No, Mr Brown. You are a weasel, a fearmonger, a small man in a big man’s expensive suit, and – like your predecessor, and many others – a panderer to corporate interests and waning governments with imperial ambitions which mirror that collapsed edifice which Daily Mail readers still feel should stretch around the globe by dint of nothing more than divine grace, stiff upper lips and unbridled paranoid bigotry based in a fundamental fear of otherness.

No one in the world ever has nor ever will do as much to curtail the freedoms I was fortunate enough to born with, Mr Brown, as you and others of your ilk. You wield fear like a whip, but you turn it on those you claim you are elected to serve.

What have you ever suffered or lost through the choices made by others on your behalf, Mr Brown? What have you given up to defend what you believe? What do you really know of fear, beyond the thought of losing the privilege you have amassed? Evidently not enough; as it has always been, the people will reap what the suits have sown. I hope that one day we will all turn around and feed it to you until you choke.

“Whoever lays his hand on me to govern me is a usurper and a tyrant and I declare him my enemy.” – Proudhon

We now return you to what passes for regular programming on this channel.

Writing about music

Another slowish week, but that’s not at all unwelcome. Festival season means the PRs are all tied up promoting things I’m not yet a big enough wheel to be of assistance with*. I can deal with that.

Album of the week

Not a great deal to choose from, really, so The Offspring take the crown easily with their eighth album Rise And Fall, Rage And Grace.

Writing about books

The Love & Sex With Robots piece is all but finished; last few paragraphs and a brisk polish, and that badboy should be ready to roll out of the warehouse, so to speak.

I’m about a fifth of the way into Schmidt’s The Coming Convergence; it should be a swift read, because I seem to be a lot more technoliterate than the reader it is designed for (so I can skip a lot of the passages telling me stuff I already know).

Futurismic

The new Futurismic bloggers are settling in nicely, and by the end of this evening I should have fixed over 380 dead incoming links that got broken when the old Moveable Type installation collapsed on us – which I hope will boost our PageRank and SERPS somewhat, and bring with it a boost in passing traffic.

The other good news is it seems the Project Wonderful ad slots are starting to mature nicely, in that advertisers are recognising their worth and bidding competitively on them. I’m hoping for more growth in this area over the next six months – especially if the dead link fixin’ mentioned above has some effect.

Freelance

The tweaking of websites and the publicising of publishers continues at a steady pace; nothing substantial to show off yet, but there’ll be solid results by the close of business this month.

Books and magazines seen

It’s a lit-crit double whammy this week!

First off we have my long-awaited copy of Farah Mendlesohn’s Rhetorics Of Fantasy – courtesy the author herself at last weekend’s AGM meet-up – which I have been looking forward to reading since hearing the framework of its taxonomy explained by Brian Stableford at last year’s Masterclass – bloody hell, a year ago.

Secondly I have my second review job for Foundation, namely The New Utopian Politics of Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed (eds. Laurence Davis and Peter Stillman) – which, as far as Amazon is concerned, has been out in the States since 2005. So either it’s getting a relaunch on this side of the pond, or Foundation‘s reviews department makes me look like a paragon of organisation and productivity**.

I couldn’t resist it, basically, though I wonder if maybe I haven’t bitten off a little more than I can chew – I’m even less qualified to talk politics than I am lit-crit***.

But Ms Le Guin’s blurb praises the book as not just a good and valuable examination of her famous novel, but refreshingly jargon-free, so maybe I’ll be OK. One thing’s for sure, there’s gonna be plenty of food for thought in there.

Aside from those two heavy-hitters, some fantasy titles from Orbit are all for which we have to thank the deities of the postbox this week.

Coda

So, on the surface of it – and by any metric of meaningful use beyond the confines of my own emotional landscape – it’s been a pretty good week, if not as productive as I’d have liked.

However, things haven’t been entirely peachy; I shan’t go into details (because this isn’t LJ or MySpace) but I’ve been an emotional wreck for no clearly discernible reason, and have consequently been shitty to people who didn’t deserve it – so there’s a nice nugget of guilt for me to chew over the weekend. Mmm, tasty guilt.

Couple that with a growing panic about next weekend’s impending Masterclass (for which I’ve still yet to read anything from the reading list that I hadn’t read before receiving it), and a certain degree of riding herd on my new bloggers at Futurismic****, and it’s obvious with hindsight why I’ve been sleeping badly and unable to concentrate on anything. Hence nearly being assassinated by a blind taxi driver while cycling to the day job this morning tipped me into a state verging on hysteria.

Thankfully my line manager is a good person, and listened to me gibber for a bit before recommending I use some of my vast backlog of annual leave allowance and take some extra time off next week. End result: I’m working a two day week from Monday, giving me two clear days to attack the Masterclass material while clearing down all my other work; then I return to work the following Tuesday. Signing the leave sheet was such a tension-release that I almost wept. I suspect I’ve been letting things get on top of me a little.

But hey, it’s the weekend! And there are few ills that The Friday Curry doesn’t at least provide the illusion of healing. After which I may go and listen to hideously loud rock music in a side-street pub, if I haven’t already fallen asleep. Enjoy your weekends, folks – hasta luego.

[ ** Under-qualified like a toddler with dentist's tools, then. ]

[ *** Only kidding, Andy. ]

[ **** No discredit to them, by the way, they're doing great; it's just one of those jobs that eats waaaay more time than you ever expect it to before you start. ]

From Neil Beynon [via Twitter] I discover that not even The Guardian – supposedly the final bastion of vaguely idiocy-free journalism in the UK – is gleefully running a “scientist says internet addiction is a disease!” article, complete with a “how to spot whether you’re hooked on the intartubes!!” checklist.

Good grief. Is there any aspect of human behaviour that isn’t a disease these days?

Look, I’m not demeaning the sometimes serious illnesses that can result from certain mental imbalances. Nor would I try to claim that there aren’t people who have serious addictions to many things, the internet being one of them – addictions which can indeed cause serious impairment to their lives.

My issue is this.

ADDICTION IS NOT A DISEASE. ADDICTION IS ADDICTION. ADDICTION IS A FUNCTION OF HUMAN PSYCHOLOGY AND PHYSIOLOGY.

I REPEAT – ADDICTION IS NOT A DISEASE. YOU CANNOT CATCH AN ADDICTION FROM SITTING NEXT TO ANOTHER ADDICT ON THE TUBE. UNTIL WE STOP TREATING ADDICTION AS A DISEASE AND START VIEWING IT AS AN UNDERSTANDABLE REACTION OF AN EASILY DISTRACTED PRIMATE BRAIN THAT EVOLVED TO RESPOND TO NOVELTY AND STRONG STIMULI, WE WILL SLOWLY DROWN IN “ILL” PEOPLE UNTIL THERE ARE NO “WELL” PEOPLE LEFT.

IF YOU WANT TO HELP PEOPLE WITH ADDICTIONS, THEN START BY FINDING OUT WHAT MOTIVATES THEM TO ABSORB THEMSELVES IN THEIR SUBSTANCE OR BEHAVIOUR OF CHOICE TO THE DETRIMENT OF THEIR DAY-TO-DAY LIVES. BECAUSE THE EVIDENCE SEEMS TO DICTATE PRETTY CLEARLY THAT SLAPPING THE STIGMA OF A DISEASE ON THEM AND TELLING THEM IT’S ALL THE FAULT OF THOSE NASTY GENES ISN’T DOING ANY BLOODY GOOD AT ALL, IS IT?

PEOPLE DEVELOP ADDICTIONS BECAUSE MODERN LIFE IS HOLLOW. STOP BEING HOMEOPATHIC – TRY TREATING THE ACTUAL DISEASE INSTEAD OF THE BLOODY SYMPTOMS.

Sometimes the rampant technophobia and litigatory idiocy our culture is saturated in really gets right up my nose.

The Guardian should be bloody ashamed of themselves for running sensationalist shit like this, blatantly shilling for a money-grabbing organisation that can see brass in the muck of people’s misery.

Rant over.

[ Don't take it personally, Neil - you just tripped one of my switches there.

And anyone who'd like to know what gives me the right to make sweeping statements about the effectiveness of addiction programs is welcome to email me privately, so I can explain to them - among other things - how my father died. ]

Everyone thinks they have a novel in them. This storytelling urge apparently runs all the way into the Ministry of Defence, who’ve decided to rewrite a certain rather gory tale with no forseeable ending that’s set in the Middle East. After all, the truth – when unpalatable – is best covered up. Especially when the children might hear it.

Perhaps some children, encouraged by their parents or just simply contrarian by nature, will refute this fictionalisation of a massive financially-motivated war crime by any other name. At which point they will doubtless have their DNA sampled for a database that is just waiting to be hacked open like a decades-old pomegranate, under suspicion of having the potential to become a life-long offender – which, once stigmatised as such, they are most certainly more likely to become.

Sneaky little free-thinking scum-bags – they will be easily spotted, as they’ll be the ones who refuse to swear allegiance to a puppet monarchy.

[ The next person who tells me I should be more proud to be British is going to receive all the swearing that I just redacted from this post before publishing it, and then some.

The next person to blame the ills of the country on im'grunts or tur'rists will spend the next two days in casualty having my boot surgically removed from their arse. ]

For my money, the sign of a really good writer is that they can write about absolutely anything, yet still retain a clarity and poetry of voice – not to mention keeping you entertained enough to read on.

Which is why I was incredibly impressed by this high-precision rant from Erik Davis (who wrote a popular science book that I’d recommend to anyone, Techgnosis), in which he bemoans windchimes:

“I love wind, the gusts that make moaning music from the pines in the mountains, or the zephyrs that blow in from the Pacific over my toy city, thrusting fog and briny mists eastward towards the bay, and tunneling up my street on their climb toward Twin Peaks. I am also down with the music of metal, the resilient blast of archangelic trumps and gluttonous tubas, not to mention the shimmering arpeggios of vibes and hammered dulcimers and the clarion call of the carillon. And I am fascinated by randomness and chance, from I Ching coin tosses to the Situationist derive to the music or paramusic of John Cage. And I love, very much, every single song that Brian Wilson wrote for Smile. All this is true, and yet the fact remains:

I f*cking hate wind chimes.”

Seriously, go read the whole thing. That, to me, is great writing. If I’m wrong, then may I never become a successful writer. Selah.