where art collides philosoperontap

Metropolish – quite a large town – almost a big city. The language continues to evolve. Whether that word gets adopted remains to be seen. I am happy with the concept that the written word does not have to conform. It can take its own shape as long as it is conveying what the writer meant to say. What the reader is meant to understand by that word.

The word metropolish does in one sense continue to conform with certain aspects of the English language and that is in its ambiguity. This morning I tweeted that I was just having a row. Someone came back thinking what I meant was I was having an argument. No no no:) I was on the rowing machine going a steady ten minutes on the flat. It’s a good time of day for it, early morning.

Well to metropolish could also mean to buff up the metro, make it gleam, shine, almost as if you can see your face in it. If this was the meaning then people would come from all over the world to see the polished metro. It would be the subject of documentaries. Such would be its popularity and fame that Japanese film crews would clash with American trying to bag camera positions. The BBC, unable to afford the filming rights would make documentaries about the filming of documentaries and David Attenborough would be brought in to comment about the human aspect of life polishing the metro.

I’m not quite sure why they chose David Attenborough because he normally does nature programmes. Perhaps he was under contract to film a certain number of documentaries and being of advancing years was not always able to fly to the Antartic to film penguins in winter.

We have now established that these documentaries are filmed in winter. Don’t ask why. Perhaps it gets too hot on the polished metro in summer, or it is too hot to polish and the polish melts. Disaster. You can imagine that when this happened for the first time the staff returned the tins of polish to the company stores complaining that it no longer had the consistency they needed for the perfect shine. Too runny and metropolish is no good, but you knew that.

They did experiment with spray polish but it was never quite the same and one of the funny things about those that practice the art of metropolishing is that they are quite old fashioned in their own way. They don’t like change. They are very proud of their jobs and when he (or nowadays she though the guild of metropolishers held off allowing female members for longer than any other trade body apart from the Honourable Guild Of Male Strip Tease Artists) completes his 7 year apprenticeship a newly qualified metropolisher considers himself to be in a job for life. It is only recently that the last pre-war metropolisher died, at his post. Metropolishers never retire. There is always that one last bit of polishing they need to finish off.

The fact that a metropolishing apprenticeship still lasts seven hears has raised some eyebrows amongst the political interfering class. How, they argue, can a job that only involves the application of copious amount of elbow grease take seven years to learn whilst being paid peanuts? I use peanuts as a turn of phrase here. They don’t actually get paid in peanuts. That phrase is used to represent a low value that is indeterminate, although I’ve never checked to see whether there is an actual definition for peanuts as pay.

I digress. The Grand Masters of the metropolishing world dismiss these arguments with a simple retort. They had to do it so they don’t see why anyone else should get more money. Or larger nuts! Activists, and there have been some over the years though they seem to disappear, wander off down a tunnel never to be heard of again, have occasionally stuck their heads through the entrance to the metro and suggested that if the pay was made in coconuts then at least these would have some resale value. If nothing else the apprentices could take their coconuts home and their mothers could use the flesh in the preparation of aromatic, coconut based curries.

Enlightened Renumeration Panels (for the Guild prides itself on conducting its business in a totally transparent manner) have considered these suggestions but have always reject them as impractical because of the altogether higher cost base of a coconut economy, not the least being transportation costs. Peanuts can be economically conveyed in sacks of manageable size. They can even be shelled/processed at their country of origin and shipped in plain, salted or roasted form packaged and ready to dish out.

The pre-processing of coconuts leads to accusations of tampering and contamination and precludes any sales outside of culinary markets. To fairgrounds for example. Don’t be shy, give it a try doesn’t work when the coconut on said shy has been replaced by a tin of coconut milk or a packet of the desiccated stuff.

There is no sign that the metropolishing profession is about to change any time soon. Jobs are handed down to family members and it is a very difficult trade for outsiders to break in to. Metropolishing families are very insular. The trade secrets are kept within their close knit circles. It is even rare for young metropolishers to marry outside of their immediate family. The resultant inbreeding which might explain why a practitioner is happy to spend a life elbow deep in polish. The average metropolisher is a simple soul.

There are no known cases of a metropolisher having been to university. Let it remain thus. They will not thank you for interfering. Get on with your own life.

3rd Law Part 50 here

3rd Law Part 52 here

It’s uplifiting. The conservatory doors are wide open. The birds are singing away happily knowing that they have a beautiful sunny day ahead. The lawn needs a bit of a cut but there is no rush. I was going to cut down the undergrowth at the bottom of the garden but I think I’ll leave it until tomorrow. Manyana. I’ve got some lively musing streaming over the wireless interweb. Radio Oxford fwiw.

I realise  I should be tuned in to Radio Lincolnshire and news of the Waddington Air Show but an offspring is reading the traffic and travel news in Oxford so I am being a dutiful parent. I’ve been to the Air Show a couple of times and it is a fantastic day out. Long queues very long queues on the roads though so if you’re thinking of going you need to get there very early. Waddington is probably three miles from our house and the cars back up on the road outside us. You have been warned.

I don’t know why we don’t go to the Air Show more often, considering it is such a good day out. The only times we have been are when one or two of the kids has been playing with the school band in one of the hangars. This is the best way to do it as we get a free family ticket and a car pass so that we can park right next to the hangar and not have to join the unwashed masses in the public car park. This also makes it easy to nip back to pick up the picnic.

Although there have been wet weekends for the Air Show on balance the weather has usually been great. On one of our visits one of the kids forgot to bring a hat and I had to share mine. The concept of hat sharing is quite novel I think. Probably not original though. Hey you can’t live your life doing completely new things all the time. Most of it has already been done before – taking a shower, making the toast, cutting the grass. You get my drift.

You’d never get anything done if it all had to be new and original. Spend all your time doing nothing trying to think of something new. I suppose you could cut the grass in a different way. Make interesting patterns with the lawnmower that gradually disappear as more of the grass gets cut. That would be a valid “new thing” because each pattern would be different even if the concept might not itself be new. You can’t spend all your time cutting the grass in a new way though because once cut the grass would need to be left a week or so to grow back to a cuttable length again. You could cut if very slowly but I don’t think it would fly. You are going to have to think of other things.

Paining a big landscape watercolour could be one way of doing it. Unfortunately I’m not a very good artist. Also I don’t have any watercolour paints and in any case this is just a mental exercise. You don’t actually have to do any of the things being discussed here although I’m not stopping you. You should let me know what happens. Take a pic of the grass half way through the mow for example and send it to me on Twitter. Simple to do and a highly effective way of sharing. I might even retweet it if I thought it was good enough to share. You could find that everyone on the planet ends up seeing your picture of the pattern in your lawn. Not that everyone is online yet but I’m sure someone would print off a copy and post it somewhere public so that everyone else could see.

The only drawback with that level of publicity is that you would find your house besieged by the press all wanting to take “exclusive” pictures of your lawn. You would spend all your time doing interviews and never have enough time to cut the grass. If you charged a fee for the interview you might be able to afford to hire a gardener to cut the grass for you but that would somehow defeat the object of the exercise. I imagine, and this is pure hypothesis you understand, people would even hire airplanes to fly over your back garden for photographs of your lawn. Google would redo its satellite shot of your house to incorporate the pattern on the lawn. How cool is that. Pre-pattern images of your lawn would begin to sell at a premium although that would not last long because we all know how easy it is to copy images on tinterweb.

This whole sad line of reasoning is of course built on the premise that there is actually a pattern to be viewed so you’d better make sure you don’t finish cutting all the lawn like  I originally suggested and leave  a pattern. Think how disappointed everyone would be if there wasn’t one after all the fuss. You would start getting adverse comments on Facebook and Twitter. People can be very cruel you know. It may all stem from jealousy and their own pathetic inadequacy but that is real life.

The alternative is not to stick your head above the parapet. Don’t do anything original. Nobody will then notice you and you can go to your grave in soon to be forgotten ignominy. You may get a few people along at the funeral. The odd passer-by and a priest, if you are that way inclined, paid to do a job of work.

“Shed not a tear for this departed brother for he was not different.” You may now cry if you think that person is you.

3rd Law Part 48 here

3rd Law Part 50 here

One of the features of the 3^rd Law and its perceived ability to manipulate time is the perpetual day. You don’t notice the change between day and night and to all intents and purposes there is no night. This does assume that you have the stamina to last that long and that in the process of continuously getting up to go and make hot drinks so that they can go cold you don’t look out of the window, or at least don’t notice what is outside the window which is perfectly feasible.

There is also a counter argument that what we are talking about is the perpetual night. Some people think that this is a reflection of an individual’s personality – the glass half full/half empty debate. I’m not so sure. Who is to say that a creature of the night isn’t just someone currently working a night shift though if I was that person’s employer I’d want to know why they spent most of their shift surfing tinternet. If I was on night shift I’d want to spend the whole time surfing. It would make the time go more quickly. That is what the 3^rd Law is all about.

It is easy to imagine people wanting to join a 3^rd Law club. Somewhere for like minded people to meet up and ignore each other by staring into their screens. This club might as well be internet based. Makes sense. People would communicate via IM and leaving comments in each others’ Facebook or Twitter streams. It happens already. We just didn’t know it was because of the 3^rd Law.

There is a dark side of the 3^rd Law and that is addiction. It isn’t something most people like to talk about. This is partly because the addicts are hooked to their screens and don’t talk but also because they are in denial. This addiction is of the worse kind. It can be totally invisible, except to those closest to you who notice the gradual degradation in your ability to communicate, other than via social networking platforms.

For families blighted by 3^rd Law addiction the yellow post it note is a thing of the past. Their only way of getting a message across to the addict is through the computer. Sticking a post it note on the screen of the computer is to be avoided as it can provoke violence. The only real answer is to call in the professionals and you know what? This form of addiction is so new that there are no professionals. The medical fraternity is still coming to terms with the problem.

3^rd Law addiction is so new that it is possible to attract government grants if you say that you are studying it. There have been few takers of the grant because not only do families not want to come to terms with the fact that one or more of them is an addict but also, being a government grant, the number of forms that have to be filled in require a week off work to get it right because the slightest mistake results in the rejection of the grant by a civil servant who is incentivised to save the government money. Job creation schemes gone mad I say.

This isn’t entirely fair on the civil servant because 3^rd Law addicts themselves have been known to apply for the grant and spend the money on expensive jars of coffee. Remember this is coffee that gets made but never completely drunk. It makes sense to stop wasteful public spending like this.

Coffee manufacturers (growers?/both?) love the 3^rd Law. Profits have shot up since the advent of tinternet and this is despite the fact that the environment that fertile ground for the 3^rd Law is the same environment that facilitates online shopping and finding the best deal for coffee. Despite this the price of coffee seems to remain high. No accusations of cartel have yet been made…

It is quite possible that there is no internet near to the slopes of Brazil, Colombia and Kenya where coffee is known to be grown. I could look it up but I wont. I quite like the smell of coffee but the taste rarely lives up to the promise. Especially when it has gone cold which it frequently does, obv.

As I write this I have just realised that I made a pot of tea about half an hour ago. Bloody 3^rd Law! Stewed tea is something I have had to get used to since my head started getting into the 3^rd Law. It’s just as prevalent as cold tea but worse in a way. You have to put up with cold stewed tea instead of just cold tea. Huh.

3rd Law Part 45 here

3rd Law Part 47 here