nothing but the brake lights of the car in front for scenery and you are proceeding merrily along the same road, you can't help but smile. But then it gets even better, when you realise every minute they sit in traffic, it's costing them money for petrol, whereas you're not only going fast for free, but getting healthier and fitter with every metre.

It's a bit more difficult to be quite so happy about it when there's lashing rain and it's cold and wet, but actually, I think I'm generally still happier that I'm out on my bike than in a car. At least I know I'm not going to get fat while I'm still cycling!

The power of music

Music is powerful. Done right, it can be incredibly emotive - though I find it incredibly difficult to believe that anyone can be moved by Bach, but that's probably an argument that I shouldn't start right here. But certainly, music has the power to conjure up really powerful emotions. I was thinking about the songs and pieces that I felt had the biggest effect on me, and something struck me - they are almost all sad. It's not the only feeling that music can instill in me, but it's certainly the easiest.

If you don't believe me, go and have a listen to A Boy and His Frog by Tom Smith. The fact that it's a Jim Henson memorial song probably gives it an unfair advantage, but even still, it's a damned good one. It was also referenced on Something Positive a while back, which was how I originally came across it.

But I'm struggling to think of (m)any songs or pieces that make me feel joyful, happy or energized. Maybe Beethoven's 9th, though that seems a bit too obvious (if you're confused, that's the "Ode to Joy"). Perhaps sorrow is just the easiest emotion to tap, but I do think this somewhat unfortunate.

Taking the hint

I was in Oxford town centre yesterday and noticed that a shop that has been mostly empty since Tchibo stopped having retail stores in the UK has now been filled. Unfortunately, it's been filled with one of those discount bookstores - you know the type; full of crap books and terrible stationery that no one wants. The Works is a nearly perfect example of this, save one small detail: The Works has found a way to be profitable. Not two doors down is another example of this type of shop that has gone out of business. At the same location prior to that shop being established was a near-identical one, which really didn't last very long at all. In fact, Oxford (and it seems, pretty much every town I know of) seems to have been littered with instances of failed cheap bookshops. Now, I'm not very good at taking hints (I'm sure Ann will tell you that), but even I realise that there's probably a very good reason for this: it's a crap business idea. No one wants to buy the stuff these shops sell and even if someone loses their mind and does buy something, all the merchandise is so crap it has to be sold at such low prices that there's very little profit available. It's not like pound shops where you might feasibly find something interesting, or something that is good enough. The only saving grace about these shops is that they're so unprofitable, it usually doesn't take long for them to disappear.

Local branding

I'm in New York at the minute, and I've been in America for the last two weeks. It's been an interesting experience, but there's something that's been bugging me. There's a clothing chain called T. J. Maxx here. In the UK, the same chain is called T. K. Maxx. Why, dammit? Who decided that that initial was so important? And what was his/her reasoning? I can see that things need to be marketed differently for the two countries (anyone who's watched a single commercial break on TV in each country will be aware of that), but is that one letter really going to make that much difference?

Requesting insults

Okay, picture the situation: you're browsing in your favourite bookshop and a book catches your eye. You've been looking for an introductory text to a particular topic and this book fits the bill. Happy that you've found it, you tuck it under your arm and saunter over to the counter to join the queue. Then, while you're patiently waiting, some complete stranger yells at you "Hey you! You're a complete idiot!". Now how does that make you feel? Angry? Confused? Outraged? Indignant? I certainly don't think I'd be happy. So why would you go and buy a book titled "The complete idiot's guide to..."? Or for that matter, "...for dummies"? I find it curious that people don't like it if you insult them for free, but are quite happy to pay good money to be insulted - and again every time they look at their own bookshelf. But they do, and whats more, they do it in their thousands. Craziness.

Cynicism

Okay, I don't want to come across overly preaching and joyous, but this is something I really need to get off my chest. It's rather similar to the first post I made this year, though with a subtly different focus. I must stress that I'm not one of these naïvely optimistic types who think that everything in the world is good. I consider myself somewhat cynical insofar as I won't take "facts" given to me at face value but rather look for corroborative evidence, or at very least think for myself about how likely it is to be true. But it seems to me that it's become cool to be cynical about everything, to an excessive extent. To doubt has become the norm; while I am a firm believer that questioning things is extremely important, I also believe that giving people the benefit of the doubt (where there's no evidence to support or deny the case in point) is simply a healthy thing to do - and above that, the sort of thing that a nice person should do. And above all else, I believe that being nice is important and something more people should try.

So I think there is a danger that all too many people are at risk of falling into - that is, to disbelieve anything because it goes against your intuition or worse, your preconceptions. To question is healthy, but you must leave yourself open minded enough to accept good, logical arguments that support ideas that might not occur to you. Not to do so is just to be bloody-minded.

Growing old

I'm getting old. Now, I know a lot of people will be foaming at the mouth at reading this yelling "You're not old! Now stop whinging and go find me my cane!" or something like that. But it's true, I am definitely getting old. I've come to this conclusion after two observations made in the last month or so:

1. When it snowed, my reaction upon waking and seeing the blanket of white wasn't "Yay! Snow!", but rather "Ohhhh, I'm going to have to walk to the lab."
2. The urge to lick the spoon when baking no longer grips me, even when baking with chocolate.
   

Ah well, it had to happen sometime...

Book dimensions revisited

Okay, maybe I was a bit hasty with my previous post on the subject. The appropriate dimension of a book is not always the length of time it takes to read. I posted a paperback to a friend in France this week and discovered that occasionally, the weight of the book (and before someone tries to be smart, yes it is the weight and not the mass - the post office measures it with a top-pan balance) is the appropriate characteristic. But on that note, I discovered that air mail is really rather cheap. Sending a ~780g package to Paris cost just £5.11. Bargain.

Bach

I was listening to Radio 3 just now, and Bach's Prelude and Fugue no. 1 from the Well-Tempered Klavier came on. Now, I know I'm not exactly the biggest Bach fan in the world, but one thing did occur to me - it's not even as interesting as Musak. There has to be something wrong when you think lift music sounds more interesting...

Buying local

For those of you who don't already know, I'm a bit of a tree-hugging hippy. I recycle obsessively, constantly bemoan my lack of a compost heap - I am currently toying with the idea of an indoor wormery, but have rather a small room - and try to save energy like there's no tomorrow (which, metaphorically, there won't be the way the world is going, but that's a rant for another time). And I care about such things as food miles (though probably not nearly as much as I should do - and I really hate the term). So between minimising energy wastage with food transportation, supporting local producers and a belief that local, small producers will often output better quality produce, I like to buy things sourced locally where possible.

It's an uphill struggle though. Earlier this week, I tried to buy a particular high powered LED (a Seoul P4 U-bin cool-white emitter) in an attempt to upgrade my bike light. So I found a UK supplier - Farnell, based in Leeds - who would sell me the LED I wanted. Now, it's a single LED, but it's not cheap - I was trying to buy £7.89 worth of goods, not 20p. But they have a minimum order charge of £20 if you want to put it on a credit card - ostensibly for their free delivery. I would have been perfectly happy to pay an extra pound or two for delivery, but they wouldn't have it. Their FAQs state that they accept BACS or cheques as payment too, but when I rang them up, they said I would have to make the £20 minimum order charge. So after a little bit of searching, I found DealExtreme, who are based in Hong Kong. It turns out, they will send me the exact same LED, with no minimum order charge from across the other side of the world. Their price? $5.12, with free shipping. That's about £3.54 at current rates. So even leaving the minimum order charge aside, that's under half the price. I hate ordering from across the globe when there's a UK alternative, but the price difference is excessive - and in this case at least, that LED is more likely than not manufactured in Taiwan or nearby anyway, so the overall distance covered by it is probably rather similar from either supplier. But the point still stands.

Another thing that irks me on this note, is how difficult it is to find locally produced honey. If you go to a local farm store, it's dead easy, but I will admit that usually convenience corrupts me and I end up at a supermarket. Take a look at the honey - you'll find honey from Australia, New Zealand, Mexico, Venezuala and a whole myriad of places over a thousand kilometres away without any trouble at all. But try looking for English honey (not even honey from your county, just honey from anywhere in England) or even honey from anywhere in the UK, and see how much harder it is. In my local supermarket, I couldn't find a single jar of honey from the British Isles. But I had a choice of three from Australia. We are a nation of beekeepers - it should not be this difficult to get honey that has come from less than 500km away!

Evolution

Sight, I can understand. The retina responds to a narrow band of EM radiation, which corresponds (give or take) to the highest intensity band generally seen on Earth. Hearing reacts to pressure waves over a large range of frequencies in the air that surrounds us. Touch responds to pressure on your skin from the local deformation. While taste has to monitor a whole host of different chemical patterns, at least it is limited to the small subset of things we stick in our mouths.

But smell - what on Earth is going on there? Your sense of smell is incredible (unless you're anosmic, in which case, my apologies) - it responds to millions (if not more) of entirely unrelated chemicals. If you pay attention, you might notice that people have (to some extent at least) their own individual smell - not their sweat, not their shower gel, but an underlying scent that will be different to another person's. Buildings have their own characteristic smell. Even the slightest hint of an ingredient is often detectable in food or drink - while some French cheeses can be smelled through the box, a plastic bag and halfway across the house. And then you remember that compared with dogs or pigs, we have an incredibly crude sense of smell. I really wonder how the sense of smell developed. Evolution is a madman I tell you.

Book dimensions

Reaching the end of a good book is always a slightly bittersweet experience. You have the joy and the contentment that you've reached the end, that the story is wrapped up and all the loose ends that are going to be tidied up have been tidied. But then you have the knowledge that there's no more to enjoy. The end of a good book always sneaks up on me. All of a sudden, you turn the last page and it's there. It's always a shock.
But the end of a mediocre book is exactly where you expect it. And the end of a bad book is, in my experience, rarely ever reached. In an ideal world, I think that places like Amazon shouldn't list the number of pages contained in books; rather they should have the length of time it takes to read it. Time is definitely the appropriate dimension to be measuring books in, not the physical size.

If you're wondering what book prompted this thought, it was The Book Thief by Marcus Zusak. You can get it for £5 on Amazon, and trust me, you won't be disappointed.

Jars of satisfaction

Jars of Nutella and instant coffee tend to come with a seal of foil-backed paper. I'm not sure I've come across anything quite as satisfying as puncturing the surface of these with a teaspoon handle or knife. I may need to start buying smaller jars of Nutella so that it happens more often.

Cool to hate

It's cool to hate. And it's easy to hate too. Turn on the TV and watch the news, and pretty much all that you'll hear is bad news. We're in the midst of a recession, unemployment is on the way up and the economy's going to get worse before it gets better. There's another war in Gaza, Iraq and Afghanistan are still pretty damned dangerous and the long-fought war in Sri Lanka still rages. Kenya, the one real example of African democracy actually working, just passed a bill curtailing the freedom of the press. Russia's cutting off it's gas supplies to the Ukraine and it's hitting Europe (again) and Zimbabwe's still trying - and failing - to free itself from Mugabe's evil grip - but now it's being ravaged by cholera too. Ask the average person on the street and they'll talk about how everything's more expensive, life is harder, taxes are too high and the government's terrible. They'll most likely yearn for the "good ol' days" and wax lyrical about how things were in days gone by.

But before you go and spend all day in the quagmire of a deep depression, this is not the point I want to make. My point is that life is pretty darned good actually. We're finally getting rid of that simian President of the USA and with the new administration, that disgrace to the supposedly free world (by which I mean the Guantanamo Bay concentration camp prison) might finally be dismantled. Technological advancements have never made life so easy as it is now. Labour saving devices abound and allow previously impossible tasks to be done with the click of a button. You can be fired in a metal tube weighing several hundred tonnes at nine-tenths of the speed of sound, 10km above the ground and expect to land safely - halfway across the world in less than a day. Even if you don't fly, you can still talk to family and friends in far-flung lands for absolutely nothing. Healthcare improves with every day and you will survive illnesses and accidents that would've killed you under half a century ago. Things we take for granted now were just dreams not very long ago at all.

Sure, there are things that aren't perfect and some things are getting worse. But there's a hell of a lot which is good and improving too. So next time you hear someone whinge that the world's crap and wish it was still the 1970s, don't just nod and give your half-hearted agreement. Have the courage to stand up and say "Actually no, you've never had it so good. Stop complaining and appreciate it, dammit!". Or at very least, think it.