Someone mailed the shelter, asking them to take a kitty back or have it put down, as it was catching mice.

A large portions of people suddenly develops allergies, particularly around holidays.

One guy had a kitty with a smashed paw around for six days, before calling. And then the reason for him calling was not the missing paw, but that the landlord would not let him have the cat anymore. He insisted the wee thing was fine. He said it was not his cat, but then in another sentence said he mentioned they thought he was a she when they got him. Just one of several contradictions. The poor thing came in with the untreated mangled paw, stinking, black and decaying flesh hanging in strips, and bone sticking out. Yea, he was fine.

I wish these people could at least lie a little more convincingly. It would prevent me from hating mankind. If the guy had kept the story simple, he could have been a hero, instead I now want to defecate in his mailbox. He could have just said he had found this poor thing outside, and thought of the shelter. End of story. He would have been a saviour. Now, he is the model of a disgusting human being.

Someone left their house for over four months. Just poured cat food over the floor and left. A caretaker or plumber found the cats. They had been drinking out of the loo, and there was cat poo everywhere. One of the cats darted out the door as helpers came in, and have not been seen since. One male, a mere kitten when abandoned, was scared and shy for a few days, and then turned out to be the most loveable creature.

A box with two rabbits was found in the parking garage of the local shopping centre. Another in a cardboard box among rubbish at a motorway rest stop. A kitten thrown out of the window of a car. Some people apparently throw kittens through the gate of the shelter. Which is at least not directly cruel, and has a mildly comical side, as there is no actual fence. Just forest. Try to shepherd cats.

see the homeless ones.

Kurt Vonnegut

A carpenter was commissioned to build some boxes for a SPCA cat shelter. This is what he did. He did not even bother to pretend to do a half decent job.

This guy have a three-year apprenticeship, cutting pieces of wood, using a drill, sandpaper and a saw. Screws juts out on the inside of the cages, the doors do not close. Distressed animals will injure themselves on these. I could have done a better job! It would have taken me ages, but I would have done a better job.

I was a teaching assistant at the university college, and one of my students came whining one day, that he had to read. That there was books with words in them. That he was expected to read. He actually said, and I quote, “I canna do it! I try! I open the first page and there are all these words!”

I smiled sweetly and said, “well maybe you should do something else. Maybe you should become a bus driver or a carpenter instead”. He was deeply offended, his classmates rekindled their hatred of me.

I regret that comment now. It turns out you can be as incompetent as a carpenter, as you could be unfit for anything vaguely academic, such as reading. The difference between rubbish carpentry and shoddy academic work is depressingly obvious. A bad house will fall down. A bad thesis will have no impact on anything. You can set fire to both, though, and you probably should.

Art can be made out of any old rubbish. Craft cannot. If you are not in fine art, you are in craft, and there is a quality gauge. If you cannot sign your work with excellence, at least do not inflict injury on homeless kittys.

The quality drink their champagne and mockingly toasts the great unwashed people below. Do you not know what a large group of ticked off people can do? You do not even have to read history. You do not even have to leave the timespan of this week. The snowball does not care about what is fair, correct or who is or was responsible. I believe you call it critical mass.

I heard an “expert” say that the protest would never achieve anything, because it is too vague, there is no clear message, they are not united under a common banner. The expert went on to say that the protesters could not achieve anything, because it is like the messy anti-war protest in the sixties.

Come again?! ..and what happened in the sixties, children? Yes, the anti-war protests and the hippies were not exactly homogenous. But things changed.

BBC radio 4 friday night comedy; one of my favourite podcasts. Last fridays NewsQuiz edition was brilliant. Sandi Toksvig, Jeremy Hardy, Andy Hamilton and Fred MacAulay are my best friends on fridays. Pointing out that usually when there is a protest, experts say “this is a few, extremists people”. Except that this time that is not the case. Jeremy Hardy quotes various media having nothing else to say that these are “well educated reasonable people”. How to you deal with that? Funny man.

One of my favourite pictures from Wall St. is one of librarians. Yes, you know things are messed up when librarians starts marching  (I will add the image here later, if the photographer gives me permission). There are guerilla libraries. How can you not love that?

The world is off its trolley, undoubtedly. Winter is coming though, and New York gets cold. Who will continue, and who does not have a choice anymore?

Many of them say they are proud to be Americans. They should not be. They should rant, rave and create change. And then be proud.

These are well behaved people. Maybe they shouldn’t be.

edit:

I will let someone more eloquent than me sketch out some very valid points. Smile or die, from Barbara Ehrenreich, courtesy of th RSA.

If you wish to study a granfalloon, just remove the skin of a toy balloon

The researcher that wrote the book on media we used in my digital media bachelor, tweeted an article from Discovery News via ABC a while back. Apparently, a bunch of other researchers in USA have researched Facebook, using it as a tool for personality analysis – or more popular term; personality test. They state some depressingly obvious things, but elegantly jump to what I will describe as utter loony-off-their-trolleys conclusions. And no-one bats an eyelid.

They use the methods and categories of sociology (I will not say “traditionally used in..”, as this lends it an air of antiquity which it does not deserve or merit), and from the information people give about themselves, they test if that is consistent with other personality tests. Apparently. Apart from the fact that I suspect a lot of personality tests are utter rubbish, this seems a little scientifically thin to me. “Sociology Mickey-Mouse-science looks through tech”. Nevermind. Let me quote a conclution from ABC’s article:

“The researchers also found that people with long last names tended to be more neurotic, perhaps because “a lifetime of having one’s long last name misspelled may lead to a person expressing more anxiety and quickness to anger,” according to the study, which is being presented this week at the Computer Human Interaction conference in Vancouver.”

Read that again. We take these people seriously? We pay them? We let them play in their labs for this? They spend electricity, occupy space as they come up with this? I find a lot of sociology methodology highly questionable, but this is bonkers. Hot air conjured up from hot air. Oh, wait, .. duh. I actually checked the publish date on this article, to be absolutely sure it was not an aprils fool.

But the rant does not end there. The guy who tweeted, whose books was on my curriculum, is the guy the media calls when they need a “social media expert” (how the meta-levels on this works is mind-boggling). I tweeted back to him, asking if he seriously thought that people with long surnames are more neurotic than others? His disturbing answer was “science has spoken!”

As I said, it is a granfalloon.

Maybe I got it all wrong. Maybe this is an endlessly intelligent study, a wonderfully insightful paper and wondrous presentations. If so, the journalist at Discovery News should find something else to do. Communication: it is so hard that not even journalists and communication media PhD’ers can do it.

Websites. it is everything and nothing. Not everyone needs a website. But by god, how much shite is out there – it is baffling; it begs belief.

There are reams, piles and buckets of resources on usability, rules-of-thumb. Endless, boring description of best-practice. And yet, I cannot find the address of the shop. The map on how to get there. The products. It drowns in FLASH, animations. I can hear the customer saying “make something that lives“. Vomit.

So I can’t find the phone number, a simple list of products. Xkcd describes it perfectly in the chart above.

..and of course, there is The Oatmeal’s how a webdesign goes straight to hell

Why this rant now? This is nothing new. In fact, small businesses in USA tends to be the worst. I do not know how it works, if they all have a cousin that “are really good at webdesign” (QUICK! RUN! HIDE!) or whatever. I was simply trying to find a bakery in D.C.

It annoys me that so much time, energy, money and talent goes to waste on making shite. These are simple sites. I want to find a bakery. I wonder what sort of stuff they have. When they are open.

I found a couple of bakeries. But because it is all FLASH, I cannot send links to specific content. I have to send the index url, and then write down all the clicks necessary to find the danish pastry. Do you think I will bother?

To all your FLASHdevelopers out there: fucking stop now! If you cannot do most of it in HTML you are idiots. Stay away from making websites.

Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.

How many different washing programmes have I used in my life? Probably three. Or attempted to use. Often, I am not hundred percent sure of what combination of temperature, prewash or not, spin cycle etc the thing is actually going to do. Or what I actually “need”. What is the difference between “economy” and “quick”? When would I choose a ten degree difference in temperature? 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, 70, 80 or 90 degrees Celsius? And what real difference does the alternative spin cycles make? “baby clothes”? “Clinical rinse”? “Normal”? “economy”? “bio”? Do I need “prewash”?

Read The Fucking Manual, I hear you say. Seriously. I think not.

In Ireland, I was confronted with washing machines that let you adjust all manner of things, but would only use cold water, regardless of temperature chosen.

Washing clothes in our cleanliness-obsessed world is not difficult. They slosh around in some water, with some soap and possibly some fabric softener. We probably wash clothes more often than necessary; no tar, oil, sap or heavy duty filth. And yet, I am given a million options.

Granted, I am not a very domesticated animal, but the endless options are way beyond the call of duty for a pretty simple appliance.

A friend of mine have a cooker, and if the power goes for a split second, the watch starts blinking the familiar 00:00. The interesting thing is that the cooker does not work until the clock is set. How does that happen, what mad set of circumstances made him figure that out? And the guy who made the thing; what was he thinking?

This is interface design. Process and product.

I am, in a way not a fan of user testing left, right and centre. I suspect a lot of pointless user harassing are being done out there, but maybe we need to employ the village idiot to ask “why is this button here?”
Someone to break what we make, so that we can fix it.

Scraps from a few weeks in the US of A:

USA is a strange place. Very, very recognizable. We’ve seen it a million times on telly. It is mundane, large, transparent, obvious, loud, surprising, well known, scary, lovable and at times plain odd. A weird counterpoint feeling of walking in a film; I realized how Americanised my own country is.

The first thing that struck me, as we drove from the airport in Washington D.C., was that USA is dark. Simply; not a lot of streetlights. Here, the highway from the airport and into town would be a string of lights. Additionally, people close their curtains, across the foam. Not so here, so you don’t get light spilling out from living-rooms either. The result being sharp, sudden shifts of pools of light and utter darkness; and I suddenly understood the term “edge of town”.

Language connection: US is the first English-speaking country I have been to where they drive on the right – took me over a week (two?) to look the right way when crossing the streets. Snow chaos in DC did not help, as all rules for traffic was suspended, and both driving and walking in the middle of the road made sense. It was bizarre; that language should dictate this. Odd connections in the brain. Wonder what will happen when I go back to Ireland or Australia…

Christian nuts on planes. Why do I always end up next to one? I make a point of avoiding chatting to people on flights, absolutely not before they have proven an ability to entertain themselves. Books, magazines, music, x-words. anything. So I end up next to The Religious Ones, on three out of six flights. Protestants ministers as far as I could figure, they read their magazines and books, yellow highlight pens in hand. And I feel only anger. Why? I don’t really know. These old old men with their cheaply printed religious magazines an pamphlets, body language spelling out “I want to talk to you”. I feel like screaming at them, without knowing why. Being trapped in a plane might have something to do with it.

Looking at the pics from DC, I strangely & strongly re-live the feeling of arriving at the hotel. The photo of Lars at the hotel with the Capitol shimmering in the distance, contains the whole three weeks. The relief, the tired joy. Smelly feet, sweaty, airplane-stuffed sinuses. All tense annoyances behind. The quiet expectation and excitement; the prospect of a comfy bed. No need to be extraordinarily polite to immigration (always. be. veery. nice.). The coolness of the hotel room. Relief. A sense of it is all good. That sweet, sweet feeling of the start of a new, little adventure. This is the best part of travelling. Setting out. Transportation over; enter adventure.

“Traveling is a brutality. It forces you to trust strangers and to lose sight of all that familiar comfort of home and friends. You are constantly off balance. Nothing is yours except the essential things – air, sleep, dreams, the sea, the sky – all things tending towards the eternal or what we imagine of it.”

– Cesare Pavese –

D.C. felt like a bubble. It is a strange city; an administrative centre. You see it in the shops, architecture, cafés, cars, peoples clothes; the things they carry. Yet, it has an abundance of wonderful museums, an endlessness of interesting things to look at. Unfortunately, we didn’t get the chance to explore them, as the snow closed the entire city. A lot of knowledgeable people work in these places, and I wonder what this means for the demographics. Who hangs out with whom, in this odd, smallish city of national administrators, lobbyists, museum people and researchers. And sheer power.

Music – most of the random music I heard was things I have, like and appreciate. To hear The Doors blasting out of a shop would not happen very often in this part of the world. It felt good and odd in equal measure. Hardly any hip-hop, plastic pop or electronica.

Chicago is a city full of strange people. It is a hard, angled, cold city, but still feels oddly familiar and comfortable. Maybe it was the mid-west-thing. Maybe it was the cold. Maybe it was because I have two good people in Chicago. They will happily tell you about the atrocious number of crime and murder, with a similar smirk as the Northern Irish used to chat about the gory bits of the troubles. I was comfortable. It felt good. Chicago treated me well.

There is a vibrant loony-scene, and it spills into the streets, dancing in the middle of the zebra crossing. People talking to thin air. And no, they do not all have hands-free. A good deal of drugs around, clearly. Chicago was the end of the trip, I had a lot of impressions to digest, my head spinning with sorting it all out; getting used to the idea of heading home. Building a buffer for that; knowing it will always be awful, I mumbled to myself.
Standing on a cold street corner in Chicago smoking a cigarette, talking to myself, I blended in.

“I travel a lot; I hate having my life disrupted by routine.”

– Caskie Stinnett –

Going back – The little things that trips you up when you come home. The exquisite pain & pleasure of travelling and coming back.  There is no life without travelling, yet it balances on a knife’s edge. The sweet excitement of adventure, the depression of coming home. I get better at dealing with it as I get older, but there is a protective buffer I am not sure is a good thing.

We are heading back to D.C. soon. It starts over again.

I can’t wait.

-Can you press some buttons on my pc? This guy did once, and then it worked.

She points vaguely at the navbbar on my mac. Somewhere in the general direction of top left corner.

-He pressed something here, and then it worked.

She knows as much about computers as I know about celebrities. Nothing.

-I have internet, all works, she says. And it turns out she cannot use her online bank, and have never been able to send mail. Yea. Well. Not my idea of working. I try to explain the basic data up, data down idea. That I checked one of those speedometers. It doesn’t register.

-The other place I lived. He just pushed something, and then it worked.

I am beginning to feel a slight echoing sensation in my head. Push. Dumb. Woman. Down. Stairs. I try to explain. The wireless thingy is sick. Connecting the router directly into my Mac, all is well. Using the wireless – nothing goes up. Out. Away. I cannot send information out, basically, but can receive anything at reasonable speed. It turns out she borrows the computer of one of the boys when she has to pay bills.

-He fixed it really quickly, just pressing something.

I try to explain my troubleshooting so far. I point at the router and the wireless. And then she comes out with it:

-Aren’t any of the boys at home?

_____________

Because she is thick as a brick and don’t listen and don’t understand. That makes me less capable of troubleshooting computers. Because I am female, she doubts my capabilities. The nature of my private parts, she thinks, decides what ability I have in solving problems, because she has none herself. She would understand less of the boys’ explanations, if they bothered giving one. But she would feel more confident that all that could be done had been done.

Kindergarden teachers – pushing down the stairs is too good for them.

In europe, the oldest fabrics are all dyed in shades of red. In fact, they say, in Roman times, the latin word for ‘coloured’ and ‘red’ were synonyms. Greeks and romans rarely dyed in blue, but the celts and germanic tribes did – using woad (that yellow plant you see all around temperate europe). Hence, blue was seen as primitive and barbaric.

Blue dye were used by the ancient people of the Middle East. They imported indigo from Asia and Africa. Indigo was used in biblical times, but it was expensive, and used only for the finest cloth, and for the wealthy. In europe, it was not used much, partly because it was expensive, but also because the colour was not … appreciated. It was also assosiated with the rabid celts and germanic people (Don’t say Braveheart – I detest that film. But I suppose the blue is correct).

In the bible, colour is rarely mentioned, but translations have made words that relate to luminosity, density, light and quality into colours. This of course, have ended in a lot of – to an atheist – delightful, snickering misunderstandings in the «life of Brian»-genre («it’s a sign, it’s a sign! he wants us all to remove our left shoe and follow!»)

The best bit is that in the english version (and others), words that describe force, richness, love, beauty, prestige, death, blood, fire etc are simply translated as «red». Excellent ground for misunderstandings… and I shall not even start on the jewish tsitsit shawl, Cleopatra’s sails or the temple of Solomon. Brilliant stories they are – go forth and research!

The high middle ages is a period we can begin to recognise the outlines of our own society and you should think that at least the painters would use blue. The sky is blue. We see the sea as blue (which it is not), but the painters in the high middle ages painted the sky white, red or gold. Emperors and nobles in the 9-10th century fancied Roman customs, and wore red, white and purple (purple is another story – an enormously fascinating one!). So ignored by nobles, blue was worn by pesants. And it would stay like that until the 12th century.. Blue was described by the rich and wealthy as sickening, unnatural, barbaric and ugly.
(is’t this exciting?!)

There are remarkably few references to blue in liturgy, placenames and people. Mr. Brown, Mr. Black, Mr White, Mr. Red. But no Mr. Blue. In latin, there are apparently no name with the root in ‘blue’ (this of course being contagious, the same goes for a lot of european languages).

Christianity: you would think that with all that emphasis on the heavens and all, christianity would expand blue. But no, the church stuck to the social and religious symbolisms already in place for regulating society.

Liturgical colours are discussed in sheaves and reams, and all sorts of colours are mentioned- except blue. Even though it is around in stained glass, enamel, paintings and in clothing. Blue is simply not part of the liturgical colour scheme or symbolism. Blue is not really entering the stage properly until the late 12th century… when blue turns up in stained glass windows, and then only as a backdrop to sacred figures.

Up until the 12th century, the virgin Mary was depicted in dark colours, to represent suffering and grief, and never in blue. Then something happens, and today, blue is associated with the virgins robes. A good example is the Wilton dipthych from 1395.
This combination of the cult of Mary and the idea of divine light, blue becomes wildly popular. (It is of course a long story, what happended – it involves an squillon church meetings, a split on the view on colours – «if colours are light, it is divine, the work of God. If colour is substance, it is the work of the deceiving devil»…. chromophobes versus chromophiles, with axes to grind, a God to justify them, and unproveable points to prove… Besides. Ultramarine pops up in Italy as the most expensive colouring. Money talks).

Colours change importance and associative power. Blue changed from being a non-colour to represent loyalty, truth, courage, and the fact that the king of France chose the well-known coat of arms: azure with golden fleur-de-lis dotted around (and yes, king Arthur pictured with a blue shield with three golden crowns) surely drove the popularity of blue.
And here’s a good piece of ancient gossip: in the thirteenth century, wealthy red dyers asked stained-glass artists to represent the devil as blue, hoping this would discredit the newly fashionable colour that was threatening their precious profits. From hardly any coats of arms having any blue in 1200, at the beginning of the 15th century one in three coats of arms had ‘azure’.

In fact, there was a fight whether the colours of the rainbow should include blue – and the fact that indigo is squeezed in between blue and violet, well, that seems to be more thanks to stubborn Newton than anything else.
…since then, blues popularity have, erm, sky-rocketed. Today, it’s topping the favourite colour scale.

And by the way- blue is not just blue…: Azure, baby blue, cerulean, cobalt, cornflower, dark blue, denim, Egyptian blue, electric blue, indigo, light blue, lapis lazuli, Maya blue, midnight blue, navy blue, periwinkle, Persian blue, powder blue, prussian blue, royal blue, sapphire, sky blue, steel blue, ultramarine…

And no, it’s not my favourite colour.

(Purple is facinating, though. Royal tyrian, slaves, snails and religious blunders.. and yellow – to us, a warning, the colour of hospital bin bags signifying harmful contagious waste; to the chinese, the colour of the emperor. Ah. it never ends.)

(all images either own or from wikipedia)

Beautiful weather, gorgeous peace.

Sitting in the garden reading, taking notes, it begins.
The neighbour fires up the lawnmower. This is, in fact more contagious than ebola in a chicken coop. So the neighbour on the other side thinks «oh, mow the lawn, maybe!» and he fires up his machinery. So then the landlord… and the guy across the road, and the next one up…

So when neighbour number 1 is finished with the mower – thank god!… out comes the bloody trimmer. A high-pitched whine, a teeth-grinding squealing. I brace myself, and see that I could go bonkers, and remember a high quality splatter-film I saw once. It included some deranged character, a blade lawnmower and about 30 000 litres of fake blood. I get pictures in my head. I see why people go apeshit on planes or turn up at work with sub machine guns. Simply one bleeding lawnmower too many.

The whole day was one continuous racket – the peace and bliss of life outside the city. Indeed. So on top of it all: the neighbour on the left have a small tractor. And for good measure, he drove it all over his own and other neighbours lawn..dragging one of those rolling things behind it. The sort of thingy you use to level out your yard. Don’t ask me why. I could see no effect at all.

Deep inside, I suspect there’s an element of keeping up with the Jones’es in all this racket. And that weird relationship between The Man and His Powertools. The importance of the machine that goes bbrrRRRAAAWWWHHH.

I have to get out of here.